Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer
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what is at stake. In traditional emblematics, “virtue” is represented by a scene (hypotyposis) of a beautiful woman beating an ugly woman with a stick. To persist with traditional ratios, and to neglect a necessary reeducation of common sense in the sublime judgment (that works with the full range of the bittersweet, repulsion as well as attraction, “ugly” as well as “beautiful”)—in short, a literal and uncritical physiognomy—leaves citizens unprepared to make prudent policy decisions not just with respect to cosmetic glamour or even Nazi racism but the coming revolution in DNA manipulation (the knowledge accident most feared by Virilio).
In his reading of Kant, Lyotard identifies what thinkers at light-speed may experience, which also helps target faculties in need of prosthetic augmentation. “The mountain masses, the pyramids of ice, the overhanging, threatening rocks, thunderclouds, oceans rising with rebellious force, volcanoes, everything ‘rude’ to be found in nature is sublime in presentation because it is at the limit of what can be grasped in a single intuition. . . . This effort is similar to the effort of the will that aims for virtue” (127). The now-time of electracy demands an enlarged capacity of the single glance against all rudeness. Lyotard finds in the rhetorical figure of “retortion” (a dialectical figure that affirms by denial) an anticipation of the extreme discordance to be negotiated by sublime judgment at light-speed (128). We learn from Kant how to notice in the manifest unhappiness of finitude the latent happiness of infinity.
Theory: Persona
The method of concept avatar is to adapt the literate concept structure to function in an electrate apparatus. Critical thinking is a practice specific to literacy, so to speak of an electrate concept for digital reasoning is like referring to an automobile as a horseless carriage. We live in a transitional moment, however, with experimental modernist literature serving as a bridge between epochs. Flash reason adapts philosophy to Internet culture. We still need theoretical thinking in electracy, but the old alphabetic techniques of inference are no longer adequate to or sufficient for the task. A methodology for our project is “heuretics” (the logic of invention). Heuretics appropriated from the history of discourses on method a generative formula for the creation of new forms and practices (Ulmer, Heuretics). The acronym CATTt identifies the set of resources needed for our invention: Contrast, Analogy, Theory, Target, tale. This generator guides a proposal for a hybrid concept (combining features of word and image), as well as the larger experiment in creating flash reason.
The ambition is to create a practice capable of conveying the accumulated potential of literate metaphysics, archived in databases, to an electrate player in a sublime glance. A hyperbolic goal, but no less worthy than curing cancer. For purposes of our exercise, I have zipped this archive into Nietzsche’s personal motto: werde der du bist. The particular quality of thought that we need our concept to support is judgment, individual decision making (prudence). The larger goal is to orient our compositional practice to the specific site from which will have emerged the metaphysics of electracy (the capacity of the body to undergo jouissance). Thus the exercise to compose an Allegory of Prudence is at the same time an experimental construction of an electrate concept. The Theory for inventing this transitional concept is derived from Deleuze and Guattari, especially from their final collaboration, What Is Philosophy? They argue that the concept as practiced in philosophy still has a role to play in contemporary civilization. Such concepts function through a kind of cinematic mise-en-scene. A philosophical concept includes the following parts:
1.Name: The “concept proper” slot in our template assigns a name to the idea (e.g. Descartes’s cogito). Deleuze and Guattari call for a stand (stance or attitude towards thought) that replaces subject/object orientation of thinking. Deleuze and Guattari name their replacement for the subject stand “event.” They call for a concept for thinking the position of “event,” rather than from the position of subject. Event thinks in and through me. It is a collective dimension of thinking that I receive readymade, to try on or adjust as needed to my expression. In the case of our electrate concept, we foreground the function of “stand,” the attitude in terms of turn, direction and posture, that operates through a concept. “Stand” differs from opinion (argument) or will (narrative).
2.Problem: Deleuze and Guattari replace subject thinking on a “plane of transcendence,” with event thinking on a “plane of immanence.” This plane or field is selected by our intervention in it, by our creative activity in relation to it, when we frame a field of discourse as problem. The problem Deleuze and Guattari select is that the construction of concepts initiated by Philosophy as part of the invention of literacy has been taken over by Commerce. The commodity form has already displaced Philosophy as the source for defining what constitutes the good life, happiness, satisfaction, well-being (one of the original questions of philosophy). Commercial discourse functions in our CATTt as Contrast.
3.Conceptual Persona: Concept construction includes a third feature, a persona that dramatizes in a vital anecdote how the proposed thought mediates the relation of a person to world. Instruction: personify the thought proposed by the concept in an appropriate character type or role, enacting the attitude and orientation of the thought (the stand). The examples of conceptual personae favored by Deleuze and Guattari include Socrates, Diogenes, and Empedocles. The anecdote(s) reported in each case allegorize or figuratively enact a mode of reasoning. Socrates: allegory of the cave. The way of the heavens. Conversion = movement through the inference procedures: abduction, deduction, induction. Diogenes: lived in a barrel on the public square, performed all his intimate functions in full view of the citizens. The way of the surface. Perversion = dramatize the metaphor in the idea. Empedocles: threw himself into Mt. Etna (he needed to disappear to corroborate his claim of transmigration of souls), but his (bronze?) sandal floating to the surface betrayed his action. The way of the depths. Subversion = transgression and destruction of forms (madness).
4.Presentation: The conceptual persona models how the concept thinks the problem plane. It remains to add to this instruction the manner of this modeling, its aesthetic premises. A text with a relevant instruction is the following:
The history of philosophy is comparable to the art of the portrait. It is not a matter of ‘making lifelike,’ that is, of repeating what a philosopher said but rather of producing resemblance by separating out both the plane of immanence he instituted and the new concepts he created. These are mental, noetic, and machinic portraits. Although they are usually created with philosophical tools, they can also be produced aesthetically. Thus Tinguely recently presented some monumental machinic portraits of philosophers, working with powerful, linked or alternating, infinite movements that can be folded over or spread out, with sounds, lightning flashes, substances of being, and images of thought according to complex curved planes. (What is Philosophy? 55–56)
Deleuze and Guattari’s opposition to “resemblance” or “representation” throughout the argument, with references to Cézanne, Klee, or Francis Bacon as relays, reinforces the instruction: do for the concept what modernist and vanguard arts did for the image. With this theme Deleuze and Guattari identify the Analogy of our CATTt (modernist art practice). In electracy, the conceptual persona will take a more important role, altering the hierarchy of the literate concept, in which problem and persona are subordinate to name (term). “The difference between conceptual personae and aesthetic figures consists first of all in this: the former are powers of concepts, and the latter are the powers of affects and percepts. The former take effect on a plane of immanence that is an image of Thought-Being (noumenon), and the latter take effect on a plane of composition as image of a Universe (phenomenon)” (65).
Socrates, as presented in Plato’s dialogues, is the prototype. Socrates embodied the persona of “gadfly,” buttonholing citizens in the streets of Athens in search of someone wiser than himself, in order to refute the Delphic oracle’s declaration that no man was wiser than Socrates. He dramatized “dialectic” as a mode of thought. We need to generate similar features for our conceptual avatar. Avatar is a conceptual persona, and this performance is a position that you ultimately learn to play (playing avatar). It becomes your Socrates, playing Virgil to your Dante, a spirit guide of your choosing. The function of avatar is to advise me on my decision, to consult on all matters of prudence. What statistics are to calculation (quantity), avatar is to prudence (quality). With the appropriated term “avatar” we are referring (paleologically) to a functionality, to