Repent for your Humanity!

R3p3n7 f0r y0ur Hum@n17y!

A more current version of this article can be found at PROVOCATIVE PENGUIN

You’re sitting on a train at the station. Another train slowly passes by on the next track over. You feel yourself leaving the station, only to realize – once the other train has passed – that you haven’t moved an inch. While illusions of motion and directionality are most often associated with spatial location (“Am I going up or down, shifting to the left or to the right, moving forwards or backwards”), we are often victims of illusions regarding the progression and regression of our culture and our inner lives: A culture celebrates its progressiveness, its forward thinking attributes, however this optimism can obscure revelations of a nationally sanctioned genocide or atrocity; an individual feels exceedingly active, strong and free, only to find some months later that this period of euphoria has betrayed a destructive psychological pathology.

Today, our clearest illusion of motion is demonstrated by our orientation to technology. Fervor over the latest gadgets permeates our popular culture. Spinning through the whirlwind of digital do-gooders promising a freer, more connected and transparent future, it is difficult to determine whether we are being propelled forwards or dragged backwards. We are usually told we are marching forward, but what if we are the victims of an optical illusion?

Our most aggressive technophiles, the Transhumanists, pine for the glorious day when human beings will be H+ : having overcome our tragic old selves, the limits of our imperfect, fleshy bodies, and our endless lamentations on the horizon of our eventual death. When this new, endless day dawns, our mind (synonymous with our ‘self’ for the Transhumanists) will have been transformed into a code capable of being uploaded into virtual worlds and synthetic bodies. Likewise, advocates of radical body modification strive to extend our limited human morphology into unlimited formations and combinations. The always gusty and unpredicatble wind of technology has gained tornadic intensity, and all around us crackles the lightening of technical wizardry, the thunderous crash of our subsequent inventions and the howling hysterical cries that we are moving beyond the human.

But how are we to tell which direction humanity is moving from within this violent funnel? Has this disorienting condition finally knocked directionality – and thus the question of human progress – out of our skulls altogether? Is this great trans-formation, this next Great Exodus of Man, allowing us to stand firmer, freer and more independent on our own two feet, or returning us to crawling on all fours at the throne of a cruel Sun God?

The philosopher Jean Baudrillard, surveying the technological tornado, observed that “the human does not give way to the superhuman, as Nietzsche had dreamed … Rather, it gives way to the subhuman, to something not beyond, but underneath the human, to an erasure of the symbolic marks that make up the species”. Instead of moving toward the overman, our trans-, or post- humanity, Baudrillard suggested that we may actually be moving us into the realm of the subhuman, that which is under man. In this critical light, the liberatory deathlessness of the Transhumanists becomes the creation of digital sarcophagi (“deathless alter-egos”) for the human species; the morphological freedom of the body modification advocates becomes destructive self-mutilation.

Keen detectives of popular culture know better than to take “the new” at face value. Simply because a consumer or cultural product is released this year does not require that it has gesticulated wholly in the womb of present day techniques, habits and practices. Consider our robust nostalgia industry and the myriad ‘new’ product that emerge from it. We find ‘new’ products that are not simply marked by nostalgic yearning, but the drive to identically simulate an earlier form. The word “nostalgia” itself derives from the Greek “nostos”, usually translated as “homecoming”. While we tend to use nostalgia to describe a temporal looking back, it originally described a spatial returning home; rather than a time-sickness (yearning to repeat the experiences of an earlier time), the term originally signified a home-sickness (the motor behind Odysseus’ journey home).

A homecoming, returning-home, a home-sickness. But what is our true home? And how long are the tendrils of nostalgia? Baudrillard answers that “Contrary to everything that seems obvious and ‘natural’, nature’s first creatures were immortal. It was only by obtaining the power to die, by dint of constant struggle, that we became the living beings we are today … [F]irst the reign of the immortals, than the mortal and sexed beings overtaking the immortals”. Our original home was an indivisible one, an immortal one, an identical one; there was no division, no sex, no alterity. (Residues of the journey away from this originary state exist in the Old Testament, where Eve and Adam are barred from access to the Tree of Eternal Life, introduced to the nakedness of the distinct sexes and the burdened with the cultural differences that provide the basis for human history. God scolds the first humans thusly: “I will put enmity / Between you and the woman, And between your offspring and hers.”)

Humanity is a celebration of endings, distinctions, duality and differentiation. Baudrillard’s warning was that we often believe post-humanism to be creating new types of life, when it is in fact a nostalgic homesickness for our distant past as inorganic, unsexed, undying creatures. The unpopular contrast to today’s post-humanism, whose aims include exploding the male-female sex binary as an artificial and unnecessary construct, was voiced by Michael Valentine Smith near the conclusion of Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land: “Male-femaleness is the greatest gift we have—romantic physical love may be unique to this planet. If it is, the universe is a poorer place than it could be … and I grok dimly that we-who-are-God will save this precious invention and spread it. The joining of bodies with merging of souls in shared ecstasy, giving, receiving, delighting in each other—well, there’s nothing on Mars to touch it, and it’s the source, I grok in fullness, of all that makes this planet so rich and wonderful.”

What is curious about our popular culture, our collective subconscious, is our romanticizing of infantilism and intoxication leading to the loss of consciousness and the control of motor reflexes. Consider Breathe Carolina’s ‘Blackout’, which begins: “Caught up and I can’t feel my hands, No need to chase. Can you relate?” or Taio Cruz, who in ‘Hangover’, wants to “[G]o until I blow up. / And I can drink until I throw up / And I don’t ever, ever want to grow up / I wanna keep it going, keep it going, going, going”, or the anthem of our gurgling age, located in Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’: Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah! Roma-Roma-ma-ah! Ga-ga-ooh-la-la!

The music video for Lady Gaga’s (her name is itself evocative of an insecurity about the demarcation between infancy and adulthood) song ‘Born this Way’ begins with a transparent, antiseptic looking, glass throne floating through space, followed by the birth of a new, asexually produced, race. The narration over this curious mythical scene – which must be quoted in full – tells us: “This is the Manifesto of Mother Monster. On G.O.A.T, a Government Owned Alien Territory in space, a birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place. But the birth was not finite. It was infinite. As the wombs numbered and the mitosis of the future began, it was perceived that this infamous moment in life is not temporal, it is eternal. And thus began the beginning of the new race, a race within the race of humanity, a race which bares no prejudice, no judgment but boundless freedom.” The sexless, deathless Mother Monster: indivisible, immortal, identical, floating on its throne through infinite space, enclosed in antiseptic, transparent, glass.

Baudrillard’s warning was that today “the [ancient] immortals are avenging themselves through the [technologically new] process of sex and cloning, through interminable reduplication, through the obliteration of sex and death”. After the revolutionary advent of sex and death, which freed us from our originary incest and primitive entropy comes the liberation of sex and death, which is “recreating precisely these [pre-sexual, pre-mortal] conditions”. After the revolution, an involution: the process whereby when something turns upon itself. “Liberty is hard to take.” From immortal to mortal and back to immortality – asexual to sexual back to asexuality – total to individual and back to totality – indistinct to distinct and back to indistinction.

We are homesick, are repentant for leaving our origin, and have embarked on an involution back to our home port.  But on the journey “backwards” we are surrounded by things that are associated with being “forwards”: cloning, simulation, programming, and genetic management. Around us are minstrels singing ballads about the loss of individual consciousness, about blacking out, and worshiping at the indivisible, immortal, throne of Mother Monster, at upwards of 170 BPM (beats-per-minute). We may believe we are setting out further beyond the Pillars of Hercules, into wholly uncharted waters, when we are actually returning home. Teenagers aboard this ship spend their evenings in the Church of the Undying Vampire, using their parent’s Visa Infinite card to purchase a ticket to the latest ‘Twilight’ film Breaking Dawn, whose tagline is: Forever is only the Beginning. They avoid sleep with Red Bull and dance the night away to the music video for Lady Gaga’s “Born this Way”, which begins with Mother Monster’s cellular mitosis and concludes with a skeleton that is very much alive.

We are in motion, that is certain, but whether we are the victims of an illusion obscuring the amplification or attenuation of our humanity is a question for us unrepentant humanists, increasingly few and far between, who are not “sick of sex, of difference, of emancipation, of culture” and who remain able to defend our diversity, our complexity, and our alterity.

Special thanks to Alison Cohen for bringing to my attention to the obsession with infantalization and getting black out drunk on the Billboard top 100. 

All Baudrillard quotes are from “The Final Solution: Cloning Beyond the Human and the Inhuman” in The Vital Illusion (Lectures given in May, 1999)

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 22: On Humanist Posthumanism) – CONCLUSION

The twenty-second (and final!) part in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars.

In contrast to claims that the avatar represents a posthuman body, I have proposed that avatarization is not (for better or worse) an overcoming of any human condition, but rather an interactive technique that works with the unconscious drives that persist in comprising our complex humanity.

Whether ones impression of avatarization is pessimistic or celebratory, both positions are enriched tremendously by at least a consideration of the Oedipal dimension
of the self, something both positions, hitherto, have tended to consider outmoded or invalid.

The analysis of Second Life carried out over the past twenty odd posts suggests that Oedipus ought always be thought alongside Epimetheus. A binocular approach, merging humanist Oedipal conclusions with a posthuman Epimethean position,
regards avatarization through the lens of a humanist posthumanism.

This humanist posthumanism challenges us to reconsider the virtual avatar as symbolic of the transubstantiation implied by “avātara” or “incarnation” without neglecting to account for the ways the virtual avatar does alter the user’s sense of self, and is reflective of the contingency of social life. The conclusions yielded by this binocular merger of Epimethean and Oedipal readings of avatarization, suggests three general tenets of a humanist posthumanism that might be applied to future studies of media technologies.

Humanist posthumanism welcomes the always-already posthuman and its perpetual overcoming of new types of bodies and senses of self only insofar as it also recognizes that all-too-human lack and psychical structure are associated with these processes. Humanist posthumanism regards the self as both a “thingless thing”, a “wind being…between jouissance, which longs for words, and the Name-of-the-Father, which orders them” and the historically contingent articulations of this “thingless thing” (Lander 44). Read through this lens, the SL avatar can indeed be considered a harbinger of the new and different, but only insofar as the new and different act in concert with what is old and long familiar.

Some final observations:

-Virtual worlds engage with our always already posthuman qualities and our humanity; despite being always-already post-human, the (virtual world) user encounters a structural humanness.

-Interacting with new types of (virtual) bodies and senses of self involves tarrying with the return, and a reminder of, a fixed set of psychical structures: we encounter the new but the old returns or remains.

-The overcoming of a fixed body or solid sense of self is due to the presence of the
user’s psychical lack: we are always overcoming, but we do not overcome lack
itself.

The psychoanalytic study presented through the preceding posts ought to be considered alongside an Epimethean reading of what is new about avatarization. This binocular reading could align Foucault’s assertion that “man” is only one historically distinct form of the human with the claims of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It becomes possible to fuse the potential latent in a reconfiguration of subjectivity as a materialist process with Lacans conception of the subject of the “lack”. Reading these positions together invokes a view of the subject as it is constituted through relations of power and its inner psychic dimensions.

Note: I do not think my views regarding a place for limitation and structure alongside becoming and contingency are in disagreement with posthuman/cyborg scholars such as Donna Haraway and Kathrine Hayles. For Haraway, remaining open to the unexpected does not come without conditions. The “death of the subject” (that is, “the opening of non-isomorphic subjects, agents, and territories of stories unimaginable from the vantage point of the cyclopean self… the satisfied eye of the master subject”) is, for her, a “painful” process (Haraway, Leaf 113). “Such considerations” she writes “are always about coming back to a consciousness about finitude, about mortality, of limitation not as a kind of utopian glorification, but a condition of possibility of creativity in the most literal sense, as opposed to negation. And I feel this is something I learned from feminism too… The insistence on a kind of non-hostile relationship of the mortal body with its breakdowns  [denaturalizations].” (Haraway, Leaf 115). She opposes radical transgression, without consciousness of finitude, mortality, and limitation: the “…affirmation of dying is absolutely fundamental. Affirmation not in the sense of glorifying death, but in the sense – to put it bluntly – that without mortality we’re nothing. In other words, the fantasy of transcending death is opposed to everything I care about” (Haraway, Leaf 116). Neither does Katherine Hayles advocate a full blown posthumanism where anything goes. Consider her comment that “If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather that the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being…” (Hayles 5)

An individual today looks out their window and sees a different vista than the one they would have seen a hundred years ago. Smart Cars zoom by instead of horsedrawn carriages, but both the Smart Car driver and the coach driver could appreciate Swann’s desire for Odette, or Koheleth’s lamentations in “Ecclesiastes”.

Likewise, the Pac Man user and the SL user both are high-tech externalizations of the all-too-human search for lost wholeness (Rehak). This humanist sense of something persisting throughout the succession of techniques and ways of life ought to be thought akin to the ebb and flow of the tides. The tide flows out only to return to the ocean, each surge forth is a surge back. I have tried to argue throughout these posts that life does not only appear to be endless flow, but that it also entails endless ebb.

Nietzsche’s much misaligned Overman is not he who embraces merely the flow of life, but he who can stand between the world’s flowing contingency and its ebbing which prohibits endless contingency, namely the eternal recurrence of the same. That is to say, while the world always changes, one has to confront the possibility that what is has been, that what is new is linked – in some way – to what has already occurred. On one hand the world flows, it is “a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing…”  (Nietzsche, Will 550). On the other hand the world ebbs, it is “…eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms”  (Nietzsche, Will 550). With the right framework, an analysis of the flow of virtual technologies reveals an uncanny ebb. Note: It reveals, in Heraclitian terms, that the variability and plurality of human beings can be explained as a systematic flowing (the river) toward a trace of otherness directed by the structural Signifier (the riverbanks).

Despite that I have insisted, that we, as posthumans, are subject to new and different Epimethean ways of being and knowing the world, my sense is that we remain hardwired into Oedipal triangulation.

Note: Perhaps we could inquire further into the question of whether a user’s avatar is “really” them. Here lies one possible answer: The Epimethean dimension, I suggest, is phenomenal and visible; the Oedipal is intellectual and invisible. The Epimethean sociologist turns his attention to understanding, and making sense out of phenomenal and visible data; the Oedipal playwright attending to what is intellectual and invisible. So which position is concerned with what is the real truth? Are there two realities, and so are we to conclude – as Plato does with his Forms – that one trumps the other? And where does this leave us given that the avatars found in virtual worlds such as SL are so frequently discussed in terms of their similitude to real life? Georges Bataille cites Georges-Henry Luquet’s suggestion there are both “visual” and “intellectual” forms of realism: “An image is a good likeness for an adult when it reproduces what the adult eye sees, and for the primitive when it translates what his mind knows.” (Bataille, Cradle 38). These posts have, using Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, demonstrated that the relationship between the real user and her virtual avatar is a dual one, co-responding to visible and intellectual, Epimethean and Oedipal, historical and entropic forms of realism.

Hidden Oedipus remains coiled around the frenzied, in-your-face, Epimethean, succession of new media technologies. Throughout the preceding posts I have attempted to articulate a theoretical framework capable of evaluating techniques such as SL avatarization in relation to this often overlooked Janus face of (post)human subjectivity.

Note: Readers interested in approaching the question of the human, posthuman, and inhuman, from this standpoint will find Dominique Janicaud’s On the Human Condition of interest. Janicaud argues that humanity occupies a chronically unstable middle ground between the “inhuman” and the “superhuman”, between regression and overcoming, beastiality and angelism. Once we recognize this, he argues, we are in a position to consider a cautious humanism that can open up to the disturbing, strange, and radically creative (and cooperative) forces that lie dormant in us. Evoking Freud’s uncanny, Janicaud writes: “…man thinks he can leave his condition behind, whereas all those ‘departures’ only take him back to his fundamental truth. Humanity is the unfathomable overcoming of its limits.” (Janicaud 30).

The notion that electric culture initiates a break – for better or worse – from a linear sense of time, Cartesian subjectivity or the regime of vision unravels spectacularly upon a posthumanist humanist analysis of a virtual world like SL. This is not to argue that new types of identities are not engendered and one does not see the stirrings of new forms dynamic life. However, the mutations and transformations of body and self that users experience through their avatar(s) appears to remain intelligible against the horizon of linearity, identity, tragedy and myth. Something ancient stirs in the fibre optics.

Inferno, Canto 5: The souls of the lustful in the infernal hurricane

How long will Oedipus remain an issue? Nothing is to say that techniques, or forms of society, may emerge that succeed in obliterating the horizon of tragedy and myth. As Lacan notes “[the] Oedipus complex cannot run indefinitely in forms of society that are more and more losing their sense of tragedy.” (Lacan, Ecrits 668). New forms of life come into focus as nature and the body are increasingly experienced, and acted upon, as technological entities. Optimists may celebrate this as the liberatory point where Western metaphysics, tragedy and myth are brought to their conclusions. Note: This form of life could no longer be understood in relation to Heraclitus’ ancient maxim of the “same river” where “different and again different waters flow”. Pessimists may consider the technologically mediated hybrid of self and the world, without the authority of having set (albeit ultimately contingent) boundaries, as nihilistically whirling around in a ceaseless technological orgasm. Note: The image I am trying to convey here derives from the punishment of sinners in the “Circle of the Lustful” found in Canto II of Dante’s Divine Comedy I: “Like the starlings wheel in the wintry season / In wide and clustering flocks wing-borne, wind-borne / Even so they go, the souls who did this treason, / Hither and thither, and up and down, outworn…” (Dante 99)Posthumanist humanism reminds us that we have something to lose and – rather than celebrating or despairing in the face of technologically mediated forms of life - leaves us on the shores of disturbing, yet productive, biopolitical questions: “Is the posthuman gamble on pure difference worth the risk?” and “Can we resist forms of government and economic systems that use logics of identity and repression for destructive purposes without discarding the identity and repression that has hitherto been a central feature of the human subject?”

Sources
==Dante. The Divine Comedy 1: Hell. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. London: Penguin Books, 1949
==Haraway, Donna. How Like a Leaf. New York. Routledge, 1998
==Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999
==Janicaud, Dominique. On the Human Condition. Routledge,
==Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006
==Nietzsche, Friedrich. Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kauffman. New York: Random House, 1968
==Rehak, Bob. “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar”. The Video Game Theory Reader. Eds. M. J. P. Wolf & B. Perron. New York: Routledge, 2003: 103-127

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 21: Lack and Excessiveness)

The twenty-first part in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars

It has been noted that video games “enable[s] players to think through questions of agency and existence, exploring in fantasy form aspects of their own materiality” (Rehak 123).

At one point near the conclusion of Seminar XI, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan briefly mentions the ‘mass media’. He writes:

Perhaps the features that appear in our time so strikingly in the form of what are more or less called the mass media,…whose place I have indicated to you in a fundamental tetrad, namely the voice – partially planeterized, even stratospherized, by our machinery – and the gaze, whose ever encroaching character is no less suggestive, for by so many spectacles, so many phantasies, it is not so much our vision that is solicited, as our gaze that is aroused (Lacan, Sem. XI 274).

This brief remark that the mass media arouses our gaze rather than our vision is striking, and reinforces what has been argued throughout my Humanizing the Avatar posts: the user’s activity with their avatar offers an opportunity to engage with their insatiable desires and to experiment with covering the void that is at the core of the Lacanian subject.

Insofar as virtual worlds allow thousands to of users to simultaneously interact with one another’s (a)vatars, they can be considered as a clear example of the gaze soliciting ‘planeterized’ and ‘stratospherized’ attributes of modern machinery. Note: But this does not mean that they are not also evocative of what the ‘posthuman/posthuman (capitalist) theorists claim about the effects of “information technology, computerization and [the] wholesale commodification of everyday life” as engendering a new sort of fragmented self. In this regard, ‘casino capitalism’ “mobilizes the self (or at least its narcissistic element)” (Elliot 171). Second Life (SL) speaks to Lacan’s thoughts on the ‘features of our time’; an uncanny comingling of hi-tech machinery and the solicitation of the primordial, ancient gaze: the objet petit (a)vatar.

What might be the impetus behind avatarization? From a Lacanian point of view, the SL user sets up a dialogue with the objet (a), and is capable of briefly considering the remainder of the real from which his or her subjectivity hangs.  In order to elaborate this idea let’s consider avatarization aesthetically. The American painter, Frank Stella, explains:

the ephemeral quality of painting reminds us that what is not there, what we cannot find, is what great paintings always promise… Painters intrinsically look to the mirror for reassurance, hoping to shake death, hoping to avoid the stare of persistent time, but the results are always disappointing. Still they keep checking… (Stella 6-9 qtd. in Bowie 169)

Malcom Bowie elaborates:

The death haunted painter, striving toward an impossible completeness of vision and retreating periodically to the consolations of the mirror, lives out by the sweat of his brow the dialectic of the Symbolic and Imaginary…And the huge, brightly coloured and many-plated constructions that Stella was working on at this time are a tribute to the erotic power of the cut and the margin (Bowie 169).

In other words, Stella’s work is a tribute to the presence of the (a). Perhaps the (a)vatar is an aesthetic object that functions in a similar way. The SL user is something of an artist; he works on objects that are impossible to complete. Note: “The death haunted [SL user], striving toward an impossible completeness of vision and retreating periodically to the consolations of the [screen], lives out by the sweat of his brow the dialectic of the Symbolic and Imaginary…And the huge, brightly coloured and many-plated [avatars and virtual prim objects] that [the user] was working on at this time are a tribute to the erotic power of the cut and the margin.” (Bowie 169)  One SL user Tasrill Sieyes, known in SL for creating abstract avatars, explains SL as a “new medium” where one can watch “people think about avatars [as] walking art and sculpture, not just a pretend human” (Rymaszewski et al. 74). The virtual world of SL is a space where the user is provided with the tools to mutate and mutilate their screen double(s). In this regard, avatars, comprised of partial objects without the hope of completion, are highly evocative of the user’s original phantasy.

On one hand, the user’s ability to mutilate these virtual doubles is evocative – as the scholars discussed in an earlier post contend – of a manipulatable, and flexible, self. In this case it is easy to concern oneself with each specific manipulation by each specific user. But, in the conclusion to Seminar XI entitled “In you more than you”, Lacan paraphrases the analysand’s attitude to their analyst:  “I love you, but because inexplicably I love in you something more than you – the objet petit a – I mutilate you” (Lacan, Sem. XI 268). Thus, on the other hand SL is not about political-economic instances of culturally oriented flexibility, but an “effect of mutilation” stemming from the (a), the leftover of the real.

Could we not read Lacan’s comment above from the standpoint of a SL user’s attitude to their avatar? Likewise, could we not consider the artist Stelarc, who mutilates his body by attaching biological and non-biological objects, claiming them to be prostheses and “not as a result of lack”, as alternatively demonstrating a cyborg body whose excessiveneness is generated by its lack? The avatar plays a similar function to the skull in Holbein’s painting: it confirms our lack. Here, the impetus for the user’s manipulation of their avatar is the ‘effect of mutilation’ whose cause is the objet petit (a).

Sources:

-Elliott, Anthony. Subject to Ourselves: Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and
Postmodernity. Boulder, Co: Paradigm Publishers, 2004
-Elliott, Anthony. Concepts of the Self. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008

Lacan, Jacques. Seminar XI – The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998

Rehak, Bob. “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar”. The Video Game Theory Reader. Eds. M. J. P. Wolf & B. Perron. New York: Routledge, 2003: 103-127

-Rymaszewski, Michael et al. Guide to Second Life – 2nd Edition. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing, 2008

-Stelarc. “Interview” Voiceworks 62 (Spring 2005) Available Online: <http://www.benjaminteicher.com/folio/interview-with-stelarc/>

-Stella, Frank. Working Space. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986 in Bowie, Malcolm. Lacan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991

Just Doing It with Hyperactive Man

This article was originally published at the Provocative Penguin on Sep. 6, 2011.

Umberto Boccioni 'Unique Forms Of Continuity In Space' 1913

The scene is Tahrir Square during the heart of the Arab Spring: A BBC reporter pulls a celebrating young man aside and asks “What’s next for Egypt? What comes after Mubarak’s government falls?” The man, with a wild gleam in his eye, turns to the reporter and giddily responds that he doesn’t know. The revolution is leaderless, there is no programme, no one is commandeering the future. He answers as if this could persist indefinitely, as if Egypt would be better off having entered eternal springtime, a golden age of permanent change.

The word “change” traditionally refers to a transformation from one state to another, whether it is from ice to water or slavery to freedom. Think about Sam Cooke’s song ‘A Change is Gonna Come’. Change was once a means-to-and-end; as we venture into the 21st century it is quickly becoming an end-in-itself.

The revolutionaries in Tahrir Square were a strange reflection of the technophile crowd at something like a TEDtalk: both hypnotized by the next best thing without stopping for a moment to ask whether their political or technological movements and changes are engendering a good, humaine future.

Rather than treating change as good in-itself (as an end-in-itself), we must be in a position to determine the good changes from bad changes. Otherwise we will, no doubt, slip into the whirlpool where the emancipatory promise of change becomes an impossibility, and eventually a forgotten possibility.

The most important lesson we do not appear to have learned in our revolutionary world is that the next thing is not always the next best thing. This unqualified trust in the Future, as if it were a benevolent goddess guiding History by the hand, is our defining pathology. It leads to the position that what is good is what has yet to come, and that the world we should look forward to is one that has no end other than permanent revolution and change. We’re on the right track, so long as we’re always changing, insofar as we kneel at the altar of Nietzsche as obedient, perpetually chaotic “dancing stars”. The slogan of the new century is shaping up to be the iconic sneaker slogan “Just do it”.

This is the legacy that modernity has bequeathed to us, that has transformed us into nihilist “dancing stars”: “willing for the sake of willing”, as Canadian George Grant put it, is the activity fit perfectly for an individual who has unwavering faith in Change and the Future. This nihilism has slithered in to all facets of 21st century life, from the political to the scientific to the religious. In a fitting epigraph to his essay on the contemporary “hyperactive man”, philosopher Paul Virilio quotes St. Nietzsche “What matters most to modern man is no longer pleasure or displeasure, but excitement”.

Advertisers, politicians and religious fundamentalists all have realized that the promise of change resonates with today’s “hyperactive man”. In a strange way, we are seeing that Barack Obama’s slogan “Change we can believe in!” really spells out the Modern creed “We can believe in change!” Whatever exists is tainted with having been permanent. “The word Establishment” according to historian Jacques Barzun “torn from it’s precise meaning, now denotes any institution, even benevolent (such as the fire department), which is tainted with having existed prior to the mood of protest.” Across the world, from the large-scale rebel war against Gaddafi in Libya to the small-scale war to change the left-leaning city council here in Toronto, the drums of change are beating. All the world – Left and Right, Liberal and Conservative, Religious and Athiest – is caught up in this futurist dance. It is a fact that today’s “hyperactive men” will parade around like the rats of Hamelin if the magic pipe of change is played loud enough.

Julian Benda, one of Nietzsche’s early readers, observed in The Treason of the Intellectuals (1928), a book neglected today at our own peril, that “Formerly man was divine because he had been able to acquire the concept of justice, the idea of law, the sense of God; to-day he is divine because he has been able to create an equipment which makes him the master of matter…” Benda’s observation was dead on. Our values today are driven by our integration into the spiralling whirlpool of new and newer technologies. Since the 17th century scientific revolution declared that what is “latest is truest” (Barzun), this obsession with technological flux has reached gargantuan proportions.

There is a curious lesson that our generation – obsessed with the future – may never have the chance to learn: the branches of the present have their roots in the past. A future that severs itself from the past will whither, shrivel and eventually die. Giovanni Reale, a scholar of antiquity, warned the colourful revolutionaries in ‘68 that “if the past is eliminated, so also with the very same stroke is the future. In fact, the past is like the roots of a large tree. If the roots are cut and pulled out because they are underground and do not bring forth any flower or fruit (which are of value to the present) and hence the tree is useless, the loss of the roots rapidly destroys the tree in the future.”

It goes without saying that there are times where radical changes are warranted. However, the belief that the Egyptian revolutionaries could indefinitely occupy Tahrir Square without a plan, a leader and an end in mind, was not only an absurdity, but risked handing over a seething mass of raw biological material into the cold hands of anti-revolutionaries brimming with plans and ends.

As you can see, this is not a veiled call for conservativism against progressivism, or stability against change, but a reminder that swinging too far to one end of the pendulum is folly.

Lewis Mumford once wrote that “Those who understand the nature of life itself will not … see reality in terms of change alone and dismiss the fixed and static as otiose; neither will they … regard flux and movement and time as unreal or illusory and seek truth only in the unchangeable.” It is up to us, surrounded by the ever-widening whirlpool of political and social change, to discover a way between the lessons of the past and the hypnotic possibilities the future will bring. But this way between will never become clear, unless we can take a deep breath and ‘hyperactive man’ can stop “just doing it”.

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 20: Performing a Striptease for the Gods – The Future of the Posthuman Drama )

The twentieth part in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars

What sort of tool is the Second Life avatar? Rather than regarding virtual worlds such as Second Life (SL) as techniques that take us beyond the ‘subject’, I have attempted to regard SL as a technique that renders explicit the deep core of subjectivity.

In one famous selection from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the narrator recounts his first telephone conversation with his grandmother. Through the medium of the telephone Proust’s narrator recognizes, for the first time, aspects of his grandmother’s voice that had always been present: “Having her [voice] beside me, seen without the mask of the face, I noticed in it for the first time the sorrows that had crackled in the course of a lifetime”. Through the medium of SL, the avatar bodies we encounter that act as doubles for our own, demonstrate our sorrows stemming from the alienation that has “crackled in it in the course of [our] lifetime”. Our primary lack stemming from the Other’s desire and our castration by the linguistic Signifier, issues that had been hitherto unimaginable, peer through the virtual medium: that which was once well known returns. And it does not return via some supernatural, or inexplicable, means.

Note: In ETA Hoffman’s “The Sandman”, Nathaniel’s symptoms are associated with different characters, either the Sandman himself (in the guise of Coppola or Copellius) or professor Spalazani, confronting Nathaniel with a new tool. In the first instance, Nathaniel is told of the Sandman’s dust and his children’s owl-like beaks. In the second instance, Nathaniel encounters Copellus and his father tending to the hot coals of the brazier. In the third instance, Copellius the optician sells Nathaniel weather glasses. In the fourth instance, Nathanel becomes aware that Spalazani’s ‘daughter’ Olympia is an automaton.  In the fifth, and final instance, the spy glass - purchased from Coppola – might be understood as returning Nathaniel to the initial scene of his ‘castration’: having his testicles/eyes poked out and burnt in the brazier by his father, also signifying the Law (the lawyer Coppelus) of the Name-of-the-Father. But in each case it is a given tool (blinding dust, knife-like beak, the brazier with its eye/ testicle-like coals and castrating/enucleating poker, weather glasses that bring the eye/testicles into focus, the fragmented body of the automaton Olympia, and the fatal spyglass) that, in its own way, reminds Nathaniel of the fundamental fantasy – until his symptoms leave him in a fit of madness he leaps from the clocktower. Each of these tools can be thought of as interrogating the idea of wholeness: Nathaniel is confronted with enucleation (castration), and the loss of bodily stability (lenses), and ultimately the entirely mix-and-match body of the automaton Olympia. Thus, I have attempted to discern the ‘uncanniness’ of SL, locating it primarily in the sense of body destabilization that the user encounters when navigating a virtual world through their avatar.

At one point near the conclusion of Seminar XI, Jacques Lacan mentions the ‘mass media’:

Perhaps the features that appear in our time so strikingly in the form of what are  more  or less called the  mass  media,…whose  place I have indicated to you in a fundamental tetrad, namely the voice – partially planeterized, even stratospherized,  by our machinery – and the gaze, whose ever encroaching character is no less suggestive, for by so many spectacles, so many  phantasies,  it is not so much  our vision that is solicited, as our gaze that is aroused (Lacan, Sem XI 274).

This claim by Lacan that the mass media arouses our gaze along with our vision is striking and reinforces what has been argued throughout the last 19 posts; the user’s activity with their avatar offers an opportunity to engage with their insatiable desires and to experiment with covering the void at the core of the subject. SL speaks to Lacan’s thoughts on the “features of our time”; an uncanny comingling of hi-tech machinery and the solicitation of the primordial, ancient gaze: the objet petit (a)vatar.

According to Daniel E. Bassuk, Hindu avatarization and Christian incarnation are associated with the reconstitution of a community’s myth in flesh and blood, a “vehicle” the community uses “for expressing its own self understanding” (Bassuk 192). The avatarization, or incarnation, of the deity designates a “type of theological strip tease, hinting that there is more beyond what is actually seen and tantalizing the viewer with what is beyond the veil” (Bassuk 192-194). As noted in the introduction, the SL avatar presents us with something of a secularized avatarization, whereby the connotation of a “descent” to an earthly community is replaced by “ascent” to a virtual world. We might argue that, while religious avatarization provides a “haunting awareness of transcendental forces peering through the cracks of the visible [or physical] universe”, secular avatarization provides a haunting awareness of the visible [or physical] universe that peers through the cracks of the transcendental. In other words, the secular myth of avatarization, or incarnation provided by the virtual-avatar, is one whereby the community performs a “strip tease” for the Gods who dwell “beyond the veil”, tantalizing them with the fleetingness of their flesh and their lack. It provides a taste of linearity in a non-linear space. In this sense avatarization remains a “vehicle” for understanding the processes of selfhood and subjectivity. SL users garner understanding, not for what is beyond the human or what the human is turning into, but rather for what is all-too-human!

In spite of the fact that my avatar Dustin Mabellon looks physically different from Dustin Cohen, my avatar bears tremendous psychical similarities to Dustin Cohen. From the perspective of Epimetheus, my avatar is a self that is reflective of changing historical structures; from the perspective of Oedipus my avatar is reflective of a self that persists alongside, but is not reducible to, the contingencies of history. But, in the end, Dustin Mabellon is neither one nor the other. Our virtual doubles are selves situated at the nexus of a contingent History and the memories of a Time “old and long forgotten” whose tendrils we can never entirely escape.

Thus, even the avatar, understood as a posthuman assemblage of haphazard parts without recourse to Edenic, or Organic, wholeness, can be explained by what is most human: the object (a) understood as the object-cause of the endlessly desiring (a)vatar.

Note: I want briefly to turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, as you may have noticed that the prior paragraph contains both Oedipal and anti-Oedipal elements. Although Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is “not the proof of an original nothingness; nor is it what remains of a lost totality” the Lacanian object (a) – which is generated by our ‘original nothingness’ and ‘lost totality’ – undergirds an excessive body moving through an endless surplus of new identifications and identities (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti 9). In other words, while the desirious object (a) is necessarily a product of “lack”, its functioning seems to coincide with the endless desire of a Deleuzian “desiring machine”. With respect to the functioning of the object (a), I think that Deleuze and Guattari and Lacan are in agreement. (Theorists such as Jerry Aline Fliger suggest that Oedipus “may actually be read as an emblem of the very desiring machine in whose name the plaintiffs [Deleuze and Guattari] are bringing suit” (Flieger 93) ). But whereas Lacan regards the object (a) as the rem(a)inder of the Other left behind by the subject’s “castration” by the linguistic Signifier, Deleuze cannot tolerate the subject’s object-cause of endless desire being tied to the barring of the Oedipal mOther by the Signifier [Signifather].

In Anti Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari do distinguish between the Other and the object (a): Lacan’s admirable theory of desire appears to us to have two poles:  one related to “the object small a” as a desiring machine, which defines desire in terms of a real production, thus going beyond both any idea of need and any idea of fantasy; and the other related to the “great Other” as a signifier, which reintroduces a certain notion of lack. (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti 27)

For Lacan, however, the two are inseparable. One cannot, from a Lacanian point of view, have the “desiring machine” without the “notion of lack”. The excessive, and endlessly desirous, object (a) cannot be separated from the big Other  , the Signifier, and the parental formula  . The excessive surplus value of the Lacanian subject functions insofar as it revolves around the Other’s lacking desire.

Without the impossible object of desire what would drive the subject’s insatiable and excessive desire? And if the object (a) is itself a “desiring machine”, why would one need to replace the generator of that desire?

I have maintained that the (a)vatar allows the user to explore the excessive surplus of his or her subjectivity, but I have not severed this from lack. The Oedipal triad – when pushed to its logical conclusion – can be regarded as responsible for a Deleuzian sort of desire: the mOther, blocked indefinitely from the Oedipal subject by the Father, hovers on the horizon. As a result of the Father’s prohibitory “no”, the subject orients itself toward a trace of the impossible mOther, becoming an asymptotic, endlessly becoming, “desiring machine”. I have not felt obliged to engage with Deleuze as I consider the ubject’s relation to the  to be sufficient to account for the vibrant, rich, desirous (a)vatars utilized in virtual worlds such as SL.

The avatar offers an opportunity to articulate a humanist posthumanist investigation of technology that seeks to preserve the wisdom of Gilgamesh, Job, Koheleth, Freud and Lacan: a 21st  century marriage of Oedipal fallenness, suffering, and lack, to Epimethean flux and contingency.

Davy Winder writes that in virtual worlds like SL “the traditional understanding of identity, which says we have a single, overriding, core personality that defines us as an individual is just no longer valid as we rush headlong into the digital era” (Winder 223). I have been challenging such claims. A single, core, overriding (Lacanian) subject can be understood as the motor for the vibrant difference of a postmodern mix and match identity.

Marshall Mcluhan notes that “men at once become fascinated by any extensions of themselves in any material other than themselves” (Mcluhan 63). In his reading of the Narcissus myth, Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection, but rather does not recognize his own reflection: “The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by the mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image.” (Mcluhan 63). Technologies of avatarization can trick us, not merely into narcissism and self-love, but into a numbness to, and blindness of, the resolutely Oedipal and all-too-human self that pokes through the strange new “prim” bodies on our monitors. The radically decentred and heterogeneous appearance of the avatar ought not to lead us, automatically, to toss the notion of a core subject out the window. A mix and match identity, I insist, is not incommensurate with the possibility of some kind of core personality.

As such, I challenge cyber optimists and critics of cyberspace. In The Ecstasy of Communication, Baudrillard claims that the “screen and the network” have obliterated the opposition between subject and object, an opposition previously guaranteed by the “mirror and the scene”, an explicit reference to Lacan’s mirror stage. Baudrillard’s argument that the “screen” (where the entire universe unfolds) has destroyed the “stage” (that which was “once preserved through a minimum distance and which was based on a secret ritual known only to its actors”) does not hold in the case of SL (Baudrillard, “Ecstacy” 21). His worry that we have lost “the private universe [that] was certainly alienating, insofar as it separated one from others, from the world in which it acted as a protective enclosure, as an imaginary protector” does not appear to be the case (Baudrillard, “Ecstacy” 21). These “Humanizing the Avatar” posts have attempted to demonstrate that this shift from the mirror to the screen, and from the scene to the network, is not a total one; it does not move us from reality to the “absolute space of [virtual] simulation”. Instead, we might think of virtual worlds as a mirror-screen and a network-scene; the stage is the network and the screen acts as a mirror. In SL, a subject exists who is at “odds with his objects and his image” and these posts have articulated SL as a space where otherness and alienation thrives (Baudrillard “Ecstasy” 16). To read SL as an “obscene” site, where “every-thing becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication” would be simply incorrect (Baudrillard “Ecstacy” 22). Everything is not immediately transparent and exposed; the body of the avatar may be manipulated in a way that seems “obscene”, but it is also possible to read that manipulation as reflective of a deep, lingering alienation. Rather than a space “where we no longer partake in the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication”, it is possible to read SL as a space where the (Oedipal) drama of alienation is rendered explicit and heightened.

