Objet Petit a(vatar): Psychoanalysis, Posthumanism and the

Question of the Self in Second Life.

(Spine Title: Objet Petit a(vatar))

(Thesis Format: Monograph)

by

Dustin Cohen

Graduate Program in Media Studies

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies

The University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada

© Dustin Cohen 2009

 THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN
ONTARIO

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES

CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION

Supervisor Examiners

______________________________ ______________________________
Dr. Alison Hearn Dr. Nick Dyer-Witheford

______________________________ ______________________________
Dr. Sharon Sliwinski Dr. Carole Farber

______________________________
Supervisory Committee Dr. Helen Fielding

______________________________

The thesis by

Dustin Cohen

entitled:

Objet Petit a(vatar): Psychoanalysis, Posthumanism and the

Question of the Self in Second Life.

is accepted in partial fulfilment of the

requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts

Date__________________________ _______________________________
Chair of the Thesis Examination Board

ii
 Abstract
In the virtual world of Second Life users create, manipulate and interact through
graphical avatar bodies. The novelty of designing, manipulating, buying and selling
body parts or prostheses for avatars has yielded the notion that virtual worlds, and
virtual embodiment, represent harbingers of a posthuman condition where both the
body and the world are rendered entirely malleable and no longer subject to the ‘all-
too-human’ psychical structures articulated by psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and
Jacques Lacan. Using Freudian and Lacanian concepts and recent scholarly work
conducted on the virtual world, this thesis finds that the so-called posthuman body is
a misnomer: avatarization is not (for better or worse) the overcoming of any human
condition, but rather an interactive technique that works with the unconscious drives
that persist in comprising our complex humanity. The thesis presents a
characterization of SL ‘skins’, customizable bodies, and attachable/detachable limbs
as uncanny reminders of a time of infantile fragmentation and imaginary
(mis)identification. It then considers the relationship between the Lacanian subject
and virtual prim bodies and objects, activities involving the Second Life economy,
and relationships such as online marriages in order to demonstrate that our real,
human, lack persists in a virtual, so-called posthuman, world.

Keywords: Avatar, Second Life, Virtual Worlds, Psychoanalysis, Humanism,

Posthuman, Posthumanism, Lacan, Freud, Subjectivity, Self, Unconscious.

iii
 Acknowledgements
This thesis could not have been possible without the patience and careful editing of my
supervisors Dr. Alison Hearn and Dr. Sharon Sliwinski. Their knowledge and guidance
made it possible, and enjoyable, to carry out interdisciplinary work. I extend my thanks,
as well, to my second reader Dr. Nick Dyer-Witheford and Dr. Carole Farber for their
interesting and constructive comments, suggestions and ideas.
This thesis developed alongside conversations and ideas I bounced off friends
and colleagues in the Media Studies program. The residues of their varied impressions
of, and reactions to, my ideas can be found throughout the thesis.
I extend my thanks to Lindsay Carrocci for her exceptional Microsoft Word
formatting prowess.
Aside from my sister, I also cannot forget to acknowledge my official sponsor
Red Bull Canada Ltd. for providing me a daily overdose dose of Caffeine and Taurine.
Their product was indispensable “during periods of increased mental and physical
exertion” and helped “temporarily restore mental alertness or wakefulness” during
“periods of fatigue or drowsiness”.
Finally, I must acknowledge my parents for (a) permitting me to spectacularly
destroy their excess wealth and resources in order to create this thesis and for (b)
keeping me adequately “triangulated” over the past two years.

“All creation has its force, its constant birth.

Creation and revelation,
becoming and designation belong together;
They determine one another.
The world is not mere fate…” – Leo Baeck

iv
Table of Contents

CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION ............................................................................. ii

ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMETS................................................................................................ iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS..............................................................................................v
LIST OF FIGURES........................................................................................................viii
LIST OF APPENDICES...............................................................................................viiii

INTRODUCTION - Humanizing the Avatar: Rethinking Avatāra in Second Life 1

Context - Between Posthumanism and Psychoanalysis: Between Epimetheus and
Oedipus........................................................................................................................ 11
Chapter Breakdown and Methodology....................................................................... 23

CHAPTER 1: Virtual Selves and Avatars: Scholarly Engagements with SL

Avatars............................................................................................................................ 27
Introduction ................................................................................................................. 27
1. The Posthuman Avatar............................................................................................ 27
1a. The Posthuman (Capitalist) Avatar .............................................................. 35
2. The Performative Avatar......................................................................................... 45
3. The Human Avatar.................................................................................................. 54
3a. The Human (Psychoanalytic) Avatar............................................................ 64
Conclusion................................................................................................................... 66

CHAPTER 2 - “Old and Long Familiar”: Virtual Worlds, Avatars and the
Psychoanalytic Uncanny............................................................................................... 70
Introduction ................................................................................................................. 70
1. Oedipal Investigations and the Question of Avatarization..................................... 70
2. Freud’s Theory of the Uncanny .............................................................................. 78
3. Lacan’s Imaginary and the Fragmented Body of the Real..................................... 86
4. The Uncanny Cyborg .............................................................................................. 91
5. The Uncanny Avatar ............................................................................................... 97
5.1. The Avatar as Extimate Object .................................................................. 103
Conclusion................................................................................................................. 112

CHAPTER 3 - Objet Petit (a)vatar: SL Avatars and Lacan’s Lost Object ......... 114
Introduction ............................................................................................................... 114
1. You.0: From the Imaginary to the Symbolic….................................................... 117
1.1. Desire, Separation and the Subject............................................................ 118
1.1.1 Desire, Separation and the Subject: An Asymptotic ‘More you you’ ...... 121
1.2 The Subject of the Linguistic Chain ............................................................ 125
1.2.1 The Subject of the Linguistic Chain: The Avatar and the Point de Capiton
........................................................................................................................... 129
2. Avatars and the Name-of-the-Father .................................................................... 133
3. Functioning of the Objet Petit (a)vatar ................................................................. 141

v
 3.1. Economies of Desire .................................................................................. 148
4. A(v)amorphosis..................................................................................................... 156
5. L.C.Desire: Teleporting the Fundamental Fantasy............................................... 165
6. Performing a Striptease for the Gods: Avatars and the Future of the (Post)human
Drama… .................................................................................................................... 168

CONCLUSION – Humanist Posthumanism: Epimetheus and Oedipus in Second

Life ................................................................................................................................ 178

APPENDIX ................................................................................................................... 187

WORKS CITED............................................................................................................ 191
VITA.............................................................................................................................. 197

vi
 List of Figures
Figure 1 – Pablo Picasso’s 1911 illustration “Mademoiselle Léonie”....................... 92

Figure 2 – Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 “Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2)” ........... 93

Figure 3 – Gary Hill’s "Inasmuch as it is Already Taking Place" ............................. 96

Figure 4 – Jacob Epstein’s “Rock Drill”.................................................................... 96

Figure 5 - Dustin Mabellon hanging from a virtual gallows...................................... 99

Figure 6 - Screenshot of SL Rezzing ....................................................................... 105

Figure 7 - Male Skins for Purchase.......................................................................... 105

Figure 8 - Experimenting with body shape, size, sex and gender ........................... 111

Figure 9 - Attaching and detaching genitalia ........................................................... 111

Figure 10 - Example of Sliders in the Appearance Window ................................... 130

Figure 11 – Image beside an advertisement for cosmetic surgery........................... 132

Figure 12 – Skin Theft!............................................................................................ 149

Figure 13 – “Cartoonify Yourself” and “A Cartoon You?” .................................... 151

Figure 14 – The L$ (Lindex) Exchange................................................................... 152

Figure 15 - L’oreal campaign offering make up and skins featured by popular

actresses .................................................................................................................... 154

Figure 16 – Hans Holbein’s 1533 “The Ambassadors” .......................................... 158

Figure 17 – Kimberly Rufer-Bach and Kim Annubus from Robbie Cooper’s Alter
Ego ............................................................................................................................ 163

Figure 18 –Two images juxtaposed on the cover of Robbie Cooper’s Alter Ego ... 164

vii
 List of Appendices

Page #

Freud’s Synopsis of E.T.A Hoffman’s "The Sandman" 187

viii
 1

Introduction - Humanizing the Avatar: Rethinking Avatāra in Second Life

In March of 2009 over one million users log in to the virtual world of Second Life

(SL) (Linden). In order to navigate and interact with others in this “computer

generated physical space…that can be experienced by many people at once”, these

users adopt a three dimensional graphical figure called an “avatar” (Castronova,

Synthetic 22 qtd. in Boellstorff 11). While software users have required some form of

representational medium since the earliest days of computing, three dimensional

graphical avatars such as those used in SL – far more complex and manipulable than

their text and image based predecessors – have become increasingly common.1

Before considering the SL avatar, I will briefly outline a brief history of the

virtual world avatar and consider its etymology. The term “avatar” has been used to

define the user’s graphical body, whether it be a “text-body” as in the case of MUDs

(Multi-User-Dungeon) or an “image-body” as in the case of MMORPGs (Cohen).2

Throughout the history of computer based avatarization one can discern a clear

trajectory from these text-bodies (as in the case of MUDs or early chat clients such as

ICQ) to image-bodies (as in the case of Microsoft Instant Messenger and Facebook),

to three dimensional “scripted bodies” (as in the case of massively-multiplayer-online

worlds (MMOs) such as SL where users can equip their graphic intensive avatars

with “scripts”, programs that allow the avatar the ability to demonstrate mannerisms

or actions from yawning to dancing to sexual innuendos). The three-dimensional

1
Recent statistics indicate that over 200 million people use one or more avatar, some for
upwards of ten hours a day (Meadows 93).
2
Islands of Kesmai (1985) launched on Compuserve and Lucasfilm’s Habitat (1986), two of
the first massively-multi-player-online-role-playing-games (MMORPG), began the trend of
gamers populating online social worlds.
 2

scripted body used in SL, offering the user the ability to construct lifelike bodies, is

paradigmatic of the third, and latest, form of engagement with virtual games and

online spaces.

In contrast to first-person-shooter games such as those in the Halo or Half Life

series, which utilize first person point of views, or real-time-strategy games such as

Command and Conquer or Starcraft, which utilize overhead or God’s eye views, the

virtual world of SL uses an in-world camera that hovers, by default, in third person

behind the head of the avatar. This third-person, behind-the-head, view requires the

user to navigate their avatar in order to experience the virtual world. The landscape

perceived in SL is “the view from your avatar’s proximity” though not its eyes

(Boellstorff 129).3 The experience of this virtual world, then, depends on the position

of the user’s avatar. Thus, the SL avatar can be thought of as the “modality through

which residents experience virtual selfhood” (Taylor, Play 110 qtd. in Boellstorff

129). The SL avatar may, therefore, be described as the graphical representation of

the embodied user’s self or identity that they use to experience virtual selfhood.

In the form of my avatar, Dustin Mabellon, I have been a “resident” of SL

since 2005, yet I would not claim that the virtual Dustin Mabellon is a direct

representation of the real Dustin Cohen. The avatar called Dustin Mabellon is not a

mirror reflection or identical token that I utilize to represent myself within the

technology; the avatar is something far more complex than a simple homologous

representation. Rather than seeing the avatar as a direct representation of the

3
Unless using “mouselook mode”: Using mouselook mode the user can scroll in on his or her
mouse and transform their view into first person. The user can also alter SL camera angles to
view their avatar from any angle they choose. But these are not default settings and from my
experience in SL most users leave their camera settings as third-person behind their avatar’s
head.
 3

embodied user’s self, I argue that the graphical figure is better described as an “alter-

ego”, a term that can designate either a reasonably straight-forward self-

representation or something quite alien.

Now let us turn to the etymology of the term “avatar”. While popularized by

Neil Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, it is etymologically derived from

Hinduism, specifically the Sanskrit term “Avatāra”, which refers to the incarnated

form of an incorporeal Hindu deity. Avatāra also designates a “descent”, a

“downcoming”, usually of a Hindu god.4 The term “avatar” is similar to the term

“incarnation” familiar to Western theology as both the Western “incarnation” and

Eastern “avatāra” designate the downcoming of a deity whereby that deity undergoes

transubstantiation allowing it to participate in the affairs of sublunary life.

In the context of computerization, common throughout popular culture, the

meaning of the term “avatar” has retained the original theological emphasis on

transubstantiation, but reverses its connotation from a “descent” to the corporeal or an

“incarnation” from spirit to flesh, to an “ascent” by the corporeal body to the

immaterial or incorporeal cyberspace or – in Stephenson’s terms – “metaverse”

(Stephenson 3).5 This appropriation and reversal of the Sanskrit term from its

emphasis on embodment (to be incarnate) to laying the emphasis on disembodiment

(to be discarnate) is sensible when understood against the broader contemporary

cultural and historical context. This context includes the Platonism of cyberpunk

literature such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer where individuals leave their

4
In Sanskrit the verb “tri” designates “to cross over, attain, save”, the prefix “ava” designates
“down”. “Ava”+”tri” designates “descent into, appear, become-incarnate”. “Ava”+”ti”+”a”
designates the “appearance of any deity on earth, or a descent from heaven” (Parrinder 19).
5
The term “metaverse” has, since the release of Stephenson’s novel, come to designate an
online, virtual world in which there are no specific goals or objectives.
 4

earthly and imperfect corporeality behind in order to enter a world of heavenly

mathematical-digital “Forms”, science fiction films such as The Matrix that assume a

Cartesian mind/body dualism, and common references by individuals such as Bill

Gates to cyberspace being the site, par excellence, of a quasi-divine realm of

“friction-free capitalism” (Gates 180). The etymological heritage of the term “avatar”

leads us to the presumption that some sort of change in substance – or sublimation –

occurs when the embodied user adopts a virtual avatar. As such, the term itself often

acts as a mystification of the processes occurring when a user adopts a virtual avatar.

I suggest that this may be because the term leads us to believe that by engaging with

an avatar the user becomes something radically different, or other, than what that user

physically is, and who that user psychologically is. For example, the most optimistic

of cyber theorists take this understanding of the avatar to its logical conclusion,

promising virtual worlds as utopias where users can leave their real-world identities

and lives behind; these critics yearn for a day when human consciousness, rendered

(or “transmuted”) informatic and no longer subject to the corporeality of the body,

can itself be uploaded into machines or virtual communities themselves (Kurzweil,

Singularity); (Kurzweil, Age). These fantastical claims are all the more reason to

critically interrogate and demystify the term “avatar”.

One way of considering this demystification is to think of it as secularizing a

religiously charged idea. Rather than regarding avatarization as a transubstantiation

(the impetus for which is the presumption of some sort of bifurcation between

radically different heavenly (virtual) and terrestrial (real) realms) I seek to secularize

the virtual, and demonstrate that it is fraught with the mass and inertia that comprises
 5

the real. This thesis suggests, via this secularized reading, that virtual worlds can be

regarded not as spaces for interactions of an entirely novel nature, but that they

externalize reality in a form different from how it appears in day to day life. This is

one of the reasons why the avatar is better understood as an alter-ego rather than a

representation. An understanding of the avatar as a representation (re-presentation)

suggests that avatarization is a means of turning oneself into a new, or different,

medium. As is well documented, when an object is re-presented it adopts new

qualities based on its representational medium and looses certain of its more limiting,

or “auratic” qualities.6 In this regard it is easy to see why terms such as

“representation” and “transubstantiation” make such fine bedfellows: the avatar user,

formerly a creature of physical (or real) reality, is re-presented as a creature of virtual

reality. Rather than interacting with a qualitatively different self, an understanding of

the avatar as an alter-ego (Latin for “the other I”) does not dwell on the notion of re-

presentation, rather, it considers the avatar to be “a very close and trusted friend who

seems almost a part of yourself” (Wordnet). An alter-ego, then, is not a re-

presentation of the user, but something that (while either physically the same or

different) is psychologically close to a hidden aspect of the user’s personality. Thus,

considering the avatar as an alter-ego, a “second self”, acknowledges a kernel of the

6
In his influential essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Walter
Benjamin writes of the changes that works of art are subjected to when they undergo processes
of mechanical reproduction. These processes of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin claims,
transform the spectator’s relationship to the work of art. What once was interpreted as
“auratic”, or “authentic”, about a work of art dissipates as it is reproduced mechanically and
removed from its unique place in the space, time and the fabric of tradition (Benjamin).
 6

real user’s self remains immune to the seemingly different and transformative

qualities offered by the virtual medium.

SL allows us to discern this in a way that other virtual spaces do not. Unlike

traditional virtual worlds, which are almost entirely designed by programmers and

developers, SL and recent MMOs like it such as Entropia Universe, are almost

entirely user-generated. In SL there are no levels through which to progress or goals

to achieve unless users collectively build and design a game within SL and create

their own levels and/or goals. Not surprisingly, the avatars found in SL are far more

diverse and varied than those found in other recent virtual worlds and online role-

playing games (i.e. Star Wars Galaxies, Everquest, World of Warcraft). Without an

overarching framework providing narratives, and spatial and/or temporal coordinates,

SL users are less likely to feel constrained in their participation; one would be hard

pressed to locate a coherent, and overarching, aesthetic or narrative within SL. By not

having an overarching aesthetic or narrative, or demanding users adorn themselves

with armour and identities that fit the developer’s criteria, one is confronted by a

virtual world that often, but by no means always, reflects the real world. In this light,

SL is a so-called virtual space where terms such as “avatāra”, or “incarnation”, hardly

apply. The real does not lose ground, or give way, to something virtual.

In SL users are not called, a priori, to role-play. While role-play does occur,

users do not necessarily have to become someone or something else. In SL, the

avatāra-inspired sense of the term “avatar”, with its emphasis on transubstantiation,

hardly functions as a description of avatarization. Indeed, the conditions of SL give us

an opportunity to understand the term “avatar” in a different light. This is because, as

 7

noted, SL is a space whose architecture is comprised of the real and the imaginary

unreal: Reuters images of the genocide in Darfur, scale virtual models of the World

Trade Center towers, and structures that stand despite having non-Euclidean

dimensions (Guest). The avatars that populate these spaces are similar to this hybrid-

architecture. They are, themselves, qualitatively positioned between the virtual and

real. For example, it is not uncommon for a user’s virtual avatar to possess many of

the physical traits of its creator(s), while being equipped and adorned with objects

that violate the laws of gravity and physics on planet Earth. This hybrid-architecture

of real and imaginary illustrates that the emphasis we place on a sort of avatar-

transubstantiation (whether from incarnate to discarnate or discarnate to incarnate) is

highly problematic. Upon logging into the virtual world of SL, users do not abandon

their flesh and transmute into a virtual avatar. The goal of this thesis is to demystify

aspects of the term’s theological etymology, and humanize the avatar.

This need becomes eminently clear when considering Robbie Cooper’s 2007

photo-essay Alter-Ego: Avatars and their Creators, one of the most theoretically

disconcerting engagements involving SL avatars. Alter-Ego is structured as a series

of portraits juxtaposing a photograph of the real user (or in certain cases users) next to

a digital screenshot of their “in-world” (a term for being logged into the SL client)

avatar. Below the juxtaposed images the users offer explanations and insights into

their relationship with their avatar(s).7

7
Cooper draws not only from user-generated virtual worlds such as SL and Entropia Universe,
but explicitly role playing virtual worlds such as Star Wars Galaxies and World of Warcraft.
However, there is a definite lack of consistency among the explanations and insights offered by
the participants. In his introduction to Alter-Ego, Julian Dibbell, author of the seminal 1993
article “A Rape in Cyberspace”, plays on this lack of coherence, suggesting that it inhibits
attempts to claim anything final, or determinative, about avatarization in either MMORPG or
 8

After perusing Alter Ego, the question of whether SL exists in the realm of the

real or the virtual is no longer intelligible.8 Acknowledging the Hindu significance of

the term “avatar”, Julian Dibbell reminds the reader that in spite of feeling a godlike

sense of control while inhabiting virtual worlds, “[w]e are no less immune to the

seductions of these worlds than the ancient gods of myth were ever safe from ours”

(Cooper). As immortal Zeus found himself in thorny situations with mortal lovers,

our real, and all-too-human, desires are equally prone to being manifest in virtual

worlds: “we fall in love, lust for power and bring our dreams of wealth and fame

along with us” (Cooper). Likewise, while a large population of users who are disabled

in real life construct alternative bodies in SL, other users construct avatars modeled

quite literally on their real selves, blemishes and disabilities included. As Dibbell

explains:

On one hand, for instance, the abundance of powerful,

beautiful avatars posed next to glamour-challenged,
suburban nobodies seems to argue the proposition that we
fly to virtual worlds as a departure from quotidian reality;
yet just as striking is the number of avatars shaped to look
precisely like the people who play them, suggesting just
as forcefully that virtual worlds are better understood as
an extension of reality and no escape from it at all
(Cooper).

MMO metaverse environments such as World of Warcraft or SL. This lack of consistency is
evident in my own engagement with SL as well. One friend I met in SL who is deaf in the real
world explained that her avatar(s) offered her a body that could, via text chatting, speak. Other
users I have befriended claim to use their avatars to experiment with different sexual
persuasions or to simply enjoy building and scripting virtual objects.
8
After all, the “real” portrait and the “virtual” screen-shot are both conventions of representing
the self. Neither one is determinatively real or imaginary. This alone suggests that the
distinction between “virtual” and “real” is highly problematic.
 9

In light of Cooper’s photographs, then, we can claim that the separation between the

real and the virtual is a porous and wafer thin membrane. One Alter Ego participant,

whose SL avatar appears nearly identical to her real world self, explains:

Most of the time my avatar looks like my real self, but

about twenty years younger. I’m jealous of some of her
clothes. I made a pair of boots that I wish I could export
into real life. I usually dress my avatar in the same sort of
stuff I wear. She doesn’t have a separate persona or
anything. She’s just an extension of me in this virtual
space. Of course, she has a few abilities in SL that I don’t
have in my first life… (Cooper)

Another participant explains her nearly identical SL avatar, Harmony Harbinger, in

the following way: “Harmony is an extension of my real-life self. I see her more like

one would see one’s conscience sitting on one’s shoulders” (Cooper). Thus, while one

does find, for instance, “furries”, users who adopt animal avatars, or metal-clad

cybernetic bounty hunter avatars, many users’ avatars are premised on what they

understand to be their real world self. In spite of the contradictions that appear

throughout Alter-Ego, hinting toward the near impossibility of appealing to a

common “gamerly identity”, we can, according to Dibbell, make one positive

observation; all the participants in the photo-essay have constructed, in one way or

another, an identity, and “play” with that identity (Cooper).

Thus, it follows that the ways we characterize avatar play should be as unique

and diverse as the players themselves. (Likewise, methodologies that work to analyze

the world of SL might not work to analyze World of Warcraft or Everquest, as the

rationales for avatar creation differ from one virtual world to the next.) Alter Ego can

be understood as suggesting that each user/player requires a tailor-made theoretical

 10

framework. In keeping with this relativist view, I am not proposing an entirely cut

and dried method of theoretical analysis. A truly viable analysis would have to

account for a plurality of possible interpretations as rich as the on-and-offline lives of

the users themselves. The uses and characteristics of avatars, and indeed virtual

worlds themselves, have become as varied as the types of selves one finds in the real

world.9 Furthermore, such methodological relativism inhibits the researcher from

characterizing the avatar as located wholly in the register of the imaginary or the

register of the real, as either a simulacral body in a nightmarish dystopia or a

harbinger of a “friction free” utopia to-come. Both positions assume, in their

respective ways, that cyberspace initiates a transubstantiation of the real; one as a

corruption (dystopia), the other as a perfection (utopia) of it.

But there is more than a methodological relativism at issue in Cooper’s photo-

essay. Rather than adhering to either a utopian vision of a self “imbued with the

freedom and flow of the digital medium itself”, or a dystopian vision of a simulated

self “triumph[ing] over the real”, it manages to capture “…something deeper…less

liberating and less oppressive, both more social and more playful, and ultimately as

9
In “The Cyberself: the Self-ing Project Goes Online, Symbolic Interaction in the Digital Age”
Laura Robinson reminds the reader that conclusions of cyberculture studies reliant on research
done on MUDs are based on early internet users. (Robinson 100) These studies, subsequently
becoming paradigmatic of online identity studies, tended to emphasize the imaginary role-
playing dimension of virtual identity construction, a dimension that now describes, according to
Robinson, only a very small percentage of internet (and avatar) use. Studies on MUDs,
Robinson notes, were conducted before the internet reached a critical mass in the general North
American population. As this critical mass was reached, some years after the heyday of the
MUD, the architecture of virtual worlds has become far more inclusive. It is becoming clearer
that one methodology, oriented toward imaginary role playing, cannot suffice. Theoretical
frameworks suitable for analyzing identity construction and play in present day virtual worlds
must account for the inconsistent, and multifarious, nature of avatar use and the increasing
impossibility of universalizing the phenomenon.
 11

real as it gets” (Cooper). Thus, while seeking to challenge the “avatār” of

transubstantiation I will ultimately come to consider the avatar as deeply revelatory.

A question arises: Is it possible, given the requirement for a plurality of

different methodologies, to conduct an analysis that simultaneously looks through a

more universal lens for something “deeper”, something that is neither “liberating” or

“oppressive” and whose “playfulness” is rendered explicit by virtual worlds? Is it

entirely paradoxical to claim that while each user’s relationship to their avatar is a

commingling of undeniably unique personal factors, that the virtual self – whether

identical to the user’s real self, or radically different from it – does not depart from

“something deeper”, “real”, and all-too-human? It is not my intention to privilege one

of these positions, but to try to find a way to work between them. Thus, I will part

ways from an entirely relativist view of the avatar and suggest that while each user’s

avatar is indeed unique and does require a tailor made method of analysis, the task of

this thesis is to reveal that it is also important to pay attention to a deeper, all-too-

humanness through which each avatar’s uniqueness is inflected.

Context - Between Posthumanism and Psychoanalysis: Between

Epimetheus and Oedipus

This thesis will consider the interaction between the user’s sense of self or

subjectivity and their SL avatar through the ideas of the psychoanalytic theorists

Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. It will ultimately side with the Lacanians Bruce

Fink and Slavoj Žižek, who insist that the aim of psychoanalysis is to understand the
 12

functioning of the largely unconscious drives that comprise our complex humanity.10

What follows is an intervention into understanding the relationship between the new

media of virtual worlds and selfhood and subjectivity using a “subjective” Lacanian

framework rather than an “anti-subjective” one (Mansfield). “Anti-subjective”

analyses of virtual worlds carried out primarily by Foucauldian, Deleuzian and

Cyberfeminist scholars are reviewed in Chapter One. In the face of these types of

analysis, this thesis asks what a properly psychoanalytic, subjective, analysis of

contemporary virtual worlds might resemble? That is to say, against the abundant

post-Oedipal, post-modern, post-gendered, post-x (etc…) interventions into virtual

reality and cyberspace, I will deploy Freud’s concept of the uncanny (“unheimlich”)

and call on the assistance of the psychoanalytic concepts “lack”, “desire”, “the object

petit a”, and the “fragmented body”, concepts that have only existed on the fringes of

contemporary cyber-discourse.

This thesis argues for an understanding of the avatar which attempts to move

beyond arguments that characterize it exclusively as a graphical representation that

10
That is, Fink and Žižek as opposed to Lacanian / Post-Lacanian literature that reads Freud
and Lacan “through the lens of Foucault” as proto post-Structuralists. (Powell) The thesis holds
that readings common to cyberculture studies, including those of the psychoanalytically-
informed (Turkle, “Multiple”) cyberfeminist scholar Sherry Turkle, appear, at times, to mis-
read the project of psychoanalysis as a denial of the human subject - a reading that ignores
Lacan’s lifelong engagement with the subject. Unlike the largely post-Structuralist position of
cyberfeminism, which comprised a great deal of the groundbreaking cyberculture studies of the
1990s, “Lacan was never interested in the ‘death of man’, which he ridiculed as a straw man
tactic in his seminars of the mid-1960s, nor did he bracket out all questions of the subject as
consistently as Michel Foucault. Thus, Lacan never reduced subjective agency to … the
transpersonal insistence of power” (Powell). In The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and
Jouissance, Bruce Fink is at pains to remind the reader that Lacan was not a post-structuralist
who sought to deconstruct and dispel the notion of the human subject, rather Lacan’s work
questioned what it meant to be a subject and the failures associated with becoming one (Fink,
Lacanian ix). For Lacan, then, otherness does not threaten, but is in fact the support for, the
subject. This is the view that Fink and Žižek push throughout their interpretations of Lacan.
 13

allows a user to navigate a virtual world, as a technological overcoming of some

human condition, as an extension / prosthesis of the self, or as a radically decentered

dispersal of the self into multiple selves and subjectivities. The different

conceptualization of the avatar attempted here does not entirely dismiss post-

structuralist (i.e. Foucauldian, Deleuzian and Cyberfeminist) claims that we are

encountering new modalities of selfhood and subjectivity as a result of our encounters

with virtual avatars. It does, however, raise questions about the view that

avatarization can be explained with exclusive recourse to these “becomings”, ever

new “rhizomatic” connections, and “machinic assemblages” noted throughout

Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. It raises questions about cyberspace as

a necessarily affirmative space where the body is no longer constrained by the

Symbolic authority of what Lacan calls the “master signifier”. It also raises questions

about characterizations of the avatar as a performative tool for the discursive creation

of new modalities of self.

Furthermore, this thesis attempts to move the theoretical debates about avatars

away from technophilic (and phobic) discourses, toward a more humanist

engagement. It takes seriously, but not exclusively, the humanist wisdom found in the

Old Testament book of “Ecclesiastes”: ‘What has been is what will be, and what has

been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun’ (Ecc. 1:9)

and attempts to fuse it with a study of new media technologies. Despite having quoted

Koheleth’s lamentations in “Ecclesiastes”, the humanist approach toward the study of

new media articulated throughout this thesis is not entirely a conservative one. As

Tom Boellstorff suggests, it is not true “that there is nothing new under the virtual
 14

sun” (Boellstorff 5). As such, this thesis insists that the so called “posthuman”

changes wrought by new media technologies, such as SL avatarization, ought to be

thought together with how those technologies interact with something that is indelibly

“human”. 11 To introduce this concept I will juxtapose two mythical figures that have

resonance for our posthumanist humanism: Epimetheus and Oedipus.

