is added; and the essay concludes with a brief epilog applying the moral” (Lechner 218). Kafka’s rhetoric continues this tradition in modernism in his appropriation of sayings and revisions of parables. The prototype of the technique (explained by Clayton Koelb), is an indirect reporting of a man seeking directions who asked a policeman the way. The policeman’s reply (“Give it up!”) indicates he took the question to be metaphysical (from one who has lost his way in life) (Koelb 11). These examples express our theme as well as its method: electrate wisdom.
The intellectual obituary of the commonplaces and the confidence in endoxal wisdom is Flaubert’s project for a mock encyclopedia of received ideas. The project reflects his own disgust with French bourgeois culture, dramatized in his novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet. He compiled a collection of platitudes and clichés that circulated in middle-class opinion, and also a collection of “stupidities” (the Sottisier) culled from supposedly authoritative or admired publications. He worked on these collections for more than twenty years, and bragged that he had read more than 1,500 books in search of his material. His method was authentically topical, in other words, but his motivation was parodic. The entries were listed alphabetically, and read not as factoids about something but as an annotation of current opinion. The entry for “feudalism” gives the flavor: “No need to have one single precise notion about it: thunder against.”
Multitude
The topical tradition went fallow, we could say, and represents now in its retrieval an important resource for an Internet choral counsel. At the conclusion of his review of rhetoric, for example, Barthes noted the “stubborn agreement” between Aristotelianism and mass culture in Western societies: “a practice based, through democracy, on an ideology of the ‘greatest number,’ of the majority-as-norm, of current opinion: everything suggests that a kind of Aristotelian vulgate still defines a type of trans-historical Occident, a civilization (our own) which is that of the endoxa” (“The Old Rhetoric” 92). He goes on to propose an assignment.
This observation, disturbing as it is in its foreshortened form, that all our literature, formed by Rhetoric and sublimated by humanism, has emerged from a politico-judicial practice: in those areas where the most brutal conflicts—of money, of property, of class—are taken over, constrained, domesticated, and sustained by state power, where state institutions regulate feigned speech and codifies all recourse to the signifier: there is where our literature is born. This is why reducing Rhetoric to the rank of a merely historical object; seeking, in the name of text, of writing, a new practice of language; and never separating ourselves from revolutionary science—these are one and the same task. (93)
Paolo Virno takes up where Barthes left off, seeing in this fit between Aristotle and the culture industry an opportunity for the recovery of a public sphere by using the “spectacle” against itself. The context for Virno’s proposal is the post-Fordist stage of capital, the information economy in which knowledge and invention are primary sources of wealth: wealth is not found in products but in the process of production. “In the spectacle we find exhibited, in a separate and fetishized form, the most relevant productive forces of society, those productive forces on which every contemporary work process must draw: linguistic competence, knowledge, imagination, etc. Thus, the spectacle has a double nature: a specific product of a particular industry, but also, at the same time, the quintessence of the mode of production in its entirety” (60).
The possibility of a new public sphere depends upon the emergence of a new collective identity, appropriate to the conditions of the electrate apparatus (currently embodied in the spectacle), theorized with reference to the writings of Spinoza. Should the collective body of society be constituted as a “people,” as a unified identity (as One), as Hobbes proposed? Or as a “multitude,” of many individuals, whose coherence does not depend on “identity” politics, as Spinoza thought? The history of modernity worked through the politics of various “peoples” (nationalism, in short). The new politics suggest a public life of the multitude. While this whole argument is relevant to the project of flash reason as a logic of deliberation for electracy, the immediate point to stress is Virno’s suggestion that the source of coherence for the multitude is the language capacity itself of human beings (the proprium, in fact, of Aristotle’s definition of “man”). To explain the kind of practice he imagines capable of supporting this electrate collectivity (image hegemony), Virno invokes the model of Aristotle’s topics and the commonplace tradition, which he sees as a particular embodiment of what Marx called the “general intellect.”
In today’s world, the “special places” of discourse and or argumentation are perishing and dissolving, while immediate visibility is being gained by the “common places,” or by generic logical-linguistic forms which establish the pattern for all forms of discourse. This means that in order to get a sense of orientation in the world and to protect ourselves from its dangers, we can not rely on those forms of thought, of reasoning, or of discourse which have their niche in one particular context or another. . . . The “common places” (these inadequate principles of the “life of the mind”) are moving to the forefront: the connection between more and less, the opposition of opposites, the relationship of reciprocity, etc. these “common places,” and these alone, are what exist in terms of offering us a standard of orientation, and thus, some sort of refuge from the direction in which the world is going. Being no longer inconspicuous, but rather having been flung into the forefront, the “common places” are the apotropaic resource of the contemporary multitude. They appear on the surface, like a toolbox containing things which are immediately useful. (36–37)
The value of Virno’s proposal is his recognition of the need for a shared mode of thought. The action item concerns a movement beyond reliance on expert specialization (techno-science) to the establishment of what used to be called “wisdom,” and which in practice represented the authority of tradition. The limitation of Virno’s insight and proposal is that he ignores the historical specificity of the apparatus. The commonplace tradition developed out of Aristotle’s metaphysics is specific to literacy. Or, the inference to be drawn from Virno’s argument is that the task is to do for electracy, the post-Fordist society of the spectacle, what Aristotle did for the Classical world: invent a new metaphysics, a category native to the digital apparatus, and a practice of thought adequate to the “toolbox” evolving so rapidly within new media culture. The project is not to follow in the footsteps of Aristotle, but to seek what he sought. The update from topics to pop culture takes care of itself, as in the genre typified by All I Really Need to Know I Learned From Watching Star Trek. Alain de Botton is closer to traditional decorum in How Proust Can Change Your Life. Concept avatar is ontological self-help.
Allegory
Avatar as conceptual persona retrieves decorum and the topical tradition, updated as a means for individuals to use the Internet as a commonplace chora. Harold Bloom, in his poetics of the modern crisis poem, noted in poets’ dialogical struggle with precursors in the tradition an underlying continuation of commonplace compositional procedures. Bloom traces the tradition of topics from Classical rhetoric, the art of places in Cicero, who listed sixteen topics of invention (devices for generating “copy”). Bloom finds six revisionary ratios persisting in Romantic and modernist poetry, surviving their historical transmittal through Associationist Psychology of the Enlightenment, as in Locke’s association of ideas, “founded on the notion of habit and memory as modes of repetition that fixed ideas through the accompaniment of pleasure and pain” (“Poetic Crossing” 516). This diachronic rhetoric continues into the present, with Bloom’s useful insight into Freud’s dreamwork and the defense mechanisms of unconscious thought as a new terminology for the old tropology of rhetoric. Flash reason extracts from Bloom’s ratios a poetics for consulting with the global cultural archive. Modernist crisis poems (from Wordsworth through Ashbery, in Bloom’s canon) offer a relay for playing avatar (the meaning of this phrase will deepen as we progress). To say “relay” means that the analogy is loose, heuristic, experimental. Keep in mind that you are inventing a practice of decision, a guide to action.
We need an exercise to ground these detours of history and
