Technological Determinism, Control, and Education: Neil Postman and Bernard Stiegler

Upon re-reading Neil Postman's Technopology: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, I found many parallels to calls from Bernard Stiegler. I am still unsure whether this should trouble me. Stiegler's detailed philosophical reading of Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida is surely not for nought. However, it may be worthwhile to look at the difference between Postman and Stiegler.

The issue here is one of control. The question concerning technology either revolves around technology's "good" or "badness" or "neutrality," or, alternately, our ability to control it. I would like to argue here that Stiegler's "politics of memory" does not imply that we can control technology or that we can slow the process down (such as Virilio, who Stiegler uses generously in TT2), but that we can engage with it. Postman, in contrast, seems to suggest that we can control technology, even though he offers many examples of how technology's effects cannot be controlled or sometimes even predicted.

For Postman, the question of any new technology, is to ask what it may undo rather than what it can do (Postman 5). This already sets up his narrative as one characterized by nostalgia, as Sid Dobrin pointed out to me yesterday. Still, Postman recognizes, as does Stiegler that technology is never "neutral" because there is no technology "in itself." Instead, technology always enters into a particular situation and as such is pharmacological.

Postman misses this pharmacological aspect of technology; instead, he frames it as if technology has a telos: "once a technology is admitted; it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do" (Postman 7). He seems to see the technology as entering society as if from an alien force. That is, at one point, for Postman, technologies did not "attack" "the dignity and integrity of the culture into which they were introduced" (23). Postman seems unaware that (at least this is Stiegler's argument) that technics came first, and constituted the very possibility of culture in the first place. But once again, it is hard to disagree with statements such as the following:

embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another. (Postman 13). 

Both Postman and Stiegler are concerned with how technologies alter education. Postman's main concern seems to be the television, a technology important to Stiegler as well ("Telecracy against Democracy"), but also the computer. Postman's views of the possibilities inherent in the computer are dated, as he argues that computers carry a banner of "private learning," "individual problem-solving." In his defense, Postman's book is pre-social network. Thus, later in this book, he characterizes computers as mainly calculating devices in the service of "Technopoly."

For Postman, the ideal time to live was not what he calls "tool using cultures" nor our contemporary moment, but what he calls a "technocracy," which emerged in the 19th century with the industrial revolution: Following Marx, he acknowledges alienation and poor work conditions, but he seems to think that back then we were more conscious of  them as evil things that must be eradicated. This is why one can call his orientation rather nostalgic compared to Stiegler (although Stiegler might be nostalgic for something else: the family? I need to read Taking Care). Postman writes,

And though it is true that technocratic capitalism created slums and alienation, it is also true that such conditions were perceived as an evil that could and should be eradicated [. . .] The nineteenth century saw the extension of public education, laid the foundation for the modern labor union, and led to the rapid diffusion of literacy. (44)

Technocracy also gave us "political and religious freedom," the idea of "progress." Postman thus concludes that "technocracy will not overwhelm us" (44-45). Technocracy does not render religion, for instance, totally ineffectual: "there still existed holy men and the concept of sin" (45).

This seems about as far away from Stiegler as one can possibly get. However, Stiegler too uses the word "spirit" as a positive term. The difference, one might argue, is that for Stiegler "spirit" must also be tied to a Freudian libidinal economy and the concept of mass affect. We get the sense that Stiegler does not long for a time when religion told us what to do; rather, much like Greg Ulmer, aesthetics and art -- various compositions -- should become an integrative paradigm. More on this later.

Returning to Postman, he sees an insidious transition between his beloved technocracy and Technopoloy. Technopology is "totalitarian technocracy" (48). Postman defines Technopoly's "thought world" via Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management:

The beliefs that the primary, if not the only goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that inf act human jdugment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.(51)

 From here, Postman laments the proliferation of information without any guiding structure (for instance, the schools). I do not think that Stiegler necessarily would disagree with this diagnosis. Indeed, this is not a far cry from Stiegler's claim in Decadence of Industrial Democracies:

the reduction of trust (and of time, that is, of belief in the future) to pure calculation, which would be capable of therefore eliminating anything incalculable, is what radically destroys all trust, because it destroys all possibility of believing: all the possibility of believing in the indetermination of the future, of the future as indeterminate and in this indetermination as chance, an opening to the future as to its improbability, that is, to the future as irreducibly singular. (45) 

Ironically, for all of his laments against calculability, if we are to believe Postman, the goal is to try and predict the future (to calculate it) and we do this by paying attention to the "telos" of technology. Ignoring Derrida's important argument that the condition for the possibility of the incalculable is also calculation, the machinic, repetition, etc. Postman condemns calculation tout-court, seeing in the concept of calculation "numerical measurement." This is the type of calculation, indeed, that Derrida or Deleuze (or maybe Stiegler) might call a "bad repetition." The repetition that does not repeat in a singular way.

Still, its notable that the gist of both thinkers map onto one another. Stiegler, like Postman, even points back toward religion as the force that once maintained those "consistencies" (infinitized tendencies that do not strictly exist -- for more on this, see Stiegler's new book, What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology).

Postman increasingly fears the autonomy of technology and technique. He seems to believe that technology can once again be subject to our control. The problem, he argues, is that we have surrendered that control to "management" and to an autonomy of techniques that have become naturalized in the belief that these technical solutions can solve our problems for us. Once again, I do not think that Stiegler is in disagreement. However, his major point is not that "we" as human beings should take back control from the autonomous machines, but that we must participate in the constitution of culture through technical objects. Without this political-cultural-economic participation, the consumer remains alienated. Furthermore, Stiegler knows there is no unified "we" as a starting point, but, following Simondon, that it is through this participation that "we" emerges.

