Practical Reason: Machiavellian Innovation

After Aristotle, the next major innovation was Machiavelli’s, “who was credited with 1) being the Descartes of practical reason” and 2) for bringing reason to bear in areas of ethics and politics. Machiavelli “understood that politics was a matter of contingency and appearance.” He recommended expediency. He introduced the notion of drawing upon a experiences in the midst of a crisis in order to make a decision for the best outcome for the future (Lecture Notes). “His innovation was to subordinate fortune to the virtue of a leader.” Machiavelli’s advice to leaders can be allied to the idea of fortune as a river: the solution to a potential problem—for example, a river flooding—is for a state to be adequately prepared (for every possibility). Virtue, in a Machiavellian system, is preparedness. In a contemporary context, the “equivalent scenario is the notion of the frontier” (Lecture Notes).

Frontier

In Heuretics: The Logic of Invention, Professor Ulmer, quoting Martin Green, explains that the concept of frontiers are “‘partially ignored’” places existing outside the “‘center where [a society’s] laws are promulgated and revered, . . . but where the law-making power fights life-or-death battles’” [Green, 1991:36]” (32). The frontier, as an analogy for electracy, therefore, is a place that operates in a different social space:

The electronic apparatus, however, is introducing, at every level of individual and institutional behavior, a decentered structuration in which maps designed in terms of centers and peripheries, of frontiers and adventure, no longer correspond to the territory. Choral work, that is, puts the ‘adventure of knowledge,’ under erasure, which is to say that it is only a prelusive, a mere beginning, a proposal, an experiment.

The strategy of chorography for deconstructing the frontier metaphor of research is to consider this 'place' and its 'genre' in rhetorical terms—as a topos” (Ulmer 33).