Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer
New Media Theory
Series Editor, Byron Hawk
The New Media Theory series investigates both media and new media as a complex ecological and rhetorical context. The merger of media and new media creates a global social sphere that is changing the ways we work, play, write, teach, think, and connect. Because this new context operates through evolving arrangements, theories of new media have yet to establish a rhetorical and theoretical paradigm that fully articulates this emerging digital life.
The series includes books that combine social, cultural, political, textual, rhetorical, aesthetic, and material theories in order to understand moments in the lives that operate in these emerging contexts. Such works typically bring rhetorical and critical theories to bear on media and new media in a way that elaborates a burgeoning post-disciplinary “medial turn” as one further development of the rhetorical and visual turns that have already influenced scholarly work.
Other Books in the Series
Mics, Cameras, Symbolic Action: Audio-Visual Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, by Bump Halbritter (2012)
The Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric, by David M. Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony J. Michel (2012)
New Media/New Methods: The Academic Turn from Literacy to Electracy, edited by Jeff Rice and Marcel O’Gorman (2008)
The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition, by Alexander Reid (2007). Honorable Mention, W. Ross Winterowd/JAC Award for Best Book in Composition Theory, 2007.
Avatar Emergency
Gregory L. Ulmer
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com
Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA
© 2012 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ulmer, Gregory L., 1944-
Avatar emergency / Gregory L. Ulmer.
p. cm. -- (New media theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60235-289-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-290-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-291-9 (ebook)
1. Digital media--Philosophy. 2. Digital media--Technological innovations. 3. Image (Philosophy) 4. Virtual reality in art. 5. Aesthetics. I. Title.
P90.U42 2012
302.23’1--dc23
2012004380
1 2 3 4 5
Cover design by David Blakesley.
Cover images © 2012 by Gregory L. Ulmer.
Printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email [email protected].
for Anjali Claire
Contents
Afterword: Class Portrait With Daimon (A Remix)
Figure 1. Titian. Allegory of Time Governed by Prudence. 1565.
Preface
Something is happening to us and through us that goes by the name “avatar.” Some of us are present in Second Life through an “avatar” or have had our identities stolen digitally, added a photograph to our Facebook account or personalized our blog with an icon, even designed and sold t-shirts, skateboards, coffee mugs and the like branded with our personal logos. But branding is not avatar. We have not yet begun to avatar, although there are futuristic scenarios and scholarly histories, looking forward and back in time, archiving the possibilities and precedents. You can meet avatar, that part of you inhabiting cyberspace (for lack of a better term). You and I need to meet the avatar that we already have, that we already are, now that it may be augmented within the digital apparatus (electracy) beyond branding to become prostheses of counsel and decision. Electrate avatar knows more than you or I do, it knows better than you or I do about what will have happened in our various respective situations. This claim must be not only understood, but undergone. It is not only an idea, a theory, but an experience. The goal of this book is to make it a practice of digital education.
The concept, tradition, and practice of “avatar” are central to the invention of “flash reason,” a deliberative rhetoric for public policy formation, making democratically informed decisions in a moment, at light speed, against the threat of a General Accident that happens everywhere simultaneously. Any theorizing of “avatar” must at least acknowledge James Cameron’s dramatization in the blockbuster film. It is fortunate for my account (given the influence this film will have in shaping the discussion) that there is an important aspect of electrate avatar captured by Cameron’s treatment. Avatar as an experience is an event of counsel. It is an uncanny encounter with one’s own possibility (potential), as undergone in various wisdom