Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
3.4
Theoria
This sample of works retrieves the institution of theoria, as practiced in the ancient
world - a combination of tourism and theory. The most famous example of theoria
is the visit of the three Wise Men to the manger in Bethlehem, to determine the truth
of the rumors that a new king was born. A theoros (member of a theoria) is sage,
someone like Solon for the Classical Greeks, a person trusted by the community,
dispatched to sort out fact from fiction in the information flow of a community (Plato
2006a
). Theoria toured a situation, consulted with locals who served as guides to all
the shrines, sites, and important personages of the area. The theoria announced its
findings
in the public square of its home city
, and these findings constituted what
was the case. Aristotle's invention of metaphysics began with the
Categories
,asif
codifying in grammar the declarative form that may be determined as either true or
false, for making trustworthy statements in the service of the Polis. A version of
his categories survive today in traditional journalism (the five W's, beginning with
“What?”).
Ubimage makes possible a new dimension of consulting, triangulating between
the present institution of tourism (a vital contemporary vernacular behavior, largest
single industry in the world), and the historical practice of divination (tarot, for
example, mapping the universal journey through life for pre-modern people).
Divination was an essential part of traditional deliberative reason, concerned with
decision-making to influence future conditions. It was a faculty for processing
the future, just as memory is a faculty for processing the past. Both tourism
and divination model a certain functionality to be appropriated by ubimage.
Tourism orients GPS (physical mobility), and divination orients EPS - Existential
Positioning System (metaphysical mobility). The retrieval of these registers of
theoria for konsult calls attention to the contradiction of contemporary media:
enthusiasm for mobile computing masks the metaphysical immobility of modernity,
the fundamental aporias that arrest policy decisions on behalf of well-being at every
turn (trope). The global city remains as paralyzed as it was when its labyrinth was
first surveyed by modernist arts and philosophy. The era of electracy begins in the
industrial city.
Tarot and the I Ching are especially misunderstood, due to caricature survivals
in New Age and self-help contexts. These popular, vernacular practices, nonethe-
less, are a resource for invention in that they provide a background tradition of
popular decision-making. The fifth estate via social media is crowd-sourced self-
help democracy. Greek philosophy (literate metaphysics) was not invented from
scratch, but was generated in the new educational institution - the Academy -
as a syncretism and refinement of cultural features of the contemporary society,
including the oral culture of spoken Greek. Tarot was created in Renaissance
Italy and is a popular expression of the same forces shaping the work of the
Neoplatonic Academy in Florence. It acquired most of its hermetic aspects in
the same environment nurturing the birth of the avant-garde arts in Paris in the
nineteenth century, and the commentaries bringing it most fully into contact with
