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Оглавление1 Prudence
Decision
In electracy a new identity behavior and experience are emerging within the tradition of avatar. To understand the full potential of avatar as subject formation (supplementing spirit and self) requires that we go beyond the narrow, partial borrowing of the term in contemporary parlance, to review the new demands placed upon the subject in electracy. A detour through Nietzsche provides an orienatation to the question, undertaken from my own perspective. The first section of Ecce Homo is entitled “Why I Am So Wise,” uttered in a complex tone. Didactic, a lesson on “wisdom,” concerning how I inhabited time: writing. What was “writing” and why did I do it? There will be some delay in getting around to my idiocy but you already have an inkling. It has everything to do with “inkling” (Ahnung) as a mode of thought in any case. “You,” I am talking to you and me—to the “self” I was in 1966, age twenty-one, and anyone else not put off by the second person. A decision was made or took place or was ratified during that year, a turn, and I am testifying in order to generalize to a “decision” theory for an image metaphysics. Dates: May 1966 / May 2011. Temporality is part of the enigma. In the cineplex watching Cameron’s Avatar through 3D goggles, when the auditorium filled with the drifting descent of glowing Woodsprites, I suddenly recalled a scene that happened in a Spanish olive orchard, May 1966. We all make decisions, choices, (mistakes) each in our own circumstances, conditions presented as situations. It was (retrospectively) a scene of decision. My decision is a way to think about decision itself, decision today and right now in your present circumstances, concerning some graphical interface for an online database. In this book I am playing avatar, belatedly.
Decision concerns event. There is an event to come but not directly so I will start with experience, to test knowing against living (knowing as living). Nietzsche was the philosopher I read in college. He posed the question that turned out to have set the agenda of my research career, speaking with the benefit of hindsight (but everything here is a delay, retrospeculative, aftering). There is a singularity in your life, Nietzsche advised, marking the intersection of the aphorism of thought with the anecdote of life. In my hands is Ecce Homo, the Walter Kaufman translation, the Vintage original, subtitled “How One Becomes What One Is.” Werde der du bist. It was his motto, adopted from Pindar, to acknowledge the antiquity of this imperative. There is an ambiguity that will have been important, whether “what” or “who” comes. I am testifying that I have learned there is no more important phrase than this one in the history of the Western tradition. Let this be the theme of our consultancy, this session between us, with regard to becoming what you are, and my imparting what I learned about it, as a kind of exit interview, a debriefing, now that I am bygone. You may be curious as well about this intersection and the convergence between thought and life, knowledge and experience, and how elders impart to youth useless counsel. Event includes the undergoing and the understanding.
Between the preface and the first numbered entry stands a paragraph designating the time of writing as a perfect day, Nietzsche wrote, everything ripening and not only the grape turning brown, when the eye of the sun fell upon his life. He looked back, looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once. He buried his forty-fourth year on this day, buried because saved, rendered immortal, by the works published that year, such as Twilight of the Idols, in which he attempted to philosophize with a hammer. “How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?—and so I tell my life to myself” (Ecce Homo 221). Don’t I know that feeling, doesn’t any scholar, when the printed volume is in your hands? That is part of what should be understood, the materialization of that product, a text, and the experience of making such a thing (here we go again). The nature of any object may be approached through this one, to relieve the illusion of its solidity, isolation, fixity, in order to undergo the force passing through it, materialized there, for what we are tracking is this axis of attraction-repulsion organizing reality in electracy. This concerns you.
Nietzsche addresses us from a site in Switzerland, an Alpine valley known as the Upper Engadine where he summered in the years between 1879—1888. I have some experience of the setting because of the seminars I taught in Saas-Fee for the European Graduate School. Walking the trails through and above that valley reminded me of Nietzsche, and perhaps I could have imagined myself in his place, except that my body was free of the pain and suffering that tormented his existence. That and also not being burdened with genius you might add, except that part of what I learned concerns the unavoidability of what genius names, even for you and me. Ecce Homo is a consultation, a book of advice, to be shelved with other self-help works. It seems Nietzsche’s books were little known in his own day, and in fact one motivation for Ecce Homo was to rectify this obscurity, the invisibility that made it appear as if it were a mere prejudice that he lived.
