Final Prezi Presentation

Prezi Project Ideas

I spent a considerable amount of time thinking of how to approach creating a Prezi presentation. My main problem, I learned, was that I was trying to figure out how to tell a story related to the issues surrounding my accident space. I think that the zoom in and zoom out features and the ability to create paths from image to image in Prezi were suggesting to me that I had to link my ideas as a sequential narrative. My attempts to tell an underlying story in this manner was overwhelming the trope space--and in my mental Prezi presentations, the end results were too obvious, dogmatic, or simply cheesy. I kept reverting back to Kovitz's book and the way he uses structure. Kovitz finally made me see that I needed to choose subjects that had nothing to do with cancer or the accident space--this helped me to move out the sequential narrative space that seemed to be prohibiting my creative choices. The structure that I chose, I knew, had to have some relation to the notions of routine and repetition; it had to be something mundane so that I could diffuse the preachy-type approach of the ideas that I was coming up with.

I thought back to why Kovitz’s focus on architecture in the book kept making me think about information exchange on servers and in database systems. Kovitz, as we discussed in class, articulates a problem with logic-based mechanized (and efficient) systems by writing from within them, with them, and letting the information that comes through create a meaning that identifies a different logic or reality--a sort of secret embedded in the human response to practical (or otherwise) routine processes. Kovitz sharply critiques utopian socialism in his book, but I also took from his book the related idea that he was conveying the notion of a loss of meaning in society through the mechanisms that allow and establish order. It occurred to me in class two weeks ago that his book is about a mass slaughter of meaning. But mechanization and repetition are also positive; they relate to well-being. This led to the idea that I could experiment with database and database design in my Prezi presentation to say something about the accident space and policy decision-making issues surrounding cancer. I spent many years learning how to design databases and connect them to web interfaces using SQL queries on the job. I think that I can do something with the structure versus content relationship in databases and the way that people use them that might--if done correctly--give me the electrate turn that charges the accident space into revealing the subtleties of its composition as well as its extremes.

I don’t know quite how I am going to do it yet, but I want to try to use tables and cells in a database, where information is routinely processed and disseminated to different users through web interfaces or reports using database queries, to get at the logic of my accident in an unexpected way. In my mind, I am making the conductive associations, but I still need to figure out how to use Prezi to make it work. I find it fascinating that I will be able to use something as logical as a database to make a broader statement of import about accident logic. I’m not sure if I am on the right track, but I, personally, will draw much from this if I can get it to work. One of my biggest problems is going to be coming up with the content for the database structure screenshots I will create. I want to design my Prezi around a theme like “How to Create Relational Databases” and then provide a manual-like guide that subordinates the content that I will place in the database cells to the instructional aspects of the “How to” presentation.

Life in the modern world (thoughts and ideas), at least to me, seems somewhat parenthetical, so I want to embody that beside-the-point tone or attitude in my presentation somehow. But the whole idea of my presentation needs to convey the idea of an unstoppable growth or a defect in an orderly system that can be understood like the term apoptosis. I have a lot of work (and thinking) to do, but this blog post represents my preliminary ideas for the final presentation.

Prezi Software: "Zooming Presentation Editor"

Prezi is an online software program where registered users create presentations by moving through images and texts on one large infinite canvas. It replaces conventional page by page or slide by slide presentations and offers a new, dynamic, seemingly interactive experience for viewers--significantly extending the interactive features of PowerPoint presentations. Not surprisingly, Prezi has been received well on the web. Since its launch in 2009, in Budapest, the company has established a large market-base and is making a profit. The U.S. office in "San Francisco . . . was established in November 2009 and the company has been cash flow positive since 2010" ("Brief History," 2011, par. 2).

In this course, we are using Prezi to create an image of electrate thought. Last year, our task was to create a static image that turned the expected logic in a different (electrate) direction, but Prezi has additional features that will allow us to work with our image base differently. For example, we can use zoom and pan out features to emphasize or deemphasize features within and among images and text. We can also create a sense of progression or regression with the zoom feature and the image path feature, which allows us to connect images and text and travel visually travel from place to place on the canvas during the presentation. One other interesting aspect of Prezi is that users have an infinite blank canvas to work with. There are no edges to work with. We are able to create frames around objects and groups of objects, though. Also, like in PowerPoint, users can send images and text areas backward and forward on the canvas, creating something like PhotoShop layers.

Tale / Kovitz's Instruction

Kovitz uses pig farming as a vehicle.  His tenor is utopian planning through Fourier.  We need to figure out a vehicle and tenor for out accident space using Prezi, in much the same way that Kovitz uses pig farming and the concept of utopian planning. 


Kovitz Pig City Model Farm creates meaning from the reader's interaction with the text--the reader's ability to make associations that extend beyond images and text.  This space is the event space, and, in this space, he states that social planning is wrong.  He states that "what is good in pig farming is bad for society" (class notes).  He frames something old within a new order of logic.  This is how the consultant report--our final Prezi presentation--will frame its meaning.  The concept of the document itself--its basis in literacy--will shape something new out of the old logic (using a new logic).  Our Prezi presentation will represent writing from the position of electrate logic.

Class Notes

• The Prezi presentation will represent our experience of the collective agency of which we are a part.
• We need to get at the entelechy of the accident.
• We have to receive the notice of the problem in the world through the apparatus that allows us to notice it.
• The accident is a sign that shows us the relationship between technics and culture.
• The measure of the world is given there.
• What is the regularity; what repeats in the accident?

General Economy & Restricted Economy

The accident space has a general economy and a restricted economy: for every need, desire, or drive, the culture we move and act through satisfies that need (class notes). The restricted economy consoles/satisfies public need, but, with this satisfaction, comes death, injury, social problems, etc.; the factors that constitute the general economy. The general economy used to be the sacred economy--the holy, the terrifying, the celebrated (class notes). If we are going to have an economy that includes losses, we have to acknowledge them (class notes). In society, there is a "massive denial and rejection of the general economy." We don't deny that there are accidents, murders, deeply ingrained social problems, etc., but we refuse to take responsibility for them, logically or otherwise (class notes). This is a disaster. "As consultants, we can say that this is not very rational. As a culture, civilization needs to address this (class notes). The role of the EmerAgency/exhibit/consulting report is to "notice this reality. The accident is not an anomaly--it has to exist.

INSTRUCTION

In Prezi, we need to evoke this dimension of insight that is neglected. We need to try to articulate and understand what the accident as sign and figure is about by exploring its semantic potentialities. We have to place ourselves in the event position and receive the sign; ask ourselves what it is saying; examine what it can say; and find out where we can go freely and where we wouldn't usually go using the inference principle of conduction. As we explore the accident space, we need to look for an area where we can jump to turn the logic in on itself and say something else. This jump is the tenor. We should gather the potential in the accident site, and the turn or jump we find will represent the moment of epiphany, which, once found will be the light speed moment we spoke about at the beginning of the course. This moment will traverse the span of time associated with our accident and express the new moment/the new logical space all at once.

Rob Kovitz's "Pig City Model Farm": Tale

Rob Kovitz's collage-themed Pig City Model Farm is fascinating visual and intellectual experience.

Kovitz put us in the event space. He gives us an example of thinking in the position of the event (the space of excess where Baudrillard combines the subject and object in "Fatal Strategies"), and that example seems to tell us (or prove) that the imaginary space of pataphysical innovation is logical and that meaning can be maneuvered and guided (can mean) without being bound by constraints of either a pre-defined meaning or logic.

