in electracy. The point that recommends Lyotard’s reading of Kant as a relay for flash reason (electrate prudence) is the support for thought provided by affect as a sublime feeling, and the rhetorical powers revealed in this experience of negative presentation. A theme of electracy (apparatus invention) is that the Western tradition already knows a great deal about flash reason (image metaphysics), and that in some respects flash reason has been an aspiration of this tradition all along, couched as speculation about the mind of God.
Lyotard calls attention to the ontological and metaphysical innovations of his project, to emphasize that the aesthetic judgments of taste and of the sublime are not approached in terms of objects and properties, essences and accidents, but as feelings that organize the heterogeneous manifold by means of mood or atmosphere (Stimmung). This affective order involves not categories, but “tautegories.”
For “logically” reflection is called judgment, but “psychologically,” if we may be permitted the improper use of this term for a moment, it is nothing but the feeling of pleasure and displeasure. As a faculty of knowledge, it is devoted to the heuristic, and in procuring “sensations,” the meaning of which will become clear, it fully discloses its tautegorical character, a term by which I designate the remarkable fact that pleasure and displeasure are at once both a “state” of the soul and the “information” collected by the soul relative to its state. (Lessons 4)
A tautegory is constructed according to the “manner” of its maker, a term that evokes the “concetto” of practical reason.
The apparent sitter in a Renaissance portrait was thus an external appearance showing an inward truth, and so, it might be said, were Renaissance works of art in general. The spirit they expressed, however, was not simply that of their subject, it was also that of the artist, who gave the painting its “life.” The Mona Lisa is a painting of—taken from the appearance of—a Florentine merchant’s wife and at the same time a painting of—from the hand and sensibility of—Leonardo da Vinci. This second, genetic relation between artist and image was fully recognized in the Renaissance commonplace “every painter paints himself,” and the idea adds another dimension to the central paradox that the objective world is only evident from a point of view. Individual style, or manner, developed together with portraiture (and naturalism in general), so that the work itself became “physiognomic” at the same time that physiognomy became a part of the science of painting. (Summers 111)
Tautegories are physiognomic, “singularities” rather than universals, opening as they do a space of “rendezvous” hosting events of decision in practical reason. Tautegories are anchored in feeling (this is the key), and are useful for inquiry in conditions that exceed understanding and knowledge, for the sublime formlessness of experience in the (post)industrial city (dromosphere). The further reflective judgment moves from what in our context is “literate” metaphysics, into the unknowns of electracy,
the more manifest the tautegorical aspect of reflection becomes. There are signs of it in the more frequent occurrence of operators such as regulation (in the “regulative Idea”), guidance (in the guiding thread), and analogy (in the “as if”), which are not categories but can be identified as heuristic tautegories. Because of these curious “subjective operators,” critical thought gives itself or discovers processes of synthesis that have not received the imprimatur of knowledge. Knowledge can only draw on them reflexively, inventing them as it does according to its feeling, though it may have to legitimate their objective validity afterward. (Lessons 33)
A first step for the invention of flash judgment, as Lyotard makes clear, is the introduction of thinkers to what might be called the new “decorum,” the relationship among thought, art, and conduct in the sublime city. The place of individual “manner” in electracy, and the role of physiognomy in guiding inquiry, suggest what is at stake. In traditional emblematics, “virtue” is represented by a scene (hypotyposis) of a beautiful woman beating an ugly woman with a stick. To persist with traditional ratios, and to neglect a necessary reeducation of common sense in the sublime judgment (that works with the full range of the bittersweet, repulsion as well as attraction, “ugly” as well as “beautiful”)—in short, a literal and uncritical physiognomy—leaves citizens unprepared to make prudent policy decisions not just with respect to cosmetic glamour or even Nazi racism but the coming revolution in DNA manipulation (the knowledge accident most feared by Virilio).
In his reading of Kant, Lyotard identifies what thinkers at light-speed may experience, which also helps target faculties in need of prosthetic augmentation. “The mountain masses, the pyramids of ice, the overhanging, threatening rocks, thunderclouds, oceans rising with rebellious force, volcanoes, everything ‘rude’ to be found in nature is sublime in presentation because it is at the limit of what can be grasped in a single intuition. . . . This effort is similar to the effort of the will that aims for virtue” (127). The now-time of electracy demands an enlarged capacity of the single glance against all rudeness. Lyotard finds in the rhetorical figure of “retortion” (a dialectical figure that affirms by denial) an anticipation of the extreme discordance to be negotiated by sublime judgment at light-speed (128). We learn from Kant how to notice in the manifest unhappiness of finitude the latent happiness of infinity.
Theory: Persona
The method of concept avatar is to adapt the literate concept structure to function in an electrate apparatus. Critical thinking is a practice specific to literacy, so to speak of an electrate concept for digital reasoning is like referring to an automobile as a horseless carriage. We live in a transitional moment, however, with experimental modernist literature serving as a bridge between epochs. Flash reason adapts philosophy to Internet culture. We still need theoretical thinking in electracy, but the old alphabetic techniques of inference are no longer adequate to or sufficient for the task. A methodology for our project is “heuretics” (the logic of invention). Heuretics appropriated from the history of discourses on method a generative formula for the creation of new forms and practices (Ulmer, Heuretics). The acronym CATTt identifies the set of resources needed for our invention: Contrast, Analogy, Theory, Target, tale. This generator guides a proposal for a hybrid concept (combining features of word and image), as well as the larger experiment in creating flash reason.
The ambition is to create a practice capable of conveying the accumulated potential of literate metaphysics, archived in databases, to an electrate player in a sublime glance. A hyperbolic goal, but no less worthy than curing cancer. For purposes of our exercise, I have zipped this archive into Nietzsche’s personal motto: werde der du bist. The particular quality of thought that we need our concept to support is judgment, individual decision making (prudence). The larger goal is to orient our compositional practice to the specific site from which will have emerged the metaphysics of electracy (the capacity of the body to undergo jouissance). Thus the exercise to compose an Allegory of Prudence is at the same time an experimental construction of an electrate concept. The Theory for inventing this transitional concept is derived from Deleuze and Guattari, especially from their final collaboration, What Is Philosophy? They argue that the concept as practiced in philosophy still has a role to play in contemporary civilization. Such concepts function through a kind of cinematic mise-en-scene. A philosophical concept includes the following parts:
1.Name: The “concept proper” slot in our template assigns a name to the idea (e.g. Descartes’s cogito). Deleuze and Guattari call for a stand (stance or attitude towards thought) that replaces subject/object orientation of thinking. Deleuze and Guattari name their replacement for the subject stand “event.” They call for a concept for thinking the position of “event,” rather than from the position of subject. Event thinks in and through me. It is a collective dimension of thinking that I receive readymade, to try on or adjust as needed to my expression. In the case of our electrate concept, we foreground the function of “stand,” the attitude in terms of turn, direction and posture, that operates through a concept. “Stand” differs from opinion (argument) or will (narrative).
2.Problem: Deleuze and Guattari replace subject thinking
