Consulting the Accident

From Oracle to Konsult

The challenge of heuretics is to integrate the CATTt sources into a unified poetics.  The immediate goal of Part Two is to relate the microcosm Once allegory of Part One with a macrocosm archetype for avatar counsel.  The registers of the CATTt treated in Part Two contribute the following instructions (briefly stated):
Analogy: Smithson.  Create/design a feature of the local site as a figure/trope expressing a force organizing the scene or situation.
Target/tale: Tarot.  An Existential Positioning System (EPS) enabling DYI comparisons between individual and collective experience.
Target/Analogy/tale: History of the Senses.  A goal of Konsult is to augment and formalize individual encounter with sensory experience at the level of macrocosm.

Konsult Design.  The experiment proposed for this semester is to create a Prezi konsult, in which the egent (you) serve as querent.  The hybrid poetics proposes to use tarot consultation as an interface to generate a bachelor machine figure, evoking a tropical relation between the querent and the Non/Site of the Accident (Koppers Superfund Disaster).

Layer One:  Pollack's Guide to Tarot is our relay.  We are creating our own deck, at least in part, in that we will start with a reading, and then update the cards drawn using the materials of our own scene as archive.  The reading requires that we first create our own spread.  The purpose of this spread is to question the Accident, as a figurative translation of the conditions of our history into an archetypal form, for further thought and action.  The spread should consist of ten "cards," having in mind the complexity accomplished by the Celtic Cross.  To compose the slots for the spread, draw upon the sorts of questions found in the Celtic Cross, keeping in mind that the goal is to activate an association between our Once allegory and the Accident Site.  Some further suggestions for the spread questions are found in ways to get to know the cards (p. 163), in getting to know a deck:  What special message do you bring? What do you want to teach me? What do I need to work with you? The section on Interpretation of Tales (p. 172) models further design strategies, tailoring the questions to a specific tale (to the Accident in our case).  Soul Questions (p. 174) are adaptable to our purposes as well:  What is (Accident)? Where Does it Come From? How Does It Teach Us? A spread suggested in another source is used to question a particular card, to ask what it means:  1 = The card does not mean this. 2 = The card means this. 3 = The card is good for this. 4 = The best course of action.  Be sure to include questions that ask about your relationship with Accident.

Layer Two: There is considerable room for invention in this adaptation of tarot to konsult.  The correlations listed here are points of departure. Once Allegory (Part One Einstellung).  The movie in your Allegory of Prudence = trump cards of the major arcana.  Significant people in your anecdotes = court cards.

Layer Three: Koppers Superfund Site may be a source for any card in principle, but consider especially the pips of the minor arcana, which trace processes from inception through excess, corresponding to the elemental system of the tradition (Earth Air Fire Water).

Layer Four: Use History of the Senses to augment the sensory features of your Once Allegory, as basis for any card in principle, with attention to the minor arcana.

Significator: The Fool's Journey passes through our scene.  A good way to select the Significator is to use the dates method (pp. 166-67).

"Card" Design: There is no need to put the features selected from your archive into emblem form, as in the formally designed decks.  However, the kinds of properties promoted to symbolic status in the formal decks are a useful guide to what to include in the features used to represent the updated "card" in your Prezi map.  Modernist collage works are a valid relay for our purposes.   The arrangement of the spread may take any shape.  Translate/update the cards drawn for each of the places in the spread, using the spread as a grid of chance to select some feature from the other layers of the assemblage. The effect of juxtapositions thus produced should in principle generate an evocative tropical figure.

Tropic Farming

We mustn't believe we are living the realization of some evil utopia -- we are living the realization of utopia, period. That is to say, its collapse into the real (Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies).

Instructions for the tale of our CATTt come from Rob Kovitz, Pig City Model Farm.  Kovitz exemplifies appropriation, collage composition to produce a trope.  The elements collected in the composition include documentation (text and image) of the following domains:  1) Model farming in general, and pig farming in Canada in particular.  The documents express scientific best practices for humane and efficient production of meat for market; 2) Utopian theory in general and Charles Fourier in particular:  principles for improving and perfecting human social and cultural life through regulation of all conduct; 3) Citations from a library of literature, serving as a commentary on the urge or drive for perfection and its disappointment; 4) Some autobiographical statements, alluding to employment in a meat-packing plant; 5) Citations and references to vanguard arts practices, Dali's Paranoid-Critical Activity, and Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass.

Metalepsis

Demonstrating what Deleuze called the logic of sense, Kovitz's brings two semantic domains together, two chains of signs sharing one property:  the shape of a particular architectural design used in farm buildings (the original disciplinary context for the work is architecture).  Placed roughly at  the center of  the composition, the famous image of the train entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau triggers the turn, producing the metaleptic leap back, reconfiguring the previous documentation on model farming as commentary on national socialist ideology of perfecting the race.  Preparing pigs for market transfers to concentration camps, with the aura of butchering meat evoking human genocide.

Kovitz's structure is that of a basic figure:  pig farming is the vehicle; utopian socialism is the tenor.  The instruction is to treat documents of our accident event as the vehicle, as a trope, to exploit its aura for commentary on some tenor.  There are several candidates for tenor in our scenes, but whichever one we choose, the instruction is to enter it as documentation, juxtaposed and intercut (montage editing) with the vehicle.