If I had to describe the experience of reading Kovitz's book, I would say that he created confusion in me and then controlled (and sustained) that confusion with the ideas that each quote and image created in me, in themselves, and due to their particular placement. His topic on pigs in itself is enough to initiate confusion in the reader, but he obviously uses the history of the mass production and slaughter of pigs to make simultaneous statements about the influences that govern society and human thinking and action. His book is notably meticulous in its appropriation of models and plans for pig farms. I particularly enjoyed the detailed accounts of workers' experiences on the farm, which made me think of how routine relates to our project. Kovitz makes art out of the agricultural practice of pig farming simply by re-creating its details--and newly identifying them as simply what they in a different context. He uses pigs and pig farms, but he could just as well be writing about the data that transfers through well-designed and optimized databases and server farms that drive the information exchange on the internet and internal and external data networks? Kovitz's order in the book identifies a deeply rooted (mechanistic) disorder that operates on a semantic level which the order itself dismisses. This idea alone makes his book--and the story I decided to make from its associations--profound.

Meaning emerges on a spatial plane that exists beyond (and because of) the juxtaposition and order of quotations and images in the book. The book cannot make sense without a reader. In this sense, it insists that meaning is derived from the reader's cognitive interaction with the visual and textual triggers. The meaning does not exist in the words or their grammar, but it depends on a collective social system of rules that it does not itself define. Kovitz arranged the book by appropriating texts and images from different authors. It can be said that he didn't really author the book itself, but there is no denying that he authored a meaning that exists beyond the text. The book itself, with a black and white image of a pig on the cover partially highlighted by yellow ink and framed with a black border, seems to suggest an oddly articulated dimensional emphasis, vaguely recalling how a 3D image looks without 3D glasses. Perhaps this yellow distortion is representing the holographic dimension of meaning that Kovitz authors. The book takes work to understand, even when the meanings start to flow into a recognizable form about a quarter of the way into the book. It is certainly not a passive experience and, in that respect, reading the book is an extremely intellectual experience, which involves what I can only describe as the pleasure a person experiences privately when he or she gets a joke or manages to work out a complex puzzle.

As our tale, Kovitz provides an example of what we need to achieve with our accident space of our disaster.

EmerAgency: "Conceptual Consulting Agency"

One of the things that I find so compelling about electracy is its inclusion of human experience in its logic/philosophy. In fact, I've learned that the human sensorium is integral to its logic. It recognizes a social problem, and it is offering a solution. Professor Ulmer uses the terms of the capitalist business world--at the heart of the problems that electracy addresses--to identify the philosophers of electracy as belonging to a virtual consulting agency (EmerAgency). And the material we create using electrate logic is a conceptual consulting document, a thing that exists virtually in thought governed and patterned by the CATTt and which offers the tools for thinking philosophically in contemporary society, addressing our current problems, and establishing that ever-elusive happiness and a feeling of life well-lived that the Greeks wrote about. Professor Ulmer describes electracy's virtual consulting agency in a 2000 lecture at The European Graduate school:

What we were working on in class is a virtual consulting agency, a new consultancy, called the Emer(a)gency. The idea is to use the internet as the delivery medium for our consulting, the specific knowledge we want to apply is from the liberal and fine arts, and we want to address public policy formation, understanding that we are going to be consultants without portfolio for some time. So this Emer(a)gency take a particular approach to problems in the world, and we have to ask what should be our relationship to disaster, and to problem as such? (Ulmer, 2000, par. 2)

If I had the time, I'd try to draw this consulting document (perhaps I will return to this if I finish my Prezi presentation in enough time).

Bachelor Machine

Artist Christian Hubert writes that

The term ‘bachelor machine’ was first used by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 in connection with pieces of work that would later be assembled in the Large Glass of 1915-1923. (Also known as the bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even) For Duchamp, the term refers specifically to the lower portion of the glass, the realm of the bachelors, which contains, among other things, the chocolate grinder, the cemetary for uniforms and liveries -- Priest, Delivery Man, Gendarme, Cuirassier, Policeman, Pallbearer, Footman, Stationmaster and Page Boy -- and the témoins oculistes. The Large glass consists of two distinct realms, the realm of the bride above, and the realm of the bachelors below, both desiring and imagining one another without any possibility of mutual comprehension. (one is here reminded of the real / imaginary distinction and the discussion of cyberspace) (“Bachelor Machine,” par. 1) 

Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, (The Large Glass), 1915-1923



Analogy / 'Pataphysics: Instruction

Our Analogy instruction is to take the attitude of fumisme; the attitude of play. The attitude of electracy starts with fumisme (class notes).

Archetype of Creative Process

1. An aggressive act or an act of disrespect (use of aggression).
2. Act of participation (use of negative capability)

From Class Notes

• Jarry’s figure of Ubu is appetite personified / personified resistance to order.
• We need to articulate an attitude in our design.
• Appropriation is parodic. We need to appropriate an object and use trope and irony to say something else with it.
• Our own position as a collective subject needs to be an aspect/feeling of the final design.
• Look at the accident space as potential sign.
• Back away from saying something specific to try to identify what the potential of the sign is (its fate).
• Caillois makes the transition to ‘pataphysics. Whenever there is a fascination of some sort, it can be broken down into parody.
• Need to break fascination with science / technics. The trance needs to be broken.
• Use trope to break out of the routine of the thing / the mechanism.
• Parody sets up the existing form (reality of a situation) and turns it.
• The first science we are turning in electracy is the engineer’s report
• Narrative form represents the articulation of the presence into the future (gives form to process).
• Start with genre of a report and its purpose, and then set-up the space for the electrate turn in logic (kehre)
• Obscenario / Conceit / Trope. Example: handbooks on how to write a scenario
• Our consultant reports should be articulated in the manner of a conceit but structured like a scenario.
• The consultant report gets at the ‘pataphysics of an event using a practical trope.
• Accident takes place within history.
• We need to be able to see the fatal strategy.
• What is the dimension that is the necessity of the event?
• Use the fourth inference principle to move through information: conduction.

INSTRUCTIONS

• General method is grammatology.
• Working by analogy.
• ’Pataphysics is the stepping stone to see what replaces metaphysics for electracy
• Reality is what our metaphysics gives to us to manipulate in order to make decisions in the world.
• We think with this reality.
• Bök is describing a bachelor machine: a phrase that sums up the invention of the avant-garde.
• Marchel Duchamp’s art piece The Large Glass embodies the process of parody and trope that we needs to guide our thinking in our Prezi realizations of our accident logic.
• Make terms up to disrupt/turn premises.
• Look at the science behind the accident logic—the technical discourse of the event—and extract from it. Take the term and define it as trope.
• Use specialized terms from other fields [the apoptosis of a cell, for example] and make an analogy to something common in reality. Create a relationship between the term, its scientific logic, and something else.
• Give more attention to the secret. We want to make our consulting report seductive. To do this, we have to make it cryptic.
• Do this by introducing a procedure—aleatory or mathematical.
• Look at the physical substance in the accident space, and do something conductive with it. Use the dictionary.
• Find the primary trope in the technical process associated with the accident and ‘distill the atmosphere out of the object.’
• We are designing from the connotative position, from the receivers position (the event space).

French Oulipianism

Oulipo, roughly translated, means "workshop of potential literature." It refers to a

loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members include novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poet Oskar Pastior and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.

The group defines the term littérature potentielle as (rough translation): 'the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy.'

Constraints are used as a means of triggering ideas and inspiration, most notably Perec's 'story-making machine', which he used in the construction of Life: A User's Manual. As well as established techniques, such as lipograms (Perec's novel A Void) and palindromes, the group devises new techniques, often based on mathematical problems, such as the Knight's Tour of the chess-board and permutations. ("Oulipo," Wikipedia, pars 1-3)

The French Oulipians, Bök explains, revised "the structure of exception in order to oppose the irrationalism of the French Surrealists” (64). Literature, for Oulipians, is a cyberorganic phenomenon that results “from deliberative collisions between poetic devices: the machinic paralogy of accidents” (64). In revising the structure of exception, Oulipians "study the syzygia between the anomalos of a ‘constraint’ and the clinamen of its ‘potentials’” (64). Oulipo explores the "metaphysics of thetical cases with the ’pataphysics of hypothetical cases--the als ob, the ‘as if,’ of what might have been” (65).

