Konsult Experiment, beginning December, 2019, Gregory Ulmer and John Craig Freeman (Florida Research Ensemble).

Ulmer and Freeman, Distance Table Work, Konsulting the Border.

A border is a line: the Big Bend diagrams a fold catastrophe (R. Thom).

Extimacy. This is Lacan’s term to identify the nature of subject identity formation in electracy. Human identity emerges within a field condition (the Unconscious), a psychoanalytic version of Heidegger’s Dasein (being in the world), in which the inside and outside of person are diagrammed using topological figures such as Klein bottle or moebius strip. The import is that “truth” is hidden in plain sight: repression does not erase the subject’s truth but displaces, disguises, distorts it using the tropology of dreamwork, such that it may be recovered, known, reconfigured in therapy (or through practices of art or politics). The theory and practice of psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, and modernist poetics are isomorphic, functioning by means of extimate epiphanies or illuminations: the invisible spiritual affective order “inside” becomes intelligible and accessible through formal operation with and through the material concrete manifest “outside.” In short, the Border outside (US-Mexico border)—configured within konsult theopraxesis—gives insight and knowledge of “the border in me,” and bordering itself as such. Extimacy is how egents gain access to both poles of alienation—totality of global commodity forces and unconscious libidinal drives of the body (corporation and corporeality).

A semiotic square (Greimas) of outlines a border system, indicating a shift from Frontier to Sprawl.

In short, event create extimacy, and extimacy is the ontology required to complete the cognitive map (choragraphy) of electracy, reconnecting the microcosm and macrocosm registers of digital apparatus. The challenge of our project is to design and test konsut, and apply it to choragraphy of the US-Mexico border. The ambition is that the extimate experience of our konsult event educates an engaged public sphere with respect to electracy in general and remediation of border disasters in particular.

Border Moment, Nogales AZ

Slides for a lost lecture.

Haiku Reason. Spring Break of 1980 I went to Europe and met Joseph Beuys in Düsseldorf and Jacques Derrida in Paris, protagonists of Applied Grammatology (1985).  The other adopted mentor I wanted to meet, Roland Barthes (inspiration for Teletheory, 1989), was fatally injured in an accident just a few days before I arrived in Paris. On the strength of reading Barthes’s Camera Lucida, published late in his career, in which he theorized image logic by analogy with Japanese haiku poetry, I based my introduction to image thinking in Internet Invention on haiku reason (synonymous with reasoneon). What I didn’t know was that at the time of his accident Barthes had just completed a seminar in which the fall semester was devoted entirely to haiku poetry as a foundation for thinking about imaging in general: The Preparation of the Novel, English, translation published 2011. We will return to late Barthes, whose A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, is a relay for mystory (in Teletheory). Japonisme in any case played a major role in the invention of modernism in France, a symptom of the syncretism underway throughout the colonial period forming a hybrid of Western and Eastern civilizations, with artists creating the cyberpidgin language made necessary by the trade routes opened by the corporation, the new institution of electracy (East India Company, 1600). In this context, Barthes’s example motivated a closer look at Japonisme in particular and Eastern resources in general.

Haiku Prose

Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs not only gives a theory and description of Japan as a haiku civilizatin, each entry (“sign”) is composed using Barthes’ own version of haiku poetics. This style is neither definition nor description in the Western sense of these terms, but “pure designation.” Barthes’ signs are not exactly brief, but they are closely observed “impressions,” staying in the moment, focused on the material signifying details of some feature of the physical world. This style is an excellent relay, useful for prose documentation of the exhibits in each discourse of your mystory. For example,

Pachinko
Pachinko is a slot machine. At the counter you buy a little stock of what look like ball bearings; then, in front of the machine (a kind of vertical panel), with one hand you stuff each ball into a hole, while with the other, by turning a flipper, you propel the ball through a series of baffles; if your initial dispatch is just right (neither too strong nor too weak), the propelled ball releases a rain of more balls, which fall into your hand, and you have only to start over again — unless you choose to exchange your winnings for an absurd reward (a candy bar, an orange, a pack of cigarettes). Pachinko parlors are extremely numerous, and always full of a varied clientele (young people, women, students in black tunics, middle-aged men in business suits). It is said that pachinko turnovers are equal (or even superior) to those of all the department stores in Japan (which is certainly saying a good deal)

…

You need to use prose in each installment of your widesite, as well as graphics. I have used Empire of Signs in my courses as an analogy (it has a hypermedia feel). What Barthes does for the world (“diegesis”) of “Japan” you should do (at least to a degree) for the diegesis of the worlds of your Family memories, Entertainment work, and Community History.

Avatar Emergency: the book, and the condition. The assignment in AE is to compose/design your Allegory of Prudence, which is extended in KE into Theopraxesis (TPE). AE was included in the CATTt of several seminars documented in Routine. The Allegory is an exercise for egents inventing konsult.

This diagram sketch suggests a way to map the components of the exercise “Allegory of Prudence” onto some conventional dynamics of narrative semiotics:  Roland Barthes’s five semiotic codes (see S/Z’s reading of Balzac’s short story), and a part of Jacques Lacan’s schema of temporality (taken as representative of the trope of metalepsis).

The version of the allegory expressed in Chapter 13 of Avatar Emergency (AE), provides an instance.  The first two codes account for Ulmer walking along the shore of the ocean at Ponte Vedra Beach (Action Code, syntagmatic axis), and encountering a sand castle that he recognizes as built by his granddaughter (Semic code, paradigmatic axis).  This sand castle (prop) is in turn organized by a higher paradigmatic code — the Cultural Code — that is the source of readymade associations accumulated historically and preserved in various documents (the commonplace of tides washing away sand castles, evoking the ephemerality and fragility of human effort).  Meanwhile, the action of the syntagmatic is also organized in turn by a higher code — the Hermeneutic code of enigmas:  actions are arranged to create and sustain interest, to pose engimas and delays of suspense.  This narrative form is supplied in Ulmer’s relay by the story of Damascius, the last diadoch (successor) of the Academy in Athens, and his exile in Persia late in life.

These four codes provide four slots for the allegory:  an action and an underlying narrative (fantasy); a feature of the scene (the prop or seme) and its associated mythology (aura).   The fifth code is the Symbolic (alluding to Lacan’s Symbolic Order), which is the structuring or “anagogical” code of the social and civilizational context of the scene.  This code is reprsented in the diagram by a partial version of one of Lacan’s schemas, showing the temporality of language, and of the unconscious (structured like a language).  The Event alluded to in AE happens in this manner, constructing the time image of prudence.  An initial satisfaction, experienced in infancy, remains latent and potentially present (flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, Benjamin says), triggered by some chance incident (Proust’s involuntary memory). The Symbolic code synthesizes the other four codes, addressing the paradigmatic axis of selection in terms of binary oppositions (male/female, death/life…), and the syntagmatic axis of combination in terms of primary exchanges in the life world– of language, wealth, and kinship. This circuit of remembrance through senation, this triggering of memory and imagination through the activation of somatic markers (Damasio, Neuroaesthetics), is the aesthetic homology to be correlated with mobile media in smart environments, to develop an electrate konsult.

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.