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)

Concept Avatar

In the 2011 seminar we derived from Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy? the obscenario, a mode of conceptual thinking adapted for doing theory in electracy (philosophy as media practice).  The obscenario is transitional alternative to the scenarios of conventional consulting, as a means to imagine the future in order to decide NOW what policy decisions to make.  Concepts are literate, and the purpose of Philosophy, D&G state, is to create concepts.  The first challenge for us is to learn how to include conceptual thinking within electrate media, in order to think our way into the new apparatus.  D&G analysed "concept" into three components:  an idea (term), a problem field addressed by the idea, and a conceptual persona who dramatizes the import of the idea in a situation.  Obscenario shifts the emphasis from literate concepts foregrounding of the eidos (abstract configuration of properties) to persona in a situation, which lends itself to imaging.  The prototype of a conceptual persona is Socrates, dramatizing "dialectic" as idea in the dialogues of Plato.  Avatar Emergency (AE) does not begin immediately with the phenomenon of "avatar," but approaches it through the formation of an obscenario, that is, through "concept avatar." We must rely on this mode to carry us some way into the invention of a post-literate practice. The phrase is ambiguous:  the concept of "avatar," and an avatar of "concept" (which itself may not appear).  The first step, in other words, is to develop within our literate skills a concept adequate to the experiment we propose:  a practice that does for electracy what the dialogue did for literacy.

The relay from Socrates is useful to identify the features of obscenario, which we should inventory in order to utilize them in our own variations.  There are several levels for emulation: 1) Plato creates the dialogue as a "tale" for his CATTt, to communicate in writing the new logic of dialectic.  Students are introduced to dialectic (analysis and synthesis) through an interface metaphor, the behavior of the gadfly Socrates.  Dialogue as pedagogy requires a certain attitude:  a commitment among friends to suspend competition in order to discover what is objectively (logically) true;  2) the scenario proper is Socrates encountering an interlocutor on the streets of Athens, in everyday life, as in Euthyphro, for example.  Euthyphro is in a situation: he has decided to prosecute his father for impiety.  Socrates asks Euthyphro to define his terms:  what does he mean by "impiety."  Of course the definition of "impiety" makes it into a concept -- a literate skill, but Euthyphro is not literate. 3) The context for the apparatus is the invention of practices of logic to augment pure reason, as a capacity of selfhood (individual identity) in a democratic state (collective identity). 

AE introduces concept avatar as obscenario, a vehicle for thinking a new identity formation, via ideas evoked in a problem situation, dramatized by a persona (it is not concept proper, but an allegory of an idea).  The instruction is to extrapolate to our own case. 

Parameters (Framing)

 It might be useful to commit some of the points and directives established in lecture (esoteric version) to exoteric (blog).  The design of konsult test begins with some presets or parameters already directing our attention. Working on behalf of the EmerAgency, Konsult communicates Arts and Letters knowledge to communities facing policy decisions, to help include considerations of well-being.  Konsult does not replace existing conventional consulting, but supplements it with electrate resources.  Why "well-being" specifically?  It is not just one condition among others, but is the fundamental dimension of Real (World) made accessible to ontology (to construction) in an electrate apparatus.

Gregory Bateson identified the keywords (guiding terms) of the oral and literate apparati in his book, Mind and Nature.  Reality in the oral apparatus (extended via Religion into the present) is organized by the principles of salvation (spiritual transcendence).  Reality in the literate apparatus (extended via Science into the present) is organized by the principles of entropy (material immanence).  Bateson does not address electracy, but we may bring his pattern up to date.  Reality in the electrate apparatus (with the effect of reordering the other institutions) is (in principle) organized by well-being (specific features of this term remain to be defined).  At present this organization is emergent within Entertainment, commercial and commodity institutions.  It is important to keep in mind also that there is nothing new about a concern for well-being:  it was also addressed in the previous orders (that well-being would be satisfied through spiritual or material means).

The goal of konsult is to develop a practice to support community institutionalization of well-being outside of narrowly commercial values, but also apart from the conventions of religion and science.  The short-term goal of our experiment (the Allegory of Prudence) is to understand and undergo for ourselves the basic insight into well-being expressed in Arts & Letters tradition, as a first step toward designing a practice for general electracy. Our CATTt is designed to provide instructions for a poetics capable of generating this practice, to be discussed in future posts.

