WIDE IMAGE 3

  3) Memory: Frank Gehry.In their book about the architect, Frank Gehry (best known for his design of the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain), Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan (Frank O. Gehry: Outside In) describe the connection between Gehry’s childhood memories and his career in a way that resonates with the principle of the wide image.

    • Gehry’s grandmother was his best friend. He says she believed in strange, magical powers and superstitions. “When somebody would look at me funny, she would lick my face! I hated that, but I loved her a lot.”

Young Frank often spent the night at his grandparent’s house. They had emigrated to Canada from Poland, and although they slowly adopted the ways of their new country, they observed their Jewish traditions. On Thursdays, Frank went to the market with his grandmother. Each week she bought a live carp to be made into gefilte fish for Sabbath supper. They carried it home in a heavy white paper bag filled with water.

“We’d put it in the bathtub, and I would watch this fish for a day, this beautiful object swimming around. Then the next day it would be gone,” he says. Those beautiful disappearing fish, still vivid in his memories, appear over and over in Gehry’s architecture. . . .

In Timmins, Frank ran into his first experience with anti-Semitism. A group of bullies tormented him at school, beating him up and calling him Fish, an insult suggesting that he smelled. it was humiliating to be punched and taunted because he was Jewish. During this painful time he pulled back from his family’s religious beliefs. . . .

Many artists use autobiographical images to work through their conflicts. For Gehry, the shape of a fish repeated over and over in his designs represents his mixed feelings. On one hand, the fish echoes the anti-Semitic slurs of his childhood. On the other, it symbolizes the comforting religious rituals observed by his grandmother. The giant fish sculptures elevate memory into art.

2018-07-16T21:59:16+00:00 July 16th, 2018|Categories: Memory, Mystory, Wide Image|Tags: , |

WIDE IMAGE 2

 2) Childhood Memory: Einstein’s Themata.

A heuristic rule is: any hermeneutics may become heuretics. Holton developed the Image of Wide Scope as hermeneutic, a mode of analysis and interpretation of the completed careers of productive people. The gambit of mystory shifts focus to the thematic, to discovery, as a rhetoric to generate a hypothetical wide image. Since the wide image is fully formed by the time students reach college, the mystory assumes that it may be composed and designed speculatively. One feature that recurs through these biographical studies of creative people is the importance of a scene of memory from childhood. Prototype is Albert Einstein, studied in depth by Holton, and we will refer to his history as a template to test for ourselves. It is possible with completed careers to observe the correspondence between the childhood scene and the disciplinary invention (between the compass and the physics of electromagnetism).

We can go back even further when searching for the point where the thematic commitment to the continuum was formed. It is well known that as a child of four or five, Einstein experienced what he called a wonder when his father showed him a simple magnetic pocket compass. It was an experience to which Einstein often referred. His friend Moszkowski reported him in 1922 to have said, “Young as I was, the remembrance of this occurrence never left me.” His biographer Seelig wrote in 1954 that the compass to this day is vividly engraved in his memory, because it practically bewitched him. In his autobiography, written at the age of sixty-seven, we read: “I can still remember –or at least I believe I can remember–that this experience made a deep and lasting impression on me. Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.”

This scene is most suggestive. There is the mysterious invariance or constancy of the compass needle, ever returning to the same direction, despite the fact that the needle seems free from any action-by-contact of the kind that is usually unconsciously invoked to explain the behavior of material things; despite the vagaries of motion one may arbitrarily impose on the case of the compass from the outside; and regardless of personal will or external Zwang or chaos. If Einstein remembered it so well and referred to it so often, it may be because the episode is an allegory of the formation of the play-ground of his basic imagination. (Gerald Holton, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought).

  –Exercise. There is no need to understand all the features of mystory, wide image, heuretics, popcycle, before beginning the discovery and design project. We may begin with a memory exercise, to notice what scene remains in memory. The instructions are just to reflect for a few minutes on one’s early childhood, to observe what may appear, to take note, to save the scene for development later on. Record the memory in anecdote form (300-word flash fiction) illustrated with found images. The exercise may also be applied analytically to biographies of interest. We will inventory a number of cases of such early memories.

