revamped thesis statement
The Avatar In Post Humanism: An Embodied Turn
In massively multi-player online environments such as Second Life and World Of Warcraft, the on-screen character, who is embodied on behalf of the user in a graphical digital space, is called an Avatar. Depending on the environment, the user’s avatar can look, move, sound, live, communicate, in highly diverse ways. The theoretical work that has been addressed to the phenomenon of being embodied digitally as an avatar and the importance of it uniquely inhabiting a three dimensional (space) and perpetual (time) environment inhabited by millions of other avatars has appeared in the context of a larger reflective and constitutive momentum of thought. This larger context has variously been called post-humanism, post-modernity and even contentiously inhumanism. In this first chapter, it will be this larger theoretical context that will be considered so that the investigation of the phenomenon of the avatar will have context.
The “post” in post-human immediately implies many potential readings including: the end or destruction of the human, the transcendence of the human, a coming after the human, the escape from the human and even a “new” human. Re-theorizing the digital avatar must take place alongside of a critique of these “posts” that are sometimes too innocently proposed as determined by developments in new media technologies. The necessity of including a survey and critique of the discourse of post-humanism to preface the investigation of the phenomenon of digital embodiment itself is a response to how the avatar and cyber body have been predominantly theorized as an image, text or representative of a counter discourse to modernity. That is, theorists such as Donna Haraway have indicated that the cyber body resists dominant discourses of heterosexist binarism which undergird the assumed liberal subject. Further, the image of the cyborg constitutes a site of transcending traditional ontologies and histories (origin-stories) due to its unusual origins and plasticity of form. In this instance (as in other post-human moments), the cyborg is invested with radical powers of mutating the classic liberal subjectivity into a “boundary subjectivity” and forcing a move from a traditional to a “chimerical” ontology. While provocative and groundbreaking at the time of writing (A Manifesto for Cyborgs, 1980) Haraway’s proposed cybernetic shift in the ontological and subjective knowledge of the human which would lead to a reordering or reconstitution of gender may have been premature. Maintaining the cyber body only as a phenomenon of language, image and or representation, the cyborg risks reinscription back into the dominant discourse it attempts to resist.
The tendency of ignoring the necessity of investigating the phenomenon or lived-experience of being embodied digitally, and considering the cyborg only in a discursive mode as a image (as mere representation) in discourse is repeated in some form throughout contemporary post-human theorizations and so the purpose of the following investigation is to take these “post” discourses to their limits as well as outline those in the field who have begun to move away from such “posts.”
Thus I propose that the avatar is not merely a formal representation of its user, rather through the unique phenomenon or lived-experience of being embodied digitally and the unique relations it makes possible with other avatars, the lived-digital body is an interactive site of re-thinking and re-doing the discourse it is framed by. The Avatar IS a possibility. A possibility of "turning" the post-human discourse, that would erase embodied knowledges from the modern subject by restricting her/him to a purely discursive grasp of embodiment, toward a nuancing of our understanding of embodied and lived experience in this “post-human” age where we are constantly being bodies within digital worlds.
Excursis of above will applied to Gendered digital Bodies...
In massively multi-player online environments such as Second Life and World Of Warcraft, the on-screen character, who is embodied on behalf of the user in a graphical digital space, is called an Avatar. Depending on the environment, the user’s avatar can look, move, sound, live, communicate, in highly diverse ways. The theoretical work that has been addressed to the phenomenon of being embodied digitally as an avatar and the importance of it uniquely inhabiting a three dimensional (space) and perpetual (time) environment inhabited by millions of other avatars has appeared in the context of a larger reflective and constitutive momentum of thought. This larger context has variously been called post-humanism, post-modernity and even contentiously inhumanism. In this first chapter, it will be this larger theoretical context that will be considered so that the investigation of the phenomenon of the avatar will have context.
The “post” in post-human immediately implies many potential readings including: the end or destruction of the human, the transcendence of the human, a coming after the human, the escape from the human and even a “new” human. Re-theorizing the digital avatar must take place alongside of a critique of these “posts” that are sometimes too innocently proposed as determined by developments in new media technologies. The necessity of including a survey and critique of the discourse of post-humanism to preface the investigation of the phenomenon of digital embodiment itself is a response to how the avatar and cyber body have been predominantly theorized as an image, text or representative of a counter discourse to modernity. That is, theorists such as Donna Haraway have indicated that the cyber body resists dominant discourses of heterosexist binarism which undergird the assumed liberal subject. Further, the image of the cyborg constitutes a site of transcending traditional ontologies and histories (origin-stories) due to its unusual origins and plasticity of form. In this instance (as in other post-human moments), the cyborg is invested with radical powers of mutating the classic liberal subjectivity into a “boundary subjectivity” and forcing a move from a traditional to a “chimerical” ontology. While provocative and groundbreaking at the time of writing (A Manifesto for Cyborgs, 1980) Haraway’s proposed cybernetic shift in the ontological and subjective knowledge of the human which would lead to a reordering or reconstitution of gender may have been premature. Maintaining the cyber body only as a phenomenon of language, image and or representation, the cyborg risks reinscription back into the dominant discourse it attempts to resist.
The tendency of ignoring the necessity of investigating the phenomenon or lived-experience of being embodied digitally, and considering the cyborg only in a discursive mode as a image (as mere representation) in discourse is repeated in some form throughout contemporary post-human theorizations and so the purpose of the following investigation is to take these “post” discourses to their limits as well as outline those in the field who have begun to move away from such “posts.”
Thus I propose that the avatar is not merely a formal representation of its user, rather through the unique phenomenon or lived-experience of being embodied digitally and the unique relations it makes possible with other avatars, the lived-digital body is an interactive site of re-thinking and re-doing the discourse it is framed by. The Avatar IS a possibility. A possibility of "turning" the post-human discourse, that would erase embodied knowledges from the modern subject by restricting her/him to a purely discursive grasp of embodiment, toward a nuancing of our understanding of embodied and lived experience in this “post-human” age where we are constantly being bodies within digital worlds.
Excursis of above will applied to Gendered digital Bodies...