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About Greg Ulmer

Professor Emeritus, English and Media Studies, University of Florida, Gainesville FL; Coordinator, Florida Research Ensemble (FRE).

Cosmic Whiteness

The motif of metaphysical whiteness provides some practice with flash reason, conductive inference charting patterns emerging in the repeating signifiers of the popcycle. Such repetitions cause figurative and even archetypal connotation to emerge from ordinary scenes. To emphasize this design principle we include for the curricular archive a few touchstones of cosmic white in American letters.

For Once, Then, Something
Robert Frost

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs 
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something

–Melville, Moby Dick: the whiteness of the whale.

What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid. Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught. […]

  But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous–why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows–a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues–every stately or lovely emblazoning–the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge–pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

_____________

Image: Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting

2018-07-23T20:56:20+00:00 July 23rd, 2018|Categories: Disaster, EPS, Tutorials|Tags: , , |

Existential Disaster: W. G. Sebald

A stunted Tatar with a red headcloth.  W. G. Sebald adds to our archive of popcycle exemplars, manifesting all the features of the genre we are learning: four levels of discourse; wide-image memory; cosmic scene glimpsed through a quotidian window. Some variation of popcycle structure recurs in most of Sebald’s novels. Vertigo, for example: “A book in four parts. The opening section is devoted to Stendhal’s memories of joining Napoleon’s army as a very young man, just when it invaded Italy. the second section centers on Casanova’s horrible imprisonment in Venice. The third part follows Kafka’s tribulations in Italy; and the fourth part chronicles Sebald’s own return to his childhood home in a small Bavarian village.”

–After Nature. The work assigned in seminar, however, is After Nature.  There are three worlds juxtaposed in this case, characterized as a triptych. The structure is thematized in the first section, about the sixteenth-century painter Matthias Grünewald, creator of perhaps the most famous triptych in art, the Isenheim Altarpiece. The second section is on the nineteenth-century botanist George Steller, and his journey into the Arctic with the expedition of Vitus Bering. The final section is an autobiographical prose poem. This section begins with testimony regarding the truth of a wide image, characterized as a memory fossil. “For it is hard to discover the winged vertebrates of prehistory embedded in tablets of slate. But if I see before me th nervature of past life in one image, I always think that this has something to with truth” (Sebald, 83). Then follows the scene of his existential epiphany (primal scene).

  I grew up, despite the dreadful course of events elsewhere, on the northern edge of the Alps, so it seems to me now, without any idea of destruction. But the habit of often falling down in the street and often sitting with bandaged hands by the open window between the potted fuchsias, waiting for the pain to subside and for hours doing nothing but looking out, early on induced me to imagine a silent catastrophe that occurs almost unperceived. What I thought at the time, while gazing down into the herb garden in which the nuns under their white starched hoods moved so slowly between the beds as though a moment ago they had still been caterpillars, this I have never got over. The emblem for me  of the scarcely identifiable disaster since that time has been a stunted Tatar with a red headcloth and a white slightly curved feather. In anthropology this figure is often associated with certain forms of self-mutilation and described as that of the adept who ascends a snow-covered mountain and long tarries there, as they say, in tears. (Sebald, After Nature, 89-90).

It is worth noting, for future reference, the figure of “whiteness” in all three worlds, this motif opening passage between the quotidian and metaphysical levels of the experience. The white hoods of the nuns links with whiteness in the Isenheim Altarpiece, the central panel’s vision of the future, “a planet utterly strange, chalk-colored behind the blackish-blue river. Here in an evil state of erosion and desolation the heritage of the ruining of life that in the end will consume even the stones has been depicted. In view of this it seems to me that the ice age, the glaringly white towering of the summits in the upper realm of the Temptation is the construction of a metaphysics.” (31). This ice scene becomes literal in the second history, of Bering’s ill-fated search for a Northwest passage.

2018-07-23T17:44:40+00:00 July 23rd, 2018|Categories: Uncategorized|

Existential Disaster: Pasolini

White transparent blind. The Italian auteurist film director and semiotician, Pasolini, outlined a theory of education that is electrate, with its emphasis on the formative importance of early childhood, (the Paleo) as foundation for the other popcycle educations. Before parents, school, or television, Pasolini insists, your educative sources “are dumb, material, objective, inert, merely present. And yet they have their own language which you, like your companions, can decipher extremely well. I am speaking of objects, of things, of the physical reality that surrounds  you.” Pasolini’s education is of the same sort Blanchot associated with the writing of the disaster (the existential epiphany of his childhood window). The wide image comes out of such conditions, relevant also to the phenomenon of transitional objects interfacing inner/outer experience in a child/mother interaction (object relations).

