there is no returning to business as usual

Now Feb 2016...there is no returning to business as usual.

Capitalist Realism (Mark Fisher), audit culture the confusion of accountability with accountancy is aiding the corrosion of social imagination.

Capitalism is the dominant force in the world and there is little point of resisting it.

https://youtu.be/49Tuck7eMqo

A wee bit of Jean Bauldrillard - juicy sweet!

Jean Baudrillard - Paroxysm: The Perfect Crime
Translated by Suture-Self Trans-Later: Ian, Michel, Sarah, William.
Association Française d'Action Artistique, 1993

If not for appearances, the world would be a perfectcrime, which is to say, without criminal, without victim, and without motive.Wherein the truth is forever withdrawn, and where the secret is never exposed,for want of traces. But, precisely, the crime is never perfect, because theworld gives itself away through appearances, which are the traces of itsinexistence, traces of the continuity of nothingness. For nothingness itself,the continuity of the link, leaves traces. It is by this that the world betraysits secret. It is by this that it lets itself be felt, all the while concealingitself behind appearances.

The artist is also always close to the perfect crime, which is: to saynothing. But he runs away from it, and his work is the trace of this criminalimperfection. The artist is, according to Michaux, the one who resists with allhis might the fundamental urge to not leave traces.

As to whether language is the trace of the imperfection of the world, nostory better demonstrates this than John's. Up until the age of 16, John, ahappy and handsome youth, gifted in every sense, had never spoken. He had neveruttered a single word until the day when, suddenly, at tea-time, he said: "Iwould like a little sugar." His ecstatic mother cried out: "But, John, youspeak! Why didn't you ever say anything?" And John replied, "Until now,everything was perfect."

The perfection of the crime resides in the fact that it is always alreadyaccomplished -- per fectum. A sidetracking, even before it producesitself, of the world as it is. It will therefore never be discovered. There willbe no final judgment to punish or absolve it. There will be no end, becausethings have always already taken place. Neither resolution nor absolution, butineluctable unfolding of consequences.

Declination of the original crime (wherein one might perhaps discover itsderisory form in the current declination of simulacra?). Our destiny, then, isthe perpetration of this crime, its implacable unfolding, the continuity ofevil, the continuation of nothingness. We will never live its "primal scene,"but at every moment we live its prosecution and atonement. There is no end tothis, and the consequences are incalculable.

Just as the first few seconds of the Big Bang are unfathomable, the fewseconds of the original crime are indeterminable. Fossil crime, then; like thefossilized sounds scattered throughout the universe. And it is the energy ofthis crime, like the initial explosion, that will spread throughout the world,until its eventual exhaustion.

Such is the mythic vision of the original crime, that distortion of the worldin the game of seduction and appearances, and of its definitive illusion. Suchis the form of the secret.

So long as an illusion is not recognized as an error, its value is exactlyequivalent to that of reality. But once the illusion is recognized as such, itno longer is one. It is therefore the concept of illusion itself, and thisalone, that is the illusion.

The big philosophical question was: "Why is there something rather thannothing?" Today, the real question is: "Why is there nothing rather thansomething?"

The absence of things to themselves, the fact that they don't take placewhile seeming to, the fact that everything withdraws behind its own appearanceand can therefore never be identical to itself -- all this is the materialillusion of the world. And this remains at bottom the great enigma, whichplunges us into terror, and from which we protect ourselves with the formalillusion of truth.

Under penalty of terror, we must decipher the world, and thus wipe outmaterial illusion. We will tolerate neither the vacuum, nor the secret, norsheer appearance. And why must we decipher it, instead of letting the illusionshine as it is, in all its brilliance? Ah, well -- this is also an enigma; itbelongs to the enigma of why we cannot bear the enigmatic. It is of a piece withthe world that we could not bear within it either illusion or pure appearance.We wouldn't tolerate any better -- if it had to exist -- radical truth andtransparence.

Truth wants to present itself naked; to reveal its nudity. It desperatelyseeks nudity, like Madonna in the film that made her famous. Moreover, Madonnais the best example of this truth-compulsion. Evocative case of someone whoabsolutely wants to be naked, to show herself naked, and who never quitemanages. She is perpetually bridled -- if not with leather or metal, then withthe vulgar will to be nude, the artificial mannerism of exhibitionism.Inhibition suddenly becomes total and, on the part of the spectator, radicalfrigidity.

This hopeless strip-tease is that of reality itself, which literally"out-strips" itself [se <>], offering to thecredulous eyes of voyeurs the appearance of nudity. But actually, this nudityenvelops it in a second skin, which no longer has even the erotic charm of dress[la robe].

A prostitution of reality, which voluntarily abandons itself to hyper-realistdetail -- there isn't even a need anymore for bachelors to strip it bare --, andwhich has voluntarily renounced the optical illusion in favor of thestrip-tease.

My principal objection to reality is, moreover, its character ofunconditional surrender to any hypothesis that one can make about it. That itthus discourages the most active minds through its deplorable conformism. Youcan subject it, with its principle --(besides, what are they doing together, ifnot limply copulating and engendering countless evidence?)--, to the harshestcruelties, to the most obscene provocations, to the most paradoxicalinsinuations: it bends over backwards for everything with an inevitableservility. Reality is a bitch. Nothing shocking there, anyway, since it was bornfrom the fornication of stupidity with a mathematical mind -- ort of sacredillusion thrown to the jackals of science?

To rediscover the trace of nothing, of the perfect crime, it is necessary totake from the reality of the world. To rediscover the configuration of thesecret it is necessary to take away from the accumulation of reality. Subtract,subtract.

The same must not be added to the same, and so on, ad nauseam. The same mustbe ripped out from the same. Each image must take from the reality of the world;there must be, behind each image, behind each fragment of reality, somethingthat has disappeared, to assure the continuity of nothing -- without,however, succumbing to the temptation of annihilation because this disappearancemust remain living, the trace of the crime must stay alive.

