Delivering Competent Knowing and Living in the Narrative Space Framed by “Inscriptive Connectivities”

Advancing modernity fatally weakened direct ways of intervening in the social, whether by the Divine Will or barricades. Nietzsche’s technique of inscription has been gradually adapted to reach the present as hazardous sub-brands of “digitally enhanced” inscriptive connectivity born out of an unlikely alliance of emergent tools of networked communication and technophobia of much of the humanities. Even some specialist topics enter the public space as “narratives”, no longer grounded in open allegiances to a system of thought or worldview. Instead authors prefer a travelogue format which hides intended connections. What then is the genealogy of this way of structuring narratives? In particular, what might serve as a tutorial door opening not only to the hidden content of such narratives but also to turning them into useful tools of learning and competence building free of top-down impositions and rota learning familiar from the curriculum delivery demanded by much of the educational Establishment? It will be shown how to guide the reader in an interactive, bottom up manner so that he or she can, gradually, and at the level of ability and resources peculiar to the case in hand, proceed through ascending stages of reading and engaging with the text, and systematically dispel the baggage of layers of loss and uncertainty preventing confident, critical approaches to communication, work, and citizenship.


Temporalisation and Localisation of Communicative Expression Re-inscribing Facticity
The Cosmos of Aristotle was a purposeful unity of Gods, humans, and things. Galileo replaced God's command with "measure and quantify" and broke up the unity of Cosmos. Immanuel Kant set out to reconcile Galileo and Newton with philosophy. To this end he divided the world into phenomena and noumena. We can then achieve reliable knowledge of phenomena thanks to a priori forms of perception of space and time. The content of Practical Reason must remain open. If one knew how to be free and moral then morality would belong to "reliable knowledge", i.e., would be the object of science! Yet, although we do not "know" how to comprehend the moral imperative and beauty, we do comprehend their incomprehensibility and this informs our judgment. That makes our existence enigmatic: for when products of pure reason leave the closure of the lab and cloister they too fall into the realm of value judgement.
The post-Einsteinian science and mathematics de-legitimated claims to universal validity based on the notions of eternal truths and absolutes of space, time, and spirit, and recast them in terms of the limits of their applicability. In the absence of any absolute reference point-offered by God or by Nature to the Kantian observer-thought is a perpetual movement of signifiers. This has far reaching consequences.
Concept generation and negation are no longer constrained by the demands of transcendental theory; any thought is only "local". Then signs do not "represent" any prior entity but derive their credibility by reference to other systems of signs. Thus this temporalisation and localisation of judgement re-inscribes facticity; i.e., the visible sign does not represent a face, a landscape or injured body as a thing out there recognizable by the meaning granted to it by a fixed place in a shared structure. It is made so as to put before us whatever brings to life a "driving engine" on the scale of a particular form of selection or "measurement" we have made; and it is often framed by conscious or unconscious attempts to make sense of any change by behaving as if there were a formula, a prescription-like arrow pointing from of A to B whether such a relation really exists or not.
Although the process of confronting narrative particulars with results of science and science-inspired logical inquiries enlivened by artistic brilliance has long exposed the limits of assumptions on which the speculative reason shaped our cultural history, it does not mean that Homer's Odyssey, Plato's Republic, the Bible, Newton's Principia and Kant's Critiques etc. are no longer documents of great value. By discoveries of independent reason of the rational grounding of our past efforts we have not lost anything. Rather we have been gradually liberated-be it at the cost of having to learn to live with novel challenging finitudes of life-from the limitations that speculative schemes supposedly of universal validity imposed often quite ruthlessly upon mankind. Nor is it right to claim as many have done that the age of reason delegitimised our spiritual inheritance without putting anything in its place.
