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2 Concept

Hypotyposis

The metaphysics of digital imaging dates from the Industrial Revolution, but its genealogy draws upon the traditions of image invention. The Prudence exercise introduces you to electracy as a particular kind of experience, and as a practice that foregrounds individual capacity for experience as such. Titian’s Allegory references his family, which is to say his manner of undergoing love and death. This context is a good one for our relay, since the tradition has counted on the shared undergoing of Eros (want) as an introduction to wisdom. Immanuel Kant is considered to be the last philosopher in the tradition of particular intellect that begins in Classical Greece and runs through Leonardo DaVinci. In this tradition thought is fundamentally sign-based, a showing of images to the mind’s eye, which is what recommends it as a resource for the invention of an image metaphysics. Kant received the tradition as posing the problem of a fundamental gap or chasm dividing human faculties between pure and practical reason (science and morality, knowledge and belief, the sensible and supersensible, phenomenal and noumenal). In his project of the three Critiques to determine the limits of philosophy, Kant introduced “judgment” as a faculty in its own right, grounded in aesthetic experience, functioning as a bridge crossing the chasm and connecting the other faculties of mind. Flash reason is this bridge.

A feature of special relevance to electracy of Kant’s Third Critique is his description of reflective judgment in which a person spontaneously recognizes some form in nature, a body, or art, and judges it to be “beautiful,” without benefit of a concept or rule guiding the judgment. This process of thinking without concepts provides a transition from the literate to an electrate apparatus (from conceptual categories to a new image category). The judgment of “beauty” assumes the existence of “common sense,” forming a community of persons sharing not any specific “taste,” but the capacity to experience beauty. The phrase refers not to our modern meaning of “good sense” or shared opinion, or even the “straight talk” of Thomas Paine, but to the inner or “sixth” sense that unified and synthesized the perceptions gathered from each of the five bodily senses. To convey the immediate and spontaneous certainty of reflective feeling, Kant associated it with the sense of taste. The Latin languages indicate a relationship between taste and knowledge with the near pun, sapore and sapere, relaying the flash of awareness between mouth and intellect measuring the range between sweet and bitter.

Concept avatar takes after reflective judgment, which works in the middle voice (auto-affection). “Beauty” is not a property of an object or thing, but a feeling by which subjects become aware of a harmony among their own faculties (auto-perception). A concept or rule is lacking for the feeling. The judgment operates formally, rather, by means of the proportional analogy “hypotyposis.” The bridge between the empirical causal world of sensible things and the moral realm of desire is accomplished analogically, with “beauty” (some sensible example) constituting a “symbol” of the supersensible “good.”

Knowledge by analogy, Kant explains, “means not, as the word is commonly taken, an imperfect similarity of two things, but a perfect similarity of two relations between quite dissimilar things.” This definition, supported by examples that Kant gives of analogy in the Critique of Judgment, a definition that neither abolishes the heterogeneity of the things to be related nor affirms their complete separation, shows these dissimilar things to be similar merely in the way they themselves relate or depend on certain other things. To take Kant’s own example: a hand mill can be shown to represent a despotic state in spite of the absence of any similarity between the two “items,” because both function only if manipulated by an individual absolute will. Thus, analogical presentation does two things, as Kant notes. First, it applies the concept (here the despotic state) to the object of a sensible intuition (the hand mill), and then it applies “the mere rule of the reflection made upon the intuition [on the type of causality it implies] to a quite different object of which the first is only the symbol.” (Gasché 212)

Hannah Arendt noted that Kant’s use of analogy in his logic of judgment was in fact the operation responsible for the formation of most philosophical concepts. The relay with our personification of prudence is explicit.

All philosophical terms are metaphors, frozen analogies, as it were, whose true meaning discloses itself when we dissolve the term into the original context, which must have been vividly in the mind of the first philosopher to use it. When Plato introduced the everyday words “soul” and “idea” into philosophical language—connecting an invisible organ in man, the soul, with something invisible present in the world of invisibles, the ideas—he still must have heard the words as they were used in ordinary pre-philosophical language. . . . The underlying analogy of Plato’s doctrine of the soul runs as follows: As the breath of life relates to the body it leaves, that is, to the corpse, so the soul from now on will be supposed to relate to the living body. The analogy underlying his doctrine of ideas can be reconstructed in a similar manner; as the craftsman’s mental image directs his hand in fabrication and is the measurement of the objects’ success or failure, so all materially and sensorily given data in the world of appearances relate to and are evaluated according to an invisible pattern, localized in the sky of ideas. (Arendt 1:104)

Paul Ricoeur further elaborates on the philosophical productivity of the mathematical notion of analogy (A is to B as C is to D):

The closest application is provided by the definition of distributive justice in the Nicomachean Ethics 5:3. The definition rests on the idea that this virtue implies four terms, two persons (equal or unequal) and two shares (advantages and disadvantages in the realms of honor or wealth); and that it establishes proportional equality in distribution between these four terms. But the application here of the idea of number, proposed by Aristotle, concerns extension not of the idea of number to irrationals but of proportion to non-homogeneous terms, provided that they can be said to be equal or unequal in some particular relation. In biology, the same formal conception of proportion permits not only classification (by saying, for example, that flying is to wings as swimming is to fins), but also demonstration (e.g., if certain animals have lungs and others do not, the latter possess an organ that takes the place of a lung). By lending themselves to proportional relationship such as these, functions and organs provide the outline of a general biology. (Ricoeur 270–71)

Kant clarified that his four-part ratios were not mathematical (not quantitative) but qualitative. Kant’s analogical bridge, the commentators point out, retraces the path of ascent from physical love to love of wisdom mapped by Plato (for example, in The Symposium). In Plato’s story Eros is not beauty but seeks beauty (Fictioc 21). The search begins with a spontaneous experience of sexual attraction. The “disinterestedness” of the feeling is the sensus communis of the universality of physical attraction. Kant’s insistence on the disinterestedness of the reflective judgment is just to distinguish aesthetic feeling from other kinds of feelings. This foregrounding of aesthetic judgment as a power in its own right is important to flash reason, to establish in the larger context of the conflicts working in deliberative rhetoric the specific dimension of aesthetic pleasure-pain and the values associated with it, separated from the representations and values of knowledge and belief.

