Thursday, April 21, 2011
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Trope Diagram
The review last week in class was very helpful in that it led me to diagram the operative slots of my Prezi in relation to Kovitz's project.
Kovitz
Tenor: utopian social planning
Vehicle: pig farming
Trope: evokes the horror concentration camps
Contaminates the Tenor: The conceit-link between utopian social planning and pig farming renders the former grotesque, especially in the instances where the material signifiers of pig farming (eg., barbed wire) correspond with the stuff of concentration camps.
My Case
Tenor: standardized testing based curriculum
Vehicle: the Jacquard Loom (first machine reader)
Trope: evoke a sense of Derrida's theories of writing and his critique of metaphysical hierarchies
Contaminates the Tenor: The metalepsis of the tenor and vehicle should emphasizes the ontological import of technics (ie., machinic reading) on the conception of knowledge in contemporary K-12 education policy.
In pataphysical terms, I'd like my Prezi to--if nothing else--"exhaust the imaginary potential" of standardized testing as a practice for learning via machinic reading. The trope then should at least open a space for considering modes of learning/writing with machinic reading other than the literate metaphysics of standardized testing.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Creating Creations
One of the more relevant and provocative ideas presented in Bok's book on Pataphysics comes in the later pages in his chapter about the Oulipo group. The oulipo writers, says Bok, were trying to make "creating creations" rather than "created creations" -- texts that act as "a catalyst rather than an artifact" (79). In other words, such a text "is not a message produced by a person" but rather a "program produced by, and for, a device...designed to make its reader become a writer" (77).
Though I'm making no formal attempt to do so in my Prezi, perhaps this notion of the creating creation bears some application on the potential uses of Prezi. Since Prezi does allow (if you keep your project public) anyone to copy and then manipulate any published Prezi, one could approach a Prezi project less in terms of classical rhetoric and more in terms of procedural rhetoric -- with the aim of creating a Prezi to act as a platform for other people write in network with one another (networked by the fact that they share your initial Prezi as a creating creation with which to generate writing).
Though I'm making no formal attempt to do so in my Prezi, perhaps this notion of the creating creation bears some application on the potential uses of Prezi. Since Prezi does allow (if you keep your project public) anyone to copy and then manipulate any published Prezi, one could approach a Prezi project less in terms of classical rhetoric and more in terms of procedural rhetoric -- with the aim of creating a Prezi to act as a platform for other people write in network with one another (networked by the fact that they share your initial Prezi as a creating creation with which to generate writing).
Monday, April 18, 2011
Playing with Utility
In his examination of the four types of games, Caillois indicates the importance of acknowledging non-productive and non-useful forces at work in any event. Of the four attitudes/games, we saw that game theory based its theory of human behavior exclusively on the competitive, win-at-all-cost drive assumed in games of agon. In the objections to game theory, we can see that part of its failure to recommend sound strategy in every situation lies in the fact that not all situations/games are based in agon. Driven by alea, mimicry, or illinx, players will willingly resign themselves to fate, non-rationality, and vertigo.
Relevance to my project: Education reform based in the measure of standardized testing sees the problem-solution entirely in terms of agon. They point to a lack of motivation -- they say a competitive, performance-based salary will push teachers to "win" the extra money by going the extra mile for their students. Standardized tests act as the figure of the official/referee and --true to the spirit of agon -- it is regarded with the utmost authority and respect. The test is also the stadium where students are judged against each other, ranked based on their individual, indisputable (lack of) achievement.
Relevance to my project: Education reform based in the measure of standardized testing sees the problem-solution entirely in terms of agon. They point to a lack of motivation -- they say a competitive, performance-based salary will push teachers to "win" the extra money by going the extra mile for their students. Standardized tests act as the figure of the official/referee and --true to the spirit of agon -- it is regarded with the utmost authority and respect. The test is also the stadium where students are judged against each other, ranked based on their individual, indisputable (lack of) achievement.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Thinking with Prezi: Reformulating the Big Picture
(continuing from the previous post)
Standardized testing, then, establishes a restricted economy of writing, which--in keeping with literate metaphysics--neglects the "accidental" iterability of (arche-)writing and the excess of the signifier. As a utilitarian response the problem/disaster of contemporary American public education, standardized testing adopts the efficiency of machine readers as perceived from the calculating standpoint of instrumental reason. This of course contrasts with genres of electrate writing, which embrace machinic technologies precisely as means to write with the excess of the signifier rather than downplay it.
And so, though I've been saying this whole time that my accident/disaster was the proliferation of standardized testing, I now think it's more accurate and productive to see it as my contrast. That is, standardized testing constitutes the restricted economy's way of dealing with the underlying disaster, which is the somewhat recent failings of the American public education system (as documented in films like Waiting for Superman).
