an avatar manifesto

7/30/2019 An Avatar Manifesto

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0/12 An Avatar Manifesto

ww.gregorylittle.org/avatars/text.html

published in "INTERTEXTS", Special Issue: Webs of Discourse: The Intertextuality of Science Studies,

volume 3, number 2, Fall 1999, Texas Tech University Press, Lubbock.

A Manifesto for AvatarsA Manifesto for AvatarsGregory Little

Kent State University Stark Campus

Figure 1, "Bacchus"

1. Introducing Avatars

AVATARA-Sanskrit.; ava-'down', tarati-'he goes, passes beyond' literally, 'a descent', a conceptiondescribed in theBhagavad gita, 4th Teaching, 1-8 where Krishna confides: "when goodness grows

weak, when evil increases, I make myself a body." (OED)

Originally referring to the incarnation of Hindu deities, avatars in the computing realms have come tomean any of the various "strap-on" visual agents that represent the user in increasing numbers of 2 and3D worlds. (Lonehead, par. 3)

This essay studies the covert, market driven forces at work in our choices of images for the avatarsinhabiting cyberspace, in order to understand the dangers of the exchange of self-images foradvertisements. To forge a set of alternative resistant and forceful conditions for imaging what SherryTurkle has termed "the second self," tactics based in imaging, language, and psychology can beopposed to the insidious and covert co-optation of the self by commodities. This essay is an attempt to


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examine the construction of alternative figures as models of resistance. The Manifesto for Avatars offersa formal set of oppositional strategies for constructing unconsumable self-images.The apparent freedom of identity and gender enjoyed by the participants in multi-user domains and theInternet in general (Langley, Stone) is a dangerous illusion, masking the corporate agendas dominatingthe nature and spirit of the construction of cyberspace and avatars. Imagine an internet chat room wherewe are all represented by the commodity of our choice. Much like the large, recognizable logos thatcorporeal jackets, sneakers, tee-shirts, and hats model, in this virtual environment our veryrepresentation, our self image, becomes an emblem of the production and accumulation of goods. The

irony in the physical world is that we choose to wear these commodities and we willingly pay multi-national corporations for the privilege of advertising their products. Through this transaction we expresspersonal fantasies, achieve a fleeting sense of democracy and individual expression, and fulfill variouslevels of desire.

2. Defining Avatars

The use of the term avatar to represent the self or user in the context of shared on-line Internetenvironments first occurs in the early 1980's with the development of LucasFilms's Habitatproject(Morningstar and Farmer 275). The term came to popular consciousness with the success of the novelSnowCrash (Stephenson). Discussions of the nature of the avatar are often mixed with current cyborgtheory. Although the avatar and the cyborg share numerous social constructions and identity politics, inthe interest of developing an understanding of the avatar, it is necessary to distinguish it from its cousin,the cyborg.

2.1. The Human EnhancedThe term cyborg was coined in 1960 with the appearance of "Cyborgs in Space" by Manfred E. Clynesand Nathan S. Kline. Clynes and Kline argued that altering man's bodily functions to meet therequirements of extraterrestrial environments was more logical than providing a controlled environmentfor him in space. Their "self-regulating artifact-organism" (Clynes and Kline 31) would be free to

explore space without remaining anchored to a cumbersome artificial environment: "Solving the manytechnical problems involved in manned space flight by adapting man to his environment rather than viceversa, will not only mark a significant step forward in man's scientific progress, but may well provide anew and larger dimension for man's spirit as well" (Clynes and Kline 33). This early cyborg is thehuman enhanced, a hybrid physical construction of wetware, hardware, and software who is withoutconscious effort able to adjust its homeostatic mechanisms to provide stable if not superior operation in avariety of friendly and unfriendly environments. The cyborg incorporates body and prostheses in theforms of mechanical, optical, coded, pharmacological, electronic, telematic, genetic, and biologicalagents, hosted by an original human consciousness to form a unified but hybrid lived body. Psycho-physiological problems like "oxygenization and carbon dioxide removal, fluid intake and output,vestibular function, cardiovascular control, muscular maintenance, perceptual problems, temperature and

pressure variations, gravitation, magnetic fields, sensory invariance, psychoses, and limbo" (32-33) mustbe overcome, and unconsciously, transparently controlled. Clynes and Kline's original cyborg wasconstructed at Rockland State Hospital in the late 1950's-a white rat with a tiny osmotic pump implantedin its body to alter its physiology by allowing chemicals to flow into its system at a controlled rate. Itwas thoroughly grounded in the corporeal, biological, and cybernetic laws of the physical world