The immediate lesson for our allegory is the assumption that my experience of embodiment may be extended through a proportional ratio as a means for moving through information of any kind. One task of flash reason is the need to update the measure of “ratio” and “proportion” to reflect the discoveries of vanguard arts. Bloom finds this option already at work in the tradition of ratio in Hellenism: one branch favored analogy (equivalence in substitution); the other branch favored anomaly (disruption, the breaking of ratio in substitution) (“The Breaking of Form” 13). Hannah Arendt was convinced of the contemporary relevance of reflective judgment, which she called

the most political of man’s mental abilities. It is the faculty that judges particulars without subsuming them under general rules which can be taught and learned until they grow into habits that can be replaced by other habits and rules. The faculty of judging particulars (as brought to light by Kant), the ability to say “this is wrong,” “this is beautiful,” and so on, is not the same as the faculty of thinking. Thinking deals with invisibles, with representations of things that are absent; judging always concerns particulars and things close at hand. But the two are interrelated, as are consciousness and conscience. (1: 193)

Bittersweet

The attraction to beauty in the beloved holds attention and stimulates reflection, revealing a harmony among the lover’s faculties (concinnitas) that gives pleasure distinct from sexual desire, motivating the lover to begin the journey of becoming human. The process begins in sensory judgment, and leads into belief through custom, the social forms ordering human relationships, revealing the larger guiding patterns at work in society (habitus, dharma). Attention shifts away from the self to the other, to beauty of character and of social order. The third stage is knowledge, learning the sciences of form, such as mathematics. The final stage is wisdom: an intution of Form as such (Fictioc 85–86). Philosophers from Pythagoras to Kant (and beyond) based their optimism about the educability of the multitude (and their enlistment in an enlightened politics) on proportional ratios (music of the spheres). It is worth dwelling on this point, since it is possible in one respect to reduce the shift from literacy to electracy to a mutation in the standard of ratio (proportion). This discussion of Alberti and architecture shows what is at stake.

The unlearned (or unskilled) person cannot do what the learned person can do, but he can judge the results of what the learned person does. Cicero speaks throughout of various arts, and he grounds this argument in a general principle of the relation of art and nature. . . . The “nature” from which art begins, and to which it must appeal to achieve anything, is our nature (which, of course, does not necessarily preclude its consonance with nature in a large sense, that is, it does not preclude the possibility that the same mean is in ourselves and in what we apprehend, and that this similarity is fact makes our apprehension of them possible). Just such an ambivalence runs through Alberti’s remarks about pulchritude and concinnitas, the latter of which is a principle of both human sense and nature at large. “Beauty is a certain consensus and unison of the parts of a thing with regard to definite number, finish and collocation, as demanded by concinnitas, the absolute and primary reason of nature” (Summers 134).

The project of concept avatar (a transition of conceptual thinking from literacy into electracy) may be seen relative to the use of “nature” in Summers’s observation. The literate concept remains responsible for “nature” proper, which it was invented to address as ontology. Concept avatar (electracy), extends the concept analogically into second nature (habitus, popular media), to attempt an image metaphysics. The fundamental analogy of the tradition is that between love and wisdom (philosophy), concerned with the desire to know. The relationship or ratio between love and knowledge has to be adjusted in each epoch, not to mention for each apparatus, with implications for individual experience and behavior. As love goes, so goes wisdom. Anne Carson identifies exactly the hinge of the ratio.

There would seem to be some resemblance between the way Eros acts in the mind of a lover and the way knowing acts in the mind of a thinker. It has been an endeavour of philosophy from the time of Socrates to understand the nature and uses of that resemblance. But not only philosophers are intrigued to do so. I would like to grasp why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive. There is something like an electrification in them. They are not like anything else, but they are like each other. (Carson 70)

The peculiar taste of this “electrification” identified by the ancient poets was, in Sappho’s term, glukupikron (bittersweet). It is the samba feeling, celebrated in every variation (saudade, blues, tango): glad to be feeling . . . sad. Arendt agrees with this extension of Eros into the “life” principle. The delights of thinking are ineffable, she says.

The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life the human body is a corpse; without thinking the human mind is dead. This in fact is the metaphor Aristotle tried out in the famous seventh chapter of “Book Lambda” of the Metaphysics: “The activity of thinking [energeia that has its end in itself] is life.” Its inherent law, which only a god can tolerate forever, man merely now and then, during which time he is godlike, is “unceasing motion, which is motion in a circle”—the only movement, that is, that never reaches an end or results in an end product. (Vol I 123)

Lacan (psychoanalysis) updates Aristotle by showing the complexity of this motion, whose territory may be figured only by topology. This feeling of being alive is what the Allegory of Prudence attempts to access and bring into an emblem, to serve as axiom for a new ratio.

Kant’s reflective judgment assumes precisely the reality and universal irrefutability of this basic feeling (life).

One of the main aims of the Third Critique is to show that sensuousness is not alien to reason. It is the architectonic of reason itself, its systematic “organic” structure constructed through the analogous techne with nature—that is “signaled” in the apprehension of the beautiful. The feeling of life [lebensgefuhl] brought forth (experienced) in this apprehension marks the self as at once body and ethical being, because this realization of the self as body is concomitant with the realization of the “mit” [gefuhl] of being with the other, the feeling of the sensus communis and with the ethical as such. (Japaridze 41)

Concept avatar is designed to bring into thought this life feeling. What could be easier, you might say, but Nietzsche reminds us: that I live may just be a prejudice. In metaphysical terms, this life feeling creates a space, an opening in the world, giving a sense of something “more” (possibility, potentiality) that unfolds into an experience of freedom beyond or within necessity.

Reaching for an object that proves to be outside and beyond himself, the lover is provoked to notice that self and its limits. From a new vantage point, which we might call self-consciousness, he looks back and sees a hole. Where does that hole come from? It comes from the lover’s classificatory process. Desire for an object that he never knew he lacked is defined, by a shift of distance, as desire for a necessary part of himself. Not a new acquisition but something that was always, properly, his. Two lacks become one. (Carson 33)

Carson alerts us to the difficulty of the allegory: it must personify this hole.

Alberto Perez-Gomez generalizes this erotic character of space as fundamental to the entire Western tradition, and classifies it as a quality of chora.

