Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer
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of architecture. It is the space for political and religious action and for theatrical performance, where drama produces katharsis and festival time occurs. It is limited space: in architecture, the creation of limits is crucial and cannot be reduced to material walls. Beyond the city wall of the Greek polis was a regional zone known as chora, a thick limit that was believed to be protected by specific divinities. This regional chora is a quasi-homophone of the central choros or dance platform that mediated between the spectators in the amphitheater and the actors on the skene in a dramatic performance. (Perez-Gomez 36–37).
The Greek understanding of beauty as “harmony” grew gradually out of experience with “joints” or arranging parts into satisfying wholes. The primary erotic “joint” refers to human genitals, and the gap between two people and all the related negotiations is included in the general art of “joining” (116). An electrate public sphere creates participation through this apprehension of the erotic character of dimensionality. Such is the tradition tested in our Allegory of Prudence, articulating the lived dimension of well-being. I will compose a scene of decision, as an experiment in electrate thinking: to think the life feeling that our tutors characterize as hole.
Tautegory
Prudence is a kind of “wind tunnel” testing flash reason. In the experience of the beautiful, central to the tradition we must upgrade, the mind’s eye is able to take in the whole of a situation in one glance (Augenblick). Prudence requires this power of ingenium, to run through the ratio of hypotyposis and grasp the proportion in one instant of wit. The goal of Renaissance pedagogy was to bridge the gap separating ars (teachable techniques) from ingenium (natural talent). The goal was to merge two kinds of instantaneous analytical insights.
The first is perspicacia, which “penetrates the most distant and minute circumstances of every subject.” This analysis is accomplished in terms of a supplementary list of Aristotle’s categories. The second is versabilita, which “rapidly compares all those circumstances among themselves, or with the subject; it joins and divides them, decides one from the other, indicates one by the other, and with marvelous dexterity puts one in the place of the other.” There is, [Tesauro] says, little difference between ingegno and prudence. (Summers 100)
Kant’s innovation in this tradition was to add consideration of the “sublime,” referring to conditions that exceed the capacities of both the outer and inner eye, the glimpse in a moment that takes the measure of a situation. Within the conditions of decorum, (beauty), the faculties are in harmony.
To every empirical concept, namely, there belong three actions of the self-active faculty of cognition: 1. the apprehension of the manifold of intuition; 2. the comprehension, i.e. the synthetic unity of consciousness of this manifold in the concept of an object; 3. the presentation (exhibitio) [darstellung] of the object corresponding to this concept in intuition. For the first action imagination is required, for the second understanding, for the third the power of judgment, which, if it is an empirical concept that is at issue, would be the determining power of judgment. (Kant qtd. in Fictioc 128)
Confronted with some phenomenon or event in nature that exceeds the capacity of imagination to present an image adequate to the concepts of understanding, the harmony is destroyed, producing displeasure. The interest of the judgment of the sublime in conditions that expose the empirical impotence of a subject, however, is the paradoxical transformation of this displeasure into the bittersweet revelation of moral freedom.
The experience of the sublime constitutes a sudden aspect change, where the intelligible point of view somehow breaks into the empirical through a “negative pleasure.” We feel the presence of the other perspective, and are made aware of the primacy of the intelligible over the empirical, which can be expressed through the idea of freedom. This neither leads to concrete actions nor gives any insight in how to deal with moral dilemmas, but has its importance in signifying our moral vocation, which is tied to our rational nature. (Myskja 130)
At stake in this experience is the capacity of the limitations of aesthetic form to evoke ethical intuitions that exceed form and experience alike.
Commentators agree that Kant’s sublime becomes the norm in conditions created by the industrial revolution, just beginning in Kant’s lifetime. Exemplifying the project to update hypotyposis, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s interest in the Analytic of the Sublime (just one part of Kant’s Third Critique) is due to the clue it offers for thought and action in an industrial and post-industrial society. In our terms, Lyotard’s adaptation of Kant’s sublime is an outline for deliberative rhetoric in electracy. The point that recommends Lyotard’s reading of Kant as a relay for flash reason (electrate prudence) is the support for thought provided by affect as a sublime feeling, and the rhetorical powers revealed in this experience of negative presentation. A theme of electracy (apparatus invention) is that the Western tradition already knows a great deal about flash reason (image metaphysics), and that in some respects flash reason has been an aspiration of this tradition all along, couched as speculation about the mind of God.
Lyotard calls attention to the ontological and metaphysical innovations of his project, to emphasize that the aesthetic judgments of taste and of the sublime are not approached in terms of objects and properties, essences and accidents, but as feelings that organize the heterogeneous manifold by means of mood or atmosphere (Stimmung). This affective order involves not categories, but “tautegories.”
For “logically” reflection is called judgment, but “psychologically,” if we may be permitted the improper use of this term for a moment, it is nothing but the feeling of pleasure and displeasure. As a faculty of knowledge, it is devoted to the heuristic, and in procuring “sensations,” the meaning of which will become clear, it fully discloses its tautegorical character, a term by which I designate the remarkable fact that pleasure and displeasure are at once both a “state” of the soul and the “information” collected by the soul relative to its state. (Lessons 4)
A tautegory is constructed according to the “manner” of its maker, a term that evokes the “concetto” of practical reason.
The apparent sitter in a Renaissance portrait was thus an external appearance showing an inward truth, and so, it might be said, were Renaissance works of art in general. The spirit they expressed, however, was not simply that of their subject, it was also that of the artist, who gave the painting its “life.” The Mona Lisa is a painting of—taken from the appearance of—a Florentine merchant’s wife and at the same time a painting of—from the hand and sensibility of—Leonardo da Vinci. This second, genetic relation between artist and image was fully recognized in the Renaissance commonplace “every painter paints himself,” and the idea adds another dimension to the central paradox that the objective world is only evident from a point of view. Individual style, or manner, developed together with portraiture (and naturalism in general), so that the work itself became “physiognomic” at the same time that physiognomy became a part of the science of painting. (Summers 111)
Tautegories are physiognomic, “singularities” rather than universals, opening as they do a space of “rendezvous” hosting events of decision in practical reason. Tautegories are anchored in feeling (this is the key), and are useful for inquiry in conditions that exceed understanding and knowledge, for the sublime formlessness of experience in the (post)industrial city (dromosphere). The further reflective judgment moves from what in our context is “literate” metaphysics, into the unknowns of electracy,
the more manifest the tautegorical aspect of reflection becomes. There are signs of it in the more frequent occurrence of operators such as regulation (in the “regulative Idea”), guidance (in the guiding thread), and analogy (in the “as if”), which are not categories but can be identified as heuristic tautegories. Because of these curious “subjective operators,” critical thought gives itself or discovers processes of synthesis that have not received the imprimatur of knowledge. Knowledge can only draw on them reflexively, inventing them as it does according to its feeling, though it may have to legitimate their objective validity afterward. (Lessons 33)
A first step for the invention of flash judgment, as Lyotard makes clear, is the introduction of thinkers to what might be called the new “decorum,” the relationship among thought, art, and conduct in the sublime city.