attunement of Albert’s disposition or temperament was manifested in this fixity, which Holton abstracts as the “invariant principle.” This disposition found a match with “speed of light” in the physics problem set Albert addressed as an adult. Holton’s argument is that this affective trace is the reason Einstein and not Poincaré or some other equally well-prepared scientist solved the problem of electromagnetism.
The image of wide scope is present in cases not covered by Holton, such as that of Frank Gehry, designer of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Gehry reported that one of his most vivid memories was of the carp that his grandmother would bring home live from the market. Frank loved to watch the carp swimming in the bathtub, before it was served for Sabbath supper. The movements of this fish are now observed in the sweeping curved geometries of Gehry’s designs. The wide image accounts for Gehry’s recognition of this feeling in the geometries, which he began to use even before he had access to the computers that made them practical.
The immediate point of relevance is to note the interface feature, equivalent in experience ontology of essence in semantic metaphysics. This feature is the kinetic gesture, the motion charged with affect, in the scene (e-motion). For Einstein it was the one fixed feature within a turning frame; for Gehry it was the undulations of a swimming fish. Commentators from a diversity of fields have made similar observations of this feature as the appropriate interface between the affective body and the archive of documents. Gelernter, arguing for adding intuition and poetry to the AI model, used a reading of Genesis to show the feature: a series of stories, whose coherence was provided by scenes of Moses making a certain gesture of “a powerful arm outstretched.” Deleuze and Guattari, in their study of Kafka, similarly opened a new network of intertext within the oeuvre, a system consisting of an oppositional pair: bent head + portrait photo / straightened head + musical sound. The implication is that the phrases expressing such patterns are present in the surface text, and may be extracted as features, designed as hooks or attractors addressing potential matches in the idiosyncratic backstories of researchers, supporting browsing or low-focus inquiry.
The further implication is that experience ontology is inherently supported in audiovisual media. The fact that film (AV media) simulates the presentation of the world to perception enables it to record the event situations that trigger the somatic markers of enactive memory. Digital simulations of lens photography further enhance the ability of audiovisualization to enhance, augment, and bring into awareness and articulation this dimension of intelligence that until now has remained “unconscious.” Commentators in the Humanities are especially excited by the possibility that database simulation allows reflection upon the dispositions that are a primary source of judgments and decisions in ethics and politics (not to mention aesthetics). The positive aspect of this discovery is that filmic presentation, in its capacity to trigger deep memory, in principle allows individuals to examine under the hood of their bachelor machine. The caveat directed to promotors of neuroaesthetics comes from the philosophical aptitude of German language. Presentation (Darstellung) is an improvement on representation (Vorstellung). However, as Sam Weber pointed out in several books, both of these modalities are framed and repurposed by a third kind discovered by Freud, distortion (Entstellung). Star Trek already taught us that in VR, the most convincingly authentic experience is in fact a kind of dream. Its Stelle results from all the turns of tropology—condensation, displacement, rationalization, representability. Concept avatar does not propose any one place, stand, location (Stelle), but the functionality of place (chora).
After the Greeks had spent some time with their epics in written form they began to notice some clustering and patterns emerging within the words, the phenomenon of paronomasia, with a variety of words formed out of a shared or similar roots. “Dike” or “justice” was the first word that was studied systematically for these patterns, and became the first concept constructed in philosophy (in Plato’s Republic). Similarly, commentators today are noticing the presence of affective intensities emerging within image work. The next step is to do for these image patterns what the Greeks did for their word patterns: put them into an ontology, that is, a system for storage and retrieval of information on a massive scale, opening a further dimension to reality. The purpose of concept avatar is to support this passage from one style of concept to another. Avatar does not eliminate essence, but redirects attention to a different aspect of a scene, to different traits, that gather into an alternative pattern expressing and constructing an affective metaphysics. “Experience ontology” is a reminder of this background of flash reason, joining data extraction, visualization, and collaboration tools, to integrate data and interface design. Virtual worlds, or mixed (augmented) realities, may be designed to support experience ontology, both for pedagogy and research, by addressing the somatic markers of affective memory, enhanced by information retrieval. The proposal is that experience ontology is to creative discovery what semantic ontologies have been to scientific method. On the side of technics, we need an experience web to supplement the semantic web. The Allegory of Prudence probes this dimension of experience, accessing this feeling that motivates your image of wide scope. Electracy augments the sensory capacity of your body to know that your foot is in the fire, extended into the dimension of thriving, so that you (we) know when there is an emergency of well-being.
3 Joke
Attitude
Concept avatar learns from bachelor machines informed by fumisme. The Allegory of Prudence does not require a certain attitude, but counsels on attitude formation as such, advising me on how attitude “turns out.” “The biolinguistic conditions of so-called ‘evil’ are the same biolinguistic conditions that animate ‘virtue,’“ Paolo Virno says. “They both feed off the uncertainty experienced in the face of ‘that which can be different from the way it is’ [Aristotle’s ethics]” (Virno, Multitude Between 21 ). The axis of Aesthetic Reason (of pleasure-pain, or joy-sadness) supplements Practical Reason at this contingent moment of choice. It answers the question: what is the measure guiding decision? Agamben states the question within the frame of a philosophical tradition, represented by Spinoza.
The Irreparable is that things are just as they are, in this or that mode, consigned without remedy to their way of being. States of things are irreparable, whatever they may be: sad or happy, atrocious or blessed. How you are, how the world is—that is the Irreparable . . . According to Spinoza the two forms of the irreparable, confidence or safety (securitas) and despair (desperatio), are identical from this point of view. What is essential is only that every cause of doubt has been removed, that things are certainly and definitively thus; it does not matter whether this brings joy or sadness. As a state of things, heaven is perfectly equivalent to hell even though it has the opposite sign. (But if we could feel confident in despair, or desperate in confidence, then we would be able to perceive in the state of things a margin, a limbo that cannot be contained within it). The root of all pure joy and sadness is that the world is as it is. Joy or sadness that arises because the world is not what it seems or what we want it to be is impure or provisional. But in the highest degree of their purity, in the so be it said to the world when every legitimate cause of doubt and hope has been removed, sadness and joy refer not to negative or positive qualities, but to a pure being-thus without any attributes. (The Coming Community 90)
Electracy is the apparatus of joy/sadness, hence our concern with augmented attitude. Agamben is glossing the “consolation” of philosophy, the contingent relationship between how the world is and our attitude within that world. Wisdom proposes that we work on our attitude rather than on the world, with the recommended answer to the transcendental question of stand (at least up to modernity) being ataraxy (suppression of desire). In electracy this pair is not an either-or, since attitude now is ontological (world-creating). Avatar emergency concerns precisely the relation between attitude and action. We take up this question of stand, orientation, direction (attitude) anew, appropriating as a relay for the inference procedure of flash reason (conduction) in electracy the stand-up routine as a practice of concept avatar. We are learning how to play with avatar, in the persona of wiseacre. “Attitude is the heartbeat of an act,” advises one handbook of the craft.
Material