Erotic space is not an a priori concept, nor an objectified geometric or topological reality. It is both the physical space of architecture at the inception of the Western tradition and the linguistic space of a metaphor, the electrified void between two terms that are brought together but kept apart. While this significant gap is the underlying subject of art (including love poems), bounded space is the underlying subject of architecture. It is the space for political and religious action and for theatrical performance, where drama produces katharsis and festival time occurs. It is limited space: in architecture, the creation of limits is crucial and cannot be reduced to material walls. Beyond the city wall of the Greek polis was a regional zone known as chora, a thick limit that was believed to be protected by specific divinities. This regional chora is a quasi-homophone of the central choros or dance platform that mediated between the spectators in the amphitheater and the actors on the skene in a dramatic performance. (Perez-Gomez 36–37).

The Greek understanding of beauty as “harmony” grew gradually out of experience with “joints” or arranging parts into satisfying wholes. The primary erotic “joint” refers to human genitals, and the gap between two people and all the related negotiations is included in the general art of “joining” (116). An electrate public sphere creates participation through this apprehension of the erotic character of dimensionality. Such is the tradition tested in our Allegory of Prudence, articulating the lived dimension of well-being. I will compose a scene of decision, as an experiment in electrate thinking: to think the life feeling that our tutors characterize as hole.

Tautegory

Prudence is a kind of “wind tunnel” testing flash reason. In the experience of the beautiful, central to the tradition we must upgrade, the mind’s eye is able to take in the whole of a situation in one glance (Augenblick). Prudence requires this power of ingenium, to run through the ratio of hypotyposis and grasp the proportion in one instant of wit. The goal of Renaissance pedagogy was to bridge the gap separating ars (teachable techniques) from ingenium (natural talent). The goal was to merge two kinds of instantaneous analytical insights.

The first is perspicacia, which “penetrates the most distant and minute circumstances of every subject.” This analysis is accomplished in terms of a supplementary list of Aristotle’s categories. The second is versabilita, which “rapidly compares all those circumstances among themselves, or with the subject; it joins and divides them, decides one from the other, indicates one by the other, and with marvelous dexterity puts one in the place of the other.” There is, [Tesauro] says, little difference between ingegno and prudence. (Summers 100)

Kant’s innovation in this tradition was to add consideration of the “sublime,” referring to conditions that exceed the capacities of both the outer and inner eye, the glimpse in a moment that takes the measure of a situation. Within the conditions of decorum, (beauty), the faculties are in harmony.

To every empirical concept, namely, there belong three actions of the self-active faculty of cognition: 1. the apprehension of the manifold of intuition; 2. the comprehension, i.e. the synthetic unity of consciousness of this manifold in the concept of an object; 3. the presentation (exhibitio) [darstellung] of the object corresponding to this concept in intuition. For the first action imagination is required, for the second understanding, for the third the power of judgment, which, if it is an empirical concept that is at issue, would be the determining power of judgment. (Kant qtd. in Fictioc 128)

Confronted with some phenomenon or event in nature that exceeds the capacity of imagination to present an image adequate to the concepts of understanding, the harmony is destroyed, producing displeasure. The interest of the judgment of the sublime in conditions that expose the empirical impotence of a subject, however, is the paradoxical transformation of this displeasure into the bittersweet revelation of moral freedom.

The experience of the sublime constitutes a sudden aspect change, where the intelligible point of view somehow breaks into the empirical through a “negative pleasure.” We feel the presence of the other perspective, and are made aware of the primacy of the intelligible over the empirical, which can be expressed through the idea of freedom. This neither leads to concrete actions nor gives any insight in how to deal with moral dilemmas, but has its importance in signifying our moral vocation, which is tied to our rational nature. (Myskja 130)

At stake in this experience is the capacity of the limitations of aesthetic form to evoke ethical intuitions that exceed form and experience alike.

Commentators agree that Kant’s sublime becomes the norm in conditions created by the industrial revolution, just beginning in Kant’s lifetime. Exemplifying the project to update hypotyposis, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s interest in the Analytic of the Sublime (just one part of Kant’s Third Critique) is due to the clue it offers for thought and action in an industrial and post-industrial society. In our terms, Lyotard’s adaptation of Kant’s sublime is an outline for deliberative rhetoric in electracy. The point that recommends Lyotard’s reading of Kant as a relay for flash reason (electrate prudence) is the support for thought provided by affect as a sublime feeling, and the rhetorical powers revealed in this experience of negative presentation. A theme of electracy (apparatus invention) is that the Western tradition already knows a great deal about flash reason (image metaphysics), and that in some respects flash reason has been an aspiration of this tradition all along, couched as speculation about the mind of God.

Lyotard calls attention to the ontological and metaphysical innovations of his project, to emphasize that the aesthetic judgments of taste and of the sublime are not approached in terms of objects and properties, essences and accidents, but as feelings that organize the heterogeneous manifold by means of mood or atmosphere (Stimmung). This affective order involves not categories, but “tautegories.”

For “logically” reflection is called judgment, but “psychologically,” if we may be permitted the improper use of this term for a moment, it is nothing but the feeling of pleasure and displeasure. As a faculty of knowledge, it is devoted to the heuristic, and in procuring “sensations,” the meaning of which will become clear, it fully discloses its tautegorical character, a term by which I designate the remarkable fact that pleasure and displeasure are at once both a “state” of the soul and the “information” collected by the soul relative to its state. (Lessons 4)

A tautegory is constructed according to the “manner” of its maker, a term that evokes the “concetto” of practical reason.

