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January 10, 2006

1000 DAYS OF THEORY

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Precision + Guided + Seeing

"Let's address this question of "precision" on two fronts: one, as a technologically-enabled drive toward efficiency and accuracy -- a drive to augment human capabilities by developing new human-machine composites, connecting and joining forces with multiple processing agencies, wherever or whatever they might be; and two, as a technologically-assisted drive to reduce mediation and offer a form of direct connection to our real objects of inquiry. We might call these the effective and the affective. Both aim for the goal of instantaneous vision: a real time perceptual agency in which multiple actors, both human and machinic, are networked and able to act in concert. A real time perceptual agency in which time and space intervals can be eliminated, reducing the gaps between detection, analysis, and engagement, or desire and its attainment. A real time perceptual agency that can somehow touch the real.

Yet the drive for the real, as Zizek suggests, always culminates in its opposite: theatrical spectacle. Why? Because the real is only able to be sustained if we fictionalize it.[2] To look for the real, then, is not to look for it directly: it is to look to our fictions, discerning how reality is "transfunctionalized" through them.

[3] Perhaps the real object of the precision-drive is not only arrived at through reduction, but through expansion. To look to the object of the precision-drive is not only to narrow the optic, honing in on the target of attention: it is to look to the cultural fictions in which the object becomes lodged. It is to open the optic; theatricalize it. To accommodate cultural fictions is to acknowledge the constitutive role of conflict. What aspects of the real are transfunctionalized through our conflict imaginaries?" From Precision + Guided + Seeing by Jordan Crandall, CTHEORY: 1000 DAYS OF THEORY, VOL 29, NOS 1-2, Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker

Posted by jo at January 10, 2006 05:23 PM

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