Who Speaks: The Interlocutor
Learning is the greatest pleasure, and is an inherent capability, perhaps the definitive one, for human beings. There are many ways to learn, and perhaps pleasure is the more important entry in the equation. We are recruiting you; you solicited us. Does it matter how the encounter occurs? Where are we when we learn? With whom am I speaking? The interlocutor, in this communication, sender and receiver? Here is the first lesson, but how is it to be taken, composed by an American academic, in English. The lesson? I am addressing myself, composing in the middle voice, neither active nor passive, but reflexive. You, overhearing me, address yourself in turn. Your mother teaching you to prepare food for a meal, she says "do it like this," and shows you how. If only it were that simple! Physician, heal thyself!
I benefitted from at least four educations, pedagogy of four institutions (and then some), and so did you. We live within these institutions which collectively we call the popcycle: Family, Entertainment (popular culture), School, Career (profession). For some of us Church may replace one of the others, or even function as a fifth register. In the epoch of literacy, Western alphabetic civilization, the popcycle institutions remained apart, analytically compartmentalized. In the emerging apparatus of electracy (digital civilization, beginning in the industrial revolution), the popcycle registers begin to converge, hybridize, blend into one complex arrangment, An apparatus is a set-up, dispositif, a framing configuration that guides all thought and action of its subjects.
How to learn in this new apparatus electracy? How to communicate within the holistic popcycle? That is what we will negotiate together.
The Popcycle
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Reoccupying "Avatar"
We are proposing a scene of electrate instruction from a particular point of view, addressing ourselves (each one of us participating). The program is not asserted but described, and its relevance must be tested by each one who feels addressed by it. We, the egents of EmerAgency. Given this attitude, let me review the argument of my recent book, Avatar Emergency, in order to clarify the state of the question for me, the point of departure for further instruction.
The Sanskrit term "Avatar" (meaning "descent") has been appropriated within popular culture, first by the creators of cyberpunk science fiction, to name the manifestation of a player's persona in cyberspace. The usage extended to virtual reality sites such as Second Life, referring to the characters one played online, and on into one's online identity in general. This usage offered an opportunity for expropriation, to open popular culture to electracy--the recognition that identity behaviors individual and collective are invented within an apparatus along with technologies of equipment and rhetorics of practice. The cyberpunk usage in fact names brand behavior, also relevant but expressing the extension and continuation of literate selfhood into electracy. Brands are self-conscious, willed, deliberately designed, projections of ego.
The theological and mythological experience to which the term avatar refers has nothing to do with brand: it is not projected by self, but received from Outside. The prototype of avatar is the scene in the Hindu classic, Bhagavad Gita, itself a part of the epic Mahabharata. Prince Arjuna arrives at the site where two great armies are preparing for battle, awaiting only his order to begin what will have been a terrible civil war. Arjuna expresses doubts to his charioteer and best friend, Krishna. Krishna reveals himself at that moment as Avatar, representative on earth of the god Vishnu. Avatar descends in conditions of crisis. The Song (Gita) consists of an interlude in the epic, a scene of instruction in which Krishna explains to Arjuna the ethos, the metaphysics, of his apparatus: the notions of hero, duty (Dharma), and how one achieves liberation (Moksha).
This narrative is a prototype for a certain functionality that we seek also for electracy: not the theology, but the scene through which an individual person receives instruction from the Absolute. This relationship between the macrocosm and microcosm collapsed during modernity, as literacy achieved closure, and needs to be reinvented for electracy. Avatar is the name for an emergent collective subject position, or rather, for this relation between person and world. The heuretic method for this invention borrows from Hans Blumenberg his insight into how each epoch learns to reoccupy the metaphysics of its predecessor, to accumulate an historical palimpsest in which most of the questions remain the same, and most of the answers are archived. Blumenberg's context was his history of secularization, the passage of Europe out of the Middle Ages into modernity.
Our curriculum includes in its program the development of this function of collective subject, experienced as a scene of instruction in the Absolute.