2018-07-17T13:12:55+00:00 July 16th, 2018|Categories: Memory, Mystory, Wide Image|Tags: , , |

WIDE IMAGE

1) The Writing of the Disaster. In Konsult egents articulate or reoccupy (retrieve) the conventions of microcosm/macrocosm by which pre-modern peoples oriented themselves (determined their EPS): As above, so below (one’s fate was written in the stars, and to read it one consulted oracles and astrologers). A contemporary version shifts from vertical to horizontal dynamics: As without, so within, The historical collective  and the individual person become mutually intelligible when articulated in the proportional analogy of hypotyposis (The Writing of the Disaster/In Me). Such is the conceit of this genre organizing pedagogy in the digital apparatus. The guiding idea of Project #1 (heuretics of Konsult) is an encounter between egents and disaster, in which egents translate their image of wide scope (Wide Image) into a diagram, to function as an original hypothesis addressing the impasse (aporia) of Disaster.

–Mystory. In order to undertake Project #1, egents first must engage the nested Project #2, Mystory. Mystory is a genre for finding/designing an Image of Wide Scope (Wide Image; WI). We will devote considerable attention to this genre, which is the core of electrate pedagogy. The first insight is that electracy does not shift the disciplinary curriculum of literacy but rather the pedagogy. The rationale for this shift comes from Gerald Holton, history of science, argued in such books as Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein (Harvard, 1988). Holton notes that the practice of science (and all productive knowing) includes three primary dimensions, of which two are routinely taught while third remains latent, implicit. Discipline learning is organized around verification (knowledge after it is discovered or invented): making as techne, which is considered to be teachable. Techne as practice includes empirical facts (materially tested); and analytical tools. The third dimension (not taught or considered not teachable) also operates nonetheless, Holton insists. It is the dimension of discovery, creativity, which Holton calls thematic– making as poiesis. The empirical and analytical are objectively present in the disciplinary institution; the thematic is subjectively personal to the egent. Its origin is one’s disposition, a unique mix of nature and nurture, referring to one’s state of mind or attunement, attitude. Holton approaches the history of science from the side of themata, existing as archetypes in the history of thought and patterns of imagination specific to individuals. They are not provable, but are the source of hypotheses. Here is a key: Disposition generates original hypothesis.

–From Disposition to Hypothesis. The first lesson from Holton is to track this relation between disposition and hypothesis, since it establishes exactly the place of the Arts and Letters archive in electrate pedagogy as creativity. The insight to register for now is that disposition is precisely the concern of much of Philosophy, especially Continental thought, as in Heidegger’s question of how things stand with me, with us, Dasein (there-being) and Ereignis (collective enowning of event). Underlying Existential Positioning Systems is Existential Phenomenology, for example. The import for curriculum is that inquiry into disposition draws upon the traditions of Philosophy. The Image of Wide Scope designed through mystory puts into form and brings to expression egent’s disposition. Similarly, the best resource for learning how to formulate and translate this disposition into hypothesis is through study of literature (transmedia). The authority here is Northrop Frye, who in Anatomy of Criticism stated that literature and fiction as such are hypothetical. In short, this thematic dimension of science (of knowing) opens onto the Humanities (Arts and Letters) disciplines, locating the frontier articulating “the two cultures.”

–Albert Camus, Lyrical Essays. Holton observed in his study of revolutionary science that the work of individual creators manifested a pattern organized around a few (four to five) images (the Wide Image). Albert Camus anticipated this insight in reflecting on his own career, commenting on the reissue of his early collection of essays, The Wrong Side and the Right Side, which serves as an epigraph for mystory.

Nothing prevents one from dreaming, in the very hour of exile, since at least I know this, with sure and certain knowledge: a man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. This is why, perhaps, after working and producing for twenty years, I still live with the idea that my work has not even begun.  (Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, 17).