Heideggerian philosopher of technology Bernard Steigler remarks in Technics

and Time Vol.1: The Fault of Epimetheus, that our contemporary techno-culture can

glean much from the ancient Greek myth of the brother gods Prometheus

(forethought) and Epimetheus (afterthought). In Plato’s Protagoras, Epimetheus is

given the task of rationing out qualities for all the earth’s creatures so that each may

exist in harmony. It happens that Epimetheus, concerned only with afterthought,

forgets to give humankind positive qualities. This is obviously a problem, for without

these qualities humans would be consumed by predators and utterly lost. Plato

continues, explaining that Prometheus “…came to inspect the distribution [of

qualities] and found that man alone was naked and shoeless and had neither bed nor

arms of defence” (Plato). Unsure of what else to do, Prometheus steals the

mechanical arts of Hephaestus and Athena – along, of course, with fire to utilize them

– and gives them to humankind. Stiegler reads this myth as a parable about humanity;

we are in a constant search for our inherent humanity, and, as a result we continually

interact with techniques, perpetually re-negotiating modalities of selfhood.

Epimetheus’ forgetfulness denied us a stable foundation, and, as a result constant

11
In declaring the cyborg to be post-Oedipal, Donna Haraway, for example, imagines a new
type of subjective arrangement. But others, such as Paul Virilio, have concerns about the loss of
phenomenological “appearance” (Virilio, Open) and can be understood as focusing their
attention on the complexities of some human condition. An inspection of the launchpad of
human subjectivity ought to be in order before blasting off into posthuman space.
 15

transformation becomes, paradoxically, our essence. This ancient, yet prescient myth

tells us that human nature involves fabricating and re-fabricating our selves. In this

view there is nothing more natural than artifice and flux. I will call this the

Epimethean view of the human being.

But, this is not the end of the story of what we are. In The Birth of Tragedy

Friedrich Nietzsche intuits that the ancient Greeks held another co-existent view of

mankind. This view is evidenced in the tragedies of playwrights such as Sophocles

and Euripides and asks what lies behind, or beyond, the technological prostheses with

which we are forced to endlessly re-negotiate ourselves.12 This view holds that there

are forces, or structures of some kind, that govern man, in spite of his ever-

transforming – or Epimetheian – essence. Nietzsche dwells on Sophocles’ tragedy

Oedipus Rex, which elucidates this later, Dionysian, dimension of self, a dimension

of structural inescapability and fate.13 In Oedipus Rex, which I will refer to

throughout the thesis in relation to the psychoanalytic “Oedipal Complex”, Oedipus

fulfills the premonitions of the Oracle at Delphi that Jocasta’s son will murder her

husband Laius and, in turn, will sleep with her. Oedipus goes on to unknowingly

murder a man who turns out to be his father Laius and finds out that his wife is, in

fact, his mother Jocasta. Nietzsche asks, “Oedipus, murderer of his father, husband of

12
If one reads Nietzsche as primarily a ‘genealogist’ then he certainly belongs alongside
Epimetheus. But here, we are considering the ‘Dionysian’ Nietzsche. My reading of Nietzsche
is not that of a “Nietzschean reference of post-structuralism” (Žižek Sublime, 172) but rather,
Nietzsche’s sense of the Dionysian ‘will’ as the terrifying ‘real’ thing standing behind the
Apollonian principium individuationis. For what I take to be Nietzsche’s basis for this idea see
the concept of the “Will” as it is used throughout Arthur Shopenhauer’s Essays and Aphorisms.
13
The Dionysian designates the chaotic, intoxicating, instinctual, destructive, orgiastic,
excessive – yet nevertheless structural – aspect of the human being. Greek tragedy, it must be
emphasized, developed out from the cult of Dionysius. Here, the spectator became aware of the
gulf between the frail, corporeal, and needy human and the continual fertility and orgiastic
robustness of the natural world.
 16

his mother, solver of the riddle of the Sphynx! What is the significance of the

mysterious triad of these deeds of destiny?” (Nietzsche, Birth 30). Sigmund Freud

resuscitates Oedipus’ fate early in the 20th century to offer an answer to Nietzsche’s

question about the largely “unconscious” desires and currents that structure our sense

of self.14 For psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, these unconscious forces and structures

inhere at the core of the subject. Of importance here is the articulation of a tragic, or

Dionysian, dimension of the human closed off from conscious, or deliberate, intent:

we are not the masters of our own house.15 We will refer to this as the Oedipal

dimension of the human being.

When we combine Epimetheus and Oedipus, as articulated by Plato (via the

Heideggerian Stiegler) and Sophocles (via Nietzsche/Freud/Lacan), we arrive at the

seemingly paradoxical claim that human “essence” is contingent and technological

(the lesson of Epimetheus), but also inescapably structured and governed (the lesson

of Oedipus).16

14
Although it is disputed how much he read or how well he read Nietzsche. Nietzsche is not a
Psychoanalyst before the letter and Freud is not a Nietzschean. But neither did Freud deny that
his idea of ‘the id’ from Nietzsche. The most we can say is that interesting parallels exist
between psychoanalysis and Nietzscheanism. (Chapelle 13)
15
“…all the celebrated figures of the Greek stage – Prometheus, Oedipus, etc.- are but masks of
this original hero, Dionysius. There is godhead behind all these masks; and that is the one
essential cause of the typical ‘ideality’, so often wondered at, of these celebrated characters.”
(Nietzsche, Birth 34). Furthermore, let us note that Dionysius is less a God than he is Necessity.
Regarding Euripides’ tragedy, the question has been asked “What God, we want to know, no
matter what provocation could make a mother dismember her son and still retain her Sophia?”
(Euripides 150). The divinity of Dionysius as the “incarnate life-force itself, the uncontrollable
chaotic eruption of nature in individuals and cities…amoral, neither good nor bad…”
(Euripides 149). Euripides’ The Baccae, described as a “mysterious, almost haunted work,
stalked by divinity and that daemonic power of necessity which for Euripides is the careless
source of man’s tragic destiny and moral dignity” (Euripides 149).
16
Fragments attributed to the pre-Socratic Heraclitus reveal that this paradoxical claim is a
quite ancient one. I want to spend a moment with Heraclitus as his ideas have been extremely
influential in my resurrection of Oedipus and Epimetheus. The central claim made in this thesis
is informed by Heraclitus’ fragment “We step into and we do not step into the same rivers. We
 17

The inability, and in many cases downright aversion, to acknowledge a role

for both Epimetheus and Oedipus has resulted, as Nick Mansfield suggests, in two

broad categories of contemporary theories of subjectivity: (1) “…those that attempt to

define the nature or structure of the subject (its ‘truth’), and (2) those that see any

definition of subjectivity as the product or culture of power” (Mansfield 51). This

tension is expressed by (1) psychoanalysis (i.e. Lacan), on the one hand and (2) post-

structuralism (i.e. Michel Foucault), on the other. Contemporary postmodern theory,

however, has abandoned balancing these two forms of subjectivity; the symbolic

reminder that we are not masters in our own house has been largely neglected in

favour of analyses of selfhood that focus on the factors responsible for the

construction and endless maintenance of the house. Regardless of what side of the

postmodern fence one stands on neither Friedrick Jameson’s account of a self

embedded in the cultural logic of late capitalism nor Jean-Francois Lyotard’s

deconstructionist account of a self incredulous toward grand, or meta, narratives has

time for Oedipus. One could argue that there has been a deliberate attempt to abandon

any remaining supports for “humanism”, and pose a radical “anti-humanism” in its

are and we are not.” (Presocratics 36). These statements reveal that Heraclitus considered
“being” and “becoming” simultaneously. In other words, “everything flows, but it flows
systematically” (Osborne 91). The river water, and all the creatures and life forms that move
through it, are in states of constant transformation. But there are factors such as the riverbed
and the banks of the river that, while also in constant transformation, provide a systematic form
that is identifiable as a “river”. Now, transfer Heraclitus’ example of the river to selfhood. Ones
sense of self is the product of both “river water” containing all the ideological and historical
forms that move through it, and a needy, corporeal and mortal “riverbed”. Of course, in both
the example of the self and the example of the river, it is possible that a river can cease to be a
river, and that a self can cease to be a self. Contemporary culture is rife with emphasizing the
contingency of both the river and the river bed, the self and the body, without asking the
question of whether some wisdom stands behind the seemingly paradoxical claim that
“changing, it rests” (Presocratics 37).
 18

place.17 This sentiment can also be located in the wild success of MMOs, such as SL,

where the buying and selling of virtual body parts is normal and routine. As will

become clear throughout Chapter 1, some of the academic work done on virtual

worlds such as SL consider them to be spaces where users, via their avatars, rehearse

for a coming posthuman era, when the body will no longer possess any psychical

interiority, as it will be wholly textualized, informatic, changeable and malleable.

Rather than the cryptic Socratic maxim “know thyself”, the postmodern theorist

recites the maxim: change, or (re)create thyself. In contrast, this thesis argues that we

continue to harbour psychical interiority despite our encounter with so-called

postmodern technologies and social patterns.

The effect that the generally post-Oedipal era of postmodernism has had on

our understanding of the interaction between the self and virtual media technologies

demands serious attention. We can learn much from academic work on virtual reality

and online identity produced throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. This work

generally takes two directions: one optimistic, the other pessimistic. The more

optimistic strand tends to be influenced by theorists such as Judith Butler, Donna

Haraway and Giles Deleuze.18 The other, more pessimistic strand of postmodern

17
For instance, see Louis Althusser’s For Marx and Foucault’s The Order of Things. The idea
is summed up quite nicely in a collection titled Posthumanism edited by Neil Badminton. This
academic “anti-humanism” finds itself materially reflected in pursuits such as the Human
Genome Project, and in biotechnologies, which allow for gene therapy and germ line
interventions.
18
…who in turn, rely heavily on Foucault’s indictment of movements such as psychoanalysis as
privileging some truth of our innermost being. This theoretical tradition, privileging difference,
and challenging the very idea of making generalities is best expressed by Foucault, whose
works proclaim: “we are not generalities”…“we are not merely instances of a larger human
character…immune to the contingencies of changing history …regardless of culture’s particular
experiences/histories” (May 10). It is not some universal human being that makes me what I
am, proponents of this view purport, but the “temporal movement” of a changing, and
 19

theory addressing virtual reality and online identity is found in the writings of Jean

Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Jean-Francois Lyotard (Virilio, Art); (Baudrillard,

Ecstacy); (Lyotard, Inhuman). The celebratory perspective on cyberculture

characterizes virtual worlds as spaces where users can be liberated from their

biological determinants, “perform” their identities and “cycle through” multiple

selves (Turkle, “Always”). The more pessimistic view sees the new post-Oedipal era

as a nightmarish development, where “the network of simulacra elides the old

Lacanian categories of Imaginary, Symbolic and Real” and conflates them into a

depthless hyper-real (Flieger 397). Both positions, libratory and hyper-critical,

however, have a shared foundation: they function either by revising and watering

down Oedipus, turning him into a theoretical straw man, or tossing him into the

historical trash bin altogether.

At this point I will acknowledge some broad aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s

influential anti-Oedipal position and let the reader know why I do not find it

persuasive or appealing.19 Deleuze and Guattari accuse psychoanalysts of using

Oedipus to route desire in constraining ways corresponding to the Oedipal triad of

“mommy-daddy-me”. This is because they regard desire as “positive” and

“productive” while the Oedipal story is premised on the “lack” of the mother and

regulated by “law” of the father (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti 3); (Ross 63). Thus,

unpredictable world that “leaves its stamp on me”, that “makes me what I am” (May 11). While
“themes” such as “discipline, normalization, bio-politics etc…” can be discerned through the
study of history, history itself, according to Foucault, is not directed by any outside teleology or
dialectic, nor does it correspond with any universality internal to the subjects produced by it.
The bodies of these subjects can be thought of as “docile”, or wholly “subject to formation
imposed from outside” (Siegel 619). “Who are we” is not what Foucault is after; rather, he is
after “Who are we now” (May 22).
19
Chapter 3, however, will briefly confront Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas in reference to the
Lacanian object petit (a).
 20

rather than a constrained “lacking” or “regulated” form of desire, Deleuze and

Guattari champion an entirely positive form of desire free to form connections with

other bodies and the outside world. This positive desire is premised on continuous

mutation and transformation, and thus, does not reduce the “multiple forms that desire

can take to those forms that can be referred to by the personal identities of the

Oedipal triangle.” (Lorraine 190).

I agree with Deleuze and Guattari that the Oedipal triad of the Jocasta

(mommy), Laius (daddy), and Oedipus (me) is a constraint on the most radical

arrangements of bodies and subjectivity; however that does not cause me – like it

does them – to seek a move beyond the Oedipal triad. In calling for a form of life

beyond constraint (i.e. negativity, lack, prohibition), the anti-Oedipal position moves

us into a wholly posthuman, wholly Epimethean, territory that is against the intention

of this thesis. Rather, as will become clearer throughout the ensuing chapters, the

claims I present here articulate a positive and connective reading of the avatar insofar

as it is integrated with a negative, Oedipal, reading. The avatar, in my account, is not

representative of a Deleuzian self endlessly “being born of the states that it consumes

and being reborn with each new state” but rather is representative of becoming and

difference that does not exist outside the auspices of the negativity and lack that the

Oedipal triad represents (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti 16). Rather than ignoring

Oedipus and flinging myself into a posthuman investigation of technology, I believe

Oedipus has much to tell us about the variability, contingency, and possibilities

opened up by contemporary technologies of avatarization. Thus, while “[Deleuze and

Guattari] urge mankind to strip itself of all anthropomorphic and anthropological

 21

armoring, all myth and tragedy, and all existentialism, in order to perceive what is

nonhuman in man, his will and his forces, his transformations and mutations”

(Deleuze and Guattari, Anti xx) I am interested in the interaction between man’s all-

too-humanness and his capacity for transformations and mutations. For this reason, I

do not align myself entirely with Oedipus or Epimetheus: I do not advocate becoming

carried away with a dark, repressive, lack and slogging through life like the plague

stricken flagellants in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, nor do I advocate for the day

when, the subject wills itself into a state of purely positive and transformative desire,

endlessly “defined by the states through which it passes.” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti

20).20

I am especially wary of the position that regards virtual worlds, such as SL,

for better or worse, as spaces where users rehearse for a time when the body becomes

wholly malleable and dynamic. This wariness is the impetus for considering virtual

world avatars through the prism of a humanist Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Although several psychoanalytic concepts will be explored throughout the

thesis, including the “Oedipus complex” and the “uncanny”, for Lacan, the

irreducible lack at the heart of the subject is of prime significance. This lack, first

theorized as the subject of the Imaginary in his paper on the “Mirror Stage’ (1949

though first delivered in 1936), never leaves us, in spite of the fact that it is later

20
Finally, whether undermining the position of the human, or (as Foucault puts it) being
“anti-homo”, is an ethical response to the threat presented by the horrors of fascism is a
difficult matter. Suffice it to say that the articulation of an utterly nonfascist form of
subjectivity without recognition of where the human begins and ends risks being equally as
vicious as a fascist form of subjectivity that is certain of where the human begins and ends.
Frankly, I do not care for extermination, whether one pure ‘I’ exterminates another ‘I’ or
whether the ‘I’ is exterminated in order to be monstrously connected to other ‘I’s and the
natural world.
 22

subsumed under the more linguistic identification with the Symbolic, as described in

“The Function of the Field of Speech”. In the virtual world of SL users must create

and re-create their avatar – rendering explicit aspects of their self that tend to be

obscured in real life. We look to the much discussed Second Life economy from the

perspective of an economy of desire, whereby real currency is spent in order to catch

a glimpse of our desires in action. From this perspective, the avatar itself is a

desiring-thing organized around what Lacan calls objet petit a (Lacan, Sem XI). For

Lacan, the Other, which can be considered akin to the (m)Other in the Oedipal drama,

represents that to which we are always striving to return. Thus, the objet petit a, is

derived from Other – Autre in French – as the little Autre, literally, little Other. While

notoriously difficult to define, objet petit a might be thought of as the remainder of

the child’s relationship to its (m)Other, or more specifically as representing the

child’s fantasy of the (m)Other’s desires which comes to structure the child’s very

being. It is this imaginary relationship that is made explicit in our interactions with

our avatars. The interactive reflection of the avatar makes explicit the subject as an

endlessly desiring thing, one that for Lacan is both an effect of and movement

through language.21 Thus, it is no coincidence that SL has been featured in the news

for its increasing integration with real life: the avatar in SL is a virtual reflection of

what has always been at the core of the subject, a reflection that, like our original

encounter with the mirror during the mirror stage, reveals the alienating virtuality at

the heart of subjectivity. Through this prism, the role and significance of the avatar

differs notably from both optimistic and pessimistic post-structuralist and

21
In the same way as Saussurian linguistics imagines the synchronic relationship between
signifiers as a process that never ends up in any finality of meaning.
 23

postmodernist formulations. This thesis will attempt to elucidate and explore some of

these differences.

Put differently, the thesis will look for what is uncanny about avatarization.

What if the avatar body - that excessive, perpetually incomplete, double with which

the user engages on their screen is not an overcoming of the Symbolic, but a working

with something that is constitutive of our very humanity? Such a formulation would

lead us to a conceptualization focused on the uncanny element of the virtual avatar, of

the avatar user as “traversing” the “fundamental fantasy” laid down to cover over the

trauma of primordial repression provoked by “castration” (Žižek, Plague 30). Thus,

this thesis seeks to consider the object petit (a)vatar. It does not strive to close down

readings that emphasize new openings and new becomings, but does wish to insist

that avatars, often heralded as harbingers of the posthuman, do continue to “mark

time on an Oedipal calendar” and remain subject to what is “old and long familiar”

(Haraway); (Freud, Uncanny). We are interested in articulating a cyborg subject who

does, playing on Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, uncannily “re-member the

cosmos…[of] Oedipal symbiosis” (Lacan, Ecrits 77); (Haraway 151).

Chapter Breakdown and Methodology

In order to justify the tentative attempt to develop a psychoanalytic frame of virtual

world (specifically SL) avatarization carried out throughout this thesis, the first

chapter provides a review and analysis of the major themes and theoretical tendencies

found in scholarly engagements with SL in relevant books and journals with a

cultural studies focus since the time the virtual world was launched for public use on

June 23, 2003 (Virtual). This textual analysis focuses on the underlying assumptions
 24

scholars have made about the relationship between the user and their avatar. I

inquired how each text generally (a) considered selfhood and/or subjectivity and (b)

regarded the relationship between virtual world avatarization and selfhood. I then

grouped these scholarly engagements into three broad categories: (1). A

“Posthumanist” and “Posthumanist (Capitalist)” understanding of the avatar; (2). A

“Performative” understanding of the avatar; (3). A “Human” and “Human

(Psychoanalytic)” understanding of the avatar (which focuses – in varied ways - on

the interactions between the real user and their avatar). Next, I noted the limitations of

each category. Drawing from personal experience as a long time user of SL and

anecdotal evidence from other SL users I felt that these scholarly studies (especially

for the 3rd “Human”/”Human (Psychoanalytic)” understanding of the avatar) could be

enriched by the application of a few central psychoanalytic concepts found in the

works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.

As such, I must emphasize that the ensuing intervention carried out

throughout the following chapters does not purport to be anything beyond a

speculative attempt at offering an alternative theoretical frame for virtual world

avatarization. I utilize personal, first person, experience to inform the textual and

theoretical analysis presented throughout these chapters. I rely on my own

observations and conversations as well as the reflections of other users found in

articles and books about SL.

The second chapter, “‘Old and Long Familiar’: Virtual Worlds, Avatars and

the Psychoanalytic Uncanny”, considers the avatar as an uncanny double. It focuses

on the uncanny as a return of the repressed, or a coming into un-concealedness of

 25

something primitive (Freud, Uncanny, 147). This reading of the avatar primarily

draws on three texts to develop its claims: E.T.A Hoffman’s 1816 short story “The

Sandman”, Sigmund Freud’s essay “The Uncanny”, and Lacan’s essay on the “mirror

stage” in Ecrits. This chapter argues that the avatar can be understood as an uncanny

double that reminds us of a forgotten past of infantile fragmentation and castration.

The third chapter, “Objet Petit (a)vatar: SL Avatars and Lacan’s Lost Object”,

draws on Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Jacques Lacan’s “Function

of the Field of Speech” in Ecrits, and selections from his Seminar XI: The Four

Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, in order to consider the user’s construction

of, and interaction with, their avatar. It argues that the avatar provides an opportunity

to catch a glimpse of the user’s insatiable desires in action. From this point of view,

the avatar cannot be understood as exclusively post-Oedipal and post-lack.

Specifically, the avatar visualizes and renders explicit the lost object (or objet petit a),

the remainder of the user’s entry into Culture/Language/the Symbolic, that inheres at

the core of the subject. The SL avatar can never reach completion or totality. Instead,

this chapter will argue that in buying new skins, limbs, and clothing users are seeking

to incorporate little pieces of the (m)Other. In the middle portion of the chapter I

consider how the user’s engagement with avatars in SL recalls the father’s “no” - the

Name-of-the-Father. Name is “nom” in French. Lacan – as will be discussed fully in

Chapters 2 and 3 – plays on the relationship between “nom” (name) and “non”, which

is “no” in French. Thus, it could be read the “no-of-the-father”. The creation of

avatars is a kind of activity, game or body-(re)construction that acknowledges the

user’s limitations and assuages his or her frustration at being unable to return to the
 26

(m)Other. The later portion of the chapter turns to focus on the relationship between

SL avatarization and what is referred to in psychoanalysis as the fundamental fantasy

of castration. This chapter argues that the avatarization carried out in the virtual world

of SL does not deviate drastically from the way Lacan claims we live our real lives;

avatarization renders explicit certain obscured aspects of our real life.

The examples selected throughout these chapters are intended to provide what

I, as a long time user of SL, believe offer a sense of the routine activities that

transpire in the virtual world. I have tried, throughout my choice of examples, to

provide experiences that SL users would not call anomalous, such as the buying and

selling of virtual body parts and forming an online relationship. For example, whether

or not one is simply a lone SL tourist, or belongs to the misogynistic “Gorean”

subculture, it is likely they will customize their avatar body in one way or another.

Likewise, novice and long time users are both confronted by the issue of avatar

rendering. I have tried, to the best of my ability, to select personal observations (and

observations located in other scholarly texts) that give a sense of life in SL. I avoided

emphasizing exceptions such as SL millionaires, users who engage in sexual play

with underage avatars, et cetera in favour of what – in my opinion as a user – appear

to be common features of avatarization.

In the conclusion “Humanist Posthumanism: Epimetheus and Oedipus in

Second Life”, I return to the dual figures of Oedipus and Epimetheus and situate the

preceding thesis in relation to the theme of posthumanism and psychoanalysis raised

throughout this introduction

 27

Chapter 1: Virtual Selves and Avatars: Scholarly Engagements with

SL Avatars

Introduction

This chapter provides descriptive surveys and critical discussions of scholarly

engagements with SL since the virtual world was launched in 2003 (Virtual).

Attention will be paid to the underlying assumptions made about the interaction

between the user and their avatar, asking how the text generally conceptualizes the

self, and how it regards the effects that virtual worlds are having on selfhood. The

chapter also considers the limitations of this theoretical literature about SL

avatarization. Rather than moving chronologically, the chapter will move from

scholarly engagements advocating the avatar as liberation from some physical and/or

psychological limitation of the human condition, to scholarly engagements that regard

the avatar as a technical object intricately tied to, and capable of revealing, our

complex humanity. Three distinct kinds of scholarly categories emerge in the

literature dealing with Second Life avatars: (1) The “Posthuman” Avatar, (1a) The

“Posthuman (Capitalist)” Avatar, (2) The “Performative” Avatar, (3) The “Human”

Avatar and (3a) The “Human (Psychoanalytic)” Avatar.

1. The Posthuman Avatar

Several studies of SL argue that avatars are technological extensions or prostheses

that are creating new types of posthuman beings. Virtual bodies, this category

contends, act as harbingers of a time beyond the human. In their article “Embodied

Narrative: The Virtual Nomad and the Meta Dreamer”, Denise Doyle and Taey Kim
 28

explore narratives of embodiment in virtual worlds and web 2.0 environments (Doyle

and Kim 209). The two researchers communicate with one another using the

monikers Wanderingfictions (for the researcher in the virtual world of SL) and

Dongdong (for the researcher in web 2.0 environments). Early in their discussion

Wanderingfictions explains to Dongdong that she acts and moves as if her “non-

human” (SL avatar) body and identity were real (Doyle and Kim 214). Dongdong,

interested by Wanderingfictions’ suggestion that her virtual-body is tied to a non-, or

post-, human form of identity, agrees, stating that “…we are all becoming

posthuman”. Both Wanderingfictions and Dongdong are interested in the radical

posthuman freedom that accompanies the loss of one’s human identity and body

within 3D virtual worlds. Wanderingfictions expresses a Katherine Hayles-inspired

posthuman reflection on the nature of virtual selfhood: “I am being defined as pattern,

not presence. I have the experience of embodiment, although I know my body is

virtual. There is little true form here, only a series of associations” (Hayles 25-26);

(Doyle and Kim 214).22

Theoretically, Doyle and Kim’s posthuman rhetoric bears traces of both

Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the fate of the “aura” amidst technological

reproduction in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

and Marshall Mcluhan’s notion of the changes that linear, or “Guttenberg”, man

undergoes in technologically mediated acoustic and non-linear environments

(Mcluhan). Both Mcluhan and Benjamin articulate an early kind of technologically

22
While reading Doyle and Kim’s discussion, one is also reminded, while reading Doyle and
Kim’s discussion, of cyber-optimist John Barlow’s claim that “Cyberspace consists of
transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our
communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where
bodies live.” (Barlow)
 29

informed posthuman self-identity; in one case human beings are affected by a world

that no longer has a sense of the “auratic”, in another case human beings are affected

by a world that no longer operates on principles of “linearity”. Consider the following

claim by Dongdong:

We are evolving ourselves with communications

and the creation of expression towards this blurry
world we exist [sic]. Text will expand in every
direction. We will not live in a horizontal timeline
any longer. You will be able to create nameless
nations and unauthorized territories, paradoxical
zones like the Taj Mahal without India in your
virtuality (Doyle and Kim 214).

A clear relationship exists between the decline of Benjamin’s aura and “the Taj

Mahal without India”, or Mcluhan’s non linear electronic community and the idea of

no longer living in a “horizontal timeline” (Benjamin); (Mcluhan 55-56). The virtual

Taj Mahal, comprised of virtual scripts and codes, deployable and removable at the

click of a mouse interrogates the authenticity, and awe, that the real Taj Mahal once

inspired. The world itself no longer demands our attention and focus in the way it did

earlier. Linear narratives privileging horizontality lose their importance as the

simulation saturated world demands different types of non-linear narratives that

privilege a de-centered and heterogeneous directionality.

Studies of online identity, one of the most famous being Sherry Turkle’s Life

on the Screen, often work with Benjamin’s insight that “even the most perfect

reproduction is lacking in one element: its presence in space and time, its unique

existence at the places where it happens to be” (Benjamin). Turkle explains that “in

simulation identity can be fluid and multiple, a signifier no longer points to a thing

that is signified, and understanding is less likely to proceed through analysis than by
 30

navigation through virtual space” (Turkle, Life 49); (Turkle, “Beyond” 646). Here,

virtual simulation does something to our identity, it creates a new sort of self, one

whose outward appearance – via its mechanical reproducibility and its inhabiting of

non-linear environments – is no longer necessarily tied to a stable referent. Likewise,

for Wanderingfictions and Dongdong, the avatar appears to radically interrogate an

autonomous, or core “I”. This “I”, prior to contemporary technologies, was a

seemingly fixed and assured Archimedean point of subjectivity which Descartes

declared in his Mediations to be “certain and unshaken” (Descartes 17).

Social theorists, philosophers and novelists have long noted the tendency for

modern technologies, and technocratic ways of living, to alter our sense of self and

what it means to be an “I”. Doyle and Kim’s posthuman conversation piece can be

located alongside antecedents as varied as philosopher Martin Heidegger and novelist

J.K. Huysmans; both of whom recognize, in their own ways, that the belief in an

unchanging human self (as a unitary, solid subject) is being radically interrogated and

challenged by new technologies and social practices.