Ubiquitous Imaging: Seminar 2013

Ubimage

This seminar uses the methodologies of grammatology and heuretics to develop a practice for electracy (the digital apparatus).  The practice is designed for work with the EmerAgency, a virtual consultancy, taking up a specific project in progress, produced by the Florida Research Ensemble.  The FRE created an interactive installation --"Murphy's Well-Being" (MWB), 2012-- for an exhibition addressing the Cabot/Koppers Superfund site in Gainesville, Florida.   MWB is an experiment testing the genre of konsult, designed to deliver Arts & Letters knowledge and practice of well-being to policy-formation controversies in the public sphere.  One premise of apparatus theory is that an apparatus includes not only communications technology, but also the invention of authoring practices within new institutional support, and native identity experience and behavior of individuals and communities.  The technology assumed for the present experiment is that of ubiquitous computing (mobile locative media).  We are not concerned directly with this equipment, but assume the vision of technics on a trajectory of innovation of which the current figure is "google glasses":  the prospect of a physical and cultural environment in which there is a convergence and synchronicity of total real-time information (Internet) with the present lifeworld (Lebenswelt).  This convergence exists first as a juxtaposition or superimposition, with a host of emerging practices attempting a suture.  Apparatus history shows that the invention of authoring skills has its own sources apart from the evolution of technics.  Ubimage draws upon an Arts & Letters history to design and test a practice for intelligent mobility. 

Correspondences

The convergence of Internet and lifeworld to create a surround of information (extending the saturation of the lifeworld with spoken and written language) creates a need and opportunity to develop a contemporary version of the microcosm-macrocosm correspondences enjoyed by premodern civilizations.  The systems of correspondences that oriented individuals to the ethos and habitus of the society and to nature were destroyed by modernity (scientific industrialized utilitarian society).  The program for a new "correspondence" (Baudelaire's "forest of symbols") concerns the functionality modeled in premodern oracles such as Tarot or the I Ching, if not the cultural content of those systems.  Oracle "games" allow individuals to author epiphanies, and the epiphany form survived in modernst poetry and art in the absence of the system that supplied data from the wisdom traditions in support of practical reason (decision procedures).  The experiment undertaken in ubimage is to design and test a contemporary practice of correspondences, constructing a system of macro-micro-cosm for an electrate wisdom.  Ubimage is a practice of "macroimaging" (arts equivalent of macroeconomics, each dealing with the dynamics of information circulation).

Heuretics

One purpose of the seminar is to gain some experience with heuretics, the logic of invention.  Electracy, like literacy before it, is invented (not generated in some deterministic unfolding of entailments).  Ubimage does not pretend to create an electrate decision tradition of well-being all at once, any more than researchers in other disciplines "cure cancer" (for example) with one experiment.  Rather, the seminar sets up one experiment, applying the CATTt generator, to undertake one version of a possible practice for a konsult, whose results may then be looped recursively into further experiments. There are many resources to choose from for ubimage, and part of the discipline of heuretics is to commit to a specific set of materials, and confine the project to those resources for the duration of the experiment.   The CATTt proposed for this seminar is the following (entries identify resource category + specific text; number indicates order in which the text appears in the assignment sequence.  Texts subject to change):

                  Contrast:  I.2--Tourism (Universal Experience:  Art, Life, and the Tourist's Eye, Curated by Francesco Bonami et. al.).

                  Analogy: II.1--Art (Robert Smithson:  Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere, by Ann Reynolds).

                  Theory: I.1--Poststructuralist philosophy (Avatar Emergency, by Gregory Ulmer).

                  Target: II.2--History (A Natural History of the Senses, by Diane Ackerman).

                  tale: I.3--Divination (The Complete Illustrated Guide to Tarot, by Rachel Pollack).