The apparent sitter in a Renaissance portrait was thus an external appearance showing an inward truth, and so, it might be said, were Renaissance works of art in general. The spirit they expressed, however, was not simply that of their subject, it was also that of the artist, who gave the painting its “life.” The Mona Lisa is a painting of—taken from the appearance of—a Florentine merchant’s wife and at the same time a painting of—from the hand and sensibility of—Leonardo da Vinci. This second, genetic relation between artist and image was fully recognized in the Renaissance commonplace “every painter paints himself,” and the idea adds another dimension to the central paradox that the objective world is only evident from a point of view. Individual style, or manner, developed together with portraiture (and naturalism in general), so that the work itself became “physiognomic” at the same time that physiognomy became a part of the science of painting. (Summers 111)

Tautegories are physiognomic, “singularities” rather than universals, opening as they do a space of “rendezvous” hosting events of decision in practical reason. Tautegories are anchored in feeling (this is the key), and are useful for inquiry in conditions that exceed understanding and knowledge, for the sublime formlessness of experience in the (post)industrial city (dromosphere). The further reflective judgment moves from what in our context is “literate” metaphysics, into the unknowns of electracy,

the more manifest the tautegorical aspect of reflection becomes. There are signs of it in the more frequent occurrence of operators such as regulation (in the “regulative Idea”), guidance (in the guiding thread), and analogy (in the “as if”), which are not categories but can be identified as heuristic tautegories. Because of these curious “subjective operators,” critical thought gives itself or discovers processes of synthesis that have not received the imprimatur of knowledge. Knowledge can only draw on them reflexively, inventing them as it does according to its feeling, though it may have to legitimate their objective validity afterward. (Lessons 33)

A first step for the invention of flash judgment, as Lyotard makes clear, is the introduction of thinkers to what might be called the new “decorum,” the relationship among thought, art, and conduct in the sublime city. The place of individual “manner” in electracy, and the role of physiognomy in guiding inquiry, suggest what is at stake. In traditional emblematics, “virtue” is represented by a scene (hypotyposis) of a beautiful woman beating an ugly woman with a stick. To persist with traditional ratios, and to neglect a necessary reeducation of common sense in the sublime judgment (that works with the full range of the bittersweet, repulsion as well as attraction, “ugly” as well as “beautiful”)—in short, a literal and uncritical physiognomy—leaves citizens unprepared to make prudent policy decisions not just with respect to cosmetic glamour or even Nazi racism but the coming revolution in DNA manipulation (the knowledge accident most feared by Virilio).

In his reading of Kant, Lyotard identifies what thinkers at light-speed may experience, which also helps target faculties in need of prosthetic augmentation. “The mountain masses, the pyramids of ice, the overhanging, threatening rocks, thunderclouds, oceans rising with rebellious force, volcanoes, everything ‘rude’ to be found in nature is sublime in presentation because it is at the limit of what can be grasped in a single intuition. . . . This effort is similar to the effort of the will that aims for virtue” (127). The now-time of electracy demands an enlarged capacity of the single glance against all rudeness. Lyotard finds in the rhetorical figure of “retortion” (a dialectical figure that affirms by denial) an anticipation of the extreme discordance to be negotiated by sublime judgment at light-speed (128). We learn from Kant how to notice in the manifest unhappiness of finitude the latent happiness of infinity.

Theory: Persona

The method of concept avatar is to adapt the literate concept structure to function in an electrate apparatus. Critical thinking is a practice specific to literacy, so to speak of an electrate concept for digital reasoning is like referring to an automobile as a horseless carriage. We live in a transitional moment, however, with experimental modernist literature serving as a bridge between epochs. Flash reason adapts philosophy to Internet culture. We still need theoretical thinking in electracy, but the old alphabetic techniques of inference are no longer adequate to or sufficient for the task. A methodology for our project is “heuretics” (the logic of invention). Heuretics appropriated from the history of discourses on method a generative formula for the creation of new forms and practices (Ulmer, Heuretics). The acronym CATTt identifies the set of resources needed for our invention: Contrast, Analogy, Theory, Target, tale. This generator guides a proposal for a hybrid concept (combining features of word and image), as well as the larger experiment in creating flash reason.

The ambition is to create a practice capable of conveying the accumulated potential of literate metaphysics, archived in databases, to an electrate player in a sublime glance. A hyperbolic goal, but no less worthy than curing cancer. For purposes of our exercise, I have zipped this archive into Nietzsche’s personal motto: werde der du bist. The particular quality of thought that we need our concept to support is judgment, individual decision making (prudence). The larger goal is to orient our compositional practice to the specific site from which will have emerged the metaphysics of electracy (the capacity of the body to undergo jouissance). Thus the exercise to compose an Allegory of Prudence is at the same time an experimental construction of an electrate concept. The Theory for inventing this transitional concept is derived from Deleuze and Guattari, especially from their final collaboration, What Is Philosophy? They argue that the concept as practiced in philosophy still has a role to play in contemporary civilization. Such concepts function through a kind of cinematic mise-en-scene. A philosophical concept includes the following parts:

1.Name: The “concept proper” slot in our template assigns a name to the idea (e.g. Descartes’s cogito). Deleuze and Guattari call for a stand (stance or attitude towards thought) that replaces subject/object orientation of thinking. Deleuze and Guattari name their replacement for the subject stand “event.” They call for a concept for thinking the position of “event,” rather than from the position of subject. Event thinks in and through me. It is a collective dimension of thinking that I receive readymade, to try on or adjust as needed to my expression. In the case of our electrate concept, we foreground the function of “stand,” the attitude in terms of turn, direction and posture, that operates through a concept. “Stand” differs from opinion (argument) or will (narrative).

2.Problem: Deleuze and Guattari replace subject thinking on a “plane of transcendence,” with event thinking on a “plane of immanence.” This plane or field is selected by our intervention in it, by our creative activity in relation to it, when we frame a field of discourse as problem. The problem Deleuze and Guattari select is that the construction of concepts initiated by Philosophy as part of the invention of literacy has been taken over by Commerce. The commodity form has already displaced Philosophy as the source for defining what constitutes the good life, happiness, satisfaction, well-being (one of the original questions of philosophy). Commercial discourse functions in our CATTt as Contrast.

3.Conceptual Persona: Concept construction includes a third feature, a persona that dramatizes in a vital anecdote how the proposed thought mediates the relation of a person to world. Instruction: personify the thought proposed by the concept in an appropriate character type or role, enacting the attitude and orientation of the thought (the stand). The examples of conceptual personae favored by Deleuze and Guattari include Socrates, Diogenes, and Empedocles. The anecdote(s) reported in each case allegorize or figuratively enact a mode of reasoning. Socrates: allegory of the cave. The way of the heavens. Conversion = movement through the inference procedures: abduction, deduction, induction. Diogenes: lived in a barrel on the public square, performed all his intimate functions in full view of the citizens. The way of the surface. Perversion = dramatize the metaphor in the idea. Empedocles: threw himself into Mt. Etna (he needed to disappear to corroborate his claim of transmigration of souls), but his (bronze?) sandal floating to the surface betrayed his action. The way of the depths. Subversion = transgression and destruction of forms (madness).

