Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer
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or even parodic, the important lesson is not any one specific attitude, but attitude as such. The design lesson is to notice that parody works explicitly from a source.
The key to concept avatar is to learn from the CATTt how a vital anecdote associated with a conceptual persona produces thought. The relevant documentation in What Is Philosophy? is the references to modernist arts practices (literature, painting, music). The mental landscape of thinking relates to the problem plane by means analogous to those invented by Cézanne (for example) to express the physical landscape. The CATTt directs us to adopt the modernist arts plane of composition (invented in Paris) as a relay (Analogy) for treating the conceptual anecdote, in order to create a vector or a different turning within the problem, to challenge the commodity version of contemporary embodiment. The short-hand instruction from our Analogy, then, for how to compose a vital anecdote, is Duchamp’s readymade. An example of a readymade is a postcard representation of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, to which Duchamp (alluding to Sapeck as much as to Leonardo) added a mustache and goatee, plus a caption, L. H. O. O. Q. (the letters punning on a phrase in French meaning “she has a hot ass”). So much for the Dark Lady. The formal instruction includes not only the attitude, but the device: take a picture. The phrase alludes to the technology of imaging, and suggests a nickname for our conceptual procedure: take (verb/noun). Avatar takes thought (as birds take flight).
Bachelor Machine
Flash reason includes the readymade as logic (it shows what the readymade is for). The Documents of Contemporary Art series includes a collection on The Artist’s Joke. Marcel Duchamp anchors this collection, as he does the one on “Appropriation.” Pressed by an interviewer to accept sophisticated hermeneutic readings of his Readymades (such as the geometry book left out in the rain), Duchamp replied that it was a joke. A pure joke. To denigrate the solemnity of a book of principles. The rhetorical form exemplified in Duchamp’s work is that of the “bachelor machine.” Lyotard contributed an essay to the catalog of the famous exhibit in which Michel Carrouges established bachelor machines as a modern myth. These bachelors are imaginary machines, related to the absurdist science of “pataphysics” (Bok), whose machinations symbolized and allegorized human sexuality. The fate of Eros in modernity is expressed in these delirious devices, whose proliferation in art and literature Carrouges documented in his exhibition.
The simplest prototype of a bachelor machine is Lautreamont’s formula, adopted by Surrealism as one of its emblems: “he is beautiful . . . like the chance meeting of a sewing-machine and an umbrella on a dissecting-table!” (22). Among the more famous examples are the ones described in Raymond Roussel’s novels, some of Kafka’s stories such as “In the Penal Colony,” or Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Works by Picabia and other artists associated with Dada and Surrealism created these mental mechanisms, articulating at once the new beauty and the new Eros, with Duchamp’s Large Glass one of the foremost examples. They are apotropaic in defending against the anxieties of the industrial sublime. The first bachelor machine, Lyotard proposes, was Pandora’s Box, closing the circle (Blumenberg would say) with the fault of Epimetheus (Duchamp’s Trans/formers 45). Eureka! Lyotard considers the contradictory structure of bachelor machines to fall within the tradition of topical dissoi logoi, the technique of arguing both sides of any question (47). We are in the neighborhood of an industrial scale concept for thinking technics.
As Lyotard observed in the case of Duchamp’s anamorphic machines, the new topological and non-Euclidean geometries created new kinds of spaces, enabling new manners of relating in every respect. The result, central to our project, was a “new cunning” (58). Thierry de Duve’s discussion of Duchamp’s invention of the readymade establishes its importance as a model of a new decision logic. What becomes clear in de Duve’s account is that the readymade is not an “object” but an action, a statement in a discourse, modeling how to author in electracy (it anticipates Lacan’s object @). De Duve foregrounds an aspect of readymades of special relevance to our context: judgment as event rather than choice.