 Georges Perec 

 Italo Calvino 

Italian Futurism

Futurism refers to an "artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century" ("Futurism," Wikipedia, par. 1). THe founder of the movement was the Italian Filippo Marinetti.

Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. "We want no part of it, the past", he wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists!" The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists. They repudiated the cult of the past and all imitation, praised originality, "however daring, however violent", bore proudly "the smear of madness", dismissed art critics as useless, rebelled against harmony and good taste, swept away all the themes and subjects of all previous art, and gloried in science. ("Futurism," Wikipedia, par. 3)

Bök's description of futurism beginning accidently out of a mechanical catastrophe coincides with Virilio's statement, borrowing from Aristotle, that

'the accident reveals the substance,' [so that] the invention of the substance is also the invention of the “accident.” . . . [T]he shipwreck is indeed the 'futuristic' invention of the ship, the air crash the invention of the supersonic plane, and the Chernobyl meltdown, the invention of the nuclear power station. (Foreword, par. 8)

Giacomo Balla, Abstract Speed + Sound, 1913-1914

Bök's states that “a car wreck . . . dramatizes the clinamen of a swerve, complete with the anomalous intensity of its shock (la scossa), its noise (il rumore), and its speed (la velocita). Such an event implies that, from any havoc wreaked by technology, there appears a route charted for aesthetics. Such a ’pataphysics epistemology values the uniqueness, if not the randomness, of surprise itself” (47). This “route charted for aesthetics” takes literal form in the entertainment industry’s reproduction and glamorization (and perhaps even, sanitization) of the accident in television and film, but as I have learned in this course the entertainment industry is integral to the logic of electracy—if I am understanding the term correctly, it is or can be the voice of electrate logic.

Bök posits that metaphor becomes "a device of transport" (48). He identifies the difference between 'the artistry of a message and the industry of its transit" (48). Futurism is concerned with the metaphor of the accident, and the uniquely human capacity to recognize something more beyond the facts of a thing or situation (and the things or situations that surround it). Metaphor is thus a "structure of exception" (48), an aspect of meaning that is part of the fact of an enunciation or the reality of a thing but that also exists outside of its control. Bök writes that the factual, objective instrument is the "delirious machinery that revises anomalos, the syzygia, and the clinamen through its own machinic paralogy of shock, noise, and speed” (48).


Umberto Boccioni, Die Stadt erhebt sich [The City Grows], 1910

Christian Bök's "'Pataphysics": Analogy

Christian Bök's 'Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science is the CATTt's Analogy instruction.  Bök's study (he refers to it as a survey) clearly intersects with our previous instructions and sets us up for the tale component of our CATTt--Rob Kovitz's Pig City Model Farm.  Pataphysics, Bök states, "represents a supplement to metaphysics, accenting it, then replacing it, in order to create a philosophic alternative to rationalism" (3). The single quote preceding the term "pataphysics" denotes the French influence on pataphysical thinking, and the double quote preceding the term signifies the Canadian influence on pataphysical thinking.

'Pataphysics is speculative, waiting for its chance to happen, as if my accident, in a themic park of scientific conception. (4)

'Pataphysics reveals that science is not as 'lucid' as once thought, since science must often ignore the arbitrary, if not whimsical status of its own axioms. (4)

'Pataphysics valorizes the exception to each rule in order to subvert the procrustean constraints of science. (5)

'Pataphysics refuses to conform to any academic standard: hence, this survey cannot demonstrate that it has learned the lessons of its topic without negotiating a virtually untenable ambiguity between the noetic mandate of scholarship and the poetic license of 'pataphysics. (5)

Buadrillard observes that, for the "[']Pataphysics of the year 2000,' history has accelerated past the escape velocity for reality, moving from the centrifugal gravity of the real into centripetal celerity of the void' ([1992] 1944a, I). Events occur in the null-space of simulation, where '[a]ll metaphysical tension has been dissipated, yielding a [']pataphysical ambiance' ([1983] 1990a, 71). Things succumb to relativity, complexity, and uncertainty, shifting from an absolute state of determinism to a dissolute field of indeterminism. The science of 'pataphysics responds to these absurdities with a genre of science fiction that shows science itself to be a fiction. It narrates not what is, but what might have become. It inhabits the tense of the future perfect, of the post modo--a paradoxical temporality, in which what has yet to happen has already taken place. (8)

Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), the inventor of pataphysics, was a writer best "known for his play Ubu Roi (1896)" ("Alfred Jarry," 2011, par. 1)--a precursor "to the Theatre of the Absurd and the greater surrealist art momvement of the early twentieth century ("Ubu Roi," 2011, par. 1) . Jarry wrote "plays, novels, poetry, esays, and speculative journalism" ("Alfred Jarry," 2011, par. 1). Bök states that Jarry had an "important influence upon the poetic legacy of this century (particularly the Italian Futurists, the French Oulipians, and the Canadian Jarryites).




Bök draws from an incredible range of sources to present the the details of pataphysics and its influence on current thinking. He identifies three declensions of 'pataphysics (these are the names of tropes):

SYZYGIA	The excessive order coming out of chaos.
ANOMALOS	The chiasm between order and chaos.
CLINAMEN	The swerve of chaos breaking away from order.

Bök divides his survey into five topics:

• Science and Poetry
• Millenial ’Pataphysics
• Italian Futurism
• French Oulipianism
• Canadian ’Pataphysics

Of immediate interest to our project are the topics of Italian futurism and French Oulipianism.

Caillois: Target Instruction

Roger Caillois book Man, Play, and Games gives us a different angle for understanding Virilio’s Target instruction—which is to think of our disaster as a sign—because we are also reading Caillois in our Target slot. His book explains how play (in the sense of a game experience) is the foundation of our experience of society and how it functions. Drawing from Johan Huizinga’s theory of play in his 1933 lecture “The Cultural Limits of Play and the Serious” and the subsequent book Homo Ludens (1938), Caillois defines four categories of play: agon, alea, mimicry, ilinx.

TARGET/CLASS GOAL

We already have the instruction of seeing the accident as a sign; we need to find a way to visualize or experience the target as an omen. Caillois will help us understand how we give the accident space form in the object/event domain. We therefore need to know how to read its patterns (derived from class notes):

• Looking for sprawl functionality in accident space.
• Trying to identify the fatality of the event; its domain of irreducibility (event at limit).
• Looking for a singular detail – modernist poetry – how does the external world show spiritual reality.

CAILLOIS' MAIN POINT

Games follow a mimicry/ilinx frame not an agon/alea framework. More primitive games are still an aspect of thinking in society, but they have been suppressed and pushed into private domains. Caillois identifies the festival site as the location of the mimicry/ilinx drive; he shows us what happens when pataphysics enters society.) (Class notes).

PLAY TYPE	MEANING
Agon	Competitive games. “[C]ombat in which equality of chances is artificially created” for confrontation under ideal conditions. Agon is “always a question of rivalry which hinges on a single quality (speed, endurance, strength, memory, skill, ingenuity, etc.), exercised, within defined limits and without outside resistance, in such a way that the winner appears to better than the loser in a certain category of exploits” (14).
Alea	“This is the Latin name for the game of dice” (17). "[D]estiny is the sole artisan of victory, and where there is rivalry, what is meant is that the winner has been more favored by fortune than the loser” (17).
Mimicry	“All play presupposes the temp acceptance . . . [of] an imaginary universe. . . . [The player] forgets, disguises, or temporarily sheds his personality in order to feign another” (19).
Ilinx	Games “which are based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind” (23).

Definition of play: Play is spectacular or ostentatious. Play exposes the secret and mysterious. It “publishes, and somehow expends” the secret/mystery. “In a word, play tends to remove the very nature of the mysterious” (4). “[I]t creates no wealth or goods, thus differing from a work or art. . . . Play is an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and of often of money for the purchase of gambling equipment or eventually to pay for the establishment” (6).

