Disasters

We can no longer approach and attempt to solve disasters as we did in the age of literacy, wherein a singular disaster would be identified and isolated, and consultants would figure a more or less univocal guilty party and a plan of action (repaying the debt of the disaster) directed only at the disaster itself. I’m thinking here of the instructive usefulness of old clichés: namely, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure…. But even the classical understanding of prevention, as framed in the epoch of literate conduct, fails us, or so it seems.

In order to prevent/cure future disasters, we need to first undergo an active and ongoing change in our ontological and metaphysical relationship to the world. We need to rejoin philosophy and aesthetics so as to create an aesthetic ethics concerned with authentic desire and well-being. In order to do so, one needs to undergo Moments that direct one’s becoming-what-they-are (rather being what one is), by reaching ontological/metaphysical limits and returning back inward, into-one’s-self. (The dialectical war between Being and Becoming, however, seems to be an ongoing philosophical war that we carry into electracy from previous epochs). After we do this, we can better exercise prudence and Flash Reason (a new mode/method of good judgment in the age of electracy), better understand authentic desire (desire authentic to our proper and enduring becoming-selves), and move towards the development of pleasure/joy that supports well-being.

Such a stylized-ontology/ontologized-style brings about an aesthetic ethics, however, that must take into account the hyper-linked and hyper-connected function of well-being in the age of electracy. The object cause of desire of one becoming-self becomes knotted together with other object cause desires within a larger social assemblage. Suddenly, the individuals within the social assemblage (and the social assemblage itself) starts acting, producing, consuming in ways that are counter-intuitive to their authentic desire and own well-being. Three key examples of such a practice (two of which have been clearly noted by Prof. Ulmer):

[Spice as the impetus for the search for--and eventual domination of--the New World]

[Molasses and Atlantic triangular trade and the support of slavery]

  [Telephone poles and the Gainesville Superfund site]

To this end, I turn to the Rolling Stones.

My lingering questions remain: how do we put this into practice in the more nuanced, detailed sense? Is such up to the consultants (especially those within the institution of the Humanities)? As we know, “electracy is not epistemological; it is affective.” It concerns an undergoing, not an understanding of meaning. If this is so, how can we accomplish what the logic of capitalism has so greatly achieved in a practical, applied sense? Again, the instructive usefulness of old clichés: you can lead a horse to water….