Technics of the Subject : The Avatar - Drive

This essay considers the digital avatar not simply as a name for a virtual double of the player of videogames, but as bound to or manifesting psychological drive, a kind of homunculus of the drive. Drawing on a wide range of theories that have informed technical constructions of the subject, it applies in particular an important moment in Lacan's description of the drive to the concept of the gaming "avatar." It argues that the avatar is a variant of precursor representations of the drive specific to the technical imaginary of videogames. The avatar haunts media and cyperspace in multiple guises. Nested in online chat rooms and seminars, internet commodity arcades, art installations, game worlds, architectural models, datashadows, and program algorithms, the avatar has become the face of it-ness, who-ness, and whatness mediating community and unseating the subject's Eigentlichkeit (self-possession, the "having" of what is my own).1 As the visible interface of the psychic drive, the avatar is not so much the double of the subject in the digital field as a kind of "puppet-homunculus" or totem that "drives" the drives. Freud's notion of psychic drive as "constant force" (konstante kraft), instrumentalized in its goal-directed motricity, becomes newly relevant to the object-oriented worlds of games and internet markets in their subsumption and transformation of subjective properties.2 Like the Aristotelian hyle (the causative and self-circular property of a form), avatarity, as I develop the concept here, bears on post-poststructuralist accounts of the destinations of agency in a technical milieu. Parade of the Subjects No theory of the avatar can be divorced from theories of the subject. Subject theory––buoyed in successive waves by the time-lag of French and German translations––predominated in the human sciences from the postwar period through the mid-1990s. Though some argue that it lost traction in the "post-critical" contemporary moment, I contest this idea. Subject theory endures as a "technics of the subject" situated at the juncture of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and media theory, and nourished by subfields as far-flung as systems theory, pragmatism, cybernetics, chaos theory, Heideggerian and Benjaminian notions of techne, Deleuzian vitalism and projections of the virtual, symbolic logic, artificial intelligence, computer programming, prosthetics, genomics, posthumanism, and game theory. The time-line of these disciplinary interactions is uneven, but not so uneven as to obscure the subtle yet generic shift from poststructuralist accounts of subjective impersonalism––from the mid-1990s on––to medial