It is always by adding to the real, by adding the real to the real with theobjective of a perfect illusion (that of the hyper-real stereotype) that onestabs at the heart of the illusion. Porno, by adding a dimension to the image ofsex removes one from desire and disqualifies all seductive illusion. At theopposite end of the spectrum, the trompe-l'oeil, in stripping a dimension awayfrom real objects, adds to their magic presence, to their illusory exactitude.Trompe-l'oeil is the ecstasy of the real object, the living illusion ofevidence, that which adds to the formal charm of painting the spiritual charm ofdeception, the mystification of the senses. For the sublime is not enough: thesubtle is also necessary, the nuance which consists in diverting the real whiletaking it literally.

Subtract, subtract, take away, nuance. What we have unlearned from modernityis that subtraction gives force; from absence power is born. We never cease toaccumulate, to add, to make a higher bid. And if we no longer are capable offacing the symbolic mastery of absence, it is because today we are immersed inthe inverse illusion, the disenchanted illusion of profusion, the modernillusion of the proliferation of screens and images.

It is all the rage to make an image that is no longer an image, in otherwords, exactly that which strips a dimension from the real world and inauguratesthe power of illusion. Today, with all the forms of the reality show and virtualreality, they want us to enter the image, the screen, the three dimensionalartifact -- real-life good to go --, thus destroying any generic illusion of theimage. The temporal equivalent is that of real-time, that purports at the speedof light -- which is that of information -- to install us in an absolutepresent, abolishing all illusion of past and future.

The virtual illusion is contrary to that of appearances. Nothing hides itselfthere, no secret, no absence. Its aim is the cloning of reality, the cloning ofthe real by the hyper-real, and the extermination of the real by its double.

The disappearance of cinematographic illusion. From silent film to talkies,from talkies to color, through to the modern gamut of special effects, theillusion has gone the way of performance. No more void, no more ellipse, no moresilence -- no more image. We are going more and more toward high-definition,toward the useless perfection of the image, which in effect no longer is one bydint of being saturated with technical artifice. The closer one approaches thedefinitive definition, the operational perfection of the image, the more itloses its power of illusion.

Consider the Beijing Opera. How, with the simple movement of their bodies,the old man and the young girl brought to life the expanse of the river; how, inthe duel scene, two bodies moving close to each other but never touchingrendered physically palpable the darkness in which the combat took place. Here,the illusion was total and intense, more of a physical than an aestheticecstasy, precisely because all realistic presence of night or river was removed,and the theatrical illusion depended on bodies alone. Today one would bring tonsof water onto the set, and they would shoot the night duel in infrared.

The image can no longer imagine the real since it is the real. It canno longer dream reality since it is virtual reality. From screen to screen, theimage has no other destiny but the image. It is as if things had swallowed theirmirror, and had become transparent to themselves, entirely present tothemselves, in broad daylight, in real-time, through an unmercifultranscription. Instead of being absent from themselves in the illusion and thesecret, they no longer register except on thousands of screens at the horizon ofwhich the real, but also the image properly speaking, have disappeared. Realityhas been driven out of reality, and has left us in a hyper-reality empty ofmeaning. Perhaps only technology still relays the scattered fragments of thereal? Where has the order of meaning gone?

The only suspense left is that of knowing how far the world can de-realizebefore succumbing to its reality deficit, or how far it can hyper-realize beforesuccumbing to its reality surplus (that is, when the world, having become morereal than the real, will fall under the blow of total simulation).

However -- and this is a foolish hypothesis, fundamentally the same as thatof the transparence of evil --, it is not certain that the constellation of thesecret is eclipsed by the transparence of the virtual universe, nor that theoriginal power of illusion, its symbolic operation, is swept away by thetechnological operation of the world -- by its technological inspection, asHeidegger would say. One can detect behind all technologies (especially the mostadvanced: electronic, computer, virtual, those of image and screen) a sort ofabsolute affectation and double-gaming -- that exorbitant character oftechnicity that makes the world a play of appearances, a chiaroscuro of anunsolvable world, behind the objective, realistic illusion of transforming it.Is technicity finally the murderous alternative to the illusion of the world, oris it only a gigantic avatar of the same fundamental illusion, its ultimate andsubtle twist, the last hypostasis? Through technicity, perhaps the world ishaving us on, that object that seduces us through the illusion of power thatwe have over it. A vertiginous hypothesis that would add up to rationality,culminating in virtual technicity, the last of the ruses of illogic -- acorrelate, in the inwardness of man, of this desire for illusion of which thedesire for truth is, according to Nietzsche, nothing but a detour and an avatar.

The Japanese intuit a deity within every industrial object. For us, thissacred presence is reduced to a faint ironic glimmer, to a nuance of play andremoteness, but which is no less a spiritual form, behind which the Evil Genieof Technicity is silhouetted, himself ensuring that the world's secret remainswell-kept. The Mischievous Spirit watches and waits behind all artifacts, and ofall our artificial products we could say what Canetti said of animals: "Behindeach of them, one has the impression that someone human is hidden, sniggering atus." This echoes Heidegger's phrase: "If we really look at the ambiguous essenceof technicity, we perceive the constellation, the stellar movement of thesecret."

It seems, through a paradoxical effect, that if the illusion of the world isstripped away, irony passes into things. It seems that technicity has taken onall the illusion that it bereft us of, and that the counterpart to this loss ofillusion is the apparition of this world's objective irony. Irony as universalform of disillusion, but also of the stratagem by which the world withdrawsbehind the radical illusion of technicity, as does the secret --(that of thecontinuation of Nothingness)-- behind the banality of our technologies andimages.

Irony is the only spiritual form of the modern world. It is the solerepository of the secret. But we no longer are privy to it. The ironic functionof the object has supplanted the critical function of the subject. From themoment they pass through medium or image, through the trace of the sign or themarket, objects exert an artificial and ironic function by their very existence.No need any longer for a critical conscience holding up to the world the mirrorof its double: our modern world has swallowed its double at the same time as ithas lost its shadow, and the irony of this incorporated double erupts at everyinstant from every fragment of our signs, of our objects, in the absurdity oftheir function -- as the Surrealists showed: things take it upon themselves toironically explain themselves. They disabuse themselves effortlessly of theirmeaning -- all of this is part of their visible sequencing, all too visible, asuperfluity which in itself creates a parody-effect.

