KONSULT: Theopraxesis

Preface

Electracy

In recent years collaborations with my colleagues have taken the form of an effort to revisit heuretics as pedagogy, to clarify and reconfigure it to serve as the basis for learning in the emerging conditions of global online education, including MOOCs, ubiquitous computing, mixed reality, and related initiatives. These chapters originally were addressed less formally to my colleagues and students (the we of this text), as theorizing how to teach the invention of electracy online. The proposal is that learning includes the construction of a genre called konsult (pronounced KON-sult) that in turn mediates all learning, relative to the complete interactive environment of systems and institutions, not only for degrees but also for life-long education and citizenship.

What is the role and future of literate school (a redundancy) in electracy? Perhaps it is not surprising that not everyone thinks education needs to change, or not in the way that we envision. We know in advance and in principle how the world works — that change happens in a certain way (the propensity of things). There seems to be an isotopy of being across all levels of existence, from atoms to galaxies, including the human dimension both biological and cultural, intuited in the design of mandalas. Any one level in this cosmology may function as a mise en abyme (miniaturization) figuring the organization of the whole (if one has the craft of allegory in mind). Here for example is an account of change in this holistic perspective, with reference to the atomic level, that resonates with cultural history.

Change begins slowly, uncertainly, and in places that are highly dependent upon local circumstances because the nuclei necessarily are misfits in the existing structure or orthodoxy. The nuclei are unpredictable (except perhaps by the Witch of Endor of whom Banquo demanded If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grains will grow and which will not, Speak then to me) because no system can by itself know ahead of time what, if any, new structure can supplant it. Nuclei do form, however, in those regions of the old structure that are least contented. A phase change is analogous to a political revolution; not the destruction of all individuals but the rearrangement of most of them into a new pattern of interaction. A revolution, driven by the injustices of the old regime, needs its formative nucleus, and its growth (which occurs in an interface of high disorder) is slowed by the need to accommodate or eliminate dissenters. Eventually, however, the structure that began as the highly creative work of a successful innovator becomes an ideology and as it spreads it becomes indoctrination, not creation. (Smith 42)

What remains for us to decide is not whether to participate in change, but the locus of our position in the array: with the normative lock, the gaps, or the misfits (the resistance, the opportunity, or the trouble).

Our collaboration begins with a review of the rationale for undertaking a more radical reform of education, to be practiced as a transition from literate to electrate learning. The first reason to change education (Apparatus) is the historical analogy, associated with the reality of the migration of the archive accumulated during the 2500-year epoch of literacy due to information overload. Historically, each apparatus first put its archive into a new medium of storage, and in the process invented a fundamentally different metaphysics (orientation to reality). School itself is a product of this invention within orality of the institution that created literacy. School is relative to the apparatus of literacy, and as such will continue within electracy, even adapting to digital technology, while having to accommodate the new dimension of civilization emerging within electracy. Part of the purpose of Konsult is to articulate the nature of this new metaphysics, to determine the most appropriate and effective operation of school in this transforming reality. We speak from within the institution of school, looking back on the historical relationship of school with church and religion, and forward to the emerging relationship of school with corporation and entertainment

Heuretics

Although Digital Humanities is a disciplinary location most immediately relevant to this proposal, it also concerns the leading institution of STEM education, which is on record as intending to reform its curriculum for a digital apparatus. The task force on the future of MIT education produced Recommendations that are a useful point of departure for innovation. The list of intentions is insightful, relative to projections of apparatus theory. For now, the point to emphasize is that however appropriate the recommendations are, they do not attempt to describe, let alone prescribe, the nature of the innovations in pedagogy and curriculum they call for, beyond reminders of the traditions and commitments that historically made MIT successful. This hesitation at the threshold of invention is not a shortcoming but an invitation to the institution at large to begin the process of invention. This invitation is intriguing and challenging in referring to the magic of MIT (an emergent and unpredictable effect of a complex system), and in implying that MIT as an institution or collective entity is as intelligent and creative as are the individuals who staff it. The basic assumption is that MIT twenty years from now will function differently, perhaps radically so, from the way it works now. In other words, the imagined future of education is not just media literacy.