Against his instincts and habits, it became necessary for Nietzsche to declare: “Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else” (217). We listen to his counsel, vouchsafed in the guise of prudence and self-defense, in the name of self-preservation. The addressees are former colleagues, that is, all of us who do little but thumb books, losing in the process our capacity to think for ourselves. When we don’t thumb, we don’t think. I don’t disagree with Nietzsche’s condemnation as I compose in free indirect discourse, erlebte rede, paperback propped precariously to leave hands free for keyboarding. Thumbing about sums it up. Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one’s strength, to read a book at such a time, Nietzsche advised, is simply depraved (253). What would he say about you, sound asleep? He speaks from experience, for he knows himself, on how one becomes merely a reagent, how one reads to ruin, to be merely a match that one has to strike to make it emit sparks (thoughts). But isn’t that an allusion to Plato?
Now I must quote, since he invokes the virtue that is our theme, prudence, which is another name for a problem, a guide to the art of decision and the relation of experience to knowledge, in the invention stream leading to electracy.
At this point the real answer to the question, how one becomes what one is, can no longer be avoided. And thus I touch on the masterpiece of the art of self-preservation—of selfishness. For let us assume that the task, the destiny, the fate of the task transcends the average very significantly: in that case, nothing could be more dangerous than catching sight of oneself with this task. To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion what one is. From this point of view even the blunders of life have their own meaning and value—the occasional side roads and wrong roads, the delays, “modesties,” seriousness wasted on tasks that are remote from the task. All this can express a great prudence, even the supreme prudence: where nosce te ipsum [know thyself] would be the recipe for ruin, forgetting oneself, misunderstanding oneself, making oneself smaller, narrower, mediocre, become reason itself. (254)
This is a saving caveat, since our prudence will be of this latter sort, found rather than planned. Our prudence is fatal.
No need to quibble about this terminology of “selfishness,” since “self” is rather what is exceeded, whether or not there is a unity or a measure guiding one’s becoming. Tradition supplies a family of terms, such as conatus, in Spinoza: the principle that to live is to strive to persevere in one’s own being. Nietzsche is an heir of this fundamental project, assigned various names by different thinkers (Entelechy, Monad, Dasein) and so are you, in your striving to become what you are. Striving. And this striving, does it not feel as though it has some direction? This direction is prudence, monitored by avatar. Nietzsche has a task, and this is a crucial point: the transvaluation of all values, aka the eternal return of the same, or the will to power. He gave this task to himself. The existence and nature of “task” is part of our consultation, but even more significant is the experience in which Nietzsche had the thought. It is an event much cited in anthologies and surveys. It is dated August 1881, penned on a sheet with the notation underneath, “6000 feet beyond man and time.” That day he was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana, he relates; at a powerful pyramidal rock not far from Surlei he stopped. It was then that the idea came to him (295).
A thought happens to Nietzsche. He has an idea. This is the event in question. He experiences a moment of insight, literally an “inspiration.” This is the point, this conjunction of experience and knowledge, which is also a possibility for you, and concerns the functionality of avatar. Right there, if we can zoom in and linger. Everything that we will have said concerns just this event, this quality of thought. I want to understand “what happened,” because to the extent that it is an event, it is not over yet, and never will be over. Nor can it be left to the few geniuses of history. You need to have an idea. Tradition, and you are a diadoch, a successor, meaning that it depends on you, for thinking is not just for experts today. The biographical details include the fascinating young Russian woman, Lou Andreas-Salomé, who behaved for a time during this period as a disciple; and also there was the friend who introduced Lou to Nietzsche. Her name constitutes evidence in favor of “signature” as destiny. The thought of “Zarathustra” intersects with the anecdotes of Nietzsche’s walks through various landscapes, along the road to Zoagli past pines with a view of the sea, and also around the bay of Rapallo from Santa Margherita all the way to Portofino. Various landscapes contributed to the process, the unfolding of the idea that had more than one date and place, not only Swtizerland but also Nice and the ascent to the Moorish eyrie at Eza. A composite place of invention. Our tactic is always to take the hint, to look around at our own landscapes, rather than to make pilgrimages to Nietzsche’s territory. Nietzsche reported a correlation between his creative energies and the suppleness of his muscles. “The body is inspired; let us keep the ‘soul’ out of it” (302). Precisely, body, for it is the body that is augmented and thinks within an electrate apparatus.
