Great Plains 111... A logic unsustainable...

This dug up by Kylen Campbell, had to post it, it's just too good.

"This, finally, is the punch line of our two hundred years on the Great Plains: we trap out the beaver, subtract the Mandan, infect the Blackfeet and the Hidatsa and the Assiniboin, overdose the Arikara; call the land a desert and hurry across it to get to California and Oregon; suck up the buffalo, bones and all; kill off nations of elk and wolves and cranes and prairie chickens and prairie dogs; dig up gold and rebury it in vaults someplace else; ruin the Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Crow and Kiowa and Comanche; kill Crazy Horse, kill Sitting Bull; harvest wave after wave of ‘immigrants’ dreams and send the wised-up dreamers on their wheat, ship out the cattle; dig up the earth itself and burn it in power plants and send the power down the line; dismiss the small farmers, empty the little towns; drill the oil and the natural gas and pipe it away; dry up the rivers and the springs, deep-drilled for irrigation water as the aquifer retreats. And in return we condense unimaginable amounts of Treasure into weapons buried beneath the land that so much Treasure came from-the weapons for which our best hope might be that we will someday take them apart and throw them away, and for which our next-best hope certainly is that they remain humming away under the prairie, absorbing fear and maintenance, unused, forever."

Great Plains 111
By Ian Frazier, New York Mag Mar 6, 1989

Place your best!

“Place your bets!” Words that can be articulated in virtually any language. The art of the wager is among our oldest cultural inventions. The fun and excitement of gambling notwithstanding, wagering is an affirmation of chance, recognition of a different kind of logic: one that is random, brutish, and sometimes profoundly sweet. “Yes!” We wager to get a shot at the action, to get where the action is. To get where discourse among people travels through actions not words, where meaning is right there in the cards, on the table, in the numbers, on the dice. The action is fast because it shouldn’t take much time to wager; wagering is not a figuring out, a thoughtfulness, or a reasoning. It’s a fast gamble, a quick bet; it’s gut and instinct and drive.

In wagering we not only reverse the principles of communication (seeking understanding based on reasoning and agreement with reasons provided). We switch our mode and means of communication. Wagering, we use our hands, not our mouths. We use numbers and tokens, not words and meanings. We enter a world where results are either for us or against us. There’s no in between a loss and a win. This binary logic not only sneers at the efforts of the reasoning mind to control or stem the losses and get the hell out of there before it’s all gone totally wrong. Its lose or win, black and white, in or out, cancel the ambiguity that once made us human and now makes us no better than the one-armed bandit we’ve been dropping quarters into all night long. The world of the wager shuts off the world of reason. It revels in its cynicism toward the work, the blood, sweat, and tears invested in all that money, which saved, it now takes the pleasure in wasting. Thus destroying not only the money but the contract that produced it the first place: my life (work) for your money (pay).

It should come as no surprise that in any culture we could probably find examples of waste and destruction aimed directly at a society’s core values. The Romans did it in their infamous festivals. Europeans during the middle ages did it in their carnivals. Native Americans have had their potlatch. From ceremonial burnings and sacrifices to modern-day Vegas, the logic of waste runs with strength and consistency.

But while ritual sacrifices comprise a coherent and intrinsic role within a society’s reproduction, contemporary gambling looks like something different. Gambling is game; each move is wager. No matter what the game is, as long as it sorts winners from losers it is played by wagering on the future. Certainly this kind of game coordinates action. But unlike the action that results from discursive activity (conversation), this kind of action offers no reasons. Nothing to debate, to test, to consider, or to change. Only compliance with the rules of the game or not. Gaming action, each wager, is just a repetition. A reproduction of the game. For the only way to change a game is to change its rules. So we see that the wagerer has no access to the game he plays, no opportunity to do anything but repeat it endlessly. Now the wager, which is a bet on the future, shows its tragedy: the rules will never change as long as the bettors place their bets. The game’s binding power obtains from its rules and not from the gaming. The gambler is like the pathetic Mr. K in Kafka’s “Trial,” unwittingly reproducing the very thing that traps him only because he fails to see that what he wants is outside the rules of the game.

Caught in a Web of Seduction

I'm posting some old writings, mostly untouched (for better or worse). This one's from 2001 one and is about how well the Net handle's the mechanism of seduction...



If what we desire is the desire of the other, then seduction is where it’s at. For its in our receptivity to the other that desire is awakened even as it yields to seduction. As we soften in the seductive embrace of the other our sense of self and with it all self limitations melt away and are suspended for the encounter in which our active desire is to be desired. In this moment of acquiescence is a powerful surrender that promises to forge, even if only fleetingly, utter and complete connection. It is this disappearance of self that happens so easily on the Net, where anonymity already provides us a guise behind which to conceal our active, accountable, and engaged selves and through which to let a connection to flow.

The power of attraction obtains from the affective power of force, force’s own affectabiliity or receptiveness. It is a power in which we are impressed as opposed to expressed. A disposition of selflessness in which we receive the active force of the other while putting our own active forces in suspension.