Heidegger’s considerations of the effects of modern technology on human

subjectivity can assist in our analysis of Doyle and Kim’s posthumanism. In his late

essays “The Question Concerning Technology” and “The Age of the World Picture”

Heidegger considers the changing status of the self amidst modern technology. Tied to

this changing status is his assertion that modern technology displaces the “wordliness”

of the world and puts a human-world in its place. He uses the term “enframing” to

explain the way humans, as users of modern technology, have come to relate to (and

literally “frame”) the world (Heidegger, “Question” 19). To demonstrate the

 31

characteristics of this modern technological “Enframing” of the world Heidegger

contrasts a windmill with a modern hydroelectric power plant. In describing how the

windmill differs from the type of “revealing” that characterizes modern technology, he

explains that the “old windmill’s…sails do indeed turn in the wind; [but are] … left

entirely to the wind's blowing. …the windmill does not unlock energy from the air

currents in order to store it” (Heidegger, “Question” 14). The windmill only transfers

motion, it “reveals” wind energy, but does not commandeer nature’s energy or store it

for future use (Mitcham 49). In contrast to a windmill or a wooden bridge that joins

one bank of the Rhine with the other, a hydroelectric plant is set in the current of the

river.23 The river itself, when impacted by the hydroelectric plant, appears under the

command of human beings. The hydroelectric plant challenges the energies of the

Rhine, stores them in a non-sensuous abstract form whose value is discernable by, and

exclusively for, the will of human beings. This, in turn, gives humans a different view

23
In the “Question Concerning Technology” Heidegger comments that:
The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It sets the
Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines
turning. This turning sets those machines in motion whose thrust sets
going the electric current for which the long-distance power station and
its network of cables are set up to dispatch electricity." In the context
of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of
electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears as something at our
command. The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as
was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of
years. Rather the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the
river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the
essence of the power station. (Heidegger, “Question” 16)
The bridge, in his argument, preserves the Rhine’s intrinsic value: the river retains its own
value, we simply cross over it. “The bridge”, Heidegger writes “lets the stream run its course”
(Heidegger “Building” 150). The power station, on the other hand, transforms the Rhine into a
very different object and its value becomes a human value. Even from the vantage of an
observer: staring out at the bridge one sees the river running beneath it, its flow unobstructed,
unimpaired by the bridge that stands across it. The bridge does not direct the flow of the water.
On the other hand, an observer of a hydroelectric power station built into the Rhine witnesses a
different sort of river, one whose flow is obstructed, impaired, and directed by the power
station.
 32

of the Rhine. This “challenging-forth”, rather than “bringing-forth”, substantiates

Heidegger’s claim that the world has been turned into “standing-reserve” as a result of

modern technology. The challenging:

…happens in that the energy concealed in nature is

unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is
transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn,
distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever
anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and
switching about are ways of revealing. But the revealing
never simply comes to an end (Heidegger, “Question”
16). (Emphasis mine)

His argument throughout “The Question Concerning Technology” that there was a

different way of revealing called techne that aimed to bring things forth and let them

appear that pre-exited our own method of technological “switching about” can be

considered one form of a posthuman argument. Doyle and Kim’s posthuman

conversation piece occurs within a worldview that believes modern technology has

done, and continues to do, something drastic to how we live and what we are. This

view regards virtual technologies, and the types of identities and selves conditioned

by them, as thriving in an environment of constant switching-about where objects are

challenged forth as standing-reserve. The virtual world of SL, where users’ online

personae have no anchoring point, no gold-standard to refer their identities to, is

paradigmatic of the Heideggerian claim of being switched about ever anew. This

position contends that the modern individual, considered a functionary of Enframing,

is less and less subject to the “wind’s blowing”, and increasingly under the purview

of an anthropocentric will to (technological) power. Following the logic of Enframing

one comes to consider the posthuman body as one fabricated entirely by, and for, the

will of human beings.

 33

While in SL, I often ask other residents whether they feel there is a typical SL

body. Some of the time I am told that the fact that there is no typical SL body is one

of the reasons the user was drawn to the virtual world in the first place. Doyle and

Kim lucidly convey this position and preference. While many users do have avatar

bodies that resemble their own, they often assert that they do not feel a sense of

authenticity and normalcy, that there is no interior subject or substance; their self is

dispersed and endlessly switching about. Their avatar-bodies are always potentially –

or virtually – a canvas for something else. Most SL users I have encountered do not

find the idea of an anchoring, or normal, SL body intelligible. In fact, all the objects

in SL, constructed of geometric prims24, are examples of standing reserve that have

no inherent value of their own apart from the value that human users bestow upon

them.25 One might alternatively associate this state of being without inherent form.

Novelist J.K. Huysmans associates this state of being without inherent form with

human beings rendering themselves aesthetic objects in a post-Copernican era.26

24
“The basic building block of Second Life… All in-world objects are constructed from
primitives. A prim is a basic shape (such as a box, sphere, cylinder, etc.) that can be
manipulated, stretched, cut, twisted, hollowed, and otherwise mangled into various forms. A
builder can link a collection of prims together to form one cohesive object. The math works out
to 15,000 prims for each 65,536 m2. So for example, a 512 m2 parcel has 117 prims, a 4096 m2
parcel has 937” (Puritans).
25
i.e. “…As this historical transformation of beings into resources becomes more pervasive, it
increasingly eludes our critical gaze; indeed, we come to treat even ourselves in the terms
underlying our technological refashioning of the world: no longer as conscious subjects in an
objective world but merely as resources to be optimized, ordered, and enhanced with maximal
efficiency (whether cosmetically, psychopharmacologically, genetically, or even
cybernetically)” (Thompson 5). If all things are transferable, offering the maximum possible
use, so are the avatar-bodies who call SL their home. If modern technology has “changed our
taste or sense of the world”, it has also changed our taste or sense of the body, what it means to
be a self (Wrathall 101).
26
That is, symptomatic of living in a culture drifting away from the niche carved out for it by
the Aristotelian cosmology where bodies, by their very nature, were understood as having a
natural way of moving (Aristotle). As Des Esseintes, the aesthete-dandy protagonist, and
modern-man par excellence, of Huysmans prophetic 1884 novel Against Nature foresaw: while
 34

Wanderingfictions and Dongdong claim that virtual worlds like Second Life

are doing something to us: “we are shrinking, growing, expanding, deforming,

deleting, creating, modifying and metamorphosizing, and disappearing” (Doyle and

Kim 218). They write as if their sense of “I”, their sense of selfhood and subjectivity

is undergoing a radical transformation. Wanderingfiction explains that her SL body

needs to be changed; she feels “very fluid”, “changes all the time”, and is “free of

form” (Doyle and Kim 218-219). By focusing on technical extensions and prostheses

as responsible for altering what it means to be an “I” Doyle and Kim’s article clearly

demonstrates a posthumanist engagement with SL avatarization.27

the self was once thought to possess a fixed place and nature, it is increasingly losing that place.
Des Esseintes suffers from a terrible stomach ailment. Due to his illness his meals are prepared
in the form of a Peptone enema. He comes to enjoy the enema so much that he begins preparing
enema-meals for himself and ends up revelling in the experience. Such an unorthodox manner
of nourishment may revolt us, but for Des Esseintes, "[t]he experience…was, so to speak, the
crowning achievement of the life he had planned for himself; his taste for the artificial had now,
without even the slightest effort on his part, attained its supreme fulfillment. No one would ever
go any further; taking nourishment in this way was undoubtedly the ultimate deviation from the
norm…" He revels in the aesthetic and artificial, and this incident is no exception. Reflecting
on the Peptone enema he thinks to himself: “What a slap in the face of mother nature, whose
monotonous demands would be permanently silenced”. In the present day we do carry much of
Des Esseintes appetite for the artificial around with us, especially in those increasingly
common instances where our bodies become the canvases for works of cosmetic surgery.
Esseintes’ aesthetic attitude transpires, he admits, in a self “beneath a firmament no longer lit
by the consoling beacon-fires of ancient hope” (Huysmans 221) Likewise, the Copernican
revolution (initiated by the decline of Ptolemaic astronomy and Aristotelian cosmology), has
been followed by immensely significant historical shifts such as Darwin's anti-teleological
theory of natural selection, Freud's relocation of the unconscious into the post-Enlightenment
mindset, Einstein's theories of special and general relativity, and two World Wars, that, taken
altogether, stain the belief that human beings have a circumscribed place in the cosmos and can
be developing toward a teleological endpoint of History. We no longer regard ourselves as
creatures whose bodies and thoughts have a pre-determined role in the cosmos. In The Gay
Science, Nietzsche conveys this post-Copernican sentiment: “What were we doing when we
unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away
from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all
directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing?”
(Nietzsche, Gay 181).
27
Less celebratory discussions of SL avatars and identities, such as Stuart Boon and Christine
Sinclair’s paper “A World I Don't Inhabit: Disquiet and Identity in Second Life and
Facebook”, regard SL avatarization as a “new kind of experience” as well (Boon and Sinclair
 35

1a. The Posthuman (Capitalist) Avatar

Similar in approach to Doyle and Kim’s “Posthuman” consideration of the avatar is

consumer researchers’ Handan Vicdan and Ebru Ulusoy’s article “Symbolic and

Experiential Consumption of Body in Virtual Worlds: From (Dis)Embodiment to

Sysembodiment”. While Doyle and Kim’s article reflects cultural critics,

philosophers and authors such as Benjamin, Turkle, Heidegger, Nietzsche and

Huysmans who noticed existential and aesthetic changes occurring in social patterns

and habits, Vicdan and Ulusoy’s analysis draws on shifts in contemporary political,

economic and technical habits and practices. These patterns, commonly referred to as

movements toward “post-industrial society” or “late capitalism”, acknowledge the

shift from Fordism to post-Fordist flexible accumulation, an industrial to a service

economy, the tendency toward working with immaterial information rather that

material objects and the ensuing proliferation of images and screens that accompanies

these trajectories (Bell); (Jameson); (Harvey). This perspective holds that the social

trajectories noted above undergird the postmodern.

The ground of postmodernity, according to critics such as David Harvey, is

intricately tied to contemporary capitalism and forms of labour. He specifically notes

the shift from the stability demanded by the rigid Fordist mode of production to the

flexibility demanded by the post-Fordist mode of flexible accumulation (Harvey

Condition 147, 302). Aside from flexible accumulation, the post-Fordist period saw

16). While Boon and Sinclair note disquieting and discomforting aspects of the SL avatar,
they regard the avatar as “artificiality writ-large”, that is, something akin to a body for a new
world where users can (re)create themselves and their relationships to others (Boon and
Sinclair 21).
 36

the rise of neo-liberalism, which typically celebrates ephemerality and, as a result,

created a disposable and flexible worker by tactics such as short term contracts

(Harvey, History 166). Unsurprisingly, flexible accumulation and neo-liberalism,

together creating an environment of permanent innovation in order to accommodate

ceaseless change rather than the control demanded by Fordism, has engendered a

“flexible personality” amongst individuals living in post-Fordist societies (Holmes 2,

7). This “flexible personality” emerges not only in response to casual labour

contracts, but also to other traits of post-Fordism including

its just-in-time production, its informational products and its

absolute dependence on virtual currency circulating in the
financial sphere…. [as well as] an entire set of very positive
images [such as] spontaneity, creativity, cooperativity,
mobility, peer relations, appreciation of difference, openness
to present experience. (Holmes 2).

Anthony Elliot argues that the postmodern self is subject to the “disorienting

effects of new capitalism”; it is a self that is constantly in motion and does not

commit itself to long term employment (Sennett, Corrosion qtd. in Elliot, Concepts

138). These effects produce modalities of selfhood that do not privilege stability. The

“Postmodern (Capitalist)” position, then, assumes that selfhood mirrors the

development of the economy from a series of “rigid, hierarchical organizaion[s]” to

an economy of “corporate re-engineering, innovation, and risk”; the “durable self”

gives way to a “fragmented, dislocated one” (Elliott, Concepts 138-140). According

to Richard Sennett, identity becomes “pliant”, a “collage of fragments unceasing in its

becoming, ever open to the new experience” under the flexible regime of new

capitalism (Sennett, Culture 14).

 37

Thus, postmodernity is – according to this point of view – evocative of “the

relatively stable aesthetic of Fordist modernism [having given] way to all the ferment,

instability and fleeting qualities of a postmodernist aesthetic that celebrates

difference, ephemerality, spectacle and the commodification of cultural forms.”

(Harvey, Condition 156). According to this position it is in this context that digital

technologies and “interconnected global communications networks” (together

comprising a virtual world like SL) are to be considered as postmodern techniques

(Harvey, Condition 171).28 The postmodern body, labouring in call centres positioned

throughout the globe or designing new software and upgrades, is inserted into these

hyper-technologized systems of production.

Critics also note that the new capitalist sensibility, marked by non-allegiance

and malleability, fosters a “self identity [that] is free from the stain of gender, class,

and race” (Elliott, Subject 142). Returning to Vicdan and Ulusoy, the two classify the

28
One way of theorizing the postmodern self is that it is engendered by contemporary forms
of labour and modes of production include the “protean” (Lifton qtd. in Figueroa-Sarriera),
“saturated” (Gergen qtd. in Figueroa-Sarriera) or “flexible” (Martin “Flexible” qtd. in
Figueroa-Sarriera) subject. Gergen, for example, regards the self as saturated: “the ego as a
hollow tube through which, under different circumstances, different parts of our personality –
each time a different one – find expression” (Filiciak 64). These ideas of the subject are
related insofar as their view of the self co-responds to new social positions and practices
demanded of our bodies by the capitalist mode of production. These formulations resonate
with contemporary descriptions on the Left about labour and current modes of production
(i.e. post-Fordist, Toyotism) that call for the emergence of a ductile, flexible subjectivity
(Brown 92). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire exemplifies an analysis of new
political powers (Empire) and contemporaneously unrealized subjectivities and relationships
between people (the Multitude), and provides a rallying cry for the emergence of a new body
able to harness this to its advantage and render itself discontinuous with contemporary
regimes of control – in other words, to use flexibility against itself. Hardt and Negri write:
“We certainly do need to change our bodies and ourselves, and in perhaps a more radical way
than the cyberpunk authors imagine. In our contemporary world, the now common aesthetic
mutations of the body, such as piercing, tattoos, punk fashion and its various imitations are all
initial indications of this corporeal transformation, but in the end they do not hold a candle to
the kind of radical mutation needed here”. (Hardt and Negri, 216)
 38

SL avatar body, which users (re)construct for its own sake, as a phenomenon of life in

postmodern and post-industrial culture. They insist that the popularity of virtual

worlds and their capacity for the creation of avatars is part and parcel of a postmodern

urge to be a self “independent and free of nature and any particular way of being and

living” (Vicdan and Ulusoy 17). In other words, they hold that the user engages with

a flexible and nature-free ‘sign’ body without a ‘referent’. To “Posthuman

(Capitalist)” critics this ability to leave the referent behind in order to be free of “any

particular way of being and living” is often naively taken to underscore some

liberatory potential of contemporary capitalism.

Miroslaw Filiciak concurs in his article “Hyperidentities: Postmodern Identity

Patterns in Massively Multiplayer Online Pole-Playing-Games”, arguing that

MMORPGs realize the postulates of a postmodern culture of simulation and

fascination with new ways of defining one’s self on a scale previously unseen

(Filiciak 88). Filiciak acknowledges that the sense of self one finds in MMORPGs is

premised on the user’s desire to shape their own self into something that real life

social, sexual, or racial limitations prohibit; this view resonates with Foucault’s claim

that we possess no inside self, no essence that makes us what we are.29 As such, for

Foucault, the self is a discursive, and temporary, construction (Filiciak 93).

Contemporary practices and techniques, in line with the capitalist desire to render the

body wholly flexible, responsive and malleable are not aimed at merely disciplining

29
According to Foucault, one’s subjectivity, or sense of a coherent identity, is the effect of
being subjugated by social factors and forces. This subjugation is carried out by discourses,
which order certain types of thought and behavior. Foucault is interested in creating a “history
of the different modes by which, in our [Western] culture, human beings are made subjects”
(Foucault, “Subject” 208). For Foucault, subjectivity is a contingent, socio-historical construct
of power and domination, and therefore subject to change and modification. There is no
absolute, transcendental stance from which to grasp a fixed subject.
 39

the body of the consumer; rather, they are aimed at experimenting upon the user’s

body and identity, transforming them, and rendering them commensurate with

contemporary habits of consumption.30 It is in this context that Filiciak writes

optimistically of MMORPGs as materializing the postmodern dream and that “thanks

to computer networks we have the possibility to freely form our self (Filiciak 100).

Another observation made by critics articulating the traits of postmodernity is

that life in 21st century post-industrial countries is oriented toward the consumption of

signs rather than objects (Baudrillard, Simulacra).31 This is evidenced in

contemporary life where the attention of consumers is increasingly fixated on abstract

or symbolic (sign) value rather than attaining the object (referent) itself. In describing

“the most advanced state of th[e cotemporary global information] economy”, Manuel

Castells explains that “the products of the new information technology industries are

information processing devices or information processing itself’” (Castells 67 qtd. in

Holmes).32

Jean Baudrillard, who calls these signs “simulacra”, claims that we are

witnessing the creation of a new order of objects and bodies that no longer exist in the

real of physical materiality, but in the order of the symbolic immaterial code. At this

30
Foucault considers these techniques and arrangements of technologized shaping of the
body and self, or “bio-technico-power” (locatable in genomics and gene mapping, artificial
intelligence, biotechnology, networks of surveillance et cetera.) to be “technologies of the
self” insofar as they have an effect on the self in a way that prior “disciplinary” techniques
did not (Dreyfuss and Rabinow xxvi); (Foucault Discipline).
31
The most obvious example of this is the shift from physical-analog to digital-binary: we
work with objects reducible to the 1s and 0s of binary code, objects qualitatively different
from those understood as a myriad combination of physical and chemical properties.
32
Steven Shaviro, David Harvey and others write of the re-organization of capital that has
occurred over the last forty years, explaining that “production is subordinated to circulation,
instead of the reverse. Money, the universal equivalent, has become increasingly virtual
(unmoored by any referent) over the past half century, and everything is decentered or
unmoored in its wake” (Shaviro 129).
 40

nihilistic stage of Western culture signifiers refer only to other signifiers and we lose

the ability to comprehend binaries such as “signifier” and “signified”, or “real” and

“unreal”.33 We now work with models of the “real” and the “true” that only refer to

other models of “real” and “true”. Often misunderstood as illusionary, the simulacra

is completely real. In what Baudrillard refers to as “third” and “fourth order”

simulacra it is not the territory that precedes the map, but the map that precedes the

territory. The map does not represent the territory, but as “simulation generates

meaning from models that pre-exist experience and perception of the ‘real’”, it comes

to constitute the territory (Pawlett 82). Thus, simulation comes to “have no relation to

any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (Baudrillard, Simulacra, 6).34

33
The placement of Baudrillard here might confuse readers of Baudrillard, and demands an
explanation. Given Baudrillard’s ever changing perspective, he need not be considered,
ultimately, as a theorist concerned with Capitalism and its effects. Capitalism comes to be
merely one facet of Baudrillard’s investigations and certainly does not remain the prime-
mover of history throughout his career. Primarily, for Baudrillard, it seems that something
ominous has happened to the West’s relationship to, and interpretation of, the world. While
this change is clearly recognizable in the realm of economics and finance, the economy does
not govern that change. In other words, for Baudrillard post-modernity signals the end, or
exhaustion, of the trajectory of modernity. Capital gets sucked into the nihilistic void of post-
modernity, but it was not capital that caused that void. Rather, modernity’s liberatory promise
(the telos of the Enlightenment) has been fulfilled: we are now living with having liberated
everything (including the commodity form). This explains the title of his essay “After the
Orgy” (Baudrillard, Transparency, 4). After the “orgy” of modernity we have nothing left to
liberate and so, in lieu of anything new to liberate, we have turned to simulating objects to
liberate. On these conditions, in relation to the intellectual project of Modernity having come
to fruition, does Baudrillard consider the technologies and techniques of capital. On these
grounds “what has been liberated has been liberated so that it can enter a state of pure
circulation, so that it can go into orbit… the goal of liberation is to foster and provision
circulatory networks” (Baudrillard, Transparency 4). It is following this “orgy” that we find
phenomena such as virtual economies. These are economies that, true to the dark promise of a
completed Modernity, are emancipated, or liberated, from real economies. For this reason, I
stress that Baudrillard’s ideas can support a “Posthuman” and/or “Posthuman (Capitalist)”
consideration of avatarization.
34
Baudrillard locates this type of simulation in “…the omnipresence of code in the West –
DNA, binary, digital – [which] enables the production of copies for which there are no
originals. Unsecured and cut adrift from the ‘reality’ which representation has for centuries
prided itself on mirroring, we are now in the age of simulation” (Berry and Pawlik).
 41

We are governed, Baudrillard claims, by the “code”, or “structural law of value”, an

era of “sign exchange value” as the principle of equivalence. Only things transformed

into code are meaningful, and the world is modeled on general equivalence. Things

are reducible to their code, to their always re-constructible patterns.35

The SL “consumer”, Vicdan and Ulusoy allege, plays with its flexibility and

capacity for (re)creation, consuming via the (re)creation of “symbolic selves” (Vicdan

and Ulusoy 2); (Martin “Use-Value” 18).36 In their characterization of the SL user as

“creat[ing] symbolic selves” Vicdan and Ulusoy are working with a resolutely

postmodern framework. According to Vicdan and Ulusoy, SL users consume the

symbolic simulacral sign. SL, and the avatars therein, provide the ability for

consumers to work with a simulation of their bodies. As signs are not necessarily tied

to the consumer’s real body or self, avatar bodies and identities are celebrated as

being “beyond constraints” and harbingers, par excellence, of the so-called “friction

free” utopia to-come. Under this schema, through their technologically mediated

35
Following Katherine Hayles, we have moved from thinking of objects (and increasingly
ourselves) in analog terms of “presence and absence” to thinking in digital terms of “pattern
and randomness” (Hayles 25). The “hyper-real” self, according to Baudrillard, represents a self
that exists in an environment where everything has become transparent and explicit. The body
undergoes transmutation in endeavours such as genetic cloning and the self, in turn, is crushed.
Our selfhood is no longer that of an active “player”, but more of a passive “spectator”. We are
no longer selves who stand dialectically against the object, but selves whom the object has
rendered “lifeless, bored, drained and atomized”. (Elliot, Concepts 150). Postmodern selfhood
exchanges a modernist sense of self (such as the Freudian one) with some hidden, concealed
depth or interiority, for a self that has no repressed element or “depth of meaning”. (Elliot,
Concepts 151) The hyper-real self, for Baudrillard, is passive and thinks in accordance with the
“code” of dominant symbolic systems. (Elliot, Concepts 151)
36
One might look to Jean Baudrillard’s For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign as
well as Jennifer Martin’s article “Consumer Code: Use-value, Exchange-Value, and the Role of
Virtual Goods in Second Life”, an exploration of virtual worlds through modern theories of
consumption which suggests that “use-value” (based on physical-material needs/the ability to
fulfill a need) has been overridden by “exchange-value” as well as “sign-value”. From this
point of view users consume symbolic-meanings (i.e. individuality, power, status, community
belonging) in relation to the virtual world of SL.
 42

simulacral double, a visually manipulatable symbolic scripted/image-body, the user

feels that they can dictate who and what they are, free from the limitations of

physicality and the signified.

Within virtual worlds, Vicdan and Ulusoy contend, users interact with and

(re)construct symbolic bodies: SL consumers are, truly, in light of this discussion, a

“cult of the hyperreal”. (Vicdan and Ulusoy 17) This cult is concerned less with

buying, selling and interacting with material objects (that had use-value) than they are

concerned with immaterial objects (that have symbolic value). Vicdan and Ulusoy

celebrate this burgeoning consumer cult of the hyperreal by citing celebratory

consumer reactions to the so-called bodily and subjective freedom of SL. Their study

documents consumers who “want to be something else” and who want to get to know

people “quickly and easily, ‘cause you’re not so worried about your appearance as

you might be in real life” (Vicdan and Ulusoy 9). A consumer named Raven explains

with fantastic naïveté:

We’re born with set bodies. They look a certain way; they
will always look a certain way and that’s it. My mind doesn’t
have those constraints. Raven is a woman that my mind
projects as me. I guess if you’re given the opportunity to be
anything, to think outside the box like that why stick with
what you are in real life when you could be an animal you
admire, a beautiful fish (Vicdan and Ulusoy 8-9).

This desire to be beyond constraint is, of course, ludicrous: aging, sickness and death

befall the body irrespective of whether we think we have mentally overcome them.

To simply ignore them is to ignore an entire history, and tradition, of tarrying with

these, fundamental, negative aspects of the human condition. Furthermore, this desire
 43

speaks to the fantasy of having originally had a stable body or identity that is

disrupted by new techniques.

One might, however, situate this consumer glorification of an “opportunity to

be anything”, against the horizon of Deleuze and Guattari’s claim in Anti-Oedipus

that human beings are increasingly becoming “transformations and exchanges of

information” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti 458). This has led their commentators, such

as Brian Massumi, to articulate modalities of indeterminate selves. Massumi writes

favourably of a simulacral “…pool of virtuality, [with the ability] to create a yet

unseen amalgamation of potentials” (Massumi). New virtual technologies, no longer

moored to a fixed referent or signifier, produce a new body or territory from which

there is no turning back…, whereby we “becom[e] realer than real in a monstrous

contagion of our own making” (Massumi).

Analyses privileging a “Posthuman” and “Posthuman (Capitalist)”

consideration of the avatar have much to tell us about the context of our second lives:

they are indispensable in articulating the political and economic conditions that might

compel a user to spend hours each day with their virtual avatar. A discussion of these

(historical-political-economic) conditions is symptomatic of an Epimethean

understanding of the effects of technology. But because such an understanding does

not adequately consider Oedipus, the category runs into severe limitations. The

starting point of the “Posthuman” category is a fantasy that the avatar represents some

deviation from what once was a core or autonomous self. The very term “posthuman”
 44

connotes that there once was a human, a self, or a subject that virtual avatarization (as

a phenomena reflective of changing historical structures) has moved us beyond.37

Following the myth of Epimetheus, however, the human was always

posthuman; it was always historical, and its essence has always been wrapped up in

technique.38 The “Posthuman” category functions paradoxically: on one hand the

posthuman avatar represents the next phase of a human that has little or no interior

human essence, and on the other hand, it clings to the fantasy that the avatar

represents the next phase of a human that did – at one time – have an interior human

essence. Because this tension is not adequately resolved, “Posthuman” critiques tend

to rely on articulating the avatar as an example of emerging subjectivities, new

formations of self, and denizens of a new world of symbolic creation with immaterial

signs, where we are naively told we can be what and who we want to be.

This “Posthuman” sense of the avatar resembles the Hindu and Judeo-

Christian connotations of “avatara” and “incarnation”. It holds that once we were

human, now we are moving beyond-the-human; but in its desire to theorize what

comes next, the category does not adequately, or care to, inquire what the human was.

As such, it is no coincidence that the category continues the idea that the avatar is a

discarnation, a reversal of incarnation. The avatar is a posthuman self that is no longer

bound in the ways that the human self was bound; it inhabits a world without

limitations. The drawback of this way of thinking is that it leads to the fantasy that

37
It is not coincidental then, that this position often involves creating a straw man of figures
paradigmatic of modernity and the early modern period such as Descartes without adequately
contextualizing their arguments. Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject, for example, is concerned with
returning to an interpretation of Descartes’ cogito that differs tremendously from the cogito
endlessly straw manned and blamed.
38
One might, as well, look to Katherine Hayles’ How we Became Posthuman.
 45

once cut adrift, rendered discarnate, or posthuman, we are liberated from the weight,

mass, and inertia of what was once our human condition. Such a dualistic way of

thinking, between the human and the posthuman, only serves to perpetuate a limited

understanding of the avatar as a form of transubstantiation.

2. The Performative Avatar

Another approach to theorizing SL avatars stresses their performative, theatrical,

and/or role playing dimensions. This is a categorization found in much literature in

the popular press where SL is often characterized as a place where individuals can

role-play, or explore an aspect of their personality that real life denies them. While

the tendency to regard SL as a theatrical, or performative, space is often poorly

articulated and/or sensationalized in these popular sources, a number of scholarly

articles explore how we perform our selves and identities in these virtual

environments. Unlike the “Posthuman” category outlined above, this “Performative”

category, as we shall see, does not overtly focus on avatars as a prosthesis or

extension of our self, nor does it regard the avatar as a simulacral symbolic body that

consumers “consume for its own sake”. Rather, articles that develop a theory of

cyber-performativity are grounded in Judith Butler’s post-structuralist claim that the

gendered subject is constituted through the performance of their gender.39

The production of gender, for Butler, occurs via performative acts of

language, illocutionary acts such as naming that constitute us each time we utter

them. We apply identity categories to ourselves. One could claim “I --- am

39
Butler is not, however, oblivious to the difficulties of performativity and asserts that it is not
simply a matter of going into the closet and deciding which gender one want to be (Hall 126). It
would be an error to believe that the subject is ever in a truly ‘free zone’ of performativity.
 46

a…teacher, woman or lesbian” (Butler, “Decking” 17). Speech acts produce a fiction

of unity, but there is always a disjunction. Each time the subject contextualizes him or

herself there is also, implicitly, a decontextualization. This moment of openness and

instability potentially offers a moment of possibility and change.40 For Butler we are

not stable subjects who go about our lives taking on acting roles. While some of us

are freer in our constitution than others, the act of performance literally constitutes

who we are (Butler, “Decking” 18). There is no internal actor who takes on her roles:

“…this ‘I’ does not play its lesbianism as a role” (Butler, “Decking” 18). She is

reconstituted as a lesbian each time she names herself, in the process of mimesis and

repetition. The “I” becomes a string of constitutive performances. The subject

emerges in this flux of performance-identities. Butler does not deny that a subject

exists, writing that “[t]he denial of the priority of the subject is not the denial of the

subject” (Butler, “Decking” 24). By this she does not jettison the subject but redefines

it as something that is always in a process of reconstitution. She denies the primacy of

the subject as a discrete entity outside of its performative roles. In other words, the ‘I’
40
To explain this continuous instability and possibility one might look to Jacques Derrida’s
notion of “différance” in Margins of Philosophy (Derrida 3-27). He proceeds from Saussure’s
claim that language is a system of signs whose meaning is never present. If one were to try
and find meaning in the sign ‘Rock’ I would go to the dictionary. But this endeavour would
provide me with multiple definitions and within these definitions terms and figures of speech
such as ‘Hard’, ‘Mineral’, ‘Crack-Cocaine’ and ‘Rock the Boat’. If I were to look for the
meaning of any of these terms I would find another multiplicity of signs. Derrida however,
“…elaborates that the meaning of any, apparently ‘present’ sign is nothing but the
relationship between all the absent meanings the term is not” (Deutscher 30). Derrida uses
différance to demonstrate that a sign such as ‘Rock’, or ‘Organic’ cannot be autonomous and
stand isolated. It is derived from the French verb ‘differer’ which translates to “defer” and
“differ”. Différance is “not the difference ‘between’ terms but the passage of infinite, endless
differentiation giving rise to apparent identities between which one might then argue there is
difference” (Deutscher 31). As such, a sign’s meaning is deferred in an endless process. It
“…is never present in and of itself, in a sufficient presence that would refer only to itself”
(Derrida 11). The signified concept is slippery, indeterminate and always in a process of
deferral, leaving it perpetually open to a change in context and new linguistic possibilities.
 47

exists; however it exists only through repeated expressions of its identity and

identifying labels. There is, importantly, no do-er behind the deed.

