Avatar Emergency, Part 4

Avatar within electracy as apparatus is appropriated as the vehicle and site of flash reason, making it possible for citizens to participate in deliberative democracy even in the dromosphere.  Avatar is practical reason against the Internet Accident, meaning that it updates prudence or good judgment.  The challenge facing the temporality of prudence is speed, dimension collapse, in which past-present-future are Now.  The method of heuretics applies McLuhan’s principle of innovation through retrieval of obsolete practices from the archive.  In fact the Western tradition has dreamed of sudden thought or flash reason from the beginning, always associated with images (as opposed to linguistic discourse), and attributed to the mind of God.  God in electracy moves from grammar to the Internet.  Flash reason extracts from the genealogy of sudden thought a logic of imaging, involving a modality of time-space formulated in German philosophy as Moment (Augenblick).   Heidegger shifted the orientation of category from Aristotle’s juridical indictment to poetic epiphany.

The work of inventing flash reason is to adapt the formal operations of traditional

Bride and Bachelors

prudence or practical reason to the aesthetic forms of art.  Good judgment was understood traditionally as the ability to formulate maxims based on past experience, and apply them ad hoc or on the fly in the midst of problematic situations leading to beneficial outcomes for the community.  This kind of wisdom based on the authority of experience is destroyed by the industrial city, creating conditions that Kant euphemized as the sublime.  The dromosphere is sublime, a condition in which individual experience is impoverished and without access to the causality at work in events.  This chapter establishes first the nature of Moment or epiphany as experience of one’s own limits, threshold, mapping the contour of inside-outside through the composition of a figure.  In addition the logic of Moment invented and enhanced by modernist arts is described:  the bachelor machine, exemplified most purely in Marcel Duchamp’s Ready-mades and Bride works.  Avatar is a bachelor machine.

Avatar Emergency continued:  Interscene 3. Miami Virtue:  Family Discourse

The third discourse of the mystory allegory of prudence is documented in this interscene.  The primary feature that recommends divination as a contemporary rhetoric of deliberation is its achievement of a relationship between the macrocosm of the civilization and the microcosm of the individual netizen.  This taking into account of the thinker in the conceptual system was formalized in Renaissance rhetoric as the “concetto,” and in modern semiotics as the tripartite sign (Pierce), including the interpretant.  The attunement of a zone of public policy problems (equivalent of defining a concept) happens when a netizen takes the role of querent, and poses a “burning question” (a personal dilemma) to the policy problems manifest in the zone or “templum.” This reading strategy is justified by semiotic accounts of myth, showing that societies use debates surrounding disasters (such as the sinking of the Titanic) to organize public thinking about points of ideological contention.

The philosophical genealogy of divination begins with Heraclitus declaring that the oracle at Delphi does not reveal or conceal, but intimates.  Heidegger appropriated this winking sign as proper to the mode of truth he found implicit in the Greek term “aletheia.”  Derrida revisits the whole genealogy in his essay on Kant, “Economimesis,” reviewing the notion of nature as constituting signatures, the enciphered  language God spoke with Adam. Truth as disclosive withdrawal (a paraphrase of the etymology  a-lethe) describes the choral measure from Plato to Derrida’s trace.  It is a poetic or aesthetic recording of the properties of the world.  The proposal of choragraphy is that, whatever the theological merits of that account may be, it has practical value for flash reason in cyberspace.

The Family Discourse documents Barbara Jo Revelle’s anecdote of a childhood memory (a primal scene in Blanchot’s sense) that grounds the mystory in a particular sensibility or disposition.  The

Barbara Jo Revelle

documentation includes entries from Revelle’s journals kept during the consultation, along with references to the situation motivating the burning question: her relationship with her partner (love is the prototypical burning question).  The purpose of the interscenes is to go beyond a simple declarative exposition of the different registers of the mystory, to dramatize the material details of the case.  This documentation singularizes the consultation, shows the richness of detail making possible the precision of choral measure, and models for others the terms to adapt to their own consultations.