For the pursuit of this very reason has recently provided humans with the means for recasting our heritage via genealogies of independent order generation and application as a function of increasing degrees of complexity. Without such clearing of the action space from the chaotic flow of value www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eshs Education, Society and Human Studies Vol. 2, No. 1, 2021 16 Published by SCHOLINK INC. judgments there would be no elbow room for recognising and fostering genuine creativity and imagination in arts and design, no protection from fraud and muddled interferences for the concept generation enabling directional movements of the mind. This is particularly relevant at a time when a Facebook executive openly calls on his company to expand its worldwide infiltration of connectivity even if it means that people could be harmed (e.g., Marantz, 2020)! Indeed, the techno-scientific development has been so fast, and has taken place on scales far exceeding those of the human body, that our social structures and their ownership by citizens have much to live up. The results of state of the art research are still emerging only in an uncoordinated, case by case manner, often cast into highly technical terms that the general reader-be it one among the well-educated-can rarely appreciate. Yet, since the limits of genealogies of order generation offered by the quantitative empirical methodologies of the digital age are known, they can inform our judgement; it gives us the confidence and tools to proceed with iterative loops of inquiries, asking at every turn what the relevant parameters and their limits of application are, and how to improve upon them. This is well in keeping with the notion of knowledge acquisition as an open process perpetually to be critically re-positioned and updated (see Jaros, 2019a, and refs. therein).

Credibility of the Narrative Space Conditioning Work, Value, and Citizenship
When value is grounded in social labour, work becomes an onto-epistemic concept. man is not subject to coercion by the arbitrary will of another or others" (Sigmund, 2017, p. 207 The neo-liberal regimes reacted to the runaway rise of complexification of life in general and of the narrative space in particular by reducing value to price. The realms of work and value have been separated from those of production and communicative action driving development. Although a few Hayekian gamblers may have ended up with pockets full of hot dollars, instead of enjoying free-wheeling independence they perhaps more than anyone end up trapped in what can best be described as "digitally enhanced serfdom" of schizophrenic consumption for the sake of consumption (Jaros, 2018 whether we acknowledge it or not by recasting its conceptualisation in relation to its past and present. Hence the practice of relating narratives is of key importance; it enjoyed heightened attention during the last decade of post-modern discourse (e.g., Cavarero, 2000, and refs. therein).
Making meaning is to select and organise experience; and to do that one must "measure" though it is rarely called so! For once put that way, it forces us to identify the intended level of complexity and the empirical limits of the application, i.e., what exactly there is to measure, its metric, precision and error.
It also requires explicit statements about the choice of variables, units, boundaries, and comparability with their predecessors in the vector of development in question (Morris, 2010;Piketty, 2014). This creates conceptual challenges and calls for sharp, creative thought. For when it is done without a credibly structured database or reduced to speculative constructs the result is a kind of lone event that at best disappears after its twenty-minute fame. Most interventions are and have always been unwittingly in the latter category-in the long run they make for "censorship by inflation"! With the rise of the Age of Reason, the flow of "measure and quantify" from the lab and cloister gradually exchanged the standards based on rituals of sacrifice and reading of religious texts for accounts of events expressed in terms of movements of matter-be it for most at the level of narrative. So quickly did it come that it left little time and social energy for finding a stable system of signs to make life with the runaway generation of new forms of order more liveable. That led to a crisis of modernity touching its very foundational principles. For actualisation of independent reason cannot maintain itself without perpetual renewal via spatio-temporal translations of couplings between social systems and the citizen on one side and emergent knowledge and its institutionalised face on the other. Since in place of absolutes and their ritual re-enacting there is the quantum probabilistic dynamics of material exchanges, the Kantian canon "to be free is to be autonomous", i.e., only in transcending the commoditisation of life one can glimpse at what is and what ought to be, may now appear to some as yet another superstition. We also have to put up with revelling in atomised existence as a popular form of self-defence; it is easier to hide in the black hole of unstructured interventions (Houllebecq, 2001;Eshun, 2004). Not to speak of Henry Kissinger's laments that the balance in world order cannot be maintained or even conceived when the most powerful of social and political functions are hidden from view in the cyberspace with no international standards of conduct (Kissinger, 2016). It is of course much worse. Already the interior ministry of Louis XVI in the decades before the revolution believed that who controls the past controls the future and acted upon it; they secretly employed a group of monks to frustrate the power of what they perceived as their adversaries (Baker, 1990)! At least they owned what they wanted: the Big Data and algorithmic chaos when left alone merely promotes the growth of Big Data and chaos! Furthermore, today all messaging flows via coding which functions as a contingent mediator, wittingly or unwittingly-but always because of some movement of matter in the shape of "data" or performance-re-making the rules of the game whatever that might be. Some even delegate the management of the flow of objectified matter to the machine by plugging it in as if it were The widespread fascinations about complexification with a life of its own also lead to highly speculative extrapolations; e.g., Ray Kurtzweil's Omega Point and his "universe with a purpose", not to mention non-material labour, luxury communism, and many others (e.g., Mirowski, 2013, and refs. therein). Fortunately, there are also brilliant Omega antidotes (DeLillo, 2010)!