2.2. The Avatar in TheoryIn the interest of defining the avatar I have considered the cyborg in its real world, physical form, theoffspring of hard science and space research, not of myth, metaphor, representation, or fiction. Incontrast, the avatar is a mythic figure with its origin in one world and projected or passing through a


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form of representation appropriate to a parallel world. The avatar is a delegate, a tool or instrumentallowing an agency to transmit signification to a parallel world. The cyborg and the avatar, then, sharethe purpose of facilitating operation in another environment. The cyborg has been described as a unifiedbut hybrid "other," whereas the avatar is born of a telematic split; the original remains in its originaryenvironment while sending a tool of signification, the avatar, into a second. In that it never detachesfrom its referent, the user, the avatar differs as well from virtual software agents produced by artificialintelligence and neural networks. It is not independent and does not in itself learn. The avatar isinseparable in nature from its host, the human user. The virtual avatar is software. Its conditions are

those of a coded environment. The avatar is essentially a visual representation, a virtual instrument orimaged prosthesis of its referent-the user, and so fundamentally related to linguistic signs andrepresentational icons. In this sense, the population of avatars could come to include the history ofportraiture in painting, photography, and sculpture, as a projection or passing through of once livingindividuals into the virtual, timeless space of representation, metaphor, and mimesis. Whereas theastronautic cyborg is grounded in the corporeal and must adhere to physical laws, the informatic avatar-whether 2D, 3D, C++, Java, or VRML-signifies through virtual visibility and affords to its referent ahigh level of choice for identity. It is in the very space of choice, from highly personal to non-consensual, that the unique power of the avatar is problematized. The most significant use of the avataris the freeing of personal identity from outmoded relationships to consistency and social consensus. The"strap-on" (Lonehead , par.3) persona, the irrelevance of grounding identity in communal agreement,

and the "wholesale appropriation of the other" (Stone 83) open the self to new territories ofsignification, connection, desire, and empowerment.

2.3. The Avatar in PracticeWho use an avatar, and to what end? A survey of the avatars and virtual bodies inhabiting the webreveals a colony of extremely generic, homogenous representations rooted in prevailing constructions ofsuccessful commodification and accumulation: pop icons, juvenile fantasies, dumbed-down cartooncharacters, and racially pure, white, young, "perfect bodies." A tool with the potential for the playfulgeneration of territories of signification and empowerment, the avatar is being used instead as a weaponagainst its own referents to seize this terrain of potential as part of a rabid process of accumulation.

Whether the avatar is a physical, earthly body inhabited by the immanence of the metaphysical(Krishna), or the reverse, a virtual representation of a corporeal body (a " strap-on" visual agent) thecreation and use of an avatar involves a pairing or doubling at a metaphysical, semantic, anddimensional level between the corporeal and the immanent, language and thing, image and imaged,mind and body, and, as we shall see, between self and commodity. The avatars inhabiting the WorldWide Web have been co-opted by forces beyond the user at the keyboard. As I have noted, the originalavatar marks a top-down descent of a force beyond the human, like a Hindu deity, but in our currentcultural condition it is Kapital, not Krishna, that makes itself a body.