As for this inspiration itself, it falls within the category of epiphany or revelation. “Revelation in the sense that suddenly, with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down—that merely describes the facts. One hears, one does not see; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightning, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form—I never had any choice” (300). The physical qualities of the rapture are associated with a feeling of freedom, of power, of capacity summarized as a depth of happiness. “One no longer has a notion of what is an image or a metaphor: everything offers itself as the nearest, most obvious, simplest expression. It actually seems as if the things themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors” (301). Like lightning, a thought flashes up. Such is the functionality we want, to manage what happens in cyberspace when the networked databases deliver a water cannon of information. Nietzsche got it, and we need a practice of getting it.
Happiness, considered as a feeling, along with a warning (it is not what you suppose). Yes, and the task of flash reason is to bring this experience into everyday pedagogy. This experience, this lightning flash of insight, the feeling of capacity or capability, potentiality, in which the world offers itself as a forest of signs composed in one’s native code, this is the mode of intelligence taken up in a rhetoric of flash reason, constructed for the quotidian practice of electracy. This experience need not be so esoteric, so Alpine, and must not be, if civilization is to thrive in in a digital apparatus. Not that I am so wise (you heard Nietzsche’s irony), but I love wisdom. I am testifying, not explaining.
Decorum
How to generalize into a practice the flash of insight? Flash reason, to accomplish the functionality of avatar as counsel, retrieves and updates the tradition of decorum as readymade wisdom. I don’t understand my own selection filter, but avatar does. Reality is ontological sampling. The modern meaning of the word “commonplace,” to indicate a banality or triviality, signals the weakness in manuscript pedagogy—its tendency to slide into cliché. The manuals always advised that the method required not just “imitation” but ingenium (genius), but the latter capacity was assumed and not considered teachable. The tradition was at its best, on its own terms, in the practice of imitations of complete individual works—even word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase transpositions of a model’s style and form, adapted to one’s own materials and situation (Moss 63). The postmodern taste for pastiche recovers some of the effects of imitatio. The mode included an appreciation for an allusive game in which the original source was partly disguised. Recognizing the model was part of the pleasure of reception of the oration or text. Pastiche is an important device for flash reason, nor am I concealing my reliance on a tradition.
The entire practice is an extension of Aristotle’s “category” into the highest orders of literate form. This metaphysical register of the alphabetic apparatus accounts for the grain or propensity of the method that led eventually to the rules of decorum, which in turn rigidified into stereotypes. Painters as much as writers were instructed that “each age, each sex, each type of human being must display its representative character, and [they] must be scrupulous in giving the appropriate physique, gesture, bearing, and facial expression to each of the figures” (Lee 35). Even if it is character RTW (off the rack), this iconizing process has important lessons for electracy, including an insight into the narrowing, pejorative meanings associated with prudence in modernity. “Decorum” came to mean “not only the suitable representation of typical aspects of human life, but also specific conformity to what is decent and proper in taste, and even more in morality and religion” (37). Through taste lifestyle itself becomes scriptable (reduced to style in early modernity, rhetoric prepared to take responsibility for lifestyle). Electracy requires designer character.
Aristotle recognized in the Rhetoric and in the Nicomachean Ethics that rhetorical decorum and prudence share a faculty of judgment that is not logical or theoretical, but practical; that does not subordinate an object to a general rule or concept, but responds to the particular per se. This is because both rhetoric and prudence are concerned with “problems about which different points of view [can] be maintained, questions open to debate because they [can] be judged only in terms of probable truth and [are] not susceptible to scientific demonstrations of irrefutable validity” (qtd. in Kahn 30). Thus Aristotle writes in the Rhetoric: “The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us . . . there are few facts of the ‘necessary’ type that can form the basis of rhetorical syllogisms. Most of the things about which we make decisions, and into which we therefore inquire, present us with alternative possibilities. For it is about our actions that we deliberate and inquire, and all our actions have a contingent character; hardly any of them are determined by necessity” (qtd. in Kahn 30). The standard of judgment for a proper or appropriate decision, in other words, was based in practical considerations “and derives its authority from the conviction that, in some practical sense, ‘what all believe to be true is actually true’” (32). Updated decorum has its point of departure not in shared opinion but singular experience.
