Avatar Emergency

Gregory L. Ulmer

Description

A new experience of identity is emerging within the digital apparatus under the rubric of “avatar.” This study develops “concept avatar” as an opportunity to invent a practice of citizenship native to the Internet that simulates the functionality of measure dramatized in the traditions of “descent” (“avatar”) or “incarnation,” including the original usage in the Bhagavad Gita, and the Western evolution of the virtue of prudence from the Ancient daimon, through genius and character, to the contemporary sinthome.

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 15 août 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602353428
• Langue: English

Extrait

New Media Theory
Series Editor, Byron Hawk
The New Media Theory series investigates both media and new media as a complex ecological and rhetorical context. The merger of media and new media creates a global social sphere that is changing the ways we work, play, write, teach, think, and connect. Because this new context operates through evolving arrangements, theories of new media have yet to establish a rhetorical and theoretical paradigm that fully articulates this emerging digital life.
The series includes books that combine social, cultural, political, textual, rhetorical, aesthetic, and material theories in order to understand moments in the lives that operate in these emerging contexts. Such works typically bring rhetorical and critical theories to bear on media and new media in a way that elaborates a burgeoning post-disciplinary “medial turn” as one further development of the rhetorical and visual turns that have already influenced scholarly work.
Other Books in the Series
Mics, Cameras, Symbolic Action: Audio- Visual Rhetoric for Writing Teachers , by Bump Halbritter (2012)
The Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric , by David M. Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony J. Michel (2012)
New Media/New Methods: The Academic Turn from Literacy to Electracy , edited by Jeff Rice and Marcel O’Gorman (2008)
The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition , by Alexander Reid (2007). Honorable Mention, W. Ross Winterowd/ JAC Award for Best Book in Composition Theory, 2007.


Avatar Emergency
Gregory L. Ulmer
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA
© 2012 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ulmer, Gregory L., 1944-
Avatar emergency / Gregory L. Ulmer.
p. cm. -- (New media theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60235-289-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-290-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-291-9 (ebook)
1. Digital media--Philosophy. 2. Digital media--Technological innovations. 3. Image (Philosophy) 4. Virtual reality in art. 5. Aesthetics. I. Title.
P90.U42 2012
302.23’1--dc23
2012004380
1 2 3 4 5
Cover design by David Blakesley.
Cover images © 2012 by Gregory L. Ulmer.
Printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email [e-mail].


for Anjali Claire


Contents
Preface
1 Prudence
2 Concept
3 Joke
4 Descent
5 Moment
6 Memory
7 Measure
8 Enjoyment
9 Letter
10 Frog
11 Hegemony
12 Counsel
13 Wisdom
Afterword: Class Portrait With Daimon (A Remix)
Works Cited
Index to the Print Version
About the Author


Figure 1. Titian . Allegory of Time Governed by Prudence. 1565.


Preface
Something is happening to us and through us that goes by the name “avatar.” Some of us are present in Second Life through an “avatar” or have had our identities stolen digitally, added a photograph to our Facebook account or personalized our blog with an icon, even designed and sold t-shirts, skateboards, coffee mugs and the like branded with our personal logos. But branding is not avatar. We have not yet begun to avatar, although there are futuristic scenarios and scholarly histories, looking forward and back in time, archiving the possibilities and precedents. You can meet avatar, that part of you inhabiting cyberspace (for lack of a better term). You and I need to meet the avatar that we already have, that we already are, now that it may be augmented within the digital apparatus (electracy) beyond branding to become prostheses of counsel and decision. Electrate avatar knows more than you or I do, it knows better than you or I do about what will have happened in our various respective situations. This claim must be not only understood, but undergone. It is not only an idea, a theory, but an experience. The goal of this book is to make it a practice of digital education.
The concept, tradition, and practice of “avatar” are central to the invention of “flash reason,” a deliberative rhetoric for public policy formation, making democratically informed decisions in a moment, at light speed, against the threat of a General Accident that happens everywhere simultaneously. Any theorizing of “avatar” must at least acknowledge James Cameron’s dramatization in the blockbuster film. It is fortunate for my account (given the influence this film will have in shaping the discussion) that there is an important aspect of electrate avatar captured by Cameron’s treatment. Avatar as an experience is an event of counsel. It is an uncanny encounter with one’s own possibility (potential), as undergone in various wisdom traditions noted here as analogies for the rhetoric (flash reason) made possible through avatar practice. Through avatar, players come to understand the General Economy (Bataille) of the universe, so to speak, represented as “nature” or the Gaia spirit of Pandora in Cameron’s film. The “jar-head” Sully, incarnated in his Na’vi simulation, transcends his Marine training as well as his limitations both physical and mental, to oppose the actions of the military-industrial-complex corporation that are threatening the natural order. It is perhaps understandable, if not inevitable, that the screenplay uses the shorthand of the Frontier myth, in high-concept reconfiguration (genre hybrid), to express its values. Cameron’s Avatar is a Western.
Concepts are an invention of literacy, created by the Classical Greeks in the Academy and Lyceum in Athens, as a device for developing alphabetic writing as a support for thought. Concepts used the formal technique of definition to identify the properties of an entity constituting its essence, its nature, based on its function or purpose. In addition to these general concepts classifying the things of the world, the Greeks produced a number of specialized concepts designed to do the work of philosophy itself, and philosophy ever since has created a host of these devices. The question today concerns whether or in what way philosophical concepts may survive in, or be adapted to, the apparatus of electracy that emerged at the beginning of the industrial revolution and is displacing literacy (and orality) as the dominant metaphysics (reality construction) of electronic digital civilization. The experiment in this study is to construct a “concept avatar” to support thought in electracy. Avatar is to electracy what “self” is to literacy, or “spirit” to orality. Avatar as concept is needed to understand how theory may still be performed in the image metaphysics of electracy.
Concepts begin in response to some problem field (plane of immanence in the vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari) that resists or challenges or threatens human thriving. The problem field of Avatar is represented in the film as the military industrial complex, allegorized in the conglom attempting to mine unobtainium on Pandora, with the help of a ruthless head of security, a former Marine colonel. We are in an allegory, a mythology whose features are familiar, in that the screenplay conforms not only to the hybrid genre terms of a sci-fi-western, but to the fundamental adventure template of a “hero with a thousand faces” that structures nearly every narrative in Western culture. Sully is a “conceptual persona” whose transformation over the course of the narrative constitutes a “vital anecdote” dramatizing the thought needed to address the problem. It is not a matter of what Cameron intended but what we may learn about avatar as thought.
Avatar as concept may be and must be thought today, in that we already are avatar, or becoming avatar. We avatar (verb) online every day; we put our self into the prosthesis of the Internet, as Jake enters the prosthetic body to explore Pandora, and enter the culture of the Na’vi. The entry into writing produced the experience of “selfhood.” An important skill of literacy concerns the management of “voice” in writing. What is the experience of becoming image online? The electrate equivalent of “voice” is not just “image” but “avatar,” with the difference being that avatar is an expression you receive, not one that you send. My proposal is to add a conceptual register to the problem, persona, and anecdote referenced in the film. What experience does Jake have in the prosthesis that transforms him from jarhead to champion of the Na’vi fight against the conglom? Structurally we recognize his decision as conventional in our culture. At the end of the second act of a standard Hollywood three-act screenplay, the protagonist is confronted by a choice: to change from the disposition given at the beginning of the adventure in order to become adequate to the problem troubling