Postman uses stronger language: "And so it is necessary to understand where our techniques come from and what they are good for; we must make them visible so that they may be restored to our sovereignty" (143). The "our" he is referring to, I think, is citizens as opposed to so called "experts."

Who are these experts? Scientists. Yes, indeed, apropos of recent debates between Stephone Pinker and Leon Wielselter, Postman is concerned with what he calls "scientism." Scientism is characterized by three principles:

1.) Methods of the natural sciences can be applied to the study of human behavior

2.) Social science generates specific principles which can be used to organize humanity on a rational and humane basis.

3.) The third idea is that faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system that gives meaning to life, as well as a sense of well-being, morality, and even immortality

(Postman 147)

Scientism, in other words, is the belief that "science" can guide our moral and ethical belief in humanity. Scientism, as Postman suggests and as Nietzsche taught us long ago, is Science as God.

As I've pointed out before, "science" itself is an abstraction. Postman is less concerned with "science" and more with "social sciences" such as psychology and sociology - precisely the kind of "science" practiced by Pinker and co. The problem with Postman's analysis is not that he reveals the quite obvious humanities point about social science (social science tells morality narratives too), but that he seems to think that the "hard" sciences are an autonomous realm of discovery, a la Galileo (science teaches us how the heavens go, not how to go to heaven). But this refuses to acknowledge that the hard sciences, too, are now "technosciences" (and have always been technoscience). Postman writes, "unlike science, social research never discovers anything" (157). To this I say, science does not merely "discover" anything. In Technics and Time 3, Stiegler writes,

Contrary to the ideal of pure, classical scientific constativity, the essence of technology, is in fact always performative. Far from describing what is i.e., the real, technoscientific invention (whose adoption is called  'invention' insofar as it brings to light a novelty that transforms being) is the inscription of a possible that always remains excessive to being, which means to the description of the reality of being. (203-204)

That is, even the narratives and inventions of science are always an instantiation of the possible rather than a discovery of the real. This also should tell us that even though Postman may be correct that the moral directives we discover in "social science" research can also be discerned and invented by the humanities, that the humanities does not have some sort of monopoly on meaning -- just that we don't do all the bullshit that gets us to such obvious conclusions (that make the conclusions more "factual" or "scientific").

What Stiegler is really calling for is for politics. Hard science, natural science -- neither is isolated from politics, as Bruno Latour shows so convincingly throughout his entire career.

The Great Symbol Drain and The Loving Resistance Fighter: What is to be done?

Postman argues that our symbols are being drained of their meaning, mostly through their overuse and abuse. In a forthcoming article on M.T. Anderson's Feed, the genesis of which can be found here, I argue that this society is so cut off from history that marketing has re-appropriated narratives and symbols almost to no effect. How could the society even understand the reference made to the bible in one of the advertisements if all of their information comes from a constant feed of new information rather than knowledge (a distinction made by Stiegler in his important article "Anamnesis and Hypomnesis"). Furthermore, Stiegler's forthcoming book, Technics and Time 4 is subtitled "Symbols and diabols." It does seem like both Stiegler and Postman are both concerned with the "draining" of the power of certain symbols -- a metaphor that recalls the sapping of the vital bodily fluid, the potency, of any given symbol. My guess is that Stiegler's analysis will be more rigorous than Postman's and at least attempt to take into account Derrida's essays on metaphor. Whereas Postman wishes these symbols still retained their potency, Stiegler's question is which symbols should be selected.

Postman laments advertising and marketing, rather than reading marketing theory in order to gain insight into marketing's function. In this way, he does not practice what he preaches: he does not inquire into the production of marketing ideology, simply asserting that it destroyed our most powerful guiding symbols. Rather than using advertising as a way to make new symbols (as I think Greg Ulmer is arguing for), he decries its irrationality and dishonesty. Although he mentions that marketing is linked to "depth psychology," the intricate history between Freud's nephew, Ed Bernays, and the advertising industry is in no way noted. For that history, we have to turn to Adam Curtis's documentary, Century of the Self.

Where Stiegler speaks of our collection of tertiary retentions, our collective memory inscribed in technical objects, Postman refers to a rather conservative notion of "tradition." He appeals to tradition, against advertising, claiming that advertising has no right to adopt traditional symbols. At his most polemic, he uses an unfortunate metaphor in our contemporary times: "The constraints are so few that we may call this a form of cultural rape, sanctioned by an ideology that gives boundless supremacy to technological progress and is indifferent to the unraveling of tradition" (170). Postman is adamant that we must maintain a distinction between the sacred and profane -- a distinction whose implications for politics has been analyzed throughout the work of Giorgio Agamben.

Furthermore, Postman relies on the concept of "narrative" in a way that completely ignores the postmodern critique of a meta-narrative. Stiegler's "politics of memory" is hardly meant to suggest a unified narrative of history and understanding. Yes, it is an attempt at escaping cultural relativism that emerged from poor readings of postmodern philosophy, but Postman seems unconcerned with idiomatic difference.

We can sense Postman's impending conservatism when he mentions E.D. Hirsch and Alan Bloom. Postman critiques Hirsch's inane idea of "cultural literacy" of an "educated person," but reads Bloom in a favorable light! Postman also writes that we need a "national" (read: American) narrative rather than a transnational narrative. This is again in contrast to Stiegler, who argues for a transnational intellectual community which would be based on criteria. It is this latter aspect (criteria) that something like "facebook" does not allow us to do. Facebook does not allow the users to constantly interrogate and adjust the criteria of their organization. Instead, the changes in facebook are imposed from without. How many of us have said at one point or another, "Oh, look what Zuckerberg did to my facebook? A timeline? Oh, that's cute. A newsfeed? Oh shit, this is gonna suck." Facebook has evolved, but not through the participation and recommendations of its users who are barred from knowing the reasons for the interfaces transformations.

