Class Notes: Heuretic Approach

UNIVERSITY DISCIPLINE / COURSE RESEARCH FRAME 

The university is funded by a society which wants results of a certain kind. University disciplines are created to solve problems (social, ethical, political, psychological, medical, scientific). In Greek, próblēma originally meant "obstacle" or "to throw or lay before” in terms of a challenge which another person picks up as if in a contest. This course and the heuretic process should be approached from this problem-based frame of mind.

Lithography by Wolff (19th century)

HEURETIC LEARNING

In this course, while we are learning the logic of electracy in real-time (through our blogs) and actually practicing its logic using heuretics. As students, we are taking on the role of employees in a "conceptual consulting agency." In the Network Book site networkedbook.org, professor Ulmer refers to the heuretic process as working in a field of "[e]piphany as logic":

Epiphany as logic is not experienced directly but composed, designed, in a consulting practice dubbed the EmerAgency, a virtual consultancy by means of which all citizens participate in an Internet public sphere (possible only through a digital prosthesis). The oracle or parable strategy is to adopt a public policy problem (a catastrophe in progress) as an image of one’s own situation, thus testing the slogan of the EmerAgency: Problems B Us. ("Introduction: Electracy," par. 7)

"Consulting is how [the university institution] teaches other institutions" (class notes). The internet as an electrate communication tool "maps over [the] cognitive frameworks” which define the consulting "clients" who invest in the tool to communicate (internet users). The internet as the consulting vehicle has "no strata of authority." The EmerAgency thus addresses the “public realm, citizenship, ethics, public policy," etc. Within this course, we are interested in policy formation. Our focus on policy formation will take shape as we start to examine the intertext of the CATTt instructions in relation to the policy issues that surround our disasters. Game theory logic will be part of our examination of this relationship.

Going back to our Target, Paul Virilio’s Museum of Accidents: Virilio provides the site of a problem which needs a new discourse. The Target slot of the CATTt deals with

an area of application that the [heuretic] method is designed to address. The target is often identifiable in terms of an institution whose needs have motivated the search for the method. Thus Target supplies an inventory out of what is lacking or missing, or out of the excess of a new situation for which no practices yet exist. Plato’s target is education. Indeed, method is the discouse of School as an institution, whose primes is that learning is transferable. (Heuretics 9)

Fiber Optic Bundle

Part of Virilio’s instruction also comes from the CATTt’s Theory slot. Virilio’s fatalistic view of the world, and its demonstrable context in his museum of accidents, is related to the society of the spectacle. Virilio’s critique of society and the disaster is important because he identifies a new space of discourse: in the dromosphere literacy is not viable; we need another logic to understand this space. We don’t have critical thinking in this new space. The disaster image space occupies a “now” logic that, in terms of the viewer, nullifies his or her past and future in the moment of direct experience. The image appears (is rendered), as such, at the speed of light (λv = c).  It seems that the images on Virilio’s site can be experienced at the speed of light in two ways: 1) as rendering and constantly refreshing through the fiber optic cables that make them available to our browsers at almost the speed of light. Apparently, light through fiber optic cables travels approximately 17 to 33 percent slower than the speed of light depending on the purity of the glass and wavelength of the transmission. 2) If considering the content of the images in the museum of accidents, we can also say that the disasters themselves (in progress, in their aftermath, about to happen) are stilled into the presence of the now (with no past or future that is readable in the image itself). Speed, in both contexts--and perhaps with more impact when experienced together--what Baudrillard calls hyperreal, the realer than real--seems to demand so much from the “now” moment of experience that it creates an anxiety of disappearance (a bizarre adaptation of Bloom’s anxiety of influence), of loss, of acting, of feeling, of reacting now.

TOOLS
 
The electrate tool that we develop in this course has to be able to work with the logic of the dromosphere--at light speed. We can’t do anything with the tool other than put our decisions into it. This is the problem that we have to solve in the role of designing the operation of the tool. Virilio helps us because he tells us to look at accidents in a metaphysical sense. In Aristotelian logic, accidents are the substance that persists through change--that become known through accidents. Virilio’s Museum of Accidents creates the environment for us to look at the accident and its patterns and treat them as a sign of a new metaphysics. He doesn’t tell us how to do it, but, in the same manner that the Greeks noticed patterns in the narratives of oral traditions, stories, and ideas when they wrote them down, we need to take the image space of disaster, gather the images, and let some part of the real--the substance--some part of ourselves--show itself to us (class notes).


VIRILIO: tale

Virilio’s exhibit of the disaster also contributes to the tale slot of our CATTt—the tale "within our tale, our blog, is an exhibit, a genre, a display. We are going to make our blog en exhibit" (class notes). This means that we should look at our disaster from several dimensions.  

DIMENSION OF THE ACCIDENT   The visual dimension of the accident is important. We need to extract some signifiers from the site of the accident. Making a sign of accident involves extracting meanings from it and reducing them and saying more by abstraction (see my attempt in the Disaster as Sign post). We need to consider the art and science of naming (class notes). The accident’s visual force is also important—the way it interprets itself through our reaction.  We need to ask ourselves, “What are the forces that made the materiality of the world do that” (class notes)?  The force involves the physicality of the image, the gravity, velocity, the pitch of its materiality as a social dilemma. LOOK OF THE ACCIDENT  The look of the accident involves its context in terms of the policy issues that surround the issue before and after the moment of occurrence. We need to consider the look of the situation, the scene of it, and determine the relevant specialized knowledge surrounding it.