[-empyre-] : [-empyre-]:An Avatar Manifesto::part Two

["Gregory Little" <glittle@oberlin.net>]

Empyreans:
What follows is a cut and paste synopsis of part Two of "An Avatar
Manifesto".  Here I attempt to define "unconsumable bodies of resistance"
through an examination of the female cyborg, the vampire, and the zombie.
Tomorrow I will final with a shorter post outlining a final strategy.
Again, I look forward to hearing from you all.:

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"The body behind the keyboard, wiggling its fingers, sliding a mouse back
and forth and staring into the screen, may be experiencing a sense of
mobility in the virtual world, but at the physical level the body resembles
Foucault's ideal subject of power, the analyzable, manipulatable, "docile
body" (Foucault 136) available to be "subjected, used, transformed, and
improved" (Dery 165). Unlike a victim of war, torture, institutionalization,
or imprisonment, the computer user is free to "shut down" and move; but the
increasing number of jobs in the "information sector" mean that current
labor, educational, and entertainment activities demand extensive hours of
computer interaction, hence millions of "docile bodies." Although in a
virtual environment anything is possible, nothing has really changed. This
disconnected connection, to touch but not really, can exacerbate feelings of
lack while simultaneously luring us further into simulation through the
momentary satiation offered by a sense of virtual agency."

3.4. Sous Rature
In her research on extremes of power relations over the body through war and
torture, Elaine Scarry points out that it is not just the separation of the
subject from their own bodies that facilitates domination, but also, that
same distancing coupled with its denial. Scarry argues that successful
torture and warfare regimes involves three separate steps-inflicting of pain
damage, objectifying it through language, and disowning it by projection to
another location: "it requires both the reciprocal infliction of massive
injury and the eventual disowning of the injury so that its attributes can
be transferred elsewhere, as they cannot be permitted to cling to the
original site of the wound, the human body" (Scarry 46). Social power, the
domination of the body (be it individual or social), regardless of purpose
(war, control, or commodity exchange) ,is based on distancing the subject
from her own body, her own pain, desire, and instincts of survival (Scarry,
1985). Because our will and desire is traditionally based in what we lack,
we allow the bifurcation to happen. The transaction is not complete until
the reality of bifurcation has been erased or denied to the subject, victim,
or consumer. It is not just the abuse that destroys the consciousness, but
the denial. The inversion of surveillance (Halleck, 1991) of popular video
that occurred when civilian George Halliday turned his camcorder on the LAPD
as they beat Rodney King represents the overturning of this denial. As
King's writhing brown body was broadcast internationally via cable and
satellite transmissions his image became an avatar for the countless
incidents of racial oppression and violence worldwide. Avital Ronell argues
that the televised images of the assault of Rodney King were actually the
avatar or counter-transference of the denial of the violence inflicted upon
the bodies of Iraq's citizens during Desert Storm (Ronell, 1994). As an
instrument of denial, language diverts us from the sense that interacting
with computer simulations "is like having your body amputated" (Barlow 42).
Today's technological discourse draws heavily from salvation myths,
promising leisure, happiness, improved lifestyle, increased intelligence,
personal fulfillment, even transcendence. Icons, avatars, and slogans all
help to form a myth that technology guarantees comfort, satiation, even
transcendence. Convinced that to be embodied is lack, we desire escape from
the particulars of the body and move out via myths of wholeness toward
technologized commodification. Religion and technology are both predicated
on this desire, and we keep coming back for more. At the Avatars 97
conference Amy Jo Kim, creative director with the virtual world creation
consultant company Naima, explained that on-line designers could learn from
religion, because "Religion really understands repeat business"
(Ziff-Davis).

4.0. Alternative Bodies
There are ways to take back the avatar, to regain the option of opening the
self to new territories of signification, connection, desire, and
empowerment. To do so requires nothing short of a complete redefinition of
our relationships to our bodies, to desire, self-image, biology, and the
hierarchies of hegemony. The avatar expands to embrace the history of
self-imaging, and, as in the example of Rodney King, to include displaced
and erased bodies forced to the surface of collective media consciousness
through strategies like the inversion of surveillance. The use of the avatar
in on-line shared environments has the potential to become the democratic
self-portrait, the revolutionary polymorphic body-image unhampered by issues
of class, race, gender, beauty, or age; capable of diverting capital's
flooding force of colonization and offering each of us a safe haven in an
unconsumable body of our own. The space of the internet must become a site
of resistance and the avatar must become grounded in an alternative,
post-biological discourse of the body. As Donna Haraway has argued, biology
is an offspring of cultural domination, capitalism, religion, and medical
technologies, not a universal truth or even a manual for the study and
understanding of life processes. The discourse of biology must be
circumvented to discover a fertile alternative discourse for the avatar.