Montaigne marks a moment of transition, in which the commonplace practice of manuscript culture passed into the print mode of the essay. Our project is to continue this update through literacy into electrate avatar. He exploited the topic of in utramque parte—the applicability of the topics to both sides of a case (to attack or defend a question)—which he extended from a rhetorical to an ontological level. He redefined prudence in terms of Pyrrhonist skepticism (53). This skepticism reflects the new sensibility, the changing worldview of early modernity, the new science and its philosophical proponents such as Descartes or Francis Bacon. For these authors “invention” shifts from finding or recognizing a traditional authority (opinion) to inquiry and the discovery of new knowledge. The authority of the “judge” at the metaphorical heart of “category” is exposed in Montaigne’s stance.
Montaigne’s proposition is an ironic or skeptical version of the speculative judgment. Unlike Hegel’s dialectic, Montaigne’s sentence is not the discovery of the identity of two terms, but a narration of the rhetorical structure of equivalence, or of the failure of dialectic. It does not reveal the “profound tautology of all thought,” but rather that an equation is authoritative only because it is apropos. In short, it is the copula itself that is the most appropriate, that is to say the most useful, because finally the most pleasurable and inevitable of human fictions. At first glance it seems to be a simple analogy between the mastery of art and life, or between rhetoric and prudence. But closer examination reveals that analogy is a process, that it is constructed and destroyed in the continual essay of the apropos. The essay as scale turns out to be a very dubious form of judgment. (149)
In the context of commonplace practice it is easy to see the extent to which Montaigne used a topical (readymade) grid to compose his essays. “A glance at one of the essays illustrates this. The essay ‘That We Should Not Judge of Our Happiness until after Our Death’ begins with a quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: ‘We must expect of man the latest day, Not, ere he die, hi’s happy can we say.’ This adage is then paraphrased; it is amplified by examples from ancient history and from myth; quotations from the classics are inserted generously; an exhortation is added; and the essay concludes with a brief epilog applying the moral” (Lechner 218). Kafka’s rhetoric continues this tradition in modernism in his appropriation of sayings and revisions of parables. The prototype of the technique (explained by Clayton Koelb), is an indirect reporting of a man seeking directions who asked a policeman the way. The policeman’s reply (“Give it up!”) indicates he took the question to be metaphysical (from one who has lost his way in life) (Koelb 11). These examples express our theme as well as its method: electrate wisdom.
The intellectual obituary of the commonplaces and the confidence in endoxal wisdom is Flaubert’s project for a mock encyclopedia of received ideas. The project reflects his own disgust with French bourgeois culture, dramatized in his novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet. He compiled a collection of platitudes and clichés that circulated in middle-class opinion, and also a collection of “stupidities” (the Sottisier) culled from supposedly authoritative or admired publications. He worked on these collections for more than twenty years, and bragged that he had read more than 1,500 books in search of his material. His method was authentically topical, in other words, but his motivation was parodic. The entries were listed alphabetically, and read not as factoids about something but as an annotation of current opinion. The entry for “feudalism” gives the flavor: “No need to have one single precise notion about it: thunder against.”
Multitude
The topical tradition went fallow, we could say, and represents now in its retrieval an important resource for an Internet choral counsel. At the conclusion of his review of rhetoric, for example, Barthes noted the “stubborn agreement” between Aristotelianism and mass culture in Western societies: “a practice based, through democracy, on an ideology of the ‘greatest number,’ of the majority-as-norm, of current opinion: everything suggests that a kind of Aristotelian vulgate still defines a type of trans-historical Occident, a civilization (our own) which is that of the endoxa” (“The Old Rhetoric” 92). He goes on to propose an assignment.