In addition to being utilitarian, standardized testing could also be seen as a profoundly literate response to the emergence of digital/binary technologies, rooted in the same fatal drives evident in the invention of the jacquard loom. As such, and this is perhaps the starting point for a future project, standardized testing as a writing system marks an important point of contrast from electrate writing practices, which in turn speaks to the value of electracy as a theoretical/pedagogical project that is distinguished from the conventional calls for so-called digital literacy, media literacy, information literacy, etc.
Standardized testing, then, establishes a restricted economy of writing, which--in keeping with literate metaphysics--neglects the "accidental" iterability of (arche-)writing and the excess of the signifier. As a utilitarian response the problem/disaster of contemporary American public education, standardized testing adopts the efficiency of machine readers as perceived from the calculating standpoint of instrumental reason. This of course contrasts with genres of electrate writing, which embrace machinic technologies precisely as means to write with the excess of the signifier rather than downplay it.
And so, though I've been saying this whole time that my accident/disaster was the proliferation of standardized testing, I now think it's more accurate and productive to see it as my contrast. That is, standardized testing constitutes the restricted economy's way of dealing with the underlying disaster, which is the somewhat recent failings of the American public education system (as documented in films like Waiting for Superman).
In addition to being utilitarian, standardized testing could also be seen as a profoundly literate response to the emergence of digital/binary technologies, rooted in the same fatal drives evident in the invention of the jacquard loom. As such, and this is perhaps the starting point for a future project, standardized testing as a writing system marks an important point of contrast from electrate writing practices, which in turn speaks to the value of electracy as a theoretical/pedagogical project that is distinguished from the conventional calls for so-called digital literacy, media literacy, information literacy, etc.
Thinking with Prezi: Receiving the Trope
Some thoughts accruing alongside my work/play in the Prezi (but not explicitly referencing what I'm doing in Prezi):
The Jacquard loom initiated machine reading processes into technics at the beginning of the 19th century. The loom was designed to "read" specific patterns programmed into punched cards by textile designs. The loom would produce textile designs based on its interpretation of the presence/absence (binary code) sequence of each punched card.
Humans have a desire to know. Since Plato's academy, schools (along with libraries and museums) have been the institution that societies entrust with the responsibility to generate, disseminate, and archive knowledge. Schools appeal to the desire to know--to learn--via literate metaphysics.
Machines can read/register binary code (presence/absence markers) much faster than human readers. If students write in binary code, then their writing can be read at the most quick and accurate manner possible. When binary writing meets machine reading, learning becomes hyperlearning (the hyperlearning of hyperknowledge?).
When machines read binary writing, the only measure is that of presence/absence. Standardized testing practices map over this measure with their own (i.e., the axis of true-false) and erect a set of referents made to stand in as signifieds for the binary writing. To write in the space of "A" is to mean/signify a pre-established answer, the true-false value of which has already been predetermined by the test-maker-as-foundation/referent. Machine reading processes – at least in the case of standardized testing – reinforce the writing of literate metaphysics.
The Jacquard loom initiated machine reading processes into technics at the beginning of the 19th century. The loom was designed to "read" specific patterns programmed into punched cards by textile designs. The loom would produce textile designs based on its interpretation of the presence/absence (binary code) sequence of each punched card.
Humans have a desire to know. Since Plato's academy, schools (along with libraries and museums) have been the institution that societies entrust with the responsibility to generate, disseminate, and archive knowledge. Schools appeal to the desire to know--to learn--via literate metaphysics.
“According to Derrida then, metaphysics involves installing hierarchies and orders of subordination in the various dualisms that it encounters (M 195). Moreover, metaphysical thought prioritises presence and purity at the expense of the contingent and the complicated, which are considered to be merely aberrations that are not important for philosophical analysis. Basically then, metaphysical thought always privileges one side of an opposition, and ignores or marginalises the alternative term of that opposition.” (IEP)
Machines can read/register binary code (presence/absence markers) much faster than human readers. If students write in binary code, then their writing can be read at the most quick and accurate manner possible. When binary writing meets machine reading, learning becomes hyperlearning (the hyperlearning of hyperknowledge?).
When machines read binary writing, the only measure is that of presence/absence. Standardized testing practices map over this measure with their own (i.e., the axis of true-false) and erect a set of referents made to stand in as signifieds for the binary writing. To write in the space of "A" is to mean/signify a pre-established answer, the true-false value of which has already been predetermined by the test-maker-as-foundation/referent. Machine reading processes – at least in the case of standardized testing – reinforce the writing of literate metaphysics.