The aura of our world is no longer sacred -- no longer the numinous horizonof appearances -- but one of absolute merchandise. Its essence isadvertising. At the heart of our universe of signs is a mischievous ad-man genieof publicity, a trickster, who has integrated the buffoonery of merchandisingwith its staging. A brilliant scenographer (capital?) has lured the world into aphantasmagoria of which we are all the fascinated victims.

All metaphysics is swept away by this reversal of situation in which thesubject is no longer master of the representation (I'll be your mirror!), butmerely a function of the world's objective irony. In all our technologies, it isthe object that refracts the subject and imposes its presence and its aleatoryform. It is the power of the object that beats a path through the play ofsimulacra and simulation, through that very artifice that we have imposed uponit. In this there is a kind of ironic reversal: the object becomes a strangeattractor. Stripped of all illusion by technicity itself, stripped of allconnotation of meaning and value, ejected -- i.e., disengaged from the orbit ofthe subject, it thus becomes pure object, a superconductor of illusion andnonsense.

At the horizon of simulation, not only has the world disappeared, but thequestion of its existence can no longer be asked. But this is perhaps a ruse ofthe world itself.

Iconoclasm in Byzantium encountered the same problem. The iconoclasts weresubtle people who aspired to represent God for his greater glory, but in showingGod's image, they thereby concealed the problem of his existence. Each image wasa pretext for not facing the problem of God's existence. Behind each one, infact, God had disappeared. He wasn't dead, he had disappeared; that is, theproblem no longer presented itself. The problem of the existence or inexistenceof God had been resolved through simulation. Just as we have done with theproblem of truth or with the fundamental illusion of the world: we have resolvedit through technical simulation, and through the profusion of images in whichthere is nothing to see.

But one might think that it's the strategy of God himself to disappear, andprecisely behind images. God takes advantage of the images in order todisappear, himself obeying the impulse to not leave traces. And so the prophecyis realized: we live in a world where the highest function of the sign is tomake reality disappear, and to mask at the same time this disappearance. Artdoes none other than this. The media today do none other than this. This is whythey are consigned to the same destiny.

Because nothing, not even painting, wants anymore exactly to be looked at,but only to be visually absorbed and circulated without leaving traces --tracing in a way, under cover of the colors of simulation, the simplifiedaesthetic form of impossible exchange --, it is difficult today to recaptureappearances. Such that the language that would best account for this would be alanguage in which there is nothing to say, which would be the equivalent of apainting in which there is nothing to see. The equivalent of pure object, of anobject that is not an object.

But an object that is not an object is precisely not nothing. It's an objectthat doesn't let up obsessing you with its immanence, its empty and immaterialpresence. The whole problem is, at the confines of nothingness, to materializethis nothingness -- at the confines of emptiness, to trace the after-image ofemptiness -- at the confines of indifference, to play according to themysterious rules of indifference.

The world is like a book. The secret of a book is always inscribed on asingle page. The rest is nothing but gloss and repetition. The ultimate finesseis to make this page disappear once the book is complete. Hence no one willguess what it is about (always the perfect crime). Yet this page remainsdispersed within the book, between the lines; the body remains dispersedthroughout its scattered limbs, and one ought to be able to reconstitute itwithout the secret being lifted. This anagrammatic dispersion of things isessential to their symbolic absence, to the force of their illusion.

Identification of the world is futile. One must seize upon things in theirsleep, or in a totally other contingency where they are absent from themselves.Like in Kawabata's The Sleeping Beauties, where the old men spend thenight beside the sleeping bodies of these women, mad with desire, but withouttouching them, and depart before they awake. They too are stretched out next toan object that is not one, and whose total indifference, in sleep, sharpens theerotic sense. But most enigmatic in Kawabata's story, and which creates thismarvelous irony, is that nothing finally, right through to the end of the tale,allows one to know whether the women are really sleeping or whether they aren'tslyly getting off, from the depths of their simulated sleep, from theirseduction and from their own deferred desire.

Those not sensitized to the illusion of amorous feeling, to the degree ofirreality and play, of malice and ironic spirituality in the language of love,are not in effect even capable of loving. True intelligence is none other thanthis intuition of the universal illusion, even in the passion of love -- aboveall in the passion of love --, without this passion, however, being distorted inits natural movement.

Even our face we are incapable of identifying, since its symmetry isdistorted by the mirror.

What significance do we give to the fact that the Creator fashioned men suchthat they cannot contemplate their own face? Upon seeing it, would we go mad?Has man evolved into a form in which his face remains invisible? Perhaps thedragonfly or the praying mantis recognize the appearance of their head? Is theirface so symmetrical that the mirror inversion is without importance, or are theothers of their species so identical that the problem of singularity of featuresnever presents itself?

Meanwhile for us, our face, that which is our most personal, exists only forothers. We do not exist but for others. We-ourselves are definitively hiddenfrom we-ourselves, unidentifiable, not only in the secret of our heart, but inthe secret of our face. In return, we know the true face of the other, wepossess the secret of the other. The Other is the one whose secret we possess,and who possesses our secret.

To contemplate our face would be madness, since we would no longer have asecret for ourselves, and would therefore be wiped out by transparence.

The mirror does not give me my true appearance. I only know myself inreflection, such as inside me I will never be. But it is like this for everyobject, that only comes to us definitively altered, including upon the screen ofour brain. All things thus offer themselves without hope of being anything otherthan the illusion of themselves. And it's good this way.