This observation, disturbing as it is in its foreshortened form, that all our literature, formed by Rhetoric and sublimated by humanism, has emerged from a politico-judicial practice: in those areas where the most brutal conflicts—of money, of property, of class—are taken over, constrained, domesticated, and sustained by state power, where state institutions regulate feigned speech and codifies all recourse to the signifier: there is where our literature is born. This is why reducing Rhetoric to the rank of a merely historical object; seeking, in the name of text, of writing, a new practice of language; and never separating ourselves from revolutionary science—these are one and the same task. (93)
Paolo Virno takes up where Barthes left off, seeing in this fit between Aristotle and the culture industry an opportunity for the recovery of a public sphere by using the “spectacle” against itself. The context for Virno’s proposal is the post-Fordist stage of capital, the information economy in which knowledge and invention are primary sources of wealth: wealth is not found in products but in the process of production. “In the spectacle we find exhibited, in a separate and fetishized form, the most relevant productive forces of society, those productive forces on which every contemporary work process must draw: linguistic competence, knowledge, imagination, etc. Thus, the spectacle has a double nature: a specific product of a particular industry, but also, at the same time, the quintessence of the mode of production in its entirety” (60).
The possibility of a new public sphere depends upon the emergence of a new collective identity, appropriate to the conditions of the electrate apparatus (currently embodied in the spectacle), theorized with reference to the writings of Spinoza. Should the collective body of society be constituted as a “people,” as a unified identity (as One), as Hobbes proposed? Or as a “multitude,” of many individuals, whose coherence does not depend on “identity” politics, as Spinoza thought? The history of modernity worked through the politics of various “peoples” (nationalism, in short). The new politics suggest a public life of the multitude. While this whole argument is relevant to the project of flash reason as a logic of deliberation for electracy, the immediate point to stress is Virno’s suggestion that the source of coherence for the multitude is the language capacity itself of human beings (the proprium, in fact, of Aristotle’s definition of “man”). To explain the kind of practice he imagines capable of supporting this electrate collectivity (image hegemony), Virno invokes the model of Aristotle’s topics and the commonplace tradition, which he sees as a particular embodiment of what Marx called the “general intellect.”
In today’s world, the “special places” of discourse and or argumentation are perishing and dissolving, while immediate visibility is being gained by the “common places,” or by generic logical-linguistic forms which establish the pattern for all forms of discourse. This means that in order to get a sense of orientation in the world and to protect ourselves from its dangers, we can not rely on those forms of thought, of reasoning, or of discourse which have their niche in one particular context or another. . . . The “common places” (these inadequate principles of the “life of the mind”) are moving to the forefront: the connection between more and less, the opposition of opposites, the relationship of reciprocity, etc. these “common places,” and these alone, are what exist in terms of offering us a standard of orientation, and thus, some sort of refuge from the direction in which the world is going. Being no longer inconspicuous, but rather having been flung into the forefront, the “common places” are the apotropaic resource of the contemporary multitude. They appear on the surface, like a toolbox containing things which are immediately useful. (36–37)
The value of Virno’s proposal is his recognition of the need for a shared mode of thought. The action item concerns a movement beyond reliance on expert specialization (techno-science) to the establishment of what used to be called “wisdom,” and which in practice represented the authority of tradition. The limitation of Virno’s insight and proposal is that he ignores the historical specificity of the apparatus. The commonplace tradition developed out of Aristotle’s metaphysics is specific to literacy. Or, the inference to be drawn from Virno’s argument is that the task is to do for electracy, the post-Fordist society of the spectacle, what Aristotle did for the Classical world: invent a new metaphysics, a category native to the digital apparatus, and a practice of thought adequate to the “toolbox” evolving so rapidly within new media culture. The project is not to follow in the footsteps of Aristotle, but to seek what he sought. The update from topics to pop culture takes care of itself, as in the genre typified by All I Really Need to Know I Learned From Watching Star Trek. Alain de Botton is closer to traditional decorum in How Proust Can Change Your Life. Concept avatar is ontological self-help.
