another way of looking @ it

Another idea that has returned into my mind at this time of year, when the days grow longer yet busy is the ancient Greek way of looking at time.

Damned Camp & Readymades

The two remaining issues to be resolved and completed with this dissertation blog are:

1) one minor revision to include of the philosophy and ideas of Marcel Duchamp, exploring the link between art and hoax which is so evident (yet self-concealing) in his Readymades

...but in addition to Duchamp, I'm going to add some related comments regarding Charles Fort's ideas of "damned data" as it relates to both Schirmacher and Zielinski - particularly to the idea of Variantology.

...and potentially make some brief references to Susan Sontag's brilliant & short essay "Notes on Camp" - largely because 'camp' is concerned with aesthetics and virisimilitude and as such is closely related to outright hoax.


2) submit the final version in .pdf for initial online publication on the EGS website.

...beyond that, I am gearing up to teach a 2nd year of the online portion of Zielinski's course "The History of Audiovisuality"
(and get all of this done along with some new syllabi during the winter break)

2 Page vs. 1 Page

The dissertation has left the building.

Three copies were mailed to my committee. The package weighed 7.6 pounds. The biggest hitch I ran into was editing my abstract from 2 pages down to 1 page. After wracking my brain for just under three hours, I distilled the abstract down to 2 pages. The instructions from my advisor were very clear, and in fact used all caps when it states "please submit a ONE PAGE abstract via email."

Knowing that I am far too close to this material to make any more cuts, I simply ran the 2 page verision through MS Word's auto-sumarization, told it to reduce by 50%. 1.8 seconds later was my one page abstract. I gave it a quick once-over, and then printed it out.

So gague for yourself here are the two abstracts.


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The 2 Page Version

Documentary Simulations: An Epistemology of Hoax and Paradox

A Dissertation Submitted to the Division of Media and Communications
Of the European Graduate School in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
By William Hanff

Abstract:

Hoaxes under Attack:

In our world of electronic media simulations, the Hoax is under attack. With the rise of mass culture the classical concepts of hoax and paradox have been knocked from a place of honor into the realm of the either the trivial or the malicious. How could any concept be considered both immaterial and treacherous? Surely the hoax still holds great power if our current attitude towards it is so paradoxical. The hoax had existed in tandem with accepted historical knowledge, but with the rise of rational scientism, the hoax and other forms of dissimulation in art face their current denigration.

Living in, with, and through their electronic media, contemporary humankind has extended their senses and knowledge of the world into areas where previous ideas of fiction versus nonfiction are no longer applicable. But in the philosophy of rational empiricism it would appear to an academic, literate skeptic that an audience which perceives their outer world through an electronic medium would have few guides for discerning a simulation of reality or a representation of an actual occurrence, from an entertaining dissimulation or simulacra of a fantasy.

Suspension of Disbelief:

Previously, suspension of disbelief had been experienced in terms of contrivance and play, and was not rationally attempted. Once it became ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, it was subject to what Martin Heidegger called technological enframing. It seeks to ‘set upon’ fictional or fantastic narratives and to make them part of the spectacle in the service of technology itself which requires humanity to see all phenomenon as resources to be exploited – including humanity’s own imagination.

Suspension of disbelief is never static and is only rarely conscious. A ‘sliding suspension of disbelief’ becomes necessary to gather information through mediated simulations about the external world from electronic media. This is an example of Wolfgang Schirmacher’s idea of media as ‘life technique’ wherein contrivance and suspension of disbelief occurs at multiple levels of human thought. As a life technique, audiences remain briefly aware of their suspension of disbelief, but then self-conceal this differentiation, in order to continue perceiving their world through their media. These life techniques in general, or hoaxes in particular, are used to mentally engage with new sense perceptions which require sliding suspension of disbelief. The future generations of humanity will require not only improved technology, but also improved life techniques for both seriously and playfully engaging with the electronic media from which they gather facts.

An Archeology of Hoaxing:

In history paradoxes and hoaxes indicate cultural leaps particularly regarding media development. But hoaxes resist the meta-narratives of literate history, and therefore a history of hoaxing must avoid the linearity of western literate hegemony. Using the concept of media archeology past hoaxes can be explored, yet while time-bound, need not uncover a linear history. While placing artifacts in the context of the greater social and historical events, archeology ideally leaves open connections to other researchers’ insights and interpretations.

History of Documentary in the Electronic Age:

Documentary film is a media simulation which exists through the mass production of technical images which, despite its inherent simulated nature of itself, nonetheless still attempts to represent natural truth in the world from a camera and production apparatus point of view. The hoax and the documentary are reflections of each other in paradox. The documentary has been highjacked, and is only allowed to reveal, the hoax has been denigrated, and is only conceptualized in terms of what it conceals.

An ‘Immodest Proposal’:

However hoax and paradox have within them the possibility of overthrowing the order which has enframed them, to create a ‘eureka’-moment. Their ironic, self-concealing nature allows them to occasionally drag their audiences to see familiar phenomenon as foreign, and anew.

With this in mind a new genre of media production will be proposed: the Hoaxumentary - using production techniques of film and television documentary, together with concepts from effective hoaxes from history. The hoaxumentary will be indistinguishable from a documentary. It is not satire nor mockumentary, but rather a real documentary about false, yet interesting events. It will briefly reveal the dissimulation of the media, before concealing again within its paradoxical nature.

Rehabilitation of the Hoax:

The media hoax exists firmly in these times when irony works together with paradox to bring about better or fuller understanding of media, precisely because its negativity requires that it withdraw from immediate consciousness. Irony is a mode of epistemology which has the possibility of bringing about changes in how humanity interacts with its media, especially electronic media. It is Søren Kierkegaard’s ‘Leap of Faith’ from enframing rationalism to playful veridicality. It is a rescuing of the hoax by those media producers who do not fear their media

As electronic media evolves into hypermedia, we must create a genre of media hoaxes designed to push far past the fastidiousness of rational skepticism, to create hoaxes that are funny, outrageous, scary, dramatic, and intense enough to ‘cover their tracks’ but remain ever so close to its audience. We must fearlessly make our media hoaxes into art.


=============================
The 1 Page Version

Documentary Simulations: An Epistemology of Hoax and Paradox
A Dissertation Submitted to the Division of Media and Communications
Of the European Graduate School in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
By William Hanff

Abstract:

In our world of electronic media simulations, the Hoax is under attack. The hoax had existed in tandem with accepted historical knowledge, but with the rise of rational scientism, the hoax and other forms of dissimulation in art face their current denigration.

A ‘sliding suspension of disbelief’ becomes necessary to gather information through mediated simulations about the external world from electronic media. This is an example of Wolfgang Schirmacher’s idea of media as ‘life technique’ wherein contrivance and suspension of disbelief occurs at multiple levels of human thought. As a life technique, audiences remain briefly aware of their suspension of disbelief, but then self-conceal this differentiation, in order to continue perceiving their world through their media. These life techniques in general, or hoaxes in particular, are used to mentally engage with new sense perceptions that require sliding suspension of disbelief.

In history paradoxes and hoaxes indicate cultural leaps particularly regarding media development. But hoaxes resist the meta-narratives of literate history, and therefore a history of hoaxing must avoid the linearity of western literate hegemony. Using the concept of media archeology past hoaxes can be explored, yet while time-bound, need not uncover a linear history.

Documentary film is a media simulation that exists through the mass production of technical images which, despite its inherent simulated nature of itself, nonetheless still attempts to represent natural truth in the world from a camera and production apparatus point of view. The hoax and the documentary are reflections of each other in paradox.
It will briefly reveal the dissimulation of the media, before concealing again within its paradoxical nature.

The media hoax exists firmly in these times when irony works together with paradox to bring about better or fuller understanding of media, precisely because its negativity requires that it withdraw from immediate consciousness. Irony is a mode of epistemology which has the possibility of bringing about changes in how humanity interacts with its media, especially electronic media. It is a rescuing of the hoax by those media producers who do not fear their media

As electronic media evolves into hypermedia, we must create a genre of media hoaxes designed to push far past the fastidiousness of rational skepticism, to create hoaxes that are funny, outrageous, scary, dramatic, and intense enough to ‘cover their tracks’ but remain ever so close to its audience. We must fearlessly make our media hoaxes into art.