2018-07-16T20:38:12+00:00 July 16th, 2018|Categories: EPS, Mystory, Wide Image|Tags: , , , |

OVERVIEW4

The Judgment of Paris, (1636) Peter Paul Rubens,

4) THEOPRAXESIS. What resources are available to egents in their practice of konsult? Egents design their Wide Image in the context of the curriculum, as a reminder of the resources of the archive of Arts and Letters traditions available for retrieval or reoccupation in the project of invention. In addition to heuretics and mystory as a genre for composing Wide Image against Disaster, egents are introduced to their own capabilities as these have been dramatized, augmented, and explored in the tradition. The entire archive is reconfigured according to this pattern, which is consistent from Plato’s Republic to Alan Kay’s Graphical User Interface (GUI). These capabilities (powers, virtues) constitute the intellectual virtues in Aristotle’s account: Theoria, Praxis, Poiesis. The portmanteau Theopraxesis in the subtitle of the book affiliated with KE refers to these powers, with the new term signaling the need for integration of capabilities in the dromosphere.

–Capabilities. The argument of Konsult: Theopraxesis is that Justice updated for electracy makes capability a human right (referencing Amartya Sen). The heuretic curriculum samples the status and relationships among the capabilities (virtues) historically. Rubens’s Judgment of Paris visualizes in this legend the quarrel or conflict inherent in the relationship among these powers, both within an individual person and in their institutional extensions. The quarrel is among three goddesses, associated with the respective powers, as to which one is more desirable: Athena (Wisdom and War); Hera, wife of Zeus (Political Power, worldly action); Aphrodite (Beauty, sexual fertility). The mortal Paris is asked to judge by awarding a Golden Apple to the One. Each Power tries to bribe him, and Aphrodite wins by promising Helen as prize, the most attractive mortal woman. Paris took the bribe and the rest is Epic. Hubert Damisch, in his book on this topos, notes the challenge of visualizing the three powers. In this medium, Aphrodite has the advantage.

–Modality. The mystorical imperative always is to recognize these histories as belonging to me: what is my experience of these three virtues personally and institutionally? In Plato’s Republic (Contrast in the CATTt generating Konsult as genre), the three powers are articulated in a microcosm/macrocosm structure, imagining social institutions as collective realizations of human virtues: Head (Rulers); Heart (Guardians); Viscera (Workers). The pattern continues in modernity in Kant’s Critiques of Pure Reason, Practical Reason, and the Judgment of Taste. Hannah Arendt attempted to update Kant’s Critiques for a post-Holocaust civilization, leaving the project unfinished at her death. This history is relevant to understanding the challenge of electrate learning: to integrate in one performance the powers of Thinking-Doing-Making; Knowing-Willing-Imagining. Alan Kay designed GUI with this history in mind, providing three inputs interfacing human capability with the digiverse: Keyboard, Mouse, Image.

–Pedagogy. The practical import of this reconfiguration is as guidance for transition from literacy to electracy. The quarrel among the virtues underlies the dispute among the traditions of Philosophy, History, and Literature as to which one is closest to Truth: Philosophy declares what is; History documents what happens; Literature imagines possibilities. The shift in orientation in electracy is away from the information of the archive to the capabilities of the egent: the goal is not objective coverage of history, but egent empowerment.

2018-07-17T00:17:46+00:00 July 13th, 2018|Categories: Capability, Overview, Theopraxesis, Wide Image|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: , , , |