  Our first memories are visual ones. In memory life becomes a silent film. We all have in our minds an image which is the first, or one of the first, in our lives. That image is a sign, or to be exact, a linguistic sign. So if it is a linguistic sign it communicates or expresses something. I shall give you an example. The first image of my life is a white, transparent bind, which hangs–without moving, I believe–from a window which looks out on to a somewhat sad and dark lane. That blind terrifies me and fills me with anguish: not as something threatening and unpleasant but as something cosmic. In that blind the spirit of the middle-class house in Bologna where I was born is summed up and takes bodily form. Indeed the images which compete with the blind for chronological primacy are a room with an alcove (where my grandmother slept), heavy “proper” furniture, a carriage in the street which I wanted to climb into. These images are less painful than that of the blind, yet in them too there is concentrated that element of the cosmic which constitutes the petty bourgeois spirit of the world into which I was born. But if in the objects and things the images which have remained firmly in my memory (like those of an indelible dream) there is precipitated and concentrated the whole world of “memories,” which is recalled by those images in a single instant– if,  that is to say, those object and those things are containers in which is stored a universe which I can extract and look at, then, at the same time, these objects and things are also something other than a container. . . . So their communication was  essentially instructional. They taught me where I had been born, in what world I lived, and above all how to think about my birth and my life. Since it was a question of an unarticulated, fixed and incontrovertible pedagogic discourse, it could not be other–as we say today–than authoritarian and repressive. What that blind said to me and taught me did not admit (and does not admit) of rejoinders. No dialogue was possible or admissible with it, nor any act of self-education. That is why I believed that the whole world was the world which that blind taught me: that is to say, I thought that the whole world was “proper,” idealistic, sad and skeptical, a little vulgar–in short, petty bourgeois. (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, trans. Stuart Hood. Carcanet Press: New York, 1987).

As may be inferred from the accumulating citations and references to Holton, Blanchot, Pasolini, Proust, and numerous examples of early childhood memories grounding the popcycle, the original aspect of konsult pedagogy is to recover, retrieve, this early education. By the time egents reach the age of five they have earned their visceral Ph.D.

2018-07-23T13:41:46+00:00 July 23rd, 2018|Categories: Disaster, Intuition, Memory, Mystory, Orientation, Tutorials, Visceral, Wide Image|Tags: , , |

Terms: Popcycle 2

Layout (Annotation): Popcycle 2

WHIRLING SQUARES : The name “Popcycle” alludes to the process of invention/discovery, to call attention to the fact that inventions draw upon the full range of cultural institutions and experience.  I have been especially interested in collecting examples of passage through the popcycle, the vector of creativity, to show how innovation detours outside discipline. A symptom of the popcycle at work may be found in the metaphors and images innovators use in describing their process of insight: The rebus puzzles Freud found in a humor magazine; the parlor game that inspired the Turing test; The duck/rabbit optical illusion central to Wittgenstein’s “aspect;” the children’s encyclopedia analogy that Einstein took as the basis for his thought experiment (riding a beam of light). Heuretics as pedagogy assumes that learning correlates strongly with creativity. Mystory maps (choragraphy) one’s position in the institutions of the popcycle, to track interpellation (construction of identity).  Konsult appropriates and adapts these practices, developed for electrate learning, to an education conducted online.

 

POPCYCLE (EXPANDED FIELD)

Meanwhile, some reflection on the popcycle diagram, by way of a question, to ask about your experience with the generative power of diagrams. The mise-en-abyme layout is not formally motivated, nor is there any one structure required to register the components.  Derrida’s reference to heraldry was one inspiration, having in mind his ambivalent explorations of abyssal figures, extending not only to modernist tropes, but to the  structure of Plato’s Timaeus and the operations of chora. I referred to it in terms of the fibonacigeometry of the whirling square (in Internet Invention), to call attention to its dynamics, as vortex (Pound). The figure will be unpacked further, since I have used it to think together every four (+1) series and set that presents itself, in the spirit of the four-color theorem: four causes (ancient and modern), suits of cards, divination systems, four (or five) tastes, the cardinal tropes, cardinal and ordinal directions, and more.

