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). 

The Industrial Revolution: Commodity, Electracy

Computational Advertising Image, 2008.

The material effect of the industrial revolution is the commodity.  A commodity is not an object or thing, it is a relationship constituted in the dialogue between a buyer and a seller--as such, the commodity refers to the relationship between the buyer and seller.  The commodity comes between a person and his or her relationship to the world.  The principle of the commodity is that it takes one thing out of distribution and makes it the measure of a larger whole, which, as a result, makes everything equivalent in terms of this measure.

EXCHANGE VALUE + USE VALUE = PRICE

The invention of the commodity exchange affects the economy proper because industry started producing goods for exchange value.  The advertising boom that began in the industrial revolution abstracts the commodity further by turning the exchange value into a sign.  The three factors of the commodity are therefore: use value, exchange value, and sign value (class notes).

Volkswagen Advertisement

"The sign value extracts from the exchange relationship the human sensorium" (class notes).  Advertisers sold people the promise of happiness.  They helped replace need with want and desire, the latter of which they made indistinguishable. 

Walter Benjamin said that advertising is superior to criticism.  He allies the glaring reflection of light on asphalt (I imagine this at night for some reason--I've been trying to find--with no luck--a photograph or painting that I once saw that captures the seduction of this image so well; it depicted the reflection of a halogen light from a street store lighting up an empty, wet, city street somewhere in Europe) with the tempting glow of the commodity sign.

Menachem Feuer, in "If this Space is For Rent, Who Will Move In?" (2006), writes further on Benjamin's contrast between criticism and advertising in the following passage:

Benjamin tells us that criticism must change and the model for this change is the advertisement or, simply, anything that creates a "perceived contact with things." Like advertising, criticism must touch and fascinate readers: because they are touched by it, blown away by it, or simply "warmed by the subject," people desire it. In a more theoretical sense, Benjamin tells us that criticism, like advertising, should affect the reader with visceral projections of "fragmented" intensity which circumvent any form of contemplation. This intensity, something like a "burst of energy," affects the very life of the subject.

Harold Bloom, in his book, Agon, identifies this burst of energy with the sublime, but associates it with a more mystical image, "an invisible breath or emanation."[4] It hits on something hidden, one might even say repressed, and, in doing so, releases a charge of energy. However, for Bloom, the energy that comes out of this marks a fear central to the destruction of that repression -- the "invisible breath" is "a breeze that precedes the start of a nervous breakdown or disorder".[5] Likewise, the advertisement exposes the reader to what Bloom calls the aura of fragmentation that hits him/her, as the car that "careens at us out of a film screen," and, in effect, "leaves them thinking" about what hit them (post-facto) -- like PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome). Bloom argues that this is what the "aura" does; but in doing so, it looks back at us as if to say that there is something in what we see that involves who we are. 

Bloom cites a letter of Gershom Scholem which provides his understanding of this aura: it is like the "dissolution of Angels once they have sung their hymn."[6] This image, or in Hebrew, Zelem, is, for Bloom, the remnant of who we are after the catastrophe of modernity -- "the final evidence of an authentic individuality... The aura is a final defense of the soul against the shock or catastrophe of multiplicity, against masses of objects or multitudes of people in the street." According to Bloom, this zelem is the combination of two contradictory things: "the shock or reversal and loss...and what he (Benjamin) calls in his beautiful essay on Leskov, the beautiful halo of the storyteller." (Feur, 2006, pars. 5-6)

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Of Poor B. B.

I, Bertolt Brecht, came out of the black forests.
My mother carried me into the cities while I lay
Inside her body. And the chill of the forests
Will remain inside me until my dying day.

In the asphalt city I’m at home. From the beginning
Provided with every last sacrament:
With newspapers. And tobacco. And brandy.
To the end distrustful, lazy, and content.

I am friendly to people. I put on
A stiff hat according to their custom.
I say: They’re animals with quite a peculiar smell.
And I say: What does it matter, I am too.

Occasionally in the morning I sit
A woman or two on my empty rocking chairs
And gaze at them thoughtlessly and say:
In me you have someone who can’t be trusted.

