Commodity Taste

Pep

Retracing the path of event (return to sender), passage and coming to pass.  Why were the trading ships entering warmer waters, where they encountered teredo navalis?  Look around from this moment to notice the current, the economy:  we are in the spice trade.  Pepper plants are native to India, and pepper has been used in Indian cuisine since ancient times.  Pepper was so valuable that it was used as money.  In its decline Rome paid "protection" to the Visigoths in the form of tons of black pepper.  The "spice" trade was in fact primarily the "pepper" trade.  Competition over control of the trade pushed the Portuguese to find a water route (alternative to the sea and land routes controlled by Venice).  The story is familiar from there.

The lesson of this history for fatal strategy is to trace the accident as Nemesis, but not so much in the ancient sense of retribution, but in the more immanent sense of "tribute." We reached for spice, and got dioxin. The accident records our gesture, creating a field of action around Flesh, that is, human embodiment.  People developed a passion for the pungency of pepper.  The account of pepper as a preservative apparently is not accurate.  It was rather flavor that sent the accident, precisely:  taste.  This particular event is exemplary in part because of its association with Kant's Critique of Judgment, and the foundation of electracy on the sense of taste, the sensorium oriented by pleasure-pain.  Check your event for its bit of Flesh (Merleau-Ponty's alternative to "substance").  Here is the passage of pleasure to which wisdom devoted most of its attention.  What is the wisdom of pepper?

Teredo Navalis

Boring

The soil in and around the Koppers Superfund site in Gainesville, Florida, is contaminated with dioxin, a byproduct of the wood treatment process performed here beginning in 1911.  The contamination is an accident, not deliberate (not a decision, not a deliberation), an unforeseen consequence following from an historical series of happenings.  It is fatal in the sense of predestined, a gift/poison out of the past, monumental, archival, and also in the sense of lethal, deadly, undermining well-being, assuming that its natural movement down into the acquifer is irreversible.   It so happens that the fetish detail of this event (Ereignis) emerges within the documentary television series, Connections, by James Burke, a series that anticipates and contributes to the discussion of technics.

It was this concern for ships' hulls that was to  lead, within a hundred years, to an invention that is present in almost every modern home.  As the ships sailed more often into tropical waters, their wooden hulls were attacked by a tiny mollusc called teredo navalis, which lived in those waters, and which bored into the hulls with devastating results.  The only protection against the mollusc was a thick layer of a mixture of tar and pitch smeared over the bottom of the ship.  At the beginning of the eighteenth century most of this material came from Scandinavia and the Baltic, from the unit of Sweden and Finland joined under the Swedish crown.  Over the previous two hundred years most of Europe had become increasingly dependent on northern timber, as the forests of England, France, Spain and Portugal had become more and more depleted.  The timber was used to build ships and to produce the tar and pitch.  The best kind of wood for making tar and pitch was pine, which was cooked slowly in pits until the tarry substance ran out of the charring wood, to be collected and distilled and then shipped in barrels. In 1700 the Russians, whose northern ports froze over in winter, decided they needed a warm-water port on the Baltic, and moved against Sweden-Finland.  The war that followed totally disrupted supplies. Fortunately for the English, there was one other source of supply--which  they owned--in the new American colonies (James Burke, Connections).

 Here is a candidate for the fetish detail (in my case) from our Theory instructions, since it was the encounter of wooden ships with the mollusc that caused the swerve (clinamen), the turn (-vert, trope), sending the manufacture of pine tar and pitch to America, and ultimately to Florida.

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.

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.

Eventence

One of the challenges of our Theory (D&G) is to construct a concept for thinking from the collective position of event.  Virno (on Target) contributes the procedure we are testing in Routine.

In the actual experience of talking, the road sign is language as a system of signs, while the different ways in which one can behave in the presence of these signs has to do with a universe of discourse language (with "the activity of the speaker who puts language into action," Benveniste: 256).  The distinction between the semiotic plane (sign) and the semantic plane (discourse), developed by Benveniste corresponds in many ways to the distinction between the normative plane and the applicative plane.  The semiotic system "exists in and of itself; it establishes the reality of language, but it does not require particular applications; the sentence, instead, the semantic expression, is solely particular"  (256).  The sentence is not a "habitual event"; rather, it is a unique, "evanescent" event (Virno, 105).

We may not "think" event directly, but write it, and receive it thus from ourselves (middle voice).  The crucial insight developed throughout Multitude is the focus on this moment of exchange, the twist in the moebius band of language, marking the imbrication of drives (body, natural regularity) in language (grammar, rule).  Julia Kristeva used similar vocabulary while naming the semiotic dimension "chora" (a term requiring further development elsewhere).  The point is that jouissance (bliss, blissence) associated with originary unconscious experiences of satisfaction (in psychoanalytic theory), are carried within discourse imbricated in the semiotic register of words.  Given the importance of the pleasure/pain axis to electracy, the usefulness of Virno's argument cannot be overstated. The value of Multitude is its foregrounding of the joke effect as announcing exactly the event of interference between the two registers.

The joke is a discourse--particular, unique, evanescent--that gives a reckoning of the difference between the semiotic system and the universe of discourse.  The comic effect derives, often, exactly from that coming and going between the two planes; inside one sentence one can see the diversity of the statute of the very same lexical entity, depending on whether it is interpreted as a sign, or as part of the discourse ("How's it going?" asks the blind man of the lame man; "Just as you see," the latter answers") (106).

In short, the event of Routine happens in the bit, in language and not only there, but in image discourse.

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)?

Concept: Event

The primary purpose of Part One of the blog is to develop a poetics or recipe for the construction of a "concept," as defined by D&G. We are not yet introducing our own concept, but creating a set of instructions for how to compose one, to be acted upon in Part Two. The formula for a concept includes the following components.

1. Concept
The "concept" slot in the template assigns a name to the concept (eg. Descartes' "cogito"). Our Theory calls for a stand (attitude towards thought) that replaces all subject/object orientations towards thinking. D&G name their replacement for the subject stand "event." We need to design a thought form that thinks from the position of "event," rather than from the position of subject. Event thinks in and through me. It is a collective dimension of thinking. "Event" is not the name of the concept we are constructing, but a description of the slot that any concept constructed according to their specifications must address.

D&G are proposing a thought adequate to the il y a, or es gibt, it rains -- phrases philosophers have used to characterize thought as reception (I don't speak language; language speaks me).