The gaze exists in SL, and one can still discern, in the newest screens and networks, the “secret” that Baudrillard claims has been rendered “entirely soluble in information and communication”. As Anthony Elliott notes, “the modern sense of self [i]s constructed around subjective elements, such as the passions, guilt, and conscience, or the Freudian unconscious; against this backdrop meanings (are) attached to identity, as concealed or hidden, with depth of self or interiority as a key theme” (Elliott “Concepts” 150). In this context, Baudrillard’s position – sure that the modern sense of self is no more – neglects to focus on what remains, or persists, of a depth of self or interiority in the contemporary information technology user. The virtual space may contain obscenity, but it is not obscene. Treating the user as if he or she were an obscene “servomechanism” (Mcluhan) of technique, as Baudrillard does, ignores the otherness that the corporeal, alienated user brings to that technique. After all, a medium mediates users as well as information, and for this reason it is important to recognize that new mediums, such as virtual worlds, make it clear that technology does not exist in some realm cut off from human subjectivity. Thus, while something like pornography is obscene, pornography is not entirely reducible to obscenity: it is littered with codes, plot devices, and angles that speak to alienated subjects, not obscene servomechanisms of the object.

While it is not outside the realm of possibility that everything may – in the near future – become obscene, and that the stage may become saturated with the plasma of the new screen, we are not nearly there yet. While the future may well be that of the obscene inhuman cyb-ject, at present, we risk throwing away the all-too- human subject just at a point when technologies, such as Second Life, can teach us so much about its secrets.  The accusation levelled by cyber optimists and pessimists that communication technologies such as Second Life override or “free us” from “the void of our own [all-too-human] mental screen” ought to be re-evaluated (Baudrillard, Transparency 14).

SOURCES
=Bassuk, Daniel. Incarnation in Hinduism and Christianity: Myth of the God-Man. Bassingstroke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1987
=Deleuze, Giles and Guattari, Felix. Anti Oedipus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta, 1983 (1972)
=Elliott, Anthony. Subject to Ourselves: Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Postmodernity. Boulder, Co: Paradigm Publishers, 2004
=Flieger, Jerry Aline. Is Oedipus Online? Siting Freud and Freud. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005
=Hoffman, ETA. Tales of Hoffman. Trans. RJ Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 1982
=Lacan, Jacques. Seminar XI – The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998
=Mcluhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: Extensions of Man – Critical Edition. New York: Ginko Press, 2003
=Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time. Trans. Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Modern Library, 2003
=Winder, Davey. Being Virtual: Who you really are Online? West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, 2008

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 19: LCDesire – Teleporting the Fundamental Fantasy)

The nineteenth part in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars

In the weeks after I first downloaded Second Life, I spent a great deal of time with the sliders in the appearance window attempting to create an avatar that looked like myself. After spending hours adjusting the sliders, and being content that my avatar had a body as close to my own as I was going to get, I exited the appearance window and began investigating the virtual world. The next time I logged in the shape I had spent so long meticulously manipulating was nowhere to be found. I panicked, quickly chose a pre-made body shape, and went to work again creating a new avatar. But this time I had a different feeling about what I was doing. I realized that what caused my panic to subside was adopting a new avatar body. My panic was tied to not having a body. This causes me to ask myself “Is creating a look-alike avatar really what I am doing with my avatar? Was I not, more fundamentally, attempting to create something with which to identify that would cover over my lack?

Given this, avatarization might be considered as “traversing the fantasy” – a crossing over, or traversal, of the fundamental fantasy (Fink, Lacanian 61). This fundamental fantasy is the trauma of primordial repression provoked by castration (Kay 68). In order to traverse this fundamental fantasy, the avatar takes the role of the objet (a): it embodies desirousness, subjectivizes trauma, and allows the user to act out the impossibility of filling the lack in the Other (Homer 89). In this way, the avatar allows us to consider the way the imagines him or herself in relation to the (a) and the Other’s desire (either as or ). It allows us to experience the process of obtaining our (second order) jouissance (Fink, Clinical 66). Furthermore, insofar as it enables us to traverse the fundamental fantasy, the avatar allows us to recognize the objet (a) for what it is: “a contingent imposition of fixity and consistency on the otherwise empty place of the subject” (Kay 68). [Note: In his discussions of cyberspace Slavoj Žižek touches on the idea of traversing the (fundamental) fantasy. He explains that the art of cinema arouses and plays with desire, but keeps it at a safe distance, domesticating it (Žižek, Perverts Guide to Cinema 26:00). Interactive virtual mediums can also assist us in confronting and “traversing the [fundamental] fantasy”, but, as opposed to cinema, they “externalize our innermost fantasies in all their inconsistency, [and] open up to artistic practice a unique possibility to stage, to ‘act out’, the phantasmatic support of our existence…” (Žižek, “Cyberspace”). Provided here, for your use, is every sustained instance I know of where Žižek discusses virtual technologies: The Reality of the Virtual (film), The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (film), The Plague of Fantasies (127-163), “From Virtual Reality to the Virtualization of Reality”, The Indivisible Remainder (189-198), “A Cup of Decaf Reality”, “Cyberspace, or how to traverse the fantasy in the Age of the Retreat of the Big Other”, “Hysteria and Cyberspace”, Looking Awry. Serious engagements with, and criticisms of, Žižek’s position on cyberspace can be found in Jerry Aline Flieger’s excellent Is Oedipus Online?: Situating Freud after Freud.] Thus, far from enslaving us as the post-Oedipal cybertheorists would have it, cyberspace “enables us to treat [our fantasies] in a playful way and thus to adopt towards them a minimum of distance — in short, to achieve what Lacan calls a, “going-through, traversing the fantasy” (Žižek, “Cyberspace”). In SL, this interweaving of contemporary technology and fundamental fantasy is rendered explicit.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - How They Met Themselves

In one of her more recent pieces, “Computer Games as Evocative Objects”, Sherry Turkle explains that computer games are objects to think with (Turkle, “Computer” 267). These “evocative objects” allow us to see ourselves in the computer and cause us to reflect on philosophical and psychological questions. The computer, acting as a “second self”, provides opportunities to project ourselves into the simulations we play on screen (Turkle, “Computer” 270). What is projected on the screen before us is, indeed, an uncanny double, but as an “evocative object” it is not something to be feared. Instead of looking at the avatar from the perspective of a monstrous double, we could see our interactions with our avatars as revelatory and capable of rendering explicit underlying dimensions of our selves that evade us in our day-to-day lives. In The Book of Imaginary Beings, Borges reminds us that the double is not always an omen of ill fate. He explains that, for the Jews “on the other hand, the apparition of the double was not a foreshadowing of death, but rather a proof that the person to whom it appeared had achieved the rank of prophet” (Borges 62). Here the double is revelatory. Bringing this idea back to avatars, online personae might be considered revelatory “objects to think with” that we manipulate in the “spirit of self reflection” to search out, and play with, our desires (Turkle, “Computer” 271).

Let’s not be overhasty and immediately celebrate these “traversals of the fundamental fantasy” or revelatory “objects to think with”: perhaps avatars are not only objects to think [about the fundamental fantasy] with but rather evidence that contemporary mediums such as SL are examples of corporately owned technical systems capable of manipulating our psychical – unconscious – desires as well as our conscious ones. On one hand it can be liberating to act out what one really is, but from a darker perspective, virtual worlds represent the commoditization of the unconscious: a state where real world advertisers, SL merchants, and Linden Labs itself (to whom [premium] users pay their dues) hawk us their virtual wares and tell us that by consuming virtual objects we can “be who we really are”.

Yee and Bailensen’s study (discussed in an earlier post) on ‘the Proteus Effect’ aimed to understand the flexible “protean” bodies of virtual worlds such as SL. But let us note that Proteus, the mythical sea God from whose namesake the term “protean” derives, changed form because he wanted to avoid capture by his opponent Menelaus. In response to the threat of capture by Menelaus, Proteus changed form and rendered himself flexible and versatile. Proteus is not a God whose shape is formless; he has a true shape but was changed to become “Protean” under duress. It is threat that calls him to “cycle through” shapes. Likewise, there is order and structure to the Lacanian subject, but it is also possible to obscure that order and structure by paying attention to only the appearance of the self. When we focus on what we appear to be, we have no sense of the ‘lack’ that subtends subjectivity. We can even make the error of believing that all that exists is our appearance. Perhaps virtual worlds such as SL represent a threat, like Menelaus was to Proteus, that causes us – like Proteus did – to begin cycling through forms and identities. We know our most dear secret, that of our subjectivity, is under threat and we work to obfuscate it as best we can: by changing form compulsively and unconsciously taunting our assailant with cheers of “We’re nothing”, “We’re what we think and say we are”, “You will never discover our secret”. Meanwhile a whole new realm of control has been opened up where creatures that refuse to return to some static form endlessly cycle through bodies and identities come to live in corporately controlled reserves for contemporary Proteus’: virtual worlds.

SOURCES
=Borges, Jorge Luis. The Book of Imaginary Creatures. Buenos Aires: Penguin, 2005
=Fink, Bruce. Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, Mass. :Harvard University Press, 1997
=Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995
=Homer, Sean. Jacques Lacan. Routledge: New York, 1995
=Kay, Sarah. Žižek: A Critical Introduction. Malden, MA :Blackwell, 2003.
=Turkle, Sherry. “Computer Games as Evocative Objects: From Projective Screens to Relational Artefacts” Handbook of Computer Game Studies. Eds. Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005: 267-278
=Žižek, Slavoj. “The cyberspace Real”
=Žižek, Slavoj. “Hysteria and Cyberspace: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek”. Telepolis. 07.10.1998.
=Žižek, Slavoj.  The Indivisible Remainder. New York: Verso, 2007 (1996)
Žižek, Slavoj.  Looking Awry. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992
Žižek, Slavoj.  Pervert’s Guide to Psychoanalysis. Film.
Žižek, Slavoj. Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997

Dehumanizing Proust

Near the conclusion of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the narrator returns to “society” after a long hiatus and encounters the now aged faces of his old acquaintances. In an indelibly human moment, he famously reflects:

…every party, which takes place after a long interval in which one has ceased to go out into society, provided it brings together some of the people whom one knew in the past, gives the impression of a masquerade, a masquerade which is more successful than any that one has ever been to and at which one is most genuinely ‘intrigued’ by the identity of the other guests, but with the novel feature that the disguises, which were assumed long ago against their wearers’ will, cannot, when the party is over, be wiped off with make up … These were puppets bathed in immaterial colors of the years, puppets which exteriorized Time, Time which by habit is made invisible and to become visible seeks bodies, which, wherever it finds them, it seizes upon, to display its magic lantern upon them.
-Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time – Volume VI – Time Regained. Pp. 340-342

A while back, while first reading Anti-Oedipus, I was left with a sour taste in my mouth with Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation of Proust, and kept returning to the passage above. Proust, they claim, creates a “new earth where desire functions according to its molecular elements and flows”. (Anti Oedipus, 319) His text is a “literary machine”… [whose] … “parts are produced as asymmetrical sections, paths that suddenly come to an end, hermetically sealed boxes, noncommunicating vessels, watertight compartments… a schizoid work par excellence” (Anti Oedipus 42-43). All of this is true I thought, but “so what!”.

Of course objects can be analyzed at the molecular level. The table I’m writing at is comprised more of empty space than it is matter – but so what? Recent science studies suggest constructing an intricate network of human and non-human actors, but at a certain point one wonders whether the approach is vacuous, and what is needed is a deep breath and a step back to see the forest from the trees. One can analyze all the molecular components of Proust’s text, but if Time – as an overarching theme – does not appear to gather all those components one has missed out on a – crucial – human dimension of that text. One will have dehumanized Proust. They will get the whole picture, but not Proust’s picture.

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 18: A(v)amorphosis)

The eighteenth part in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars

The argument that the avatars provide an awareness of the Lacanian objet (a) is not without precedent. There is an instance where Jacques Lacan claims that works of art can provide glimpses of the objet (a) through aesthetic devices that skew the viewer’s perspective such as “anamorphosis”. In this post I will consider how Second Life (SL) avatars provide a glimpse of the objet (a) through a(v)amorphosis.

Lacanian Note: The objet (a), as remainder of the lack, void, or absence that inheres within the subject, resists specularization (Fink, Lacanian 91). Throughout Seminar XI, Lacan likens the (a) to a certain type of gaze or a certain tone of voice. For example, one can discern the gaze in the act of looking (Fink, Lacanian 91-92). These partial objects (gaze and voice) are unspecularizable; one cannot see them. Fink explains that at the most basic level, the (a) is a “certain kind of look someone gives you, the timber of someone’s voice, the whiteness, feel, smell, of someone’s skin, eye color, attitude…” (Fink, Clinical 52). The (a) can also be discerned in an object that looks back at us and reminds us of our own lack. The (a) is an instance of the uncanny, reminding us of the lack that lies beyond our desires. The (a) pre-exists the eye. Prior to experience we have, as the thrust of that experience, “the lack that constitutes castration anxiety” (Lacan, Sem XI 72). The (a) shows up as a “stain” whose “track”, “thread” and “trace” can be discerned in the scopic field (Lacan, Sem XI 72).

To offer an example of the object petit (a) though anamorphosis, Lacan looks to a “partial object” located in Hans Holbein’s painting “The Ambassadors” (1533) (Lacan, Sem XI 88). “The Ambassadors” is a painting that depicts two male figures. In front of them is a skull, painted from a skewed, or distorted angle. The skull is painted using anamorphosis, the systematically distorted projection of an optical image which can only be glimpsed from an angle. Using anamorphosis, Holbein attempts to paint the unpaintable: death’s head – the ultimate symbol of the Real. The painting demonstrates the “imperceptible fallenness of the Subject”, “the inescapable lack and destitution that castration ordains for it” (Bowie 172). It also elicits uncanny emotions, as it depicts a moment where the Symbolic order reveals itself alongside the Real and the Imaginary. Amidst the vanity of the two wealthy figures in the painting is a reminder of the real, the (a).

The static figures and the room in Holbein’s painting can be compared to the avatars and terrain of the virtual world of Second Life. Unless the user owns the land his avatar is currently on or flying over, he cannot change or manipulate it. What can be manipulated is a small portion of the screen: their avatar. Thus, using the appearance sliders, the avatar contorts and transforms: it “gazes” back at the user as something different, while reminding them of the Real. The whole of SL, the user’s entire screen, can become an instance of the distorted skull in Holbein’s painting. This occurs when the user recognizes their sense of self as an:

effect of anamorphosis, a ‘shadow of nothing’; however getting rid of this insubstantial spectre does not leave [the user] with the simple reality of what [he or she] effectively is…what we get if we look at it straight on is a chaotic nothing. So what we get after we are stripped of symbolic identifications, [de-self-ed], is nothing. The ‘Death’ figure in the middle of the crown is not simply death, but the subject himself reduced to the void. (Žižek, Lacan 70).

My avatar, Dustin Mabellon, is a continually changing object through which I navigate the (virtual) world and is the focus of my attention. In the moments where I manipulate the avatar, attaching or detaching its qualities and attributes, I encounter its nothingness. Note: In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek discusses the nature of the postmodern injunction to “be yourself” (Žižek, Ticklish 458). What does it mean, he wonders to “be yourself”? When we are isolated from our surroundings we are confronted with a paradox, namely that “if you are completely isolated from your surroundings you are left with nothing whatsoever, with a void of idiocy pure and simple.” (Žižek, Ticklish 458) He continues:

The inherent obverse of ‘Be your true Self!’ is therefore the injunction to cultivate permanent refashioning, in accordance with the postmodern postulate of the subject’s indefinite plasticity … in short, extreme individualization reverts to its opposite, leading to the ultimate identity crisis: subjects experience themselves as radically unsure, with no ‘proper face’, changing from one imposed mask to another, since what is behind the mask is ultimately nothing, a horrifying void they are frantically trying to fill in with their compulsive activity or by shifting between more and more idiosyncratic hobbies or ways of dressing, meant of accentuate their individual identity. Here we can see how extreme individuation (the endeavor to be true to one’s Self outside imposed fixed socio-symbolic roles) tends to overlap with its opposite, with the uncanny, anxiety provoking feeling of the loss of one’s identity – is this not the ultimate confirmation of Lacan’s insight into how one can achieve a minimum of identity and ‘be oneself’ only by accepting the fundamental alienation of the symbolic network. (Žižek, Ticklish 458)

It is not by looking at the avatar that I encounter what Lacan refers to as “the gaze”. Rather, this phenomenon has to do with intuiting the type of object the avatar is. Through a(v)amorphosis, the objet (a) does not appear, but the user has a sense of its functioning. Lacan explains that “man, in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is the gaze: the screen is here the locus of mediation” (Lacan, Sem XI 107). For this reason, we are not after art criticism, which would amount to discussing the aesthetic attributes of the SL avatar (Lacan, Sem XI 109). Rather, while each SL user has their own life experience and unique position within their historical configuration, Lacan advocates considering “the function that the artist’s original phantasy played in his creation”  (Lacan, Sem XI 110). In this regard, SL avatars are not “disproportionately interesting”, but are, rather, examples of the “generality of desire” (Lacan, Sem XI 110); (Bowie 171). What stares back at us is precisely the generality of our desire.  Note: In this regard there is something intriguing about our new screens, wired into the internet, with increasingly realistic graphics. As things become increasingly realistic and mediated – perhaps what emerges not a breakdown of appearances (i.e. Virilio’s Open Sky) or a hell of the same (Baudrillard’s Transparency of Evil), rather, the Real emerges in new ways – perhaps en masse.)

The perpetual as-if quality of SL does not interrogate reality and move us to a place where reality is no longer at issue; rather it confirms, and makes explicit, the lack that haunts reality. It demonstrates that even in virtual worlds  – where the real is supposed to have been rendered simulacral, or hyper-real – what we encounter is actually quite similar to our present non-simulacral reality. Rather than doing anything to reality, SL brings the fundamental, obscured, lack that is intrinsic to reality into focus; we are still working with subjects and objects, selves and others. Note: Here would want to delve in Žižek’s work, specifically his comments on virtual reality in The Plague of Fantasies (especially the chapter “Cyberspace, or the Unbearable Closure of Being”).

In Robbie Cooper’s photo-essay Alter Ego, one juxtaposition of avatar and user, that of Kimberly Rufer-Bach and her avatar Kim Anubus, stands out. The page portrays two versions of Kim(berly): on the left the physical Kimberly and on the right the virtual Kim. At first glance one might think that both images were photographs. Recalling that the death’s head in Holbein’s painting is “the subject reduced to the void…stripped down of symbolic identifications”, the virtual Kim leaves the reader with the unspecular virtuality that inheres within the physical Kimberly. In her comments about the juxtaposition, Kimberly explains: “[Kim] doesn’t have a separate persona or anything. She’s just an extension of myself in this virtual space” (Cooper). Despite the fact that Kim looks strikingly like Kimberly, she is not equivalent with Kimberly: she can be thought of as an externalization of the lack that subtends Kimberly’s subjectivity. Thus, whereas Kimberly’s fleshy real hands would bleed if they were amputated, one recognizes that Kim’s hands are made to be elongated, thickened, or amputated. Kimberly does not become Kim. Kimberly is always already (Kim)berly; to believe that Kim begins where Kimberly ends is to fall into what I called the “Posthuman” way of thinking in an earlier post. The avatar achieves the same function as the bony deaths head in Holbein’s painting; it is an interactive, geometric, prim-based deaths head, displayed on a digital canvas.

Here lies another example of a(v)amorphosis: The cover of Cooper’s book displays two individuals holding hands on a bustling downtown street. Tilting the cover of the book reveals their avatars superimposed on top of them and causes the individuals faces to blur with their avatars. Viewing the superimposed images from different angles reveals real fleshy faces merged with the digital faces of their avatars. The effect is unmistakably an uncanny anamorphosis. From one point of view a digital metal clad fantasy avatar, from another point of view a fleshy exposed body; beneath the fleshy exposed body is a digital metal clad fantasy avatar. Thus the avatar may be read as far more than a harbinger of what so many critics have described, either optimistically (i.e. Nick Bostrom) or pessimistically (i.e. Francis Fukuyama) as our posthuman future.

Sources
=Bostrom, Nick. “The History of Transhumanist Thought”. Journal of Evolution and Technology, 14 (April, 2005)
=Bowie, Malcolm. Lacan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991
=Cooper, Robbie. Alter-Ego. London: Chris Boot Ltd, 2007
=Fink, Bruce. Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, Mass. :Harvard University Press, 1997
=Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995
=Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future. New York: Picador Press, 2003
=Lacan, Jacques. Seminar XI – The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998
=Žižek, Slavoj. Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. New York: Verso Press, 2009 (1999)
=Žižek, Slavoj. Lacan. London: Granta Books, 2006

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 17: Economies of Desire)

The seventeenth part in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars

In Second Life (SL) shops one can purchase everything from intricately detailed houses, to avatar animations, to jewelry, plants and vegetation. But the most common SL shops cater to the purchase and sale of avatar skins, clothing, animations, hair, etc… We might consider this design, purchase and sale of scripts, clothing, and body parts in SL as an economy of desire. Note:  For specifics on the SL economy locate Chapter 8 ‘The Fun Economy’ in Edward Castronova’s Exodus to the Virtual World as well as Chapter 8 ‘Political Economy’ of Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in SL.  It seems obligatory, in the literature on SL, to want to shock readers about a few individuals – such as Anshe Chung – who have made tremendous sums of money in SL, but while these individuals, themselves few and far between, are the subject of an interesting study, they offer very little to this post (Ludlow and Wallace 77); (Hof).

Skin Theft! (Personal Screenshot from Second Life.)

The phrase “economy of desire” has at least two meanings.
-One meaning refers to the economic management of the user’s desire: the production, development and management of the user’s subjective desire.
-Another meaning of the phrase “economy of desire” pertains to the production, development, and management of human desire in virtual worlds for profit in both real and virtual world currencies.
The first sense pertains to the effect that SL avatarization has on an economy of subjective desire, the second pertains to the form that this economy of subjective desire has taken; it has been rendered commensurate with the larger real-world financial market.

Note: This distinction may be better understood by returning to the etymological root of the term “economy”, the Greek term “Oikonemen”. “Oikonemen” designates “one who manages a household”: “Oikos” designates “house” and “Nemen” designates ‘to deal out/to manage’. Our first usage pertains to the affairs of the “oikos” (house), while the second usage pertains to the ‘nemen’ (management) of the house. This can also be understood in the dual sense of “economic” as pertaining to both (a) the “management of a household or of private affairs, esp. with reference to monetary means”, and (b) the “management of the affairs of a community, etc., with reference to income, expenditures, the development of resources, etc.

As has been demonstrated throughout these ‘Humanizing the Avatar‘ posts, SL avatarization can be understood as engaging with some interior psychical dimension of the human being. Through his or her avatar(s), the user manages his or her psychic resources in economic terms, playing-out their endless (mis)recognition and interacting with the remainder(s), the excess of the Real, leftover from their entry into the Symbolic. Places, people and things in-world reflect back to the user the absence which structures their subjectivity. Through avatars, users manage their subjective desire. The purchase and sale of new and newer bodies and prostheses for asymptotic avatars follows the Lacanian formulation .

Personal Screenshot from Facebook

A recent advertisement on a leading bit torrent site depicts a photograph of a woman’s face next to a cartoonish 3D model of his face. Beneath the juxtaposed faces reads: “Click here to see yourself as a cartoon!” Why might this ability, so similar to SL avatarization, be so appealing to the user? On one hand it could be lamented as a sign of the withering of the real body into a sterile digital space, on the other hand it could be celebrated as offering the user the ability to experiment with their body and try out new ones. But, what if there is another option – namely that the cartoon self (and the ability to pay in order to “cartoonify yourself”) is so appealing and lucrative because it exposes the deep core of human subjectivity insofar as it reflects a virtual self constantly unfixed and incomplete? Following this option, the ability to juxtapose the real user with their three dimensional avatar does not produce either an optimistic or nightmarish future for the self, but reconfirms the endlessly desiring subject as it currently exists.

The L$ (Lindex) Exchange

The production, distribution and consumption of virtual prosthetics – objects that assist in the management of the user’s psychic economy – have value and worth in the larger Second Life (L$), and world (US$), money economies. Linden dollars (L$) can be purchased on the Linden Dollar Exchange (the Lindex). Many users convert funds procured in the real world in order to participate in the psychic desire economy of SL. The formula for this exchange of psychical and financial economies might resemble something like:  i.e. refering to the way that the user’s psychical economy and the financial economy exist, in SL, in relation to the objet (a).

SL is free to join with a “basic” account, however this “basic” account does not permit the user to own land or any objects;  items a basic user creates are erased from the SL grid every 12 hours (while remaining in the user’s inventory). In contrast, a “premium” account, costing $9.95 USD/month, permits the user to own land, receive a weekly stipend of SL currency, called Lindens (L$), and allows them to build, store and display objects on their own land for as long as they please.

Much of the SL (L$) economy revolves around the design, purchase and sale of objects and body parts for avatars. It appears that the majority of SL users, myself included, do not design the attributes of their avatar(s). While they can manipulate their avatar with the customizable sliders, the avatar’s base hair, eyes, genitals et cetera are usually purchased using L$ from SL designers who sell their wares in virtual malls or shops. As in real-life, users who are skilled at building and crafting sell their designs and objects to others, and users who own land can go into virtual real estate, leasing or hoping to sell their land for monetary profit. Users can also offer services (such as working in retail or the adult entertainment industry) in exchange for L$.

SL objects are not bound by the same limitations as objects in the real-world. Hair, skins, cars and prosthetic genitalia (to name a few of the items users routinely purchase in-world) are constructed out of electronic “prims” rather than material objects. Accordingly, designers are not faced with issues of material scarcity. As SL user Tamara Kirshner explains:

When it comes to pricing, Second Life designers have a definite advantage. While they have to invest in design tools and spend a lot of time designing, just like real-life designers, they don’t have to pay for materials. It costs a Second Life designer the same amount to produce one pair of shoes as one thousand pairs of shoes. What that means for me is that Second Life designs are incredibly affordable and that I can have the wardrobe of my dreams in Second Life while shopping sale racks in real life (Rymaszewski et al. 264).

Another user, Madison Carnot, explains “my virtual closet will expand to hold whatever I can manage to buy…It’s pixels for the win in my shopping world” (Rymaszewski et al. 265).

The L’oreal campaign offered make up and skins featured by popular actresses such as Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson. (K-Zero Blog. “Virtual Celebrities” http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/?p=1614

The virtual world has piqued the interest of real world corporations such as American Apparel, Toyota, L’Oreal, Sony Music and H&M, all of whom have, over the past few years, launched virtual world marketing campaigns (Ludlow and Wallace 77). In these instances, where attempts are made to create real profits, we find a co- mingling of the real, virtual and psychic economies. K-Zero, the advertising company responsible for an in-world L’Oreal make up campaign, described its job as “metabranding”.

K-Zero defines “metabranding” as working with a brand that is “created to exist solely in a virtual space. It lives only on servers, is powered by electricity, experienced only on a computer screen to provide a service, solution or product to avatars living in a metaverse. A metabrand satisfies a demand that exists purely on a virtual basis” (K-Zero). It is important to stress the description of a metabrand as existing on a virtual basis, but also that it is for use by virtual objects; it is both the virtuality of the avatar and the virutality of the user to which a metabrand appeals. The avatar, as noted earlier, is marked by endless desire, and thus, can consume an endless supply of things. It is sensible, then, that the avatar consumes metabrands, which “satisfy a demand that exists purely on a virtual basis.” These virtual commodities work with our psychic economy, playing on our lack as Lacanian subjects. But this psychic economy can also yield financial profits in virtual, and more importantly, real currencies. SL Avatar users are consumers whose demands are endless, as the virtual world is constructed out of material prims that can be endlessly produced and manipulated. Note: The economy of desire might be considered akin to something like Georges Bataille’s “solar economy”, i.e. an economy that operates on the principle of jouissance-like excess rather than “scarcity”. Like the sun, which brims forth without scarcity, the “lack” is endless. See (Bataille, Visions).

SL provides advertisers and marketers the ability to do product testing, giveaways of cars, boats, houses, skins etc… and data mining for application in real life. Demonstrating the formula , the SL CEO Phillip Rosedale explains: “If you launch a clothing line in SL and it’s hot in SL, you can launch it in the real world … its telling you the same stuff. It’s telling you that it’s a cool, trendy, idea” (Ludlow and Wallace 77).

Note: Steven Levine makes a similar observation to myas he reflects on his typographic choice of the symbol “$” for the barred ubject and the symbol “@” for the object a:

Although not sanctioned by Lacan’s own typographic practice, I believe the split subject is appropriately designated throughout this text by the dollar sign – $ – inasmuch as it is the global flow of capital that constitutes us as conscious and unconscious consumers within the worldwide store of commodities on which our modern subjecthood of lack so largely depends. Objecthood for us resides in the empty form of the commodity itself – <> – for beyond it lies the unattainable object of the endlessly circleing corporeal drive, designated by the typographical sign for both an individual item’s price – @ – as well as a named individual’s concrete e-mail link to a disembodied web of commercial cyberspace. Barbara Kruger, an American graphic artist who escaped from the consumerist world of advertising, challenges us with a huge photograph of an empty hand seeming to hold a sign that declares, ‘I shop therefore I am’ (1987). … In the dollar sign the subject of the desired commodity is cleft in twain, making it an alienated Symbolic object – $ – to itself. Into the empty frame of the commodity is projected the Imaginary object – <> – that is desired just because it is that which the other is presumed to desire from among the ever-changing high-gloss and hard-sell images of the mass media. And in its repetitive encircling of the Real Thing – @ – as a popular cola calls itself, the corporeal drive pays again and again the price of its mad roulette wager to recover the original stake it has irreversibly lost. In the face of the unrelenting demand of the Other – $<>D – for me to be its lost object, I fashion for myself a fantasy – S <> @ – in order to protect myself from being drawn into the Other’s lethal grip. In the variegated forms of artistic sublimation I retrieve some abject scrap of materiality, which is all that remains from the primal severing of the voice, gaze, and flesh of the Thing. Subject, object, abject. Symbolic, Imaginary, Real. S<>@. (Levine 55-56)

Sources
=Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess. Trans. Alan Stoekel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004
=Hof, Robert D. “My Virtual Life.”  Businessweek Magazine.  <http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_18/b3982001.htm?chan=search>
=Levine, Steven Z. Lacan Reframed. New York; London: IB Taurus and Co., 2008
=Ludlow, Peter & Wallace, Mark. The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007
=Mitham, Nic. “A Key Moment for Metabrands”. K-Zero.
=Rymaszewski, Michael et al. Guide to Second Life – 2nd Edition. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing, 2008

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 16: Engaging with our lack)

The sixteenth part in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars

Davy Winder, author of Being Virtual, describes his sense of virtual selfhood:

…you can think of my personalities in terms of clothing, and I was simply trying on as many different styles to see which ones fitted, which suited me best of all. Of course, the truth is that there was no ‘best fit’ as it turned out. I was destined to become the sum of my parts, a composite personality: a little bit from here, a little bit  from  there (Winder 223).

Winder’s trying on of different styles, and his recognition that there was no “best fit” echoes my own experience with my Second Life (SL) avatar, Dustin Mabellon. My avatar only barely and provisionally covers the fact that, in SL, I have no organic or whole identity. Beneath the contingent constellation of body parts, clothing and skins that comprises my virtual self is an endlessly collapsing sinkhole, fading in and out of being. (The sliding “signifiers” that comprise my avatar body slide around this sinkhole similarly to the way that, following Einstein’s theory of relativity, a planet’s orbit is determined by the degree to which a larger body – such as a sun – is responsible for warping the fabric of space into a bowl shape. This perpetually incomplete aspect of the avatar causes it to resemble a series of sliding “signifiers”.)

LACANIAN NOTE:  Let’s turn to one feature of the Lacanian subject – the objet petit a. Lacan explains the relationship between the (a) and the subject as follows: “…the interest the subject takes in his own split is bound up with that which determines it – namely, a privileged object, which has emerged from some primal separation, from some self-mutilation induced by the very approach of the real, whose name, in our algebra, is the objet a.” (Lacan, Sem XI 83)

Once the subject experiences the mOther through the Signifier, as  , its sense of the unification between mother and child is experienced as prohibited jouissance. After the letter (the Signifier), anything resembling the mother-child unity is only achievable by (second order) jouissance; this Lacan equates with the objet petit (a). This (a), which stands for the little Autre or Other, stands for the rem(a)inder of lost jouissance  (Fink, Clinical 66). The (a), then, refers to the leftover of the Real in the Symbolic. In the conclusion to Seminar XI, Lacan writes that, “(t)his a is presented precisely, in the field of the mirage of the narcissistic function of desire, as the object that cannot be swallowed, as it were, which remains stuck in the gullet of the signifier” (Lacan, Sem XI 270).

We once had a sense of being unified with the Other (Autre), a sense of imaginary completion which, during the mirror stage, came from the world outside and other subjects (Mansfield 46). Once the mirror stage is complete, however, we are barred from the Other and must seek small (o)bjects that we mistake for the (O)ther. In Lacan’s own words, the a “fills the gap constituted by the inaugural division of the subject” (Lacan, Ecrits 270).

Let us be clear that the autre is not the Autre; the other is not the Other. The (a)utre is not the mOther, to which we are forever barred by the Signifier, but the sense of mOtherness that the Signifier leaves us with. Thus, it is not an object we can ever attain; it is the sense of otherness that haunts our desire. We strive compulsively toward the a, and, simultaneously, are never at ease with what we possess because it reminds us of our lost plenitude (Ross). We go from one a to another throughout our life; they substitute for the “huge, miraculous Other, hovering on the horizon of human possibility” – the lure of complete satisfaction and totality (Mansfield). Desire has no object as such, and is caused, or brought into being, by the (a). The (a), then, is the object-cause of desire (Homer 73). As noted above, desire seeks only its own furtherance. We desire to desire; we do not, ultimately, desire any particular object. This leftover of the Real acts as a void at the core of the subject’s being that the subject constantly tries to fill (Homer 87). Because of the (a), we have the sensation something is lacking from our lives.

The (a) functions as both object and cause of desire. As cause it is a void or gap of the Real that inheres at the core of the subject (and around which the Symbolic order is structured). As object it is “whatever momentarily fills that gap in our Symbolic reality”:

[T]he object (a) is not part of the signifying chain; it is a hole in that chain. It is a hole in the field of representation, but does not simply ruin representation. It mends it as it ruins it. It both produces a hole, and is what comes to the place of lack to cover it over (Homer 87).

It differs from the signifying chain because it is ultimately “non-signified” or the “beyond-of-the-signified” and has the status of das ding (“the Freudian Thing”); the signifying chain circles around it (Fink, Lacanian 95). The (a) “resist[s] symbolization, and thus resists the dialectization characteristic of the Symbolic Order, in which, one thing can be substituted for another…” (Fink, Lacanian 92). Mladen Dolar suggests that the (a) is an instance, par excellence, of the uncanny, where the Real erupts into the “homely” and we can comprehend the rem(a)inder that haunts real-ity (Dolar 13). Fink defines the (a) as “residue of symbolization, the real (r2) that remains, insists, ex-sists after, or despite, symbolization – as traumatic cause interrupting the smooth functioning of the law and the automatic functioning of the Symbolic chain” (Fink, Lacanian 83).

Through these posts we have encountered the ego (of the Imaginary) and the unconscious (the desire of the Symbolic mOther, or ) that operate within us. We are aware that the mOther is lacking () and the intermediating S(ignifier) has produced a remainder (a). Thus, Lacan takes the  and places it in relation to (symbolized by ) the (a). This reads as:   . Insofar as it is in relation to (a), the insatiable object- cause of desire, the Lacanian ubject acts as a gap in the signifying chain. Lacan explains that the subject is akin to an empty set {0}, meaning not that it is without ontological status, but that it is qualified as empty, a “spatial metaphor implying that it could alternatively be full” (Fink, Lacanian 52). The forumula   refers to the subject fading in and out of being in relation to the objet (a), the “phantasmatic partner” that ever arouses the subject’s desire. When something attempts to cover that object-cause, the subject acquires some being. Being is never solid, but is comprised of “metonymic slippage from one object to the next in accordance with the paternal” phallus/signifier that now mediates real-ity (Fink, Subject 91).

Rather than seeking to fill the (w)hole of the  with the lack in the  , the subject’s desire takes on a new role, the (a) (Fink, Lacanian 58). This occurs the moment the child recognizes that the A is in fact . Having to engage with Real-ity, (the Real mediated through the Signifier) is to engage with a mediated Otherness, the (a). Put differently, the (a) can be thought of as a rem(a)inder of the Other that allows the subject to sustain him/her self as a “being of desire” (Fink, Lacanian 61).

It’s easy to mistake something such as fantasy for the object of desire, but fantasy for Lacan, is the setting, rather than the object, of desire (Homer, Lacan 87). It is fantasy that supports our objectless desire. Through fantasy the subject attempts to sustain the illusion of unity with the Other and ignore his or her own division. Although the desire of the Other always exceeds or escapes the subject, there nevertheless remains something that the subject can recover and thus sustains him or herself. This something is the objet a (Homer 87).

I hope I have conveyed that Lacan’s sense of the subject (as interpreted by Fink and Žižek) differs tremendously from the Foucauldian one (Žižek, Sublime 197). Post-Structualism works with “subject positions” and the subject is reduced to subjectivation, while the Lacanian subject is a divided subject, that can be understood as a subtraction of “all the richness of the different modes of subjectivation, all the fullness of experience present in the way the individuals are ‘living’ their subject positions” (Žižek, Sublime 197). This subtraction reveals the Lacanian subject as an “empty place”…the “original void”…this “lack of symbolic structure”. The Lacanian subject, Žižek clarifies “is therefore to be strictly opposed to the effect of subjectivation: what the subjectivation masks is not a pre- or trans-subjective process of writing but a lack in the structrure, a lack which is the subject.” (Žižek, Sublime 197) The Lacanian subject goes through life attempting to find “a signifier that would be ‘its own’: the failure of its representation is its positive condition”. The subject tries to articulate itself in a signifying representation; the representation fails; instead of a richness we have a lack, and this void opened by the failure is the subject of the signifier…the subject of the signifier is a retroactive effect of the failure of its own representation; that is why the failure of representation is the only way to represent it adequately.” (Žižek, Sublime 198). [A sustained discussion can be found in Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject.]

The construction and manipulation of avatars render explicit our constant striving towards the (a) and the spectre of plenitude that propels this endless striving. Within SL the user has no proscribed Edenic form to return to. There is no final (or teleological) completion; the idea itself is senseless in the context of SL. So, SL avatarization can be thought of as a technique that engages the object-cause of our desire.

In “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar” Bob Rehak claims that “avatars reduplicate and render in visible form their players’ actions – they complete an arc of desire” (Rehak 107). Avatars, or “avatarial mirrors” as he refers to them, reflect back the “desired and resented lost object, existing in endless cycles of renunciation and reclamation” and create a spectral-participatory relationship with onscreen traces of self  (Rehak 111). The user engages – via their avatar – with their lack, seeking to consume new and newer virtual objects.

The SL avatar tends to take the form of something animate. Users do not tend to encounter avatars of objects such as the monolith from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Avatars usually resemble some organism, whether it is the likeness of a cybernetic or biological organism. If one encounters an avatar, for example, of a cellular phone, it will likely be clear that the cellular phone is animate – it will likely have a mouth, eyes, and/or some other animate traits.

Rehak identifies Pac Man (1980) as featuring one of the first organic avatars. Prior to Pac Man, games were primarily focused on inorganic spaceships and missile launchers that would, anally, expel missiles or rockets. For Rehak, the Pac Man avatar, which consumes through his fleshy mouth rather than expels. In this sense, Pac Man is a:

semiotically collapsed  subject  (a  thing  that  eats)  with object (a thing that is eaten) to constitute a closed system of desire. Equally important, Pac Man’s body acquires its signification through a missing part (“the shape that was left”); Pac-Man (is) recognizable as Pac-Man because of what (is) excluded from its form. This pie-slice absence also structure(s) Pac-Man’s agency within the  game, its ceaseless voracity. … Pac-Man was never at rest within its infinite progression of mazes, consuming dots – his own objets  a, frail reflections, perhaps, of an eternally missing slice (Rehak 115).

