Consulting the Accident

From Oracle to Konsult

The challenge of heuretics is to integrate the CATTt sources into a unified poetics.  The immediate goal of Part Two is to relate the microcosm Once allegory of Part One with a macrocosm archetype for avatar counsel.  The registers of the CATTt treated in Part Two contribute the following instructions (briefly stated):
Analogy: Smithson.  Create/design a feature of the local site as a figure/trope expressing a force organizing the scene or situation.
Target/tale: Tarot.  An Existential Positioning System (EPS) enabling DYI comparisons between individual and collective experience.
Target/Analogy/tale: History of the Senses.  A goal of Konsult is to augment and formalize individual encounter with sensory experience at the level of macrocosm.

Konsult Design.  The experiment proposed for this semester is to create a Prezi konsult, in which the egent (you) serve as querent.  The hybrid poetics proposes to use tarot consultation as an interface to generate a bachelor machine figure, evoking a tropical relation between the querent and the Non/Site of the Accident (Koppers Superfund Disaster).

Layer One:  Pollack's Guide to Tarot is our relay.  We are creating our own deck, at least in part, in that we will start with a reading, and then update the cards drawn using the materials of our own scene as archive.  The reading requires that we first create our own spread.  The purpose of this spread is to question the Accident, as a figurative translation of the conditions of our history into an archetypal form, for further thought and action.  The spread should consist of ten "cards," having in mind the complexity accomplished by the Celtic Cross.  To compose the slots for the spread, draw upon the sorts of questions found in the Celtic Cross, keeping in mind that the goal is to activate an association between our Once allegory and the Accident Site.  Some further suggestions for the spread questions are found in ways to get to know the cards (p. 163), in getting to know a deck:  What special message do you bring? What do you want to teach me? What do I need to work with you? The section on Interpretation of Tales (p. 172) models further design strategies, tailoring the questions to a specific tale (to the Accident in our case).  Soul Questions (p. 174) are adaptable to our purposes as well:  What is (Accident)? Where Does it Come From? How Does It Teach Us? A spread suggested in another source is used to question a particular card, to ask what it means:  1 = The card does not mean this. 2 = The card means this. 3 = The card is good for this. 4 = The best course of action.  Be sure to include questions that ask about your relationship with Accident.

Layer Two: There is considerable room for invention in this adaptation of tarot to konsult.  The correlations listed here are points of departure. Once Allegory (Part One Einstellung).  The movie in your Allegory of Prudence = trump cards of the major arcana.  Significant people in your anecdotes = court cards.

Layer Three: Koppers Superfund Site may be a source for any card in principle, but consider especially the pips of the minor arcana, which trace processes from inception through excess, corresponding to the elemental system of the tradition (Earth Air Fire Water).

Layer Four: Use History of the Senses to augment the sensory features of your Once Allegory, as basis for any card in principle, with attention to the minor arcana.

Significator: The Fool's Journey passes through our scene.  A good way to select the Significator is to use the dates method (pp. 166-67).

"Card" Design: There is no need to put the features selected from your archive into emblem form, as in the formally designed decks.  However, the kinds of properties promoted to symbolic status in the formal decks are a useful guide to what to include in the features used to represent the updated "card" in your Prezi map.  Modernist collage works are a valid relay for our purposes.   The arrangement of the spread may take any shape.  Translate/update the cards drawn for each of the places in the spread, using the spread as a grid of chance to select some feature from the other layers of the assemblage. The effect of juxtapositions thus produced should in principle generate an evocative tropical figure.

