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SINTHOME/Theopraxesis

Jacques Lacan, The Sinthome, Seminar XXIII, 1975-76

Lacan offered seminars annually from 1952 to 1980. Lacan’s seminars make an important contribution to the Theory in the CATTt guiding the invention of Konsult in general, and theopraxesis in particular. In this later seminar Lacan makes explicit some connections with the sources of our project that until now operated as assumptions. The first of these relationships is outlined here.

Capabilities.

Real, imaginary, and symbolic strikes me as just as valid as the other triad from which, going by Aristotle, the juice was extracted to compose man, namely, will, intelligence, and affectivity. (Sinthome 126).

As discussed in the book, Konsult: Theopraxesis, one function of our experiment is to support a transition from literacy to electracy in education (to negotiate a passage from one apparatus to another). The pedagogy is centered on egents, the ones supposed to learn, appropriating the resources of Arts & Letters curriculum as means for students to undergo and develop their capabilities—their faculties, powers, virtues, potentiality—identified in the tradition dating from the invention of literacy in the Athenian academies as the embodied intellectual virtues: Theoria, Praxis, Poesis (theory, practice, poetics; thinking, doing, making; understanding, will, imagination). Kant’s Three Critiques take up this thread. The Third Critique promotes Aesthetics to equal status with Science and Morality, to propose aesthetic judgment as mediator bridging the abyss separating science and religion. Hannah Arendt took up Kant’s project as the best option for a Public Sphere in industrialized mass society after Auschwitz.

The importance of Lacan’s contribution is apparent in this context. His mnemonic image of the embodied virtues is a bag (the body, mathematically the empty set, the one) tied closed with cord (string, ficelles). RSI (playing on rhymes and puns with “heresy” and “airesis” or choice)—Lacan’s updating of the three faculties—Real, Symbolic, Imaginary—interrelate topologically, entangled in a way that Lacan explores through knot topology, with the Borromean knot specifically manifesting the sinthome (unique symptom). We have argued elsewhere that the sinthome helps account for the image of wide scope. One implication to be tested in our experiments is that in experience we encounter the apparatus stack (the popcycle) as entangled, knotted, in a manner articulated by topology. Lacan supplies one guide for the Kant-Arendt project, that we are calling theopraxesis: the virtues and their institutions already are fully integrated in a potential state (dunamis, but in a condition of privation, steresis). The “symptom” of this virtual condition is the polemos or seemingly irreducible conflict apparent in relations both macrocosmic and microcosmic of civilization.

HOGARTH: Line of Beauty

A second affiliation with tradition important to note in this seminar is Lacan’s reference to Hogarth’s curved line of beauty as relevant to the genealogy of his knot topology. This connection makes explicit Lacan’s contribution to the larger question of the gramme, the invention of the plasmatic line in the Paleo apparatus, in continuing service up to the present, now augmented in electracy through animation and digital FX. Sergei Eisenstein cited Disney’s animated film, Steamboat Willie (1928) as a revelation of the new order opened up in media by the plasmatic line. We will have more to say about the ontological properties of this line.

2019-01-10T15:32:44+00:00 December 19th, 2018|Categories: Capability, Diagram, Draw, Lacan, Popcycle, Sinthome, Theopraxesis, Topology, Uncategorized, Wide Image|

Theopraxesis: Allegory

Allegory of Konsult. Plato in Republic condensed his metaphysics of education in the allegory of the cave,  We take this famous story as a relay, prompting us to propose an allegory that dramatizes the equivalent experience of education in electracy. We will explore several possibilities throughout KE, beginning with the film version of The Wizard of Oz, based on the novels by L. Frank Baum. We recall the story of the cave was a round trip: the prisoner released from chains, turned around (converted), led out of the fire-lit cave into the sunlight outside, expected then to return to bring the news of this other world to the cave. This theme of Nostos (round trip, ida y vuelta) structures Homer’s Odyssey, of which Oz is said to be a remake update. A key point in our allegory relative to this tradition is the moment of consulting. Odysseus is prevented from returning home to Ithaca, held in thrall by Circe. Circe relents and tells Odysseus that to learn how to return home he must consult with Tiresias in Hades.