Introduction (Again)

Chapter 1: Introduction

The Hoax Under Attack

In our world of electronic media simulations, the Hoax is under attack, despite its proliferation and notoriety. With the rise of mass culture the classical concepts of hoax and paradox have been knocked from a place of intellectual and social honor into the realm of the inconsequential and trivial or the purvey of unabashed maliciousness. How could any concept, particularly one which had been held in high esteem, be considered either immaterial to where it is not worth seriously discussing, or treacherous to the point where it should not be tolerated? Surely the hoax still holds great power if our current attitude towards it is so openly paradoxical. “Nevertheless, as frequently happens, the misunderstanding and the minimization of a phenomenon, far from signifying that it is remote and extraneous, are rather symptoms of a proximity so intolerable as to require camouflage and repression.” (Agamben 1992, p.5)
Throughout the history of western civilization the hoax, like theatre, existed in tandem with accepted historical knowledge. The genres of parody and paradoxorgaphy existed literally side-by-side with accepted canons of literature. Only with the rise of rational scientism and free market capitalism in the early modern era did the hoax, and other forms of dissimulation in art, face their current plight.
“ ‘Techne’ was the Greek philosophy of life. In that time, art was not yet conceived of separately from technology, from the work of the artist. Not until the one-sided preference for usefulness in the modern age, and the systematic design for the domination of nature following Bacon’s teachings, did technology become a weapon against nature. And with it, meaning of art was subjugated.” (Schirmacher 1983) Modern epistemologies could only conceptualize and allow ‘revealing’ as a mode of knowing. This was a result of the ossification of rhetoric in the linear mold of literate thought which could not allow paradox and hoax to challenge its hermeneutics. This literate, rationalist culture could only allow for reasoning by induction and deduction. To eliminate complexity, the Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries excised intersubjectivity and emotional logic. The result was a loss of imagination within the realm of empiricism and rationalism.
This Enlightenment project was already in the thrall of a technological enframing which sets upon humanity to conceive of hoax and paradox (as well as science fiction, advertisements, etc) as fodder and content for media, and not as media itself. This enframing forces us to conceive of media in terms of its utilitarian instrumentalism, and the genres of media simply as content – not as techniques with which an audience interfaces with its world. Thus despite a proliferation of images and moving images, despite the fact that there is an imagistically dense electronic media, replete with hoaxes and paradoxes – these hoaxes and paradoxes are under threat of being ignored and sidelined in the world of media, exactally when we need them most.
As a people of media, as those who live their lives in, with, and through media – as contemporary philosophers, we must come to the aid of Hoax and Paradox.

From Mimesis to Simulation
Most of humanity lives in an artificially constructed world, where the majority of day-to-day knowledge and general learning is derived from electronically mediated sources. Electronic technologies are used to create and distribute audiovisual information to humankind. With each new technology there is a greater ability for this audiovisual information to be endlessly altered, edited, improved, or counterfeited. By living in, with, and through their electronic media, and in an epistemology of electronically mediated learning, contemporary humankind has extended their senses and knowledge of the world into areas where previous ideas of fiction versus nonficion are no longer applicable. Hypermedia leads naturally to hyperreality, which is not a loss of reality, but instead a new relationship to reality. However, within the philosophy of rational empiricism it would appear to an academic, literate skeptic that an audience which perceives their outer world through an electronic medium would have few guides for discerning a simulation of reality or a representation of an actual occurrence, from an entertaining dissimulation or simulacra of a fantasy.
The rise of technical images in audiovisual simulations has changed how humanity conceives of itself as ‘audience’ and their surroundings as ‘spectacle’: “…the spectacle’s job is to cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seen via different specialized mediations.” (Debord 1994, p. 17) The rationalist, alarmist, reaction to this change would be to rail against the highjacking of images by audiovisual electronic media, “When you are watching television all categories of your own image-making capacities go dormant, submerged in the television image. TV effectively intervenes between you and your images, substituting itself.” (Mander 1978, p. 240) This view is typical of media critics who seek to delineate fiction from nonfiction in media and simulated from immediate experience, “Once the images are inside your head, the mind doesn’t really distinguish between the image that was gathered directly and the one derived from television.” (Mander 1978, p. 245) Others simply try to reconcile entertainment into rationalism.
“Every film is a documentary. Even the most whimsical of fictions gives evidence of the culture that produced it and reproduces the likenesses of the people who perform within it. In fact, we could say that there are two kinds of film: (1) documentaries of wish-fulfillment and (2) documentaries of social representation. Each type tells a story, but the stories, or narratives, are of different sorts.” (Nichols 2001, p. 1)
Rationalists who strike out at any non-rationalism are dangerously zealous and are unaware of the influence of technological enframing upon them. Any crisis of reality in media is overstated. Living in their simulated worlds, audiences of electronic media are able to discern which realities may be consciously trusted and those which are entertaining fantasies, and to the consternation of rational empiricists and media theorists, most audiences simply do not care. This does not make an average audience less aware than rationalist media philosophers who point to their ‘intellectual flaw’. As a group, humankind is not completely in the thrall of television, film, and other visual entertainment media. This is not to say that some individuals of human society aren’t. The majority of humankind has learned how to discern – not perfectly, not always, not even consistently – useable true facts from entertaining fictions. And living through, with, and in their media, audiences remain aware of these distinctions, but then self-conceal this differentiation, in order to continue perceiving their world through their media. This revealing and concealing of an audience’s relationship with media has been a philosophical inquiry throughout western history, it is currently mis-identified as a “Willing Suspension of Disbelief”. The suspension of disbelief is only, very occasionally willing; it quickly retreats into self-concealment.
As Heidegger points out in The Question Concerning Technology, the essence of a concept and its praxis are not identical. The essence of suspension of disbelief is not at all like its technical manifestation. In order to come to the rescue of the hoax, we must come to understand the true essence of suspension of disbelief, and the nature of the truth it retrieves as Heidegger’s concept of ancient Greek ‘aletheia’. In practice, the nature of suspension of disbelief and hoax are self-concealing, they are necessarily misunderstood by most inquiries which seek to understand them.
Ancient Greek philosophy of theatre brought forth the concepts of ritual and audience. Aristotle saw in the ritual aspects of the theatre an ability to transmit archetypal truths within individual fictitious narratives. It is the contrivance of the ritual and the suspension of disbelief, the willingness to be hoaxed, by a group of people coming together which reconceptualizes them from a simple group into a dramatic ‘audience’. Effectively the ritual nature of suspension of disbelief creates the concept of audience. Once self-created, the audience’s function was to engage with the narrative, despite its spectacle, in order to culturally learn from the story. “The poet’s function is not to report things as they have happened, but rather to tell of such things as might happen, things that are possibilities by virtue of being in themselves inevitable or probable.” (Poetics §14451a)
As the first media epistemologists, the ancient Greeks were active at a time where the rise of written language was separating learning-from-theatre and learning-from-writing, which persisted for 2,500 years of western history. Valued information and facts were transcribed into the linear form of writing, while the archetypal knowledge of the world from drama and theatrical representations was, over time, relegated to the realm of entertainment or moralistic fables for the masses. With the rise of the mass production of images through electronic technologies, learning from dramatic representations is reintegrating with literate knowledge. This makes the rescue of the hoax and paradox all the more important at this phase in history. The time is right, we have never needed the hoax more.

Representations in Media
At the beginning of the modern era, the creation of images moved from small scale theatrical representations and individual works of art to the mass production of images and the photographic recording and electronic distribution of events. Vilém Flusser refers to these as ‘technical images’ – those images which are created based on applied scientific texts. These images differ considerably from older traditional images. These mass-produced technical images seek to rejoin learning from writing and learning from seeing, however, “…they cannot reduce culture to the lowest common denominator, as was intended, but, on the contrary, they grind it up into amorphous masses. Mass culture is the result.” (Flusser 1983, p. 19) Additionally the enframing of technology that was the result of the proliferation of mass production created a philosophy which sought to denigrate hoaxes and paradoxes. Philosophers and media critics stuck in 19th century rational empiricism began to see dissimulation as a negative effect of their new mass media.