In a culture dominated by the challenge to produce and to make something of ourselves, the attraction of attraction should come as no surprise. After all, we spent the first months of our lives in a state of blissful unity with our mothers; individuation and separation occur only with the emergence of ego. Lacan refers frequently to the “mirror phase,” that moment in childhood development when the little one discovers himself in the mirror as an object, and Other. Seduction operates in the other direction. Picture yourself with difficulty, if you will, being seduced by a man or woman (your pick) and catching yourself in the mirror; a moment shattered, certainly, for the act of seduction works by erasing self-awareness.

The net’s ability to conduct the flow of seduction works because as a medium it has no mirrors. Where this produces solitude and isolation in the physical world, in the virtual it facilitates seduction. For what breaks seduction is not an encounter with the other, but an encounter with the self. It’s in the sudden and jarring shock or recognition that seduction falls apart. Those precious and tantalizing moments when we meet others online for play or seduction are protected by the absence of reflective surfaces—and enhanced by the empty and formless space into which we allow ourselves to fall.

Projection: The Screen, The Other, What We See and What's Behind

I'm posting some old writings, mostly untouch (for better or worse). Here's one on projection that i wrote up when thinking about the screening effect of technology in online dating. The "chemistry" moment that comes with meeting a person in real life contrasts sharply with the excitement of the anticipation....


Projection is a term used by psychologists to describe the phenomenon by which we produce and project an image of our own creation onto the another (person). We’re so familiar with the concept that its become part our vernacular: “Shut up, you’re projecting.” Indeed. In the therapeutic community, we transfer associations onto others in such a manner that the reality of the encounter or interaction we’re in is skewed by the fact that in our mind’s eye the other person has become somebody else. Our associations may or may not involve our parental units. In either case, it’s assumed that projection is contrary to healthy communication.

Projection is a personal function, a flow of force(s) towards another that fails to encounter the other because it forms instead an image. The projection function creates a substitution. We may or may not be aware of the substitution once it has taken place, meaning that it’s possible we will wind up communicating with a projection rather than the other person.

We establish relations online, through the Net, with others all the time. And yet the anonymity of self presentation and the absence of physical presence should call into question the Who with whom we’ve established relations. Indeed, there is no presentation of self online. What there is, is only a tracing. A pixellated remainder of what the person (should they be who they say they are and how they present themselves to be, both of which are highly circumspect and virtually unverifiable) has written or rendered, delayed by the latency that operates behind the screen and through the network. ASCII self is not much of a self, even if intentions are true, sincere, and justifiable.

Like trackers on the hunt, we follow these footsteps and conjure up our projections of the character that walked them. Is he big or small? Is she fat or skinny? Is he rich or wanna-be? Is she of legal age? We find wit in their words and make of them a comedic star. We find wisdom in their words and make of them a self confident buddha. Finally, or eventually, we discover that our chatroom play is only several degrees removed from what we did with cars and trucks and dolls and action figures in the far more interactive and thrilling sandbox of our childhood.

But perhaps therein lies the sheer fun online: in its receptivity to the characters of our past and our imagination, not somebody else’s. It gives us a chance to communicate with ourselves and personalities of our own creation. Perhaps we work things out (for ourselves, not for others). Perhaps, even when communicating live and in real time, we’re really just entertaining our multiple selves. Roll the credits.

In Alaska, the Map Precedes the Territory After All, After Oil

A moment of Baudrillardian irony appeared in the NY Times this morning. Jean Baudrillard is the French philosopher-critic whose concepts of the Hyperreal and Simulacra landed him many frequent flier miles during the late 1980s and 1990s.

Mistaken for a post-modernist, he's actually more of a nostalgic and perhaps melancholic modernist, I think. His passage on the hyperreal was summarized in The Matrix by Morpheus in the oft-sampled: "Welcome to the Desert of the Real."

Double irony here would be the connecting line Cheney-Baudrillard. Think about it, because not even Baudrillard could have invented this one. In Baudrillard's version the conceptual "map" precedes the real. We have removed "the Real" from the equation and now live in a rarefied and disconnected set of simulations, plans, and strategies. In reality, it now appears, a map's disappearance now precedes the disappearance of the Real. Beautiful. I love it so much I could cry.




"The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory--precession of simulacra--it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. it is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself." Jean Baudrillard

From the New York Times, today:

"Maps matter. They chronicle the struggles of empires and zoning boards. They chart political compromise. So it was natural for Republican Congressional aides, doing due diligence for what may be the last battle in the fight over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to ask for the legally binding 1978 map of the refuge and its coastal plain.

It was gone. No map, no copies, no digitized version.

The wall-size 1:250,000-scale map delineated the tundra in the biggest national land-use controversy of the last quarter-century, an area that environmentalists call America's Serengeti and that oil enthusiasts see as America's Oman.

The map had been stored behind a filing cabinet in a locked room in Arlington, Va. Late in 2002, it was there. In early 2003, it disappeared. There are just a few reflection-flecked photographs to remember it by.

All this may have real consequences. The United States Geological Survey drew up a new map. On Wednesday, the Senate Energy and Commerce Committee passed a measure based on the new map that opened to drilling 1.5 million acres of coastal plain in the refuge.