The agon/alea mindset represents modern society. The current competitive mindset, Caillois argues, rewards the skill and ingenuity of people who use knowledge, strategy, or strength to move ahead in society. Competitors have an edge over ‘players’ who, for economic reasons, are not adequately educated or are not well equipped in other ways to compete in a capitalist market economy. Caillois states that lower class citizens or citizens that for any reason cannot compete successfully in an agonistic market, resort to alea, chance. He explains that the lottery, gambling, or other get-rich quick schemes, serve to equalize the class disparities in contemporary society formed by the agon mindset. For example, a person who believes in chance and routinely buys lottery tickets not only contributes significantly to the economy, he or she is also giving him or herself the chance to bypass the competitive marketplace route to success and go directly to the top with a big win. In this manner, alea balances out the social distinctions in agon-type societies by using beliefs, superstition, and hope as a means of compensation—chance, as Caillois describes it, seems to be the compensation for not being able to compete effectively in an agon-based society.

MASK

Callois explains the importance of the mask in Dionysian (primitive) societies as “a sacred object universally present, whose transformation into a plaything perhaps marks a prime mutation in the history of civilization” (59). Dionysian societies “are ruled equally by masks and possession, i.e. by mimicry and ilinx” (87). Later agon/alea societies, by contrast, are called “rational” societies (87). Masks “reinvigorate, renew, and recharge both nature and society” (88). Caillois explains that the dance and festival rituals of primitive societies extend mimicry to its limit in order to become an experience of vertigo. The rituals themselves and their increasing excitement literally transform and control not only the dancers but the crowds that watch. Caillois states that these rituals are the precursors of the power systems at work in contemporary society. He states that masks “are the true social bond” (89) of primitive societies—they maintain the social order.

The shaman ritual, he explains, “involves a violent crisis and temporary loss of consciousness in which the shaman becomes possessed by one or more spirits. He then embarks upon a magic journey through the world, which he narrates and re-enacts” (90). No matter how violent the attack, it all “takes place according to a precise liturgy and in conformity with a traditional mythology. The séance is like a play, with the possessed in costume” (93).

Alfred Metraux, analyzing the course and nature of the voodooistic fit has demonstrated how the subject’s conscious desire to undergo it, an appropriate technique for stimulating it, and a liturgical pattern in its unfolding are necessary. The role of suggestion and even simulation is certain. However, most of the time they themselves seem to be the results of the impatience of the one desiring to be possessed and therefore a means of hastening the onset of the seizure. Suggestion and simulation increase one’s susceptibility and stimulate the trance. (94)

Caillois repeatedly refers to the notion of contagion in his book as a collective social phenomena initiated by the parameters of play. In the above passage, he implies that the shaman’s use of suggestion (the shaman’s dance, acts, gestures, the accompanying drum beats and the story he is retelling in his dance) creates a momentum that escalates to vertigo. The shaman is using and giving passage to ideas through his body and the figures he acts out in his story. I suppose that we can view this in the context of our project as the mask/shaman/ritual pushing ideas through the body or a figure to its limit. Caillois states that the mimicry ritual “is not a game. It ends in vertigo, becomes part of the religious order, and fulfills a social function” (94). The wearer of the mask may not be deceived at the beginning, but he “yields to the intoxication that seizes him. His mind is enthralled, he becomes completely abandoned to the disorder excited in him by his own mimicry” (95). Interestingly, he states that “these apparitions from the beyond [in Dionysian societies] are the forerunner of government. The mask has now become institutionalized. Among the Dogon, for example, a culture that continuously resorts to masks, it has been observed how all the public life of the group is impregnated with them” (95).

When a more advanced (agon/alea cultural mindset) succeeds a less advanced one, “a palpable repression of the power of vertigo and simulation is verified. [The older culture] lose[s] their traditional dominance, are pushed to the periphery of public life, [and] reduced to roles that become more and more modern and intermittent . . . or are regulated to the limited and regulated domain of games and fiction where they afford men the same eternal satisfactions, but in sublimated form, serving merely as an escape from boredom or work and entailing neither madness or delirium” (97).

Our previous instructions, especially our Theory CATTt slot (Baudrillard), has pointed us toward the notion of ilinx as the space of sensation that we need to focus on in the second part of the course. The full sensation of ilinx/vertigo is the logical disaster space of our accidents—it is our disaster at its limit before it destructs (Baudrillard’s instruction). Ilinx, Caillois explains, in Dionysian societies and in the suppressed mimicry/ilinx mindset that contemporary societies satisfy through games, uses the power of mystery to regulate meaning. All of its meanings emanate from within the realm of mystery, the realm of trope—there is nothing outside of ilinx other than the full experience of undefined potentialities. I suppose that we could interpret a boundary around meaning in the experience of ilinx as the bound created by the mask (a visual bound). The inability to experience a definitive bound in the experience of ilinx, perhaps caused by the not knowing and the environmental influences that contribute to the passage from mimicry to possession, could itself be the logic for bounding the experience in knowledge—as if not knowing is the logic of knowing.

The mask, in contemporary society, Caillois explain, is now a protective tool. It now plays a utilitarian role: as “a means of disguise for the malefactor seeking to hide his identity, it does not intrude a new presence but protect him from being recognized. . . . A mask is rather a mechanism for protecting the respiratory organs in a contaminated environment or assuring a supply of needed oxygen to the lungs” (130). The uniform, too, “replaces the mask of a vertiginous society” (132). The uniform is the exact opposite of the mask. A mask “aimed to dissimulate and terrify” and erupt a “fearful power.” The “uniform is also a disguise, but it is official, permanent, regulated, and, above all, leaves the face exposed” (132). Caillois states that the shaman or other primitive authority figure could contort his face in any manner necessary to express the stories he tries to tell through his body, but the contemporary “uniformed representative must be careful that his bare face reveal nothing but calm and rationality, the face of a person specially charged with administering the law” (132).

Caillois ends his fascinating book with the different atmospheres of the travelling fair, carnival, and the circus. The circus, he states, is the “austere side of the fair” (137). Ilinx and mimicry are still very much alive in the atmosphere of festivals and travelling fairs, but the circus brings a seriousness to the various aspects of the characters and acts that comprise which is important to our project in this course. The tightrope walker, for example, has to master vertigo. Caillois writes that the high wire is “the very heart of prowess and [where the] only aim is to master vertigo. The game consists expressly in moving through space as if the void were not fascinating, and as if no danger were involved ” (137). The tightrope walker has to be unconscious of the fear of falling and injuring him or herself in order to master vertigo. He or she defers the suspense of this conscious unconsciousness into the audience, who, like the crowds in Dionysian rituals, succumb to the contagion of the danger and experience ilinx through the acrobat--they, in the act of the experience, become the acrobat walker, conscious of the danger, and fearing for their lives through him without any real danger of being hurt (another deferred--and thereby--controlled) experience of ilinx.

While the acrobat gives us an example of how to control vertigo we, obviously, cannot reenact the tightrope walker’s experience that Caillois describes in our projects--even with the use of the four tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony). Our Target instruction from Caillois, therefore comes from the clown.

In our projects we “want to introduce well-being into the equation” (class notes). In last year’s class, we learned that the commodity form (advertising) has taken over philosophy’s role of establishing well-being. Our project therefore deals with the question of life (contemporary life, if I am interpreting my notes correctly, is an open slot in electracy--an area that needs to be defined). Our instructions from Caillois are to “look again at the secret in Baudrillard--the secret (enigma) is going to be more important in our project because it has an attractive effect” (class notes). The secret is related to the space of ilinx. In our project we “have to assert that the situations we are addressing [our disasters] are driven by ilinx” (class notes). Our accidents actually reflect the ilinx experience in the object space felt in the subject space--it combines both and pushes the accident space to its limit (to an excess limit), as Baudrillard explains. The accident space describes a giddiness and spinning--a drive that people need to satisfy through experience. Our instruction involves how to interpret that drive (class notes). The answer involves looking at the clown’s role in the circus atmosphere. The clown is a parodic clown; he or she breaks ilinx with laughter and disruption. He/She interrupts the experience of chaos by breaking the trance like state of ilinx. Laughter or disrupting the normal experience of a situation with something abnormal is the way we control ilinx in the figure of the disaster we will create at the end of this course.