4.Presentation: The conceptual persona models how the concept thinks the problem plane. It remains to add to this instruction the manner of this modeling, its aesthetic premises. A text with a relevant instruction is the following:

The history of philosophy is comparable to the art of the portrait. It is not a matter of ‘making lifelike,’ that is, of repeating what a philosopher said but rather of producing resemblance by separating out both the plane of immanence he instituted and the new concepts he created. These are mental, noetic, and machinic portraits. Although they are usually created with philosophical tools, they can also be produced aesthetically. Thus Tinguely recently presented some monumental machinic portraits of philosophers, working with powerful, linked or alternating, infinite movements that can be folded over or spread out, with sounds, lightning flashes, substances of being, and images of thought according to complex curved planes. (What is Philosophy? 55–56)

Deleuze and Guattari’s opposition to “resemblance” or “representation” throughout the argument, with references to Cézanne, Klee, or Francis Bacon as relays, reinforces the instruction: do for the concept what modernist and vanguard arts did for the image. With this theme Deleuze and Guattari identify the Analogy of our CATTt (modernist art practice). In electracy, the conceptual persona will take a more important role, altering the hierarchy of the literate concept, in which problem and persona are subordinate to name (term). “The difference between conceptual personae and aesthetic figures consists first of all in this: the former are powers of concepts, and the latter are the powers of affects and percepts. The former take effect on a plane of immanence that is an image of Thought-Being (noumenon), and the latter take effect on a plane of composition as image of a Universe (phenomenon)” (65).

Socrates, as presented in Plato’s dialogues, is the prototype. Socrates embodied the persona of “gadfly,” buttonholing citizens in the streets of Athens in search of someone wiser than himself, in order to refute the Delphic oracle’s declaration that no man was wiser than Socrates. He dramatized “dialectic” as a mode of thought. We need to generate similar features for our conceptual avatar. Avatar is a conceptual persona, and this performance is a position that you ultimately learn to play (playing avatar). It becomes your Socrates, playing Virgil to your Dante, a spirit guide of your choosing. The function of avatar is to advise me on my decision, to consult on all matters of prudence. What statistics are to calculation (quantity), avatar is to prudence (quality). With the appropriated term “avatar” we are referring (paleologically) to a functionality, to be reverse-designed into a rhetorical (ontological) practice. As a transitional concept, avatar must support both thought and feeling. To get avatar you have to do the exercise, not just read about it. It is not a psychological but an ontological subject.

An electrate concept is not confined to the professional or disciplinary parameters of philosophy, but is a means for theoretical thinking native to a civilization of the Internet, in which digital imaging supersedes alphabetic writing. The historical record shows that each innovation in forms and practices of thought preserves some parts of the previous mode, abandons some parts, and adds some new elements. An electrate concept, in this spirit, does not simply reproduce Deleuze and Guattari’s proposal, but revises it with our purpose in mind, looking for those aspects of their poetics that lend themselves to digital imaging, while deemphasizing other aspects relevant only to the literate apparatus. The following discussion makes one pass through the generator, to propose a style of written reasoning adapted for electracy. Here is the CATTt: Theory, Deleuze and Guattari; Contrast, Commercial advertising; Analogy, experimental modernist arts; Target, the public sphere, deliberative rhetoric, the practice of consulting needed for a democratic society; tale (the tail of the CATT), referring to the form used to organize the other resources: Allegory of Prudence. This version is an invitation to test your own pass, revising the recipe to taste. The Allegory of Prudence we are composing is an experiment testing the electrate concept “avatar.” This is heuretics: learning as making-doing.

Contrast: Commerce

Deleuze and Guattari complained that Commerce took over concept production in our era, along with everything else in the order of public discourse. Roland Marchand’s history of the creation of the commodity sign is a useful resource to document our Contrast. He begins in the 1920s, which is not the beginning of advertising, but the first full separation of exchange value from use value in guiding promotional thought. Contrast is not a rejection of its source, but an inventory of materials to discover what sorts of concepts Commerce makes. Philosophy can learn something from Commerce about how to adapt to the conditions of electracy. We accept the formal discoveries of Commerce (use of icons, schemas, scenarios, tableaux and the like) but reject its propaganda stance on behalf of corporate profit. Our goal is thinking, not selling/buying. The real craft of using the CATTt generator comes at this point: How do we create (invent) a synthesis, a hybrid of our Theory and Contrast, to formulate an emergent set of instructions for constructing an electrate concept?

Our inventory of Marchand covers what Commerce got right, understanding that the emergence of electracy in a capitalist society is a contingency of history. Marchand describes advertising as the discourse primarily responsible for converting the citizens of the industrial city to the worldview of the new apparatus, which dates from the beginnings of the industrial revolution. This worldview is based in aesthetics, referring to the sensory faculty of taste described by Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century. The aesthetic image is to electracy what the analytical word is to literacy. The commodity form, separating exchange value from use value, desire from product, expression from object, allowed the pedagogy of aesthetic judgment to operate autonomously. Advertisers realized they were selling not the steak but the sizzle. Electrate intelligence, not just commerce but civics and ethics (practical reason), functions in the dimension of sizzle. Advertising discourse disseminated throughout America (and the emerging global economy) the inventions of Paris, including not only “fashion” but the new logic of taste, and the design styles of modernist arts. The appropriation in ad practices of popular culture forms from tabloid magazines to celebrity gossip and movies contributed to the didactic value, assisting the public in internalizing the new native discourse of the image apparatus. They were learning brand, but not avatar.

Within this general frame of Commerce as advice on modernization, the ads specifically demonstrated how to construct concepts in the emerging mass media discourse, and this is what Deleuze and Guattari recognized as a direct challenge to Philosophy. An important point of alignment between Deleuze and Guattari and Marchand is precisely here. The philosophical concept includes a conceptual persona to mediate between the “name” of the concept (the idea) and the problem plane or discursive field addressed by the idea (between the general and the particular). Literate concepts foreground idea; commercial concepts foreground persona. Everything that Marchand describes about the strategies of ad campaigns is relevant to the design of conceptual personae: social tableaux, parables, visual clichés, fantasies and icons. Betty Crocker and her peers are to Commerce what Socrates is to Philosophy. Plato’s parable of the cave in the Republic dramatizes the essential gesture of philosophy: conversion. One prisoner turns around, away from the shadows cast on the walls of the cave, to behold the true light of the sun outside the cave. Diversion (the “vert,” turn or trope of Commerce) is a conceptual stand of reassurance, crystallizing majority opinion around a few key figures (scenes). A prisoner. Turns. Such is the invention scene of philosophy.

