Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