In “Playing Dress Up: Costumes, Role-play and Imagination” Janine Fron et

al. consider dress up and fashion in MMORPGs. They describe digital dress up as a

transformative kind of play where users take on new roles and learn about themselves

in order to play with and against gender (Fron et al. 13). Their analysis relies on

Butler’s assumption that “gender is always a doing, though not by a subject who

might be said to pre-exist the deed… There is no gender identity behind the

expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constructed by the very

‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Butler, Gender qtd. in Fron 15).

Another article that deploys a performative reading of the avatar by considers

role playing, theatricality and performance in virtual worlds is Jacqueyn Ford Morie’s

“Performing in (Virtual) Spaces: Embodiment and Being in Virtual Environments”.

Morie claims that the user is subsumed in a “created space-for-becoming”, an

“opening for a new interrogation of the world and ourselves and consequently the

possibility of imagining other kinds of space, other possible ways of being a body-

that-becomes-space” (Palumbo qtd. in Morie 134).

Most virtual worlds, SL included, adopt a third person point of view. In this

third person point of view the avatar appears out in front of the users’ “physical and

imaginal locus” (Morie). Morie focuses on the theatricality of virtual worlds – a

theatricality whereby we watch ourselves perform in the third person (Laurel qtd. in

Morie). To explain why we would want to watch ourselves perform, Morie notes the

etymology of the term “theatre”. The term derives from the Greek “theatron”, which
 48

designates “a place for seeing, not simply in the sense of watching but also in the

deeper meaning to see – to grasp, to behold, to understand” (Morie 134).

Morie uses this analysis of theatricality to touch on a paradoxical aspect of

virtual reality environments. The Head Mounted Display41 used in virtual reality,

which, for the purposes of our discussion, could be considered as analogous to the 3D

avatar in virtual worlds, acts as a “mask that removes other masks” (Morie 134). By

“other masks”, Morie is referring to the personas through which we perform our

specific social roles. The avatar, like the Head Mounted Display, is a technology that

creates the conditions where our social masks are no longer necessary, allowing the

user to explore a “private and more personal self” (Morie 134). Thus, the theatricality

(understood as “theatron”) of virtual worlds involves the avatarial mask: this mask

allows us to grasp, behold, and/or understand our private and more personal self.

Curiously, Morie follows up her discussion of masks that remove other masks

and the etymological significance of “theatron”, with the quote: “posthuman theorists

maintain that interaction with our technologies allows us to gain new understandings

of ourself” (Morie 134). Here we see the conceptualizations of the “Performative”

avatar and the “Posthuman” avatar are often quite similar. The two categories regard

virtual worlds, and the avatarization that occurs therein, as conditioning or allowing

for the user to become a qualitatively different sort of self than so-called real life

permits.

41
Head Mounted Display (HMD): “A display system built and worn like goggles that gives the
illusion of a floating monitor in front of the user's face. The head mounted display (HMD) is a
critical component of a body-worn computer (wearable computer). Single-eye units are used to
display hands-free instructional material, and dual-eye, stereoscopic units are used for virtual
reality applications.” (Computer Desktop Encyclopaedia)
 49

One slight exception to this is artist Mark Stephen Meadows’ book I Avatar –

The Culture and Consequences of Having a SL (Meadows 37). Similar to Morie’s

analysis of the root “theatron”, Meadows emphasizes the etymological significance of

the Greek term “persona” (Eng. “mask”) which does not designate that which hides

one’s face, but what one really is. Thus, rather than the avatar initiating a qualitative

shift or radical extension of the posthuman variety, the avatar as “persona” (Gr.)

returns us to a less protected and human version of ourselves.

Meadows, however, still can be placed in the “Posthuman” category.

Fascinated by the new, his book begins by describing, “a strange migration into…

machines from which the driver [the user] can peek out, squinting through alien eyes,

and find a new world…” This migration also allows the “driver” to “…look inside

himself, as if gazing into his navel, and find a new landscape inside as well”

(Meadows 37). Confusingly, Meadows describes the avatar as the user’s “inner-hero”

and, at other times, calls it “the usher of a posthuman era”. As the user of the

posthuman era, Meadows refers to the avatar as a “psychological prosthetic” that

“teleports our psyche” (Meadows 93). This sentiment is expressed most clearly when

he suggests that in fifty years man may look back and note this as the period where

“our bodies became obsolete, replaced by [the] more flexible, interesting,

transportable, replicable, controllable prosthetic of the Avatar” (Meadows 94). In his

argument, there is no human left to be extended into technology; this new body is

built as much as it is born. Meadows, sounding like a New Age shaman, announces
 50

that “this is not science fiction but ‘progress’, it is how we grow into our imaginations

and how our dreams become real” (Meadows 95).42

In a section of I Avatar titled “Where there is ID, there will be EGO”

Meadows discusses the users “inner hero”. He informs the reader: “you are the trunk

of the identity tree, your avatars are the leaves” (Meadows 96). Given his prior

comments about the avatar as the usher of the posthuman era, it remains unclear,

however, whether he feels there is a discrete thing called the “I”. If not, how can there

be an “identity tree”? Meadows cites the work of Dr. Volcani, who stresses the fact

that the avatar allows us to control an aspect of our personality in a similar way that a

child uses a doll to externalize an inner hero (Meadows 96). But where does

personality, personhood, or the drive to externalize an inner hero come from in the

first place? What generates the desire to see the hero succeed? The questions and

contradictions multiply as Meadows explains Dr. Volcani’s argument that the avatar

allows us to “experiment with new worlds, new versions of ourselves, and rehearse

for life” (Meadows 96); (Brown 138). Are these “new worlds” and “new versions” of

ourselves closed off to us by the limitations of real life? Or are these worlds and

versions of our selves something new altogether?

Meadows argues that our avatars are us “in transformation. Being able to

watch ourselves [in a sort of play therapy] creates a reflective state that’s good for us”

(Meadows 96). Some of the tensions in Meadow’s work are resolved when he calls

the avatar an “auto portrait”. A portrait is always a combination of “realism and the

42
Critics such as Paul Virilio lament this type of body. See the chapter “From Superman to
Hyperactiveman” in his Art of the Motor for an exceptionally frightening account of where this
type of body may end us up. (Virilio, Art 100)
 51

techniques artists use to communicate the subject’s personality” (Meadows 9). An

auto-portrait possesses these qualities, but is also interactive. These ideas square well

with his other assertions that the avatar remains “deeply attached to the psychology of

the user” (Meadows 8). Understanding the avatar as an auto-portrait, deeply

connected to the psychology and real life of the user, but necessarily, and

simultaneously, enmeshed in social techniques answers some of the contradictory

assertions found in Meadows’ book.

In an identically titled article, “I, Avatar: Constructions of Self and Place in

Second Life and the Technological Imagination”, Donald E. Jones argues that SL

avatars allow user(s) to partake in types of creative activity that might not be

available to them in real life (Jones 19). He also explains virtual bodies are capable of

“extending the real body into virtual space” (Jones 22). This virtual extension,

however, extends us in ways conditioned by our real lives. For example, users often

seek to model their avatar on a “culturally accepted beauty or fantastical transcendent

(mysterious) figure” (Jones 22-23). According to Jones, virtual worlds are spaces

where users can construct either normalized (i.e. highly gendered, with certain ideal

physical beauty traits) or fantastic (i.e. strictly performative, like a “furry” that allows

the user to conform to their mental image) avatars (Jones 23-24).

Similarly to Meadows and Morie, Jones claims that, “…in the imagination

world of SL, the material flesh is transcended [into] new configurations of self that

fulfil wishes and fantasies” (Jones 25).43 But, what are we transcending? For instance,

43
One is reminded here of Rita Koganzon’s claim in her article “The World Made New” that
SL seems to be a rehearsal of social behaviour in an unpressured low stakes environment, rather
than taking responsibility for the self we are given. (Koganzon) For another spin on this see
 52

when a child rebels against her parents by getting drunk, tattooed, and pierced, does

she transcend their parental authority? Obviously not; the tattoos, drunkenness and

piercings actually qualify and call upon that parental authority. If my body does not

meet the culturally proscribed criteria and I turn to an imaginary world that allows me

to create a body that does meet those criteria, my unacceptable physical body remains

unacceptable. Indeed, my unsatisfying body is the impetus, foundation, and motor for

my so-called transcendence. Jones’ claim that the “material body is transcended” in

imaginary play is suspect as the limits of the user’s material body are actually the

necessary ground for the user’s choice to look at an imaginary-elsewhere.

Jones claims that we ought to think of the SL avatar as a “performative

extension of the self without losing sight of its groundedness in actuality and

embodiment of the flesh” (Jones 28). He continues: “a true understanding will ensure

that, instead of being distracted by godhood and monstrosity, we can ever seek the

human in whatever form it takes” (Jones 28). In the idea that we simultaneously enter

into new performative extensions while being “embodied in the flesh” there is an

unresolved schism in Jones’ article, a schism evocative of many theories of role-play,

theatricality and performativity when they attempt to theorize avatarization.

There are, I insist, limitations to this “Performative” category of research on

avatars. We noted earlier that the Greek “theatron” designates “a place for seeing, not

simply in the sense of watching but also in the deeper meaning to see – to grasp, to

behold, to understand”. Similar to the root “theatron”, the Greek term “persona” (or

Paul Virilio’s comments in The Art of the Motor about cyber-sex, which, claim nearly the same
thing – albeit from a darker point of view. This “low stakes environment” seems to be a space
where we are free to let our imagination have its way with others, without concern for their
flesh or embodiment.
 53

“mask”) does not designate that which hides one’s face, but rather, what one really is.

SL, understood as a theatre, where users adopt personae, then, provides the ability to

grasp, behold, or understand, what one really is. Following the theories of the

“Performativity” category, this is done by rendering explicit the fact that the user

really is not a fixed subject behind a mask, and does not exist outside of its masks.

When facing their screens, users construct and reconstruct their masks, rendering

explicit that there is no actor outside the role, confirming that the “I” exists only

through repeated expressions of its identity and identifying labels. Thus, the

“Performative” – like the “Posthuman” categorization of the avatar – can generally be

thought of as anti-subjective and demonstrative of the contingency and flux of

selfhood. SL, in this context, provides a space for the self (understood via

performativity) to experiment with the possibility of change. Each new performance,

or utterance that the avatar undergoes constitutes a sense of self within the user whose

presence is always deffered.

The “Performative” avatar helps the user to understand self as a performance,

and consequently, to engage with the engenderment of new selves. Each performance

demonstrates the constant defferal and flux that comprises the self. When Morie

explains that “virtual environments proffer exceptional insights…” (Morie 134), one

wonders what, exactly, these insights illuminate? When she speaks of “new

landscapes” we suspect that this “newness” has been brought into being

performatively. What one grasps or understands, is not what Columbus experienced

on finding the New World but something closer to the feelings of the engineers who

artificially constructed the Palm Islands in Dubai. The user does not behold a
 54

previously unknown, unchanging core-self, but, rather, a self in flux that blossoms in

new and newer ways. For this reason, Meadows explains that the avatar allows us to

play, and “experiment with new worlds, new versions of ourselves…” (Meadows 96).

Theorists of cyber “performativity”, along with the “posthuman” theorists, assert that

the “interaction with our technologies allows us to gain new understandings of

ourself” in transformation (Morie 134).

The “Performative” categorization of the avatar, however, seems to want to

have it both ways; it seems unclear as to whether – despite performing endless new

identities – there is some interiority, some “identity tree” that generates the desire for

an “inner hero” to succeed. Like the “Posthuman” category, this category focuses too

heavily on what virtual worlds such as SL allows users to become. Here, the term

“avatar” continues to connote a transubstantiation the user undergoes in order to enter

a space where the limitations of real life can be overcome.

3. The Human Avatar

Unlike the “Posthuman” or the “Performative” categorizations, the “Human” category

of the avatar describes a type of theoretical engagement that focuses on the relation

between the real user and her avatar. One example of this “Human” approach is Don

Heider’s article “Identity and Reality: What Does it Mean to Live Virtually?” While

Heider acknowledges that SL avatars are evocative of a culture where medical and

cosmetic surgery has become sophisticated, accessible and affordable, he does not

reduce SL avatars to the drive toward body modification and manipulation (Heider

134). While it is fashionable to address avatar groups of elves, furries, technopunks,

human-cat hybrids, etc…, Heider explains that “most people [in SL] are not devoted
 55

to” such groupings, and that “people generally create avatars that look much like they

do in real life…people overwhelmingly not only chose human forms, they chose

human forms that resemble what they report to look like in the real world” (Heider

136). So, while Heider recognizes that identity and selfhood is something fluid and

defined by broad cultural changes and conditions, he also, importantly, notes a SL

user’s comment that “[there] is a core of who I am that remained consistent. My

surroundings did somewhat define me” (Heider 137).

Simulation, for Heider is not simulacral. In contrast to Baudrillard’s fourth

order simulacra (which has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure

simulacrum), Heider argues that SL avatars are intricately tied to a real person

(Heider 141). He explains that

even in cases of people who are serious role-players or

pathological liars I would argue that what they say or do
is in some way reflective of who they are, what is inside
their heads, no matter how distant it may seem from the
actual person. It is a reflection of our self, deeper, more
profound than real life allows (Heider 141).

The avatar refers back to some “thing”. Heider suggests that avatars provide the

“experience of a more profound sense of a person’s identity than we might [have]

under normal non-virtual environments…a more acute and profound version of

personal identity” (Heider 142).44

44
Likewise, in their article “Docile Avatars: Aesthetics, Experience, and Sexual Interaction in
Second Life”, Shaowen and Jeffrey Bardzell write of Bondage-Discipline-Sado-Masochism
(BDSM) culture in SL as a new interface on a classic taboo (Bardzell and Bardzell 5). Instead
of claiming that SL is qualitatively different than real life, the Bardzell’s focus on the idea that
the brain has always been the largest sex organ. Throughout his work, Žižek makes much of
this idea, describing sex as masturbation with a real person. In an interview he explains: “It's
not only that masturbation is having sex with an imagined partner. What if real sex is only
masturbation with a real partner? That is to say, you think you're doing it with a real partner but
 56

One of the most frequently cited studies of avatars, “The Proteus Effect: The

Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behaviour” conducted by Nick Yee

and Jeremy Bailenson is demonstrative of a position that pays keen attention to the

relationship between the user’s real/offline and online self-representation. The study

aims to better understand the “protean” nature of avatarization in virtual worlds. (The

adjective “protean”, meaning versatile, flexible and capable of changing forms,

derives from the mythological sea god Proteus who, in Homer’s Odyssey,

transformed himself into a myriad of different creatures in order to avoid

interrogation.45) Yee et al. spend time in the game World of Warcraft compiling data

on the attractiveness of different avatar types and rating them on a scale from least to

most attractive. Participants are then provided with these different avatar types to use

in other virtual reality environments.46 The type of avatar the researchers provided to

each participant affected how the participants acted in the virtual environment. The

researchers concluded that “participants assigned to more attractive [in this instance

taller] avatars in immersive virtual environments were more intimate with

confederates in a self-disclosure and interpersonal distance task than participants

assigned shorter avatars” (Yee and Bailenson). Avatars ranked with a high degree of

you use the real partner as a masturbatory device, the real partner just gives you a minimum of
material so you can act out your fantasies” (Žižek, “Hysteria”).
45
In the fourth book of Homer’s Odyssey, Menalaus exclaims “Then we rushed upon him
with a shout and seized him; on which he began at once with his old tricks, and changed
himself first into a lion with a great mane; then all of a sudden he became a dragon, a leopard,
a wild boar; the next moment he was running water, and then again directly he was a tree, but
we stuck to him and never lost hold, till at last the cunning old creature became distressed,
and said, Which of the gods was it, Son of Atreus, that hatched this plot with you for snaring
me and seizing me against my will? What do you want?'” (Homer 48)
46
While the participants could see their avatar, the users they interacted with saw a control
avatar that was not, given the scale the researchers devised, highly attractive or unattractive.
This way the researchers cancelled out social feedback, or “priming”.
 57

attractiveness walked closer to their confederates and disclosed more personal

information to strangers than short avatars did. The study also looked at the effect of

online encounters on offline relationships. The researchers “found that participants

given taller avatars negotiated more aggressively in subsequent face-to-face

interactions than participants given shorter avatars” (Yee, Bailenson and Ducheneaut

2). This research demonstrates that the early cyberculture rhetoric (featured by

theorists such as Turkle and Barlow) employing “metaphors of liberation and

fluidity” must be complicated or reconsidered in light of the entangled nature of the

virtual and physical worlds (Yee, Bailenson and Ducheneaut 39). The Proteus effect

explains that our behaviors “shaped by our digital avatars in virtual environments

carries over into physical settings” (Yee, Bailenson and Ducheneaut 39). The

researchers suggest that “neither the virtual nor the physical self can ever truly be

liberated from the other. What we learn in one body is shared with other bodies we

inhabit, whether virtual o[r] physical” (Yee, Bailenson and Ducheneaut 39). This

study ties the “protean”, flexible, bodies users adopted in virtual worlds to their user’s

real, physical, bodies.

In "On the Relationship between My Avatar and Myself" Paul Messinger et

al. arrive at similar conclusions as do Yee and Bailensen., alleging that avatars tend to

be similar, but somewhat more attractive, outgoing, risk taking and superficial, than

the user understands him or herself to be in real life (Messinger et al. 4). The

researchers note that differences between the user and their avatar can be explained

by a tendency for computer mediated communication to break down normal

behavioural constraints and “deindividuate” the user, causing them “to experience a
 58

loss of personal identity and lead[ing] them to behave in ways not normal for that

person” (Kiesler et al. qtd. in Messinger et al.).

Another stimulating study of SL, conducted in 2008 by Matteo Varvello et al.,

monitored public areas of the virtual world and studied the habits of avatars (Varvello

et al.). Supporting the conclusions of Yee and Bailensen and Messinger et al., the

researchers concluded that avatars act similarly to the way humans act in RL. Avatars

tend to gather in small groups of two to ten, visit the same sorts of virtual places as

one another, and show highly predictable behaviour.47 Varvello et al. importantly also

demonstrate that many of the sensationalized media reports about SL purporting it to

be an entirely new world are not grounded in fact. According to their study only

30,000 to 50,000 users were active in a given month, only 0.3% of the registered

users on SL (Varvello et al. 2). Furthermore, the researchers note that 90% of the time

avatars do not move around despite the ability to walk, fly, and teleport (Varvello et

al. 2). Most users prefer to chat. Finally, the researchers note that 30% of the SL

regions attract no visitors and that the number of concurrent visitors barely reaches

50,000 (Varvello et al. 13). This is not to negate the creative activities that do occur in

SL, but to offer a reminder that these activities are not occurring all the time. 48

47
Jamie Loke’s “Identity and Gender in Second Life” raises a similar point: when female SL
users are given a choice to become something else, Loke found that the norm was to adhere
to the “stereotypical beauty standards of reality” (Loke 146).
48
On January 15, 2007 Second Life became host to a cyber protest against the anti-immigration
policies of Jean-Marie le Pen and the French Front National. Avatars from all around the
metaverse came together to devise new ways of combating the right wing policies of the
movement. A ‘violent’ protest erupted outside the gates of the Second Life headquarters for the
Front National. During the protest the anti Front National protestors levelled digital buildings
and created a surreal scene outside the headquarters. There have been a number of Second Life
protests that cross over into the real world, including one against the war in Iraq.
 59

More theoretically developed expressions of this attempt to humanize the

avatar can be located in J. David Velleman’s article “Bodies, Selves” and Tom

Boellstorff’s book Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the

Virtually Human. Velleman and Boellstorff attempt to provide theoretical

groundwork for the radical inseparability of the virtual from the real. In “Bodies,

Selves”, J. David Velleman strives to understand the extent to which the user is their

avatar. What is transpiring, he wonders, if a user who is a quadriplegic, exclaims “I

ran!” when using an able bodied avatar (Velleman 2)? The common view, he claims,

is to regard the avatar as “make believe”, a prop in “pretend play” (Velleman 2). This

common view insists that “the agency of the human participant is also fictional”

(Valleman 3). Velleman disagrees, arguing that the user’s performance with their

avatar is not fictional but, rather, is quite literal.

Playing on the concept of [psycho]analytic transference, Velleman claims that

the user “literally performs fictional actions” (Velleman 3). In analytic transference

the analyst [A] and the patient [P] may perform “fictional” roles as a parent [p] and

child [c].49 [Pc] may attempt to “fictionally” seduce [Ap], however [Pc] is really

making that attempt, “and really is the agent of that unreal action” (Velleman 3).

Thus, actions carried out within the transference are not make-believe, but are

“fictional actions literally performed” (Velleman 3). Velleman explains that one has

the sense that [P] and [A], as [Pc] and [Ap], really are the selves of the people they

are representing. Likewise, he argues that in virtual worlds such as Second Life the

49
Velleman himself does not utilize this notion [A,P…]. I have designated the analyst as parent
by [Ap] and the patient as child is designated by [Pc].
 60

user is “speaking the literal truth when he says of his avatar “this is me” (Velleman

3).50

Velleman claims that within “virtual play” users do not “generally attribute

attitudes to their avatars at all; they simply have thoughts and feelings about the world

of the game, they act on that world through their avatars but under the motivational

force of their own attitudes … players themselves want the items that their avatars

buy on their behalf” (Velleman 9). Something radical does not happen to the user and

the user does not become something new. Velleman explains that “users don’t

experience themselves as artists inventing characters; they experience themselves as

the characters, behaving in character, under the impetus of their own thoughts and

feelings” (Velleman 10). The avatar is not considered to be an extension that the user

controls, but a thing that stands in between, something that the user does things with,

or what the user does things as (Velleman 11). It is more a proxy for one’s real body

than an extension, or modification, of it.

The user’s own, very real, “beliefs and desires” control the avatar. In virtual

play “a person really has a fictional body…but their relationship to that fictional body

is real” (Velleman 20 and 13). Like the user’s real body, the virtual avatar “expresses

traits, thoughts and feelings conceived of as belonging to…” the user (Velleman 21).

Velleman continues:

50
But this is not a matter of intent, virtual worlds – governed by ‘virtual play’ are not the same
as a child’s game of ‘make believe’ (or ‘pretend play’) (Velleman 4). ‘Virtual Play’ such as SL
is not outside the ‘reality principle’ as a child’s game of ‘pretend play’ may be. A user cannot,
as a child may, do what whatever she or he pleases. Rather in ‘virtual play’ the user exists in a
live, shared, world that is not pretend. For example, if a user wants a pirate ship, they must
build, buy, or be given one as a gift. One’s own actions are constrained by their avatar, the
interface, and the natural laws that govern the virtual world. “Virtual Worlds”, according to
Velleman, are not places we can “conjure up or conjure away” but have a “determinateness and
recalcitrance” more like real life.
 61

your body is giving expression to a self-conception, under

the control of the one therein conceived as ‘self’. Your
body is not just controlled by an inner-spirit; it is used by
that spirit to express how it conceives of itself; and so an
allusion to its controlling spirit as ‘self’ is implicit in its
behaviour (Velleman 22).

For Velleman, the SL avatar is governed by a notion of “self”; it is a fictional, virtual-

world body joined to a literal, real world mind. The personae users adopt in SL, like

the patient’s persona as [Pc] and the therapist/analyst’s persona as [Ap], are tied to

real motives and intentions.

In Coming of Age in Second Life, Tom Boellstorff explicitly emphasizes that

he does not believe online culture warrants a “posthuman” classification. SL, for

Boellstorff, is a “profoundly human” space. He claims that, while online culture is not

posthuman, virtual worlds are not totally human (Boellstorff, 5). It is not true, he

insists, “that there is nothing new under the virtual sun” (Boellstorff 5). In SL, we do

find transformed possibilities for subjectivity; we are not quite human. But this does

not mean Boellstorff endorses the posthuman.

According to Boellstorff virtual worlds borrow assumptions from real life and

show us that our real lives have been virtual all along. For this reason he expresses

concern about considering the virtual and the actual through a rigid binarism. The

term “virtual” connotes an “approach to the actual without arriving there”. Drawing

on Deleuze and Virilio, Boellstorff claims that the virtual “…must be defined as

strictly a part of the real object” (Virilio, Vision qtd in Boellstorff 19); (Deleuze,

Difference 260 qtd. in Boellstorff 19). As part of the real object, there is an inherent

“as if” quality: “a basic starting point for any serious discussion of the virtual must be

recognition of the non autonomy of the virtual – a recognition of the fact that the
 62

virtual does not constitute an autonomous, independent, or ‘closed’ system, but is

instead always dependent, in a variety of ways, on the everyday world in which it is

embedded” (Malpas). Boellstorff dwells on the “gap” between the virtual and the

actual (Boellstorff 19). If this crucial gap were “…to be filled in, there would be no

virtual worlds, and in a sense no actual world either” (Boellstorff 19). In virtual

worlds, users are, through “techne”, invited to “open up a gap from the actual and

discover new possibilities for human being. At the same time, virtual worlds highlight

the virtuality that has always been a part of the human condition. This is why it is

mistaken to temporalize this virtual human into the figure of the ‘posthuman’”

(Boellstorff 25, 238). Because the virtual and the actual have always been

inseparable, Boellstorff does not see SL and virtual worlds like it as technologies

which will overcome the limits of the human form. He claims that “forms of selfhood

and sociality characterizing virtual worlds “does not necessarily mean the end of the

human…we need to see the human re-configured and organized differently” (Nayar

21 qtd. in Boellstorff 28). He summarizes:

The relationship between the virtual and the human is not

a ‘post’ relationship where one term displaces the other; it
is a relationship of coconstitution. Far from being the
case that virtual worlds herald the emergence of the
posthuman,…I argue that it is in being virtual that we are
human. Virtual worlds reconfigure selfhood and sociality,
but this is only possible because they rework the
virtuality that characterizes human being in the actual
world (Boellstorff 29).

He speaks of “homo cyber” (Boellstorff 29), the virtually human, as comprising (a)

forms of human social life emerging (i.e. new subject positions) online, and (b) the
 63

way human being has always been constituted – as in the myth of Epimetheus –

through technique (or techne).

Boellstorff does not harbour the fantasy that the avatar represents a move

beyond, or post-, the human as if there were a stable “I” prior to the immersion of

digital technologies into everyday life. In a section near the conclusion of his book,

Boellstorff cites Walter Ong: “technologies are artificial, but…artificiality is natural

to human beings” (Ong qtd. in Boellstorff). Rather than making sharp distinctions

between humans and posthumans Boellstorff recognizes the Epimethean idea that

technology alters our “sensory ratios” (Mcluhan 67). This idea of change as endemic

to the human offers one half – an Epimetheian posthumanism - of a humanist

posthumanism.

Boellstorff claims that it is “in being virtual that we are human”. Virtual

worlds, and the ability to craft therein, provide new ways for us to define humanity

and what it means to be human. Crafting an avatar, “a zone of embodiment that is

intentionally crafted – the product of techne – and thus a ‘zone of relationality’

between persons”, is not something that creates an artificial body or extends us into

some simulacral posthuman space, but is simply a way of making the virtual

environment real (Taylor, Play 41 qtd. in Boellstorff 129); (Weinstone in Boellstorff

129). So, while Boellstorff argues that, “in virtual worlds we can be virtually human,

because in them humans, through techne, open up a gap from the actual and discover

new possibilities for human being”, he does not highlight posthuman possibilities but,

rather, insists that “virtuality has always been a part of this human condition”
 64

(Boellstorff 238).51 Thus, he defends his position and his anthropological

methodology against posthumanists such as Sadie Plant: “It is not that theories of the

virtual must shed their anthropocentric associations…virtual worlds draw on a

capacity as old as humanity itself, but aspects of selfhood and society within them are

novel” (Boellstorff 238). The virtual world of SL is symptomatic of an “age of

Techne”. Given that techne is (one of) the thing(s) that makes us human, Boellstorff

alleges SL can be studied using anthropology, “the same flexible, underdetermined,

ethnographic tools used to study human cultures in the actual world” (Boellstorff

237). Rather than shedding our anthropocentric associations, Boellstorff draws on

Turkle and claims that virtual avatars allow us to reflect on what being human can

mean (Turkle, Life 24); (Turkle, “Computer”).52 For this reason Boellstorff provides

an acceptable Epimetheian-posthumanism that we can factor into our search for a

humanist posthumanism.

3a. The Human (Psychoanalytic) Avatar

In the thesis introduction I suggested that the human be thought of as dual, that is,

subject-of some unconscious structure (articulated by the ancients in the guise of the

mythological figures Oedipus and Dionysius) and being subject-to historically

contingent practices, techniques and historical themes (articulated by the ancients

through the figure of Epimetheus). Thus, while I agree with Boellstorff’s Epimethean

posthumanism where techne plays a key role in what it means to be human, an

51
He quotes Levy’s comment that “rather than inaugurating the posthuman, virtual worlds
make us ‘even more human’” (Levy 216 qtd. in Boellstorff 238).
52
Considering avatarization as a version of, rather than differing from, the human is an
approach shared by Boellstorff, Heider, Yee and Bailenson, Messinger et al., Varvello et al.
and Velleman.
 65

Oedipal sense of what it means to be human is supplied by psychoanalytic critics.53

The remainder of the thesis will consider this dimension and inquire as to what an

Oedipal approach to SL avatarization might resemble. This final approach found in

the literature does not overtly advocate the view that users are performing new

identities and subjectivities, nor does it advocate the idea that users are participating

in a technology acting as harbinger of some radical shift in what the human being is.