Prism of Conatus

Avatar Function

To understand identity formation native to electracy AE uses the avatar function as a relay.  "Avatar" (descent) -- experienced as the reception of divine counsel (revelation) -- in the Western tradition, is dramatized as Daimon.  Heidegger's method of reading the tradition was to follow the translations.  Greek "Daimon" becomes Latin "Genius."  In Medieval Christianity "Daimon" splits into Angel/Demon.  Goethe in the Enlightenment translates "Daimon" as "Grenze," "Limit" in English.  The most recent version of this experience -- the capacity of the human subject to split and encounter itself (daio) is theorized in Lacan with reference to topology, foregrounding the operation of "edge."  Topology of the split subject (daio) maps the events of threshold (Catastrophe).  Thresholds are the location favored by daimons.  Before departing to attend his trial, Socrates paused at the threshold of his home, to consult his daimon.  Boundary is on the move again in electracy, and it is the function of choragraphy to map this movement. 

Meanwhile, the diagram showing embodiment as prism (the prism-house of being) evokes the relationship of well-being to the collection of demi-gods including Daimon.  It is important to consider this set together as an inventory of Measure or Limit, as a shorthand for the forces still operating in electracy.  The avatar function must include all of these forces.

Popcycle

Ubimage (apparatus correlation of ubiquitous computing and imaging) reoccupies a relationship between place and culture first exercise as Dreamtime by Australian Aborigenes.  Dreamtime is a mnemonic system of wayfinding in which mythologies (ritual and story) coded features of the landscape to guide a nomadic economy.

The functionality of this ancient wisdom system is a variation on the larger context of avatar functionality guiding ubimage.  Several such correspondences have been mapped for Alachua County.

Alachua Region

Fable

The film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, is an exhibit for how a situation may give rise to an aesthetic frame.  The point-of-view character, the doctor, undergoes a metaphysical event, a manifestation of the fundamental rhythm of existence, the axis life-death.

Review by Michael Wood

Correlating Triggers

Ubiquitous Sensibility

The electrate apparatus is invented in three registers:  technology, compositional practices, and identity formation.  The saturation of Everyday environments with mobile devices encountering sensor settings is the contribution of technics.  Interactive equipment establishes at the level of technics a feature of the world central to the history of the arts, which materialize and augment a human capacity to be affected by place and event. Marcel Proust's involuntary memory, triggered by the taste of a tea biscuit, or the Wolf Man, whose obsessions were triggered by the site of a maid scrubbing the floor, are two famous examples of embodied triggers, emblematic of this capacity.

Situation

 What does it mean to approach Everyday Life with an aesthetic attitude? There is nothing novel about framing one's quotidian roles in some state of mind -- wisdom, science, religion. As practice, the aesthetic attitude is included within a situation, adding to the intentionality of some project the distance that generates aura of signification.  "Situation" is a guideword, evoking the existentialist point that circumstances become a situation when considered from the point of view of one's "project," the goals of a practice, encountering a scene not indifferently but according to its affordances for some purpose.  In a Visit (for konsult) this project or purpose is given an aesthetic frame.

Ulmer's Visit documented in Chapter 13 (Wisdom) of Avatar Emergency offers a relay for our instructions.  What is Ulmer's situation:

• Family:  Mother's Day holiday, with three generations of relatives sharing a rented house.
• Work: Ulmer continues to ponder the perplexities of a theoretical question (the image metaphysics of electracy: the diadoch Damascius).
• Memory: A formative experience in Ulmer's past -- a night in an olive orchard in Spain, 1966.
• Current Events:  History of the present unfolding in daily reports and analysis of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
• Site: Place, Ponte Vedra Beach on the Atlantic coast of Florida.
• Form:  The Aesthetic Attitude includes familiar forms and genres, constituting a mythology: popular culture for laymen, but for Ulmer (academic) the forms are high art (Titian's Allegory of Prudence, Kafka's aphorisms).

A relevant context to Visit as the construction of an epiphany is the common experience in the history of creative insight of the Eureka moment appearing during some ordinary activity:  Archimedes in his bath; Poincaré stepping off a bus.  In Ulmer's relay, adopting the Aesthetic Attitude means that he consciously scans his setting for some feature he recognizes as an objective correlative for his state of mind, registering the Mood or atmosphere attuning as vehicle and tenor (outer and inner) dimensions of his life world.  The feature he recognizes, promoting it to object @, is the sand castle built by his granddaughter the previous evening.

