Theopraxesis (Theoria-Praxis-Poiesis)
Our generative template is Plato's dialogue, Socrates as persona dramatizing literate metaphysics through his conversations with friends. In heuretic terms (logic of invention that we are using to craft an electrate metaphysics), the Republic teaches us by Contrast. We accept its question and strategy, but seek something different (not necessarily something "opposite"). The invention of new methods throughout the history of literacy drew upon an implicit CATTt (the acronym identifying the devices of Contrast, Analogy, Theory, Target, tale). Five inputs, from whose intertextual constellation emerges a set of instructions for the new practice. We call upon this proven device of literacy to bootstrap ourselves into electracy. We don't yet have the complete institution, but we have most of the parts, and you are learning electracy by helping us put them together. Analogy is "art" in a post-medium sense, with the exemplars of Sterbak and Brodsky already being reviewed for instructions. Theory is "philosophy" again in a general sense, drawing upon the work of Continental Poststructuralism primarily. Target is the Internet, the emergent institution in need of a language practice. Tale for now is our lessons and exercises, but what we seek is an "app" (to use this term as shorthand) for EmerAgency consulting, to support participation in a fifth estate. This fifth estate is to a global political order what journalism as fourth estate has been to the order of nation states. We need names for our distinctive processes, forms, and practices, to facilitate discussion, to clarify and direct our collaboration in this invention. Our form is not "dialogue" but "konsult," functioning as an app for a "smart" device with internet connectivity, in order to contribute to social media and their database resources, including "surveillance" conditions in intelligent environments. To distinguish our electrate logic from dialectic let us call it "appiphany."
The fifth estate does for everyday life--ordinary habitus, quotidian routines--what the fourth estate does for extraordinary events, "all the news that is fit to print." In everyday life "nothing happens," or rather, everything "else" goes on in our getting by and passing through. As the poet William Carlos Williams wrote, "It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." Emerson referred to the "silent melancholy" of routine living, that Thoreau called "quiet desperation." This dimension of everyday experience is registered in "Waiting for High Water," our allegory. Sterbak takes her dog Stanley for a walk on a winter day in Venice. Most people who have a dog take it for a walk every day (the dog insists upon it). Here is an action, Doing-- Praxis. At the same time the walk is recorded in video (cameras attached to Stanley's head). This is Making--Poiesis. Thinking frames the performances at several levels, in the interaction between the scene of high water and the manner in which it is experienced. Sterbak as exemplary artist developed the footage for an installation, but you and I post our videos online. The archive of recordings is available for further processing, to support a collective experience. These terms signal that our allegory is reconfiguring the relationship among the three intellectual virtues (capacities) identified in literacy from Aristotle to Kant: Theoria (Knowledge of what is necessary), Praxis (taking Action in a particular situation), Poiesis (making an aesthetic product). Kant's three critiques formulate the limits of these faculties--Pure, Practical, and Aesthetic Reason. The most satisfying human experience is when these three capacities function together in harmonious interplay, Kant maintained, although the analytical procedures of literacy have worked to separate, isolate, and put the three in conflict.
It is not difficult to sort out the different emphases of the fourth and fifth estates. My local newspaper reported recently the rape and murder of two teenage girls in rural India. The girls of a lower caste we attacked, raped, murdered, and their bodies hung from a mango tree in the village. The context shifts to the concerns of the fifth estate: the girls had walked into a field some fifteen minutes from the village in the dark of night to relieve themselves. Women usually go in larger groups for protection, wary of just such attacks. U. N. figures show that half of India's population of 1.2 billion people have no toilets. "From villages in Nepal to the urban slums of Cape Town, South Afria, women say that lack of safe access to toilets often puts them at risk of sexual violence and harassment" (Gainesville Sun, June 4, 2014). Well-being demands a justice of toilets, and proposes a new measure to secure it. One of the classical quarrels in the tradition is among the three crafts of history, literature, and philosophy, concerning the hierarchy of truth. Aristotle ordered the hierarchy with history the lowest, concerned with the past of particular actions; poetry next imagining the possibilities of what might be; philosophy the highest, articulating what ought to be in eternal truth. Three transcendental categories are invoked--the Good (enacted by Statesmen), the Beautiful (produced by artists), the True (defined by Philosophers). The goal of our konsult genre is to design and test theopraxesis, a performance engaging all three capacities simultaneously. The integration of the three capacities requires and enables a reconfiguration of Justice as capability, to enable participation in a fifth estate, working for well-being against disaster.
