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.

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.

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 Values of the Foundation for Florida's Future (1)

The above ad, put on by Jeb Bush's Foundation for Florida's Future, urges citizens of Florida to support Senate Bill 6.  The Foundation for Florida's Future has been the major hub for the state's education reform efforts for several years, and they are currently working with legislators to finish up a revision of SB 6 that will be voted on later this year.

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.

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.

Nurse Ratched's Policies

Nurse Ratched, the head of the ward staff, is the central decision-maker in the film; she observes all the patients on a daily basis and is responsible for leading group therapy sessions, devising treatment plans, establishing patients' schedules, and implementing ward policies.  In fact, the facility's head psychologist defers to her on the most crucial decision in the film: should they keep McMurphy in the ward or let him go? (ie., Is he crazy or not?)

decisions/values

Nurse Ratched decides the ward should keep McMurphy, beyond his mandated 90 days, for an indefinite extension.  She cites the ward's responsibility to its patients and to society--to let McMurphy go would be to "pass our problem onto somebody else."  Perhaps he would be a danger to society if let free completing therapy/treatment...perhaps he would just end up in another institution (another ward or prison), or so her thinking goes.  Ultimately, her decision is based on a sense of professional responsibility--the actor's consistent and resolute composure creates an impression that she is not acting out a personal vendetta against McMurphy (at least not in the movie, the book's a bit different).

That Nurse Ratched decides/acts out of responsibility much more than animosity is precisely what prevents the film from becoming melodramatic.  She never appears to hate any of the patients, maybe she loves them.  When she leads the group therapy sessions, probing into each man's problems (Billy's suicidal tendencies, Harding's failed marriage, etc.), she clearly hurts them.  But she genuinely believes its for their own good, and that she would be failing her responsibility by taking it easier on them.  Every single shot of her in the film could be very plausibly captioned with Hamlet's motto: "I must be cruel only to be kind."  

In deciding to keep McMurphy in the ward indefinitely, she is being cruel out of kindness to him, to society, and to all humanity.  And yet, her decision leads to disaster: McMurphy--unable to leave--brings the outside world into the ward: the patients go wild (as opposed to "insane"), Nurse Ratched's scolding drives Billy to suicide, Billy's suicide drives McMurphy to choke Nurse Ratched, and this nearly fatal choking incident drives Nurse Ratched to order McMurphy's lobotomy.

reversibility

Glass in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Object: Glass

Crucial plot moments involving glass:

• The sliding glass doors of the nurse station generally only open up when the patients come there to receive and swallow their mandatory pills
• McMurphy bangs on the glass to get Nurse Ratched's attention when she refused to recognize Chief Bromden's vote to watch the baseball game
• McMurphy breaks the glass of the nurse station to retrieve a carton of cigarettes 
• Chief Bromden ends up breaking one of the ward's big glass windows when he escapes 
• Billy breaks a glass jar and uses a piece of it to kill himself
• The guys improv watching the baseball game on the reflective glass of the television screen 

Glass is transparent, reflective, and fragile.  Glass promotes a special kind of division, enabling parties on both sides to see through it even though it is solid--glass makes for a non-threating sense of division, a naturalized division.

The second half of this clip, wherein McMurphy begs Nurse Ratched to change the patients' schedule so they can watch the World Series, shows three important functions/qualities of glass in the film.

1) The sliding glass windows of the nurse station: transparent division

(the glass allows the patients to see the nurses as they talk to them, but the glass also allows the nurses to ignore the patients--as if, by the material fact of the closed glass, the patients imposing upon them: the glass serves as a justification mechanism for the nurses' right to selective attention: one can ignore the patients' direct request behind closed class ('I'm a nurse in a nurses station--I'm busy right now' ) in almost the same instance as monitoring the patients without consent/request (I'm a nurse in a nurses station--I'm watching you for your own good')

2) The gated glass windows of the ward walls: barred vision

(the view of the outside is always barred...$...patients are barred/split between their life in the ward and the inaccessible window to the world beyond the ward...some of the "vegetable" patients spend the entire time on screen gazing at these gated windows) 

3) The reflective glass of the television screen: play and illusion

(the blank screen becomes a means for the patients to project their own image onto a shared performative space, the television, which is also associated with the world beyond the ward...their performance in the scene creates an illusion for them of the possibilities of living their lives outside of the ward)

Pop Film Narrative: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

Holding in mind Bertrand Russell's use of Rebel Without a Cause as metaphor for brinksmanship in the Cold War, I have chosen the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest  (adapted from Ken Kensey's novel) as a popular narrative to think about the policy formation surrounding FL S.B. 6, in particular, and the proliferation of high-stakes standardized testing, in general.