OVERVIEW2

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2) Anthropocene. Electracy dates from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, in the later eighteenth century, which is to say that one of its identifying features is the Anthropocene (the epoch in which human activity began to modify the world environment). James Watt’s steam engine (1775), The French Revolution (1789), and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), are three threshold events introducing electracy. Literacy began in Classical Greece with the Presocratics experience of Nature (Phusis) as Being in itself, arising or upsurging out of itself, not caused by gods (hence shifting metaphysics out of orality into literacy, out of religion into science as accounting for reality). Electracy is responsible for inventing a new metaphysics through encountering Second Phusis (artefactual reality). In orality the cause of the destruction of the world was imagined to be God. Literacy gave humanity itself the power to destroy the world. A rationale for seeking an alternative to spiritual and materialist consulting is that both established apparati threaten world destruction. Electracy offers a third way, an alternative (without guarantee, since it is possible the propensity of any apparatus is toward catastrophe). Climate Change stands in for all hyperobjects created by and exceeding control of civilization, with posthuman consequences (in which human survival and thriving are not considered).

—General Accident. The apparatus of science (including literate schooling, individual selfhood and the democratic nation state) has reached a condition of failure, in the sense of heart failure in which the organs are consumed by their own energy. Paul Virilio testified through his Museum of Accidents (and many books) to the impasse created by digital speed, light-speed technologies creating real-time conditions collapsing all dimensions into Now, overwhelming the practices of critical thinking. Hopes for engineering solutions through technological progress are delusions, Virilio observes, since every invention includes its own accident: the invention of the car includes the car wreck. Virilio warns of the General Accident, that happens everywhere simultaneously, with disasters such as Chernobyl nuclear meltdown representing harbingers. Perhaps the Internet Accident has happened already, with the pollution of the public sphere by fake news, contributing significantly to the erosion of democracy everywhere it exists. Virilio most fears a Knowledge Accident, related to human intervention in the genome, genetic inventions.

—Apparatus Incommensurability. A further factor motivating invention of alternative learning is the opposition to science (evidence-based thinking), the fundamental incommensurability that exists among apparati. History could be read as a violent quarrel between religion and science (from the execution of Socrates for corrupting the youth to the assassination attempt on Malala Yousafzai). The corporation is the core institution formation of electracy, which has its own reasons for opposing science. It is a sign of the times that the administration of Donald Trump is enacting policies hostile to science, including climate change “skepticism” as rationale for extensive deregulation of commercial activity. The motivation for much of this science denial appears to be the adverse impact on profits and business models that follows from acknowledging human responsibility for climate change.

2018-07-12T21:27:44+00:00 July 12th, 2018|Categories: Overview|Tags: , |

OVERVIEW (Survol)

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Introduction to Projects

KE is for anyone interested in adapting Humanities education, and pedagogy in general, to digital media. It is not the only way such an adaptation may be accomplished, but it may be in the mix for those taking into account apparatus theory (electracy names the digital apparatus). The curriculum and pedagogy are organized around the invention, design, and testing of konsult, the genre for learning in an electrate way. The rationale and related practices are inventoried in the following outline, to be unpacked and tested throughout KE.

1) Adopt a Disaster. The invention begins when egents (student konsultants) choose an ongoing disaster as the setting for their konsultation. The choice is based on punctum–a sting or trigger of emotion, a feeling of in/justice with respect to current events.

 –Felt: Electracy constitutes a metaphysics of Desire, underwriting and augmenting across institutions the human capacity of attraction/repulsion (pleasure/pain). These passions include Thymos as well as Eros. A feeling of in/justice is addressed not as a “virtue” (a concept or ideal) but within the full range of passions, treated within literacy as até dramatized in tragedy (and comedy), probing the insight relating individual foolishness to collective calamity. Konsult seeks to do for the visceral order of passion what dialogue did for the intellectual order of reason.

—Attitude: Electracy does not compete with literacy as science or oraltiy as religion, but complements them. To the extent that prayer and engineering are sufficient for managing catastrophe, there is no need for konsult. Konsult intervenes when business as usual no longer suffices, disasters persist and increase. Konsult adopts its own attitude to disaster: egents “consult” (seek advice from, attempt to learn from) the disaster. They attempt to transate for themselves and the community the writing of the disaster (Blanchot).

2018-07-12T17:20:02+00:00 July 12th, 2018|Categories: Overview|Tags: , , , , |
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