The notion of attitude is crucial. Attitude describes a certain direction and a movement that is following a pattern in a certain direction and way. “The attitude of electracy is fumisme (parodic). The Western tradition laughs at parody; mocks it. Dadaism, for example, is a deliberate mockery of the whole Western tradition” (class notes). Pataphysics is a parody of metaphysics: it does what it says; it is more metaphysics than metaphysics (class notes). It meets the reality of a thing and pushes it to its extreme--like science fiction.

We have to take a loose attitudes when we create the figure of our accident visually in Prezi. We need to take the accident space and turn it, in the manner of the spinning feeling of ilinx, using trope. If we control the space of the accident in this manner, the thing that seemed complete before our intervention will surprise us by producing more meaning. This additional meaning will emerge in trope, the turning space; it will create the meaning beyond meaning that is the event space in electracy.

Human Embodiment of Accident / Event

In our projects, we are trying to develop a metaphysics of human decision-making; an act that is situated and defined by the parameters of a world or reality that is always already underway. Our goal is to enact the shift from dasein--being, the presence of the human in the world, in an ontological sense--to ereignis--something coming into itself through itself--which can be understood as an historical event. When we make a decision, it is an enacting of ereignis. The elements of the choice, including the choice itself, have already been made. The individual him or herself only comprises approximately two percent of the drive that constitutes a decision (class notes). Tradition has already made a whole series of choices and we exist inescapably among them. When we make a decision, all the factors that lead to the moment of choice are already existent, so, in essence, we are only gathering together and reformulating in our own contexts what already exists--and perpetuating these ideas and practices, which, with repetition, constitute what becomes tradition.

The question electracy asks is which parts of what constitutes a decision-making act do we have control of and which parts part do we not have control of. We put ourselves in the position of answering this question when we think of the event from a first person perspective. The electrate subject experiences the event as something that is happening in real time; he or she experiences the world through the apparatus--he or she undergoes the electrate apparatus (class notes). In electracy, the thought about the accident happens through the apparatus. The apparatus is a relay, but the thought itself, through the mechanism of the apparatus, always comes back to us, to the human embodiment of the thing itself, which, when identified, carries a whole history of meaning though time--it gives a sort of foundation to a new logic of understanding while also enabling a whole series of influences that exist as equally valid despite the fact that it may seem that only chance bought a current fact or dilemma into being over time. For example, professor Ulmer traced back the tar pitch that protects wood from eroding in utility poles in Gainesville, FL, to the origins of the spice trade and trade shipping routes. Early ships made of wood had to be protected from the water erosion and molluscs known as teredo navalis that bore into the wood and weakened its efficacy, so they were coated in tar pitch to repel molluscs. The practice of treating wood, therefore, was brought to America because of the spice trade, particularly, pepper. Pepper--in other words, the human need to enjoy the taste of food--constitutes the human embodiment of the event of the accident that is the soil contamination around the Koppers Superfund site in Gainesville. The problem of contamination is an unforeseen, unplanned, consequence of a particular human need. The current soil contamination problem, viewed/thought from the first person position of the event (ereignis), through the electrate thinking apparatus, can be traced back to a past event that constitutes a human embodiment of the current problem (pepper and the human need for better tasting food), which carries a whole history of associations from the past to create the current situation. All of these influences might be thought of as random, chance occurrences, but electracy argues that the social influences that bring something into the present (the whole history of decisions that created the soil contamination problem in Gainesville) have a uniquely human logic.

Professor Ulmer asked individuals in the class to identify the human embodiment of their accidents. We had to identify or think “the sprawl functionality in our accidents” (class notes). First, we had to identify the human aspect of our accidents; then we had to determine the intersection between the fundamental organic life aspect of our accident and the technical aspects of it, or its technics. Professor Ulmer stated that “for there to be accident, there has to be a human vitality and a tool that intersects” (class notes)--“humanity is subsequent to technics” (class notes).

We are dealing with two forces (class notes):

1. TECHNICS (tool prior to humanity)
2. PLAY

To think of the cancer cells with this logic, I’d have to identify that an untreated cancer cell’s proliferation will eventually (and ironically) cause death. The logic of a cancer cell’s compromised suicide program (apoptosis) can be compared to the manifest sprawl and the social effects of a capitalist economy. In this context, professor Ulmer suggested that in the current social and political economy, nobody wants to admit that death is necessary. Cancer is aberrant to the social norm of life, prosperity, healthy growth. The rap against capitalism is that it compromises everything to grow. The capitalist machine can be allied to the growth and spread of cancer (class notes) but without a physical, breathing body to establish a cap or limit. The human embodiment of the accident space of a cell gone awry in the human body is either 1) the human body itself (the human being, human flesh) as an accident, as the fatality of the event or 2) the meaning and history of the term apoptosis as analyzed through a specific type of cancer (with its own series of environmental and biological factors that can be traced back though time to an initiating factor), as an accident and fatality of the body. The term apoptosis is the term the Greeks used “to describe the ‘dropping off’ or ‘falling off’ of petals from flowers, or leaves from trees” (OED). In modern usage, it is a medical term for “resolution, relaxation, or loosening of something.” In biology, it refers to the “death of individual cells” (OED). It is the manner in which a normal cell acts after it has served its purpose or in order to preserve the cellular order needed for healthy human life. Natalie Angier, in Natural Obsessions, describes it as the process that occurs “when a cell essentially ‘decides’ to die for the good of the body around it, and initiates a sequence of molecular events to literally blow itself apart.” Angier calls it a cell’s “suicide program” (xvi).

(Genetics Home Reference, NIH, 2011)

As I stated in last year's spring course, the various historical meanings of the term apoptosis have interesting literary associations dealing with the changing seasons, longing, and death through the work of Virgil, Dante, Milton, Shelley, and no doubt many other poets and artists. I think that I will still have to chose a specific cancer before working in Prezi, but the human embodiment of the accident space of a cell with a damaged suicide program is the science (technics) that brought (and continues to bring) knowledge of how the disease is caused, and how it can be prevented, across the centuries to the present day, along with how cancer "plays" in the logic of its reality in the terms associated with it through history and the literature which addresses the related questions of loss and death. Additionally, when (or if) I choose a particular cancer to focus the accident space later in the course, the series of meanings than can be drawn from the term apoptosis can be analyzed in terms of the history of the specific cancer, how it acts in the body, how it is treated, how it is caused, etc.

Part Two Overview

Part two of this course will move our thinking into the dimension of the figure. Literal meaning is the outcome of the use of figurative language—the figuration of language is inescapable. While computers can process factual information—literal meaning—at incredible speeds, it cannot be programmed to process and make literal meaning from figurative language unless by accident and only as an accident recognizable through the relational modalities of human cognition. Part two of this course, therefore, involves our approach to the question: can we formulate a figure that supports thinking that could lead to deliberate action.

We are still thinking of our accident as sign (Virilio), but we need to ask ourselves what properties our accident as sign has that give it its own nature—makes it predictable. Baudrillard does not look for a rational option; he looks for an unavoidable option (something destined, predestined and returning) (class notes).

Our task is to engage in a different dimension of thinking and logic. The new dimension in electracy is the dimension of augury (dream work). We need to treat our chosen accidents as omens, and work in the realm of dream logic to think and visualize these omens. The process of doing this and the end result will resemble or be the metaphysics of the omen. Baudrillard, in our Theory slot, is key to our ability to think of our accident as an omen. Our accidents are the spaces of fatality. They are the logic of human fatality. The Fates, as mentioned in an earlier blog entry, create the predestined tensions that orient our lives. We can think of them as the hidden products of society that orient our inner lives. Like the narrative logic (mythologies) that orient our understanding of ourselves in the world and in society, they deliver human life and its many influences to us in the form of the figurative tensions between the axis of conflict (the Helper, Subject, and Opponents) and the axis of communication that is the product (and perhaps the mask) of the hidden desires and aims that give energy and form to the Sender, Object, and Receiver roles.

