A Consultation (postponed)
A MEmorial consultation from a course that used mystory as policy testimony rather than to simulate the image of wide scope.
The book does not end but is interrupted, the idea being that the work of the EmerAgency has just begun once you know your wide image. In an early draft the book went on for another 100 pages and became too long. In any case it takes me two semesters to teach the wide image and then the application of the image to a policy consultation. Nonetheless, for better or worse, the wide image and the EmerAgency are interdependent.Look for Electronic Monuments, University of Minnesota Press (2005), for a continuation of the consultancy into the MEmorial testimonial.Or perhaps I let myself be guided too strongly by the interface metaphor of a quest narrative:
This quest formula is an allegory for learning the wide image and for consulting for the EmerAgency
- The family world of the hero is disturbed by a problem.
- Heroes enter the special world of the problem where they meet a donor who tests them. If the heroes pass the test, the donor provides them with a magic tool. This tool is the device that helps the heroes overcome the obstacle, defeat the villain, win the day.
If I had dropped this interface we could have produced the wide image without thinking at all about the EmerAgency. I decided to retain the connection with the EmerAgency in order to suggest the larger context in which the wide image is relevant to practices beyond the obviously important one of self-knowledge.
- Problem disturbs the family world = public policy issue
- Special world = conditions of the problem addressed by the policy
- Donor = figures of identification encountered in the popcycle
- Magic tool = wide image
- Obstacle/Villain = specific facts of the policy problem.