Part Two Overview

Part two of this course will move our thinking into the dimension of the figure. Literal meaning is the outcome of the use of figurative language—the figuration of language is inescapable. While computers can process factual information—literal meaning—at incredible speeds, it cannot be programmed to process and make literal meaning from figurative language unless by accident and only as an accident recognizable through the relational modalities of human cognition. Part two of this course, therefore, involves our approach to the question: can we formulate a figure that supports thinking that could lead to deliberate action.

We are still thinking of our accident as sign (Virilio), but we need to ask ourselves what properties our accident as sign has that give it its own nature—makes it predictable. Baudrillard does not look for a rational option; he looks for an unavoidable option (something destined, predestined and returning) (class notes).

Our task is to engage in a different dimension of thinking and logic. The new dimension in electracy is the dimension of augury (dream work). We need to treat our chosen accidents as omens, and work in the realm of dream logic to think and visualize these omens. The process of doing this and the end result will resemble or be the metaphysics of the omen. Baudrillard, in our Theory slot, is key to our ability to think of our accident as an omen. Our accidents are the spaces of fatality. They are the logic of human fatality. The Fates, as mentioned in an earlier blog entry, create the predestined tensions that orient our lives. We can think of them as the hidden products of society that orient our inner lives. Like the narrative logic (mythologies) that orient our understanding of ourselves in the world and in society, they deliver human life and its many influences to us in the form of the figurative tensions between the axis of conflict (the Helper, Subject, and Opponents) and the axis of communication that is the product (and perhaps the mask) of the hidden desires and aims that give energy and form to the Sender, Object, and Receiver roles.

Our thinking dimension—the dimension of augury and the realm of the Fates—tells us that there are deep, underlying patterns in the world of human experience. In part two, we will try to read these patterns and use their logic to understand the accident space, which acts at the fatal limit of logic and, in turn, refreshes the routine of everyday life by injecting it with the escape it both fears and yearns for. These patterns in the accident logic will create the polar space/logic between pleasure and pain and map them on and within each other. Our final figure of this logic will be an expression of thinking of our accident from the first person event position. It will put in real-time the happening of my experience of reality today undergoing the logic of the electrate apparatus. (In electracy, the thought about the accident happens through the apparatus—it’s a relay be means of the apparatus—but it always comes back to us (class notes).)

We are “trying to develop a metaphysics of human decision” in process. We are trying “to think about the ontology of pure reason” (class notes). This process can be explained as a shift from Heidegger’s dasein to ereignis, to the historical event. “When you make a decision, it is as an ereignis.” The decision has already been made; it has already happened. All of the decisions we make can be imagined as a massive palimpsest of ideas whose paths and connections have always already been experienced or thought (either actually or in the possibilities that their simultaneous existence enables). These decisions are the secrets that the patterns of the Fates and destiny hold and endlessly weave together and which people experience uniquely and individually despite the fact that the innovation we bring to a decision making process is only approximately “two percent” (class notes) of its action. Tradition “has already made a whole series of choices. In decision-making, we need to think about which parts we have control over and which parts belong to tradition" (class notes).