Despite Postman's more blatant conservatism and rhetoric -- and the lack of nuance in his argument-- both Postman and Stiegler arrive at similar educational imperatives. This begins with both arguing that central to our future is the future of our educational institutions. Both ask: What are our educational institutions for?

In an interview with Marcel O'Gorman, Stiegler says,

It's very important to study how maps are created. This is not taught in school, because we only teach the end results. We don't teach the process of the production of knowledge. It's a mistake. [. . .] We believe its necessary to revist the history of the construction of occidental knowledge, integrating these new technologies not just as a means of transmitting knowledge, as both objects to be explored and instruments for exploration. (470)

In Technopoly, Postman explains that we should hold

to the idea that to become educated means to become aware of the origins and growth of knowledge and knowledge systems; to be familiar with the intellectual and creative processes by which the best that has been thought and said has been produced; to learn how to participate, even if as a listener. (188)

But the problem, and the crucial difference, between Postman and Stiegler is that the former believes "the structure of the subject-matter curriculum that exists in most schools at present is entirely usable" (188). For Postman, its a question of making these subjects coherent, "a sense of purpose, meaning, and interconnectedness" of what they learn. This course of action, I think, describes the ideal of something like my own public liberal arts institution's goal. For Postman it's about understanding the past; for Stiegler, its a question of constantly (re)making the past and present in preparation for the indeterminate future.

Stiegler is making new institutions whereas Postman wants reform. Postman also clearly prefers "classical" art to our mere entertainment. He writes, "the schools must make available the products of classical art forms precisely because they are not so available and because they demand a different order of sensibility and response" (197).

This is suspicious and indicates Postman's implicit iconoclasm. Against "images," he presents us with "ideas" and classical art that demand a different sensibility. These artworks, however, do not demand a different sensibility "in themselves," but because they were from a different time period. I am not against teaching art from the past; however, art history and education cannot simply be, as Jack Stenner says referring to one of his students, "pictures of jesus." Its not the art of the past, but the art of the present --including the mass media -- that may be useful to bring students into the importance of symbols and what makes life worth living. This is Greg Ulmer's project and, I would like to believe, Stiegler is following suit.

But aside from the many problems with Postman's analysis, I generally agree with him that our education should be more focused on the humanities and that "technopoly" has sacrificed some of what makes our life meaning for the sake of efficiency and meaningless calculation and information. However, whereas Postman makes this an almost moral crusade, I prefer to frame the problem in terms of an intergenerational "politics of memory" and the processes of collective individuation via Stiegler and Simondon. Postman's "we" is an ideal we, a static we that does not attend to tendencies and desire.

For Stiegler, we may not be able to predict and control technologies, to weild it as sovereign subjects, but we can respond to it and hopefully invent not only new ways of "using" it, but inventing new technologies that can herald a new apparatus. Ulmer calls our current apparatus: electracy.

Anthropomorphism revisited: Ulmer, Bennett, and Bogost

What follows is once again an attempt to put New Materialism and OOO in conversation with Greg Ulmer's work. It may be of only slight interest to the class. For those of you interested in his work and our current project in his class, check out routine.electracy.com

Bennett writes toward the end of Vibrant Matter, "if a green materialism requires of us a more refined sensitivity to the outside-that-is-inside too, then maybe a bit of anthropomorphizing will prove valuable" (120). To anthropomorphize is to assign human characteristics to nonhuman entities (animals, objects, etc.). Bogost follows up on her claim by claiming that anthropomorphism allows us to see that any object encounter is a caricature of the object (whether animal, human, or object). Both Bogost and Bennett claim that anthropomorphism can also help us understand the agency of nonhumans -- their vital materiality, to use Benett's terms. Bennett figures her work in terms of a (meta)physics/ontology and Bogost as a "tiny ontology," which accompanies "alien phenomenology."

In class yesterday, Laurie asked us if Bennett's work and other New Materialisms resonates with Ulmer's work. On the one hand, yes, because we do need to pay attention to the forces of nonhuman entities (accidents). On the other hand, Ulmer believes that the metaphysical logic has already been created: what we need is a rhetoric. For ontology, he relies heavily on the work of Heidegger and Lacan as well as post-structuralist philosophers (who understood and further theorized the logic of electracy inherited from the Paris avant-garde) The rhetoric he seeks is an "image-rhetoric" performed in the age of "electracy" (which is analogous to the apparatus of "literacy" and "orality") through vernacular practices such as taking pictures with smart phones. The technological apparatus calls for the institutionalization of new practices that will help to cultivate an electrate identity formation, which is not the "self" formed under the literate paradigm.

Ulmer argues that the Greek grammatical "middle voice" is the mode in which we experience electracy. The middle voice refers to an action in which the subject is neither exclusively the actor or patient, but may include both. We could read this as another way to talk about "actants" in Latour's terms. But Ulmer understands the middle voice more as a reflexive function, in which the actor's actions affects the actor rather than something else (a direct object).

Objects, for Ulmer, are not totally other and do not have "perceptions" of their own in some sort of animistic sense. However, they do affect human beings; not only in the sense that they are forces in the world that make things happen in a physical world, but that the world and objects in it are given to us and already have meaning for us. They already have meaning for us because they are never simply "outside" of us, but, I think, that our agency has been distributed through the world, through what we have made and that this distribution all leads back to our embodied experience. That is, for Ulmer, we need to figure out what need/desire of our body is then externalized to the environment.

