event mechanics

Most reviews of Up In the Air work hard to locate it in a romantic comedy framework, such as David Cox’s review at The Guardian. It is not a romantic comedy. Similar in some ways to Punch-Drunk Love, Up In the Air uses a constellation of romantic comedy tropes as a critical tool. Instead of romance and isolationist social relations like in Punch-Drunk Love, Up In the Air uses the romantic comedy tropes to problematise ‘loyalty’ in our privileged late-capitalist and post-everything cultural landscape.

Loyalty is no longer something built on trust or expectations of trust forged through shared experience. The function of expectation in this traditional sense of loyalty is important, because it introduces a temporal logic whereby one’s trust is demonstrated now by proffering one’s future trustworthiness. Within capitalist relations of exchange loyalty was therefore experienced as the goodwill developed from already demonstrated positive service experiences and the expectation of continued good service.

What Up In the Air explores is the inversion of the burden of loyalty. A capitalist enterprise does not produce loyalty in its customers or in its workers in a traditional sense of goodwill through positive social relations and the expectation of positive social relations. Instead, enterprises now produce ‘loyalty’ as the accumulation of the debt of good service that the company owes a customer (or worker). The company wants to owe its customers ‘reward points’; it is in the customer’s debt: hence, the production of an expectation and a formalisation of process and time itself. This is naturalised as a ‘reward’ for the customer’s ‘loyal’ patronage.

There are a number of relations of actual (dis)loyalty in Up In the Air:

1) Between businesses and their workers, who for the most part of the film are about to be fired.
2) Between various romantic couplings.
3) Between enterprises and their consumer patrons.

The virtual relations of loyalty — what I described in a previous post as “the virtual feedforward loops that cultivate and then harness anticipation as an affective or ‘felt tendency’ for guiding consumer behaviour” — are structurated by conventions of expectations. Beyond consumption is a mobile diffuse logic of expectation determined by capital, that exploits the affective conditions of trust that underpins loyalty.

Relations of actual loyalty have an inherent temporal dimension because loyalty is only ever actualised as a field of social possibility premised on assumed distributions of trust. I am loyal, because I trust, therefore my loyalty is trusted. The expectation emerges from affective relations of shared experiences as the world is endured together.

But we are increasingly atomised. Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is absolutely solitary. He wants to inhabit a frictionless world; points of disjuncture are merely fulcra to propel himself further into the flow. He is the limit case of a process through which we are forced out into the world and alienated from solidarity only so we scrabble to consume formalised, ritualised cultural events together. Sport, the nation, the family. A spectator does not experience sport; ‘sport’ is the shared experience of another’s affective implication in the potentiality of an entirely contrived contigency (shared with yet another’s affective implication…). The poverty of the formal dimension of these experiences breeds the need to push beyond the surface affectivity. Violence, hatred, hooliganism produce real contingencies in the world that must be endured together. The economy of respect in masculinist sporting cultures is an index of trust and its distribution. Other peripheral cultures have the same generative capacity. The limit case is perfectly described by Paul Corrigan in his short piece ‘Doing Nothing’ about the way working class youth in 1970s Britain used the street as a space of potentiality.

In capitalist enterprises there is absolutely no trust. Instead of a distribution of trust, there is a distribution of naked expectation. A perverse and obscene expectation of the worst. And at worst it is the expectation of a ruthless ambition to satisfy self-interest. The profit motive is a shared belief that gives discursive form to this expectation. Workers (anyone who labours under the expectations of others) are continually at war with the received infrastructure of alienated expectations by using humour and the potentiality of the workplace itself to generate shared experiences. Such bonding is tolerated by those that impose their expectations as a necessary condition of lived labour. The expecters have their own weapons, by making expectation mobile, by controlling the expectation of expectation through distributions of risk. Risk introduces contingency into the workplace. This is what the workers fired in Up in the Air failed to recognise. Their fellow workers may have endured the world of the workplace together with them and felt like family, or they may have even worked extremely hard to assume and inculcate the imposed expectations of management into their daily experience of the workplace, but this is not loyalty. The expectation of expectations can not be trusted. Workers have to be at war with expectation and exploit the mechanism of imposition (reception, inculcation, expression).

I am very fluey writing this, and have easily gone through a third of a big box of tissues blowing my nose. I’ve taken a day off work and with not much else to do I thought I’d catch up on my blogging.

