That for the sake of which

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Coming from the railroad yard, a man with a rucksack approached our house.

To Write

He came from the train parked on the nearby tracks.  Mom was hanging up laundry.  Standing on the  other side of the low fence, he said something to her, and she went inside the house.  I could see him from where I sat on the far side of the laundry hanging on the clothesline. She returned after a few minutes and handed the man a sandwich.

Threshold

In an interview published in Bomb (No. 108), Jacques Roubaud, discussing his interest in the history of mnemonics, described his primal image.

Everything I speak about is, in a way, linked to the old abandoned project.  I want to say something about it, but I digress as soon as I start saying something, because I remember something else that I then begin to explain, and so on.  So  the structure is a big meandering.  I begin The Loop with a very old childhood image of snow in Carcassonne, where snow is very rare.  I’m in my room and it’s very cold outside.  At night there’s frost on the windowpane — I write and make pictures on it.  So that’s the image:  there’s  an outer and an inner space, memory and the present.  That’s the first image of the book, which at the end, returns to it.

This image resonates with what Maurice Blanchot called the primal scene (in The Writing of the Disaster), to refer to an early childhood memory of looking out a window and experiencing a realization.  Cynthia Ozick indicates why it is important to practice with this first image, since all writing (in a creative mode) begins with an invested image.

If you’re going to write an essay, you at least have a subject in hand, and you know something.  If you’re going to write fiction, you have nothing.  You begin in chaos. You may have a smell, a scene, a word, an idea, an emotion.  It seems to me that ideas and emotions are inseparable.  Emotions may not always be ideas, but ideas are always emotions.  In fiction you can come up with something that you never knew you knew.  I think essays are, in this respect, inferior as a form to fiction, and that fiction itself is inferior to poetry.  The Shawl began with a line, one sentence in The Rise and Fall  of the Third Reich by William Shirer.  This one sentence told of a real event, about a baby being thrown against an electrified fence.  And that stayed with me and stayed with me, and that was the very explicit origin of The Shawl (The Writer’s Chronicle, 41: 4).

Avatar Emergency continued.  Part 5:  Hegemony.

This chapter places the proposals of flash reason in the context of contemporary political theory.  Avatar as an updating of prudence for the dromosphere marks it as the latest development of hegemony.  Machiavelli did for practical reason (ethics and politics) what Descartes did for pure reason (scientific method), by putting some distance between reason and Religion.  Machiavelli thought it possible for virtue to triumph over Fortune through a certain craft of thought. Virtue is the dimension of human experience ontologized in electracy.  This craft of decision was updated by Gramsci, who replaced the Prince with the political Party as leader.  Hegemony is revised for poststructural theory by Ernesto Laclau, whose description of the empty universal and its isotopy with Lacan’s object @ and the commodity sign show the point of application of flash reason in contemporary society.  Avatar shifts the role of Prince and Party to the distributed sage, whose witness and decision are correlated in the KaChing database interface.  Contemporary emancipatory politics proposes that it is possible to sustain democracy in the absence of a “people” (a unified body politic), through the transformation of the crowd into a multitude.

Bridge and Bachelors

The rhetorical unity of the multitude is achieved through the “bachelor” logic of Freud’s “Rat Bridge,” according to Laclau.  The electrate image category, that is, functions at every level, from language to society, to gather or form assemblages.  It is a “metaphysics,” after all.  Assemblages (the new abstraction, electrate logos) form not through the common sense of shared intentional content, but through the bliss sense (jouissance) of repeating signifiers, the prototype of which is found in the dreamwork or jokework of the Unconscious.  Freud is a logician of the new prudence.  The fullest development of flash reason in support of Moment, the temporality of judgment in the dromosphere Now, is by Jacques Derrida.  Laclau referred to Derrida’s differance as one of the keys to group formation through disjunctive relationship.  Derrida’s choral trace works with the musical slope of language, as distinct from the semantic slope cultivated by literate ontology.  The history of vanguard innovations across all the arts is the context for this non-objective reasoning, which ontologizes the urbanized body, what Cezanne called his “little sensations,” and Deleuze formulated as the capacity to be affected, derived from Spinoza’s conatus.  The next step is to design databases using choral ontologies to supplement the semantic ontology still informing most contemporary database design.  Aristotle still presides over semantic web ontology.

Avatar Emergency continued:  Interscene 4.  Miami Virtue: Discipline Discourse

Ulmer’s theory of choragraphy motivating the design of the Miami consultation is explained, relating the four discourses documented in the Interscenes to the tradition of allegory.  Fredric Jameson noted the relevance of medieval allegory as a relay for understanding the need for a microcosm-macrocosm connection, which he sought through architectural cognitive mapping.  Mystory is a genre for writing/thinking in all four primary discourses of modern life at once.  The flash of flash reason occurs through the bachelor machine superimpositions of four dimensions of experience, producing an emergent pattern.  The relay is from medieval allegory of the sort Dante used to structure his Comedy.  The four levels are the literal (Old Testament story of Israel coming out of Egypt), allegorical (Christ’s Passion); moral (the believer’s personal salvation), anagogical (redemption of the world at the end of time).  This structure is updated, secularized, by translating the quartenary into modern discourses:  history of the community; entertainment identification with a celebrity; personal habitus; discipline or career field.  Lacan’s four categories map readily onto the system:  Symbolic, Imaginary, Symptom, Real.

Proportional Analogy

The querent with the assistance of the diviner (the FRE in this case), receives from the archives (the documentation of the zone) information selected through the filter of the personal anecdote.  The individual symptom, in other words, replaces anagogy as hegemonic in the allegory.  The formal details of Revelle’s ordinating anecdote featured a mattress.  This mattress becomes the hinge of the system, opening passage between microcosm and macrocosm, finding matches in each of the other registers.  This pattern of repeating mattresses includes Revelle’s memory of the childhood game in the basement of the mattress maker in Skeeversville; the Haitian trader Simon Lubin, whose impounded boat was loaded with used mattresses; the analogy of the “quilting point” in Lacan’s psychoanalysis; the bedroom tactics of the femme fatale in neo-noir narratives.  The querent receives the pattern as uncanny, recognizing the truth of the pattern as an answer to the burning question:  in my relationship with my partner, I am impounded (like the derelict Haitian trader).  Here is a goal of this project, of the figure as rhetoric opening the avatar relation (the relation between self and image):  an affective encounter with my disposition, nature, virtue, daimon, genius, limit.

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.”