Rather, an Oedipal approach is deeply tied to a view of the avatar as an

externalization of the structure co-responsible, but indispensible, for being human.

While its articulation will be the task of the remaining two chapters, the germ

of such an approach can be found in the ideas of the “Human” theorists such

Velleman and Boellstorff, as well as in a 2008 doctoral thesis by Kathy Cleland

(Cleland). Cleland introduces the idea that the SL avatar can be thought of as uncanny

other, between subject and object, living and nonliving, and real and virtual. Cleland

speculates about the virtual image reflected back at the SL user and, drawing on

Christian Metz, claims that the reflected avatar-image depicts a phantom, or

phantasmatic element, of the real object or living being.54 The cinematic, or in the

case of SL digital-virtual, imaginary reflects back our “shade, our phantom, our

double, our replica, in a new kind of mirror” (Metz 44 qtd. in Cleland). This thesis

will focus on this phantom/phantasy-double as an instance of the “shade” that inheres

within us as a result of what Freud called primal castration and the fundamental

53
This Oedipal side supplied by psychoanalysis will provide the humanism for our
posthumanist-humanism.
54
In psychoanalysis, "phantasy" with the "ph" refers to the unconscious psychic content of the
drives.
 66

fantasy. It is something like a residual remainder, rather than an extension or

Boellstorff’s homo cyber.

This thesis will build on Cleland’s brief suggestion that virtual world avatars

call us to return to Lacan’s description of the “fragmented body”, that is, the body

“experienced by the subject in dreams of disintegration and disjointed limbs”, an

uncanny return of the infants’ body in bits and pieces (Grosz 44 qtd. in Cleland).

Cleland considers updating Lacan’s discussion of the mirror stage to “account for the

new range of experiences and identifications resulting from new media mirrors” such

as SL. She calls this updating of the mirror stage the “mirror of the cyborg”. The

following two chapters develop this idea suggested by Cleland that the mirror stage

be applied to virtual worlds, and attempts a psychoanalytic intervention into SL

avatarization, turning Haraway on her head and articulating a cyborg that cannot

escape dreaming of “expecting its father to save it through the restoration of the

garden” and whose father is, in the Lacanian sense, certainly not “inessential”

(Haraway 151).

Conclusion

SL user Isablan Neva explains her sense of avatarization: “What motivates people to

look a certain way is something I wouldn’t even begin to speculate on. Ultimately,

your avatar is your representative in-world and can run the entire range of your

personality. It’s your second life; be whomever and whatever you want to be.”

(Rymaszewski et al. 79). But this view says very little and we ought to probe deeper.

The work that has been done on avatarization is tainted either by a fantasy of moving

beyond the human, or else attempts to claim the avatar is deeply related to the user by
 67

relying on a basic, or surface, analysis. For this reason, the “Human (Psychoanalytic)”

category hopes to probe the relationship between user and avatar in a way the

“Human” category does not.

The Official Guide to Second Life notes that “the vast majority of SL citizens

opt to stay human in Second Life…Your avatar choices say a lot about who you are;

to the people you encounter in the SL world, your avatar is who you are. It’s true too

– your avatar choices reflect your personality and mentality. It’s good to keep that in

mind” (Rymaszewski et al. 10). The “Human (Psychoanalytic)” avatar, whose

articulation comprises the remainder of the thesis, offers one way of investigating

what it means to stay human in Second Life. It allows us to deeply consider claims

such as those made by SL user Lille Yifu, a major player in the SL escort industry,

that “avatars, even venues and builds, in the end, become a reflection of the inner

person, the one that screams to get out in what we call real life” (Rymaszewski et al.

79). Rather than becoming bogged down in the uniqueness of “who” each individual

user is, psychoanalysis suggests this uniqueness is inflected through what we might

consider to be Yifu’s “inner person”, or what the SL Guide calls “who you are”. But

this inner person whom we really are has an unconscious element, and we must

detect its stirrings and effects through claims by, and observations of, users’

activities. We suggest that this repressed, unconscious (or Oedipal), dimension of the

human being, plays a tremendously important role in motivating the behaviour of

avatar users in virtual worlds. Thus, while our investigation does not rule out the

effect that postmodern social patterns and posthuman technologies (the insights of the

“Posthuman” and “Posthuman (Capitalist)” categories) have for an understanding of

 68

avatarization, it does not entirely explain reduce avatarization under the schema of a

shift from modernism to post-modernism, capitalism to late capitalism, Ptolemaic to

post-Ptolemaic cosmology, or from the human to the post-human. My investigation

does not argue against the idea that users take to avatarization in order to act out, or

perform (i.e. the “Performative” category), new modalities of subjectivity and

selfhood; but neither does it reduce avatarization to an endless engendering and

deferral of new subjectivities. Our investigation takes for granted that one’s virtual

avatar is evocative of who they purport to be in real life (i.e. the “Human” category),

but strives to complicate – and deepen – what real life is. Considering SL

psychoanalytically allows us to consider avatarization beyond the face value, which

the “Human” category is not suited or, to be fair, intended for.

A category privileging the “Human (Psychoanalytic)” avatar suggests that it is

possible to consider user’s comments – say, that their vampire avatar represents their

fascination with vampires in real life – as motivated by an unconscious “realm” of

repressed emotions and memories (Freud, “Die Verdrangung” 36); (Macintyre 50). It

allows us to problematize a user’s comment that “my avatar is me”. For example, SL

user Lupus Delacroix explains:

It’s hard to say what motivates me to look the way I do in

SL, I have so many looks to choose from. I have a firm
belief in tasting everything on the buffet, and being picky
like I am, I went for the best of the best. It’s hard to tell
what I’m going to be from one day to the next: a
magnificent dragon, a bipedal wolf, a vampire, or a really
good-looking human... (Rymaszewski et al. 78)

One could relate Lupus’ comments to his sense of who he consciously or explicitly is,

but the investigation of the avatar from the “Human (Psychoanalytic)” category that
 69

will be carried out through for the remainder of this thesis uses Lupus’ comments to

suggest that another, unconscious, source of motivation is responsible for structuring

the very desire to be a dragon one day, a wolf the next, and a vampire the day after

that. The “Human (Psychoanalytic)” category does not seek to negate that humans are

constantly changing. It suggests, however, that there is something behind this change.
 70

Chapter 2 – “Old and Long Familiar”: Virtual Worlds, Avatars and the
Psychoanalytic Uncanny

Introduction
This chapter considers the uncanny qualities of the Second Life (SL) avatar. It

focuses on Sigmund Freud’s assertion that the uncanny designates a return of the

repressed, or a coming out of concealment of something primitive and familiar.

Jacques Lacan’s conceptualization of the interactions between the Real and Imaginary

orders which emerge during what he calls the mirror stage will be employed to

explore this uncanny return or coming out of concealment.55 Using the psychoanalytic

concepts of the uncanny and the mirror stage, we can understand the SL avatar as an

anxiety-creating uncanny double that reminds us of a forgotten past of infantile

fragmentation and castration.

1. Oedipal Investigations and the Question of Avatarization

Our task is to consider the effect that repressed ideas and emotions inhering within

the unconscious have on the user’s engagement with their avatar. The unconscious,

which acts as the “omnipresent background to consciousness”, will – in keeping with

Freud’s sustained usage of the term “fate” and his esteem of poetry and tragedy – be

referred to as the Oedipal dimension of the self (Freud, “Drives”); (Macintyre 50).

We might think of it as a general characteristic of the self through which all the rich

55
Henceforth the reader will note the difference between ‘real’ and ‘Real’, ‘imaginary’ and
‘Imaginary’, ‘symbolic’ and ‘Symbolic’. The capitalized terms refer to the Lacanian usage of
them, the lower case refer to any other usages. For example, the ‘Real’ is not ‘reality’, but more
akin to ‘brute materiality’ which can intrude into our everyday social ‘reality’. The Imaginary
designates a narcissistic, and illusory sense of wholeness and totality that is often accompanied
by aggression.
 71

specific characteristics of the self are inflected. In the thesis introduction we

explained there are two related ways to consider the self. One regards the self as a

function of discursive processes and contingent historical conditions; the other argues

that some sort of continuous self, full with emotion and depth, remains operational.

Within this second perspective we locate psychoanalysis and its analysis of the

unconscious aspects of the self.

According to Freud “who each of us is concerns how we live the historical

conflicts that characterize our early life. Although the particular character of those

conflicts is unique to each of us, there is a general pattern that all of them follow”

(May 6). This dimension of the self can be considered akin to a set of pre-

programmed stages through which human beings pass. The bedrock of the self is

constructed as the human being moves from infancy through childhood. During these

early years the child develops through stages that structure its psyche. This general

pattern begins with an “oral” stage, moves into an “anal” stage and then into the

Oedipal (or for girls Electra) stage and its resolution. (Freud, Three Essays 39-66)

For example, the infant, during the stage of “oral eroticism”, takes their

mother – specifically the mother’s breast – to be their original object of sexual desire

(Mullahy 17). By suckling the mother’s breast the child learns about their sexual

instincts. But suckling also involves the ingestion of food. Now two instincts are at

work: a hunger instinct and a sexual instinct. During this stage the infant wishes to

repeat the act of taking in food without demanding food. The set-up for libidinal

satisfaction is constructed in the infant at this point. The child begins to yearn for

libidinal, or sexual, satisfaction. During the “auto erotic” stage the infant replaces the
 72

mother’s breast with a part of his or her own body (usually the thumb, tongue, or

genitals). This allows the infant to find objects of sexual interest in their own body.

Soon psychic forces begin to develop “more or less spontaneously; they are

organically determined” and form the “psyche” of the infant (Mullahy 18).

According to Freud, children pass through other, pre-determined, early stages.

For example, boys believe both males and females have male genitals. When the boy

discovers the female does not have male genitals he tries to deny what he has seen as

the idea of being without genitals is unthinkable and inconceivable. The girl’s

genitals, he believes, must have been removed, initiating his intense fear of losing his

own genitals: the castration complex.56 As Samuel Weber points out in The Legend of

Freud, the rejection of perception (of the horrific castration) ushers in the story of

castration. Here castration is “the title of a story that children of both sexes tell

themselves, but from a single point of view – that of the male child – in order to

render the perception of sexual difference compatible with the ‘expectation’ of male

identity” (Weber, Legend 5).

The child’s curiosity does not abate. He becomes fixated on issues related to

sexual life such as the mystery of birth. This bolsters the child’s idea that the father

plays an important role in sexual reproduction. While coming to respect the father’s

authority, the mother remains the child’s original and most powerful sexual object.

The little boy’s attachment to his mother causes him to become jealous of his father,

who, he worries, will castrate him. Thus, in the face of this horrific possibility the

little boy represses awareness of the mother as his primary sexual object. He is forced

56
Girls experienced this, according to Freud, by wanting to have a penis and are disturbed by
their lack of one.
 73

to look for other sexual partners, but not to violate the incest taboo and provoke his

father’s wrath. How the child resolves the crises of its early years impacts his or her

life tremendously. This “family” drama Freud calls the Oedipal crisis.

The figure of Oedipus appears in The Interpretation of Dreams during a

discussion of “psychoneurotics”57, in which Freud pays close attention to the role that

a patient’s parents have in the formation of psychoneurotic symptoms (Freud,

Interpretation 155-168). He notices that patients have a common orientation toward

their parents: they “fall in love with one parent and hat[e] the other” (Freud,

Interpretation 155). Freud claims that this psychoneurotic tendency is not limited to

psychoneurotics, but is active in “the majority of children” (Freud, Interpretation

155). In fact, he claims that these parental roles form a part of the “permanent stock

of the psychic impulses” (Freud, Interpretation 155).

Freud explicitly argues that psychic impulses are not, at their most

fundamental level, historically contingent, but, rather, have accompanied human

beings throughout the centuries; indeed they are evident in the work of the ancient

Greek tragedians, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Woody Allen’s films. Freud asserts that

contemporary human beings harbour these “impulses”, and that “antiquity furnished

us with legendary material which corroborates this belief… the profound and

universal validity of the old legends is explicable only by an equally universal

validity of the…hypothesis of infantile psychology” (Freud, Interpretation 155). This

“legendary material” is summarized by Freud as:

57
Psychoneurotic: a term no longer in use that “designated a mental or personality disturbance
not attributable to any known neurological or organic dysfunction” (WordNet).
 74

…the legend of King Oedipus and the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles.

Oedipus, the son of Laius, king of Thebes, and Jocasta, is exposed
as a suckling, because an oracle had informed the father that his
son, who was still unborn, would be his murderer. He is rescued,
and grows up as a king's son at a foreign court, until, being
uncertain of his origin, he, too, consults the oracle, and is warned to
avoid his native place, for he is destined to become the murderer of
his father and the husband of his mother. On the road leading away
from his supposed home he meets King Laius, and in a sudden
quarrel strikes him dead. He comes to Thebes, where he solves the
riddle of the Sphinx, who is barring the way to the city, whereupon
he is elected king by the grateful Thebans, and is rewarded with the
hand of Jocasta. He reigns for many years in peace and honour, and
begets two sons and two daughters upon his unknown mother, until
at last a plague breaks out- which causes the Thebians to consult the
oracle anew. Here Sophocles' tragedy begins. The messengers bring
the reply that the plague will stop as soon as the murderer of Laius
is driven from the country. But where is he?
Where shall be found,
Faint, and hard to be known, the trace of the ancient guilt?
The action of the play consists simply in the disclosure, approached
step by step and artistically delayed (and comparable to the work of
a psycho-analysis) that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius,
and that he is the son of the murdered man and Jocasta. Shocked by
the abominable crime which he has unwittingly committed, Oedipus
blinds himself, and departs from his native city. The prophecy of
the oracle has been fulfilled (Freud, Interpretation 155-156).

Freud will later call the story a “tragedy of fate”, where the will of the gods trounce

the vain efforts of human beings (Freud, Interpretation 156). The legend of Oedipus

conveys a fate “laid upon us before our birth”, and is “constitutive of the human

conditions” that individuals in Freud’s twentieth, and indeed our present twenty-first

century, share with the ancients (Freud, Interpretation 157); (Lear 180).

Following his summary of the Oedipal legend, Freud notes that his own

patients’ sexual impulses are often first directed toward their mothers, and their first

violent-aggressive impulses are often directed toward their fathers. While most of

Freud’s patients came to “withdraw” their sexual impulses from their mothers, or

“forget” their fathers’ jealousy, it is the psychoneurotic who reminds us that we share,
 75

often in a muted way, the Oedipal desires that nature has forced onto us. It is

important to note that in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud does not waver on this

issue, insisting that reading about Oedipus’ fate makes us aware of “our own inner

selves, in which the same impulses are still extant, even though they are suppressed”

(Freud, Interpretation 157).

According to Jonathan Lear there are four general insights that can be drawn

from the Oedipal crisis (Lear 180-184). One is that children are born helpless and

have a fundamental dependency on some parental or nurturing agent. This is, for

Freud, the mother, who is the first, and primary, caregiver. Due to the deep bond

between child and mother, the child regards any third figure as an intruder into the

mother-child dyad. This third figure is the father, who distracts the mother’s attention

from the helpless and dependent infant who loves her deeply. As a result, the infant

becomes aggressive toward the father, and is happy when he is away. This is

discernable when infants or young children tell their mother’s they want to “marry

them” etc… (Mullahy 26). But the boy, terrified of castration, and the authority of the

father, is prohibited from actually carrying out his desire. He comes to renounce his

desire; however, it “persists in an unconscious state in the id and will later manifest

its phylogenic effect” (Hamilton 274). There is no resolution of the Oedipal stage,

only the modification of desires through repression.

This discussion of an Oedipal self is perhaps the best way of illustrating

Freud’s core assertion that there is an immensely influential inner part of the human

self closed off from our consciousness. Freud calls this aspect of the self the

“unconscious” or “id”. Although he repeatedly revises his views about the function
 76

and nature of the unconscious, he retains the view that some “thing” inheres within

us, returns to plague us without our consent, and often disquiets and disturbs us when

we intuit its presence.

Freud appears to have considered the mind mechanistically as a series of

hydraulic pumps and gauges. This mechanism can be thought of as having three

distinct areas (the “unconscious”, “preconscious” and “conscious”) however a firm,

yet porous, barrier divides the unconscious from the preconscious and the conscious.

The unconscious is a tempestuous broth of “primary processes”, ideas, emotions and

wishes that the individual repressed throughout their infancy and early childhood

(Freud, “Repression” 37). While this is but “one part” of the unconscious, it is the one

that will occupy our attention for the reminder of the thesis (Freud, “Unconscious”

49). Thankfully, while these ideas, emotions and wishes “retain their original

character” in the unconscious, the conscious aspect of the mind cannot access them

directly (Freud, “Unconscious” 49); (Macintyre 69). This does not, however, mean

that the conscious aspect of mind is not affected by the repressed emotions, memories

and wishes that comprise the unconscious. As was noted a moment ago, the division

between the conscious and unconscious exists, however psychic traffic flows between

the two. The unconscious is ever searching for new outlets to vent the noxious fumes

of repression as they generate pressure. A normally functioning mind, for Freud,

releases (abreacts) those fumes in ways that do not compromise daily functioning.

Dreams, where we are only barely conscious, offer a means of releasing these fumes.

The neurotic, by contrast, does not properly release those fumes and thus the fumes

penetrate his consciousness in ways that intrude his or her daily functioning.
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Nevertheless, the unconscious is the “background” link between infancy and

adult life and exerts a “causal influence on conscious thought and behaviour”

(Macintyre 66). For this reason we can note from the outset that an Oedipal, or

psychoanalytically inflected, study of avatarization would not be overtly concerned

with whether one’s avatar is like them physically or acts like they do in the real

world. Neither would such a study be overtly concerned with determining whether the

user’s motivation is to create an avatar similar to or different from the real lives they

lead. Rather it would direct its attention to a deeper level of intention, one more

difficult to locate, yet discernable through the user’s comments about, and behaviour

with, their avatar. The only way to get at this deeper level of intention, however, is

through an analysis of surface conditions: there is no x-ray device suited for this type

of analysis; one has to proceed from manifest symptoms. One can listen to a user

claim that they create an avatar to “escape from reality”, or to “act out who they

really are”, but these claims can lead toward an understanding of the unconscious

motivation at play. It is possible to discern the workings of this unconscious

dimension of the user’s subjectivity through a consideration of the phenomena of

avatarization. This method of analysis allows us to note another dimension of

intention co-present, and co-responsible for the success of virtual worlds such as SL.

Our task is to discern the role that the Oedipal complex plays in the

phenomena of avatarization. One way of doing this is to note the uncanny aspects of

avatars and virtual worlds. User’s repressed pasts, something “old and long familiar”,

can be understood as motivating their engagement with their avatar(s). The

characterization of the avatar as something new and yet also somehow reflective of
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the user’s deeper true self has a parallel in Freud’s essay “The Uncanny”. In that

essay he defines the uncanny as anything we experience in adulthood that reminds us

of earlier stages in our psychical development, of aspects of our unconscious life, or

of the primitive experience of the human species. Freud’s concept of the uncanny

acknowledges that human beings possess some psychical structure, and that this

structure, assembled throughout our childhood, leaves behind permanent residues and

traces. In this view there exists some psychical interiority we are capable of

remembering, however obliquely, through the residues and traces that follow us into

adulthood.

As noted throughout the analysis carried out in the first chapter, SL users have

the ability to control and radically manipulate their avatar body. Let us establish three

ways this manipulation occurs: first, the user can purchase, freely obtain, or, if they

are savvy enough, design, entirely new avatar-bodies. A second form of manipulation

is a less radical customization of a given avatar body. Third, a user can, in certain

instances, choose to detach or reattach an aspect of their avatar body. Throughout the

remainder of the chapter we will discuss the uncanny aspects of these methods of

avatarial manipulation. What follows is an attempt at an Oedipal investigation into

the relationship between the user’s psychical interiority and the three processes of

manipulation and customization of a technologically mediated body listed above.

2. Freud’s Theory of the Uncanny

In his famous essay of the same name, Freud explains that the uncanny constitutes a

specific kind of disquieting or frightening thing (Freud, “Uncanny” 123). Similar to

the seemingly paradoxical claim, made by theorists of performativity, that the avatar
 79

allows us to behold new aspects of our true self, the uncanny designates something

that is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. Freud considers the semantic context

of the German word “unheimlich” (in English “eerie” or “uncanny”) whose

etymology derives from “un-homely” (Freud, “Uncanny” 124). The word

“unheimlich” describes a “species of the frightening” comprising “persons, things,

sense impressions, experiences and situations” that go back to what was “once well

known and had long been familiar” (Freud, “Uncanny” 124). But why should

something well known and once familiar appear frighteningly “unhomely” or

uncanny?

The antonym of “unheimlich”, “heimlich” designates what is “local, native,

domestic, at-home, or familiar” (Freud, “Uncanny” 124). Freud finds that “heimlich”

can be defined as (1) what is “belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame,

dear, intimate, homely, etc…, (2) something kept concealed or hidden, or (3)

designating its antonym “unheimlich”, that is, everything that was “meant to remain

secret and hidden and has come out into the open” (Freud, “Uncanny” 132). This

third definition of “heimlich” joins the term with its antonym, “unheimlich”. One can,

in other words, speak of the “homely” as “unhomely”.58 “Unheimlich”, Freud

explains, is a species of the “heimlich”, a species of the familiar.

Recall that for Freud, during a male child’s formative years the child invests

his mother with libidinal desire and comes to sexually desire her. The child then

worries that he has provoked the jealousy of his father and that the father will punish

him for desiring his wife by castrating him. As a result, the child comes to accept, and

58
Schelling describes “unheimlich” as applying to “everything that was intended to
remain secret and hidden and has come out into the open” (Freud, “Uncanny” 134).
 80

identify with, the father’s authority, or law, and represses his libidinal desires for his

mother. This is clearly evocative of the Oedipal drama, where Oedipus does not

receive the law from his father Laius, but slays him instead. As a result, he sleeps

with his mother, and afterwards inflicts the father’s law on himself. Thus, for Freud,

the uncanny elements of ETA Hoffman’s short story “The Sandman” (See Appendix

1 – Freud’s Synopsis of Hoffman’s “The Sandman”) bring us back to the Oedipal

“infantile castration complex”, the return of something old and long familiar. Freud

outlines four instances of the uncanny in Hoffman’s story.

First, the story explores the threat of enucleation, or the loss of eyesight; this

is exemplified in its motif of a Sandman who threatens to tear out the protagonist,

Nathaniel’s, eyes. According to Freud, this threat is associated with the fear of

castration. Nathaniel’s fear of blindness is explicitly Oedipal; Oedipus blinds himself

at the end of Sophocles’ myth, a self-inflicted “mitigated form of the penalty of

castration” that “befits him” (Freud, “Uncanny” 139). Indeed, Freud notes that in

dreams the eye and the male member are “substitutive” and related.59 Likewise, there

59
Freud suggests in “the Uncanny” that the fear of damaging one’s eyes is symbolic of the fear
of castration. This insight is quite apt given the tremendous body of work and literature, such as
Bataille’s The Story of the Eye or Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes, conducted on the
“occularcentric” regime of vision and its association not only with the Cartesian subject but
masculinity in general. Refer to Appendix 1 and consider the “circle of fire” in Hoffman’s story
(i.e. “Upon the enucleation of the automaton Olympia, Nathaniel lapses into madness and utters
the incantation: “Ha, ha, ha. Circle of fire, circle of fire! Spin, spin, circle of fire! Merrily,
merrily! Puppet ha, lovely puppet, spin, spin!”) that Nathaniel raves about during the onset of
his maniacal episodes. What is the “circle of fire” and what does it have to do with the
damaging of eyes and the threat of castration?
The terrifying Sandman is described by a maid as “a wicked man who comes after
children when they won’t go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they jump
out of their heads all bloody”. (Hoffman 87) But it is what she says about the Sandman after
this introduction that is truly of interest to us. The maid describes the Sandman carrying his
child victims to “the crescent moon as food for his little children, who have their nest up there
and have crooked beaks like owls and peck up the eyes of the naughty children” (Hoffman 87).
We think of the homology between the crescent shape of the beak and the crescent moon. We
 81

have been many associations discerned between blindness/light and

castration/virility.60 Thus, the relationship between the uncanny, the narrative of “The

Sandman”, the Oedipal myth, and castration is quite explicit. “The Sandman” is a

story whose uncanniness results from it’s reminding the reader of the castration

now relate these to the geometrical properties of the crescent shape and its likeness to a blade.
As well, the crescent, as in an eclipse, is symbolic of the obscuring of the sun’s rays. It is an
obscuring of this solar principle that is symbolized by the crescent blade which threatens the
loss of virility in the human body. This is particularly revealing in the context of the Sandman
as the ‘bad father’, intent on castrating his son Nathaniel. In this context, where, as we have
noted, eyes and genitalia can be used interchangeably, this seemingly innocuous aspect of the
maid’s description of the Sandman takes on another dimension of interpretation. In this reading
the ‘bad father’, who lives on a moon symbolized by a blade, is bent on severing his son’s penis
and taking it back to the moon where it is to be further mutilated by crescent shaped beaks. The
son is left with a circular bloody and hot wound where his penis once was.
Even more revealing and enigmatic is the incident early on where young Nathaniel
watches Coppelius and his father’s alchemical dealings. He describes the incident: “I seemed to
see human faces appearing all around, but without eyes – instead of eyes there were hideous
black cavities”. Reading this with the eye-penis symbolism in mind one might conclude that
Nathaniel’s fear is less of being caught then it is castration by Coppelius (i.e. the ‘bad father’).
He is terrified of the castrated body, of having a hideous black cavity where his penis once was.
He is afraid of the Sandman’s enucleating dust, or the will of the ‘bad father’, whose own ‘dust’
will leave him with the wounds of castration.
The fear of castration, stemming from the Oedipal struggle, runs behind Hoffman’s
text. We find a whole number of phallic shaped objects associated with madness and death. In
the story Nathaniel and Clara ascend a tower where they are alone and for the first time in a
long while at ease with one another. Nathaniel catches a glimpse of something moving down
below. He uses his telescope to have a better look. Upon doing so he goes mad and, after a
short yet wild dance, jumps to his death. We might be inclined to understand the story as
follows: Nathaniel and Clara are, indeed, finally alone and at ease. So much at ease that
Nathaniel has been able to escape his fear of the dreaded Oedipal father who has barred his
every attempt at sexual gratification. Alas, we have the tower (Nathaniel’s erect penis). Upon
ascending the tower (achieving erection) Nathaniel is reminded of the threat of enucleation
(castration). As such, his attention is diverted to something (-repressed) moving below. He uses
the telescope (the erect penis) and diverts his gaze through it (ejaculation) toward the Sandman
rather than his beloved Clara. Once again Nathaniel’s promise of sexual gratification has been
thwarted and his fear of bloody castration (the ring of fire) has been activated. Hoffman writes
that “a spasm shuddered through him” before he jumps to his death.
60
Light, sight and virility are deeply interrelated. Light has long been regarded as the “essence
of the father’s phallus, or ‘masculine substance’”. For example, darkness, as evidenced in the
Hebraic God’s penultimate plague (Exodus 8-14) represents a threat to the unyielding virility of
the Egyptian sun God Ra. Darkness is associated with the imperfect corporeal world in contrast
to the perfect and incorporeal Platonic Good or Neo-Platonic One. One interesting story
evocative of the linkage between masculinity and sight tells of Isaac Newton’s turning a solid
beam of light into the “beautiful (feminine?) colors of the rainbow completing his own Oedipal
triumph” of splitting the phallus into pieces. Thus, Newton’s anti-trinity based turn to alchemy
and Unitarianism aimed to re-interpret God as an indivisible entity (Ward 59).
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complex. For example, in the story Nathaniel’s father appears as the “disruptor of

love” (Freud, “Uncanny” 205); every time Nathaniel is about to find sexual fulfilment

he is reminded of his father, and the Sandman, whether in the guise of Coppelius or

Coppola, arrives to enucleate him. Within SL, the user is robbed of his or her own

eyes in a sense, and must depend instead on either the virtual eyes of the avatar or (in

mouselook mode) the “eye” of the in-world camera. Specifically, one wonders about

the possible links between the Freudian idea of “ocular anxiety” and the forms of

avatarial vision in virtual worlds such as SL. In SL we encounter new types of vision:

the user can, via something like mouselook mode, experience a set of binocular eyes

befitting the inhuman Terminator. In doing so the importance of the user’s own eyes

is negated: they become akin to hollowed out tunnels for the transmission of avatarial

vision. The virtual world is not created to be seen by the physiological eye, but the

physiological eye hollowed out and acting as a tunnel for a machinic, avatarial, one.

Second, Freud emphasizes the uncanny is often associated with the “double”

or the “doppelganger”. Doubles and lookalikes are uncanny because they cause a

person to “identify with another and so become unsure of his true self. Th[is] self may

be duplicated, divided and interchanged” (Freud, “Uncanny” 142). Freud notes that

doubles are evocative of both castration anxiety and the desire for immortality. But

what is the relationship between the uncanniness of doubling, castration, and

immortality? Freud claims that in dreams a doubling or multiplying of the genital

symbol expresses the idea of castration. He also claims that doubling “belongs to a

primitive phase in our mental development [where the double was considered an

insurance against death or dissolution], a phase [we have since] surmounted” (Freud,
 83

“Uncanny” 143). The doubling that occurs in Hoffman’s story is uncanny because it

harkens back to “phases in the evolution of the sense of self, a regression to times

when the ego had not set itself off from the world outside and others” (Freud,

“Uncanny” 143).61 The avatar is generally understood as a double or doppelganger, a

representative of that self, which also works to challenge the user’s “true self” as

fixed, indivisible, and non-duplicative (Freud, “Uncanny” 142). In this manner, the

avatar represents a self that remains identical each and every time the user logs in to

SL. In other words, the user can repeatedly interact with a double that retains the

same age, facial features, bodily qualities, et cetera “throughout successive

generations” (Freud, “Uncanny” 143).

