Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