When it comes to the image of wide scope (four or five fundamental images structuring imagination, and central to the history of invention), the prototype is Einstein’s compass (received from his father as a gift at age four or five): the wide image is a compass for the existential positioning system of learning, to orient egents tracking the vector of invention.
Coming across the work of Stephen Willats, I recognized the diagram in Perceptions of a Married Couple (1975), which prompted the thought that I should do a systematic search to trace the diagram conductively. “In ‘Perceptions of a Married Couple’ , the main focus is in the relationship between the form of the inter-personal network that underlies perception of self and others and the resulting generation of social attitudes. It was Willats’ first work where people were photographed within the coded world they themselves had actually constructed.”

2018-07-22T18:25:45+00:00 July 22nd, 2018|Categories: Design, Mystory, Popcycle, Terms, Tutorials, Wide Image|Tags: |

Terms: Popcycle

  Popcycle. Learning is a complex adaptive system, and an aspect of what we are exploring is a certain isomorphism transversing all such systems. Heuretic pedagogy is describable within a systems perspective, beginning with the popcyle of institutions within which identity is constructed.  Mystory (electrate equivalent of historiography) maps the position of a subject within the popcycle of institutions. The premise of heuretics is that there is an equivalent in learning of the four color theorem in mapping (choragraphy maps learning).  “In mathematics, the four color theorem, or the four color map theorem, states that, given any separation of a plane into contiguous regions, producing a figure called a map, no more than four colors are required to color the regions of the map so that no two adjacent regions have the same color.” The analogy is that the four institutions of the popcycle suffice as interface relating a learner with every possible dimension of reality.  This allusive argument is unpacked in subsequent posts, seeking further understanding, in configuring konsult as the mise-en-abyme of a popcycle.

 –Mandala. A basic diagram (popcycle mandala) is used consistently throughout KE to map and correlate correspondences across the layers and levels of the popcycle-mystory-wide image as Interface for the Stack of digital civilization. The diagram is not original, but is appropriated from various fourfold system templates. The diagram below registers the CATTt of a seminar documented in Ulmer’s blog, Routine, which includes extensive exposition of CATTt generators.

2018-07-22T18:11:59+00:00 July 22nd, 2018|Categories: Design, Popcycle, Terms, Tutorials|Tags: , , |

Terms: Egent

  From Agent to EgentThese posts undertake a meandering trace of inquiry.  KE reviews Ulmer’s work of the past four+ decades in order to understand it again, whole, as if given all at once, in a flash of insight. Egents undertaking konsult are interlocutors, collaborators, tutors.  The purpose is to compose and design a discourse on method, in the tradition running from Plato’s Phaedrus to contemporary French philosophy, describing and testing a mode of learning native to electracy (the digital apparatus).  The outline necessarily begins in literacy and school. The coming pedagogy is also explored elsewhere, in the context of EmerAgency (conceptual konsulting, without portfolio), addressing the curriculum reform in progress at MIT as well as Digital Humanities institutionalization.  The discussion across disciplines concerns TPE (Theopraxesis)–a shared interest in learning how to learn in digital civilization, using heuretics,  the logic of invention.

Some vocabulary must be introduced to speak precisely in the context of invention, to reduce misunderstandings to some extent, while acknowledging that misunderstanding is part of inventing. Electrate learners are egents.  “Egent” evokes “agent,” placing the function and stance of voice, alerting us to the shift of identity experience from literacy to electracy.  In literacy subjects are constructed as “self,” having individual agency, active voice in written technology, responsible party in ethics and law, and much more.  Electrate personhood involves a different experience and behavior, supplementing oral spirit (soul) and literate self. Part of our inquiry concerns the nature of this emerging subjectivation, since it is this dimension of being that must be educated.  Electracy does not improve on the existing constructions, on Church and School, soul and self.  Such is the site of the first discontinuity and occasion of misunderstanding.  If you want to know God go to church.  If you want to know Engineering go to school.  The Internet may support church and school, but those modalities are not native to it.  And if you go to the Internet, you don’t know, but you know-do-make– with respect to what?

