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.

Torino Scale

The Torino Scale is a "Richter Scale" for categorizing the [Earth](Event) impact hazard associated with [newly discovered asteroids and comets](Accidents). It is intended to serve as a communication tool for [astronomers](Egents) and the public to assess the seriousness of predictions of close encounters by [asteroids and comets] (Accidents)during the 21st century.

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.

Unknown Quantity

Deepwater Horizon

Paul Virilio's Museum of the Accident constitutes the Target for Routine's second CATTt.  The immediate passage between the seminar inventing an Internet Concept (Routine) and the present project to invent a fatal strategy is the condition of surprise.  "Turning around the threat of the unexpected in this way, surprise becomes a subject for research and major risks a subject for exposure and for exhibition, within the framework of instantaneous telecommunications" (Virilio, Unknown Quantity, "Foreword").  In Routine we used as a point of departure for an image concept the conductive logic of the joke form, with its power to register exact cultural locations of expectations and their violation.  Now this system is extended into strategy as a mode of thought.  An initial statement of our Target, then, (that is, of the problem addressed by our project), comes from Virilio:  

If, in fact, invention is just a way of seeing, of grasping accidents as signs, as opportunities, it is high time to open up our galleries to the impromptu, to that “indirect production” of science and the techno-sciences that is the disaster, the (industrial or other) catastrophe. If, according to Aristotle, “the accident reveals the substance,” the invention of the substance is also the invention of the “accident.” Seen this way, the shipwreck is indeed the “futuristic” invention of the ship, the air crash the invention of the supersonic plane, and the Chernobyl meltdown, the invention of the nuclear power station.

Instruction:  The accident (+ policies) you select as the Target for fatal strategy is framed as a "sign."

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)?

Seminar 2011

Here is the initial course description for my spring 2011 graduate seminar (these things have to be submitted early in the fall, while the course is still in development).

Gift Game Economy Strategy

The title refers to a set of theoretical operations whose convergence is tracked and tested in this seminar.  The methodological frame is heuretics (the logic of invention), and one of the purposes of the seminar is to gain some experience with “invention” as an orientation applicable to any area of the discipline. The semester project is generated by extracting from “the logic of the gift” a principle of “strategy,” to function as an alternative to the strategy of game theory informing American policy during the Cold War. Our interest is not only in political or policy strategy but in “strategy” as an attitude or orientation within any problem field. The heuretic goal is to articulate and test a strategy (a game?) of “gift.” A particular benefit of grounding our experiment in the logic of the gift is that acquaintance with this account of pre-capitalist economy reduces some of the mystery surrounding the most original thinkers of French poststructuralism (for example, Bataille, Derrida, Baudrillard, among others). Readings may include the following: Alan D. Schrift, Ed., The Logic of the Gift:  Toward an Ethic of Generosity; William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb; Richard A. Lanham, On the Economics of Attention:  Style and Substance in the Age of Information; Sun Tzu, The Art of War. The semester experiment is composed as a blog.  

The original plan has been modified, to clarify and simplify the heuretic CATTt generator.
Prisoner's Dilemma remains the Contrast.  Baudrillard is now Theory, specifically Fatal Strategies, in part because Baudrillard represents one major option coming out of Gift theory.  The fact that he couches his approach as "strategy," is useful, but more important is his appropriation of 'pataphysics as the basis for the strategy.  Analogy is a book on 'pataphysics by Christian Bok (replacing Lanham's useful but tamer framing of dadaism as a brand strategy in an attention economy -- an insight that can be covered in lecture).  This set-up means that the seminar continues to explore Routine, taking up where last year's experiment left off.  The immediate pivot is the pun (noted by Bok):  Ubu is a slapstick comedian (pataud physique) of unhealthy obesity (pateux physique)...  Target remains public policy formation (EmerAgency consulting), but the texts relevant to Target and tale are undecided at this moment.