Dreams, Fatality, & Omens in Twin Peaks

Achtung: spoilers

/Part1 : Fatal Strategy

“We’re living in the future.” – Orlando Cordero, roommate

“You need to be rich to live in the future.” – [yours truly]

The accident, as the sight of a new ontology, shows us something of the real—it shows us our own agency, removed from us, coming back to haunt us.  We give up our own agency in the form of our creativity in favor of technoscience and the better, more convenient, more comfortable future that it promises.  Investment in ‘objectivity’ promises that this future will be the same for us all.

In the case of Pruitt-Igoe, we want the future—an elegantly geometric future that expresses how far the old ontology of science has taken us.  Unfortunately, that metaphysics is no longer relevant; we have to figure out a new future, and come to grips with the fact that the object will lead us there, co-opting our agency to bring itself & ourselves out of the present and further into the new metaphysics.

“Some called him a ‘pretext’.  Others said he was a point-for-point microcosm.” – A Spokesman for the Counterforce

“That could be a building, that was so general.” – Ian Roberts, improv comic

In Pruitt-Igoe, the infinite exchangeability of the object—the commodity relationship of living in futurity, the desire for technoscientific utopia—breaks down and bites us like a carnivorous coffee table.  Or, rather, it bit the lower-class residents who lacked capital and thus the capacity to consummate (after all, it is seduction) a range or variety of commodity relationships with different objects.  The infinite repetition of living space fills in for the (missing) infinite exchangeability of capital.

The grid shows us a certain ideal, a world wherein everything is calculable and placeable, but this disregards the bending or deformation that is the grid’s force.  This deformation is the accident—in Pruitt-Igoe, in Game Theory, the logical approach hits a breaking point.  Instead of imposing the subjective logic of literacy’s metaphysics onto the object, we have to let the object dictate our new strategy.

En abyme, the grid subdivides itself into smaller and smaller increments, like the fine calculation of a curve, infinitely expandable and contractible.  The golden spiral of Modulor is more poetic, and though we find this pattern in nature, Le Corbusier’s scale makes man the measure of all such objects.  But what happens to these at Planck scale, when time and space purportedly break down?

“Man’s desires are limited by his perceptions; none can desire what he has not perceived.”

“He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God.  He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.”

- Blake, “There is No Natural Religion” [a&b]

The case of Watson, of Wolfram|Alpha, is the desire to bend the object to our will.  Instead of letting the object speak in its own way, we want the object to speak to our own understanding.  This seems like it will take us further from being able to ‘speak machine’ and grasp the accident as a sign, from being electrate.  Not the fatality we’re looking for.

The image of graffiti on the bare walls of Pruitt-Igoe keeps coming back to me; the logical zero-sum game of funding left a blank canvas for inhabitants (not necessarily residents).  If human and technological enetelchies are intertwined, this is the object co-opting us to bring it to ecstasy, to make it what it already is.  Pruitt-Igoe replaced St. Louis slums with a vision of the future of architecture-as-human-habitat that came to be worse than what it replaced—more slum than slum.

The task now is to find the poetics of space.  To liberate the image from the aqualitative grid and let it become artistic.

“…in Eternity the Four Arts: Poetry, Painting, Music,

And Architecture which is Science: are the Four Faces of Man.

Not so in Time & Space: there Three are shut out, and only

Science remains thro Mercy: & by means of Science, the Three

Become apparent in time & space, in the Three Professions

Poetry in Religion: Music, Law: Painting, in Physic & Surgery:”

- Blake, Milton

Of course, the only way out (past limit) is through (and on into ecstasis--abyme, Eternity, infinity).

I've come across poetic renderings of self-referentiality (the cultural archetype or myth I've found) more than a few times: Blake does it obliquely on several occassions, and Mark Danielewski depicts it explicitly in House of Leaves when his protagonist finds a copy of the book itself; Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde make a similar gesture when they make play the subject of the play (in Shakespeare's case, it's usually overtly metatheatrical; Wilde is subtler).  Being placed en abyme is what breaks mathematics (Godel and Principia) and machines (Euclid and the 216-digit number).

Mise en Abyme en Abyme : ^n+1 ?

Deformation & Fetish Objects

Deformation’s been on my mind all semester.  A big part of this chronic fixation is my puppy-love for Jerome McGann’s book radiant textuality: literature after the world wide web.  (It’s a spectacular book.  Really.)  Deformation is McGann’s instruction; he advocates precisely the sort of image manipulation we started our semester with, and shares his experience messing around with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s art that lead to new insights on his own part.  His dictum is that no text (or image, I suppose) is ever self identical—so why not bring the image (or text, I suppose) into its ecstasy by helping it along?  McGann uses the term deformation to foreground the function of criticism and interpretation.  Transformation works equally well, and sheds any negative connotations that deformation might carry.

