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POPCYCLE 2

 2) Memory Palace. Konsult externalizes and augments mental modeling, including cognitive mapping, the capability of proprioception fundamental to orientation in space and time. A feature of apparatus shift is called innervation (facilitation)–referring to the neurological changes associated with brain/mind adaptation to new technologies. In Phaedrus (the first discourse on method of literacy), Socrates warned his pupil, Phaedrus (who came to his tutorial session with a cheat-sheet up his sleeve of the text he was supposed to memorize) that writing would destroy his memory. Pedagogy in the epoch of manuscript technology involved two interdependent practices: composition of a commonplace book (florilegia), organized by topics (topoi), consisting of methods for generating various genres along with archives of relevant information and resources; memory palace, mnemonic training necessary for memorizing for oral delivery the sermon, lecture, speech for the given occasion. These practices continued up to (and beyond) the era of print, which did finally render memorization obsolete. Students designed and composed a memory palace beginning with fixing in memory an image of a familiar setting, such as their childhood home and environs. On this foundation and primary level, representing their cognitive map, as Kevin Lynch calls the internal model of place and space people form of their locale, students distribute at regular intervals in significant sites a series of strong images drawn from learned and popular culture (Biblical figures, monsters, acts of violence, grotesques), which in turn are associated using poetic devices with the words of the script. Here are versions of three levels of mystory: family home setting; entertainment mythology, community history or career discourse: GPS is the first level of mapping beginning with memory images of a real place, extending into Existential Positioning formed through experience of a popular culture and community history.

 –GPS/EPS. The comparable warning today is that GPS technologies are destroying our capacity for cognitive mapping. The rule is not to lament this loss (it is inevitable) but to accept it as a tradeoff for the augmented power of navigation (way-finding) in cyberspace. Orientation thus is a central concern of konsult, with mystory as a retrieval and updating of the obsoleted (McLuhan) practices of manuscript pedagogy (to be discussed in detail through KE). Orientation is augmented in electrate konsult just as reasoning is augmented in literate dialogue. Fredric Jameson observed that the alienation of modern experience was due to this loss of EPS that was enjoyed by premodern people. In the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian syncretism organizing Western civilization up to modernity (now being modified by further syncretism via post-colonial encounters into a global hybrid), there were four levels of meaning, in an allegorical system codified by Dante relative to the Divine Comedy. Individual believers oriented themselves (Moral position) relative to the larger allegorical pattern based on the Bible: Literal level = Old Testament, Israel coming out of captivity in Egypt; Allegorical level = life of Jesus, resurrection; Moral level (the believer’s striving against sin); Anagogical level = Theological cosmology, destiny of humanity within history, salvation. Jameson calls for a new cosmology or allegorical practice relevant to contemporary metaphysics (electracy) that restores this ability to read across the micro-macrocosm gap. Mystory does precisely this by mapping one’s position within the popcycle, and putting the pattern of repetition generated via the fourfold allegorical reading into a wide image, based on egents’s contemporary world.

2018-07-19T19:21:54+00:00 July 19th, 2018|Categories: Memory, Orientation, Popcycle|Tags: , , , , |

POPCYCLE

Mystory. The Wide Image posts reviewed examples of completed careers in which it is possible to recognize the signature of a childhood primal scene of memory. The function of mystory is to discover and design one’s wide image at the beginning of a career, and we will review some careers in which the mystory levels are legible, as relays for composing our own version. The premise of mystory is that disposition is shaped into identity (selfhood, subject) uniquely for each individual during upbringing (ideological interpellation) within a specific habitus of four institutions before entering into career:  Family, Church, School, Entertainment. These institutions form a popcycle –the name referring to the circulation of culture across levels, a matrix or system we will explore in detail in KE. Mystory is composed by documenting the scene of interpellation in each of the institutions, using memory and research to register how one became positioned or placed (how one was “called”) relative to the ideological configuration of that institution. The assumption is that identity is not given in nature, but is formed within specific ideology. Ideology names those categories of dominant/subordinant behaviors and attitudes whose shorthand tag is WASP (in Western society). The conventional preferred identity status until recently was White race, Anglo-Saxon ethnicity, Protestant religion, continuing through the inventory to Heterosexual (sexuality) Bourgeois (class) Male (gender). These preferences and categories are breaking down now, manifested in intensely contested policy debates. Identity formation is one of the three fundamental areas of apparatus invention, so one of the concerns of konsult is to engage with new identity behaviors emerging in electracy.