Technologies
As these technologies spread, humanity is returning to learning of its environment from representations of outer events. However, along with simulations of reality, they will encounter new media simulations which are openly dramatic contrivances. Walter Benjamin remarked that, “By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieu under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.” (Benjamin 1969, p. 248) To the rational empiricists this return of conductive logic and intersubjectivity was viewed negatively because these developing media of mass production had created a new middle class, with a new connection to old archetypes and a powerful means of new life through this new media. Among the growing middle class there was a growing mental self-determination.
Therefore at the beginning of the attack upon the hoax by logical positivists and rational empiricists, there was a 19th century revolution in media epistemology, brought about by the invention of the photographic camera and the mass production of public ideas through the mechanization of the printing press. Perhaps the most decisive blow against the hoax was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s coining of the phrase “willing suspension of disbelief”:
“…my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to produce for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” (Coleridge 1817)

Although the idea of suspension of disbelief had been well charted in western literature, particularly in the study of ritual, play, and paradox, Coleridge was the first to coalesce the idea into this exact description in 1817. Although he was defending the idea of romanticism and the fantastic in literature against dry realism, his phrase did exceptional damage to the concept by couching suspension of disbelief in terms of conscious rational beliefs. Before it had been experienced in terms of contrivance and play, and was never rationally attempted. Once suspension of disbelief became conscious and ‘willing,’ it was subject to technological enframing. From this point in history the technology of image-making grew quickly in complexity and proficiency until it reached the current level where differentiation between truthful representations and fictitious representations in media simulations becomes difficult, exactly when the mechanism for unconsciously differentiating them had been co-opted into rational discourse.
As all communication takes place through some form mimesis and all electronically mediated experiences are simulations of one kind or another, suspension of disbelief is a necessary technique for a mediated representation to be a functional mode of epistemological learning. However Coleridge’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ in its attempt to reveal without concealing, enframes and oversimplifies the process, from a multi-leveled event to a simple phenomenon.
Although Heidegger believed that “the question as to how we arrive at a relationship with technology always comes too late.” (Heidegger, p. 14), Conceiving of media through ‘suspension of disbelief’ was popularized by Coleridge at the historical point where image making was about to become industrialized. This life technique, this philosophy, this cliché, this idea – coalesced in society just in time. Wolfgang Schirmacher sets forth the idea that these life techniques are not usually conscious, “a Technique needs no justification or understanding in order to work”. He continues that they often conceal their very existence. Addressing the concept of “Media Cloning”, as a form of extended simulation, explains how this function of media can work:
“What cloning does with its spectacle is to reveal our fundamental activity as Homo generator and at the same moment to conceal the way any generation makes a home in the ethical worlds of bioscaping, soul, Geviert (balance) and kairos (timing). It is the signature of truth to erase its signing right after the fact in order to allow the on-going folding, unfolding and refolding to be done in peace.” (Schirmacher 2000)

Media hoaxes function as this type of life technique, helping to bring about this sliding suspension of disbelief in individual members of an electronic media’s audience, while allowing this sliding suspension of disbelief retreats and is almost completely unknown to this audience.
The ‘life technique’ of media contrivance and suspension of disbelief occurs at the perceptual level and the empirical level. The audience must allow the representation to be perceived as a reality, long enough to appropriate its meaning. Only after the initial meaning is appropriated and digested, can the audience either continue to suspend disbelief, in order to enjoy a pleasing fiction, or to skeptically discard the information, at a rational level. Without a means for testing, the process of suspension of disbelief would allow all audiences to be totally permeable to any and all media representations regardless of how useful or true they were. Without a desire to test media, audiences would discard all mediated simulations as worthless. In other words a perfectly un-skeptical suspension of disbelief would not allow an audience the ability to act based on their media perceptions; a perfectly skeptical lack of suspension of disbelief would not allow an audience to gather perceptions or meaning from electronic media at all. Suspension of disbelief must be able to adapt to the situation in which an audience finds itself.
Throughout literate history paradoxes and hoaxes have filled this need. Paradoxes formally lay out the limits of knowledge in theory, while hoaxes test the limits of credibility in practice. Many paradoxes and hoaxes became historically significant in and of themselves: the Liar’s paradox, the Trojan Horse, Zeno’s paradoxes, Swift’s A Modest Proposal, Mencken’s Bathtub Hoax, Welles’ War of the Worlds, and Sokal’s Transgressing Boundaries. Paradoxes mark the edge of accepted academic learning. Hoaxes are the test that an audience undergoes at odd intervals to remind itself that the mediated experience is a simulated experience and that representations can just as easily be false as true. Hoaxes briefly unconceal suspension of disbelief, but then retreat into spectacle, and thus allow an audience a broader (mediated) picture of which could be based on the audience’s cultural archetypes.
Because new media technologies have changed mediated representations into an electronic simulation through (perceptually coercive) technical images, contemporary media hoaxes keep an audience critical of important non-fiction simulations, while at the same time allowing them to access their archetypes through the spectacle. ‘Spectacle’ and ‘fascination’, as defined by the French post-modernists, play a large part in electronic media in general, and mass entertainment in particular. Their upside is a playfulness and détournement; their downside is coerciveness and the blinding of the audience to the essence of media. How an audience, and individual members of that audience, learns to live with, through, and inside these inherently coercive technical aspects of visual electronic media will determine whether television and film, in general, and journalism and documentary filmmaking in particular, remain free to function in their true nature, or whether these genres, as well as hoax and paradox, will be appropriated into larger media instrumentalist matrices concerned primarily with persuasion and commerce.
Suspension of disbelief is never static and is only rarely conscious. When an audience engages with a specific mediated narrative, it does so at specific levels of suspension of disbelief. Individual works of media take on the aspects of ritual as event, whether they are categorized as fiction or non-fiction, rely on narrative form, mimesis, and representation. This ritual aspect is detailed in Aristotle’s Poetics and further expanded by media philosophers in the 19th and 20th centuries. “Ritual Participation is not primarily a matter of watching, but acting and being engaged with the sights, sounds, smells of the ritual event.” (Goethals 1981, p. 127) The contemporary technological equivalent of classical theatrical narrative representation is media simulation, particularly visual simulation. Both experiences are representations of character and archetype, as defined by psychoanalysts like C.G. Jung: “…the archetype is an element of our psychic structure and thus a vital and necessary component in our psychic economy. It represents or personifies certain instinctive data of the dark primitive psyche; the real, the invisible roots of consciousness.” (Jung 1949, p. 341)


Simulations of Mimesis
Film, television or any electronic mediated experience of a narrative story is a simulation of a representation of character and archetype, an abstraction of an abstraction. The technology adds another level of complexity. Both representations and simulations actively retrieve older archetypes through contemporary media production clichés. This is a key argument from McLuhan’s Cliché to Archetype. “The archetype is a retrieved awareness or consciousness. It is consequently a retrieved cliché – and old cliché retrieved by a new cliché.” (McLuhan 1970, p. 21) However, the simulation extends perception farther with unintentional cultural results. “As we tend to extend consciousness itself by new technology, we probe all, we scrap all, in a deluge of fragments of cultures for creativity.” (McLuhan 1970, p. 158) This is mirrored in Zizek’s Parallax View where he criticizes society, “in neo-Darwinism, human individuals are conceived as mere instruments – or rather vehicles – of the reproduction of ‘their’ genes, and analogously, human culture, the cultural activity of mankind, as a vehicle for the proliferation of ‘memes’.” Zizek fights against this instrumentalism, “Insofar as nineteenth-century ‘demystification’ is a reduction of the noble appearance to some ‘lower’ reality (Marx-Nietzsche-Freud), then the twentieth century as another turn of the screw by rehabilitating (a weird, previously unheard-of) appearance itself.” (Zizek 2006, p. 151)
Assuming that Jung and McLuhan’s archetype-retrieval system is a workable model for media representations, then Martin Heidegger’s idea that the essence of technology as an ‘enframing” of the world as a ‘standing reserve’ (of deep archetype images that are used as a means-of-learning), are an epistemological category regardless of whether they reflect true facts. “Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.” (Heidegger 1977, p. 20) The essence of technology is not technical in the way that film or television production techniques are technical, but rather it is a “means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology…and which is itself nothing technological”. (Heidegger 1977, p. 20)
Conscious ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ is simply another form of technological enframing. It seeks to ‘set upon’ fictional or fantastic narratives and to make them part of the spectacle in the service, first of the commercial interests of media production, then by technology itself which requires humanity to see all phenomenon as resources to be exploited – including humanity’s own imagination!
A multi-leveled ‘sliding suspension of disbelief’ is a “poetic faith” (Coleridge) that allows the archetypes to be retrieved and used for empirical learning. At the height of rational empirical western culture in the mid to late 19th century, literate representations in media quickly reached an single operating level for suspension of disbelief. The individual would remain at this level of suspension of disbelief for the duration of the mediated narrative. In contemporary media usage, the late 20th and early 21st century, post-literate hypermedia require a sophisticated audience to seamlessly, rapidly, and frequently move between different levels of suspension of disbelief within narrative structures – e.g. tabloid newspapers, internet websites, online games, television documentaries, docu-dramas and many more. Due to an overall increase of information exchange, made possible through new media technologies, narratives become units in meta-narratives.
Each individual narrative requires a different level of suspension of disbelief. Simply to engage these new complex media, a sliding suspension of disbelief must be developed by members of the electronic media’s audience. This sliding suspension of disbelief – this epistemological movement – is required when moving between news broadcasts and commercial messages, within docu-dramas which include archival footage inside mediated narratives, and constantly while moving through websites via hyperlinks.
Because suspension of disbelief is engaged at a perceptual level, an empirical level, and only occasionally at a rational level, the term ‘sliding suspension of disbelief’ only rarely involves conscious rational empirical epistemology. Suspension of disbelief is first the unconscious creating of perception, then the liminal creating of empirical facts and ideas, then finally the rational creating of an understanding and knowledge. Only at this highest level could the term ‘willing’ be attached to the technique of a sliding suspension of disbelief.