Between recommendations and implementation comes invention. Electracy as a mode of study includes heuretics (the logic of invention), assuming that the transformation that it proposes must be and can be invented. Critical analysis of the discourse on method in the Western tradition revealed that every text introducing what proved to be a fundamental innovation in thought, reason, and procedure, beginning with Plato’s Phaedrus and continuing through avant-garde manifestos in modernism, was organized around a rhetorical matrix, a device consisting of five operators: Contrast, Analogy, Theory, Target, tale. The challenge of creative thinking is that the outcome is unknown (by definition). Or rather, we have a goal that guides the process — the design of an electrate mode of learning that is global, syncretic, holistic, online (blended), including service, engaging with real-world problems, and the other principles itemized in the recommendations. How exactly are these principles to be enacted?

The first step of invention is to outline the function of each operator of the heuretic matrix known as the CATTt. The generator retains the primary literate procedure: problem/solution. The Problem is articulated in terms of the pair Contrast-Target: Contrast is being rejected (obsoleted in McLuhan’s matrix). Plato in outlining his ideal city and its literate education rejected Homeric models of learning. Target describes the affordances of the new condition for which the method is being created (in Plato’s case, the Academy with its devices of reading and writing, and mathematics). The Solution is (experimentally) articulated in the pair Analogy-Theory. Analogy identifies an existing discourse in a different domain that manifests some of the desired features. For Plato, medical diagnosis demonstrated the powers of analysis in the physical realm that he desired for metaphysics. Theory is an existing account of reality adopted (provisionally) to guide the choices and direction of the design. Plato worked in the tradition of Pythagoras, with Socrates as his immediate inspiration. Tale refers to the mode or genre, the form, in which to assemble and integrate the four sets of resources (each resource being inventoried for its relevant features), to bring them into conversation. The tale partially explains the emergent instructions, and partly demonstrates them (it does what it says). Plato invented the dialogue form as the means to support the bootstrapping of the Academy into literacy (Maranhao). The dramatized conversations of Socrates (usually) with one or more interlocutors constituted an interface metaphor — the scene of conversation brought students natively oral into the experience of dialectic, the mode of reasoning native to literacy.

CATTt

A meta-CATTt has guided my experiments with electracy. A useful feature of the CATTt is that it accomodates any group of resources, and produces or generates a poetics or set of instructions specific to those resources. Each of my graduate seminars over the past decades tested a different CATTt, but the category of resource for each slot in the template repeated. Here is an overview of the genre formulated for the seminars. The CATTt slots function like a spread in Tarot reading (or in any template, such as Lacan’s four discourses): the slot itself is active and inflects any resource it receives. The syntax of CATTt begins with the articulation of a problem: Contrast repels; Target attracts. Contrast: the extant metaphysics of literacy are fine as far as they go, but are relative to their alphabetic apparatus. Target: The Internet requires a digitally native metaphysics. The Contrast and Target are kenotic, emptying out, opening a site for invention. The procedure is to inventory the respective resources to understand the terms of the problem, both what is being rejected, that for which an alternative is sought, and the affordances of the new condition. Solution is generated from an inventory of Analogy and Theory. Analogy is an extant related practice suggesting possibilities of the new discourse; Theory identifies the principles structuring the invention as a whole (the What of the enterprise). The CATTt produces four inventories, four lists, each list inflected by its slot. A pattern of correspondences emerges in the intertext created by the juxtaposition of lists. This pattern is configured into a poetics, a formula or recipe of instructions for composing (in our case) an electrate metaphysics. This book supports and organizes the process of collection, inventory, and correlation, dictating therefore that for now the poetics remains literate, and only describes a practice that is implemented elsewhere. The poetics described here may serve as relay for your own invention, and will guide the online extension of this book, Konsult Experiment.

Target

A point of departure is Target, establishing the contemporary circumstances calling for fresh thinking. The MIT Recommendations outline a plan of desired innovations that correlate with apparatus projections. The most relevant proposals documented in the Recommendations include the following:

Initiative for educational innovation(#1)

Engaging in bold experiments(#2)

Strengthening teaching of communications(#4)

Creating service opportunities(#5)

Extending new pedagogical approaches to the world (#7): modularity, game-based learning, partnering to encourage blended learning, seeding global discussions, increasingdiversity.

Harnessing the knowledge of a lasting global community(#8)

Engaging with the world(#10)

The implied scenario imagines students combining residential, blended, and online modalities of pedagogy and curriculum, undertaking a holistic learning integrating pure and applied study, engaging with real-world, global problems directly in their actual setting, ones that challenge and resist business-as-usual public-policy solutions, performed through service learning, internships, flexible residencies, and partnering with relevant institutions, in collaboration with peers and cohorts from the broader community of schooling as well as other institutions of society. The electrate character of this vision is its commitment to relational, holistic, collective dimensions of education, needed to overcome the isolating, rigid divisions separating the various institutional dimensions of the life-world, resulting in significant obstacles for an ecology of learning that is at the same level of complexity as the problems inhibiting global thriving. The remainder of the CATTt resources supplies the materials for a poetics generating instructions for how to conduct schooling that accomplishes the purposes of Target.

