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.

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.

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."

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) 

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.

Polling and Testing

In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard has a lot of critical things to say about "polls and other forms of directive solicitation."  These passages, of course, resonate with the directive solicitation practices at the core of SB 6: voting ballots and, especially, standardized testing (eg, FCAT).

Certainly, the answer is induced by the question.  But the one who asks the question has no more autonomy: he can only ask questions which have a chance of getting a circular reply--he is caught in exactly the same vicious circle. (67)

However you perfect them, polls will never represent anything, because the rule of their game is representation. (116)

The obscenity proper to polls comes not from their betrayal of the secret of an opinion...but from statistical exhibitionism, from this continual voyeurism of the group spying on itself. At every moment it must know what it wants, what it thinks, it must see itself in numbers...Overinformed, it becomes obese with itself. (118)

...no one can live in the anticipated image of what he is, nor in the exorbitant mirror of his statistical truth. (120)

At all events the greatness of statistics is not in their objectivity but in their involuntary humor. (121)

Statistical Exhibitionism

It is tempting and humorous/ironic to think of a test as a poll.  It even seems accurate in the case of standardized, multiple-choice questions dealing with contingencies of practical reason, as is generally the case with reading comprehension/interpretation sections.  For Baudrillard, the kind of knowledge yield by the poll is only ever a degraded form of opinion.  Can the same be said of standardized tests like the FCAT--that they test (and teach) not knowledge but a degraded form of opinion?  As such, an FCAT-based education could be framed (via obsenario) as an series of exercises in learning how to think with degraded opinions.

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).

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.