The Task

The task of this course expands every week--I don’t mean with homework, although, I do have a lot of homework to do, I mean my understanding expands. As more doors of understanding open, I experience a larger scope of associated meanings (I’m still lost, but, like in a dream, I don’t necessarily know what’s going on but everything still feels connected). Or, rather, I am realizing that the opening door metaphor--the phrase itself, perhaps--really is imaginary, in that there is more than one standard way of learning and thinking. The idea that I have to open doors to see something implies that there is a mental block of some sort, imposed through a myriad of social influences and habits that connect through time, my body, my mind, our history, to this moment, this me, this statement, which is closed, somewhat, to its full potential, to the idea of itself realized as idea, and free, somehow, in itself, in the image of my thought, this thought flashing before your eyes. Look. See. Think. Span. To bring this out, to realize this out, to travel in new ways through this world in our bodies, in our minds, is the task. Already, there’s an imposition in the name, the meaning, the necessity to do; a restriction, perhaps, a muddy path with obstacles, each triumph a freedom, an opening up. And so to really see we need new ways to bore through the fabric of the whole history of thought and gather the bits and pieces to take with us into this new space with different doors, different openings, different closings,--some bits might be needed, some might not, some are part of us--through Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Montaigne, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Liebniz, and many others. The task needs us to step through or above or beyond or walk right into the collective thought of Western tradition and rework it to include what it means to live in the world in the 21st century. We’ll need to dwell in the Baroque period, walk its streets, touch its contours, and understand how and why it disappeared from the pedagogical history of thought (see Baroque stand). We’ll find the future or the now, perhaps, in the shadows of its vacancy; in what it means when an aspect of truth in history is glossed over by what came before and after.

The task, then, is to create a concept for seeing, thinking, and understanding in the increasingly virtual modes of communication that characterize the way we experience the world. Specifically, we are creating a new metaphysics for the digital image, for inventing electracy. Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? is providing the theoretical framework for our task. To create this concept, we need instructions. The first part of the collective task of this course, is to mark out the instructions (develop the poetics) to create an electrate concept. To create a concept, we need:

A concept that rejects the traditional orienting negotiation between a subject and object.

1. Electracy replaces the subject/object relationship with the “Event.”
2. The concept will “speak” the Event of everything it is.
3. It will “speak” in the new emerging space of a new epoch, a 4th epoch of creativity.
4. The new concept will let us receive reality / what is happening.
5. My policy problem is a manifestation of what is happening.
6. The new concept will allow us to think the event. It will allow us to “see” collective thought in electracy.

Deleuze and Guattari are providing the theoretical means for us to approach creating a concept of electracy (CATTt). We are creating a discourse on method in our invention of a concept for the digital image in electracy. Deleuze and Guattari are guiding us though one component of our goal. They help us locate the new landscape for our project, the internet, and provide the theoretical framework for us to claim a space on this virtual realm, name it, create a character to perform the thought the concept is, and relate all these elements to a public policy issue. The following posts will address these four instructions for creating a poetics of a concept.