3. Bodies of Capital

The vast majority of avatars inhabiting cyberspace today are drawn from the image database ofadvertising, fashion, and entertainment. These countless generic representations-big breasted small-waisted babes, idealized perfect-skinned trim and tan hunks, Disney-derived characters, bowling pins,smiley faces, coffee cups, exotic animals, and steroid-driven snarling, hard-bodied war machines-are not

just the tool of the user behind the screen, but covert instruments of multinational capitalism. Concerningthe use of avatars in virtual chat rooms like The Palace, Lex Lonehood refers to "regular members whohad constructed their own avatars-mostly supermodel cutouts and cutesy cartoons" (Lonehead , par.3).Clearly these representations fulfill defining conditions of the avatar: they (1) are strap-ons for their usersrepresenting a corporeal individual's presence in this or that space, (2) provide a source identity for the


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bubbles of text that emerge from them, and (3) involve others in a guessing game with respect to themetaphorical or actual relationship between representer and represented. However, regardless of theembedded levels of transgendered activities, wish fulfillment, and psychological doubling that occur, itis highly questionable to what extent these generic representations are personal: when in these spaces itis difficult to avoid the sense that one is wandering among the commodities and celebrities on the pagesofPeople magazine. If , for example, my avatar is a Nike sneaker, then my signifier also signifies anadvertisement for a corporation or process of commerce. Similarly, a celebrity's constructed image as aproduct of a hegemonic discourse: most entertainers are fetishized representations seeking popular

consensus. In the real world it costs me to wear (advertise) Nike, and the profits go to Nike. Thecurrently low cost of the Web might make such virtual co-optation seem more innocuous than itsoccurrence in the physical domain. However, consider the following corporate accomplishment, citedduring theAvatars 97conference in San Francisco: "For the past two years, Fujitsu has been running anon-line 3D community called WorldsAway. WorldsAway has developed to the point where it is about tostart making a profit off per-minute usage charges-an accomplishment quite rare in the field"(Maclarchian, par.5). If your avatar, your self-image, becomes a covert instrument of Fujitsu, then theEnlightenment agenda of Cartesian bifurcation is complete, although warped from "I think therefore Iam" to "I shop therefore I am" (Kruger): "The individual is displaced from its central location by the(commodity) object, which established priority and sovereignty, over the subject" (Linker and Kruger78).

3.1. Self and CommodityThe mind/body dichotomy is a red herring. The most dangerous and incarcerating binary is thefabricated pairing of self and commodity, between lived processes and production/accumulation. Wedesire to become commodities. We desire all of our lived processes to be towardaccumulation/production, we long to be made whole, consistent, useful, stackable, to conform to the"bottom line". We live in DeBord's society of the spectacle, where accumulation/production occurs tosuch an extent that capital is transformed into an image, or avatar, of itself (DeBord 34). Humanity issacrificed at the altar of production's bottom line. Our sense of democracy has been distorted from oneperson, one vote to one dollar, one vote. The avatar, under the semblance of a representation of one,

democratic individual free to construct his or her "own" mythic fantasy or satiation of personal desire, isactually returned to its original function as a top-down tool, the embodiment of post-modern multi-national commerce. An examination of the dynamics between the construction of desire, human will,and the capitalist commodity will reveal the structure of this process.

3.2. Desire and LackDesire moves outward toward acquisition of an object to fill its apparent void. Desire is the need toacquire and represents a secondary force, toward a primary element, the object in the world. For on-lineusers of chat rooms, role playing, transgendered activities, and shape-shifting become anxiouscompulsions on continuous-loop. Rather than free-floating, pure, generative, self-gratifying desire, online activities form a closed system of self perpetuating personal pathologies serving a thriving system of

commodity exchange: "lack is created, planned, and organized in and through social production. . . .The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of the dominant class. Thisinvolves deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of production; making all of desireteeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one's needs satisfied" (Deleuze and Guattari 28).Being in the body is to be aware of this fear, this emptiness. Movement out of the body is movementtoward resolution of lack through acquisition. Disembodied is valorized. When bombarded withcountless representations of the latest model/celebrity/product, we are confronted with intentionallyunattainable cultural ideals in the guise of an attainable personalized commodity. What we lack, havelost, come to desire, and cannot attain through the actual is valorized and can be attained only throughthe commodified, fetishized virtual; just for this moment, and always at a cost.