While the uncanniness provoked by “duplication, ego splitting, revenant, or

the recurrence of traits, characters and destinies” (Weber, Legend 10) returns us to an

earlier phase of either personal or cultural development, the uncanniness provoked by

doubling or multiplying of the genital symbol is more difficult to understand. The

doubling, or multiplication, of the genital symbol recalls the Oedipal situation: that is,

the threat of castration initiated by the father in order to quell his sons’ desire for his

mother. A response to the fear of losing something is to fracture it, duplicate it, or

multiply it. For example, in the Harry Potter series the villain Voldemort splits and

preserves his self in shards of glass or “horcruxes” in order to achieve immortality

(Freud, “Uncanny” 143).62 This idea can be traced back to Freud’s comment in The

61
It also “…has ambivalent, narcissistic significance. A portent of death once the second self is
no longer protected by primary narcissism : duplication, the multiplication of selves, becomes
the splitting of the self, no longer overcoming but rather confirming its non identity and
mortality” (Weber, Legend 216)
62
Many technophilic writers appear radically thanatophobic; that is, they express a fear of
death. Many of the ideas I encountered (i.e. human reproductive cloning, the uploading of
 84

Interpretation of Dreams, that as “an insurance against castration, the dream uses one

of the common symbols of the penis in double, or multiple form; and the appearance

in the dream of a lizard – an animal whose tail, if pulled off, is regenerated by a new

growth has the same meaning” (Freud, “Uncanny” 236). In SL, users can design or

purchase genitals, an activity that often involves a manipulation, duplication or

multiplication of the genital symbol. This activity in SL could be read as the

subversion of anxiety associated with the Oedipus complex.

The third uncanny aspect present in Hoffman’s story concerns dolls and

automatons, such as the automaton Olympia. Freud claims Olympia is not uncanny

because she puts the reader (and Nathaniel) in a position of “intellectual uncertainty”,

but because Olympia, a automaton created by her father, Professor Spalzanni, takes

the reader (and Nathaniel) “back to the world of childhood”; this involves a return to

the infantile association of dolls with living animate beings, a time where there was

“no sharp distinction between the animate and inanimate” (Freud, “Uncanny” 141).

Lifeless objects such as “waxwork figurines, ingeniously constructed dolls and

automata” can inspire uncanny disquiet. Likewise, as Freud suggests in the

human consciousness espoused by Marvin Minsky and Hans Moravec, the Singularity
promised by Ray Kurzweil in his The Singularity is Near), appear to express a profound fear of
death and advocate the desire to live-on at any cost. These writers seem to be driven by the
desire to collapse the self into something like the villain Voldemort’s “Horcruxes” in order to
either await a time when the self can be “resurrected” or else become rendered informatic and
capable of living on in some modified virtual form. These scientists could be read as searching
for some insurance against “castration”. They can be read as suffering from a fear of the
impotency associated with castration; they are afraid to grow old and infirm. They are afraid of
not being able to reproduce. So, they work on doubling themselves, creating hi-tech
doppelgangers of themselves in order to never lose their “youth”, that is, the ability to ejaculate
(and reproduce). Here, in a different (more biological) guise, castration anxiety and the desire
for immortality serve to explain the doubling of the self (and the genital symbol). Kurzweil,
Minsky and Moravec: technophiles whose quest to create hi-tech doubles capable of
immortality masks (and externalizes) their fear of loosing “it”.
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“Uncanny”, “[E]pileptic seizures” and “manifestations of insanity” are uncanny

because they “arouse in the onlooker various notions of automatic – mechanical –

processes that lie behind the familiar image of a living person”. The avatar can be

thought of or described as a doll or puppet that the user animates and controls.

Finally, something that “unintentionally returns” can be regarded as uncanny

(Freud, “Uncanny” 144). One such “unintentional return” can be a return to the “old

animistic view of the universe…a narcissistic overrating of one’s own mental

processes by the omnipotence of thoughts” (Freud, “Uncanny” 144-145). By this

Freud refers to a time in the prehistory of human culture where not only inanimate

objects but our own thoughts were believed to have agency and could effect the

physical world. Although humanity has developed from this pre-modern animate

universe, Freud believes that we retain residual traces of it and that these traces can

make themselves felt in uncanny ways. The entire SL environment, where your

dreams can become reality is reminiscent of the return to this superannuated,

animistic view of the universe, when human thoughts were taken to be omnipotent.

The anthropocentric will of the user has agency in virtual worlds that it does not have

in the physical world. A user can lift objects without physically lifting them, and

create anything that can be sculpted with SL prims. Furthermore, SL is the space, par

excellence, of what Freud calls the uncanny effect of a “blurring of fantasy and

reality”. (Freud, “Uncanny” 150) This in-betweenness is evident in the difficulty of

describing SL: it is not like the space of a fictional novel, nor is it wholly located in

the realm of real life.

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The fear or disquiet associated with the pre-modern attribution of

omnipotence to human thoughts, the doppelganger or double who reminds us of

castration, enucleation which reminds us of the father’s castrating “no”, and the

attribution of childlike agency to dolls or automata are to be regarded as “nothing new

or strange, but …long familiar to the psyche and …estranged from it only by being

repressed” (Freud, “Uncanny” 148). These themes and sentiments are all old, hidden,

or repressed, and become uncanny only by coming out into the open. Witnessing an

epileptic seizure or a bout of madness, are examples of the manifestation of forces we

do not suspect in “a fellow human being, but whose stirrings…[can be]…dimly

perceived in remote corners of [our] own personality.63 Throughout the remainder of

this chapter SL avatarization will be further considered as a technique that returns the

user to something old without negating its novel aspects.

3. Lacan’s Imaginary and the Fragmented Body of the Real

In “the Uncanny”, Freud describes an incident involving a double that jarred him

(Freud, “Uncanny” 161-162). He was in his cabin on a night-train. The train lurched

forward and the toilet door swung open. At that moment Freud caught sight of an

elderly man who came into his room, replete with dressing gown and travelling cap.

Assuming the elderly man had lost his way returning from the toilet, Freud went to

direct him back toward his own cabin when – to his astonishment – he realized the

“lost” old man was a reflection of himself displayed on a mirror hanging on the inside

of the, now wide open, toilet door. Freud’s own image confronts him as “unbidden”

63
Also, in moments where reality and fantasy break down, we verge close to when we were
infants and our thoughts had an omnipotence whereby a “symbol [could] take on full function
and significance of what it symbolizes” (Freud, “Uncanny” 150).
 87

and “unexpected” (Freud, “Uncanny” 162). This incident reminds us of the

unpleasantness that something as benign and intimate as our own reflection can

produce; individuals have to acknowledge their reflection as themselves in order to

overcome the initial alienation of their own bodies. In this case, Freud is not unsettled

by the uncanny animism of something like dead souls et cetera., but, rather, it is his

own self, which has become strange (Gordon 54).

Jacques Lacan develops this idea of the self as alienating in his essay “The

Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” in Ecrits. This essay helps to frame the

uncanny aspects of the dispersed, or fragmented, characteristic of the avatar body.64

Lacan agrees with Freud that there is a fundamental tension at the heart of the self,

described as “the never ending drama that governs our interior life” (Mansfield 40).

This “…dehiscence at the very heart of the organism, a primal Discord…” begins at

the very outset of our lives (Lacan, Ecrits 78). Lacan asserts human beings are born

pre-maturely. As a result, during our neonatal months our relationship to our bodies is

a fragmented one, and marked by poor motor-coordination; there is no time before

our alienation from our bodies, no Edenic point of wholeness or totality that we ever

can have known.

Lacan’s conception of our inner life is a dark realm of fractured wholes. He

“take[s] as his point of departure the function of misrecognition that characterizes the

ego” (Lacan, Ecrits 80). But what does he mean by “misrecognition”, and, if a

misrecognition characterizes the ego, than what sort of ego does Lacan have in mind?

64
…with “symbolic” rather than “biological” factors. In other words, bringing the mirror stage
to bear on Hoffman’s story allows us to discern forms of the uncanny that Freud did not; a
Lacanian might not agree with Freud that the automaton Olympia is “quite irrelevant” (Freud
“Uncanny”).
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What Lacan calls the Real might be considered akin to our originary unity

with our mother’s body (as in a state of nature), a unity that is severed (as is an

umbilicus) to enter into culture. It is this unity, a place outside what he calls the

Symbolic, to which we perpetually strive to return. But the term “we” is misleading,

for the infant is not yet in a position to think of itself as “I” or to think of that which

lies outside of it as “other”. The infant at this early point has not yet distanced itself

from its (m)Other. It comes to think of itself as an “I” during, what Lacan refers to as,

the mirror stage.

The infant, during the neo-natal months, comes to view itself in a mirror. In

contrast to other animals, the human infant recognizes that the mirror reflection bears

a relation to the sensation of its own body. Strictly speaking, the infant identifies with

the image outside of himself; but now, problematically, one’s identification is in the

place of the Other. For this reason Lacan considers the ego to be an imaginary

crystallization of images. The fluidity and sense of wholeness that the specular image

possesses exists in stark contrast to the fragmented neo-natal body of the infant. The

infant is delighted to view its reflection, but this delight is bound up with aggression,

as the specular wholeness is contrasted with the infant’s fragmented body.65 This

dialectic of (mis)recognition forms the genesis of what will become a lifelong

sensation of irredeemable lack. Furthermore, it will become the ordering principle of

the lifelong relationship between “jouissance” [pleasure] and “aggression”.

65
Importantly, as Lorenzo Chiesa points out, the infant is not a “fragmented body” until it has
experienced a sense of “wholeness”. That is, the infant “recognizes the fragmentation of his real
body only when he starts to be attracted by the completeness of his specular image” (Chiesa
18). At the point of encountering its own body in the mirror, or recognizing the body of its
(m)Other as separate from its self, it forms the binary of “fragmented” and “whole”. But prior
to this binary, the infant is not concerned with its fragmentation.
 89

What Lacan refers to as the Imaginary produces an ideal (the ideal-ego) of

perfection that we strive to emulate. There is no healthy, or universal, ideal-ego. The

ego is an image internalized by the infant that did not exist prior to it. For Lacan, the

ego comes after the image, breaking with the Hegelian pre-supposition of identity

(Weber, Return 17). In other words, there is a mirror, then the image, and then what it

depicts. There is identification with image which gives rise to the ego (as imaginary).

We are forever haunted by that reflection (Weber, Return 18). There is no pre-

existent ego until the external world is recognized as a problem that must be dealt

with. In this way, both Freud and Lacan recognize the ego as a construct that must

mediate between the infant’s newly bifurcated sense of reality. It is less the

recognition of selfhood than a mis-recognition. In other words, the ego is

characterized not by a solid “I” but an alienated “I”, whose constitution is an endless

series of mis-identifications.

During the formulation of the ideal-ego we are initiated into the false, yet

necessary, binary of self and other. We begin to grasp the idea that others exist

outside of our Imaginary “I” construction. The key here is that otherness structures

our sense of selfhood; it is by way of others that we formulate a notion of self. Self is,

following Lacan, actually an other that I misrecognize as myself. Lacan terms this

identification a (mis)recognition since any such identity-solidifying recognition is

founded on an error, albeit a necessary one. It is only when the child is able to

conceive of herself as an “I” that she can understand herself in relation to others (and

to the Other).
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Thus, for Lacan “…the self exists in a state of unrest as a result of an

unresolved encounter with alterity” (Hobbs 3). This state of unrest, characteristic of

the Imaginary, is a continuous one. From the onset of the mirror stage the infant

“…enters into a continuous process of staging and restaging his/her identity, a

process that situates him/her as elsewhere forever” (Hobbs 4).

If this Imaginary sense of the ideal-ego should collapse, we may experience

bodily fragmentation and disintegration. In “Some Reflections on the Ego”, Lacan

describes the fantasy-of-the-body-in-bits-and-pieces which often surfaces in dreams

and typically shows the “body of the mother as having a mosaic structure like that of

a stained glass window” or a “jigsaw puzzle, with the separate parts of the body of a

man or an animal in disorderly array” (Lacan, “Some Reflections” 13 qtd. in

Silverman, Threshold 20). Lacan also describes the fantasy of the fragmented body as

“…incongruous images, in which disjoined limbs are arranged as strange trophies;

trunks [are] cut up in slices and stuffed with the most unlikely fillings, [and] strange

appendages [are] shown in eccentric positions” (Lacan, “Some Reflections” 13 qtd. in

Silverman, Threshold 20). This fantasy is clearly related to the originary motor

incapacity the infant recognized, and repressed, during the mirror stage.

The similarities with Freud’s articulation of the uncanny are clear here: “the

disturbances of the ego” articulated in Hoffman’s uncanny story, “involve a

hearkening back to single phases in the evolution of the sense of self, a regression to

times when the ego had not yet clearly set itself off against the world outside and

from others” (Freud, “Uncanny” 143). This could be considered a characterization of

the infant Lacan describes as the “I” in its primordial form, before being objectified in
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the dialectic of identification with the other and before language disciplines it into its

function as a subject (Lacan, Ecrits 77).

4. The Uncanny Cyborg

Before arriving at our analysis of the uncanny attributes SL avatar, it would be useful

to consider a number of instances where technologies – especially human-machine

hybrids – have been considered uncanny. Our discussion of avatarization as uncanny

is not without precedent. The SL avatar, as a technology that merges the human and

the technological, is a contemporary instance of what Bruce Grenville describes in the

introduction to The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture as a long standing

“cultural anxiety” surrounding the interaction between bodies and machines: an

anxiety stemming from at least the seventeenth century when Descartes and William

Harvey begun thinking about the body mechanistically (Grenville 13). In the early

twentieth century, cubist works such as Pablo Picasso’s “Mademoiselle Léonie”

(1911) [See Figure 1] and Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase no.2”

(1912) [See Figure 2] “which depicted bodies as mechanistic structures, and were

recognized as “threats to the popular perception of the human body and its physical

limits” (Grenville 18). In reference to “Mademoiselle Léonie”, art critics have noted

Picasso’s use of “partial circles, rectangles, and trapezoids” to “dislocate the figure’s

anatomy” and convey “mechanical distortions” (Franciscono 141). Léonie’s

“shoulders, hips and breasts – seem to emerge and then retreat into the choppy matrix

of lines and plates that comprise the figure” (Schulman 129).

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Figure 1 – Pablo Picasso’s 1911 illustration “Mademoiselle Léonie” (Picasso, Pablo.

“Mademoiselle Léonie.” 1911. Henry Kahnweiler, Paris. Illustration from Max Jacob’s Saint
Matorel. The Amica Library 22 Jul 2009 <http://www.amica.davidrumsey.com>)
 93

Figure 2 – Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 “Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2)” (Duchamp,

Marcel. “Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2)” 1912. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.
Marcel Duchamp Web Community. 10 May 2009. <http://www.marcelduchamp.net>)
 94

Twentieth century photography also played a major role in reproducing the

body in mechanistic ways. For example, Edward Muybridge’s chronophotography

(circa 1870), whose genesis lies in the settling of a bet over whether there was a point

in a horse’s gallop where all its feet left the ground, expressed a “desire to capture a

heretofore intangible aspect of human nature”: the machinic, consistent, and repeatable

nature of the body (Grenville 17).

Duchamp, via works such as “Nude Descending…” considered the “notion of

the machine as a distinct entity that invades, embraces, and reforms the modern human

body” into something machinic, whereas Muybridge was concerned with revealing the

body as already machinic (Grenville 19). Again the question emerges: does technology

reform the body as Duchamp appears to have argued or does it reveal something

formerly unnoticed about the body as Muybridge appears to have argued? Cubism can

be seen as a reaction to the flow of contemporary life or as an aesthetic revelatory of

the flux and fragmentation inherent in the aesthetic depiction of a thing. Thus,

Grenville, who draws on the Freudian uncanny, argues that the cyborg is uncanny not

because it is unfamiliar or alien, but rather because it is all too familiar: bodies doubled

by the machine “allow for the return of the repressed in a controlled medium, in an

imaginary form that allows us to disregard its real presence” (Grenville 21). Other

twentieth and twenty first century artistic instances of this cyborg uncanny include

Jacob Epstien’s Futurist “Rock Drill” (1913-1915) [See Figure 4] where the bottom

half of a human torso is the bottom half of a drill, evoking the castration complex and

the “repression of sexuality and procreative forces”, and Gary Hill’s “Inasmuch as it is
 95

Already Taking Place” (1990) [See Figure 3], where the body is displayed as dispersed

or fragmented across a series of monitors (Grenville 22, 37).

Epstein and Hill present bodies mutilated by the violence of modern life and

new technologies, however both works reveal cyborg forms that have raised the issue

of some fundamental aspects of human identity, whether it is the cyborg’s virility, or,

“the hidden core to which the components of the body are attached [which] serves as a

metaphor for a human being's invisible, existential center: the soul” (Moma). Thus, the

new, the unfamiliar, the mutilated, can serve to reveal the contours of that which is

closest to us.66 These pieces of art, like avatars, are creations that draw on

contemporaneous mediums, themes and ideas to explore – or reveal – aspects of the

human self. The bodies depicted through these contemporary mediums, themes and

ideas are indeed products of a particular time and place, however despite this

particularity, they reveal a certain generality. The cold, almost turquoise, head of

Epstein’s “Rock Drill”, staring blindly into the horizon, is less a postmodern cyborg

revelling in its present time and place than an alienated modernist lamenting

transitioning into what Epstein himself called “the armed, sinister figure of today and

tomorrow. No humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein's monster we have made

ourselves into...” (Epstein 56).

66
One is reminded here of Heidegger’s claim in Being and Time that the essence of a thing, in his
example a hammer, can be discerned when it is broken. When broken, we can discern the hammer’s
“hammerness”. We “discover the unusability [of the hammer] not by looking and ascertaining
properties, but rather by paying attention to the associations in which we use it. When we discover
its unusability, the [hammer] becomes conspicuous” (Heidegger, Being 102). When something
appears inoperable or broken it can be de-naturalized, becoming simply an object in relation to all
others. A simple way of thinking of this is that in order to use an object we must bracket its
complexity. Heidegger refers to this bracketing as “withdrawing”. “Withdrawing” refers to the state
where the hammer is naturalized and becomes “readiness-to-hand” (Heidegger, Being 87). In order
for something to be ready-at-hand the complex “thingness” (in the case the “hammerness”) of the
object must withdraw. The hammer, as “ready-at-hand” becomes an extension of our own arm, and
we bracket the complexly designed and shaped metal and wood.
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Figure 3 – Gary Hill’s "Inasmuch as it is Already Taking Place". (Hill, Gary. "Inasmuch as
it is always already taking place…" 1991. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Museum of Modern
Art. 19 Jun. 2009 <http://www.moma.org/collection/>)

Figure 4 – Jacob Epstein’s “Rock Drill” (Epstein, Jacob. “The Rock Drill.” 1913. Museum of
Modern Art, New York. Museum of Modern Art. 19 Jul. 2009 <http://www.moma.org/collection/>)
 97

5. The Uncanny Avatar

Kazuhiro Aridian, a SL user whose avatars usually involve customized robot

exoskeletons, explains:

when I look at things of metal, it feels sharp, painful. I

created that avatar as a response to that…It is painful,
skeletal, ethereal, and almost human, but things like the
inverted knees and elongated hands make it not human at
all. Even with all this painful metal, it retains a human
face, almost as a mockery of humanity (Rymaszewski et
al. 74).

In his statement about the rationale behind the creation of his avatars, Aridian

explains that a “human face” peers through the “painful”, “metallic”, exoskeleton.

From an uncanny viewpoint human desire peeks through the painful, skeletal and

prohibitive exoskeleton, mocking the possibility that his desire can ever be free from

Oedipal prohibition. Aridian’s avatars, clad in the robot exoskeleton of an imagined

future, reveal the continuation of prohibition – whose genesis lies buried in the past.

This interpretation is echoed by recent scholarly studies such as Siân Bayne’s

“Uncanny Spaces for Higher Education: Teaching and Learning in Virtual Worlds”

that emphasize the uncanny attributes of virtual worlds and games requiring an

avatar. Bayne emphasizes the capacity for these virtual worlds to blur the boundary

between reality and fantasy, activate our fear of death and ghosts, question the nature

of selfhood and the double or doppelganger, and create situations of intellectual

uncertainty (Bayne 1). The avatar possesses an in-between status, it is a “doll invested

to some extent with the interactional and personality characteristics of the real user”

(Bayne 2). The ability for the user to automate movements and create scripted

animations foregrounds this in-betweenness of the avatar (Bayne 2).

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Drawing on Freud’s assertion that automata and dolls can be uncanny, Bayne

notes a student named Eleanor’s reflection that “[a]vatars are nothing but corpses. So,

somebody comes along and will fill those dead corpses with something that is

believed to be identity or feelings? For me they are artificially normed identities,

perhaps even desires…” (Bayne 1) Between 1998 and 2002, many young people used

a social network called ICQ. The network was eventually abandoned, as users moved

to networks that offered a greater degree of identity-creation. Upon logging into my

ICQ avatar for the first time since 2002, the virtual world dead and lifeless I wrote:

Returning to my old dwelling place, logging on, and entering the ICQ
framework now evokes a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Here I encounter
what may be one of the first major Pompeii’s of the digital world. A
chill runs of up my spine. Why do I feel as if this were a real
place…that I have stumbled upon the scene of some massacre? I know I
am looking at patterns of information and binary code, but I don’t care.
What once was a thriving community, a fertile dwelling place, is now
barren and devoid of all maintenance and human agency. What exists is
the infrastructure: the roads, plumbing, and power lines. What remains,
in states of suspended animation, are the shed lifeless sarcophagi of
users who have altered their digital bodies (Cohen).

Bayne also notes many descriptions of virtual worlds emphasizing their “deathliness”.

Another student observer, “Maisie”, describes the experience as similar to what she

imagines dying might be like: “sort of like a physical death only to awake in the other

world with one’s senses intact” (Bayne 3). From the standpoint of the Freudian

uncanny, a user discussing their virtual double in the context of death and deathliness

is revelatory of our still active primitive fear of death. For example, one could argue

that by interacting with these doubles the user acts out a virtual death in order to deny

the shrouded mysteriousness that surrounds physical death. But in no case does

physical death lose its importance; indeed from this point of view the experimentation

with virtual deathliness has the mortal and corporeal body as its motor.
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Figure 5 - Dustin Mabellon hanging from a virtual gallows. (Personal Screenshot from
Second Life.)
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For many users, one of the more uncanny aspects of the SL avatar is the

impossibility of fixing the identity of the users with which one interacts (Bayne 2).

This raises the issue of uncanny “intellectual uncertainty”, an idea explored by

Freud’s contemporary Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 paper “On the Psychology of the

Uncanny”. It is unnerving to be perpetually unsure of the identity of the avatar with

whom one is interacting, or to not know – in the case of bots67 – whether the avatar is

being manipulated by a human at all. According to Jentsch, confronting something

outside of our habitual routines, or looking at it in a different way, causes it to

become “uncanny” (Jentsch 4). For example, under normal circumstances the rising

of the sun is not uncanny, but “when one remembers that the rising of the sun does

not depend on the sun at all, but rather, on the movement of the earth…” one

experiences the sunrise in an unusual, uncanny, way. Similarly, encountering familiar

others through the medium of the avatar can feel quite unnerving and strange. While

becoming accustomed to SL in 2006, I wrote this note, which conveys a sense of

uncanny intellectual uncertainty:

I am able to modify my avatar in nearly any way imaginable, from

the color of his socks to the size of his body to the shape of his hair.
And I am not limited to a his, I can be a her. I am not limited to the
colors and types of clothing within Second Life as I can upload
graphics into the virtual-world and fashion a photo of myself in the
real-world or an atomic mushroom cloud into a vest. Like a child I
begin to learn how to navigate the virtual-environment, a
progression from looking, to walking, to running and even flying.
My first observation is how unique each avatar is, an array of faces
and bodies. My second is how colorful and lifelike the forest
environ I find myself within is. While learning how to navigate I
innocently clicked the ‘remove button’ and in an instant I was
standing naked for the Second Life community to see. What

67
Definition of bot: “An AI-controlled player in a computer game (especially a first-person
shooter such as Quake) which, unlike ordinary monsters, operates like a human-controlled
player, with access to a player's weapons and abilities” (Jargon).
 101

occurred to me was that I felt ashamed and frantically tried to cover

myself back up, clicking fervently at the mouse in the same way
that I might embarrassedly fumble with my fly in front of a group of
strangers. Following the incident I teleport (the equivalent to air-
travel in Second Life) myself to another piece of the Second Life
landscape, a pyramid like island where an amoeba-like-creature and
group of avatars dance with a number of bellowing cows. Music,
possibly composed by one of the avatars, blares as I draw close to
the group. I stand for a minute watching, roam around the island,
and return to the spectacle. The national anthem for this pyramid
island of dancing avatars might as well be appropriated from Donna
Haraway’s prophetic essay: ‘Our machines are disturbingly lively,
and we ourselves frighteningly inert’ (Haraway). As the group of
avatar cows, amoebae and humanoids had not ceased dancing all
that I can think of is how still their real-world counterparts likely
are (Cohen 15).

During these early experiences in Second Life, I felt as though I had comprehended

reality from a radically different perspective; both the real world and the virtual world

felt unreal.

For those users who are comfortable with avatarization, encountering the self

and others on SL is acceptable, but others can become disoriented and unsure. Bayne

quotes from the weblog a student named “Margaret”: “We like to experiment with the

appearance of the avatar and through experimentation I think we can gain some

understanding of who we really are…I would say that our identities are more real

when expressed though an avatar” (Bayne 5). But, for another student named Joe, the

uncanny disruption between copy and original, self and double, is a deep disturbance

to his religious security:

The bible…teaches that we are made in God’s image and

that if one adopts the image or looks of an animal that
s/he is adopting an image of an idol hence s/he is
practicing idolatry. It is even worse in cases where a
person considers the animal face to represent their
identity better than their real face (Bayne 6).
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When a new user logs into SL for the first time they are taken to Orientation Island,

where they learn to control their avatar and the virtual world at large. As a long time

gamer, my first experience at Orientation Island was not highly unusual, however I

can image the disorientation that my grandmother, for example, would likely

experience. I am used to being represented in virtual space, whereas she would likely

ask me “why would I want to look like an animal, or a robot, or something other than

me!?” This unusual way of looking at her self would surely startle her.68

In “Play Dead: Genre and Affect in Silent Hill and Plainscape Torment”

Dianne Carr explains that the uncanny can be amplified when we watch bodies in

motion on film. It is even further amplified in video games where we operate and

navigate 3D avatars (Carr 6). Laura Hoeger and William Huber’s “Ghastly

Manipulation: Fatal Frame II and the Videogame Uncanny”, also notes that the 3D

video game uncanny is not simply a derivative version of the filmic or literary

uncanny, but is, rather, a “distinctively designed affective experience in which textual

elements are deeply entwined with the mechanical and spatial aspects [of the virtual

game or world]” (Hoeger and Huber 152).69

68
Likewise, Jentsch notes that there are “among adults…sensitive natures who do not like to
attend masked balls, since the masks and disguises produce in them an exceedingly awkward
impression to which they are incapable of being accustomed” (Jentsch 6).
69
Hoeger and Huber note that the uncanny can result from the “imperfect simulacra of living
bodies”. This type of uncanniness was noted by Masahiro Mori in the 1970s and termed the
“uncanny valley” (Mori). Mori claimed that when confronted with a double that was nearly
human, but not quite, we reach a point of anxiety and disquiet – a valley. A feeling of repulsion
or horror arises when a certain threshold of resemblance is crossed (Hoeger and Huber 153).
They refer to moments (animaltions, scripts etc…) where the user can control the avatar, but
the avatar has independent activity (Hoeger and Huber 155). It can be “spooky to have this
control momentarily taken away then thrust back”. For more on this type of uncanny and its
application for studies of virtual worlds see Elif Ayiter’s “Syncretia: a Sojurn into Uncanny
Valley”.
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Stuart Boon and Christine Sinclair’s “A World I Don’t Inhabit: Disquiet and

Identity in Second Life and Facebook” also considers the disquiet associated with

Second Life. They explain that SL is “…a new kind of experience, a new metaphor, a

new world in which to re/create ourselves, re/imagine our relationships to others, and

re/evaluate the real and the unreal” (Boon and Sinclair 16).70 While SL is liberating

for some users, “not all will find the experience so positive. From the outset SL

necessitates a commitment to the unreal, going so far as to make it impossible for

users to use their own names … this stripping of real identity can be frustrating and

unsettling” (Boon and Sinclair 20). They discuss the uncanny disquiet associated with

simulating a self in three dimensions that has an “utterly variable identity” and is

“artificiality writ large”, a “fabricating, and in some cases a digital form devoid of

personal significance – that can be a problem for many users” (Boon and Sinclair 21).

5.1. The Avatar as Extimate Object

What Freud calls the uncanny, Lacan refers to as the “extime” or “extimacy”,

neologisms combining “exterior” (Fr. “exterieur”) and “intimate”/”intimacy” (Fr.

“intimate”), and designating the blurring of subject and object, interiority and

exteriority, mind and body, where intimate interiority to coincide with the exterior.

The “extime” designates the interruption of the Real into the “homely” commonly

accepted reality, shattering known divisions. Lacan describes it as the recognition that

“the other is something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me” (Lacan, Sem

VII 71). The double, for example, “initiates a crumbling of the subject’s accustomed

70
This causes me to consider that the very name Second Life is itself a doubling: but what does
it mean to have a first life?
 104

reality and often arranges things to turn out badly, by realizing the subject’s hidden or

repressed desires” (Dolar 11).

How, in the context of the Lacanian mirror stage, is the SL avatar an extimite

object? From the outset of this chapter I mentioned three ways that users manipulate

and customize their avatar bodies. Whether they are (1) rendering new avatar bodies,

(2) customizing their current body, or (3) detaching/attaching limbs or appendages,

the user is encountering (and engaging with) a body resistant to the orthopaedic

stability of the ideal-ego that results during the mirror stage.