Specifically, the heading Extending MIT’s Educational Impact included five recommendations, most already adopted within the EmerAgency project to invent electrate consulting. Item 7d, for example, especially resonates with programs already explored in a number of konsultancies by the Florida Research Ensemble for the EmerAgency (Ulmer et al., Miami Virtue).

Using open problems to seed global discussions. Problem-based learning is at the heart of an MIT education. While understanding the foundation and principles of a particular discipline is essential, the Task Force feels that the investment of students in learning is most successful when they apply their learning to real-world problems. Many such problems do not have clearly defined solutions and they enable a continuing conversation that also often spans departmental silos. The Task Force recommends encouraging departments to develop classes or series defined by the challenges they seek to address. For instance, one might imagine an MITx series on air pollution. Within that series, a student would find a number of classes — including air purification, urban planning, politics, and poverty — that are intended to aid the understanding and examination of air pollution from a variety of perspectives. This might require a student to work on projects with students from different corners of the world who may already be addressing the nuances of air pollution in their individual communities. This connection will help create a global community of thought and practice around global challenges, and a cadre of sophisticated problem solvers. (Institute-Wide Task Force).

Konsult

Konsult is to the invention of electrate learning what dialogue was to Plato’s Academy. Plato invented a new genre to support written learning, and we may use his dramatized conversation as a relay and analogy for developing a similar unifying genre for learning in the digital apparatus. A related relay is the memory palace technique used in manuscript pedagogy to facilitate memorization of large quantities of information. Memory palaces consisted of three layers: a familiar street, often from one’s hometown; strong memorable images from general culture; specialized information. Konsult functions by means of mobile ubiquitous computing, enabling the egent (electrate consultant) freedom of movement in space and time (GPS and EPS [Existential Positioning System]). The genre supports holistic learning, mediating collective attunement among collaborating consultants and institutions. The holistic orientation requires receiving resources not only from one’s specialized discipline but from the divisions of knowledge as a whole.

The other primary institutions of society must be integrated into the interface as well, such as governments and corporations. Finally, and most importantly, the egent’s home and family context play a central role. Digital learners are distributed globally. The konsultation is grounded in a site of disaster (a public policy aporia) selected by the egent, and this problem resistant to all solutions provides the boundary object guiding the learning. The genre functions as avatar in the proper sense (Ulmer, Avatar Emergency), meaning that the egent is in the receptive position of Arjuna to whom Krishna revealed himself as god in order to explain Hindu ethos, in the original account of epic crisis (Bhagavad Gita). Arjuna acted based on his reception of total knowledge relative to his episteme and epoch. Konsult manages this advisory function relative to contemporary global civilization.

Theopraxesis is a portmanteau word formulated to express the syncretic integration of the three virtues, capacities or faculties organizing intellectual endeavor in the Western tradition: Theory, Praxis, Poiesis (versions include: Thinking, Doing, Making; Knowledge, Purpose, Affect; Pure Reason, Practical Reason, Judgment of Taste). In practice, three genres or modes of representation were associated with the respective faculties: Philosophy, History, Literature. The relationship among these three modalities throughout literacy has been that of hostility, hierarchy, rivalry or competition, each one claiming to have a greater access to reality (Ought, Is, What If). Literacy required analysis, separation and even isolation of parts for its economy of information: clear and distinct ideas, relative to the fundamental practice of producing concepts through definition. Electracy inversely is integral, requiring in principle a syncretism of the three virtues. Theopraxesis is an integrated practice of the three virtues (capacities).

Stigmergy

Egents collaborate through the interface of konsult, treating aporetic disasters as boundary objects. From the first time I read about stigmergy, perhaps in something by Lewis Thomas, it seemed like a good analogy for collaboration. The Internet created conditions that made the figure literal, as generalized in the first definition one finds, a mechanism of indirect coordination between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent. The original coinage by Pierre-Paul Grasse to describe the behavior of termites has been extended to cover open source distributed group collaboration, especially in networked environments. The passage is from social insects to social media, further extensible to algorithms. 