The functionality of avatar concerns the ability of the persona and anecdote to materialize the attitude or stand (position, gesture) of thought as event. “Truth can only be defined on the plane [of immanence] by a ‘turning toward’ or by ‘that toward which thought turns’; but this does not provide us with a concept of truth” (What is Philosophy? 39). Kenneth Burke provides some context for the turning (the vert of version) enabled by “concept.” “Turn” refers to “trope” in rhetoric, and is the stylistic operation relevant to the “directionality” and movement of thought within writing. In his study of St. Augustine’s Confessions, generalized as The Rhetoric of Religion, Burke forgrounded the vert family in relation to decision-making (“voting or purchasing, giving answers to questionnaires, taking of risks calculated on the basis of probability”) (101). “I sometimes wonder whether the good Bishop of Hippo could ever have written that work were it not for the many Latin words that grow from this root, meaning turn” (Langauge as Symbolic Action 242). Augustine’s moment of conversion to Christianity (the famous scene in Book VIII) is analyzed dramatistically:

There are the tense moments of decision in formal drama, when the protagonist debates whether to make a certain move, and finally makes the choice that shapes his destiny, though he still has to discover what that destiny is. . . . We are interested in the kind of decision, if it can be called decision at all: the kind of development that usually takes place in the third act of a five-act drama. Despite his great stress upon the will, and despite his extraordinary energy in theological controversy, Augustine seems to have felt rather that, at the critical moment of his conversion, something was decided for him. Act III is the point at which some new quality of motivation enters. And however active one may be henceforth, the course is more like a rolling downhill than like a straining uphill. (Rhetoric of Religion 63)

The feeling that “something was decided for him” is the avatar function. This is the level of decision that concerns us: not some superficial choice, but the indictment of destiny (so to speak). This moment of decision and change is taught as the turning-point of the standard Hollywood screenplay, instructions for which may be found in countless primers on scriptwriting (coming in this genre at the end of the second act of a three-act script). There is a narrative or dramatistic dimension in our thought, but “concept” separates, isolates, and develops as an alternative to any particular turn or direction, the pivot or switch site, the Archimedian lever upon which turning of thought as such depends. Augustine contrasts his con-version with the per-version of his pagan experience. “As regards Augustine’s Confessions, the most notable use of the -vert family is in the contrast between Book II, concerned with what he calls his adolescent perversity, in stealing pears (a Gidean acte gratuit), and Book VIII, that describes his conversion” (93). Augustine, that is, decided to turn away from embodied pleasure. This turn is one version, one take, among possible attitudes. He tutors us on turning, but his movement cannot be ours. The instruction from Contrast is to foreground a persona to dramatize our idea, to show how to stand and turn in a problem field (understanding “turn” as “trope”). Each resource of the CATTt contributes to the final emergent poetics of our concept in an unpredictable way. The framing imperative is that we take responsibility for our own turning, and test it now with an Allegory of Prudence.

Analogy: Cabaret

Electracy dates from the late eighteenth century, the epoch of revolutions (industrial, bourgeois, representational, technological). We orient ourselves to our own epoch by analogy with the invention of literacy in Classical Greece. The term “apparatus” in this context (derived and expanded from media studies) is used to notice that the invention is a matrix including institution 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. (The Odd One In 49)

Although the spirit of Montmartre (our Analogy) is comedic or even parodic, the important lesson is not any one specific attitude, but attitude as such. The design lesson is to notice that parody works explicitly from a source.

The key to concept avatar is to learn from the CATTt how a vital anecdote associated with a conceptual persona produces thought. The relevant documentation in What Is Philosophy? is the references to modernist arts practices (literature, painting, music). The mental landscape of thinking relates to the problem plane by means analogous to those invented by Cézanne (for example) to express the physical landscape. The CATTt directs us to adopt the modernist arts plane of composition (invented in Paris) as a relay (Analogy) for treating the conceptual anecdote, in order to create a vector or a different turning within the problem, to challenge the commodity version of contemporary embodiment. The short-hand instruction from our Analogy, then, for how to compose a vital anecdote, is Duchamp’s readymade. An example of a readymade is a postcard representation of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, to which Duchamp (alluding to Sapeck as much as to Leonardo) added a mustache and goatee, plus a caption, L. H. O. O. Q. (the letters punning on a phrase in French meaning “she has a hot ass”). So much for the Dark Lady. The formal instruction includes not only the attitude, but the device: take a picture. The phrase alludes to the technology of imaging, and suggests a nickname for our conceptual procedure: take (verb/noun). Avatar takes thought (as birds take flight).

Bachelor Machine

Flash reason includes the readymade as logic (it shows what the readymade is for). The Documents of Contemporary Art series includes a collection on The Artist’s Joke. Marcel Duchamp anchors this collection, as he does the one on “Appropriation.” Pressed by an interviewer to accept sophisticated hermeneutic readings of his Readymades (such as the geometry book left out in the rain), Duchamp replied that it was a joke. A pure joke. To denigrate the solemnity of a book of principles. The rhetorical form exemplified in Duchamp’s work is that of the “bachelor machine.” Lyotard contributed an essay to the catalog of the famous exhibit in which Michel Carrouges established bachelor machines as a modern myth. These bachelors are imaginary machines, related to the absurdist science of “pataphysics” (Bok), whose machinations symbolized and allegorized human sexuality. The fate of Eros in modernity is expressed in these delirious devices, whose proliferation in art and literature Carrouges documented in his exhibition.

