NETWORKED: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)
Turbulence.Org

Proposal for a Wiki-based chapter on networked art

Gregory L. Ulmer
Department of English
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611
glue@ufl.edu

CV

Avatars Against the Internet Accident

Abstract

This article hosts a collaboration for the invention of Flash Reason, a rhetoric for an Internet public sphere, making possible a deliberative reason in conditions of the General (Internet) Accident warned of by Paul Virilio as a necessary consequence of a society of the spectacle. The methodological framework for the invention includes grammatology (history and theory of writing) and heuretics (logic of invention). The materials of the invention are provided by the archive of the Western tradition, specifically the arts, and the practices of imaging developed through several millennia of engagements testing the capacity of the image to support sudden thought. This image logic is the skill-set for citizen avatars, consulting on public policy formation in social networking environments, supported by semantic-web enhanced databases. The article initiates the collaboration by modeling the invention rationale and procedures, and identifying areas for invention predicted by the primary analogy guiding the process (the invention of literacy in Classical Greece). Comparisons with the invention of writing in China, and the wisdom traditions popularized through the I Ching oracle, may be provided as a relay mapping an applied epiphany engine. The ambition of the article is to show how the Networked Wiki may be to digital technologies what Plato's Academy was to alphabetic writing.

Keywords

Accident, Apparatus, Art, Avatar, Branding, Celebrity, Citizenship, Collaboration, Commodity, Consulting, Database, Dromosphere, Epiphany, Experience, Experiment, Hegemony, History, Identity, Imaging, Internet, Invention, Literacy, Metaphysics, Network, Outside, Post-Human, Public Sphere, Rhetoric, Spectacle, Wiki, Work.

1. Purpose

The purpose of this chapter is to facilitate an online civic practice for an Internet Public Sphere. Specifically, the Wiki setting coordinates the design and implementation of a netizen consultancy, creating a rhetoric of deliberative reason for citizen avatars. The context motivating this approach to Networked is Paul Virilio's warning that the conditions of the dromosphere (dimension collapse due to speed of light communications) imply the possibility of a General Accident that occurs everywhere simultancously. The current global financial crisis is an example of the credibility of this threat. The point of departure for a response to Virilio is his observation that in the dromosphere no deliberative reason is possible, since Now time allows for no critical distance, no democratic formation of consensus or consent of the governed. The task of Avatars is to design and test a rhetoric native to new media, for use by database assisted avatars, permitting citizen participation in public policy formation, creating a capacity for speed of light democracy. The immediate relevance of this larger ambition to the goals of Networked is the claim that the formal features enabling an Internet civic sphere are found primarily in art. A policy implication of this claim (to be tested in the Wiki environment) is that art education should become a priority for a society migrating online.

2. Method

Laws of Media
Marshall McLuhan noted a pattern in the history of inventions: that in any important innovation something current is made obsolete, and something old is retrieved from the archive and updated. Avatars models this procedure of retrieval, by using a few key historical cases demonstrating the extensive knowledge possessed within the Western tradition (and beyond) with respect to a rhetoric of instant (sudden) thought. Associated with imaging (as distinct from discursive logic), Flash Reason (as we will call it) obsessed Western philosophers and artists from the Ancient Greeks to vanguard modernists. In a word, the basic device of Flash Reason is epiphany. The popularity of Gladwell's Blink offers a context that simultancously shows the possibilities of an applied epiphany and the absence of arts knowledge from generalist discourse. Some Arts and Letters historical precedents for contemporary Quick Thinking include: Manuscript era pedagogies of Memory Palaces, Commonplace Topics, Byzantine Religious Iconography. Modernist poetics foreground the epiphany through a number of major examples: Baudelaire's correspondences, Rilke's Weltinnenraum, Eliot's objective correlative, Joyce's epiphany, Proust's involuntary memory, Benjamin's dialectical image, Freud's transference, to list some of the best known instances. Indeed, modernist arts in all media (including music and architecture), far from being superceded in civilizational terms (as argued in some postmodernist texts), get credit for forms that adapted human experience to the sublime city. They all share the structure of juxtaposing past present, implying a future; in short, creating a time-image. The poetics of modernist (experimental) arts have been ported online through new media innovations.