–Apparatus. The allegory helps clarify the difference in metaphysics separating the apparati. Each has a fundamental understanding of reality, and each focuses all its resources to manage the system of cause and effect according to the respective realities. In the oral world of Odysseus, gods represent cause, and humans manage this energy by means of ritual, sacrifice, worship. Odysseus’s behavior gave offense to the gods, thus activating the right-wrong metaphysics of orality. To gain access to Hades, Odysseus performs a ritual sacrifice of oxen, collecting the blood, which attracts the spirits of the dead, including Tiresias, who arrives and counsels the hero about his return home. Socrates as gadfly in the streets of Athens performs a literate consultancy, using dialectical logic questioning interlocutors, according to the true-false reality of literate metaphysics. The Wizard of Oz suggests a third manner of consulting, relative to the reality structuring electracy (Fantasy).

–Scenario. Assuming familiarity with the synopsis of the narrative, we may outline the allegorical import. In general the narrative is instructive of mystorical design in that there is an isotopic rhyming between Dorothy’s world in Kansas and the fantasy world of Oz. The encounter of these two orders is dramatized when Dorothy’s house lands in Oz, crushing the Wicked Witch of the East, whose red shoes Dorothy inherits. The tornado that interrupted a family crisis in Kansas represents Disaster. Dorothy is egent, or soul (psyche) in the allegory, and her journey to find the Wizard to get his advice dramatizes the egent’s actualization of her capabilities in theopraxesis. The three capabilities (virtues, faculties) are represented by the three companions Dorothy meets along the way, the Yellow Brick Road. The three figures embody the significance of the lack articulated in the term “egent” (they lack). The three companions represent the three virtues in a state of privation, Steresis, potentiality not realized (im/potence). Their impotence is a projection of Dorothy’s virtuality, her lack, the condition of any ephebe on the way. The three figures manifest the tripartite system of virtues, but Baum euphemized the assignments somewhat, blending heart and gut. In our appropriation of the story for konsult allegory the alignment with the tradition is clear: Scarecrow wants a brain (Knowledge, Theoria, Head, Rulers); Lion wants courage, so heart (Will, Praxis, Guardians); Tin Woodman’s problem is not his “heart” but his “axe” (enchanted by the witch), which prevents him from loving (having sex). He represents Viscera (Desire, Poiesis, Workers).

–Wizard. The scene of consultation with the Wizard, when Psyche and her three Capabilities make their requests, shows the full arrangement of apparati and their relationship at the collective level. In this expanded scene, the microcosm/macrocosm individual/collective isotopy is made explicit: Tin Man is Paleo (Family, sexual fertility), Lion is Oral (Church), Scarecrow is Literate (School), Wizard is Electrate (Entertainment). Much theory could be referenced here to support this configuration. To mention Lacan, for example, the Wizard is the Big Other, the one supposed to know, whose hold over us it is the purpose of therapy to dispel. The immediate value of the Oz allegory is to highlight this passage in education, the adventure of learning (dealing with the trials testing Psyche/Dorothy) as actualization of the three capabilities. Equally important is the fact that the Wizard is augmented capability, imagination mise-en-macbine, with the imperative of the allegory being for us to understand how Oz makes able, activates, the three virtues so Dorothy may return home (overcome disaster).

2018-08-01T16:03:46+00:00 August 1st, 2018|Categories: Capability, Overview, Popcycle, Theopraxesis, Visceral|Tags: |

TPE: Emblem, Wabi Sabi 2

–Tenor (Themata): Catechism. The image on the left is the emblem Ulmer generated from his mystory, leading to design of his wide image in Noon Star. The formal rules from Koren’s relay generates theopraxesis by requiring that the answer to the catechism questions must be derived from one of the popcycle stories, each story used once only. The three capabilities are expressed in Wabi-Sabi by three M’s (resonating with the H’MMM disciplines): Metaphysics (Theoria); Morality (Praxis); Mood (Poiesis). Egents ask themselves:

1) which of the popcycle stories, received as a fable (parable), expresses their understanding of how the world works, the character of reality. The Japanese tradition answers, “Things are either devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness.” For Ulmer, the Family story of the botched piano recital, the red star (not gold or silver) on the sheet music, is a parable of a reality in which one is continuously judged in endless competitions.  His epigram describes that condition.

2) Morality (Spiritual Values): which popcyle story is a fable of how one must act, given the character of reality? Wabi-Sabi proposes to get rid of what is unnecessary, ignore material hierarchy. For Ulmer, Custer’s foolish ambition serves as a negative example, a fable warning against Custer’s desire for glory. Ulmer’s motto expresses his lesson: Where are your Reservations?

