Seduced's Epiphany

Jeanne Duval

Our game is not "Prisoner's Dilemma," but "Seduced's Epiphany." To receive the accident we occupy the position of object, within the field of event.  The relay comes from Modernism in general, Baudelaire in particular, and his strategy of becoming commodity (see Walter Benjamin's reading).  As alternative to the calculation of Game Theory, with its grid of all rational options, fatal strategy "feels lucky" in recognizing that what seduces is the fetish (the object cause of desire).  In place of expanding into a narrative scenario, the consultation locates the sender of event.

No longer to explain things and to set their value in objective criteria and in an unbounded system of references, but, on the contrary, to implicate the whole world in a single one of its details, an entire event in a single one of its features, all the energy of nature in a single one of its objects, dead or alive--to find the esoteric ellipsis, the perfect shortcut toward the pure object, the one which is not involved in the division of meaning, and which shares its secret and power with no other (FS, 146).

Strategy learned from the poets in Paris, adapting to the shocks of industrial cities.  The trauma of alienation, of objectification, separates from the experience of agency.  Agency in any case moves elsewhere, outside, neither spirit nor self, but into the collective order, as operant subject.  It returns (the uncanny) in the form of event, accident, and this effect is what fascinates, since the accident is us (Problems B Us, slogan of the EmerAgency).  The extimacy of communication requires poetic method:  Baudelaire's correspondences first of all, followed by all the variations (Eliot's objective correlative, Rilke's Weltinnenraum, Joyce's epiphany, Benjamin's dialectical image, Freud's Unheimlich).  The allegory has become immanent, the commodity is anagogical.  The lyrical image registers the shock in the microcosm of the disaster in the macrocosm.  Baudrillard learns from Baudelaire how to receive the intimations of the real, by treating phenomena of public policy as miniaturizations (mise-en-abyme).  Our pain poses the question of Befindlichkeit (Heidegger, how do things stand, for me, for my situation in the world?).  The disaster answers:  obesity, cancer, terror.  These are the mirrors that fascinate.

The Accident Replies

Gift Economy

Target instruction is to receive the Accident as a sign.  Theory now refines this instruction.  These specs begin with one of the primary moments of Theory's response to Target's call:

This 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.  It's always like this that destiny becomes specific:  at a given moment, at a given point, signs become objects, impossible to turn into metaphors, cruel, without appeal.They cut short any decipherment, become confused with things (which is why fate is a dreamer, with the unintelligible instantaneity signs and words have in dreams).  The strategy of the object, like that of the woman in the story [she sent her suitor one of the eyeballs he claimed to admire], is to be confused with the thing desired (FS, 153).

Some terminology is clarified in this statement.  "Fatal" as adjective in French means "predestined" before it means "lethal." A "fatal strategy" is one that maps this default trajectory, this entropy, this passage of the world.  Hypertely is our version of "entelechy".  The other point is to note the challenge posed to electracy by the dromosphere or dimension collapse.  The reason why "scene" disappears is because media (information) and event have merged:  information and world coincide.  What the Greek language singing Homeric epics was to literacy, the ubiquitous broadcasting of pop entertainment (including all journalism, databases and the like) is to electracy.  Philosophy (literate metaphysics) was created out of written Greek culture (mythos into logos).  Electrate metaphysics must be created out of the signifying materials of pop information.

Baudrillard's qualification of the catastrophe as "pure" (p. 36) alludes to his instruction for us, to be found in his discussion of Baudelaire and the inception of "pure art" in Bohemian Paris (about which more later).  Meanwhile, the blind reply in the Real is the end of literate metaphysics (the excrescence overrunning all literate categories), not the end of signification.  It is the point of transfer into electracy (in progress).  We need to apprehend the attributes of the accident-sign, in order to outline the language which emerges with it as a whole, even if existing in our moment only synchronically, with its diachrony coming from the future.

If the waves of meaning, if the waves of memory and historical time are receding, if the waves of causality around the effect are fading (and the event today comes at us like a wave; it doesn't travel only "over the waves" -- it is a wave indecipherable in terms of language and meaning, decipherable only and instantly in terms of color, tactility, ambiance, in terms of sensory effects), it is because light is slowing down, because somewhere a gravitational effect is forcing the light from the event, the light which carries the event's meaning beyond itself bearing messages, to slow to a standstill, and the same is true of political and historical light, which we no longer perceive but feebly, and for the light from bodies of which we receive only faint simulacra (FS, 36-7).

Part of the implication concerns the apparatus:  that cinematography (the optical unconscious) is required to make these effects of the dromosphere (so far in excess of human faculties) legible.  The Museum of the Accident as tale requested an exhibitable event, and we agreed that the graphics of abstract art afforded appropriate means to register the forces manifested in the material break-up.  The instruction is: learn to read and write "accident."