In a response to one of Wendy’s emails earlier this semester, I wrote a little about the deformation of the accident as an event into the static, flattened image of the accident, the sign; and about the deformation into pixilation (which allows us to make all those fun transformations).  This is implicit in McGann, particularly his discussion of how a high-powerd scanner never produced the same facsimile twice.  ‘Pixelation’ is also implicit in Newton’s calculus, which divides a curve into numerous discreet segments that resemble the original curve, and the same with Cartesian arithmetic, which transforms an algebraic statement into a geometric form mapped onto a grid—my figure for the Pruitt-Igoe disaster.  The design of the buildings was heavily influenced by Le Corbusier’s philosophy of architecture (thanks, Todd!) which relies heavily on formal properties and geometric space.  Le Corbusier is a pseudonym, a transformation of the identity, which corresponds with Le Corbusier’s Modular scale, a transformation of the physical body—the human form—into a mathematical exemplar, a harmony of ratios.  Even the name, Le Corbusier, suggests the force of bending and deforming.

I’ve looked briefly at the fetish-object, the relation between dominoes and punched cards.  Part of that examination was the difficulty of deciding just how far back to trace in pursuit of the object.  Both of these are, of course, cases of transformation/deformation, but the dominoes seem more interesting to me as a transformation of aleatory play.  Dominoes were, allegedly, derived from dice; in a physical sense, the dice are flattened out in the transformation to dominoes, but the luck of the throw is transformed into the luck of the draw, which seems like a sort of flattening out (maybe Caillois will be able to help me with this).  Dominoes also have the added feature of physical extension, of creating an emergent structure, form from number just as Le Corbusier’s architectural philosophy extols.  The difference between the domino-structure and the Pruitt-Igoe grid is the difference between liberal-aleatory and conservative-utilitarian deployments of space.

What’s the difference between Pruitt-Igoe and a stack of dominoes?  The stack of dominoes has a better chance of staying upright.

Singularity

Self-referentiality is the ecstasy of the object, the passing of a rational limit—math becomes more logical than logic can accommodate, Euclid becomes more intelligent than its systems can sustain.  Baudrillard’s dimension collapse.

The allure of the object in this case is the promise of the future; it seduces us with the possibility of becoming futurity.

These themes come together in the theoretical Singularity—the belief that technoscience’s exponential growth of capacity, and the diminishing time needed to achieve this growth, will culminate in a radical historical event that will usher in a new type of technology and civilization.  One possibility is that computers like Euclid would no longer have to worry about self-referential meltdowns; artificial intelligence would be the new standard of electronic technology.

[In physics, a singularity is a similar impossible event.  The event of technology reaching a point of infinite improvement at infinite speed is much like the time-space event of the black hole, a point of infinite density and infinite gravity.  Nature abhors a vacuum, but she abhors infinites even more—at least, according to physics, which does not allow for infinite values, unknowable quantities.  A popular theory is that a singularity was the source of our universe; or, in its ecstatic form, that singularities are the wombs of universes.]

All of this, of course, relies on acceleration, speed, a greater or even qualitatively new condition of circulation in the dromosphere.  At the moment, we still have the luxury of critical thought, but after the singularity (if it does indeed happen), unpredictability will be the condition of the moment; we’ll have no choice but to think at the speed of light.  We’ve got to be faster than Watson.

The principles of the International school of architecture gave Pruitt-Igoe this shine of the future.  Theorizing the singularity and attending the inauguration of Pruitt-Igoe are both anticipations of the future.  The commodity relationship in a techno-utopic culture, reliant on science and mathematics, is the promise of the future, today.

The end of duration?

But what if the myth holds?  Could the singularity turn out to be π all over again? 

No Shinola, Sherlock

Objects communicate with us in at least two ways: through the accident as a sign, at the site of the new ontology, the place where reality reveals something of itself; and in the commodity relationship, showing the consumer a sympathetic version of him/herself.  Our task is to learn how to understand these signs, translate for our technology, understand what it is ‘saying’.

IBM’s Watson, the electronic champion of Jeopardy, seems like a step in the other direction.

