Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer
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native code, this is the mode of intelligence taken up in a rhetoric of flash reason, constructed for the quotidian practice of electracy. This experience need not be so esoteric, so Alpine, and must not be, if civilization is to thrive in in a digital apparatus. Not that I am so wise (you heard Nietzsche’s irony), but I love wisdom. I am testifying, not explaining.
Decorum
How to generalize into a practice the flash of insight? Flash reason, to accomplish the functionality of avatar as counsel, retrieves and updates the tradition of decorum as readymade wisdom. I don’t understand my own selection filter, but avatar does. Reality is ontological sampling. The modern meaning of the word “commonplace,” to indicate a banality or triviality, signals the weakness in manuscript pedagogy—its tendency to slide into cliché. The manuals always advised that the method required not just “imitation” but ingenium (genius), but the latter capacity was assumed and not considered teachable. The tradition was at its best, on its own terms, in the practice of imitations of complete individual works—even word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase transpositions of a model’s style and form, adapted to one’s own materials and situation (Moss 63). The postmodern taste for pastiche recovers some of the effects of imitatio. The mode included an appreciation for an allusive game in which the original source was partly disguised. Recognizing the model was part of the pleasure of reception of the oration or text. Pastiche is an important device for flash reason, nor am I concealing my reliance on a tradition.
The entire practice is an extension of Aristotle’s “category” into the highest orders of literate form. This metaphysical register of the alphabetic apparatus accounts for the grain or propensity of the method that led eventually to the rules of decorum, which in turn rigidified into stereotypes. Painters as much as writers were instructed that “each age, each sex, each type of human being must display its representative character, and [they] must be scrupulous in giving the appropriate physique, gesture, bearing, and facial expression to each of the figures” (Lee 35). Even if it is character RTW (off the rack), this iconizing process has important lessons for electracy, including an insight into the narrowing, pejorative meanings associated with prudence in modernity. “Decorum” came to mean “not only the suitable representation of typical aspects of human life, but also specific conformity to what is decent and proper in taste, and even more in morality and religion” (37). Through taste lifestyle itself becomes scriptable (reduced to style in early modernity, rhetoric prepared to take responsibility for lifestyle). Electracy requires designer character.
Aristotle recognized in the Rhetoric and in the Nicomachean Ethics that rhetorical decorum and prudence share a faculty of judgment that is not logical or theoretical, but practical; that does not subordinate an object to a general rule or concept, but responds to the particular per se. This is because both rhetoric and prudence are concerned with “problems about which different points of view [can] be maintained, questions open to debate because they [can] be judged only in terms of probable truth and [are] not susceptible to scientific demonstrations of irrefutable validity” (qtd. in Kahn 30). Thus Aristotle writes in the Rhetoric: “The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us . . . there are few facts of the ‘necessary’ type that can form the basis of rhetorical syllogisms. Most of the things about which we make decisions, and into which we therefore inquire, present us with alternative possibilities. For it is about our actions that we deliberate and inquire, and all our actions have a contingent character; hardly any of them are determined by necessity” (qtd. in Kahn 30). The standard of judgment for a proper or appropriate decision, in other words, was based in practical considerations “and derives its authority from the conviction that, in some practical sense, ‘what all believe to be true is actually true’” (32). Updated decorum has its point of departure not in shared opinion but singular experience.
Montaigne marks a moment of transition, in which the commonplace practice of manuscript culture passed into the print mode of the essay. Our project is to continue this update through literacy into electrate avatar. He exploited the topic of in utramque parte—the applicability of the topics to both sides of a case (to attack or defend a question)—which he extended from a rhetorical to an ontological level. He redefined prudence in terms of Pyrrhonist skepticism (53). This skepticism reflects the new sensibility, the changing worldview of early modernity, the new science and its philosophical proponents such as Descartes or Francis Bacon. For these authors “invention” shifts from finding or recognizing a traditional authority (opinion) to inquiry and the discovery of new knowledge. The authority of the “judge” at the metaphorical heart of “category” is exposed in Montaigne’s stance.
Montaigne’s proposition is an ironic or skeptical version of the speculative judgment. Unlike Hegel’s dialectic, Montaigne’s sentence is not the discovery of the identity of two terms, but a narration of the rhetorical structure of equivalence, or of the failure of dialectic. It does not reveal the “profound tautology of all thought,” but rather that an equation is authoritative only because it is apropos. In short, it is the copula itself that is the most appropriate, that is to say the most useful, because finally the most pleasurable and inevitable of human fictions. At first glance it seems to be a simple analogy between the mastery of art and life, or between rhetoric and prudence. But closer examination reveals that analogy is a process, that it is constructed and destroyed in the continual essay of the apropos. The essay as scale turns out to be a very dubious form of judgment. (149)
In the context of commonplace practice it is easy to see the extent to which Montaigne used a topical (readymade) grid to compose his essays. “A glance at one of the essays illustrates this. The essay ‘That We Should Not Judge of Our Happiness until after Our Death’ begins with a quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: ‘We must expect of man the latest day, Not, ere he die, hi’s happy can we say.’ This adage is then paraphrased; it is amplified by examples from ancient history and from myth; quotations from the classics are inserted generously; an exhortation is added; and the essay concludes with a brief epilog applying the moral” (Lechner 218). Kafka’s rhetoric continues this tradition in modernism in his appropriation of sayings and revisions of parables. The prototype of the technique (explained by Clayton Koelb), is an indirect reporting of a man seeking directions who asked a policeman the way. The policeman’s reply (“Give it up!”) indicates he took the question to be metaphysical (from one who has lost his way in life) (Koelb 11). These examples express our theme as well as its method: electrate wisdom.
The intellectual obituary of the commonplaces and the confidence in endoxal wisdom is Flaubert’s project for a mock encyclopedia of received ideas. The project reflects his own disgust with French bourgeois culture, dramatized in his novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet. He compiled a collection of platitudes and clichés that circulated in middle-class opinion, and also a collection of “stupidities” (the Sottisier) culled from supposedly authoritative or admired publications. He worked on these collections for more than twenty years, and bragged that he had read more than 1,500 books in search of his material. His method was authentically topical, in other words, but his motivation was parodic. The entries were listed alphabetically, and read not as factoids about something but as an annotation of current opinion. The entry for “feudalism” gives the flavor: “No need to have one single precise notion about it: thunder against.”
Multitude
The topical tradition went fallow, we could say, and represents now in its retrieval an important resource for an Internet choral counsel. At the conclusion of his review of rhetoric, for example, Barthes noted the “stubborn agreement” between Aristotelianism and mass culture in Western societies: “a practice based, through democracy, on an ideology of the ‘greatest number,’ of the majority-as-norm, of current opinion: everything suggests that a kind of Aristotelian vulgate still defines a type of trans-historical Occident, a civilization (our own) which is that of the endoxa” (“The Old Rhetoric” 92). He goes on to propose an assignment.
This observation, disturbing as it is in its foreshortened form, that all our literature, formed by Rhetoric and sublimated by humanism, has emerged from a politico-judicial practice: in those areas where the most brutal conflicts—of money, of property, of class—are taken over, constrained, domesticated, and sustained by state power, where state institutions regulate feigned speech and codifies all recourse