“Derrida’s more generalised notion of writing, arche-writing, refers to the way in which the written is possible only on account of this ‘originary’ deferral of meaning that ensures that meaning can never be definitively present…He suggests that “writing is not a sign of a sign, except if one says it of all signs, which would be more profoundly true” (OG 43), and this process of infinite referral, of never arriving at meaning itself, is the notion of ‘writing’ that he wants to emphasise…The widespread conviction that the sign literally represents something, which even if not actually present, could be potentially present, is rendered impossible by arche-writing, which insists that signs always refer to yet more signs ad infinitum, and that there is no ultimate referent or foundation.” (IEP)
On Kovitz's Style: Quotes and Anecdotes
Ultimately, my reading of Pig City Model Farm focused on the style of the book -- looking intently for elements of Kovitz's style that we could learn from and make use of as we begin our Prezi.
Quotes
One of the most striking features of the book is of course that it is made up of about 95% quoted material. For me, this was cause for frustration that lasted for about the first 25 pages. Most of us are use to reading for the author's position/stance, and, as Jake pointed out, Kovitz complicates that very notion of positionality. Thus, after getting over my frustration, what helped me "get into" the book was paying close attention to the sudden shifts in one discourse to another (ie, from quotes of farm-handbook discourse to stuff like Donald Barthelme). These shifts, as well as the juxtapositions between images and quotes, seem to be the location of Kovitz's work. When discussing "normal" books, we tend to point the presence of words, sentences, paragraphs, etc. as the location of the author's thought. Whereas, with Kovitz, we may do better to locate thinking in terms of absence -- to prioritize the white space as the mark of his most profound gestures, which is to establish (conductive) relations among disparate discourse. Like Kovitz, our consulting reports will perform a lot of quoting (whether it's verbal or visual), so I think we can learn from ambition (as I see it) to "write with the white space" -- to really stress the generative role of combination (collage/montage) in our composition. In the band presentation, I also plan to discuss a potential difference between Kovitz's book and our Prezi: Kovitz's quoting is primarily verbal and our quoting is likely to rely more on visuals. Through some examples, I'll try to show how we can try to make some of Kovitz's tactics work visually.
Anecdotes
Given the dominance of quotation, the anecdotes of Kovitz's summer work in the meat packing plant (spread over two different pages) really stuck out. Though the tone differs from Blanchot, these anecdotes reminded me a lot of Blanchot's inclusion of his primal scene in his book The Writing of the Disaster. In both books, the inclusion of the anecdote adds another layer of relationality, in Kovitz's case: the intersection of architecture and agriculture in Kovitz's early life which become two of the prime discourses in his book. Though I don't think we've put this on the list of instructions yet, the subtle inclusion of a brief anecdote (especially if written in the Hemingway/Chekhov style of Kovitz's, which seems to emphasize the object) in our Prezi may give our consultant's report an added dimension, as it does for Kovitz.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Syzygi and Conceit
"Jarry does not borrow scientific concepts so much as scientific conceits..." (29)
"Jarry may posit this notion [ie, syzygia] within a medieval context...but such a principal of alliance does provide a pretext for postmodern philosophy about the theme of syncretism...conceits which conjoin as much as they disjoin, inverting, while equating, the values of the binary that must support them" (40-1).
In his commentary on Jarry, Bok points to the role of conceit as a 'pataphysical interface between poetry and science. Conceit, as a literary device, can be added to our list of the four rhetorical tropes -- or at least be acknowledged as a specific brand of metaphor. In particular, "The metaphysical conceit involves the use of paradox, images from arcane sources not usually drawn upon by poets, and an original and usually complex comparison between two highly dissimilar things. The originality of a metaphysical conceit often derives from ordinary or esoteric materials used in a previously unthought-of way. A single metaphysical conceit may function as the controlling image for the entire poem" (Bedford Glossary of Literary Terms).
The prezi could be approached as a 'pataphysical conceit, wherein we -- like the poets -- develop a visual conceit as the controlling image or guiding figure of our consultant's report. This visual conceit could stand as the large, establishing shot/image, which contains the smaller images that get zoomed in on throughout the path. Perhaps each zoom shows an image that somehow tropes the meaning of the controlling image when we zoom back out. The controlling image could be ordinary at first glance, then inch closer and closer to a conceit as the viewer moves through each zoom in and out, ultimately coming to see that initial controlling image in the light of the syncretism generated by each of the close-ups.
"Jarry may posit this notion [ie, syzygia] within a medieval context...but such a principal of alliance does provide a pretext for postmodern philosophy about the theme of syncretism...conceits which conjoin as much as they disjoin, inverting, while equating, the values of the binary that must support them" (40-1).
In his commentary on Jarry, Bok points to the role of conceit as a 'pataphysical interface between poetry and science. Conceit, as a literary device, can be added to our list of the four rhetorical tropes -- or at least be acknowledged as a specific brand of metaphor. In particular, "The metaphysical conceit involves the use of paradox, images from arcane sources not usually drawn upon by poets, and an original and usually complex comparison between two highly dissimilar things. The originality of a metaphysical conceit often derives from ordinary or esoteric materials used in a previously unthought-of way. A single metaphysical conceit may function as the controlling image for the entire poem" (Bedford Glossary of Literary Terms).
