Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer
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of spirit into flesh). Avatar in Hindu or Indian religion refers to the descent of God into material existence in a time of crisis, and the functionality to be adapted for electracy is this event of consultation, the occasion of decision requiring wisdom, good judgment, prudence (phronesis). “Descent” also refers to human embodiment, whether as the incarnation of spirit in pre-modern cosmologies, or arbitrarily thrown, as in existentialist modernity after the death of God. Ironically, the crisis facing civilization in electracy is precisely the one angels know nothing about: finite sexuated corporeality. Michael’s self-indulgences certainly set a bad example for sustainable embodiment. We are going to have to deal with the emergency of the senses on our own. Avatar Emergency experiments with a rhetoric of flash reason that, instantiated in digital technology, makes possible a practice of judgment that is the electrate equivalent of what Michael personifies in the life of Frank Quinlan (or that Sully undergoes in his Na’vi prosthesis). This “flash” refers to velocity of thought, an illumination of insight referred to by numerous modern philosophers and writers. Representative of this emblem of illumination is Walter Benjamin, who described the dialectical image as a lighting flash: “What was must be held fast as it flashes its lightning image in the now of recognizability” (Benjamin, 1999: N 9, 7). The phrase is associated with networked communications, everything from short fiction through the animation program to “flash mobs” gathered using social media. These and other practices evolving within electracy are probes within which may be discerned an image (primary process) logic. A purpose of Avatar Emergency is to explore the capacities of this emergent logic through the invention of concept avatar.
EmerAgency
Avatar Emergency (AE) completes a tetralogy of books featuring the “EmerAgency,” an online virtual consultancy, intended as a collaborative framework for inventing the practices of electracy. As with Internet Invention (2003), Electronic Monuments (2005), and Miami Virtue (2011), AE’s point of departure is Paul Virilio’s challenge to our information society: every technology brings with it its own disaster. The technology in question is that of our communications infrastructure, the digital media that function at the speed of light. The disasters Virilio has in mind are natural, technical, cultural, and social (he even has a category for “deliberate accidents,” such as 9/11). The speed of our digital world has created a dimensional pollution, compressing everything into “now” (ironically, separated from “here”). This condition threatens to render impossible any democratic public sphere since there is no time for the deliberative reason, the persuasion and argument, needed to achieve the consent of the governed.
A similar point about the disparity between computing speed and human reason is made in a more optimistic way by cyber boosters. They predict that by 2050 one personal computer will have the computing power of the entire human population of the earth (Kurzweil.Qtd. in Oosterhuis 42). The challenge is to interface the equipment with human thought. The optimistic proposal is to invent “artificial intuition,” which, in the grammatological context, could use the Greek term for intuitive intellect: nous. The proposal is for a direct connection between the brain and the machine (cyborg). “To allow yourself to act intuitively behind a computer device is a liberating process. You should allow yourself to have direct access to your distributed project databases. How can you as a designer do that? Invent a process, run the process, jump right into the process and make your split second decisions. Sculpt your information in real time” (Novak 39). Marcos Novak describes his work as constructing the alien. The alien stands for something new. The alien represents the unknown. Although Novak’s “alien” may be a cousin of “avatar,” the first mistake of this appeal is to isolate “brain” from “body.” Electracy rather proposes that direct access to databases must be through “mindbodies,” engaging mappings among orifices, brain, culture, and technics.
AE is an alternative to both the dystopian and utopian versions of this challenge of speed, arguing that “getting up to speed” is a motivation to take seriously the lesson of apparatus theory, which is that language technologies are not just equipment, but include institution formation (to develop and disseminate the relevant skill-set) and identity experience (individual and collective adaptations and adjustments to the new conditions). Even if we become posthuman (whether or not as cyborgs), the proposed invention must still include a practice or skill set that mediates between user and the equipment, just as the practices of literacy mediate between the person and the library. “Electracy” is to digital media what “literacy” is to alphabetic writing. The method of AE is to draw upon a sampling of elements, representing something of what the Western tradition knows about flash reason, sudden thought, or thinking at the speed of light, associated with the archive of image practices, usually associated with a mode of thought alternative to discursive analytical reason. Concept avatar assists our transition from the discursive to the momental. In fact, the ambition of flash reason is to bring into a rhetorical practice the effect Proust experienced as involuntary memory, referring to an event of time that exceeds the three ekstases of past-present-future:
And now, suddenly, the effect of this harsh law [that we can only imagine what is absent] had been neutralized, temporarily annulled, by a marvelous expedient of nature which had caused a sensation—the noise made both by the spoon and by the hammer, for instance—to be mirrored at one and the same time in the past, so that my imagination was permitted to savor it, and in the present, where the actual shock to my sense of the noise, the touch of the linen napkin, or whatever it might be, had added to the dreams of the imagination the concept of ‘existence’ which they usually lack, and through this subterfuge had made it possible for my being to secure, to isolate, to immobilize—for a moment brief as a flash of lightning—what normally it never apprehends: a fragment of time in the pure state. (The Past Recaptured 133)
I had this experience when the Woodsprites floated out of the screen of Avatar (a moment to be discussed later).
A review of the tradition, having in mind the qualities of immediate insight, reveals that flash reason is associated with a particular virtue—that virtue without which all other virtues are useless, some have said: prudence, or phronesis, as Aristotle called it. There is a renewal of interest not just in ethics but in wisdom, noted in, for example, the Arete Initiative at the University of Chicago, which announced a two million dollar research program on the nature and benefits of wisdom. Two million dollars buys a lot of pie. Prudence is a time-wisdom, a capacity to make an appropriate decision in an instant by taking the measure of a particular situation in its temporal context. This virtue has a history that is not well understood, causing it to fall out of favor or be reduced to caricatures (“expediency”) and even to be forgotten entirely. The formal goal for this study is to outline an image metaphysics that will do for electracy what Aristotle’s categories did for literacy. A premise is that the path to the invention of general electracy (a fully electrate society) passes through an updating of the virtue of prudence. To approach the design of an interface rhetoric through the history of a virtue is to answer one of the four questions of Marshall McLuhan’s heuristic tetrad. With respect to the invention of any artifact one is prompted to ask, what does it: 1) enhance? 2) obsolete? 3) retrieve? 4) produce when taken to its extreme? (Laws of Media 7). Our heuretic experiment retrieves from obsolescence the virtue of making an instant judgment in a particular situation as a source for the new logic of now-time as the best hope for thinking in Virilio’s dromosphere.
AE is organized, then, around an exercise—the design of a personal allegory of prudence, based on a model of “encounter,” in which contemporary artists updated famous paintings from a museum collection. The scene of decision foregrounded in this allegory is a point of departure for thinking about judgment itself as a kind of experience, including collective judgments of the kind archived in cultural traditions. What might wisdom be today, upon what authority might it be grounded, according to what measure, on behalf of what world view, what vision of well-being? The argument is expressed as testimony, not as declaration or prescription, framed in a reflexive account of my attempt to design an allegorical emblem out of my own experience. This exercise in allegory is a means to design and test a conceptual persona through a vital anecdote, as relay for concept avatar. Within this frame I present, in the genre of mystory (Ulmer, Internet Invention), what I have come to understand about living, my decision to become a professor of the Humanities and the lifestyle embraced as part of that choice, just enough (a measured contribution) to assist