motivating Ecce Homo, except that I am working the other side of the aisle, that of the idiot. Already names of the experience to which I am testifying are accumulating on the side of knowledge but we mean to reach across from knowledge to this other lived dimension, sometimes confused with ignorance, stupidity, nescience. Since I can’t think without thumbing, let me set up an exercise through which you may approach a version of Nietzsche’s moment. I need a form in which to cast the memory of an event, and Titian’s Allegory of Prudence looks promising. The prudence organizing Nietzsche’s advice is what the Greeks called phronesis. What I have to impart can be approached as an update, adaptation, appropriation of this tradition, virtue, capacity, faculty. I am speaking of the Western tradition, but not only that, since our concern is with wisdom and its deficit, an ecology of thought for a global consultancy. We all need to be on the same screen, with correlated databases, to make the coming decisions, which require some device with decision as a specific experience and practice. Can there be an electrate decorum? Solve WWXD? for the value avatar (what would avatar do).
The ambition of flash reason is to support collective epiphany, despite the skepticism of pundits today, questioning the very possibility of “defining moments” creative of national unity. The event motivating this concern was the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, and the conversation led to regret that even the sense of community following 9/11 had no lasting effect. “It may just be that modern society is impervious to brilliant flashes of clarity. There is very little shared experience in the nation now; there are only competing versions of the experience, consumed in such a way as to confirm whatever preconceptions you already have, rather than to make you reflect on them” (Bai ). Flash reason does not concern opinion, does not operate in the dimension of persuasion. Rather, it takes up the operation itself of “version” that puts us in a spin. It thinks the preconceptual.
We are updating an ancient ambition, concerning how humans might communicate with God/gods. The relay from the tradition indicates that individuals may appropriate for themselves if not absolute comprehension (nous), then at least the accumulated potentiality of the archive. Take Titian, for example. Titian’s painting is composed as an “emblem,” consisting of a picture and a motto, whose relationship poses a certain enigma. The practice we are proposing, flash reason, depends upon a (digital) image metaphysics, just as literacy developed a metaphysics of the written word, and we will use the latter as a relay to construct the former. Emblem is a hinge articulating the two apparati. Titian’s picture shows the heads of three men, each posed in alignment with the heads of three animals directly below them. The motto reads, “From the [experience of the] past, the present acts prudently, lest it spoil future action.”
The elements of this inscription are so arranged as to facilitate the interpretation of the parts as well as the whole: the words praeterito, praesens and futura serve as labels, so to speak, for the three human faces in the upper zone, viz., the profile of a very old man turned to the left, the full-face portrait of a middle-aged man in the center, and the profile of a beardless youth turned to the right; whereas the clause praesens prudenter agit gives the impression of summarizing the total content after the fashion of a “headline.” We are given to understand, then, that the three faces, in addition to typifying three states of human life (youth, maturity, old age), are meant to symbolize the three modes or forms of time in general: past, present, and future. And we are further asked to connect these three modes or forms of time with the idea of prudence or, more specifically, with the three psychological faculties in the combined exercise of which this virtue consists: memory, which remembers, and learns from, the past; intelligence, which judges of, and acts in, the present; and foresight, which anticipates, and provides for or against, the future. (Panofsky 149)
We may borrow from Titian’s Prudence the concetto form, his personalizing of the iconography. The role of epigram in an emblem is to resolve the enigma (in this case) of the busts (humans and animals) juxtaposed with the motto invoking prudence. That role is played here by the fact that the three men are Titian and his family: the old man is a self-portrait; the mature man is Titian’s younger son; the youth is an adopted grandson. The painting celebrates an occasion of satisfaction, a prudent action—the successful completion of a legal case in which Titian changed his will so that his inheritance would pass not to the oldest (scoundrel) son, but to the younger son (who is shown as the lion) (166). Most of all, it is an encounter with time.
The three animal heads are derived from several iconographic traditions (image commonplaces), as Panofsky explains. The tricephalous monster was a companion of Serapis (Pluto), god of the underworld. The arrangement associates the old man with the wolf (the past devours time); the mature man with the lion (action in the present); the youth with the dog (always trying to please, in hopes of a good outcome). The three heads in the convention are joined by a serpent’s body—the serpent being an allusion to the snake swallowing its own tail. Titian’s design reflects the Renaissance fascination with hieroglyphic signs popularized by the Neoplatonists. Gombrich cites Ficino as providing the charter for the art of emblematics, setting a precedent from which modern advertising benefitted, for our ads are precisely emblems. Modernity through advertising already absorbed what the tradition knows about thinking fast, about instant comprehension, but there is nothing inherently Capitalist or Christian about the emblem.
When the Egyptian priests wished to signify divine mysteries, they did not use the small characters of script, but the whole images of plants, trees or animals; for God has knowledge of things not by way of multiple thought but like the pure and firm shape of the thing itself. Your thoughts about time are multiple and shifting, when you say that time is swift or that, by a kind of turning movement, it links the beginning again to the end, that it teaches prudence and that it brings things and carries them away again. But the Egyptian can comprehend the whole of this discourse in one firm image when he paints a winged serpent with its tail in its mouth, and so with the other images which Horus described. (Ficino qtd. in Gombrich 158–59)
Emblematic images support flash reason by means of enigmas that provoke thought to move beyond the given sense.
Not only can we not think of the sign as representing a real creature, even the event it represents transcends the possibility of our experience—what will happen when the devouring jaws reach the neck and the jaws themselves? It is this paradoxical nature of the image that has made it the archetypal symbol of mystery. The serpent does not represent either time or the Universe, but precisely because it is inexhaustible in its signification it shows us so much “in a flash” that we return from its contemplation as from a dream we can no longer quite recount or explain. (159)
The “flash” of inference produced by such “open signs” does involve some articulation: “the experience of meaning after meaning which is suggested to our mind as we contemplate the enigmatic images becomes an analogue of the mode of apprehension in which the higher intelligence may not only see one particular proposition as in a flash, but all the truth their mind can encompass—in the case of the Divine Mind the totality of all propositions” (159). We could just as well think of the schema as an allegory of rhetoric, sorted out according to temporal responsibility: forensic (past), epideictic (present), deliberative (future). The flash of reason has always been desirable but becomes a necessity when the three time zones collapse into Now. And for “the Divine Mind” read “Internet,” since what is at stake in our updating of Prudence is the functionality of what was imagined and described in previous eras as the “mind of God.” Avatar is how individual and collective (total) beings communicate in a digital apparatus.
Template
In order to exercise the quality of experience augmented in electracy, you may compose your own Allegory of Prudence, using Titian’s work as a point of departure. The template includes the formal possibilities (allegory, iconography, portraiture), and also the content (a family incident, cultural mythology and legend). The work celebrates a satisfaction. The purpose of the exercise is to get a feeling for flash reason by composing an image commemorating an act of decision, specifically a decision covered by prudence. It is not that the action was itself prudent, but that im/prudence