Why Study Hoaxes?
In a electronically mediated world, a sliding suspension of disbelief becomes necessary to gather useable truths through mediated simulations about the external world. Throughout written history, humankind has developed formal and informal means to test the credibility of sense perceptions, empirical data and rational abstractions, immediate or mediated. Scientific quantification, skepticism and formal pragmatism, paradoxes and hoaxes have all played this role. However, due to the hidden nature of technology and science, skepticism and formal pragmatism only create truth by revealing. This in turn leads to more technological enframing of all phenomenon as resources, and eventual collapse of meaning into the spectacle.
On the other hand, paradoxes and hoaxes conceal as much knowledge as they reveal. They create more unknown than known, and by concealing themselves as means of knowing their own paradoxical nature rescues them from the enframing of technology.
Because of this unique attribute, and their suitability to the narrative form of entertainment media and electronic media, this investigation seeks to explore the history, nature, and operation of hoax, and by extension paradox. Both paradoxes and hoaxes allow their audiences access to narrative archetypes. However, formal paradoxes are slow and, like rationalism and skepticism, require a high amount of education and literacy in order to be effectively engaged by an audience. Hoaxes, on the other hand, are easily accessible, and often serve an entertainment function in and of themselves. A hoax is difficult to adequately define, largely because the hoax is self-concealing by nature. Thus the hoax runs the risk being confused with other forms of instrumental deception and malicious dissimulation. For the sake of discussion and as a point of departure, this investigation will use the malleable definition, put from by Alex Boese in his popular work The Museum of Hoaxes: “A hoax, then, is a deliberately deceptive act that has succeeded in capturing the attention (and, ideally, the imagination) of the public.” (Boese 2002, p. 2) He clarifies further, “A deception rises to the level of a hoax by achieving public notoriety.” (Boese 2002, p. 2)
Before the degradation of the hoax by rational philosophy, they were a valuable epistemological means of testing dramatic representations and media simulations. Despite the rise of postmodern epistemological philosophies, which embraced the ideas of inter-subjective truth, the hoax is still in peril, because some postmodern philosophers fear hoaxes could undermine and subvert the authority they have wrested from empiricists. They couldn’t be more mislead. In their application, both postmodern philosophy and hoaxes create an alternative to the enframing of technology – they offer mental technologies for interacting with the world and reinventing themselves. These life techniques in general, or credibility-testing hoaxes in particular, are used to mentally engage with new sense perceptions which require sliding suspension of disbelief. The future generations of humanity will require not only improved technology, but also improved life techniques for both seriously and playfully engaging with the electronic media from which they gather facts. Although suspension of disbelief occurs both consciously and unconsciously, an undisciplined suspension of disbelief is likely to be highjacked by an inhuman corporate construct concerned with persuasion and commerce.

Putting On The Audience
During the early phases of ancient Greek drama, a poet/performer was considered to ‘become’ his audience while performing for them. This was accomplished by the technical use of masks and stylistic clichés of poetic language syntax. The phrase ‘You’re putting me on!’ is derived from this relationship between mediator and audience. As a performer donned a costume and mask, they physically ‘put on’ the archetypes that were inherent in the audience. The performer was expected to ‘put on’ the audience, and with their active contrivance, deceive the audience. To the Greeks, mimesis in drama was a space where the audience could allow itself to be carried away, and conceptually expanded, in order to retrieve and reconnect to the long-standing archetypes that were implicit in itself, but which must remain concealed by their nature. “If the narrator avoids realistic pictorial description in favor of stylized and iconic blocks, he can include more of the environmental complexity and motivation than realism permits.” (McLuhan 1970, p. 204) “…to get into a role as opposed to merely having a job, is to put on the corporate social power of one’s culture.” (McLuhan 1970, p. 204)
The growth and proliferation of media technology and production clichés, for example in big-budget, high-concept Hollywood filmmaking, which requires very high levels of suspension of disbelief, attests to this continuing need of mass audiences. The technical use of film effects and stylistic clichés of scriptwriting have replaced physical masks and spoken hexameter. These media production values, which require suspension of disbelief in media narratives, have filtered down into all forms of electronically mediated communication. In order to use electronic media effectively, the audience must unconsciously appreciate the production clichés, be able to test its suspension of disbelief, and then adjust it accordingly. In contemporary mass media culture, the ability to suspend disbelief while still critically engaging media is of utmost importance.
It is in not surprising that the phrase ‘You’re putting me on!’ is still in the popular vernacular for describing the event when an audience notices that a hoax has moved into a media realm which had been considered ‘nonfiction’. What is interesting is how these hoax-esque production clichés move from narrative fiction into other genres of media. This relationship between hoaxes, production clichés, and nonfiction electronic media is perhaps the most active area of hoaxing and paradox, and will inform many of the practical explorations of this investigation. What is the relationship between documentary film production and famous hoaxes? What role do archetypes play in media clichés?


Structure of Explorations
In order to better understand why the hoax has been under attack and to devise methods for its reëvaluation and rehabilitation, this investigation will seek to explore several questions. The first exploration, as it is fundamental to both hoax and media, will concern the suspension of disbelief and delve into the epistemologies of media, the relevance of archetypes, and the challenge of the spectacle and technological enframing (Chapter 2). After conceptualizing media epistemology, this investigation will explore with the documentary film, because it is a paradoxical media genre which claims to represent a truth in media simulations. Exploration of this history will also look for the connections between the history of documentary simulations and the technologies which have been employed to create and distribute them (Chapter 3). Following the identified connections to technology and technical images, this investigation will probe the background of literacy, its birth in ancient Greece, its massifiaction through industrialism, and its rationalist assault on hoaxes and indirect communication, then finally literacy’s evolution into Ulmer’s concept of electracy in hypermedia (Chapter 4). Using Zielinski’s concepts of deep time and media archeology, this investigation will embark on an ‘archeology of hoaxing’ and find the points in history where hoax and paradox were especially pronounced and active, and explore 19th century pop culture and the relationship between reproducibility and credibility (Chapter 5). Using the artifacts and ideas from the explorations into documentary and hoaxing which will lead to an “Immodest Proposal”. A paradoxical proposal of searching for mediated truth through deliberate, but archetypal misinformation. This “Immodest Proposal” entails creating, producing, releasing, and nurturing occasional hoaxes and playful epistemologies in the global internetworks of entertainment, journalism, and commerce. For the sake of scope, only the popular television documentary will be parodied – because it has an established history and easily copied genre conventions. This investigation will suggest a new media form based on documentary film and television called the “Hoaxumentary” (Chapter 6). Because all good hoax media is a balance of concealing and revealing of reality and knowing, this investigation will compare media and paradox in terms of their ability to engage in narrative while testing technologies (Chapter 7). Lastly this investigation will return to the initial discussions of contrivance and theatrics which created the audience in the forge of paradox and suspension of disbelief – specifically the ideas of epideixis, epyllion and epic theatre (Chapter 8).
All of this investigation will give some insight into the nature of suspension of disbelief, theatrics, contrivance, documentary film and television, literacy and electracy, technology and the value of hoax and paradox in contemporary media and hypermedia. Although this will answer the question of why the hoax is persecuted and belittled, it leaves unaddressed what can be done to rehabilitate hoaxes, and why rehabilitation of the hoax is so vital. For this we turn from the media hoax as phenomenon to conceiving the media hoax as event (Ereignis). As stated earlier in this chapter, the hoax is a form of life technique which requires a leap of faith on the part of its audience, and repays this leap with a much deeper and fuller experience of their world (Chapter 9).