Two of Watson’s processes are significant here.  One is the search-retrieve function, a massive undertaking with Jeopardy.  This is a function we’re all familiar with.  Before it can do this, however, Watson has to parse, read and interpret the language of the question.  Wolfram|Alpha interprets and searches rather well, provided that the user is inputting simple, straightforward language.  Watson’s task is trickier.  Sometimes, Jeopardy’s language is relatively straightforward, but we’ve all seen the twisted puns and wordplay, the very essence of riddles.  How can a computer, with its brutal simplicity, understand poetic language? 

That’s the challenge for Watson.  And apparently, he did pretty well.  KurzweilAI suggests that the machine had a significantly faster reaction time than the human players—but then, we already knew that computers are quicker than we are, but supposedly at the price of versatility.  Watson shows that this isn’t an insurmountable divide.

Our technologies are capable of reading us faster than we can read them.  Do machines that communicate more efficiently with us, on our terms, mean less incentive to understand how the object communicates in its own way?

What does this mean for the personal computer—hell, all personal electronics—in a commodity relationship through which the object secures our help to further its own entelechy?

Is technology becoming more organic, while we become more mechanical?

What could this mean for a Max & Euclid relationship?

The Ecstasy of the Fetish?

Punched cards and dominoes; presence and absence.

Some Dutch sailors playing dominoes.  Each domino represents the outcomes of throwing two dice.

A set of Hindu dominoes.  Eastern culture adapted thrown dice into static tiles.

The work of Indian scholar Pingala is the first known description of binary, as a description of metre.  Leibniz discovered binary in the West more than a few centuries later, not too long before dominoes made their way to Europe.

Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Corbusier & Corbusier

"Le Corbusier 

adopted his pseudonym in the 1920s, deriving it in part from the name of a distant ancestor, Lecorbésier. But in the absence of a first name, it suggests a physical force as much as a human being. It brings to mind the verb courber, to bend, and, of course, Le Corbusier was a great bender of townscapes to his own will. It also brings to mind le corbeau, the crow or raven, not a conventionally beautiful bird in plumage or song, but one that is simple and unornamental in both and therefore, metaphorically speaking, honest and undeceiving, as Le Corbusier claimed his architecture to be. In French, le corbeau has a further meaning: that of a bird of ill omen—and perhaps that is the architect’s little joke upon the world."

-Theodore Dalrymple

Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man

Le Corbusier's design was informed by his Modulor, a scale of proportions based on the ratios of the human body, a continuation of Da Vinci's project in the Vitruvian Man.  It relies on the golden ratio, another irrational mathematical constant like pi, and the Fibonacci sequence, an exercise in vertigo which produces the golden spiral whose growth is related to the golden ratio.  Da Vinci and found this ratio inherent to the human form, and it can be seen in other natural phenomena.  Le Corbusier's ambition was to use this ratio to create architecture and design suited precisely to human proportions, possible through the mathematical order of the universe.

Le Corbusier's Modular Man

The first Modulor Man was based on the height of the average Frenchman, but was later revised to accord with the standard height of attractive men in English detective novels.  At least in the second case the base was a professedly fictional standard.  The very name, "Modular", evokes "modular", or interchangeable, the very image of Pruitt-Igoe, the design of which was inspired by Le Corbusier's architectural principles.  He considered the Modulor scale to be one capable of uniting the Metric and Imperial scales, creating universal equivalency.


One of Le Corbusier's early projects was the Domino House.  It is a very simple, practical design, but also one in which interior layout is customizable within the overall form.  The name evokes the image of dominoes stacked and arranged to build a small structure, but also recalls the variety of ways dominoes can be combined and recombined within the overall structure or rules of the game--the very essence of modularity.

Perhaps we've found the fetish-object?

Metamythics

The myth shows itself in the incompatibility of formal with informal (irrational) systems.  The human mind, in dealing with pure formal logic, will break down; and the machine, when grappling with self-reference, will do the same.  The search for absolute truth in mathematics will break the human mind, and it will also break mathematics.

Dangerous Knowledge, or, the prehistory of π.  The myth is not a new one.

Metamythics: a step outside of the myth, the level-jumping of self-awareness so important to the constitution of the math-myth.  Mise en abyme – the story within the story; here, the inner is also the outer.  The figure is also its own ground—math en abyme.  Turtles all the way down.

The figure of the accident is self-reference, the point where logic is pushed into convulsion and refraction, overflows its bounds into a new logic.  The problem of infinite repeatability, the figure of the grid; there’s only space for metastatic extension, not for overflow past limit at the point of logical hemorrhage.