3) The third question is Mood: given the necessity to act in that way, in a world of that character, how do I feel? Wabi-Sabi advises acceptance of the inevitable and appreciation of the cosmic order. Ulmer found his state of mind expressed in High Noon as a fable of duty: despite his contempt for the hypocritical community, the sheriff fought the gang of killers, after which he threw away the tin star. This gesture of discarding the badge of status determined the tin star as the icon of the emblem. In practice it is best to decide which popcycle story supplies the picture, and which question of the catechism that story answers, and the rest of the emblem follows from there.

The wide image has no innate form, and  is not confined to emblem poetics. It is inchoate, accessed intuitively, acquired during the early years of embodied visceral education. It may take many forms and manifest itself within the creative production of an egent. The heuretic frame of electrate pedagogy moves egents through the transition from a condition of privation, Steresis, impotence, potentiality of capability (Dunamis, Virtuality) into Energeia, Actualization, raising consciousness of their positioning and disposition relative to the archive of world culture recording in infinite variation the unfolding of the work of realization of life and death. Konsult is equipment for living (Kenneth Burke), thus, empowering in principle the egent with the resources of civilization available for a fatal encounter with disaster.

2018-07-30T01:53:14+00:00 July 30th, 2018|Categories: Assignments, Capability, EPS, Mystory, Popcycle, Theopraxesis, Wide Image|Tags: , , , |

TPE: Emblem, Wabi-Sabi

The Expanded Image. Hypermedia students composed an image of wide scope in four steps, extended over a semester: 1) Family Memory, read John Briggs, Fire in the Crucible, on the wide image; 2) Entertainment narrative, read Zinsser, Worlds of Childhood; 3) Community History, read Momaday, Rainy Mountain; 4) Emblem, read Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers. Japanese enjoys a rich vocabulary of aesthetic terms, with Wabi-Sabi one of the most important. Introducing this book to students (which they invariably liked), I asserted that it was the best single book on the poetics of “image” that I had ever read. There were certain books I introduced with some fanfare, using hyperbole as a substitute for experience, to overcome the insecurity of thinking that while Koren’s book was good, there must be other books that were better somewhere else. University of Florida is rated as a “good bargain,” since it has one of the lowest tuitions of any AAU school: $6500 a year. My introduction claimed that this book was as true at UF for $6500 as it was true at Stanford for $45,000. Helen Cixous’s Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, I continued, is true for $6500. At Stanford for $45,000 there is no fourth step. Similarly Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, still lacks the sixth memo (the lecture series one short at Calvino’s death) at Stanford, as it is at UF. The motivation for the hyperbole and performative framing was part of introducing students to theopraxesis, the three capabilities received from Avatar, that Koren made explicit in his exposition of Japanese traditional culture and aesthetics.

–How an Image becomes Wide. Koren demonstrates how a detail of the world is selected as a vehicle for a poetic image: for example, a worn shingle on an old hut, with a streak of rust descending from an iron nail. The tenor (theme) of this vehicle is coded in Japanese traditional culture, relative to the wisdom metaphysics of Buddhism, to express an existential insight into time and entropy known as wabi-sabi.  “Wabi-Sabi can be called a ‘comprehensive’ aesthetic system. Its world view, or universe, is self-referential. It provides an integrated approach to the ultimate nature of existence (metaphysics), sacred knowledge (spirituality), emotional well-being (state of mind), behavior (morality), and the look and feel of things (materiality)” (Koren, 41). The instruction was not to seek Wabi-Sabi in one’s own experience, but the equivalent, the mood and atmosphere, to find one’s personal version of what was modeled in Japanese tradition. The folk traditions of Blues into Jazz in global Creole syncretism (mufarse into tango, saudade into samba) is central to the thymotic and erotic dimension of world materialized in digital electracy. Koren’s analysis demonstrates how to expand the two-part vehicle and tenor of image into a six-part inventory. Students generated their emblems productive of wide image by answer six questions posed by Koren: three for vehicle; three for tenor. The three questions addressing tenor (themata) are the same three articulated in the catechism of modernism, directing theopraxesis. One implication, to be developed further, is that the system of capabilities is not confined to the Western Tradition, but functions globally across cultures and civilizations.