Since the 1980s, virtual games have evolved toward more complex instances of this development, through Wolfenstein 3D (1992), Quake (1996) and now into virtual worlds such as SL. Here avatars became explicitly organic and humanoid, “confront[ing] players with detailed and lifelike ‘doubles’” (Rehak 118). Virtual worlds such as SL utilize more complex ways of creating closed systems of desire for increasingly organic doubles.

The SL avatar is far more organic than the consuming blob Pac Man. Whereas the user has to proceed by analogy to understand that Pac Man plays with its desire, playing with one’s SL alter-ego, which may or may not resemble the user, renders that desire far more explicit. The SL user has a deeper relationship to their avatar’s “lack of being”, than does the Pac Man manipulator. Not only is the SL user responsible for tending to the consumption of the lack, they are confronted with the fact that their initial sense of totality was itself an illusion. One does not question the form of Pac Man: he is a circle with a slice removed who appears once a quarter is popped into the arcade machine. The user engagement with their SL avatar, however, by continually questioning and constructing its form. Through the avatars of virtual worlds such as SL, users come to recognize the terrible lack and instability at the foundation of what and who they are.

Sources
=Dolar, Mladen. “I Shall Be With You On Your Wedding Night: Lacan and the Uncanny.” October Vol. 58 Fall (1991): 5-23.
=Fink, Bruce. Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis.Cambridge,Mass.:HarvardUniversity Press, 1997
=Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton:PrincetonUniversity Press, 1995
=Homer, Sean. Jacques Lacan. Routledge:New York, 1995
=Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink.New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006
=Lacan, Jacques. Seminar XI – The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.Trans. Alan Sheridan.New York: W.W. Norton, 1998
=Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. New York:New YorkUniversityPress, 2000
=Rehak, Bob. “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar”. The Video Game Theory Reader. Eds. M. J. P. Wolf & B. Perron.New York: Routledge, 2003: 103- 127
=Ross, Stephen. A Very Brief Introduction to Lacan. (2002). Online. http://web.uvic.ca/~saross/lacan.html
=Winder, Davey. Being Virtual: Who you really are Online? West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, 2008
=Žižek, Slavoj. Sublime Object of Ideology.New York: Verso, 2008 (1989)
=Žižek, Slavoj. Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology.New York: Verso Press, 2009 (1999)

Thoughts on the vinyl LP resurgence…

A more recent version of this article can be found at Provocative Penguin

A few quick thoughts about an article in the Los Angeles Times titled “CD and mobile music sales fall in 2010, but vinyl continues its resurgence”. I’m not particularly surprised by the RIAA’s 2010 Year-End Shipment Statistics, which reveal that vinyl LP sales surged 26% while digital music sales – albeit still positive – were fairly unimpressive. Over the past few years it has been fascinating to see band merchandise tables at local bars inundated with young fans lining up to purchase LPs. At the end of any indie show it’s not uncommon to see the crowd streaming out – LP in hand.

Let’s begin by thinking about the usual explanations for this phenomenon (i.e. that the increase in LP sales comes “partly from live DJs who prefer vinyl over digital and partly from a new generation of collectors who see them as valuable souvenirs.”) There are two factors to consider: (1) live DJs and (2) LPs as valuable collectors items. I’ll avoid the easy, self evident, answers which you can probably come up with on your own, and offer a few – less intuitive – ones

There is a certain mystique surrounding analog media. Cassette tapes are now valued for their nostalgic properties, ‘authentic’ DJs spin vinyl records in contrast to their digital spinning poseurs. Quite some time ago in 2007 I observed the – almost religious – awe that young people in clubs had for vinyl spinning DJs. It struck me then that the DJ was something like an analog priest that the young data crunching digital information labourers turned to on their weekends for a little ‘saving’:

 “It is the thrill we feel upon seeing vinyl. The return of the LP, nearly dead, now valorized: a call for the grooves of the vinyl over the binary numerals of the digital. Surrounded by the noise of the machine, learning to dance in a cybernetic feedback loop as the bears-per-minute exceed 160, [but] we are calmed by sight of the vinyl, we are warmed inside: the sound compelling our bodies to learn to dance faster was produced – thank goodness – by physical ridges and grooves.”

We – in technologically savvy nations – are said to increasingly be living in an age that is post-scarcity. The DJ in this regard, equipped with (often rare) analog pressings stands as something of a throwback or reminder of the age of scarcity. (It is no coincidence, in this regard, that we are obsessed today with reality TV and live events: we tune in each week to catch a glimpse of something ‘real’, something that falls outside of our rationalized, pre-programmed, digital lives. This is precisely why DVRs will never capture 100% of the TV market: viewers enjoy watching programs and sporting events live in order to procure a little bit of something ‘real’.)

If we are going to think about why LP sales are surging, we should very briefly consider why people purchase objects. A consumer agrees to purchase an object or service for a whole host of reasons: Sometimes we need the thing in question for physiological reasons (for example, a bottle of water on a scorching hot day); Sometimes we want the thing in question in order to be personally satisfied or entertained (for example, a new book by our favourite author); Sometimes we expect the thing in question to confer upon us a kind of symbolic or social prestige (for example, the trendiest brand name clothing or a rare work of art to ‘ooh and awe’ our collector friends). Of course, almost every object or service we purchase has some mixture of need, want and expectation. I may be parched yet conscious of the brand of water I buy (for example: needing water to survive in the summer sun, but also expecting others to symbolically acknowledge me as a Evian kind of guy vs. a Starbucks Ethos kind of guy vs. a No Name brand kind of guy.)

It is expectation that I think is useful if we are to understand the continued success of LPs. Consider that a major factor in getting a consumer to fork out their hard earned cash – as George Lucas is all too aware – is to offer a “limited” or “special” item. And owning a limited, or special, item offers symbolic or social prestige. This is drilled into our heads early on in our lives: you might recall coughing up your allowance for a pack of sports cards in the hopes of finding a fabled ‘rare card’. As any kid is all too aware, the common cards are nice to have, but it’s difficult to get excited about something every other kid on the block has ten of… You become the talk of the playground by having a card that no one else has. I would call it juvenile if it weren’t the case that many grown men act this way as well, albeit with more expensive toys.

Although I don’t like to admit it, when I go to my local record shop, I rationalize my purchase in a similar way. The store usually displays 2 or 3 copies of a new album. If I don’t buy it at the time I’m in the store it could be a week or two before new copies come in. (Or, longer if the store wasn’t planning on stocking any more.) At worst, the album might have been produced with a limited pressing, meaning that I’d have to look to the secondary market.

Consider how radically different this sort of reasoning is from that of the iTunes customer, or a user hemming and hawing over whether to pay for a Grooveshark Plus subscription. What’s different is that the iTunes or Grooveshark customer does not have to deal with the issue of scarcity. And for that reason it’s difficult to accumulate social prestige or symbolic value through the ownership of MP3 files purchased from iTunes or by streaming them on Grooveshark. (The very same principle applies for Google Books, which may one day offer access to a universal library. A part of me thinks that the hesitation to drop printed books and read ebooks – exemplified by the popularity of bookstores like Indigo and Chapters – has to do with a narcissistic component of the act of reading: Often when I am on the Subway I watch people read. Frequently the readers will divert their eyes from the book and check to see who is looking at what they are reading. In contrast, nobody can tell what you’re reading from the back of your iPad or Kindle. Perhaps these ereaders would sell better if they could display the books’ cover on the backside of the device… )

Creating an LP is complex and until the mid-late 1980s consumers could not easily reproduce an album in the comfort of their own homes. When cassette tapes begun replacing LPs an individual could create a reproduction – albeit taking the same amount of time to reproduce as the length of the content. These cassette reproductions were timely to create and imperfect. When compact discs began replacing cassette tapes it became possible to simulate content and make identical copies. Furthermore, these identical copies no longer were beholden to the length of the content, and CD writers increased their speeds with each passing year until finally reaching near-instantaneous simulation of content. A few years after the Mp3 revolution begun with Napster and was legitimized by iTunes, consumers had the ability to duplicate/simulate content instantaneously. There is a psychological gap between analog songs on an LP and digital Mp3 files on your hard drive. The LP cannot be copied whereas I know an Mp3 file can be copied for anyone without data loss as many times as possible… One is subject to a principle of scarcity, the other is not.

Now, it’s absurd to expect that LPs themselves will be the great savior of the recording industry in 2012+, however I’m sure the industry I’m sure will be looking to the 26% sales surge of LPs for clues to its own success. I think it’s only a matter of time until the industry looks to LPs and asks how they can – in the year 2011/12 – integrate some of the exclusivity, scarcity and physicality into digital content.

So what can digital media learn from (and take from) analog media? Here’s a wild suggestion that seems to run against the attributes of new media/digital content and will seem backwards to most: To build a principle of scarcity into digital media. What if, for example, record labels started imposing limits on the number of times an album can be downloaded, thereby injecting scarcity into digital media? To tell you the truth, I think the industry will probably attempt something similar when ‘cloud’ based services like Grooveshark don’t pay off as they were expected to and it dawns on them that access to content is not the only active force comprising consumers’ desires.

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 15: Avatars and the Name-of-the-Father)

The fifteenth part in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars.

In an earlier post I pointed out some studies that draw attention to the ways that being virtual and being real or actual are not opposites. I’ll add that while virtual worlds are not identical to everyday reality, everyday reality is not immune to virtual reality. For instance, while it is true that one can be whatever they desire in the virtual world, users tend to take predictable forms, usually adopting an avatar close (physically and psychologically) to themselves but with slight improvements (see the work of Yee and Bailenson).

Marshall Mcluhan’s idea that electronic media create an “acoustic/non-linear” space is germane here: the virtual world does appear to have a non-linear form, however upon investigation, highly linear activities occur there. Linearity stamps a certain order, or authority, on non-linear environments. One might take, as an analogy, that something like space travel entails the cold of infinite space, free from the pull of gravity or directionality, and the keen sense of finitude, mass, up and down that astronauts bring with them from earth. While it is possible to create situations and games within Second Life (SL) that exceed the physical possibilities of real life, a trip to the day’s SL hotspots would most likely involve primarily linear activities: watching tai chi in a park, trying not to disturb a couple dancing at an outdoor ballroom, checking out a group gathering to mourn the passing of the latest celebrity to overdose, and or trying out a fishing game. All of these activities have a set routine and purpose. Likewise, sex in the virtual world often “mimics the most loving flavors of sex in the offline world, or the blandest. Sometimes it begins as Sim love and later becomes the kind of relationships any of us could recognize from our own, offline lives” (Ludlow and Wallace 132). One way of understanding the persistence of this linear activity in a non-linear medium, involves recognizing that the Lacanian Name-of-the-Father, a fundamental linear property of the Lacanian subject, is active in the non-linear virtual world.

Lacanian Note: What is the Name-of-the-Father? Following the mirror stage, the infant is cut off from the mother, although he or she is not entirely removed from mOtherness; while the hope of returning to the Other is nullified, traces of otherness linger. Entering the Symbolic world of the Signifier does not eliminate the Real mOther, but masks it. Lacan uses the term “jouissance” to describe the gratification that we lost upon being “castrated” by language. Following castration, the ability to achieve satisfaction appears “excessive, overwhelming and disgusting”, but does not cease to be fascinating (Fink, Lacanian xii). Similar to the infant engaged in the Freudian game of fort/da, the Lacanian subject is a “fixation, a symptom, a repetitive way of “getting off’ and obtaining jouissance” (Fink, Lacanian xii). Our desire, as Subjects, to fill in the mOther’s lack with our own lack (that is , with ) and obtain jouissance can only be carried out from a distance; the Signifier allows us to derive jouissance from  from a distance, without attempting to entirely fill it in. Thus, as Bruce Fink argues, the subject is the outcome of the Oedipus complex whereby the child finally accepts the father’s threat and is kicked out of the mOther (Fink, Lacanian 58). As in the Oedipus myth, the father acts as a barrier to the child’s desire to fill in the (w)hole of its mOther, or, in less familial terms, it acts as a barrier to encountering the unmediated Real as it exists prior to language and the Signifier. The Signifier leaves behind a gap between the mOther’s and the child’s desire.

In Seminar XVII, Lacan explains that the Signifier (or Phallus) acts as something like a crowbar [|] that stands in the midst of the mOther’s open “alligator” jaws of desire [<] (Lacan, Sem XVII 129 qtd. in Fink, Lacanian 55-56). The Signifier [|] acts to resolve fears of the collapsing jaws of desire [<], neutralizing the mOther’s desire that threatens to engulf the child. It is the Signifier (or Oedipal Phallus) that protects us from sleeping with our mothers, a “potentially dangerous dyadic situation” (Lacan, Ecrits 200 in Fink, Lacanian 56-67). Thus, the Name-of-the-Father, comes to stand over the mOther’s desire (Name/Desire). The Father’s Name (which Lacan puns as rhyming in French with “non” [non-nom]), no, saying, prohibition, the phallus, the Signifier of desire, and the [|] are all terms for that which comes to mediate the mOther’s desire; they allow us to symbolize it, transform it into signifiers, and, thereby, create a rift in the mother-child unity, producing a space in which the child can breathe easy (Fink, Lacanian 57). 

Let’s be clear that Lacan’s concept of the Name-of-the-Father has already been fruitfully brought to media studies. Marc Santos and Sarah White’s essay “Playing with Ourselves: A Psychoanalytic Investigation of Resident Evil and Silent Hill” explores the idea that the Signifier or Name-of-the-Father can be located in the activities that occur within, or using, virtual technologies (such as video games). Santos and White argue that horror themed games allow the user to “engage…the underlying structures of our psychology” such as the “Lacanian Real” from a safe distance (Santos and White 69). The game Resident Evil pays particular attention to eyes and gazing, in a way that exposes the “fragility of both our subjectivity and the symbolic order (that which founds subjectivity)…” (Santos and White 70). They emphasize, for example, the utterly human eyes of the undead cannibalistic zombies, which:

acknowledge us not as another subject, nor even a fantasy screen  (as  the  petit  object  a),  but  as  a  thing  to  be consumed. The human eyes on the hideously monstrous face horrify us because they reflect a repressed aspect of our  desire  back  at  us  –  the  deep  repressed  desire  for nihilistic assimilation, the desire to be  reunited with the maternal body, to be consumed (literally in this case) by the other (Santos and White 71).

The Resident Evil player attacks zombies and creatures that threaten to annihilate its self-stability, thereby “preserv[ing] the symbolic order” (Santos and White 72).

The authors compellingly argue that both the games Silent Hill and Resident Evil, “position the player as the defender of subjectivity [upholders of the Symbolic Order]; a player vanquishes monsters and clarifies ambiguities which threaten not only the stability of the player’s subjectivity, but also the psycho-social order founding his or her subjectivity” (Santos and White 70). These virtual horror-survival games, which rely on third-person points of view similar to SL, can be seen as instances where the player unravels a plot littered with “moaning abjections threatening the symbolic order” that culminates in a climactic battle positioning the player “against all-powerful phallic m(others), an ultimate manifestation of the Other that threatens our subjectivity and the stability of the symbolic order” (Santos and White 72). The final battle in Resident Evil: Code Veronica X, for example, requires a weapon, tellingly called the “linear launcher”, to defeat the final maternally-themed monster, “further illustrating how we must retain order, wield the paternal phallus that maintains the Oedipal order, and thus, emerge victorious from this encounter with the Real” (Santos and White 73).

The narrative and conclusion of the game Silent Hill is also evocative of the process of Oedipalization, where “following the Law of the Father, we provide a fetishized coherence and illusory linearity” (Santos and White 70). According to Santos and White, the final villain in Silent Hill, “represents the threat of the pre- Oedipal maternal body” whom the player must destroy to “preserve not only her own subjectivity but also the symbolic culture itself” (Santos and White 74). Similar to the argument that something exists beneath/beyond the clothing, hair and skin shops, dance clubs, and prim sculpting schools in SL, Santos and White insist that:

…these games are more than simply defeating monsters and  shooting  ‘bad  guys’  –  the  ‘evil’  we  encounter… represents the  fragility and duality of our own psyches: the call of the Real that  constantly threatens our own subjectivity.  The  artificially  constructed  space  of  the video  game  becomes  a  ‘safe  space’  in  which  we  can indulge in festishistic ‘play’ with a simulation of the Real (Santos and White 77).

Similarly, one could read SL as a non-linear space where the user practices being linear. As I have noted throughout these posts, many scholars  emphasize the banality and orderliness of the virtual world. There is an obvious disjuncture between the possibility of being virtually anything and the fact that many users are concerned with being something real (or something close to it). One could argue, then, that users turn to SL in order to contain their anxieties about dyadic unity; rather than immersing themselves in the jouissance of being whoever they want to be online, they act in accordance with the Name-of-the-Father. Thus, activity in the virtual world falls in line with what Lacan refers to as “normal neurotic” behaviour that acts in accordance with the Father’s Name. In much SL behaviour avatars appear to be used for similar kinds of  activities that characterize real life; they seem banal, orderly, and linear. From the standpoint of the Name-of-the-Father, this linearity could be considered as an attempt to obtain jouissance in a virtual world whose avatars and environment are asymptotic and unstable. What these linear activities do is place the Signifier in the Other’s threatening jaws in such a way that the subject (the user) can obtain some small sense of otherness. In order to avoid losing herself in the incompleteness of the virtual, the user preserves the symbolic order. SL users foster long-term romances in-world and can even be married by a virtual priest. Here, the virtual world is used for a straightforward game of “get[ting] closer to their object of affection” (Winder 58). These are instances where something, such as romantic love, which, in keeping with Plato’s Symposium is resolutely human, linear, and has a clear goal, makes its way into a space without inherent teleology and linearity.

In Being Virtual, Davy Winder recounts the details of one such SL relationship which resulted in marriage between two users. Rhonda, a 38 year old in a troubled relationship, is introduced to SL. She spends some time experimenting with the world, trying at first to create an avatar that looks like herself before finally searching for a “new look”:

I spent the first week in SL trying to figure out what there was to do and see.  I found out that I could go shopping for things for my  avatar to wear… What I [her avatar] ended up with was a very short, athletic build character, with small breasts and a big butt,  everything that was nothing like me in real life. I gave her black hair and pale white skin the colour of a sheet of printer paper. Her body had tribal tattoos all over it and her lips were full and deep   red.  I  loved  looking  at  her.  The  contrast  was beautiful.     She  only ever wore red, white or black.        I sculpted a beautiful body for her and purchased my hair, skin, clothing, shoes and jewellery (Winder 63).

In order to be able to afford to keep shaping her avatar, Rhonda begun entering virtual world dance competitions. At one of these dance competitions Rhonda’s avatar, Heart Wishbringer, met Joe Stravinsky. Rhonda describes her first time meeting Joe, a 7’9 vampire:

I had never seen anything like it before.  He was amazing to look at,  the tallest avatar I ever had seen.   The first thing I noticed was his boots…better than any boots I had ever seen on a man yet.  I glanced up and he wore tight shiny black leather pants and his skin was almost as white as mine… stark white, his chest was almost bare except for the wet t-shirt he had on that was stark white again and his eyes had dark black circles around them, his eyes were red snake eyes on black, his lips were black and he had vampire fangs and his hair was a very long beautiful white Mohawk.   I just sat  there in awe.   This man was artistic, his avatar was original and unique.  Red, White, Black… my lips turned upwards into an evil  smile as I clicked on him to read his profile (Winder 66).

One clearly gets the sense that Rhonda recognizes Joe’s “artistic” nature. She recognizes that he is an assemblage of red snake eyes, black lips, vampire fangs etc… Winder discusses the banal, soap-opera like, quality of their ensuing relationship. The users sent each other comments such as “I need you to love me, and I want you to need me” and search for their “better half” in a space of impossible fulfillment (Winder 71). This is something SL shares with real life: the user-as-avatar has to tarry with the same attempts to obtain jouissance as the real user does. When Rhonda exclaims “Why was it that we were making each other feel so whole, and so happy?  Why was it that the love we felt here in Second Life felt so real and was so all encompassing?” (Winder 72). We note that this is the same language as one might use in the real world. Despite the fact that one can claim to be anything, or anyone they want in SL, users still seem to be looking for a better half, something, or someone to make them feel complete, or, evoking Arisophanes’ myth in Plato’s Symposium, whole. As in real life, all the subject can wish for is a temporary jouissance, a slight sensation of the Real, insofar as it is achieved through the linearity, and law, of the Signifier. Virtual worlds do not bypass the inertia of the user’s subjectivity; the user’s first life follows them into their digital second life. As Bob Rehak suggests: “The worlds we create …and the avatarial bodies through which we experience them seem destined to mirror not only our wholeness, but our lack of it” (Rehak 125).

Likewise, while the modification of bodies and identities is often associated with the breakdown of authority, it can be understood as precisely the opposite. From this standpoint SL avatar body modification acts out of the Name-of-the-Father; rather than being anybody or anything they desire the user recognizes that they are perpetually nobody, playing with a self that is always incomplete and partial. The endless malleability of the avatar is thus a testament to the Father’s law. If you get too close to believing you can be what you want in cyberspace, the threat of castration creeps in. To be who you want and find no teleological satiety is to recognize, and work with, the father’s castrating “no”. What we do in SL is act out the Father’s name. Rather than a realm of psychosis or radical freedom, SL involves becoming aware of the neurosis, alienation, and prohibited jouissance that characterize ‘normal’ subjectivity.

Sources
=Fink, Bruce. Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, Mass. :Harvard University Press, 1997
=Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995
=Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006
=Lacan, Jacques. Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton and Co, 2007 qtd. in Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995
=Ludlow, Peter & Wallace, Mark. The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007
=Santos, Marc C. and White, Sarah E. “Playing with Ourselves: A Psychoanalytic Investigation of Resident Evil and Silent Hill” Digital Gameplay Ed. Nate Garrelts. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2007: 67-79
=Winder, Davey. Being Virtual: Who you really are Online? West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, 2008
=Yee, Nick and Bailenson Jeremy. “The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behaviour” Human Communication Research 33:3 (2007):271-290
=Yee, Nick and Bailenson Jeremy and Nicolas Ducheneaut. “The Proteus Effect: Implications of Transformed Digital Self-Representation on Online and Offline Behavior.” Communication Research 36:2 (2009): 285-312

Humanizing the Avatar: (Part 14: Avatars as Anchors of Subjectivity)

The fourteenth part in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars.

The avatar is similar to the Lacanian Subject (see the note at the end of this post if you’re unfamiliar with Lacanian ideas) insofar as it can be understood as an object represented by a signifier for another signifier. The avatar body as a commingling of various prim objects and scripts, is not entirely without a fixed meaning. Indeed, users’ avatars mean much to them, but these meanings never seem to be final, or complete. The avatar’s properties (comprised of virtual polygons and scripts) constantly slide around, but are held together at certain points that ensure the user is able to stabilize some meaning (and identity) from and with them. It is one “point of convergence that enables everything that happens in this [cyber] discourse to be situated retroactively and prospectively” (Lacan, Sem III 267-8).

For example, an avatar is a series of “particular” scripts, attachments and body parts tied together in some coherent way, without regard to any “absolute referent” (Fink, Clinical 94). In the Second Life (SL) appearance window one has the option to modify the shape of a number of body parts. Selecting appearance–>shape–>eyes provides the user with ten sliders, and describes the fact that they can slide from the left to the right (or 0% of a slider effect to 100% of a slider effect). In the appearance–>shape–>eyes tab the user can manipulate sliders for ‘eye size’ (from ‘beady’ to ‘anime’), ‘eye opening’ (from ‘narrow’ to ‘wide), ‘eye spacing’ (from ‘close-set’ to ‘far set’), ‘outer eye corner’ (from ‘corner down’ to ‘corner up’, ‘eye depth’ (from ‘sunken eyes’ to ‘bugged eyes’), etc… Moving close to either pole (0% or 100%) creates wildly exaggerated features. Dustin Mabellon’s average ‘eye shape’ usually ranges between 43% and 54% on the sliders.

While I interact with my shifting avatar each time I manipulate it, I do not verge closer to re-presenting something actual; rather, each constellation of virtual signifiers presents me with a new avatar body. Davy Winder describes his own avatar in Being Virtual: “…I did not regain a lost identity, even if long buried parts of my personality did make the odd appearance every now and then. I created an entirely new one” (Winder 119).

The fact that each avatar constellation is new and unique does not mean that it is meaningless. The avatar is not a haphazard constellation of virtual polygons and scripts but is anchored at various points, constraining the polygons and scripts from spilling wildly and meaninglessly out into the virtual world. Thus, Lacan’s description of the point de capiton is a useful tool for contemplating the avatar body: “(a)t best the [avatar] arrest[s] the movement of [the user’s] desire for a time before the tyranny of the symbolic order reasserts itself, the deep connection is broken, and the…[user]…is forced to move on in quest of another, more lasting gratification.” Note: The sentence originally reads: “At best they arrest the movement of desire for a time before the tyranny of the symbolic order reasserts itself, the deep connection is broken, and the subject is forced to move on in quest of another, more lasting gratification.” (Ross)

Image beside an advertisement for cosmetic surgery copied from my Facebook homepage.

In this regard, it is understandable that advertisers are currently using virtual worlds and social networks, both of which require the use of an avatar, to advertise cosmetic plastic surgery. One such advertisement, currently on Facebook, presents an image of two feminine faces with pink lips, protruding out of what looks like the sands of an elemental desert. The faces resemble mountains or rock formations, which weather and/or human processes have chipped away at or engineered over time. In the advertisement, the faces appeared to be something malleable; they are presented as an undisturbed block of granite for an artist to work with in order to actualize an idea that hitherto was a mere figment. A short sentence below the “faces” reads: “Facial Plastic Surgeon: If you’ve been considering plastic surgery, book a complimentary consult [sic] with Dr.  X to discuss your ideas and needs” [Emphasis mine]. The term “need” occurs here almost as an afterthought. Here, advertisers have recognized they have a set of potential consumers insofar as Facebook and SL avatarization itself represents working with bodies whose impetus is insatiable desire rather than satiable need.

Lacanian Note: What is the Lacanian Subject? One of Lacan’s sources for his idea of the “subject” is a scene in Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle where one of Freud’s nephews plays a game of hide and seek with a spool. This game is a repetition- compulsion activity where the toddler re-enacts, using a spool, the loss of his mother; oscillating between the sorrow of the “fort” (spool is gone) and the joy of the “da” (spool is here). Freud interprets this fort/da game as the child’s way of mastering his mother’s absence (the child’s mother has died). The toddler practices averting the trauma produced by this predicament of recognizing he is distinct from his mother. In order to articulate his lack, he turns to the “concrete discourse [of those] around him by reproducing more or less approximately in his Fort! and Da! the terms he received from them” (Ecrits 319). For Lacan, this is a linguistic game; the child’s subjectivity is produced through language. The Lacanian subject is a “function of the signifying chain, a linguistic phenomenon produced by the Symbolic order which the infant enters in the originary moment of articulating the mother’s absence” (Ross).

The child’s acquisition of speech allows it to articulate its predicament and serves as a means of successfully denying things that are obstructing it from its prior position of constant and undifferentiated pleasure with the mOther. Here, the child comes to learn that it can have some control over the presence and absence of things insofar as this control is based in a linguistic game. The toddler begins to pick up on the law(s) of the Other, accepting his or her “integration into the dichotomy of phonemes, whose synchronic structure the existing language offers up for him to assimilate” (Ecrits 319). This logic of presence (da) and absence (fort) is at the heart of language.

In learning this language game the toddler is not only articulating the loss of his mother, but is also expressing his recognition of the possibility of otherness. The toddler recognizes that the spool is simply an object like any other, and that it, like all others, can disappear and reappear. He also learns that he is not complete in and of himself. This infantile activity has repercussions for the remainder of our psychical life. Lacan explains: “…the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire” (Ecrits 319). These occultation games can be understood as a “killing” of the real mother and the replacement of her with a sound; it is the point where the recognition of self is transformed into the signifier “I” (Ecrits 262).

But why does this process result in the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire? According to the rules of Saussurean linguistics, there is no necessary link between signifier and signified. A signifier only means insofar as we understand what it does not mean. This play of signification attempts to adequately signify, but, if we intend to search for totality, we will only experience frustration; signifiers lead only to other signifiers in an infinite web of signification, and so, the subject, itself only a signifier for another signifier, exists within the ceaseless flux of signification. The Symbolic order provides human beings with language to express our existence, but the Symbolic is inexhaustible and our entrance into it leaves us with a permanent sensation of lack and a perpetual desire for some sort of coherence and stability. This desire not only subsists on the grounds that language is a set of sliding signifiers, but also because the totality we are after is itself a (mis)recognition.

The Lacanian subject is constituted through language. As in linguistics, this means that the subject acts as a pronoun or a shifter – the least stable entity in language since its “meaning is purely a function of the moment of its utterance” (Sarup 53). Not only is it unstable as a pronoun, but there are also losses and difficulties in the word itself. During the game of fort/da, the infant, as a subject, comes to believe falsely in a point of certainty. The point of certainty is false because words only come to mean by signifying what they are not.

Lacan refers to this process of meaning as the product of “points de capiton” (Ecrits 303). A point de capiton, translated as a “quilting” or “anchoring” point, can be thought of as equivalent to the stud or button that holds an upholstered couch or piece of clothing together (Sarup 53); (Evans 149). Lacan uses the point de capiton to refer to the punctuation at the end of a sentence that halts an otherwise endless string of signifiers; it is the point in the signifying chain at which “the signifier stops the endless movement of the signification” (Evans 149); (Ecrits 303). Lacan is not claiming that there is no fixed meaning whatsoever; points de capiton allow for stable moments of signification (Homer 42). But, while meaning is temporarily produced or stopped, it is ultimately illusory. The Symbolic order requires this illusory meaning in order to function.

The Lacanian subject comes to terms with the crisis of the mirror stage. The subject is located in the system of the Symbolic replete with an endlessly circulating series of signifiers. The concept of the “I” in this Symbolic system “…provides an image of self, but only when selfhood concedes its meaning and definition to the system of signification, of which the signifier “I” is a part” (Mansfield40). Lingering amidst this endless flux of signification, however, is the Imaginary recollection of totality and wholeness that we experienced in our neo-natal months.

The subject, then, is ensnared in the promise of the Symbolic, the illusory hope that it can offer to us the sense of satisfaction we felt upon recognizing our self in the mirror stage; the Lacanian subject, then, is best described as “a subjectivized lack, not a lacking subject or a subject of impossibility, even though he presupposes the assumption and overcoming of a purely negative moment” (Chiesa 15). Until we reach the Symbolic, where we can recognize the irredeemable split between subject and object and thus have something to explicitly desire, there is no ego or subject. It is not until our recognition of a lack that our unconscious comes to be our explicit concern. Now we can see more clearly how the subject is differentiated from the ego insofar as it is a property of the Symbolic and located in the unconscious rather than being a property of the specular Imaginary.

Sources:
=Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and Otherness, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007
=Evans, Dylan. Introductory Dictionary to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1996.
=Fink, Bruce. Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1997
=Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 1961.
=Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006
—. Seminar III: The Psychoses, 1955-1956. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993.
=Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. New York: New York University Press, 2000
=Ross, Stephen. A Very Brief Introduction to Lacan.(2002). Online. <http://web.uvic.ca/~saross/lacan.html>
=Sarup, Madran. Jacques Lacan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.
=Winder, Davey. Being Virtual: Who you really are Online? West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, 2008

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 13: You.0 and Asymptotic Desire)

Second Life (SL) avatars provide an opportunity to catch a glimpse of the our desire in action. Rather than positioning the avatar as evocative of a post-Oedipal, post-lack, desiring machine, as other critics have done, I will argue that the avatar visualizes and renders explicit the lost object, the remainder of our entry into Culture/Language/the Symbolic inhering at the core of the Subject. Through examples demonstrating the SL user’s engagements with their avatars, I will suggest that the SL avatar reflects, and offers the user the ability to engage with, the structure of their subjectivity.

If you’re unfamiliar with Lacanian concepts you might want to read the red NOTE at the end of the post…

The Second Life (SL) avatar can be characterized by endless wandering: the virtual avatar parallels the real desire of the user, which has crystallized out of the impossibility of fulfilment. The terrain of the virtual world, replete with fantastical creatures and vistas, is constructed of the same wandering desire and impossible fulfilment that constitute the real world. Both the virtual world, and the avatar that moves through it, make the functioning of desire more evident than it is in the rush of our everyday lives.

Aside from select roads and waterways controlled by Linden Labs, SL is comprised of a terrain constructed and managed by its users. This means that nearly everything, including the avatars themselves, have been controlled, chosen, and/or manipulated by users. The ability to manipulate and design the world and the avatars therein provides a virtual body to something that is psychical (or phantasmatic). SL prim objects and avatars which have no inherent, biological or organic fullness or completeness, appear on the user’s monitor; they are bodies constructed by human desire, and, as such, should be read as externalizations of the asymptotic nature of that desire. It is no coincidence that one has to build objects out of prims, the raw building blocks of the virtual world have no desire or tendencies of their own: prims can be thought of as the fundamental virtual material that our desire manipulates; or rather, a material capable of externalizing our phantasmatic desire. Comprised of this prim material, SL objects have no inherent place, or organic wholeness; they are always uncertain, always potentially something else. Nothing in SL ever feels complete. The entire virtual world, avatars included, exist as explicitly manipulatable; in SL the user forms an image-ideal, an ideal-ego, but is uncertain of the Other’s desire and keeps on with his or her desirous wandering.

Recall that desire is “based upon lack – not on the lack of any identifiable thing, but rather the lack of what Lacan calls “being”, “presence”, “the here and now” (Silverman, “Subjectivity” 36). Each of us, however, expresses the “impossible non-object of desire” in our own particular way. This explains why SL is such a vibrant world of different objects and avatars. The colourful and complex terrains and avatars can be regarded as comprised of particular and unique expressions of this impossible non-object of desire. Flying through the vast world, one might experience the sensation that they are surveying a land built with human desire. While building, or sculpting prim-based objects in the virtual world, a user is arguably working with the fundamental building blocks of desire.

What I mean by the fundamental building blocks of human desire can be elucidated by focusing on one of the most compelling features of SL avatars and objects: their inherent incompleteness. Using my SL avatar, Dustin Mabellon, I used to chat with SL users about what they claim their avatar provides for them.  Often the conversation will turn to the idea there is no prototypical or normal SL avatar. A SL friend once described this non-normalcy as the state of being “normal-plus”. She claimed that this state of normal-plus exemplified a way of being that was “freer than RL [Real Life]…freer from reality’s limits”. This sense of normal-plus is intriguing because the majority of popular literature about SL describes participants who claim to use the virtual world in order to become normal or to make up for some real-life imperfection. The comment above, however, seems to indicate that achieving a point of normality is not the SL avatar’s raison d’etre. The virtual space of SL makes explicit that there is no normal to which to aspire, no way of ever being sated or completed. “Being the real you”, my friend explained, is always already a “More You you”. At the very moment the avatar becomes sufficient, it often becomes insufficient. In this light, the virtual avatar could be described as a truly asymptotic object. A virtual avatar offers the user the ability to interact with a self that perpetually approaches finality or wholeness, but never arrives there. The avatar is never fixed: it has no essence except for being “in essence”.

What does it mean to have a prosthesis, or double, that represents a “more You you”? What does it mean to have the sense that the real me is an endlessly desiring “more Me me”? In a Lacanian parlance, this suggests that the user is always in excess; there is always a remainder that evades the Symbolic. The avatar is something that represents the contingency that is integral to the self. Looking at my avatar, Dustin Mabellon, I notice the pixilation; manipulating his body I recognize his utter contingency. This helps me to reflect on the contradictions that comprise my own subjectivity. Note: For Slavoj Žižek “the dialectic is simply a process for the production of contradictions; as thesis generates antithesis in the progression of the dialectic. Žižek’s claim is that a merger of Lacan and Hegel reveals that final resolution of the dialectic remains an impossible dream. Just as the Lacanian individual subject has a permanent lack at the centre of his or her being (desires that can never be met), so the Hegelian dialectic has a contradiction. In neither case can the desired object be reached, and we are left with the experience of difference and contingency instead (Sim 85).  Via the avatar, we have our desire standing before us, desire that inheres at the core of what we are but would likely go unnoticed in real life. Thus, by blurring the real, the imaginary and the code, the SL avatar, uncannily, gets at the heart of us.

A constantly changing avatar may be seen as the harbinger of both a “remixed” self, intelligible against the horizon of so-called late capitalism and against the horizon of Swann’s desire in Proust’s great novel: an impassioned building, which endlessly condenses and evaporates and can never be sated. As one SL user, Davy Winder, explains: “I can relate to the concept of self as a paper doll, a plaything to be shaped and coloured as the moment requires, and discarded, crumpled and torn, when that moment passes” (Winder 117). Individuals “keep moving and don’t commit [themselves]”, welcoming both fragmented physical bodies and senses of self (Sennett, Corrosion qtd. in Elliot, Concepts 138). On the other hand, avatarization can be understood as an externalization of something that interacts with, but is not reducible to, the impact of one’s subjection to contingent historical themes, practices and techniques.

LACANIAN NOTE: During the mirror stage (refered to in my last post) , the infant’s ego arises as a “crystallization/sedimentation of ideal images tantamount to a fixed/reified object with which the child learns to identify with himself”. This learning is due to the parent or caregiver telling the baby: “baby, that’s you!” (Fink, Lacanian 35). At this stage, we learn behaviours that are dictated by our parents; for example we learn what it means to be a good or bad boy or girl (Fink, Lacanian 35). We learn to internalize an imaginary production of images of ourselves reflected back to us by Others (or mOthers) (Fink, Lacanian 84).

But, at this point the infant also begins to ask, using language, what the Other wants of them. The infant is no longer at one with the mOther, but is now aware of the mother, and is in possession of desires s/he does not yet understand. This is horrifying to the infant because there is now a blank spot of uncertainty in what was hitherto a period of non-individuation. It is at this point that desire is born in the infant and the specular ego has another dimension to grapple with: specular wholeness may not actually be what his or her mOther desires.

In this respect, Lacan’s seemingly puzzling statement that “man’s desire is to be desired by the Other” or “man’s desire is the Other’s desire”, becomes easier to understand (Fink, Clinical 59): From the outset of our psychical development, the mOther’s desire has been internalized and adopted as our own. From the moment the mOther speaks and confirms that the image in the mirror is our self, we have been “deciphering” what the mOther wants from our ego (Fink, Clinical 54). In this moment, we also learn that there is the possibility of a not-self, something other than our own ego. We learn it is possible to err. We learn about doubt and the impossibility of knowing for certain that we have satisfied the mOther’s desire. This impossibility becomes part of our own desire. As a result, our desire becomes structured by a wandering, hopeful pursuit of the mOther’s desire. The logic of desire, then, can be regarded as an “asymptotic progression that never succeeds”, a “perpetual approach” that “never arrives and yet constantly promises to coincide with that toward which it tends” (Lacan, Ecrits 251); (Ross). (A fine example of asymptotic desire would be the numerous love interests in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In this work, Proust emphasizes that desire cannot be sated. Our desire does not yearn for fulfilment, but only the desire to desire. In Proust’s novel, Swann’s desire fades when he has obtained his desired love object; desire is rekindled when he is provided the opportunity to seek out a new object of desire.)