A couple of years ago I flagged the problem of scale when dealing with Deleuze’s conception of events. In a couple of passages from The Logic of Sense he raises the example of a battle and he makes two keen points.

1) “If the battle is not an example of an event among others, but rather the Event in its essence, it is no doubt because it is actualized in diverse manners at once, and because each participant may grasp it at a different level of actualization within its variable present” (100). The virtual battle-event can be grasped by the participants in a multipliticity of ways. The virtual battle ‘hovers’ above the participants. Any conflict can be used as an example of this, particularly those that are not resolved with a shared horizon of experience. The Israel-Palestinian conflict is a good example of differential conflicts being actualised from the singular conflict. This is evidenced by the different temporalities invoked by both sides when discussing/arguing about the conflict, which I saw much of when working at Gleebooks as part of the event staff. One side will raise ‘this’ incursion ‘then’, the other side will raise ‘this’ armed intervention at this other ‘then’ and so on until a cosmic blockade is reached between differential experiences of religion. They are not arguing about the question of causality and who did what to which people when, but they are presenting (at least) two actualisations of the conflict itself.

There is the pure virtual conflict that contains the multiplicity of every singular act inflicted upon/by human and non-human participants, then there is the conflict that emerges on the horizon of experience as experience. Further along the ontological chain, the experience of conflict is discoursed and gains an individuated intelligibility. (Hence, the differend between participants in the singular multiplicity of the pure event who buttress their relative position with differentiated, that is, different conflicts.) In the midst of the actualised conflict the pure event of the virtual conflict can only be intuited, it is not yet actual. A less socially frought example of ‘conflict’ or the clash of bodies is provided by my working through of the shared event of the kiss (from 4 years ago!).

2) “Everything is singular, and thus both collective and private, particular and general, neither individual nor universal. Which war, for example, is not a private affair? Conversely, which wound is not inflicted by war and derived as a society as a whole? Which private event does not have all its coordinates, that is, all its impersonal social singularities?” (152) Every event is a cascade of events. If we were Time Lords like Dr Who, but without the Doctor’s Time Lord capacities, then we would be overwhelmed by the differentiated temporalities (perhaps best represented by Rose Tyler’s absorption of the ‘time vortex’). How can a wound be inflicted by ‘war’? A wound is inflicted by an adversorial combatant, surely? Yes, but only within the restricted temporality of the wounded person’s experience. The ethico-political question, expressed unfortunately in a somewhat negative way, is how to be worthy of the wounds inflicted upon us. The wound considered as an event is already a cascade of events of various temporalities (including relations of futurity with the present). The wound could be an actualisation of a future ‘victory’, a past ‘grudge’, or a haphazard biography absent of any normative consistency, which could all be of the singular pure virtuality.

Deleuze is pushing beyond this kind of delineation of events achored to the emergent horizon of human experience, however. The concept of the fourth-person singular is necessary intervention to even conceive of a horizon of experience that is not bound by normative human constraints. Does this mean that Deleuze is explicitly advocating a position whereby a near-God-like figure can stand above and beyond the triviality of the merely human, a kind of hyper-objectivity? No (lol). How can there be actualisation without experience (in an expanded non-human Whiteheadian sense, of prehensions prehending each other). I want to suggest the fourth person singular necessarily commands a capacity of perception that indeed evades the individuated human subjectivity, but only because of the capacity to emphasise with absolutely open intuition the emergent horizon of experience as the experience of any event as it is differentiately actualised.

My reason for bringing this up again has been the interesting work of Levi over at Larval Subjects as he has also grappled with the problem of scale from a slightly different conceptual orientation, a systems-based or complexity-based object-oriented interpretation of Deleuze and others. Towards the end of this post on Nested Objects and Political Engagement, he writes:

objects or individuals at a larger level of scale tend towards a stable state in the face of most perturbations. Far from the perturbations fundamentally changing the organization of the object, they are, in most instances, simply absorbed by the system or object and function to reinforce the organization of the object.