The figure of self-reference doesn’t directly present itself at Pruitt-Igoe.  This is appropriate, since the problem here is the formalism of mathematics; it shouldn’t be expected to supply a solution, especially since it’s a key component of disaster in the myth.  Pruitt-Igoe was a disaster of formalism and mathematics, but applied formalism and mathematics; self-reference, in π and Gödel incompleteness, arises out of more abstract mathematical endeavors.  Nonetheless, disaster arises from the application of mathematics to problems of human beings.  I feel like this will probably be useful in approaching the myth-logic as a contrast.

As seen in Mythematics III, the human and the technology are intertwined at Pruitt-Igoe; the mathematical architecture requires human agency to achieve its self-destruction.  We can see this also in Max’s relationship with Euclid.  In pure mathematics, we’re seduced into thinking that the problem is inherently there; but it took incredible acts of human creativity to set the conditions and bring the accident about.  Technology’s entelechy progresses toward disaster, with our help it finds its limit.

Focusing on the object’s circulation is too ego-centric; rather, shouldn’t we be paying more attention to how things circulate around the object?  Does Max’s number circulate amongst the characters, or do the characters circulate through the number?  Isn’t the Pruitt-Igoe disaster defined, not by the circulation of objects, but the circulation of the social relative to the object, supplying the all-important speed?  Didn’t Gödel allow mathematics to circulate within itself, and leave us to figure it out?

The voice of the object: “You’re all egotistical—that’s ok, I can work with that.  Here’s something shiny.  Isn’t that nice?  Life can be shiny too—you can live in the future, just stick with me.  Say, have you ever heard of Plato?”

The accident shows us ourselves.  (Achtung, baby: spoilers.)  A preference for applied research over pure research, practicality over creativity for creativity’s sake.  The humanistic study is self-destructing.  Cultural studies, theory, aims at elucidating and improving the cultural clusterfuck in which we find ourselves.  But here, we fall back on infinite repeatability—let’s apply Marx the same way we apply Newton—turtles all the way down, stripped of qualitative novelty, ready to slip quietly into the archive’s grid. 

Plato and Play-Doh: the persistence of consistency versus the fun of essential mutability.  Wouldn’t you rather sculpt than use a mold?

The Silent Insurrection Begins

It won’t be televised.  It will be in your living room.

After an eight-hour jam session with Baudrillard, “meat-eating furniture” was probably the last phrase I wanted to hear.  But that didn’t stop reality:

This is just plain weird, but it seems like a useful sort of weird, at least for our purposes.  I don’t think this is quite the rebellion of objects that Baudrillard has in mind, but there are (at least) two factors at work here that seem relevant to our purposes.

First, the epithet alone screams “Consumer Accident!”, in every sense of the term.  A writeup from the Baudrillard-Virilio ad agency would probably read something like:

“Tired of just circulating signs?  Now, you too can enjoy the spectacle of the accident in your own home!  Hours of fun, and utility!  Works great with children and most pets! (Children and pets not included.)”

Second, this is self-professedly art.  Strange, even morbid, but still art—fatal art.  Art depicting the consumption of organic bodies by mechanical objects.  An obscene excess by our standards—greener than green?—but this excess is made essential to the thing itself (and isn’t this, in itself, really the condition of art?)—the power of the mouse-eating table is the fact that it eats mice when no table really has to do so.  Fatality is function, and accident is essential.  The amalgamation of practical objects yields an art which draws its power from the accidental, develops a material poetics of the accident.  In skipping the entire fossil-fuel cycle—fatal speed, terminal velocity?—it also extracts sacrifice from symbolic exchange and grants it pure utility.  I don’t think this is obscene yet, but what if we were to start encouraging rodent populations as a power supply?

“Our electricity bill has gone way down.  Not only do the appliances power themselves, but on Saturday nights, which used to be family TV night, we bet on whose chair will catch the most spiders.”

The dual-utility object is seductive: it is not overtly terrifying, but maintains its fatality as enigma.  Baudellaire’s seduction—“vertigo of obscenity”—shocking and disquieting (149).  The fatal strategy forces the subject into the paradoxical political position: subjectivity is a breakwater against change, emblematized by death, and now the fatal art-object forces this into the most mundane part of our lives—our furniture and appliances—as a means of showcasing our obscene position, “returns the subject to mortal transparency” (144).  Instead of being haunted by the excrescent body, the art-objects use them as energy.  Instead of trying to suppress accidents, this art actively welcomes them.  The utopia of the accident, embracing the thing itself and bringing it into our very lives.

“Camping’s a breeze with my new grill.  The scorpions add a little zing of flavor.”