Happiness

Paolo Virno's Multitude configures the Target register of the CATTt.  Our Target is a public policy issue, as it is manifested in the debates circulating in the public sphere, relative to our roles as consultants (egents) for the EmerAgency (a virtual consultancy).  The first step in seeking instructions from Virno is to situate his argument in the context of the history of philosophy (the discourse of our  Theory).  Virno himself identifies his work as addressing the problem of good judgment, prudence or phronesis, the virtue of practical reason.  Routine is constructed within a situation of our concern for a specific policy dilemma, requiring collective decision (deliberative rhetoric).  What should we do?

Virno explains the difficulty of this question, given that humans are open to the world, dis-oriented, indeterminate.  We will recognize in this description the terms of Aristotle's Ethics and Greek metaphysics (literacy) in general.  Literate metaphysics opened a plane of immanence to ontologize, identifying the reality of what exists in the substance of what is, the essence of entities, which is their nature, purpose, or end.  Aristotle named this essence with an invented portmanteau term, entelechy.  This concept (an operating principle of philsophy and hence also a concept in D&G's terms) is Aristotle's answer to Plato's question, asking about the relationship between being and becoming.  Plato proposed chora (space, a receptacle of mediation) as a solution, but Aristotle introduced time:  a thing becomes what it already is.  Reality has two dimensions:  the potential and the actual (dunamis and energeia). An acorn is a potential oak, and its actualization or becoming over time is guided by this inner nature.

In his Ethics Aristotle asked after the inner nature of humans.  What is our end (telos) or purpose?  Humans are unique in nature in that our own choices (proairesis) are included in our becoming.  There is nonetheless a guiding principle.  Human purpose is well-being, our goal or end is to thrive.  A measure of our well-being is in the experience of happiness.   Here is the immediate connection of Virno with our CATTt so far.  Theory and Contrast (D&G and Marchand), philosophy and commerce, are in a dialogical struggle to define the terms and construct the concepts most relevant for practical reason in electracy.  Virno now adds a philosophical approach to the arguments organizing the policy debates themselves, with a proposal for how to innovate within practical reason.

The "Athens" of Electracy

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 ofpleasure/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.