What Lacan refers to as “separation” designates an attempt by the child to come to grips with the mOther’s desire: separation is the point at which the child recognizes that there is no mother-child unity (Fink, Lacanian 50). The child’s sense of lack (at the level of the mOther) is engendered when the mOther demonstrates to her child that she too is incomplete and has the same endlessly wandering desires. Now we have two lacks – the lack in the self and the lack in the mOther. Still attempting to achieve a sense of totality and fullness, the child, attempts to “gain a foothold within the divided parent” and does so by “lodging” his or her “lack of being (manqué-a-etre) in that place where the Other was lacking” (Fink, Lacanian 54). So, separation is an attempt to fill the mOther’s lack. The child attempts to fill up the (w)hole of the mOther’s lack, her whole space of desire, and, by making their desires coincide, tries to be everything to her (Fink, Lacanian 55). But, desire can never end in satisfaction because it coincides with the Other’s desire which we can never know in its totality.

Lacan reads this state of the Other’s impossible desire through Sausurrean linguistics, which serves to de-biologize the Freudian ideas with which he is working. He reads the encounter described above between self and other (infant and mOther) as the submission to, and internalization of, language. Language here acts as the third – triangulating – element of the Oedipus myth. Thus, the father (Laius) is read as the linguistic Signifier. The Signifier comes to replace/symbolize/neutralize the Other’s desire. Without the Signifier we would not cease attempting to fill up the mOther’s lack (incidentally, non-internalization of the Signifier is how Lacan defines psychosis). Once the child has internalized the Signifier, he or she has undergone the process of subjectivization: the subject, then, is the child with an intermediating third factor (in this case the Signifier/language), which acts to ensure that he or she is not overwhelmed by the Other’s desire. 

Sources
=Fink, Bruce. Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, Mass. :Harvard University Press, 1997
—. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995
=Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006
=Ross, Stephen. A Very Brief Introduction to Lacan. (2002). Online. <http://web.uvic.ca/~saross/lacan.html>
=Sennett, R. Corrosion of Character: Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: WW Norton, 1998 in Elliott, Anthony. Concepts of the Self. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008
=Sim, Stuart. Irony and Crisis. Cambridge, UK: Icon Books, 2002
=Silverman, Kaja. “Subjectivity and Identity: The World Wants Your Desire.” n.paradoxa. 19 (May 2006)
=Winder, Davey. Being Virtual: Who you really are Online? West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, 2008

Roots of Anti-Humanism: “Our object was to know Man; as for men, we left them to do as they chose” -Goethe

Julian Benda’s (b.1867-d.1956) The Treason of the Intellectuals (La Trahison des clercs) is one of the most astute diagnoses of the contemporary age I have ever read, despite being written in 1928. It is a goldmine of ideas and offers an early look into the social snowball that would come to be known as the Culture Wars. It’s also, curiously, read by both the left and the right of the political spectrum, referenced both in an essay by Roger Kimball and in Chris Hedges new-ish book The Death of the Liberal Class. But I’d like to bring your attention to a little passage on Humanism, one of this blog’s favourite themes.

It’s fashionable to talk about post-humanism or trans-humanism, but once you raise humanism, people often think you’re refering to secular-humanism or humanitarianism.

But post-humanism, as it is used by its technophilic proponents is not advocating a post-secular-humanism or a post-humanitarianism: it is advocating post-humanism. (Likewise, trans-humanism, as it is used by its freezer burned proponents is not advocating a trans-secular-humanism or a trans-humanitarianism: it is advocating trans-humanism.)

Movements such as transhumanism and posthumanism are anti-humanist, that is, in the words of the great and mighty Wikipedia, a way of thinking that holds the view that “…all notions of ‘human nature’ or of ‘Man’ or ‘humanity’ in the abstract should be rejected as historically relative, or as metaphysical...” So that’s a wiki-mouthful, but I think it describes the aim of the anti-humanism. And I think it helps to distinguish anti-humanism from anti-secular-humanism, or anti-humanitarianism.

Now, what’s so interesting about Benda is that his anti-humanist observations are not about the usual technological culprits (biotechnology, germ line engineering, human cloning, Body Worlds plastinated corpses etc…) at whose feet we usually lay blame. (In fact, in 1988 Alain Finkeilkraut explored Benda’s ideas and teased out the idea that our belief in ‘humanity’ in the abstract was destroyed by the French counter-revolutionaries and German Romantics after the  French Revolution. I’d like to return to this in a future post, but in the meantime you can probably dig Finkielkrauts book The Undoing of Thought out of your local library’s black hole and surprise all your cool post-human friends.)

One of the tendencies that Benda noticed was that the intellectual class of his day had set out to “exalt the will of men to feel conscious of themselves as distinct from others, and to proclaim as contemptible every tendency to establish oneself in a universal.” The “moralists of Europe” between 1870-1920 “praised the effort of men to feel conscious of themselves in their nation and race, to the extent that this distinguishes them from others and opposes them to others, and have made them ashamed of every aspiration to feel conscious of themselves as men in the general sense and in the sense of rising above ethnical aims“.

Benda continues, “…in our age, we have denounced humanitarianism as a moral degeneration, nay, an intellectual degeneration…” But he does not mean humanitarianism as we usually mean it, rather he writes: “I should like to draw a distinction between humanitarianism as I mean it here - a sensitiveness to the abstract quality of what is human, to Montaigne’s ‘whole form of the human condition’ - and the feeling which is usually called humanitarianism, which is meant love for human beings existing in the concrete.”

Benda’s sense of humanitarianism (humanism) is a “pure passion of the intelligence”, and quips that “it is quite easy to conceive of a person plunging into the concept of what is human without having the least desire to see a man”. Goethe, Erasimus, Malebranche, Spinoza, etc… all loved humanity but weren’t anxious “to throw themselves into the arms of their neighbors”. They weren’t subject to what we call today humanitariansm, a sentimental type of humanism, “a state of heart and therefore a portion of plebian souls…occuring among moralists in periods when lofty intellectual discipline dissapears among them and gives way to sentimental exaltation (see Diderot, Proudhon, etc…)”. This distinction [between the two types of humanism] was expressed by Goethe when he related the indifference of himself and his friends to the events of 1789. “In our little circle, we took no nottice of news and newspapers; our object was to know Man; as for men, we left them to do as they chose.” The Humanities, Benda points out, as instituted by the Jesuists in the Seventeenth century, the studia humanitatis, are “the study of what is most essentially human”, and were in no sense altruistic exercises.)

Just some food for thought to get you thinking about situating anti-humanism outside of technological explanations and inquiring about what it is that post-humanism aims at moving beyond and trans-humanism aims at transforming.

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 12: Interactive Mirrors and the Fragmented Body)

The twelfth part in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars.

In “the Uncanny”, Sigmund Freud describes an incident involving a double that jarred him. He was in his cabin on a night-train. The train lurched forward and the toilet door swung open. At that moment Freud caught sight of an elderly man who came into his room, replete with dressing gown and travelling cap. Assuming the elderly man had lost his way returning from the toilet, Freud went to direct him back toward his own cabin when – to his astonishment – he realized the ‘lost’ old man was a reflection of himself displayed on a mirror hanging on the inside of the, now wide open, toilet door. Freud’s own image confronted him as “unbidden” and “unexpected” (p. 162). This incident reminds us of the unpleasantness that something as benign and intimate as our own reflection can produce; individuals have to acknowledge their reflection as themselves in order to overcome the initial alienation of their own bodies. In this case, Freud is not unsettled by the uncanny animism of something like dead souls et cetera., but, rather, it is his own self, which has become strange (Gordon 54).

Note on the Lacanian “Mirror Stage”: Jacques Lacan explained that human beings are born pre-maturely. As a result, during our neonatal months our relationship to our bodies is a fragmented one, and marked by poor motor-coordination; there is no time before our alienation from our bodies, no Edenic point of wholeness or totality that we ever can have known.

An infant, during its neo-natal months, comes to view itself in a mirror. In contrast to other animals, the human infant recognizes that the mirror reflection bears a relation to the sensation of its own body. Strictly speaking, the infant identifies with the image outside of himself; but now, problematically, one’s identification is in the place of the Other. For this reason Lacan considers the ego to be an imaginary crystallization of images. The fluidity and sense of wholeness that the specular image possesses exists in stark contrast to the fragmented neo-natal body of the infant. The infant is delighted to view its reflection, but this delight is bound up with aggression, as the specular wholeness is contrasted with the infant’s fragmented body. At the point of encountering its own body in the mirror, or recognizing the body of its (m)Other as separate from its self, the infant forms the binary of “fragmented” and “whole”. But prior to this binary, the infant is not concerned with its fragmentation. This dialectic of (mis)recognition forms the genesis of what will become a lifelong sensation of irredeemable lack.

There is no healthy, or universal, ideal-ego. The ego is an image internalized by the infant that did not exist prior to it.  Both Freud and Lacan recognize the ego as a construct that must mediate between the infant’s newly bifurcated sense of reality. It is less the recognition of selfhood than a mis-recognition. In other words, the ego is characterized not by a solid “I” but an alienated “I”, whose constitution is an endless series of mis-identifications.

During the formulation of the ideal-ego we are initiated into the false, yet necessary, binary of self and other. We begin to grasp the idea that others exist outside of our Imaginary “I” construction. The key here is that otherness structures our sense of selfhood; it is by way of others that we formulate a notion of self. Self is, following Lacan, actually an other that I misrecognize as myself. Lacan terms this identification a (mis)recognition since any such identity-solidifying recognition is founded on an error, albeit a necessary one. It is only when the child is able to conceive of herself as an “I” that she can understand herself in relation to others (and to the Other).

Thus, for Lacan “…the self exists in a state of unrest as a result of an unresolved encounter with alterity” (Hobbs 3). This state of unrest, characteristic of the Imaginary, is a continuous one. From the onset of the mirror stage the infant “…enters into a continuous process of staging and restaging his/her identity, a process that situates him/her as elsewhere forever” (Hobbs 4).

If our Imaginary sense of the ideal-ego should collapse, we may experience bodily fragmentation and disintegration. Lacan describes the fantasy-of-the-body-in-bits-and-pieces which often surfaces in dreams and typically shows the “body of the mother as having a mosaic structure like that of a stained glass window” or a “jigsaw puzzle, with the separate parts of the body of a man or an animal in disorderly array” (Lacan, “Some Reflections” 13 qtd. in Silverman, Threshold 20). Lacan also describes the fantasy of the fragmented body as “…incongruous images, in which disjoined limbs are arranged as strange trophies; trunks [are] cut up in slices and stuffed with the most unlikely fillings, [and] strange appendages [are] shown in eccentric positions” (Lacan, “Some Reflections” 13 qtd. in Silverman, Threshold 20). This fantasy is clearly related to the originary motor incapacity the infant recognized, and repressed, during the mirror stage.

The similarities with Freud’s articulation of the uncanny are clear here: “the disturbances of the ego” articulated in Hoffman’s Sandman, “involve a hearkening back to single phases in the evolution of the sense of self, a regression to times when the ego had not yet clearly set itself off against the world outside and from others” (Freud, “Uncanny” 143). This could be considered a characterization of the infant Lacan describes as the “I” in its primordial form, before being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other and before language disciplines it into its function as a subject (Lacan, Ecrits 77).

Note: What Freud calls the uncanny, Lacan refers to as the “extime” or “extimacy”, neologisms combining “exterior” and “intimate”/”intimacy”, and designating the blurring of subject and object, interiority and exteriority, mind and body, where intimate interiority to coincide with the exterior. The “extime” designates the interruption of the Real into the “homely” commonly accepted reality, shattering known divisions. Lacan describes it as the recognition that “the other is something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me” (Lacan, Sem VII 71). The double, for example, “initiates a crumbling of the subject’s accustomed reality and often arranges things to turn out badly, by realizing the subject’s hidden or repressed desires” (Dolar 11).

So, how, in the context of the Lacanian mirror stage, is the Second Life (SL) avatar an extimite object? In an earlier post I mentioned 3 ways that SL users manipulate and customize their avatar bodies. Whether users are (1) rendering new avatar bodies, (2) customizing their current body, or (3) detaching/attaching limbs or appendages, the user is encountering (and engaging with) a body resistant to the orthopaedic stability of the ideal-ego that results during the mirror stage.

Figure 7 – Male Skins for Purchase. (“Second Life Male Shapes by Dimension Skins” Dimensions Online)

1. The rendering of new avatar bodies: Most SL users purchase new bodies from SL shops using the SL Linden (L$) currency. The new body, also called a “skin”, is then deposited into the user’s inventory. The user selects the new skin – say that of a favourite celebrity, or that of a clunky 1950s robot – and drags it from their inventory onto their avatar. [See Figure 7] Upon releasing the mouse button the user’s avatar will morph into the chosen body. This reveals, and challenges, the ideal-ego, the “I”, that we mis(identified) as our self. Through  the rendering of new avatar bodies the user interacts with his or her alienated ego, and plays with the recognition that while there was no “I” before the other was (mis)identified as self.

Figure 6 - Screenshot of SL Rezzing. (Paradox Olber. “Screenshot of Rezzing”. Spindrift, in SciLands Second Life Blog.)

Often the process of rendering one’s body requires a wait while the new body renders. During this time the avatar may spend a moment or two in an awkward transitional phase where dull grey spots appear, designating areas where the new body has yet to render. [See Figure 6] Of interest here is the limbo where the embodied user sees their avatar in three simultaneous states: as avatar-body-1, an undifferentiated and yet unrendered grey, and as avatar-body-2. The rendering, or “rezzing”, grey goo between avatar-body-1 and avatar-body-2 might be considered the ectoplasm of the digital Real: a high tech residual reminder of our early encounter with the undifferentiated Lacanian Real: a state of existence prior to symbolization.

In these instances the user is confronted not only with two reified selves (avatar-body-1 and avatar-body-2) but the undifferentiated grey Real that hides beneath the self. The rendering of new virtual bodies can be seen to stir the traces and residues of infancy that remain throughout our life and act as the ordering principles of the ego. Teleporting mishaps in SL also can, through a psychoanalytic lens, be considered evocative of the undifferentiated state of pre-Oedipal symbiosis. These mishaps occur when multiple users teleport into a small space, often piling on top of one another, or in immediate proximity to one another, resulting in another sort of virtual grey goo. Note: Important to consider is that since this grey goo is itself a symbolization,  representation that a user can capture with the “screen shot” feature, it is closer to an approximation or analogy for thinking about Lacan’s framework than it is an actual encounter with the Real.

Let us note, as well, that this surely links to our mystified relationship to technology as well. Most users do not understand the technology behind the virtual worlds in which they participate. Both Jentsch and Freud discuss the uncanny effects associated with the “bafflement regarding how the conditions of origin for the achievement in question were brought about” (Jentsch 7). Jentsch also notes that a sense of uncanniness can arise in darkness or semi-darkness, when where one is uncertain of the terrain. Most users are in a “state of darkness” when it comes to understanding the hardware and software of SL (Jentsch 9).

2. The ability to customize one’s avatar bodies using the SL “appearance window”: Once the user selects the appearance window their avatar turns and faces them. (Any other SL users in close proximity are aware that the user is editing their avatar, as the words “Editing Avatar” hovers above it.) Within the appearance window, the user is given the ability to customize nearly every aspect of their avatar, from the density of their body to the color and thickness of their eyebrows. These adjustments are effected by moving one of the hundreds of customizable “sliders” in the appearance window. Dragging a slider slightly to the left or right will make minimal adjustments in the avatar’s body; dragging it entirely to the left or the right will result in either the disappearance of the trait associated with that slider, or a wildly exaggerated version of that trait. Users can also upload and utilize their own hair and skin textures from images already saved on their hard drives.

This “slider-self for the age of Techne” (Boellstorff), a radically manipulatable, customizable and flexible self is, by virtue of the SL interface, always a few mouse clicks away from uncannilly re-experiencing the original Lacanian dialectic between fragmentariness and wholeness. This also allows us to return to Hoffman’s “The Sandman” and interpret Nathaniel’s automaton lover Olympia differently from Freud‘s reading of her as a symbol of narcissistic, compulsive love. A Lacanian reading might emphasize Olympia as symbolic of the uncanny fragmented body: she becomes an obsession for Nathaniel due to her automatic responses, her mechanical demeanour and movements. Olympia, in this Lacanian reading, re-awakens Nathaniel to the bedrock of fragmentariness that constituted the ego; thus she is an uncanny reflection of his undifferentiated state prior to, and existing beneath, the dialectic established during the mirror stage. In SL, the primordial discord, malaise, and lack of motor coordination stemming from the neonatal months that forms the Innenwelt of the human organism are presented here in a seemingly posthuman way.

Both Jentsch and Freud insist that the uncanniness of mechanical processes provide:

the dark knowledge… that mechanical processes are taking place in which he was previously used to regarding as a unified psyche…For the epileptic attack of spasms reveals the human body to the viewer – the body that under normal circumstances is so meaningful, expedient, and unitary, functioning according to the directions of his consciousness – as an immensely complicated and delicate mechanism. This is an important cause of the epileptic fit’s ability to produce such a demonic effect on those who see it (Jentsch 14).

In SL, glitches regularly occur in the software that can cause avatars to drift out the user’s control, and shoot mechanically out into the virtual world. When these glitches occur, the user has very little control over their virtual-self. Control can usually only be regained by teleporting to a new location or rebooting the SL client; without turning to the authority of the teleport or the exit buttons, the user is left to anxiously confront their alter-egos uncannily careening off into virtual space, outside of their control.

From another, related, angle, we might consider Freud’s assertion that “loss of teeth”, “beheading”, “baldness”, and “haircutting” are representations of castration in dreams, as capable to telling us much about the customizability of the avatar body in the dreamlike world of SL (Freud, Interpretation 236). In this case, the SL appearance window and the adjustments offered therein do not create new bodies without reference to the user. Indeed, the control over things like “head shape”, “hair patterns”, etc… can be thought of, as Freud suggests in his dream interpretations, as a return to the Oedipal threat of castration.

Figure 8 - Experimenting with body shape, size, sex and gender.

3.  Detaching/attaching virtual limbs or appendages: In instances where the user interacts with an avatar body that is entirely customized, this process entails something akin to the amputation of a limb. A user would employ the “detach” feature when, for example, traveling from a “mature”portion of SL where they had been engaged in sexual activities requiring the attachment of genitalia, to a “PG” portion of SL where uncovered genitals are not tolerated. Note: There are ‘Mature’ and ‘PG’ (parental guidance) portions of SL where certain adult behaviours are, and are not, tolerated. A user can “re-attach” any body part they choose by dragging that part from their “inventory” back on to their avatar. Traveling to any of the adult themed sex areas or “orgy pits” in SL one will encounter a number of lifelike sexual organs and phalluses, some capable of realistic ejaculation, that can be attached and reattached at the user’s whim. [See Figures 8 and 9] (During an academic conference I attended a participant teleported in and had forgotten to detach his erect virtual phallus; other conference participants were typing his name and trying to alert him, in a nice way, to “conceal” himself.) This feature of genital attachment and detachment evokes something akin to symbolic castration. This symbolic castration allows us to contextualize, in the constructed world of SL, the narrative that began with our childhood recognition of sexual difference.

Figure 9 - Attaching and detaching genitalia.

The ability to detach and re-attach body parts and appendages in SL presents the user with a self that can appear coherent and stable, but is only one mouse click away from a rehearsal of its primordial fear of castration at any given time. Looking to “The Sandman” as an example, there are instances where the fragmented body, something once familiar but since tucked away, becomes explicit and even frightening. Thus, a Lacanian reading of Hoffman’s story suggests that Nathaniel’s encounter with castration leads to the fear of the loss of bodily totality. As we encounter our limbs unanchored from bodies or strangely juxtaposed organs, interiority and exteriority coincide. Freud refers to the uncanniness of detached body parts, “a severed head, a hand detached from the arm…feet that dance by themselves” which evoke in us primal fears of castration and dismemberment (Freud, “Uncanny”). In The Interpretation of Dreams, he explains that, in addition to “timeless” symbols of castration (i.e. snakes, lizards etc…), new symbols, based on new technologies such as the aircraft, are constantly coming to remind us of castration (Freud, Interpretation 236). As  noted earlier, Jentsch and Freud’s senses of the uncanny raise the theme of mechanical motion. When the SL user experiences their self as machinic, mechanic and fragmented, they encounter something familiar in an unexpected way; in the way that Jentsch describes “old accounts of journeys [where] someone sat down in an ancient forest on a tree trunk and… to the horror of the traveller, this trunk suddenly began to move and showed itself to be a giant snake” (Jentsch 8).

Summary: There is something timely and untimely about the avatar, something described by Freud as both familiar and unfamiliar. The historically dated apparatuses featured in Hoffman’s “The Sandman ”do not hinder the modern reader from gleaning the atemporal dimension it manifests in Nathaniel; peering out through the brazier, the machinic clockwork of the automaton Olympia, Copolla’s lenses etc., is a reminder of the repression that inheres at the core of the self. In Concepts of the Self, Anthony Elliot mentions the role that mirrors and reflective surfaces play in constituting the Lacanian self. For Lacan, it is this “visual or optic genesis of narcissism” that acts as our condition of selfhood (Elliott, Concepts 61). It is clear that the originary encounter with the mirror or screen provides the infant with an orthopaedic meconnaisance ; the infant’s stable “I” is a misrecognition. Elliot explains: “the mirror is, in fact, profoundly imaginary, because the consolingly unified image it presents is diametrically opposed to the lack of physical coordination that the child actually experiences. In a word, the mirror lies.”

Interestingly, our newest machines feature interactive screens and screen doubles. But, as has been suggested, virtual worlds seem to be different kinds of mirrors; as a result of the interface and properties of the medium, they can put us in touch with the opposite of an orthopaedic meconnaisance. Thus, what we encounter is not something that lies, but rather, we encounter something evocative of the fragmented Real. The interactive screen of SL where we encounter our avatar(s) does not lie, and this is what makes it uncanny. It provides us with an opportunity to comprehend our interaction with the psychical residues of fragmentation remaining from a time of  “dyadic unity”, prior to the distinction between self and (the maternal body of the (m)other (Elliott, Concepts 61). For this reason there is no better term than “uncanny” to describe interactive virtual worlds and their avatar bodies, which enable new forms of interaction and yet are simultaneously revelatory of an aspect of the user’s true self.

Sources:

+Elliott, Anthony. Concepts of the Self.Cambridge,UK: Polity Press, 2008
+Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. AA Brill.London: Wordsworth,1997
—. “The Uncanny” The Uncanny.London: Penguin Books, 2003.
+Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008
+Hobbs, Peter. “The Image Before Me.” Invisible Culture. 7 (2004)
+Hoffman, ETA. Tales of Hoffman. Trans. RJ Hollingdale.London: Penguin Books, 1982
+Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny ” Trans. Roy Sellars
+Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink.New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006
—. “Some Reflections on the Ego” in Silverman, Kaja. Threshold of the Visible World.New York: Routledge, 1996

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 11: Uncanny Cyborgs and Avatars)

The Eleventh part in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars.

Figure 1 – Pablo Picasso’s 1911 illustration “Mademoiselle Léonie” (From Max Jacob’s Saint Matorel. The Amica Library)

Let’s consider a few instances where technologies – especially human/machine hybrids – have been considered uncanny in order to demonstrate that considering avatars to be uncanny is not without precedent. The Second Life (SL) avatar, as a technology that merges the human and the technological, is a contemporary instance of what Bruce Grenville describes in the introduction to The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture as a long standing “cultural anxiety” surrounding the interaction between bodies and machines: an anxiety stemming from at least the seventeenth century when Descartes and William Harvey begun thinking about the body mechanistically (Grenville 13). In the early twentieth century, cubist works such as Pablo Picasso’s “Mademoiselle Léonie” (1911) [See Figure 1] and Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase no.2” (1912) [See Figure 2 below] “which depicted bodies as mechanistic structures, and were recognized as “threats to the popular perception of the human body and its physical limits” (Grenville 18). In reference to “Mademoiselle Léonie”, art critics have noted Picasso’s use of “partial circles, rectangles, and trapezoids” to “dislocate the figure’ anatomy” and convey “mechanical distortions” (Franciscono 141). Léonie’s “shoulders, hips and breasts – seem to emerge and then retreat into the choppy matrix of lines and plates that comprise the figure” (Schulman 129).

Figure 2 – Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 “Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2)” (Philadelphia Museum of Art.)

Twentieth century photography also played a major role in reproducing the body in mechanistic ways. For example, Edward Muybridge’s chronophotography (circa 1870), whose genesis lies in the settling of a bet over whether there was a point in a horse’s gallop where all its feet left the ground, expressed a “desire to capture a heretofore intangible aspect of human nature”: the machinic, consistent, and repeatable nature of the body (Grenville 17).

Duchamp, via works such as “Nude Descending…” considered the “notion of the machine as a distinct entity that invades, embraces, and reforms the modern human body” into something machinic, whereas Muybridge was concerned with revealing the body as already machinic (Grenville 19). Again the question emerges: does technology reform the body as Duchamp appears to have argued or does it reveal something formerly unnoticed about the body as Muybridge appears to have argued? Cubism can be seen as a reaction to the flow of contemporary life or as an aesthetic technique aimed at revealing the flux and fragmentation always inherent in things. Thus, Grenville, who draws on the Freudian uncanny, argues that the cyborg is uncanny not because it is unfamiliar or alien, but rather because it is all too familiar: bodies doubled by the machine “allow for the return of the repressed in a controlled medium, in an imaginary form that allows us to disregard its real presence” (Grenville 21).

Other twentieth and twenty first century artistic instances of this cyborg uncanny include Jacob Epstien’s Futurist “Rock Drill” (1913-1915) [See Figure 4 below] where the bottom half of a human torso is the bottom half of a drill, evoking the castration complex and the “repression of sexuality and procreative forces”, and Gary Hill’s “Inasmuch as it is Already Taking Place” (1990) [See Figure 3 below], where the body is displayed as dispersed or fragmented across a series of monitors (Grenville 22, 37).

Figure 3 – Gary Hill’s "Inasmuch as it is Already Taking Place". 1991. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Epstein and Hill present bodies mutilated by the violence of modern life and new technologies, however both works reveal cyborg forms that have raised the issue of some fundamental aspects of human identity, whether it is the cyborg’s virility, or, “the hidden core to which the components of the body are attached [which] serves as a metaphor for a human being’s invisible, existential center: the soul” (Moma). Thus, the new, the unfamiliar, the mutilated, can serve to reveal the contours of that which is closest to us. Note: One is reminded here of Martin Heidegger’s claim in Being and Time that the essence of a thing, in his example a hammer, can be discerned when it is broken. When broken, we can discern the hammer’s “hammerness”. We “discover the unusability [of the hammer] not by looking and ascertaining properties, but rather by paying attention to the associations in which we use it. When we discover its unusability, the [hammer] becomes conspicuous” (Heidegger, Being 102). When something appears inoperable or broken it can be de-naturalized, becoming simply an object in relation to all others. A simple way of thinking of this is that in order to use an object we must bracket its complexity. Heidegger refers to this bracketing as “withdrawing”. “Withdrawing” refers to the state where the hammer is naturalized and becomes “readiness-to-hand” (Heidegger, Being 87). In order for something to be ready-at-hand the complex “thingness” (in the case the “hammerness”) of the object must withdraw. The hammer, as “ready-at-hand” becomes an extension of our own arm, and we bracket the complexly designed and shaped metal and wood.

Figure 4 – Jacob Epstein’s “Rock Drill” 1913. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

These ‘uncanny’ works of art, like avatars, are creations that draw on contemporaneous mediums, themes and ideas to explore – or reveal – aspects of the human self. The bodies depicted through these contemporary mediums, themes and ideas are indeed products of a particular time and place, however despite this particularity, they reveal a certain generality. The cold, almost turquoise, head of Epstein’s “Rock Drill”, staring blindly into the horizon, is less a postmodern cyborg revelling in its present time and place than an alienated modernist lamenting transitioning into what Epstein himself called “the armed, sinister figure of today and tomorrow. No humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein’s monster we have made ourselves into…” (Epstein 56).

Kazuhiro Aridian, a SL user whose avatars usually involve customized robot exoskeletons, explains:

when I look at things of metal, it feels sharp, painful. I created that avatar as a response to that…It is painful, skeletal, ethereal, and almost human, but things like the inverted knees and elongated hands make it not human at all. Even with all this painful metal, it retains a human face, almost as a mockery of humanity (Rymaszewski et al. 74).

In his statement about the rationale behind the creation of his avatars, Aridian explains that a “human face” peers through the “painful”, “metallic”, exoskeleton. From an uncanny viewpoint human desire peeks through the painful, skeletal and prohibitive exoskeleton, mocking the possibility that his desire can ever be free from Oedipal prohibition. Aridian’s avatars, clad in the robot exoskeleton of an imagined future, reveal the continuation of prohibition – whose genesis lies buried in the past.

This interpretation is echoed by recent scholarly studies such as Siân Bayne’s “Uncanny Spaces for Higher Education: Teaching and Learning in Virtual Worlds” that emphasize the uncanny attributes of virtual worlds and games requiring an avatar. Bayne emphasizes the capacity for these virtual worlds to blur the boundary between reality and fantasy, activate our fear of death and ghosts, question the nature of selfhood and the double or doppelganger, and create situations of intellectual uncertainty (Bayne 1). The avatar possesses an in-between status, it is a “doll invested to some extent with the interactional and personality characteristics of the real user” (Bayne 2). The ability for the user to automate movements and create scripted animations foregrounds this in-betweenness of the avatar (Bayne 2).

Drawing on Freud’s assertion that automata and dolls can be uncanny, Bayne notes a student named Eleanor’s reflection that “[a]vatars are nothing but corpses. So, somebody comes along and will fill those dead corpses with something that is believed to be identity or feelings? For me they are artificially normed identities, perhaps even desires…” (Bayne 1) Between 1998 and 2002, many young people used a social network called ICQ. The network was eventually abandoned, as users moved to networks that offered a greater degree of identity-creation. Upon logging into my ICQ avatar for the first time since 2002, the virtual world dead and lifeless I wrote:

Returning to my old dwelling place, logging on, and entering the ICQ framework now evokes a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Here I encounter what may be one of the first major Pompeii’s of the digital world. A chill runs of up my spine. Why do I feel as if this were a real place…that I have stumbled upon the scene of some massacre? I know I am looking at patterns of information and binary code, but I don’t care. What once was a thriving community, a fertile dwelling place, is now barren and devoid of all maintenance and human agency. What exists is the infrastructure: the roads, plumbing, and power lines. What remains, in states of suspended animation, are the shed lifeless sarcophagi of users who have altered their digital bodies (2006).

Dustin Mabellon hanging from a virtual gallows. (Personal Screenshot from SL)

Bayne notes descriptions of virtual worlds emphasizing their “deathliness”. Another student observer, “Maisie”, describes the experience as similar to what she imagines dying might be like: “sort of like a physical death only to awake in the other world with one’s senses intact” (Bayne 3). From the standpoint of the Freudian uncanny, a user discussing their virtual double in the context of death and deathliness is revelatory of our still active primitive fear of death. For example, one could argue that by interacting with these doubles the user acts out a virtual death in order to deny the shrouded mysteriousness that surrounds physical death. But in no case does physical death lose its importance; indeed from this point of view the experimentation with virtual deathliness has the mortal and corporeal body as its motor.

For many users, one of the more uncanny aspects of the SL avatar is the impossibility of fixing the identity of the users with which one interacts (Bayne 2). This raises the issue of uncanny “intellectual uncertainty”, an idea explored by Freud’s contemporary Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 paper “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”. It is unnerving to be perpetually unsure of the identity of the avatar with whom one is interacting, or to not know – in the case of bots – whether the avatar is being manipulated by a human at all. Note: Definition of bot: “An AI-controlled player in a computer game (especially a first-person shooter such as Quake) which, unlike ordinary monsters, operates like a human-controlled player, with access to a player’s weapons and abilities”. According to Jentsch, confronting something outside of our habitual routines, or looking at it in a different way, causes it to become “uncanny” (Jentsch 4). For example, under normal circumstances the rising of the sun is not uncanny, but “when one remembers that the rising of the sun does not depend on the sun at all, but rather, on the movement of the earth…” one experiences the sunrise in an unusual, uncanny, way. Similarly, encountering familiar others through the medium of the avatar can feel quite unnerving and strange. While becoming accustomed to SL in 2006, I wrote this note, which conveys a sense of uncanny intellectual uncertainty:

I am able to modify my avatar in nearly any way imaginable, from the color of his socks to the size of his body to the shape of his hair. And I am not limited to a his, I can be a her. I am not limited to the colors and types of clothing within SL as I can upload graphics into the virtual-world and fashion a photo of myself in the real-world or an atomic mushroom cloud into a vest. Like a child I begin to learn how to navigate the virtual-environment, a progression from looking, to walking, to running and even flying. My first observation is how unique each avatar is, an array of faces and bodies. My second is how colorful and lifelike the forest environ I find myself within is. While learning how to navigate I innocently clicked the ‘remove button’ and in an instant I was standing naked for the SL community to see. What occurred to me was that I felt ashamed and frantically tried to cover myself back up, clicking fervently at the mouse in the same way that I might embarrassedly fumble with my fly in front of a group of strangers. Following the incident I teleport (the equivalent to airtravel in SL) myself to another piece of the Second Life landscape, a pyramid like island where an amoeba-like-creature and group of avatars dance with a number of bellowing cows. Music, possibly composed by one of the avatars, blares as I draw close to the group. I stand for a minute watching, roam around the island, and return to the spectacle. The national anthem for this pyramid island of dancing avatars might as well be appropriated from Donna Haraway’s prophetic essay: ‘Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert’. As the group of avatar cows, amoebae and humanoids had not ceased dancing all that I can think of is how still their real-world counterparts likely are (2006)

During these early experiences in SL, I felt as though I had comprehended reality from a radically different perspective; both the real world and the virtual world felt unreal.

For those users who are comfortable with avatarization, encountering the self and others on SL is acceptable, but others can become disoriented and unsure. Bayne quotes from the weblog a student named “Margaret”: “We like to experiment with the appearance of the avatar and through experimentation I think we can gain some understanding of who we really are…I would say that our identities are more real when expressed though an avatar” (Bayne 5). But, for another student named Joe, the uncanny disruption between copy and original, self and double, is a deep disturbance to his religious security:

The bible…teaches that we are made in God’s image and that if one adopts the image or looks of an animal that s/he is adopting an image of an idol hence s/he is practicing idolatry. It is even worse in cases where a person considers the animal face to represent their identity better than their real face (Bayne 6).

When a new user logs into SL for the first time they are taken to Orientation Island, where they learn to control their avatar and the virtual world at large. As a long time gamer, my first experience at Orientation Island was not highly unusual, however I can image the disorientation that my grandmother, for example, would likely experience. I am used to being represented in virtual space, whereas she would likely ask me “why would I want to look like an animal, or a robot, or something other than me!?” This unusual way of looking at her self would surely startle her. Note: Likewise, Jentsch notes that there are “among adults…sensitive natures who do not like to attend masked balls, since the masks and disguises produce in them an exceedingly awkward impression to which they are incapable of being accustomed” (Jentsch 6).

In “Play Dead: Genre and Affect in Silent Hill and Plainscape Torment”, Dianne Carr explains that the uncanny can be amplified when we watch bodies in motion on film. It is even further amplified in video games where we operate and navigate 3D avatars (Carr 6). Laura Hoeger and William Huber’s “Ghastly Manipulation: Fatal Frame II and the Videogame Uncanny”, also notes that the 3D video game uncanny is not simply a derivative version of the filmic or literary uncanny, but is, rather, a “distinctively designed affective experience in which textual elements are deeply entwined with the mechanical and spatial aspects [of the virtual game or world]” (Hoeger and Huber 152). Note: Hoeger and Huber explain that the uncanny can result from the “imperfect simulacra of living bodies”. This type of uncanniness was noted by Masahiro Mori in the 1970s and termed the “uncanny valley”. Mori claimed that when confronted with a double that was nearly human, but not quite, we reach a point of anxiety and disquiet – a valley. A feeling of repulsion or horror arises when a certain threshold of resemblance is crossed (Hoeger and Huber 153). They refer to moments (animaltions, scripts etc…) where the user can control the avatar, but the avatar has independent activity (Hoeger and Huber 155). It can be “spooky to have this control momentarily taken away then thrust back”.

Stuart Boon and Christine Sinclair’s “A World I Don’t Inhabit: Disquiet and Identity in Second Life and Facebook” also considers the disquiet associated with SL. They explain that SL is “…a new kind of experience, a new metaphor, a new world in which to re/create ourselves, re/imagine our relationships to others, and re/evaluate the real and the unreal” (Boon and Sinclair 16). While SL is liberating for some users, “not all will find the experience so positive. From the outset SL necessitates a commitment to the unreal, going so far as to make it impossible for users to use their own names … this stripping of real identity can be frustrating and unsettling” (Boon and Sinclair 20). They discuss the uncanny disquiet associated with simulating a self in three dimensions that has an “utterly variable identity” and is “artificiality writ large”, a “fabricating, and in some cases a digital form devoid of personal significance – that can be a problem for many users”.

SOURCES
=>Bayne, Siân. “Uncanny spaces for higher education: teaching and learning in virtual worlds”. Alt-J. 16.3 (2008): 197-205 (Page Number’s co-respond to PDF available at http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/bayne_virtual_worlds.pdf>

=>Boon, Stuart and Sinclair, Christine. “A World I Don’t Inhabit: Disquiet and Identity in Second Life and Facebook”. Sixth International Conference on Networked Learning, Halkidiki, Greece, 2009

=>Carr, Diane. “Play Dead: Genre and Affect in Silent Hill and Plainscape Torment” Game Studies 3:1 (May 2003)

=>Epstein, Jacob. Let there be Light. AMS Press, 1985

=>Grenville, Bruce. The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2001

=>Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1955

=>Hoeger, Laura and Huber, William. “Ghastly Manipulation: Fatal Frame II and the Video Game Uncanny” Situated Play: The Proceedings of the DiGRA Conference, 2007.

=>Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny ” Trans. Roy Sellars <www.cpmg.org.br/artigos/on_the_psychology_of_the_uncanny.pdf>

=>Moma – Museum of Modern Art: Gary Hill. <http://www.moma.org/collection/>

=>Mori, M. “The Uncanny Valley”. Trans. K. F. MacDorman & T. Minato Trans. 2005 (1970) from
<http://www.androidscience.com/theuncannyvalley/proceedings2005/uncannyvalley.
html>

=>Rymaszewski, Michael et al. Guide to Second Life – 2nd Edition. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing, 2008

=>Schulman, Daniel. “Mademoiselle Leonie” Graphic Modernism. Eds. Susan Rossen and Brandon Ruud. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2003

Immortality in-the-world and of-the-flesh: Death in Platonism and Transhumanism

I’ve been thinking about the famous passage in Plato’s Phaedo where Socrates explains to his Pythagorean interlocutors Simmias and Cebes that a philosopher must be willing to die and follow the dying. This willingness to follow the dying does not come without qualifications: the philosopher ought not, for example, commit suicide.

Cebes asks Socrates why “a man ought not to take his own life, but that the philosopher will be ready to follow the dying?” This is a good question: why should it matter how the philosopher is willing to die?

Socrates begins his answer to Cebes: “I admit the appearance of inconsistency…but there may not be any real inconsistency after all in this.” In order to resolve this inconsistency, he tells Cebes about a secret doctrine: “In the [secret] language of the mysteries …we men are in a kind of prison, and …one must not try to free oneself or run away.” Socrates adds that “this seems to me an impressive doctrine and one not easy to understand fully”.

I find myself returning, over and over again to these lines about “not trying to free oneself or run away”– despite the incessant 21^st century call to liberate ourselves from both the tragic limitations of our human fate and the authority of our masters. By contrast, the ancient mysteries recounted by Socrates insist that “the gods are our guardians [i.e. our good masters] and that men are one of their possessions”.