Theoria

The assignment builds upon FRE experience with the institution of theoria, as practiced in the ancient world--a combination of tourism and theory (see Miami Virtue).  The most famous example of theoria is the visit of the three Wise Men to the manger in Bethlehem, to determine the truth of the rumors that a new king was born.  A theoros (member of a theoria) is sage, someone like Solon for the Classical Greeks, a person trusted by the community, sent as investigative journalists to sort out fact from fiction in the information flow of a community.  Theoria is associated with tourism in that part of the inquiry involved consulting with locals who served as guides to all the shrines, sites, and important personages of the area.  The purpose of ubimage is to open a new dimension of consulting, triangulating between the present institution of tourism (a vital contemporary vernacular behavior, largest single industry in the world), and the historical practice of tarot (a mapping of the universal journey through life for premodern people).  Both tourism and tarot are treated as positive resources for inventing ubimage functionality.  Tarot is especially misunderstood, due to its caricature survivals in New Age and self-help contexts.  These popular and vernacular practices, of course, are an advantage in that they provide a background familiarity with a potential discourse of well-being.  Greek philosophy was not invented from scratch, but was generated in the Academy as a syncretism and refinement of cultural features of the contemporary society.  It is important to remember that tarot is created in Renaissance Italy and is a popular expression of the same forces shaping the work of the Neoplatonic Academy in Florence.  It acquired much of its hermetic aspects in the same environment nurturing the birth of the avant-garde arts in Paris in the nineteenth century, and its best (unintentional) commentator bringing it most fully into contact with contemporary thought is Sigmund Freud.  Psychoanalysis, in its cultural productivity, is divination (that dare not speak its name).  EmerAgency consulting experiments with electrate theoria.

Tropic Farming

We mustn't believe we are living the realization of some evil utopia -- we are living the realization of utopia, period. That is to say, its collapse into the real (Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies).

Instructions for the tale of our CATTt come from Rob Kovitz, Pig City Model Farm.  Kovitz exemplifies appropriation, collage composition to produce a trope.  The elements collected in the composition include documentation (text and image) of the following domains:  1) Model farming in general, and pig farming in Canada in particular.  The documents express scientific best practices for humane and efficient production of meat for market; 2) Utopian theory in general and Charles Fourier in particular:  principles for improving and perfecting human social and cultural life through regulation of all conduct; 3) Citations from a library of literature, serving as a commentary on the urge or drive for perfection and its disappointment; 4) Some autobiographical statements, alluding to employment in a meat-packing plant; 5) Citations and references to vanguard arts practices, Dali's Paranoid-Critical Activity, and Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass.

Metalepsis

Demonstrating what Deleuze called the logic of sense, Kovitz's brings two semantic domains together, two chains of signs sharing one property:  the shape of a particular architectural design used in farm buildings (the original disciplinary context for the work is architecture).  Placed roughly at  the center of  the composition, the famous image of the train entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau triggers the turn, producing the metaleptic leap back, reconfiguring the previous documentation on model farming as commentary on national socialist ideology of perfecting the race.  Preparing pigs for market transfers to concentration camps, with the aura of butchering meat evoking human genocide.

Kovitz's structure is that of a basic figure:  pig farming is the vehicle; utopian socialism is the tenor.  The instruction is to treat documents of our accident event as the vehicle, as a trope, to exploit its aura for commentary on some tenor.  There are several candidates for tenor in our scenes, but whichever one we choose, the instruction is to enter it as documentation, juxtaposed and intercut (montage editing) with the vehicle.

Be Still

Further instructions from 'Pataphysics (Bok):  use a Surrationalist strategy, to compose from the object position.  The relay OULIPO suggests ours is an experiment in potential consulting.  Pine tar is produced by means of distillation.  It is distilled. The Superfund is still here.