I suggest that the systems that appear to tend towards a more stable state perhaps only do so because they exist as actualised temporalities experienced as relatively more stable (the US has just had the Fourth of July celebrations; so how old is the US? Ok, which US are you talking about?). The great cultural celebrations of a nation (national days, etc) differentially repeat not only the ‘cultural values’ of the ‘imagined community’ of the ‘nation’ but also enable the experience of the ‘nation’ according to its monumental temporality that is quite literally actualised as ‘monument’. Hence the ideological component of all these moments of cultural reinforcement. They only work if those experiencing them expect them to work. Expectation is a relation of futurity whereby the future past (of the present) is experienced as an already-always. The horizon of intelligibility emergent with the experience of the actualised ‘nation’ on a ‘national day’ works to block other possible futures. Steve Shaviro’s work has been really useful on this question. Here is what I wrote back then:

I think Shaviro’s reading of Whitehead’s concept is actually more productive than Massumi’s notion of ‘anticipation’ briefly developed in Parables of the Virtual. Both attempt to account for relations of futurity, but Massumi’s is organised around the superposition of one moment upon the next, and this, it seems to me, elides the relation of contingency that makes possible demanding the impossible.

Levi notes something similar but from a systems-based perspective of his object-oriented philosophy:

The issue here is one of how individuals that compose a larger scale object can act on that object without simply reinforcing its existing basin of attraction. In part this requires the formation of new organs or objects that, in another post, I referred to as “alliances” following Latour and Harman. The second problem is that even where a new sub-multiple or object is formed through an alliance, and even where this object is intense enough to push the larger scale multiple of which it is a part into a new basin of attraction, this new basin of attraction is itself highly unpredictable.

My interpretation of Levi’s observation regarding the politics of the big and little is of a virtual war waged between (at least) two different actualisations of ‘conflict’ in question.

A contemporary example is the turgid neo-liberal managerial discourse of ‘opportunity’ evident in my current vocation as a writer (and also within the academy). Workers are meant to be on the look out for ‘opportunity’ in the workplace or work milieu (if freelancers). They are meant to capitalise on the opportunity and maximise the positive outcome of opportunity to further their respective careers. There is a continuum of opportunity that is differentiated by relations of futurity made possible by the character of contingency around which opportunity is organised.

1) If opportunity is presented by those in power to a worker, then the contingency is often disciplined in accordance with the outcomes of productivity demanded by the managers and the way surplus value is extracted from the worker’s labour.
2) If opportunity presents ‘itself’, then it is because the contingency of labour relations and relations between worker productivity and the market have not been actualised. A new relation to the market can be actualised.
3) If a worker creates ‘opportunity’, then it is because he or she has critically appreciates the mechanics of labour relations and relations between worker productivity and the market in its virtuality, an example of the limited fourth-person singular; that is, the worker does not perceive the situation though the identity and horizon of experience of a ‘worker’ per se. The worker actively differentiates a new set of relations that can only be apprehended through action. (What Deleuzians call counter-actualisation.)

To enfranchise workers in the emergent entrepreneurial mode of the unfortunately called ‘creative capitalism’ means equipping them with the capacity to appreciate the dynamics of managerial techniques and apprehend new conditions between labour and the market through the praxis of their own labour. It is not a matter of grasping the relations between specific individuals or objects (big or little) but of appreciating how the relations between individuals are actualised and differentially repeated in experience.

Reading Todd McGowan’s article in the most recent issue of Film-Philosophy it is clear that Hegelians have a radically different conception of the future than I do, and I guess I am a Deleuzian. McGowan argues that the representation of the future in science fiction cinema can not be but an expression of the present ideologies. I agree. So the future of science fiction is not the future at all, but an ideological representation of the present. What, then, is the future?

Brian Massumi has best explored what I would call the actuality of the future, which is another way of saying, in the first instance (pun intended), the actualised virtuality of the present. The virtual can not be represented as such, only actualised. Does this therefore mean that the future can not be actual or is only ever actual? Otherwise the future would be, without any becoming. The futurity of the present, that which is to come but has not yet been actualised, is both present and in the future. The present is not this instant, the first or otherwise, but what is happening contemporaneously now. That is to say, the present duration does not merely exist within the contemporary now; rather, the contemporary exists beyond the present. The virtual exists as the contemporary that is not present, but in the future. Think of events that you are part. Your marriage, it is happening now, so stop reading this infernal internet, but it is also yet to happen. Your marriage has a future, I hope. The happening has not yet been exhausted.

