(Ob)Scene-o-gram

From Narrative to Figure via Oracle

In his book How to Adapt Anything into A Screenplay, Richard Krevolin admits that his method actually describes how to adapt anything into the Hollywood template.  He includes this "scene-o-gram" in his book, mapping the three-act template of the screenplay, with the crucial turning-points punctuating the structure.  As a visualization of structure, the layout evoked a tarot spread, which is not surprising considering the correlation of the three-level matrix of the major arcana with the screenplay form, mediated by the tradition of "the hero with a thousand faces."  Since the shape of our tarot spread is open (for the Prezi map), it could be interesting to test the syncretic capacities of our own adaptation to konsult:  can a Prezi configuration evoke together a tarot spread and a Hollywood scenario? 

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.

Mapping the Blind Spot

Don't Make Me Take You To The Woodshed

Robert Smithson's oeuvre as described by Ann Reynolds is our Analogy.  We approach this analogy holistically, appropriating for konsult Smithson's poetics.

1) The first insight is his use of abstract art as a grammar of image inquiry.  He invokes the entire problematic of representation through his use of enantiomorphic projection to figure Blind Spot as the register to address.  This blind spot to be mapped by konsult is not only the various forces at work in reality that are out of sight, neglected, but still within the material realm.  Force in this sense obsoletes substance in electrate metaphysics, to the extent that reality exceeds objecthood.  Smithson devotes numerous works, activities, installations, and performances to rendering visible the force of entropy.  Our analogy at this level is to ask: what is the force operating in the field addressed by konsult? That force is the human body itself, specifically our sensory capacity for pleasure-pain, attraction-repulsion. 

2) The second dimension of Blind Spot is figurative, that which comes into thought, feeling and experience only through sign semiosis expression, and this is Smithson's (and art in general) primary interest.  He constructs the woodshed on the site near Kent State University, covers it with loads of dirt until the support beam cracks (twenty tons), in order to demonstrate physical limit.  This physical limit is a figure, a trope, as is always the case in Smithson's projects, to intimate the force of entropy across all registers of real: physical, mental, ethical, political, economic, metaphysical.  He suggests:  where is your woodshed?  Why a woodshed, if not to invoke the idiom:  to take someone to the woodshed is for punishment.  It is the luck of synchronicity that four months after this installation was completed, the notorious events happened at Kent State, when National Guard troops fired on protesting students.  This historical juxtaposition just makes explicit the historical forces relevant to the question of limit, counsel, measure, decision.

Limit (Measure)

3) Blind Spot, then, identifies the dimension to be mapped by konsult as that of tropology, figurative allusion, and konsult itself as a practice of reading and authoring figures.  From Smithson we may learn to appropriate some feature of the consultancy field, to activate it in an image mode, to create a figurative comment.  The most obvious material for this comment is the Cabot Koppers site itself -- the contemporary dilemma of pollution, contamination threatening the acquifer and the well-field, the issue of technics, in the manufacture of pine tar, and the history of this invention, including its contribution to the spice trade and colonialism.  The direct analogy from Smithson is to ask after the pine tar in me.  That analogy should be a point of departure for a broader review of the scene, to map a figurative ground, considering the full array of senses driving human invention.

Outline: Learning From Florida

Reference: CATTt 

Apparatus theory (grammatology) reminds us that ubiquitous computing is an example of technics: the technology is one register among three in an inventive matrix (institutional practices + identity formations).  The primary focalizer for the responsibilities of konsult has been Paul Virilio and his warnings about the General Accident, and more conventionally the historical fact that every invention comes with a Gift Cause, the unintended but inevitable byproduct of the accident.  In consulting on well-being relative to the Superfund Site in Gainesville, we may consider pollution resulting from pine tar production as emblem for the accident potential in ubicomp as well.  It is worth remembering also, in designing our Existential Positioning System, that Heidegger anticipates Virilio's warnings in a way that makes catastrophe inherent in being.

The actively violent one, the creator, who moves out into the un-said, breaks into the un-thought, who compels the unhappened and makes the unseen appear, this actively violent one stands at all times in peril.  In risking a prevailing over being, he must take a risk with regard to the onrush of non-being, with regard to disintegration, un-constancy, lack of structural order and disorder. (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics).

Heidegger's account foregrounds the "violence" of creative invention that produces both human prevailing against the overwhelming (nature) and also catastrophe (the lesson of tragedy in general).  His insight is that aporia is an irreducible dimension of poros.  Our terms should register this complexity:  a/poria, im/mobility.  Ubimage for well-being is a practice of a/poria (im/mobile media).