Allegory
Avatar as conceptual persona retrieves decorum and the topical tradition, updated as a means for individuals to use the Internet as a commonplace chora. Harold Bloom, in his poetics of the modern crisis poem, noted in poets’ dialogical struggle with precursors in the tradition an underlying continuation of commonplace compositional procedures. Bloom traces the tradition of topics from Classical rhetoric, the art of places in Cicero, who listed sixteen topics of invention (devices for generating “copy”). Bloom finds six revisionary ratios persisting in Romantic and modernist poetry, surviving their historical transmittal through Associationist Psychology of the Enlightenment, as in Locke’s association of ideas, “founded on the notion of habit and memory as modes of repetition that fixed ideas through the accompaniment of pleasure and pain” (“Poetic Crossing” 516). This diachronic rhetoric continues into the present, with Bloom’s useful insight into Freud’s dreamwork and the defense mechanisms of unconscious thought as a new terminology for the old tropology of rhetoric. Flash reason extracts from Bloom’s ratios a poetics for consulting with the global cultural archive. Modernist crisis poems (from Wordsworth through Ashbery, in Bloom’s canon) offer a relay for playing avatar (the meaning of this phrase will deepen as we progress). To say “relay” means that the analogy is loose, heuristic, experimental. Keep in mind that you are inventing a practice of decision, a guide to action.
We need an exercise to ground these detours of history and theory in our own experience. Our consultation falls within the same genre as the one motivating Ecce Homo, except that I am working the other side of the aisle, that of the idiot. Already names of the experience to which I am testifying are accumulating on the side of knowledge but we mean to reach across from knowledge to this other lived dimension, sometimes confused with ignorance, stupidity, nescience. Since I can’t think without thumbing, let me set up an exercise through which you may approach a version of Nietzsche’s moment. I need a form in which to cast the memory of an event, and Titian’s Allegory of Prudence looks promising. The prudence organizing Nietzsche’s advice is what the Greeks called phronesis. What I have to impart can be approached as an update, adaptation, appropriation of this tradition, virtue, capacity, faculty. I am speaking of the Western tradition, but not only that, since our concern is with wisdom and its deficit, an ecology of thought for a global consultancy. We all need to be on the same screen, with correlated databases, to make the coming decisions, which require some device with decision as a specific experience and practice. Can there be an electrate decorum? Solve WWXD? for the value avatar (what would avatar do).
The ambition of flash reason is to support collective epiphany, despite the skepticism of pundits today, questioning the very possibility of “defining moments” creative of national unity. The event motivating this concern was the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, and the conversation led to regret that even the sense of community following 9/11 had no lasting effect. “It may just be that modern society is impervious to brilliant flashes of clarity. There is very little shared experience in the nation now; there are only competing versions of the experience, consumed in such a way as to confirm whatever preconceptions you already have, rather than to make you reflect on them” (Bai ). Flash reason does not concern opinion, does not operate in the dimension of persuasion. Rather, it takes up the operation itself of “version” that puts us in a spin. It thinks the preconceptual.
We are updating an ancient ambition, concerning how humans might communicate with God/gods. The relay from the tradition indicates that individuals may appropriate for themselves if not absolute comprehension (nous), then at least the accumulated potentiality of the archive. Take Titian, for example. Titian’s painting is composed as an “emblem,” consisting of a picture and a motto, whose relationship poses a certain enigma. The practice we are proposing, flash reason, depends upon a (digital) image metaphysics, just as literacy developed a metaphysics of the written word, and we will use the latter as a relay to construct the former. Emblem is a hinge articulating the two apparati. Titian’s picture shows the heads of three men, each posed in alignment with the heads of three animals directly below them. The motto reads, “From the [experience of the] past, the present acts prudently, lest it spoil future action.”