–Poetics: Image expanded into Emblem. The expanded image consists of two registers: material; metaphysical. Working with the narratives generated in composition of mystory, students must commit to one pedagogical object (magic tool), some detail found in at least one of the diegesis of the popcycle, to serve as logo or brand icon for the wide image. In Ulmer’s case (Noon Star), the repeating detail (like the dogs repeating in Momaday’s section III) was a five-pointed star: Family memory (the red star on his sheet music of the march, Garry Owen; Entertainment mythology (the film High Noon, Gary Cooper as Will Kane, discarding his sheriff’s star in the dirt after the gun fight); Community history (“General” Custer’s badge of rank, and Indian name, Son of the Morning Star). The three material questions are: 1) what is the prop/ icon? Ulmer chose the tin star sheriff’s badge to represent this materiality. 2) What are its attributes? (what mood or atmosphere is expressed that distinguishes this icon from its archetype, configuring it specifically for me. The context of High Noon star thrown in the dirt expresses rejection and disgust with the  hypocritical authority symbolized in the badge. 3) Archetype: what is the conventional meaning associated with this icon in the archive? (the five-pointed star has an extensive presence throughout many cultures).

2018-07-30T00:51:55+00:00 July 30th, 2018|Categories: Assignments, Device, Theopraxesis, Tutorials, Wide Image|Tags: , , |

TPE: Emblem 3, Readymade

Readymade: Found Emblems. Modernist experimental vanguard arts invented the operating practices (logic) of electracy– collage montage, cut and paste, creating meaning through appropriation and arrangements drawn from the archive of popular and commercial media circulating ubiquitously in the recording technologies invented as part of the industrial revolution. Konsult extends this formal practice (Dadaism, bachelor machine) into education and pedagogy. Egents designing wide images may learn from the likes of Marcel Duchamp how to author and design with image apps.

–Fable: What resources are available for inquiry and expression in the conditions after Nietzsche, the history of an error, after the simultaneous withdrawal of the true world and the apparent world along with  it?  The time is noon (the  shortest shadow).  What remains is fable, Nietzsche said.  What are the possibilities of fable as genre?  Duchamp improvised one approach, perhaps not even yet fully appreciated. His Readymades are fables, albeit weak (faible) fables, in that they provide the illustrations only (the emblems, impresas).  He intimated his variation on the mode with his most notorious instance, whose title “Fountain” translates “La Fontaine,” antonomasia between common and proper noun, evoking the name of the author of many fables in the common “fountain,” itself a euphemistic title for a urinal.  Ulmer’s collage of the urinal with a cover of La Fontaine’s book make the joke explicit. Duchamp’s commitment to the punning bachelor machine logic central to modernism is well known.  He acknowledged his attendance at a performance of a stage adaptation of Raymond Roussel’s 1910 novel Impressions of Africa as a turning point in his career (Roussel’s method of composition used generative puns).  It has been suggested that some of the Readymades at least are comments on dreams described in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, hence that they use rebus methods (visualizations evoking words).  Freud noted, for example, that many dreams are triggered when sleepers experience the need to urinate (the dream allows sleep to continue briefly). The text of the fabled fountain is provided by its history, being as it is the most influential (if not the “best”) art work of the twentieth century, including its status as a prank, and all the manipulations Duchamp performed to put the image of La Fontaine into circulation, recorded in Thierry De Duve’s Kant After Duchamp.  What is the moral of the readymade fable?

____________

–Martin Kippenberger, “Rameau’s Nephew,” 1988

A few minor changes and some careful wallpapering are quite enough to lend a mundane and utilitarian item a touch of sophisticated polish or at least a bit of homely comfort. The result of these efforts arouses ambivalent feelings of embarrassment and admiration. The beautiful wallpaper heightens the esthetic ineptitude of the box to the point of unbearable bleakness and yet a conciliatory glow seems to emanate from the depths of its decoratively enhanced ineptitude. The man in the wallpaper obviously has no such ambivalent qualms; he only wants to to eat (his noodles?) in peace. Perhaps he mirrors the imperturbability that Martin Kippenberger highlights in his art as a means of reconciling us with the ubiquity of embarrassing banality.

According to literary history, Rameau’s nephew was a Bohemian without character but not without talent, who was plunged into misery upon the death of his wife and children. Diderot’s novel of the same name depicts him as a cynical parasite and a brilliant failure, in short, a paradoxical protagonist beyond good and evil.

Patrick Frey, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should not be silent,” in Parkett. 19 (1989). Observe in Kippenberger’s example the enigma created in what he called the interval–the art of Readymade composition is to create an interval between a title (functioning as motto) and an image or object; in this case between the evocative “Rameau’s Nephew,” and a packing box lined with wall paper. The instruction from the artists is not “look how beautiful,” but “everyone an artist” (literally the motto of Joseph Beuys).

