Technics of the Subject: The Avatar-Drive Emily Apter - English

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Freud, Sigmund. "Drives and Their Fate." 1915. The Unconscious. Trans. Graham Frankland. Ed. Adam Phillips. London: Penguin Books, 2005. –––. "The Ego and the Id." 1927. Trans. Joan Riviere. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 19. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1995. –––. "Triebe und Triebschicksale." Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 10. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999. Friedmann, Georges. Machine et humanisme: Problèmes humains du machinisme industriel. Paris: Gallimard, 1946. Galloway, Alexander R. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. London: U of Minnesota P, 2006. –––. "StarCraft, or Balance." Grey Room 28 (Summer 2007): 86-107. Groddeck, Georg. The Book of the It [Das Buch vom Es]. Trans. V.M.E. Collins. New York: Knopf, 1949. Lacan, Jacques. "The Deconstruction of the Drive." The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho- Analysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1978. Leroi-Gournhan, André. Milieu et techniques. Paris: Albin Michel, 1945. Little, Gregory. "A Manifesto for Avatars." Intertexts 3.2 (Fall 1999). http://www.gregorylittle.org/avatars/text.html. Luhmann, Niklas. Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy [Liebe Als Passion]. Trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Massumi, Brian. "Introduction: Like a Thought." A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari. Ed. Brian Massumi. New York: Routledge, 2002. Morningstar, Chip, and F. Randall Farmer. "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat." Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991. 273-301. Nancy, Jean-Luc. L'Intrus. Paris: Galilée, 2000. Nietszche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1989. Phillips, Adam. "Introduction." Freud, Sigmund. Wild Analysis. Trans. Alan Bance. London: Penguin, 2002. vii-xxvi. Simondon, Gilbert. Du Mode d'existence des objets techniques. 1958. Paris: Aubier, 1989. Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam, 1992. Stiegler, Bernard. Prendre soin: Tome 1, De la jeunesse et des générations. Paris: Flammarion, 2008. –––. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007. Weber, Samuel. Mass Mediauras: Essays on Form, Technics, and Media. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. –––. "Medium, Reflexivity, and the Economy of the Self." Unpublished paper. 20 Dec.2007. University of Poitiers. Wilson, Laetitia. "Interactivity or Interpassivity: a Question of Agency in Digital Play." Fine Art Forum 17.8 (August 2003). Zizek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997. Footnotes 14
1. See Stiegler, Epithemeus, Chapter 3, Part 1 ("Who? What? The Invention of the Human") and Chapter 3, Part 2 ("The Disengagement of the What"), especially 267-76. 2. The term avatar emerged in the mid-eighties as the name for an ideal, victorious player (as in the game Ultima IV of 1985) or to designate the virtual double of the agent-player (as in the George Lucas game Habitat of 1987). See Morningstar and Farmer (http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html). The essay was first given as a lecture in 1990, but much of what the authors have to say about the object-driven parameters of Habitat's world is relevant to a theory of the avatar as "driver." One can chart the gradual abandonment of the theological position of drive-programmers in favor of a libertarian approach in which programmers cast themselves as choreographers or "facilitators." 3. Friedmann sets off his theory of the technical milieu, with its emphasis on the subject's environmental entrainment, over and against André Leroi-Gourhan's anthropological use of the term, which emphasizes how the tool (and the know-how of utensility more broadly) "invents" the human. Both Friedmann and Leroi-Gourhan were working with the concept in the 1940s. By the 1950s, cybernetics, information theory, and debates over human engineering would expand the parameters of technical milieu theory in relation to consciousness, subjectivity, and immersive ambience. Raymond Ruyer's La cybernétique et l'origine de l'information (Paris: Flammarion, 1954) and Gilbert Simondon's Du Mode d'existence des objets techniques (1958) are key representative works for these theoretical and disciplinary extensions. 4. See also Gilbert Simondon, L'individuation psychique et collective (Paris: Aubier, 1989 and 2007). The 2007 edition contains a preface by Bernard Stiegler. 5. See also Bernard Stiegler, Prendre soin de la jeunesse et des générations (Paris: Flammarion, 2008). In this last work, we see the influence of the Foucault lectures from 1977-79 in which the notion of "discipline" is extended to disciplinary techniques and new modes of governmentality that grow out of and are newly applied to genetics, the politics of security, social and urban planning, and new forms of biopolitics. See Michel Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population. Cours au Collège de France. 1977-1978, ed. François Ewald et. al. (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2004) and Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France 1978-1979, ed. François Ewald et al. (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2004). 6. See Sloterdijk, Derrida, un Egyptien (Paris: Maren Sell Editeurs, 2006), esp. 19-21. 7. I borrow this expression from Paul Baines; see his "Subjectless Subjectivities" in A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi (London: Routledge, 2002), 101-16. Baines draws heavily on the work of Raymond Ruyer, whose Paradoxes de la conscience et limites de l'automatisme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1966) is especially relevant to a theory of the avatar as transformer of drive. 8. Alexander Galloway, in an email of June 10, 2007. In his essay "StarCraft, or, Balance" Galloway writes of the avatar: "the homonymic pun is crucial here insofar as it shows the extent to which the very definition of the avatar is impossible to separate from the uncanny effects of linguistic techne" (92). 15
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