A Call to Action, A Call to Hoax
As contemporary media users, humankind needs to devise for itself increasingly and concisely believable scenarios and narratives, in order to test the believability of electronic media, and then immediately ignore this test and continue living in this very same media. Any media which attempts to rationally say something about itself will by nature become a paradox and automatically re-conceal its nature. The “Immodest Proposal” of hoaxumentaries should act as a contemporary media version of the classic Greek epyllion, coercive advertising, the imagination of children, or contemporary science fiction. We must create a genre of media hoaxes designed to push far past the fastidiousness of rational skepticism, to create hoaxes that are funny, outrageous, scary, dramatic, and intense enough to ‘cover their tracks’ but remain ever so close to its audience. To be interesting enough to allow for what Schirmacher calls the ‘secret task of media’ – for the media to allow humanity to see what it could become without being aware of the self-same functioning – to be a media life technique.
There is an obvious epistemological paradox of searching for truth in media by looking at deliberate untruths, and of using misinformation and lies within hoaxes to create a larger and more durable notion of truth. Playfully, Debord points out an interesting paradox of contemporary mediated epistemology, “In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.” (Debord, p. 14)
We now stand just before another turning point in the history of image making, when images begin to return to the primary means of moving information, the primary means of learning and the primary means of epistemology. As a global network blends written and imagistic symbols and the idea of post-literate, post-historic culture emerges, electronic media epistemology will need to move from willing suspension of disbelief to sliding suspension of disbelief.
We must rescue and rehabilitate the hoax, and restore its unique mode of epistemology and entertainment. We must learn to hoax ourselves better with our new audiovisual hypermedia, at the point where suspension of disbelief moves from being a phenomenon to an event. Now is the time to act. Now is the time to hoax.

Chapter 4 & more mind dumps

Posted here is about 20 pages which roughly make up chapter 4. It's mostly here for my own edification, so that I know that I am getting somewhere with this.

If someone is inclined to read this, I promise it will be largely unreadable, but there are some pretty good ideas lurking deep in here.

From Literacy to Electricity

As chapter three traced the development of “the documentary” throughout the history of the electronic era (which is also the contemporary era), this chapter will trace the evolution of social learning from textual literacy into hyper-text-based communication through an electronic medium, which uses linear text, symbols, icons, moving image simulations and deep-based human archetypes. While this emerging postmodern form of communication does have many names, this investigation will be focusing on Gregory Ulmer’s concepts of “electracy” as “writing-with-electricity”, which itself is based on some of the theories of Jacques Derrida. Ulmer’s ideas based upon Derrida’s Applied Grammatology deal with the philosophy of writing, however, when dealing with ‘writing-with-electricity’ the entire form of writing changes into a more sophisticated idea where images become the quanta of idea formation. This drastically changes the grammar of the information being conveyed, and retrieves a mode of information exchange which predates literate writing – based in the oral myth-making and early religious rituals which later became codified as “theatre” in many cultures [for the sake of simplicity this investigation will keep focused upon early Greek myth-making and theatre]. Therefore, tracing this development chronologically, this investigation will begin with several of the pre-Socratic philosopher’s and their ideas of learning using mental concepts prior to written alphabets. Particularly Zeno, Anaxamander and the dialogues of Georgias (which, while Georgia is a pre-Socratic philosopher, we learn of his thoughts on oratory in a dialogue with Socrates, as written by Plato)
However, this retrieval of pre-literate oral storytelling grammar is based upon the ability to create, transmit and store cultural texts which are more sophisticated and technologically advanced than linear texts. This investigation will take for granted many of the ideas of the segmentation and rationalism which were epistemological outgrowths of text-based learning and information storage and retrieval, although some of these ideas have been mentioned in the discussion of McLuhan’s Gutenberg galaxy.
This jump from a two-thousand year text-based epistemology of rationalism into the contemporary hyper-textual multi-media epistemology of simulation leads through the development of media technologies based upon Vilém Flusser’s idea of technical images as opposed to traditional images. It is also connected to Walter Benjamin’s ideas of the lack of aura of a work that is infinitely reproducible. Although the use of technical images in the media technologies is fraught with some potential epistemological peril, it can eventually lead to Ulmer’s ideas of writing with electricity and the new chora-based connections which occur to the writer and their audience. These new chora-based connections eventually find their way into the means of writing with electricity and become the hyper-text that is now hallmark of a multi-media production.
But despite this upside to writing with electricity, it moves the learning from being based in textual representation either back into a theatrical mimesis (as addressed in chapter 1) or into an electronic simulation (as addressed in chapter two). Aside from the drift of all simulations into simulacra, another factor to this kind of communication is the epistemological problem of fascination brought on by a completely mediated simulated world view. This is an extension of Baudrillard and Debord’s ideas in chapter two, but is addressed here as it is an outcome of learning as it evolves into electronic media.
Although both Baudrillard and Debord believe that in a situation where the spectacle has created a (phenomenological) fascination in the mass society and its audience, little, and eventually no information would be passed around. Paradoxically, the exact opposite seems to be happening. Although we should be drowning out “meaning” in an ocean of fact and un-connected information, there appears to be chaotic connections which form. It will be argued in chapter six, that this occurs precisely because much of this new electronic media learning doesn’t purport to teach, yet it does anyway because it sets up these new technological lifestyles, which based in ideas like hoax and misinformation, don’t disappear into the realm of spectacle and fascination, even though they travel through the very type of multi-media entertainment productions which created the loss-of-meaning through spectacle in the first place. {damn, will this make any sense to me when I re-read it? Yes, I think it will}


Plato vs. the Elegiac School: Orality into Literacy
As with chapter one, once again this investigation turns to Aristotle’s Poetics (and to some of the Elegiac school) for the initial ideas of literacy. However, the ritual aspects of storytelling in theatre existed closely with the jump of ideas from oral storytelling into a structured from of presentation in both poetry and drama. Once this had occurred the natural tendency toward a linear phonetic grammar would only take a short time. Not addressing some of the very complicated ideas of historical sociolinguistics, Marshall McLuhan made the differentiation of “hot” and “cool” media which was largely based on the movement of learning, knowing and archiving from the more interactive and active “cool” media of oral myths and theatre rituals into the more linear and passive “hot” media of written text. [insert McLuhan & Pre-Socratic quotes]
Aristotle and the Greek pre-Socratic thinkers lived on the edge from oral into written culture. In fact, in his Poetics, Aristotle claims that there is no name for an art or medium that would represent reality using words alone, “The art that imitates by language alone, in prose or in [nonlyrical] verse (whether combining different meters, or using only one of them) remains to this day without a name.” (Poetics, p. 45) Living in what was still a very multi-media and multi-sensory world which had not yet been set into linearity by text Aristotle expected that written words themselves would have a much larger internal variation. Indeed, Greek poetry did use considerably more forms of verse and meter than existed in the centuries which followed. Aristotle points out that, “ There are, however, certain arts that make use of all the stated media, viz., rhythm, song and metrical language, and among these are dithyrambic poetry, nomic poetry, tragedy and comedy.” (Poetics, p. 46) Aristotle continues and describes how each of these early formats utilize different linguistic styles which he refers to as ‘media’. “ Here the distinction is that dithyramb and nome employ all three media continuously throughout, while comedy and tragedy employ first one means, then the other.” (Poetics, p. 46)
Since the concepts of mimesis have largely been discussed in chapter 1, this chapter will address the different types of writing, and the different rationales. Returning to the quote from the Poetics, “Those things that are distressful to see in reality – for example the basest animals and corpses – we contemplate with pleasure when we find them represented with perfect realism in images.” (Poetics, p. 47) The taking pleasure in representations of naturalistic things cuts across social boundaries and eras for Aristotle. “the experience of learning is highly enjoyable, not only for philosophers but for other people as well; only their share in it is limited,” (Poetics, p. 47) As elitist as this might sound, Aristotle allows that learning through looking is nearly universally accessible, while learning through reading, contemplation and dialogue is not. Oratory and public address pose an interesting problem to Aristotle, since like learning from looking, learning from oratory is also due in large part to the pleasure that the audience takes in it.
For Plato and Aristotle were both interested in those oratory, and by historical extension, later writings, which were created in order to educate and enlighten, versus those which were created simply to appeal to mass audience in the greatest way to increase the appeal of the orator. The first they called education and possibly diagnosis, while the second they referred to as sophistry or pandering. This dichotomy of education versus entertainment was ossified into the coming literate cultures based on linear texts.
[insert Georgias quotes]
As Greek knowledge passed from orality to literacy, it took these two ideas (learning as spit between high and low) & (education vs. pandering) into twenty five hundred years of literate thought. Throughout the literate phases of history these issues were continually faced, and often were relegated to the realm of unsolvable paradox and marginalized from debate. [insert Colie quote]
What Aristotle saw as the evolution and eventual ossification of poetry into the forms of comedy and tragedy, can just as easily be applied to all forms of learning as they passed into literacy: “Little by little tragedy grew greater as the poets developed whatever they perceived of its emergent form, and after passing through many changes, it came to a stop, being now in possession of its specific nature.” (Poetics, p. 48) The exact social processes by which societies like the ancient Greek, and many others made the change from oral into literate cultures is both well documented, and still a source for some debate. The results are well established, [Havelock quotes?] with the plastic arts loosing their status as immanent icons and visual crafts being considered art for art’s sake. Theatre alone remained a means of teaching, and only in a limited sense. All learning, and thus all hoaxes and paradoxes moved to written material throughout western civilization. [Colie quotes?]