Of course, Socrates still has not resolved Cebes’ question. Cebes wonders why, under any circumstances (sucide or otherwise) men should desire to leave their good, Godly, masters? “It is not logical that the wisest of men should not resent leaving this service in which they are governed by the best of masters, the gods, for a wise man cannot believe he will look after himself better when he is free. A foolish man might easily think so, that he must escape from his master; he would not reflect that one must not escape from a good master but stay with him as long as possible, because it would be foolish to escape. But the sensible man would want always to remain with the one better than himself. So, Socrates… [it is]…the wise who would resent dying, whereas the foolish would rejoice at it.” In other words, why would the philosopher rejoice in death, that is, in no longer being governed by the best masters (the gods) and escaping into the wilderness of the universe? Simmias turns to Socrates and exclaims: “Cebes has a point now. Why should the truly wise man want to avoid the service of masters better than themselves, and leave them easily?”

Socrates’ defends his position by asserting that death is not an escape from one’s masters, but a journey toward better masters: “I should be wrong not to resent dying if I did not believe that I should go first to other wise and good gods, and then to men who have died and are better than men who are here. Be assured that, as it is, I expect to join the company of good men. I insist…that I shall come to gods who are very good masters…” In other words, upon leaving his initial prison and masters, Socrates will enter a new, better, kind of prison, with new, better, masters.

What is striking about these passages is that, in contrast to our contemporary ‘revolutionary’ mode of thinking, the importance of being ruled by good masters is of central concern. (i.e. ‘revolutionary’ mode of thinking: whether we are advocates or critics of the ‘free market’, capitalists or communists, we concern ourselves today with clearing the way of some kind of masters’ impediment). In contrast to our Modern obsession with man losing his shackles (whatever those shackles may be) or the human freedom engendered by the so-called ‘death of God’, Socrates and the Pythagoreans hold no illusions over whether man’s shackles and obedience to his master are good. Whereas we today equate goodness with freedom from our physical or metaphysical masters, Socrates and the Pythagoreans remind each other that goodness consists in being ruled or governed by good masters. Today we need to think carefully about this ancient hesitation to free oneself and run away from their masters, which Socrates called “an impressive doctrine and one not easy to understand fully”.

Today we have no care for the Platonic doctrine to follow the dying willingly toward better masters. Instead, we obsess over transforming ourselves and leaving our prisons. The most radical contemporary fetishists for liberation prattle on endlessly about man leaving the prison of his humanity or else extending the length of time that our technologized “bodies” (eventually our bodiless intelligences) can live out their days. We do this for ourselves, for our own human will, not for the sake of a master. This transformation and liberation of the self is what passes for wisdom nowadays. In a section of The Singularity is Near titled “The transformation to Non-Biological Existence” (p.323-326) transhumanist Ray Kurzweil explains that one day our brains will be reinstated in a more powerful computational substrate: “As we move toward non-biological existence, we will gain the means of ‘backing ourselves up’ (storing the key patterns underlying our knowledge, skills, and personality), thereby eliminating most causes of death as we know it.”

Socrates’ would have had a lot to say if this passage were presented to him. (I think it is a misreading to regard the transhumanists as Platonists. I admit to doing this in the past and am now backtracking…) Death, for Socrates, is a pilgrimage the inhuman soul undertakes toward masters who closer to the forms of Truth, Beauty, Justice etc…that were hitherto obscured by the body’s imperfect sensory organs. In death, one is – ideally – ‘released’ into the chains of better masters, not transformed or freed into the nothingness of the cosmos.

For the transhumanists, humans will become “morphable projections of our intelligence” [and we will be potentially immortal by being] “able to create and recreate different bodies at will” (Kurzweil). This is – very clearly – a different kind of immortality from the one Plato via Socrates has in mind. The transhumanist project – from a Platonic standpoint – is about remaining in our prisons as long as possible, or else radically transforming our prisons. Either way, the ‘for the sake of which’, the master, is nowhere to be found. Man exists for himself. Kurzweil dreams not of a pilgrimage elsewhere, or a journey to a better master or a release into a better prison, but of an amplification, extension or transformation of man: man-plus, symbolized by the transhumanist symbol H+ (Human+).

The transhumanist’s dreams include “software based humans … living out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies in diverse realms of virtual reality, holographically projected bodies, foglet-projected bodies, and physical bodies comprising nanobot swarms and other forms of nanotechnology” (Kurzweil). I used to believe this dream was ancient, but now I suspect it is Modern through and through. There’s nothing about masters, about proximity to ideas of Justice, Beauty and Truth. Rather, what one finds here is the will to human power, what is in question is the immortality of the human subject, not the soul. For this reason, death becomes a release into the Singularity that will emerge out of our quickly evolving information technologies and artificial intelligences.

So why is it that Socrates does not advocate committing suicide? Because the philosopher’s death is a “pilgrimage” not a liberation, a journey to a new prison not a dispersal of the soul into the nothingness of the universe. In other words, one dies for the sake of, and to enter the company of, better masters. The philosopher – for Socrates – dies willingly for the sake of something divine; he does not destroy himself to extinguish his own subjective anxieties, nor does he cling to his life out of his own subjective fear of death. Consider the very term Suicde as the killing (-cide) of one’s self by one’s self (sui).

The sui-cidal individual is comforted by Aristotle’s observation that “human powers stop at the gates of death”. Likewise the trans-humanist, hopes to amplify his humanity, to re-inforce (or transform) the walls of his prison, in order to defer his death and find consolation in a technological immortality in-the-world and of-the-flesh.

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 10: “Old and Long Familiar” Avatars and the Freudian Uncanny)

The Tenth part in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars.



In ”The Uncanny”, Sigmund Freud explains that the “uncanny” constitutes a specific kind of disquieting or frightening thing. Similar to the seemingly paradoxical claim, made by theorists of performativity, that the avatar allows us to behold new aspects of our true self, the uncanny designates something that is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. Freud considers the semantic context of the German word “unheimlich” (in English “eerie” or “uncanny”) whose etymology derives from “un-homely” (Freud, “Uncanny” 124). The word “unheimlich” describes a “species of the frightening” comprising “persons, things, sense impressions, experiences and situations” that go back to what was “once well known and had long been familiar”. But why should something well known and once familiar appear frighteningly “unhomely” or uncanny?

The antonym of “unheimlich”, “heimlich” designates what is “local, native, domestic, at-home, or familiar” (Freud, “Uncanny” 124). Freud finds that “heimlich” can be defined as (1) what is “belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, dear, intimate, homely, etc…, (2) something kept concealed or hidden, or (3)
designating its antonym “unheimlich”, that is, everything that was “meant to remain secret and hidden and has come out into the open” (Freud, “Uncanny” 132). This third definition of “heimlich” joins the term with its antonym, “unheimlich”. One can, in other words, speak of the “homely” as “unhomely”. Note: Schelling describes “unheimlich” as applying to “everything that was intended to remain secret and hidden and has come out into the open” (Freud, “Uncanny” 134) “Unheimlich”, Freud explains, is a species of the “heimlich”, a species of the familiar.

Recall that for Freud, during a male child’s formative years he invests his mother with libidinal desire and comes to sexually desire her. The child then worries that he has provoked the jealousy of his father and that the father will punish him for desiring his wife by castrating him. As a result, the child comes to accept, and identify with, the father’s authority, or law, and represses his libidinal desires for his mother. This is clearly evocative of the Oedipal drama, where Oedipus does not receive the law from his father Laius, but slays him instead. As a result, he sleeps with his mother, and afterwards inflicts the father’s law on himself. Thus, for Freud, the uncanny elements of ETA Hoffman’s short story “The Sandman” (See Freud’s Synopsis of Hoffman’s “The Sandman”) bring us back to the Oedipal “infantile castration complex”, the return of something old and long familiar. Freud outlines a few instances of the uncanny in Hoffman’s story.

1. First, the story explores the threat of enucleation, or the loss of eyesight; this is exemplified in its motif of a Sandman who threatens to tear out the protagonist, Nathaniel’s, eyes. According to Freud, this threat is associated with the fear of castration. Nathaniel’s fear of blindness is explicitly Oedipal; Oedipus blinds himself at the end of Sophocles’ myth, a self-inflicted “mitigated form of the penalty of castration” that “befits him” (Freud, “Uncanny” 139). Indeed, Freud notes that in dreams the eye and the male member are “substitutive” and related.

Digression: In “the Uncanny”, Freud suggests that the fear of damaging one’s eyes is symbolic of the fear of castration. This insight is quite apt given the tremendous body of work and literature, such as Bataille’s The Story of the Eye or Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes, conducted on the “occularcentric” regime of vision and its association not only with the Cartesian subject but masculinity in general. Consider the “circle of fire” in Hoffman’s story (i.e. “Upon the enucleation of the automaton Olympia, Nathaniel lapses into madness and utters the incantation: “Ha, ha, ha. Circle of fire, circle of fire! Spin, spin, circle of fire! Merrily, merrily! Puppet ha, lovely puppet, spin, spin!”) that Nathaniel raves about during the onset of his maniacal episodes. What is the “circle of fire” and what does it have to do with the damaging of eyes and the threat of castration?

The terrifying Sandman is described by a maid as “a wicked man who comes after children when they won’t go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they jump out of their heads all bloody”. (Hoffman 87) But it is what she says about the Sandman after this introduction that is truly of interest to us. The maid describes the Sandman carrying his child victims to “the crescent moon as food for his little children, who have their nest up there and have crooked beaks like owls and peck up the eyes of the naughty children” (Hoffman 87).

Think of the homology between the crescent shape of the beak and the crescent moon. We now relate these to the geometrical properties of the crescent shape and its likeness to a blade. As well, the crescent, as in an eclipse, is symbolic of the obscuring of the sun’s rays. It is an obscuring of this solar principle that is symbolized by the crescent blade which threatens the loss of virility in the human body. This is particularly revealing in the context of the Sandman as the ‘bad father’, intent on castrating his son Nathaniel. In this context, where, as we have noted, eyes and genitalia can be used interchangeably, this seemingly innocuous aspect of the maid’s description of the Sandman takes on another dimension of interpretation. In this reading the ‘bad father’, who lives on a moon symbolized by a blade, is bent on severing his son’s penis and taking it back to the moon where it is to be further mutilated by crescent shaped beaks. The son is left with a circular bloody and hot wound where his penis once was.

Even more revealing and enigmatic is the incident early on where young Nathaniel watches Coppelius and his father’s alchemical dealings. He describes the incident: “I seemed to see human faces appearing all around, but without eyes – instead of eyes there were hideous black cavities”. Reading this with the eye-penis symbolism in mind one might conclude that Nathaniel’s fear is less of being caught then it is castration by Coppelius (i.e. the ‘bad father’). He is terrified of the castrated body, of having a hideous black cavity where his penis once was. He is afraid of the Sandman’s enucleating dust, or the will of the ‘bad father’, whose own ‘dust’ will leave him with the wounds of castration. The fear of castration, stemming from the Oedipal struggle, runs behind Hoffman’s text.

We find a whole number of phallic shaped objects associated with madness and death. In the story Nathaniel and Clara ascend a tower where they are alone and for the first time in a long while at ease with one another. Nathaniel catches a glimpse of something moving down below. He uses his telescope to have a better look. Upon doing so he goes mad and, after a short yet wild dance, jumps to his death. We might be inclined to understand the story as follows: Nathaniel and Clara are, indeed, finally alone and at ease. So much at ease that Nathaniel has been able to escape his fear of the dreaded Oedipal father who has barred his every attempt at sexual gratification. Alas, we have the tower (Nathaniel’s erect penis).  Upon ascending the tower (achieving erection) Nathaniel is reminded of the threat of enucleation (castration). As such, his attention is diverted to something (-repressed) moving below. He uses the telescope (the erect penis) and diverts his gaze through it (ejaculation) toward the Sandman rather than his beloved Clara. Once again Nathaniel’s promise of sexual gratification has been thwarted and his fear of bloody castration (the ring of fire) has been activated. Hoffman writes that “a spasm shuddered through him” before he jumps to his death.

Likewise, there have been many associations discerned between blindness/light and castration/virility. Light, sight and virility are deeply interrelated. Light has long been regarded as the “essence of the father’s phallus, or ‘masculine substance’”. For example, darkness, as evidenced in the Hebraic God’s penultimate plague (Exodus 8-14) represents a threat to the unyielding virility of the Egyptian sun God Ra. Darkness is associated with the imperfect corporeal world in contrast to the perfect and incorporeal Platonic Good or Neo-Platonic One. One interesting story evocative of the linkage between masculinity and sight tells of Isaac Newton’s turning a solid beam of light into the “beautiful (feminine?) colors of the rainbow completing his own Oedipal triumph” of splitting the phallus into pieces. Thus, Newton’s anti-trinity based turn to alchemy and Unitarianism aimed to re-interpret God as an indivisible entity (Ward 59).

The relationship between the uncanny, the narrative of “The Sandman”, the Oedipal myth, and castration is quite explicit. To Freud, “The Sandman” is a story whose uncanniness results from it’s reminding the reader of the castration complex. For example, in the story Nathaniel’s father appears as the “disruptor of love” (Freud, “Uncanny” 205); every time Nathaniel is about to find sexual fulfillment he is reminded of his father, and the Sandman, whether in the guise of Coppelius or Coppola, arrives to enucleate him. Within Second Life (SL), the user is robbed of his or her own eyes in a sense, and must depend instead on either the virtual eyes of the avatar or (in mouselook mode) the “eye” of the in-world camera. Specifically, I wonder about the possible links between the Freudian idea of “ocular anxiety” and the forms of avatarial vision in virtual worlds such as SL. In SL we encounter new types of vision: the user can, via something like mouselook mode, experience a set of binocular eyes befitting the inhuman Terminator. In doing so the importance of the user’s own eyes is negated: they become akin to hollowed out tunnels for the transmission of avatarial vision. The virtual world is not created to be seen by the physiological eye, but the physiological eye hollowed out and acting as a tunnel for a machinic, avatarial, one.

2. Second, Freud emphasizes the uncanny is often associated with the “double” or the “doppelganger”. Doubles and lookalikes are uncanny because they cause a person to “identify with another and so become unsure of his true self. Th[is] self may be duplicated, divided and interchanged” (Freud, “Uncanny” 142). Freud notes that doubles are evocative of both castration anxiety and the desire for immortality. But what is the relationship between the uncanniness of doubling, castration, and immortality? Freud claims that in dreams a doubling or multiplying of the genital symbol expresses the idea of castration. He also claims that doubling “belongs to a primitive phase in our mental development [where the double was considered an insurance against death or dissolution], a phase [we have since] surmounted” (Freud, “Uncanny” 143). The doubling that occurs in Hoffman’s story is uncanny because it harkens back to “phases in the evolution of the sense of self, a regression to times when the ego had not set itself off from the world outside and others”. Note: It also “…has ambivalent, narcissistic significance. A portent of death once the second self is no longer protected by primary narcissism: duplication, the multiplication of selves, becomes the splitting of the self, no longer overcoming but rather confirming its non identity and mortality” (Weber, Legend 216) The avatar is generally understood as a double or doppelganger, a representative of that self, which also works to challenge the user’s “true self” as fixed, indivisible, and non-duplicative. In this manner, the avatar represents a self that remains identical each and every time the user logs in to SL. In other words, the user can repeatedly interact with a double that retains the same age, facial features, bodily qualities, et cetera “throughout successive generations”.

While the uncanniness provoked by “duplication, ego splitting, revenant, or the recurrence of traits, characters and destinies” (Weber, Legend, 10) returns us to an earlier phase of either personal or cultural development, the uncanniness provoked by doubling or multiplying of the genital symbol is more difficult to understand. The doubling, or multiplication, of the genital symbol recalls the Oedipal situation: that is, the threat of castration initiated by the father in order to quell his sons’ desire for his mother. A response to the fear of losing something is to fracture it, duplicate it, or multiply it. For example, in the Harry Potter series the villain Voldemort splits and preserves his self in shards of glass or “horcruxes” in order to achieve immortality (Freud, “Uncanny” 143).

Note: Many technophilic writers appear radically thanatophobic; that is, they express a fear of death. Many ideas I have encountered (i.e. human reproductive cloning, the uploading of human consciousness espoused by Marvin Minsky and Hans Moravec, the Singularity promised by Ray Kurzweil), appear to express a profound fear of death and advocate the desire to live-on at any cost. These writers seem to be driven by the desire to collapse the self into something like the villain Voldemort’s “Horcruxes” in order to either await a time when the self can be “resurrected” or else become rendered informatic and capable of living on in some modified virtual form. These scientists could be read as searching for some insurance against “castration”. They can be read as suffering from a fear of the impotency associated with castration; they are afraid to grow old and infirm. They are afraid of not being able to reproduce. So, they work on doubling themselves, creating hi-tech doppelgangers of themselves in order to never lose their “youth”, that is, the ability to ejaculate (and reproduce). Here, in a different (more biological) guise, castration anxiety and the desire for immortality serve to explain the doubling of the self (and the genital symbol). Kurzweil, Minsky and Moravec: technophiles whose quest to create hi-tech doubles capable of immortality masks (and externalizes) their fear of loosing “it”.

This idea can be traced back to Freud’s comment in The Interpretation of Dreams, that as “an insurance against castration, the dream uses one of the common symbols of the penis in double, or multiple form; and the appearance in the dream of a lizard – an animal whose tail, if pulled off, is regenerated by a new growth has the same meaning” (Freud, “Uncanny” 236).  In SL, users can design or purchase genitals, an activity that often involves a manipulation, duplication or multiplication of the genital symbol. This activity in SL could be read as the subversion of anxiety associated with the Oedipus complex.

3. The third uncanny aspect present in Hoffman’s story concerns dolls and automatons, such as the automaton Olympia. Freud claims Olympia is not uncanny because she puts the reader (and Nathaniel) in a position of “intellectual uncertainty”, but because Olympia, a automaton created by her father, Professor Spalzanni, takes the reader (and Nathaniel) “back to the world of childhood”; this involves a return to the infantile association of dolls with living animate beings, a time where there was “no sharp distinction between the animate and inanimate” (Freud, “Uncanny” 141).

Lifeless objects such as “waxwork figurines, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata” can inspire uncanny disquiet. Likewise, “[E]pileptic seizures” and “manifestations of insanity” are uncanny because they “arouse in the onlooker various notions of automatic – mechanical – processes that lie behind the familiar image of a living person”. The avatar can be thought of or described as a doll or puppet that the user animates and controls.

4. Finally, something that “unintentionally returns” can be regarded as uncanny (Freud, “Uncanny” 144). One such “unintentional return” can be a return to the “old animistic view of the universe…a narcissistic overrating of one’s own mental processes by the omnipotence of thoughts” (Freud, “Uncanny” 144-145). By this Freud refers to a time in the prehistory of human culture where not only inanimate objects but our own thoughts were believed to have agency and could effect the physical world. Although humanity has developed from this pre-modern animate universe, Freud believes that we retain residual traces of it and that these traces can make themselves felt in uncanny ways. The entire SL environment, where your dreams can become reality is reminiscent of the return to this superannuated, animistic view of the universe, when human thoughts were taken to be omnipotent. The anthropocentric will of the user has agency in virtual worlds that it does not have in the physical world. A user can lift objects without physically lifting them, and create anything that can be sculpted with SL prims. Furthermore, SL is the space, par excellence, of what Freud calls the uncanny effect of a “blurring of fantasy and reality” (Freud, “Uncanny” 150). This in-betweenness is evident in the difficulty of describing SL: it is not like the space of a fictional novel, nor is it wholly located in the realm of real life.

The fear or disquiet associated with the pre-modern attribution of omnipotence to human thoughts, the doppelganger or double who reminds us of castration, enucleation which reminds us of the father’s castrating “no”, and the attribution of childlike agency to dolls or automata are to be regarded as “nothing new or strange, but …long familiar to the psyche and …estranged from it only by being repressed” (Freud, “Uncanny” 148). These themes and sentiments are all old, hidden, or repressed, and become uncanny only by coming out into the open. Witnessing an epileptic seizure or a bout of madness, are examples of the manifestation of forces we do not suspect in “a fellow human being, but whose stirrings…[can be]…dimly perceived in remote corners of [our] own personality. Note: Also, in moments where reality and fantasy break down, we verge close to when we were infants and our thoughts had an omnipotence whereby a “symbol [could] take on full function and significance of what it symbolizes” (Freud, “Uncanny” 150). In the next post SL avatarization will be further considered as a technique that returns the user to something old, but without negating its novel aspects.

Sources
+Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny” The Uncanny. London: Penguin Books, 2003
+Hoffman, ETA. Tales of Hoffman. Trans. RJ Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 1982
+Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: Denigration of Vision in 20th Century French Thought. Berkley: University of California Press, 1993
+Ward, Ivan. Castration. Cambridge, UK: Icon Books, 2003
+Weber, Samuel. The Legend of Freud. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 9: Through an Oedipal lens…)

The Ninth part in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars.

The next few posts will consider the uncanny qualities of the Second Life (SL) avatar. They focus on Sigmund Freud’s assertion that the uncanny designates a return of the repressed, or a coming out of concealment of something primitive and familiar. Through the uncanny we can understand the SL avatar as an anxiety-creating uncanny double that reminds us of a forgotten past of infantile fragmentation and castration.

My task is to consider the effect that repressed ideas and emotions inhering within the unconscious have on the user’s engagement with their avatar. The unconscious, which acts as the “omnipresent background to consciousness”, will – in keeping with Freud’s sustained usage of the term “fate” and his esteem of poetry and tragedy – be referred to as the Oedipal dimension of the self (Freud, “Drives”); (Macintyre 50). We might think of it as a general characteristic of the self through which all the rich specific characteristics of the self are inflected. In an earlier post I explained there are two related ways – Epimethean and Oedipal – to consider the self: the Epimethean way regards the self as a function of discursive processes and contingent historical conditions; the Oedipal way argues that some sort of continuous self, full with emotion and depth, remains operational. Within this Oedipal perspective we locate psychoanalysis and its analysis of the unconscious aspects of the self.

According to Freud “who each of us is concerns how we live the historical conflicts that characterize our early life. Although the particular character of those conflicts is unique to each of us, there is a general pattern that all of them follow” (May 6). This dimension of the self can be considered akin to a set of preprogrammed stages through which human beings pass. The bedrock of the self is constructed as the human being moves from infancy through childhood. During these early years the child develops through stages that structure its psyche. This general pattern begins with an “oral” stage, moves into an “anal” stage and then into the Oedipal (or for girls Electra) stage and its resolution. (Freud, Three Essays 39-66)

Note: For example, the infant, during the stage of “oral eroticism”, takes its mother – specifically the mother’s breast – to be their original object of sexual desire (Mullahy 17). By suckling the mother’s breast the child learns about their sexual instincts. But suckling also involves the ingestion of food. Now two instincts are at work: a hunger instinct and a sexual instinct. During this stage the infant wishes to repeat the act of taking in food without demanding food. The set-up for libidinal satisfaction is constructed in the infant at this point. The child begins to yearn for libidinal, or sexual, satisfaction. During the “auto erotic” stage the infant replaces the mother’s breast with a part of his or her own body (usually the thumb, tongue, or genitals). This allows the infant to find objects of sexual interest in their own body.Soon psychic forces begin to develop “more or less spontaneously; they are organically determined” and form the “psyche” of the infant (Mullahy 18).

According to Freud, children pass through other, pre-determined, early stages. For example, boys believe both males and females have male genitals. When the boy discovers the female does not have male genitals he tries to deny what he has seen as the idea of being without genitals is unthinkable and inconceivable. The girl’s genitals, he believes, must have been removed, initiating his intense fear of losing his own genitals: the castration complex. Note: Girls experienced this, according to Freud, by wanting to have a penis and are disturbed by their lack of one. As Samuel Weber points out in The Legend of Freud, the rejection of perception (of the horrific castration) ushers in the story of castration. Here castration is “the title of a story that children of both sexes tell themselves, but from a single point of view – that of the male child – in order to render the perception of sexual difference compatible with the ‘expectation’ of male identity” (Weber, Legend 5).

The child’s curiosity does not abate. He becomes fixated on issues related to sexual life such as the mystery of birth. This bolsters the child’s idea that the father plays an important role in sexual reproduction. While coming to respect the father’s authority, the mother remains the child’s original and most powerful sexual object. The little boy’s attachment to his mother causes him to become jealous of his father, who, he worries, will castrate him. Thus, in the face of this horrific possibility the little boy represses awareness of the mother as his primary sexual object. He is forced to look for other sexual partners, but not to violate the incest taboo and provoke his father’s wrath. How the child resolves the crises of its early years impacts his or her life tremendously. This “family” drama Freud calls the Oedipal crisis.

The figure of Oedipus appears Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams during a discussion of “psychoneurotics” [Note: Psychoneurotic: a term no longer in use that “designated a mental or personality disturbance not attributable to any known neurological or organic dysfunction”], where he pays close attention to the role that a patient’s parents have in the formation of psychoneurotic symptoms (Freud, Interpretation 155-168). He notices that patients have a common orientation toward their parents: they “fall in love with one parent and hat[e] the other” (Freud, Interpretation 155). This psychoneurotic tendency, Freud claims, is not limited to psychoneurotics, but is active in “the majority of children” (Freud, Interpretation 155). In fact, these parental roles form a part of the “permanent stock of the psychic impulses” (Freud, Interpretation 155).

Freud  argues that psychic impulses are not, at their most fundamental level, historically contingent, but, rather, have accompanied human beings throughout the centuries; indeed they are evident in the work of the ancient Greek tragedians, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Woody Allen’s films. Freud asserts that contemporary human beings harbour these “impulses”, and that “antiquity furnished us with legendary material which corroborates this belief… the profound and universal validity of the old legends is explicable only by an equally universal validity of the…hypothesis of infantile psychology” (Freud, Interpretation 155). This “legendary material” is summarized by Freud as:

…the legend of King Oedipus and the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles. Oedipus, the son of Laius, king of Thebes, and Jocasta, is exposed as a suckling, because an oracle had informed the father that his son, who was still unborn, would be his murderer. He is rescued, and grows up as a king’s son at a foreign court, until, being uncertain of his origin, he, too, consults the oracle, and is warned to avoid his native place, for he is destined to become the murderer of his father and the husband of his mother. On the road leading away from his supposed home he meets King Laius, and in a sudden quarrel strikes him dead. He comes to Thebes, where he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, who is barring the way to the city, whereupon he is elected king by the grateful Thebans, and is rewarded with the hand of Jocasta. He reigns for many years in peace and honour, and begets two sons and two daughters upon his unknown mother, until at last a plague breaks out- which causes the Thebians to consult the oracle anew. Here Sophocles’ tragedy begins. The messengers bring the reply that the plague will stop as soon as the murderer of Laius is driven from the country. But where is he?
Where shall be found,
Faint, and hard to be known, the trace of the ancient guilt?
The action of the play consists simply in the disclosure, approached step by step and artistically delayed (and comparable to the work of a psycho-analysis) that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius, and that he is the son of the murdered man and Jocasta. Shocked by the abominable crime which he has unwittingly committed, Oedipus blinds himself, and departs from his native city. The prophecy of the oracle has been fulfilled (Freud, Interpretation 155-156).

Freud will later call the story a “tragedy of fate”, where the will of the gods trounce the vain efforts of human beings (Freud, Interpretation 156). The legend of Oedipus conveys a fate “laid upon us before our birth”, and is “constitutive of the human conditions” that individuals in Freud’s twentieth, and indeed our present twenty-first century, share with the ancients (Freud, Interpretation 157); (Lear 180).

Following his summary of the Oedipal legend, Freud notes that his own patients’ sexual impulses are often first directed toward their mothers, and their first violent-aggressive impulses are often directed toward their fathers. While most of his patients came to “withdraw” their sexual impulses from their mothers, or “forget” their fathers’ jealousy, it is the psychoneurotic who reminds us that we share, often in a muted way, the Oedipal desires that nature has forced onto us. It is important to note that in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud does not waver on this issue, insisting that reading about Oedipus’ fate makes us aware of “our own inner selves, in which the same impulses are still extant, even though they are suppressed” (Freud, Interpretation 157).

According to Jonathan Lear there are a few general insights that can be drawn from the Oedipal crisis (Lear 180-184). One is that children are born helpless and have a fundamental dependency on some parental or nurturing agent. This is, for Freud, the mother, who is the first, and primary, caregiver. Due to the deep bond between child and mother, the child regards any third figure as an intruder into the mother-child dyad. This third figure is the father, who distracts the mother’s attention from the helpless and dependent infant who loves her deeply. As a result, the infant becomes aggressive toward the father, and is happy when he is away. This is discernable when infants or young children tell their mother’s they want to “marry them” etc… (Mullahy 26). But the boy, terrified of castration, and the authority of the father, is prohibited from actually carrying out his desire. He comes to renounce his desire; however, it “persists in an unconscious state in the id and will later manifest its phylogenic effect” (Hamilton 274). There is no resolution of the Oedipal stage, only the modification of desires through repression.

This discussion of an Oedipal self is perhaps the best way of illustrating Freud’s core assertion that there is an immensely influential inner part of the human self closed off from our consciousness. Freud calls this aspect of the self the “unconscious” or “id”. Although he repeatedly revises his views about the function and nature of the unconscious, he retains the view that some “thing” inheres within us, returns to plague us without our consent, and often disquiets and disturbs us when we intuit its presence.

Freud appears to have considered the mind mechanistically as a series of hydraulic pumps and gauges. This mechanism can be thought of as having three distinct areas (the “unconscious”, “preconscious” and “conscious”) however a firm, yet porous, barrier divides the unconscious from the preconscious and the conscious. The unconscious is a tempestuous broth of “primary processes”, ideas, emotions and wishes that the individual repressed throughout their infancy and early childhood (Freud, “Repression” 37). While this is but “one part” of the unconscious, it is the one that will occupy our attention for the reminder of these posts (Freud, “Unconscious” 49). Thankfully, while these ideas, emotions and wishes “retain their original character” in the unconscious, the conscious aspect of the mind cannot access them directly (Freud, “Unconscious” 49); (Macintyre 69). This does not, however, mean that the conscious aspect of mind is not affected by the repressed emotions, memories and wishes that comprise the unconscious. As was noted a moment ago, the division between the conscious and unconscious exists, however psychic traffic flows between the two. The unconscious is ever searching for new outlets to vent the noxious fumes of repression as they generate pressure. A normally functioning mind, for Freud, releases (abreacts) those fumes in ways that do not compromise daily functioning. Dreams, where we are only barely conscious, offer a means of releasing these fumes. The neurotic, by contrast, does not properly release those fumes and thus the fumes penetrate his consciousness in ways that intrude his or her daily functioning.

Nevertheless, the unconscious is the “background” link between infancy and adult life and exerts a “causal influence on conscious thought and behaviour” (Macintyre 66). For this reason we  note that an Oedipal, or psychoanalytically inflected, study of avatarization would not be overtly concerned with whether one’s avatar is like them physically or acts like they do in the real world. Neither are we overtly concerned with determining whether the user’s motivation is to create an avatar similar to or different from the real lives they lead. Rather it would direct its attention to a deeper level of intention, one more difficult to locate, yet discernable through the user’s comments about, and behaviour with, their avatar. The only way to get at this deeper level of intention, however, is through an analysis of surface conditions: there is no x-ray device suited for this type of analysis; one has to proceed from manifest symptoms. One can listen to a user claim that they create an avatar to “escape from reality”, or to “act out who they really are”, but these claims can lead toward an understanding of the unconscious motivation at play. It is possible to discern the workings of this unconscious dimension of the user’s subjectivity through a consideration of the phenomena of avatarization. This method of analysis allows us to note another dimension of intention co-present, and co-responsible for the success of virtual worlds such as SL.

So what role does the Oedipal complex play in the phenomena of avatarization? One way of answering this is to note the uncanny aspects of avatars and virtual worlds. User’s repressed pasts, something “old and long familiar”, can be understood as motivating their engagement with their avatar(s). The characterization of the avatar as something new and yet also somehow reflective of the user’s deeper true self has a parallel in Freud’s essay “The Uncanny”. In that essay he defines the uncanny as anything we experience in adulthood that reminds us of earlier stages in our psychical development, of aspects of our unconscious life, or of the primitive experience of the human species. Freud’s concept of the uncanny acknowledges that human beings possess some psychical structure, and that this structure, assembled throughout our childhood, leaves behind permanent residues and traces. In this view there exists some psychical interiority we are capable of remembering, however obliquely, through the residues and traces that follow us into adulthood.

SL users have the ability to control and radically manipulate their avatar body. Let’s establish three ways this manipulation occurs: first, the user can purchase, freely obtain, or, if they are savvy enough, design, entirely new avatar-bodies. A second form of manipulation is a less radical customization of a given avatar body. Third, a user can, in certain instances, choose to detach or reattach an aspect of their avatar body. In the next post I will discuss the uncanny aspects of these methods of avatarial manipulation. What will follow is an attempt at an Oedipal investigation into the relationship between the user’s psychical interiority and the three processes of manipulation and customization of a technologically mediated body listed above.

Sources

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 1961.
—. Dora. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997 (1963)
—. “Die Verdrangung” [Repression] in Freud, Sigmund. The Unconscious. Trans. Graham Falkland. Ed. Adam Phillips. London: Penguin Books, 2005
—. The Ego and the Id. Trans. Joan Riviere. New York: WW Norton and Co. Inc., 1960
—. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. AA Brill. London: Wordsworth, 1997
—. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Trans. James Strachey.New York: W.W. Norton, 1965.
—. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 2000 (1962)
—. “The Uncanny” The Uncanny. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
—. “The Unconscious” in Freud, Sigmund. The Unconscious. Trans. Graham Falkland. Ed. Adam Phillips. London: Penguin Books, 2005

Lear, Jonathan. Freud. New York: Routledge, 2005

Macintyre, Alasdair. The Unconscious. New York: Routledge, 2004 (1958)

Mullahy, Patrick. Oedipus: Myth and Complex. New York: Grove Press, 1955

Weber, Samuel. The Legend of Freud. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 8: The Psychoanalytic Avatar?)

The Eighth part in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars.

Three kinds of categories emerge in scholarly literature dealing with avatars:
(1) The “Posthuman” Avatar and (1a) The “Posthuman (Capitalist)” Avatar,
(2) The “Performative” Avatar,
(3) The “Human” Avatar and (3a) The “Human (Psychoanalytic)” Avatar.

In this post, I will discuss (3a) The “Human (Psychoanalytic)” Avatar:

In an earlier post, I suggested that the human be thought of as dual, that is, subject-of some unconscious structure (articulated by the ancients in the guise of the mythological figures Oedipus and Dionysius) and subject-to historically contingent practices, techniques and historical themes (articulated by the ancients through the figure of Epimetheus).

While I agree with Tom Boellstorff’s (Epimethean) posthumanism where technology plays a key role in what it means to be human, an (Oedipal) sense of what it means to be human is supplied by psychoanalytic critics. Note: This Oedipal side supplied by psychoanalysis provides the humanism for our posthumanist-humanism. The remainder of these Humanizing the Avatar posts will propose an Oedipal approach to understanding virtual world avatars.

The psychoanalytic approach, as found in scholarly literature, does not overtly advocate the view that users are performing new identities and subjectivities, nor does it advocate the idea that users are participating in a technology acting as harbinger of some radical shift in what the human being is. Rather, an Oedipal approach is deeply tied to a view of the avatar as an externalization of the structure co-responsible, but indispensible, for being human.

The germ of this approach can be found in the ideas of what I earlier called the “Human” theorists such Velleman and Boellstorff, as well as in a doctoral thesis by Kathy Cleland. Cleland introduces the idea that Second Life (SL) avatars can be thought of as uncanny others, between subject and object, living and nonliving, and real and virtual. She speculates about the virtual image reflected back at the SL user and, drawing on Christian Metz, claims that the reflected avatar-image depicts a phantom, or phantasmatic element, of the real object or living being. Note: In psychoanalysis, “phantasy” with the “ph” refers to the unconscious psychic content of the drives. The cinematic, or in the case of SL digital-virtual, imaginary reflects back our “shade, our phantom, our double, our replica, in a new kind of mirror” (Metz 44 qtd. in Cleland). I am – as will be articulated over the next few weeks – interested in this phantom/phantasy-double as an instance of the “shade” that inheres within us as a result of what Freud called primal castration and the fundamental fantasy: it is something like a residual remainder, rather than an extension or Boellstorff’s homo cyber.

I will also develop the idea that virtual world avatars return us to Jacques Lacan’s description of the “fragmented body”, that is, the body “experienced by the subject in dreams of disintegration and disjointed limbs”, an uncanny return of the infants’ body in bits and pieces (Grosz 44 qtd. in Cleland). Cleland considers updating Lacan’s discussion of the mirror stage to “account for the new range of experiences and identifications resulting from new media mirrors” such as SL. She calls this updating of the mirror stage the “mirror of the cyborg”. The following posts will develop this idea that the mirror stage be applied to virtual worlds, and attempts a psychoanalytic intervention into SL avatarization, turning Haraway on her head and articulating a cyborg that cannot escape dreaming of “expecting its father to save it through the restoration of the garden” and whose father is, in the Lacanian sense, certainly not “inessential” (Haraway 151).

SL user Isablan Neva explains her sense of avatarization: “What motivates people to look a certain way is something I wouldn’t even begin to speculate on. Ultimately, your avatar is your representative in-world and can run the entire range of your personality. It’s your second life; be whomever and whatever you want to be.” (Rymaszewski et al. 79). But this view says very little and we ought to probe deeper. The work that has been done on avatarization is tainted either by a fantasy of moving beyond the human, or else attempts to claim the avatar is deeply related to the user by relying on a basic, or surface, analysis.

The Official Guide to Second Life notes that “the vast majority of SL citizens opt to stay human in Second Life…Your avatar choices say a lot about who you are; to the people you encounter in the SL world, your avatar is who you are. It’s true too – your avatar choices reflect your personality and mentality. It’s good to keep that in mind” (Rymaszewski et al. 10). The “Human (Psychoanalytic)” avatar offers one way of investigating what it means to stay human in SL. It allows us to deeply consider claims such as those made by SL user Lillie Yifu, a major player in the SL escort industry, that “avatars, even venues and builds, in the end, become a reflection of the inner person, the one that screams to get out in what we call real life” (Rymaszewski et al. 79). Rather than becoming bogged down in the uniqueness of “who” each individual user is, psychoanalysis suggests this uniqueness is inflected through what we might consider to be Yifu’s “inner person”, or what the SL Guide calls “who you are”. But this inner person whom we really are has an unconscious element, and we must detect its stirrings and effects through claims by, and observations of, users’ activities. I suggest that this repressed, unconscious (or Oedipal), dimension of the human being, plays a tremendously important role in motivating the behaviour of avatar users in virtual worlds. Thus, while this investigation does not rule out the effect that postmodern social patterns and posthuman technologies (the insights of the “Posthuman” and “Posthuman (Capitalist)” categories) have for an understanding of avatarization, it does not entirely explain reduce avatarization under the schema of a shift from modernism to post-modernism, capitalism to late capitalism, Ptolemaic to post-Ptolemaic cosmology, or from the human to the post-human. My investigation does not argue against the idea that users take to avatars in order to act out, or perform (i.e. the “Performative” category), new modalities of subjectivity and selfhood; but neither do I reduce avatarization to an endless engendering and deferral of new subjectivities. The following posts will take for granted that one’s virtual avatar is evocative of who they purport to be in real life (i.e. the “Human” category), but will strive to complicate – and deepen – what real life is. Considering SL psychoanalytically allows us to consider avatarization beyond the face value, which the “Human” category is not suited or, to be fair, intended for.

