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: CATTt

Smile Now, Cry Later (Francesco Clemente)

The challenge of heuretics is that of creating a discourse on method:  The method you need has to be generated even while you are applying it.  Blogs are a good support for this generative practice, since they enable a developmental unfolding.  A project experiment is set (the design of konsult for EmerAgency catalysis of public policy dilemmas), a set of resources are chosen as generators, assigned to slots in the CATTt, and each resource is inventoried in turn, in a sequence from which emerges an intertext, to be synthesized and integrated into a working recipe.  Blogs document this process, inventorying each resource as it is encountered, itemizing instructions from the operating features of the resource, testing them in part, while moving through the sequence, integrating instructions for further testing.  The result is both a commentary on and demonstration of the desired poetics.

What are the operating features available in the CATTt for Part One?
Theory:  Avatar Emergency

• Rationale:  "Prudence" as a "time virtue," good judgment integrating experience of past and present for a decision promising optimal outcomes in the future.  Prudence must be updated for electrate conditions of dromosphere.
• Relay (Model):  Titian, Allegory of Prudence -- the artist's decision resolving a family dilemma, celebrated in a painting associating each relevant person with an animal selected from an iconographic tradition.
• Encounter:  Titian updated by Francesco Clemente for a museum exhibit of artists's appropriations of famous works from the archive (collection).  This update opens up the original relay to further invention.
• Epiphany:  Poetics of sudden thought (encounters between microcosm/macrocosm) established in both religious and secular versions, codified in modernist poetry as correspondences, objective correlative and the like. Some ordinary feature of quotidian circumstances (external setting) triggers (catalyzes) a feeling of recognition, of identity, as a figure (tenor) of Mood (Stimmung, Heidegger).
• Memory:  Catalysis (outside environment triggering inside recognition) happens through memory:  some past Moment of experience, enduring in subconscious memory, matches some sensory aspect of the present situation. Ulmer reflects upon the formative events of his year studying in Spain, including enduring memories of a night sleeping outside with a companion in an olive orchard, as well as his adoption of the diaries of Franz Kafka as a tutor author for his own journals that year.
• Event:  Ulmer constructs an allegory through reflection on family vacations, situations in which the family travels to Florence Italy, Key West Florida, and Ponte Vedra Beach. 
• Image/Pastiche:  the allegory is formalized in a collection of three snapshots (White-crowned pigeon, Gelato sign, sand castle) associated with three members of the family) plus anecdotes about the events associated with each image.  In addition, Ulmer composes a pastiche of an aphorism selected from Kafka's Blue Octavo Notebooks, offered as "motto" for the allegory, using Kafka's form and style to express a philosophical version of the commemorated judgment.
• Ubimage:  it may be worth putting a point on this outline:  konsult is designed specifically as an electrate contribution to the technics of ubiquitous-pervasive computing.

The further step of using the CATTt is to extrapolate from these operating features, to adopt them as forms only, substituting one's own materials suggested by the relay, to test an allegory of prudence (aesthetic judgment) drawing on equivalents of the features found in the source Theory.

The related point is that the exercise defined in AE is not left as is, but is modified by intertextual synthesis with subsequent resources:  Contrast (Universal Experience) and tale (Once).  Universal Experience develops the setting of the encounter as within the institution of tourism (the community already has an aesthetic structure for the gaze or collective attention --attraction).  Once (Wenders) as tale specifies how to represent the allegory in photography and anecdotes, including Einstellung as an extension of epiphany into photography.

Diagrams

 

 Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Godard)

These diagrams reference different but related aspects of "aesthetic experience," which is the frame of mind within which konsult functions.  The famous "coffee scene" linked above is an example of how an ordinary item in a quotidian situation (having an espresso in a cafe) may become an occasion for a philosophical reflection on the meaning of experience.  The diagrams and charts below outline the formal, rhetorical, and theoretical features operating in that scene. 

Mythologies (Barthes): Extended Version

C. S. Pierce (Sign)

Lacan (Borromean Knot)

Bloom (Crisis Poem)

Plato (Allegory of the Cave)

Aesthetic Attitude

Moment Against Now

 Konsult includes aesthetic attitude in the public sphere, to exercise and enhance capacity to be affected.  The attitude is modeled in several areas of common experience:  tourism, movies, the arts.  Konsult applies the vanguard project of merging art with everyday life, not to make art, but to put the stamp of being on becoming.  Moment against dromosphere in any case attempts praxis as poiesis.  Orhan Pamuck, in his novel Snow, tells the story of Ka, an exiled poet who return to Turkey to report on a wave of suicides, and also on the possibility of reconnecting with a woman he had known in his youth.  He has not written any poetry in a number of years.  But during the events of his visit, the old creative capacity returns, at least briefly, and he is able to write a poem.  The example is relevant to us not for the poem, but for how the feelings of significance arise in the midst of ongoing events, pursuing both professional and personal projects, while reflecting on the meaning and purpose of his life.  The immediate lessons may be derived from the gradual dawning of inspiration as the circumstances of recent incidents begin to form into a system of correspondences producing epiphany, Einstellung (Wenders).  The citation is selective, just to note the flavor of the account.

He made his way along the train track, past the snow-covered silo that loomed overhead like a great white cloud, and was soon back inside the station. As he passed through the empty, dirty building, he saw a dog approaching, wagging its curly tail in a friendly way.  It was a black dog with a round white patch on its forehaed.  As he looked across the filthy waiting hall, Ka saw three teenage boys, who were beckoning the dog with sesame rolls.

There was a long silence.  A feeling of peace rose up inside Ka.  They were so far from the center of the world, one couldn't even imagine going there, and as he fell under the spell of the snowflakes that seemed to hang in the sky outside, he began to wonder if he had entered a world without gravity.  When everyone had ceased to pay any attention to him, another poem came to Ka.  The poem was made up of many of the thoughts that had come to him all at once a short while earlier: the falling snow, cemeteries, the black dog running happily around the station building, an assortment of childhood memories, and the image that had lured him back to the hotel: Ipek. How happy it made him just to imagine her face--and also how terrified! He called the poem "Snow."

Much later when he thought about how he'd written this poem, he had a vision of a snowflake; this snowflake, he decided, was his life writ small; the poem that had unlocked the meaning of his life, he now saw sitting at its center.  But--just as the poem itself defies easy explanation--it is difficult to say how much he decided at that moment and how much of his life was determiend by the hidden symmetries this book is seeking to unveil.  Before finishing the poem, Ka went silently to the window and watched the scene outside: the large snowflakes floating so elegantly through the air.  He had the feeling that simply by watching the snow fall he would be able to bring the poem to its predetermined end.

Ka's Snowflake Diagram

Rebus (Letter)

Life (EPS)

By about 2,800 BC some of the Sumerian glyphs were being used to represent sounds using the rebus principle. For example, the symbol for arrow, pronounced 'ti', was used to represent the word for life (til). There were also many glyphs which were pronounced the same but represented different words. Later a system of determinatives, which gave you a hint at the category a word belonged to, and of phonetic components, which indiciated how to pronounce a word, developed, and helped disambiguate the meanings of glyphs.

The Rebus device is fundamental to writing as such, across all media and modes.  Lacan extends it into ontology with his letter (l'étre) linking cultural Signifiers with libidinal Sinthomes (Symptoms) in the extimacy of the split subject ($ = daio).  A parable of Existential Positioning begins with the ambiguity of the switch-word "here."  A traveler, exhausted from a difficult journey, consults a map in the terminal.  The momentary confusion of location and existence in here renews her determination to continue.