Our thinking dimension—the dimension of augury and the realm of the Fates—tells us that there are deep, underlying patterns in the world of human experience. In part two, we will try to read these patterns and use their logic to understand the accident space, which acts at the fatal limit of logic and, in turn, refreshes the routine of everyday life by injecting it with the escape it both fears and yearns for. These patterns in the accident logic will create the polar space/logic between pleasure and pain and map them on and within each other. Our final figure of this logic will be an expression of thinking of our accident from the first person event position. It will put in real-time the happening of my experience of reality today undergoing the logic of the electrate apparatus. (In electracy, the thought about the accident happens through the apparatus—it’s a relay be means of the apparatus—but it always comes back to us (class notes).)

We are “trying to develop a metaphysics of human decision” in process. We are trying “to think about the ontology of pure reason” (class notes). This process can be explained as a shift from Heidegger’s dasein to ereignis, to the historical event. “When you make a decision, it is as an ereignis.” The decision has already been made; it has already happened. All of the decisions we make can be imagined as a massive palimpsest of ideas whose paths and connections have always already been experienced or thought (either actually or in the possibilities that their simultaneous existence enables). These decisions are the secrets that the patterns of the Fates and destiny hold and endlessly weave together and which people experience uniquely and individually despite the fact that the innovation we bring to a decision making process is only approximately “two percent” (class notes) of its action. Tradition “has already made a whole series of choices. In decision-making, we need to think about which parts we have control over and which parts belong to tradition" (class notes).

PART TWO

THEORY INSTRUCTION: The Measure of Limit

Our Theory instruction is to find the "excrescence" in our disaster.  The figure which we will create in part II is the thing in our disasters which expresses itself at its limit.  For example, the figure of my disaster at its point of excrescence is cancerous cells metastasizing--the process itself of metastasis is the "substance" of excrescence in an object form before it destructs the host (social environment) that gives it life.

A cancerous cell metastasizing is the pattern of cancer as disaster.  Cancer "speaks," as such through its metastatic excrescence--which is also its sign.  A cell becomes cancerous when its internal "suicide program" (apoptosis) stops functioning and the cell proliferates without any pre-programmed function.  There is no one source that is the trigger for somebody developing cancer, but scientists suggest that cancer is caused by series of factors, which include lifestyle and environmental factors (tobacco use, diet, exposure to UV radiation, exposure to carcinogens) (NCI).  In some cases, "having an inherited gene alteration does not always mean that the person will develop cancer; it only means that the chance of getting cancer is increased" (NCI).

Baudrillard: Quotes

Seduction

"It is difficult to say what constitutes the scene of the body. We can at least say this: it is where the body is in play, and particularly where it plays itself, where it escapes into the ellipsis of forms and movements, into dance, where it escapes its inertia, into gesture, where it is unbound itself, into the aura of looking, where it makes itself into allusion and absence—in short, where it offers itself as seduction" (51).

“What makes you exist is not the force of your desire . . . , but the play of the world and seduction; it is the passion of playing and being played, it is the passion of illusion and appearance, it is that which comes from elsewhere, form others, from their face, their language, their gestures—and that which bothers you, lures you, summons you into existence; it is the encounter, the surprise of what exists before you, outside of you, without you—the marvelous exteriority of the pure object, of the pure event, of what happens without you having anything to do with it” (172-173).

Vulgar commodity: “Raised to the power of absolute commodity, it produces effects of seduction” (149).

“The work of art—a new and triumphant fetish and not a sad alienated one—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 familiar object and become monstrously foreign” (149).

“Shine” of foreignness not of repression or alienated object or of haunting quality, but it shines “out of some secret dispossession; it glows with veritable seduction that comes from elsewhere, from having exceeded its own form and become pure object, pure event” (149).

The source of this perspective for Baudelaire is “the spectacle of transfiguration of the commodity in the Universal Exposition of 1855” (149).

Wit

"In order for there to be seduction, signs or words must thus function without knowing it, as in the Witz.  Things must be absent from themselves, and words must be meaningless" (169).  

Game Theory & Fatal Strategies

Game theory helps understand how play works in the fatal strategy space.  We can't use its logic or its probability calculations, but we can use the tension it predicts and formalizes between players and groups of players.  Game theory gives us the analogy of the narrative that can be applied to real-world situations, catastrophe's, etc.  And fatal strategies give us the theory to move into the space of play and do something else with it (in part II).


The Absolute Commodity

The absolute object is one that is worthless, whose quality is a matter of indifference, but which escapes objective alienation in that it has made itself more of an object than the object—this is a fatal quality.

     This escalation to the limit . . .–responding to alienation on its own terms . . .--is found prefigured in the absolute commodity, according to Baudelaire. Art (the work of art), confronted in modern times with the challenge of the commodity does not, nor should it, look for its rescue in a critical denial . . . , but rather in outbidding the very formal an fetishized abstraction of commodities, under the enchantment of exchange-value—becoming more commodity than commodity, since even farther from all use-value. (146-148)

Chance vs. Fatality
 
Logic of Baudelaire: work of art becomes one with fashion, advertising – work of art that bewilders in its venality, mobility, . . . chance, vertigo—a pure object of marvelous commutability, since, the causes having disappeared, all effects are virtually equivalent” (148).

 “What happens accidentally takes on a meaning and intensity that we no longer assign to rational occurrence. In an overdetermined world, chance is the creator of special effects” (184).

"Chance itself is a special effect; it assumes in the imagination the perfection of the accident” (184).

Spectacle

“the immoral principle of the spectacle, the ironic principle of Evil” will save us (226).

Appearance

"We will not be looking for change, and will not oppose the fixed to the mobile; we will look for the more mobile than mobile: metamorphosis . . . We will not distinguish the true from the false, but will look for the falser than false: illusion and appearance" (25-26).

Ceremony

“The form opposite to love would then by observance: wherever a rule and a game are reinvented, love disappears.  Compared to the regulated and highly conventional intensities of the game or the ceremony, love is a system of freely circulating energy.  It is therefore charged with a whole ideology of liberation and free circulation; it is the pathos of modernity” (134).

The “ceremony is the equivalent of fatality. . . . An ecstatic connection like that of the game: ceremony has no meaning, it has only esoteric rule.  It has no end, since it is initiatory” (203).

“In it we find the definitively factitious and conventional order of the world exalted, the occult objectivity that shines behind the subjectivity of appearances” (203).

“The ceremony puts an end to this occultism of subjectivity” (203).

Liquidation of Metaphor

“The liquidation of metaphor, this precipitation of the sign into brute, senseless matter, is a thing of murderous efficacy. It is of the same order as the meaningless event, the catastrophe, which is also a blind reply, without metaphor, of the world as object to man as subject” (153).

Theory

“Theory is just like ceremony” (217).  “Ceremony is always sacrificial” (217).

”There is perhaps one fatal strategy and only one: theory” (219).