Luckily the objects that appear to us have always already disappeared.Happily nothing appears to us in real time, any more than the stars in the nightsky. If the speed of light were infinite, all the stars in the universe would behere at once -- in real time -- and the vault of the sky would be of anunbearable incandescence. No more night -- perpetual day. Happily nothing takesplace in real time, otherwise we would be subjected, through information, to thelight of all events, and the present would be of an unbearable incandescence.Happily we live in the mode of a vital illusion, in the mode of an absence, ofan irreality, a non-immediacy of things. Happily all things, the world andothers, come to us definitively altered. Happily nothing is instantaneous, norsimultaneous, nor contemporaneous. Happily reality doesn't take place.Thankfully the crime is never perfect.

Jean Baudrillard

This text was first published in the context of the "Study for the Secret"meetings, June 9-11, 1993 at the Venice Biennale and appears in AFAA(Association Française d'Action Artistique) 1993, pp. 5-12.

Translated by Suture-Self Trans-Later: Ian, Michel, Sarah, William,April 1995.

Baudrillard, Jean. "The Perfect Crime." "Study for the Secret" meetings, June 9-11, 1993 at the Venice Biennale and appears in AFAA (Association Française d'Action Artistique) 1993, pp. 5-12. Available: http://www.simulation.dk/articles/perfect_crime.htm

Jails and nursing homes

Jails and Nursing Homes

Something to think about:

Let's put the seniors in jail and the felons in nursing homes.

This would correct two things in one motion:

Seniors would have access to showers, hobbies and walks.

They would receive unlimited free prescriptions, dental and medical treatment, wheel chairs, etc.

They would receive money instead of having to pay it out.

They would have constant video monitoring, so they would be helped instantly if they fell or needed assistance.

Bedding would be washed twice a week and all clothing would be ironed and returned to them.

A guard would check on them every 20 minutes.

All meals and snacks would be brought to them

They would have family visits in a suite built for that purpose.

They would have access to a library, weight/fitness room, spiritual counselling, a pool and education...and free admission to in-house concerts by nationally recognized entertainment artists.

Simple clothing - i.e.., shoes, slippers, pj's - and legal aid would be free upon request..

There would be private, secure rooms provided for all with an outdoor exercise yard complete with gardens.

Each senior would have a computer, T. V., phone and radio in their room at no cost.

They would receive daily phone calls.

There would be a board of directors to hear any complaints and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association would fight for their rights and protection.

The orderlies would have a code of conduct to be strictly adhered to, with attorneys available, at no charge to protect the seniors and their families from abuse or neglect.


As for the felons:

They would receive cold food.

They would be left alone and unsupervised.

They would receive showers once a week.

They would live in tiny rooms, for which they would have to pay $5,000 per month.

They would have no hope of ever getting out.

Interesting.


Support Poverty Awareness Week October 16 - 27, 2010.

Bob's Post McLuhan Paramedia Ecology

Definition: Android Meme - Automated self-replicating unit of cultural transmission; machines communicating with machines.

Remember, the parts of the Android Meme are the Chemical Body, the Astral Body, the TV Body, and the Chip Body. the AP position, which is post-Chip Body and post-TV Body. Human bodies are First Nature, the human bodies make Second Nature, which is media and language. There's a subtle interplay between the bodies and the media. The bodies as souls come and go, but the media keeps building itself through time. So we come to the point where the media builds itself, completes itself, and it's merging with the bodies.

The best way to express that is to show the bodies, show the Android Meme dominating them, which is just simple language dominating humans in this dimension, then the language resolves itself through the Android Meme. We've moved into the fused First and Second Nature situation, and therefore you can't tell the difference between First Nature and Second Nature. Cloned ESP. I mean, people don't need words to function today. They have a post-verbal language, which is the intuitive electric media. Electronic digital media. e-mail be considered language?

That's ESP. That's mainly your instant interaction with people with words that are a component but not the dominating medium. In fact, the post-moderns talk about the end of the logocentric, that's visual space language. Verbal written language, that disappeared in the 20th century. But you still have language in terms of tactile communication, which is, you use a computer, e-mail, the fellow responds back to you, like when you do instant messaging. That's not verbal language. Verbal is inside it, part of what you read, or you can send pictures, but the instantaneous, the medium you use, the digital environment, is the language, is your tongue. It's your means to communicate.

I would say the simple agenda is this. Whatever traditional images you have that make you think you're being affected in a certain way, get rid of those images! Break up those images you have. Don't think "psychosomatic," don't think this, don't think "organic food processes," don't think any of these normal ideas of what might be causing you pain. What's affecting you is something that you can't really visualize. So you loosen up the people's obsession on, "Oh man, I ate too much Wheat Germ, that's causing this, I better go get a doctor to give me a drug."

If you get lost in that thought form, and the doctors give you a "solution," then that'll cause you more problems. You need to just sit back and say, "Yep, I'm being massaged," and just accept it. Basically the population's being put on a collective LSD trip, in a more subtle way than TV managed to do. Because these refined vibratory devices are affecting our chi levels, our etheric bodies, which is then affecting the astral plane. So we're being affected in ways that no knowledge system can map anymore.

The media needs new content. Because the media want to be kept on and people want to live in that discarnate cyberspace of TV. They want to be part of it every day. So every form of human expression will be used and exploited and expressed. So, you can play a game where each one of us is both figure and ground. Every one of us in this planet is in a yin-yang situation - we're creating our own disease as well as curing it.

The hidden environment is what's really motivating everybody, and creating a lot of obsession or neurosis, and the stress of life is always caused by the new invisible environment. Therefore, an antidote or an anaesthetic to that is the past environments, but to use them as props. So, all human creativity is now provided as the content, but the mixed corporate-media create the stress on people, and they're trying to find out how that stress is affecting them. They'll never be able to find out how that stress is affecting them. But all they have to do is understand what I'm talking about.

"Process" is what is affecting all of us, that's the hidden ground, and they just reflected the need, subconsciously, for psychology to adapt to the new electric environment in the '60s and '70s, the electric environment being processual. So they came up with concepts of "process". Now that concept is obsolete because they've exhausted it, people are no longer using it, but they are stuck in an environment that is process incarnate. So, they've got a problem.

