Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
3.5
The Malala Test
What is at stake in this syncretizing ambition for the arts in electracy may be seen in
the irreducible hostility between religion and science currently plaguing civilization.
We must appreciate that this confrontation is between not just institutions, but
entire apparati. Any number of incidents might represent the impasse for our time,
as the confrontation between Galileo and the Church did for Bertolt Brecht. A
radical Islamist group in Nigeria calling itself “Boko Haram” (meaning “Western
Education is Sacrilege”), burned down a school in Nigeria, killing 29 students and an
English teacher. The Khmer Rouge included in its genocide anyone wearing glasses,
a shibboleth signaling “intellectual.” Konsult takes the side of Malala Yousafzai
against her Taliban would-be assassins: “One child, one teacher, one topic, one
pen can change the world,” she declared, in demanding the right to education for
everyone. Ubimage takes up again the old struggle between pens and swords, to
demand that religion and science correlate with well-being.
A caveat to avoid melodramatic oversimplifications of the test is found in another
version of the opposition: Jihad vs. McWorld. Is Las Vegas the best electracy can do
in promoting the good life? Each apparatus has its own version of fair and foul. What
if obesity fell into the wrong hands? The challenge of ubimage is to extrapolate
from the inventions of corporate entertainment (the leading edge of electrate
institution formation) the means of metaphysical innovation that transforms the
conflict of civilizations into a correlation of apparati. What in fact constitutes well-
being? Aristotle said it was happiness, accomplished through the good, but these
transcendental terms could only be defined within a Polis, a political community,
since they were not given as actual, but only as potential. The fifth estate (ubiquitous
democracy) is this Polis. An immediate goal of konsult is to develop a practice to
support community institutionalization of well-being outside merely commercial
values (Bataille's restricted economy) (Bataille
1991
), but also apart from the
restrictions of religion and science. The short-term goal of the present experiments is
to understand and undergo for ourselves the basic insight into well-being expressed
in Arts & Letters tradition, as a first step toward designing a practice for general
electracy.
The convergence of Internet and lifeworld producing an ecology of information
creates a need and opportunity to develop a contemporary version of the microcosm-
macrocosm correspondences enjoyed by pre-modern civilizations. The systems
of correspondences organizing divination that oriented individuals to the ethos
and habitus of society were destroyed by modernity (scientific industrialized
utilitarian society). The program for a new “correspondence” (Baudelaire's “forest
of symbols” (Baudelaire
1994
), Walter Benjamin's Arcades allegory (Benjamin
1999
)) concerns the functionality modeled in oracles such as Tarot or the I Ching,
if not the cultural content of those systems. Oracle “games” allow individuals to
author epiphanies, and the epiphany form survived in modernist poetry and art
in the absence of the system that supplied data from the wisdom traditions in
support of practical reason (decision procedures). The experiments undertaken in