Tar Story

Natural Pine Tar Pitch

The disaster is an inheritance, a (mis)trust fund supplied through tradition.  Event (Ereignis) refers to this received decision, what is given as gift, a duty to be paid by receiver.  In the event of the Cabot Koppers site in Gainesville, the activity resulting in pollution began in 1911, and the pitch pine tar was used to treat utility poles.  "Pine tar is a byproduct formed as the result of distilling pine wood at high temperatures, forcing it to decompose. Once the wood breaks down, it results in the formation of charcoal and a gum-like substance, tar. When the tar is further distilled, oils are removed from it, creating the byproduct pine tar pitch." The history of this product goes back six centuries, with the original use being the treatment of ship hulls.  Pine tar is an important link in the story of invention tracked in episode seven ("The Long Chain") of Connections (James Burke), and is a good example of technics, referring to the autonomous, interdependent ontologies of technology and humans.  The original source of pine tar (Scandinavian forests) used by the British and other European fleets was cut off due to war, replaced by the colonies as primary supplier, primarily the Southern states.  The evolution of inventions, passing through a series of accidents, mistakes, chance connections traced by Burke passes on from pine tar through coal tar eventually on to plastics.

Metaphysical Disaster

Baudrillard says of Pompeii, that "everything is metaphysical in this city."

The tactile presence of these ruins is magnificent for the psyche, with their suspense, their twisting shadows, their sheer matter-of-factness.  A conjunction of the banality of a promenade and the immanence of another time, another moment, unique, that of catastrophe. . . . Few places leave such an impression of worrisome uncanniness (it is no surprise that Jansen and Freud set the psychic action of Gradiva there).  Here one feels all the heat of death, rendered all the more vivid by the fossilized and fugitive signs of daily life (FS, 42).

Perhaps a sign of the timeliness of our inquiry into the metaphysics of accident is the recent collapse of the ruins of Pompeii, the second death of which philosophers speak (since we are learning the semiotics of immanence)?

Oscillation

Virno functions as resource for the Target of our CATTt.  An immediate connection with this dimension of public policy disaster is his allusion to Hurricane Katrina through the metonym of the "Superdome."  A number of the students missed this allusion in their notes.

A theory of institutions that seeks to abandon the paradigm of sovereignty, without eluding the question of intraspecies aggression, must place at center stage that inviolable weaving together of the three levels on which human praxis is articulated: a) regularity, or "the common behavior of mankind"; b) defined rule; c) application contingent upon the defined rule.  None of these levels (and even less so, the application) constitutes a free zone, immune from so called "evil": all these levels are a theater for the oscillation between the good life and the Superdome of New Orleans (Virno, 36).

 The concern of Routine (in a project to place well-being at the center of electrate thought) must take into account Virno's observation, that virtue and evil emerge from the same capacities and faculties of human potentiality.  The oscillation signals we are in a threshold condition of cultural turbulence.  The Real speaks through the Superdome figure, intimating the catastrophe of winner-take-all values emblematized in this sports arena.  The natural and social disasters manifest at the Superdome allude to a further disaster of hypercompetition, the dangers of Entertainment as the site of emergent electracy.  Meanwhile, this scene is associated with a viral appropriation still in circulation, a photoshop joke, proving that a cliche (Nero and his fiddle) is also an archetype.

What Is Happening?

The Cabot-Koppers Superfund site in my city is just one of many such polluted sites in America and the world. Until recently the Koppers plant supplied the utility poles for the Gainesville Regional Utility (GRU), the entity also responsible for the well-field threatened by creosote used in treating the wood. The treatment makes the wood resistant to the wear of weather and insects. Florida was one of three states where most wood treatment was done, dating back to the colonial period. At one time treated wood was used in shipbuilding.

My bicycle route to campus takes me along roads lined with trees and utility poles, the wooden ones supplied locally until a month ago. GRU now gets its poles from Georgia. My house is connected to this grid by wires supported by these poles, and my swimming pool was recently refilled using city water. It took two days to fill the 20 x 40 pool at a rate of 35 gallons/min.

I am thinking my circumstances as a subject, a self, signed by my proper name. We are constructing a concept capable in principle of thinking what is happening from a different position, as event. Our concept (event, persona, problem) is to philosophy what "partial observer" is to science. Through science we grasp the state of affairs. The instruments monitoring the well-field, put in place by the Corps of Engineers, the corporation, the city, produce a measure from within the state of affairs, indicating the rate of seepage at which the pollutant is approaching the well-field in the acquifer that supplies our drinking water. What is the thought of the human measure, by means of which collectively we could think from our participation in these intersecting forces and processes (electricity, drinking water)?