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| Taste Receptors |
A premise of the experiment underway here is that electracy is the apparatus developing a metaphysics and related institutions for the third axis of human potentiality: pleasure-pain (joy-sadness; attraction-repulsion). A founding document for opening this faculty to ontology is Kant's Critique of Judgment (the Judgment of Taste). The 2011 seminar experiments tested fatal strategy as a means to orient EmerAgency consulting along this axis.
The prototype for the strategy is the Cabot-Koppers Superfund site in Gainesville, Florida, where the community well-field is threatened by dioxin, which polluted the soil as a by-product of a wood treatment plant in operation on the site since 1911. The strategy extrapolates an accidentology (Virilio), to include in policy formation a figure giving to planners an experience of the irreparability of the accident. The accident disaster surprises because our metaphysics has not yet incorporated embodiment as ground (electracy is a metaphysics of embodiment). Fatal strategy looks for the attractor in the scene, conventionally a commodity that seduces ("attractor" replaces literacy's "category"). Commodity marks and activates the operation of primordial or prereflective existence at work in any situation (the dimension of Dasein, Monad, Conatus, Entelechy). This phenomenological register is the one ontologized in electracy, complementing the propositional cognitive register ontologized in literacy.
The temporal unit of commodity identified in the Koppers (ob)scene is pepper, seducing human desire for flavor (this desire is irreducible, irreparable, despite the best efforts of ascetic wisdom traditions found in every civilization). Flavor formed a dynamic current between ancient India through the spice trade, requiring wood treatment to protect ship hulls from destruction by shipworms, to Gainesville's wood treatment business. The principle of embodied agency as fundamental force is generalized (hypothetically), to be tested in further consultations. The confirming results are documented in the student blogs linked here.
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