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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: |

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: , , |

WIDE IMAGE 7

7) Howard Gardner: Definition of Wide Image. Gardner references Howard E. Gruber, who also studied creativity in science from the point of view of the wide image. Gruber’s examples cited below are cases of memories translated into wide images, applied as guiding figures (analogies, metaphors, allegories) used to structure otherwise unshaped archive of data.

The creative individual pursues (or is pursued by) a number of dominant metaphors. These figures are images of wide scope, rich, and susceptible to considerable exploration, exposing the investigator to aspects of phenomena that might otherwise remain invisible to him. Often the key to the individual’s most important innovations inhere in these images. In Darwin’s case, the most fecund metaphor was the branching tree of evolution, on which he could trace the rise and fate of various species. Gruber’s students have uncovered other such metaphors of wide scope. William James had a penchant for viewing mental processes as a stream or river, rather than in terms of the associationist images of a train or a chain. Any consideration of John Locke should focus on his falconer, whose release of a bird symbolized the quest for human knowledge. Finally, in conveying his own emerging view of the creative process, Gruber finds himiself attracted to the Mosaic image of the bush that is always burning but never consumed. (Howard Gardner, Art, Mind, and Brain: A Cognitive Approach to Creativity).

–Memory Glimpse. There are many more examples of memories from early childhood that resonate retrospectively with a career. It is important to note for our Exercise that these early memories do not always present themselves so clearly to the maker as was the case for Einstein or Darwin. The memory may first appear as a glimpse, an intuition, an endocept rather than a concept. The first lesson is just that the way to a pedagogy of creativity passes through childhood experience, involving eventually both memory work, and historical research, as well as some ethnographic field work. All of that comes later. For now it is enough to retrieve a memory and save it in an illustrated anecdote. Here is one more example for now.

  –Steven Spielberg. Sarah Boxer asked Steven Spielberg to recall his earliest visual experience. He found one from the age of 3.

“My parents put me into a fluoroscope, a big, horizontal X-ray machine. My parents were very friendly with the doctor, and he tested his fluoroscope on me.” They laid their toddler down “in the machine, a kind of coffin, and closed the lid on me. It was all green in there, a white-green light. That was one of my earliest and most scary memories. I guess they were looking at my bones. But my point of view was that they put me in a box, and it was all green. And I couldn’t get out. I think that might have been the beginning of ‘Poltergeist’ and ‘Jaws.'” The connection between the light and “Poltergeist” was clear. But how do you get “Jaws” from green light? Spielberg didn’t miss a beat. “Just being abandoned, you know, set adrift, in the middle of the ocean, my ocean of green light.”

Before the green light came another light. “The first thing I remember was the eternal light.” He was only 6 months old at the time and was in a synagogue in Cincinnati, the city where he was born in 1946. “I didn’t know at the time that that’s what it was. I remember seeing people with long beards, handing me crackers. And a red light.” The crackers were called Tamtams, and “the red light was the eternal light, the Ner Tamid,” the light that never goes out. Given all these extraordinary encounters with light — green, red and eternal — it’s no wonder that Spielberg became obsessed with alien abductions. “I’ve been dealing with abduction ever since ‘Close Encounters,'” he said.

(Gainesville Sun, December 7, 2002).

2018-07-18T14:16:04+00:00 July 18th, 2018|Categories: Memory, Mystory, Wide Image|Tags: , , , , |

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 6) Memory Exercise: Kandinsky.  As illustrated by the careers of productive people, at some point an interviewer will ask about an early memory from childhood. Mystory may adopt such interviews–the kind of things people want to know about the sources and motivations of creativity–as a guide to identify similar resources in one’s own biography to bring into the wide image matrix. Exercise: read an interview with a creative person of interest, inventory the questions asked, and answer them in your own case.

In Pictorial Nominalism, Thierry de Duve describes the autobiography of Wassily Kandinsky, one of the inventors of abstract painting, in a way that resonates with the theory of the image of wide scope.

    • In Ruckblicke (Reminiscences) Kandinsky relates his memories of several aesthetic experiences that he judges retrospectively to have been crucial and that he endows with all the inner necessity required to have justified his passage to abstraction. […] One is a memory dated from adolescence, which deals with the being and name of color and which Kandinsky describes with a fervent lyricism that gives it the value of a true revelation: “As a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boy, I gradually saved up enough money to buy myself a paintbox containing oil paints. I can still feel today the sensation I experienced then–or, to put it better, the experience I underwent then–of the paints emerging from the tube. One squeeze of the fingers, and out came these strange beings, one after the other, which one calls colors–exultant, solemn, brooding, dreamy, self-absorbed, deeply serious, with roguish exuberance, with a sigh of release, with a deep sound of mourning, with defiant power and resistance, with submissive suppleness… Living an independent life of their own, with all the necessary qualities for further, autonomous existence, prepared to make way readily, in an instant, for new combinations, to mingle with one another and create an infinite succession of new worlds.” This sentence is pivotal in more than one way. By its position in the book, it acts as a hinge in time allowing two other memories to fold onto one another. The first, an archaic one, is the childhood memory with which the text of Reminiscences opens and that gives to the title all the phantasmatic weight of a “primal scene”: “The first colors to make a powerful impression on me were light juicy green, white, carmine red, black, and yellow ochre. These memories go as far back as the age of three.”