2018-07-29T18:58:12+00:00 July 29th, 2018|Categories: Assignments, Device, Terms, Theopraxesis, Tutorials|Tags: , , , , , , |

Theopraxesis: Emblem

Catechism: Wide Image. The catechism of modernism (drawing on the Western Tradition) is articulated in Kant’s philosophy and Gauguin’s painting. The answers to the questions are specific to each person, and are generated during the composition of the wide image. Several posts are required to unfold this poetics, by means of which egents learn to actualize in their own projects the intelligence potential (latent) in the cultural archive. This archive in its global version functions for electracy the way Avatar functioned for orality: source of absolute knowledge (the project of Avatar Emergency was learning to receive this communication of Avatar). One of the first things that happens in transition from one apparatus to another is the mise en machine of the previous apparatus. As McLuhan observed, the content of the new medium is the old medium (literacy put oral mythologies into writing; electracy digitized the libraries). The remainder of the apparatus epoch is devoted to invention and diffusion throughout society of the new metaphysics (operating practices).

–Emblem. The translation of mystory into wide image is mediated by emblematics. The emblem (having the same structure as a generic advertisement), considering its historical relationship with allegory, expresses in condensed form the image of wide scope ( sinthome, Lacan) that emerges in the making of a mystory (it embodies the pattern of signifiers that repeat when the makers situation is mapped across the popcycle). Studio and Textshop exercises explore the form, including its history from its introduction in the Renaissance through to contemporary advertising. An advantage of the form is just this combination of archival presence and pop familiarity. Ulmer designed this emblem based on his mystory: Motto is “pithy,” aphoristic, allusive, to produce an evocative connotation when combined with the picture. The epigraph is informational, clarifying what is suggested in the motto-picture juxtaposition.

–Advertisement.The Marlboro Cowboy
In 1954 Philip Morris Corporation sought an advertising agency to design a campaign that would allow men to smoke a filtered cigarette in public without embarrassment. Leo Burnett (The Burnett Agency) did some research to determine the most “virile” male image in American culture, which not surprisingly turned out to be the “cowboy.”

2018-07-29T18:09:54+00:00 July 29th, 2018|Categories: Design, Device, Overview, Theopraxesis, Tutorials, Wide Image|Tags: , , |

Theopraxesis: Apparatus

Apparatus Orientation. Gauguin’s visualized catechism exemplifies the orientation (EPS) organizing the Western Tradition. The table on the left charts the isotopic alignments of Capabilities across the microcosm/macrocosm, individual and collective registers. The Western Tradition in our heuretic curriculum is configured to make explicit this system of relationships among the virtues and the popcycle. The theme takes many forms, one of which is the legend of the Golden Apple Paris awarded to Aphrodite in the context with Athena and Hera regarding which power was most desirable. The three goddesses represent the three virtues: Athena (Wisdom and War); Hera (Social and Political Power); Aphrodite (Sexuality and Fertility). Plato addressed the relationship among these powers in the Republic, advising a hierarchy of Head (Rulers), Heart (Guardians), Viscera (Workers), in that order. Education of the individual begins with Aphrodite (sexual desire, appetites), and follows the power of attraction upwards through the virtues to Hera’s realm of social custom, and finally on th Athena’s wisdom, knowledge of the Forms (Ideas) themselves: Beauty as such.

–Kant’s Critiques retrieve Aristotle’s Theoria, Praxis, Poiesis, Circumscribing the limits of each Capability: Pure Reason, Practical Reason, Judgment of Taste, with the Third Critique constituting an innovation that marks the beginning of Electracy–the promotion of the faculty of imagination (poiesis, aesthetics) to equal status with the other two faculties, which up to that point it did not have. Kant proposed his own version of the catechism, relative to these three powers: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?  This system informed Alan Kay’s design of computer interface when he worked at Xerox Park. Navigation of information space should engage all three of the virtues (theopraxesis in our terms). The three inputs: Keyboard (Symbol, highest order conceptual, linguistic) = Athena; Mouse (enactive doing) = Hera; Windows (image, icon) = Aphrodite.

–Nested levels (mise en abyme): The table helps clarify that, however dispersed our exposition may become, this system configuration is consistently present, governing the transformation from potential to actual.

