Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer
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the name of text, of writing, a new practice of language; and never separating ourselves from revolutionary science—these are one and the same task. (93)
Paolo Virno takes up where Barthes left off, seeing in this fit between Aristotle and the culture industry an opportunity for the recovery of a public sphere by using the “spectacle” against itself. The context for Virno’s proposal is the post-Fordist stage of capital, the information economy in which knowledge and invention are primary sources of wealth: wealth is not found in products but in the process of production. “In the spectacle we find exhibited, in a separate and fetishized form, the most relevant productive forces of society, those productive forces on which every contemporary work process must draw: linguistic competence, knowledge, imagination, etc. Thus, the spectacle has a double nature: a specific product of a particular industry, but also, at the same time, the quintessence of the mode of production in its entirety” (60).
The possibility of a new public sphere depends upon the emergence of a new collective identity, appropriate to the conditions of the electrate apparatus (currently embodied in the spectacle), theorized with reference to the writings of Spinoza. Should the collective body of society be constituted as a “people,” as a unified identity (as One), as Hobbes proposed? Or as a “multitude,” of many individuals, whose coherence does not depend on “identity” politics, as Spinoza thought? The history of modernity worked through the politics of various “peoples” (nationalism, in short). The new politics suggest a public life of the multitude. While this whole argument is relevant to the project of flash reason as a logic of deliberation for electracy, the immediate point to stress is Virno’s suggestion that the source of coherence for the multitude is the language capacity itself of human beings (the proprium, in fact, of Aristotle’s definition of “man”). To explain the kind of practice he imagines capable of supporting this electrate collectivity (image hegemony), Virno invokes the model of Aristotle’s topics and the commonplace tradition, which he sees as a particular embodiment of what Marx called the “general intellect.”
In today’s world, the “special places” of discourse and or argumentation are perishing and dissolving, while immediate visibility is being gained by the “common places,” or by generic logical-linguistic forms which establish the pattern for all forms of discourse. This means that in order to get a sense of orientation in the world and to protect ourselves from its dangers, we can not rely on those forms of thought, of reasoning, or of discourse which have their niche in one particular context or another. . . . The “common places” (these inadequate principles of the “life of the mind”) are moving to the forefront: the connection between more and less, the opposition of opposites, the relationship of reciprocity, etc. these “common places,” and these alone, are what exist in terms of offering us a standard of orientation, and thus, some sort of refuge from the direction in which the world is going. Being no longer inconspicuous, but rather having been flung into the forefront, the “common places” are the apotropaic resource of the contemporary multitude. They appear on the surface, like a toolbox containing things which are immediately useful. (36–37)
The value of Virno’s proposal is his recognition of the need for a shared mode of thought. The action item concerns a movement beyond reliance on expert specialization (techno-science) to the establishment of what used to be called “wisdom,” and which in practice represented the authority of tradition. The limitation of Virno’s insight and proposal is that he ignores the historical specificity of the apparatus. The commonplace tradition developed out of Aristotle’s metaphysics is specific to literacy. Or, the inference to be drawn from Virno’s argument is that the task is to do for electracy, the post-Fordist society of the spectacle, what Aristotle did for the Classical world: invent a new metaphysics, a category native to the digital apparatus, and a practice of thought adequate to the “toolbox” evolving so rapidly within new media culture. The project is not to follow in the footsteps of Aristotle, but to seek what he sought. The update from topics to pop culture takes care of itself, as in the genre typified by All I Really Need to Know I Learned From Watching Star Trek. Alain de Botton is closer to traditional decorum in How Proust Can Change Your Life. Concept avatar is ontological self-help.
Allegory
Avatar as conceptual persona retrieves decorum and the topical tradition, updated as a means for individuals to use the Internet as a commonplace chora. Harold Bloom, in his poetics of the modern crisis poem, noted in poets’ dialogical struggle with precursors in the tradition an underlying continuation of commonplace compositional procedures. Bloom traces the tradition of topics from Classical rhetoric, the art of places in Cicero, who listed sixteen topics of invention (devices for generating “copy”). Bloom finds six revisionary ratios persisting in Romantic and modernist poetry, surviving their historical transmittal through Associationist Psychology of the Enlightenment, as in Locke’s association of ideas, “founded on the notion of habit and memory as modes of repetition that fixed ideas through the accompaniment of pleasure and pain” (“Poetic Crossing” 516). This diachronic rhetoric continues into the present, with Bloom’s useful insight into Freud’s dreamwork and the defense mechanisms of unconscious thought as a new terminology for the old tropology of rhetoric. Flash reason extracts from Bloom’s ratios a poetics for consulting with the global cultural archive. Modernist crisis poems (from Wordsworth through Ashbery, in Bloom’s canon) offer a relay for playing avatar (the meaning of this phrase will deepen as we progress). To say “relay” means that the analogy is loose, heuristic, experimental. Keep in mind that you are inventing a practice of decision, a guide to action.
We need an exercise to ground these detours of history and theory in our own experience. Our consultation falls within the same genre as the one motivating Ecce Homo, except that I am working the other side of the aisle, that of the idiot. Already names of the experience to which I am testifying are accumulating on the side of knowledge but we mean to reach across from knowledge to this other lived dimension, sometimes confused with ignorance, stupidity, nescience. Since I can’t think without thumbing, let me set up an exercise through which you may approach a version of Nietzsche’s moment. I need a form in which to cast the memory of an event, and Titian’s Allegory of Prudence looks promising. The prudence organizing Nietzsche’s advice is what the Greeks called phronesis. What I have to impart can be approached as an update, adaptation, appropriation of this tradition, virtue, capacity, faculty. I am speaking of the Western tradition, but not only that, since our concern is with wisdom and its deficit, an ecology of thought for a global consultancy. We all need to be on the same screen, with correlated databases, to make the coming decisions, which require some device with decision as a specific experience and practice. Can there be an electrate decorum? Solve WWXD? for the value avatar (what would avatar do).
The ambition of flash reason is to support collective epiphany, despite the skepticism of pundits today, questioning the very possibility of “defining moments” creative of national unity. The event motivating this concern was the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, and the conversation led to regret that even the sense of community following 9/11 had no lasting effect. “It may just be that modern society is impervious to brilliant flashes of clarity. There is very little shared experience in the nation now; there are only competing versions of the experience, consumed in such a way as to confirm whatever preconceptions you already have, rather than to make you reflect on them” (Bai ). Flash reason does not concern opinion, does not operate in the dimension of persuasion. Rather, it takes up the operation itself of “version” that puts us in a spin. It thinks the preconceptual.
We are updating an ancient ambition, concerning how humans might communicate with God/gods. The relay from the tradition indicates that individuals may appropriate for themselves if not absolute comprehension (nous), then at least the accumulated potentiality of the archive. Take Titian, for example. Titian’s painting is composed as an “emblem,” consisting of a picture and a motto, whose relationship poses a certain enigma. The practice we are proposing, flash reason, depends upon a (digital) image metaphysics, just as literacy developed a metaphysics of the written word, and we will use the latter as a relay to construct the former. Emblem is a hinge articulating the two apparati. Titian’s picture shows the heads of three men, each posed in alignment with the heads of three animals directly below them. The motto reads, “From the [experience of the] past, the present acts prudently, lest it spoil