You are saturated with TV by the time you are 18 or 19, you want to know what to do, you want to develop an identity. Study something that has taken the best of what has happened in the last 40 or 50 years. You study that and then you realize that the understanding you got from that is obsolete. Then that's the apocalypse - finding out that you don't exist. You have to deal with the fact you live in an almost Oriental oblivion, you live in a resonating void. Once you realize you are gone, you are invisible, in terms of expressing that relation to anybody else, you might then realize "I'm still here!", and then you start to realize you've survived.

by Bob Dobbs - paramedia megalomaniac

Idle Praxis

The role of communication in creating and sustaining healthy communities and enhancing grassroots community participation has been my personal professional focus in two primary ways: (1) Which communication dynamics need to be strengthened or balanced to discover positive and negative trends within the community to facilitate change (2) effective communication lays the path to success for both myself and for the community I work in and for.
A tertiary analysis of communication theory has fortified a repository of many sage words of advice: the study of communication theory offers the opportunity to be reflexive, engaged and an active participant with the conversation about communication theory. (Littlejohn and Foss, 2008, p 77); communication is one of the most persuasive, important, and complex aspects of human life. (Littlejohn and Foss, 2008.). Scholars have made many attempts to define communication but establishing a single definition has proved impossible (Littlejohn and Foss, 2008. ). Theories are not just things to be read and learned, they are constantly evolving works. (Littlejohn and Foss, 2008). Theories are not mutually exclusive from social context and historical traditions, but perhaps a reflection of those (Craig, 2007). Communication theory serves as an avenue of thought to study specialized forms of discourse, cultivated means of thinking and talking (Craig, 2007). Communication Theory is intellectual refinement of ordinary practices; an acts of interpretation (Craig, 2007). Communication theory serves as a fruitful source of ideas and stimulated perfunctory thought (Craig, 2007).


Almost in contradiction to that safe repository, LittleJohn and Foss (Littlejohn and Foss 2008) classify communication as virtually indefinable. Peter Craig posits communication theory as practical while at the same time stating, “even as we do more theory, we become (collectively if not individually) less certain of exactly what we are doing or should be doing. (Craig 2007. ix) 2). Pursuing this professional uber quest within the context of communication theory his theory overload has lead to a dire personal diagnosis of analysis paralysis; the situation where too many choices make it difficult to concretize and cause mental clutter. (Schwartz 2004). The power of analysis paralysis has further had the effect of generating a seemingly idle and discordant praxis out of the uber quest, the predominant question shifting from how to create and sustain healthy communities to how to make sense of and act upon communication theory, which in itself shifts the quest back to how to create and sustain healthy communities.

A primary source for the incongruent need for order in thought, theory, and action comes from Aristotelian histrionics which argue that in the face of uncertainty, in a world based on chance, order emerges in a linear manner as the final and ideal form. Widespread Aristotelian based thinking has imbedded itself as a predominant academic model and has reinforced the idea that clutter and chaotic thought has little value in and of itself other than being observed as a mere component of a linear logical sequence moving toward a final resolution or theory. In an Aristotelian world, idle and dissonant praxis is the antithesis of the best conclusion.

Upholding the linear modality, Claude Shannon formulated a theory explaining the communication of information (Shannon – weaver model, 2003). Shannon’s Information Theory includes the basic elements of any general communication system. Information is the message. Communication is the medium through which the information is transferred and synthesized. According to Shannon, the basic elements of any general communication system includes the following: a) Source b) Sender c) Message d) Channel e) Receiver f) Destination and g) Noise source communication is not just what we talk. Expressions, gestures or visual sense.(4) But effective communication occurs only when the three important aspects of communication viz., 1) visual (used in seeing: the visual sense) (2) audio (pertaining to, or employed in the transmission, reception, or reproduction of sound) and 3) kinesics (the study of body movements, gestures, facial expressions, etc., as a means of communication) are in the right proportion. Therefore, in general, human communication may be defined as, “the process in which all of the three important aspects of communication is involved in the right proportion, in order to exchange information between humans in an effective manner.”

The compulsion toward linearity and the need to avoid dissonance is comparable to satisfying hunger and is reinforced in communication’s cybernetic tradition which states simply that people are more comfortable with consistency than inconsistency. (Festinger as quoted in Griffin, 2006, p 228) People seek homeostasis. The mind is imagined as a system that takes inputs from the environment in the form of information processes and then creates behavioural outputs (Littlejohn and Foss, 2008). Festinger posits three possible outputs: the first registers the input as irrelevant; the second registers the input as consonant and third registers the input dissonant, registering the input as an opposition to some other consonant or irrelevant input; ergo cognitive dissonance is given its birth. The degree of dissonance experienced is a function of two factors (1) the relative proportions of constant dissonant elements and (2) the importance of the elements or issue (Littlejohn and Foss, 2008, p.77). Festinger imagined a number of methods for dealing with cognitive dissonance: (1) altering the importance of the issue of the elements involved, (2) changing one or more of the cognitive elements, (3)adding a new element to one side of the tension or the other, (4) seeing consonant information and (5) distorting or misinterpreting dissonant evidence (Littlejohn and Foss, p.78). The application of the theory of cognitive dissonance then is the active attempt to avoid it. LittleJohn and Foss use the metaphor of buyer’s remorse (Littlejohn and Foss, 2008, p79) to describe cognitive dissonance. Being plagued by regret and second thoughts after a tough choice, people seek information that vindicates their decision and dispels nagging doubt. If an individual states a belief that is difficult to justify, that person will attempt to justify the belief making his or her attitudes more consistent with the statement (Aronson, 2004, p. 164). We succeed in modifying our attitudes because we have succeeded in convincing ourselves that our previous attitudes were incorrect. Acting as if we believe something promotes the belief itself. What becomes illuminated is the ongoing potential for the Stockholm Effect en masse. People are not rational beings but rather rationalizing beings. Humans are motivated not so much to be right as to believe they are right and to justify their own actions beliefs and feelings. When they do something they will try to convince themselves and others that is was a logical reasonable thing to do. (Aronson, 2004, p. 164. 
 An excellent starting place for anyone wishing to experience analysis paralysis, in its own right, are the works of Roland Barthes. Challenging standard beliefs and theorizing on the interpretation of signs Barthes' ultimate goal was to explain how seemingly straightforward signs pick up ideological meaning and work to maintain the status quo. In Barthes’ theory, he states that a sign has a signifier and a signified. The signifier is something that is seen and grasped; what the signifier represents is the signified. You cannot have one with out the other. Manipulation of the signified is the means of retaining social control, or status quo, the modus operandi for modern social marketers, bank robbers, or even community developers.