The prezi could be approached as a 'pataphysical conceit, wherein we -- like the poets -- develop a visual conceit as the controlling image or guiding figure of our consultant's report. This visual conceit could stand as the large, establishing shot/image, which contains the smaller images that get zoomed in on throughout the path. Perhaps each zoom shows an image that somehow tropes the meaning of the controlling image when we zoom back out. The controlling image could be ordinary at first glance, then inch closer and closer to a conceit as the viewer moves through each zoom in and out, ultimately coming to see that initial controlling image in the light of the syncretism generated by each of the close-ups.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Caillois's Relevance for our Project's tale
Caillois's linking of gaming and culture is predicated upon Huizinga's thesis that "culture is derived from play," which has always been an important form/force of invention (58). Furthermore, games as such occur only within the pure space of play; the spatial and temporal boundaries of play separate it from the pressures, obligations, and stakes of "ordinary life." These restrictions enable the players to partake in the logic of potlatch and gift economy: "Play is an occasion of pure waste [of time, energy, skill, etc.]" (5).
One way to conceive of our perspective work with Prezi is to see this phase of the project as a pure space of play, in the sense elaborated by Caillois. Not to say that it is a waste of time, of course, but to say that the fatal strategies of our consultant's report embrace waste: our method experiments with modes of thought/expression that run contra to those deemed "useful" by conventional consulting practices, and we are also making it a point to notice the waste evident in our accident.
Moreover, in defining his game catagories, Caillois description of mimicry and ilinx seem especially applicable to our work with Prezi. Particularly his claim that, "Mimicry is incessant invention...it consists in the actor's fascinating the spectator" and his claim about the seductive appeal of ilinx, "which consist[s] of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind" (23). In our case the role/agency of actor is replaced by the fatality of the object. We can also think about the cinematic movements of Prezi as a kind of ilinx-generating machine (Caillois points out that the speedy machinery of the Industrial Revolution were crucial to the development of ilinx games).
If we do approach our Prezi reports as a space of pure play (invention in spite of--or by virtue of--waste), then, for framing purposes, we can appeal back to Baudrillard's comment about the relationship between fiction and reality: "Somehow, whatever happens on the level of pure appearance of the tale always impinges on the real" (169). Play-as-consulting does not solve the accident but playing with the accident affects our perception/conception of it, enables us to see it differently, and possibly introduces something new/unthought into processes of deliberative reasoning and policy formation concerning the accident.
One way to conceive of our perspective work with Prezi is to see this phase of the project as a pure space of play, in the sense elaborated by Caillois. Not to say that it is a waste of time, of course, but to say that the fatal strategies of our consultant's report embrace waste: our method experiments with modes of thought/expression that run contra to those deemed "useful" by conventional consulting practices, and we are also making it a point to notice the waste evident in our accident.
Moreover, in defining his game catagories, Caillois description of mimicry and ilinx seem especially applicable to our work with Prezi. Particularly his claim that, "Mimicry is incessant invention...it consists in the actor's fascinating the spectator" and his claim about the seductive appeal of ilinx, "which consist[s] of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind" (23). In our case the role/agency of actor is replaced by the fatality of the object. We can also think about the cinematic movements of Prezi as a kind of ilinx-generating machine (Caillois points out that the speedy machinery of the Industrial Revolution were crucial to the development of ilinx games).
If we do approach our Prezi reports as a space of pure play (invention in spite of--or by virtue of--waste), then, for framing purposes, we can appeal back to Baudrillard's comment about the relationship between fiction and reality: "Somehow, whatever happens on the level of pure appearance of the tale always impinges on the real" (169). Play-as-consulting does not solve the accident but playing with the accident affects our perception/conception of it, enables us to see it differently, and possibly introduces something new/unthought into processes of deliberative reasoning and policy formation concerning the accident.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Planning a Fatal Strategy
We know that the second half of the project will be devoted to making a consultant's report targeted at public policy formation surrounding our disaster. Furthermore, we know that this report will break from the conventional literate/scientific mode of consulting (e.g., a narrative forecast of possible scenarios) and will instead focus on obscene and fatal graphic details arranged by an aesthetic and pataphysical logic of conduction. The exhibition of accident -- the fascinating seduction of its appearance -- will be of greater concern to us than any ambition to explain its empirical cause and to pitch a positivistic solution.
So, what have part one of the project prepared me to do for part two? Looking back over my posts so far, I'm confident that three groups of post will come in handy during part two.