EPS (Existential Positioning System)

Africa, 1805

 Konsult is a practice to correlate existential experience with everyday life materiality.  For an environment to be intelligent, the apparatus needs to manage not only physical location (GPS), but EPS, which requires tracking not only presence but absence (differance).  If conventional wayfinding gives coordinates that say "You Are Here," Existential coordinates engage a more complex orientation:  You are where you are not, and are not where you are.  A Visit is an event of encounter between egents and places, both of which involve dimensions that are not phenomenal, not present, without presence and not presentable.  Thoreau's Walden concludes with a figure that provides an emblem for EPS:  What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.  Choragraphy as ontological mapping takes up this question of coordinating material and spiritual wayfinding, exploring the shifting borders and thresholds between inner and outer identity formations.  

Thoreau's passage is emblematic because it uses global exploration and mapping as a metaphor for self-knowledge (the kind of knowledge and the mode of expression within the cognitive jurisdiction of Arts & Letters disciplines informing EmerAgency consulting on Well-Being).  The challenge of EPS choragraphy is that the spacetime for which it is responsible is a second-order construction, figurative rather than literal, emerging through aesthetic formal manipuation of media.  But the promise of ubimage is to create an interface convergence of literal and figurative dimensions of human experience.  Clive James's explanation gives an idea of the nature of figuration that renders intelligible the nonphenomenal dimension absent from all maps.

Any poem that does not just slide past us like all those thousands of others usually has an ignition point for our attention.  To take the most startling possible example, think of "Spring," by Gerard Manley Hopkins.  Everyone knows the first line because everyone know the poem.  "Nothing is so beautiful as Spring" is a line that hundreds of poets could have written, and was probably designed to sound that way. Only two lines further on, however, we get "Thrush's eggs look little low heavens" and we are electrified. Eventually we see that the complete poem is fitting in its every part, for its task of living up to the standards of thought and perception set by that single flash  of illumination. But we wouldn't even be checking up if we had not been put on the alert by a lightning strike of an idea that goes beyond thought and perception and into the area of metaphorical transformation that a poem demands.  A poem ... is dependent on this ability to project you into a reality so drastically rearranged that it makes your hair fizz even when it looks exactly like itself.  (Clive James, "Little Low Heavens," Poetry, Sept. 2008).

Two aspects of James's description are worth noting in our context:  the figure of electrification and the lightning strike of an image, resonant with electracy and flash reason; that the version of reality made receivable through aesthetic indirection is -- like Plato's chora -- beyond both thought and perception.  This point must be kept in mind, in  the context of ubimage, given the (legitimate) resurgence of interest in phenomenology by commentators on pervasive computing, who (rashly) ignore the critique of phenomenology motivating most of French poststructuralist philosophy, not to mention deconstruction.

                                                             

Allegory of Prudence (After Titian)

Is it possible to receive your own post as if for the first time, as if it were news about yourself originating from abroad? This prospect articulates the aporia, the no/way out or im/passe in the circuit of auto-affection. To subscribe to this channel one must use the good offices of an avatar, a go- between (a prosopon). That, then, really means recognizing your autobiography in the schtick of a Punch and Judy show. What is commonplace, even stereotyped, in the material world is obscure, indeterminate in the spiritual one. There there are no stock characters, no plot formulas, or rather, it is only we self-observers who continue to miss the point of our love for puppet shows. How pathetically scanty is my self-knowledge compared with, say, my knowledge of my home town. (Past). And so? Any observation of the inner world is accomplished through sketches of the outer world. At least expression is doubtless a form of improvisational theater, an abstract graphing of one’s own shape. The inner life may be figured, not narrated, described, or analyzed. Expression is the opening of a passage between the two sides of life (the im/material). Or, more correctly, the invention of an aesthetic effigy that neither resembles nor indexes either dimension of my nature, since, immersed as we are in spectacle, we only see programming wherever we turn.

Allegory of Prudence Governed by Time