Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
that brings about the best outcome for the community. In oral culture this
kind of judgment on the fly was associated with
metis
, a skill of
savoir-faire
demonstrated in its purest style in the conduct of a race.
Kairos
is the mode of temporality proper to metis (the term refers to the
weaver's art of throwing the shuttle at just the right moment). Kairotic time
displaces cyclical (oral) and linear (literate) models of time to become the
primary temporality in electracy.
III. Flash Reason
The lightning flash of insight (intuition, inspiration) has been fully theo-
rized in Western thought, especially with respect to Moment (
Augenblick
).
Moment is taken up in konsult as the answer to Now crisis. Sudden thought
draws together all human faculties to take in a situation in one (augmented)
glance. The limits of this glance relative to the human sensorium are
codified as “beauty,” however that experience may be understood in a
given culture. The invention of Aesthetics as a separate faculty at the
beginnings of electracy (Kant et al.) recognized and anticipated the challenge
to Moment in the notion of the sublime. The conditions of the industrial
city are sublime, producing shock experience of alienation, reification,
objectification, in which denizens lose connection with agency (with the
categories of experience: space, time, cause).
The arts take up the dynamics of Moment, focusing on a poetics of epiphany.
Epiphany (secularized revelation) is the formal structure of flash reason,
transformed in Romanticism (German Idealism) as the “crisis poem” (Harold
Bloom), reconfiguring the operations of allegory and symbol, promoting
tropology as supplement of inference and narrative as primary skills of
the cultural interface. The project evolved across the arts, leading to a
new structural mode of correspondences addressing the disjunction of
microcosm/macrocosm in the city.
Relevant versions of epiphany include Baudelaire's correspondences,
Rimbaud's illuminations, Rilke's world-inner-space, Eliot's objective
correlative. Proust (involuntary memory) and Joyce (epiphany) extended
the function to the novel, as did Brecht (gestus, V [A] effect) and Artaud
(cruelty) in theater. Freud's transference, Benjamin's dialectical image, and
Merleau-Ponty's flesh are key instances of theoretical elaboration of flash
reason.
IV. Mechanical Reproduction
Manifesting a certain (happy) correlation across the levels of the apparatus,
the invention of photography makes available one of the new supports
of communication displacing alphabetic writing in the electrate economy.
Photography was just the first in a series of major innovations lending
technological augmentation to the sensorium, continuing today in digital