1. Technics. I've gathered an inventory of technical devices and processes that have been historically crucial to the rise of standardized testing, noting these machines are basically the same one used in voting for the legislators who have come to promote bills like FL SB 6. A key question for part two: what does this popular application of copy/scan technics show us about the conditions of though in the dromosphere? (i.e., how does it explain us?)
2. Values. Thinking rhetorically about the information I gathered from the Foundation for Florida's Future (the "think tank" behind SB 6), and using One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as a relay for the fundamental values at work in my policy debates, has alerted me to some of the drives and desires currently guiding the more pronounced stances on the issue. As I've commented in these posts, values such as civic duty, pay-for-performance, and omni-accountability -- though not "bad" values -- seemed to have become warped to the point of ate (blindness/foolishness) in this case.
3. Graphic Detail. I've been seduced by a graphic detail -- the clip-art style images of kids that typically adorn FCAT worksheets -- which clearly resonates with the politics/values of standardized testing as an educational application of copy/scan technics. This detail also suggestive of appearance and disappearance, or the appearance of a disappearance: the disappearance not only of a person a standardized ideal of "the student," but also (and more subtly) the disappearance a certain way of experiencing the world and engaging with knowledge (the disappearance of the methods of the humanities?). I'll be continuing this line of thinking/designing in part two, attempting to make the disaster of this disappearance appear more and more seductively.
Taking each of these areas into part two, the major task I'm prepared to pursue (which I've drawn from class lectures) is to design the appearance of my disaster such as to evoke (conduce?) an epiphany about emergent electrate thought structures. To put more specifically, my aim in part two will be to articulate (or at least make visible and seductive) the metaphysical stakes of the appearance of the disappearance occurring at the intersection of copy/scan technics and bureaucratic education policies/practices.
So, what have part one of the project prepared me to do for part two? Looking back over my posts so far, I'm confident that three groups of post will come in handy during part two.
1. Technics. I've gathered an inventory of technical devices and processes that have been historically crucial to the rise of standardized testing, noting these machines are basically the same one used in voting for the legislators who have come to promote bills like FL SB 6. A key question for part two: what does this popular application of copy/scan technics show us about the conditions of though in the dromosphere? (i.e., how does it explain us?)
2. Values. Thinking rhetorically about the information I gathered from the Foundation for Florida's Future (the "think tank" behind SB 6), and using One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as a relay for the fundamental values at work in my policy debates, has alerted me to some of the drives and desires currently guiding the more pronounced stances on the issue. As I've commented in these posts, values such as civic duty, pay-for-performance, and omni-accountability -- though not "bad" values -- seemed to have become warped to the point of ate (blindness/foolishness) in this case.
3. Graphic Detail. I've been seduced by a graphic detail -- the clip-art style images of kids that typically adorn FCAT worksheets -- which clearly resonates with the politics/values of standardized testing as an educational application of copy/scan technics. This detail also suggestive of appearance and disappearance, or the appearance of a disappearance: the disappearance not only of a person a standardized ideal of "the student," but also (and more subtly) the disappearance a certain way of experiencing the world and engaging with knowledge (the disappearance of the methods of the humanities?). I'll be continuing this line of thinking/designing in part two, attempting to make the disaster of this disappearance appear more and more seductively.
Taking each of these areas into part two, the major task I'm prepared to pursue (which I've drawn from class lectures) is to design the appearance of my disaster such as to evoke (conduce?) an epiphany about emergent electrate thought structures. To put more specifically, my aim in part two will be to articulate (or at least make visible and seductive) the metaphysical stakes of the appearance of the disappearance occurring at the intersection of copy/scan technics and bureaucratic education policies/practices.
What are Fatal Strategies?
From Baudrillard, I am able to glean at least four important generalizations about what constitutes/distinguishes fatal strategies: enigma, appearance, object, seduction.
1. Enigma. Fatal strategies side with enigma instead of trying to clarify enigmas or explain them away. The hypothesis, which underlies every fatal strategy, is that "there is a fatal and enigmatic bias in the order of things" (230). To combat/condemn enigmas, rather than embrace them, would be to perpetuate the "occultism of subjectivity" -- filtering the things of our experience on the basis of subjective desire.
2. Appearance. In siding with enigma, fatal strategies deal in appearances in advance of meaning. Everything revolves around the preservation of things at the level of their appearances because -- another hypothesis -- the fatal linkage of things occurs in the order of appearances (193). Causal linkage is ascribed (by subjects) among things (objects) only after they have already happened, and this only appear as seductive objects when they move faster than causal development/interpretation (198).
3. Object. Only the object is a good conductor of the fatal; objects in their appearances elicit yet another hypothesis: "From this angel, everything burst with connection, seduction; nothing is isolated, nothing happens by chance--there is a total correlation" (185).
