Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer
formation and identity behavior (individual and collective). A relevant point of the analogy is that in Athens Plato and his students (including Aristotle) created a new institution (the Academy) that opened a new zone in the city within which they invented the devices of “pure thought.” This new kind of thought was different from the oral apparatus (religion, ritual, spirit, tribe). It has been dubbed “natural history” retroactively, and eventually became hegemonic, or at least fully independent, in the seventeenth century, the inception of “science” in the modern sense. “Science” as a stand first became possible within the literate apparatus. The related identity inventions are “selfhood” as experience and behavior, and the democratic political state. Our present moment is the heir of the two previous apparati (orality and literacy), providing two axes guiding (in unstable syncretism) our collective deliberations: right/wrong (oral); true/false (literate). Electracy does not eliminate or replace these two historical orientations, but supplements them with a third stand. The formal practices of electracy are invented primarily in nineteenth-century Paris. Paris is the Athens of electracy. The template from Athens maps the dynamics of apparatus creation. Simultaneous with the emergence of bourgeois hegemony, a counterculture zone opened first in Paris, known as “bohemia.” The original bohemia was the neighborhood of Montmartre, on the outskirts of Paris. The taverns and bistros of the area provided cheap wine, prostitution, song and dance (all the vices). The first official cabaret associated with the avant-garde is Le Chat Noir, founded in 1881, followed by the Lapin Agile and the Moulin Rouge. These Cabarets are to electracy what the Academy and Lyceum were to literacy.
A good account of the institution formation related to this scene is Pierre Bourdieu. Aesthetic experience is the relevant human capacity to be augmented in the prosthesis (the electrate apparatus), and pure art is the means. Bourdieu identifies Baudelaire and Flaubert as the inventors of this stand and formal operation, with Manet as their equivalent in painting. “Before Baudelaire,” Walter Benjamin wrote in his study of Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century, “the apache, who lived out his life within the precincts of society and of the big city, had had no place in literature. The most striking depiction of this subject in Les fleurs du mal, ‘Le Vin de l’Assassin,’ inaugurated a Parisian genre. The café known as Le Chat Noir became its ‘artistic headquarters.’ ‘Passant, sois moderne!’ was the inscription it bore during its early, heroic period” (Writing of Modern Life 108). The monumental importance of Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades project is its ambition to reconstruct through documentation the milieu from which emerged the metaphysics of the new apparatus. The vanguard revolution more generally subsequently develops and institutionalizes this stand or attitude. The future of electracy involves unfolding the potential of pure art, just as the history of literacy records the unfolding of the potential of pure reason. The new form is an adaptation to the shock of life in the industrial city.
The philosophical account of this historical gambit is familiar, beginning with Kant’s promotion of aesthetic judgment (the faculty of taste) to equal status with pure and practical reason. The third faculty added to the axes orienting thought is that of pleasure/pain (Spinoza’s joy/sadness). Embodied sensory experience, in other words, is the ground of electrate intelligence. The responsibility of this dimension (distinct from oral salvation or literate engineering) is well-being (thriving). The commodity form contributes to the invention of electracy by initiating a reformation in Western identity, the most profound since Rome converted to Christianity, and in the same league as the Protestant Reformation. In this case it is the conversion to “pleasure” (sensory satisfaction) albeit in the guise of consumerism: the old values of “character” (self-denial) are displaced by “personality” (self-promotion), opening a new dimension of identity formation (brand). The implications for politics and ethics are substantial: what happens when pleasure/pain (attraction/repulsion) has equal status relative to right/wrong and true/false in contemporary civic life? The difference between a language and a dialect, some wit observed, is that a language is a dialect with an army. Well-being needs an army (an institution). Concept avatar is intended to think this register of experience, the capacity to be affected. Both branches of the Western tradition (Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian) deprecated visceral experience and even condemned human embodiment as misfortune or sin. The challenge of electracy is to design practices of thought for an augmented aesthetic prosthesis that make affect intelligent.
What is the state of mind (stance) to be dramatized in the conceptual persona of avatar? The “pure art” created in Cabaret achieved international recognition ultimately in Dadaism, product of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich (where the cabaret scene moved during the World War). The readymades in general, and Fountain in particular (the urinal submitted as a joke to a supposedly non-juried exhibition) make Marcel Duchamp the Aristotle of electracy. Mona Lisa with a Pipe (by the artist known as Sapeck, 1887) is emblematic of the attitude that is the “Spirit of Montmartre” expressed in these works. The attitude is fumisme, used to name the mocking humor that characterized the cabaret scene of bohemian Paris. The anchoring term is the verb fumer (to smoke), but with a usage in agriculture, “to manure.” A fumiste is a chimney sweep, with slang extension to name a joker, crackpot, fraud. An immediate point of interest is the background that Sapeck’s Mona Lisa provides for Duchamp’s more famous readymade (the mustachioed Mona Lisa), composed much later. The choice of iconic image to profane is motivated in part by the term fumisme itself. The hazy smoke referenced in this semantic field resonates with one of the important terms used to identify Leonardo’s style: sfumato. Sfumato is a term coined by Leonardo to refer to a painting technique which overlays translucent layers of color to create perceptions of depth, volume and form. In Italian sfumato means “blended” or “smoky” and is derived from the Italian word fumo meaning “smoke.” Duchamp was “blowing smoke.”
A “wit” is different from a fumiste, a distinction used to clarify the intent of Sapeck’s illustrations:
Whereas the former made fun of idiots in terms that they were not always able to understand, the fumiste accepts the ideas of the idiot and expresses their quintessence. . . . The fumiste avoids discussions of ideas, he does not set up a specific target, he adopts a posture of withdrawal that makes all distinctions hazy, and he internalizes Universal Stupidity by postulating the illusory nature of values and of the Beautiful, whence his denial of the established order and of official hierarchies. From this point of view, which is that of the sage, the dandy, the observer, and the skeptic, everything has the same value, everything is one and the same thing. (Grojnowski 104)
The Sfumato effect invented by Leonardo was a solution to a compositional problem relevant to flash reason. The problem was that of physiognomy, the capacity of external features to express character, disposition. Leonardo codified an emerging analogy in his era between the air of a face and the atmosphere of a landscape. The historical precedent concerns how one of the primordial elements (air) was adapted to expressing the uniqueness of “face” (prosopon) (Stimilli, 65). Andy Warhol emulating Duchamp gave this stand its purest performance to date, by transforming celebrity portraits into a pop iconography. The image of thought mocked in fumisme is Descartes’s cogito, since, as Deleuze and Guattari observed, the stand of the subject in Descartes’s radical doubt (I think, therefore I am) is that of “idiot” in the classical sense of “private person,” one who does not participate in the public sphere. This alienated subject finally goes crazy in modernity, they explain, with reference to Dostoevsky.
Avatar personifies attitude. “Attitude” concerns the state of mind within which the thought happens, concerning belief or desire (for example) directed towards our Target (the practice of judgment or decision). Taken as a whole, or as a position of enunciation within the culture, comedy implies a certain attitude towards reality, for example, which is one answer to a fundamental question of philosophy—the transcendental question (where are we when we think?). Alenka Zupancic describes the comedic stand:
There is something very real in comedy’s supposedly unrealistic insistence on the indestructible, on something that persists, keeps reasserting itself and won’t go away, like a tic that goes on even though its “owner” is already dead. In this respect, one could say that the flaws, extravagances, excesses, and so-called human weaknesses of comic characters are precisely what account for their not being “only human.” More precisely, they show us that what is “human” exists only in this kind of excess over itself.