Antonin Artaud stood before his dressing mirror. As he instructed his left
hand to brush his hair, to his surprise the hand remained still as his
tongue caressed his lips. An attempt to open his mouth caused his right
ankle to turn. Artaud had become unmapped. The hierarchy of bodily
organization, the "organic organization of the organs," and the
territorialization of his cerebral cortex had become scrambled; he found
"himself with no shape or form whatsoever" (Deleuze and Guattari,
Anti-Oedipus, 8). Artaud described this experience as "the body without
organs" (BwO)..........as an addict and schizophrenic receiving intensive
electroshock treatment and drug therapy, Artaud sought a definition of the
body that could resist the methods used to control and alter his
consciousness-he desired to become unconsumable. The BwO mirrors
post-biological structures that undermine anatomical classification,
capitalist consumption, and tedious mind/body/commodity separations in
support of a more distributed, nomadic, and emergent model of embodied
consciousness..........."No mouth. No tongue. No teeth. No larynx. No
esophagus. No belly. No anus. The automata stop dead and set free the
unorganized mass they once served to articulate. The full body without
organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable"
(Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 8).........I will attempt to distribute
the "body without organs" across three other bodies of resistance: the
cyborg, the vampire, and the zombie. These figures are primary tropes for
forming a manifesto of the signifying avatar.

4.11. The Cyborg
An examination of the signifying cyborg as "other" is necessary to construct
an alternative field of action and signification for the avatar. Donna
Haraway's female cyborg described in "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," an otherly
mixture of the real and the trope, offers a model for an unconsumable
avatar. The cyborg's hybrid biology, a combination of tissue and technology,
is categorically adaptable to external conditions and therefore outside the
scope of human classifications like gender, health, race, age, and
reproduction. The cyborg does not reproduce, it replicates, clones, gets
erased and reprogrammed. It is outside of the discourse of gender and human
reproduction. The cyborg is not concerned with sin and salvation because it
does not die, it has no stable personality, no sense of lack or anxiety. For
Haraway's signifying female cyborg, roots, patriarchal allegiance, fear,
envy, lack, life, death, and salvation are irrelevant. It seeks alliances
outside the geopolitical processes of capitalism.

4.12. The Vampire
The vampire is a highly nomadic figure, capable of becoming a wolf, a bat, a
cloud of mist, a rat, owl, cat, or fly. It has the power to hypnotize its
enemies and to corrupt the innocent. The vampire is simultaneously a monster
and a multi-lingual cosmopolitan, a Jew, a landowner, a romantic, and a
queer. Because it is already dead, it is more alive and sensuous and of
purer desire than the living. Its body is without any singular biological
organization except its endless thirst for fresh blood. The vampire does not
fear death or contagion, only decomposition...........The vampire's
"troubling mobility" and refusal to be categorized, its alien biology, lack
of "natural" organic organization, nomadic abilities of transformation and
transmutation, and contingent immortality rooted in flesh and blood hosts
make it immune to any bifurcating Cartesian agenda. Its incorruptibility and
unconsumablity is due to its transgressive powers of abjection and seemingly
innocent clarity of purpose.

4.13. The Zombie
Discussing George Romero's classic trilogy-Night of the Living Dead (1969),
Dawn of the Dead (1978), and Day of the Dead-Steven Shaviro remarks:
"Zombies cannot be categorized within the diegesis (they cannot be placed in
terms of our usual binary oppositions of life and death, nature and
culture)" (101)..........."The fear of one's own body, of how one controls
it and relates to it, and the fear of not being able to control other
bodies, those bodies whose exploitation is too fundamental to capitalist
economy, are both at the heart of whiteness. Never has this horror been more
deliriously evoked than in these films of the Dead" (Dyer 61). The zombies
are hyper-physical and mindless. There has been ample discourse on the
dangers of detached minds, those ruled by their minds, unfeeling, cold, and
distant. Romero's zombies are radical speculations on the severed body, the
body without a mind, the amputee with a phantom mind. They are rabid
embodiments of voracious baroque capitalism, consuming machines of mass
desire. Parables of the dead wasteland of capital (especially in Dawn of the
Dead, which takes place almost entirely within the confines of a shopping
mall), these films exhibit the uncontrollable, vengeful revolt of a disowned
illegitimate sibling, our bodies. In a Cartesian nightmare, the cogito's
docile other, anesthetized by reterritorialization, has become undead.
Zombies have turned on the system that produced them; they are carcinogenic
monsters metastasizing through the orderly strip malls of capital. Their
lack has become pure. Free from any drive toward commodification, they are
delirious examples of innocent, ecstatic process. Like the vampire and
cyborg, these undead appear to have a contingent immortality, left to their
own devices they will remain undead, they will not die a natural
death..............

4.2. Deterritorialized Referents
Each of these figures-Haraway's female cyborg and vampire, Romero's
zombie-is an illegitimate child outside the cycles of lack and accumulation
that produced them. They feel no allegiance to parents. The cyborg, the
vampire, and the zombie have lost their original referents, become
unanchored from meaning, from life, and from the hegemonic discourses of
biology, economy, family, and social value. The already dead have no fear,
no investment in salvation, and no moral imperatives. Capitalism has no
leverage with them. Similarly, the avatar needs to become undead: to step
outside of biological discourse, detach from the referents that bind it to
mind/body bifurcation, lack-based desire, and cycles of commodity exchange