2018-07-17T14:55:10+00:00 July 17th, 2018|Categories: Art, Memory, Mystory, Wide Image|Tags: , , |

WIDE IMAGE 5

  5) Design Relay: Coco Chanel. Design is electrate écriture (konsult is designed). Design in general and in its various specialized applications is a resource for composing wide image since there is a legible continuity relating the memory event with the gesture defining the designer’s style. Coco Chanel is a case in point. In her account of the life and career of the designer Coco Chanel, (Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life), Justine Picardie explains the origins of Chanel’s Logo as alluding to the arabesque patterns of the stained glass windows in the convent that took care of destitute children, the Cistercian abbey at Aubazine, where Chanel lived from the time she was 12 years old, until age 18. This match between a detail from a childhood memory and the adult career is a signal that an image of wide scope is at work. It is worth noting in this context the archetype that is latent within and no doubt deliberately invoked by Chanel’s design: the sacred geometric figure known as   the Vesica Piscis 

Chanel created the Little Black Dress (so accepted in popular culture that it is known by its acronym LBD). Perhaps the most famous LBD was worn by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but it has been present in numerous other films. The correspondence between the nun habits of memory and the secular fashion of the liberated woman creates a hybrid in popular erotic fantasy.

2018-07-17T14:15:35+00:00 July 17th, 2018|Categories: Design, Memory, Mystory, Wide Image|Tags: |

WIDE IMAGE 4

  4) Childhood Memory: Renzo Piano.Hal Foster was in Gainesville to give a lecture for the Architecture School.  The theme was Neomodernism, focusing on Norman Foster and Renzo Piano.  I had not heard the story before about the role that childhood memories played in Piano’s aesthetic.  It is another example of an image of wide scope, the formatting of an imagination in specific childhood experiences.  There are two memories that reinforce one another in Piano’s case:  one of watching sailing ships in the port city of Genoa, his hometown; the other of laundry blowing in the wind on the roofs of the city.

The notion of a ‘light modernity’ is suggestive. ‘There is one theme that is very important for me,’ Piano remarks: ‘Lightness (and obviously not in reference only to the physical mass of objects).’ He traces this preoccupation from his early experiments with ‘weightless structures’ to his continued investigations of ‘immaterial elements’ like wind and light. Lightness is also the message of his primal scene as a designer, a childhood memory of sheets billowing in the breeze on a Genoese rooftop, a vision that conjures up the shapely beauty of classical drapery as well as contemporary sailing boats as architectural ideals. For Piano lightness is thus a value that bears on the human as well as on the architectural – it concerns graceful comportment in both realms.

The talk of not struggling is all very well, but in order to be where he is today, Piano has had to work very hard, with great purpose and commercial nous. (His point is that it is a question of balance.) Piano’s outlook is heavily influenced by two things: having been a child in postwar Italy, and growing up near a port. “A harbour,” he says, “is like an imaginary city where everything keeps moving.”

Every Sunday his father would take him to Genoa’s harbour and Piano would watch the ships, which he thought of as “immense buildings that move”. When they sailed, he watched them cross the water and imagined that they were flying. These notions converged in his mind to form an idea of buildings as structures that “fought against gravity”, as “miracles”.

  The 95-story skyscraper Piano designed for the Shard Quarter in London expresses the sail as its Idea or parti. Architects are good relays for this translation of wide image into hypothesis since their Idea (parti pris) is precisely a materialized gesture unifying a complex program. Every wide image is a “compass,” we could say, generalizing from Einstein’s case, in that the idenification of true north allows one to go in any direction. Similarly we may generalize from architecture to say that any wide image provides the parti pris of Konsult.

” This thing came very quickly,” architect Renzo Piano has recalled of his first thoughts about the building that would become the Shard, in central London. Piano apparently sketched his idea on a restaurant napkin while meeting property developer Irvine Sellar in March 2000. According to Piano’s architectural firm, RPBW, Sellar keeps the famous napkin in his offices. “He saw the beauty of the river and the railways and the way their energy blended and began to sketch in green felt pen on a napkin what he saw as a giant sail or an iceberg,” Sellar recalled in a recent interview. Piano, for his part, has sometimes sounded squeamish about the legend that has built up around his off-the-cuff sketch. “I don’t want to create a mythology,” he has said.

2018-07-18T14:19:03+00:00 July 16th, 2018|Categories: Memory, Mystory, Wide Image|Tags: , , , |

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: , , , |
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