  • Collective: Apparatus–Paleo, Oral, Literate, Electrate
  • Collective: Popcycle Institution–Family, Church, School, Corporation
  • Individual: Capability–Language, Will, Thought, Imagination
  • Individual: Theopraxesis (Mystory Wide Image generate hypothesis from disposition)
  • Meta: Mandala, Game, Engine, Drive [not yet discussed]
2018-07-28T17:15:19+00:00 July 28th, 2018|Categories: Capability, Orientation, Overview, Theopraxesis|Tags: , |

Theopraxesis: Gauguin

Capability.  As these posts accumulate across an expanding set of categories, it is important to recall the focus of KE. Konsult learns the writing of the disaster in three dimensions: heuretics (invention), wide image (mystory), theopraxesis (capability). So far we have assumed some disaster addresses us, and devoted our attention to the heuretics of mystory, learning how to design an image of wide scope, source of our original hypothesis responding to disaster. Konsult takes up for electracy an ancient, even primordial drama: the striving to persist in one’s own being (to live), that Spinoza called Conatus, against the Overwhelming force of resistance, entropy, death. Heidegger characterized the drama as Riss, exploiting as was his craft German vocabulary, finding a term that means both Rift (split, break) and design (drawing). The drama of living derives from an irreducible opposition between Earth and World (nature and culture). Konsult is rift design (an assertion that must be developed elsewhere), taking up this enigmatic primordial experience of resistance encountered through living. Norbert Weiner, one of the inventors of cybernetics, defined life simply as anything that was negentropic, whether man or machine. We need to include in the drift of our posts a review of human capabilities, virtues, powers, the potentiality of egents which through education is realized in the service of well-being, thriving, living against disaster.

–Gauguin in Tahiti. An important part of KE is advisory to colleagues experimenting with transitions from literacy to electracy, adapting alphabetic curriculum and pedagogy to digital metaphysics. Posts up to now have referenced various canonical figures practicing the poetics of popcycle, mystory, wide image. The basic proposal for transition into electracy is just to reframe the curriculum within heuretics, to engage with it (following the advice of Roland Barthes)  not in terms of what it means, but how it was made. This is the fundamental lesson of the avant-garde arts, relative to the new purpose of electracy which is not to communicate a meaning (literacy does that), but to access a visceral memory that otherwise remains inchoate. The practical point is that the entire curriculum manifests a continuous engagement with the three fundamental capabilities, intellectual virtues, human faculties, first defined by the Classical Greeks (Aristotle). These are the negentropic faculties or powers that are potential in every person, beginning in a state of impotence, with the mission of education being actualization of world.

–The Three Questions. Gauguin, for example. Literate schooling studies the likes of Gauguin, Momaday, Sebald, Heidegger. The heuretic frame shifts the role of these exemplars to relay: egents are positioned not as students observing from the outside some body of information, but as receivers of a tradition (tradition is Avatar, konsult is Gita (Song) by means of which egent receives the totality of what tradition knows). Let Gauguin’s masterpiece serve as emblem for a catechism fundamental to the Western tradition (Hal Foster in Prosthetic Gods proposed that this work represented the catechism of Modernism). The title consists of three questions: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? These questions anchor our fundamental theme: orientation, and how it is modalized in electracy. The work must be placed in its situation, since the implicit question always is: what is that for me? Gauguin’s state of mind in Tahiti in 1897 was despair, disillusionment exacerbated by debt and illness (the primitive paradise he had imagined disappeared a hundred years before he arrived). Gauguin decided on suicide, but wanted first to paint a testament. The scene of this wall-sized tableau is a narrative, developing from right to left, the movement representing the vector of life and death (Derrida’s trace).

The upper corner chrome yellow (like damaged fresco). To the right below sleeping baby three seated women, two figures dressed in purple confide their thoughts. Enormous crouching figure (intentionally violated perspective) raises its arm and looks in astonishment at these two people who dare to think of their destiny. A figure in the center is picking fruit. Two cats near a child. A white goat. An idol, both arms rhythmically raised seem to indicate the Beyond. A crouching girl seems to listen to the idol and lastly an old woman approaching death appears reconciled to her thoughts. She completes the story. At her feet a strange white bird holing a lizard in its claws, represents a futility of words. The setting is  the bank of a stream in the woods. In the background the ocean, and beyond, the mountains of a neighbboring island. In spite of changes of tone, the landscape is blue and veronese green from one end to the other. The naked figures stand out against it in bold orange. If anyone said to the students competing for the Rome Prize at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, the picture you must paint is to represent Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? what would they do?  (Paul Gauguin, in a letter).

Yes, that question is addressed to us, egents of the EmerAgency.

2018-07-28T15:28:22+00:00 July 27th, 2018|Categories: Art, Capability, Orientation, Theopraxesis|Tags: , , , |

Terms: Egent

  From Agent to Egent. These 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: , |

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: , , |
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