There is no hurry in answering what is not a well-made question. Rather, we notice this dimension, this position of electrate voice, labelled “egent,” to help this noticing, to  differentiate it from agent. “Egent” as name draws also upon conduction, the fourth inference, newly supported in electracy, going beyond the inference paths managed within literacy–abduction, deduction, induction (TBC). A conductive vector: agent – E (things electrate, electronic, ePub) – egent (electrate agent) – egency (agency, EmerAgency consulting agency) – egent (Latin egeo) – they lack – desire – Desire (Lacan) – Metaphysics. It is a Latin verb, conjugation of egeo, to lack (to be needy, be in want, be poor, need, want, lack), third person plural, present indicative active.  The first usage offered as example is: Te amo, et egent vos (I love you and need you).  Theory proposes a category: Desire.  It is much discussed, but in a literate fashion. Nonetheless, appetite is to electracy what reason is to literacy. The learner is egent, plural individual (grammar is not adequate), middle voice. Not to replace soul and self, church and school, our pedagogy addresses learner as egent.

2018-07-22T17:46:10+00:00 July 22nd, 2018|Categories: Capability, Terms, Theopraxesis, Visceral|Tags: , |

Device: Gestus

Excerpts from Bertolt Brecht’s article “On Gestic Music,” translated by John Willett. This principle helps us see how images become wide.; how the primal scene is generalized into a personal category. The wide image is the generator of a gest. To adapt the analysis to mystory, extend “class struggle” to all the ideological categories, and associate the term creative with “political.” Gest constitutes interface between microcosm and macrocosmic disaster. Pedagogy becomes heuretic when objects of study (such as Brecht or Blanchot) become relays for konsult.


DEFINITION

  “Gest” is not supposed to mean gesticulation: it is not a matter of explana-tory or emphatic movements of the hands, but of overall attitudes. A language is gestic when it is grounded in a gest and conveys particular attitudes adopted by the speaker towards other men. The sentence “pluck the eye that offends thee out” is less effective from the gestic point of view than “if thine eve offend thee, pluck it out.” The latter starts by pre-senting the eye, and the first clause has the definite gest of making an assumption; the main clause then comes as a surprise, a piece of advice, and a relief.

AN ARTISTIC PRINCIPLE

The musician sees this initially as an artistic principle, and not a specially interesting one. It may perhaps help him to set his texts in a particularly lively and easily assimilated way. What is more important is the fact that this principle of looking to the gest can allow him to adopt his own political attitude while making music. For that it is essential that be should he setting a social gest.

WHAT IS A SOCIAL GEST?

Not all gests are social gests. The attitude of chasing away a fly is not yet a social gest, though the attitude of chasing away a dog may be one, for in-stance if it comes to represent a badly dressed man’s continual battle against watchdogs. One’s efforts to keep one’s balance on a slippery surface result in a social gest as soon as falling down would mean “losing face”; in other words, losing one’s market value. The gest of working is definitely a social gest, because all human activity directed towards the mastery of nature is a social undertaking, an undertaking between men. On the other hand a gest of pain, as long as it is kept so abstract and generalized that it does not rise above a purely animal category, is not yet a social one. But this is precisely the common tendency of art: to remove the social element in any gest. The artist is not happy till he achieves “the look of a hunted animal.” The man then becomes just Man; his gest is stripped of any social indi-viduality; it is an empty one, not representing any undertaking or operation among men by this particular man. The “look of a hunted animal” can be-come a social gest if it is shown that particular maneuvers by men can de-grade the individual man to the level of a beast; the social gest is the gest relevant to society, the gest that allows conclusions to be drawn about the social circumstances.

HOW CAN THE COMPOSER’S ATTITUDE TO THE TEXT REFLECT HIS ATTITUDE TO THE CLASS STRUGGLE?

  Suppose that the musician composing a cantata on Lenin’s death has to reproduce his own attitude to the class struggle. As far as the gest goes, there are a number of different ways in which the report of Lenin’s death can be set. A certain dignity of presentation means little, since where death is involved this could also be held to be fitting in the case of an enemy. Anger at ‘the blind workings of providence’ cutting short the lives of the best members of the community would not be a communist gest; nor would a wise resignation to “life’s irony”; for the gest of communists mourning a communist is a very special one. The musician’s attitude to his text, the spokesman’s to his report, shows the extent of his political, and so of his human maturity. A man’s stature is shown by what he mourns and in what way he mourns it. To raise mourning to a high plane, to make it into an element of social progress: that is an artistic task.

2018-07-25T14:50:12+00:00 July 22nd, 2018|Categories: Disaster, EPS, Tutorials, Wide Image|Tags: , , |

EXISTENTIAL DISASTER 2

Here is Existential Positioning (EPS) in experience.  How common is it to have an intuition of mortality during childhood? It is as if each person has to realize for him/herself individually what the sages codified in Ancient philosophy as ataraxy. Ataraxy is a state of mind in which the sage, realizing that s/he has no control over external events, decides to reduce her/his own desires. This ascetic view is associated with the stance that “philosophy is learning how to die.” Paradoxically, it may seem, philosophers insist that the realization that everyone dies is liberating. Since death is inevitable, why get so excited over one’s successes and failures in life? Of course, various response to this intuition are possible, such as carpe diem (seize the day).