The elements of this inscription are so arranged as to facilitate the interpretation of the parts as well as the whole: the words praeterito, praesens and futura serve as labels, so to speak, for the three human faces in the upper zone, viz., the profile of a very old man turned to the left, the full-face portrait of a middle-aged man in the center, and the profile of a beardless youth turned to the right; whereas the clause praesens prudenter agit gives the impression of summarizing the total content after the fashion of a “headline.” We are given to understand, then, that the three faces, in addition to typifying three states of human life (youth, maturity, old age), are meant to symbolize the three modes or forms of time in general: past, present, and future. And we are further asked to connect these three modes or forms of time with the idea of prudence or, more specifically, with the three psychological faculties in the combined exercise of which this virtue consists: memory, which remembers, and learns from, the past; intelligence, which judges of, and acts in, the present; and foresight, which anticipates, and provides for or against, the future. (Panofsky 149)
We may borrow from Titian’s Prudence the concetto form, his personalizing of the iconography. The role of epigram in an emblem is to resolve the enigma (in this case) of the busts (humans and animals) juxtaposed with the motto invoking prudence. That role is played here by the fact that the three men are Titian and his family: the old man is a self-portrait; the mature man is Titian’s younger son; the youth is an adopted grandson. The painting celebrates an occasion of satisfaction, a prudent action—the successful completion of a legal case in which Titian changed his will so that his inheritance would pass not to the oldest (scoundrel) son, but to the younger son (who is shown as the lion) (166). Most of all, it is an encounter with time.
The three animal heads are derived from several iconographic traditions (image commonplaces), as Panofsky explains. The tricephalous monster was a companion of Serapis (Pluto), god of the underworld. The arrangement associates the old man with the wolf (the past devours time); the mature man with the lion (action in the present); the youth with the dog (always trying to please, in hopes of a good outcome). The three heads in the convention are joined by a serpent’s body—the serpent being an allusion to the snake swallowing its own tail. Titian’s design reflects the Renaissance fascination with hieroglyphic signs popularized by the Neoplatonists. Gombrich cites Ficino as providing the charter for the art of emblematics, setting a precedent from which modern advertising benefitted, for our ads are precisely emblems. Modernity through advertising already absorbed what the tradition knows about thinking fast, about instant comprehension, but there is nothing inherently Capitalist or Christian about the emblem.
When the Egyptian priests wished to signify divine mysteries, they did not use the small characters of script, but the whole images of plants, trees or animals; for God has knowledge of things not by way of multiple thought but like the pure and firm shape of the thing itself. Your thoughts about time are multiple and shifting, when you say that time is swift or that, by a kind of turning movement, it links the beginning again to the end, that it teaches prudence and that it brings things and carries them away again. But the Egyptian can comprehend the whole of this discourse in one firm image when he paints a winged serpent with its tail in its mouth, and so with the other images which Horus described. (Ficino qtd. in Gombrich 158–59)
Emblematic images support flash reason by means of enigmas that provoke thought to move beyond the given sense.
Not only can we not think of the sign as representing a real creature, even the event it represents transcends the possibility of our experience—what will happen when the devouring jaws reach the neck and the jaws themselves? It is this paradoxical nature of the image that has made it the archetypal symbol of mystery. The serpent does not represent either time or the Universe, but precisely because it is inexhaustible in its signification it shows us so much “in a flash” that we return from its contemplation as from a dream we can no longer quite recount or explain. (159)
The “flash” of inference produced by such “open signs” does involve some articulation: “the experience of meaning after meaning which is suggested to our mind as we contemplate the enigmatic images becomes an analogue of the mode of apprehension in which the higher intelligence may not only see one particular proposition as in a flash, but all the truth their mind can encompass—in the case of the Divine Mind the totality of all propositions” (159). We could just as well think of the schema as an allegory of rhetoric, sorted out according to temporal responsibility: forensic (past), epideictic (present), deliberative (future). The flash of reason has always been desirable but becomes a necessity when the three time zones collapse into Now. And for “the Divine Mind” read “Internet,” since what is at stake in our updating of Prudence is the functionality of what was imagined and described in previous eras as the “mind of God.” Avatar is how individual and collective (total) beings communicate in a digital apparatus.
Template
In order to exercise the quality of experience augmented in electracy, you may compose your own Allegory of Prudence, using Titian’s work as a point of departure. The template includes the formal possibilities (allegory, iconography, portraiture), and also the content (a family incident, cultural mythology and legend). The work celebrates a satisfaction. The purpose of the exercise is to get a feeling for flash reason by composing an image commemorating an act of decision, specifically a decision covered by prudence. It is not that the action was itself prudent, but that im/prudence offers a frame, a measure, of your judgment (your decision). The elements of the template include 1. a grounding in personal experience, specifically some decision made in the past, that is memorable for whatever reason; 2. a framing of this event by the tradition of the virtues, specifically prudence, which measures the decision in the context of time (past-present-future); 3. icons: find some equivalent for the allegorical animals, which are “corporate” in McLuhan’s sense, each having an assigned meaning in the cultural encyclopedia, recoded to make specific sense in the setting created by Titian; 4. compose a motto or maxim (even a proverb) that expresses the moral of the event.