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3.3. Docile BodiesFar from "the freeing of personal identity from its outmoded relationship to consistency and socialconsensus," personal identity is insidiously seized on both levels, at the level of the flesh as we willinglysit for hours motionless at the keyboard, and the artifactual body or avatar, an insignia of capital in theguise of personal choice. Two recent studies of the relationship of Internet use and mental health haveshown that use of the net has definite effects on users. Bill Scherlis, co-author ofInternet Paradox,found that moderate internet usage among individuals without history of mental disorder led to feelingsof depression and loneliness (Scherlis et all). A second study was of individuals exhibiting "abnormal"

internet usage: "Being hooked on the internet is not a recognized disorder. But Shapira (Nathan Shapira,psychiatrist at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine) said that excessive on-line use by the studyparticipants would qualify as a disorder of impulse control, in the same category as kleptomania orcompulsive shopping. In fact, he suggested the Internet problem be called Internetomania or Netomaniarather than addiction" (Associated Press par.8). In a disorder of impulse control such as kleptomania orcompulsive shopping, impulse manifests as will or libido directed toward a fetishized object of desire-inthe case of Netomania, toward a highly contingent sense of agency in the virtual world. Netomania isexacerbated by the cult of docile bodies (car culture, game culture, couch potatoes, PC culture, etc). Forthe highly susceptible, to "shut down" and walk away is too painful, as the virtual collapses back intothe screen and one becomes painfully aware that everything is, to quote the Talking Heads, "the same asit ever was."

But in the words of Waylon Jennings: "The doers and thinkers say movin' is the closest thing to bein'free." The body behind the keyboard, wiggling its fingers, sliding a mouse back and forth and staringinto the screen, may be experiencing a sense of mobility in the virtual world, but at the physical level thebody 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 avictim of war, torture, institutionalization, or imprisonment, the computer user is free to "shut down" andmove; 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 millionsof "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 ofvirtual agency.

3.4. Sous RatureIn her research on extremes of power relations over the body through war and torture, Elaine Scarrypoints 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. In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmakingof the World,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 anotherlocation: "it requires both the reciprocal infliction of massive injury and the eventual disowning of theinjury 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 64). Social power, the domination of the body (beit individual or social), regardless of purpose (war, control, or commodity exchange), is based ondistancing the subject from her own body, her own pain, desire, and instincts of survival (46). Becauseour will and desire is traditionally based in what we lack, we allow the bifurcation to happen. Thetransaction 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 inversionof surveillance (Halleck, 218-228) of popular video that occurred when civilian George Halliday turnedhis camcorder on the LAPD as they beat Rodney King represents the overturning of this denial. AsKing's writhing brown body was broadcast internationally via cable and satellite transmissions his imagebecame an avatar for the countless incidents of racial oppression and violence worldwide. Avital Ronellargues that the televised images of the assault of Rodney King were actually the avatar or counter-


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transference of the denial of the violence inflicted upon the bodies of Iraq's citizens during Desert Storm(Ronell, 277).As an instrument of denial, language diverts us from the sense that interacting with computersimulations "is like having your body amputated" (Barlow 42). Today's technological discourse drawsheavily from salvation myths, promising leisure, happiness, improved lifestyle, increased intelligence,personal fulfillment, even transcendence. Icons, avatars, and slogans all help to form a myth thattechnology 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 wekeep coming back for more. At the Avatars 97 conference Amy Jo Kim, creative director with thevirtual world creation consultant company Naima, explained that on-line designers could learn fromreligion, because "Religion really understands repeat business" (Maclarchian par.5).

4.0. Alternative Bodies

"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right." (DiFranco , "My IQ")

There are ways to take back the avatar, to regain the option of opening the self to new territories ofsignification, connection, desire, and empowerment. To do so requires nothing short of a completeredefinition of our relationships to our bodies, to desire, self-image, biology, and the hierarchies ofhegemony. The avatar expands to embrace the history of self-imaging, and, as in the example ofRodney King, to include displaced and erased bodies forced to the surface of collective mediaconsciousness through strategies like the inversion of surveillance. The use of the avatar in on-lineshared environments has the potential to become the democratic self-portrait, the revolutionarypolymorphic body-image unhampered by issues of class, race, gender, beauty, or age; capable ofdiverting capital's flooding force of colonization and offering each of us a safe haven in anunconsumable body of our own. The space of the internet must become a site of resistance and theavatar 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 medicaltechnologies, not a universal truth or even a manual for the study and understanding of life processes("The Past is the Contested Zone"). The discourse of biology must be circumvented to discover a fertilealternative discourse for the avatar.