I do not think Ulmer would argue against Bennett and others that nonhuman objects have "agency" or potential in their own right. However, because Ulmer is interested in a rhetoric that could potentially burst out of a rareified academic setting, he believes that what is important for us to recognize in this world is not the agencies of objects, but our agency. For Ulmer, we have lost our sense of agency in the world. The "aesthetic attitude" advocated by Ulmer is not to get at the reality of other beings, but to recognize that our inventions all serve our embodiment. In the MIddle Ages, argues Ulmer, people knew where they fit in the macrocosm; our job is to try and reconnect our individual, affective experiences back to that macrocosm, so as to recognize our agency in the world, which would, ideally, get us to act (or at the very least, understand that our actions result in certain sacrifices on behalf of a value; Ulmer elaborates on this point extensively in Electronic Monuments).

Once again, though, we come to the question of anthropomorphism. Instead of anthropomorphism, Ulmer argues that we should recognize our own agency, desire, and limit of our embodiment in the world. We should tie ourselves to contingent being not in order to pretend to understand them outside of the human-world relation, but rather in order to understand how we connect (if only poetically, through the use of tropes) to what we see in the world.

Again, its not that humans are the sole actants in the world, but that Ulmer is less interested in developing a new metaphysics, because the metaphysics has already been invented and the practices associated with it have just begun (in comparison to orality and literacy). OOO and perhaps new materialism to a certain extent still rely on a "literate" concept of being -- trying to define being (definition is already a literate construction). Ulmer focuses on "affect" in the sense of mood, state of mind (befindlichkeit -- Heidegger). The external (or, to be more precise, the extimate, world) can help us understand our attitude toward the world and this is our "EPS" -- existential positioning system to correspond to our "GPS."

"Anthropomorphism," then, is not quite the term I'd use for Ulmer's method. Instead, the world is filled with "triggers" that set off affective states and memories in an analogous way to the various spots which we can access via smartphones. The key for Ulmer is to be able to think with the vernacular practice of image making with a smartphone; for this to happen, it must be institutionalized. His literate scholarship is not an end in itself, but always trying to point toward an electrate way of being.

WIthin his literate work (i.e. his books), Ulmer does draw on rich ancient traditions of the gods; most recently, the idea of the "avatar," not in the sense of a gaming avatar, but more as a guide that tells us our limit, such as Krishna's advice to Arjuna: "Dude, you are a warrior -- you can't not fight!" (to quickly paraphrase the advice of the Bhagavad Gita). In the Western Tradition, this function is the "guardian angel" in the Greek tradition, this is "daimon" which is our experience of limit. What we call an "accident" in the world (indeed, in my last seminar we spoke of a "metaphysics of the accident" rather than a metaphysics of substance, returning to Aristotle's famous distniction) corresponds to what the Greek's called Nemesis -- that which comes back to us when we go too far. Accidents result in death, that death becomes an indirect sacrifice for our actions.

On the one hand, we might think that Ulmer is reviving even more than the vibrant materialists or the vitalists outdated notions such as 'the gods' which are clearly not how the world really works. On the other, it is crucial to understand that Ulmer evokes these figures as analogies because he believes that, although we do not think of these gods as actual beings that advise us, their functions still persist. That is, for Ulmer, we look back to other wisdom traditions in order then to look at our world, our apparatus, our regime, in order to find how these ideas get translated into electracy.

Bogost too recommends "analogy," but, for him, analogy is used to perform alien phenomenology, so that we can recognize that any way we see/experience/describe an object is a "caricature" of it. But for Ulmer, the world (objects, scenes captured in images that may include humans, etc.) is extimate, intimately bound up with our embodiment because this is how we experience the world.

The Limits of Ontography: Ian Bogost, OOO, and Greg Ulmer

In Professor Ulmer’s class, we have been thinking about the ‘nonhuman’ world in a different way than object-oriented ontology. For Ulmer, the objects outside of us are actually not completely outside of us – instead they are “extimate,” the outside that reflects the inside. Ulmer fully endorses several different Modernist conceits of the outside as a figure for the inside (Eliot’s objective correlative, for instance). In this sense, Ulmer is certainly a ‘correlationist’ in the sense that the world primarily addresses us as human beings and that the world can never be ‘the great outdoors’ separate from us, a “nonsemiotic” world as Bogost puts it. As Caroline points out, the consideration of the world as “alien” can reinforce the distinction between us and them (or “that” in this case) that ideally the notion of humans as objects among others would tend to break down. Although seeing the world as speaking to human beings seems to embody correlationism, to argue that we somehow need to get back to the world (as if we ever left it) still seems to posit an absolute split between human experience and what things experience “for themselves.”

One might argue that thinking of things “speaking to us” is kind of like Bogost’s suggestion, following Bennett, that anthropomorphism is a way ultimately out of anthropocentrism, but I’m not sure I would agree (65). One might also think that Ulmer’s method parallels Harman’s argument that things only “allude” to the depths of things, but I think both of these tend to see “depth” in objects rather than a surface of signifiers. For Ulmer, the question is “What CAN an object say” and that possibility is always related to the particular person experiencing it. Ulmer claims that nowadays it is this particular experience that, rather than the universal abstractions of philosophy past, paradoxically, can become understood globally. Poetry’s strength is not in its concepts and abstractions, but rather the way it names something in its particularity that can express an affective experience.

