Information Technology Reference
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Arts - fact, concept, affect-percept). The challenge of ubimage is to design a practice
capable of work-play with all three orders at once in the context of a situation.
Such is the skill-set of electracy. The exercise testing concept avatar (the thought
of feeling) takes up the imperative of the avant-garde, championed in many forms
subsequently-to merge art with everyday life. The terminology calls attention to
the specific target of ubimage relative to apparatus theory. The STEM engineers, as
they say, have saturated the Everyday world (
Lebenswelt)
with equipment (mobile
devices networking with sensors in smart environments). That takes care of technics,
but the commentary tends to assume that Everyday Life is unproblematic, which
is far from the case. In fact, the Everyday is a major topic of discipline interest,
as for example in the philosophy of Henri Lefebvre (Lefebvre
1992
), taken up
in Situationism, Guy Debord (Debord
1994
), not to mention Walter Benjamin's
Arcades Project (Benjamin
1999
), and the Frankfurt School focus on the problem
of alienation as the impoverishment of everyday life experience.
Specifically, the parallel with digital convergence and saturation is the integration
of the aesthetic attitude into lifeworld behavior and skills. Here is a key to the
electrate apparatus in general: it emerges into metaphysics through the aesthetic
attitude, just as literacy as science required the frame of curiosity in order to thrive.
The invention of an “attitude” is part of apparatus formation. “Aesthetics” introduces
a certain “distance” into experience, termed “aura” by Benjamin. It is important to
clarify that the devotion to “pure art” (art for art's sake) during the initial period of
electracy in nineteenth-century Paris (Parisian Bohemia in Montmartre cabarets is
the electrate equivalent of the Athenian academies creating a space for pure reason)
was inventive, a necessary concentration for articulation of art as “logic,” prior to
dissemination as general cultural interface (GCI) for an electrate civilization. The
point is that netizens (ubizens) via the apparatus are able to include aura not as
separation from but syncretic with their other institutional behaviors - work, family,
leisure. Aura (aesthetic attitude)
creates value
, which recommends it as the means
to overcome alienation and recover experience of individual and collective agency,
which is the avatar function. The insight is that well-being refers to specific values,
whose aesthetic character can and should be realized through public policy. “Being a
dynamic principle, the aesthetic function is potentially unlimited; 'it can accompany
every human act, and every object can manifest it.' Its limit lies in the fact that
it derives from the dialectical negation of a practical or communicative function.
And because the phenomena it produces in the constant renewal of the aesthetic
experience are subject to societal judgment, i.e., must find public recognition before
they can enter the tradition-creating process as aesthetic norms, there is a second,
intersubjective limitation. In contrast to Roman Jacobson's earlier definition of
the poetic influence of language, the aesthetic function is not self-referential for
Mukarovsky, it is more than a statement oriented toward expression for its own
sake. Because the aesthetic function changes everything that it touches into a sign,
it becomes transparent for the thing or activity that it “sets aside some practical
association.” Precisely because the aesthetic function differs from all others (the
noetic, the political, the pedagogic) in having no “concrete aim” and because it
lacks “unequivocal content,” it can take hold of the contents of other functions and
give their expression the most effective form” (Jauss
1982
).
