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)

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

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

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”.

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 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)

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

…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.

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Julian Benda’s

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.

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

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

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.

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

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