  –Popcycle. The popcycle is structured as an isotopy of microcosm and macrocosm, manifesting an homology of correspondences relating individual faculties (faculty psychology remains relevant in pedagogy) with institutions and even apparati. Understanding of this civilizational recapitulation (ontogeny repeating phylogeny) is one key to egent capability put to work in konsult. By the time egents reach college they have become natives of all four apparati: born into a family and hence a native language  (Paleolithic institution, the Paleo apparatus); introduced to Orality through religion, learning ethics (right and wrong behavior) whether directly in the institution of church, synagogue, mosque, or indirectly through popular culture; Literacy is acquired in school, including enculturation into the history and values of a community (a nation); simultaneously with these three interpellations, children encounter Electracy in their consumption of media. Two points must be noted: these institutions are prostheses and collective projections of the intellectual virtues or powers of individuals: Language plus Theoria (Knowing institutionalized in Literacy), Praxis (Willing institutionalized in Orality), Poiesis (Imagining institutionalized in Electracy): theopraxesis. The second point is that at the collective level these institutions are at odds, in opposition and conflict with one another. A challenge for konsult is to invent theopraxesis not only as a skill-set of individuals but also of civilizations.

2018-07-19T16:21:42+00:00 July 19th, 2018|Categories: Mystory, Popcycle, Theopraxesis|Tags: , , , |

OVERVIEW3

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3) Heuretics. In the context of differend (Lyotard) among apparatus metaphysics, electrate learning turns to the human capability of creativity. Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) differentiated between revolutionary and normal science. KE takes up the challenge of designing a pedagogy for revolutionary science (recognizing that “science” is a catachresis in this context). An assumption of heuretics is that creativity is a procedure with its own methodology and modes of evaluation, such that it may be taught with the same degree of confidence assumed in teaching methods of criticism and critique.

–Image of Wide Scope. Gerald Holton, historian of science, identified an image of wide scope (wide image) organizing the imaginations of the most productive creators in modernity (from Kepler to Einstein). Holton identified the wide image as a pattern emerging within the oeuvre of innovators. The pattern was constituted by four or five images, anchored in a scene of childhood memory. The prototype is the career of Albert Einstein, and the memory he recorded in his autobiographical statements, of the gift of a compass from his father when Albert was four or five years old. It is possible posthumously or at the end of a career for an historian to note the uncanny symmetry between the compass and the physics of electromagnetism. The wide image is just that: a vehicle and a tenor. The vehicle for Einstein is the compass; the tenor is “invariance.” Commentators have suggested that the theory of relativity might be better dubbed a theory of invariance. Vehicle: the compass needle pointing north; Tenor: the speed of light. Subsequently, analysts have identified wide images in the careers of hundreds of figures across all fields of culture (see John Briggs, Fire in the Crucible).

–Mystory. The genre of mystory was created to enable students to discover and design their wide image at the beginning of their productive lives, rather than waiting for a biographer to extract the pattern posthumously. Nor is revolutionary science a measure of the success of this genre, in that it supports learning as equipment for living (Kenneth Burke) as well as for productivity. Mystory reoccupies (retrieves)  the pedagogical tradition of Memory Palace and topical logics from manuscript culture, as a means to connect a primal scene of childhood experience with a disciplinary aporia. Mystory documents the egents’s EPS (Existential Positioning System) in the popcycle of their culture. It is a documentation of interpellation, registering the position with which one identifies in each of the primary institutions of an apparatus: family; mythology (entertainment); history (community); career (profession). These four levels constitute a mandala of civilization, and will be tracked throughout KE. Dante is famous for codifying this typology structuring Medieval metaphysics. The immediate point is that egents’ wide image is formed before they enter university and declare a major (career). Mystory as genre brings this inchoate intuitive mental model into material configuration, providing the point of departure for the design of an image of wide scope.

2018-07-13T00:21:42+00:00 July 12th, 2018|Categories: EPS, Overview, Popcycle, Uncategorized, Wide Image|Tags: , , , |