"Hacking, Tapping, Jacking, Hiding, Faking .. and more!"

Matt King — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:00:00 +0000

"A Tingle Table used by the IRS" — Image Credit: Eric Paul Zamora/Associated Press (at nytimes.com)

A peculiar find in David Foster Wallace’s archive at the Harry Ransom Center points to the intersection of two threads in Wallace’s thinking: questions of fraudulence and authenticity, and the notion of procedurality. Wallace frequently engaged and struggled with the former throughout his career, asking what it means to authentically engage another person and inhabit another consciousness without the needs, addictions, and deceptions of the self getting in the way. That is, what does it look like to operate outside of those mechanisms that turn us back inside of ourselves and translate our experience into the logic of the self?

The notion of procedurality gets us into concerns with systems of rules, processes, logics, and games. Wallace’s writing and his life generally show an engagement with the procedural on multiple levels. His writing frequently takes up procedural systems: the game of tennis, rules of grammar and usage, twelve-step programs and their procedures for recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction, the IRS and its auditing procedures. As a student, Wallace was a self-proclaimed “snoot” (“a really extreme usage fanatic” [69]); as an adolescent, he was a nationally ranked tennis player; as a philosophy major in college, he studied modal logic and was heavily invested in Wittgenstein, the theorist of language games; as an adult struggling with depression and alcohol and drug abuse, he (although attribution is complicated) “flummox[ed] 12-Step sponsors over certain obvious paradoxes inherent in the concept of denial” before eventually accepting the processes of 12-Step recovery despite his doubts about the logic behind it.

In the research materials for The Pale King, Wallace’s interests in authenticity and procedurality intersect in a collection of guides published by a mysterious entity known as The Information Center.

Pamphlet produced by The Information Center — Image Credit: Photograph by Matt King

The pamphlets offer instruction in the ways of “Hacking, Tapping, Jacking, Hiding, Faking .. and more!” They are crude, clearly having been produced on a dot matrix printer and then photocopied repeatedly. They contain numerous spelling and grammatical errors and rely on an excessive use of capitalization and exclamation points. The subjects of the guides range from tax and credit fraud to identity theft; from picking locks to hacking into computers, GPS systems, and car garages; from interrogation tactics to brainwashing. In the context of The Pale King, the most interesting pamphlet covers “AUTOMOBILE SABOTAGE,” as the character Toni Ware ends up using a version of one of these techniques on her mother’s physically abusive boyfriend.

CLICK HERE TO ENLARGE: "Automobile Sabotage" Instructions by The Information Center — Image Credit: Photograph by Matt King

CLICK HERE TO ENLARGE: More "Automobile Sabotage" Instructions by The Information Center — Image Credit: Photograph by Matt King

These guides sit among a larger collection of research materials mainly comprised of tax manuals, auditing guides, and notes from accounting classes—documents outlining the many procedures of the IRS. A sort of dialectic emerges out of this juxtaposition of materials: the pamphlets on fraud serve as the negative image or the dark complement to the procedures of the IRS; if the tax system embodies a set of procedures through which we contribute to the larger social welfare and the government’s financial solvency, then these guides serve as an expression of our capacities and desires for undercutting the system and operating according to selfish, destructive, and vengeful logics.

While both the accounting materials and the pamphlets offer insight into Wallace’s imagination of the IRS, they also offer a different perspective on Wallace’s larger concerns with authentic relations. Here I want to turn to the work of Ian Bogost and his thinking on procedurality. Although his work tends to focus on computational systems and video games and the ways that these embody certain processes, rules, and logics, Bogost also draws on this notion of procedurality more generally to think about how the world works, how objects (understood broadly to include things, people, conceptual systems, fictitious entities, etc.) encounter, engage, and relate to one another.

“Fractal.org” Tree — Image Credit: typedow's Flickr

For Bogost, objects are distinguished by the unique “logic[s] of behavior” and “way[s] of operating” that characterize their being (6). These logics can be understood as capacities for expression and engagement, and these capacities differ from object to object. Ontologically, “Within the withdrawn core of an object, swirls of murky logics churn, regulating the ways an object might enter and exit relations with other objects in order to constitute still different objects” (7).

"Procedural art at the UofT Art Centre from students in the architecture department" — Image Credit: hyfen's Flickr

"Procedural city created with Unity3D" — Image Credit: bartekd's Flickr

Procedurality thus offers a way of framing relations as the space through which the murky logics of objects express themselves. We can translate this into Wallace’s terms accordingly: his concern with authenticity highlights the extent to which the logics of the self assert themselves in our relations with others, preventing us from openly and honestly engaging with someone else. This in turn raises the question of how we might escape or operate outside of the logics of solipsism and various addictions.

In The Pale King, Wallace suggests that giving ourselves over to procedural systems—for example, by working at the IRS—offers one such mode of getting beyond the logic of the self. This mode hinges on the boredom that comes from highly routinized and proceduralized work. For Wallace, boredom interrupts the logics of the self and creates a space for us to experience and engage with something or someone else. Different possibilities emerge; we see new things when our own needs and desires don’t occupy the center of our attention.

For now, I’ll leave aside the question of whether boredom offers a satisfying response to the question of authentic relations to give the last word instead to The Information Center. At first glance, these guides to fraud appear to reinforce selfish and solipsistic impulses. Keeping in mind Bogost’s thoughts on procedurality, however, these pamphlets also offer an exploration of the ways that various objects work, from credit cards to pepper spray to graphite pens. Each of these objects has its own capacities for expression, and these go well beyond the ways we normally use them. Furthermore, the author—identified here only as “E Man”—parallels the IRS worker in his attention to the logic of fraud. He thoroughly dedicates himself to its various expressions, and his work (like that of the IRS) offers a way of accounting for a complex system of relations, impulses, desires, and exchanges. The pamphlets make available a different mode of procedural engagement, one that exposes us to the murky logics hidden away in the corners of American culture and global capitalism.

Dartmouth Photography Tampering Website

Nate Kreuter — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 18:40:45 +0000

Dartmouth has a very interesting website I just discovered that documents the manipulation of photos with examples spanning photography's history. The site is well worth checking out. Many of the examples provided touch on sensitive issues, making them potentially rich for an in-class discussion of what's at stake (rhetorically, politically, journalistically, historically) when photos are manipulated by photographers, news editors or political leaders.

viz. - Fraud

"Hacking, Tapping, Jacking, Hiding, Faking .. and more!"

Dartmouth Photography Tampering Website