Toward evening, I gather men around me,
We address one another as “gentlemen.”
They rest their feet on my tabletops
And say: Things will get better for us, and I don’t ask when.

Toward morning in the grey light the fir trees piss
And their vermin, the birds, begin to chirp.
At that hour I drain my glass in town and chuck
The cigar butt and worriedly fall asleep.

We have sat, an easy generation,
In houses thought to be indestructible
(So we have built those tall boxes on the island of Manhattan
And those thin antennae that amuse the Atlantic swell).

Of these cities all that will remain is what passed through them, the wind!
The house makes the consumer happy: he empties it out.
We know that we are only tenants, provisional ones,
And after us there’ll be nothing much worth talking about.

In the earthquakes to come, I very much hope
I don’t let my cigar go out, embittered or not,
I, Bertolt Brecht, carried into the asphalt cities
From the black forests inside my mother long ago.
                                                  (Doss, Lock Raven Review, 2009)

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The advertising industry is a negative influence because they "shift values of self-criticism to a self-seeking indulgence. However, they play a positive role in social values because they took on the role of educating "people into the dimension of electracy--the realm of enjoyment" (class notes). Electracy is not concerned with the literate principles of truth and falsehood; it is concerned with the axis of pleasure and pain--the aesthetic and flesh (classnotes). Kant states that "aesthetic experience is a faculty of its own. Electracy is an application of that faculty" (class notes). The challenge of Electracy is to make the pleasure and pain axis of experience intelligent.

From Notes

Cabaret, 1972.

• Right now entertainment is providing the image of a good life.
• In electrate thinking, we are looking for where we can intervene.
• The goal isn’t to try to improve upon science or religion but to work with a third dimension—electracy—which is still young and needs to be invented.
• Electracy began in 19th Century Paris.
• The attraction was the pleasure district – a free zone on the pleasure pain axis of experience.
• The academy of electracy is the cabaret.
• The cabaret in Paris is the equivalent of what literacy was to the Greeks.
• In cabarets, the avant garde was created in the framework of a particular attitude.
• The cabaret attitude is called fumisme (literal meaning: “mocking disdain”)
• Bohemia is a rejection of the bourgeoisie, profit-making world.

The Aristotle of cabaret is Marcel Duchamp, who submits a urinal to the Paris Salon as a joke in 1917.  It is an articulation of the cabaret attitude of fumisme.  Duchamp tricked Alfred Stieglitz to take a photograph of it, but his real goal was to get the image of the fountain to articulare the sign as commodity (a ready-made) (class notes).

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917.

The key point for the purposes of our course is to acknowledge that the logic of electracy has already been invented in advertising and avant garde Paris.  Altough the logos has been invented, we still need to know what to do with it.  Our project will tackle this issue by inventing a logical category for the image--in other words, creating an image metaphysics.  The raw material for this new metaphysics is the commidity, art, popular culture, the circulating echange of information.  We willl need to extract an image metaphysics from our disaster.

Economy, Commodity, Exchange, Gift



John Mayall, Portrait of Karl Marx, 1875.

As stated in an earlier post, electracy is a philosophical shift that happened during the late 18th century among the social upheavals of the industrial revolution. The political revolutions of this era erased the hierarchy of class distinctions and created a new proletarian class. The new industrial city due to advances in technology came about very quickly. It was Marx’s ambition that proletariat class would establish themselves as their own social entity. Answering an interview question on the politics of social identity at the University of Washington in 2006, Alain Badiou states that Marx saw the proletariat as a generic category with no pure identity—their identity formation comes from the catch-all term “humanity,” which is the same as non-identity. I’ve quoted how whole answer to the question below because it has relevance to our project, and I would like to refer back to it.