Problem/Disturbance: R. P. McMurphy (played by Jack Nicholson) upsets the routine of the ward immediately.  Some of the most memorable examples:

• He bring the patients into the world and the world into the ward (hijacks the ward bus and takes the patients deep sea fishing, brings girls and alcohol into the ward)
• He gets Chief Bromdem to talk (all the staff and patients believe the Chief to be deaf and dumb) and proposes a plan to escape from the ward
• He  (organizes a patient basketball team and they beat staff team, invades nurse station, almost chokes Nurse Ratched to death, etc.) 

disturbance

Solution: After individual & group therapy and electro-shock treatment have clearly failed to discipline McMurphy, the ward staff decides to give him a lobotomy, effectively turning him into one of the "vegetables."

lobotomy

Gaming

What is the nature of gaming in game theory?

If we take game as a basic form of making meaning, certainly the treatment of games in game theory does not encompass all possible ways to experience games. As Gregory Bateson says (cited by Poundstone), "Von Neumann's 'players' differ profoundly from people and mammals in that those robots totally lack humor and are totally unable to 'play' (in the sense in which the word is applied to kittens and puppies)" (168). Game theory is obsessed with being at least one step ahead of the opponent, which require one to think in advance of the other on their behalf. We might say that this type of thought leads to an eclipsing of the other, but, then again, it is this same thinking that goes into giving someone a really good gift. How do game theory go about accounting for what others are thinking/desiring/scheming? According to Von Neumann, once players enter into a game (or at least the games he's interested in), they are automatically assumed to play on behalf of self-interest and a healthy distrust of the other players (who are also out for themselves)--the occurrence of anything resembling gift exchange is discarded as useless and irrational. Carrying this mentality into prisoner's dilemmas (which would not be dilemmas at all in an established gift economy), we see that a rational fear of the other can lead to just as destructive an outcome as would irrational hatred. (My so-called opponent and I can easily help each other, but fear and rationality lead to second-guessing about that option--defection--that would help one of us and hurt the other...it's uncertain whether fear drives rationality or rationality drives fear, but the connection seems evident enough). I'm also interested in thinking more about the metaphysics of gaming in game theory, which seem founded upon the assumption an unproblematic, absolute separation between my side and your side (i.e., a victory is always a victory and a loss is always a loss, and the outcome experienced by one side has no consequences for the outcome experienced at the other side).

In thinking toward a strategy for policy formation that contrasts from game theory, one of the important points of comparison will be the concept/form of the game (perhaps comparing the games of game theory with the games of Man, Play and Games). The "theory" of game theory is (in)formed by the visions of "game" that it assumes/forwards.

Copy/Scan Technics

@ The Printing Press

@ The Copy Machine

Since the invention of the printing press, the reproduction of printed documents has been getting easier and easier.  But nothing has done more to democratize the means of reproduction than the electronic copy mechanisms of the 20th century.  Institutions such as schools could suddenly perform much of their copying and scanning needs in-house.

The Official Machine of Degraded Opinion

It's hard to imagine the magnitude of the shift from scribes to the printing press, in terms of how much that shift accelerated the reproduction of writing.  With the Scantron, a prototypical machine reader (which are currently exploding onto the scene of everyday reading), we can see the early signs of an acceleration similar to the printing press.
This acceleration initiated by the Scantron-as-machine reader does for processes of reading what the printing press did for processes of reproduction.

With the printing press (and more so with the electronic copier), I can run a piece of paper through a machine and get an instant reproduction of the writing I "programed" into it.  With the Scantron (and other reading machines), I can run a piece of paper through a machine in order to get an instant, programmed reading of the document.

What forms of reading can be programmed?  If a test is to be graded by a Scantron, then the Scantron must be able to read it--and that reading must be programmable.  Machine readers, like all computers, are masters at one thing and one thing only: counting (or calculating).  Thus, all programmed reading is really just a (sophisticated) form of counting.

What forms of writing lend themselves to programmable reading?  Obviously, at the current stage of AI, a machine reader can not "read" a novel or poem (or even a memo) anymore than the printing press or electronic copier can "write" one.

In order for its reading to programmable, applications of the Scantron (eg, standardized testing) must remove the accident from writing: it, like game theory, recasts practical reason as pure reason.

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.