1. First, let us consider the rendering of new avatar bodies. Most SL users

purchase new bodies from SL shops using the SL Linden (L$) currency. The new

body, also called a “skin” is then deposited into the user’s inventory. The user selects

the new skin - say that of a favourite celebrity, or that of a clunky 1950s robot - and

drags it from their inventory onto their avatar. [See Figure 7] Upon releasing the

mouse button the user’s avatar will morph into the chosen body. This reveals, and

challenges, the ideal-ego, the “I”, that we mis(identified) as our self. Through this the

rendering of new avatar bodies the user interacts with his or her alienated ego, and

plays with the recognition that while there was no “I” before the other was

(mis)identified as self.

Often the process of rendering one’s body requires a wait while the new body

renders. During this time the avatar may spend a moment or two in an awkward

transitional phase where dull grey spots appear, designating areas where the new

body has yet to render. [See Figure 6] Of interest here is the limbo where the

embodied user sees their avatar in three simultaneous states: as avatar-body-1, an

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Figure 6 - Screenshot of SL Rezzing. (Paradox Olber. “Screenshot of Rezzing”. Spindrift, in

SciLands Second Life Blog. 28 Mar 2008. <http://spindriftisland.wordpress.com/2008/03/>)

Figure 7 – Male Skins for Purchase. (“Second Life Male Shapes by Dimension Skins” Digital
Image. Dimensions Online. 24 Aug 2009. <http://dimensionsonline.org/blog/>)
 106

undifferentiated and yet unrendered grey, and as avatar-body-2. The rendering, or

“rezzing”, grey goo between avatar-body-1 and avatar-body-2 might be considered

the ectoplasm of the digital Real: a high tech residual reminder of our early encounter

with the undifferentiated Lacanian Real: a state of existence prior to symbolization.

In these instances the user is confronted not only with two reified selves

(avatar-body-1 and avatar-body-2) but the undifferentiated grey Real that hides

beneath the self. The rendering of new virtual bodies can be seen to stir the traces

and residues of infancy that remain throughout our life and act as the ordering

principles of the ego. Teleporting mishaps in SL also can, through a psychoanalytic

lens, be considered evocative of the undifferentiated state of pre-Oedipal symbiosis.

These mishaps occur when multiple users teleport into a small space, often piling on

top of one another, or in immediate proximity to one another, resulting in another sort

of virtual grey goo. Important to consider is that since this grey goo is itself a

symbolization, a representation that a user can capture with the “screen shot” feature,

it is closer to an approximation or analogy for thinking about Lacan’s framework than

it is an actual encounter with the Real.

Let us note, as well, that this surely links to our mystified relationship to

technology as well. Most users do not understand the technology behind the virtual

worlds in which they participate. Both Jentsch and Freud discuss the uncanny effects

associated with the “bafflement regarding how the conditions of origin for the

achievement in question were brought about” (Jentsch 7). Jentsch also notes that a

sense of uncanniness can arise in darkness or semi-darkness, when where one is

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uncertain of the terrain. Most users are in a “state of darkness” when it comes to

understanding the hardware and software of SL (Jentsch 9).

2. Second, users can customize their avatar bodies using the SL “appearance

window”. Once the user selects the appearance window their avatar turns and faces

them. (Any other SL users in close proximity are aware that the user is editing their

avatar, as the words “Editing Avatar” hovers above it.) Within the appearance

window, the user is given the ability to customize nearly every aspect of their avatar,

from the density of their body to the color and thickness of their eyebrows. These

adjustments are effected by moving one of the hundreds of customizable “sliders” in

the appearance window. Dragging a slider slightly to the left or right will make

minimal adjustments in the avatar’s body; dragging it entirely to the left or the right

will result in either the disappearance of the trait associated with that slider, or a

wildly exaggerated version of that trait. Users can also upload and utilize their own

hair and skin textures from images already saved on their hard drives.

This “slider-self for the age of Techne” (Boellstorff), a radically

manipulatable, customizable and flexible self is, by virtue of the SL interface, always

a few mouse clicks away from uncannilly re-experiencing the original Lacanian

dialectic between fragmentariness and wholeness. This also allows us to return to

Hoffman’s “The Sandman” and interpret Nathaniel’s automaton lover Olympia

differently from Freud‘s reading of her as a symbol of narcissistic, compulsive love.

A Lacanian reading might emphasize Olympia as symbolic of the uncanny

fragmented body: she becomes an obsession for Nathaniel due to her automatic

responses, her mechanical demeanour and movements. Olympia, in this Lacanian

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reading, re-awakens Nathaniel to the bedrock of fragmentariness that constituted the

ego; thus she is an uncanny reflection of his undifferentiated state prior to, and

existing beneath, the dialectic established during the mirror stage. In SL, the

primordial discord, malaise, and lack of motor coordination stemming from the

neonatal months that forms the Innenwelt of the human organism are presented here

in a seemingly posthuman way.

Both Jentsch and Freud insist that the uncanniness of mechanical processes

provide:

the dark knowledge… that mechanical processes are taking

place in which he was previously used to regarding as a
unified psyche…For the epileptic attack of spasms reveals
the human body to the viewer – the body that under normal
circumstances is so meaningful, expedient, and unitary,
functioning according to the directions of his consciousness –
as an immensely complicated and delicate mechanism. This
is an important cause of the epileptic fit’s ability to produce
such a demonic effect on those who see it (Jentsch 14).

In SL, glitches regularly occur in the software that can cause avatars to drift out the

user’s control, and shoot mechanically out into the virtual world. When these glitches

occur, the user has very little control over their virtual-self. Control can usually only

be regained by teleporting to a new location or rebooting the SL client; without

turning to the authority of the teleport or the exit buttons, the user is left to anxiously

confront their alter-egos uncannily careening off into virtual space, outside of their

control.

From another, related, angle, we might consider Freud’s assertion that “loss of

teeth”, “beheading”, “baldness”, and “haircutting” are representations of castration in

dreams, as capable to telling us much about the customizability of the avatar body in
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the dreamlike world of SL (Freud, Interpretation 236). In this case, the SL appearance

window and the adjustments offered therein do not create new bodies without

reference to the user. Indeed, the control over things like “head shape”, “hair

patterns”, etc… can be thought of, as Freud suggests in his dream interpretations, as a

return to the Oedipal threat of castration.

3. Third, SL allows the user to detach/attach virtual limbs or appendages. In

instances where the user interacts with an avatar body that is entirely customized, this

process entails something akin to the amputation of a limb. A user would employ the

“detach” feature when, for example, traveling from a “mature”71 portion of SL where

they had been engaged in sexual activities requiring the attachment of genitalia, to a

“PG” portion of SL where uncovered genitals are not tolerated. A user can “re-attach”

any body part they choose by dragging that part from their “inventory” back on to

their avatar. Traveling to any of the adult themed sex areas or “orgy pits” in SL one

will encounter a number of lifelike sexual organs and phalluses, some capable of

realistic ejaculation, that can be attached and reattached at the user’s whim. [See

Figures 8 and 9] (During an academic conference I attended a participant teleported

in and had forgotten to detach his erect virtual phallus; other conference participants

were typing his name and trying to alert him, in a nice way, to “conceal” himself.)

This feature of genital attachment and detachment evokes something akin to symbolic

castration. This symbolic castration allows us to contextualize, in the constructed

world of SL, the narrative that began with our childhood recognition of sexual

difference.

71
There are ‘Mature’ and ‘PG’ (parental guidance) portions of SL where certain adult
behaviours are, and are not, tolerated.
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The ability to detach and re-attach body parts and appendages in SL presents

the user with a self that can appear coherent and stable, but is only one mouse click

away from a rehearsal of its primordial fear of castration at any given time. Looking

to “The Sandman” as an example, there are instances where the fragmented body,

something once familiar but since tucked away, becomes explicit and even

frightening. Thus, a Lacanian reading of Hoffman’s story suggests that Nathaniel’s

encounter with castration leads to the fear of the loss of bodily totality. As we

encounter our limbs unanchored from bodies or strangely juxtaposed organs,

interiority and exteriority coincide. Freud refers to the uncanniness of detached body

parts, “a severed head, a hand detached from the arm…feet that dance by themselves”

which evoke in us primal fears of castration and dismemberment (Freud, “Uncanny”).

In The Interpretation of Dreams, he explains that, in addition to “timeless” symbols of

castration (i.e. snakes, lizards etc…), new symbols, based on new technologies such

as the aircraft, are constantly coming to remind us of castration (Freud, Interpretation

236). As we noted earlier, Jentsch and Freud’s senses of the uncanny raise the theme

of mechanical motion. When the SL user experiences their self as machinic, mechanic

and fragmented, they encounter something familiar in an unexpected way; in the way

that Jentsch describes “old accounts of journeys [where] someone sat down in an

ancient forest on a tree trunk and… to the horror of the traveller, this trunk suddenly

began to move and showed itself to be a giant snake” (Jentsch 8).

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Figure 8 - Experimenting with body shape, size, sex and gender. (Personal Screenshot from
Second Life.)

Figure 9 - Attaching and detaching genitalia. (Personal Screenshot from Second Life.)
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Conclusion

There is something timely and untimely about the avatar, something described by

Freud in “The Uncanny” as both familiar and unfamiliar. The historically dated

apparatuses featured in Hoffman’s “The Sandman” do not hinder the modern reader

from gleaning the atemporal dimension it manifests in Nathaniel; peering out through

the brazier, the machinic clockwork of the automaton Olympia, Copolla’s lenses etc.,

is a reminder of the repression that inheres at the core of the self. In Concepts of the

Self, Anthony Elliot mentions the role that mirrors and reflective surfaces play in

constituting the Lacanian self. For Lacan, it is this “visual or optic genesis of

narcissism” that acts as our condition of selfhood (Elliott, Concepts 61). It is clear

that the originary encounter with the mirror or screen provides the infant with an

orthopaedic meconnaisance; the infant’s stable “I” is a misrecognition. Elliot

explains: “the mirror is, in fact, profoundly imaginary, because the consolingly

unified image it presents is diametrically opposed to the lack of physical co-

ordination that the child actually experiences. In a word, the mirror lies.”

Interestingly, our newest machines feature interactive screens and screen doubles.

But, as has been suggested, virtual worlds seem to be different kinds of mirrors; as a

result of the interface and properties of the medium, they can put us in touch with the

opposite of an orthopaedic meconnaisance. Thus, what we encounter is not

something that lies, but rather, we encounter something evocative of the fragmented

Real. The interactive screen of SL where we encounter our avatar(s) does not lie, and

this is what makes it uncanny. It provides us with an opportunity to comprehend our

interaction with the psychical residues of fragmentation remaining from a time of

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“dyadic unity”, prior to the distinction between self and (the maternal body of the

m)other (Elliott, Concepts 61). For this reason there is no better term than “uncanny”

to describe interactive virtual worlds and their avatar bodies, which enable new forms

of interaction and yet are simultaneously revelatory of an aspect of the user’s true

self.
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Chapter 3 - Objet Petit (a)vatar: SL Avatars and Lacan’s Lost Object

Introduction

This chapter draws primarily on concepts discussed in Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the

Pleasure Principle, Jacques Lacan’s “Function of the Field of Speech” and selections

from Lacan’s Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis in

order to further understand users’ constructions of, and interactions with, their Second

Life (SL) avatars. It argues the SL avatar provides an opportunity to catch a glimpse

of the user’s desire in action, rather than positioning the avatar as evocative of a post-

Oedipal, post-lack desiring machine, as other critics have done. Here I will argue the

avatar visualizes and renders explicit the lost object (what Lacan calls “objet petit a”),

the remainder of our entry into Culture/Language/the Symbolic inhering at the core of

the subject. The chapter does not argue that the avatar is identical with the subject,

but does claim that the avatar reflected back at the user in their “avatarial mirror”

(Rehak) bears striking similarities to Lacan’s theories about the structure of human

subjectivity. Through examples demonstrating the SL user's engagements with their

avatars, I discuss the relevancy Lacanian ideas have for understanding how the SL

avatar reflects, and offers the user the ability to engage with, the structure of their

subjectivity. The reader will meet Lacan’s ideas systematically, following the

development of Lacan’s thought, in order to explain aspects of SL avatarization.

Section 1 explores similarities between the SL avatar and Lacan’s idea of the

subject. It relates the avatar to his insistence that the subject goes through life

searching, albeit unsuccessfully, for a way to return to the sense of (illusory)

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wholeness and totality experienced in infancy. Insofar as the avatar is a reflection of

the user’s self, which can never reach completion or totality, it reflects the

impossibility of wholeness and totality back to the user. The avatar and the structure

of our desire can be likened to a constant wandering; our desire wanders from desired

object to desired object and the avatar “wanders” through different bodies, skins,

limbs and/or clothing. These are rich and diverse forms of wandering, however, not

lethargic slogs. These wanderings retain hope that it is possible to decipher the

mOther’s desire, and thus return to primordial wholeness and totality. The thesis

relates these ideas to prims (the building blocks of SL), the appearance window and

the ability to manipulate the avatar via sliders.

Section 2 moves from the structure of the avatar to how the user engages with

it. It deploys a key feature of the Lacanian subject, the-Name-of-the-Father, and

examines the role the father’s prohibitionary “no” has on the functioning of the

subject.72 In one sense, the Name-of-the-Father refers to linearity or orderliness.

Following this idea, SL (a non-linear medium) offers a space for users to engage in

highly linear, and teleological, activities. We will consider the creation of avatars to

be evocative of the Name-of-the-Father insofar as they represent an activity or body-

(re)construction that acknowledges our limitations and assuages our frustration at

being unable to return to the mythical state before we became aware of our alienation

from the mOther. Thus, it is possible to regard the constant attachments,

manipulations and detachments the user makes to their avatar body as an acting-out

of their predicament as subjects after the father’s castrating “no”. In this way, the

72
Lacan, as we shall see throughout the chapter, plays on the relationship between ‘nom’ and
‘non’, which is ‘no’ in French. Thus, it could be read ‘the No-of-the-Father’.
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avatar, much like the Lacanian subject, functions by being “represented by a signifier

for another signifier”, but never arriving at any finality. These ideas will be applied to

a discussion of the activities that occur in the virtual world, including an example of a

romantic relationship between two users.

Section 3 considers the avatar in the context of Lacan’s claim that the subject

can achieve a sense of the mOther through the “object petit a” within the functioning

of the Name-of-the-Father. The lower case (a) designates the “small other”, rather

than the “big Other” or mOther. The (a) designates the “rem(a)inder” of the mOther

that lingers despite our entrance into the Symbolic order initiated by the father’s “no”

(Fink, Lacanian). The (a) is pivotal as it acts as the object-cause of our desire and,

hence, inheres at the core of our subjectivity. The avatar, referred to throughout this

section as object petit (a)vatar, can be considered as externalizing, or rendering

explicit, the object-cause of desire: the (a)vatar is both the gap in the virtual world

towards which our desire inclines and the cause of our desire, as it is the avatar’s

body and form that is manipulated and played with. The section will feature a

discussion of the SL “economy of desire” where users buy and sell virtual objects

including body parts.

Section 4 develops the object petit (a)vatar by exploring Lacan’s claim that we

can become aware of the object (a) through an object that “gazes” back, reminding us

of the “lack” our subjectivity clings to. The avatar is one such object; the user is

confronted by a reflection that does not look back, but whose entire piecemeal

constitution “gazes” back, reminding the user of their lack and the (a), both initiated

by the fundamental (castration) fantasy. This helps shift understandings of the

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(a)vatar toward an all-too-human lacking-machine; the impetus behind the user’s

manipulation and (re)configuration of the avatar body being not solely to produce

new and newer productive assemblages, but rather, to mitigate and traverse the

fundamental (castration) fantasy. The ideas discussed in this section are applied to

discussions of Cooper’s Alter Ego as well as to an incident where I lost my SL body.

Section 5 briefly attends to the medium of SL. By suggesting avatars are hi-

tech objects capable of engaging with, and reflecting back to the user, something old.

We arrive at uncanny conclusions suggesting our engagements with virtual worlds do

not move us beyond Oedipal triangulation, but, rather, offer a reminder of the

continued centrality of the mOther and the Name-of-the-Father in the formation of the

human subject.

The concluding section bridges back to Chapter 2 by interrogating, and aiming

to complicate, postmodern readings of the avatar. This chapter argues that

avatarization carried out in virtual worlds does not deviate drastically from the way

Lacan claims we live our real lives; avatarization renders explicit certain obscured

aspects of our real life.

1. You.0: From the Imaginary to the Symbolic…

Whereas Chapter 2 was concerned primarily with outlining uncanny aspects of the

Real and Imaginary orders, it is by way of Lacan’s concept of the Symbolic order that

we will ultimately arrive at the “objet petit a”: the uncanny or “extimite” object par

excellence (Dolar 7). Chapter 2 concluded at the point where the infant has

crystallized his or her ideal-ego, setting in place an image of otherness that that will

remain with it for the rest of its adult life. But, for Lacan, psychical development does
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not cease with the formation of the ego; the mirror stage leaves the infant with desires

that must be mitigated. In other words, the infant encounters its desire for the mOther,

for wholeness, but begins to suspect that all is not right, something else is now

functioning or set in place. This something now in place is the Symbolic order and the

subject and the objet petit (a) are engendered alongside it.

To make clear the distinction between the ego (of the Imaginary order) and

the subject (of the Symbolic order) we remind ourselves that the “subject cannot be

reduced to its imaginary dimension, but the ego is a necessary imaginary function of

the subject” (Chiesa 13). That is, the subject is not equivalent to the ego, but the ego

is necessary for the formation of subjectivity. In “The Function of the Field of

Speech”, Lacan argues that the mirror stage is the pre-condition for the subject’s

symbolic identification (Chiesa 5). The ego “co-responds to the subject’s identifying

alienation in the Imaginary order, and, given its narcissistic-specular nature, should

not be confused with the subject of the unconscious” (Chiesa 9).

We are enrolled into the world we are born into through the mirror stage. But

how does this series of (mis)identifications enrol us in the world? And what does this

enrolling have to do with the engendering of the subject? These questions will be

explored through a discussion of how “desire”, “separation” and Saussurean

linguistics can help us better understand the SL avatar.

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1.1. Desire, Separation and the Subject

During the mirror stage, the infant’s ego arises as a “crystallization/sedimentation of

ideal images tantamount to a fixed/reified object with which the child learns to

identify with himself”. This learning is due to the parent or caregiver telling the baby:

“baby, that’s you!” (Fink, Lacanian 35). At this stage, we learn behaviours that are

dictated by our parents; for example we learn what it means to be a good or bad boy

or girl (Fink, Lacanian 35). We learn to internalize an imaginary production of

images of ourselves reflected back to us by Others (or mOthers) (Fink, Lacanian 84).

But, at this point the infant also begins to ask, using language, what the Other

wants of them. The infant is no longer at one with the mOther, but is now aware of

the mother, and is in possession of desires s/he does not yet understand. This is

horrifying to the infant because there is now a blank spot of uncertainty in what was

hitherto a period of non-individuation. It is at this point that desire is born in the

infant and the specular ego has another dimension to grapple with: specular

wholeness may not actually be what his or her mOther desires.

In this respect, Lacan’s seemingly puzzling statement that “man’s desire is to

be desired by the Other” or “man’s desire is the Other’s desire”, becomes easier to

understand (Fink, Clinical 59). From the outset of our psychical development, the

mOther’s desire has been internalized and adopted as our own. From the moment the

mOther speaks and confirms that the image in the mirror is our self, we have been

“deciphering” what the mOther wants from our ego (Fink, Clinical 54). In that

moment, we also learn that there is the possibility of a not-self, something other than

our own ego. We learn it is possible to err. We learn about doubt and the
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impossibility of knowing for certain that we have satisfied the mOther’s desire. This

impossibility becomes part of our own desire. As a result, our desire becomes

structured by a wandering, hopeful pursuit of the mOther’s desire. The logic of desire,

then, can be regarded as an “asymptotic progression that never succeeds”, a

“perpetual approach” that “never arrives and yet constantly promises to coincide with

that toward which it tends” (Lacan, Ecrits 251); (Ross). A fine example of asymptotic

desire would be the numerous love interests in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost

Time. In this work, Proust emphasizes that desire cannot be sated. Our desire does not

yearn for fulfilment, but only the desire to desire. In Proust’s novel, Swann’s desire

fades when he has obtained his desired love object; desire is rekindled when he is

provided the opportunity to seek out a new object of desire.

What Lacan refers to as “separation” designates an attempt by the child to

come to grips with the mOther’s desire: separation is the point at which the child

recognizes that there is no mother-child unity (Fink, Lacanian 50). The child’s sense

of lack (at the level of the mOther) is engendered when the mOther demonstrates to

her child that she too is incomplete and has the same endlessly wandering desires.

Now we have two lacks – the lack in the self and the lack in the mOther. Still

attempting to achieve a sense of totality and fullness, the child, attempts to “gain a

foothold within the divided parent” and does so by “lodging” his or her “lack of being

(manqué-a-etre) in that place where the Other was lacking” (Fink, Lacanian 54). So

separation is an attempt to fill the mOther’s lack. The child attempts to fill up the

(w)hole of the mOther’s lack, her whole space of desire, and, by making their desires

coincide, tries to be everything to her (Fink, Lacanian 55). But, desire can never end
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in satisfaction because it coincides with the Other’s desire which we can never know

in its totality.

Lacan reads this state of the Other’s impossible desire through Sausurrean

linguistics, which serves to de-biologize the Freudian ideas with which he is working.

He reads the encounter described above between self and other (infant and mOther)

as the submission to, and internalization of, language. Language here acts as the third

– triangulating – element of the Oedipus myth. Thus, the father (Laius) is read as the

linguistic Signifier. The Signifier (identified by the capitalized letter “S”) comes to

replace/symbolize/neutralize the Other’s (identified by the capitalized letter “A”)

desire. Without the Signifier we would not cease attempting to fill up the mOther’s

lack (incidentally, non-internalization of the Signifier is how Lacan defines

psychosis). The Lacanian formulation for the Signifier of the lack in the Other, or the

Signifier of the Other’s desire reads: . Once the child has internalized the

Signifier, he or she has undergone the process of subjectivization: the subject, then, is

the child with an intermediating third factor (in this case the Signifier/language),

which acts to ensure that he or she is not overwhelmed by the Other’s desire. Thus,

the Other (A[utre]) is “barred” and now reads .

1.1.1 Desire, Separation and the Subject: An Asymptotic ‘More you you’

The SL avatar can be characterized by an endless wandering: the virtual avatar

parallels the real desire of the user, which has crystallized out of the impossibility of

fulfilment. The terrain of the virtual world, replete with fantastical creatures and

vistas, is constructed of the same wandering desire and impossible fulfilment that
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constitute the real world. Both the virtual world, and the avatar that moves through it,

make the functioning of desire more evident than it is in the rush of our everyday

lives.

Aside from select roads and waterways controlled by Linden Labs, SL is

comprised of a terrain constructed and managed by its users. This means that nearly

everything, including the avatars themselves, have been controlled, chosen, and/or

manipulated by users. The ability to manipulate and design the world and the avatars

therein provides a virtual body to something that is psychical (or phantasmatic). SL

prim objects and avatars which have no inherent, biological or organic fullness or

completeness appear on the user’s monitor; they are bodies constructed by human

desire, and, as such, should be read as externalizations of the asymptotic nature of

that desire. It is no coincidence that one has to build objects out of prims, the raw

building blocks of the virtual world have no desire or tendencies of their own: prims

can be thought of as the fundamental virtual material that our desire manipulates; or

rather, a material capable of externalizing our phantasmatic desire. Comprised of this

prim material, SL objects have no inherent place, or organic wholeness; they are

always uncertain, always potentially something else. Nothing in SL ever feels

complete. The entire virtual world, avatars included, exist as explicitly manipulatable;

in SL the user forms an image-ideal, an ideal-ego, but is uncertain of the Other’s

desire and keeps on with his or her desirous wandering.

Recall that desire is “based upon lack – not on the lack of any identifiable

thing, but rather the lack of what Lacan calls “being”, “presence”, “the here and now”

(Silverman, “Subjectivity” 36). Each of us, however, expresses the “impossible non-
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object of desire” in our own particular way (Silverman “Subjectivity” 36). This

explains why SL is such a vibrant world of different objects and avatars. The

colourful and complex terrains and avatars can be regarded as comprised of

particular and unique expressions of this impossible non-object of desire. Flying

through the vast world, one might experience the sensation that they are surveying a

land built with human desire. While building, or sculpting prim-based objects in the

virtual world, a user is arguably working with the fundamental building blocks of

desire.

What we mean by the fundamental building blocks of human desire can be

elucidated by focusing on one of the most compelling features of SL avatars and

objects: their inherent incompleteness. Using my SL avatar, Dustin Mabellon, I often

chat with SL users about what they claim their avatar provides for them. Often the

conversation will turn to the idea there is no prototypical or normal SL avatar. A SL

friend once described this non-normalcy as the state of being “normal-plus”. She

claimed that this state of normal-plus exemplified a way of being that was “freer than

RL [Real Life]…freer from reality’s limits”. This sense of normal-plus is intriguing

because the majority of popular literature about SL describes participants who claim

to use the virtual world in order to become normal or to make up for some real-life

imperfection. The comment above, however, seems to indicate that achieving a point

of normality is not the SL avatar’s raison d’etre. The virtual space of SL makes

explicit that there is no normal to which to aspire, no way of ever being sated or

completed. “Being the real you”, my friend explained, is always already a “More You

you”. At the very moment the avatar becomes sufficient, it becomes insufficient. In
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this light, the virtual avatar could be described as a truly asymptotic object. A virtual

avatar offers the user the ability to interact with a self that perpetually approaches

finality or wholeness, but never arrives there. The avatar is never fixed: it has no

essence except for being “in essence”.

What does it mean to have a prosthesis, or double, that represents a “more

You you”? What does it mean to have the sense that the real me is an endlessly

desiring “more Me me”? In a Lacanian parlance, this suggests that the user is always

in excess; there is always a remainder that evades the Symbolic. The avatar is

something that represents the contingency that is integral to the self. Looking at my

avatar, Dustin Mabellon, I notice the pixilation; manipulating his body I recognize his

utter contingency. This helps me to reflect on the contradictions that comprise my

own subjectivity.73 Via the avatar, we have our desire standing before us, desire that

inheres at the core of what we are but would likely go unnoticed in real life. Thus, by

blurring the real, the imaginary and the code, the SL avatar, uncannily, gets at the

heart of us.

This section has argued that a constantly shifting avatar may be seen as the

harbinger of both a “remixed” self, intelligible against the horizon of so-called late

capitalism and against the horizon of Swann’s desire in Proust’s novel: an

impassioned building, which endlessly condenses and evaporates and can never be

73
For Žižek “the dialectic is simply a process for the production of contradictions; as
thesis generates antithesis in the progression of the dialectic. Žižek’s claim is that a
merger of Lacan and Hegel reveals that final resolution of the dialectic remains an
impossible dream. Just as the Lacanian individual subject has a permanent lack at the
centre of his or her being (desires that can never be met), so the Hegelian dialectic has
a contradiction. In neither case can the desired object be reached, and we are left with
the experience of difference and contingency instead. (Sim 85)
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sated. As one SL user, Davy Winder, explains: “I can relate to the concept of self as a

paper doll, a plaything to be shaped and coloured as the moment requires, and

discarded, crumpled and torn, when that moment passes” (Winder 117). Individuals

“keep moving and don’t commit [themselves]”, welcoming both fragmented physical

bodies and senses of self (Sennett, Corrosion qtd. in Elliot, Concepts 138). On the

other hand, avatarization can be understood as an externalization of something that

interacts with, but is not reducible to, the impact of one’s subjection to contingent

historical themes, practices and techniques.

1.2 The Subject of the Linguistic Chain

One of Lacan’s key sources for his idea of the subject is Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure

Principle. The book includes a significant scene in which one of Freud’s nephews

plays a game of hide and seek with a spool. This fort/da game is a repetition-

compulsion activity where the toddler re-enacts, using a spool, the loss of his mother;

oscillating between the sorrow of the “fort” (gone) and the joy of the “da” (there)

(Freud, Beyond 11). Freud interprets this fort/da game as the child’s way of mastering

his mother’s absence (the child’s mother has died). The toddler practices averting the

trauma produced by this predicament of recognizing he is distinct from his mother. In

order to articulate the lack he has recognized, he turns to the “concrete discourse [of

those] around him by reproducing more or less approximately in his Fort! and Da! the

terms he received from them” (Lacan, Ecrits 319).

For Lacan, the child’s play is best elucidated as a linguistic game; the child’s

subjectivity is produced through language. The Lacanian subject is a “function of the

signifying chain, a linguistic phenomenon produced by the Symbolic order which the
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infant enters in the originary moment of articulating the mother’s absence” (Ross).

The Symbolic order, in contrast to the Imaginary order, is entered into once we

recognize that we cannot survive in the Imaginary alone because it introduces us to

the notion of lack, which our ego has no means of articulating. For Lacan, this simple

game is an instance where the child becomes enrolled into discourse. More

specifically, the child’s acquisition of speech allows it to articulate its predicament

and serves as a means of successfully denying things that are obstructing it from its

prior position of constant and undifferentiated pleasure with the mOther. Here, the

child comes to learn that it can have some control over the presence and absence of

things insofar as this control is based in a linguistic game. The toddler begins to pick

up on the law(s) of the Other, accepting his or her “integration into the dichotomy of

phonemes, whose synchronic structure the existing language offers up for him to

assimilate” (Lacan, Ecrits 319). This logic of presence (da) and absence (fort) is at the

heart of language, and stands as a gateway into the Symbolic order.

