The dilemma is moot, in any case, since there is no reservoir of tradition to supply authoritative proverbs in the first place. Or rather, tradition has been replaced by Commerce (entertainment).
The aporia is implacable, since in the sublime conditions of the industrial city the archive of maxims and proverbs recording the wisdom of collective experience lost all authority. Moreover, the locus of causality disappeared from everyday life, to become accessible only to scientific expertise supported by technology. Commerce filled the void, promoting through advertising the conversion of citizens to an entirely new stand, oriented along the axis of pleasure-pain (attraction/repulsion). Wisdom is reduced to taste. Marchand cites a pronouncement made by one advertising agency in the 1920s to note the role Commerce attempted to play:
The product of advertising is public opinion; and in a democracy public opinion is the uncrowned king. It is the advertising agency’s business to write the speeches from the throne of that king; to help his subjects decide what they should eat and wear; how they should invest their savings; by what courses they can improve their minds; and even what laws they should make, and by what faith they may be saved. (Marchand 31)
We see what is at stake in our invention: who or what gives counsel in the electrate public sphere?
Virno’s proposal assumes that we are now living in conditions of a permanent “state of exception,” in which the rules guiding judgment may be open to revision, to innovation, to testing against experience (a ratio of anomaly, not equivalence, is needed). Here is an opportunity for flash reason. His suggestion to replace valid reasoning with the deliberate use of fallacies, in order to expose the enthymemes, the assumptions and values determining the ineffective deductions guiding decision-making, acknowledges the unconscious as a site of ethical decision unsuspected in pre-modern philosophy. Ethics we now understand is beyond the reach of both reason and will. Fallacies and joke-work are transitional forms manifesting the fourth mode of inference invented in Cabaret: conduction. The primary instruction derived from Virno is based on his proposal to adopt logical fallacies (exploiting the structure of joke-work: condensation, displacement, secondary elaboration) as sources of innovative inference practice in conditions of ethical/political crisis. “Jokes and innovative action displace the ‘rotational axis’ of a form of life by means of an openly ‘fallacious’ conjecture, one that nonetheless reveals in a flash a different way of applying the rules of the game: contrary to the way it seemed before, it is entirely possible to embark on a side path or to escape from Pharaoh’s Egypt” (Multitude 163). Joke-work surprises thought from an unexpected direction.
Virno’s proposal shows the relevance of fumisme as a rhetoric. The pragmatics of laughter and the forms that elicit it are guides to the site of interface, the moebius twist, crossing body and language. The two sides of language (biology and culture) are hinged here, enabling discourse and desire (unconscious satisfaction, that the French call jouissance) to coexist in one practice. This is the point of departure for electracy as metaphysics. Literacy ontologized the semantic register of writing; electracy ontologizes the libidinal register (the signifier).
The logic of crisis is most evident in the articulation between instinctual apparatus and propositional structure, between drives and grammar. Each attempt at delineating a different normative “substratum,” though it unravels within wholly contingent sociopolitical circumstances, retraces and compounds, on a reduced scale, the passage from life in general to linguistic life. Anomalous inferences are the precision instrument by virtue of which verbal thought, delineating a different normative ‘substratum,’ recalls, each time anew, the anthropogenetic passage. Their anomaly lies in the manner in which language preserves within itself, though transfigured to the point of being barely recognizable, the original nonlinguistic drive. (Multitude 160)
Virno’s insight introduces the topic of “letter” (a hybrid of language and body), theorized in Lacan’s psychoanalysis (to which we will return).
Instruction: Style gives access to embodied (sensory, aesthetic) thought. The lesson of our Target resource, then, is to create a concept persona supporting judgment (decision) conducted in an aesthetic style. This style sheet is the one invented by the Parisian avant-garde. The goal is to activate and administer in writing the embodied (unconscious) drives that accompany meaning. Aesthetics is the area of philosophy that remains functional in electracy.
Experience Ontology
It is worth remembering that in the context of apparatus invention the bachelor machine is as practical for the pleasure-pain axis as is dialectic for the true-false axis. Inquiry is conducted in at least two modalities: the high focus of specific questions, guided by methodological presuppositions, and low focus browsing, relying on intuition and associative or lateral thinking. Literate schooling teaches the former and assumes the latter. Intuition is actually the default mode, in research and quotidian thought alike, in conditions of massive complexity with rich redundancy in the information. It is also the mode in which fields of knowledge are invented, and sometimes transformed (creative discovery, sudden insight). If Kant were alive today, his example for the “sublime” might be “information” rather than “ocean storm.” The institutional pragmatic goal of concept avatar is to adapt the logic or mechanisms of intuitive inquiry to interface design for semantic web databasing.
The analogy with the sublime is apt, since, as Kant explained, in those conditions the site of world measure shifts from the objective order of things (the order of beauty), to personal embodied experience. Kant’s Copernican revolution in metaphysics (shifting the locus of categories from the world to the [transcendental] mind) was the point of departure for what has evolved into a new ontology of experience, made viable by digital imaging technologies. The notion of experience ontology is proposed by analogy with the invention of semantic ontology by the Classical Greeks at the beginnings of literacy. Being (ontology) is not in the world, but is a classification system made possible by alphabetic writing. Semantic ontology, based on the categories invented by Aristotle (substance and accidents), uses rules of definition to extract certain features from observed entities. The salient features that count as “essence” are those manifesting function (purpose, end): “form follows function” was in Greek metaphysics before it became the mantra of modern design. Certainly things had functions before literacy, but literacy put this quality of experience into a tool and institutionalized it. In recent decades these ancient categories have been made more flexible, but are no match for the information sublime.
Similarly, experience ontology is relative to the apparatus (social machine) that makes it possible or functional (digital imaging). The quality of experience made accessible to ontology in electracy is that of affective memory in the individual body. Affective memory is the deepest order of memory, existing only as somatic markers informing kinesthetic intelligence. It is “enactive,” resulting from the accumulation of routines, habitus, acquired through daily life, and carrying emotional charges associated in idiosyncratic (singular) ways with individual enculturation. Anyone who has reacted “automatically” in an emergency situation of instant reflex has drawn on this kind of experience (blink). More immediately relevant in our context is the fact that this dimension of emotionally cathected sensori-motor enactions is also the source of coherence for intuition and creative insight. This affective network does not depend on specific image representations, but is encoded across the senses, multimodally. The event of insight, in which irrelevant semantic domains are superimposed, yielding a eureka moment, is due to an affective match that is not in the semantics of the domains but in the idiosyncratic experience of the seeker.
The most extensive analysis of these sorts of matches is by Gerald Holton, historian of science, who introduced the phrase “image of wide scope” (wide image) to account for his observations (Ulmer, Internet Invention). Although Holton and others using his methods have studied hundreds of cases of the most productive people across the full range of sciences, arts, and society, the prototype is Albert Einstein. Einstein himself mentioned in his autobiography the importance of the memory of a gift from his father of a compass when Albert was four-years old. Albert was fascinated