The Archetypal Role of Loss in Western Culture and its Meta-Modern Other
Genealogies of cultural development are punctuated by ever present be it perpetually changing narrative expressions of irredeemable loss (see e.g., Dollimore, 2001). Doctrines of the Fall, breakup of the unity of Cosmos, the divided self of the post-Freudian mind, the enforced shift in the inquiring mind from Aristotle's Why and Galileo's How to post-Einsteinian What-all that made it look as if humans have been losing their starry position at the center of Universe that had been gifted to them by Providence, and then step by step taken away by advancing rationality.
The unity of Cosmos also meant unity of virtue, truth, and perfection. Without such bonds, advances in making and shaping not only heightened a sense of loss and insecurity but also of some generic "ruinnessness" of the human condition. When we say that the chief function of narratology is to make our human condition liveable, dispelling the myth of loss and opening access to liberating moves of independent reason freed of imposing layers of illusory certainties must be what it is about. What a formidable challenge! Centuries of religious as well as secular speculative thought claiming universal validity built up layers of illusions of stability exploiting the power of constitutive value of loss framing human existence and expectations. When people believed that God created matter, it looked as if he must have endowed it with a purpose of its own, so that it cannot be merely a container for something else. Yet rational moderns cannot see any purpose in nature, for otherwise it could not serve as a neutral referent which is one of the pillars on which stands independent reason in general and Galilean science in particular. This condition alone makes our alienation from nature and the sense of loss it brings explicit. Since humans identified themselves in time and space by marking the earth, loss is a fault in the fabric of being they ought to own, poised between form and formlessness where it now stands separated from the context of production which brought it to light. No wonder that already in the Hebrew tradition prohibition of idolatry was not just about protection of monotheism but a way to address what it saw as limitation of the status of objects. "You shall not make unto the any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in the heaven above or that in the earth beneath or that in the water under the earth" (Exodus, 20:3-4, p. 24). For a thing as an embodiment of finitude is less then suitable for conveying the divine content of the absolute. Since form cannot express everything a thing is either, any representation must appear as a kind of violence which fixes the object in the finitude of its making. pass from ignorance to knowledge. It makes for a world of what would appear to be generically damaged goods, of a world as if constituted by a new class of ruin-ness with action micro-spaces separated by ephemeral gaps and voids. Time, extension, and materiality on which stood the Cartesian ontology appear to be "out of joint" in a space whose metric is unexplainably fluid. The command of language depends on competence to "own" its functioning and meaning making. Hence, we must ask what new ways of knowing and being has this development brought about and what are the key manifestations of their actuality in narrative accounts of the human condition.
It is essential and urgent to make the process of perpetual translations and metamorphosis of products of the human mind and hand transmissible (Jaros, 2019b). We must free materia poetica and concept generation it fosters from any chaos by fostering independent means for taxonomy of novelty and its separation from imitation, trivia of opportunism, and from commoditisation of life at large. Not to reduce life to layers of silicon "bits" but to protect it from them by making actualisation of reason recognisable and retrievable-narratable (Jaros, 2020a)!

Demise of Traditional Story Telling
Humans can only remain human if they possess competent command of language. The necessary condition for this to materialise is to keep translating human experience of life so as to maintain quasi-continuity of meaning making. That in turn depends on the degree of recognition and directional pursuit of disparate forms of independent order and its genealogy. Only then is personal independence and social emancipation achievable, and only then can the human-machine interfaces remain within the bounds set by the human design no matter how robotic is their functioning. The fear of what would happen if human delegated too much of the action space to machines is no more or less than the fear of losing competence in recognition of and engagement with novel forms of-to use the Foucauldian term again-the order of things. Although new methods of modelling fostered by quantitative empirical methods and tools make it possible perpetually to upgrade the level of our accomplishments and cast them into genealogical sequences based on transparent parametrisation and limits open to public scrutiny, their application remains confined to case by case studies and cast in highly technical terms challenging even the well-informed audiences. The task of narrators is-as it has always been, be it now with an upgrade to what might be called "digitally-enhanced challenge"-to make the flux of order generation and structuring into signs capable of enchanting living places.