The actual future, that of the present that has not yet been actualised and that of the contemporary, that is not yet present, has little to do with representations of the future in science fiction. I am very interested in the future, because capitalism functions most demonstratively in this space, in what Negri and Hardt called the passage from the virtual to the actual. My interest is specifically in thinking a Deleuzian conception of the spectacle. I agree with every critique in Guy Debord’s masterwork, The Society of the Spectacle, except for his assumptions regarding time, for his assumptions are far too Hegelian. I’ve written about this somewhere, I need to find it.

My primary example, at this stage, is of the ‘rewards’ card — the frequent shopper card, the Fly Buys card, the ‘points’ card, and most telling, the ‘loyalty’ card. ‘Loyalty’ examined through the lens of the Kantian imperative is a question of moral duty. ‘Loyalty’ examined by way of a Deleuzian event mechanics is an effect of modulating the field of possibility in the passage from the virtual to the actual. It is not a question of identity, but a constriction of the field of action. We are all Pavlov’s dogs, it is the character of the reward that defines us and whether or not we are worthy of it. Some of us are more worthy dogs than others.

The loyalty card operates within the space of the contemporary that is never present. There is a deferral of an actualised present that hums with an affective tension. It is pure ideology in the way a closure and contradiction is represented as an escape, a reward. To invert Derrida’s hauntology, capitalism haunts the present with the future while never escaping the contemporary. A perverted eschatology, the deferral of the present is its own reward.

I have been idly contemplating the role, function and incorporation of creativity into capitalism. The contemplation has been instigated because I now work in a commercial enterprise. For the first time in my life I am being forced to think like a capitalist. There is something liberating and joyful about this. For so long I have basically been at war with a part of myself — my habitus — that was individuated/grown in the capitalist ecology of late-20th century neoliberalism. Many people opt out of this war much earlier in life and dismiss it as teenage fantasy, and some continue the war fueled by teenage fantasy, but I am doing neither. I am learning. This learning is progessing along two main axes. One of which I describe below in an anexact yet rigorous fashion

From my PhD research I already have an account of how human endeavour — no matter how seemingly trivial and banal — is commercialised. I have been haunted by Manuel DeLanda’s comments regarding the uselessness of the term ‘commodification’ in that it is far too simplisitic a term. Indeed, I agree it is far too simple. I have been thinking about the concept of the spectacle and how to invert it to stand it right side up on its material base. The spectacle has been described a number of ways since Debord. I think the closest to my way of thinking come from Jonathan Crary’s remarks on ‘relations of attention’:

Spectacle is not primarily concerned with looking at images, but rather with the construction of conditions that individuate, immobilize, and separate subjects, even within a world in which mobility and circulation are ubiquitous. In this way attention becomes key to the operation of noncoercive forms of power. This is why it is not inappropriate to conflate seemingly different optical or technological objects [in a discussion of Foucault’s and Debord’s respective works]: they are similarly about arrangements of bodies in space, techniques of isolation, cellularization, and above all separation. Spectacle is not an optics of power but an architecture. (Crary 1999: 74-75)

In my dissertation I describe this as an imperceptible ‘structurating expectation’ that is felt in the bodies of enthusiasts. Alongside what Deleuze isolates as two of Foucault’s conceptual innovations — ‘statements’ and ‘visibilities’ — is this third [something]. I am not sure what to call it. It has a far more dynamic relationality than both the ‘statement’ and ‘visible’. Sanford Kwinter isolates something similar in his book Achitectures of Time. I will try to outline precisely what I am trying to talk about.
The first part seems similar to what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘refrain’ in that it has a catalysing function. A ‘new’ iteration of organisation precipitates across the heterogeneous elements grouped by a given consistency. There is a seemingly silly dimension to this: the elements are grouped because they are grouped. But that ignores the dynamic dimension of how different basins of consistency (I prefer this to basins of attraction, as ‘attraction’ implies a relation between similar elements, when they are purely heterogeneous) are formed and unformed.

Note I have used the Derridean term ‘iteration’ to describe the relation between different consistencies of organisation. This is a problemtic term. The event, in Derrida’s philosophy, is that irreducible element that cannot be actualised and is continually deferred. What in Deleuzian philosophy would be called the ‘pure event’. Without a doubt there is a pure event, that of pure existence, of everything, the cosmos, for all eternity. This is perfectly useless for mundane human affairs. Introduce any degree of spatialisation and temporalisation — so that the pure happening of the cosmos becomes the happening of any discrete composition of elements — and there is a near infinite complexity of temporality, spatiality and causality. The best concept I have come across that attempts to tackle this complexity is that of ‘transversality’.
‘Transversality’ is a term that describes the non-spatial and non-temporal contiguity of elements in a complex system. The character of transversal relationality is what Deleuze and Guattari rather enigmatically, and with a hint of irony (at least for this reader), describe as ‘problematic’. The seriality of the differential repetition of events into iterative organisational consistencies is not linear; it has a ‘problematic’ character. The seriality is transversal. The second dimension of this [something] I am trying to describe is its transversality. The transversal (iterative) seriality is contained within the [something].