4. Seduction. Think from the seduction of the object, not the desire of the subject; that is to say, follow the (conductive logic of) interconnection of appearances, which is marked by enigmatic, accidental details (the object's charming glances at you, "the excess of the signifier") and not by the strands of meaning essentialized by causal narratives.
1. Enigma. Fatal strategies side with enigma instead of trying to clarify enigmas or explain them away. The hypothesis, which underlies every fatal strategy, is that "there is a fatal and enigmatic bias in the order of things" (230). To combat/condemn enigmas, rather than embrace them, would be to perpetuate the "occultism of subjectivity" -- filtering the things of our experience on the basis of subjective desire.
2. Appearance. In siding with enigma, fatal strategies deal in appearances in advance of meaning. Everything revolves around the preservation of things at the level of their appearances because -- another hypothesis -- the fatal linkage of things occurs in the order of appearances (193). Causal linkage is ascribed (by subjects) among things (objects) only after they have already happened, and this only appear as seductive objects when they move faster than causal development/interpretation (198).
3. Object. Only the object is a good conductor of the fatal; objects in their appearances elicit yet another hypothesis: "From this angel, everything burst with connection, seduction; nothing is isolated, nothing happens by chance--there is a total correlation" (185).
4. Seduction. Think from the seduction of the object, not the desire of the subject; that is to say, follow the (conductive logic of) interconnection of appearances, which is marked by enigmatic, accidental details (the object's charming glances at you, "the excess of the signifier") and not by the strands of meaning essentialized by causal narratives.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
Psychobubble
Toward the end of Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard rails against psychoanalysis, almost as vehemently as McMurphy does in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (my Contrast movie). Having already initiated a dialogue between this movie and my disaster, as well as between Baudrillard and my disaster, I want to try to elicit a conduction from Baudrillard through the movie to my disaster: psychoanalysis in Baudrillard, psychoanalysis in Cuckoo's Nest...psychoanalysis in standardized testing?
Baudrillard citing Canetti on psychoanalysis: "The harm done by the interpretation of dreams is immeasurable" (177).
Baudrillard on psychoanalysis: "it transforms every sign into a symptom...every representation into a hallucination of desire" (178).
Deleuze and Guattari on psychoanalysis: "Freud doesn't like schizophrenics. He doesn't like their resistance to being oedipalized, and tends to treat them more or less as animals. They mistake words for things, he says" (Anti-Oedipus 23).
In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard clearly seems to be drawing on D&G's use of schizophrenia as a relay when he describes, for example, the catastrophe as a pure event "where the subject himself is no longer a word but a thing, and functions at the mercy of things" (190).
In 1975, the same year One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest won Best Picture, journalist Richard Dean Rosen invented the word "psychobabble" to denote the explosion of psychological treatment and terminology witnessed in the 70s:
Possible "writing with the icon" image: screenshot of McMurphy post-lobotomy with bubble sheet letter-graphics layered over his face and body; caption: "words for things."
Baudrillard citing Canetti on psychoanalysis: "The harm done by the interpretation of dreams is immeasurable" (177).
Baudrillard on psychoanalysis: "it transforms every sign into a symptom...every representation into a hallucination of desire" (178).
Deleuze and Guattari on psychoanalysis: "Freud doesn't like schizophrenics. He doesn't like their resistance to being oedipalized, and tends to treat them more or less as animals. They mistake words for things, he says" (Anti-Oedipus 23).
In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard clearly seems to be drawing on D&G's use of schizophrenia as a relay when he describes, for example, the catastrophe as a pure event "where the subject himself is no longer a word but a thing, and functions at the mercy of things" (190).
In 1975, the same year One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest won Best Picture, journalist Richard Dean Rosen invented the word "psychobabble" to denote the explosion of psychological treatment and terminology witnessed in the 70s:
Psychobabble is … a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candour, and understanding it pretends to promote. It’s an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.With the proliferation of standardized testing, we can extend the critique of psychobabble to account for the these educational practices as "psychobubble." Standardized tests, like Rosen says of psychoanalysis, kills off the very understanding it pretends to promote and reduces insight to a collection of standardized observations.
Possible "writing with the icon" image: screenshot of McMurphy post-lobotomy with bubble sheet letter-graphics layered over his face and body; caption: "words for things."
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Imaging Tips from Baudrillard
Below are several passages from the forth and longest chapter of Fatal Strategies that I found especially helpful. I've been treating them as a collaged mission statement, using the various objectives Buadrillard articulates as loose guidelines for working with the visual details of my disaster -- for thinking/designing with them.