The figure triggers some further contexts, such as that of dung beetles and their more exotic label, scarab. There is a general possibility of finding relays in the natural world for literal and figurative guidance with systems relations. Dung beetles, for example, are the only known creatures to navigate and orient themselves according to the Milky Way. Aesop’s fables offer a prompt, with the Ant and the Grasshopper coming to mind especially. Michel Serres, Parasite, has shown the philosophical potential of this material. Parasitism operates through the logic of taking without giving or abuse value. But the parasite nevertheless makes exchange possible by creating connections between otherwise incommensurable forms of ordering.

Stigmergy is a figure suggesting how an electrate polis might function. Electracy includes new identity formations (individual and collective), beyond selfhood and the democratic state. I proposed elsewhere that a fifth estate (adding a new dimension to the three estates of governing and the fourth estate of journalism) is forming, assisted by social media and mobile ubiquitous computing, observed in such movements as Occupy or groups such as Anonymous. The film about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (The Fifth Estate) adds to the usefulness of this analogy. Ants communicate, for example, by leaving trails of pheromones as chemical signals. Ant stigmergy is a suggestive figure for how Internet technology and Derrida’s trace may support an emergent dispersed global theopraxesis.

New Ratios

The stigmergy figure alludes to a primary question of invention. The construction of metaphysics includes establishing a Measure (Limit). The humanistic tradition of literacy proposed man as the measure, and there is a certain irreducible anthropomorphism in epistemology, and perhaps even ontology (if these modalities are even distinguishable today). The modernist revolution that is part of electracy supports an alternative ratio (proportion as a relation of ratios). Various species behaviors such as rhizomatic swarming evoke possibilities as relays guiding design thinking relative to digital computing. Peter Eisenman comes to mind as exemplary of this movement, his discussion of slime mold as a measure orienting parametric design.

What I am saying is that in other disciplines there exists the possibility of modeling voids. In other words, to model such structures as slime molds, which are self-generating internalized mechanisms that have their own laws and behavior and which do not start from a fixed profile, they do not start from a recognizable profile. Slime mold does not look like anything. In fact, it mutates and takes its shape from the container that it is in. It will take on various formal structural organizations depending on its own internal movement and growth.

If architecture had the capacity to begin from such modeling, we would begin to have a kind of new architecture, an architecture that was no longer phallocentric. Now that does not mean that we would not be sheltering and containing, rather the containing would be seen as the residue of the process, and not metaphoric of the process. In other words, the process image and its analogous meanings would come from the self-generating activity as opposed to the enclosing activity. In this sense nobody is saying that architecture would not shelter, enclose, contain, etc. but it will not necessarily make metaphors of these organizations. (Peter Eisenman, in Selim Koder, Interview).

The theorist Charles Jencks, discussing thinking with objects, noted slime molds as examples of self-organizing systems studied in complexity theory. In 1992 I gave Eisenman a sealed bottle labeled by the producer New Orleans Cajun Slime, and I added the word Mould. He accepted the gift, as a fitting symbol of the new paradigm in architecture. (1). The larger point suggested by this polysemy is not any one organic system (not slime mold is the measure of all things), but the pattern, this heuristic analogy bringing together certain instances of natural systems, contemporary mathematics, computation, design. This vector may be extended into apparatus invention, creating an electrate alternative to form (Idea). 

Popcycle

The biological models of complex adaptive systems are central to the relational metaphysics of electracy. Learning is itself an instance of a complex adaptive system, and an aspect of what we are exploring is the extent to which there is a certain isomorphism transversing all such systems. Heuretic pedagogy is describable within a systems perspective, beginning with the popcyle of institutions within which identity is constructed. Mystory (electrate equivalent of historiography) maps the position of a subject within the popcycle of institutions. The premise of heuretics is that there is an equivalent in learning of the four-color theorem in mapping (choragraphy maps learning). In mathematics (according to one definition), the four-color map theorem states that, given any separation of a plane into contiguous regions, producing a figure called a map, no more than four colors are required to color the regions of the map so that no two adjacent regions have the same color. The analogy is that the four institutions of the popcycle suffice as interface relating a learner with every possible dimension of reality.

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. Acting on the EmerAgency slogan, follow the invention, I have shown how innovation traverses multiple disciplines. 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); the Japanese ukiyo-e prints Claude Lévi-Strauss received as rewards beginning at age six from his portrait-painter father. 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. Konsult conducts interface bringing into relation aporetic problems, expert schemas, mystory wide images, and electrate annotation in the context of what Benjamin Bratton calls the Stack (Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User).