THEORY: Jean Baudrillard's Fatal Strategies

As I read Baudrillard, in my mind, I kept going back to the following passage in Virilio's foreword:

Let us now accept Valéry’s postulate: if consciousness exists only for accidents and if things now operate only “outside of” consciousness, the loss of consciousness of the accident, and of the major disaster, would amount not just to thoughtlessness, but to madness—the madness of voluntary blindness to the fatal consequences of our actions and inventions (I am thinking in particular of genetic engineering and the biotechnologies). This is a situation which would be akin to the sudden reversal of philosophy into its opposite. It would be akin to the birth of a philanoia—literally: a love of madness. A love of radical mindlessness, in which the insane character of our acts would not only cease to worry us consciously, but would delight and captivate us. (Virilio)

I see this same logic of the consciousness of the accident in Virilio in Baudrillard's explanation of the effects' monopoly on the cause in casual reasoning when he takes Virilio's logic one step further--into an actual representation of the "voluntary blindness to the fatal consequences of our actions and inventions" (Virilio) in the indifferent (but conscious) object. This consciousness of the object as object is fascinating to me, especially in relation to the inanimate object. In particular, I can't seem to get the image of the detached eye out of my mind in Baudrillard's anecdote. I tried to figure out what it was about the image that was so disturbing, and I came to the conclusion that it wasn't so much about the horror of language being stripped of metaphor and being taken literally (152) but more so about the collective history of social conventions that pack into the motivations that created that literal object. The detached eye seems beside the point in relation to the stories that give its moment of representation so much power (so much consciousness). And I think that this is really what consciousness means in the realm of the object--it doesn't literally speak to us, but it has the power to tell us something true and real about ourselves. This truth is revealed through the object as a secret, as something seductive because it is always out of reach, something that we want to know but are afraid to have realized in tangible form. This, of course, relates to the narrative focus we are taking from for our Contrast instructions. We have the disaster as a sign (not literal, but given meaning through abstraction, as if the abstraction reduces the blow of a direct hit at the same time it creates it) and a narrative structure to work with. Perhaps Baudrillard is giving us the space to understand the logic of how they fit together and how to do something with this fatal space.

Baudrillard writes about a sort of regressive collapse of representation that ends up exceeding its former 'mass.' In the context of electracy, we are to think of this excess of representation that brings the object or experience to us through history as "sending" process.  We experience the past in the present through this sending in the image of all the components parts it is comprised of through history; much in the same way that the stories in narratives are sending the collective history of their past in the framework of the present through the space of interaction between the characters and the objects they interact with. This idea, when you really think about it, is mind boggling because you can never capture all the trails of associations. 

CONTRAST: Disaster, Film Narrative, Archetype

I chose the Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation as an articulation of our Contrast instruction from game theory. I considered using the film Antonia’s Line for different reasons and emphases that would have worked just as well as Lost in Translation, but I like the open, silent spaces in Coppola’s film, and the sense of isolation that the many panoramic scenes of the Tokyo landscape seen through hotel windows convey.

Anybody who has travelled to Japan can appreciate the genius of Coppola’s achievement of her artistic vision in the film. She captures the character of the experience of a foreigner visiting Japan; particularly the experience of staying in Tokyo: the adjustment to the time difference, the sense of isolation, and loneliness among all the vibrant sounds, the pitch and cadence of recorded womens’ voices in seemingly repetitive public announcements, the lights of the city at night, the hustle and bustle of people, and an efficiency of movement and purpose that is difficult to comprehend without knowing the mindset that drives the culture. Coppola manages to convey the sense of isolation a traveler experiences amid the hustle and bustle of a way of life that a traveler only recognizes as operating normally without understanding its intricacies.

Bill Murray seems to be the perfect character for the role of Bob Harris--a middle-aged actor riding out the effects of a successful career in the film industry. His combination of insomnia, reserve, patience, and the passivity of his mid-life crisis are perfect for downplaying (and thereby emphasizing) the utter fascination a person experiences when first arriving in Japan. Scarlett Johansson, similarly, is the perfect counterpart to Murray’s character: a young woman, just graduated from university and unsure of what she wants to do with her life, who is spending time with her new husband while he works in Tokyo. Coppola slowly brings the two oddly matched characters together: Johansson (Charlotte) is just starting out in life and questioning herself and her marriage, and Murray (Bob) is questioning his role in his marriage and his career—emphasized by the bland communications he has with his wife, who is excessively preoccupied with getting Bob to decide on what color carpet he should have in his study.

While the film purposely shows the characters following parallel paths and following different motivations in the film, the protagonist is clearly Bill Murray's character, Bob.  Looking at the film in context of narrative actants (mythologies), Bob is the Subject, who is dealing with multiple Opponents (his foreign environment, his age, falling into a displaced routine with his wife, and a reserved and mutual attraction to Charlotte).  His magic tool and Helper is Charlotte, who helps him overcome the foreign environment that he feels (respectfully) so out of place in.  Bob's and Charlotte's roles do, however, interchange.  The film juxtaposes the two characters in a manner that allows for Charlotte to also be the Subject, with Opponents that are similar to Bob's but seen from the perspective of the beginning of her adult life.  Her Helper and magic tool is Bob.  Both characters perfectly complement each other because Bob offers Charlotte (and embodies) the experience and a subtle sense of weariness (with life, emphasized intriguingly by his foreign surroundings) that she lacks (and which makes his character's passivity and his sort of stunned nonchalance and sense of humor attractive) and Charlotte gives him the opportunity to share his difficulty adjusting to Japan, which is an issue for both of them due to their different Opponents.   

They both find a sort of sanctuary in each other that in many ways replicates the larger cultural space of foreignness that they both find themselves in.  The familiar/foreign space they create between each other slowly opens up their resistance to the larger foreign space of Japan.  This opening up is subtle in the film.  It takes the position of the Object, which again is different with each character (and is associated with their Opponents, who never substantially present to offer the satisfaction that each character seeks).  Because the Object for each character does not have material form, the foreignness takes up the Sender-Object-Receiver space on the axis of communication, which becomes realized in the obvious desire between Bob and Charlotte in the second half of the film.  This desire, though, is more than a physical desire for both characters because it is the desire for the absent Opponents (literal and figurative) that they are both seeking and dealing with in different ways and which they recognize in each other.

Contrast Instruction: Narrative Logic

Our instruction from William Poundstone’s Prisoner’s Dilemma comes from Bertrand Russell’s innovation of conceiving of the dare game “Chicken” as “a metaphor for the nuclear stalemate. His 1959 book, Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, not only describes the game but offers mordant comments on those who play the geopolitical version of it” (197).

Poundstone explains that the game “Chicken readily translates into an abstract game. Strictly speaking, game theory’s chicken dilemma occurs at the last possible moment of a game of highway chicken. Each driver has calculated his reaction time and his car’s turning radius (which are assumed identical for both cars and both drivers); there comes a moment of truth in which each must whether or not to swerve” (198). The drivers’ decision is irrevocable, and it is made without knowing the other’s decision. There is no time for either party to know the other’s decision. Poundstone state that “In its simultaneous, life or death simplicity, chicken is one of the purest examples of John von Neumann’s concept of a game” (198).


James Dean, 1955.

 Russell correlates chicken with the famous 1955 James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause. Our instruction comes specifically from Russell’s correlation of the game with this film and, particularly, the game’s application to the larger political implications of international relations in time of unrest.

Elmer G. Wiens, created a "game tableau of [that] represents the payoffs for James and Buzz [the two characters who play chicken in Rebel Without a Cause] for each choice of strategy" (par. 4). He explains that "there are four possible outcomes of the game. The worst that can happen is that both James and Buzz chose to jump after the other driver jumps. Both cars will plunge over the cliff killing James and Buzz" (par. 3). The tableau he created is below, and his website includes a detailed description of the numbers and an overview of every possible strategy available for each character:

The site of our Contrast is the model of Russell using a movie to describe the game chicken. We are to think of how policy makers, decision makers, movie makers, and, really, every external aspect of our lives as drawing fron the same mythologies. The people that wrote and directed Rebel Without A Cause were expressing the values of the culture. With this in mind, our instruction is to identify a pop narrative (preferably a film) that is to my disaster what James Dean's film is the Cuban Missile Crisis. In order to do this, we have to anticipate the idea of fate (Baudrillard will provide instruction on this) and personify human destiny (again, Baudrillard will give us much to consider regarding destiny) like Greek mythology's three fates: Clotho (how spins the thread of life), Lachesis (who allots the length of the yarn), and Atropos (who makes the final cut in the thread):

Flemish Tapestry, The Triumph of Death, or The 3 Fates, ca. 1510-1520.

The Fates' thread is like the bindings that hold life together in the manner of a "feeling of constraint" (class notes).  People can't escape fatality because it is a pattern of fate--a predestination that brings thing, events, ideas to us.

