tale (E-CATTt)
We are designing a discourse on method for inventing an electrate education, using the CATTt generator found analytically in every discourse on method composed in the tradition in literacy, from Plato's Phaedrus to the manifestos of the avant-garde. The four registers of Contrast-Analogy-Theory-Target supply the resources of the invention, and the function of tale is as vehicle--genre, form--both to perform and explain the new method. The prototype is the dialogue, invented by Plato as the form for inculcating and communicating the powers of writing. There are several levels for emulation: 1) Plato creates the dialogue as a "tale" for his CATTt, to communicate in writing the new logic of dialectic. Students are introduced to dialectic (analysis and synthesis) through an interface metaphor, the behavior of the gadfly Socrates. Dialogue as pedagogy requires a certain attitude: a commitment among friends to suspend competition in order to discover what is objectively (logically) true; 2) the scenario proper is Socrates encountering an interlocutor on the streets of Athens, in everyday life, as in Euthyphro, for example. Euthyphro is in a situation: he has decided to prosecute his father for impiety. Socrates asks Euthyphro to define his terms: what does he mean by "impiety"? Of course the definition of "impiety" makes it into a concept -- a literate skill, but Euthyphro is not literate. 3) The context for the apparatus is the invention of practices of logic to augment pure reason, as a capacity of selfhood (individual identity) in a democratic state (collective identity).
The admonishment of Basho (adopted as motto of heuretics) is: not to follow in the footsteps of the masters, but to seek what they sought. Heuretics is not dialogue or dialectic, but uses those as relay for the tale of our own CATTt, used to generate an electrate equivalent, to do for electracy what dialogue did for Plato's Academy. Our genre is not dialogue, but konsult. The capacity to be addressed, supported, augmented, is not reason (logic), but affect, sensory perception (aesthetics). The medium (equipment) is not alphabetic writing, but ubiquitous computing (pervasive computing: mobile devices in smart environments): ubimage in short. These features of the electrate equivalent of dialogue (konsult) remain to be justified and developed in further topics.
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Konsult
Our generative method uses Plato's participation in the invention of literacy as a prototype and relay ("relay" names a predecessor who serves not as model but resource marking a direction for invention). The key points are that the dialogue is an interface bringing together a familiar situation of orality (talking in the street) with the unfamiliar method of literacy--dialectic. In our case, konsult (the "k" marking the specialized usage in our invention) is to the encounter with electracy what dialogue was for first encounters with literacy. "Consulting" is a familiar literate practice, within which we will introduce the unfamiliar operations of electracy (introduced in the other CATTt resources). One of the relevant featuers of consulting is that it is an institutional pedagogy: it is a form by means of which expertise codifed within one institution (usually school) is delivered outside that discipline to another institution--corporation, state, government agency and the like. Electracy, that is, includes the invention of identity formation, and specifically moves beyond the creation of behaviors of "self" in literacy to address the formation of collective identity in electracy. The analogy with literacy is Socrates introducing the individual Euthyphro to the advantages of conceptual reasoning, that enabled him (in principle) to notice the contradictions at work in his plans, leading to error and worse. The challenge of konsult -- the consulting form and practice-- is to address collective Euthyphros, to bring them into awareness of the practices continually producing unforeseen consequences with disastrous outcomes.
It is worth remembering, at the same time, that Euthyphro himself, and the community of Athens as a whole, did not exactly appreciate the gadfly Socrates, whose intellectual performances were received as blasphemy, and recognized implicitly as the overturning of the heroic values of the hegemonic oral society. Aristophanes The Clouds is a parody of Socratic teaching. It is nerds against jocks, more or less, with the jocks finally ransacking the school. Consulting is advising, in other words, and the problem remains the same, from Plato to MIT: how to educate tyrants.
In Practice
The tale proposes that konsult is the genre that does for electrate learning what dialogue did for students learning literacy in the Academy and Lyceum. The genre of konsult (hybrid of literacy and electracy), and the practice of consulting in this digitally augmented form, is the site unifying and correlating the diverse dimensions of experiences and practices outlined in the Target (learning in the dispersed modes of residential, blended, online, service, collaborative, and the like).