Today even topical interventions in physical and social sciences enter the public space as "narratives". "crypt" is supplied-alas, now by the very allegorist-its impact in the chaotic cyberspace is almost certain to lead to unintended outcomes. Instead authors prefer going on a "trip" (e.g., Sebald, 2000).
There they pick "cases of interest" they deem fit for being "translated" into tools in the service of a chosen anchor concept or agenda-or so the reader must hope for today their identity is often unintelligible. In performing these "translations", "customers" are led to acquiring a particular way of looking at and connecting things that then informs any of their future encounters. They all have one thing in common; the constraint of depending for the work's readability on at least a rudimentary knowledge of a structured reference system of thought, and of having to be ready to defend its

Being as Wayfaring in Search of a Lifestory
We have lost the aura and authority of traditions in a world that is dominated by mediation via networked structures of disparate character and purpose; what is more, we now depend on them for our wellbeing without ever fully mastering their functioning. Our response is governed in the main not by direct seeing, hearing, and touching of static objects out there whose meaning is "fixed". Instead we depend on pseudo-algorithmic rhythms of neo-liberal social practices. They lend contingent meanings to direct encounters. The flow of objectified material exchanges and its assemblage-like machinic character incorporates the human body, and this body in turn incorporates the images of other objects to the point of being dominated by them (Rabinow, 1992)! The living in an unstable human environment is then a kind of wayfaring, of making moves that keep re-constituting and re-engaging one's identity and a sense of purpose. Under the description of the actual travel path, there is a promise of a deeper motive and a story to tell. A walk, "travel" happens via bodily movements, more generally via an object and it is therefore an obvious means of self-recognition in the material condition of humans. The apparent reason for the journey invariably hides an onto-epistemic content under wholesale aesthetisation of life (e.g., Steyer, 2017, and refs. therein). It constitutes the self by its journey and that in turn constitutes the journey as a living, experiential space-time. It amounts to punctuated experimentation and depends for its initial conditions on involuntary memory of the world of action, and for its being on access to rails along which thoughts can travel and collide. It raises the status of facilitating this access-to education in particular-to the level of importance normally reserved for health and wealth! What then constitutes the actuality of meaning making in the narrative space framed by novel means of human expression peculiar to the dynamics of neo-liberal decades?

Birth of the Art of Inscription
The dominant mode of human expression in the course of the long 19 th century, in many ways well into the 1980ties, was steeped in the increasingly furious discourse of ideologies. In spite of the warring conditions, it remained in the main fueled by beliefs in this or that version of "universal history" and progress in human self-understanding, with all its socio-cultural consequences. However, already in the mid-19 th century some anything…" For the Galilean science accredited with rationality without any limits internal to itself the human object and its social being will be there to be dissected again and again and the result available for perpetual processing in the quest for knowledge and power. However, since "a tool cannot criticize itself", in Nietzsche's judgment the human as a social being had no chance of engaging this potentially runaway freedom so as to impose sustainable humanizing limits and directionality upon it. The object-event could no longer be seen for what it really was by direct means, by immediately visible appearances-the individual had to be "guided" via a concept in order to grasp it! Nietzsche exploited the methodological opportunity presented by this novel, emergent condition of humans by launching a "subliminal" method of individualized genealogies of judiciously chosen object-events. Waiting behind the narrative appearances was a new agenda thriving on runaway generation of "local" concepts enforcing de-territorialisation of experience and its records. There he implants into the reader's mind a vector of sensitivity to recognition of a selected class of encounters, de-contextualised and arranged into brilliant patchworks of linguistic provocations, floating on a promise of "self-deliverance". It was programmed by an intentionally concealed, aesthetic-in-extremis, individualized dimension of life whose philosophical grounding and directionality remains "unreadable" to the uninitiated majority. In Geoff Waite's words, Nietzsche was the first truly effective "revolutionary programmer of late fascoid-neoliberal techno-culture". His texts are "immunopathological" in that they are "producing antibodies against the auto-immune community it has established within itself" (Waite, 1996).