A problem that took me a long time to be able to even grasp was with seemed to be the conflict inherent between different interests within a given consistency of elements. In my dissertation this consistency of elements most often appeared as the ‘scene’ of an enthusiasm. How to reconcile the commercial intersts of capital and the subjective interests of enthusiasts born of a complex psychology of identity and so on. Perhaps the simplest way to imagine this is in terms of the conflict of ideology. There is a clash of beliefs at the level of what is perceptible and expressible as signifying elements in terms of what is visible and statements (what can be said at any given juncture). Yet, in a war for example, the conflict has a dimension of participation in that, as the cliche goes, it takes two to tango.

Whitehead’s concept of ‘congruence’ is a way to grasp the asignifying relationality between elements that are otherwise antagonistic. Perhaps this is an echo of human will or any will for that matter, one that does not yet take on the consistency of agency, yet overdetermines the trajectory of elements that have a consistency and the character of this consistency. At stake is the integration of the perceptible — the object world of a subject — and the vast imperceptible transversal relationality of the happening of iteration and the pure event of the cosmos. The transversal contiguity of iterative consistencies has a congruent relationality that is felt, ie as affect, but is otherwise imperceptible to participants. To frame it in the terms of another conceptual paradigm, it is the content of what Kant described as intuition. Congruence then is the third and, at this stage of conceptual development, final dimension of this [something] I am trying to describe.

There is a fourth dimension that with purposeful irony is related to time. I haven’t quite figured out how to formulate this as yet. The specific problem is super complex and relates to different orders of causality (feedback and feedforward loops, for example) within the transversal seriality of different iterations of consistency. At the moment I am leaning towards another concept from Whitehead to describe the processual dimension of this complex causality, what he called ‘appetition’. For Whitehead, this was the integration of prehensions prehending each other into an ‘actual occurence’, basically what Deleuze would call ‘actualisation’. The troubling part of this is the function of human imagination in the form of memory and probabilistic calculation, of how the ‘past’ or felt relationality of crystalised impercibility commonally referred to as ‘memory’, affects the relations of futurity by opening or closing perceptible relations and thus effecting the present directionality of action. It is a feedback loop with a feedforward loop ratified on the level of affect and directly consecrating action into the appropriate and inappropriate. This is what I would call the appetition of the spectacle and pushes Crary’s description of the spectacle as an ‘architecture’ into a fourth dimension.

To return to my opening remarks, what I am learning is how to map the effect of capital within this dynamic through the distribution of effort into the appropriateness or not of action. How to render this process of the distribution of appropriate action perceptible and guide it seems to me to be the location of agency and the purpose of what Deleuze described as counter-actualisation. One positive effect of all this thinking is that the distribution of effort within this transversal iterations of consistency as I understand clearly renders the utter conceptual poverty of the phrase ‘self interest’. ‘Self interest’ is a refrain that consecrates the distribution of effort into actions for the ‘self’ as appropriate and thus ratifying the affects of capitalist apprehension and, in a word, judgement.

So I bought the new game Spore over the weekend. I have started it a few times and now my most advanced game is in the space stage and my ‘spaceship’ is at the highest level of advancement (‘Omniscient’). Sure I am a gamer, so I was very interested in playing such a hyped game, but I had other reasons, too. This is mainly because of the upcoming Fibreculture journal special issue on Web 2.0 and theories of the event, and Steven E. Jones’ book The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies. This post (over the fold) can be thought of as a very rough draft of some ideas that I want to develop for a Fibreculture submission.

(more…)

My PhD is now available online through the UWS library.

EDIT: Ok, so here it is on the ADT site, not actually loading the pdf, however.

EDIT: Ok, try this link.