The simplest prototype of a bachelor machine is Lautreamont’s formula, adopted by Surrealism as one of its emblems: “he is beautiful . . . like the chance meeting of a sewing-machine and an umbrella on a dissecting-table!” (22). Among the more famous examples are the ones described in Raymond Roussel’s novels, some of Kafka’s stories such as “In the Penal Colony,” or Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Works by Picabia and other artists associated with Dada and Surrealism created these mental mechanisms, articulating at once the new beauty and the new Eros, with Duchamp’s Large Glass one of the foremost examples. They are apotropaic in defending against the anxieties of the industrial sublime. The first bachelor machine, Lyotard proposes, was Pandora’s Box, closing the circle (Blumenberg would say) with the fault of Epimetheus (Duchamp’s Trans/formers 45). Eureka! Lyotard considers the contradictory structure of bachelor machines to fall within the tradition of topical dissoi logoi, the technique of arguing both sides of any question (47). We are in the neighborhood of an industrial scale concept for thinking technics.

As Lyotard observed in the case of Duchamp’s anamorphic machines, the new topological and non-Euclidean geometries created new kinds of spaces, enabling new manners of relating in every respect. The result, central to our project, was a “new cunning” (58). Thierry de Duve’s discussion of Duchamp’s invention of the readymade establishes its importance as a model of a new decision logic. What becomes clear in de Duve’s account is that the readymade is not an “object” but an action, a statement in a discourse, modeling how to author in electracy (it anticipates Lacan’s object @). De Duve foregrounds an aspect of readymades of special relevance to our context: judgment as event rather than choice.

The Bottle Dryer of 1914 was Duchamp’s first pure Ready-made. Alternately entitled a Bottle Drainer, Bottle Rack, and Hedge-Hog, this piece was selected by Duchamp without the addition of other items or alterations. Essentially this object appears to be a work of “open” abstract sculpture, a symmetrical form that could have been made by some artist anywhere from the 1920s to the late 1960s. But in titling it by its literal designation Bottle Dryer, Duchamp was simply reinforcing an internal contradiction already established in many viewers’ minds. These facts simply define its claim to be called art. But Duchamp’s appellation of “hedgehog” for this restaurant appliance runs somewhat deeper. In an essay by Isaiah Berlin there is a comment on a line written by the Greek poet Archilochus, “mark one of the deepest differences which divides writers and thinkers, and, it may be human beings in general. The one type, ‘the fox,’ consists of men who live by ideas scattered and often unrelated to one another. But the man of the other type, the ‘hedgehog,’ relates ‘everything to a central vision, one system more or less coherent or articulate . . . a single, universal, organizing principle.’ ” Not only does this appliance resemble a hedgehog, apparently it suggests a unified vision. (Burnham 83)

Burnham read Bottle Dryer as emblem expressing aura (evoking “hedgehog” as a type of thinker). The readymade is a relay for the new judgment, for operant-idiots of anticipation. Readymades are a part of a larger context in which painters responded to the industrial revolution (the beginning of electracy) including the impact on their medium of the invention of photography and also of commercial tubes of paint. Duchamp’s solution to the crisis of painting was more extreme than that of his colleagues, in that, while they were willing to strip away nearly every attribute of their practice, to reduce it to some essential property (e.g. flatness), Duchamp took the final step and abandoned painting altogether. The point that de Duve stresses, is that the readymade is an act of pure judgment . It is an act of reflective judgment (in Kant’s terms) that puts the maker in the position of spectator, whose reception produces art. In contrast with literacy, this act of selection is empty of intention, the opposite of identity as self-presence.

This act of randomized selection and remotivation of the received or given is the point of departure for electrate decision. The device is neither mimetic nor expressive, but conative: the aim is to receive event (in the manner of consulting an oracle). That most of the Readymades are commodities, commercial objects, is an important part of the invention, demonstrating that electrate authoring shifts to a meta-level, taking as the material of its discourse the commodity-information sphere. Again, a crucial point is that this judgment is distinct from both understanding and reason (conceptual knowledge and moral belief) and represents a distinct region of valuation (the life feeling of “little sensations”—the infra-thin—what Lacan called lichettes). The equivalent of the natural written language from which the Greeks crafted the working concepts of philosophy is the discourse of popular culture, including Commerce, in all its forms and genres, the manipulation of which generates an ad hoc semantics (second nature).

De Duve’s detailed review of the R. Mutt case recognizes that the readymade is an utterance in a discourse and not an object, and hence to appreciate its status as a relay for electrate judgment. In our context we recognize it also as a move in a language game. What it means to position oneself temporally in the hinge of Now (as Lyotard described Duchamp’s stance, showing its relevance for flash reason), becomes clear in the cunning manifested in the process that resulted, eventually, in the recognition of a urinal, entitled Fountain, signed by one R. Mutt, as a work of art. A further Kantian element of de Duve’s history of this delay is his use of the formal ratio of hypotyposis, or the “algebraic comparison” as Duchamp called it, to articulate the steps Duchamp undertook to create his invention. As the story goes, Duchamp learned from his experience with Nude Descending a Staircase about the power of scandal to create publicity and status. He submitted Fountain anonymously, to test his colleagues’ declaration that any work by any person would be admitted to the exhibition of independent artists, for which Duchamp himself was one of the organizers. The submission was a provocation, an experiment, a joke, a gambit, a wager on the future of art, a wager that Duchamp won. Ingenium.

The significant point for our purposes is that Duchamp did not simply submit the assisted readymade and leave it at that. He manipulated the situation as a mediated image, to get not the object, but the picture of the object as provocation, 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 the former and assumes the latter. Intuition is actually the default mode, in research and quotidian thought alike, in conditions of massive complexity with rich redundancy in the information. It is also the mode in which fields of knowledge are invented, and sometimes transformed (creative discovery, sudden insight). If Kant were alive today, his example for the “sublime” might be “information” rather than “ocean storm.” The institutional pragmatic goal of concept avatar is to adapt the logic or mechanisms of intuitive inquiry to interface design for semantic web databasing.

The analogy with the sublime is apt, since, as Kant explained, in those conditions the site of world measure shifts from the objective order of things (the order of beauty), to personal embodied experience. Kant’s Copernican revolution in metaphysics (shifting the locus of categories from the world to the [transcendental] mind) was the point of departure for what has evolved into a new ontology of experience, made viable by digital imaging technologies. The notion of experience ontology is proposed by analogy with the invention of semantic ontology by the Classical Greeks at the beginnings of literacy. Being (ontology) is not in the world, but is a classification system made possible by alphabetic writing. Semantic ontology, based on the categories invented by Aristotle (substance and accidents), uses rules of definition to extract certain features from observed entities. The salient features that count as “essence” are those manifesting function (purpose, end): “form follows function” was in Greek metaphysics before it became the mantra of modern design. Certainly things had functions before literacy, but literacy put this quality of experience into a tool and institutionalized it. In recent decades these ancient categories have been made more flexible, but are no match for the information sublime.

