CATTtable

A tactic for tracking the emerging poetics of the CATTt is to put into table form the relationships between (in this case) Contrast and Theory.  The table categories itemize the topics shared by the sources, and the generative procedure is to name the contraries of the contrast.  The list is provisional and subject to revision.  The table is not intended to be self-explanatory, but it should make sense in the context of the readings.

The list is expandable.  For example:
                      Deception:          Bluff                                                        Promise

Obscenario

Prudence

The effect of working through the sources of the CATTt  is the emergence of a conversation (intertext) between and among the readings.  The specifications of instructions in one text call out correspondences in subsequent texts.  For example, the instruction from Contrast is to appropriate some popular narrative (Hollywood movie) as a probe to identify relative to your disaster an operative mythology (Russell's "Chicken" relating Rebel Without A Cause to Dulles's brinksmanship, subsequently applied to the Cuban Missile Crisis).  This instruction is further motivated by the context of matching and replacing the role of Game Theory in public policy formation.  An important feature of this Contrast is the use of scenario form, narrative structure, to represent strategy alternatives.

There are many studies of this practice, and some of the basic principles include the goal of identifying and changing the mental models of decision makers, in order to envision possibilities for actions anticipating tendencies, trends, propensities of events in the future.  In short, scenarios are formulations of deliberative reason, or collective or organizational prudence.  It is common to propose three or four alternatives, between the poles of best and worst case.  Peter Schwartz in The Art of the Long View identified a collection of plot templates:  winners and losers, challenge and response, evolution, revolution, cycles, the lone ranger, "my generation".  It goes without saying that the narrative form itself supplies a set of assumptions:  a model of human agency, the role of action in transformation situations, the whole actantial structure familiar to students of literature. 

There are two key points for our instructions.  First is the central argument of our Theory regarding Figures of the Transpolitical, which declares the end of scene as such.

The transpolitical is the transparency and obscenity of all structures in a destructured universe, the transparency and obscenity of change in a dehistoricized universe, the transparency and obscenity of information in a universe emptied of event, the transparency and obscenity of space in the promiscuity of networks, transparency and obscenity of the social in the masses, of the political in terror, of the body in obesity and genetic cloning.... The end of the scene of the historical, the end of the scene of the political, then of the scene of fantasy, the end of the scene of the body--the irruption of the obscene.  The end of the secret--the irruption of transparency (Baudrillard, 45).

 The second point is that a goal of our project is to do for obscene what scenario did for scene:  obscenario.  Our strategy must perform the function fulfilled by Contrast, using our own means for guiding policy planning, to assist decision makers with collective prudence, that draws upon the ecstacy of communication in the same way that Game Theory drew upon the theatrics of alienation.  We need to learn from Theory the formal resources of the obscenario.

Scenario

Instant Policy

The relationship between the policy of brinksmanship and the film Rebel Without A Cause noted by Bertrand Russell in his essay proposing the variation on Prisoner's Dilemma known as "Chicken," recalls a more general observation made by Richard Slotkin.  Slotkin observed that US policy planners and Hollywood scriptwriters drew upon the same "mythologies" in the formulation of their scenarios.

Rio Grande thus appears to be in some sort of dialogue with history.  Film and event "speak" to each other--event lending political resonance to the fiction, the fiction providing mythological justification for particular scenarios of real-world action.  They did so in the first instance (1950) not because one necessarily caused or influenced the other, but because the conceptual categories which shaped the scenarios developed by both movie-makers and policy-makers were drawn from the same cultural lexicon, the same set of mythological models.  But once the "cult of the cavalry" was established as a major division of American mythic space and was seen to be responsive to the course of political events, its fictive rationales and heroic styles of action (especially as embodied in the symbolic persona of John Wayne) became functional terms in public discourse and symbols of the correct or heroic response to the challenges of the Cold War (Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation).

Slotkin adds that an entire complex history is condensed into an emblem consisting of John Wayne in his cowboy persona associated with a motto (the right man with a gun).  The emblem communicates in a flash (flash reason) US counterinsurgency strategy from Vietnam to the present. The fact of this conjunction suggests a heuristic device:  to use popular narratives as probes to locate the fundamental values (the common scenarios) motivating decision-making in individual and collective situations.   The instruction is to explore such a connection with our Target disaster, keeping in mind that we are documenting an aspect of Contrast.

Chicken

Proof

William Poundstone's Prisoner's Dilemma is the source for our CATTt Contrast.  This account of the passage from pure research (Von Neumann's invention of "game theory") to public policy formation (American foreign policy, specifically US nuclear strategy) during the Cold War, establishes that part of the problem for which fatal strategy is the alternative.  We retain public policy formation, choosing a specific disaster (accident) and its related policy options, while updating strategy for international relations and nuclear weapons in the new conditions of terrorism.  The first step in filling the Contrast slot is to inventory primary attributes of the source example.  We need to understand how Game Theory evolved into public policy, in order to locate opportunities for Fatal Games.  In keeping with the heuretic method, we identify one primary feature of the source to translate into an instruction for our CATTt.  That feature is the example of the variation on Prisoner's Dilemma known as Chicken.

Bertrand Russell is credited with identifying this model of human conflict in his book Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare (1959).  The relevant instruction comes from Russell's use of the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause (starring James Dean) as a metaphor for nuclear stalement.  "In the movie, spoiled Los Angeles teenagers drive stolen cars to a cliff and play a game they call a 'chicken run.' The game consists of two boys simultaneously driving their cars off the edge of the cliff, jumping out at the last possible moment. The boy who jumps out first is 'chicken' and loses" (Poundstone, 197).  Russell saw this game as an emblem for "brinksmanship."  The metaphor was picked up in subsequent discussion, and contributed to the discourse surrounding the Cuban Missile
 Crisis.

Instruction:  select a pop film narrative to use as a metaphor or emblem for articulating or expressing the fatal strategy relevant to your disaster/accident.