Perhaps one of the best ways to get at this is the primacy in Bogost given to “lists,” following Latourist litanies, in Bogost and Harman’s thought. In a recent talk on Laruelle and Speculative Realism, Anthony Paul Smith argues that Latourist litanies are kind of like Insane Clown Posse’s song, “Miracles,” which can be seen below. Indeed, words elevated into concepts like “wonder” and “allure,” as well as Harman’s claim that if you populate your texts with concrete objects rather than abstractions than you are truly doing more for a ‘nonhuman’ turn make it seem like these thinkers want us to just go: “Hey look! Objects! Aren’t they mysterious and wonderful!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs

Bogost argues that lists are the perfect “antidote” to “the obsession with Deleuzean becoming,” taking it so far as to suggest that lists “rebuff the connecting powers of being itself.” Bogost writes, “Lists are perfect tools to free us from the prison of representation precisely because they are so inexpressive. They decline traditional artifice, instead using mundaneness to offer ‘a brief intimation of everything’” (40). I do not see how lists free us from representation, for, if anything, it seems that it sticks us right back in the middle of representation but without its expressive power explored in great literature. It makes literature serve as a mode of description of worldly detail rather than, in the case of someone like Joyce, a transubstantiation of everyday life. Latour and Harman’s lists attempt to put everything on the same plane, but without any context of why we should care about these things (except as they are ‘in themselves’ as autonomous objects), they mean very little. The example Bogost gives from Moby Dick, for instance, is not the same kind of “list” as deployed by Harman and Latour. Bogost then makes the banal point that Moby Dick can be called “a natural history” as much as a novel; indeed, some of my favorite literature is literature that mixes genres and could be called “Encyclopedic,” but I’m not sure these examples support an object-oriented ontology or an alien phenomenology. These are ways to aesthetically receive and conceive the world, but it is not meant to be a representation of reality as it “really” is outside of human perception.

As Michelle pointed out, the “all things equally exist but not everything exists equally” is a way to, in some sense, smuggle hierarchy back into the ontology while one ostensibly maintains the egalitarian rhetoric of a “flat ontology.” I do not think many of us would disagree now that hierarchy is not bad ‘in itself’ because there ARE some things in certain contexts that we should pay attention to more or that are more at stake for how we exist in the world. For instance, Bogost makes a distinction between photographs and the “actual objects,” which gets at Andrew’s point about whether the “picture” is an object with its own perception/reception of world (as I briefly argued one can claim in the case of two different cameras the record the world):

“Photographic ontography is effective as art and as metaphysics. But photographs are static; they imply but they do not depict unit operations. For the latter, we must look to the artifacts that they themselves operate” (52).

I’m really not sure how to read this statement. It seems like Bogost’s privileging of games as “not static” comes out in this chapter, as he moves on to describe “the artifacts that they themselves operate” in the examples of two games. I’m also not quite sure how he reads Shore’s photographs as “an automatically encyclopedic rendition of a scene, thanks to the photographic apparatus’s ability to record actuality” (52). Bogost argues that his photographs are ontographs because “he refuses to treat any object as primary, as subject” (52). I certainly don’t look at Shore’s “Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue” and think that everything is treated absolutely equally because, first, there is always foreground and background and, second, there is always something outside the frame. The photographer chose to take this photograph of this particular scene.

I think the point stands that the “picture” is somehow inferior to the game, which may both be superior to writing ‘proper’ since literary writing, especially when in the form lists, really only serves to point toward “rebuffing the connecting powers of being itself” (40). Indeed, we often think of literature as the exact opposite: a gathering together of things to show the multitudes of connections possible and yet the inability to decide meaning. Making connections is what makes meaning and context (im)possible. Not the plenitude of meaning or polysemy (“the condensation of multitudes into dense singularities” (58)) but its dissemination, our inability to decide on a final meaning. As Derrida writes,

The generalization of the grammatical or the textual hinges on the disappearance, or rather the reinscription, of the semantic horizon, even when-- and especially when-- it comprehends difference or plurality. In diverging from polysemy, comprising both more and less than the latter,dissemination interrupts the circulation that transforms into an origin what is actually an after-effect of meaning.

This is still talking about language, but when can we ever talk about anything else? Just because you name something that we can recognize as a real object in the world does not mean that it only signifies this referent. As Andrew pointed out today, all these theorists seem to deny that they are operating in the same language (and the same ‘writing’) as others.

I began this reflection with thinking about how this method differs from Ulmer’s understanding of the function of objects in poetry and thus the way we should experience objects affectively as an embodied human being. I think the best way I can make this distinction is that for Bogost, it seems like the word is tied to its “outside” referent as an object whereas for Ulmer, the object can mean many things aside from itself as a material referent. Bogost argues that the “lists of objects” work their magic through their inexpressiveness, their lack of explication, description, or clarification. Concerning the Trader Joe’s video, Bogost writes, “List of objects without explication can do philosophical work of drawing our attention toward them with greater attentiveness” (45). But as we’ve pointed out, these objects do not exist in isolation; they already come with a certain degree of context and understanding. The explication and explanation are actually the elements that would do the philosophical work. If we list the objects, devoid of any context, we miss specific things like—what is it about the customers? What does the managerial policy say about the way it runs its business? These are not neutral, as we all seem to have agreed in class. Bogost’s description suggests that these lists provide THE experience of shopping at Trader Joe’s, but we’d clearly all experience it differently.