Similarly, experience ontology is relative to the apparatus (social machine) that makes it possible or functional (digital imaging). The quality of experience made accessible to ontology in electracy is that of affective memory in the individual body. Affective memory is the deepest order of memory, existing only as somatic markers informing kinesthetic intelligence. It is “enactive,” resulting from the accumulation of routines, habitus, acquired through daily life, and carrying emotional charges associated in idiosyncratic (singular) ways with individual enculturation. Anyone who has reacted “automatically” in an emergency situation of instant reflex has drawn on this kind of experience (blink). More immediately relevant in our context is the fact that this dimension of emotionally cathected sensori-motor enactions is also the source of coherence for intuition and creative insight. This affective network does not depend on specific image representations, but is encoded across the senses, multimodally. The event of insight, in which irrelevant semantic domains are superimposed, yielding a eureka moment, is due to an affective match that is not in the semantics of the domains but in the idiosyncratic experience of the seeker.

The most extensive analysis of these sorts of matches is by Gerald Holton, historian of science, who introduced the phrase “image of wide scope” (wide image) to account for his observations (Ulmer, Internet Invention). Although Holton and others using his methods have studied hundreds of cases of the most productive people across the full range of sciences, arts, and society, the prototype is Albert Einstein. Einstein himself mentioned in his autobiography the importance of the memory of a gift from his father of a compass when Albert was four-years old. Albert was fascinated by the fixity of the arrow regardless of the movements of the compass. The attunement of Albert’s disposition or temperament was manifested in this fixity, which Holton abstracts as the “invariant principle.” This disposition found a match with “speed of light” in the physics problem set Albert addressed as an adult. Holton’s argument is that this affective trace is the reason Einstein and not Poincaré or some other equally well-prepared scientist solved the problem of electromagnetism.

The image of wide scope is present in cases not covered by Holton, such as that of Frank Gehry, designer of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Gehry reported that one of his most vivid memories was of the carp that his grandmother would bring home live from the market. Frank loved to watch the carp swimming in the bathtub, before it was served for Sabbath supper. The movements of this fish are now observed in the sweeping curved geometries of Gehry’s designs. The wide image accounts for Gehry’s recognition of this feeling in the geometries, which he began to use even before he had access to the computers that made them practical.

The immediate point of relevance is to note the interface feature, equivalent in experience ontology of essence in semantic metaphysics. This feature is the kinetic gesture, the motion charged with affect, in the scene (e-motion). For Einstein it was the one fixed feature within a turning frame; for Gehry it was the undulations of a swimming fish. Commentators from a diversity of fields have made similar observations of this feature as the appropriate interface between the affective body and the archive of documents. Gelernter, arguing for adding intuition and poetry to the AI model, used a reading of Genesis to show the feature: a series of stories, whose coherence was provided by scenes of Moses making a certain gesture of “a powerful arm outstretched.” Deleuze and Guattari, in their study of Kafka, similarly opened a new network of intertext within the oeuvre, a system consisting of an oppositional pair: bent head + portrait photo / straightened head + musical sound. The implication is that the phrases expressing such patterns are present in the surface text, and may be extracted as features, designed as hooks or attractors addressing potential matches in the idiosyncratic backstories of researchers, supporting browsing or low-focus inquiry.

The further implication is that experience ontology is inherently supported in audiovisual media. The fact that film (AV media) simulates the presentation of the world to perception enables it to record the event situations that trigger the somatic markers of enactive memory. Digital simulations of lens photography further enhance the ability of audiovisualization to enhance, augment, and bring into awareness and articulation this dimension of intelligence that until now has remained “unconscious.” Commentators in the Humanities are especially excited by the possibility that database simulation allows reflection upon the dispositions that are a primary source of judgments and decisions in ethics and politics (not to mention aesthetics). The positive aspect of this discovery is that filmic presentation, in its capacity to trigger deep memory, in principle allows individuals to examine under the hood of their bachelor machine. The caveat directed to promotors of neuroaesthetics comes from the philosophical aptitude of German language. Presentation (Darstellung) is an improvement on representation (Vorstellung). However, as Sam Weber pointed out in several books, both of these modalities are framed and repurposed by a third kind discovered by Freud, distortion (Entstellung). Star Trek already taught us that in VR, the most convincingly authentic experience is in fact a kind of dream. Its Stelle results from all the turns of tropology—condensation, displacement, rationalization, representability. Concept avatar does not propose any one place, stand, location (Stelle), but the functionality of place (chora).

After the Greeks had spent some time with their epics in written form they began to notice some clustering and patterns emerging within the words, the phenomenon of paronomasia, with a variety of words formed out of a shared or similar roots. “Dike” or “justice” was the first word that was studied systematically for these patterns, and became the first concept constructed in philosophy (in Plato’s Republic). Similarly, commentators today are noticing the presence of affective intensities emerging within image work. The next step is to do for these image patterns what the Greeks did for their word patterns: put them into an ontology, that is, a system for storage and retrieval of information on a massive scale, opening a further dimension to reality. The purpose of concept avatar is to support this passage from one style of concept to another. Avatar does not eliminate essence, but redirects attention to a different aspect of a scene, to different traits, that gather into an alternative pattern expressing and constructing an affective metaphysics. “Experience ontology” is a reminder of this background of flash reason, joining data extraction, visualization, and collaboration tools, to integrate data and interface design. Virtual worlds, or mixed (augmented) realities, may be designed to support experience ontology, both for pedagogy and research, by addressing the somatic markers of affective memory, enhanced by information retrieval. The proposal is that experience ontology is to creative discovery what semantic ontologies have been to scientific method. On the side of technics, we need an experience web to supplement the semantic web. The Allegory of Prudence probes this dimension of experience, accessing this feeling that motivates your image of wide scope. Electracy augments the sensory capacity of your body to know that your foot is in the fire, extended into the dimension of thriving, so that you (we) know when there is an emergency of well-being.