Paulo Freire challenged the one way flow of Aristotelian histrionics; the traditional communication model. Freire insisted on the fact that communication is a process that cannot be considered in isolation away from social and political processes. But he, like others, called for a greater emphasis on praxis. Freire's "conscentiation" (Friere, 1970) means simply thoughts perceive reality as a process of transformation rather than a static entity. This challenged the one way flow and proposed a communication model rooted in dialogue and discussion. Praxis is reflexive of internal processes rather than external. This again creates a fresh fissure from which to nourish analysis paralysis. Applying Freire’s theory to augment community development strategies creates a paradox; community development is an external process intended to effect change in social structures where reflexivity is internal rather than external. 


A parallel paradox is illuminated by extolling reflection on practice rather than theory (Bordieu, 1991). Those who create theory have an abstract logic that is different from the practical logic of those who live in the social world. Those who create theory, the observers, do not represent practical knowledge. Practical activities represent the world of action, things from the experience of participants. This participant-observer paradox has to do with a person's point of view. One is either a participant or an observer. The paradox emerges when one realizes that it is only as an observer that one comes to know that he is a participant and what that entails. What Bordieu wants to do is to create a theory based on practice where life is seen only through subjective experience.

Imagine now three dialogues: in the first a conversation is forgotten quickly, never to be recalled; in the second an enjoyable conversation takes place, but in recalling it content is not remarkable or specific; in the third, someone makes a statement you which you cannot immediately comprehend, and the result is confusion or perhaps embarrassment. What has occurred in the latter example becomes an occurrence of dramatic proportions that neither of the first two examples illustrate (Briankle, 2006,) . These are the theoretical examples offered by Briankle in an effort to postulate a truth in communication: that the sense of apprehension or uncertainly - when there is a moment, however minimal, of non understanding – is the true moment of communication. The sense of apprehension or uncertainly about what is to unfold more powerfully defines an event that is truly communicative when one does not understand. Communication can therefore take place when it appears not to take place. This theory offers yet another communication paradox – in this case to the linear communication model where communication is understood as an intentional and observable process of creating and sharing information for mutual understanding.

Overwhelmed by detail; better than anything that has been herein reviewed and considered, the best resolution of analysis paralysis comes from the Belgian artist Francis Alys’ work The Paradox of Praxis. In this work the artist took a very large block of ice and pushed it through the streets. The melting ice left an evaporating trail of water and eventually nothing more than a puddle evaporating in the street. Praxis is the idea of deep conviction that hard work brings tangible benefits. But as Alys communicated in this work the struggle slowly, steadily, inevitably dissipates transforming first into distraction (the focus on pushing the block of ice through the streets) eventually into trivial sport (playing and kicking the ice block, in its latter form, along the streets), and finally into a soon to be forgotten wet smudge evaporating on an anonymous city street. (Zwirner, The David Zwirner Gallery).

My conclusion: simply overwhelmed.


**********


"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." -Nietzsche









References
Aronson, E. (2004). The Social Animal (9th ed.). New York: Worth Publishers.
Bordieu, P. (1990). In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology. Sanford University Press
Bordieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge University Press
Briankle, C. (1996). Deconstructing Communication Representation, Subject, and Economics of Exchange, University of Minnesota Press.
Craig, R. T., & Muller, H. L. (2007). Theorizing Communication: Readings Across Traditions. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.
Griffin, E. (2006). A First Look at Communication Theory (6th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Littlejohn, S. W., & Foss, K. A. (2005). Theories of Human Communication (9th ed.). Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth.
Schwartz, B. (2004). The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More, Harper Collins/ECCO. New York, NY.
The Shannon-Weaver Model. In CCMS, Communication Culture and Media Studies, retrieved January 16, 2009 from http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/index.html
Watson, J., & Hill, A. (1989). A Dictionary of Communication and Media Studies (2nd ed.). London: Edward Arnold.
Zwirner, D. David Zwirner Gallery. The Paradox of Praxis. Retrieved January 13, 2009 from www.davidzwirner.com/news/87/work_2902.htm

Gobbledygook and Social Change

Social change is the task of altering social consciousness, and much of that task is done through language and communication. Though the actual effort required to speak is low when compared to other activities, words carry a lot of power. In the affairs of humans, language is very important. Whether written or spoken, language may be the greatest weapon used in a social change journey. Words carefully crafted for mass consumption by a gifted communications expert can elicit mass support and social change; how we use language as a tool is important for it can orchestrate creation, or it can shape destruction.

One of the most interesting ways to explore communications as a tool for social change is through the lens of nonsense, or gobbledygook. Marshal McLuhan while touring the South Pacific in the late-1970’s was interviewed on the Australian Broadcasting Commission program, Monday Conference (Moody, 2001). Throughout the interview McLuhan discussed dialogue as an alternative to violence, and developed his precept that the task at hand is to understand media because understanding the nature of these forms neutralize some of the adverse effects. McLuhan often inferred a predilection for teasing, challenging and confusing people. As an example, McLuhan frequently punned on the word "message" changing it to "mass age", "mess age", and "massage"; a later book, The Medium is the Massage was originally to be titled The Medium is the Message, but McLuhan preferred the new title which is said to have been a printing error (Wikipedia).