4.1.Making Ourselves a "Body w/o Organs"Antonin Artaud stood before his dressing mirror. As he instructed his left hand to brush his hair, to hissurprise the hand remained still as his tongue caressed his lips. An attempt to open his mouth caused hisright ankle to turn. Artaud had become unmapped. The hierarchy of bodily organization, the "organicorganization of the organs," and the territorialization of his cerebral cortex had become scrambled; hefound "himself with no shape or form whatsoever" (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus8). Artaud

described this experience as "the body without organs" (BwO). He called for detachment of the thingsof consciousness from captivity in the brain, and a reclassification according to an emotional or affectiveorder (Thacker par.10). as an addict and schizophrenic receiving intensive electroshock treatment anddrug therapy, Artaud sought a definition of the body that could resist the methods used to control andalter his consciousness-he desired to become unconsumable. The BwO mirrors post-biologicalstructures that undermine anatomical classification, capitalist consumption, and tediousmind/body/commodity separations in support of a more distributed, nomadic, and emergent model ofembodied consciousness.Artaud's "Body without Organs", traversed repeatedly by the texts of Deleuze and Guattari, is neverwholly defined. It resists any single definition and is therefore "unconsumable": "No mouth. No tongue.


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No teeth. No larynx. No esophagus. No belly. No anus. The automata stop dead and set free theunorganized mass they once served to articulate. The full body without organs is the unproductive, thesterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable" (Deleuze and Guattari,Anti-Oedipus 8). It is not withinthe scope of this paper to fully develop the myriad of locations, meanings, and associations surroundingthis extremely complex and fascinating territory. Rather I will attempt to distribute the "body withoutorgans" across three other bodies of resistance: the cyborg, the vampire, and the zombie. These figuresare primary tropes for forming a manifesto of the signifying avatar.4.11. The Cyborg

The application of the term "cyborg" has expanded to the point where there is no longer any consensusabout its meaning. For the purpose of creating visual tactics for imaging resistant, unconsumable avatars,I am most interested in figures that signify through the visual; the lived cyborg body that demonstrates,not hides, its hybridity. Society traditionally treats the signifying cyborgs among us as "other",especially in the case of the handicapped or disabled who are unable to blend entirely into the visual andfunctional fabric of socially-defined normalcy. An examination of the signifying cyborg as "other" isnecessary to construct an alternative field of action and signification for the avatar. Donna Haraway'sfemale 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 andtechnology, is categorically adaptable to external conditions and therefore outside the scope of humanclassifications 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 humanreproduction. The cyborg is not concerned with sin and salvation because it does not die, it has no stablepersonality, no sense of lack or anxiety. For Haraway's signifying female cyborg, roots, patriarchalallegiance, fear, envy, lack, life, death, and salvation are irrelevant. It seeks alliances outside thegeopolitical processes of capitalism ("Manifesto 149-151").4.12. The VampireThe 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 issimultaneously a monster and a multi-lingual cosmopolitan, a Jew, a landowner, a romantic, and aqueer. 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. Thevampire does not fear death or contagion, only decomposition. As Haraway reveals in her explorationsof vampire culture inModest_Witness, the vampire's lust for bodily fluids and its mixing and sharing ofblood make it an avatar of our dominant global fear of viral epidemics, ethnic purity, race, and"originary lineage" (215). At the same time, its singular focus and driving energy directed outwardtoward acquisition and consumption make it a trope for the rabid processes of capitalism. The vampire's"troubling mobility" and refusal to be categorized, its alien biology, lack of "natural" organicorganization, nomadic abilities of transformation and transmutation, and contingent immortality rootedin flesh and blood hosts make it immune to any bifurcating Cartesian agenda. Its incorruptibility andunconsumablity is due to its transgressive powers of abjection and seemingly innocent clarity ofpurpose.