More recent versions of the method of inscribed meanings have assumed novel significance since the ascent of neo-liberal doctrines and their cultural echoes, and have been inventively adopted almost anywhere, from academic interventions to the crudest twitting of "false news". It always amounts to calculated integration of human life into larger than human structures through which life is, under an "attractive narrative cover", manipulated into assimilating the patterns of a particular behavioral framework. This is how a fenced off action space is manufactured ready made for selected elites who can take advantage of their privileged position to read or misread with great social impact the texts and images so presented; and their returns are made as if of the transcendental subject! Alas! The only "Will" that matters here has no regard for reality other than one's self-assertion-even at the cost of one's life not to speak of that of others. Such a life is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon; the world is a solitary "work of art" produced by and unique to the mind of its creator. Since it does not represent anything other than itself, it lives and dies with the fleeting illusion of its bearer!

The Archaeological Method of the Arcades Project
Since in this way of approaching Nietzsche's intervention it is seen as a result of the shift in the material condition of humans rather than a freak result of a twist of sickly personal brilliance, the emergence of new technicity of the human condition is a problem for his followers just as for any other tribe then and now.
Indeed, much of methodological effort in the last hundred years or so has been devoted to rising to this challenge and hoping to move beyond the blind alley of destructive individualism without falling back on the manner of grand speculations of the 19 th century. In particular, by mid 1930s it was clear to many that not only Nature but also politics and culture at large are neither linear nor continuous, and that the legacy of Kantian autonomy, Hegelian history, Newton's mechanical and reversible universe, as well as their numerous successful off-springs, were no more or less than outstanding simplifications.
Furthermore, access to reality by direct experimentation-observing falling stones, taking photographs or making linguistic signs of proof and poetry-no longer seemed an unproblematic route to the Cartesian "clear and distinct" as it did to Galileo and Kant. It was also the time when Walter Benjamin (Benjamin, 1999)   each carefully crafted so as to look almost self-contained. Their solidity is enhanced by the economy with which the sentence is composed. It invariably contains seemingly factual information-such as that 50 000 horses and men were killed at Waterloo-even though the story has nothing to do with the battle. Still less is it necessary to provide details about its death toll. Here he makes it clear that understanding details is a key to grasping the turn of events; it is not there to inform as such but as a methodological tool; "tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything". He employs great precision to embellish the passage or building block of text with concrete names of archaeological-genealogical importance. He inserts photos-of intentionally poor quality-of tickets, buildings, dresses, schematic drawings, with dates, numbers and brand marks clearly visible though the photos are of poor quality again to indicate they are a tool, not data. He refers to measurable physical properties such as material composition, colour and sound, light reflection, to acts of performance, even though judgements themselves often openly deny any possibility of uniqueness or indeed reality of what is being described.
By frequent references by name to churches, railway stations, streets, gardens, the reader is led to developing high level of confidence in the narrator. Yet there is not quite the sense of completeness familiar from traditional novels. Even Franz Kafka, with whom Sebald as it turns out wants to be compared, settles his characters into their cloths and chairs and makes sure we know they are "there".
His depends on recognition of what people do. There is none of Sebald's "abstract selectivity" and none of the generous supply of would be data, names, etc. arranged into sequential moves as if following a logical argument. However, by choosing to refer to one of his heroes as K., the author wants to initiate a chain reaction inviting parallels with the misfortunes of the famous Kafka's hero. The reader familiar with the Trial (and the Castle!) can engage in a sophisticated game of parallel pastiche readings. But no Casey "place" (Casey, 1998)  misadventure. He wants the reader to know that his is a kind of pseudo-probabilistic outlook (Merrell, 1998). In his words, "…the more images I gathered from the past…the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way".