Here I am trying to get back to the attempted distinction between Ulmer’s project and Bogost’s. The key for Ulmer is not to flatten objects onto the same plane, but to notice how one’s reception of objects shows us something about our own state-of-mind or attitude toward the world. Every object does not have the same seductiveness and allure for us; instead, certain objects are important to us or could say something to us that would, perhaps, move us to act or at least to recognize our state of being in the world. Our embodiment and the interfaces we use in addition (body as interface just as much as camera, Iphone, Smartphone). We need to find a way to connect our embodiment with larger problems. Perhaps the goal for Ulmer is unashamedly concerned about human beings, but when did we begin to have this idea that human beings have been spoken of enough? Or that we know what a human being “is” and so we can move on to those “not-human” beings? Ulmer argues that we need to find a way to re-connect to the Macrocosm; in a different parlance, Stiegler argues that we are “dis-oriented” due to the acceleration of technological development (hyper-industrialisation). Understanding objects “in themselves” seems like a less urgent project than figuring out how we can re-orient ourselves in the midst of the rest of the matter and matters in the world.

Region 4: Transformation through Imagination, A Reflective Review

At Thomas Center Gallery, from now until April 28^th, anyone can view, for free, an exhibit that artistically explores the complex local issue of the Cabot/Koppers Superfund Site. The EPA defines a Superfund as the “the name given to the environmental program established to address abandoned hazardous waste sites” and is also “the name of the fund established by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980.” I’d like also to think about Superfund’s connotations. “Superfund” sounds to me like an economic surplus combined with an image of Superman. I imagine an economic superman. In Gainesville, there is surplus, but it’s not economic; rather it’s a surplus of toxic material that has soaked into the soil, the material traces of the Cabot/Koppers wood treatment plant. Thus, the Cabot/Koppesr plant has created waste, producing harmful effects that outlives its own historical time. As the works in the exhibit show though, we cannot easily locate the origin and the cause at the Cabot/Koppers wood treatment plant; indeed, there are many origins, including our own values and desires, as Murphy’s Well Being, the centerpiece of the exhibit highlights, and as the video taken from the exhibit explains. As Ulmer Ulmer, head theorist of the Florida Research Ensemble, so pointedly puts it in his book, Electronic Monuments: Problems B Us.

I have had the honor to work with Greg Ulmer in a graduate seminar last spring during which he and the FRE were researching and developing Murphy’s Well Being. I firmly remember the day when he had made a significant breakthrough and shouted “PEPPPER!” (See the above video for an explanation of why this is important). The course was titled Gift Game Strategy Economy, four words juxtaposed together that somehow structured a course. But Ulmer has a unique method and theoretical apparatus that helps him structure his courses. The course was complicated, theoretically dense, and infinitely rewarding, but for brevity’s sake, the basic idea is that we were to gather information about a disaster and archive it in a blog (click link for my blog) and then create a final project using Prezi that makes visible through manipulating images, text, and video interdisciplinary connections that do not attempt to solve the problem, but rather, to explore it; Ulmer teaches students to dwell in the complexity of situations by analyzing and exploring a problem through many different avenues. (My final prezi can be found below and embedded in my blog site)

Final Project--Gift Game Strategy Economy on Prezi

I mention my personal connection to the exhibit because anyone who has studied with Ulmer, read his books, or taken a course with him, will notice the significance given to personal narrative in his method. The personal participates in the collective and is important aspect of our connection to the world around us. Ulmer’s theory takes into account the affective dimension of human experience as well as the cognitive. This general attitude corresponds to the Superfund Art Project’s goal to organize an art exhibition that would “ ‘express the science and the emotions’ of living in proximity to a toxic Superfund site in a way that will make the story come alive” (“Transformations” 5). The affective dimension of the work does not preclude cognitive insights nor does the exhibit favor one particular emotion (anger, pity, happiness); instead, the work rewards extended engagement with a wide array of feelings, knowledge, and intuitions so that one comes away with a new outlook on not only the Superfund site, but also the greater Gainesville community.

Before I describe and interpret Murphy’s Well Being, though, I want to take a moment and recognize two the other artworks that gave me pause, John A. O’Connor’s Left Behind (2012) and Anthony Costranovo’s Citizen Bio-detector (2012). O’Connor’s piece consists of three panels of mixed media on Sintra, but the resemblance of the paintings to the surface of blackboard is uncanny. The blackboard images, O’Connor notes in his artist statement, arise from his classroom experience as both a student and a professor, but the blackboard also signifies the possibility of erasing and redrawing history. He writes in his artist statement,

Erasing and moving borders become a history lesson: a history of the work itself. Wiping out and/or covering up images and messages goes far beyond the processes themselves. The procedure raises several questions: What is covered up? Why? What is missing? (“Transformations” 38)

I actually approached the “final” panel of the piece first, thinking the other panels were actually other artworks, so I was confronted with the full complexity of the palimpsest built upon the previous images. I saw two ‘sticky notes’, one red that reads “Their science,” one white that says “your reality.” At first I only saw the vaguely human outline of a figure that appeared in an abstract lotus meditation pose, so I thought it was saying something about left and right, yin and yang, or some such, but then I saw the blue “sticky note” at the top, which says “Get it? You will.” So, as if I were struggling to find Waldo or the hidden picture in the noise of colors, I started to see other shapes, figures, and text. slightly erased, blurred, and almost transparent equations and chemical structures in the background, a vague shape of a skull started to poke through the ‘chest’ of the humanoid figure and underneath a skull and cross bones—I was starting to get it.

At this point I noticed the other panels and began to compare and contrast them. One of the final images I saw in the last panel was a human target, complete with rings and a bullseye at the center of the skull. These figures slowly revealing themselves to me in layers created an uneasiness rather than a direct “meaning.” Indeed, although the first panel clearly potrays a skull and crossbones layered over chemical equations, this is not merely about death. Because the blackboard situates the piece in a pedagogical scene, the piece to me regards the abstraction of science into a self-sufficient figure and code, a code that ‘erases’ the visible differences between toxic and innocuous chemicals. But do not think that I have explicated and ruined the work for you, there are still many traces bleeding through the canvas, despite the effort of the eraser.