Is anyone going to this? I wish I could go to ask some pointed questions about Massumi’s work as Bell has this critique. Bell doesn’t seem to understand what Massumi means by ‘incorporeal’, or how when paired with ‘materiality’ we should actually, first, turn to Foucault’s work to understand what is meant, and then to Deleuze’s work on ‘sense’ and the ‘event’. However, Massumi’s book is very difficult forthose without the required reading resources and instead of the ‘incorporeality of the concrete’, Massumi may have better been served by explaining the ‘concrete of incorporeality’ first.

Date: Thursday 3 April

Venue: Seminar Room 2.330, Level 2, Building 10, UTS.
Walking from Central Station along Broadway (heading west), turn right after the UTS Tower on to Jones Street. Building 10 is then on your left.
Entry is free and there is no need to RSVP

TIME: 4.00 – 6.00

Philip Bell (Media and Communications UNSW)
‘Failing ‘Theory’: The neo-Psychology of Cultural Studies’

Abstract: I argue that many of the central postulates and most popular arguments of Anglophone Capital T-Theory fail as realist Psychology and/or as coherent meta-theory. Some are idealist and ontologically fanciful to the point of incoherence. Students of ‘post-disciplinary’ Humanities need to be given conceptual tools with which critically to confront these intimidating modes of analysis.

Bio: Philip Bell is Emeritus Professor of Media and Communications at UNSW. He has published widely (over more years than he cares to remember) on Australian media and on methodological issues in the Social Sciences

The Greenwich Philsopohy Department have a pretty cool blog happening over here (one which the possibilities of navigation are almost exhausted; try getting to the below paper from the ‘front page’…?).

They just published a paper from the 16 of Jan on Deleuze’s short essay in Essay Clinical and Critical on The Exhausted. I don’t disagree with any arguments in the paper. I just wanted to add one connection to Deleuze’s previous work which seemes to be overlooked. That is regarding the status of the Image and what exactly is being exhausted.

The Image is the virtual component of an event, but which isn’t an event, because as Deleuze writes in “The Exhausted”:

“The any-space-whatever already belongs to the category of possibility, because its potentialities make possible the realization of an event that is itself possible. But the image is more profound because it frees itself from its object in order to become a process itself, that is, an event as a “possible” that no longer even needs to be realized in a body or an object, somewhat like the smile without a cat in Lewis Carroll.”

The event, hey? In the Greenwich paper all references to the ‘event’ are quoted out. Deleuze writes in _TLoS_, “Sense [the event] is both the expressible or the expressed of the proposition, and the attribute of the state of affairs.” An attribute of a state of affairs does not have to be expressed as such, only expressible. There is a potentiality here in language and discourse more generally, and in bodies and in states of affairs. What is an event if it is “not confused with its spatio-temporal realization in a state of affairs” but also not the expressed of a proposition? (“A tree falls in the forest…?”) Using the concept of the virtual or “real-material-but-incorporeal” image Massumi explores this potentiality as a relation and on the side of the bodies or states of affairs to which it belongs.

When a body is in motion, it does not coincide with itself. It coincides with its own transition: its own variation. […] This self-disjunctive coinciding [of body-image and body] sinks an ontological difference into the heart of the body. The body’s potential to vary belongs to the same reality as the body as variety (positioned thing) but partakes of it in a different mode. Integrating movement slips us directly into what Michel Foucault called incorporeal materialism.

Of course, we all know that Foucault described Deleuze’s _TLoS_ as an ‘incorporeal materiality’ and then later used the phrase to talk about discursive events in his inaugural address to the College de France. Anyway, Deleuze continues in The Exhasted:

“The image is precisely this: not a representation of an object but a movement in the world of the mind.”

Exhaustion is not a tiredness, but a depotentialisation across the dimensions of events in their seriality. I am drawing on Foucault’s discussion of seriality in the Archeology of Knowledge. The distribution of Statements (or singularities) in the archive correlates with a further distribution of singularities between discourse and non-discursive multiplicities. The second distribution always forms conditions of possibilities for the discourse which exist in serial form. Foucault described his archival work as a ‘minor science’ and tracing singularities of the archive means tracing the series across which singularities are distributed. Anyway, the incorporeal effects of the conditions of possibility that Foucault talked about is exactly that which is discussed by Deleuze as being exhausted.