A category privileging the “Human (Psychoanalytic)” avatar suggests that it is possible to consider user’s comments – say, that their vampire avatar represents their fascination with vampires in real life – as motivated by an unconscious “realm” of repressed emotions and memories (Freud, “Die Verdrangung” 36); (Macintyre 50). It allows us to problematize a user’s comment that “my avatar is me”. For example, SL user Lupus Delacroix explains:

It’s hard to say what motivates me to look the way I do in SL, I have so many looks to choose from. I have a firm belief in tasting everything on the buffet, and being picky like I am, I went for the best of the best. It’s hard to tell what I’m going to be from one day to the next: a magnificent dragon, a bipedal wolf, a vampire, or a really good-looking human… (Rymaszewski et al. 78)

One could relate Lupus’ comments to his sense of who he consciously or explicitly is, but the investigation of the avatar interpreted through the “Human (Psychoanalytic)” category allows Lupus’ comments to suggest another, unconscious, source of motivation is responsible for structuring the very desire to be a dragon one day, a wolf the next, and a vampire the day after that. The “Human (Psychoanalytic)” category does not seek to negate that humans are constantly changing. It suggests, however, that there is something behind, or driving, this change.

I’ll explain this line of thought over the next few weeks.

Sources:
+Freud, Sigmund. “Die Verdrangung” [Repression] in Freud, Sigmund. The Unconscious. Trans. Graham Falkland. Ed. Adam Phillips. London: Penguin Books, 2005
+Grosz, Elizabeth. Jacques Lacan: a feminist introduction. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990 in Cleland, Kathy. Image Avatars: self-other encounters in a mediated world, PhD thesis, Sydney: UTS, 2008
+Haraway, Donna.  Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991
+Macintyre, Alasdair. The Unconscious. New York: Routledge, 2004 (1958)
+Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1982 qtd. in Cleland, Kathy. Image Avatars: self-other encounters in a mediated world, PhD thesis, Sydney: UTS, 2008.
+Rymaszewski, Michael et al. Guide to Second Life – 2nd Edition. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing, 2008

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 7: The Human Avatar?)

The Seventh part in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars.

Three kinds of categories emerge in scholarly literature dealing with avatars:
(1) The “Posthuman” Avatar and (1a) The “Posthuman (Capitalist)” Avatar,
(2) The “Performative” Avatar,
(3) The “Human” Avatar and (3a) The “Human (Psychoanalytic)” Avatar.

In this post, I will discuss (3) the “Human” Avatar:

Unlike the “Posthuman” or the “Performative” categorizations, the “Human” category of the avatar describes a type of theoretical engagement focusing on the relation between the real user and her avatar. A good example of this “Human” approach is Don Heider’s article “Identity and Reality: What Does it Mean to Live Virtually?” While Heider acknowledges that SL avatars are evocative of a culture where medical and cosmetic surgery has become sophisticated, accessible and affordable, he does not reduce Second Life (SL) avatars to the drive toward body modification and manipulation (Heider 134). While it is fashionable to address avatar groups of elves, furries, technopunks, human-cat hybrids, etc…, Heider explains that “most people [in SL] are not devoted to” such groupings, and that “people generally create avatars that look much like they do in real life…people overwhelmingly not only chose human forms, they chose human forms that resemble what they report to look like in the real world” (Heider 136). So, while Heider recognizes that identity and selfhood is something fluid and defined by broad cultural changes and conditions, he also, importantly, notes a SL user’s comment that “[there] is a core of who I am that remained consistent. My surroundings did somewhat define me” (Heider 137).

Simulation, for Heider is not simulacral. In contrast to Baudrillard’s fourth order simulacra (which has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum), Heider argues that SL avatars are intricately tied to a real person (Heider 141). He explains that:

even in cases of people who are serious role-players or pathological liars I would argue that what they say or do is in some way reflective of who they are, what is inside their heads, no matter how distant it may seem from the actual person. It is a reflection of our self, deeper, more profound than real life allows (Heider 141).

The avatar refers back to some “thing”. Heider suggests that avatars provide the “experience of a more profound sense of a person’s identity than we might [have] under normal non-virtual environments…a more acute and profound version of personal identity” (Heider 142). Note: Likewise, in their article “Docile Avatars: Aesthetics, Experience, and Sexual Interaction in Second Life”, Shaowen and Jeffrey Bardzell write of Bondage-Discipline-Sado-Masochism (BDSM) culture in SL as a new interface on a classic taboo (Bardzell and Bardzell 5). Instead of claiming that SL is qualitatively different than real life, they focus on the idea that the brain has always been the largest sex organ. Throughout his work, Žižek makes much of this idea, describing sex as masturbation with a real person. In an interview he explains: “It’s not only that masturbation is having sex with an imagined partner. What if real sex is only masturbation with a real partner? That is to say, you think you’re doing it with a real partner but you use the real partner as a masturbatory device, the real partner just gives you a minimum of material so you can act out your fantasies” (Žižek, “Hysteria”).

One of the most frequently cited studies of avatars, “The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behaviour” conducted by Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson is demonstrative of a position that pays keen attention to the relationship between the user’s real/offline and online self-representation. The study aims to better understand the “protean” nature of avatarization in virtual worlds. (The adjective “protean”, meaning versatile, flexible and capable of changing forms, derives from the mythological sea god Proteus who, in Homer’s Odyssey, transformed himself into a myriad of different creatures in order to avoid interrogation. Note: In the fourth book of Homer’s Odyssey, Menalaus exclaims “Then we rushed upon him with a shout and seized him; on which he began at once with his old tricks, and changed himself first into a lion with a great mane; then all of a sudden he became a dragon, a leopard, a wild boar; the next moment he was running water, and then again directly he was a tree, but we stuck to him and never lost hold, till at last the cunning old creature became distressed, and said, Which of the gods was it, Son of Atreus, that hatched this plot with you for snaring me and seizing me against my will? What do you want?’” (Homer 48) Yee et al. spend time in the game World of Warcraft compiling data on the attractiveness of different avatar types and rating them on a scale from least to most attractive. Participants are then provided with these different avatar types to use in other virtual reality environments. Note:  While the participants could see their avatar, the users they interacted with saw a control avatar that was not, given the scale the researchers devised, highly attractive or unattractive. This way the researchers cancelled out social feedback, or “priming”. The type of avatar the researchers provided to each participant affected how the participants acted in the virtual environment. The researchers concluded that “participants assigned to more attractive [in this instance taller] avatars in immersive virtual environments were more intimate with confederates in a self-disclosure and interpersonal distance task than participants assigned shorter avatars” (Yee and Bailenson). Avatars ranked with a high degree of attractiveness walked closer to their confederates and disclosed more personal information to strangers than short avatars did. The study also looked at the effect of online encounters on offline relationships. The researchers “found that participants given taller avatars negotiated more aggressively in subsequent face-to-face interactions than participants given shorter avatars” (Yee, Bailenson and Ducheneaut 2). This research demonstrates that the early cyberculture rhetoric (featured by theorists such as Turkle and Barlow) employing “metaphors of liberation and fluidity” must be complicated or reconsidered in light of the entangled nature of the virtual and physical worlds (Yee, Bailenson and Ducheneaut 39). The Proteus effect explains that our behaviors “shaped by our digital avatars in virtual environments carries over into physical settings” (Yee, Bailenson and Ducheneaut 39). The researchers suggest that “neither the virtual nor the physical self can ever truly be liberated from the other. What we learn in one body is shared with other bodies we inhabit, whether virtual o[r] physical” (Yee, Bailenson and Ducheneaut 39). This study ties the “protean”, flexible, bodies users adopted in virtual worlds to their user’s real, physical, bodies.

In “On the Relationship between My Avatar and Myself” Paul Messinger et al. arrive at similar conclusions, alleging that avatars tend to be similar, but somewhat more attractive, outgoing, risk taking and superficial, than the user understands him or herself to be in real life (Messinger et al. 4). The researchers note that differences between the user and their avatar can be explained by a tendency for computer mediated communication to break down normal behavioural constraints and “deindividuate” the user, causing them “to experience a loss of personal identity and lead[ing] them to behave in ways not normal for that person” (Kiesler et al. qtd. in Messinger et al.).

Another stimulating study of SL, conducted in 2008 by Matteo Varvello et al., monitored public areas of the virtual world and studied the habits of avatars (Varvello et al.). Supporting the conclusions of Yee and Bailensen and Messinger et al., the researchers concluded that avatars act similarly to the way humans act in RL. Avatars tend to gather in small groups of two to ten, visit the same sorts of virtual places as one another, and show highly predictable behaviour. Note: Jamie Loke’s “Identity and Gender in Second Life” raises a similar point: when female SL users are given a choice to become something else, Loke found that the norm was to adhere to the “stereotypical beauty standards of reality” (Loke 146). Varvello et al. importantly also demonstrate that many of the sensationalized media reports about SL purporting it to be an entirely new world are not grounded in fact. According to their study only 30,000 to 50,000 users were active in a given month, only 0.3% of the registered users on SL (Varvello et al. 2). Furthermore, the researchers note that 90% of the time avatars do not move around despite the ability to walk, fly, and teleport (Varvello et al. 2). Most users prefer to chat. Finally, the researchers note that 30% of the SL regions attract no visitors and that the number of concurrent visitors barely reaches 50,000 (Varvello et al. 13). This is not to negate the creative activities that do  occur in SL, but to offer a reminder that these activities are not occurring all the time. Note: In January, 2007 SL became host to a cyber protest against the anti-immigration policies of Jean-Marie le Pen and the French Front National. Avatars from all around the metaverse came together to devise new ways of combating the right wing policies of the movement. A ‘violent’ protest erupted outside the gates of the SL headquarters for the Front National. During the protest the anti Front National protestors levelled digital buildings and created a surreal scene outside the headquarters. There have been a number of SL protests that cross over into the real world, including one against the war in Iraq. Whatever you make of the efficacy of this type of protest…

More theoretically developed expressions of this attempt to humanize the avatar can be located in J. David Velleman’s article “Bodies, Selves” and Tom Boellstorff’s book Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Velleman and Boellstorff attempt to provide theoretical groundwork for the radical inseparability of the virtual from the real. In “Bodies, Selves”, J. David Velleman strives to understand the extent to which the user is their avatar. What is transpiring, he wonders, if a user who is a quadriplegic, exclaims “I ran!” when using an able bodied avatar (Velleman 2)? The common view, he claims, is to regard the avatar as “make believe”, a prop in “pretend play” (Velleman 2). This common view insists that “the agency of the human participant is also fictional” (Valleman 3). Velleman disagrees, arguing that the user’s performance with their avatar is not fictional but, rather, is quite literal.

Playing on the concept of [psycho]analytic transference, Velleman claims that the user “literally performs fictional actions” (Velleman 3). In analytic transference the analyst [A] and the patient [P] may perform “fictional” roles as a parent [p] and child [c]. Note: Velleman himself does not utilize this notion [A,P…]. I have designated the analyst as parent by [Ap] and the patient as child is designated by [Pc]. [Pc] may attempt to “fictionally” seduce [Ap], however [Pc] is really making that attempt, “and really is the agent of that unreal action” (Velleman 3). Thus, actions carried out within the transference are not make-believe, but are “fictional actions literally performed” (Velleman 3). Velleman explains that one has the sense that [P] and [A], as [Pc] and [Ap], really are the selves of the people they are representing. Likewise, he argues that in virtual worlds such as SL the user is “speaking the literal truth when he says of his avatar “this is me” (Velleman 3). Note: But this is not a matter of intent, virtual worlds – governed by ‘virtual play’ are not the same as a child’s game of ‘make believe’ (or ‘pretend play’) (Velleman 4). ‘Virtual Play’ such as SL is not outside the ‘reality principle’ as a child’s game of ‘pretend play’ may be. A user cannot, as a child may, do what whatever she or he pleases. Rather in ‘virtual play’ the user exists in a live, shared, world that is not pretend. For example, if a user wants a pirate ship, they must build, buy, or be given one as a gift. One’s own actions are constrained by their avatar, the interface, and the natural laws that govern the virtual world. “Virtual Worlds”, according to Velleman, are not places we can “conjure up or conjure away” but have a “determinateness and recalcitrance” more like real life.

Kean Kelly the avatar, and the Four Yip portrait: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/08/the-mixed-reali.html

Velleman claims that within “virtual play” users do not “generally attribute attitudes to their avatars at all; they simply have thoughts and feelings about the world of the game, they act on that world through their avatars but under the motivational force of their own attitudes … players themselves want the items that their avatars buy on their behalf” (Velleman 9). Something radical does not happen to the user and the user does not become something new. Velleman explains that “users don’t experience themselves as artists inventing characters; they experience themselves as the characters, behaving in character, under the impetus of their own thoughts and feelings” (Velleman 10). The avatar is not considered to be an extension that the user controls, but a thing that stands in between, something that the user does things with, or what the user does things as (Velleman 11). It is more a proxy for one’s real body than an extension, or modification, of it.

The user’s own, very real, “beliefs and desires” control the avatar. In virtual play “a person really has a fictional body…but their relationship to that fictional body is real” (Velleman 20 and 13). Like the user’s real body, the virtual avatar “expresses traits, thoughts and feelings conceived of as belonging to…” the user (Velleman 21). Velleman continues:

your body is giving expression to a self-conception, under the control of the one therein conceived as ‘self’. Your body is not just controlled by an inner-spirit; it is used by that spirit to express how it conceives of itself; and so an allusion to its controlling spirit as ‘self’ is implicit in its behaviour (Velleman 22)

For Velleman, the SL avatar is governed by a notion of “self”; it is a fictional, virtual-world body joined to a literal, real-world mind. The personae users adopt in SL, like the patient’s persona as [Pc] and the therapist/analyst’s persona as [Ap], are tied to real motives and intentions.

In Coming of Age in Second Life, Tom Boellstorff explicitly emphasizes that he does not believe online culture warrants a “posthuman” classification. SL, for Boellstorff, is a “profoundly human” space. He claims that, while online culture is not posthuman, virtual worlds are not totally human (Boellstorff, 5). It is not true, he insists, “that there is nothing new under the virtual sun” (Boellstorff 5). In SL, we do find transformed possibilities for subjectivity; we are not quite human. But this does not mean Boellstorff endorses the posthuman?

According to Boellstorff virtual worlds borrow assumptions from real life and show us that our real lives have been virtual all along. For this reason he expresses concern about considering the virtual and the actual through a rigid binarism. The term “virtual” connotes an “approach to the actual without arriving there”. Drawing on Deleuze and Virilio, Boellstorff claims that the virtual “…must be defined as strictly a part of the real object” (Virilio, Vision qtd in Boellstorff 19); (Deleuze, Difference 260 qtd. in Boellstorff 19). As part of the real object, there is an inherent “as if” quality: “a basic starting point for any serious discussion of the virtual must be recognition of the non autonomy of the virtual – a recognition of the fact that the virtual does not constitute an autonomous, independent, or ‘closed’ system, but is instead always dependent, in a variety of ways, on the everyday world in which it is embedded” (Malpas). Boellstorff dwells on the “gap” between the virtual and the actual (Boellstorff 19). If this crucial gap were “…to be filled in, there would be no virtual worlds, and in a sense no actual world either” (Boellstorff 19). In virtual worlds, users are, through “techne”, invited to “open up a gap from the actual and discover new possibilities for human being. At the same time, virtual worlds highlight the virtuality that has always been a part of the human condition. This is why it is mistaken to temporalize this virtual human into the figure of the ‘posthuman’” (Boellstorff 25, 238). Because the virtual and the actual have always been inseparable, Boellstorff does not see SL and virtual worlds like it as technologies which will overcome the limits of the human form. He claims that “forms of selfhood and sociality characterizing virtual worlds “does not necessarily mean the end of the human…we need to see the human re-configured and organized differently” (Nayar 21 qtd. in Boellstorff 28). He summarizes:

The relationship between the virtual and the human is not a ‘post’ relationship where one term displaces the other; it is a relationship of coconstitution. Far from being the case that virtual worlds herald the emergence of the posthuman,…I argue that it is in being virtual that we are human. Virtual worlds reconfigure selfhood and sociality, but this is only possible because they rework the virtuality that characterizes human being in the actual world (Boellstorff 29).

He speaks of “homo cyber” (Boellstorff 29), the virtually human, as comprising (a) forms of human social life emerging (i.e. new subject positions) online, and (b) the way human being has always been constituted – as in the myth of Epimetheus –through technique (or techne).

Boellstorff does not harbour the fantasy that the avatar represents a move beyond, or post-, the human as if there were a stable “I” prior to the immersion of digital technologies into everyday life. He cites Walter Ong: “technologies are artificial, but…artificiality is natural to human beings” (Ong qtd. in Boellstorff). Rather than making sharp distinctions between humans and posthumans Boellstorff recognizes the Epimethean idea that technology alters our “sensory ratios” (Mcluhan 67). This idea of change as endemic to the human offers one half – an Epimethean posthumanism – of a humanist posthumanism.

Boellstorff claims that it is “in being virtual that we are human”. Virtual worlds, and the ability to craft therein, provide new ways for us to define humanity and what it means to be human. Crafting an avatar, “a zone of embodiment that is intentionally crafted – the product of techne – and thus a ‘zone of relationality’ between persons”, is not something that creates an artificial body or extends us into some simulacral posthuman space, but is simply a way of making the virtual environment real (Taylor, Play 41 qtd. in Boellstorff 129); (Weinstone in Boellstorff 129). So, while Boellstorff argues that, “in virtual worlds we can be virtually human, because in them humans, through techne, open up a gap from the actual and discover new possibilities for human being”, he does not highlight posthuman possibilities but, rather, insists that “virtuality has always been a part of this human condition” (Boellstorff 238). Note: He quotes Levy’s comment that “rather than inaugurating the posthuman, virtual worlds make us ‘even more human’” (Levy 216 qtd. in Boellstorff 238). Thus, he defends his position and his anthropological methodology against posthumanists such as Sadie Plant: “It is not that theories of the virtual must shed their anthropocentric associations…virtual worlds draw on a capacity as old as humanity itself, but aspects of selfhood and society within them are novel” (Boellstorff 238). The virtual world of SL is symptomatic of an “age of Techne”. Given that techne is (one of) the thing(s) that makes us human, Boellstorff alleges SL can be studied using anthropology, “the same flexible, underdetermined, ethnographic tools used to study human cultures in the actual world” (Boellstorff 237). Rather than shedding our anthropocentric associations, Boellstorff draws on Turkle and claims that virtual avatars allow us to reflect on what being human can mean (Turkle, Life 24); (Turkle, “Computer”). Note:  Considering avatarization as a version of, rather than differing from, the human is an approach shared by Boellstorff, Heider, Yee and Bailenson, Messinger et al., Varvello et al. and Velleman. For this reason Boellstorff provides an acceptable Epimethean posthumanism that we can factor into our search for a humanist posthumanism.

Sources
+Bardzell Shaowen & Jeffrey. “Docile avatars: aesthetics, experience, and sexual interaction in Second Life” HCI…But not as we know it: People and Computers XXI – British Computer Society, 2007
+Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008
+Heider, Don. “Identity and Reality”. In Living Virtually: Researching New Worlds.Ed. Don Heider. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Co., 2009 (pp. 130-143)
+Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Samuel Butler. Read Books, 2008
+Kiesler, S., Siegel, J., & McGuire, T. W. “Social psychological aspects of computermediated communication.” American Psychologist, 39:10 (1984): 1123-1134. qtd. in Messinger, Paul R.; Ge, Xin; Stroulia, Eleni; Lyons, Kelly; Smirnov, Kristen; Bone, Michael. “On the Relationship between My Avatar and Myself” Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. 1(2) (November 2008)
+Levy, Pierre. Cyberculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. qtd in Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008
+Loke, Jamie. “Identity and Gender in Second Life” In Living Virtually: Researching New Worlds. Ed. Don Heider. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Co., 2009 (pp. 141-161)
+Malpas, Jeff. “On the Non-Autonomy of the Virtual” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 15:2 (2009) 135-139
+Mcluhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: Extensions of Man – Critical Edition. New York: Ginko Press, 2003
+Messinger, Paul R.; Ge, Xin; Stroulia, Eleni; Lyons, Kelly; Smirnov, Kristen; Bone, Michael. “On the Relationship between My Avatar and Myself” Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. 1(2) (November 2008)
+Nayar, Pramod. Virtual Worlds: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cybertechnology. New Dehli: Sage Publications, 2004 in Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008
+Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologzing of the World. London: Methuen, 1982. in Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008
+Taylor, TL. “Living Digitally: Embodiment in Virtual Worlds” in The Social Life of Avatars: Presence and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments. Ed. Ralph Schroder, 40-62. London: Springer-Virlag, 2002 in Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008
—. Play Between Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006 in Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008
+Turkle, Sherry.  Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007
—. Life on the Screen. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1995
+Velleman, J. David. “Bodies, Selves”. American Imago. vol65:iss3 (2008): 405-246
+Weinstone, Ann. Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. in Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008
+Yee, Nick and Bailenson Jeremy and Nicolas Ducheneaut. “The Proteus Effect: Implications of Transformed Digital Self-Representation on Online and Offline Behavior.” Communication Research 36:2 (2009): 285-312
+Yee, Nick and Bailenson Jeremy. “The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behaviour” Human Communication Research 33:3 (2007): 271-29
+Žižek, Slavoj. “Hysteria and Cyberspace: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek”. Telepolis. 07.10.1998. <http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/2/2492/1.html>

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 6: The Performative Avatar?)

The Sixth part in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars.

Three kinds of categories emerge in scholarly literature dealing with avatars:
(1) The “Posthuman” Avatar and (1a) The “Posthuman (Capitalist)” Avatar,
(2) The “Performative” Avatar,
(3) The “Human” Avatar and (3a) The “Human (Psychoanalytic)” Avatar.

In this post, I will discuss (2) The Performative Avatar:

One approach to theorizing avatars stresses their performative, theatrical, and role playing dimensions. This is a categorization found typically in the popular press where virtual worlds like Second Life (SL) are often characterized as a place where individuals can role-play, or explore an aspect of their personality that real life denies them. While the tendency to regard SL as a theatrical, or performative, space is often poorly articulated and sensationalized in these popular sources, a number of scholarly articles explore how we perform our selves and identities in these virtual environments. Unlike the “Posthuman” and “Posthuman Capitalist” categories outlined over the last two posts, this “Performative” category does not overtly focus on avatars as a prosthesis or extension of our self, nor does it regard the avatar as a simulacral symbolic body that consumers “consume for its own sake”. Rather, articles that develop a theory of cyber-performativity are grounded in Judith Butler’s post-structuralist claim that the gendered subject is constituted through the performance of their gender. Note: Butler is not, however, oblivious to the difficulties of performativity and asserts that it is not simply a matter of going into the closet and deciding which gender one want to be (Hall 126). It would be an error to believe that the subject is ever in a truly ‘free zone’ of performativity.

The production of gender, for Butler, occurs via performative acts of language, illocutionary acts such as naming that constitute us each time we utter them. We apply identity categories to ourselves. One could claim “I — am a…teacher, woman or lesbian” (Butler, “Decking” 17). Speech acts produce a fiction of unity, but there is always a disjunction. Each time the subject contextualizes him or herself there is also, implicitly, a decontextualization. This moment of openness and instability potentially offers a moment of possibility and change. Note: To explain this continuous instability and possibility one might look to Jacques Derrida’s notion of “différance” in Margins of Philosophy (Derrida 3-27). He proceeds from Saussure’s claim that language is a system of signs whose meaning is never present. If one were to try and find meaning in the sign ‘Rock’ I would go to the dictionary. But this endeavour would provide me with multiple definitions and within these definitions terms and figures of speech such as ‘Hard’, ‘Mineral’, ‘Crack-Cocaine’ and ‘Rock the Boat’. If I were to look for the meaning of any of these terms I would find another multiplicity of signs. Derrida however, “…elaborates that the meaning of any, apparently ‘present’ sign is nothing but the  relationship between all the absent meanings the term is not” (Deutscher 30). Derrida uses différance to demonstrate that a sign such as ‘Rock’, or ‘Organic’ cannot be autonomous and stand isolated. It is derived from the French verb ‘differer’ which translates to “defer” and “differ”. Différance is “not the difference ‘between’ terms but the passage of infinite, endless differentiation giving rise to apparent identities between which one might then argue there is difference” (Deutscher 31). As such, a sign’s meaning is deferred in an endless process. It “…is never present in and of itself, in a sufficient presence that would refer only to itself” (Derrida 11). The signified concept is slippery, indeterminate and always in a process of deferral, leaving it perpetually open to a change in context and new linguistic possibilities. For Butler we are not stable subjects who go about our lives taking on acting roles. While some of us are freer in our constitution than others, the act of performance literally constitutes who we are (Butler, “Decking” 18). There is no internal actor who takes on her roles: “…this ‘I’ does not play its lesbianism as a role” (Butler, “Decking” 18). She is reconstituted as a lesbian each time she names herself, in the process of mimesis and repetition. The “I” becomes a string of constitutive performances. The subject emerges in this flux of performance-identities. Butler does not deny that a subject exists, writing that “[t]he denial of the priority of the subject is not the denial of the subject” (Butler, “Decking” 24). By this she does not jettison the subject but redefines it as something that is always in a process of reconstitution. She denies the primacy of the subject as a discrete entity outside of its performative roles. In other words, the ‘I’ exists; however it exists only through repeated expressions of its identity and identifying labels. There is, importantly, no do-er behind the deed.

In “Playing Dress Up: Costumes, Role-play and Imagination” Janine Fron et al. consider dress up and fashion in MMORPGs. They describe digital dress up as a transformative kind of play where users take on new roles and learn about themselves in order to play with and against gender (Fron et al. 13). Their analysis relies on Butler’s assumption that “gender is always a doing, though not by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed… There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constructed by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Butler, Gender qtd. in Fron 15).

Another article that deploys a performative reading of the avatar by considering role-playing, theatricality and performance in virtual worlds is Jacqueyn Ford Morie’s “Performing in (Virtual) Spaces: Embodiment and Being in Virtual Environments”. Morie claims that the user is subsumed in a “created space-for-becoming”, an “opening for a new interrogation of the world and ourselves and consequently the possibility of imagining other kinds of space, other possible ways of being a body-that-becomes-space” (Palumbo qtd. in Morie 134).

Most virtual worlds, SL included, adopt a third person point of view. In this third person point of view the avatar appears out in front of the users’ “physical and imaginal locus” (Morie). Morie focuses on the theatricality of virtual worlds – a theatricality whereby we watch ourselves perform in the third person (Laurel qtd. in Morie). To explain why we would want to watch ourselves perform, Morie notes the etymology of the term “theatre”. The term derives from the Greek “theatron”, which designates “a place for seeing, not simply in the sense of watching but also in the deeper meaning to see – to grasp, to behold, to understand” (Morie 134).

Morie uses this analysis of theatricality to touch on a paradoxical aspect of virtual reality environments. The Head Mounted Display used in virtual reality, which, for the purposes of our discussion, could be considered as analogous to the 3D avatar in virtual worlds, acts as a “mask that removes other masks” (Morie 134). By “other masks”, Morie is referring to the personas through which we perform our specific social roles. The avatar, like the Head Mounted Display, is a technology that creates the conditions where our social masks are no longer necessary, allowing the user to explore a “private and more personal self” (Morie 134). Thus, the theatricality (understood as “theatron”) of virtual worlds involves the avatarial mask: this mask allows us to grasp, behold, and/or understand our private and more personal self.

Curiously, Morie follows up her discussion of masks that remove other masks and the etymological significance of “theatron”, with the quote: “posthuman theorists maintain that interaction with our technologies allows us to gain new understandings of ourself” (Morie 134). Here we see the conceptualizations of the “Performative” avatar and the “Posthuman” avatar are often quite similar. The two categories regard virtual worlds, and the avatarization that occurs therein, as conditioning or allowing for the user to become a qualitatively different sort of self than so-called real life permits.

One slight exception to this is artist Mark Stephen Meadows’ book I Avatar – The Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life (Meadows 37). Similar to Morie’s analysis of the root “theatron”, Meadows emphasizes the etymological significance of the Greek term “persona” (Eng. “mask”) which does not designate that which hides one’s face, but what one really is. Thus, rather than the avatar initiating a qualitative shift or radical extension of the posthuman variety, the avatar as “persona” (Gr.) returns us to a less protected and human version of ourselves.

Meadows, however, still can be placed in the “Posthuman” category. Fascinated by the new, his book begins by describing, “a strange migration into… machines from which the driver [the user] can peek out, squinting through alien eyes, and find a new world…” This migration also allows the “driver” to “…look inside himself, as if gazing into his navel, and find a new landscape inside as well” (Meadows 37). Confusingly, Meadows describes the avatar as the user’s “inner-hero” and, at other times, calls it “the usher of a posthuman era”. As the user of the posthuman era, Meadows refers to the avatar as a “psychological prosthetic” that “teleports our psyche” (Meadows 93). This sentiment is expressed most clearly when he suggests that in fifty years man may look back and note this as the period where “our bodies became obsolete, replaced by [the] more flexible, interesting, transportable, replicable, controllable prosthetic of the Avatar” (Meadows 94). In his argument, there is no human left to be extended into technology; this new body is built as much as it is born. Meadows, sounding like a New Age shaman, announces that “this is not science fiction but ‘progress’, it is how we grow into our imaginations and how our dreams become real” (Meadows 95). Note: Critics such as Paul Virilio lament this type of body. See the chapter “From Superman to Hyperactiveman” in his Art of the Motor for an exceptionally frightening account of where this type of body may end us up. (Virilio, Art 100)

In a section of I Avatar titled “Where there is ID, there will be EGO” Meadows discusses the users “inner hero”. He informs the reader: “you are the trunk of the identity tree, your avatars are the leaves” (Meadows 96). Given his prior comments about the avatar as the usher of the posthuman era, it remains unclear, however, whether he feels there is a discrete thing called the “I”. If not, how can there be an “identity tree”? Meadows cites the work of Dr. Volcani, who stresses the fact that the avatar allows us to control an aspect of our personality in a similar way that a child uses a doll to externalize an inner hero (Meadows 96). But where does personality, personhood, or the drive to externalize an inner hero come from in the first place? What generates the desire to see the hero succeed? The questions and contradictions multiply as Meadows explains Dr. Volcani’s argument that the avatar allows us to “experiment with new worlds, new versions of ourselves, and rehearse for life” (Meadows 96); (Brown 138). Are these “new worlds” and “new versions” of ourselves closed off to us by the limitations of real life? Or are these worlds and versions of our selves something new altogether?

Meadows argues that our avatars are us “in transformation. Being able to watch ourselves [in a sort of play therapy] creates a reflective state that’s good for us” (Meadows 96). Some of the tensions in Meadow’s work are resolved when he calls the avatar an “auto portrait”. A portrait is always a combination of “realism and the techniques artists use to communicate the subject’s personality” (Meadows 9). An auto-portrait possesses these qualities, but is also interactive. These ideas square well with his other assertions that the avatar remains “deeply attached to the psychology of the user” (Meadows 8). Understanding the avatar as an auto-portrait, deeply connected to the psychology and real life of the user, but necessarily, and simultaneously, enmeshed in social techniques answers some of the contradictory assertions found in Meadows’ book.

In an identically titled article, “I, Avatar: Constructions of Self and Place in Second Life and the Technological Imagination”, Donald E. Jones argues that SL avatars allow users to partake in types of creative activity that might not be available to them in real life (Jones 19). He also explains virtual bodies are capable of “extending the real body into virtual space” (Jones 22). This virtual extension, however, extends us in ways conditioned by our real lives. For example, users often seek to model their avatar on a “culturally accepted beauty or fantastical transcendent (mysterious) figure” (Jones 22-23). According to Jones, virtual worlds are spaces where users can construct either normalized (i.e. highly gendered, with certain ideal physical beauty traits) or fantastic (i.e. strictly performative, like a “furry” that allows the user to conform to their mental image) avatars (Jones 23-24).

Similarly to Meadows and Morie, Jones claims that, “…in the imagination world of SL, the material flesh is transcended [into] new configurations of self that fulfil wishes and fantasies” (Jones 25).43 Note: One is reminded here of Rita Koganzon’s claim in her article “The World Made New” that SL seems to be a rehearsal of social behaviour in an unpressured low stakes environment, rather than taking responsibility for the self we are given. (Koganzon) For another spin on this see Paul Virilio’s comments in The Art of the Motor about cyber-sex, which, claim nearly the same thing – albeit from a darker point of view. This “low stakes environment” seems to be a space where we are free to let our imagination have its way with others, without concern for their flesh or embodiment. But, what are we transcending? For instance, when a child rebels against her parents by getting drunk, tattooed, and pierced, does she transcend their parental authority? Obviously not; the tattoos, drunkenness and piercings actually qualify and call upon that parental authority. If my body does not meet the culturally proscribed criteria and I turn to an imaginary world that allows me to create a body that does meet those criteria, my unacceptable physical body remains unacceptable. Indeed, my unsatisfying body is the impetus, foundation, and motor for my so-called transcendence. Jones’ claim that the “material body is transcended” in imaginary play is suspect as the limits of the user’s material body are actually the necessary ground for the user’s choice to look at an imaginary-elsewhere.

Jones claims that we ought to think of the SL avatar as a “performative extension of the self without losing sight of its groundedness in actuality and embodiment of the flesh” (Jones 28). He continues: “a true understanding will ensure that, instead of being distracted by godhood and monstrosity, we can ever seek the human in whatever form it takes” (Jones 28). In the idea that we simultaneously enter into new performative extensions while being “embodied in the flesh” there is an unresolved schism in Jones’ article, a schism evocative of many theories of role-play, theatricality and performativity when they attempt to theorize avatarization.

There are, I insist, limitations to this “Performative” category of research on avatars. Recall that the Greek “theatron” designates “a place for seeing, not simply in the sense of watching but also in the deeper meaning to see – to grasp, to behold, to understand”. Similar to the root “theatron”, the Greek term “persona” (or “mask”) does not designate that which hides one’s face, but rather, what one really is. SL, understood as a theatre where users adopt personae, then, provides the ability to grasp, behold, or understand, what one really is. Following the theories of the “Performativity” category, this is done by rendering explicit the fact that the user really is not a fixed subject behind a mask, and does not exist outside of its masks.

When facing their screens, users construct and reconstruct their masks, rendering explicit that there is no actor outside the role, confirming that the “I” exists only through repeated expressions of its identity and identifying labels.

Thus, the “Performative” – like the “Posthuman” categorization of the avatar – can generally be thought of as anti-subjective and demonstrative of the contingency and flux of selfhood. SL, in this context, provides a space for the self (understood via performativity) to experiment with the possibility of change. Each new performance, or utterance that the avatar undergoes constitutes a sense of self within the user whose presence is always deffered.

The “Performative” avatar helps the user to understand self as a performance, and consequently, to engage with the engenderment of new selves. Each performance demonstrates the constant defferal and flux that comprises the self. When Morie explains that “virtual environments proffer exceptional insights…” (Morie 134), one wonders what, exactly, these insights illuminate? When she speaks of “new landscapes” we suspect that this “newness” has been brought into being performatively. What one grasps or understands, is not what Columbus experienced on finding the New World but something closer to the feelings of the engineers who artificially constructed the Palm Islands in Dubai. The user does not behold a previously unknown, unchanging core-self, but, rather, a self in flux that blossoms in new and newer ways. For this reason, Meadows explains that the avatar allows us to play, and “experiment with new worlds, new versions of ourselves…” (Meadows 96). Theorists of cyber “performativity”, along with the “posthuman” theorists, assert that the “interaction with our technologies allows us to gain new understandings of ourself” in transformation (Morie 134).

The “Performative” categorization of the avatar, however, seems to want to have it both ways; it seems unclear as to whether – despite performing endless new identities – there is some interiority, some “identity tree” that generates the desire for an “inner hero” to succeed. Like the “Posthuman” category, this category focuses too heavily on what virtual worlds such as SL allows users to become. Here, the term “avatar” continues to connote a transubstantiation the user undergoes in order to enter a space where the limitations of real life can be overcome.

Sources:

+Brown, Steven D. “Electronic Networks and Subjectivity” Cyberpsychology. Eds. Angel J. Gordo Lopez and Ian Parker. New York: Routledge, 1999: 146-167
+Butler, Judith. “Decking Out: Performing Identities” Inside / Out: Lesbian and Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991
—. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990 qtd. in Fron, Janine; Fullerton, Tracy; Morie, Jacquelyn Morie; Pearce, Cella. “Playing Dress-up: Costumes, Roleplay, Imagination”. Women in Games Conference, University of Wales, April 19-21, 2007
+Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
+Deutscher, Penelope. Derrida. London: Granta Books, 2005
+Fron, Janine; Fullerton, Tracy; Morie, Jacquelyn Morie; Pearce, Cella. “Playing Dress-up: Costumes, Roleplay, Imagination”. Women in Games Conference, University of Wales, April 19-21, 2007
+Hall, Donald E. Subjectivity. New York: Routledge, 2004
+Jones, D.E. “I, Avatar: Constructions of Self and Place in Second Life and the Technological Imagination” Gnovis, Journal of Communication, Culture and Technology, 2006:6.
+Meadows, Mark Stephen. I Avatar: The Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life. Indianapolis: New Riders Press, 2007
+Morie, Jacquelyn Ford. “Performing in (Virtual) Spaces: Embodiment and being in Virtual Environments”. International Journal of Performance and Digital Media 3(2&3):123-138
+Palumbo, M.L. New Wombs: Electronic Bodies and Architectural Disorders. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser, 2000 qtd. in Morie, Jacquelyn Ford. “Performing in (Virtual) Spaces: Embodiment and being in Virtual Environments.” in International Journal of Performance and Digital Media Vol 3(2&3): 123-138

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 5: Avatars as Evocative of Post-Industrial Capitalism?)

The Fifth part in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars.

Three kinds of categories emerge in scholarly literature dealing with avatars:
(1) The “Posthuman” Avatar and (1a) The “Posthuman (Capitalist)” Avatar,
(2) The “Performative” Avatar,
(3) The “Human” Avatar and (3a) The “Human (Psychoanalytic)” Avatar.

In this post, I will discuss (1a) The Posthuman (Capitalist) Avatar:
Similar to the “Posthuman” consideration of the avatar discussed in Part 4 is consumer researchers’ Handan Vicdan and Ebru Ulusoy’s article “Symbolic and Experiential Consumption of Body in Virtual Worlds: From (Dis)Embodiment to Sysembodiment”. While the “posthuman’ consideration reflects cultural critics, philosophers and authors such as Walter Benjamin,  Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche and JK Huysmans who noticed existential and aesthetic changes occurring in social patterns and habits, Vicdan and Ulusoy’s analysis draws on shifts in contemporary political, economic and technical habits and practices. These patterns, commonly referred to as movements toward “post-industrial society” or “late capitalism”, acknowledge the shift from Fordism to post-Fordist flexible accumulation, an industrial to a service economy, the tendency toward working with immaterial information rather that material objects and the ensuing proliferation of images and screens that accompanies these trajectories (Bell); (Jameson); (Harvey). This perspective holds that the social trajectories noted above undergird the postmodern.

The ground of postmodernity, according to critics such as David Harvey, is intricately tied to contemporary capitalism and forms of labour. Harvey specifically notes the shift from the stability demanded by the rigid Fordist mode of production to the flexibility demanded by the post-Fordist mode of flexible accumulation (Harvey, Condition 147, 302). Aside from flexible accumulation, the post-Fordist period saw the rise of neo-liberalism, which typically celebrates ephemerality and, as a result, created a disposable and flexible worker by tactics such as short term contracts (Harvey, History 166). Unsurprisingly, flexible accumulation and neo-liberalism, together creating an environment of permanent innovation in order to accommodate ceaseless change rather than the control demanded by Fordism, has engendered a “flexible personality” amongst individuals living in post-Fordist societies (Holmes 2, 7). This “flexible personality” emerges not only in response to casual labour contracts, but also to other traits of post-Fordism including its just-in-time production, its informational products and its absolute  dependence on virtual currency circulating in the financial sphere…. [as well as] an entire set of very positive images [such as] spontaneity, creativity, cooperativity, mobility, peer relations, appreciation of difference, openness to present experience (Holmes 2).