Anthony Castranov identifies in his artist statement that a major problem in preventing the public’s engagement with the Koppers/Superfund site issue is “the expense of testing and the lack of access to appropriate tools.” In order to remedy this, Anthony has created Citizen Bio-Detector, a tool-vest that will allow citizens to gather data concerning the water quality of creeks in the neighborhood surrounding the Koppers site. As a vest that positions the LED display for data on the back of the vest, people wearing the vest are more apt to ask what these numbers mean. I find this piece interesting for many reasons, but mostly because of its invention of a device that, at least theoretically, would actually work. Castronovo claims that “multiple units can be created that can be loaned to people in the area,” so that we may see people actually wearing these units. This particular piece, in contrast to many of the pieces on display, could theoretically be reproduced and used as a combination of a research tool and a performative spectacle that will, in Castronovo’s words, “draw attention to issues and stimulate dialogue and action” (“Transformations” 18).

There are many other pieces that invite the audience to pause, reflect, and feel. but I hardly consider it adequate to describe these works in a few paragraphs, nor do I think my analyses of the works above definitive or even ‘correct’. All of these works deserve to be viewed in person, as access is free and the exhibit small enough to where one can spend time reading artist statements and drinking the healing nutrients of the artworks.

But plan on multiple visits especially for what I called above the “centerpiece” of the exhibit, Florida Research Ensemble’s Murphy’s Well Being. I spent at least two hours exploring this piece and I still desire to return, take more notes, and make more connections. Yes, I took notes because I could not help but note the connections and meanings ‘drawn’ from the well. Before I get too ahead of myself though, I should describe the exhibit. As one walks into the Thomas Gallery, we hear and see the main video posted above that explains the macro-structure of the project. Toward the end of the video, it invites the viewer to “interact” with the well. The “well” being the video refers to is a cylindrical object located in front of the wall on which the images are projected that came up to about my belly and was about three feet in diameter (it is a large well). Peering into the cylinder, we see a screen projecting an image of water in the well, but when we touch it, the well pulls us in to reveal – not a bottomless pit – but a map of the superfund site, divided into regions and labeled appropriately. Within the map, the viewer notices names such as “Tattoo,” “Alachua,” and “Pearce.” There are at least twenty names on there or so (I didn’t count) and next to each name, a sound icon appears. If the viewer pushes the icon on the screen, the perspective zooms in and colors start to appear, colors that resemble the ones in the overview video which are vaguely psychedelic, reminding me somehow of the roto-scoping techniques Richard Linklater used in his film Waking Life.

At first see the person as a kind of cardboard cutout in a pose. If we touch the screen again, we generate a menu including links to History, Myth, Philosophy, the three subsections mentioned in the overview video. Regardless of which link we click on, the sequence of images is the same. On the left side of the wall, we sit in on a mini-interview with a resident or place in Gainesville and hear about their lives and their knowledge of the Superfund site. The first sequence then gives way to the right side of the wall where we are treated to another genre of discourse, including self-help guides, documentaries, deep ecologists, eastern wise men, music videos, musicals in films, commercials. The videos on the left, so far as I could tell, were all unique but sometimes the videos on the right would repeat for different people on the map. Thus, it was never guaranteed that we would discern an explicit connection between the left and right side, although sometimes the connection is powerful. Flashes of insight and reason take place not only within the individual sites on the map, but also between the sites. Each of us will focus on different details that somehow puncture us, which Barthes calls the punctum, which Greg Ulmer has used extensively as part of his methodology. Some of the resident’s narratives did not resonate as strongly as others and surely many of this would depend on the viewer of the work. I happened to notice, if I remember correctly, that one man outside the Salvation army were calling people “jerks” and that I had seen in the corner of the video documenting the Occupy Corporations rally had a shirt that said “Jerk” and I”m sure some other things. This could be written off as a coincidence, but such coincidences can also serve as a method of invention for our own thinking.

As someone who rarely if ever participates in direct activism such as protests, walkouts, or rallies, I tended to focus on the philosophical side of the work. Murphy’s Well Being is a well of well-being – its main purpose is to look at “happiness.” But happiness in this formulation, I think, meant to signify a fleeting emotional state, nor the utilitarian notion of happiness as “the greatest good for the greatest number of people,” but rather Aristotle’s sense of eudemonia – eu “good” and daimon “being.” But for good or for ill, most of the videos call this “happiness” rather than well-being or eudemonia. So we are treated to many views on happiness that creates a cognitive dissonance (but not necessarily disagreement) in order to show how difficult it is to achieve collective (and not just individual—this is why we are also not in the realm of Aristotelian “virtue” ethics, where virtues are properties of individuals) well-being. How can we reconcile John Lennon’s “Happiness is a Warm Gun” with Buddhist enlightenment?

But we live these contradictions, these aporias every day and rather than ignore them, this artwork asks us to engage and, to draw on psychoanalytic language, to “work through” them. I want to offer an example of what I think is one of the most powerful sequences. A couple months ago, Cornell West came to speak at Bo Diddly Plaza and at University of Florida in support of Occupy the Corporations. I unfortunately did not attend these events, but luckily, someone in the Florida research ensemble did. The “Bo Diddly” link takes use to the scene as Cornell West preaches as though he were preaching philosophy. It is truly a beautiful performance in and of itself. But even more potent is after or before the speech, when West is introduced on the ground to the “history” of Gainesville’s Superfund site. From the videos, he seems to be unaware of it, but he listens attentively, asking questions and responding with a look of concern. Just as the “history” portion fades out, we hear someone tell him “please check into it. . .”

