[-empyre-] Complicity

[Gregory Ulmer]

Warning:  This post has approx 626 words.

The keyword filter for my hobby horse (electracy) is being pinged 
repeatedly in this conversation, with the added motivation of a live 
conversation.   Here is how our topic (especially the themes of 
complicity and pure art) looks from the angle of grammatology (history 
and theory of writing), that is, within the frame of electracy as an 
apparatus (social machine), that is to digital technologies what 
literacy is to alphabetic technologies.

Some of you will recall my comments on electracy from this past October, 
during the discussion of the Networkedbook (Turbulence.org).  Electracy 
dates from the turn into the nineteenth century, the epoch of 
revolutions (industrial, bourgeois, representational, technological).  
The arts & letters strategy for orienting ourselves to our own epoch is 
by analogy with the invention of literacy in classical Greece.  The term 
“apparatus” in this context (derived and expanded from media studies) is 
used to notice that the invention is a matrix including institution 
formation and identity behavior (individual and collective).  A relevant 
point of the analogy is that in Athens Plato et al created a new 
institution (the Academy), which opened a new zone, within which they 
invented the devices enabling “pure thought.” This new kind of thought 
was different from the oral apparatus (religion, ritual, spirit, 
tribe).  It has been dubbed “natural history” retroactively, and 
eventually became hegemonic, or at least fully independent, in the 
seventeenth century, the inception of “science” in the modern sense.  
“Science” as a worldview, however, became possible within the literate 
apparatus.  The related identity inventions are “selfhood” as experience 
and behavior, and the democratic state. 

Our present moment is the heir of these two apparati, providing two axes 
guiding (in unstable syncretism) our collective deliberations:  
right/wrong (oral); true/false (literate).  Electracy does not eliminate 
or replace these two historical forces, but supplements them with a 
third dimension.  The invention of this third dimension occurs primarily 
in 19th-c Paris.  Paris is the Athens of electracy.  The template from 
Athens maps the recurrence of apparatus creation.  A good account of 
this event is Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art:  Genesis and Structure 
of the Literary Field.  A new zone opens within hegemonic (bourgeois) 
culture, known as “bohemia.” The aesthetic is the relevant human 
capacity to be augmented in the prosthesis (the apparatus), and pure art 
is the means. 

Bourdieu identifies Baudelaire and Flaubert as the inventors (his term) 
of this stance and formal operation, with Manet as their equivalent in 
painting.  The vanguard revolution more generally subsequently develops 
and institutionalizes this innovation.  The philosophical account of 
this gambit is familiar, beginning with Kant’s promotion of aesthetic 
judgment (taste) to equal status with pure and practical reason.  The 
third dimension added to the axes orienting deliberation is that of 
pleasure/pain (Spinoza’s joy/sadness).  The responsibility of this 
dimension (distinct from oral salvation or literate science) is 
well-being (thriving).  The implications for politics and ethics are 
substantial:  what happens when pleasure/pain has equal (?) voice 
relative to right/wrong and true/false?  To put it another way, what 
happens when well-being has an army?

For better or worse, this new dimension was quickly colonized by 
capitalism, institutionalized as entertainment, with the definition of 
“satisfaction” inherited from philosophy (the purpose of life as 
“happiness”) appropriated by the commodity form.   Such is our present 
moment, with all dimensions of the electrate matrix still in flux, 
becoming whatever (autopoietically, without telos), still open to 
invention (but with strong tendencies already hegemonic).  The caveat is 
that these developments include mutation of identity.  As Kuhn said 
about scientific revolutions:  the new paradigm does not solve the old 
problems but makes them irrelevant.  Apparatus framing revises Kuhn:  
the old problems remain relevant, but relative to their apparatus.  Our 
present condition then is tricameral, undergoing continuing negotiations.


-- 
*Gregory L. Ulmer*
http://www.english.ufl.edu/~glue
http://heuretics.wordpress.com
 University of Florida