The phrase "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" was coined by Noam Chomsky as an example of nonsense. The individual words make sense, and are arranged according to proper grammar, yet the result is still nonsense. The inspiration for this attempt at creating verbal nonsense came from the idea of contradiction and irrelevant or immaterial characteristics (an idea cannot have a dimension of color, green or otherwise), both of which would be sure to make a phrase meaningless. The phrase "the square root of Tuesday" operates on the latter principle. This principle is behind the inscrutability of the koan "What is the sound of one hand clapping?", as one hand would supposedly require another hand to complete the definition of clapping. Still, the human will to find meaning, even in nonsense is strong.

The dreamlike language of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake sheds light on nonsense in a similar way; full of portmanteau words, it is bursting with multiple layers of meaning, but in many passages it is difficult to say whether any one person's interpretation of a text is the intended or correct one. There may in fact be no such interpretation.

Jabberwocky is a poem of nonsense verse found in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll. It is generally considered to be one of the greatest nonsense poems written in the English language. The word jabberwocky has also occasionally been used as a synonym of nonsense.

George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm is about a group of animals who take over a farm in the name of freedom and democracy. Eventually the pigs gain control over the rest of the animals and it becomes a totalitarian state. Similarly, Orwell’s 1984 is about a totalitarian society which controls and manipulates recorded history and the language to control the populace. In his work Politics and the English Language Orwell writes, “Political regeneration is indeed within our package of tasks” (Orwell, G.). He further identifies the marks of political writing such as “staleness of imagery” and “lack of precision” the ability to dissolve the concrete in the abstract. Orwell persists like a priest identifying the mark of the devil, in his case it is the mark of totalitarianism. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases, one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy; a feeling which becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying. This reduced state of consciousness is favorable to political conformity.

Of all the discordant and truly fantastic theories about language is one that personally provides the most fun; it is that of Linda Goodman (1993), who proposed that in the beginning of all things, the creators spoke certain sounds which produced differing sets of vibrational frequencies in the ethers. Some of these were of such low frequency that they formed particles of what we call matter or physical substance. In this manner were tiny word druids created. These nature spirit druids were charged with the sacred mission of hiding and protecting the Anglo-Saxon alphabet until the preordained time for it to be resurrected and gradually re-seeded into the mass collective sub consciousness of humans. Part of the work of these word druids is to place deeper esoteric meaning within words; many of us have played these anagram games. According to Goodman, by treating each work as an anagram, we discover deep meaning. Goodman calls these Lexigrams. An example of what she does to discern true meaning from words, is here from the word ABORTIONS (Goodman, p.113):

It is torn
It is not born
It is a robot
A robot is not born
No sin
Is abortion sin?
No, it is not a sin

Now, to try this personally it is an opportunity to give common sense a work-out. Chosen arbitrarily the random word selection next lexigramed herein is BULLSHIT:
Is this Bull?
It is still bull.
Thus this is bull.
This is but bull.

A relatively harmless and fun theory, and as silly as it may seem, in an odd and different way it too demonstrates the power which can be hidden in words; incredulity assists us in seeking ways of discerning meaning and truth. Like McLuhan’s teasing, challenging and confusing, these uses of language and communication have the capacity to halt socially conditioned responses and ordinary patterns of interacting and perceiving - and by so doing assist in a next logical step in social change which is to expose the ‘what if’s’. Like discovering positive deviance, these discordant processes and theories have the potential for birthing innovation and to allow new knowing to emerge.

It is truly disheartening however, to learn of a growing body of literature and practice which suggests that innovation does not have to be an uncontrollable force. Instead, it can be a rational management process with its own distinct set of processes, practices, and tools (Keeley, 2007). In fact, some research shows that this type of systematic innovation in an organization typically yields much more productive, scalable, and sustainable ideas over time. Systematic innovation requires well-managed and repeatable processes, to move an organization beyond a dependence on the lightning-strike of sporadic innovations and to create a more constant and dependable flow of new ideas:“Innovation that works is a disciplined process…. The real frontier is to not think of it as a creative exercise, but to think about it as being disciplined in using the right methods.” (Keeley, p.78)

Governments and businesses—especially large corporations—have responded to these insights about systematic innovation by improving their research & development teams, using more collaborative design processes, open-sourcing to find innovation and innovators, and restructuring to offer greater incentives. There are a wide range of new methodologies and strategies that have been developed to help foster and promote innovation. Yet in the social sector, where creative thinking abounds it is in fact the nonsensical and the move to unknowing which is more powerful than the knowing; it is the offering of questions and not the answers which brings the greatest innovation and social change (Born, 2008)

Other than indulging my cultural paranoia, there is no single meaning in this missive for there could be several, I merely wish to demonstrate that truth can be elusive; that knowledge is personal and relative; and to emphasize Orwell’s warnings, be conscious of the world of language and communication. As awareness of deep social trauma enters our lives, we must be aware of the attempts to conceal it. We must be aware of political attempts to use language, written or spoken, to create generalities of reality, to undermine the freedom and rights of all. Listen to your bosses and politicians adopt carefully crafted phrases and listen to yourself as you adopt those phrases; and remember what is suggested here, that nonsense and the incredulity it generates, may be more masterful marriage in the creation of positive and fruitful social change.

References:
Born, P.. 2008. Community Conversations, BPS Books, Toronto ON
Fivebodied, retrieved November 9, 2009 from http://www.fivebodied.com
Goodman, L. 1993. Linda Goodman’s Starsigns. St. Martins Press, New York, NY
Keeley, L., 2007. Taming of the New. SuccessBooks retrieved from
http://books.google.ca/books, November 15, 2009
Moody, B., 2001. Redeveloping Communication for Social Change. p. 878 from Communication for Social Change Anthology, Gumucio, A. Retrieved from http:// books.google.ca/books November 10, 2009.
Orwell, G., Politics and the English Language retrieved from
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit, November 7, 2009

One of my favourite pieces for MSU (Make Shit Up)

Playing Peek-a-Boo: Superfluous Engagement By and For The Matrix

Without apology, I am continuing in my attempt to learn while having my own fun communicating by means of a somewhat discordant narrative. The PCOM 640 Week 9 readings herein referred to, service this purpose ideally as a kind of rabbit hole by which to enter into a better understanding of the latest stages of humanity's complex relationship with all forms of media or what Marshall McLuhan called "the Extensions of Man."