4.13. The ZombieZombies have many of the same characteristics for transgression and avoidance of bifurcation asHaraway's female cyborg and vampire culture. Discussing George Romero's classic trilogy-Night of the

Living Dead(1969),Dawn of the Dead(1978), andDay of the Dead(1985)-Steven Shaviro remarks:"Zombies cannot be categorized within the diegesis (they cannot be placed in terms of our usual binaryoppositions of life and death, nature and culture)" (100.1). Yet the exact nature of this allegory of thezombie is delightfully slippery. In "White", Dyer builds an argument linking Romero's zombies to racerelations in the US: "The liberal critique of whites as ruled by their heads; as a radio announcer says,'Kill the brain and you kill the ghoul,'" as if "zombies/whites are nothing but their brains"; as "brainsspatter against the wall" (157), the radical dismemberment of both the zombies and the livingdeconstructs any over-investment one could have in the brain, or any other organ or appendage: "The


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fear of one's own body, of how one controls it and relates to it, and the fear of not being able to controlother bodies, those bodies whose exploitation is too fundamental to capitalist economy, are both at theheart of whiteness. Never has this horror been more deliriously evoked than in these films of the Dead"(Dyer 160).The zombies are hyper-physical and mindless. There has been ample discourse on the dangers ofdetached minds, those ruled by their minds, unfeeling, cold, and distant. Romero's zombies are radicalspeculations on the severed body, the body without a mind, the amputee with a phantom mind. They arerabid embodiments of voracious baroque capitalism, consuming machines of mass desire. Parables of

the dead wasteland of capital (especially inDawn of the Dead, which takes place almost entirely withinthe confines of a shopping mall), these films exhibit the uncontrollable, vengeful revolt of a disownedillegitimate sibling, our bodies. In a Cartesian nightmare, the Cogito's docile other, anesthetized byreterritorialization, has become undead. Zombies have turned on the system that produced them; theyare carcinogenic monsters metastasizing through the orderly strip malls of capital. Their lack has becomepure. Free from any drive toward commodification, they are delirious examples of innocent, ecstaticprocess. Like the vampire and cyborg, these undead appear to have a contingent immortality, left to theirown devices they will remain undead, they will not die a natural death.

4.2. Deterritorialized ReferentsEach 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. Thecyborg, the vampire, and the zombie have lost their original referents, become unanchored frommeaning, 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 noleverage with them. Similarly, the avatar needs to become undead: to step outside of biologicaldiscourse, detach from the referents that bind it to mind/body bifurcation, lack-based desire, and cyclesof commodity exchange.

5.0. Manifesto

This Manifesto is a call to artists, netomanics, software, hardware, and wetware designers, creativedirectors, teachers, scientists, slackers, hackers, CEOs, students, cyborgs, zombies, vampires, workinggroups, technology officers, specialists, politicians, surgeons, doctors, rappers, rockers, and clowns, acall to cast off the dumbing-down manacles of wholistics, universals, boundaries, acceptablilities,salvations, moral imperatives, family values, personal fantasies, dualisms, and "the God trick"(Haraway, "Actors are Cyborg" 22). Let us make ourselves an unconsumable, signifying, body withoutorgans.The partial, the schizoid, the nomadic and local are threats to the primacy of capital. Fragmentation,irregularity, dissolution, hybridity, swarming, and wandering stubbornly are lethal weapons againstglobalization. The displacement of the self by the commodity insures the survival of the commodity and

the perpetuation of the processes of accumulation. The movement of capital into the avatar is aninevitable part of capitalism's infinite return. It represents nothing less than the wholesale loss of thepossibility of liberation and awareness of the processes of production and accumulation. The dominant,"universal" myths, psychologies, sciences, philosophies, religions, and economies that form the NewWorld Order perpetuate impulse disorder through the abhorrence of partiality and the resultantmovement outward toward the object of capital in the guise of the illusion of wholeness. We have cometo believe that we are imperfect, incomplete creatures and that completion, oneness, and wholeness isthe Goal. It is this argument that permits the inscribing of production across consciousness at theexpense of tolerance, difference, and free desire.We are partial, parts of a network of drifts. We slip across a curved matrix whose beginning is