The Bottle Dryer of 1914 was Duchamp’s first pure Ready-made. Alternately entitled a Bottle Drainer, Bottle Rack, and Hedge-Hog, this piece was selected by Duchamp without the addition of other items or alterations. Essentially this object appears to be a work of “open” abstract sculpture, a symmetrical form that could have been made by some artist anywhere from the 1920s to the late 1960s. But in titling it by its literal designation Bottle Dryer, Duchamp was simply reinforcing an internal contradiction already established in many viewers’ minds. These facts simply define its claim to be called art. But Duchamp’s appellation of “hedgehog” for this restaurant appliance runs somewhat deeper. In an essay by Isaiah Berlin there is a comment on a line written by the Greek poet Archilochus, “mark one of the deepest differences which divides writers and thinkers, and, it may be human beings in general. The one type, ‘the fox,’ consists of men who live by ideas scattered and often unrelated to one another. But the man of the other type, the ‘hedgehog,’ relates ‘everything to a central vision, one system more or less coherent or articulate . . . a single, universal, organizing principle.’ ” Not only does this appliance resemble a hedgehog, apparently it suggests a unified vision. (Burnham 83)
Burnham read Bottle Dryer as emblem expressing aura (evoking “hedgehog” as a type of thinker). The readymade is a relay for the new judgment, for operant-idiots of anticipation. Readymades are a part of a larger context in which painters responded to the industrial revolution (the beginning of electracy) including the impact on their medium of the invention of photography and also of commercial tubes of paint. Duchamp’s solution to the crisis of painting was more extreme than that of his colleagues, in that, while they were willing to strip away nearly every attribute of their practice, to reduce it to some essential property (e.g. flatness), Duchamp took the final step and abandoned painting altogether. The point that de Duve stresses, is that the readymade is an act of pure judgment . It is an act of reflective judgment (in Kant’s terms) that puts the maker in the position of spectator, whose reception produces art. In contrast with literacy, this act of selection is empty of intention, the opposite of identity as self-presence.
This act of randomized selection and remotivation of the received or given is the point of departure for electrate decision. The device is neither mimetic nor expressive, but conative: the aim is to receive event (in the manner of consulting an oracle). That most of the Readymades are commodities, commercial objects, is an important part of the invention, demonstrating that electrate authoring shifts to a meta-level, taking as the material of its discourse the commodity-information sphere. Again, a crucial point is that this judgment is distinct from both understanding and reason (conceptual knowledge and moral belief) and represents a distinct region of valuation (the life feeling of “little sensations”—the infra-thin—what Lacan called lichettes). The equivalent of the natural written language from which the Greeks crafted the working concepts of philosophy is the discourse of popular culture, including Commerce, in all its forms and genres, the manipulation of which generates an ad hoc semantics (second nature).
De Duve’s detailed review of the R. Mutt case recognizes that the readymade is an utterance in a discourse and not an object, and hence to appreciate its status as a relay for electrate judgment. In our context we recognize it also as a move in a language game. What it means to position oneself temporally in the hinge of Now (as Lyotard described Duchamp’s stance, showing its relevance for flash reason), becomes clear in the cunning manifested in the process that resulted, eventually, in the recognition of a urinal, entitled Fountain, signed by one R. Mutt, as a work of art. A further Kantian element of de Duve’s history of this delay is his use of the formal ratio of hypotyposis, or the “algebraic comparison” as Duchamp called it, to articulate the steps Duchamp undertook to create his invention. As the story goes, Duchamp learned from his experience with Nude Descending a Staircase about the power of scandal to create publicity and status. He submitted Fountain anonymously, to test his colleagues’ declaration that any work by any person would be admitted to the exhibition of independent artists, for which Duchamp himself was one of the organizers. The submission was a provocation, an experiment, a joke, a gambit, a wager on the future of art, a wager that Duchamp won. Ingenium.
The significant point for our purposes is that Duchamp did not simply submit the assisted readymade and leave it at that. He manipulated the situation as a mediated image, to