for experts today. The biographical details include the fascinating young Russian woman, Lou Andreas-Salomé, who behaved for a time during this period as a disciple; and also there was the friend who introduced Lou to Nietzsche. Her name constitutes evidence in favor of “signature” as destiny. The thought of “Zarathustra” intersects with the anecdotes of Nietzsche’s walks through various landscapes, along the road to Zoagli past pines with a view of the sea, and also around the bay of Rapallo from Santa Margherita all the way to Portofino. Various landscapes contributed to the process, the unfolding of the idea that had more than one date and place, not only Swtizerland but also Nice and the ascent to the Moorish eyrie at Eza. A composite place of invention. Our tactic is always to take the hint, to look around at our own landscapes, rather than to make pilgrimages to Nietzsche’s territory. Nietzsche reported a correlation between his creative energies and the suppleness of his muscles. “The body is inspired; let us keep the ‘soul’ out of it” (302). Precisely, body, for it is the body that is augmented and thinks within an electrate apparatus.
As for this inspiration itself, it falls within the category of epiphany or revelation. “Revelation in the sense that suddenly, with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down—that merely describes the facts. One hears, one does not see; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightning, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form—I never had any choice” (300). The physical qualities of the rapture are associated with a feeling of freedom, of power, of capacity summarized as a depth of happiness. “One no longer has a notion of what is an image or a metaphor: everything offers itself as the nearest, most obvious, simplest expression. It actually seems as if the things themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors” (301). Like lightning, a thought flashes up. Such is the functionality we want, to manage what happens in cyberspace when the networked databases deliver a water cannon of information. Nietzsche got it, and we need a practice of getting it.
Happiness, considered as a feeling, along with a warning (it is not what you suppose). Yes, and the task of flash reason is to bring this experience into everyday pedagogy. This experience, this lightning flash of insight, the feeling of capacity or capability, potentiality, in which the world offers itself as a forest of signs composed in one’s native code, this is the mode of intelligence taken up in a rhetoric of flash reason, constructed for the quotidian practice of electracy. This experience need not be so esoteric, so Alpine, and must not be, if civilization is to thrive in in a digital apparatus. Not that I am so wise (you heard Nietzsche’s irony), but I love wisdom. I am testifying, not explaining.
Decorum
How to generalize into a practice the flash of insight? Flash reason, to accomplish the functionality of avatar as counsel, retrieves and updates the tradition of decorum as readymade wisdom. I don’t understand my own selection filter, but avatar does. Reality is ontological sampling. The modern meaning of the word “commonplace,” to indicate a banality or triviality, signals the weakness in manuscript pedagogy—its tendency to slide into cliché. The manuals always advised that the method required not just “imitation” but ingenium (genius), but the latter capacity was assumed and not considered teachable. The tradition was at its best, on its own terms, in the practice of imitations of complete individual works—even word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase transpositions of a model’s style and form, adapted to one’s own materials and situation (Moss 63). The postmodern taste for pastiche recovers some of the effects of imitatio. The mode included an appreciation for an allusive game in which the original source was partly disguised. Recognizing the model was part of the pleasure of reception of the oration or text. Pastiche is an important device for flash reason, nor am I concealing my reliance on a tradition.
The entire practice is an extension of Aristotle’s “category” into the highest orders of literate form. This metaphysical register of the alphabetic apparatus accounts for the grain or propensity of the method that led eventually to the rules of decorum, which in turn rigidified into stereotypes. Painters as much as writers were instructed that “each age, each sex, each type of human being must display its representative character, and [they] must be scrupulous in giving the appropriate physique, gesture, bearing, and facial expression to each of the figures” (Lee 35). Even if it is character RTW (off the rack), this iconizing process has important lessons for electracy, including an insight into the narrowing, pejorative meanings associated with prudence in modernity. “Decorum” came to mean “not only the suitable representation of typical aspects of human life, but also specific conformity to what is decent and proper in taste, and even more in morality and religion” (37). Through taste lifestyle itself becomes scriptable (reduced to style in early modernity, rhetoric prepared to take responsibility for lifestyle). Electracy requires designer character.
Aristotle recognized in the Rhetoric and in the Nicomachean Ethics that rhetorical decorum and prudence share a faculty of judgment that is not logical or theoretical, but practical; that does not subordinate an object to a general rule or concept, but responds to the particular per se. This is because both rhetoric and prudence are concerned with “problems about which different points of view [can] be maintained, questions open to debate because they [can] be judged only in terms of probable truth and [are] not susceptible to scientific demonstrations of irrefutable validity” (qtd. in Kahn 30). Thus Aristotle writes in the Rhetoric: “The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us . . . there are few facts of the ‘necessary’ type that can form the basis of rhetorical syllogisms. Most of the things about which we make decisions, and into which we therefore inquire, present us with alternative possibilities. For it is about our actions that we deliberate and inquire, and all our actions have a contingent character; hardly any of them are determined by necessity” (qtd. in Kahn 30). The standard of judgment for a proper or appropriate decision, in other words, was based in practical considerations “and derives its authority from the conviction that, in some practical sense, ‘what all believe to be true is actually true’” (32). Updated decorum has its point of departure not in shared opinion but singular experience.
Montaigne marks a moment of transition, in which the commonplace practice of manuscript culture passed into the print mode of the essay. Our project is to continue this update through literacy into electrate avatar. He exploited the topic of in utramque parte—the applicability of the topics to both sides of a case (to attack or defend a question)—which he extended from a rhetorical to an ontological level. He redefined prudence in terms of Pyrrhonist skepticism (53). This skepticism reflects the new sensibility, the changing worldview of early modernity, the new science and its philosophical proponents such as Descartes or Francis Bacon. For these authors “invention” shifts from finding or recognizing a traditional authority (opinion) to inquiry and the discovery of new knowledge. The authority of the “judge” at the metaphorical heart of “category” is exposed in Montaigne’s stance.
Montaigne’s proposition is an ironic or skeptical version of the speculative judgment. Unlike Hegel’s dialectic, Montaigne’s sentence is not the discovery of the identity of two terms, but a narration of the rhetorical structure of equivalence, or of the failure of dialectic. It does not reveal the “profound tautology of all thought,” but rather that an equation is authoritative only because it is apropos. In short, it is the copula itself that is the most appropriate, that is to say the most useful, because finally the most pleasurable and inevitable of human fictions. At first glance it seems to be a simple analogy between the mastery of art and life, or between rhetoric and prudence. But closer examination reveals that analogy is a process, that it is constructed and destroyed in the continual essay of the apropos. The essay as scale turns out to be a very dubious form of judgment. (149)
In the context of commonplace practice it is easy to see the extent to which Montaigne used a topical (readymade) grid to compose his essays. “A glance at one of the essays illustrates this. The essay ‘That We Should Not Judge of Our Happiness until after Our Death’ begins with a quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: ‘We must expect of man the latest day, Not, ere he die, hi’s happy can we say.’ This