Avatar Emergency, continued:  Part 3:  Category

Avatar operates in the imagined community.  Citizens have avatars the way they have cars and driver’s license.  Avatar consulting addresses several layers of wisdom formation:  witness (accumulation of observations); scenario construction for mythography; category in image metaphysics.  Avatar attunement of a zone (as demonstrated by Revelle in Miami) is to electracy what definition of a concept is to literacy.  The analogy for the vicissitudes of avatar as image category is Blanchot’s updating of Orpheus’s descent into Hades to rescue Eurydice.  The insight is “descent,” that the experience of being/having an image in cyberspace is understood as

Orpheus

“mourning,” or the “entry into language.” To say that avatar is to electracy what category is to literacy means that imaging must function as measure, as organizing system articulating reality out of the Real, for me (distributed metaphysics).  Metaphysics is singularized, but reassembled and correlated in the KaChing. This chapter outlines the logic netizens learn in order to function categorially in cyberspace.  The practice of tagging and formation of folksonomies now commonplace online are the behavior to be augmented by this metaphysics.

The formal operator originated with Plato’s account of chora, a third order introduced to mediate Being and Becoming, a measure sorting chaos into order.  The chapter retraces the genealogy of chora through several key moments of invention and development:  Aristotle’s “categories,” the commonplace and topical pedagogy of manuscript culture, especially its use of the virtues and vices as primary categories; the icon in Byzantium.  These instances of chora are used to offer a vantage point on the society of the spectacle (the dromosphere).  Kant’s introduction of aesthetic judgment as a bridge between Being and Becoming (Pure and Practical Reason) updates choral measure for modernist art as the basis for an image logic.

Interscene 2.  Miami Virtue: Entertainment Discourse

Myami Virtue

The mystory consultation on the Miami River continues, documenting the expression of Miami in Entertainment discourse.  Dubbed “Myami,” to distinguish the brand (image, reputation) from the historical city, the documentation samples the media environment circulating within the scene to be organized by the consultation into an interface metaphor for an electrate deliberative cloud of services.  Myami is tracked through a Colors of Benetton advertising campaign, and the television series Miami Vice, which, as an example of the neo-noir genre, embodies the Frontier myth (Crockett and Tubbs).  Picking up the implication of the theoretical chapter, the Interscene follows the invention of the noir mode and its forensic aesthetics into its history as a Franco-American syncretic invention.  The French Situationists, representatives of the acephallic artist heroes, embraced the noir motif as a strategy for an experimental urbanism against the rationalist urban planning of Corbusier.  The Situationist strategies for creating situations in the city are adopted as guide to way-finding in the information space of the dromosphere.  The FRE consultation learns from the SI how to translate a city zone into an image, making it available as an interface metaphor for an Internet oracle.  Avatar functions as a means for citizens to play the role of distributed sage, to participate in authoring a wisdom for electracy, against the commodification of well-being.  Respecting the syncretic nature of this proposed practice, the Internet oracle is called “KaChing.”

Avatar Emergency outline continued:

Avatar, within a database prosthesis and oracle interface, supports an Internet public sphere.

Inventing Salome

Individuals have always made decisions at the speed of light, at blink speed, in situations of emergency or crisis.  Habitus expressed through stereotypes (individuals) and myths (collectivities) guides decision-making even in modern literate democratic states.  Image metaphysics, through the practice of flash reason, brings this blink dimension into a medium and expression, opening it to ontology, and hence to revision and education.  The point emphasized within apparatus theory is that these cultural operations are invented.  The primary mythology organizing American public and foreign policy is the Frontier.  Our most recent, and probably not the last, cowboy president was George W. Bush.

Electracy dates from the rise of the industrial city, beginning in the nineteenth century.  The new recording technologies invented in the modern city, most of them institutionalized in forms and modes created by Entertainment, functioned to help citizens adapt to industrialization.  The closing of the historical frontier near the end of the nineteenth century motivated the creation of the Frontier myth.  The names and dates of this invention are well documented.  The purpose of this chapter is to extract from this history (in the account by Richard Slotkin) not only an analysis of this myth as a world-view guiding policy formation as well as Entertainment forms, but also a poetics that may be generalized as a means to revise the Frontier or even to author a new mythology more adequate to the global conditions of electracy.  Within this general poetics the creation of several character types is reviewed:  the cowboy (becoming hard-boiled detective), Salome (becoming femme fatale).  A counter-mythology of the (European) artist hero is reviewed as well, representing an “acephallic” stance in the cityscape capable of thinking with the seductions of surface special effects, alternative to the nostalgia for rationality and individualism that still inform the common sense of American national identity.

