Class Notes: Background on Heuretic Approach

Our instructions, following this heuretic learning method, will emerge from the intertext of putting all of the CATTt slots together. Something original will emerge from our set of instructions. Putting all the parts of the CATTt together is the emergent property of the heuretic method, which will result in us generating an original poetics by inventing something (class notes).

Our Target slot—Paul Virilio’s website Unknown Quantity--explains the art of the accident.  It also provides an insight into the Theory part of the CATTt.  The logic of the accident is “not covered by the inference principles of literacy” (class notes).  The “unknown quantity” in Virilio’s site surprise (being surprised by something out of the ordinary, the unexpected).  Virilio’s site is going to tell us “something about the nature of reality.  We are going to make something [in this course] that addresses that site” of reality—the site of the accident (class notes).

Blog Form

The blog form for cataloguing the invention process lends itself to experiment.  We are to think of each blog post like one frame of a film.  The hypermedia form of the blog “doesn’t hold together like an argument [as in literacy]; it holds together in a cinematic way” (class notes).  Through the repetition that the blog posts signify, an order will emerge that will represent a logical sequence of learning/invention (and the confusion along the way) that will read to our invention of a fatal strategy in part II.

For the first part of the course, we have to post approximately 25 blogs documenting our understanding (and misunderstanding) process as we tackle finding out about the policy issues and other details surrounding our disaster in the context of the instructions we will draw from our reading assignments.  The process of learning the details of our disasters in our blog posts is an inventory-taking process of the issues that are at stake in our disaster.

Our attitude should take the form and tone of confusion and concern.  The blog posts should be written and read as an articulation of the real-time process of figuring everything out.  In a sense, this early part of our blog (and perhaps the entire blog, when it is complete) is the site of an accident.  It (I) is (am) in the logical space of an accident happening in reverse, where I don’t really understand the space around me and what I am supposed to do with it because it is unfamiliar, out of the ordinary.  The CATTt will be the method I use to make sense of this space around me.  I won’t use everything I sense or feel, but I need to let what I find here tell me something about the world, life, myself, other people—the issues the heuretic learning method is concerned with.

The policy issues we document in our blogs, along with the other specifics of our disaster, will represent public opinion, commonly held world views (class notes).  The disasters we have chosen exist as disasters because there is something about them that resists solution.  This resistance must be visualizable in some way in the ‘wrongness’ or ‘out-of-the-ordinariness’ that makes up the disaster.  In this course, we will “bring fatal strategies to bear on” this resistance to solution (class notes).