Concept avatar is intended to think this register of experience, the capacity to be affected. Both branches of the Western tradition (Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian) deprecated visceral experience and even condemned human embodiment as misfortune or sin. The challenge of electracy is to design practices of thought for an augmented aesthetic prosthesis that make affect intelligent.
What is the state of mind (stance) to be dramatized in the conceptual persona of avatar? The “pure art” created in Cabaret achieved international recognition ultimately in Dadaism, product of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich (where the cabaret scene moved during the World War). The readymades in general, and Fountain in particular (the urinal submitted as a joke to a supposedly non-juried exhibition) make Marcel Duchamp the Aristotle of electracy. Mona Lisa with a Pipe (by the artist known as Sapeck, 1887) is emblematic of the attitude that is the “Spirit of Montmartre” expressed in these works. The attitude is fumisme, used to name the mocking humor that characterized the cabaret scene of bohemian Paris. The anchoring term is the verb fumer (to smoke), but with a usage in agriculture, “to manure.” A fumiste is a chimney sweep, with slang extension to name a joker, crackpot, fraud. An immediate point of interest is the background that Sapeck’s Mona Lisa provides for Duchamp’s more famous readymade (the mustachioed Mona Lisa), composed much later. The choice of iconic image to profane is motivated in part by the term fumisme itself. The hazy smoke referenced in this semantic field resonates with one of the important terms used to identify Leonardo’s style: sfumato. Sfumato is a term coined by Leonardo to refer to a painting technique which overlays translucent layers of color to create perceptions of depth, volume and form. In Italian sfumato means “blended” or “smoky” and is derived from the Italian word fumo meaning “smoke.” Duchamp was “blowing smoke.”
A “wit” is different from a fumiste, a distinction used to clarify the intent of Sapeck’s illustrations:
Whereas the former made fun of idiots in terms that they were not always able to understand, the fumiste accepts the ideas of the idiot and expresses their quintessence. . . . The fumiste avoids discussions of ideas, he does not set up a specific target, he adopts a posture of withdrawal that makes all distinctions hazy, and he internalizes Universal Stupidity by postulating the illusory nature of values and of the Beautiful, whence his denial of the established order and of official hierarchies. From this point of view, which is that of the sage, the dandy, the observer, and the skeptic, everything has the same value, everything is one and the same thing. (Grojnowski 104)
The Sfumato effect invented by Leonardo was a solution to a compositional problem relevant to flash reason. The problem was that of physiognomy, the capacity of external features to express character, disposition. Leonardo codified an emerging analogy in his era between the air of a face and the atmosphere of a landscape. The historical precedent concerns how one of the primordial elements (air) was adapted to expressing the uniqueness of “face” (prosopon) (Stimilli, 65). Andy Warhol emulating Duchamp gave this stand its purest performance to date, by transforming celebrity portraits into a pop iconography. The image of thought mocked in fumisme is Descartes’s cogito, since, as Deleuze and Guattari observed, the stand of the subject in Descartes’s radical doubt (I think, therefore I am) is that of “idiot” in the classical sense of “private person,” one who does not participate in the public sphere. This alienated subject finally goes crazy in modernity, they explain, with reference to Dostoevsky.
Avatar personifies attitude. “Attitude” concerns the state of mind within which the thought happens, concerning belief or desire (for example) directed towards our Target (the practice of judgment or decision). Taken as a whole, or as a position of enunciation within the culture, comedy implies a certain attitude towards reality, for example, which is one answer to a fundamental question of philosophy—the transcendental question (where are we when we think?). Alenka Zupancic describes the comedic stand:
There is something very real in comedy’s supposedly unrealistic insistence on the indestructible, on something that persists, keeps reasserting itself and won’t go away, like a tic that goes on even though its “owner” is already dead. In this respect, one could say that the flaws, extravagances, excesses, and so-called human weaknesses of comic characters are precisely what account for their not being “only human.” More precisely, they show us that what is “human” exists only in this kind of excess over itself. (The Odd One In 49)
Although the spirit of Montmartre (our Analogy) is comedic or even parodic, the important lesson is not any one specific attitude, but attitude as such. The design lesson is to notice that parody works explicitly from a source.
The key to concept avatar is to learn from the CATTt how a vital anecdote associated with a conceptual persona produces thought. The relevant documentation in What Is Philosophy? is the references to modernist arts practices (literature, painting, music). The mental landscape of thinking relates to the problem plane by means analogous to those invented by Cézanne (for example) to express the physical landscape. The CATTt directs us to adopt the modernist arts plane of composition (invented in Paris) as a relay (Analogy) for treating the conceptual anecdote, in order to create a vector or a different turning within the problem, to challenge the commodity version of contemporary embodiment. The short-hand instruction from our Analogy, then, for how to compose a vital anecdote, is Duchamp’s readymade. An example of a readymade is a postcard representation of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, to which Duchamp (alluding to Sapeck as much as to Leonardo) added a mustache and goatee, plus a caption, L. H. O. O. Q. (the letters punning on a phrase in French meaning “she has a hot ass”). So much for the Dark Lady. The formal instruction includes not only the attitude, but the device: take a picture. The phrase alludes to the technology of imaging, and suggests a nickname for our conceptual procedure: take (verb/noun). Avatar takes thought (as birds take flight).
Bachelor Machine
Flash reason includes the readymade as logic (it shows what the readymade is for). The Documents of Contemporary Art series includes a collection on The Artist’s Joke. Marcel Duchamp anchors this collection, as he does the one on “Appropriation.” Pressed by an interviewer to accept sophisticated hermeneutic readings of his Readymades (such as the geometry book left out in the rain), Duchamp replied that it was a joke. A pure joke. To denigrate the solemnity of a book of principles. The rhetorical form exemplified in Duchamp’s work is that of the “bachelor machine.” Lyotard contributed an essay to the catalog of the famous exhibit in which Michel Carrouges established bachelor machines as a modern myth. These bachelors are imaginary machines, related to the absurdist science of “pataphysics” (Bok), whose machinations symbolized and allegorized human sexuality. The fate of Eros in modernity is expressed in these delirious devices, whose proliferation in art and literature Carrouges documented in his exhibition.
The simplest prototype of a bachelor machine is Lautreamont’s formula, adopted by Surrealism as one of its emblems: “he is beautiful . . . like the chance meeting of a sewing-machine and an umbrella on a dissecting-table!” (22). Among the more famous examples are the ones described in Raymond Roussel’s novels, some of Kafka’s stories such as “In the Penal Colony,” or Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Works by Picabia and other artists associated with Dada and Surrealism created these mental mechanisms, articulating at once the new beauty and the new Eros, with Duchamp’s Large Glass one of the foremost examples. They are apotropaic in defending against the anxieties of the industrial sublime. The first bachelor machine, Lyotard proposes, was Pandora’s Box, closing the circle (Blumenberg would say) with the fault of Epimetheus (Duchamp’s Trans/formers 45). Eureka! Lyotard considers the contradictory structure of bachelor machines to fall within the tradition of topical dissoi logoi, the technique of arguing both sides of any question (47). We are in the neighborhood of an industrial scale concept for thinking technics.
As Lyotard observed in the case of Duchamp’s anamorphic machines, the new topological and non-Euclidean geometries created new kinds of spaces, enabling new manners of relating in every respect. The result, central to our project, was a “new cunning” (58). Thierry de Duve’s discussion of Duchamp’s