Avatar Emergency outline:  continued.

Crossroads (composite)

The Interscenes document an experiment in consulting, known as the EmerAgency, conducted by the Florida Research Ensemble, a creative arts collaboration, in the city of Miami.  This consultation on public policy problems demonstrates a practice of imaging showing the practical possibilities of flash reason (image metaphysics) theorized in the chapters. The insight unpacked historically through the theoretical chapters is that the identity dimension of the apparatus mutates out of a new kind of experience that occurs through engagement with the new recording equipment and its institutionalization.  Selfhood is an invention relative to alphabetic writing, as Eric Havelock has shown, originating in a different experience of thought undergone during reading and writing.  “Avatar” similarly names a different experience of thought, undergone through filmic media, leading similarly to new behaviors and ultimately to an ethics and politics native to electracy.  Shorthand terms for this experience are “post-human,” or “terminal identity.”  The experience in question is the “uncanny,” a particular version of “alienation,” theorized primarily by Marx, Freud and Heidegger, and manifested generally in the aesthetics of modernists arts.  The “uncanny” names the process, underway since the beginning of electracy in the rise of the industrial city, by which individual agency separates from itself and returns from the outside (return of the repressed, commodity fetishism, Event, the Neutral).

Avatar inhabits this experience, capturing its force in a logic derived from modernist poetics, named flash reason.   It is poetic epiphany put into a rhetoric for general electracy.  The rhetoric of this practice is not itself new, in that it is the mystory pedagogy first introduced in Teletheory (Ulmer, 1989), and developed in subsequent books, through Electronic Monuments (Ulmer, 2005).  What is new in Miami Virtue is the extension of the mystory into a group collaborative mode of inquiry.  This experimental practice for an Internet public sphere is described through four Interscenes, providing along the way an example of flash reason.  Mystory, in the digital prosthesis, allows the consultant to think in four discourses simultaneously.  Each discourse of the Miami mystory is treated separately, in its own Interscene, beginning here with the Community discourse setting up the public policy problem engaging the consultancy:  the Caribbean Code safety policy that excluded Haitian trading boats from the Miami River port.  Documentation is used to establish the atmosphere of the setting:  news reports, tourist guides, policy pamphlets, interviews, all relevant to the consultation.  The rationale for this documentary approach is to allow readers to discover and track the constellation or choral pattern as it emerges within the archive of the policy zone.

Hal Foster was in Gainesville to give a lecture for the Architecture School.  The theme was neomodernism, focusing on Norman Foster and Renzo Piano.  I had not heard the story before about the role that childhood memories played in Piano’s aesthetic.  It is another example of an image of wide scope, the formatting of an imagination in specific childhood experiences.  There are two memories that reinforce one another in Piano’s case:  one of watching sailing ships in the port city of Genoa, his hometown; the other of laundry blowing in the wind on the roofs of the city.  Below are two citations documenting the references.  The images are of the “flying carpet” roof, the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago.

"Flying Carpet" roof

The notion of a ‘light modernity’ is suggestive. ‘There is one theme that is very important for me,’ Piano remarks: ‘Lightness (and obviously not in reference only to the physical mass of objects).’ He traces this preoccupation from his early experiments with ‘weightless structures’ to his continued investigations of ‘immaterial elements’ like wind and light. Lightness is also the message of his primal scene as a designer, a childhood memory of sheets billowing in the breeze on a Genoese rooftop, a vision that conjures up the shapely beauty of classical drapery as well as contemporary sailing boats as architectural ideals. For Piano lightness is thus a value that bears on the human as well as on the architectural – it concerns graceful comportment in both realms.