Flusser’s Technical Images
In the early 19th Century, the scientific knowledge that had been amassed over roughly two thousand years of linear literate thought began to be used to create means for scientifically recreating images without direct human input it terms of the fine arts, plastic arts or even folk crafts. This invention was, of course, photography, which is now being argued as one of the most socially and philosophically important inventions, thus epistemologies, since the movement from oral to literate traditions, even surpassing the mechanical printing press, or at least equivalent to it, although the photographic apparatus is an historical outgrowth of the science proliferated through the mass production of scientific texts which was made possible by the printing press.
Among the thinkers who put forth this proposition is Vilém Flusser, who strongly compares and contrasts the traditional images which preceded the era of the photographic apparatus, and the technical images which are created as a result of the application of science to image making. “The technical image is an image produced by apparatuses. As apparatuses themselves are produced by scientific texts, in the case of technical images one is dealing with the indirect products of scientific texts.” (Flusser, p. 14) His implication is that although literary and scientific texts were abstractions from oral traditions and traditional images and immanent icons, that the images produced by photographic means and other manufacturing are abstractions of a higher level. What Flusser believes is even more difficult, and potentially ontologically dangerous for the audience for whom these technical images are created, is that they conceal this abstraction-of-an-abstraction part of their nature and appear to be equivalent to the traditional images of the fine arts, or even superior to them because of a more scientifically objective nature. “Technical images are difficult to decode, for a strange reason. To all appearances, they do not have to be decoded, since their significance is automatically reflected on their surface” (p. 14)
It is the ‘automatically’ that Flusser is concerned about. The technology involved in the photographic film and paper, or later the technology involved in CCDs or phosphorous in a television screen, conceals itself in exactly the way that Heidegger predicted it would, as discussed in chapter 2. With his statement “the ‘objectivity’ of technical images is an illusion”, (p. 15) Flusser is speaking, like McLuhan, across all content, and all media which are involved in the technological simulation and representation of images, as well as narratives. Although both may be more worried than historical events warranted. “This lack of criticism of technical images is potentially dangerous at a time when technical images are in the process of displacing texts – dangerous for the reason that the ‘objectivity’ of technical images is an illusion.” (p. 15)
For the audiences of technical images seem to have developed the previously mentioned technique of “sliding suspension of disbelief” which at its phenomenological core has to assume that none of the representations or simulations of technical images could ever be considered wholly “true”.
In the same way that Flusser believes that these technical images are second-order abstractions from traditional images, it will be shown that the narratives which occur in media representations are second-order abstractions from the archetypes which existed in folk tales and theatre. These will be called “technical narratives”, and will be addressed in the context of ‘production value” in chapter six, and story-telling in chapter seven.
Flusser continues his philosophical line on technical images, “are metacodes of texts which signify texts, not the world out there.” (p. 15) And that the apparatus of the image making becomes inextricably entwined with the process of imagination, “The imagination that produces them involves the ability to transcode concepts from texts into images; when we observe them, we see concepts – encoded in a new way – of the world out there.” (p. 15) The human imagination, the apriori image-making ability of humanity is therefore undergoing a change away from that which it has been operating under throughout the literate phases of humanity, phases which were openly hostile to the idea of paradox, and sought to limit or marginalize the hoax. In the same way that new literate cultures existed side-by-side [para-hodos] with oral culture for several hundred years, if occurring again with electronic post-literate culture side-by-side with literate culture. Exactly what will become of both will remain to be seen.
However, Flusser gives to ideas of how both epistemology and phenomenology are changing. The first is implicit in the above quote the ‘imagination-with-encoding-ability’. “Another factor places itself between them (technical images) and their significance, i.e. a camera and a human being operating it (for example a photographer), but it does not look as if the ‘machine/operator’ complex would break the chain between image and significance.” (p. 16) Here, Flusser first establishes the idea of a hybrid machine/human apparatus which works together in the “imagination” and image making which now makes up the majority of simulations and representations in electronic media. He then points out that the working of this ‘machine/operator’ complex works to conceal itself. “The significance appears to flow into the complex on one side (input) in order to flow out on the other side (output) during which the process – what is going on inside the complex – remains concealed: a ‘black box’ in fact.” Later it will be shown that this concealment is not necessarily a block to epistemological understanding, it is not necessarily a bad thing. Because not all of the mass media audience for these technical images through an electronic media can engage in the criticism which Flusser advocates, “ The encoding of technical images, however, is what is going on un in the interior of this black box and consequently, any criticism of technical images must be aimed at an elucidation of its inner workings.” He claims that not being able to engage in this criticism will result in massive illiteracy, ironically Flusser is still thinking from the point of view of his literate background, and not from the point of view of electronic literacy. Audiences who do not engage in understanding of the “apparatus theory” of mass media are not illiterate to its meaning or to its effects. Still this investigation will delve deeper into Flusser and other thinkers ideas of the apparatus theory in regards to production value and the second-order abstraction of the here newly coined “technical narratives”, again in chapter seven.
Flusser’s second insight into functioning of epistemology in the electronic age of technical images focuses on the “magical effect” of all images which technical images share with the traditional images of fine arts and even earlier immanent icons, as all images are “surfaces that translate everything into state of things; like all images they have a magical effect ; and they entice those receiving them to project this undecoded magic onto the world out there.” (p. 16) Flusser here describes a magical fascination with technical images which has as a precedent in traditional images, but differs in many respects. He describes traditional images as ‘pre-historic’ and older than the historic consciousness which was brought about by the switch to a literate culture, even though traditional images remain side-by-side with literate culture in the fine arts and folk arts. Flusser refers to the magical fascination of technical images to the ‘post-historic’ in that it has begun at the time when culture was making its first movements away from the historical consciousness brought on by literacy. Therefore being second order abstractions these technical images are, “not designed to alter the world out there but our concepts in relation to the world.” (p.17) Or put a little more cheekily, “conjuring tricks with abstractions”. (p. 17)
Flusser sums up the fascination magic of technical images as such “The function of technical images is to liberate their receivers by magic from the necessity of thinking conceptually, at the same time replacing historical consciousness with a second-order magical consciousness and replacing the ability to think conceptually with a second-order imagination.” Again this second-order imagination does conceal most of its inner workings but that alone does not disturb their epistemological effectiveness. At their extreme, “Technical images absorb the whole of history and form a collective memory going endlessly round in circles.”, (p. 19) and create a culture that has aspects of pre-historic ritual. Although Flusser never uses the word “Spectacle” he does believe that this machine/operator complex, which can be as narrow as a lone photographer and her camera, or as broad as the entire image-making capitalist industry processes images in this magical obfuscating way and that in particular interest to documentary production “there is no artistic, scientific or political activity that is not aimed at it, there is no everyday activity that does not aspire to be photographer, filmed videotaped. For there is a general desire to be endlessly remembered and endlessly repeatable.” (p. 20) And the electronic media which developed after photography have begun to make this possible.

“With writing, history in a narrower sense begins as a struggle against idolatry. With photography, ‘post-history’ begins as a struggle against textolatry.” (p. 18) Flusser once again shows himself a philosopher very much of the 20th Century who seemed unwilling to see these historical movements in terms of hybridization. Although he did give some thought to a world of television, his theory of technical images becomes less useful is when all of the surfaces he is dealing with become electrical ones, a shift which has been occurring in contemporary media over the last several decades. He did not contemplate that “hot” literate symbols of letters, words and Asian characters themselves would be reified into images, and that electronic technology would make all surfaces equal. This is leading not to a breakdown of literacy as Flusser, and to a lesser extent McLuhan, see it, but rather as a shift in the meaning of literacy, and with it the meaning of truth, and with that the meaning of paradox.

