CATTt Resources

This blog project is an experiment in heuretics and is organized the CATTt generator, which is elaborated on by Gregory Ulmer in Heuretics: The Logic of Invention.  

Below are a summary of the first three elements of our project's CATTt: Target, Contrast, and Theory.  (The remaining elements, Analogy and tale, will be filled in during part two of the project.)  In short, the Target shows us the site/terms of a problem with which our project will aim to engage and hopefully intervene.  The Contrast shows us how this problem has been conventionally dealt with.  Our Theory, noting the slots established by the Contrast, will provide an alternative set of premises from which to approach the problem.

TARGET: Virillio’s “Unknown Quantity” exhibit—museum of accidents…every invention invents its own accident (accident here is used in the Aristotelian sense…that which is part of a thing but not defined as its essence). Digital media introduces a new degree of speed to the accident (the dromosphere—temporal dimension collapse—all is “now time”). This type of accident is not addressed/covered by the critical thinking processes of literacy. Our work with this accident will tell us something about ontology that literate metaphysics won’t. What happens when we turn our decision making over to technology? We need to invent a rhetoric for the dromosphere—critical thinking native to the digital apparatus. We are going to be treating the accident/policy via aesthetics and affective reasoning; that is, we will treat the accident as a sign/signifier (ie., a cipher of the real): “we don’t explain the accident/disaster, it explains us!”

CONTRAST: Game Theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Depicts a cycle of pure research (game theory) to applied research (public policy formation). What are the parts/slots of game theory—it’s invention structure? Keep it and use it in the context of Baudillard. Game theory as an invention—a product of heuretics—that becomes applied knowledge through the RAND corporation (who developed the Internet also). We want to develop a different theory of game and a new formulation (other than the Prisoner’s Dilemma)—that will be relevant to public policy discourse/formation—based on an inventory of Poundstone’s book. That is, we need a different kind of game/theory that is native to contemporary dilemmas (as opposed to the US v. USSR nuclear threat). Bertrand Russell uses the narrative of Rebel without a Cause and abstracts the chicken dilemma from it as a framework for understanding the Cuban Missile Crisis and making policy decisions. Taking this as an instruction, we will Identity a popular film that is to my disaster what Rebel without a Cause is to the Cuban Missile Crisis for Russell. In doing so, we can begin to think about both policymakers and screenwriters as drawing upon the same mythologies and sharing the language of scenarios in their tales.

THEORY: Jean Baudrillard's Fatal Strategies.  "Fatal strategies" replaces game theory with alternative mode for policy formation that registers (if not thinks from) the seductive appearances of the catastrophic objects (or obscene figures) of our current transpolitical era. Our appropriates/applies Baudrillard's theory by making it a concrete method for consulting on  a wide range of public policy issues.  Moreover, Baudrillard treat Baudelaire as a relay, which presents another major source of our instructions: Baudelaire was the first to understand the position of the commodity object and the axis of pleasure/pain. Baudelaire calls it correspondence (later examples: epiphany, objective correlative)—all claim that “I am out there”: things exist as fetishes which are full of being—everything is part material being, part human desire. Baudelaire focus on this feeling he calls “spleen”—the outside world shows me my agency.