Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1107302237210.9802@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Wounded Avatars text
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2011 22:40:10 -0400 (EDT)
Wounded Avatars "when i was young i was told i wouldn't live past twenty-five. i gave the ugly lie to that interpretation. now these words resonate but only briefly with my voice. you'll read them in your own, nothing otherwise will remain. the back-theory is that fragile, look how the letters line up. one, two, and three, they appear different to you than they ever did to me." Wounded avatars are inconceivable; however what is transmitted across - from the visualization of the data-base to the user - may reflect a surplus of inscription. This is accomplished in at least two ways: 1. the augury and presence of the human voice, as voice-over or apparently emanating from the avatar, whose movement of the lips can reflect the pronunciation of the phonemes in real time; and 2. the use of photographic textures, of the wounded and/or sexualized body, attached to objects and avatars. The first is resonant with the 'grain of the voice,' which is easily transmitted (occupying a fairly small audio bandwidth, simple to channel and receive) and yet perceived as _of_ the body, intimate with and within the body, in other words an aural tissue inhering in the speaking subject, and listened to, in that regard, by the receiver. The second, the use of photographic (photographed) textures, is based on the gaze, and its function as a proscenium of arousal and empathy; the body gazed-upon is my own (taken as my own, inhabited), the wound and genitals are my own (inhabited), and so forth. The silencing of the voice, the portrayal of the death of the body are my own as well, and the more obdurate the silencing and portrayal - the more these appear to deny the epistemology of the data-codecs that are at the heart of their transmission - the more the viewer succumbs to them, the more they are lodged within the him or hir, the more the flesh appears beyond what otherwise defaults to the usual (notion of the) transparency of data. So that, to re-mark within the virtual, within virtual worlds, the presence of the body, wounded or aroused or dying for examples - the use of voice and texture are useful portals to those journeys we all take at various times in our lives, and towards their ending, when the flow of the body becomes insistent in its very becoming-object. In the nightclub, the sleazy can predominate, as can elegance, brilliance, glitter, and monstrosity. Imagine a windowless space, dark but for the presence of club kids, who emerge as rare birds of the night, a metaphor done to death and stereotypical, but clear in its depiction of a menagerie which appears self-illuminated, self-controlled, self-presented. In this way, ontology is self-determined, what is, is brought to the foreground by the club kids themselves; this is the world of the club, the world of the night, the world of flat black texture in virtual worlds where what is visible is always already a detour or bypass, an inversion of the usual roles of light and shadow. Further, what appears in the nightclub, in this self-illumination, self- ontology, is nothing more or less than the image or flash, evanescent and always on the verge of disappearing. This image appears simultaneously real (for it is there, before me) and virtual (since it seems grounded in translucence and the ephemeral; in fact it sutures inscription to the flesh, perhaps erring on the side of inscription. For what is occurring (but does not occur) within a depth psychology here, is the aging of the image-body, body-image, outside the club, which then is visible (as the club kid is visible) as a framing-device remote from time, forestalling time. The time of the club is always a detour. So here is the third device within virtual presentation, beyond voice and photographic texture, the device of the glow or self- or narrowed- illumination, which isolates and creates, which effaces architecture through architectonics, and which insists on the wounded or dying avatar, the sick or aroused avatar, the avatar brought to its/our knees at its limits, which are the limitations of representation among transmissions, codes, protocols, and so forth. I can imagine a solitary avatar, whose body is that of carefully-recon- structed wounds and violent demarcations, mouthing almost autonomically the audible narration of a woman starving in the Horn of Africa, a survivor from a Rwandan massacre, a soldier chewed up by a roadside bomb, or an American dying from malnutrition; I can imagine an avatar whose body is mapped from aroused or used and debilitated flesh, audibly murmuring the caress of sexuality, or sexuality's violence... So many difficult and un/comfortable modes of presentation, carrying the real of the body into the virtual, returning it to the real of the observer, who may become a participant in spite of hirself, and for what end? For experience and empathy that inhabits the lived world, breaks down virtuality, or better, demonstrates that virtuality and inscription inhabit all of us, that it is not an escape, that our bodies and desires follow us and paint the world in colors which are often abject and denied. I would like famine and war brought home to second life, in a semiotic close to the ikonic, not the usual cartoon-indexical which all too often colors 'magical' representa- tion. I would like arousal to move other than Vaihinger's as-if or Ben- tham's fictions, to bring the body and its consequences to the foreground (as speech often does). And I'd like death to appear as other than commodity as representable in its non-representability; I'd like that death to appear as _our_ death, not the death of the other, not the death which is named, but the death which is unnameable. And finally, I'd like the wager which comes from all of this (and there are other means to apply as well, of course; I'm just scratching the surface), to be seen for what it is: not a wager in the sense of a zero-sum game, but a wager within the real, within organism, where we all are lost in the end, but may have moments of clarity and action on the way there. Otherwise we spend our lives as separate 'real' and 'virtual,' both skittering across data-banks and back-ups, as if such constitute how the world is turning or has become. And the danger there is that, to repeat myself, that real war, starvation, arousal (it is not all negative), wounding, cessation, is always just around the corner, and we ignore this, politically and somatically, at our peril. Some texts - Reporting Vietnam, Part 1 and 2, includes Herr's Dispatches The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry Tibetan Medicine, the Ven., Rechung Rinpoche The Matrixial Borderspace, BrachaL. Ettinger Leaves of Grass, Second Annex: Good-bye My Fancy, Walt Whitman thanks to Monika Weiss