Part II: Fla4 (Fla Vor; Flavor) Florida Still

Nemesis

Part II of the seminar begins now, continuing with the project to invent konsult. Konsult is to the EmerAgency what dialogue was to the Academy in Athens. We are inventing a discourse on method for electrate consulting -- pedagogy among institutions, for (in)corporate beings.  It is self-help deliberative reason for citizen decision on behalf of well-being.  The heuretic project begins with this name for a practice that remains to be designed and tested.  Konsult may occur within tourism or other leisure experience (skole = "leisure" in Greek), reoccupying the ancient practice of Theoria (theory tour), supported by Appiphany and related devices of ubimage.  It  is not only equipment of ubiquitous computing, but a practice of deliberative rhetoric, framing experience with an aesthetic attitude, to receive counsel (der Rat) from avatar (function).

The prototype encounters Cabot-Koppers Superfund site in Gainesville, Florida, included within Region 4 of the 10 Regions organizing Superfund administration.  Konsult appropriates the discourses of popular culture that inculcate aesthetic attitude as vernacular discourse:  tourism, cinema, television, digital games, to develop a behavior or conduct of sitesensing.  Call it flavor for short -- #Fla4:  fla (Fl) vor (four), to use conductive (Wake) linguistics.  Vor as German preposition carries us to the matter.  Place (Dative) of course: "though in referring to place only when it indicates condition or rest (if it answers the question 'where?') before, previous or prior to, ere, antecedent to (in time); before, in front of, ahead of (in place); in presence of; for, on account of, through, because of, with (joy, etc.)' from or against (with verbs of protection, warning, etc.); in preference to, more than, above."  Let us skip to the adverb: "only in nach vie -, as always, as ever, still, now as before."  Still (guide word).

More to come, but to review:  konsult functions as flash reason in dromosphere conditions, turbulence of Entstellung (distortion) as norm. Tropics of dreamwork, condensation, displacement, mise-en-scene, secondary elaboration:  defenses, nescience, resistance to thought and feeling, diversion as constant turning (away) of attention, framing not just gaze but every part object and its sense:  Perception and its cultural project are created (deliberately) to filter out stimuli/information/realization. The logic known as "fetish" operates freely and seemingly without resistance (it is resistance as such):  I know, but still... (current locus classicus:  "I know Obama has a U.S. birth certificate, but still...").  Cynical reason (Sloterdijk). Against but still, there is flavor.

Outline: Rationale

Gestalt

The readings in the seminar are selected as generators for a CATTt, designed to produce a poetics or recipe for our project.  The project proposes to design and test a practice of konsult, applied in EmerAgency consulting on well-being in the context of community public policy formation.  The seminar develops the design in two parts.  The readings for Part One include Avatar Emergency (Theory), Universal Experience (Contrast/Analogy), and Once (tale/Analogy).  Here is an outline of the logic motivating this selection (it will require several posts to fill out the rationale for the Part-One CATTt).



I. Dromosphere

• Frame:  Avatar Emergency takes up concept avatar (the avatar function) to develop a practice of citizen participation adequate to the conditions of the dromosphere (dimension collapse) theorized by Paul Virilio.  Virilio argues convincingly that the light-speed of the digital apparatus has made possible (inevitable) a General Accident that occurs everywhere simultaneously. 
•  Dimension pollution compresses time-space into Now, challenging literate formations of individual critical thinking and the democratic public sphere.  This challenge is the crisis motivating the "descent" of avatar (EmerAgency modified motto:  "Avatar B Us").  Dromos (race) consists of three positions (moments, opportunities, openings):  start, turn, finish.  Konsult practices Turn.

II. Prudence

• Konsult draws upon the experience of Arts and Letters traditions with immediate intuitive judgment to formulate flash reason as the logic needed for deliberation (community decision-making) in the dromosphere. 
• Prudence (Aristotle's phronesis) is the virtue of good judgement. A person with good judgment is able (posse) -- in the midst of an ongoing situation -- to draw upon past experience to make the right decision about how to act that brings about the best outcome for the community.  In oral culture this kind of judgement on the fly was associated with metis, a skill of savoir-faire demonstrated in its purest style in the conduct of a race.   
• Kairos is the mode of temporality proper to metis (the term refers to the weaver's art of throwing the shuttle at just the right moment). Kairotic time displaces cyclical (oral) and linear (literate) models of time to become the primary temporality in electracy.

