Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer
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be not only understood, but undergone.
iDatabase
AE is organized as a theoretical pedagogy, proposing exercises that introduce the operating principles and devices testing an aesthetic deliberative reason. The basic insight of apparatus theory is that the language practices of a civilization are an apparatus (a social machine), involving inventions arrived at autonomously in each of the three principal lines of evolution: technology, institutional practices, identity formation. Flash reason is a synthesis made from parts of historical practices, but for it to function as the general skill set of electracy assumes that it is taught in some form institutionally, augmented by the full power of the digital prosthesis. Reviewing the features of image authoring provided by the iLife suite of programs found on most Mac computers (iPhoto, iMovieHD, iDVD, GarageBand, iWeb) might be sufficient motivation for the invention of an electrate rhetoric, in any case. Despite the ease and ubiquity of these and similar authoring programs, however, the question of interface design is not as straightforward as it might seem. Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media gives an idea of some of the challenges facing the transition to electracy.
Since the featured experiment in prudence does not directly discuss new media, a brief inventory of Manovich’s description of what is included under this rubric gives an idea of the context assumed for avatar as an image practice.
Technology
1.The convergence of all media in digital form, thus making all media programmable. The post-medium condition.
2.A new data object in information space. The new image ontology is “object-oriented.” An info-thing is a collection of diverse multimedia items (text, image, sound, voice, music, animation, clips, links, data streams, and the like) formed as an assemblage.
3.Support for real-time interaction with and modification of data. This capability of authoring “on the fly” is what makes it possible for flash reason to address the dangers of the Internet Accident.
Software
1.The avant-garde revolution of modernism, more or less achieving the full potential of its innovations by the 1920s, offers the best description of digital production tools: the cut-and-paste aesthetics of collage-montage, from Cubism to cinema, continuing in the Fine Arts up to our own time, and culminating in postmodernism. Manovich’s list of operations includes (besides cut-and-paste) copy, sort, search, filter, transcode, and rip. These aesthetics have become hegemonic in the tools, in the hardware and software of computing, but not yet in the common sense of everyday life or popular culture. This disparity between the parts of the apparatus (technology and institutional practices being out of joint) is a major challenge for education.
2.Information space is a composite, juxtaposing or superimposing heterogeneous locations. The logic of selection (menus) is modular, involving a range of features from video-keying to the program loop. The related point in grammatological terms is that literacy remains relevant as the category system for creating topics (topoi), but these topics are modules assembled into heterogeneous wholes that in turn need a regional category. That category (theorized here and in my previous work) is “chora.”
3.Simulation exceeds and incorporates representation. The computer replaces, simulates, and exceeds the lens. The scene created in the computer is not limited to, and is independent of, the parameters of conceptual and perceptible environments. Electracy as an apparatus is challenged to invent the institution, a metaphysics, and its related language/thought practices supporting this new relationship between humans and our equipment. Flash reason separates out and adds “affect” to concept and percept, or “judgment” to reason and will, as an autonomous faculty now accessible to ontology through the capacities of digital technology.
Interface (HCI)
1.The computer screen as equipment is literally and figuratively a frame. Or, the various registers of framing constituting any metaphysics are made more explicit in electracy; the computer screen frames an information space; cinematic editing frames the mise-en-scene of this space-time; image ontology frames what counts as reality for those using the apparatus. The interface displaying the information has a double structure, toggling between the transparent (promoting identification with a mimetic scenography) and the opaque (a critical tool for control and navigation).
2.A new object. Any object, thing, or prop in the represented/simulated scene may function as a sign with all the powers of the “as-structure” of language, meaning that it operates to control and navigate information. Any such sign may serve as a portal or gate switching between the levels of identification and control. In historical terms, this interface construes the equipment as externalized and programmable memory palace.
3.General cultural interface. Popular (entertainment) culture in general, and film (cinematography) in particular have become internalized and naturalized to the point that they comprise a rhetoric capable of organizing any body of information. In Aristotle’s terms, we could say that the commonplaces of popular forms and media may be used to structure and communicate the specialized places of knowledge. Any data may be constructed and navigated as if it were a movie.
Electracy then faces the same challenge confronting literacy in the era of Plato and Aristotle. In both cases there is in place a vernacular or endoxal skill-set available and capable of exploiting the new media (alphabetic or digital). Aristotle’s logic and rhetoric fashioned that endoxal interface of natural language into the powerful devices of argumentative inference that remain the core of literate education to this very day. Our proposal is that flash reason may do for the general cultural interface of media popular culture what Aristotle did for the natural language vernacular of Greek writing.
This set of features of new media extracted rather crudely from Manovich’s sophisticated and detailed argument constitutes nonetheless a useful reminder of the equipmental dimension of the electrate apparatus upon which to map the features of flash reason. Flash reason is the rhetoric citizens will need to become native users of the “language” described by Manovich. Flash reason, that is, as avatar rhetoric, is a second-order conduct, articulating the extant information culture for purposes of personal, professional, and public ends, the way literate rhetoric articulated the resources of natural language (including mythology, epics, ritual performance and the like) in the previous apparatus.
Image Ontological Affect
The flash reason necessary for avatar is the skill set native to new media, in the way that argumentation is native to literacy. It does not replace oral or literate practices, but supplements them with a new authoring, constructing a new metaphysics. This new metaphysics opens a dimension of human experience that until now seemed beyond the reach of education, if not of manipulation. This dimension of human capacity was framed by the Classical Greeks as a matter of virtue, meaning “power” or “capacity” native to a person. Virtue as such could not be taught, it was said, but could be trained by means of habit. A synonym for virtue in this usage is “disposition,” “inclination,” “habitus.”
This aspect of human “being” as life principle or force has been described by various terms: entelechy (Aristotle), conatus (Spinoza), monad (Leibniz), eternal return (Nietzsche), unconscious (Freud), Dasein (Heidegger). Spinoza’s definition of conatus summarizes the phenomenon in question: a striving to persevere in one’s own being. Striving—to what end? The key point is that this dimension of reality happens within first-person experience, not as an idea or concept, but affectively, as a feeling, the sensation of being alive. This “little sensation” is the site of a struggle for the future of humanity today, just as at one time was the “soul.” Most recently “disposition” is the target of neuroscience. An index of this continuity in the tradition is Antonio Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Damasio is one of the leading commentators on how neuroscience is explaining physiologically some of the insights of artists and philosophers. This affective dimension of the real is now accessible to image ontology in electracy.
A good account of the technological, artistic, and theoretical context motivating flash reason is Mark Hansen’s New Philosophy for New Media. Hansen’s insight is that in new media the very definition of “image” is transformed. An image is not some external support that we perceive as