The rule of thumb for such assignments, when adopting existing works as a relay for a new composition, is to ask “what is that for me, in my circumstances?” Such is the pedagogy of decorum. I observe prudence in Nietzsche or Titian not as information for an exam, but to notice prudence in my own case. With this rule in mind, it is worth noting that Francesco Clemente did a version of our exercise in a different context, as part of a millennium celebration, in which the National Gallery invited twenty-four contemporary artists to make a new piece based on some historical work in the collection. Clemente chose Titian’s Prudence as his relay, but the “encounters” idea suggests that a further element in our template puts in play Titian’s work itself: the point of departure may be Titian’s allegory, but then some other work of art might be selected to guide the remake, as a relay for the commemoration design. The modified instruction is: select an existing work of any sort, genre, medium, mode, as a reference for your allegory. Clemente’s remake indicates also how loose this adaptation may be, since his version expresses ambivalence. The template identifies fields of attention, to provoke thought.
The salient components of Clemente’s remake, entitled Smile Now, Cry Later, were inventoried in the commentary by the curator of the exhibition, Richard Morphet:
1.The point of departure for the theme came from one of Clemente’s friends in Los Angeles, a Chicano, who had a tattoo including a statement of wisdom popular among his peers. On each arm there was tattooed a girl, one smiling, with the words “smile now,” one crying, with the words “cry later.” Similar wisdom may be found in a number of classic proverbs.
2.Clemente chose to enter a dialogue with Titian’s allegory for several reasons, beginning with his own admiration for the emblem as a form and tradition. Ezra Pound’s imagism, or vorticism, was one resource, taking the poetics of the ideogram as an updating of the emblem, with its capacity to create an internal flash of coherence through the juxtaposition of heterogeneous materials.
3.Clemente riffed on Titian’s iconography (relating the three ages of man with three totem animals) which Clemente associated with the gryllus, a representation for Medieval people of the baser instincts of life. The gryllus theme is evoked through the growing vine, each of whose leaves depicts a naked black man, each one either smiling or crying and holding a paper with the appropriate half of the title proverb. Superimposed over the entire scene is a winged phallus, an ancient symbol associated with sexual cosmic vitality. The gryllus and the winged phallus may be read as conflicting attitudes towards embodied desire.
4.The painting fills a wall (92 x 184 ins), done in a style evoking graffiti art, including spray painting, referring to the setting in which Clemente’s Chicano friend lived (the vulgar gryllus).
How do I go on from here? What is the vector of the relay from Titian through Clemente to me, intimating how I may configure my own relationship with prudence? It is worth remembering that the purpose of this exercise is to learn from the history of prudence (good judgment) how to deliberate at the speed of light. The reason prudence works in a flash is because the response is “character” (given). “It is plain that the word ‘character’ must be taken here in a stronger sense than the one we ordinarily associate with it: as meaning not just firmness, but rather inalterability of character. Because of such an intransigence, of such a single-mindedness, so to speak, the ancient concept of character, which Goethe properly translates with daimon and not with ethos, must be assigned to the sphere of nature, and not to that of ethics. The moral of the fable, as Shaftesbury puts it, can only be an ostensive gesture: ‘such a one he is! Such he is – Sic, Crito est hic! This is the creature!’” (Stimilli, The Face, 51). The Allegory exercise uses decorum to help you map the sources of this response. Our task differs in its motivation from nostalgia for the classical virtues expressed by William J. Bennett, whose The Book of Virtues was a best seller for some time. (How uncouth). That book, and its companion volume, The Moral Compass, amount to florilegia–- collections of moral exempla, which are useful as far as they go, exhibiting the alliance of prudence and decorum. What we want to retrieve is not the old virtues (the Allegory is not mimetic), but a time-image for decision-making in electracy, in vicious circumstances.
