experience, specifically some decision made in the past, that is memorable for whatever reason; 2. a framing of this event by the tradition of the virtues, specifically prudence, which measures the decision in the context of time (past-present-future); 3. icons: find some equivalent for the allegorical animals, which are “corporate” in McLuhan’s sense, each having an assigned meaning in the cultural encyclopedia, recoded to make specific sense in the setting created by Titian; 4. compose a motto or maxim (even a proverb) that expresses the moral of the event.
The rule of thumb for such assignments, when adopting existing works as a relay for a new composition, is to ask “what is that for me, in my circumstances?” Such is the pedagogy of decorum. I observe prudence in Nietzsche or Titian not as information for an exam, but to notice prudence in my own case. With this rule in mind, it is worth noting that Francesco Clemente did a version of our exercise in a different context, as part of a millennium celebration, in which the National Gallery invited twenty-four contemporary artists to make a new piece based on some historical work in the collection. Clemente chose Titian’s Prudence as his relay, but the “encounters” idea suggests that a further element in our template puts in play Titian’s work itself: the point of departure may be Titian’s allegory, but then some other work of art might be selected to guide the remake, as a relay for the commemoration design. The modified instruction is: select an existing work of any sort, genre, medium, mode, as a reference for your allegory. Clemente’s remake indicates also how loose this adaptation may be, since his version expresses ambivalence. The template identifies fields of attention, to provoke thought.
The salient components of Clemente’s remake, entitled Smile Now, Cry Later, were inventoried in the commentary by the curator of the exhibition, Richard Morphet:
1.The point of departure for the theme came from one of Clemente’s friends in Los Angeles, a Chicano, who had a tattoo including a statement of wisdom popular among his peers. On each arm there was tattooed a girl, one smiling, with the words “smile now,” one crying, with the words “cry later.” Similar wisdom may be found in a number of classic proverbs.
2.Clemente chose to enter a dialogue with Titian’s allegory for several reasons, beginning with his own admiration for the emblem as a form and tradition. Ezra Pound’s imagism, or vorticism, was one resource, taking the poetics of the ideogram as an updating of the emblem, with its capacity to create an internal flash of coherence through the juxtaposition of heterogeneous materials.
3.Clemente riffed on Titian’s iconography (relating the three ages of man with three totem animals) which Clemente associated with the gryllus, a representation for Medieval people of the baser instincts of life. The gryllus theme is evoked through the growing vine, each of whose leaves depicts a naked black man, each one either smiling or crying and holding a paper with the appropriate half of the title proverb. Superimposed over the entire scene is a winged phallus, an ancient symbol associated with sexual cosmic vitality. The gryllus and the winged phallus may be read as conflicting attitudes towards embodied desire.
4.The painting fills a wall (92 x 184 ins), done in a style evoking graffiti art, including spray painting, referring to the setting in which Clemente’s Chicano friend lived (the vulgar gryllus).
How do I go on from here? What is the vector of the relay from Titian through Clemente to me, intimating how I may configure my own relationship with prudence? It is worth remembering that the purpose of this exercise is to learn from the history of prudence (good judgment) how to deliberate at the speed of light. The reason prudence works in a flash is because the response is “character” (given). “It is plain that the word ‘character’ must be taken here in a stronger sense than the one we ordinarily associate with it: as meaning not just firmness, but rather inalterability of character. Because of such an intransigence, of such a single-mindedness, so to speak, the ancient concept of character, which Goethe properly translates with daimon and not with ethos, must be assigned to the sphere of nature, and not to that of ethics. The moral of the fable, as Shaftesbury puts it, can only be an ostensive gesture: ‘such a one he is! Such he is – Sic, Crito est hic! This is the creature!’” (Stimilli, The Face, 51). The Allegory exercise uses decorum to help you map the sources of this response. Our task differs in its motivation from nostalgia for the classical virtues expressed by William J. Bennett, whose The Book of Virtues was a best seller for some time. (How uncouth). That book, and its companion volume, The Moral Compass, amount to florilegia–- collections of moral exempla, which are useful as far as they go, exhibiting the alliance of prudence and decorum. What we want to retrieve is not the old virtues (the Allegory is not mimetic), but a time-image for decision-making in electracy, in vicious circumstances.
2 Concept
Hypotyposis
The metaphysics of digital imaging dates from the Industrial Revolution, but its genealogy draws upon the traditions of image invention. The Prudence exercise introduces you to electracy as a particular kind of experience, and as a practice that foregrounds individual capacity for experience as such. Titian’s Allegory references his family, which is to say his manner of undergoing love and death. This context is a good one for our relay, since the tradition has counted on the shared undergoing of Eros (want) as an introduction to wisdom. Immanuel Kant is considered to be the last philosopher in the tradition of particular intellect that begins in Classical Greece and runs through Leonardo DaVinci. In this tradition thought is fundamentally sign-based, a showing of images to the mind’s eye, which is what recommends it as a resource for the invention of an image metaphysics. Kant received the tradition as posing the problem of a fundamental gap or chasm dividing human faculties between pure and practical reason (science and morality, knowledge and belief, the sensible and supersensible, phenomenal and noumenal). In his project of the three Critiques to determine the limits of philosophy, Kant introduced “judgment” as a faculty in its own right, grounded in aesthetic experience, functioning as a bridge crossing the chasm and connecting the other faculties of mind. Flash reason is this bridge.
A feature of special relevance to electracy of Kant’s Third Critique is his description of reflective judgment in which a person spontaneously recognizes some form in nature, a body, or art, and judges it to be “beautiful,” without benefit of a concept or rule guiding the judgment. This process of thinking without concepts provides a transition from the literate to an electrate apparatus (from conceptual categories to a new image category). The judgment of “beauty” assumes the existence of “common sense,” forming a community of persons sharing not any specific “taste,” but the capacity to experience beauty. The phrase refers not to our modern meaning of “good sense” or shared opinion, or even the “straight talk” of Thomas Paine, but to the inner or “sixth” sense that unified and synthesized the perceptions gathered from each of the five bodily senses. To convey the immediate and spontaneous certainty of reflective feeling, Kant associated it with the sense of taste. The Latin languages indicate a relationship between taste and knowledge with the near pun, sapore and sapere, relaying the flash of awareness between mouth and intellect measuring the range between sweet and bitter.
Concept avatar takes after reflective judgment, which works in the middle voice (auto-affection). “Beauty” is not a property of an object or thing, but a feeling by which subjects become aware of a harmony among their own faculties (auto-perception). A concept or rule is lacking for the feeling. The judgment operates formally, rather, by means of the proportional analogy “hypotyposis.” The bridge between the empirical causal world of sensible things and the moral realm of desire is accomplished analogically, with “beauty” (some sensible example) constituting a “symbol” of the supersensible “good.”
Knowledge by analogy, Kant explains, “means not, as the word is commonly taken, an imperfect similarity of two things, but a perfect similarity of two relations between quite dissimilar things.” This definition, supported by examples that Kant gives of analogy in the Critique of Judgment, a definition that neither abolishes the heterogeneity of the things to be related nor affirms their