Figuring Exception

Syzygy

Part 2 is devoted to developing the insight from Part 1:  the Accident is a sign.  Further instructions indicated that the sign is a trope, and the terms of the figure are set by the event itself.  Bok's 'Pataphysics makes the instruction more precise.  The lesson is found in the breakout of Surrationalist 'Pataphysics into three "declensions":  Anomalos (principle of variance); Syzygy (principle of alliance); Clinamen (principle of deviance).  A difficulty of heuretics is its heuristic nature:  how should we respond to this appearance of three figures in our Analogy source?  We could simply accept Bok's terms, and apply one of them as the figure with which to design the Prezi exhibit.  But then we consider the invented nature of Bok's figures.  Syzygy is borrowed from astronomy, for example, naming one or the other of two points in the orbit of a celestial body either in opposition to or conjunction with the sun.  The term is generalized to refer to any unity achieved through coordination of alignment.  Bok's creative move guides our option:  identify in the technical discourse of your event a process that may be generalized into a trope or figure of thought. 

Bok refers to Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence at one point, suggesting its relevance to 'Pataphysics.  This insight reinforces the above instruction, since Bloom constructed a set of six tropes to name the process belated poets perform to create a place for themselves in literary tradition, in competition with their predecessors.  Bloom clarified the practical value of the fact that Freud's vocabulary describing ego defense mechanisms is a direct appropriation of tropology from the history of rhetoric.  Bloom's first trope (move or compositional strategy) is "Clinamen" also.  Second is "Tessera" (term taken not from mosaics but ancient mystery cults, where it meant a token of recognition); third is "Kenosis" (from St. Paul, the humbling or emptying out of Jesus), and so forth.  The relay suggests the productivity of troping the terms of some knowledge discourse for use as a rhetorical figure more generally.  A worthy experiment for some future CATTt could be to compose a different tropology, to replace Bloom's Agon version of poets in competition, with an Ilynx version, of poets dancing (or some related form of spin).

Divertisements

Our CATTt is derived from the one implicit in WIP?  Modernist arts are referenced throughout this text as a relay for understanding the "non-objective" (non-mimetic) treatment of ideas in the history of philosophy.  The "Documents of Contemporary Art" series includes a collection on "The Artist's Joke," which might have worked.  Duchamp anchors this collection, as he does the one we used on "Appropriation."  Pressed by an interviewer to accept sophisticated hermeneutic readings of his Readymades (such as the geometry book left out in the rain), Duchamp replied, "It was a joke.  A pure joke.  To denigrate the solemnity of a book of principles" (cited in Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art).

Appropriation is a twofer, since it includes the bit strategy while foregrounding the logical operation of detournement.  The CATTt context frames the collage method first in relation to the quarrel between philosophy and commerce.  Advertising already uses appropriate inference, including bachelor machine juxtapositions and fallacies of ambiguity and relevance.  The apparatus context shows that the flow of mass or pop media discourse is the "natural language" of electracy (pop media : electracy :: inscribed Greek epics : literacy).  Appropriation is electrate "writing" (designing).  The categories of image metaphysics are emerging through this modernist arts practice of the photogram (the principle of "taking" pictures).  The second point is that appropriation in general, and detournement in particular, extend the logic of joke-work fully into conduction as the fourth inference principle (the one that electracy adds to the -ductions invented within literacy).  The instruction from the CATTt is to introduce detournement into the joke mechanism, as the ultimate device for turning up the unthought.  Routine distinguishes its direction (attitude), its -vert on the plane of immanence, as diversion (not conversion, perversion, subversion, or adversion).

One example illustrating the logic is Jeff Wall on Dan Graham's Homes for America (1966-67).

The magazine pieces are structured as small, ironically insignificant defeats for liberationist ideas, as "defeatist interventions" in the mechanisms of ideological dominations.  They are aimed at interrupting the flow of standardized, falsified representation and language, and inducing a "mini-crisis" for the reader or viewer by means of the inversions they create.  Reflected in the provocations and interventions characteristic of 1960s Situationism,  in which an unexpected and confrontational gesture interrupts the established rhythm of relationships in a specific context, and induces a form of contestation, paradox or crisis, this approach thereby exposes the forms of authority and domination in the situation, which are normally imperceptible or veiled. The most notable artistic image of this is the unexpected "void" or "rupture" in this seamlessly designed social surface, and conceptualism's origins are filled with such blanks, erasures, tears and cuts [,,,]  It aggravates Pop irony by means of humour noir, and attempts to elicit a recognition of the terroristic aspects of the normalized environment of images, things, spaces and mechanisms (Appropriation, Evans, Ed., 43).

"Laugh" Iconed

Appropriation in the context of electracy is a device for the formation of image metaphysics. Pop media is to electracy what natural language was to Greek philosophy. Philosophy formed practices of literate metaphysics as a second-order system based on written Greek. Image metaphysics similarly is extracted from mass media discourse. Here is an example of isolating a pop signifier.



Thanks to Geof Carter for this suggestion. 

Is Maus/s's Gift Appropriate?

Literary Appropriation

A sign of timeliness is the appearance of this article in the NYT, Sunday, 2/28/10, reporting on the inroads that appropriation techniques from the other arts are making in the craft of literary authorship.
The Free-Appropriation Writer
The author in question is Helene Hegemann, whose novel about the Berlin club scene is a mash-up of unacknowledged quotations from other writers.  It is odd that the Times article does not mention the cut-ups of William Burroughs.