Dictionary   
still 1 |stil|
adjective
not moving or making a sound : the still body of the young man.
• (of air or water) undisturbed by wind, sound, or current; calm and tranquil : her voice carried on the still air | a still autumn day.
• (of a drink such as wine) not effervescent; compare with sparkle .
noun
1 deep silence and calm; stillness : the still of the night.
2 an ordinary static photograph as opposed to a motion picture, esp. a single shot from a movie.
adverb
1 without moving : the sheriff commanded him to stand still and drop the gun.
2 up to and including the present or the time mentioned; even now (or then) as formerly : he still lives with his mother | it was still raining.
• referring to something that will or may happen in the future : we could still win.
3 nevertheless; all the same : I'm afraid he's crazy. Still, he's harmless.
4 even (used with comparatives for emphasis) : write, or better still, type, captions for the pictures | Hank, already sweltering, began to sweat still more profusely.
verb
make or become still; quieten : [ trans. ] she raised her hand, stilling Erica's protests | [ intrans. ] the din in the hall stilled.
PHRASES
still and all informal nevertheless; even so.
still small voice the voice of one's conscience (with reference to 1 Kings 19:12).
still waters run deep proverb a quiet or placid manner may conceal a more passionate nature.
DERIVATIVES
stillness noun
ORIGIN Old English stille (adjective and adverb), stillan (verb), from a base meaning ‘be fixed, stand.’
still 2
noun
an apparatus for distilling alcoholic drinks such as whiskey.
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from the rare verb still [extract by distillation,] shortening of distill .

Thesaurus   
still
adjective
1 the parrot lay still motionless, unmoving, not moving a muscle, stock-still, immobile, inanimate, like a statue, as if turned to stone, rooted to the spot, transfixed, static, stationary. antonym moving, active.
2 a still night quiet, silent, hushed, soundless, noiseless, undisturbed; calm, peaceful, serene, windless; literary stilly. antonym noisy.
3 the lake was still calm, flat, even, smooth, placid, tranquil, pacific, waveless, glassy, like a millpond, unruffled, stagnant. antonym rough, turbulent.
noun
the still of the night quietness, quiet, quietude, silence, stillness, hush, soundlessness; calm, tranquility, peace, serenity. antonym noise, disturbance, hubbub.
adverb
1 she's still running in circles up to this time, up to the present time, until now, even now, yet.
2 He's crazy. Still, he's good for dinner conversation nevertheless, nonetheless, regardless, all the same, just the same, anyway, anyhow, even so, yet, but, however, notwithstanding, despite that, in spite of that, for all that, be that as it may, in any event, at any rate; informal still and all, anyhoo.
verb
1 she stilled the crowd quiet, silence, hush; calm, settle, pacify, soothe, lull, allay, subdue. antonym stir up.
2 the wind stilled abate, die down, lessen, subside, ease up/off, let up, moderate, slacken, weaken. antonym get stronger.

Figuring Exception

Syzygy

Part 2 is devoted to developing the insight from Part 1:  the Accident is a sign.  Further instructions indicated that the sign is a trope, and the terms of the figure are set by the event itself.  Bok's 'Pataphysics makes the instruction more precise.  The lesson is found in the breakout of Surrationalist 'Pataphysics into three "declensions":  Anomalos (principle of variance); Syzygy (principle of alliance); Clinamen (principle of deviance).  A difficulty of heuretics is its heuristic nature:  how should we respond to this appearance of three figures in our Analogy source?  We could simply accept Bok's terms, and apply one of them as the figure with which to design the Prezi exhibit.  But then we consider the invented nature of Bok's figures.  Syzygy is borrowed from astronomy, for example, naming one or the other of two points in the orbit of a celestial body either in opposition to or conjunction with the sun.  The term is generalized to refer to any unity achieved through coordination of alignment.  Bok's creative move guides our option:  identify in the technical discourse of your event a process that may be generalized into a trope or figure of thought. 

Bok refers to Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence at one point, suggesting its relevance to 'Pataphysics.  This insight reinforces the above instruction, since Bloom constructed a set of six tropes to name the process belated poets perform to create a place for themselves in literary tradition, in competition with their predecessors.  Bloom clarified the practical value of the fact that Freud's vocabulary describing ego defense mechanisms is a direct appropriation of tropology from the history of rhetoric.  Bloom's first trope (move or compositional strategy) is "Clinamen" also.  Second is "Tessera" (term taken not from mosaics but ancient mystery cults, where it meant a token of recognition); third is "Kenosis" (from St. Paul, the humbling or emptying out of Jesus), and so forth.  The relay suggests the productivity of troping the terms of some knowledge discourse for use as a rhetorical figure more generally.  A worthy experiment for some future CATTt could be to compose a different tropology, to replace Bloom's Agon version of poets in competition, with an Ilynx version, of poets dancing (or some related form of spin).