This is my final prezi presentation. After doing much research and thinking in the middle voice, I decided to connect blackwater, Mountain Top Removal, Asheville and, finally, radiation (the final slide) which finally shows that despite the change of name and mission, Blackwater (as well as Massey Energy) still will follow the ontology of the accident.
The "punctum" that hit me harder than ANYTHING I have done in this class so far is the Massey Energy icon/logo of an M with fire atop it. This basically set off the rest of my thinking and was a crucial 'accident'/'coincidence' (or perhaps a series of fatal occurences--as Baudrillard would put it) for my accident. Once I realized I could superimpose this logo on my alma mater's Logo--I knew that the conduction was fatal. I also realize that this was my way I could visually use the personal anecdote (or, primal scene as Ulmer puts it in Internet Invention) but without making it a narrative--in this one doctored image:
I knew that THIS is what 'sent' me this accident--this is what 'explains me' and explains us as a collective. The necessity of the destruction of the mountains for energy (symbolized by the fire above the M).
Finally, another thing that I 'surprised myself" with is how similar my Museum of Accidents was to Virilio's. It was only AFTER I started labeling my slides with dates that I realized this was using Virilio as Ta(i)le probably more than Kovitz. I remembered that I pointed out in the first band how essential this aspect of Virilio was--the date distances us from the event.
Finally, I realized I could frame the entire presentation in terms of "cleaning the name". I then tried to think of what I could use for the epigraph and I remember Derrida's essay/book Sauf le Nom. I started searching pretty randomly through the essay via googlebooks (kind of using--if you will--MINING--the text like an Oulipian Dictionary) and found a passage about "naming God." This stung my memory hard as I remembered that one of the people from Massey Energy called the sludge spill "an act of God." I knew I had the epigraph.
Ultimately, what this blogpost is trying to say--in coffee-addled, empty-stomach words and phrases--is that conduction and the CATTt method WORKED for me--sending me in all different directions and finally crystallizing around the idea of "cleaning" as a philosophical metaphor.
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