Anthony Elliot likewise argues that the postmodern self is subject to the “disorienting effects of new capitalism”; it is a self that is constantly in motion and does not commit itself to long term employment (Sennett, Corrosion qtd. in Elliot, Concepts 138). These effects produce modalities of selfhood that do not privilege stability. The “Postmodern (Capitalist)” consideration of the avatar assumes that selfhood mirrors the development of the economy from a series of “rigid, hierarchical organizaion[s]” to an economy of “corporate re-engineering, innovation, and risk”; the “durable self” gives way to a “fragmented, dislocated one” (Elliott, Concepts 138-140). According to Richard Sennett, identity becomes “pliant”, a “collage of fragments unceasing in its becoming, ever open to the new experience” under the flexible regime of new capitalism (Sennett, Culture 14).

Thus, postmodernity is – according to this point of view – evocative of “the relatively stable aesthetic of Fordist modernism [having given] way to all the ferment, instability and fleeting qualities of a postmodernist aesthetic that celebrates difference, ephemerality, spectacle and the commodification of cultural forms.” (Harvey, Condition 156). According to this position it is in this context that digital technologies and “interconnected global communications networks” (together comprising a virtual world like Second Life SL) are to be considered as postmodern techniques (Harvey, Condition 171). Note: One way of theorizing the postmodern self is that it is engendered by contemporary forms of labour and modes of production include the “protean” (Lifton), “saturated” (Gergen) or “flexible” (Martin) subject. Gergen, for example, regards the self as saturated: “the ego as a hollow tube through which, under different circumstances, different parts of our personality – each time a different one – find expression” (Filiciak 64). These ideas are related insofar as their view of the self co-responds to new social positions and practices demanded of our bodies by the capitalist mode of production. These formulations resonate with contemporary descriptions on the Left about labour and current modes of production (i.e. post-Fordist, Toyotism) that call for the emergence of a ductile, flexible subjectivity (Brown 92). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire exemplifies an analysis of new political powers (Empire) and contemporaneously unrealized subjectivities and relationships between people (the Multitude), and provides a rallying cry for the emergence of a new body able to harness this to its advantage and render itself discontinuous with contemporary regimes of control – in other words, to use flexibility against itself. They write: “We certainly do need to change our bodies and ourselves, and in perhaps a more radical way than the cyberpunk authors imagine. In our contemporary world, the now common aesthetic mutations of the body, such as piercing, tattoos, punk fashion and its various imitations are all initial indications of this corporeal transformation, but in the end they do not hold a candle to the kind of radical mutation needed here”. (Hardt and Negri, 216).  The postmodern body, labouring in call centres positioned throughout the globe or designing new software and upgrades, is inserted into these hyper-technologized systems of production.

Image from http://chaosmonster.blogspot.com/2008_07_01_archive.html

Critics also note that the new capitalist sensibility, marked by non-allegiance and malleability, fosters a “self identity [that] is free from the stain of gender, class, and race” (Elliott, Subject 142). Vicdan and Ulusoy classify the SL avatar body, which users (re)construct for its own sake, as a phenomenon of life in postmodern and post-industrial culture. They insist that the popularity of virtual worlds and their capacity for the creation of avatars is part and parcel of a postmodern urge to be a self “independent and free of nature and any particular way of being and living” (Vicdan and Ulusoy 17). In other words, they hold that the user engages with a flexible and nature-free ‘sign’ body without a ‘referent’. To “Posthuman (Capitalist)” critics this ability to leave the referent behind in order to be free of “any particular way of being and living” is often naively taken to underscore some liberatory potential of contemporary capitalism.

In “Hyperidentities: Postmodern Identity Patterns in Massively Multiplayer Online Pole-Playing-Games”, Miroslaw Filiciak argues that MMORPGs realize the postulates of a postmodern culture of simulation and fascination with new ways of defining one’s self on a scale previously unseen (Filiciak 88). He acknowledges that the sense of self one finds in MMORPGs is premised on the user’s desire to shape their own self into something that real life social, sexual, or racial limitations prohibit; this view resonates with Michel Foucault’s claim that we possess no inside self, no essence that makes us what we are. Note: According to Foucault, one’s subjectivity, or sense of a coherent identity, is the effect of being subjugated by social factors and forces. This subjugation is carried out by discourses, which order certain types of thought and behavior. Foucault is interested in creating a “history of the different modes by which, in our [Western] culture, human beings are made subjects” (Foucault, “Subject” 208). For him, subjectivity is a contingent, socio-historical construct of power and domination, and therefore subject to change and modification. There is no absolute, transcendental stance from which to grasp a fixed subject.  As such, for Foucault, the self is a discursive, and temporary, construction (Filiciak 93). Contemporary practices and techniques, in line with the capitalist desire to render the body wholly flexible, responsive and malleable are not aimed at merely disciplining the body of the consumer; rather, they are aimed at experimenting upon the user’s body and identity, transforming them, and rendering them commensurate with contemporary habits of consumption. Note: Foucault considers these techniques and arrangements of technologized shaping of the body and self, or “bio-technico-power” (locatable in genomics and gene mapping, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, networks of surveillance et cetera.) to be “technologies of the self” insofar as they have an effect on the self in a way that prior “disciplinary” techniques did not (Dreyfuss and Rabinow xxvi); (Foucault Discipline).  It is in this context that Filiciak writes optimistically of MMORPGs as materializing the postmodern dream and that “thanks to computer networks we have the possibility to freely form our self (Filiciak 100).

Another observation made by critics articulating the traits of postmodernity is that life in 21st century post-industrial countries is oriented toward the consumption of signs rather than objects (Baudrillard, Simulacra). Note: The most obvious example of this is the shift from physical-analog to digital-binary: we work with objects reducible to the 1s and 0s of binary code, objects qualitatively different from those understood as a myriad combination of physical and chemical properties. This is evidenced in contemporary life where the attention of consumers is increasingly fixated on abstract or symbolic (sign) value rather than attaining the object (referent) itself. In describing “the most advanced state of th[e cotemporary global information] economy”, Manuel Castells explains that “the products of the new information technology industries are information processing devices or information processing itself’” (Castells 67 qtd. in Holmes). Note:  Steven Shaviro, David Harvey and others write of the re-organization of capital that has occurred over the last forty years, explaining that “production is subordinated to circulation, instead of the reverse. Money, the universal equivalent, has become increasingly virtual (unmoored by any referent) over the past half century, and everything is decentered or unmoored in its wake” (Shaviro 129).

Jean Baudrillard, who calls these signs “simulacra”, claims that we are witnessing the creation of a new order of objects and bodies that no longer exist in the real of physical materiality, but in the order of the symbolic immaterial code. At this nihilistic stage of Western culture signifiers refer only to other signifiers and we lose the ability to comprehend binaries such as “signifier” and “signified”, or “real” and “unreal”. Note: The placement of Baudrillard here might confuse some readers of Baudrillard, and demands an explanation. Given Baudrillard’s ever-changing perspective, he need not be considered, ultimately, as a theorist concerned with Capitalism and its effects. Capitalism comes to be merely one facet of Baudrillard’s investigations and certainly does not remain the prime- mover of history throughout his career. Primarily, for Baudrillard, it seems that something ominous has happened to the West’s relationship to, and interpretation of, the world. While this change is clearly recognizable in the realm of economics and finance, the economy does not govern that change. In other words, for Baudrillard post-modernity signals the end, or exhaustion, of the trajectory of modernity. Capital gets sucked into the nihilistic void of post-modernity, but it was not capital that caused that void. Rather, modernity’s liberatory promise (the telos of the Enlightenment) has been fulfilled: we are now living with having liberated everything (including the commodity form). This explains the title of his essay “After the Orgy” (Baudrillard, Transparency, 4). After the “orgy” of modernity we have nothing left to liberate and so, in lieu of anything new to liberate, we have turned to simulating objects to liberate. On these conditions, in relation to the intellectual project of Modernity having come to fruition, does Baudrillard consider the technologies and techniques of capital. On these grounds “what has been liberated has been liberated so that it can enter a state of pure circulation, so that it can go into orbit… the goal of liberation is to foster and provision circulatory networks” (Baudrillard, Transparency 4). It is following this “orgy” that we find phenomena such as virtual economies. These are economies that, true to the dark promise of acompleted Modernity, are emancipated, or liberated, from real economies. For this reason, I stress that Baudrillard’s ideas can support a “Posthuman” and/or “Posthuman (Capitalist)” consideration of avatarization. We now work with models of the “real” and the “true” that only refer to other models of “real” and “true”. Often misunderstood as illusionary, the simulacra is completely real. In what Baudrillard refers to as “third” and “fourth order” simulacra it is not the territory that precedes the map, but the map that precedes the territory. The map does not represent the territory, but as “simulation generates meaning from models that pre-exist experience and perception of the ‘real’”, it comes to constitute the territory (Pawlett 82). Thus, simulation comes to “have no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (Baudrillard, Simulacra, 6). Note: Baudrillard locates this type of simulation in “…the omnipresence of code in the West – DNA, binary, digital – [which] enables the production of copies for which there are no originals. Unsecured and cut adrift from the ‘reality’ which representation has for centuries prided itself on mirroring, we are now in the age of simulation” (Berry and Pawlik).

We are governed, Baudrillard claims, by the “code”, or “structural law of value”, an era of “sign exchange value” as the principle of equivalence. Only things transformed into code are meaningful, and the world is modeled on general equivalence. Things are reducible to their code, to their always re-constructible patterns. Note: Following Katherine Hayles, we have moved from thinking of objects (and increasingly ourselves) in analog terms of “presence and absence” to thinking in digital terms of “pattern and randomness” (Hayles 25). The “hyper-real” self, according to Baudrillard, represents a self that exists in an environment where everything has become transparent and explicit. The body undergoes transmutation in endeavours such as genetic cloning and the self, in turn, is crushed. Our selfhood is no longer that of an active “player”, but more of a passive “spectator”. We are no longer selves who stand dialectically against the object, but selves whom the object has rendered “lifeless, bored, drained and atomized”. (Elliot, Concepts 150). Postmodern selfhood exchanges a modernist sense of self (such as the Freudian one) with some hidden, concealed depth or interiority, for a self that has no repressed element or “depth of meaning”. (Elliot, Concepts 151) The hyper-real self, for Baudrillard, is passive and thinks in accordance with the “code” of dominant symbolic systems. (Elliot, Concepts 151)

The SL “consumer”, Vicdan and Ulusoy allege, plays with its flexibility and capacity for (re)creation, consuming via the (re)creation of “symbolic selves” (Vicdan and Ulusoy 2); (Martin “Use-Value” 18). Note: One might look to Jean Baudrillard’s For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign as well as Jennifer Martin’s article “Consumer Code: Use-value, Exchange-Value, and the Role of Virtual Goods in Second Life”, an exploration of virtual worlds through modern theories of consumption which suggests that “use-value” (based on physical-material needs/the ability to fulfill a need) has been overridden by “exchange-value” as well as “sign-value”. From this point of view users consume symbolic-meanings (i.e. individuality, power, status, community belonging) in relation to the virtual world of SL. In their characterization of the SL user as “creat[ing] symbolic selves” Vicdan and Ulusoy are working with a resolutely postmodern framework: SL users consume the symbolic simulacral sign. SL avatars provide the ability for consumers to work with a simulation of their bodies. As signs are not necessarily tied to the consumer’s real body or self, avatar bodies and identities are celebrated as being “beyond constraints” and harbingers, par excellence, of the so-called “friction free” utopia to-come. Under this schema, through their technologically mediated simulacral double, a visually manipulatable symbolic scripted/image-body, the user feels that they can dictate who and what they are, free from the limitations of physicality and the signified.

Within virtual worlds users interact with and (re)construct symbolic bodies: SL consumers are, truly, in light of this discussion, a “cult of the hyperreal”. (Vicdan and Ulusoy 17) This cult is concerned less with buying, selling and interacting with material objects (that had use-value) than they are concerned with immaterial objects (that have symbolic value). Vicdan and Ulusoy celebrate this burgeoning consumer cult of the hyperreal by citing celebratory consumer reactions to the so-called bodily and subjective freedom of SL. Their study documents consumers who “want to be something else” and who want to get to know people “quickly and easily, ‘cause you’re not so worried about your appearance as you might be in real life” (Vicdan and Ulusoy 9). A consumer named Raven explains with fantastic naïveté:

We’re born with set bodies. They look a certain way; they will always look a certain way and that’s it. My mind doesn’t have  those  constraints.  Raven  is  a  woman  that  my  mind projects as me. I guess if you’re given the opportunity to be anything, to think outside the box like that  why stick with what you are in real life when you could be an animal you admire, a beautiful fish (Vicdan and Ulusoy 8-9).

This desire to be beyond constraint is, of course, ludicrous: aging, sickness and death befall the body irrespective of whether we think we have mentally overcome them. To simply ignore them is to ignore an entire history, and tradition, of tarrying with these, fundamental, negative aspects of the human condition. Furthermore, this desire peaks to the fantasy of having originally had a stable body or identity that is disrupted by new techniques.

One might, however, situate this consumer glorification of an “opportunity to be anything”, against the horizon of Deleuze and Guattari’s claim in Anti-Oedipus that human beings are increasingly becoming “transformations and exchanges of information” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti 458). This has led their commentators, such as Brian Massumi, to articulate modalities of indeterminate selves. Massumi writes favourably of a simulacral “…pool of virtuality, [with the ability] to create a yet unseen amalgamation of potentials” (Massumi). New virtual technologies, no longer moored to a fixed referent or signifier, produce a new body or territory from which there is no turning back…, whereby we “becom[e] realer than real in a monstrous contagion of our own making” (Massumi).

Summary of the (1)”Posthuman” and (1a) “Posthuman (Capitalist)” understanding of avatars: “Posthuman” and “Posthuman (Capitalist)” analyses have much to tell us about the context of our second lives: they are indispensable in articulating the political and economic conditions that might compel a user to spend hours each day with their virtual avatar. A discussion of these (historical-political-economic) conditions is symptomatic of an Epimethean understanding of the effects of technology. But because such an understanding does not adequately consider Oedipus, the category runs into severe limitations. The starting point of the “Posthuman” category is a fantasy that the avatar represents some deviation from what once was a core or autonomous self. The very term “posthuman connotes that there once was a human, a self, or a subject that virtual avatarization (as a phenomena reflective of changing historical structures) has moved us beyond. Note: It is not coincidental then, that this position often involves creating a strawman of figures paradigmatic of modernity and the early modern period such as Descartes without adequately contextualizing their arguments. Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject, for example, is concerned with returning to an interpretation of Descartes’ cogito that differs tremendously from the cogito endlessly strawmanned and blamed.

Following the myth of Epimetheus, however, the human was always posthuman; it was always historical, and its essence has always been wrapped up in technique. The “Posthuman” category functions paradoxically: on one hand the posthuman avatar represents the next phase of a human that has little or no interior human essence, and on the other hand, it clings to the fantasy that the avatar represents the next phase of a human that did – at one time – have an interior human essence. Because this tension is not adequately resolved, “Posthuman” critiques tend to rely on articulating the avatar as an example of emerging subjectivities, new formations of self, and denizens of a new world of symbolic creation with immaterial signs, where we are naively told we can be what and who we want to be.

This “Posthuman” sense of the avatar resembles the Hindu and Judeo- Christian connotations of “avatara” and “incarnation”. It holds that once we were human, now we are moving beyond-the-human; but in its desire to theorize what comes next, the category does not adequately, or care to, inquire what the human was. As such, it is no coincidence that the category continues the idea that the avatar is a discarnation, a reversal of incarnation. The avatar is a posthuman self that is no longer bound in the ways that the human self was bound; it inhabits a world without limitations. The drawback of this way of thinking is that it leads to the fantasy that  that  once cut adrift, rendered discarnate, or posthuman, we are liberated from the weight, mass, and inertia of what was once our human condition. Such a dualistic way of thinking, between the human and the posthuman, only serves to perpetuate a limited understanding of the avatar as a form of transubstantiation.

Sources
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—. Ecstasy of Communication. Trans. Bernard and Caroline Schutze. New York: Semiotext(e), 1988
—. For a Critique of the Political Economy of The Sign. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981
—. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. New York: Verso Books, 1990
+Bell, Daniel. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Basic Books, 1976
+Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. London: Blackwell, 1996 in Holmes, Brian. “The Flexible Personality”
+Deleuze, Giles and Guattari, Felix. Anti Oedipus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta, 1983 (1972)
+Elliott, Anthony. Subject to Ourselves: Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Postmodernity. Boulder, Co: Paradigm Publishers, 2004
—. Concepts of the Self. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008
+Filiciak, Miroslaw. “Hyperidentities: Postmodern Identity Patterns in Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games” The Video Game Theory Reader. Eds. J.P. Mark Wolf and Bernard Perron. London : Routledge, 2003.
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+Lifton, Robert Jay. The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation. New York: Basic Books, 1983 qtd. in Figueroa-Sarriera, Heidi J. “In and out of the Digital Closet: The Self as a Communication Network” Trans. Jane Ramirez. Cyberpsychology. Eds. Angel J Gordo-Lopez and Ian Parker. New York: Routledge, 1999: 130-145
+Martin, Jennifer. “Consuming Code: Use-Value, Exchange-Value, and the Role of Virtual Goods in Second Life” Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 1:2 (2008)
+Martin, Emily. Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of Aids. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994 qtd. in Figueroa- Sarriera, Heidi J. “In and out of the Digital Closet: The Self as a Communication Network” Trans. Jane Ramirez. Cyberpsychology. Eds. Angel J Gordo-Lopez and Ian Parker. New York: Routledge, 1999: 130-145
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+Vicdan, Handan and Ulusoy, Ebru. “Symbolic and Experiential Consumption of Body in Virtual Worlds: From (Dis)Embodiment to Sysembodiment” Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 1:2 (Nov 2008)
+Žižek, Slavoj. Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. New York: Verso Press, 2009 (1999)

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 4: Avatars as Harbingers of the Posthuman?)

The Fourth in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars.

Three kinds of categories emerge in scholarly literature dealing with avatars:
(1) The “Posthuman” Avatar and (1a) The “Posthuman (Capitalist)” Avatar,
(2) The “Performative” Avatar,
(3) The “Human” Avatar and (3a) The “Human (Psychoanalytic)” Avatar.

In this post, I will discuss (1) The Posthuman Avatar:
Several studies of Second Life (SL) argue that avatars are technological extensions or prostheses that create new types of posthuman beings. Virtual bodies, these studies contend, act as harbingers of a time beyond the human. In their article “Embodied Narrative: The Virtual Nomad and the Meta Dreamer”, Denise Doyle and Taey Kim explore narratives of embodiment in virtual worlds and web 2.0 environments. The two researchers communicate with one another using the monikers Wanderingfictions (for the researcher in SL) and Dongdong (for the researcher using web 2.0 environments). Wanderingfictions explains to Dongdong that she acts and moves as if her “non- human” (SL avatar) body and identity were real (Doyle and Kim 214). Dongdong, interested by Wanderingfictions’ suggestion that her virtual-body is tied to a non-, or post-, human form of identity, agrees, stating that “…we are all becoming posthuman”. The researchers are interested in the radical posthuman freedom that accompanies the loss of one’s human identity and body within 3D virtual worlds. Wanderingfictions expresses a Katherine Hayles-inspired posthuman reflection on the nature of virtual selfhood: “I am being defined as pattern, not presence. I have the experience of embodiment, although I know my body is virtual. There is little true form here, only a series of associations” (Hayles 25-26); (Doyle and Kim 214). Note: While reading their discussion, I am reminded of cyber-optimist John Barlow’s claim that “Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.” (Barlow)

Theoretically, Doyle and Kim’s posthuman rhetoric bears traces of both Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the fate of the “aura” amidst technological reproduction in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and Marshall Mcluhan’s notion of the changes that linear, or “Guttenberg”, man undergoes in technologically mediated acoustic and non-linear environments (Mcluhan). Mcluhan and Benjamin articulate an early kind of technologically informed posthuman self-identity; in one case human beings are affected by a world that no longer has a sense of the “auratic”, in another case human beings are affected by a world that no longer operates on principles of “linearity”. Consider the following claim by Dongdong:

We are evolving ourselves with communications and the creation of expression towards this blurry world we exist  [sic]. Text will expand in every direction. We will not live in a horizontal timeline any longer. You will be able to  create nameless nations and unauthorized territories,  paradoxical zones like the Taj Mahal without India in  your virtuality (Doyle and Kim 214).

A clear relationship exists between the decline of Benjamin’s aura and “the Taj Mahal without India”, or Mcluhan’s non linear electronic community and the idea of no longer living in a “horizontal timeline” (Benjamin); (Mcluhan 55-56). The virtual Taj Mahal, comprised of virtual scripts and codes, deployable and removable at the click of a mouse interrogates the authenticity, and awe, that the real Taj Mahal once inspired. The world itself no longer demands our attention and focus in the way it did earlier. Linear narratives privileging horizontality lose their importance as the simulation saturated world demands different types of non-linear narratives that privilege a de-centered and heterogeneous directionality.

Studies of online identity, one of the most famous being Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen, often work with Benjamin’s insight that “even the most perfect reproduction is lacking in one element: its presence in space and time, its unique existence at the places where it happens to be” (Benjamin). Turkle explains that “in simulation identity can be fluid and multiple, a signifier no longer points to a thing that is signified, and understanding is less likely to proceed through analysis than by navigation through virtual space” (Turkle, Life 49); (Turkle, “Beyond” 646). Here, virtual simulation does something to our identity, it creates a new sort of self, one whose outward appearance – via its mechanical reproducibility and its inhabiting of non-linear environments – is no longer necessarily tied to a stable referent. Likewise, for Wanderingfictions and Dongdong, the avatar appears to radically interrogate an autonomous, or core “I”. This “I”, prior to contemporary technologies, was a seemingly fixed and assured Archimedean point of subjectivity which Descartes declared in his Mediations to be “certain and unshaken” (Descartes 17).

Social theorists, philosophers and novelists have long noted the tendency for modern technologies, and technocratic ways of living, to alter our sense of self and what it means to be an “I”. Doyle and Kim’s posthuman conversation piece can be located alongside antecedents as varied as philosopher Martin Heidegger and novelist J.K. Huysmans; both of whom recognize, in their own ways, that the belief in an unchanging human self (as a unitary, solid subject) is being radically interrogated and challenged by new technologies and social practices.

Heidegger’s considerations of the effects of modern technology on human subjectivity can assist in our analysis of Doyle and Kim’s posthumanism. In “The Question Concerning Technology” and “The Age of the World Picture” Heidegger considers the changing status of the self amidst modern technology. Tied to this changing status is his assertion that modern technology displaces the “wordliness” of the world and puts a human-world in its place. He uses the term “enframing” to explain the way humans, as users of modern technology, have come to relate to (and literally “frame”) the world (Heidegger, “Question” 19). To demonstrate the characteristics of this modern technological “Enframing” of the world Heidegger contrasts a windmill with a modern hydroelectric power plant. In describing how the windmill differs from the type of “revealing” that characterizes modern technology, he explains that the “old windmill’s…sails do indeed turn in the wind; [but are] … left entirely to the wind’s blowing. …the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it” (Heidegger, “Question” 14). The windmill only transfers motion, it “reveals” wind energy, but does not commandeer nature’s energy or store it for future use (Mitcham 49). In contrast to a windmill or a wooden bridge that joins one bank of the Rhine with the other, a hydroelectric plant is set in the current of the river.  Note: In the “Question Concerning Technology” Heidegger comments:

The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It sets the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines turning. This turning sets those machines in motion whose thrust sets going the electric current for which the long-distance power station and its network of cables are set up to dispatch electricity.” In the context of the  interlocking  processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical  energy, even the  Rhine  itself  appears  as something  at our command. The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather  the  river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station. (Heidegger, “Question” 16)

The bridge, in his argument, preserves  the Rhine’s  intrinsic  value: the river retains its own value, we simply cross over it. “The bridge”, Heidegger writes “lets the stream run its course” (Heidegger “Building” 150). The power station, on the other hand, transforms the Rhine into a very  different  object  and  its  value  becomes  a  human  value.  Even  from  the  vantage  of  an observer: staring out at the bridge one sees the river running beneath it, its flow unobstructed, unimpaired by the bridge that stands across it. The bridge does not direct the flow of the water. On the other hand, an observer of a hydroelectric power station built into the Rhine witnesses a different  sort  of  river,  one  whose  flow  is  obstructed,  impaired,  and  directed  by  the  power station. The river itself, when impacted by the hydroelectric plant, appears under the command of human beings. The hydroelectric plant challenges the energies of the Rhine, stores them in a non-sensuous abstract form whose value is discernable by, and exclusively for, the will of human beings. This, in turn, gives humans a different view of the Rhine. This “challenging-forth”, rather than “bringing-forth”, substantiates Heidegger’s claim that the world has been turned into “standing-reserve” as a result of modern technology. The challenging:

…happens  in  that  the  energy  concealed  in  nature  is unlocked,  what  is  unlocked  is  transformed,  what  is transformed  is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing. But the revealing never simply comes to an end (Heidegger, “Question” 16). (Emphasis mine)

His argument throughout “The Question Concerning Technology” that there was a different way of revealing called techne that aimed to bring things forth and let them appear that pre-exited our own method of technological “switching about” can be considered one form of a posthuman argument. Doyle and Kim’s posthuman conversation piece occurs within a worldview that believes modern technology has done, and continues to do, something drastic to how we live and what we are. This view regards virtual technologies, and the types of identities and selves conditioned by them, as thriving in an environment of constant switching-about where objects are challenged forth as standing-reserve. The virtual world of SL, where users’ online personae have no anchoring point, no gold-standard to refer their identities to, is paradigmatic of the Heideggerian claim of being switched about ever anew. This position contends that the modern individual, considered a functionary of Enframing, is less and less subject to the “wind’s blowing”, and increasingly under the purview of an anthropocentric will to (technological) power. Following the logic of Enframing one comes to consider the posthuman body as one fabricated entirely by, and for, the will of human beings.

While in SL, I often ask other residents whether they feel there is a typical SL body. Some of the time I am told that the fact that there is no typical SL body is one of the reasons the user was drawn to the virtual world in the first place. Doyle and Kim lucidly convey this position and preference. While many users do have avatar bodies that resemble their own, they often assert that they do not feel a sense of authenticity and normalcy, that there is no interior subject or substance; their self is dispersed and endlessly switching about. Their avatar-bodies are always potentially – or virtually – a canvas for something else. Most SL users I have encountered do not find the idea of an anchoring, or normal, SL body intelligible. In fact, all the objects in SL, constructed of geometric prims, Note: “The basic building block of Second Life… All in-world objects are constructed from primitives. A prim is a basic shape (such as a box, sphere, cylinder, etc.) that can be manipulated, stretched, cut, twisted, hollowed, and otherwise mangled into various forms. A builder can link a collection of prims together to form one cohesive object.” (Puritans). are examples of standing reserve that have no inherent value of their own apart from the value that human users bestow upon them. Note: i.e. “…As this historical transformation of beings into resources becomes more pervasive, it increasingly eludes our critical gaze; indeed, we come to treat even ourselves in the terms underlying our technological refashioning of the world: no longer as conscious subjects in an objective world but merely as resources to be optimized, ordered, and enhanced with maximal efficiency (whether cosmetically, psychopharmacologically, genetically, or even cybernetically)” (Thompson 5). If all things are transferable, offering the maximum possible use, so are the avatar-bodies who call SL their home. If modern technology has “changed our taste or sense of the world”, it has also changed our taste or sense of the body, what it means to be a self (Wrathall 101). Novelist J.K. Huysmans associates this state of being without inherent form with human beings rendering themselves aesthetic objects in a post-Copernican era. Note: That is, symptomatic of living in a culture drifting away from the niche carved out for it by the Aristotelian cosmology where bodies, by their very nature, were understood as having a natural way of moving (Aristotle). As Des Esseintes, the aesthete-dandy protagonist, and modern-man par excellence, of Huysmans prophetic 1884 novel Against Nature foresaw: while the self was once thought to possess a fixed place and nature, it is increasingly losing that place. Des Esseintes suffers from a terrible stomach ailment. Due to his illness his meals are prepared in the form of a Peptone enema. He comes to enjoy the enema so much that he begins preparing enema-meals for himself and ends up revelling in the experience. Such an unorthodox manner of nourishment may revolt us, but for him, “[t]he experience…was, so to speak, the crowning achievement of the life he had planned for himself; his taste for the artificial had now, without even the slightest effort on his part, attained its supreme fulfillment. No one would ever go any further; taking nourishment in this way was undoubtedly the ultimate deviation from the norm…” He revels in the aesthetic and artificial, and this incident is no exception. Reflecting on the Peptone enema he thinks to himself: “What a slap in the face of mother nature, whose monotonous demands would be permanently silenced”. In the present day we do carry much of Des Esseintes appetite for the artificial around with us, especially in those increasingly common instances where our bodies become the canvases for works of cosmetic surgery. Esseintes’ aesthetic attitude transpires, he admits, in a self “beneath a firmament no longer lit by the consoling beacon-fires of ancient hope” (Huysmans 221) Likewise, the Copernican revolution (initiated by the decline of Ptolemaic astronomy and Aristotelian cosmology), has been followed by immensely significant historical shifts such as Darwin’s anti-teleological theory of natural selection, Freud’s relocation of the unconscious into the post-Enlightenment mindset, Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, and two World Wars, that, taken altogether, stain the belief that human beings have a circumscribed place in the cosmos and can be developing toward a teleological endpoint of History. We no longer regard ourselves as creatures whose bodies and thoughts have a pre-determined role in the cosmos. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche conveys this post-Copernican sentiment: “What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing?” (Nietzsche, Gay 181).

Wanderingfictions and Dongdong claim that virtual worlds like Second Life are doing something to us: “we are shrinking, growing, expanding, deforming, deleting, creating, modifying and metamorphosizing, and disappearing” (Doyle and Kim 218). They write as if their sense of “I”, their sense of selfhood and subjectivity is undergoing a radical transformation. Wanderingfiction explains that her SL body needs to be changed; she feels “very fluid”, “changes all the time”, and is “free of form” (Doyle and Kim 218-219). By focusing on technical extensions and prostheses as responsible for altering what it means to be an “I” Doyle and Kim’s article clearly demonstrates a posthumanist engagement with SL avatarization.

In the next post, I’ll discuss The “Posthuman (Capitalist)” understanding of avatars…

Sources
+Aristotle. On the Heavens. Trans. WKC Guthrie. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1960
+Barlow, John. “A Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace” 9 Feb 1996. <http://wac.colostate.edu/rhetnet/barlow/barlow_declaration.html>
+Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1986
+Doyle, Denise, and Kim, Taey. “Embodied narrative: The virtual nomad and the meta dreamer” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 3:2-3 (December 2007).
+Heidegger, Martin.  “Age of the World Picture” The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Garland Publishing, 1977
—. “Question Concerning Technology” The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Garland Publishing, 1977
—. “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstader. New York: Harper Collins, 1971
+Mcluhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: Extensions of Man – Critical Edition. New York: Ginko Press, 2003
+Nietzsche, Friedrich. Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kauffman. New York: Random House, 1974
+Thompson, Iain. “What’s Wrong With Being a Technological Essentialist: A Response to Feenberg” Inquiry 43:4 (December 2000):429–444
+Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1995
—. “Looking Toward Cyberspace: Beyond Grounded Sociology” Contemporary Sociology 28:6 (Nov 1999): 643-648
+Wrathall, Mark. Heidegger. London: Granta Books, 1998

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 3: The Human in the Posthuman; Oedipus behind Epimetheus)

The Third in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars.

The Avatar through a Subjective and Humanist Lens

Over the next posts I will be interested in the interaction between the user’s sense of self or subjectivity and their Second Life (SL) avatar through the lens of the psychoanalytic theorists Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. I will ultimately side with the Lacanians Bruce Fink and Slavoj Žižek who insist that the aim of psychoanalysis is to understand the functioning of the largely unconscious drives that comprise our complex humanity. Note: That is, Fink and Žižek as opposed to Lacanian/Post-Lacanian literature that reads Freud and Lacan “through the lens of Foucault” as proto post-Structuralists. (Powell) Readings common to cyberculture studies appear, at times, to misread the project of psychoanalysis as a denial of the human subject – a reading that ignores Lacan’s lifelong engagement with the subject. Unlike the largely post-Structuralist position of cyberfeminism, which comprised a great deal of the groundbreaking cyberculture studies of the 1990s, “Lacan was never interested in the ‘death of man’, which he ridiculed as a straw man tactic in his seminars of the mid-1960s, nor did he bracket out all questions of the subject as consistently as Michel Foucault. Thus, Lacan never reduced subjective agency to … the transpersonal insistence of power” (Powell). Bruce Fink is at pains to remind the us that Lacan was not a post-Structuralist who sought to deconstruct and dispel the notion of the human subject, rather Lacan’s work questioned what it meant to be a subject and the failures associated with becoming one (Fink, Lacanian ix). For Lacan, then, otherness does not threaten, but is in fact the support for, the subject. This is the view that Fink and Žižek push throughout their interpretations of Lacan, and one that I share. Over the next few weeks I will be offering an intervention into understanding the relationship between the new media of virtual worlds and selfhood and subjectivity using a “subjective” Lacanian framework rather than an “anti-subjective” one (Mansfield). In the face of “Anti-subjective” analyses of virtual worlds carried out primarily by Foucauldians, Deleuzians and Cyberfeminists, I want to know what a properly psychoanalytic, subjective, analysis of virtual world avatars might resemble? That is to say, against the abundant post-Oedipal, post-modern, post-gendered, post-x (etc…) interventions into virtual reality and cyberspace, I will deploy concepts like the Freudian uncanny (“unheimlich”) and call on the assistance of the psychoanalytic concepts “lack”, “desire”, “the object petit a”, and the “fragmented body”, which tend to occupy the fringes of contemporary cyber-discourse.

Avatars are not exclusively graphical representations that allows users the ability to navigate a virtual world, technological overcomings of our human condition, extensions/prostheses of the self, or radically decentered dispersals of the self into multiple selves and subjectivities. The conceptualization of the avatar that I am attempting to convey does not entirely dismiss post-Structuralist (i.e. Foucauldian, Deleuzian and Cyberfeminist) claims that we are encountering new modalities of selfhood and subjectivity as a result of our encounters with virtual avatars. It does, however, raise questions about the view that avatarization can be explained with exclusive recourse to these “becomings”, ever new “rhizomatic” connections, and “machinic assemblages” noted throughout works like Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. It raises questions about regarding cyberspace as a necessarily affirmative space where the body is no longer constrained by the Symbolic authority of what Lacan calls the “master signifier”. It also raises questions about characterizations of the avatar as a performative tool for the discursive creation of new modalities of self.

I want to move theoretical debates about avatars away from technophilic (and phobic) discourses, toward a more humanist engagement. I take seriously, but not exclusively, the humanist wisdom found in the Old Testament book of “Ecclesiastes”: ‘What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun’ (Ecc. 1:9) and attempt to fuse it with a study of new media technologies. Despite having quoted Koheleth’s lamentations in “Ecclesiastes”, the humanist approach toward the study of new media articulated throughout these posts is not entirely a conservative one. As Tom Boellstorff suggests, it is not true “that there is nothing new under the virtual sun” (Boellstorff 5). As such, I insist that the so-called new “posthuman” changes wrought by new media technologies, such as SL avatarization, ought to be thought together with how those technologies interact with something that is indelibly “human”. Note: In declaring the cyborg to be post-Oedipal, Donna Haraway, for example, imagines a new type of subjective arrangement. But others, such as Paul Virilio, have concerns about the loss of phenomenological “appearance” (Virilio, Open) and can be understood as focusing their attention on the complexities of some human condition. An inspection of the launchpad of human subjectivity ought to be in order before blasting off into posthuman space.

The Epimethean Dimension of Human Being

I introduce this posthumanist humanism by juxtaposing two mythical figures: Epimetheus and Oedipus.  Heideggerian philosopher of technology Bernard Steigler remarks in Technics and Time Vol.1: The Fault of Epimetheus, that our contemporary technoculture can glean much from the ancient Greek myth of the brother gods Prometheus (forethought) and Epimetheus (afterthought). In Plato’s Protagoras, Epimetheus is given the task of rationing out qualities for all the earth’s creatures so that each may exist in harmony. It happens that Epimetheus, concerned only with afterthought, forgets to give humankind positive qualities. This is obviously a problem, for without these qualities humans would be consumed by predators and utterly lost. Plato continues, explaining that Prometheus “…came to inspect the distribution [of qualities] and found that man alone was naked and shoeless and had neither bed nor arms of defence”. Unsure of what else to do, Prometheus steals the mechanical arts of Hephaestus and Athena – along, of course, with fire to utilize them – and gives them to humankind. Stiegler reads this myth as a parable about humanity; we are in a constant search for our inherent humanity, and, as a result we continually interact with techniques, perpetually re-negotiating modalities of selfhood. Epimetheus’ forgetfulness denied us a stable foundation, and, as a result constant transformation becomes, paradoxically, our essence. This ancient, yet prescient myth tells us that human nature involves fabricating and re-fabricating our selves. In this view there is nothing more natural than artifice and flux. I call this the Epimethean dimension of the human being.

The Oedipal Dimension of Human Being

But, this is not the end of the story of what we are. In The Birth of Tragedy Friedrich Nietzsche intuits that the ancient Greeks held another co-existent view of mankind. This view is evidenced in the tragedies of playwrights such as Sophocles and Euripides and asks what lies behind, or beyond, the technological prostheses with which we are forced to endlessly re-negotiate ourselves. Note: If one reads Nietzsche as primarily a ‘genealogist’ then he certainly belongs alongside Epimetheus. But here, I am considering the ‘Dionysian’ Nietzsche. My reading of Nietzsche is not that of a “Nietzschean reference of post-structuralism” (Žižek Sublime, 172) but rather, Nietzsche’s sense of the Dionysian ‘will’ as the terrifying ‘real’ thing standing behind the Apollonian principium individuationis. For what I take to be Nietzsche’s basis for this idea see the concept of the “Will” as it is used throughout Arthur Shopenhauer’s Essays and Aphorisms. This view holds that there are forces, or structures of some kind, that govern man, in spite of his ever-transforming – or Epimetheian – essence. Nietzsche dwells on Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex, which elucidates this later, Dionysian, dimension of self, a dimension of structural inescapability and fate. Note: The Dionysian designates the chaotic, intoxicating, instinctual, destructive, orgiastic, excessive – yet nevertheless structural – aspect of the human being. Greek tragedy, it must be emphasized, developed out from the cult of Dionysius: the spectator became aware of the gulf between the frail, corporeal, and needy human and the continual fertility and orgiastic robustness of the natural world. In Oedipus Rex, source of the psychoanalytic “Oedipal Complex”, Oedipus fulfills the premonitions of the Oracle at Delphi that Jocasta’s son will murder her husband Laius and, in turn, sleep with her. Oedipus goes on to unknowingly murder a man who turns out to be his father Laius and finds out that his wife is, in fact, his mother Jocasta. Nietzsche asks, “Oedipus, murderer of his father, husband of his mother, solver of the riddle of the Sphynx! What is the significance of the mysterious triad of these deeds of destiny?” (Nietzsche, Birth 30). Sigmund Freud resuscitates Oedipus’ fate early in the 20th century to offer an answer to Nietzsche’s question about the largely “unconscious” desires and currents that structure our sense of self. Note: Although it is disputed how much he read or how well he read Nietzsche. Nietzsche is not a Psychoanalyst before the letter and Freud is not a Nietzschean. But neither did Freud deny that his idea of ‘the id’ came from Nietzsche. The most we can say is that interesting parallels exist between psychoanalysis and Nietzscheanism. (Chapelle 13) For psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, these unconscious forces and structures inhere at the core of the subject. Of importance here is the articulation of a tragic, or Dionysian, dimension of the human closed off from conscious, or deliberate, intent: we are not the masters of our own house. Note: “…all the celebrated figures of the Greek stage – Prometheus, Oedipus, etc.- are but masks of this original hero, Dionysius. There is godhead behind all these masks; and that is the one essential cause of the typical ‘ideality’, so often wondered at, of these celebrated characters.” (Nietzsche, Birth 34). Furthermore, let us note that Dionysius is less a God than he is Necessity. Regarding Euripides’ tragedy, the question has been asked “What God, we want to know, no matter what provocation could make a mother dismember her son and still retain her Sophia?” (Euripides 150). The divinity of Dionysius as the “incarnate life-force itself, the uncontrollable chaotic eruption of nature in individuals and cities…amoral, neither good nor bad…” (Euripides 149). Euripides’ The Baccae, described as a “mysterious, almost haunted work, stalked by divinity and that daemonic power of necessity which for Euripides is the careless source of man’s tragic destiny and moral dignity” (Euripides 149).] I call this the Oedipal dimension of the human being.

