Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer
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avatar must support both thought and feeling. To get avatar you have to do the exercise, not just read about it. It is not a psychological but an ontological subject.
An electrate concept is not confined to the professional or disciplinary parameters of philosophy, but is a means for theoretical thinking native to a civilization of the Internet, in which digital imaging supersedes alphabetic writing. The historical record shows that each innovation in forms and practices of thought preserves some parts of the previous mode, abandons some parts, and adds some new elements. An electrate concept, in this spirit, does not simply reproduce Deleuze and Guattari’s proposal, but revises it with our purpose in mind, looking for those aspects of their poetics that lend themselves to digital imaging, while deemphasizing other aspects relevant only to the literate apparatus. The following discussion makes one pass through the generator, to propose a style of written reasoning adapted for electracy. Here is the CATTt: Theory, Deleuze and Guattari; Contrast, Commercial advertising; Analogy, experimental modernist arts; Target, the public sphere, deliberative rhetoric, the practice of consulting needed for a democratic society; tale (the tail of the CATT), referring to the form used to organize the other resources: Allegory of Prudence. This version is an invitation to test your own pass, revising the recipe to taste. The Allegory of Prudence we are composing is an experiment testing the electrate concept “avatar.” This is heuretics: learning as making-doing.
Contrast: Commerce
Deleuze and Guattari complained that Commerce took over concept production in our era, along with everything else in the order of public discourse. Roland Marchand’s history of the creation of the commodity sign is a useful resource to document our Contrast. He begins in the 1920s, which is not the beginning of advertising, but the first full separation of exchange value from use value in guiding promotional thought. Contrast is not a rejection of its source, but an inventory of materials to discover what sorts of concepts Commerce makes. Philosophy can learn something from Commerce about how to adapt to the conditions of electracy. We accept the formal discoveries of Commerce (use of icons, schemas, scenarios, tableaux and the like) but reject its propaganda stance on behalf of corporate profit. Our goal is thinking, not selling/buying. The real craft of using the CATTt generator comes at this point: How do we create (invent) a synthesis, a hybrid of our Theory and Contrast, to formulate an emergent set of instructions for constructing an electrate concept?
Our inventory of Marchand covers what Commerce got right, understanding that the emergence of electracy in a capitalist society is a contingency of history. Marchand describes advertising as the discourse primarily responsible for converting the citizens of the industrial city to the worldview of the new apparatus, which dates from the beginnings of the industrial revolution. This worldview is based in aesthetics, referring to the sensory faculty of taste described by Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century. The aesthetic image is to electracy what the analytical word is to literacy. The commodity form, separating exchange value from use value, desire from product, expression from object, allowed the pedagogy of aesthetic judgment to operate autonomously. Advertisers realized they were selling not the steak but the sizzle. Electrate intelligence, not just commerce but civics and ethics (practical reason), functions in the dimension of sizzle. Advertising discourse disseminated throughout America (and the emerging global economy) the inventions of Paris, including not only “fashion” but the new logic of taste, and the design styles of modernist arts. The appropriation in ad practices of popular culture forms from tabloid magazines to celebrity gossip and movies contributed to the didactic value, assisting the public in internalizing the new native discourse of the image apparatus. They were learning brand, but not avatar.
Within this general frame of Commerce as advice on modernization, the ads specifically demonstrated how to construct concepts in the emerging mass media discourse, and this is what Deleuze and Guattari recognized as a direct challenge to Philosophy. An important point of alignment between Deleuze and Guattari and Marchand is precisely here. The philosophical concept includes a conceptual persona to mediate between the “name” of the concept (the idea) and the problem plane or discursive field addressed by the idea (between the general and the particular). Literate concepts foreground idea; commercial concepts foreground persona. Everything that Marchand describes about the strategies of ad campaigns is relevant to the design of conceptual personae: social tableaux, parables, visual clichés, fantasies and icons. Betty Crocker and her peers are to Commerce what Socrates is to Philosophy. Plato’s parable of the cave in the Republic dramatizes the essential gesture of philosophy: conversion. One prisoner turns around, away from the shadows cast on the walls of the cave, to behold the true light of the sun outside the cave. Diversion (the “vert,” turn or trope of Commerce) is a conceptual stand of reassurance, crystallizing majority opinion around a few key figures (scenes). A prisoner. Turns. Such is the invention scene of philosophy.
The functionality of avatar concerns the ability of the persona and anecdote to materialize the attitude or stand (position, gesture) of thought as event. “Truth can only be defined on the plane [of immanence] by a ‘turning toward’ or by ‘that toward which thought turns’; but this does not provide us with a concept of truth” (What is Philosophy? 39). Kenneth Burke provides some context for the turning (the vert of version) enabled by “concept.” “Turn” refers to “trope” in rhetoric, and is the stylistic operation relevant to the “directionality” and movement of thought within writing. In his study of St. Augustine’s Confessions, generalized as The Rhetoric of Religion, Burke forgrounded the vert family in relation to decision-making (“voting or purchasing, giving answers to questionnaires, taking of risks calculated on the basis of probability”) (101). “I sometimes wonder whether the good Bishop of Hippo could ever have written that work were it not for the many Latin words that grow from this root, meaning turn” (Langauge as Symbolic Action 242). Augustine’s moment of conversion to Christianity (the famous scene in Book VIII) is analyzed dramatistically:
There are the tense moments of decision in formal drama, when the protagonist debates whether to make a certain move, and finally makes the choice that shapes his destiny, though he still has to discover what that destiny is. . . . We are interested in the kind of decision, if it can be called decision at all: the kind of development that usually takes place in the third act of a five-act drama. Despite his great stress upon the will, and despite his extraordinary energy in theological controversy, Augustine seems to have felt rather that, at the critical moment of his conversion, something was decided for him. Act III is the point at which some new quality of motivation enters. And however active one may be henceforth, the course is more like a rolling downhill than like a straining uphill. (Rhetoric of Religion 63)
The feeling that “something was decided for him” is the avatar function. This is the level of decision that concerns us: not some superficial choice, but the indictment of destiny (so to speak). This moment of decision and change is taught as the turning-point of the standard Hollywood screenplay, instructions for which may be found in countless primers on scriptwriting (coming in this genre at the end of the second act of a three-act script). There is a narrative or dramatistic dimension in our thought, but “concept” separates, isolates, and develops as an alternative to any particular turn or direction, the pivot or switch site, the Archimedian lever upon which turning of thought as such depends. Augustine contrasts his con-version with the per-version of his pagan experience. “As regards Augustine’s Confessions, the most notable use of the -vert family is in the contrast between Book II, concerned with what he calls his adolescent perversity, in stealing pears (a Gidean acte gratuit), and Book VIII, that describes his conversion” (93). Augustine, that is, decided to turn away from embodied pleasure. This turn is one version, one take, among possible attitudes. He tutors us on turning, but his movement cannot be ours. The instruction from Contrast is to foreground a persona to dramatize our idea, to show how to stand and turn in a problem field (understanding “turn” as “trope”). Each resource of the CATTt contributes to the final emergent poetics of our concept in an unpredictable way. The framing imperative is that we take responsibility for our own turning, and test it now with an Allegory of Prudence.
Analogy: Cabaret
Electracy dates from the late eighteenth century, the epoch of revolutions (industrial, bourgeois, representational, technological). We orient ourselves to our own epoch by analogy with the invention of literacy in Classical Greece. The term