The question of the political process is always a question that goes beyond identities. It's the question of finding something that is, paradoxically, a generic identity, the identity of no-identity, the identity which is beyond all identities. For Marx, "proletariat" was the name of something like that. In the Manuscripts of 1844, Marx writes that the very nature of the proletariat is to be generic. It's not an identity. It's something like an identity which is non-identity; it's humanity as such. That's why for Marx the liberation of the working class is liberation of humanity as such, because the working class is something generic and not a pure identity. Probably that function of the working class is saturated. We cannot substitute a mere collection of identities for the saturated generic identity of the working class. I think we have to find the political determination that integrates the identities, the principles of which are beyond identity. The great difficulty is to do that without something like the working class. Without something that was a connection between particularity and universality, because that's what the working class was. The particularity of the working class was its location in a singular place; the working class was generic. The solution of the problem for Marxism was the human group which is not really an identity, which is beyond identity.

We have to do the same thing, but probably without that sort of solution. We cannot say that today this group is the generic group and that the emancipation of this group is also the emancipation of us all. So we have to find something more formal. Why formal? Because it's less inscribed in the singularity of a group. It's a relation between principles, between the formalism of the new discipline and all identities in the social field. It's a problem now for which we don't yet have the solution.

Marx's solution is a sort of miracle: you find the group which is also the generic group. It was an extraordinary invention. The history of this Marxist invention, in its concrete political determination, was not so much the history of the generic group, of the working class as such, but rather history of the representation of this generic group in a political organization: it was the history of the party. The crisis now is the crisis of representation, and also the crisis of the idea of the generic group.

When you see that a sequence of politics of emancipation is finished, you have a choice: you can continue in the same political field, or you can find the fidelity to the fidelity. It's the same thing here: If the idea of the working class as a generic group is saturated, you have the choice of saying that there are only identities, and that the best hope is the revolt of some particular identity. Or you can say that we have to find something much more universal, much more generic. But probably without the representative generic group. (George, Interview with Badiou 2006, pars. 18-21)

Gustave Doré, Over London by Rail, 1870.

The notion of identity and the sense of selfhood are part of the experience of literacy. The idea of a collective or group subject came into being with the industrial revolution and electracy. The possibility of a collective consciousness was part of this electrate shift. People became aware of themselves through the notion of the proletariat class and their role in a new group subjectivity. This phenomena of group behavior is called effervescence—an “effervescence comes over the people” (class notes). Kant was fascinated by the effervescence of people during the French Revolution:

If a revolution is successful, citizens have as much obligation to obey the new regime as they had to obey the old one (6:323). Since the new regime is in fact a state authority, it now possesses the right to rule. Further, in his theory of history, Kant argues that progress in the long run will come about in part through violent and unjust actions such as wars. Kant even takes it as a sign of progress that spectators of the French Revolution have greeted it with "a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm" (7:85). Kant is not pointing to the revolution itself as a sign of progress but to the reaction of people such as himself to news of the revolution. The spectators endorse the revolution not because it is legitimate but because it is aimed at the creation of a civil constitution. Revolution, then, is wrong but still contributes to progress (Rauscher, “Kant's Social and Political Philosophy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008), par. 29).

ECONOMY

Our CATTt, perhaps, Dressed Up for a Night on the Town

The notion of prioritizing the civic outcome of radical change because it contributes to progress is entangled in the distribution of wealth and the economy. Of course, due to investment and the accumulation of capital, industry is an economic mode of production. Adam Smith developed the new social context of the industrial revolution and the proletariat’s collective “non-identity” in terms of economics. He posited that collective identity works with an invisible hand (class notes). Smith argued that an individual's establishment of well-being is achieved purely by one's self interest. If everyone systematically looks out for him or herself, then an economy will continue to prosper—this logic has obvious parallels to game theory. Kaushik Basu elaborates further in the following passage from Beyond the Invisible Hand (2011):

An outsider viewing a modern economy, with goods changing hands and workers toiling away to produce goods in which they themselves have no interest, may be tempted to think that there is an outside agency or divine will that organizes this huge machinery. But Smith argued that this is not the case; the market is like an invisible hand that can guide producers that have goods delivered where they are most needed.