...a work of art that bewilders in its venality, mobility, effects of missing referent, chance, vertigo -- a pure object of marvelous commutability, since, the causes having disappeared, all effects are virtually equivalent. (148)
The work of art...should work to deconstruct its own traditional aura, its authority and power of illusion, in order to shine resplendent in the pure obscenity of the commodity. It must annihilate itself as a familiar object and become monstrously foreign. (149)
The strategy of the object...is to be confused with the thing desired. (153)
...like the eruption of a pure unidentified object that renders the subject unidentifiable to himself…the object becomes powerful with all the powers of the subject. (170)
....suddenly erase all conscious and unconscious determinism. (171)
...tear beings from the psychological sphere of fantasy, repression, the primal scene, to return them to the vertiginous and superficial play of appearances. (176)
...everything is fatally, admirably connection…no at all according to rational relations, but…according to the seductive rapports of form and appearance…everything bursts with connection, seduction; nothing is isolated, nothing happens by chance—there is total correlation. (185)
...provoke a deescalation of rational causes and an inverse escalation of magical linkage. (188)
It is never causes but rather appearances that, when they link themselves up, lead to catastrophe. (192)
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Detail Trope
Technics and the human intersect at the (ob)scene of the disaster, to paraphrase from Ulmer's review lecture. The proliferation of (policies mandating) standardized testing is a critical site through which we are engineering our own becoming.
The heuretic method, coupled with the CATTt readings for this particular project, suggests that we locate a precise visual detail from the (mediated) material of our disaster, and that we treat this detail as a mise-en-abyme for an epiphany (or at least a punctum feeling) we have about the disaster.
In my case, the clip-art images of children that conventionally appear on FCAT practice tests and worksheets struck my as a promising visual detail.
The aesthetic of these images (low-res, black & white) seems to reflect something about the political/bureaucratic institutions that commissioned them: from a technical standpoint, these clip-art images are the most efficient design for circulating unchanged from the national or state Department of Education to the copiers and scanners of each and every school in the region. As such, the images are designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator of technical capabilities--they are settled upon a design which can be read by and agreed with (exactly reproduced) by even the most rudimentary copy machine. Moreover, on a more enigmatic level, the clip-art aesthetic elicits, from me, an eerie sense of correspondence between the design of the image, the structure of the test, the experience of taking/teaching the test, and it's ramification for education (and consequently thought).
Flattening. Stratifying. Efficiency. Black and White.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
The Values of the Foundation for Florida's Future (2)
The Foundation for Florida's Future really likes grade things. I don't know if this tendency is an expression of their fundamental values as policy makers so much as it is an attempt to transpose their political agenda into what seems like a more objective/neutral system of espousing value judgments.
The Foundation prides itself on establishing objective measures for data-driven accountability to promote statistically-evident increases in student learning.
To this end, in consultation with the Foundation, Florida has adopted an education policy that calculates grades for each and every public school in the state based on student proficiency levels (measure by the FCAT). The state then uses these grades as the basis for dolling out funding. "A" schools get the most money, "B" schools a little less, and so on. Here's the Foundation's reasoning: "Funding that recognizes and rewards progress will result in rising student achievement and more efficient and productive school systems." Not only do "failing schools" receive less funding--the teachers at these schools are required to attend weekend workshops learning how to teach the FCAT and must devote a minimum amount of their class time FCAT practice questions. In this way, the grade-policy appropriates the qualitative tradition of school grading systems as a euphemistic means to proscribe quantitative (money and time) rewards and punishments, whereby (administrative) data becomes more knowledgeable than (disciplinary) knowledge.
But schools aren't the only thing the Foundation likes to grade. There's another thing, which I just discovered on the Foundation for Florida's Future website. And it's is almost too funny to believe. The Foundation gives a grade to each of Florida's state legislators based on their performance related to educational policy. So, as I click on the link to these "grades," I'm wondering just how great the disparity is going to be between Democrats and Republicans. And sure enough, the grades for Democrat senators: 1 "C"; 2 "D"; 10 "F"...really, 10 F's out of 13. And, of course, the Foundation scored all but a handful of Republican senators as "A" and even "A+"...this so-called report card is worth seeing for yourself.
The Foundation prides itself on establishing objective measures for data-driven accountability to promote statistically-evident increases in student learning.
To this end, in consultation with the Foundation, Florida has adopted an education policy that calculates grades for each and every public school in the state based on student proficiency levels (measure by the FCAT). The state then uses these grades as the basis for dolling out funding. "A" schools get the most money, "B" schools a little less, and so on. Here's the Foundation's reasoning: "Funding that recognizes and rewards progress will result in rising student achievement and more efficient and productive school systems." Not only do "failing schools" receive less funding--the teachers at these schools are required to attend weekend workshops learning how to teach the FCAT and must devote a minimum amount of their class time FCAT practice questions. In this way, the grade-policy appropriates the qualitative tradition of school grading systems as a euphemistic means to proscribe quantitative (money and time) rewards and punishments, whereby (administrative) data becomes more knowledgeable than (disciplinary) knowledge.