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everywhere, whose center is nowhere, and whose diameter is infinite. We are unable to perceive awhole or pattern, we participate and form tendencies. We can connect and disconnect from desire'sconduit without risk or loss, there is nothing to measure or acquire. Through the dismantling of theneurosis of the individual, alienated self, the celebration of locality and partiality, and the unbinding ofour consciousness from dilemmas of bifurcation, the lust for uniformity, and the impulse disorders oflack-based desire; we can experience "a joy that is immanent to desire as though desire were filled byitself and its contemplations, a joy that implies no lack or impossibility and is not measured by pleasuresince it distributes intensities of pleasure and prevents us from being suffused by anxiety, shame, and

guilt" (Deleuze and Guattari ,A Thousand Plateaus, 155). At present our collective social body isparalyzed by loss. Like an amputee dreaming about a phantom limb we re-remember our irrevocablebody, we hallucinate its presence, long for its return, wait to wake up from the nightmare. We mustmove on from the bifurcating past and build a new body.

5.1. Imaging Wildcards

Figure 2. Identity Construction Menu

As a part of the discourse of bodily representation, the avatar signifies through the visual as an image.

The postmodern, millennial avatar signifies in a public sphere (the Web), is a social representation thatcan be both target and weapon. The postmodern artist is less a producer of rarified objects than amanipulator of visual codes, social signs, and media images (Foster, 100). Particular kinds of marks,styles, images, and forms have come to signify modes of expression or feeling, like the spiritual, thepersonal, the expressive, the exotic, and high or low culture. These elements form a system of signs,tropes, or codes for the artist to manipulate and combine. The social and virtual context of the Webdistances the artist entirely from the production of the corporeal art object and frees her for the activity ofcoding/recoding. This activity often gives attention to the particular institutional framework or site inorder to reveal how an exhibition context participates in the construction of the meaning and audience ofthe art object. The signifying avatar will take a resistant, reactive position relative to its institutional

context, the commodified Web.The strategies available to the avatar include: 1) the freedom of choice of self-image and the lack of needfor consensus relative to self imaging; this frees the avatar from any singular representation and opensthe individual to a plurality of possibilities; 2) an emphasis on radical embodiment, on all that is theliteral body, and on all that it is to be grounded in the body at the expense of social, biological, cultural,economic, psychoanalytic, and religious discourse; this can free the individual from lack-based desireand myths of wholeness and transcendence that cause us to abandon the body to rehabitation by capital;and 3) drawing from various alternative narratives of abjection, the alien, and the other; this can offer usvisual and procedural models for constructing unconsumable images.To combine visual codes, signifying signs, and social images into avatars that take a combative stancetoward the forces of capital:

1. Seek, rarify, and valorize disintegration and instability[Figure 3. Photoshop]

2. Resist unified identity relative to race, gender, age, human, animal, or machine.


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[Figure 4. "Satyr']

3. Refuse participation in wholeness and actively dismantle myths of transcendentalism.


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[Figure 5. "Garth']

4. Create tensions and conflicts through the simultaneous presentation of the desiring subject and thefetishized object of desire.


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[Figure 6. "The Enforcer']

5. Draw from narratives of abjection, the alien, and the other


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[Figure 7. "The Terrorist"]

6. Pierce the skin, do the taboo, show the insides, destroy the internal/external binary.


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[Figure 8. "The Clown"]

7. Refuse the temptation to succumb to the slick, seamless special effects of emergent technology

[Figure 9. "Prom Night"]8. Avoid personal or social fantasy, step out of bounds, lose your boundaries altogether


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[Figure 10. 'Dolly']

9. Avoid mystery, make analysis of the unconscious impossible, be hyper literal

[Figure 11]10. Use images that speak of hyperembodiment, of extremes of physicality, like the visceral, the abject,

the defiled, and the horrific[Figure 12]

The avatar offers a new territory for understanding ourselves. Let us construct the avatar as arevolutionary site of resistance inside the belly of an armed-to-the-teeth multinational monster ofexchange. Polymorphic, bi-gendered, unstable nomadic, pained and maimed representations of the selfas subject could act, in Donna Haraway's terms, as "trickster figures," "potent wild cards" to undermine,infect, and terrorize the monster from the inside out. The avatar is thus born of the dialectic of the bodysimultaneously as the idealized, commodified body of capital; and as the abject, transgressive, hyper-visceral embodied body. This is a call to build avatars, computers, images, discourses, and relationships

that refuse and subvert the "self exterminating impulses of the discourses of disembodiment" (Sobchack314). This is a call to joy, the joy of mortality, partiality, and finality; a call to the lived body of desire.

