Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer
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seeks beauty (Fictioc 21). The search begins with a spontaneous experience of sexual attraction. The “disinterestedness” of the feeling is the sensus communis of the universality of physical attraction. Kant’s insistence on the disinterestedness of the reflective judgment is just to distinguish aesthetic feeling from other kinds of feelings. This foregrounding of aesthetic judgment as a power in its own right is important to flash reason, to establish in the larger context of the conflicts working in deliberative rhetoric the specific dimension of aesthetic pleasure-pain and the values associated with it, separated from the representations and values of knowledge and belief.
The immediate lesson for our allegory is the assumption that my experience of embodiment may be extended through a proportional ratio as a means for moving through information of any kind. One task of flash reason is the need to update the measure of “ratio” and “proportion” to reflect the discoveries of vanguard arts. Bloom finds this option already at work in the tradition of ratio in Hellenism: one branch favored analogy (equivalence in substitution); the other branch favored anomaly (disruption, the breaking of ratio in substitution) (“The Breaking of Form” 13). Hannah Arendt was convinced of the contemporary relevance of reflective judgment, which she called
the most political of man’s mental abilities. It is the faculty that judges particulars without subsuming them under general rules which can be taught and learned until they grow into habits that can be replaced by other habits and rules. The faculty of judging particulars (as brought to light by Kant), the ability to say “this is wrong,” “this is beautiful,” and so on, is not the same as the faculty of thinking. Thinking deals with invisibles, with representations of things that are absent; judging always concerns particulars and things close at hand. But the two are interrelated, as are consciousness and conscience. (1: 193)
Bittersweet
The attraction to beauty in the beloved holds attention and stimulates reflection, revealing a harmony among the lover’s faculties (concinnitas) that gives pleasure distinct from sexual desire, motivating the lover to begin the journey of becoming human. The process begins in sensory judgment, and leads into belief through custom, the social forms ordering human relationships, revealing the larger guiding patterns at work in society (habitus, dharma). Attention shifts away from the self to the other, to beauty of character and of social order. The third stage is knowledge, learning the sciences of form, such as mathematics. The final stage is wisdom: an intution of Form as such (Fictioc 85–86). Philosophers from Pythagoras to Kant (and beyond) based their optimism about the educability of the multitude (and their enlistment in an enlightened politics) on proportional ratios (music of the spheres). It is worth dwelling on this point, since it is possible in one respect to reduce the shift from literacy to electracy to a mutation in the standard of ratio (proportion). This discussion of Alberti and architecture shows what is at stake.
The unlearned (or unskilled) person cannot do what the learned person can do, but he can judge the results of what the learned person does. Cicero speaks throughout of various arts, and he grounds this argument in a general principle of the relation of art and nature. . . . The “nature” from which art begins, and to which it must appeal to achieve anything, is our nature (which, of course, does not necessarily preclude its consonance with nature in a large sense, that is, it does not preclude the possibility that the same mean is in ourselves and in what we apprehend, and that this similarity is fact makes our apprehension of them possible). Just such an ambivalence runs through Alberti’s remarks about pulchritude and concinnitas, the latter of which is a principle of both human sense and nature at large. “Beauty is a certain consensus and unison of the parts of a thing with regard to definite number, finish and collocation, as demanded by concinnitas, the absolute and primary reason of nature” (Summers 134).
The project of concept avatar (a transition of conceptual thinking from literacy into electracy) may be seen relative to the use of “nature” in Summers’s observation. The literate concept remains responsible for “nature” proper, which it was invented to address as ontology. Concept avatar (electracy), extends the concept analogically into second nature (habitus, popular media), to attempt an image metaphysics. The fundamental analogy of the tradition is that between love and wisdom (philosophy), concerned with the desire to know. The relationship or ratio between love and knowledge has to be adjusted in each epoch, not to mention for each apparatus, with implications for individual experience and behavior. As love goes, so goes wisdom. Anne Carson identifies exactly the hinge of the ratio.
There would seem to be some resemblance between the way Eros acts in the mind of a lover and the way knowing acts in the mind of a thinker. It has been an endeavour of philosophy from the time of Socrates to understand the nature and uses of that resemblance. But not only philosophers are intrigued to do so. I would like to grasp why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive. There is something like an electrification in them. They are not like anything else, but they are like each other. (Carson 70)
The peculiar taste of this “electrification” identified by the ancient poets was, in Sappho’s term, glukupikron (bittersweet). It is the samba feeling, celebrated in every variation (saudade, blues, tango): glad to be feeling . . . sad. Arendt agrees with this extension of Eros into the “life” principle. The delights of thinking are ineffable, she says.
The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life the human body is a corpse; without thinking the human mind is dead. This in fact is the metaphor Aristotle tried out in the famous seventh chapter of “Book Lambda” of the Metaphysics: “The activity of thinking [energeia that has its end in itself] is life.” Its inherent law, which only a god can tolerate forever, man merely now and then, during which time he is godlike, is “unceasing motion, which is motion in a circle”—the only movement, that is, that never reaches an end or results in an end product. (Vol I 123)
Lacan (psychoanalysis) updates Aristotle by showing the complexity of this motion, whose territory may be figured only by topology. This feeling of being alive is what the Allegory of Prudence attempts to access and bring into an emblem, to serve as axiom for a new ratio.
Kant’s reflective judgment assumes precisely the reality and universal irrefutability of this basic feeling (life).
One of the main aims of the Third Critique is to show that sensuousness is not alien to reason. It is the architectonic of reason itself, its systematic “organic” structure constructed through the analogous techne with nature—that is “signaled” in the apprehension of the beautiful. The feeling of life [lebensgefuhl] brought forth (experienced) in this apprehension marks the self as at once body and ethical being, because this realization of the self as body is concomitant with the realization of the “mit” [gefuhl] of being with the other, the feeling of the sensus communis and with the ethical as such. (Japaridze 41)
Concept avatar is designed to bring into thought this life feeling. What could be easier, you might say, but Nietzsche reminds us: that I live may just be a prejudice. In metaphysical terms, this life feeling creates a space, an opening in the world, giving a sense of something “more” (possibility, potentiality) that unfolds into an experience of freedom beyond or within necessity.
Reaching for an object that proves to be outside and beyond himself, the lover is provoked to notice that self and its limits. From a new vantage point, which we might call self-consciousness, he looks back and sees a hole. Where does that hole come from? It comes from the lover’s classificatory process. Desire for an object that he never knew he lacked is defined, by a shift of distance, as desire for a necessary part of himself. Not a new acquisition but something that was always, properly, his. Two lacks become one. (Carson 33)
Carson alerts us to the difficulty of the allegory: it must personify this hole.
Alberto Perez-Gomez generalizes this erotic character of space as fundamental to the entire Western tradition, and classifies it as a quality of chora.
Erotic space is not an a priori concept, nor an objectified geometric or topological reality. It is both the physical space of architecture at the inception of the Western tradition and the linguistic space of a metaphor, the electrified void between two terms that are brought together