Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer
into public circulation. Following the logic of a bachelor machine, Duchamp was able to attach or link his statement to other statements, and then to let the ratios of information circulation do their work as transformers. Duchamp’s strategy meets the requirements of an operator in the dromosphere, to manage expectation and anticipation, the belated temporality of prudence.
Making avant-garde art of true significance means anticipating a verdict that can only be retrospective. It means delivering the unexpected in lieu of the expected in such a way that betrayed and disappointed expectations show themselves, in the end, to have been fulfilled. Because it is in the nature of expectations not to depend on factual verification for their truth as expectations—that is, as projected scenarios—the scenario that I have described as the chain of fulfilled expectations proves to be the right one. Indeed, let’s reestablish the facts: instead of the Chessplayers, the Paris Independents were presented with the Nude Descending a Staircase, and they rejected it; instead of going directly to Stieglitz in order to gain avant-garde legitimacy for Fountain, Richard Mutt went to the Independents, and they rejected it. The last formula, the one that happily linked the two chains of algebraic comparisons, translates back into one that is familiar: Nude/Paris Indeps = (Nude)/(Armory Show) = Fountain/N.Y.Indeps. (de Duve 141)
Duchamp put an emblem (an image, an idea, a label) into the temporal loop of time, the after-effect or retrospective emergence of meaning, the future anterior, in order to influence the values and practices of his institution. Duchamp raised “joke” to its highest power, confirming Koestler’s claim about the shared features of wit and creativity. The adjustment to be made for our rehearsal is to shift the setting away from art proper, to follow Duchamp’s creation of the possibility of making art in general, rather than working in any specific medium. His answer to the question of the ontology of art (what is painting?) becomes the analogy for an art of ontology, that is, using the readymade as a unit of discourse, to articulate an image category for electrate metaphysics. The readymade opens the possibility not just of art in general, but of general electracy. Duchamp occupies temporarily the position of conceptual persona, along with the vital anecdote of the R. Mutt joke. Concept avatar does not rely on any one persona, however, but facilitates a practice of adopting tutor anecdotes.
Target: Judgment
How is judgment as bachelor machine applied in flash reason? How does one take a stand or make a turn away from or towards a position by means of avatar? Paolo Virno provides a source for Target (specifying the need or lack to be supplied by our concept). Conceptual thinking continues to be relevant in electracy to the extent that a democratic public sphere is still possible in an Internet civilization. Our concept must support judgment in decision making. Judgment (practical reason) means drawing upon the lessons of the past to make a decision in the present situation promising the best outcome for the future well-being of the community. Good judgment requires the virtue of phronesis. Prudence is a virtue, meaning that it is a matter of disposition, a quality of character. The practice of deliberative rhetoric in the civic sphere follows the paths of inference, beginning with abduction from the particular conditions to the rules (an archive of maxims and proverbs representing the wisdom of experience or tradition and its associated respected authorities). Commonsense rules supplied the premises for deductions formulating hypothetical cases, which in turn inductively were applied to the situation. The problem with practical reason today, Virno observes, is that there is not now, and never has been, a rule for applying the rule to a case. The application requires a decision, arbitrary in itself, and this decision represents the aporia (impasse) of ethics. The dilemma is moot, in any case, since there is no reservoir of tradition to supply authoritative proverbs in the first place. Or rather, tradition has been replaced by Commerce (entertainment).
The aporia is implacable, since in the sublime conditions of the industrial city the archive of maxims and proverbs recording the wisdom of collective experience lost all authority. Moreover, the locus of causality disappeared from everyday life, to become accessible only to scientific expertise supported by technology. Commerce filled the void, promoting through advertising the conversion of citizens to an entirely new stand, oriented along the axis of pleasure-pain (attraction/repulsion). Wisdom is reduced to taste. Marchand cites a pronouncement made by one advertising agency in the 1920s to note the role Commerce attempted to play:
The product of advertising is public opinion; and in a democracy public opinion is the uncrowned king. It is the advertising agency’s business to write the speeches from the throne of that king; to help his subjects decide what they should eat and wear; how they should invest their savings; by what courses they can improve their minds; and even what laws they should make, and by what faith they may be saved. (Marchand 31)
We see what is at stake in our invention: who or what gives counsel in the electrate public sphere?
Virno’s proposal assumes that we are now living in conditions of a permanent “state of exception,” in which the rules guiding judgment may be open to revision, to innovation, to testing against experience (a ratio of anomaly, not equivalence, is needed). Here is an opportunity for flash reason. His suggestion to replace valid reasoning with the deliberate use of fallacies, in order to expose the enthymemes, the assumptions and values determining the ineffective deductions guiding decision-making, acknowledges the unconscious as a site of ethical decision unsuspected in pre-modern philosophy. Ethics we now understand is beyond the reach of both reason and will. Fallacies and joke-work are transitional forms manifesting the fourth mode of inference invented in Cabaret: conduction. The primary instruction derived from Virno is based on his proposal to adopt logical fallacies (exploiting the structure of joke-work: condensation, displacement, secondary elaboration) as sources of innovative inference practice in conditions of ethical/political crisis. “Jokes and innovative action displace the ‘rotational axis’ of a form of life by means of an openly ‘fallacious’ conjecture, one that nonetheless reveals in a flash a different way of applying the rules of the game: contrary to the way it seemed before, it is entirely possible to embark on a side path or to escape from Pharaoh’s Egypt” (Multitude 163). Joke-work surprises thought from an unexpected direction.
Virno’s proposal shows the relevance of fumisme as a rhetoric. The pragmatics of laughter and the forms that elicit it are guides to the site of interface, the moebius twist, crossing body and language. The two sides of language (biology and culture) are hinged here, enabling discourse and desire (unconscious satisfaction, that the French call jouissance) to coexist in one practice. This is the point of departure for electracy as metaphysics. Literacy ontologized the semantic register of writing; electracy ontologizes the libidinal register (the signifier).
The logic of crisis is most evident in the articulation between instinctual apparatus and propositional structure, between drives and grammar. Each attempt at delineating a different normative “substratum,” though it unravels within wholly contingent sociopolitical circumstances, retraces and compounds, on a reduced scale, the passage from life in general to linguistic life. Anomalous inferences are the precision instrument by virtue of which verbal thought, delineating a different normative ‘substratum,’ recalls, each time anew, the anthropogenetic passage. Their anomaly lies in the manner in which language preserves within itself, though transfigured to the point of being barely recognizable, the original nonlinguistic drive. (Multitude 160)
Virno’s insight introduces the topic of “letter” (a hybrid of language and body), theorized in Lacan’s psychoanalysis (to which we will return).
Instruction: Style gives access to embodied (sensory, aesthetic) thought. The lesson of our Target resource, then, is to create a concept persona supporting judgment (decision) conducted in an aesthetic style. This style sheet is the one invented by the Parisian avant-garde. The goal is to activate and administer in writing the embodied (unconscious) drives that accompany meaning. Aesthetics is the area of philosophy that remains functional in electracy.
Experience Ontology
It is worth remembering that in the context of apparatus invention the bachelor machine is as practical for the pleasure-pain axis as is dialectic for the true-false axis. Inquiry is conducted in at least two modalities: the high focus of specific questions, guided by methodological presuppositions, and low focus browsing, relying on intuition and associative or lateral thinking. Literate schooling teaches