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.

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.

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.

“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)

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.

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.

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:

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."

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.        

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.

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.

Technics and the "Indirect Production of Science"

Connecting last week's lecture on technics with Virilio's writing on the accident, I'm finding myself more curious about the presence of technology in my disaster, which I hadn't really grappled with directly when making my video on Senate Bill 6 last spring.  A frequent translator of Bernard Stiegler's work, Stephen Barker comments on the vital role of technics in the shaping of (human) experience:

What is being “profoundly transformed,” according to Stiegler, is nothing less that the nature of the human itself, by which Stiegler does not mean some traditional notion of “human nature”: since for Stiegler technics and technology are temporally prior to “the human” (and obviously, therefore, to any “humanism”) our need to attempt to “understand the process of technical evolution” is a vitally important ontological (and existential) imperative.

And so, here's a question we could be asking: What is the ontological or existential significance of the technics at work in my accident/disaster? Or, more specifically, how does the disaster reveal the "indirect production" (those qualities concealed/obscured by narratives of progress and utility) of the technics involved?

In the case of my disaster (the rampant proliferation of mandatory standardized testing as stipulated by FL's SB 6), my next blog post will look at the technologies that underlay if not engender that thought of such educational policies/practices.  Indeed, if we accept Stiegler's notion that technics precede human subjectivity, then technologies like photocopiers and scanners become reframed as immensely significant from an ontological perspective, rather than (boring) machines that sit passively in the sense of a "standing reserve."  A survey of the history of standardized testing, for example, reveals that the very concept of a standardized, multiple-choice test was, at least in the West, unheard of (and unthought) until soon after the Industrial Revolution; furthermore, the concept and cultural place of standardized testing wasn't really developed until the 1930's--the same decade in which the first automatic scanner was invented: the IBM 805.

The IBM 805

Of course, after noting this relation between the evolution of copy/scan technology and standardized testing, we have to qualify the terms of relationship.  For instance, my video (ABCDE, see in blog below) critiques the FCAT education environment as an "evaluation machine gone crazy," and I use image repetition and audio looping to suggest the experience of teaching a standard, drill-based, top-down mandated curriculum.  Throughout the video, though, I am relying upon the exact same copy/scan technologies that underlie standardized testing; my engages these technologies to create an aesthetic and visceral affect, while standardized testing uses them to establish and enforce a disembodied/universal jungle-gym of utilitarian rationality.  So we cannot claim that the technologies of copy/scan (the bedrock of computational media) inherently foster the kind of dull repetition symbolized by standardized testing and other forms of bureaucratic paperwork.

If, as Virilio (a la Ulmer) suggests, we treat contemporary standardized testing--and its surrounding policy debates--as a sign of the coming metaphysics, then we need to approach this particular practice of copy/scan technics as an entry point.  Rather than interpret, critique, and condemn the situation (and then just complain about it as it persists), a heuretic encounter with standardized testing aims to learn something from it--something about how our society tends to conceive of and relate to copy/scan technics.  If we can learn something here about copy/paste technics, then perhaps we'll be in a better position to articulate an alternative strategy for governing or occupying copy/scan technics--a strategy that contrasts from the utilitarian rationality evident in the FCAT, but a strategy that nonetheless answers to the same historical, technological, and political conditions.

A CATTt for The Museum of Accidents

Note: all quotes below reference Paul Virilio's forward to Unknown Quantity, a 2002 exhibit that prefigures his ultimate (not yet realized) project for a Museum of the Accident.

Objective/Purpose:
*to expose the accidents ("and the frequency of their industrial and postindustrial repetitions"), which we encounter as witnesses and/or victims, to current and future generations, thereby promoting "a critical distance from excesses" and "a homage to discernment"

Contrast:
*news media, which Virilio calls "a museum of horrors"
*according to Virilio, news media "always precedes and accompanies the upsurge of even greater disasters [than those which it has already covered]...[b]y progressive habituation to insensitivity and indifference in the face of the craziest scenes" and "a programming of extravagance at any cost which ends not any longer in meaninglessness, but in the heroicization of terror and terrorism."  (In other words, the media makes terror--and its various personifications--into heroes in the sense that they have now become vital to the appeal/buzz created by the news; the news commands a greater market share over our cultural attention to the extent that it renders horror/terror as a urgent, threatening object.  Furthermore, in many cases, the news media can amplify an otherwise insignificant event or person, making that event/person into a spectacle of horror for all the world to experience instantaneously and respond against with threats/acts of terrorism...recent example: Pastor Terry Jones.)
*Virilio also seems to attribute two related effects to news media: (1) a societal shift from citizens-as-actors to citizens-as-witnesses; (2) "the fading of ethical and aesthetic points of reference"

Theory:
*Paul Valery assessment of the novelty of the 20th century (eg., the sudden and rapid emergence of unprecedented questions/problems, the reduction of memory/temporality to the "event-instant," the automation/mechanization of function, the imperative to remain conscious of accidents)
*Aristotle's metaphysics (eg., "the accident reveals the substance")

***

The progressive qualities of scientific knowledge tend to obscure its accidental, disastrous qualities from our (collective) consciousness.  Virilio infers that all the great technical innovations/discoveries that characterize the 20th century will give rise to an equally unprecedented degree of global accidents/disasters in the 21st century.  Hence the need for a cultural institution--a museum of accidents--to ensure that this string of inevitable(?) accidents be given a profound/monumental place within the existential territories future generations will inhabit--that they not become automatic or denied via "voluntary blindness to the fatal consequences of our actions and inventions."

In order to avoid succumbing to such voluntary blindness, Virilio says we urgently need to cultivate "an 'intelligence (ie., an understanding) of the crisis of intelligence'...an understanding of which ecology is the clinical symptom."  As far as I can surmise from this passage, I gather that Virilio sees ecological/relational thinking as an early indicator (symptom, in that sense) of or first step toward achieving the critical distance and discernment he calls for at the end of his forward to the exhibit.

We already have intelligence--the thought that has built and continues to advance the "thought technologies" guiding contemporary technical innovation at an exponential rate.  The crisis of intelligence is evidently referring to the unprecedented accidents/disasters--accompanying intelligent technical innovations like a shadow--that occur ever more frequently on an increasingly global scale.  This brings us to the intelligence of the crisis of intelligence, which must, as a ecological enterprise, act as a kind of meta-intelligence and bootstrap the intelligence of technical innovation though a relentless cognitive mapping of the accident/disaster.  To inscribe the accident/disaster perpetually upon collective consciousness is "to take a stand against the fading ethical and aesthetic points of reference."

***

Virilio's tale is of course his not yet realized museum of accidents, and, drawing upon my reading above, I would posit that for this particular project his Analogy is perhaps ecology (in a general sense) and his Target is collective consciousness as archived/embodied/cultivated through public cultural institutions.

Also important, for our purposes especially, is Virilio's statement about invention.  He claims that invention is a way of seeing/grasping accidents as signs and opportunities.  The Museum of Accidents, then, would seems to promote this way of relating to the accident: as a heuretic encounter with "the indirect production of science" and "the shadow of technical innovation."

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.