If at first you don't succeed, GOTO LINE 1

If we don't want to spend the rest of the semester dumbfounded by lines like assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives, we must pick a starting point for understanding.

To that end, we focused on the act of understanding as an iterative process. Like a puzzle whose pieces we only slowly begin to recognize, physical systems can be approached in a simple but effective way: the scientific method. I am not claiming that scientists are alone in their efforts to understand systems, but the scientific method is at least an algorithmic approach to the problem.

1. Watch a thing happen
2. Suggest a way of understanding that thing
3. Test some aspect of your suggestion
   
4. Compare the results of the test to the claims you made.

If your results agree, you can move forward with more testing. Getting your friends to perform similar tests and checking out their results implies reproducibility. If your results crash and/or burn, you go back to watching the thing happen and try again. Tadaaaa! Iteration.

For us, the system that gave us headaches was Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. We attacked it head-on and understood parts of it better than others. Viewing the text, or rather, the process of our attempt to understand the text, as a repeated application of the scientific method will do two things for us. First, we will get a clearer understanding of what Baudrillard means. Second, it will help us wrap our heads around iterative processes.