The same view of the central opinion in mainstream economics was described more eloquently by the British Marxist economist Joan Robinson (1979, 43), in a commencement speech at the University of Maine in May 1977: 'The philosophy of orthodox economics is that the pursuit of self will lead to the benefit of society. By this means the moral problem is abolished. The moral problem is concerned with the conflict between the individual interest and the interest of society. And this doctrine tells us that there is no conflict, we can all pursue our self-interest with good conscience. . . . This doctrine is attributed to Adam Smith.' (Basu, p. 9)

Smith's theory of the invisible hand was unacknowledged

for close to two centuries after the appearance of the classic, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. . . . It took a considerable machinery of mathematical economics . . . for it to be given formal shape and proof. It was well into the twentieth century that the conditions under which a competitive equilibrium exists and is optimal were formally demonstrated. That is, it was formally proved, given some condition, all individuals pursuing their respective self-interest leads society to an optimal state. This has come to be known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics and is the formal statement of the invisible hand conjecture. (pp. 9-10)

The tension that is enabled between two or more players when they play a game to win is the same enabling space of Smith’s invisible hand: the players playing the game both create and mold the space without affecting the logic or substance of its composition—it exists in a state of entelechy. History as an idea follows the same invisible spatial logic—like a sort of charged space enabled by the actions of the “non-identity” of “humanity as such” (George, Interview with Badiou, 2006, pars. 18-21). Adam Smith, through Hegel, suggests that  “there is an entelechy to history” (class notes). For the purposes of our project, the notion of the economy should be conceived as a kind of relationship. The market economy creates two new experiences of being human in society: 1) the feeling of alienation and 2) the relationship we have with the commodity or the relationship it has with us.

ALIENATION

Käthe Kollwitz, Die Mütter (The Mothers), 1921.

Positive
The modern relationship between a person and their work can be traced back to the industrial revolution. Traditionally, people used tools to make things. Work itself in is an alienating activity because the relationship of the self to work is a singular relationship. "You have to alienate yourself to interact with the world, and, in doing so, you become at one with the world" (class notes). Alienation, in this context, is a good thing; it's a positive alienation. Homer's Odyssey is an example of a positive alienation: Ulysses adventures on the way home from the Trojan war is an example of a spiritual roundtrip (an image of becoming that allows experience home again for the first time) (class notes).

Victor Turner, Scene from Homer's Odyssey, 1829.

Negative
The negative aspect of alienation is the "break between a person's sense of agency and the products of their work" (class notes).  People feel alienated when they fail to recognize their own agency and sense of purpose in the world; when we become alienated from our own causality in the world.  Alienation of this kind is a failure of experience.  The effect of disinterestedness, deracination, is called anomie. 

Class Notes: Heuretic Approach

UNIVERSITY DISCIPLINE / COURSE RESEARCH FRAME 

The university is funded by a society which wants results of a certain kind. University disciplines are created to solve problems (social, ethical, political, psychological, medical, scientific). In Greek, próblēma originally meant "obstacle" or "to throw or lay before” in terms of a challenge which another person picks up as if in a contest. This course and the heuretic process should be approached from this problem-based frame of mind.

Lithography by Wolff (19th century)

HEURETIC LEARNING

In this course, while we are learning the logic of electracy in real-time (through our blogs) and actually practicing its logic using heuretics. As students, we are taking on the role of employees in a "conceptual consulting agency." In the Network Book site networkedbook.org, professor Ulmer refers to the heuretic process as working in a field of "[e]piphany as logic":

Epiphany as logic is not experienced directly but composed, designed, in a consulting practice dubbed the EmerAgency, a virtual consultancy by means of which all citizens participate in an Internet public sphere (possible only through a digital prosthesis). The oracle or parable strategy is to adopt a public policy problem (a catastrophe in progress) as an image of one’s own situation, thus testing the slogan of the EmerAgency: Problems B Us. ("Introduction: Electracy," par. 7)

"Consulting is how [the university institution] teaches other institutions" (class notes). The internet as an electrate communication tool "maps over [the] cognitive frameworks” which define the consulting "clients" who invest in the tool to communicate (internet users). The internet as the consulting vehicle has "no strata of authority." The EmerAgency thus addresses the “public realm, citizenship, ethics, public policy," etc. Within this course, we are interested in policy formation. Our focus on policy formation will take shape as we start to examine the intertext of the CATTt instructions in relation to the policy issues that surround our disasters. Game theory logic will be part of our examination of this relationship.

