Commodity Taste

Pep

Retracing the path of event (return to sender), passage and coming to pass.  Why were the trading ships entering warmer waters, where they encountered teredo navalis?  Look around from this moment to notice the current, the economy:  we are in the spice trade.  Pepper plants are native to India, and pepper has been used in Indian cuisine since ancient times.  Pepper was so valuable that it was used as money.  In its decline Rome paid "protection" to the Visigoths in the form of tons of black pepper.  The "spice" trade was in fact primarily the "pepper" trade.  Competition over control of the trade pushed the Portuguese to find a water route (alternative to the sea and land routes controlled by Venice).  The story is familiar from there.

The lesson of this history for fatal strategy is to trace the accident as Nemesis, but not so much in the ancient sense of retribution, but in the more immanent sense of "tribute." We reached for spice, and got dioxin. The accident records our gesture, creating a field of action around Flesh, that is, human embodiment.  People developed a passion for the pungency of pepper.  The account of pepper as a preservative apparently is not accurate.  It was rather flavor that sent the accident, precisely:  taste.  This particular event is exemplary in part because of its association with Kant's Critique of Judgment, and the foundation of electracy on the sense of taste, the sensorium oriented by pleasure-pain.  Check your event for its bit of Flesh (Merleau-Ponty's alternative to "substance").  Here is the passage of pleasure to which wisdom devoted most of its attention.  What is the wisdom of pepper?

Plane of Immanence - 2

Continuing concept

3. Plane of Immanence: Part Two
Our project has its own agenda, for which D&G supply the Theory (CATTt). We are less interested in philosophy as a discipline, and more in learning what sort of theoretical thinking is appropriate for the apparatus of Electracy, relative to digital technologies. This electrate thought must serve an Internet public sphere, to support deliberative reason (civic decision making) at the speed of light. Hence we supplement the problem given by D&G with our own: a public policy issue.

The context of WIP? clarifies the reason why event is required for thought in the plane of immanence, since the dimension we need to capture in our concept is the state of affairs named chaos or complexity in science. The old "causality" is called into question by the new account of nature, and our concept is relative to contemporary science, just as was cogito in its epoch. The forces of self-organizing systems, strange attractors, thresholds and emergent behaviors operate in the plane of immanence. For our Target, we select a public policy issue that concerns or attracts us, (a disaster in Blanchot's terms), and adopt it as a site by means of which to observe what is happening on the problem plane: turbulence interrupting order.

The CATTt heuristic directs us to put these different elements of our materials into conversation (intertext). The immediate instruction for this component of concept, is to document the opinions, presuppositions, cliches, majority discourse at work within our policy issue: how does Commerce (commodity form) frame what is happening? The italics for this phrase are a reminder that in D&G's vocabulary event is extracted from what happens.