Tipping Point: the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point; the point when everyday things reach epidemic proportions. see also: non-fiction best seller written by New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell. Incidentally, Gladwell’s hair is not a terrible graphic model for the out of control, unpredictable, yet sublime quality of the economic apocalypse. Granted, Gladwell wrote about banal things like Vans shoes, apparently counterintuitive things like the link between broken windows and turnstile jumping and general lawlessness in his now (perhaps too) often quoted first book. However, his sort of joyfully perverse style of analysis is actually not a bad model to adopt when thinking through useful approaches that will yield fresh insights despite the best efforts of hegemonic discourse. So, to begin, we take an obvious instance of a painfully obvious phenomena:
Instance: Icelandic Economic meltdown
Painfully Obvious Phenomena demonstrated: Dangerous world in which conscience-less finance sectors and financially ignorant lower/middle classes borrow without reference ot possible ablity to pay said debts off in the future.
Gladwellian turn “turn” or “twist” on this problem: Normally, we might think of this problem– crisis–in terms of a problem awaiting a solution: stricter banking regulations might be called for or the overturn of neo-liberalism in general. This is the point in which Gladwell would dazzle his readers with his elegant yet affable prose and his carefully woven tapestry of weirdos who are at the right place at the right time with a perfectly, fortuitiously skewed perspective. Also: social scientists. He loves him some social scientists. Often, these groups intersect.
I have no such weirdos– unless you count the CATT and our relays– our friendly neighborhood engine for heuristic invention!! Of particular interest here is the analysis of the social as it is, rather than as it’s idealized. Desire, as I’ve remarked (and everyone else has often remarked) earlier in this blog, is the drive that impells us forward. The disaster– that is, what I’m trying to represent via logo in this blog–is a moment in which the usual flows of desire are interrupted. It’s the interruption that, in theory, will prove most telling. Previously, I mentioned that the idea of “Over Unity” was pretty telling. Graphically capturing this interruption is what I’m trying to work through at present.
C/O Scary Go Round. The implied mania is what I'm trying to capture in my own blog.
The Tipping Point for Mr. Gladwell's hair came around 2004ish, accoring to his accounts. But we know it as the apolalypse manifest.
