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

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

On Fri, 22 Nov 2002, Gregory Little wrote:

> "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."
>
Yes - that's where desire and the gamble come in.

> 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).
>
This is problematic in terms of the "we" - who desires such escape? How? I
think the demographics of game-playing really come into play here, more
than one might think.

> 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.

Well... I was on Worldsaway once & an avatar was carrying his/her identi-
fication sign "Nigger Lover." The problem is the assumption that a
so-called blankslate/level playingfield leads in one direction; in fact
the Net for example is a prime target of hate groups who create intensi-
fications of racist/stereotypical identifications, and other traditional
groups (thinking of Australian Aborigines or Micmac here for example) use
the Net for preservation of fragile local cultures.

In other words, Turkle, Haraway, Stone notwithstanding, the issues just
don't go away for a variety of reasons; they're manifested differently in
different spaces.

> Antonin Artaud stood before his dressing mirror. As he instructed his left

As you know, Stelarc and others have done a huge amount of remapping in
various ways. But the BWO for me is frightful; for me, a kind of full
embodiment of the sort Drew Leder speaks of - or Alphonso Lingis for that
matter - is far more of interest. But that's personal of course.
>
> 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.
>
It's hardly outside gender; it's female by virtue of Haraway. This is a
dream or fantasy image, one of many. One conveniently forgets the
economics of cyborgia - in the real world the main thing is prosthetics,
intelligent and otherwise, and their use for the handicapped, or those in
need of extended site etc. I had endocscopy this morning.

The economics are terrible here - Christopher Reeves rides the wave of
paralysis research, and others languish forgotten - without monies etc. I
know I'm expressing this badly, but for example D&G seem far more consum-
erist than otherwise, and this carries through into all of these
futures...

The BWO needs institutional support.

> 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.

Yes, and the vampire is to be feared by Jews and other groups who can be
accused of such activity. Look at Svengali in Trilby.

> 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
>
But they are not outside! The very stereotyping is where the referents
lie; you must be familiar with the works of Sandor Gilman on these issues?

The avatar is far too culturally loaded, too bound to economics as well
for me. This isn't a critique of course, but a preference - or at least
what "I" can deal with?

yours, Alan