But schools aren't the only thing the Foundation likes to grade. There's another thing, which I just discovered on the Foundation for Florida's Future website. And it's is almost too funny to believe. The Foundation gives a grade to each of Florida's state legislators based on their performance related to educational policy. So, as I click on the link to these "grades," I'm wondering just how great the disparity is going to be between Democrats and Republicans. And sure enough, the grades for Democrat senators: 1 "C"; 2 "D"; 10 "F"...really, 10 F's out of 13. And, of course, the Foundation scored all but a handful of Republican senators as "A" and even "A+"...this so-called report card is worth seeing for yourself.
The Values of the Foundation for Florida's Future (1)
Continuing my back and forth between One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and SB 6, I'll spend this post looking directly at the fundamental values apparent in the Foundation for Florida's Future promo materials and website, all the while keeping in mind the insights generated from my posts on the movie.
Returning to the ad above, here's a breakdown of its three main verbal appeals (and the subtext of their rhetorical function as an enthymeme):
1) "Florida's neediest students...the poor, the disabled, those in broken homes with broken spirits... deserve an education that gives them hope for a better life."
Doxa: charity, good will, the American Dream
Omitted Premise: The current education system neglects Florida's neediest students.
Omitted Premise 2: Neglecting the needy is bad but nothing's worst than neglecting needy children.
2) "We can finally pay more to teachers who care about every child's learning"
Doxa: pay for performance (capitalism), equal opportunity (democracy)
Omitted Premise: Emphasis on "finally" -- SB 6 is progressive if not obvious, while other teacher pay systems are backwards and not reflective of the current economic system.
Omitted Premise 2: Emphasis on "care" -- Teachers who don't teach their students how to do well on the FCAT do not care about student learning.
3) "Please, don't abandon these children."
Doxa: intergenerational/civic duty
Omitted Premise: These children desperately need/want SB 6 to pass.
Omitted Conclusion: If you don't support SB 6, then you are turning your back on the(ir) future.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Target+Contrast+Theory
Here's a question that stuck with me from last class: What is it about our accident/disaster that is seducing (some of) us? Framing the question in this (Baudriallard) way adds something, I think, to the instruction from our Contrast, which is "to use popular narratives as probes to locate the fundamental values (the common scenarios) motivating decision-making in individual and collective situations." That is to say, locating these fundamental values is a matter of tracing the characters' and the policymakers' fascination; their (fanatical) adherence to certain values probably has more to do with seduction and symbolic exchange (general/gift economy) than with rationality and utility (restricted economy), even when they justify their decisions with logical appeals to the common good.
This is a glaring point of correspondence between my Contrast movie (One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest) and my Target disaster (standardized testing & the policies that promote/enforce them). In my movie, for instance, Nurse Ratched uses a logical appeal to the common good to justify the most crucial policy decision of the film (the decision to keep McMurphy in the ward beyond his mandatory 90 day sentence). In spite of the psychologists' willingness to give McMurphy the benefit of the doubt (yes, he's a bit wild, but he's not clinically insane), Nurse Ratched urges them to retain McMurphy in the name of the institution's professional responsibility to society. She believes that "giving up" on McMurphy would be to "pass our problem onto somebody else."
The scene (and obscenity) of this decision in the film corresponds rather clearly with current policy debates surrounding public education in Florida. Failing schools (teachers and students) are cast into the role of McMurphy, while the FL legislators sit at the table with Nurse Ratched and the psychologist (all bathing each other in their collective sense of personal responsibility). Of course, personal responsibility is not a bad thing/value in inself; it becomes problematic, however, when one's (ecstatic) sense of personal responsibility drives her/him to take responsibility away from others. At this point, what is called personal/professional/civic responsibility becomes a game of subject/object relations:
*by appealing to my professional responsibility to the "common good," as a state legislator, I am indirectly extending the reach/power of my subjectivity at the dispense of those teachers and students who, as the statistics show, have failed their responsibility to the common good
*the fact/proof of their failure affords me the power as legislator to impose a plan (my plan) upon them in the name of civic duty
*my power as legislator (i.e., my capacity to impose my will upon others, rendering them into passive objects of my subjectivity--as FCAT literally does) is directly proportionate to my ability to exhibit the statistical failings of the teachers and students (FCAT data sheets have always excelled at this)
*my fascination with my professional responsibility to the common good is at once the image of my own power seducing me
(I can give the people of the Florida education system a lobotomy--like Nurse Ratched eventually does to McMurphy--all the while believing that it's the correct course of action.)
Hence, the fascination with values of "professional/civic responsibility" and "doing what's (morally and/or statistically) 'right' for the 'common good'" can, as McMurphy puts it, "rig the game" of policy formation.
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