This event is set against a video where the Coca-Cola Company sets up a “special” coke machine on a college campus, the “happiness machine,” to unsuspecting college students. As soon as I saw what was going on, I immediately thought about Coke’s recent slogan that has always disturbed me: open happiness – what a vague, but powerful slogan – open happiness. Well, the video is an experience in “open” happiness – happiness that “everyone,” at least in the video, has access. The video can be found below.

On the one hand, the video shows that, indeed, a plenitude of cokes, including a person in the machine whose hands[1] give out flowers, pizza, a giant club sandwich as a girl says “thank you coke,” can definitely make people smile, bring people together who weren’t together before, and change the entire dynamic of a setting. Neither the commercial nor its iteration in Murphy’s Well Being wants to hide this fact, but then we must ask a few questions. What happens when we think about Coke’s slogan in relation to John Lennon’s “Happiness is a Warm Gun”? And what happens when we remember that this is a rare, staged occurrence and that corporations only hand out free stuff so they can record it, present it as the “face” of the company, and let you drown in a well of caffeine and sugar in relative anonymity. I still feel as though there are so many connections to make and parts of the well to explore, but I have to leave some surprises and room for your own punctive experience.

I hope I have shown the breadth and, pun intended, the depth of these works that are working for our collective well-being. I exhort you to draw from this well as if it were a fountain of youth and then draw some lines on a paper, and then erase or redraw the lines, so that we recognize that even if we are only on the margins, we are all connected to the local, Gainesville community and, as Marshall Mcluhan calls it, the global village.

For more information on the exhibit and other events at the Thomas Gallery click here.

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[1] So many connections are shooting through my brain right now: Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” (this may be a visible hand, but it’s still anonymous) and the hand that gives with one hand what it takes away with the other (or in this case, the hands that give you one thing but the other hands of the corporation are hidden and draining the well drop by drop. 

Baudrillard

Baudrillard Post

In Moment of Complexity, Mark C. Taylor critiques Baudrillard’s theory of simulation. Or rather, to be more accurate, he criticizes Baudrillard’s lack of a solution: “With no prospect of productive activity, all we can do is to mourn interminably the death of the real” (Taylor 71). Taylor argues that reproduction and production creates something new outside of the binary oppositions rather than one consuming the other. For Taylor, Baudrillard’s theories deny the creative possibilities of the new media culture.

True, Baudrillard’s attention to the gift economy (Bataille’s general economy) rather than the restricted economy suggests that he longs for a past where the gift economy still operates. But this is not quite accurate either, as the introduction to Symbolic Exchange and Death points out: “It is a mistake, then, to think that Symbolic Exchange and Death is simply about the 'ideological process' of the reduction of the symbolic by the semiotic. It is also about the irruption of the symbolic within the semiotic” (xii).  As Greg Ulmer has pointed out to me (and others), the general economy (the gift economy) is still present in today’s world. For Ulmer, this manifests itself in the accident. For Ulmer (and I suspect in Baudrillard as well) the general economy takes into account the necessity of sacrifice and death, what is not taken up in the universal exchange of signs and simulacra. This may not be Baudrillard’s position, but it seems that it might buffer Taylor’s critique.

Furthermore, even though Taylor mentions Baudrillard’s Fatal Strategies, he does not pick up on Baudrillard’s suggestion for a positive program for resistance. Essentially, he suggests that we need to take things to their limit—their ecstasy—in order to overcome the ennui of banal binary oppositions and reign of the simulacra. The problem with binary oppositions is that they eliminate any real adversity and conflict between them, they merely become exchangeable and reversible signs. Thus, usual modes of opposition are anticipated and merely reproduce the binary. In Simulations, it seems as though Baudrillard is lamenting the coming of parody and pastiche, but I think that Baudrillard is more hopeful than Jameson about the use of comedy, or at the very least, using the discourse/object itself and pushing it to its limit. Jameson argues that pastiche has rendered parody impossible, but Baudrillard’s interest in pataphysics makes it seem as though he believes that certain parodies, particularly parodies of science, may have a positive effect.

In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard recommends that rather than oppose one sign to another in a binary, we take a concept to its ecstasy in the form of “more truth than truth” more “false than false,” etc. The implosion, like Nietzsche’s slave morality (although not related in content), contains a potential power in order to transform itself into an ecstasy at the same time that it erases “the real.” Only through a creative transformation of slave morality can we get to an affirmative and creative philosophy. Similarly, Baudrillard seems to be advocate moving through (transversing the fantasy?) of simulacra in order to solicit the real. For Ulmer, as already pointed out, the real resides in the accident—we can look at the accident as an indication of the general economy.

But I’d like to suggest that, though Baudrillard declares at the end of Simulations, “and so art is everywhere, since artifice is at the very heart of reality. And so art is dead,” (Baudrillard 151) certain public artwork demonstrations escapes the deadlock of binary oppositions, zero or 1. Public art, I want to argue, in effect re-creates a “scene” of the political, localizing it an allowing a point of resistance. I elaborate more on this argument with particular texts in my paper on Noise, posted a few days ago. In the movie Noise the protagonist throws all he has at car alarms—smashing them to bits, vandalizing the cars, to no avail. Only when he uses the car alarms’ power is he able to affect change. In this sense, the protagonist follows and takes the side of the object. Baudrillard writes, “the object mocks the laws we attach to it,” and in the concluding parts of Fatal Strategies elaborates (Baudrillard 227):  

The object, subtler than man, hardly answers. But it’s certain nevertheless that in disobeying laws, in unraveling desire, it answers secretly to some enigma. What remains but to side with this enigma? (Baudrillard 230).

Thus, we take the side of the object—subject ourselves to the object in order to affect the status quo. More on this later.