Practical Reason: Electrate Innovation

The experience of modernity—that is, being cut-off from conditions of experience—has no escape routes. Like the populace that Marchand describes, of 1920s and 1930s America, experiencing mental and physical problems associated with industrialization, we need a new apparatus for navigating the territory of electracy—for establishing well-being. The commodity form offers temporary satisfaction, or illusions of it, but it does not penetrate into the mindset of the era nor does it offer new ways to navigate through the loss of direct experience that consumerism in some ways contributes to and perpetuates. Innovations in science operate on a progressive, parallel plane, but they are impossible to experience (despite the fact that they may contribute to what constitutes experience in electracy: the web, cell phone technology, video games, etc.). Science, like the source and application of the rule in Virno's system, only goes so far, then the concept of atë” (Lecture Notes) comes into play; the chaos in the system (Deleuze and Guattari), the human aspect, that enables (and perhaps presupposes) innovation (Virno).

Virno identifies two historiconatural institutions that “metabolize ambivalence and oscillation, rather than postulating their unilateral resolution” (as they would in a literate system) and that “avoid the delineation of a pseudoenvironment for human praxis, thus meriting the designation of being truly worldly institutions” (44): language and ritual.

The concept of katechon (“‘that which restrains’—a force that defers, over and over again, total destruction” (45)) does for ritual what the rule of law aims to do for the multitude: “the concept of katechon, with the political implications of ritual practices, contributes significantly in defining the structure and the duties of institutions that no longer pertain to the state” (45).

Language, Virno states, “ has a preindividual and superindividual life. It concerns the single human animal only in as much as this animal is part of a ‘mass of speakers.’ Just like freedom or power, it exists only in the relation between the members of a community” (46). Language essentially exists outside of the rule of law because “it is not limited in its process” and cannot “be accounted for within a human rule, which is continually corrected or directed or is able to be corrected of directed by human reason” (50). The “gap and [associated] risk” that Virno identifies as the anthropogenetic lot of the human being in society, is the essence of language: “Both gap and risk have an exact name: the faculty of language” (47), where “faculty” is pure potentiality that is “still lacking an effective reality” (47). Language and writing, Virno writes, quoting Suassure,

are NOT BASED on a natural relationship between things. There is never a way to link a certain sibilant sound and the shape of the letter S, and similarly it is no harder for the word vache than the word vacca to refer to a cow. […]. Language is nothing other than an institution. But it proves much more; it shows that language is an institution which has no COMPARABLE COUNTERPART [ibid: 146-147]. (49)

The "gap and risk" embodied in language (the materials of innovation), Virno posits, can be experienced in the logic of the joke. Jokes “can offer us an adequate empirical basis for understanding the way in which linguistic animals give evidence of an unexpected deviation from their normal praxis” (72). If language enables an “unexpected deviation from . . . normal practice,” then this enabling space of difference is important because it is the space of creativity that characterizes electracy:

jokes seem to exemplify, quite effectively, the restricted acceptance of ‘creativity’: that is to say, that which does not coincide tautologically with human nature in its complex totality, but uses, instead, a critical situation as its own exclusive testing ground. (72)

Conduction

The junction between normal praxis and a creative space of innovation is enabled by the inference principles of practical reasoning: abduction, deduction, induction. Electracy adds a fourth inference, conduction (which can be verbal and extraverbal (Lecture Notes)). Professor Ulmer explains conduction in the following passage from Heuretics: The Logic of Invention:

abduction moves from ‘thing’ to ‘rule’; deduction moves from ‘rule’ to ‘case’; and induction moves from ‘case’ to ‘thing’ (Eco and Sebeok).  In electronic logic, however, it is necessary to reason directly from 'thing' to 'thing,' from particular to particular, supplementing the inferential detour through conceptual reasoning.  Hence the importance of folie: French poststructurlism in general, including Lacanian psychoanalysis, provides the best outline of such logic as a guide to inventing the premises for a logic of invention. This electronic path of ‘inference’ is called ‘conduction’ (Teletheory) and its operations show that ‘chance’ has its own order that makes ‘opposition’ thinkable in another way (a new gesture). (195).

In this course, we will go beyond Virno (into the logic of electracy) by extending his joke principle with the help of the tale component of the CATTt, using Greg Dean’s joke making mechanism and David Evan’s explanation of appropriation art (CATTt).