Ulmer – Writing in Electricity
Where Flusser leaves his philosophy historically he has established the changes which philosophy and society are going through, and gives ideas of the direction. Gregory Ulmer pulls from the tradition of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, and, among a broad field of idea, starts setting about exactly what the institutions of electronic media will be involved in the epistemology of electronic media. Ulmer’s ideas start with an extension of “picto-ideo-phonographic” writing from some of the explorations of Derrida and Lacan, a hybrid philosophy between linguistics and psychoanalysis, and that this type of writing could be the basis for an established academic tradition of electronic media. Ulmer later attempted to formulate a production genre which could use and organize picto-ideo-phonographic writing as a means of teaching. Using ideas from Derrida’s structuralism, Ulmer created an idea of “mystory”, a personalized set of connections which stands with the individual user not is opposition to overall history, but as a supplement to it.
In an attempt to broaden these ideas of personal “mystory” approaches to electrate writing, Ulmer began to look for institutions within overall society that would create or patronize and support these writing-through-electricity personal mystories to make up a larger societal library and history.[ clean up this idea of institutional electric-style writing]
In order to do this Ulmer conceptualizes the current use of media as a “hypermedia” which like myth, creates a learning and knowing based on invention rather than verification and mimesis. This is not to say that it never seeks to represent and only gets lost in simulation, but rather that using this type of interconnected electric media which is simultaneously pictures, words, moving pictures, music, sounds and related hyper-links to related media, allows for representation of facts to lie side-by-side with greater connections which may be personal, or familial, local or global. This idea of simultaneous stories side by side is also seen in McLuhan’s ideas of re-tribalization.
Ulmer argues that literate argumentative critical writing of the last two thousand years has been largely in the realm of reasoning by deduction and induction, and had largely left behind reasoning by abduction and conduction. [insert quotes] It is this reasoning by conduction which has been made accessible through electronic media such as film, television and computer hyper-text models. The first two made visual story-telling retake its dominant role in learning, the third allowed the connections to be followed and a physical record, even if just a computer code, to be “written” so that it could be followed and both its validity and its usefulness be checked by later users and fact/connection seekers.
Like Flusser, Ulmer is ahead of his time in that although some of what he has theoretically set down has come to pass, it is still in the process of becoming an “institution”, and even as it does it will likely not resemble the institutions of the past. It will look as strange as the new ‘nation state’ would have to the pre-renaissance church. The institutions for this conductive hypermedia electronic epistemology and learning will be very powerful, and may likely be difficult to describe in terms of older institutions. It will almost certainly look chaotic and anarchic from their vantage points.
These conductive hypermedia institutions will be able to adjust to Baudrillards collapse of the real into mass audiences by being based on connections, and will also be able to deal with hoax and even welcome paradox, particularly in terms of advertising.
As for institutions the contemporary culture industries as described by the Frankfurt school would certainly play a part in what will become these new institutions. However, they will most likely be less hierarchical, and smaller that the corporations required for contemporary capitalism. They will also likely blend with weblogger, academic institutions, filmmakers, activists – any individual or organization which itself begins using this electrate means of epistemology as a life technology.
First, Ulmer broadens media from the idea of ‘significant surfaces’ as they are addressed as in Flusser’s work to include “the convergence of code and the computer in hypermedia” (p. 16) An idea allowing written words and images to coexist on several different types of technical images imprinted either permanently or impermenently on a variety of electric and non-electric surfaces. While Flusser was very focused on the technology and apparatus itself Ulmer claims “My interest is not only in the technology itself but also in the problem of inventing the practices that may institutionalize electronic in terms of schooling.” He is very careful to note that this idea is not in direct opposition to rational scientism brought on by literate culture. “Most of the writers calling attention to the symptoms of the closure of conceptual reason do not want to abandon the principles of the Enlightenment. They retain a desire to act in the world, to make life better for all humanity, but they admit to an experience of impasse.” (p. 20) Ulmer is specifically mentioning the academic attacks that had been leveled at Jacques Derrida by members of established schools for at best holding post-structuralism above the necessity of rationalism, and at worst claiming the end of rationalism altogether.
Since Ulmer takes his ideas of grammatology from Derrida, he is making the assertion that Derrida’s post-structuralism was conceived to exist side-by-side with other academic lines of thought, a paradox in the best of senses. As many academics called Derrida a hoax or fraud, Ulmer points to post-modernism as the best kind of hoax as life technology: one that can help humanity see the world in a more complicated light, and make the connections they need to. A paradox that allows rhetoric to exist simultaneously with hyper rhetoric.

To do this Ulmer moves from an apparatus of hypermedia, which he defines in a manner similar to Flusser. “For Grammatology, hypermedia is the technological aspect of an electronic apparatus (referring to an interactive matrix of technology, institutional practices and ideological subject formation).” (Heuretics, p. 17) [italics and parantheticals are Ulmer’s] Ulmer sees the interface of computer search engines replacing the interface of the book, or newspaper/magazine, and sees a similarity to another ancient Greek institution which rivaled theatre in terms of knowledge gatherings the “Theoria”, a group of travelers or magistrates sent to travel to another city or region to both act as delegates, but more importantly to bring back needed, or even un-needed, information. With the new technologies at hand Ulmer is seeking to find an “electronic theoria”.
He also points out the growing belief that “hypermedia now constitutes a laboratory for the testing of poststructuralist (or even more specifically “deconstructive”) theory.” (p. 21) [quotation marks and parantheticals are Ulmer’s] And he makes the ambitious and optimistic statement that “theory is no more fixed or “arrested” than is the technology.” (p. 21) This may be the positive side to technological determinism, wherein if all theories will always be based on what humanity can perceive through their technologies, be they their eyes, their texts, their televisions or telescopes, then if frees the users epistemologically once they realize that they live inside their technologies. Widening the technologies widens the epistemology. The paradoxical jump which hoaxes allow is that widening the epistemology, even if it is with the fantastic and incredible, will over the course of history attract a technology/life technique which will make that fantasy epistemology imaginable and then into existence. In chapter five several examples of hoaxes which ‘widened out’ epistemologies, and then cultural institutions to fit them will be addressed.
To establish this electronic theoria, this institution of ------------ based on the technology of hypermedia, Ulmer looks to the Greek concept of “chora” – a place where ideas are sifted and connections are made, as opposed to topos – which is to put each idea into a static position for learning retrieval. The idea of topos leads to classical traditional rhetoric wherein each idea moves through “invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory”. (34) The idea of chora, with the help of electronic technology, leads to an electronic rhetoric “one meant to exploit (but not limited to) the digital convergence of media in hypermedia”. (34)

“to practice hyper rhetoric myself, which is assumed to have something in common with the dream logic of surrealism” (p. 16) This dream logic of surrealism is best ‘understood’ through some neologisms of Ulmer’s which explain how electronic media can help bring about this new from of reasoning. First among them is writing based on the idea of “chora” which he has called chorography. When each member of the multimedia audience engages in this hypermedia rhetoric they do so through an institution which is Ulmer’s second neologism, the “popcycle”.
This Popcycle interpellates/ “hails” each member of the multimedia audience from several different pre-existing institutions in their world which mirror the phases of epistemology throughout history. The first is the family/tribe institution which is based in the orality epistemology which introduces language and other cultural knowledge, The second is the Entertainment/Media which introduces not only pop culture but also the conductive logic of electronic media. It is thoroughly post-literate, post-historical and in being closer to orality it has replaced the institution of Formal Schooling and Pedagogy as a more primary means of learning, it uses electronic media, particularly multi-channel television and computer internet works browsers and search engines as its interface. The Formal Schooling/Pedagogy is the literate culture which gives each member of the multi-media audience their sense of official history and authority. It is linear and text-based, and uses books and other printed material as its interface. The last of the institutions is the Career Discipline which draws from the earlier institutions in different parts and may value one over the other, nonetheless it requires specialized knowledge, and it must be both found and created by the individual audience member of multi-media. [insert McLuhan quote]
Between these institutions each media participant/audience member creates their personal wide-image. It is this “wide image” created in the interface with this Popcylce that becomes institutionalized rhetoric of the machine/operator complex which Flusser had set forth. This wide images, although personalized it not fleeting, it evolves but remains largely dependable for each participant/audience member. Also, this wide image, although personalized is not unique to each individual, and is based in a large part upon borrowed institutionalism – particularly family standing and occupation. Generally the more self-directed an individual’s wide image is, the more hyper mediated their life is. This allows those members of society who have little to no conduct with the new electronic media and their conductive logic and hyper rhetoric, to still take the majority of their wide image from the previously existing institutions and be unaware that more would have been available to them.
What is of interest in this new electronic epistemology is the rising power of the entertainment/media complex and institutions, and the return to dominance of learning though watching, and learning though archetypes. It allows for the reestablishment of intersubjectivity of images, and the ability to learn of truths and actualities while experiencing a fantasy or a fiction. In short this type of conductive logic has a newfound tolerance of paradox and occasional desire for hoaxing, which had been nearly eliminated in the institutions of Formal Schooling and Career Discipline.
Ulmer has formulated with great detail some of the connections between images, texts, icons, familial/tribal rituals, cultures which he had found in applying his theory back onto his own personal experiences, his own personal “popcycle”. [insert Ulmer quote] Heuretics not as opposed to hermeneutics, but rather as supplemental to it. [Generating connections to be vetted]

