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.

Be Still

Further instructions from 'Pataphysics (Bok):  use a Surrationalist strategy, to compose from the object position.  The relay OULIPO suggests ours is an experiment in potential consulting.  Pine tar is produced by means of distillation.  It is distilled. The Superfund is still here.

Dictionary   
still 1 |stil|
adjective
not moving or making a sound : the still body of the young man.
• (of air or water) undisturbed by wind, sound, or current; calm and tranquil : her voice carried on the still air | a still autumn day.
• (of a drink such as wine) not effervescent; compare with sparkle .
noun
1 deep silence and calm; stillness : the still of the night.
2 an ordinary static photograph as opposed to a motion picture, esp. a single shot from a movie.
adverb
1 without moving : the sheriff commanded him to stand still and drop the gun.
2 up to and including the present or the time mentioned; even now (or then) as formerly : he still lives with his mother | it was still raining.
• referring to something that will or may happen in the future : we could still win.
3 nevertheless; all the same : I'm afraid he's crazy. Still, he's harmless.
4 even (used with comparatives for emphasis) : write, or better still, type, captions for the pictures | Hank, already sweltering, began to sweat still more profusely.
verb
make or become still; quieten : [ trans. ] she raised her hand, stilling Erica's protests | [ intrans. ] the din in the hall stilled.
PHRASES
still and all informal nevertheless; even so.
still small voice the voice of one's conscience (with reference to 1 Kings 19:12).
still waters run deep proverb a quiet or placid manner may conceal a more passionate nature.
DERIVATIVES
stillness noun
ORIGIN Old English stille (adjective and adverb), stillan (verb), from a base meaning ‘be fixed, stand.’
still 2
noun
an apparatus for distilling alcoholic drinks such as whiskey.
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from the rare verb still [extract by distillation,] shortening of distill .

Thesaurus   
still
adjective
1 the parrot lay still motionless, unmoving, not moving a muscle, stock-still, immobile, inanimate, like a statue, as if turned to stone, rooted to the spot, transfixed, static, stationary. antonym moving, active.
2 a still night quiet, silent, hushed, soundless, noiseless, undisturbed; calm, peaceful, serene, windless; literary stilly. antonym noisy.
3 the lake was still calm, flat, even, smooth, placid, tranquil, pacific, waveless, glassy, like a millpond, unruffled, stagnant. antonym rough, turbulent.
noun
the still of the night quietness, quiet, quietude, silence, stillness, hush, soundlessness; calm, tranquility, peace, serenity. antonym noise, disturbance, hubbub.
adverb
1 she's still running in circles up to this time, up to the present time, until now, even now, yet.
2 He's crazy. Still, he's good for dinner conversation nevertheless, nonetheless, regardless, all the same, just the same, anyway, anyhow, even so, yet, but, however, notwithstanding, despite that, in spite of that, for all that, be that as it may, in any event, at any rate; informal still and all, anyhoo.
verb
1 she stilled the crowd quiet, silence, hush; calm, settle, pacify, soothe, lull, allay, subdue. antonym stir up.
2 the wind stilled abate, die down, lessen, subside, ease up/off, let up, moderate, slacken, weaken. antonym get stronger.

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).

Simultaneism

A relay for composing an EmerAgency egents report, to exhibit in the Museum of Accidents, is the movement of concrete and visual poetries in general, and Apollinaire in particular.  Apollinaire is one of the inventors of the poetics of the Paris vanguard, being responsible for naming and defining some of the most important inventions, thus contributing importantly to electrate image metaphysics.  The visual poem "Lettre-Ocean" (referring to a type of post, the overseas letter) prepared the way for his Calligrammes.  This use of layout, replacing textual syntax with schema and diagram, is suggestive for our experiment with Prezi figures.

Manuscript version

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.

Transformations

The principle of "version" is central to concept creation.  Philosophical concepts are dynamic, enabling an orientation on the plane of immanence, in relation to the problem (the disaster) that motivated the concept design.  Orientation refers to direction, directedness, and more fundamentally to attitude of the conceptual persona (of the one who thinks).  This principle has its corollary in graphic design, especially in architecture, in the practice of "transformation" of an open-ended image during the design process.  The most common transformations are topological, ornamental, reversal, and distortion.  The grammar of ornament has been studied in these terms, describing the basic manipulations of a geometric unit used to generate a pattern:  translation, rotation, reflection, and inversion.  The rhetoric of Routine includes image as well as text versions.

