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 traditions noted here as analogies for the rhetoric (flash reason) made possible through avatar practice. Through avatar, players come to understand the General Economy (Bataille) of the universe, so to speak, represented as “nature” or the Gaia spirit of Pandora in Cameron’s film. The “jar-head” Sully, incarnated in his Na’vi simulation, transcends his Marine training as well as his limitations both physical and mental, to oppose the actions of the military-industrial-complex corporation that are threatening the natural order. It is perhaps understandable, if not inevitable, that the screenplay uses the shorthand of the Frontier myth, in high-concept reconfiguration (genre hybrid), to express its values. Cameron’s Avatar is a Western.
Concepts are an invention of literacy, created by the Classical Greeks in the Academy and Lyceum in Athens, as a device for developing alphabetic writing as a support for thought. Concepts used the formal technique of definition to identify the properties of an entity constituting its essence, its nature, based on its function or purpose. In addition to these general concepts classifying the things of the world, the Greeks produced a number of specialized concepts designed to do the work of philosophy itself, and philosophy ever since has created a host of these devices. The question today concerns whether or in what way philosophical concepts may survive in, or be adapted to, the apparatus of electracy that emerged at the beginning of the industrial revolution and is displacing literacy (and orality) as the dominant metaphysics (reality construction) of electronic digital civilization. The experiment in this study is to construct a “concept avatar” to support thought in electracy. Avatar is to electracy what “self” is to literacy, or “spirit” to orality. Avatar as concept is needed to understand how theory may still be performed in the image metaphysics of electracy.
Concepts begin in response to some problem field (plane of immanence in the vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari) that resists or challenges or threatens human thriving. The problem field of Avatar is represented in the film as the military industrial complex, allegorized in the conglom attempting to mine unobtainium on Pandora, with the help of a ruthless head of security, a former Marine colonel. We are in an allegory, a mythology whose features are familiar, in that the screenplay conforms not only to the hybrid genre terms of a sci-fi-western, but to the fundamental adventure template of a “hero with a thousand faces” that structures nearly every narrative in Western culture. Sully is a “conceptual persona” whose transformation over the course of the narrative constitutes a “vital anecdote” dramatizing the thought needed to address the problem. It is not a matter of what Cameron intended but what we may learn about avatar as thought.
Avatar as concept may be and must be thought today, in that we already are avatar, or becoming avatar. We avatar (verb) online every day; we put our self into the prosthesis of the Internet, as Jake enters the prosthetic body to explore Pandora, and enter the culture of the Na’vi. The entry into writing produced the experience of “selfhood.” An important skill of literacy concerns the management of “voice” in writing. What is the experience of becoming image online? The electrate equivalent of “voice” is not just “image” but “avatar,” with the difference being that avatar is an expression you receive, not one that you send. My proposal is to add a conceptual register to the problem, persona, and anecdote referenced in the film. What experience does Jake have in the prosthesis that transforms him from jarhead to champion of the Na’vi fight against the conglom? Structurally we recognize his decision as conventional in our culture. At the end of the second act of a standard Hollywood three-act screenplay, the protagonist is confronted by a choice: to change from the disposition given at the beginning of the adventure in order to become adequate to the problem troubling the special world, and hence to take on the role of hero, or to refuse that role. This moment and opportunity to become what one (already) is, is a threshold position latent in experience, and a primary element in our wisdom and assumptions about identity. The mystery of this change is not only that it happens, but how it happens.
Jake’s decision to take the side of the Na’vi (Navi means “prophet” in the Hebrew Bible) against the conglom puts him in the service of a Gaia principle maintaining a balance of nature, not only on Pandora but presumably in the universe as a whole. He learned something prosthetically about the principle of Limit, Measure. Measure is the thought experience of avatar. What in the narrative as a whole might function as detail to articulate more clearly the vital anecdote of concept avatar? There is one scene that perhaps intimates more clearly than any other what our concept requires. It is the scene when Sully first meets Neytiri in the forest of Pandora. This Amazonian warrior intervenes to save Sully and help him (Pocahantas-like, as the reviewers point out), because of a sign of his life-affirming potential. This sign is the attraction to the prosthetic Sully of the Woodsprites (Atokirina), the floating seeds of the Pandoran holy tree, resembling small glowing jellyfish, and understood by the Na’vi as spiritual beings. This scene illustrates the controversial technical achievement of the film, shot in 3-D, in that these glowing sprites extend out from the screen, entering the space of the audience, and fill the auditorium with a soft drifting rain of colored beauty. This effect calls attention to the technology of the medium. The relevant point for concept avatar is just that the effect is accomplished by a technical replication of the way binocular vision produces depth perception, which is by the simultaneous rendering of two views of the same scene, slightly displaced one from the other. The thought of avatar must sustain this parallax dimension, supporting the emergence of a third quality out of a logic of two. Hold this effect as an emblem of what is attempted in Avatar Emergency (a rhetorical extra dimension).
Michael
Another popular film, a romantic fantasy in this case, provides a version of avatar more reflective of the traditional personification: Michael (1996), directed and written by Nora Ephron. The protagonist is Frank Quinlan (William Hurt), a journalist whose once-promising career was ruined when he refused to compromise his integrity. Having become disenchanted and cynical, Frank works for a sleazy tabloid (The National Mirror), whose editor (Bob Hoskins) considers him his top reporter, specializing in celebrity gossip and fanciful counterfactual events. The relevance of the film in our context is that the angel Michael (John Travolta) is using his last permitted visit to Earth to intervene in Frank’s affairs, to restore his connection with the life principle, Eros, vitality (Gaia). In this project Michael is acting as Frank’s “guardian angel,” as this figure was known in the Christian era, updated from the daimon or personal genius accompanying each soul entering the world in Ancient cosmology. The project unfolds through a lure, a situation arranged by the angel, that brings a crew from the tabloid to rural Iowa to investigate reports that an actual angel (wings and all) has shown up at the home of Patsy Millband (Jean Stapleton), a fan of the tabloid (especially of its mascot, Sparky the Wonder Dog).
Accompanying Frank and his photographer Huey Driscoll (Robert Pastorelli), owner of Sparky, is Dorothy Winters (Andie MacDowell), added to the group by the editor, claiming that she is an expert on angels. She actually is a professional dog trainer, hired by the editor, who wants to take Sparky away from Huey. Michael agrees to ride with the team back to Chicago, his plan being that Frank will fall in love with Dorothy during the journey. During