Apparatus
A second, related methodological assumption is that digital technologies are one dimension of an apparatus or social machine that includes also institution formation (with relevant practices) and identity experience (individual and collective). Literacy is an apparatus that includes not only alphabetic writing, but also School (Plato's Academy) and the practices invented within the institution native to alphabetic equipment (method as such, science). In addition, grammatologists have shown that selfhood as a behavior and the democratic (city) state were invented within this matrix, displacing the hegemonic oral society. The lesson is that literacy was invented in all three registers, and so too must be electracy (the digital apparatus). Most important in this context, the invention streams (genealogies) for each of the registers is autonomous. There is no technological determinism. The features of Flash Reason may not be inferred directly from the properties of digital equipment. Specifically, the institutional setting with the most expertise relevant to the creation of the skill-set for an Internet citizenship is not computer science and engineering, but the Arts and Letters disciplines. A major task for an Internet public sphere, in any case, will be the reintegration of the divisions of knowledge into a holistic mode of inquiry (consilience revised, replacing cognitive science with aesthetics).

Metaphysics
Flash Reason is invented with the help of an analogy with the invention of literacy. For example, the analogy proposes that we identify the electrate equivalent of Socrates. Socrates was the last oracle and the first philosopher, or at least the prototype of a syncretic thinker, possessed simultaneously with mantic and dialectical capabilities. The Wiki asks: who is our Socrates? The analogy offers the name of almost any celebrity, since they are the ones experiencing what it is to become an image. "So would I," was Cary Grant s reply to a fan who said he would like to be Cary Grant. Mariah Carey complained that her image was having much more fun than she was. Liz Taylor distanced herself from her image by calling it a commodity. "I don t know what the ingredients are," she said. "I just know that it makes money." The analogy with literacy proposes the following generator. Literate metaphysics (Aristotle) produced the category as such, within which appeared the "thing," resulting from the new procedure of definition in terms of essence. Human identity was reconfigured in this context as "essence." A possible equivalent for electracy: the commodity as a second-order thing (based not on essential properties of use or function, but on relationships of exchange). The mutation into post-human identity is already underway in the commodified spectacle. Selves becoming images must learn the logic of the commodity sign, that is, must take up the identity designs of branding, and engage with commercial culture in a dialogical struggle for the right to determine what constitutes the good life in the new apparatus (formerly the project of philosophy). The first issue for the new consultancy may be: what is the nature of well-being? What are the best uses for experiences of dis/satisfaction in the dromosphere? In fact, Ernesto Laclau has described the new logic of hegemony using commodity sign examples (how does Coca-Cola = America?).

3. Avatar

An arts contribution to apparatus invention may center on the question of avatar, understood in the broadest terms (presentation/transformation of "self" in any online environment). Avatar is the site of emergence of the identity dimension of the new apparatus, replacing selfhood and state. The cyberpunk fictions, such as Snow Crash, that established avatar as the relevant term for online identity formation, took the term from Hindu tradition (Vishnu's nine incarnations with one more pending). Our retrieval method, however, notes that avatar (meaning "descent") is also central to the Western tradition. Hellenistic Christian syncretism (precisely the account of human being challenged by the post-human) assumed a circular trajectory, a fall out of spirit into matter (catabasis, procession), a sublunar abiding or dwelling (conatus, striving), a return or ascension (anabasis, epistrophe). In Neoplatonism, every embodied human is an avatar. The world itself is an image of the ideal Forms. Christ is an avatar, whose avatar in turn is the Church. To ignore this profound, ubiquitous tradition is to import and repeat it in our designs. It serves rather as Contrast and generator for an alternative understanding of living life. The invention strategy modeled in Avatar (heuretics) makes explicit the heuristics of apparatus generation, and invites all parties to consult. The guiding analogy of this experiment is the updating of avatar in modernist arts, as theorized by Maurice Blanchot, especially in his reading of the Orpheus myth. What is the experience of avatar (of becoming image)? It is the experience of the art work (keywords: the outside, the neutral). In this context the term "network" opens up to expose: 1) "net" as a guiding image of metis (fishing net, trap, deceit, surprise, ambush -- an art of seeming rather than being), associated with the cunning intelligence of Classical Greece, alternative to contemplation (theory); 2) "work" as Ergon, calling attention to all borders, thresholds, passages, as in Derrida's Parergon. Avatar translates "network" as "threshold lure."

4. Contact: Gregory Ulmer, Networked Writing

Invent-L@lists.ufl.edu Creator, Moderator

Collaboration with John Craig Freeman, Florida Research Ensemble
Imaging Beijing

Blog, Heuretics

Catalyst for group anthology
The Illogic of Sense: The Gregory L. Ulmer Remix

Website Project, Image of Wide Scope (pedagogical model).
Noon Star