Snakes on a Plane is a masterful creation. Forget the snakes, as a function of tension the macguffins are thrown at you snake bite after snake bite. It is almost like a Scary Movie scenario of too many plotlines in a cinematic mash-up. The brushstrokes aren’t subtle, entire genres are invoked to capture singularities. For example, of kickboxing and martial arts flicks (ala Van Damme) to justify a character having quicker then normal reflexes. There is a superfluous sex scene that heralds the classic Hollywood morality play in teen horror movies. What is key, is not the seemingly random plot twists (air conditioning? what?), but the justifications given for the plot twists. All such lines are delivered with a tone of exasperation, such an exasperation can not be acted. Everything that happens outside of the plane (ie on the ground) is irrelevant to the resolution of the plot.

Seriously though, the phenomenon of SOAP is probably well known to most people who read this blog, so I won’t bother detailing it again. However, I will point out that the hype exceeded opening weekend ticket sales, not for a sinister reason, but to ask, why was there so much hype about this film? And clearly it was a ground swell of hype, not some genius advertising campaign. The production and distribution people sleep-walked through this one. My response, which I have already expressed on LP (here) is that SOAP is more of an expression of post-9/11 media in the wake of the 9/11 event, than those ‘tribute’ films purporting to actually be about the event.

I was particularly critical of the Salon article which included a quote from Adorno Gramsci in some sort of consumerist resistance argument about why there had been so much interest in the film leading up to its release. What utter nonsense! Ok so a threatening situation about something going bad on a plane is trivialised? And it gets hyped? And you go back to Adorno? Right… So the phenomenon of the film’s pre-release popularity is about what? Consumerist resistance? Or the ability to make a joke about the most traumatic global event in recent memory? Sure more horrendous things have happened since (such as the tsunami), but nothing else has precipitated such effects and tranformations to the political composition of the globe.

This far right conservative blogger gets the superficial cultural connection. As I pointed out on the LP thread the equivalent relationship to the snakes is to terrorists as the invading aliens in the 1950s were to the communists. But if you stop there such a brief analysis doesn’t grasp the complexities of popular culture and what actually occurred with Snakes on a Plane. There is a difference between the movie and the media event of the movie. The movie itself has a release date and is advertised, spruiked, talked about and discussed potentially anywhere. All of this tertiary communication around the cultural commodity produces another, very real entity — a media event. Now the media event in this circumstance was organised around making funny, if not lame spoof trailers and spoilers. The concept of snakes on a plane is not scary as such, rather it triggers a distributive ontogenesis of the individual along a line that bifurcates from the governmental use of fear. What does this mean?

Let’s take Massumi’s argument regarding the affective modulation of a population.

In the aftermath of 9-11, the public’s fearfulness had tended to swing out of control in response to dramatic, but maddeningly vague, government warnings of an impending follow-up attack. The alert system was designed to modulate that fear. [...]
The alerts presented no form, ideological or ideational and, remaining vague as to the source, nature, and location of the threat, bore precious little content. They were signals without signification. All they distinctly offered was an “activation contour” : a variation in intensity of feeling over time. [...]
The reality of the situation is its affective quality – its being an unfolding of fear, as opposed to of anger, boredom, or love. To say that at this level the experience is in the fear, rather than the fear being the content of an experience, is to say that its momentum-gathering, action-driving, reality-registering operation is not phenomenal. It is the in-which of experience ; in other words, experience’s immanence. [...]
George Bush’s color alert system is designed to exploit and foster the varieties of fear while expanding upon their ontogenetic powers. It assumes the full spectrum of fear, up to and including its becoming-autonomous as a regenerative ground of existence, in action and in-action, in feeling and without it in thought. This refocusing of government sign-action on complex affective modulation is a tactic of incalculable power. It allies the politics of communication with powers capable of “possessing” the individual at the level at which its experience reemerges (dispossessing it of its own genesis). [...]
The alert system is a tool for modulating collective individuation. Through the mass-media, it addresses itself to the population from the angle of its potential to reindividuate differentially.

Ok, so what do you do to combat this form of control? Ramp up your own mode of affective modulation, and demonstrate how you can bang tables louder about even more stupid shit? Yes the bang-the-table-louder approach. Time To Get Tough. The classic response by all centre-right and right-wing conservative governments, and all those overtaken by their ‘microfascisms’. Or do you depotentialise the event, try to make a joke of it, laugh in its face. Not in the face of the traumatic event, the shock (and spectacle) of which needs to be worked through, but the residual of its utter and complete horror as it is repeated all the time in fucking tribute films, prime time documentaries and political speeches justifying even more horrendous acts.