The mise-en-abyme layout (interpenetration of strata) of the interface is not formally motivated, nor is there any one structure required to register the dimensions. The affordances of the technology are being updated constantly, but there is less attention given to the other dimensions of the interface. Derrida’s reference to heraldry was one inspiration for our approach, 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 Fibonacci geometry of the whirling square (in Internet Invention), to call attention to its dynamics as vortex (Pound). The figure may 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) tested in the pedagogy of Internet Invention, the prototype is Einstein’s compass (received from his father as a gift at age four or five): any wide image functions as compass for the existential positioning system of learning, to orient egents tracking the vector of invention. Literacy established education as an institution of knowledge, constituting an archive of information, history, and craft skills and schemas, but it neglected the creative invention of the disciplines. Electrate learning shifts emphasis from reproduction of verification to an institution of invention, designed as an existential positioning system that individual learners use to innovate within received systems (hence syncretism of literate and electrate education). Learners (inventors) intuit a certain path or direction, that is also experienced in everyday life as conatus, a striving to persist in one’s own being (to live). Heidegger supplemented literate instrumental calculation with the poetics of following a path (Cristin, Heidegger and Leibniz). It turns out that Heidegger’s Dasein, his existentialia as electrate categories, opens the dimension of disposition that is exactly the one identified by Gerald Holton as the site of an inventor’s image of wide scope. In Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger goes further, framing thought as such as creative.

One of the Contributions’ most striking words for the new thinking is Er-denken, which we can render as bethinking. Erdenken ordinarily means to think something up, to invent it (erfinden). Heidegger seems to be daring us to raise some typical objecitons to his thought: it is fantastic, arbitrary, nonobjective. The conception of truth as correct representation looks on inventiveness with suspicion: creativity must be subordinated to the way things are. The very word Er-denken is part of Heidegger’s assault on representational thought. Bethinking tries to step beyond being as presencing, and thus beyond the present-indicative tonality of traditional thought." (Polt, The Emergency of Being 109).

The name for someone practicing heuretics is heuretes (one who finds), corresponding with bethinking in Heidegger’s turn from concepts to incepts (inceptive thinking). Einstein’s compass, embodying the concrete logic of his personal disposition (pre-disposition Holton would say) has as much to do with his revolutionary science as do the disciplines of physics and mathematics.

Aporia Disaster

We may introduce here another organizing feature of konsult after apparatus and heuretics: disaster. The egent (electrate learner, heuretes), konsults on disaster (the k marks the practice as inventional rather than conventional). This disaster is such because aporetic — an actual condition of public policy debate that is fundamentally resistant to the best solutions of conventional practice (scientific, political, social). For the EmerAgency prototype this site is the Cabot/Koppers Superfund Site in Gainesville, Florida, addressed in the konsult entitled Murphy’s Well-Being. The design of MWB is developed through a series of units interpolated as interludes between the chapters. Conventional consulting is in the Contrast slot in our CATTt. Contrast does not mean that conventional consulting (consulting with a c) is wrong or bad, but that it is inadequate to the entangled ecology of disaster. Let the empirical utilitarian (literate) practices do their best. The disasters persist. Konsult is thus motivated to seek experimental alternatives.

Konsult is to electracy what dialogue is to literacy: the genre created to support learning in the new apparatus. Dialogue is structured by an interface metaphor of conversation, albeit in written form. Conversation is a practice familiar in the oral apparatus, and the conceptual persona of Socrates alludes to the practice of an historical person. Within the dramatized conversations, students encountered dialectic (the logic native to literacy). Konsult similarly appropriates consulting as a practice familiar to literacy and central to applied knowledge in specialized disciplines. Egents konsulting on a disaster are like interlocutors conversing with Socrates. Disaster is the Socrates of electracy. The challenge of heuretics is to design konsulting (electrate consulting) in a way that brings egents into relation with practices native to the affordances of the digital apparatus. Socrates was skilled in conceptual reasoning (many of the dialogues are exercises in defining of terms, as well as in inferential reasoning applying the definitions to circumstances). What is the writing of the disaster (to allude to Blanchot)? Disasters are expressions, communications, replies, feedback loops, revelations of Avatar. What may be counter-intuitive is that, given its status as pedagogy, konsult introduces between pure and applied disciplinary knowledge the wide image (autobiography of interpellation, predisposition) of the egent. Wide-image is simulacrum (a claim to be developed further). Part of heuretics as pedagogy is to learn how to translate a unique wide image into an original hypothesis addressing a collective aporia. Analogies for the relation of egents with disasters might be analysands with analysts, or auteurs with Hollywood B movies.