The following piece is Ulmer’s pastiche of Blanchot’s epiphany. Pastiche is a useful form for mystory in which one’s own location within the discourses of the popcycle is mapped. Ulmer imitated Blanchot’s style and form, but substituted his own experience event. Exercise: compose your own primal scene as a pastiche of Blanchot’s epiphanic memory.


  A primal scene? The boy is eleven, starting seventh grade. His father explains that it is time to learn the value of work. He has arranged a job for his son with a friend whose name is Cutting and who owns a sheet metal shop. Every Saturday the boy rides his bicycle across town to Cutting’s Sheet Metal. The employees are done for the week at noon on Saturday. He has to arrive by noon so the boss can lock up, leaving the boy inside (he is too young to be trusted with a key). The job is to clean the shop — sweep the floor, gather up the tools and align them neatly in their designated places on the work benches, collect the remnants and clippings of the metal sheets scattered everywhere. It takes most of the afternoon to finish the chores. The shop is a cavernous open warehouse, with rows of heavy tables, the walls lined with shelves stacked to the distant ceiling with equipment, tools, metals. It is quiet, the stillness of dust motes swirling in the beams of sunlight filtered through the few windows high up near the roof, carving vectors through deep shadow. The sunlight catches the edges of a museum of blades, a taxonomy of every snipping snap slice chop saw hack rend rip cleave nip or severing machine. Half-shaped tin objects stand in rows behind piles of hammers and modelling frames. After so many weeks and months of Saturday noons the boy begins to lose touch with his former friends and companions, who go their separate ways.

  What happens then? The light and shadow of the industrial building open all at once onto a void, a black hole and white wall of divided worlds in this little infinite town: the official world of adults (parents, teachers, coaches, ministers, scout masters) that until then had constituted reality, and the unofficial world of his peers, whose existence he had only just discovered. Two completely different systems of virtue and vice, success and failure, winning and losing, visibility and invisibility, were enforced in these realms: systems Not only different, but opposite and in conflict. What earned admiration and respect in one was inversely judged in the other. He could not have articulated the revelation so abstractly then. The unexpected aspect of this scene is the sense of abandonment, solitary isolation, that overcomes the child, a spilling out or abjection, an absolute exhaling of substance, followed soon after by the inhaled relief of knowing that it doesn’t matter, since everyone and everything dies everywhere the same death.

2018-07-22T00:42:08+00:00 July 22nd, 2018|Categories: Disaster, Intuition, Memory, Mystory, Tutorials|Tags: , , , , , , |

EXISTENTIAL DISASTER

One of the experiments underway in KE is Ulmer’s revision of his career project, to receive it as a student of his own project, to notice the pattern and projection, to be his own Gerald Holton (since that is what egents must be). An element in that project is Disaster, understood literally, but then adopted as a figure of a fundamental intuition. Konsult as pedagogy invites egents to consider this intuition. It began formally in a seminar, Spring 2009, using heuretics to develop flash reason as a deliberative rhetoric for an Internet civic sphere.  Taking up a theme central to Electronic Monuments in order to push further along the path opened there, the Theory of the CATTt was Blanchot’s Writing of the Disaster, which set the terms of the experiment, as expressed in this paraphrase: What escapes all that can be said, is what must be said. The challenge to the students was to generate a poetics of the unsayable, since this is the dimension of the disaster that is not accessible to STEM disciplines.

  The method is counterintuitive, in that egents turn away from the historical catastrophe, in order to access their peculiar power. The instructions derived from the text are to compose a figure by juxtaposing a childhood memory with a collective event (a disaster).  Blanchot calls this memory a primal scene.  It represents an early if not first experience of self-awareness of the human condition – an existential intuition.  The corresponding event for Blanchot is the Holocaust.

The figure reproduces in contemporary singular form a correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm.  It makes explicit the two dimensions treated in tragedy as Atê (personal blindness producing collective catastrophe).  The figure is composed in first person, middle voice, seeking in the documentation of the event an objective correlative for the feeling of the memory.  This feeling (affect percept) is the experiential basis of electrate intelligence, to be augmented in the digital prosthesis.   The nature and function of the figure will be developed in several posts.  Here is Blanchot’s primal scene.