When you share in the laughter and make your own dumb arse trailer, you not only refuse to let politicians exploit the human response of fear, but you also refuse to let the terrorist act succeed by making you afraid.

Laugh. Make others laugh.

Digitalisation has had a profound impact here too; text and image are no longer ontologically separated but have become expressions of similar codes. The hyperreality of digital codes is that there is no possibility of ascertaining authenticity – editing of images and texts is an ongoing process.

Joost van Loon over @ Space and Culture has published 4 of Seven Theses on Terror. The above is from the fourth. I agree with much of what Joost is writing however the two lines above are problematic as it inverts the logic of the rest of the Fourth Thesis. The Fourth Thesis is pertinent to my work as Joost shifts gears to look at popular culture.

First line: ‘Digitalisation’ is presented as an onto-epistemological discursive mode by Joost, yet this mode existed for a long time before being used online or with computers. I have also looked at the ontological relation between Text and Image, not because of the WoT, but because of car enthusiast magazines. The images and text must work in concert to capture the particular affects of the enthusiasm. This is one of my main points of my dissertation. Cars are ‘tough’ and represented in images to accentuate the ‘toughness’ and the text normally revolves around an axiomatic truth in the first paragraph that reinscribes the subject-object relations of an enthusiasm on an affective level in a particular way. However, diferent magazines had different discursive modes. So, for example, there is a difference between the massifying Street Machine magazine and the old 1980s Supercar magazine. Street Machine treated readers as individual enthusiasts and sought to connect readers directly with the affects of events and cars. Supercar magazine mediated reports on events through the structured and habitualised heirarchical affects of car clubs. When did this ontological link between image and text emerge? I am not sure but going by my genealogy of car enthusiast magazines it was sometime in the late 1970s.

Second line: I’ll assume Joost is implicitly using the Baudrillard argument about the non-events of media simulacrum; that is, of representations refering to representations refering to representations and so on with no ‘originary’ link. I tend to think of this as feedback to feedback with only a provisional locus of stability. However, Baudrillard’s semiotics is still caught up in what D&G call the despotic signifier. The ‘despotic signifer’ captures the assymetrical relation between signified and signifier in pre-capitalist semiotics. (D&G are unclear in other writings, particularly Guattari, when they talk about ‘archaisms’ returning. Does that mean with the return of these archaic social movements that there is a return to the despotic signifier? Isn’t this precisely what is happening?) The simulacrum is used as an endocolonising power, which what I understand the rest of what the Fourth Thesis is about. The ontological link between text and image of this media simulacra captures the affects of particular enthusiasms. Here ‘enthusiasm’ is meant in the broader Kantian sense as the universal of being enthused that can be recognised on the face of others! (Yes, I have been reading;) Replace ‘universal’ with ‘singularity’ and ‘face’ with ‘faciality’ and now you’re cooking. The ontological link between text and image captures a particular mobilising constellation of affects, ie faciality (cf. Deleuze’s affect-image of Cinema 1).

The truth of the hyperreality is irrelevant when the power of the simulacrum does not rely on truth! The truth of the simulcra is determined by the affective resonance of the image, by what it does, not by what it represents. ‘Truth’ is a heavily reinscribed simulcrum, it has an affective gravity that previously dwarfed other ‘truths’. The truth may or may not set you free, but it is certainly what captures you. Also Weber’s comments on Charismatic leadership are relevant, not the stuff about actual leaders, but the short sections where Weber discusses what happens in organisations between leaders. Membership to this charismatically organised population is facilitated through tests of belonging that are carried out by the lesser members. Enter yellow ribbons and national flags…

The ongoing editing is not because of the impossible slippery link between signifier and signified but merely the technical means for the ongoing affective modulation and attunement of populations. Media is thus a biopolitical problem, not a problem of representation.

I’ve got another post in the works written partially in response to Joost’s excellent posts at Space and Culture, but also in reply to the America – Civilization 3 chapter of McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H30RY and the absence of what is called the ‘fog of war’. It directly relates to the above as the ‘fog of war’ produces an event horizon that introduces chance into the determinations of the algorithm, thus makes gaming exciting, but on an ‘allegorithmic’ level reproduces docile populations for the warmongering machinations of current state-of-emergency governmental modes.