Ulcers dream logic of surrealism or conductive logic of the Wide Image (as situationist psychogeography) and the institutions of the Popcycle does have a dangerous side which may make its full institutionalism difficult if not impossible. It is the same problem that the Situationist International had during its formation in the 1960s and 1970s; despite the resistance that dream logic and conduction has to the overwhelming power of the spectacle, it is still vulnerable to the effects of fascination. In many ways Baudrillard and Debord’s fascination is the flip and chaotic side to Ulmer’s chorography which leads to an individual participant/audience member’s wide image and the emergent institution(s) of the popcycle.

Fascination
“Beyond meaning, there is fascination, which results from the neutralization and implosion of meaning.” (p. 104) Baudrillard idea of the collapse of meaning are still a direct challenge to the idea of learning through the new conductive epistemology of electronic media. He poses a double challenge for meaning and for electronic media epistemology of any type. He sees both, “the defiance of meaning by the masses and their silence (which is not at all a passive resistance) – and the defiance of meaning which comes from the media and its fascination. ” (p. 104) [parantheticals are Baudrillard’s]
However the meaning which Baudriallard is referring to is very likely the limited meaning which can only be created in the linear induction or deduction, but he has traces of an idea of meaning and epistemology that would exist beyond this limited type of meaning. “For us as untenable hypothesis: that it may be possible to communicate outside the medium of meaning, that the very intensity of communication may be proportional to the reabsorbption of meaning and to its collapse.” (p. 36) But since leaning, meaning and epistemological life techniques continue in postmodern electronic mass media this idea is not untenable. The masses and their relationship to mass media, although one of fascination with the floating of signifiers and the concomitant danger to meaning in the literally “literate” sense, are engaging in a shift in what is considered meaning.
“The masses and their involuntary humor would introduce us to a pataphysics of the social which would ultimately relieve us of all that cumbersome metaphysics of the social.” (p. 34) Here, finally Baudrillard comes to his paradoxical conclusion about the final outcome of fascination: it is also very tolerant of paradox. The paradoxes which could resist the loss of meaning when they were stripped of their signifiers (particularly those which were picto-ideo-phongrammatic to begin with) would be the new type of meaning that could exist within this collapse of the social and a fascination of the masses in their media. “Evidently there is a paradox in this inextricable conjunction of the masses and the media: is it the media that neutralizes meaning and that produced the “unformed” (or informed) mass, or is it the mass that victoriously resists the media by diverting or absorbing all the messages without responding to them?” Effectively the masses become the media and vice versa, in a matter not unlike is being born out in convergent computer-media. The mass participants/audiences are using their media to make the conduction jumps between family, schooling, entertainment and career. They do not “respond” in the manner that they should have during the literate era, they respond in a way similar to early Greek theatre goers.
“This absence of response is a positive counter-strategy of the masses themselves in their encounter with power, and no longer at all a structure of power.” It will be shown that these reactions, as a mass participant/audience member moves from literacy to electricity is a technologically-enabled life technique which goes far beyond the hardware of software or content of the media. These techniques are individualized but not wholly individual, they are interconnected and subject to the fascination of the mass media, but their meaning persists to the mass audience/participant. These life techniques are also often engaged in a type of pataphysical at both the individual level of knowledge/epistemology and at the social level of corporate self-knowledge as well as cultural knowledge/epistemology.
More importantly, it will be shown that media hoaxes have filled this need for a pataphysics for both individuals and societies at all phases (and retro-phases) of history. While paradoxical, and certainly a vital part of contemporary electronic media epistemology, the pataphysics of hoaxes can be seen throughout history. The next chapter will deal with an archeology of hoaxes looking at the artifacts they leave behind, and seeing those artifacts in the context of the greater social and historical events of the time. It will be shown that whenever an epistemological leap is made in the way humanity conceives of its knowledge paradoxes and hoaxes are excellent signposts of these turbulent times.


**Axiom of Credibility:?

Keep Feeling Fascination!

Having put nose to grindstone, I have written a reasonable first draft of chapters 2 and 3. I still want to put some more work into the ending of chapter 3, and both will need some serious editing before I post them here. I had a lot of fun trying to get Baudrillard, Heidegger and McLuhan to 'agree' with each other. Not 'agree' in the strictest of senses, but rather to come to a similar point or two about epistemology through media - surprisingly they kind of do. More on that later.
In chapter three I'm tracing the development of the documentary as a means toward 'mediated truth' over the last hundred and twenty some years. I have changed the working outline to reflect some of the expansion in this area - also I wanted to find some way to work in the word "Phantasmagoria" more often. This chapter focusses on what types of truths media producers and their audiences expected to see in their 'documentary'. The tension between closer-to-actuality documentary and the more fantastic and contrived documentary has ocurred time and again, from the Magic Lantern shows of the Vicortian era, to the tension between cinéma vérité and propaganda docs, to today's 'serious' cable channel documentaries and reality-based TV. But even more interesting is the borrowing of production techniques into narrative film and the emergence of the pseudo-documentary and the mockumentary.

Hopefully I'll get the actual chapter online soon. In the meantime, I am looking for good quotes for chapter headers. Among them is this quote from "The Human League"

"Well the truth may need some rearranging,
if the story's to be told.
It's plain to see the facts are changing,
no meaning left to hold"

Any other suggestions?

Working Outline

1. Introduction
1. Mimesis in Electronic Media
2. Archetypes in Narrative Form
3. Paradox
1. Suspension of Disbelief
2. The Intersubjectivity of Fantasy
4. Hoaxes an Inoculation
1. Ancient Paradoxography
2. Contemporary Communication
2. Epistemology of Media
1. Truth in Simulation
1. Hermenutics: Simulations & Reality
2. Archetypes: Simulacra & Fantasy
2. Two Questions Concerning the Spectacle
1. Mass Society
   
2. Technology
3. History of Documentary in the Electronic Age
1. Precinema: the Magic Lantern
1. Travelogues & Lectures
2. Phantasmagoria
   
2. Film/Cinema
1. Cinéma Vérité
2. Direct Cinema
   
3. Television & Cable Networks
1. Pseudo-documentary vs. Mockumentary
   
2. Commerical Pop Documentary
   
4. Convergent Computer Media
   
4. From Literacy to Electricity
1. Aristotle - Theory of Theatre
2. Flusser - Technical Images
3. Ulmer - Notion of Writing with Electricity
4. Debord & Baudriallard - Fascination
   
5. An Archeology of Hoaxes
1. Eureka! & Theatre
1. Ritual
2. Audience
3. Scena
2. Pop Culture Memetics of te 19th Century
1. Zielinski
2. P.T. Barnum
3. Vaudeville and Legerdemain as Safe Space
4. "War of the Worlds" & Walter Benjamin
1. Reproducability vs. Credibility
6. An Immodest Proposal
1. Visual Grammar & Production Value
2. Suspension of Disbelief
3. the "Hoax-umentary"
1. prototype
2. stereotype
7. Self-Concealment & Revealing
1. Media
1. Apparatus Theory
2. Technological Determinism
3. Story-Telling
2. Paradox
1. as Self-Contradiction
2. when Encomium becomes Reality
3. Clichés in Representation
8. Paradox & Theatrics
1. Epideixis
1. Heidegger's Parmenides
2. Sokal's Transgressing Boundaries
2. Epyllion
1. Play & Science Fiction
2. Contrivance & Advertising
3. Epic Theatre
4. As a Life Technique
1. unconcealing a new truth
2. Lies for a better lifestyle
9. Conclusion
1. The Meaning of Information
1. Phenomenology
2. Heuretics
2. The Rehabilitation of the Hoax
3. Hoaxes as Life Technique
1. Indirect Communication
2. Embracing the "Fake"