Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer
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what you are, and my imparting what I learned about it, as a kind of exit interview, a debriefing, now that I am bygone. You may be curious as well about this intersection and the convergence between thought and life, knowledge and experience, and how elders impart to youth useless counsel. Event includes the undergoing and the understanding.
Between the preface and the first numbered entry stands a paragraph designating the time of writing as a perfect day, Nietzsche wrote, everything ripening and not only the grape turning brown, when the eye of the sun fell upon his life. He looked back, looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once. He buried his forty-fourth year on this day, buried because saved, rendered immortal, by the works published that year, such as Twilight of the Idols, in which he attempted to philosophize with a hammer. “How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?—and so I tell my life to myself” (Ecce Homo 221). Don’t I know that feeling, doesn’t any scholar, when the printed volume is in your hands? That is part of what should be understood, the materialization of that product, a text, and the experience of making such a thing (here we go again). The nature of any object may be approached through this one, to relieve the illusion of its solidity, isolation, fixity, in order to undergo the force passing through it, materialized there, for what we are tracking is this axis of attraction-repulsion organizing reality in electracy. This concerns you.
Nietzsche addresses us from a site in Switzerland, an Alpine valley known as the Upper Engadine where he summered in the years between 1879—1888. I have some experience of the setting because of the seminars I taught in Saas-Fee for the European Graduate School. Walking the trails through and above that valley reminded me of Nietzsche, and perhaps I could have imagined myself in his place, except that my body was free of the pain and suffering that tormented his existence. That and also not being burdened with genius you might add, except that part of what I learned concerns the unavoidability of what genius names, even for you and me. Ecce Homo is a consultation, a book of advice, to be shelved with other self-help works. It seems Nietzsche’s books were little known in his own day, and in fact one motivation for Ecce Homo was to rectify this obscurity, the invisibility that made it appear as if it were a mere prejudice that he lived.
Against his instincts and habits, it became necessary for Nietzsche to declare: “Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else” (217). We listen to his counsel, vouchsafed in the guise of prudence and self-defense, in the name of self-preservation. The addressees are former colleagues, that is, all of us who do little but thumb books, losing in the process our capacity to think for ourselves. When we don’t thumb, we don’t think. I don’t disagree with Nietzsche’s condemnation as I compose in free indirect discourse, erlebte rede, paperback propped precariously to leave hands free for keyboarding. Thumbing about sums it up. Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one’s strength, to read a book at such a time, Nietzsche advised, is simply depraved (253). What would he say about you, sound asleep? He speaks from experience, for he knows himself, on how one becomes merely a reagent, how one reads to ruin, to be merely a match that one has to strike to make it emit sparks (thoughts). But isn’t that an allusion to Plato?
Now I must quote, since he invokes the virtue that is our theme, prudence, which is another name for a problem, a guide to the art of decision and the relation of experience to knowledge, in the invention stream leading to electracy.
At this point the real answer to the question, how one becomes what one is, can no longer be avoided. And thus I touch on the masterpiece of the art of self-preservation—of selfishness. For let us assume that the task, the destiny, the fate of the task transcends the average very significantly: in that case, nothing could be more dangerous than catching sight of oneself with this task. To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion what one is. From this point of view even the blunders of life have their own meaning and value—the occasional side roads and wrong roads, the delays, “modesties,” seriousness wasted on tasks that are remote from the task. All this can express a great prudence, even the supreme prudence: where nosce te ipsum [know thyself] would be the recipe for ruin, forgetting oneself, misunderstanding oneself, making oneself smaller, narrower, mediocre, become reason itself. (254)
This is a saving caveat, since our prudence will be of this latter sort, found rather than planned. Our prudence is fatal.
No need to quibble about this terminology of “selfishness,” since “self” is rather what is exceeded, whether or not there is a unity or a measure guiding one’s becoming. Tradition supplies a family of terms, such as conatus, in Spinoza: the principle that to live is to strive to persevere in one’s own being. Nietzsche is an heir of this fundamental project, assigned various names by different thinkers (Entelechy, Monad, Dasein) and so are you, in your striving to become what you are. Striving. And this striving, does it not feel as though it has some direction? This direction is prudence, monitored by avatar. Nietzsche has a task, and this is a crucial point: the transvaluation of all values, aka the eternal return of the same, or the will to power. He gave this task to himself. The existence and nature of “task” is part of our consultation, but even more significant is the experience in which Nietzsche had the thought. It is an event much cited in anthologies and surveys. It is dated August 1881, penned on a sheet with the notation underneath, “6000 feet beyond man and time.” That day he was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana, he relates; at a powerful pyramidal rock not far from Surlei he stopped. It was then that the idea came to him (295).
A thought happens to Nietzsche. He has an idea. This is the event in question. He experiences a moment of insight, literally an “inspiration.” This is the point, this conjunction of experience and knowledge, which is also a possibility for you, and concerns the functionality of avatar. Right there, if we can zoom in and linger. Everything that we will have said concerns just this event, this quality of thought. I want to understand “what happened,” because to the extent that it is an event, it is not over yet, and never will be over. Nor can it be left to the few geniuses of history. You need to have an idea. Tradition, and you are a diadoch, a successor, meaning that it depends on you, for thinking is not just for experts today. The biographical details include the fascinating young Russian woman, Lou Andreas-Salomé, who behaved for a time during this period as a disciple; and also there was the friend who introduced Lou to Nietzsche. Her name constitutes evidence in favor of “signature” as destiny. The thought of “Zarathustra” intersects with the anecdotes of Nietzsche’s walks through various landscapes, along the road to Zoagli past pines with a view of the sea, and also around the bay of Rapallo from Santa Margherita all the way to Portofino. Various landscapes contributed to the process, the unfolding of the idea that had more than one date and place, not only Swtizerland but also Nice and the ascent to the Moorish eyrie at Eza. A composite place of invention. Our tactic is always to take the hint, to look around at our own landscapes, rather than to make pilgrimages to Nietzsche’s territory. Nietzsche reported a correlation between his creative energies and the suppleness of his muscles. “The body is inspired; let us keep the ‘soul’ out of it” (302). Precisely, body, for it is the body that is augmented and thinks within an electrate apparatus.
As for this inspiration itself, it falls within the category of epiphany or revelation. “Revelation in the sense that suddenly, with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down—that merely describes the facts. One hears, one does not see; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightning, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form—I never had any choice” (300). The physical qualities of the rapture are associated with a feeling of freedom, of power, of capacity summarized as a depth of happiness. “One no longer has a notion of what is an image or a metaphor: everything offers itself as the nearest, most obvious, simplest expression. It actually seems as if the things themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors” (301). Like lightning, a thought flashes up. Such is the functionality we want, to manage what happens in cyberspace when the networked databases deliver a water cannon of information. Nietzsche got it, and we need a practice of getting it.
Happiness, considered as a feeling, along with a warning (it is not what you suppose). Yes, and the task of flash reason is to bring this experience into everyday pedagogy. This experience, this lightning