After reading the Week 9 literate shards, Lyon and Niedzviecki respectively, I have experienced an unexpected kind of deja vu. Upon some reflection this reaction relates back to two points of recall. The first, as alluded to in the first paragraph, comes from McLuhan who discerned a subtle interplay between our physical bodies and the media; the bodies come and go, but media keeps building itself through time: we come to the point where the media builds itself and completes itself merging with our bodies. The second point of recall comes from a previous scanning of Baudrillard’s description of the hyperreal and in particular his description of the “Great game of Exchange” ( Baudrillard, p.7), a game grounded in an endless exchange of nothing.

According to Niedzviecki we are deep in the throws of "peep culture": a tell-all, show-all, know-all digital phenomenon that is dramatically altering notions of privacy, individuality, security, and even humanity. Peep culture refers to reality TV, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, chat rooms, amateur porn, surveillance technology, cell phones and more. Peep culture draws attention to the the irony that we are trying to look for community by moving in solitude into these technologies, for example it is more likely to see people in a social environment immersed in their IPhones and BlackBerrys instead of communicating with people in a room.

In consideration of my deja vu points of recall comes the first look down the rabbit hole. Rather than serving as antecedent of a narcissistic epoch I am instead drawn to a ‘McLuhanesque’ construct of an android hallucination that keeps us fixated on the content and not the effects. Another glance down the rabbit hole also reveals more clearly Baudrillard’s description of the “Great Game of Exchange” (p. 7), referring to an endless exchange of nothing; a game that leads in the end to the liquidation of everything and, “passing around the debt, the unreal unnameable thing you cannot get rid of” (p. 7). Niedzviecki’s peep culture is a portrayal of a media environment which creates and converts data into content which can be bought and sold. Ergo, peep culture merely serves to keep the economy operating. The phatic twittering, jabbering, texting, typing and talking (a digital matrix) is the endless exchange of nothing; its not the messages but rather it is the action of every one participating. As long as people are consuming and generating media we have an economy.

Both Lyon and Niedzviecki appear to be working with the idea that communication is shifting to being the exchange of visual images, and not the intuition and deduction of spoken phrases; a reversion from the aural to visual. A text received on a smart phone is not a conversation in the literate sense, it is an image. The text is the flashing of bright lights into the visual senses. Texting is not communication, it’s taking a flashlight to your corpus callosum just as McLuhan’s description of the nature of watching television. (McLuhan, 1988, p.47)

Overlaying the McLuhan / Baudrillard constructs, media culture and its analysis (this includes Lyon’s and Niedzviecki’s narratives) become an international common hallucination, an hallucination triggered by unprecedented visual interplay with our physical selves. The very act of engaging in theoretical constructs, arguing for their validity becomes and act of international common hallucination triggered by the digital matrix. Phatic discussion of who and how we are free, merely serves to further amplify a kind of paranoia of our digital age with its linch-pin being Orwellian allegory. As objects of ocular surveillance, our lives are depicted as no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum. Promoting the study of surveillance culture ultimately will deter any reference to the real but instead retrieve Orwellian analogies and further reaffirm our belief in the values associated with a mocked-up representation of the real; merely reaching, responding, and creating more content.

What people have been subjected to, i.e. the media completing itself and merging with our physicality, is beyond comprehension when held in comparison to the default Orwellian surveillance meme. Analyzing the digital matrix as a maturation chamber for emergent peep habits, or as a tool of surveillance is based on simple sender receiver constructs. Whereas McLuhan and Baudrillard show us media is about an experience which is beyond the dimensions of the physical body. We are all connecting our bodies into a massive network, creating a massive calculator. Forty years ago, Marshall McLuhan's description of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, in retrospect, hits the bulls-eye when applied to our interactive-media world:

"... Burroughs, whose world is a paradigm of a future in which there
can be no spectators but only participants. All men are totally
involved in the insides of all men. There is no privacy and no private
parts. In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one
another, there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. Such is
the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global
membrane of enclosure." (McLuhan, 1964).

Ironically, both Lyon and Niedzviecki are producing these matrix feeding weapons of mass instruction (a phrase borrowed from a book of the same title by John Taylor Gatto). The very processes they are attempting to subsume by illumination are relished by multinational markets craving to imbed the interaction of their laboratory designed, mass produced, digitized wealth. Facilitated by the flickering of millions of screens literate culture becomes a function of algorithms and digital outputs. What we regard as meaningful exploration of emerging social constructs is merely a literate media pantomime, an illusion of individuals participating in forms of media which is merely spectacle for the processing analyzing, filtering and transmitting of digital data into machines. This is not peep, pop, nor surveillance. Rather, it is the construct of digital computer networks building, completing, and merging themselves to the banality of a literate society flailing in the after-image of capitalism. (Bauldrillard, 2001)

Lyon and Niedzviecki have found their own rabbit hole, deep into the dialectic between culture and technology; striving to hoik up the political; seeking culpability, compliance, and legality by emphasizing a need to think about what privacy is and means to each individual. I’ve just begun to probe my own rabbit hole and I see that culture and technology have merged, and come alive. Technology has taken on a life of its own, and the digitized illusion of certainty has dissolved.

***

This information is top security. When you have read it, destroy yourself.
-Marshall McLuhan-


References:
Baudrillard, J. (2001). Impossible Exchanges. (C. Turner, Trans.). London: Verso. (Original work published 1999).
McLuhan, M. & McLuhan, E. (1988). Laws of Media: The New Science.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
McLuhan, M. (1964). The Nation, pp.517-19. retrieved April 2, 2009 from:
http://realitystudio.org/criticism/notes-on-burroughs/