Windsack

The talk of not struggling is all very well, but in order to be where he is today, Piano has had to work very hard, with great purpose and commercial nous. (His point is that it is a question of balance.) Piano’s outlook is heavily influenced by two things: having been a child in postwar Italy, and growing up near a port. “A harbour,” he says, “is like an imaginary city where everything keeps moving.”

Every Sunday his father would take him to Genoa’s harbour and Piano would watch the ships, which he thought of as “immense buildings that move”. When they sailed, he watched them cross the water and imagined that they were flying. These notions converged in his mind to form an idea of buildings as structures that “fought against gravity”, as “miracles”.

I said I would publish the abstract of Avatar Emergency (my book in progress) starting from the conclusion, and did.  But now this decision seems a false start, since I am not posting the sections all at once.  Therefore, begin again:  the first unit, entitled “Avatar.”

Consulting Avatar

The function of avatar in electracy is as the site of a new dimension of identity formation, supplementing spirit (oral) and literate (self) formations.  The character of this expanded understanding of avatar is developed by means of analogies, to show its potential functionality as a practice of deliberative (practical) reason appropriate for a digital prosthesis augmenting individual and collective judgment (decision-making).  Analogies for Internet-assisted judgment reviewed in this chapter include several relationships, modeling the relationship between player and avatar:  Arjuna and Krishna (in Bhagavadgita); citizen and Socrates; Socrates and his Daimon; Titian’s “Allegory  of Prudence”; querent and sage in the I Ching; writer and work in Blanchot’s revision of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

The rationale for this approach is provided by the popular culture usage of “avatar” to name a player’s icon in online venues.  The argument explores the practical consequences of taking seriously the full potential of this Sanskrit name and tradition.  “Avatar” means “descent,” referring to the incarnation of a god at a time of crisis.  The crisis in our context is that of the General (Internet) Accident described by Paul Virilio:  the dromosphere (dimension pollution).  The player-avatar relation is associated with the history of practical reason and the virtue of prudence, or good judgment.  The proposal is to upgrade prudence from literacy to electracy.  Prudence in practice names the ability to use experience of the past to make decisions in present circumstances leading to good outcomes for the collective order in the future:  it is a time logic.  Virilio’s point is that in the dromosphere (light-speed mediation) all dimensions collapse into Now.  What is prudence for the dromosphere? Apparatus theory shows that this upgrade involves not only the outline of a new mode of inference, but a new mode of identity as well.  Avatar is identified as the site of a new experience motivating a shift in behavior and even of being, both individually and collectively.

I finally am getting around to putting the pilot for the Mr. Mentality Show on YouTube.

This video was made in collaboration with the Critical Arts Ensemble (Steve Kurtz and friends).

Avatar Emergency:  Conclusion

Here starts a chapter by chapter outline of Avatar Emergency, the book in progress, beginning with the conclusion (attempting to game the blog format).

The conclusion does not so much summarize the arguments of the book as demonstrate how to apply it as heuretics.  The central argument is that avatar and its practice of flash reason in the KaChing decision prosthetic, is the means to sustain democratic participation in public policy formation, against the threat of a General Accident, in the dromosphere that eradicates the conditions necessary for literate critical thinking.  Avatar is electrate politics and ethics.  Since avatar is part of a new apparatus, its creation takes place at the level of metaphysics itself, giving this practice access to the dimension of culture that actually motivates individual and collective striving to persevere (the life force).  Avatar brings into players’ experience the source of motivation (disposition and its formation through habitus, to use Bourdieu’s favorite term for conatus).

In practice this means that avatar (collective) as the site of identity formation in electracy, is authorized as mythographer.  This chapter models mythography by applying to the creation of Jazz in America the poetics of myth extracted from the Frontier (using Slotkin’s three-volume history as the archive).  Jazz historically is not completely separate from Frontier, but is a version of the Frontier told from the point of view of the Crowd.  Its dominant mood is not anxiety but joy.  The poetics of Jazz shows in principle its features as worldview, and hence as strategy for everything from daily life to foreign policy.  It is not about playing music anymore than the Frontier is about herding cows.  It is rather a state of mind, an attitude, a framing of experience guiding a certain approach to well-being more adequate to the conditions of globalization in an Internet public sphere.