Version Logic

Routine as a mode of inference (working conduction) engages version (-vert) as trace.  The stakes and opportunities of version (the directionality of attitude), the potentiality of turning in relation to problem on the plane of immanence, may be appreciated relative to the historical developments in the several practices and disciplines that exploit this register.  One example is the inference procedures systematized by categorical propositions.  Any textbook of logic covers the manipulations of the logical square (Aristotle), including conversion, obversion, and contraposition.

The converse of any categorical proposition is the new categorical proposition that results from putting the predicate term of the original proposition in the subject place of the new proposition and the subject term of the original in the predicate place of the new. Thus, for example, the converse of "No dogs are felines" is "No felines are dogs," and the converse of "Some snakes are poisonous animals" is "Some poisonous animals are snakes."

In order to form the obverse of a categorical proposition, we replace the predicate term of the proposition with its complement and reverse the quality of the proposition, either from affirmative to negative or from negative to affirmative. Thus, for example, the obverse of "All ants are insects" is "No ants are non-insects"

The contrapositive of any categorical proposition is the new categorical proposition that results from putting the complement of the predicate term of the original proposition in the subject place of the new proposition and the complement of the subject term of the original in the predicate place of the new. Thus, for example, the contrapositive of "All crows are birds" is "All non-birds are non-crows,"

 [Interactive Demo]

Interpellation

A familiar example of a vital anecdote associated with a concept is the scene of hailing offered by Louis Althusser.  The anecdote is relevant for us in showing another case of turning (-vert).

I shall then suggest that ideology "acts" or "functions" in such a way that it "recruits" subjects among the individuals (it recruits them al), or "transforms" the individuals into subjects by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing:  "Hey, you there!"  Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn around.  By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject.  Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was "really" addressed to him, and that "it was really him who was hailed" (and not someone else) [Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"].

Routine concerns the trace of turn, meaning not this or that version, but turning as such, the direction and directedness of attitude, and a temporal movement that includes at some point or site a pivot or switch, enabling or generating the experience of peripety and anagnorisis.

Taking Turns

Truth can only be defined on the plane [of immanence] by a "turning toward" or by "that toward which thought turns"; but this does not provide us with a concept of truth (WIP? 39).

Kenneth Burke provides some context for the turning (the -vert family of terms) enabled by "concept."  "Turn" is the rhetorical operation relevant to the "directionality" experienced through attitude.  In his study of St. Augustine's Confessions, generalized as The Rhetoric of Religion, Burke foregrounds the -vert family in relation to decision-making ("voting or purchasing, giving answers to questionnaires, taking of risks calculated on the basis of probability"). "I sometimes wonder whether the good Bishop of Hippo could ever have written that work were it not for the many Latin words that grow from this root, meaning turn." Augustine's moment of conversion to Christianity (the famous scene in Book VIII) is analyzed dramatistically:

There are the tense moments of decision in formal drama, when the protagonist debates whether to make a certain move, and finally makes the choice that shapes his destiny, though he still has to discover what that destiny is. . . . We are interested in the kind of decision, if it can be called decision at all:  the kind of development that usually takes place in the third act of a five-act drama.  Despite his great stress upon the will, and despite his extraordinary energy in theological controversy, Augustine seems to have felt rather that, at the critical moment of his conversion, something was decided for him.  Act III is the point at which some new quality of motivation enters.  And however active one may be henceforth, the course is more like a rolling downhill than like a straining uphill (Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion).

This moment of decision is taught as the turning point of the standard Hollywood screenplay, instructions for which may be found in countless primers on scriptwriting (coming in this genre at the end of the second act of a three-act script).  There is a narrative or dramatistic dimension in Routine, but "concept" separates, isolates, and develops as an alternative to any particular turn or direction, the pivot or switch site, the Archimedian lever of upon which turning as such depends.   Routine does for turn of attitude what peripety (peripeteia) does for drama.

Burke's analysis of the Confessions resonates with Virno's observation about virtue and evil exploiting the same rhetorical resources of language,  Augustine himself contrasts his con-version with the per-version of his pagan experience. "As regards Augustine's Confessions, the  most notable use of the vert- family is in the contrast between Book II, concerned with what he calls his adolescent perversity, in stealing pears (a Gidean acte gratuit), and Book VIII, that describes his conversion."

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).