Going back to our Target, Paul Virilio’s Museum of Accidents: Virilio provides the site of a problem which needs a new discourse. The Target slot of the CATTt deals with

an area of application that the [heuretic] method is designed to address. The target is often identifiable in terms of an institution whose needs have motivated the search for the method. Thus Target supplies an inventory out of what is lacking or missing, or out of the excess of a new situation for which no practices yet exist. Plato’s target is education. Indeed, method is the discouse of School as an institution, whose primes is that learning is transferable. (Heuretics 9)

Fiber Optic Bundle

Part of Virilio’s instruction also comes from the CATTt’s Theory slot. Virilio’s fatalistic view of the world, and its demonstrable context in his museum of accidents, is related to the society of the spectacle. Virilio’s critique of society and the disaster is important because he identifies a new space of discourse: in the dromosphere literacy is not viable; we need another logic to understand this space. We don’t have critical thinking in this new space. The disaster image space occupies a “now” logic that, in terms of the viewer, nullifies his or her past and future in the moment of direct experience. The image appears (is rendered), as such, at the speed of light (λv = c).  It seems that the images on Virilio’s site can be experienced at the speed of light in two ways: 1) as rendering and constantly refreshing through the fiber optic cables that make them available to our browsers at almost the speed of light. Apparently, light through fiber optic cables travels approximately 17 to 33 percent slower than the speed of light depending on the purity of the glass and wavelength of the transmission. 2) If considering the content of the images in the museum of accidents, we can also say that the disasters themselves (in progress, in their aftermath, about to happen) are stilled into the presence of the now (with no past or future that is readable in the image itself). Speed, in both contexts--and perhaps with more impact when experienced together--what Baudrillard calls hyperreal, the realer than real--seems to demand so much from the “now” moment of experience that it creates an anxiety of disappearance (a bizarre adaptation of Bloom’s anxiety of influence), of loss, of acting, of feeling, of reacting now.

TOOLS
 
The electrate tool that we develop in this course has to be able to work with the logic of the dromosphere--at light speed. We can’t do anything with the tool other than put our decisions into it. This is the problem that we have to solve in the role of designing the operation of the tool. Virilio helps us because he tells us to look at accidents in a metaphysical sense. In Aristotelian logic, accidents are the substance that persists through change--that become known through accidents. Virilio’s Museum of Accidents creates the environment for us to look at the accident and its patterns and treat them as a sign of a new metaphysics. He doesn’t tell us how to do it, but, in the same manner that the Greeks noticed patterns in the narratives of oral traditions, stories, and ideas when they wrote them down, we need to take the image space of disaster, gather the images, and let some part of the real--the substance--some part of ourselves--show itself to us (class notes).


VIRILIO: tale

Virilio’s exhibit of the disaster also contributes to the tale slot of our CATTt—the tale "within our tale, our blog, is an exhibit, a genre, a display. We are going to make our blog en exhibit" (class notes). This means that we should look at our disaster from several dimensions.  

DIMENSION OF THE ACCIDENT   The visual dimension of the accident is important. We need to extract some signifiers from the site of the accident. Making a sign of accident involves extracting meanings from it and reducing them and saying more by abstraction (see my attempt in the Disaster as Sign post). We need to consider the art and science of naming (class notes). The accident’s visual force is also important—the way it interprets itself through our reaction.  We need to ask ourselves, “What are the forces that made the materiality of the world do that” (class notes)?  The force involves the physicality of the image, the gravity, velocity, the pitch of its materiality as a social dilemma. LOOK OF THE ACCIDENT  The look of the accident involves its context in terms of the policy issues that surround the issue before and after the moment of occurrence. We need to consider the look of the situation, the scene of it, and determine the relevant specialized knowledge surrounding it.