(A primal scene?) You who live later, close to a heart that beats no more, suppose, suppose this:  the child – is he seven years old, or eight perhaps? – standing by the window, drawing the curtain and, through  the pane, looking.  What he sees:  the garden, the wintry trees, the wall of a house.  Though he sees, no doubt in a child’s way, his play space, he grows weary and slowly looks up toward the ordinary sky, with clouds, grey  light – pallid daylight  without depth.

What happens then: the sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely black and absolutely empty, revealing (as though the pane had broken) such an absence that all has since always and forevermore been lost therein – so lost that therein is affirmed and dissolved the vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond.  The unexpected aspect of this scene (its interminable feature) is the feeling of happiness that straightaway  submerges the child, the ravaging joy to which he can bear witness only by tears, an endless flood of tears.  He is thought to suffer a childish sorrow; attempts are made to console him.  He says nothing.  He will live henceforth in the secret.  He will weep no more. (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster).

2018-07-22T00:40:29+00:00 July 21st, 2018|Categories: Disaster, Tutorials|Tags: , , , |

MYSTORY 5

5) Recognition. The kind of memory specifically supported in electracy is discussed in Konsult: Theopraxesis using the example of Marcel Proust’s involuntary memory (the event of remembrance when Marcel tasted the biscuit dipped in tea). Roland Barthes referred to the punctum or sting of recognition he experienced when viewing certain photos. This event of recognition signals the operation of intuition, the intelligence accessing deep memory formed during the visceral education of disposition in childhood. This visceral orientation is not accessed directly, but informs judgments of taste (Kant), of action in prudence (phronesis), constituting the thymotic dimension of all decision. The discovery of konsult is that mystory enables theopraxesis (integrated thought-action-imagine), mise-en-machine of visceral attraction-repulsion (passional intelligence). This logic of orientation is called flash reason, conductive inference, structured in the manner of poetic epiphany, adaptive for real-time augmented smart space. We will address this rhetoric throughout KE.

–Antonio Damasio: Context for flash reason, used in the composition and design of mystory.

Conatus

In his most recent book (Self Come to Mind), the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio discusses the human capacity to recognize one’s  own being in features of the external world (natural and cultural things, events, works).  The world offers us a mirror in which to track the turns of our identity.  He offers an example of his own experience of this capacity.

It is an object that has helped him construct, interpret, ponder and crystallize his identity, or at least his idea of it. It came to him in the early 1970s, when he was in medical school at the University of Lisbon. The sculpture, made by a woman he had just begun dating (a fellow neuroscience student and a sculptor named Hanna Costa), is a little terra-cotta figure of a man seeming to fight his way forward in a storm. And it all but cried out to Dr. Damasio with a mysterious urgency.

“Somehow I felt that it was me, or belonged to me,” he recalled. “Even though she had done it before we met.”

The doctor was even more convinced that it was a sculpture of his favorite boyhood hero: Tintin, the boyish blond reporter and detective whose comic-book adventures, written by Georges Remi (a k a Hergé) from the 1930s to the early 1980s, delighted generations of European children. Dr. Damasio was one of them, having found endless inspiration in Tintin’s feats of derring-do and the restlessly inquisitive mind that dispatched mystery after mystery with faultlessly astute reasoning and a killer right punch.

In a review of Damasio’s book, Ned Block pointed to one significant area of disagreement, not with Damasio’s example, but with how the capacity  is interpreted.  It reflects not so much “self-consciousness” as “phenomenal” consciousness, related to Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh.”

But there is also a different kind, as anyone who knows what it is like to have a headache, taste chocolate or see red can attest. Self-consciousness is a sophisticated and perhaps uniquely human cognitive achievement. Phenomenal consciousness by contrast — what it is like to experience — is something we share with many animals. A person who is drunk or delirious or dreaming can be excruciatingly conscious without being wakeful, self-aware or aware of his surroundings. (Block)

For the purposes of flash reason this disagreement is beside the point.  It is important rather to mark this capacity as precisely the capacity augmented in the electrate apparatus, whose skill set is flash reason managing dromosphere information sprawl.  The funtion of measure in image metaphysics is this event of recognition (belonging to me).

2018-07-20T15:25:48+00:00 July 20th, 2018|Categories: Art, Design, Intuition, Memory, Mystory, Orientation, Theopraxesis, Tutorials, Visceral|Tags: , , |