The missing map did not seem to include in the coastal plain tens of thousands of acres of Native Alaskans' lands. On the new map, those lands were included, arguably making it easier to open them to energy development."

Arctic Map Vanishes, and Oil Area Expands
By FELICITY BARRINGER
Published: October 21, 2005

Flash Kitsch and the Culture of Email

I received one of these "Awesome Card" emails today from Mom. Click it if you'd like, but trust me, it's horrible. A fishy (Christian motif I presume, in my ignorance of such things) Flash "Sol et Lumiere" type of animation in which a humorless still life of fish, shells, and sea weed assembles itself, to rousing music, into the American eagle... I'm reminded of Roland Barthes on the semiotics of patriotism. But regardless of what's intended with this kind of Flitsch, it's significance is not evident in the "art" of the thing alone. Rather, it's in the thing's promulgation. And when I get these kinds of things from my Mom I wonder if I've just looked in on a vast subculture of suburbian Church organists and Tupperware sealers whose late night anxiety attacks are meted out, frame by frame, in the soothing and sprititually palliative creation of religious subversion, sent to friends the next morning as if doing so might count as penance... Are these some modern form of religious "indulgence?" What is their purpose? Is it in the making of them? Or is it in sending them about?
It's funny, though. Being in this business, it's easy to assume that the bleeding edge of the Net is at Flickr, or Tribe, or 43Things... I shiver at the thought that the bulk of social networking might actually look more like a couple guys in suits, hands clasping the Good Book, meticulously plunging index finger into doorbell upon doorbell upon doorbell....

A White Sox Win breaks the rules of the game

Last night's ninth inning call on White Sox hitter A.J. Pierzynski, with two outs in the can, allowing him to take first base when he'd been ruled struck out, and leading ultimately to a White Sox win, fell on Angels fans like the period at the end of this sentence.

In game play sports (see my last posting), the rules of the game are enforced by players. They're called umpires, but their judgments are as subject to the imprecision and bias of any human observer. Baseball, unlike football, doesn't use instant replay.

The interactionist Erving Goffman observed the difference between strict rules of construction or game play (the hard and fast rules) and the softer contextual principles required in any system that involves meanings produced live. The grammar that articulates the production of meaning through sentences can't arbitrate the meaning of a non-grammatical sentence; interpretation must then be referred to a higher system:

"And just as system constraints will always condition how talk is managed, so, too, will ritual ones. Observe that unlike grammatical constraints, system and ritual ones open up the possibility of corrective action as part of these very constraints. Grammars do not have rules for managing what happens when rules are broken."

And so too, with the rules that govern games. If the grammar man is an umpire whose line of sight on the ball may be obscured from time to time, and who must respond to events in real time, higher orders must contain his independence.
This is how many fans felt as the game wound up last night: upset at violation of a rule on the order of the game itself, a rule higher than just the grammar of the game, and one that is tacit, unspoken and unwritten, and thus of the highest order: ritual.

Had the man at bat not run for first base, the ambiguity of the situation (it was unclear whether or not he actually called "out" on the batter; the batter thought the pitch hit the dirt and that since the catcher hadn't tagged him, he could legally run for first base) wouldnt have come into question. The umpire allowed his position as grammar man to be compromised by the (obviously biased) hitter's running gamble. And now, with the Angels leaving the field thinking they had three outs and the game in the bag, the umpire stood by the hitter's interpretation: he had not been called out, and so was now safe at first base.

But every fan of the game recognizes the impropriety, from a playoff series perspective, of making such a call in the ninth, with the game on the line. His decision threatened the very integrity of the series; an umpiring move by one man poisoned the win, letting down all whose expectations of the world series selection process are set high.

In the world of game play, as in other domains in which grammar governs what is said, but not the sincerity, or normativity, or accuracy of what is said, other constraints govern the player and the game play.

In the ninth paragraph, with that much at stake, would it be fair to write that all I've written is a joke? Even here, because blogging ought to be sincere, you'e entitled to a proper ending. Seriously.

Baseball, and the anxiety of the fan before the pitch

Wender's called it "the anxiety of the goal keeper before the penalty kick." I think that might be the equivalent, in the soccer world, of the suspense that baseball stretches into an entire game form.

I used to think the sport was boring, but that's when I thought it was a game comprised of a lot of waiting for very little to happen. (This can be true of soccer also, but in soccer the players expend a great deal of effort in the meantime.)

Baseball actually hews to the filmic convention required for the creation of a good suspense picture: stretch out the time between announcing what the audience anticipates might happen, and its actually happening. The action, so to speak, in a ballgame, moves at 90 mph and takes a matter of seconds. The game is enjoyable because of the tension built up in the fan's mind and body as his organs seize and hold for the release.

The action in chess, by the way, also involves a lot of waiting. But unlike the ball sport, the moves played in chess do not add to the game play. Pieces are neither hurled nor batted.

One might say that a game that can be told in print, translated into its conceptual game play, is a game of strategy. A game played in moves, on the other hand, is a game of activity.

Nay, baseball is not boring after all.