Works Cited

Anders, Peter. "www.theother.com.", unpublished book review. Email attachment to author, 23 Mar.1999..

Associated Press. "Study: Internet 'addicts' often show other disorders." CNN Interactive (May 31,


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Kruger, Barbara. From "Untitled (I shop therefore I am)." Photographic silkscreen on vinyl, 120" x120", 1987. Collection of Thomas Ammann, Zurich.

Langer, Suzanne. K. Mind, An Essay on Human Feeling. [2 volumes]. Baltimore: John HopkinsUniversity Press, 1967). [place vol. # with p.# in body of text]

Langley, Charles. "The Avatar with a Thousand Faces: The Social Functions of DreamscapeMythology". 1997. n. pag Online. www.sfgate.com/eguide/flipside/arc97/1119avatar.html.

Maclarchian, Malcom. "Avatar Conference Advocates Rules for Virtual Worlds." TechWeb, n. pagOnline. CMP.net, 1997. www.techweb.com/wire/news/1997/10/1024avatars.html.

Morningstar, Chip. and F. Randal Farmer. "The Lessons of LucasFilm's Habitat." In Cyberspace:First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991, 273-301.

National Public Radio, transcript from 'Science Friday', August 24, 1998.

Penley, Constance., and Andrew Ross. "Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway.", InTechnoculture. Ed. Penley and Ross, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. 18-23.

Ronell, Avital. "Video/Television/Rodney King: Twelve Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle". InCulture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology. Eds Gretchen Bender and Timothy Druckrey. The DiaFoundation for the Arts. Seattle. Bay Press, 1994

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1985.

---. "The Merging of Bodies and Artifacts in the Social Contract." In Culture on the Brink-Ideologies ofTechnology. Ed. G. Bender and T. Druckrey. Seattle: Bay Press, 1994, 80-86

Shaviro, Steven. "Contagious Allegories: George Romero." In The Cinematic Body. Minnesota:University of Minnesota Press, 1993, 101-103.

Sobchack, V. "Beating the Meat/Surviving the Text, or How to Get Out of this Century Alive." In TheVisible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science. Ed. P. A. Treichler, L. Cartwright, andC. Penley. New York: New York University Press, 1998, 312-314

Stephenson, Neal. SnowCrash, New York, Bantam Books, 1992.

Stone, Allucquere Rosanne."Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories About Virtual

Cultures." In Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Benedikt, 82-85.

Talking Heads. "Once in a Lifetime." Perf. David Byrne, Brian Eno, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison,Tina Weymouth. Remain in Light. Sire Records, 1980.

Thacker, Eugene. ".../visible_human.html/digital anatomy and the hyper-texted body", CTHEORY, 2June, 1998. Online, n pag. Oct. 1998. http://www.ctheory.com/a60.html

Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self-Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster,1984.


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Ziff-Davis TV, Inc. "If You Build It, They Will Come." thesite: The Avatars 97 Conference. Aug.1997 Online, n pag. ZdNet Sept. 1998www.zdnet.com/zdtv/thesite/1197w2/play/play1033jump1_110697.html.

from a paper called "Agents, Identity Constructs, and Lightbodies--A Manifesto for Avatarspresented at Webs of Discourse: The Intertextuality of Science StudiesFebruary 1998, Texas Tech University, Lubbock;and a presentation made at Consciousness Re-Framed: Art and Consciousness

in the Post-Biological Era, Center for Advanced Inquiry into the Interactive Arts, Wales College,Univerisity of Newport.

an avatar manifesto

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