The reader whose education resembles that of Sebald's-i.e., someone who had been taught about the importance of visiting Italy and seeing its treasures a la Goethe's Italian Journeys (Goethe, 1980) and Hegelian Kulturgeschichte-will recognise and identify with at a very different level of appreciation, e.g., the twenty pages of accurate geographical and art historical tour from p. work can be compared with that of authors who use scientific experiment or documentary argument to inform and to educate or simply to hold reader's attention. The reference to mathematical or physical models or effects only appears indirectly via their manifestations; they stand as it were in the background and yet in the text, as inscriptions to be felt behind the lines. They create an atmosphere of possibility of order, of an unfulfilled promise of organisation far exceeding in importance the visible object and its features. For example, Austerlitz "…was obeying an impulse which he himself, to this day, did not really understand, but which was somehow linked to his early fascination with the idea of hardware network such as that of the entire railway system…", and a little later, "he…found himself in the grip of dangerous and entirely incomprehensible currents of emotion in the Parisian railway stations which he said he regarded as places marked by both blissful happiness and profound misfortune". Just as the Arcades Project is a patchwork of disparate fragments arranged into collector's boxes, so is Sebald's novel. It makes the resulting openness even more both promising and traumatic.
This reduction of systems to their "local" manifestations breaks down the authority of speculative models of the world-as well as of those originating in the closure characteristic of the Newtonian mechanical universe and of the scientific models it has inspired-without excluding any possible benefit they might bring to any of us. It scatters their fragments across the boundaries of science and technology and into aesthetic and social domains. When Benjamin writes about colour, he is informed by Goethe, not Maxwell or Einstein. Like Goethe, he can only "marvel at the knowledge of colours displayed by scientists". Sebald's Austerlitz, an orphaned child of WWII, is keen on artefacts, but his interest is almost entirely consumed by monumental architecture of late capitalism such as the colossal Central Railway Stations of Antwerp and Brussel; also, this fascination appears to end at about 1900! Indeed, many a Sebald traveller had been educated very much like Benjamin, or better likes to think he had been educated that way, e.g., to want to follow the example of great men of Western culture like Johann W. Goethe, in order to instil in the mind the spirit of Renaissance as a measure of the enlightened way of living whose meaning is universal. That is why when a hero of Vertigo goes to Verona he does follow in footsteps of Goethe to enter Verona the "right way"-that is from the railway station to Giardino Giusti! But when it actually happens, Sebald's hero does not gaze studiously at the architecture and paintings as a romantic wayfarer would have done any time between 1600 and 1900, if, since according to Kafka there is hope but it is not for us…! Here then is another example of a text free of systemic impositions of esteemed views about life offering to an interesting inquirer several levels of reading of ascending sophistication-a welcome gift of tutorial material; for in skilled hands, it can serve-and has already done so on many an occasion (Jaros, 2014a(Jaros, , 2014b The grounding line informing the approach to the Lessons-as well as to the Arcades Project and Vertigo-is that appearances of the past and present depend on never ending processes of translation between the past and the present. More than that, in Stewart's words "…It is only in the continual transmission of our values, in the life of thought, language, and critical consideration, that we can find any permanence". Yes, adds Robyn Creswell in his insightful review of The Ruins Lesson, but which texts and which values shall we transmit to find any "permanence"? And who is we (Creswell, 2020)?
What is or should be the transmission path along which making and naming takes place, and how can it be made transparently definable and retrievable? These are not just the customary academic jibes.
There is a long way from paragraph fruit pickings, whose authority in such a rendering rests chiefly on the notoriety of names like Piranesi, Winckelmann or Goethe, to the conceptual foundations of their oeuvre and its position in the historical, philosophical, and linguistic idioms. Only then might, say, imposing frameworks of high-minded critics, so as to inscribe connectivity and meaning without having to declare allegiance to any particular style or system of thought-not to speak of offering a new one. It is, as we are reminded here and there, to find an alternative to the hated paths filling the Cyberland by "reducing everything to bits". Yet while the structure or rather its absence in the usual sense of the term in this genre certainly does serve the declared objective, it would be very difficult to benefit from so ambitious an account of, say, composition of materials used in craft and architecture many centuries ago, unless one can make good use of internet-assisted access to the relevant sources without which it is just a piece of trumpery-or one has a seat in the senior common room next to the right Professor! The same goes for unlocking the rich content hinted at every now and then and hidden behind dates and locations mapping the author's personal patchwork of favoured pieces of development and decay, not only of ruins and ruin-ness of artefacts but also of all those people who inhabit collapsing physical and social structures wittily described in The Ruins Lesson as "lost in place". Alas!