The Epimethean and Oedipal Dimensions of Human Being

When we combine Epimetheus and Oedipus, as articulated by Plato (via the Heideggerian Stiegler) and Sophocles (via Nietzsche/Freud/Lacan), we arrive at the seemingly paradoxical claim that human “essence” is contingent and technological (the lesson of Epimetheus), but also inescapably structured and governed (the lesson of Oedipus). Note: Fragments attributed to the pre-Socratic Heraclitus reveal that this paradoxical claim is a quite ancient one. I want to spend a moment with Heraclitus as his ideas have been extremely influential in my resurrection of Oedipus and Epimetheus. Heraclitus’ fragment “We step into and we do not step into the same rivers. We are and we are not.” reveals that he considered “being” and “becoming” simultaneously. In other words, “everything flows, but it flows systematically” (Osborne 91). The river water, and all the creatures and life forms that move through it, are in states of constant transformation. But there are factors such as the riverbed and the banks of the river that, while also in constant transformation, provide a systematic form that is identifiable as a “river”. Now, transfer Heraclitus’ example of the river to selfhood. Ones sense of self is the product of both “river water” containing all the ideological and historical forms that move through it, and a needy, corporeal and mortal “riverbed”. Of course, in both the example of the self and the example of the river, it is possible that a river can cease to be a river, and that a self can cease to be a self. Contemporary culture is rife with emphasizing the contingency of both the river and the river bed, the self and the body, without asking the question of what wisdom stands behind the seemingly paradoxical claim that “changing, it rests”.

The inability, and in many cases downright aversion, to acknowledge a role for both Epimetheus and Oedipus has resulted, as Nick Mansfield suggests, in two broad categories of contemporary theories of subjectivity: (1) “…those that attempt to define the nature or structure of the subject (its ‘truth’), and (2) those that see any definition of subjectivity as the product or culture of power” (Mansfield 51). This tension is expressed by (1) psychoanalysis (i.e. Lacan), on the one hand and (2) poststructuralism (i.e. Michel Foucault), on the other. Contemporary postmodern theory, however, has abandoned balancing these two forms of subjectivity; the symbolic reminder that we are not masters in our own house has been largely neglected in favour of analyses of selfhood that focus on the factors responsible for the construction and endless maintenance of the house. Regardless of what side of the postmodern fence one stands on neither Friedrick Jameson’s account of a self embedded in the cultural logic of late capitalism nor Jean-Francois Lyotard’s deconstructionist account of a self incredulous toward grand, or meta, narratives has time for Oedipus. One could argue that there has been a deliberate attempt to abandon any remaining supports for “humanism”, and pose a radical “anti-humanism” in its place. Note: See Louis Althusser’s For Marx and Foucault’s The Order of Things. The idea is summed up quite nicely in a collection titled Posthumanism edited by Neil Badminton. This academic “anti-humanism” finds itself materially reflected in pursuits such as the Human Genome Project, and in biotechnologies, which allow for gene therapy and germ line interventions. This sentiment can also be located in the wild success of MMOs, such as SL, where the buying and selling of virtual body parts is normal and routine. As will become clear throughout these posts, much of the academic work done on virtual worlds such as SL consider them to be spaces where users, via their avatars, rehearse for a coming posthuman era, when the body will no longer possess any psychical interiority, as it will be wholly textualized, informatic, changeable and malleable. Rather than the cryptic Socratic maxim “know thyself”, the postmodern theorist recites the maxim: change, or (re)create thyself. In contrast, I believe that we continue to harbor psychical interiority despite our encounter with so-called postmodern technologies and social patterns.

Image from this site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rodrigomoreira/sets/72157625053272679/

The effect that the generally post-Oedipal era of postmodernism has had on our understanding of the interaction between the self and virtual media technologies demands serious attention. We can learn much from academic work on virtual reality and online identity produced throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. This work generally takes two directions: one optimistic, the other pessimistic. The more optimistic strand tends to be influenced by theorists such as Judith Butler, Donna Haraway and Giles Deleuze. Note: Theorists who in turn, appear to rely heavily on Foucault’s indictment of movements such as psychoanalysis as privileging some truth of our innermost being. This theoretical tradition, privileging difference, and challenging the very idea of making generalities is best expressed by Foucault, whose works proclaim: “we are not generalities”…“we are not merely instances of a larger human character…immune to the contingencies of changing history …regardless of culture’s particular experiences/histories” (May 10). It is not some universal human being that makes me what I am, proponents of this view purport, but the “temporal movement” of a changing, and unpredictable world that “leaves its stamp on me”, that “makes me what I am” (May 11). While “themes” such as “discipline, normalization, bio-politics etc…” can be discerned through the study of history, history itself, according to Foucault, is not directed by any outside teleology or dialectic, nor does it correspond with any universality internal to the subjects produced by it. The bodies of these subjects can be thought of as “docile”, or wholly “subject to formation imposed from outside” (Siegel 619). “Who are we” is not what Foucault is after; rather, he is after “Who are we now” (May 22). The other, more pessimistic strand of postmodern theory addressing virtual reality and online identity is found in the writings of Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Jean-Francois Lyotard (Virilio, Art); (Baudrillard, Ecstacy); (Lyotard, Inhuman). The celebratory perspective on cyberculture characterizes virtual worlds as spaces where users can be liberated from their biological determinants, “perform” their identities and “cycle through” multiple selves (Turkle, “Always”). The more pessimistic perspective sees the new post-Oedipal era as a nightmarish development, where “the network of simulacra elides the old Lacanian categories of Imaginary, Symbolic and Real” and conflates them into a depthless hyper-real (Flieger 397). Both positions, libratory and hyper-critical, however, have a shared foundation: they function either by revising and watering down Oedipus, turning him into a theoretical straw man, or tossing him into the historical trash bin altogether.

At this point I will acknowledge some broad aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s influential anti-Oedipal position and let the reader know why I do not find it persuasive or appealing. Deleuze and Guattari accuse psychoanalysts of using Oedipus to route desire in constraining ways corresponding to the Oedipal triad of “mommy-daddy-me”. This is because they regard desire as “positive” and “productive” while the Oedipal story is premised on the “lack” of the mother and regulated by “law” of the father (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti 3); (Ross 63). Thus, rather than a constrained “lacking” or “regulated” form of desire, Deleuze and Guattari champion an entirely positive form of desire free to form connections with other bodies and the outside world. This positive desire is premised on continuous mutation and transformation, and thus, does not reduce the “multiple forms that desire can take to those forms that can be referred to by the personal identities of the Oedipal triangle.” (Lorraine 190). Now, I agree with Deleuze and Guattari that the Oedipal triad of the Jocasta (mommy), Laius (daddy), and Oedipus (me) is a constraint on the most radical arrangements of bodies and subjectivity; however that does not cause me – like it does them – to seek a move beyond the Oedipal triad. In calling for a form of life beyond constraint (i.e. negativity, lack, prohibition), the anti-Oedipal position moves us into a wholly posthuman, wholly Epimethean, territory.

As will become clearer throughout ensuing posts, the claims I present on Cybject advocate a positive and connective reading of the avatar only insofar as it is integrated with a negative, Oedipal, reading. The avatar, in my account, is not representative of a Deleuzian self endlessly “being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state” but rather is representative of becoming and difference that does not exist outside the auspices of the negativity and lack that the Oedipal triad represents (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti 16).

What Can Old Oedipus Teach us New Media?

Rather than ignoring old Oedipus and flinging myself into a posthuman investigation of technology, I believe he has much to tell us about the variability, contingency, and possibilities opened up by contemporary technologies of avatarization. Thus, while “[Deleuze and Guattari] urge mankind to strip itself of all anthropomorphic and anthropological armoring, all myth and tragedy, and all existentialism, in order to perceive what is nonhuman in man, his will and his forces, his transformations and mutations” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti xx) I am interested in the interaction between man’s all-too-humanness and his capacity for transformations and mutations. For this reason, I do not align myself entirely with Oedipus or Epimetheus: I do not advocate becoming carried away with a dark, repressive, lack and slogging through life like the plague stricken flagellants in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, nor do I advocate for the day when, the subject wills itself into a state of purely positive and transformative desire, endlessly “defined by the states through which it passes.” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti 20). Note: Finally, whether undermining the position of the human, or (as Foucault puts it) being “anti-homo”, is an ethical response to the threat presented by the horrors of fascism is a difficult matter. Suffice it to say that the articulation of an utterly non-fascist form of subjectivity without recognition of where the human begins and ends risks being equally as vicious as a fascist form of subjectivity that is certain of where the human begins and ends. Frankly, I do not care for extermination, whether one pure ‘I’ exterminates another ‘I’ or whether the ‘I’ is exterminated in order to be monstrously connected to other ‘I’s and the natural world.

A taste of what’s to come over the next few posts

I am especially wary of positions that regard virtual worlds such as SL, for better or worse, as spaces where users rehearse for a time when the body becomes wholly malleable and dynamic. This wariness is the impetus for considering virtual world avatars through the prism of a humanist Lacanian psychoanalysis. Although several psychoanalytic concepts will be explored throughout these posts, including the “Oedipus complex” and the “uncanny”, for Lacan, the irreducible lack at the heart of the subject is of prime significance. This lack, first theorized as the subject of the Imaginary in his paper on the “Mirror Stage’ (1949 though first delivered in 1936), never leaves us, in spite of the fact that it is later subsumed under the more linguistic identification with the Symbolic. In the virtual world of SL users must create and re-create their avatar – rendering explicit aspects of their self that tend to be obscured in real life. I will look to the much discussed SL economy from the perspective of an economy of desire, whereby real currency is spent in order to catch a glimpse of our desires in action. From this perspective, the avatar itself is a desiring-thing organized around what Lacan calls objet petit a (Lacan, Sem XI). For Lacan, the Other, which can be considered akin to the (m)Other in the Oedipal drama, represents that to which we are always striving to return. Thus, the objet petit a, is derived from Other – Autre in French – as the little Autre, literally, little Other. Note: While notoriously difficult to define, objet petit a might be thought of as the remainder of the child’s relationship to its (m)Other, or more specifically as representing the child’s fantasy of the (m)Other’s desires which comes to structure the child’s very being. It is this imaginary relationship – I claim – that is made explicit in our interactions with our avatars. The interactive reflection of the avatar makes explicit the subject as an endlessly desiring thing, one that for Lacan is both an effect of and movement through language.

Thus, it is no coincidence that SL has been featured in the news for its increasing integration with real life: the avatar in SL is a virtual reflection of what has always been at the core of the subject, a reflection that, like our original encounter with the mirror during the mirror stage, reveals the alienating virtuality at the heart of subjectivity. Through this prism, the role and significance of the avatar differs notably from both optimistic and pessimistic post-structuralist and postmodernist formulations. These posts will attempt to elucidate and explore some of these differences. Put differently, they will look for what is uncanny about avatarization. What if the avatar body – that excessive, perpetually incomplete, double with which the user engages on their screen is not an overcoming of the Symbolic, but a working with something that is constitutive of our very humanity? Such a formulation would lead to a conceptualization focused on the uncanny element of the virtual avatar, or of the avatar user as “traversing” the “fundamental fantasy” laid down to cover over the trauma of primordial repression provoked by “castration” (Žižek, Plague 30). Thus, these posts seek to consider the object petit (a)vatar. My aim is not to close down readings that emphasize new openings and new becomings, but to insist that avatars, often heralded as harbingers of the posthuman, do continue to “mark time on an Oedipal calendar” and remain subject to what is “old and long familiar” (Haraway); (Freud, Uncanny). I am interested in articulating a cyborg subject who does, playing on Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, uncannily “re-member the cosmos…[of] Oedipal symbiosis” (Lacan, Ecrits 77); (Haraway 151).

Click here for Part 4

Sources:
+Althusser, Louis. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: NLB, 1997
+Badminton, Neil. “Approaching Posthumanism” in Posthumanism. Ed. Neil Badminton. New York: Palgrave, 2000
+Baudrillard, Jean. Ecstasy of Communication. Trans. Bernard and Caroline Schutze. New York: Semiotext(e), 1988
+Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008
+Chapelle, Daniel. Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis. Albany: State University of New York, 1993
+Deleuze, Giles and Guattari, Felix. Anti Oedipus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta, 1983 (1972)
—. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta, 2000(1987)
+Euripides. The Baccae. Trans. William Arrowsmith. Ed. David Greene and Richard Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959
+Fink, Bruce. Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, Mass. :Harvard University Press, 1997
—. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995
+Flieger, Jerry Aline. Is Oedipus Online? Siting Freud and Freud. Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, 2005
+Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridon. New York: Random House, 1977
—. Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994 (1970)
—. “The Subject and Power” afterwards to Dreyfuss, Hubert and Rabinow, Paul. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982
+Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991
+Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006
+Lyotard, JF. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989 (1979)
—. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991 (1988)
+Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. New York: New York University Press, 2000
+Nietzsche, Friedrich. Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kauffman. New York: Random House, 1967
+Plato. Protagoras <http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/protagoras.html>
+Powell, Larson. “Friedrich Kittler zur Einfuring”, Substance 35.3
+Presocratic Fragments: Selected Fragments and Testamonia. Trans. Richard D. McKirahan Jr. Ed. Patricia Curd. Indianapolis: Hackett Press, 1995
+Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essays and Aphorisms. Trans. RJ Hollingdale. London: Penguin Press, 1970
+Sophocles. Oedipus the King. Trans. David Greene. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960
+Seigel, Jerrold. Idea of the Self. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005
+Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time Vol 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998
“Ecclesiastes”. Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985
+Turkle, Sherry. “Always-on/Always-on-You: The Tethered Self” in Handbook of Mobile Communications and Social Change. Ed. James Katz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008: 121-139
+Virilio, Paul. The Art of the Motor. Trans. Julie Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
—. Open sky. New York: Verso, 1997
+Žižek, Slavoj. Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997
—. Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 2008 (1989)

Humanizing the Avatar (Part 2: Searching the Virtual for the All-Too-Human)

The Second in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars.

Alter-Ego and the Avatar-User Relationship

The need to “humanize the avatar” becomes evident when considering Robbie Cooper’s 2007 photo-essay Alter-Ego: Avatars and their Creators, one of the most theoretically disconcerting engagements involving avatars. Alter-Ego is structured as a series of portraits juxtaposing a photograph of the real user (or in certain cases users) next to a digital screenshot of their “in-world” (a term for being logged into the Second Life [SL] client) avatar. Below the juxtaposed images the user(s) offer explanations and insights into their relationship with their avatar(s). Cooper draws not only from user-generated virtual worlds such as SL, but as well from explicitly role playing virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft. However, there is a definite lack of consistency among the explanations and insights offered by the participants. In his introduction to Alter-Ego, Julian Dibbell, author of the seminal 1993 article “A Rape in Cyberspace”, plays on this lack of coherence, suggesting that it inhibits attempts to claim anything final, or determinative, about avatar use in either MMORPG or MMO metaverse environments such as World of Warcraft or SL. This lack of consistency is evident in my own engagement with SL as well. One friend I met in SL who is deaf in the real world explained that her avatars offered her a body that could, via text chatting, speak. Other users I have befriended claim to use their avatars to experiment with different sexual persuasions or to simply enjoy building and scripting virtual objects.

After perusing Alter-Ego, the question of whether SL exists in the realm of the real or the virtual is no longer intelligible. Note: After all, the “real” portrait and the “virtual” screen-shot are both conventions of representing the self. Neither one is determinatively real or imaginary. This alone suggests that the distinction between “virtual” and “real” is highly problematic. Acknowledging the Hindu significance of the term “avatar”, Dibbell reminds the reader that in spite of feeling a godlike sense of control while inhabiting virtual worlds, “[w]e are no less immune to the seductions of these worlds than the ancient gods of myth were ever safe from ours” (Cooper). As immortal Zeus found himself in thorny situations with mortal lovers, our real, and all-too-human, desires are equally prone to being manifest in virtual worlds: “we fall in love, lust for power and bring our dreams of wealth and fame along with us” (Cooper). Likewise, while a large population of users who are disabled in real life construct alternative bodies in SL, other users construct avatars modeled quite literally on their real selves, blemishes and disabilities included. As Dibbell explains:

“On one hand, for instance, the abundance of powerful, beautiful avatars posed next to glamor-challenged, suburban nobodies seems to argue the proposition that we fly to virtual worlds as a departure from quotidian reality; yet just as striking is the number of avatars shaped to look precisely like the people who play them, suggesting just as forcefully that virtual worlds are better understood as an extension of reality and no escape from it at all” (Cooper)

In light of Cooper’s photographs, then, we can claim that the separation between the real and the virtual is a porous and wafer thin membrane. One Alter-Ego participant, whose SL avatar appears nearly identical to her real world self, explains:

“Most of the time my avatar looks like my real self, but about twenty years younger. I’m jealous of some of her clothes. I made a pair of boots that I wish I could export into real life. I usually dress my avatar in the same sort of stuff I wear. She doesn’t have a separate persona or anything. She’s just an extension of me in this virtual space. Of course, she has a few abilities in SL that I don’t have in my first life…” (Cooper)

Another Alter-Ego participant explains her nearly identical SL avatar, Harmony Harbinger, in the following way: “Harmony is an extension of my real-life self. I see her more like one would see one’s conscience sitting on one’s shoulders” (Cooper). Thus, while one does find, for instance, “furries”, users who adopt animal avatars, or metal-clad cybernetic bounty hunter avatars, many users’ avatars are premised on what they understand to be their real world self.

Methodological Relativism vs. Looking for Something Deeper, Real and All-Too-Human?

In spite of the contradictions that appear throughout Alter-Ego, hinting toward the near impossibility of appealing to a common “gamerly identity”, we can, according to Dibbell, make one positive observation: all the participants in the photo-essay have constructed, in one way or another, an identity, and “play” with that identity (Cooper). It follows that the ways we characterize avatar play should be as unique and diverse as the players themselves. (Likewise, methodologies that work to analyze SL might not work to analyze World of Warcraft, as the rationales for avatar creation differ from one virtual world to the next.) Alter-Ego can be understood as suggesting that each user/player requires a tailor-made theoretical framework. Acknowledging this relativist view, over the the rest of these blog posts I will not be proposing an entirely cut and dried method of theoretical analysis. A truly viable analysis would have to account for a plurality of possible interpretations as rich as the on-and-offline lives of the users themselves. The uses and characteristics of avatars, and indeed virtual worlds themselves, have become as varied as the types of selves one finds in the real world. Furthermore, such methodological relativism inhibits the researcher from characterizing the avatar as located wholly in the register of the imaginary or the register of the real, as either a simulacral body in a nightmarish dystopia or a harbinger of a “friction free” utopia to-come. Both positions assume, in their respective ways, that cyberspace initiates a transubstantiation of the real; one as a corruption (dystopia), the other as a perfection (utopia) of it. Note: In “The Cyberself: the Self-ing Project Goes Online, Symbolic Interaction in the Digital Age” Laura Robinson reminds us that conclusions of cyberculture studies reliant on research done on MUDs are based on early internet users. (Robinson 100) These studies, subsequently becoming paradigmatic of online identity studies, tended to emphasize the imaginary roleplaying dimension of virtual identity construction, a dimension that now describes, according to Robinson, only a very small percentage of internet (and avatar) use. Studies on MUDs, Robinson notes, were conducted before the internet reached a critical mass. As this critical mass was reached, some years after the heyday of the MUD, the architecture of virtual worlds has become far more inclusive. It is becoming clearer that one methodology, oriented toward imaginary role playing, cannot suffice. Theoretical frameworks suitable for analyzing identity construction and play in present day virtual worlds must account for the inconsistent, and multifarious, nature of avatar use and the increasing impossibility of universalizing the phenomenon. 

But there is more than a methodological relativism at issue in Cooper’s photo essay.  Rather than an analysis of the utopian vision of a self “imbued with the freedom and flow of the digital medium itself”, or the dystopian vision of a simulated self “triumph[ing] over the real”, Alter-Ego manages to capture “…something deeper…less liberating and less oppressive, both more social and more playful, and ultimately as real as it gets” (Cooper). Thus, while seeking to challenge the “avatār” of transubstantiation I will ultimately echo this claim that the avatar is deeply revelatory.

A difficult question arises: Is it possible, given the requirement for a plurality of particular methodologies, to conduct an analysis that simultaneously looks through a universal lens for something “deeper”, something that is neither “liberating” or “oppressive” and whose “playfulness” is rendered explicit by virtual worlds? Is it entirely paradoxical to claim that while each user’s relationship to their avatar is a commingling of undeniably unique personal factors, the virtual self – whether identical to the user’s real self, or radically different from it – does not depart from “something deeper”, “real”, and all-too-human? It is not my intention over the next few posts to privilege one of these positions, but to try to find a way to work between them. Thus, I will part ways from an entirely relativist view and suggest that while each user’s avatar is indeed unique and does require a tailor made method of analysis, we must also look to reveal a deeper, all-too-humanness through which each avatar’s uniqueness is inflected.
 

(Click here to read part 3)

Sources

Cooper, Robbie. Alter-Ego. London: Chris Boot Ltd, 2007

Robinson, Laura. “The Cyberself: the self-ing project goes online, symbolic interaction in the digital age” New Media and Society. Vol9(1): 93-110



Humanizing the Avatar (Part 1: Secularizing Avatāra & the Real in the Virtual)

The first in a series offering a humanist understanding of virtual world avatars.

The Etymology & Contemporary Usage of “Avatar”

While popularized by Neil Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, the term “avatar” is etymologically derived from Hinduism, specifically the Sanskrit term “Avatāra”, which refers to the incarnated form of an incorporeal Hindu deity. Avatāra also designates a “descent”, a “downcoming”, usually of a Hindu god. Note: In Sanskrit the verb “tri” designates “to cross over, attain, save”, the prefix “ava” designates “down”. “Ava”+”tri” designates “descent into, appear, become-incarnate”. “Ava”+”ti”+”a” designates the “appearance of any deity on earth, or a descent from heaven” (see Parrinder 19). The term “avatar” is similar to the term “incarnation” familiar to Western theology as both the Western “incarnation” and Eastern “avatāra” designate the downcoming of a deity whereby that deity undergoes transubstantiation allowing it to participate in the affairs of sublunary life.

In the context of computerization common throughout popular culture, the meaning of the term “avatar” has retained the original theological emphasis on transubstantiation, but reverses its connotation from a “descent” to the corporeal or an “incarnation” from spirit to flesh, to an “ascent” by the corporeal body to the immaterial or incorporeal cyberspace or – in Stephenson’s terms – “metaverse” (Stephenson 3). Note: The term “metaverse” has, since the release of Stephenson’s novel, come to designate an online, virtual world in which there are no specific goals or objectives. This appropriation and reversal of the Sanskrit term from its emphasis on embodiment (to be incarnate) to laying the emphasis on disembodiment (to be discarnate) is sensible when understood against the broader contemporary cultural and historical context.

This context includes the Platonism of cyberpunk literature such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer where individuals leave their earthly and imperfect corporeality behind in order to enter a world of heavenly mathematical-digital “Forms”, science fiction films such as The Matrix that assume a Cartesian mind/body dualism, and common references by individuals such as Bill Gates to cyberspace being the site, par excellence, of a quasi-divine realm of “friction-free capitalism” (Gates 180). The etymological heritage of the term “avatar” leads us to the presumption that some sort of change in substance – or sublimation – occurs when the embodied user adopts a virtual avatar. As such, the term itself often acts as a mystification of the processes occurring when a user adopts a virtual avatar. This may be because the term leads us to believe that by engaging with an avatar the user becomes something radically different, or other, than what that user physically is, and who that user psychologically is. For example, the most optimistic of cyber theorists take this understanding of the avatar to its logical conclusion, promising virtual worlds as utopias where users can leave their real-world identities and lives behind; these critics yearn for a day when human consciousness, rendered (or “transmuted”) informatic and no longer subject to the corporeality of the body, can itself be uploaded into machines or virtual communities themselves (Kurzweil, Singularity); (Kurzweil, Age). These fantastical claims are all the more reason to critically interrogate and demystify the term “avatar”.

Demystifying the Avatar: The Real in the Virtual

One way of considering this demystification is to think of it as secularizing a religiously charged idea. Rather than regarding avatarization as a transubstantiation (the impetus for which is the presumption of some sort of bifurcation between radically different heavenly [virtual] and terrestrial [real] realms) I suggest secularizing the virtual, and will demonstrate that the virtual is fraught with the mass and inertia that comprises the real. I suggest, via this secularized reading, that virtual worlds can be regarded not as spaces for interactions of an entirely novel nature, but that they externalize reality in a form different from how it appears in day to day life.

The avatar is better understood as an alter-ego rather than a representation. An understanding of the avatar as a representation (re-presentation) suggests that avatarization is a means of turning oneself into a new, or different, medium. As is well documented, when an object is re-presented it adopts new qualities based on its representational medium and looses certain of its more limiting, or “auratic” qualities. Note: In his influential essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Walter Benjamin writes of the changes that works of art are subjected to when they undergo processes of mechanical reproduction. These processes of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin claims, transform the spectator’s relationship to the work of art. What once was interpreted as “auratic”, or “authentic”, about a work of art dissipates as it is reproduced mechanically and removed from its unique place in the space, time and the fabric of tradition (Benjamin). In this regard it is easy to see why terms such as “representation” and “transubstantiation” make such fine bedfellows: the avatar user, formerly a creature of physical (or real) reality, is re-presented as a creature of virtual reality. Rather than interacting with a qualitatively different self, an understanding of the avatar as an alter-ego (Latin for “the other I”) does not dwell on the notion of representation, rather, it considers the avatar to be “a very close and trusted friend who seems almost a part of yourself” (Wordnet definition). An alter-ego, then, is not a representation of the user, but something that (while either physically the same or different) is psychologically close to a hidden aspect of the user’s personality. Thus, considering the avatar as an alter-ego, a “second self”, acknowledges a kernel of the real user’s self remains immune to the seemingly different and transformative qualities offered by the virtual medium.

Second Life (SL), for example, allows us to discern this in a way that other virtual spaces do not. Unlike traditional virtual worlds, which are almost entirely designed by programmers and developers, SL is almost entirely user-generated. In SL there are no levels through which to progress or goals to achieve unless users collectively build and design a game within SL and create their own levels and/or goals. Not surprisingly, the avatars found in SL are far more diverse and varied than those found in other recent virtual worlds and online roleplaying games like World of Warcraft. Without an overarching framework providing narratives, and spatial and/or temporal coordinates, SL users are less likely to feel constrained in their participation; one would be hard pressed to locate a coherent, and overarching, aesthetic or narrative within SL. By not having an overarching aesthetic or narrative, or demanding users adorn themselves with armour and identities that fit the developer’s criteria, one is confronted by a virtual world that often, but by no means always, reflects the real world. In this light, SL is a so-called virtual space where terms such as “avatāra”, or “incarnation”, hardly apply. The real does not lose ground, or give way entirely, to something virtual.

In SL users are not called, a priori, to role-play. While role-play does occur, users do not necessarily have to become someone or something else. In SL, the avatāra-inspired sense of the term “avatar”, with its emphasis on transubstantiation, hardly functions as a description of avatarization. Indeed, the conditions of SL give us an opportunity to understand the term “avatar” in a different light. This is because, as noted, SL is a space whose architecture is comprised of the real and the imaginary unreal: Reuters images of the genocide in Darfur, scale virtual models of the World Trade Center towers, and structures that stand despite having non-Euclidean dimensions (Guest). The avatars that populate these spaces are similar to this hybrid architecture. They are, themselves, qualitatively positioned between the virtual and real. For example, it is not uncommon for a user’s virtual avatar to possess many of the physical traits of its creator(s), while being equipped and adorned with objects that violate the laws of gravity and physics on planet Earth. This hybrid-architecture of real and imaginary illustrates that the emphasis we place on a sort of avatar transubstantiation (whether from incarnate to discarnate or discarnate to incarnate) is highly problematic. Upon logging into the virtual world of SL, users do not abandon their flesh and transmute into a virtual avatar. My goal over the next few posts is to demystify aspects of the term’s theological etymology, and humanize the avatar.

Click here to read part 2

Sources

-Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1986

-Gates, Bill. The Road Ahead. New York: Viking, 1995

 

-Guest, Tim. Second Lives: A Journey through Virtual Worlds. New York: Random House, 2008

-Kurzweil, Ray. The Age of Spiritual Intelligent Machines. New York: Viking, 1999

-Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Viking, 2005

-Parrinder, Geoffrey. Avatar and Incarnation. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970

-Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam, 1992 

 

 

February 24, 2011 Technology Roundup: 3D Printing & Copyright, A Solar ‘Katrina’ Storm?, Kurzweil: Solar’s our Saviour, IBM’s Watson = Just a Faster Computer, Mobile Trends & More!

Cory Doctorow: 3D printing’s first copyright complaint goes away, but things are just getting started (Boing Boing, Feb 22, 2011)
The 3D Printing copyright battle begins… “More news on the first-ever DMCA threat for violating a copyright in a 3D object — Ulrich Schwanitz has rescinded his complaint and will release his shape into the public domain today.”

The Real Avatar: Swiss Researchers Use Virtual Reality and Brain Imaging to Hunt for the Science of the Self (Science Direct, Feb. 2011)
Experiments on selfhood using Virtual Reality: “That feeling of being in, and owning, your own body is a fundamental human experience. But where does it originate and how does it come to be? Now, Professor Olaf Blanke, a neurologist with the Brain Mind Institute announces an important step in decoding the phenomenon. By combining techniques from cognitive science with those of  VR and brain imaging, he and his team are narrowing in on the first experimental, data-driven approach to understanding self-consciousness.”

Modern Society Threatened by Solar Storms (Discovery, Feb. 19, 2011)
Are we headed for a digital Katrina? It seems it’s not a question of IF, but WHEN.  ”The Earth just dodged a solar bullet, but what about next time? Sensitive technology could be mankind’s Achilles heel.”

Futurist Ray Kurzweil isn’t worried about climate change (PBS, Feb. 16, 2011)
Ever the optimist, Kurzweil predicts that Solar Energy (which, according to him is doubling every two years) will be our Saviour.  I knew we’d come back around to Sun Worship one of these years.

A Warning to LCDs – Watch Your Back, AMOLEDs are Coming (Singularity Hub, Feb. 14, 2011)
In case you’ve never heard of Active Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode (AMOLED): “Samsung recently unveiled a slew of new AMOLED products at CES 2011, and they did not disappoint. By layering thin sheets of an electroluminescent organic material, Samsung has managed to conceive of an entire line of products that take LED displays to an entirely new level.”

Toward Computers That Fit on a Pen Tip: New Technologies Usher in the Millimeter-Scale Computing Era (Science Daily, Feb. 22, 2011)
“Millimeter-scale computing, believed to be the next electronics frontier. … Nearly invisible millimeter-scale systems could enable ubiquitous computing, and the researchers say that’s the future of the industry. They point to Bell’s Law, a corollary to Moore’s Law. (Moore’s says that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years, roughly doubling processing power.) Bell’s Law says there’s a new class of smaller, cheaper computers about every decade.”

Stanley Fish: What Did Watson the Computer Do? (New York Times Opinionator Blog, Feb. 21, 2011)
A great little article aimed at bursting the IBM Watson hype bubble that reminds us that even the most advanced AI today doesn’t come close to the knowledge generated by human mental processes, and that being an expert at following precise and narrowly formatted rules, is not cornerstone of our humanity.

Jonathan Lethem psychoanalyzes They Live’s Ghouls (i09 Horror, Feb. 2011)
A few excerpts from Jonathan Lethem’s book which psychoanalyzes John Carpenters’ underrated film They Live.

GOP Lawmaker Mike Beard Claims God Will Provide Unlimited Natural Resources (Huffington Post, Feb. 16, 2011)
I don’t really have anything to say about this and think it speaks for itself: “Mike Beard, a Republican state representative from Minnesota, recently argued that coal mining should resume, in part because he believes God has created an earth that will provide unlimited natural resources.”

The Future of Education? Droids Teach Toddlers (Live Science, Feb. 22, 2011)
“Robots could one day help teach kids in classrooms, suggests research involving droids and toddlers in California.” Can you imagine dropping your kid off at preschool knowing he/she’s being taught by an overweight fireplace with pipecleaners sticking out of its head? I love that the scientist’s optimism about how terrified and scared the children were. Also, on a safety note, do you think those plastic hands are strong enough to strangle a toddler?

Even in a Crowd, Individuals Remain Unique, Rodent Vocalization Study Finds (Science Daily, Feb. 22, 2011)
“Biologists Kimberly Pollard and Daniel Blumstein examined the evolution of individuality — personal uniqueness — by recording alarm-call vocalizations in eight species of rodents that live in social groups of various sizes. They found that the size of the groups strongly predicted the individual uniqueness in the animals’ voices: The bigger the group, the more unique each animal’s voice typically was and the easier it was to tell individuals apart.”

Stanley Fish: What Did Watson the Computer Do? (New York Times Opinionator Blog, Feb. 21, 2011)
A great little article bent on bursting the IBM Watson hype bubble that reminds us that even the most advanced AI today doesn’t come close to the knowledge generated by human mental processes, and that being an expert at following precise and narrowly formatted rules, is not cornerstone of our humanity.

Watson, Can You Hear Me? The Significance of the “Jeopardy” AI win (New Atlantis Futurisms Blog, Feb. 17, 2011)
Did Watson represent an innovation in AI, or was it simply a better computer?

Top 10 Mobile Internet Trends (Kleiner Perkins, Feb. 2011)
In case, like me, you’re interested in what the ‘experts’ think about the future for telecommunications. I’m a real sucker for these ‘top 10 trend’ lists.

Printing out new ears and skin on Inkjet Printers (BBC, Feb. 21, 2011)
The early stages of printed skin on a regular inkjet printer and portable battlefield skin bioprinters… ”[A]t the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC, the buzzword is bioprinting: using the same technique to artfully knock out new body parts.” Looks like this is less than 20 years away.

Leaker Reveals ‘Mystery’ Nintendo 3DS Augmented Reality Games (Wired, Feb. 22, 2011)
“Fishing and billiards are among six new augmented reality games that will come preloaded on Nintendo 3DS, according to an anonymous source who provided details of five as-yet-unannounced titles to Wired.com. The glasses-free 3-D portable gaming system launches Saturday in Japan, and AR games are among its most highly anticipated features. While Nintendo has demo’d one of the games, the company has remained mum about the other five.”

Phoenix Goddess Temple’s “Sacred Sexuality” Is More Like New Age Prostitution (Phoenix New Times, Feb. 17, 2011)
Cybject’s not just interested in new technology, but in critiquing (i.e. deflating) New Age-y philosophies. A great glimpse inside the Phoenix Goddess Temple, a New Age Resort that seems like it sprung out of the head of Michel Houellebecq.

Q&A: Artificial intelligence pioneer aims to make computers learn like brains (Globe and Mail, Feb. 21, 2011)
Brief interview with Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, who was awarded the country’s top science prize last week, the prestigious Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal.

The Augmentation (i.e. Humanization) of the World

“This word [subiectum] names that-which-lies-before, which, as ground, gathers everything onto itself.” – Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture”

According to the technocrats a change in our reality is under way. They call this change the “augmentation” of reality, which ought to assuage our ever persistent fears of a degradation of reality, a phantasmagorical and schizophrenic unreality. In contrast to this Virtual unReality, Augmented Reality (or AR as it referred to in the pages of Wired and co.) signals precisely the opposite: a new robustness of reality. [See my earlier posts here , here and here about the definition of “augment” as an ‘increasing’ or a ‘making stronger’]

We tend to breathe a sigh of relief at the prospect of a reality that will be Augmented rather than Virtual, however it is imperative we take a deep breath and ask ourselves whether our sighs of relief has been premature. Even the desire for health and robustness can become pathological, as the newly minted diagnosis orthorexia nervosa (the obsession with healthy eating) attests.

There are no shortages of dystopian or apocalyptic analyses purporting that technology is mashing our subjective and emotional qualities into a pulp. By fixating on the end of Man in the world of high technology we ignore dystopian and apocalyptic analyses based on the humanizing (anthropomorphizing?) of the world. So typical to the 21^st century, we worry about the anorexia of the human subject, but never the orthorexia of the subject. And we do so at our peril.

What if it is not that the meaning-less Object that is consuming the Subject, but the meaning-giving Subject that is consuming the Object? What if, rather than being de-humanized (inhuman), we are becoming over-humanized (all-too-human)?

I’ll suggest to you that techniques-of-subjectivism (where I situate AR, for example) are not unique to the present day. Nor need they be thought of as machine based technologies. For well over a century, astute commentators such as the terribly neglected Julian Benda, have noted with trepidation the “curious desire of moderns to yield to subjectivism”. (See pg.73 of his Treason of the Intellectuals)

But this “subjectivism”, this desire for Man to impose himself on the natural world, is by no means Modern. Seen from a height, our desire to “yield to subjectivism” is the culmination of an extraordinarily long historical narrative dealing with the aestheticization of the world, the will to make the world in the image of Man.

Compare those paintings on the cave walls in dark Lascaux to the luminous metropolises visible outside the earth’s atmosphere. Compare the Palaeolithic Venus of Brassempouy carved from the ivory of a long extinct species to the present day geneticist who dreams of carving and cutting away at the ideal genome…

I am in Tokyo, on the balcony of my 30^th floor hotel room, looking down on the bustling city after dark. I am trapped beneath the black night sky, surrounded by glass skyscrapers, bright neon lights and the endless city. Two hundred and twenty miles above me are astronauts aboard the International Space Station, whose night-time photos of the earth tell a similar story. From space, vast areas of the earth’s surface are covered in a webwork of snaking lights and cities like Rome, Cairo, and New Orleans are bathed in an eerie white glow. The earth has put on its finest sequined gown and it shimmers in the eyes of mankind, its narcissistic lover.

What if the clue as to what drives history lies in our ever increasing and ever complex will to subjectivize and aestheticize: the will-to-design cities like Masdar and our will – since the Romantic days of the anti-Enlightenment – to carve up the canvas of the universal into particular volksgeist (i.e. all those particular gendered, cultural and religious knowledges battered into the heads of wide eyed postmodern undergraduates). The later being similar to what Paul Virilio, in an Ellulian moment, refers to as the “prohibition on imagining any form of transcendence, perspectival, prospective, physical, or metaphysical”. (See pg.89 of his new Futurism of the Instant). Modern day cities, from this point of view, are immense living canvases where human beings are free to engage in the largest, and most intricate, portraiture the world has ever seen.

What if history is the story of technology but technology is really the story of art and increasing aesthetization?