The concept of a fatal strategy is grounded in the notion of fate (and its tensions) today.

Narrative / Commodity of Gift Exchange

Narratives are forms of mythology that the societies use to make sense of themselves (and our mortality).  Baudrillard in Fatal Strategies turns back to the alternative commodity of gift exchange in terms of symbolic exchange.  Symbolic exchange is the equivalent practice of economic gift exchange in the form of storytelling (class notes).  The below image is a re-creation of the image of narrative actants that professor Ulmer showed us in class.  This image shows us the template that narratives, public policy decision-making, and perhaps even the choices we make on day by day basis, generally follow because they all draw from the same history of influences (mythologies):

The protagonist of a story is always simply an ordinary person who has etiquette: he or she respects the social order of behaviour and politeness.  To prove the protagonist's (subject) a donor tests the him or her.  If the protagonist passes the test, the donor gains the protagonist's magic tool. 

Game theory helps us figure out how and why people are compelled to reciprocate.  It helps us address the question and space of interaction in terms of symbolic relationships--scripted routines, as such, that guide the right and wrong paths we follow.  The gift economy of the donor represents a power of reciprocity that is personal.

INSTRUCTION: choose a film and analyze its strategy by looking at its structure, determining the protagonist(s), donor(s), and the field of characters that guide the narrative and establish its tensions and trajectories. The relationship between the protagonist and donor is key: the power dialogue between the two simulates a type of sacrifice.

CONTRAST: Game Theory / William Poundstone's Prisoner's Dilemma

In Prisoner’s Dilemma, William Poundstone traces the origin and development of game theory and the personal and political lives of the scientists involved in its conception and development (John von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern, J. Robert Oppenhiemer, John Nash, Bertrand Russell, and all the major figures surrounding the Manhattan Project and the atom bomb).  Game theory is a systematic mathematical process for predicting the outcome of a predicament between two or more people or groups who are in a situation where they only have their best interests in mind.

Poundstone presents the following situation as an example of prisoner’s dilemma:

you, your spouse, and your mother are kidnapped by mad scientists and placed in a room with a strange machine. All three of you are bound to immobile to chairs. A machine gun looms in front of your spouse and mother, and a menacing clock ticks away on the wall . . . [A scientist announces that pushing a button on a] mechanism will aim the gun at the mother and shoot her dead. If you don’t push it within sixty seconds it will aim and fire at your spouse. . . . What do you do? (1)

I also saw an example of a prisoner’s dilemma in a recent episode of The Good Wife, where a young college-aged couple is arrested for a crime involving drugs and a murder. The male is the son of prominent society family and the female comes from a middle class (or poorer) single-parent family. The couple are in love and each refuses to compromise by the telling the officers the truth. They are then placed in separate rooms and interrogated individually. The officers try to trick them by suggesting that the other person has confessed to the truth, but they both hold their ground despite the temptations offered to them by the officers to escape the situation unscathed because they have faith that their partner will not say anything. In the end, the viewer learns that the female is actually responsible for the murder although the situation itself only arose because the male wanted to buy drugs to stay awake to study for a paper or final exam. The male ends up confessing to the murder and taking the blame for the female for this reason and out of his love for her. The whole situation of the game that the officers played to manipulate the male and female into revealing the truth of the situation falls into the logic of game theory.

Game theory logic is usually presented in the form of logic tables like the following:

	B refuses deal	B turns state’s evidence
A cooperates	1 yr, 1 yr	3 yrs, 0 yrs
A turns state’s evidence	0 yrs, 3 yrs	2 yrs, 2 yrs

F.W. Murnau, Faust, 1926.

Poundstone describes another prisoner’s dilemma situation where police officials may not have enough evidence to convict two individuals, and they are offered a Faustian bargain (118): if one individual testifies against the other, he/she will go free, but the other individual will get three in prison for the main charge.  The catch is that if they both “testify against each other, both will get two years in jail.”  Each individual knows that the other is being offered the same deal, and each individual is only concerned with his/her own welfare (and the lesser prison sentence).  According to game theory, if both players “are rational, both will testify and both will get two years in jail” (118-119).

Game Theory's Working Parts

• Zero sum game (A two-player noncoopertive game "where the total winnings or payoffs are fixed" (51), such as in poker).
• N-person game (A game “with an arbitrary number of players" that "involve[] coalitions that change the rules of the game and its logic).
• Non-zero sum game (A game with three or more players where cooperation is a factor in the game logic. Associated with John Nash's work in Game Theory))
• Pure Strategy (always making strategic moves according to a preset plan).
• Mixed Strategy (make strategic moves randomly, so that your opponent(s) can't orient their moves on a fixed pattern and outsmart you)
• Utility (Subjective. The “abstraction that can be thought of as the ‘points’ that players play for” (170))
• Saddle Points:
“When the maximin and the minimax are identical, that outcome is called a ‘saddle point’” (54).
• When a game has a saddle point, the saddle point is the solution of the game, the expected outcome of rational play.
• “This rational solution . . . is an equilibrium enforced by self-interest and mistrust” (97)

John Nash

·         N-person games involve multiple players, but the concept remains in a 2-person zero sum game context because the players form coalitions (63).

o   N-person games worked for JVN and Morgenstern’s aim:  to treat economic conflicts as n-person games.

·         Nash studied ‘noncooperative’ games where coalitions are forbidden” (96) – multiple players over time: non-zero sum games and games with over three players (97).

o   Rule: you can’t change another team’s strategy.

·         Emphasis on equilibrium points: “outcomes where the players have no regrets” (98)

o   Player’s achieve well-being (key point)

·         Nash Equilibrium

o   Nash proved that every two-person finite game has at least one equilibrium point.  

o   Nash’s proof says that non-zero-sum games have equilibrium points, too.  Which was a new outcome.

o   Mutual defection as strategy with best utility payoff in the long run.

·         We need non zero sum game for our disaster logic (rather than zero-sum) because we have multiple players with different interests and different strategies that aren’t in effect changed by another player’s strategy. 

Game Theory and Disaster

I tried to imagine how I might fit my disaster of the disease cancer into the game theory logic using the Nash's non-zero sum game logic with equilibrium points.  I thought that the "player's" in the game would be the government regulators, scientists, and the public, each of which have functional equilibrium points where their needs are being satisfied as best as possible given the social factors that each operate within.  In a non-zero sum game the equilibrium point falls into the defect/defect category--Nash argues that this is the common best outcome for a multi-player situation on a long-term basis.  However, Poundstone explains that an experiment by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher proved that an outcome of cooperation among the players (cooperation/cooperation) was the most common outcome on a short-term basis. 

	B cooperates	B defects
A cooperates	cooperate, cooperate (CC)	cooperate, defect (CD)
A defects	defect, cooperate (DC)	defect, defect (DD)

If these outcomes are both valid in their temporal contexts, I thought (incorrectly because of the problematic of multiple players) that I could imagine the transaction of the individual visiting a doctor after noticing something is wrong. In the transaction of the doctor's visit, all the players come together to cooperate in the service they offer to the patient and the service the patient gives back by being an operand in the system that establishes the factors that create the "well-being" of the other "players in the game." In the long-term, however, if the patient has cancer, then the system itself can be seen to buckle in its full cooperation for any number of reasons associated with treatment options, costs, and the stubbornness of some forms of cancer. The defect/defect strategy could be seen to work in this latter situation when the stakes are raised for each party and each must theoretically decide to shift the outcome toward a slight loss for each party to accommodate for positive outcome for a longer duration.

o   Players in the game:

§  Government regulators (equilibrium: regulations, policies)

·         Government research funds

§  Scientists (equilibrium dependent on funding)

§  Public (equilibrium: healthy)

§  Health Insurers (equilibrium: wealthy)

o   Each has equilibrium points.

o   Non-zero sum game cooperation/cooperation; defection/defection

o   Strategy: short term: CC

o   Strategy: long term: DD (to keep progress innovative but also increase opportunity for disaster).