The loss-ness never touched on in this book but lurking behind just about every little item on the huge agenda, and one more formidable than any of its precursors afforded so generous a treatment there, has been given novel actuality by taking the inscriptive design of narration into the digital age. The loss-ness that emanates from every screen which-apart from a few quixotic characters-must be indispensable for everyone's thoughtful if not critical readings of such texts! For when in an unguarded moment we lift our tired eye from the shiny flat surface before us and begin to think about what it has brought to our attention, the trauma of facing the abys presented by the open system on whose interrogation the success of our effort depends but one that we can never fully control or critically assess, is bound to overwhelm us.

Conclusions
Today even topical interventions in physical and social sciences enter the public space as "narratives". technique of inscription re-emerged as a source of major social challenges when it was adopted in recent decades as a mainstream narrative practice grounded in "inscriptive connectivities" and cemented by the unlikely alliance of emergent tools of networked communication and technophobia of the large section of the humanities. "Inscribed" into even some of the most common of messages, the intended connectivity is hidden behind a pseudo-travelogue of a manipulative tale. Its signature is invariably an atmosphere of open-ended "punctuated equilibrium", full of pointers to spicy novelty; it is as if it were to lead to salvation-without ever delivering it. Its aims are achieved by tangential hints, witticisms, and arrows to would-be desired objects, events, and meanings apparently outside the text.
They are bound to create misleading impressions; no wonder if they turn the bewildered reader to seeking help in the overkill of messages offered at the click of a mouse by the Cyberspace-its ease only amplifying the sense of personal insecurity! For the regime of "anything goes" in public Sebald's oeuvre, may be instrumental in lifting from under the veil of cryptic pointers a fresh route to meaning making, and to taking the level of ambition to new heights. The chief aim here is not turning people into walking encyclopaedias but to instil an attitude fostering habitual deferrals of hasty conclusions in favour of iterative loops of meaning making, gradually clarifying the relevant assumptions, causes, variables, and limits of applicability-surely the only sane way of countering the colossal misuses of emergent technologies and of the social structures that promoted them or were created in their wake. Without developing effective means for delivering personal confidence in making sense of the narrative space, leading to a credible form of emancipated citizenship, it is unlikely that the current challenges resolve themselves in consensual making of a just society. The state-of-the-art studies (Piketty, 2020) do support this outlook. In particular, it is argued that although economy is inseparable from governance and citizenship at large, inequality is neither economic nor technological but first and foremost a product of the ideological and political, grounded in educational structures. History seen in the light of empirical, quantitative results "…shows that economic development and human progress depend on education and not on the sacralisation of inequality and property" (Piketty, 2020(Piketty, , p. 1007. Though evidence, the "facts", can only be transmitted in a system of signs whose form reflects the social norms as they are held at the site of action, and the quantitative data are always subject to inherent methodological limitations, so long as their finitudes are known they can inform our judgment about specific contextual meanings.
It is for the tutorial skill to position the learner so that he or she can, at the rate and depth matching their ability and resources, acquire an attitude equipping the mind with confidence and tools fit to take it through ascending stages of critical reading. When the routine delivery of the factual content of the curriculum is left to interactive software, it will release tutorial time for personalised engagement with the content of the programme (Jaros, 2014a(Jaros, , 2014b(Jaros, , 2020b. Recent experience shows that no amount of good will, revolutionary fervour, or top-down directives can replace the power of personal ownership of work and value, and of the social content of products of creativity and sweat. Also, the competence in critical un-concealing of meaning making in disparate forms of narrative production dominating the public space is the necessary condition for bringing it home to citizens that the personal independence making it possible for them to do what they are good at, in a shared public space, is the ultimate measure of value. Only then can people consensually choose and bring about structural social reforms that have a chance to stick. The mass disenfranchisement heightened by distortions of access to rational meaning is recognised as a major source of instability of contemporary democracies. It was also the disenfranchisement of individuals in all walks of life that accounts for the depth of the collapse of the post-war "East European socialism"; it failed to deliver personal ownership of meaning making and work in spite of giving everyone free education, health service, and the right to work-and making us school children memorise comrade Lenin's advice "learn, learn, learn"!