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.

Transpolitical Conditions: From Scene to Obscene

Like Virilio, Baudrillard deals consistently with the notion of speed and catastrophe, and his assessment of what he calls the transpolitical has much in common with Virilio's dromosphere.  Furthermore, Baudrillard's claim that the disaster's symbolic energy is even more powerful than its material destruction reinforces the instruction to approach our accident as a sign.

Pompei

Baudrillard's treatment of the Pompei ruins serves as a helpful relay in this regard, particularly his engagement with the materiality of the scene ("the fold of a toga on a body buried beneath the ashes," etc.) and the moment of his insight on "the mental effect of catastrophe" (i.e., "stopping things before they end, thus maintaining them indefinitely in the suspense of their apparition") (42-3).  For Baudrillard, Pompei has the feel of the "vertigo of a missing dimension" and the "hallucination of an added dimension," which he likens to--maybe this is his most pataphysical sentence--a "precise vision of submerged trees living at the bottom of an artificial lake over which you pass while swimming" (43).

Pompei enables Baudrillard to move from the catastrophe to a further abstraction: the obscene.  The obscenity of catastrophe is a matter of excrescence and anomaly: superfluous proliferation, or "ascension to extremes related to the absence of rules" (55).  His examples include obesity, pornography, the masses, and information overload.  And yet, his cursory definition of pataphysics (something we know he admires) resembles his description of these ecstatic forms (things we know he detests).  He tells us that pataphysics ("this logical going beyond, this escalation") begins when a system "enters live into noncontradiction, into its own exalted contemplation, into ecstasy" (33).  Like the obscene, pataphysics (and fatal strategies) seems to thrive on fascination (cool) rather than passion (hot)--the indeterminate fate of the object rather than the determined will of the subject (94).

As we prepare to exhibit our accidents and our fatal strategies, I think an important factor in the production of our images will be to distinguish between the metaphysics of the scene and the pataphysics of the obscene--and to enact the latter in the design of our exhibits.  The problem with the naturalistic theatrical scene, as Baudrillard points out in his ramblings on the history of theatre, is that the actor's gesture has become oversignified by stereotypical "social antagonisms and psychological conflicts" (86).  A "hysteria of causality" consumes every tableaux presented by the naturalistic scene--the meaning of every action is restricted to (or traced back to) plausible origins in social circumstances or individual psychology/motives.  A pataphysical tableaux of the accident would therefore not feed into this hysteria of causality, especially if the exhibit strategy is attune to the fate of the catastrophe, which is "more eventful than the event--but an event without consequences, one that leaves the world in suspense" (36).

Before the Scantron, There was the Jacquard Loom

The Jacquard loom*, invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801, was one of the first machines to use punched cards -- making the loom an often cited processor/influence in many narratives of the history of computer hardware and computer programming.  Demonstrated in the above video, the loom allowed textile designers to "program" a sequence of mechanical movements via the punched card; the designed punched card could then be feed into the Jacquard loom to be read and executed.

Punched Cards

The loom operated on the basis of the same binary (yes/no, on/off) logic that remains fundamental to computers today, and with enough binary input the loom was capable of outputting a surprisingly complex range of patterns.  If the textile designer wanted to change the output pattern, all they needed to do was feed the loom a new punched card (i.e., punched card as software and loom as hardware).

What is striking to me about the Jacquard loom as compared with the standardized testing machines of the 20th century is the differences of their outputs.

The Jacquard loom read punched cards that were designed -- with a specific visual/material output pattern in mind --  in order to produce a textile such as a rug:

And standardized testing machines (and voting machines), by the same basic technical processes, read bubble sheets that are designed -- presumably without any pattern in mind -- in order to produce data visualizations such as bar graphs:

(*Thanks to Walton for giving me this lead.)

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."

Little Flags

Featured in Paul Virilio's exhibit Unknown Quantity, Jem Cohen's short film Little Flags draws on footage he captured at a Gulf War victory parade in New York City (~1991).  

The film seems to be suggest two distinct parts. 

The first part is a loud, abrasive montage of close-ups shots: groups of people chanting and cheering, each looking on at some spectacle the film never shows us.  The camera (ie, Cohen) is on the move, sometimes spinning 180 degrees at the sound/reaction of the crowds and sometimes bumping into people as they try to weave between one another.  

Then the screen goes black and silent for a couple seconds.  

In this unofficial "second part" of the film, most of the crowd has left.  The city streets are covered with the parade's debris; new sets of pedestrians (apparently not there to see the parade) walk solemnly over the white mess, shuffling through it like snow.  Unlike the "first part," the camera relaxes into a few still, contemplative moments: papers whirl around and fall among the bases of skyscrapers, a man with a suit and briefcase walks alone down a long paper-covered street, a toddler sleeps through it all in a stroller as his mom stands motionless in the street.  The audio track too has slowed down to a drowning crawl, until the music fades on the image of a young woman sitting in the middle of another street.  And then the film ends with a man picking up little American flags  amidst the mounds of trash, while we hear the ambience of parade noise and, above it, another man chanting (almost robotically), "Let's all celebrate; 250,000 dead."

The Post-Industrial Accident

In an interview called "Surfing the Accident," Paul Virilio explains his theory that a new kind of accident has emerged--an accident that is contemporaneous with exponential speed and global scope of current technical innovation.

Just like there has been a change in the nature of the accident somewhere in the eighteenth and nineteenth century - from the natural accident towards the industrial accident - we now witness a fresh transmutation of the accident: from the industrial accident to its post-industrial successor. This transmutation is accompanied by a very substantial increase in scale. The industrial accident is still the kind of event that "takes place." The post-industrial accident, on the other hand, goes beyond a certain place, you may say that it does no longer "take place," but becomes an environment. The disaster that befell the Titanic involved only its passengers; the Millennium Bug will involve everybody on this Earth.

What bothers me most about the apparent logic of SB 6 is the belief that problems with the public education system can be treated (and solved) in the manner of an industrial accident/disaster.  That is, while the bill targets and seeks to reform instances where failure 'takes place' (in the most empirical, data-driven sense), supporters of the bill (and even many who oppose it) do not realize that the logic of the bill 'becomes an environment.'  This industrial treatment of the accident (ie, failing students/schools) is precisely what engenders disaster on a post-industrial scale.  Evaluation mechanisms have an enormous influence over day-to-day curriculum decisions, each subject/discipline requires its own form of thinking, and the learning strategies of K-12 accompany students as they enter college or the workforce.

By suiting educational practices to the evaluation mechanism (ie., standardized, multiple-choice tests), we impose restrictions over how much of the thinking unique to a subject/discipline can actually be exercised in the classroom.  How can the generative/creative thinking so crucial to the resolutely qualitative/subjective subjects (eg, art, music, English, humanities, etc) be mobilized or even approximated by the multiple-choice format?  FCAT questions dealing with literary passages, for example, generally remain anchored in sheer comprehension/regurgitation and occasionally ask students to choose among several interpretations and select the "correct" one, as if that interpretation was an inherent/eternal property of the work itself, independent of a reader's reading of the work.   

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.