Poetics

Here is an overview of the poetics of konsult, to be tested and adapted for your own case. Experiments select specific operators within the resources for probes and projects.

1.Konsult: Egents create konsult to organize all learning. The genre as interface brings into relation the popcycle system (field, network) of institutions. Egents may be: a) enrolled in a college program; b) MOOC participant; c) fifth estate movement; d) activist, artist, citizen; e) lifelong learner; f) professional consultant; g) other. The practice itself correlates collaboration across institutions and among disparate egents. The purpose is choragraphy: to map a process interfacing literacy with electracy: the isolated divisions of the university and of culture put into connection with the entangled holistic events of disaster. One becomes educated, even if the aporia remains.

2.Interface: The genre appropriates existing practice of consulting as the interface metaphor conjoining literate schooling (specialized knowledge, applied science), with electrate metaphysics. The guiding stand is that egents konsult on aporetic problems of personal concern: disasters natural and cultural, matters resistant to public policy initiatives. The disaster is a boundary object, gathering heterogeneous specializations into collaborative groups.

3.Pedagogy: the function of the genre is not to replicate or mime consulting but to propose an electrate supplement for it. Konsult supports learning, from the side of creativity and invention. The CATTt poetics is needed to design and test a system of annotation that reconfigures the disaster according to electrate metaphysics. The genre reconfigures not only consulting (disciplinary practices) but pedagogy itself (learning practices). Pedagogy is understood to be a representation of disciplinary knowledge (not the knowledge itself) and as such is open to the revolution in representation that is a feature of the passage from literacy to electracy.

4.Theory (CATTt): The theory informing konsult poetics is poststructuralism: French reading Germans reading Greek philosophy. Apparatus (dispositif) is the fundamental organizing concept of this reading relevant to us — the insight that civilization evolves through an adaptive system interrelating technology, institution invention, identity formation. The three most recent epochs are orality, literacy, electracy, each epoch opening a new dimension of capability relevant to human thriving. A shorthand version of the relationship among the epochs is found in Kant’s three critiques, which in turn may be condensed in the truism that the three relevant virtues (powers, capabilities) are the Good (Right/Wrong, orality, religion), the True (True/False, literacy, science), the Beautiful (Attraction/Repulsion, electracy, entertainment). The crucial point is that electracy addresses the power of desire (attraction/ repulsion). Electracy does not replace science and religion but supplements them (reconfiguration among the apparati). Religion and science continue and transform to accommodate the third power of desire within the project of well-being. The keywords (synonyms) directing this orientation are: Enjoyment (Heidegger); Jouissance (Lacan); Trace (Derrida). This latter term shows the stakes, since Derrida’s trace is folded into electracy. The list could be extended (Bataille’s General Economy; Klossowski’s simulcrum). Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s conatus (joy/sadness) is important, not to mention desiring machines (Deleuze and Guattari)

5.Analogy (CATTt): The resource for articulating electrate logic is the vanguard revolution in the arts, originating in Montmartre cabarets and culminating in its first phase in Zurich Dada. The avant-garde opened a space of pure creativity, pure invention, in Bohemian Paris in the nineteenth century. A general description of this logic is that it does for desire (drive, affect, emotion, feeling) what Aristotle’s propositional logic did for reason. All the resources of signifiance are legitimated, beyond the propositional and mathematical configuration of literacy, across all media. The break and redirection again is sited in Kant, Third Critique, bringing aesthetics into equal standing with scientific understanding and moral reason. Everything follows from Kant’s proposal of reflective judgment, which is thought ordered through aesthetic relations without concepts or topical logics. Much of what has happened in culture during the past two centuries may be characterized as working out the consequences of reflective judgment, which accesses the dimension of life-death, a primoridal or primal scene (obscenario), Unconscious, primary process (to use phrases from psychoanalysis, which is the fullest rational account of these operations). In more conventional terms, articulated most fully in the work of Hannah Arendt, Kant’s third Critique (of Judgment) concerns not thinking or will but imagination. Electracy is to the virtue of imagination what literacy is to the virtue of thinking. Arts innovations (bachelor machine construction) provide the rhetoric with which to organize multimodal annotations of disaster as scene of instruction.

6.Experiment: The hypothesis of our framing is that electrate learning requires students to design and test konsult. Konsult extends the form of conventional consultant scenarios and other annotations into a mental model (cognitive map, memory palace, wide image, existential positioning system — EPS) locating learner orientation within the forces shaping the situation of the disaster. Countering