III. Flash Reason

•  The lightning flash of insight (intuition, inspiration) has been fully theorized in Western thought, especially with respect to Moment (Augenblick).  Moment is taken up in konsult as the answer to Now.  Sudden thought draws together all human faculties to take in a situation in one glance.  The limits of this glance relative to the human sensorium are codified as "beauty," however that experience may be understood in a given culture.  The invention of Aesthetics as a separate faculty at the beginnings of electracy (Kant et al) recognized and anticipated the challenge to Moment in the notion of the sublime.  The conditions of the industrial city are sublime, producing shock experience of alienation, reification, objectification, in which denizens lose connection with agency (with the categories of experience: space, time, cause).  
• The arts take up the dynamics of Moment, focusing on a poetics of epiphany.  Epiphany (secularized revelation) is the formal structure of flash reason, transformed in Romanticism (German Idealism) as the "crisis poem" (Bloom), reconfiguring the operations of allegory and symbol, promoting tropology as supplement of inference and narrative as primary skills of the cultural interface.  The project evolved across the arts, leading to a new structural mode of correspondences addressing the disjunction of microcosm/macrocosm in the city.  
• Relevant versions of epiphany include Baudelaire's correspondences, Rimbaud's illuminations, Rilke's world-inner-space, Eliot's objective correlative.  Proust (involuntary memory) and Joyce (epiphany) extended the function to the novel, as did Brecht (gestus, V [A] effect) and Artaud (cruelty) in theater.  Freud's transference, Benjamin's dialectical image, and Merleau-Ponty's flesh are key instances of theoretical elaboration of flash reason.  

IV. Mechanical Reproduction

• Manifesting a certain (happy) correlation across the levels of the apparatus, the invention of the camera makes available one of the new supports of communication displacing alphabetic writing in the electrate economy.  The camera is just the first in a series of major innovations lending technological augmentation to the sensorium, continuing today in digital computing.  The camera augments the glance, making it more adequate to the sublime, especially when the optical function is understood in its temporal dimension as Moment.  The snapshot is kairotic.  The insight of apparatus theory is that a general electracy of the society must be developed as institution and practice to coordinate digital equipment with flash reason.
• The aesthetics of Moment was formulated most precisely in photography by Henri Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment" (shooting a la sauvette).  This design principle has a long history in the visual arts, with painters choosing the telling instance of an action to lend a narrative dimension to a picture. The principle reaches its theoretical completion in Gestalt psychology and phenomenology -- the principle of Prägnanz: the combination of expectation and perception to produce default continuities or groupings in experience.  Gestalt manifests the limitations of glance, inadequate to dromospheric sublime. 
• Avant-garde poetics invented during this same period (nineteenth-century Paris), whose prototype is Duchamp's readymades, such as "Fountain," extended Kant's Judgment to include the automatism of the snapshot.  Chance as a formal device, coordinated with recording equipment and flash poetics, were integrated in support of a new attitude towards everyday life, beyond both knowledge and will (the constitutive stands of Pure and Practical Reason).  
• Theoretical complements of vanguard poetics include Georges Bataille's informe (formless),  Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome (swarm), Lacan's stain, and related engagements with sprawl complexity. 

Socrates Relay

 The admonishment of Basho (adopted as motto of heuretics) is: not to follow in the footsteps of the masters, but to seek what they sought.  Concept Avatar is not dialogue or dialectic, but uses those as relay for the tale of our own CATTt, used to generate an electrate equivalent, to do for EmerAgency what dialogue did for Plato's Academy.  Our genre is not dialogue, but konsult.  The capacity to be addressed, supported, augmented, is not reason (logic), but affect, sensory perception (aesthetics).  The medium (equipment) is not alphabetic writing, but ubiquitous computing (pervasive computing:  mobile devices in smart environments):  ubimage in short.

Euthyphro in the midst of a situation encountered in the streets of a Polis (Athens) the gadfly Socrates.  Egent (intern of EmerAgency) consulting (testifying) on public policy encounters, via smart device in an intelligent environmnet, avatar.  Who is addressee of konsult?  First, it is the egent and her network. That is the frame of konsult.  What is the obscenario?  The genre features within konsult of conceptual persona for avatar need to be unpacked further.  In AE, Ulmer gives several examples.  A primary instance is his encounter with Franz Kafka's Diaries, and also with Thoreau's Walden, appropriated as relays to show himself to himself (to map his own position relative to a tradition/archive)