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Literate metaphysics invented a measure of Justice different from the standard functioning in orality. It is important to keep in mind the stakes of our project, for inventing a measure of Justice we are bringing into practice an entire metaphysics. As Levi-Strauss once said about language, it must have come into being whole (synchrony), even while it also developed historically (diachrony). As was recently dramatized in the popular television series, Game of Thrones, in an oral metaphysics the truth of an event (who murdered the King) may be determined by combat. Of course that measure still exists collectively in our civilization, in the form of war. Our interest in Plato's Justice is not only in its measure of that condition, but in the concept as such. Plato asked not for this or that example of justice or injustice, but what is Justice itself, the pure form. The verb "to be" was put to work beyond its function as copula in Indo-European grammar (linking subject with predicate), to pose the question of Being proper, the nature of what is real. The written word "Justice" (Dike) is a recording device, and the practice of definition was devised to determine and state those features or properties of "Justice" that constituted its function and purpose. The term eidos (shape) was promoted from everyday usage to name the Idea, the Form of Justice as it appeared and manifested itself. The Academy began the project of recording reality in this way, and the dictionary and encyclopedia today are the fruits of this program (along with nearly everything else in our civilization). Definition of terms plays an important role in many dialogues, such as in Euthyphro. On his way to prosecute his own father for the crime of impiety, Euthyphro encounters Socrates and is asked to explain what he means by "piety" and "impiety." Euthyphro contradicts himself repeatedly, since he is not literate, and Socrates demonstrates that his interlocutor does not really know what he is doing. Unfortunately, this proof often was not appreciated.
Aristotle (one of Plato's pupils), continued the invention by creating the Categories of what it is possible to say (or write) about anything that may be proven to be either true or false. Here is the fundamental invention of literacy, putting civilization on the path to science, materialism, empiricism, evidence-based thinking and behavior. Aristotle singled out the declarative proposition, a statement such as "Socrates is a man." The term "category" in ordinary Greek means "indictment"--a term in jurisprudence. Definition in effect was an accusation, charging an entity with being what it is (and proving or disproving it by the logic of definition). It is interesting that the corresponding term for "defense" against an accusation (category) is "apology," recalling the title of the dialogue dramatizing Socrates's unsuccessful attempt to defend himself against the charge of corrupting the youth. There are ten categories itemizing this dimension of saying: Substance (Socrates, to cite the conventional example); Quality (a philosopher); Quantity (5' 8" tall); Relation (friend of Plato); Time (noon); Position (standing); Place (the public square); State (ill-clothed); Action (talking); Affection (being taunted).
This categorial system enhanced a particular institution shared by numerous cultures that the Greeks called Theoria. An individual such as Solon (reputed to have preserved Greek democracy by introducing the principle of equal protection under the law) or any wise elder trusted by the community was a theoros, and a group of such individuals was a Theoria. Information management was important to the thriving of a community, and Theoria was used for rumor control. When some piece of information circulated widely enough to cause disturbance, a Theoria wa dispatched to check it out. The importance of sight and seeing to this metaphysics is registered in the names, with "theoria" in Greek meaning "contemplation, speculation, a looking at, viewing, a sight, show, spectacle." The most famous Theoria in Western Christendom is the Magi (the three wise men), who visited the baby Jesus in Bethlehem, to determine the truth of the rumors that a new king was born. Plato reports in Timaeus about Solon's travels and his return to Greece with the story of Atlantis. Theory in its early form was as much tourism as it was investigation. The sages arrived at the site, met their local counterparts, visited the shrines. When the Theoria returned they reported in the public square of their city what they had learned, and that became the truth (and no other version of the case was permitted). It is not difficult to discern in Aristotle's categories the guiding questions of the fourth estate, modern journalism, reporting (ideally) the Who What When Where Why of any event (the shootings of Malala Yousafzai and Gabby Giffords for example).
When we say that literacy is metaphysical--as manifested in its practices such as the categories and propositional logic--we mean that every facet of alphabetic civilization is organized according to this apparatus (set-up, framing, dispositif). This complete saturation of our reality by this set-up (Gestell) may be observed in other practices structured by discourse. Kenneth Burke, the American rhetorician, developed "dramatism" as a way to describe the practices of our institutions through the filter of Theoria: Act (What); Scene (Where-When); Agent (Who); Agency (How- What Means); Purpose (Why). His notion of "symbolic action" is a version of theopraxesis, anticipating the emergence of "media events" in electracy. Any Hollywood screenplay casts our world into this frame, and provides a transition in this mode, with entertainment movies having undertaken the process during the past hundred years or so to translate our novels and stories into film versions. It could be that the screenplay (scenario) is an appropriate interface metaphor for encountering electracy, just as Plato used a dramatized conversation in the dialogue for encountering dialectic. Meanwhile, we recognize the completion or final cause of Aristotle's metaphysics in the genesis of computing. Propositional topics were put into truth tables in modern philosophy, where this system was recognized as fitting (a guideword for our project) the capacities of electric switches, true/false, on/off, and 1/0. What happens when literate metaphysics is put into a machine and fully automated? It is the point of departure for an entirely new apparatus, just as happened when the oral epics were transcribed in writing at the beginnings of literacy.
The function of this review of concept and category in literacy in heuretics is to ask: what is that in our case, what is the equivalent for electracy? We retain all the institutions and pratices of orality and literacy, and supplement them now with a new measure, produced within a digital apparatus. We want to learn from a poet's visit to Venice a metaphysics of well-being against disaster. Brodsky (and Sterbak) are in Venice (and me in my place, you in yours) on behalf of the fifth estate.