In learning this language game the toddler is not only articulating the loss of

his mother, but is also expressing his recognition of the possibility of otherness. The

toddler recognizes that the spool is simply an object like any other, and that it, like all

others, can disappear and reappear. He also learns that he is not complete in and of

himself. This infantile activity has repercussions for the remainder of our psychical

life. Lacan explains: “…the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing,

and this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire” (Lacan,

Ecrits 319). These occultation games can be understood as a “killing” of the real
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mother and the replacement of her with a sound; it is the point where the recognition

of self is transformed into the signifier “I” (Lacan, Ecrits 262).

But why does this process result in the endless perpetuation of the subject’s

desire? According to the rules of Saussurean linguistics, there is no necessary link

between signifier and signified. A signifier only means insofar as we understand what

it does not mean. This play of signification attempts to adequately signify, but, if we

intend to search for totality, we will only experience frustration; signifiers lead only

to other signifiers in an infinite web of signification, and so, the subject, itself only a

signifier for another signifier, exists within the ceaseless flux of signification. The

Symbolic order provides human beings with language to express our existence, but

the Symbolic is inexhaustible and our entrance into it leaves us with a permanent

sensation of lack and a perpetual desire for some sort of coherence and stability. This

desire not only subsists on the grounds that language is a set of sliding signifiers, but

also because the totality we are after is itself a (mis)recognition.

The Lacanian subject is constituted through language. As in linguistics, this

means that the subject acts as a pronoun or a shifter - the least stable entity in

language since its “meaning is purely a function of the moment of its utterance”

(Sarup 53). Not only is it unstable as a pronoun, but there are also losses and

difficulties in the word itself. During the game of fort/da, the infant, as a subject,

comes to believe falsely in a point of certainty. The point of certainty is false because

words only come to mean by signifying what they are not.

Lacan refers to this process of meaning as the product of “points de capiton”

(Lacan, Ecrits 303). A point de capiton, translated as a “quilting” or “anchoring”

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point, can be thought of as equivalent to the stud or button that holds an upholstered

couch or piece of clothing together (Sarup 53); (Evans 149). Lacan uses the point de

capiton to refer to the punctuation at the end of a sentence that halts an otherwise

endless string of signifiers; it is the point in the signifying chain at which “the

signifier stops the endless movement of the signification” (Evans 149); (Lacan, Ecrits

303). Lacan is not claiming that there is no fixed meaning whatsoever; points de

capiton allow for stable moments of signification (Homer 42). But, while meaning is

temporarily produced or stopped, it is ultimately illusory. The Symbolic order

requires this illusory meaning in order to function, and to prevent the Symbolic

function from degrading and potentially causing psychosis.

The Lacanian subject comes to terms with the crisis of the mirror stage. The

subject is located in the system of the Symbolic replete with an endlessly circulating

series of signifiers. The concept of the “I” in this Symbolic system “…provides an

image of self, but only when selfhood concedes its meaning and definition to the

system of signification, of which the signifier “I” is a part” (Mansfield 40). Lingering

amidst this endless flux of signification, however, is the Imaginary recollection of

totality and wholeness that we experienced in our neo-natal months. The subject,

then, is ensnared in the promise of the Symbolic, the illusory hope that it can offer to

us the sense of satisfaction we felt upon recognizing our self in the mirror stage; the

Lacanian subject, then, is best described as “a subjectivized lack, not a lacking subject

or a subject of impossibility, even though he presupposes the assumption and

overcoming of a purely negative moment” (Chiesa 15). Until we reach the Symbolic,

where we can recognize the irredeemable split between subject and object and thus
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have something to explicitly desire, there is no ego or subject. It is not until our

recognition of a lack that our unconscious comes to be our explicit concern. Now we

can see more clearly how the subject is differentiated from the ego insofar as it is a

property of the Symbolic and located in the unconscious rather than being a property

of the specular Imaginary.

1.2.1 The Subject of the Linguistic Chain: The Avatar and the Point de
Capiton

Similarly to the Lacanian subject, the avatar is also “represented by a signifier for

another signifier” (Homer 45). The avatar body as a commingling of prim objects and

scripts, is not entirely without a fixed meaning. Indeed, users’ avatars mean much to

them, but these meanings are never final, or complete. The avatar is similar to the

Lacanian subject in that its properties (comprised of virtual polygons and scripts)

constantly slide around, but are held together at certain points that ensure the user is

able to stabilize some meaning (and identity) from and with them. The avatar is one

“point of convergence that enables everything that happens in this [cyber] discourse

to be situated retroactively and prospectively” (Lacan, Sem III 267-8).

For example, an avatar is a series of “particular” scripts, attachments and body

parts tied together in some coherent way, without regard to any “absolute referent”

(Fink, Clinical 94). In the SL appearance window one has the option to modify the

shape of a number of body parts. [See Figure 10] Selecting appearanceshapeeyes

provides the user with ten sliders, and describes the fact that they can slide from the

left to the right (or 0% of a slider effect to 100% of a slider effect). In the

appearanceshapeeyes tab the user can manipulate sliders for ‘eye size’ (from
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Figure 10 - Example of Sliders in the Appearance Window. (Personal Screenshot from

Second Life)
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‘beady’ to ‘anime’), ‘eye opening’ (from ‘narrow’ to ‘wide), ‘eye spacing’ (from

‘close-set’ to ‘far set’), ‘outer eye corner’ (from ‘corner down’ to ‘corner up’, ‘eye

depth’ (from ‘sunken eyes’ to ‘bugged eyes’), ‘upper eyelid fold’ (from ‘uncreased’

to ‘creased’), ‘eye bags’ (from ‘smooth’ to ‘baggy’), puffy eyelids (from ‘flat’ to

‘puffy’), eyelash length (from ‘short’ to ‘long’), eye pop (from ‘pop left eye’ to ‘pop

right eye’). Moving close to either pole (0% or 100%) creates wildly exaggerated

features.

Dustin Mabellon’s average ‘eye shape’ ranges between 43% and 54% on the

sliders. While I interact with my shifting avatar each time I manipulate it, I do not

verge closer to re-presenting something actual; rather, each constellation of virtual

signifiers presents me with a new avatar body. Davy Winder describes his own avatar

in Being Virtual: “…I did not regain a lost identity, even if long buried parts of my

personality did make the odd appearance every now and then. I created an entirely

new one” (Winder 119).

The fact that each avatar constellation is new and unique does not mean that it

is meaningless. The avatar is not a haphazard constellation of virtual polygons and

scripts but is anchored at various points, constraining the polygons and scripts from

spilling wildly and meaninglessly out into the virtual world. Thus, Lacan’s

description of the point de capiton is a useful tool for contemplating the avatar body:

“(a)t best the [avatar] arrest[s] the movement of [the user’s] desire for a time before
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the tyranny of the symbolic order reasserts itself, the deep connection is broken, and

the…[user]…is forced to move on in quest of another, more lasting gratification.”74

In this regard, it is understandable that advertisers are currently using virtual

worlds and social networks, both of which require the use of an avatar, to advertise

cosmetic plastic surgery. One such advertisement, currently on the social network site

Facebook, presents an image of two feminine faces with pink lips, protruding out of

what looks like the sands of an elemental desert. [See Figure 11]

Figure 11 – Image beside an advertisement for cosmetic surgery copied from my

Facebook homepage.

The faces resemble mountains or rock formations, which weather and/or human

processes have chipped away at or engineered over time. In the advertisement, the

faces appeared to be something malleable; they are presented as an undisturbed block

of granite for an artist to work with in order to actualize an idea that hitherto was a

mere figment. A short sentence below the “faces” reads: “Facial Plastic Surgeon: If

you’ve been considering plastic surgery, book a complimentary consult [sic] with Dr.
74
The sentence originally reads: “At best they arrest the movement of desire for a time before
the tyranny of the symbolic order reasserts itself, the deep connection is broken, and the subject
is forced to move on in quest of another, more lasting gratification.” (Ross)
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X to discuss your ideas and needs” [Emphasis added]. The term “need” occurs here

almost as an afterthought. Here, advertisers have recognized they have a set of

potential consumers insofar as Facebook and Second Life avatarization itself

represents working with bodies whose impetus is insatiable desire rather than satiable

need.

2. Avatars and the Name-of-the-Father

What does the SL user do with these avatar bodies? The studies discussed in Chapter

1 of the “Human” categorization of the avatar, such as Heider, Yee and Bailensen,

Messinger et al., Varvelo et al., and Boellstorff, provide excellent starting points for

this question. These studies draw attention to the ways that being virtual and being

real or actual are not opposites. One might add that, while virtual worlds are not

identical to everyday reality, everyday reality is not immune to virtual reality. For

instance, while it is true that one can be whatever they desire in the virtual world,

users tend to take predictable forms, usually adopting an avatar close (physically and

psychologically) to themselves but with slight improvements (Yee and Bailenson).

Marshall Mcluhan’s idea that electronic media create an “acoustic/non-linear” space

is germane here; the virtual world does appear to have a non-linear form, however

upon investigation, highly linear activities occur there. Linearity stamps a certain

order, or authority, on non-linear environments. One might take, as an analogy, that

something like space travel entails the cold of infinite space, free from the pull of

gravity or directionality, and the keen sense of finitude, mass, up and down that

astronauts bring with them from earth. While it is possible to create situations and

games within SL that exceed the physical possibilities of real life, a trip to the day’s
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SL hotspots would most likely involve primarily linear activities: watching tai chi in

a park, trying not to disturb a couple dancing at an outdoor ballroom, checking out a

group gathering to mourn the passing of Michael Jackson, and or trying out a fishing

game. All of these activities have a set routine and purpose. Sex in the virtual world

often “mimics the most loving flavors of sex in the offline world, or the blandest.

Sometimes it begins as Sim love and later becomes the kind of relationships any of us

could recognize from our own, offline lives” (Ludlow and Wallace 132). One way of

understanding the persistence of this linear activity in a non-linear medium, involves

recognizing that the Lacanian Name-of-the-Father, a fundamental linear property of

the Lacanian subject, is active in the non-linear virtual world.

What exactly is the Name-of-the-Father? Following the mirror stage, the

infant is cut off from the mother, although he or she is not entirely removed from

mOtherness; while the hope of returning to the Other is nullified, traces of otherness

linger. Entering the Symbolic world of the Signifier does not eliminate the Real

mOther, but masks it. Lacan uses the term “jouissance” to describe the gratification

and satisfaction that we lost upon being “castrated” by language. Following

castration, the ability to achieve satisfaction appears “excessive, overwhelming and

disgusting”, but does not cease to be fascinating (Fink, Lacanian xii). Similar to the

infant engaged in the Freudian game of fort/da, the Lacanian subject is a “fixation, a

symptom, a repetitive way of “getting off’ and obtaining jouissance” (Fink, Lacanian

xii). Our desire, as Subjects, to fill in the mOther’s lack with our own lack (that is

, with ) and obtain jouissance can only be carried out from a distance; the

Signifier allows us to derive jouissance from from a distance, without attempting

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to entirely fill it in. Thus, as Bruce Fink argues, the subject is the outcome of the

Oedipus complex whereby the child finally accepts the father’s threat and is kicked

out of the mOther (Fink, Lacanian 58). As in the Oedipus myth, the father acts as a

barrier to the child’s desire to fill in the (w)hole of its mOther, or, in less familial

terms, it acts as a barrier to encountering the unmediated Real as it exists prior to

language and the Signifier. The Signifier leaves behind a gap between the mOther’s

and the child’s desire.

In Seminar XVII, Lacan explains that the Signifier (or Phallus) acts as

something like a crowbar [|] that stands in the midst of the mOther’s open “alligator”

jaws of desire [<] (Lacan, Sem XVII 129 qtd. in Fink, Lacanian 55-56). The Signifier

[|] acts to resolve fears of the collapsing jaws of desire [<], neutralizing the mOther’s

desire that threatens to engulf the child. It is the Signifier (or Oedipal Phallus) that

protects us from sleeping with our mothers, a “potentially dangerous dyadic situation”

(Lacan, Ecrits 200 in Fink, Subject 56-67). Thus, the Name-of-the-Father, comes to

stand over the mOther’s desire (Name/Desire). The Father’s Name (which Lacan

puns as rhyming in French with “non” [non-nom])75, no, saying, prohibition, the

phallus, the Signifier of desire , and the [|] are all terms for that which comes to

mediate the mOther’s desire; they allow us to symbolize it, transform it into

75
Lacan refers to the Name-of-the-Father as the Oedipal father’s propitiatory “no” that we
come to recognize upon our entrance into the Symbolic. (Lacan, Ecrits 230) For Freud, the
penis exists as an object that males constantly strive to own and control, for they are aware that
“their possession of the penis is not certain”. (Mansfield 47) This unstable anxiousness
regarding the condition of the penis governs masculine subjectivity. Lacan certainly resumes
this Oedipal story, however he stages it not in the physiological but the linguistic body. It is not
control over the penis that governs the subject’s inner life, but the pursuit of an “ideal moment
of language use that draws him ever on into field of language, with the ever-postponed but
ever-renewed hope of a complete and efficient image of himself appearing to stabilize his
subjectivity”. (Mansfield 48) Thus, the biologistic Freduian penis is understood to be the
linguistic Name-of-the-Father.
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signifiers, and, thereby, create a rift in the mother-child unity, producing a space in

which the child can breathe easy (Fink, Lacanian 57).

Lacan’s concept of the Name-of-the-Father has already been fruitfully brought

to media studies. Marc Santos and Sarah White’s essay “Playing with Ourselves: A

Psychoanalytic Investigation of Resident Evil and Silent Hill” explores the idea that

the Signifier or Name-of-the-Father can be located in the activities that occur within,

or using, virtual technologies (such as video games). Santos and White argue that

horror themed video games allow the user to “engage…the underlying structures of

our psychology” such as the “Lacanian Real” from a safe distance (Santos and White

69). The game Resident Evil pays particular attention to eyes and gazing, in a way

that exposes the “fragility of both our subjectivity and the symbolic order (that which

founds subjectivity)…” (Santos and White 70). They emphasize, for example, the

utterly human eyes of the undead cannibalistic zombies, which:

acknowledge us not as another subject, nor even a fantasy

screen (as the petit object a), but as a thing to be
consumed. The human eyes on the hideously monstrous
face horrify us because they reflect a repressed aspect of
our desire back at us – the deep repressed desire for
nihilistic assimilation, the desire to be reunited with the
maternal body, to be consumed (literally in this case) by
the other (Santos and White 71).

The Resident Evil player attacks zombies and creatures that threaten to annihilate its

self-stability, thereby “preserv[ing] the symbolic order” (Santos and White 72).

The authors compellingly argue that both the games Silent Hill and Resident

Evil, “position the player as the defender of subjectivity [upholders of the Symbolic

Order]; a player vanquishes monsters and clarifies ambiguities which threaten not

only the stability of the player’s subjectivity, but also the psycho-social order
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founding his or her subjectivity” (Santos and White 70). These virtual horror-survival

games, which rely on third-person points of view similar to SL, can be seen as

instances where the player unravels a plot littered with “moaning abjections

threatening the symbolic order” that culminates in a climactic battle positioning the

player “against all-powerful phallic m(others), an ultimate manifestation of the Other

that threatens our subjectivity and the stability of the symbolic order” (Santos and

White 72). The final battle in Resident Evil, for example, requires a weapon, tellingly

called the “linear launcher”, to defeat the final maternally-themed monster, “further

illustrating how we must retain order, wield the paternal phallus that maintains the

Oedipal order, and thus, emerge victorious from this encounter with the Real” (Santos

and White 73). The narrative and conclusion of the game Silent Hill is also evocative

of the process of Oedipalization, where “following the Law of the Father, we provide

a fetishized coherence and illusory linearity” (Santos and White 70). According to

Santos and White, the final villain in Silent Hill, “represents the threat of the pre-

Oedipal maternal body” whom the player must destroy to “preserve not only her own

subjectivity but also the symbolic culture itself” (Santos and White 74). Similar to the

argument that something exists beneath/beyond the clothing, hair and skin shops,

dance clubs, and prim sculpting schools in SL, Santos and White insist that:

…these games are more than simply defeating monsters

and shooting ‘bad guys’ – the ‘evil’ we encounter…
represents the fragility and duality of our own psyches:
the call of the Real that constantly threatens our own
subjectivity. The artificially constructed space of the
video game becomes a ‘safe space’ in which we can
indulge in festishistic ‘play’ with a simulation of the Real
(Santos and White 77).
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Similarly, one could read SL as a non-linear space where the user practices being

linear. As noted in Chapter 1, many scholarly studies of SL – particularly those found

in the “Human Avatar” category – emphasize the banality and orderliness of the

virtual world. There is an obvious disjuncture between the possibility of being

virtually anything and the fact that many users are concerned with being something

real (or something close to it). One could argue, then, that users turn to SL in order to

contain their anxieties about dyadic unity; rather than immersing themselves in the

jouissance of being whoever they want to be online, they act in accordance with the

Name-of-the-Father. Thus, activity in the virtual world falls in line with what Lacan

refers to as “normal neurotic” behaviour that acts in accordance with the Father’s

Name. In much SL behaviour avatars appear to be used for similar kinds of activities

that characterize real life; they seem banal, orderly, and linear. From the standpoint of

the Name-of-the-Father, this linearity could be considered as an attempt to obtain

jouissance in a virtual world whose avatars and environment are asymptotic and

unstable. What these linear activities do is place the Signifier in the Other’s

threatening jaws in such a way that the subject (the user) can obtain some small sense

of otherness. In order to avoid losing herself in the incompleteness of the virtual, the

user preserves the symbolic order. SL users foster long-term romances in-world and

can even be married by a virtual priest. Here, the virtual world is used for a

straightforward game of “get[ting] closer to their object of affection” (Winder 58).

These are instances where something, such as romantic love, which, in keeping with

Plato’s Symposium is resolutely human, linear, and has a clear goal, makes its way

into a space without inherent teleology and linearity.

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In Being Virtual, Winder recounts the details of one such SL relationship

which resulted in marriage between two users. Rhonda, a 38 year old in a troubled

relationship, is introduced to SL. She spends some time experimenting with the

world, trying at first to create an avatar that looks like herself before finally searching

for a “new look”:

I spent the first week in SL trying to figure out what there

was to do and see. I found out that I could go shopping
for things for my avatar to wear… What I [her avatar]
ended up with was a very short, athletic build character,
with small breasts and a big butt, everything that was
nothing like me in real life. I gave her black hair and pale
white skin the colour of a sheet of printer paper. Her body
had tribal tattoos all over it and her lips were full and
deep red. I loved looking at her. The contrast was
beautiful. She only ever wore red, white or black. I
sculpted a beautiful body for her and purchased my hair,
skin, clothing, shoes and jewellery (Winder 63).

In order to be able to afford to keep shaping her avatar, Rhonda begun entering virtual

world dance competitions. At one of these dance competitions Rhonda’s avatar, Heart

Wishbringer, met Joe Stravinsky. Rhonda describes her first time meeting Joe, a 7’9

vampire:

I had never seen anything like it before. He was amazing

to look at, the tallest avatar I ever had seen. The first
thing I noticed was his boots…better than any boots I had
ever seen on a man yet. I glanced up and he wore tight
shiny black leather pants and his skin was almost as white
as mine… stark white, his chest was almost bare except
for the wet t-shirt he had on that was stark white again
and his eyes had dark black circles around them, his eyes
were red snake eyes on black, his lips were black and he
had vampire fangs and his hair was a very long beautiful
white Mohawk. I just sat there in awe. This man was
artistic, his avatar was original and unique. Red, White,
Black… my lips turned upwards into an evil smile as I
clicked on him to read his profile (Winder 66).
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One clearly gets the sense that Rhonda recognizes Joe’s “artistic” nature. She

recognizes that he is an assemblage of red snake eyes, black lips, vampire fangs et

cetera. Winder discusses the banal, soap-opera like, quality of their ensuing

relationship. The users sent each other comments such as “I need you to love me, and

I want you to need me” and search for their “better half” in a space of impossible

fulfillment (Winder 71). This is something SL shares with real life: the user-as-avatar

has to tarry with the same attempts to obtain jouissance as the real user does. When

Rhonda exclaims “Why was it that we were making each other feel so whole, and so

happy? Why was it that the love we felt here in Second Life felt so real and was so

all encompassing?” (Winder 72). We note that this is the same language as one might

use in the real world. Despite the fact that one can claim to be anything, or anyone

they want in SL, users still seem to be looking for a better half, something, or

someone to make them feel complete, or, evoking Arisophanes’ myth in Plato’s

Symposium, whole. As in real life, all the subject can wish for is a temporary

jouissance, a slight sensation of the Real, insofar as it is achieved through the

linearity, and law, of the Signifier. Virtual worlds do not bypass the inertia of the

user’s subjectivity; the user’s first life follows them into their digital second life. As

Bob Rehak suggests: “The worlds we create …and the avatarial bodies through which

we experience them seem destined to mirror not only our wholeness, but our lack of

it” (Rehak 125).

Likewise, while the modification of bodies and identities is often associated

with the breakdown of authority, it can be understood as precisely the opposite. From

this standpoint SL avatar body modification acts out of the Name-of-the-Father;

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rather than being anybody or anything they desire the user recognizes that they are

perpetually nobody, playing with a self that is always incomplete and partial. The

endless malleability of the avatar is thus a testament to the father’s law. If you get too

close to believing you can be what you want in cyberspace, the threat of castration

creeps in. To be who you want and find no teleological satiety is to recognize, and

work with, the father’s castrating “no”. What we do in SL is act out the Father’s

name. Rather than a realm of psychosis or radical freedom, SL involves becoming

aware of the neurosis, alienation, and prohibited jouissance that characterize ‘normal’

subjectivity.

3. Functioning of the Objet Petit (a)vatar

Davy Winder, author of Being Virtual, describes his sense of virtual selfhood:

…you can think of my personalities in terms of clothing,

and I was simply trying on as many different styles to see
which ones fitted, which suited me best of all. Of course,
the truth is that there was no ‘best fit’ as it turned out. I
was destined to become the sum of my parts, a composite
personality: a little bit from here, a little bit from there
(Winder 223).

Winder’s trying on of different styles, and his recognition that there was no “best fit”

echoes my own experience with my SL avatar, Dustin Mabellon. My avatar only

barely and provisionally covers the fact that, in SL, I have no organic or whole

identity. Beneath the contingent constellation of body parts, clothing and skins that

comprises my virtual self is an endlessly collapsing sinkhole,76 fading in and out of

76
The sliding “signifiers” that comprise my avatar body slide around this sinkhole similarly to
the way that, following Einstein’s theory of relativity, a planet’s orbit is determined by the
degree to which a larger body (such as a sun) is responsible for warping the fabric of space into
a bowl shape.
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being. This perpetually incomplete aspect of the avatar causes it to resemble a series

of sliding “signifiers”. To better understand this feature of the avatar, let us turn to

another aspect of the Lacanian subject: the objet petit a.77

Once the subject experiences the mOther through the signifier, as , it’s

sense of the unification between mother and child is experienced as prohibited

jouissance.78 After the letter (the Signifier), anything resembling the mother-child

unity is only achievable by (second order79) jouissance; this Lacan equates with the

objet petit (a). This (a), which stands for the little Autre80 or Other, stands for the

rem(a)inder of lost jouissance (Fink, Clinical 66). The (a), then, refers to the leftover

of the Real in the Symbolic. In the conclusion to Seminar XI, Lacan writes that,

“(t)his a is presented precisely, in the field of the mirage of the narcissistic function of

desire, as the object that cannot be swallowed, as it were, which remains stuck in the

gullet of the signifier” (Lacan, Sem XI 270).

We once had a sense of being unified with the Other (Autre), a sense of

imaginary completion which, during the mirror stage, came from the world outside

and other subjects (Mansfield 46). Once the mirror stage is complete, however, we

are barred from the Other and must seek small (o)bjects that we mistake for the

(O)ther. In Lacan’s own words, the a “fills the gap constituted by the inaugural

division of the subject” (Lacan, Ecrits 270).

77
Lacan explains the relationship between the (a) and the subject as follows: “…the interest the
subject takes in his own split is bound up with that which determines it – namely, a privileged
object, which has emerged from some primal separation, from some self-mutilation induced by
the very approach of the real, whose name, in our algebra, is the objet a.” (Lacan, Sem XI 83)
78
Jouissance, Fink explains, demands the eroticizing power of prohibition (Fink, Clinical 67).
79
Fink designates jouissance before the letter as J1 and jouissance after the letter as J2.
80
“Autre” in French is “Other” in English
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Let us be clear that the autre is not the Autre; the other is not the Other. The

(a)utre is not the mOther, to which we are forever barred by the Signifier, but the

sense of mOtherness that the Signifier leaves us with. Thus, it is not an object we can

ever attain; it is the sense of otherness that haunts our desire. We strive compulsively

toward the a, and, simultaneously, are never at ease with what we possess because it

reminds us of our lost plenitude (Ross). We go from one a to another throughout our

life; they substitute for the “huge, miraculous Other, hovering on the horizon of

human possibility” - the lure of complete satisfaction and totality (Mansfield). Desire

has no object as such, and is caused, or brought into being, by the (a) (Lacan, Ecrits

7-50 qtd. in Fink, Lacanian 91). The (a), then, is the object-cause of desire (Homer

73). As we noted above, desire seeks only its own furtherance. We desire to desire;

we do not, ultimately, desire any particular object. This left over of the Real acts as a

void, or abyss, at the core of the subject’s being that the subject constantly tries to fill

(Homer 87). Because of the (a), we have the sensation that something is lacking or

missing from our lives.

The (a) functions as both object and cause of desire. As cause it is a void or

gap of the Real that inheres at the core of the subject (and around which the Symbolic

order is structured). As object it is “whatever momentarily fills that gap in our

Symbolic reality” (Homer 88):

[T]he object (a) is not part of the signifying chain; it is a

hole in that chain. It is a hole in the field of
representation, but does not simply ruin representation. It
mends it as it ruins it. It both produces a hole, and is what
comes to the place of lack to cover it over (Homer 87).
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The (a) differs from the signifying chain because it is ultimately “non-signified” or

the “beyond-of-the-signified” and has the status of das ding (“the Freudian Thing”);

the signifying chain circles around it (Fink, Lacanian 95). The (a) “resist[s]

symbolization, and thus resists the dialectization characteristic of the Symbolic Order,

in which, one thing can be substituted for another...” (Fink, Lacanian 92). Mladen

Dolar suggests that the (a) is an instance, par excellence, of the uncanny, where the

Real erupts into the “homely” and we can comprehend the rem(a)inder that haunts

real-ity (Dolar 13). Fink defines the (a) as the “residue of symbolization, the real (r2)

that remains, insists, ex-sists after, or despite, symbolization – as traumatic cause

interrupting the smooth functioning of the law and the automatic functioning of the

Symbolic chain” (Fink, Lacanian 83).

Thus far we have encountered the ego (of the Imaginary) and the unconscious

(the desire of the Symbolic mOther, or ) that operate within us. We are aware that

the mOther is lacking ( ) and the intermediating S(ignifier) has produced a

remainder (a). Thus, Lacan takes the and places it in relation to (symbolized by )

the (a). This reads as: . Insofar as it is in relation to (a), the insatiable object-

cause of desire, the Lacanian ubject acts as a gap in the signifying chain. Lacan

explains that the subject is akin to an empty set {0}, meaning not that it is without

ontological status, but that it is qualified as empty, a “spatial metaphor implying that

it could alternatively be full” (Fink, Lacanian 52). refers to the subject fading

in and out of being in relation to the objet (a), the “phantasmatic partner” that ever

arouses the subject’s desire. When something attempts to cover that object-cause, the
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subject acquires some being. Being is never solid, but is comprised of “metonymic

slippage from one object to the next in accordance with the paternal” phallus/signifier

that now mediates real-ity (Fink, Subject 91).

Rather than seeking to fill the (w)hole of the with the lack in the , the

subject’s desire takes on a new role, the (a) (Fink, Lacanian 58).81 This occurs the

moment the child recognizes that the A is in fact . Having to engage with Real-ity,

(the Real mediated through the Signifier) is to engage with a mediated Otherness, the

(a). Put differently, the objet (a) can be thought of as a rem(a)inder of the Other that

allows the subject to sustain him or her self as a “being of desire” (Fink, Lacanian

61).

It is easy to mistake something such as fantasy for the object of desire, but

fantasy for Lacan, is the setting, rather than the object, of desire (Homer, Lacan 87). It

is fantasy that supports our objectless desire. Through fantasy the subject “attempts to

sustain the illusion of unity with the Other and ignore his or her own division.

Although the desire of the Other always exceeds or escapes the subject, there

nevertheless remains something that the subject can recover and thus sustains him or

herself. This something is the objet a (Homer 87).82

81
We have seen the Other go from (A) to to (a) in Lacan’s algebra
82
Bridging back to the introduction, I hope I have conveyed that Lacan’s sense of the subject
(as interpreted by Fink and Žižek) differs tremendously from the Foucauldian one (Žižek,
Sublime 197). Post-Structualism works with “subject positions” and the subject is reduced to
subjectivation, while the Lacanian subject is a divided subject, that can be understood as a
subtraction of “all the richness of the different modes of subjectivation, all the fullness of
experience present in the way the individuals are ‘living’ their subject positions” (Žižek,
Sublime 197). This subtraction reveals the Lacanian subject as an “empty place”…the “original
void”…this “lack of symbolic structure”. The Lacanian subject, Žižek clarifies “is therefore to
be strictly opposed to the effect of subjectivation: what the subjectivation masks is not a pre- or
 146

The construction and manipulation of avatars render explicit our constant

striving towards the (a) and the spectre of plenitude that propels this endless striving.

Within SL the user has no proscribed Edenic form to return to. There is no final (or

teleological) completion; the idea itself is senseless in the context of SL. So, SL

avatarization can be thought of as a technique that engages the object-cause of our

desire.

In his paper “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar” Bob Rehak

claims that “avatars reduplicate and render in visible form their players’ actions –

they complete an arc of desire” (Rehak 107). Avatars, or “avatarial mirrors” as he

refers to them, reflect back the “desired and resented lost object, existing in endless

cycles of renunciation and reclamation” and create a spectral-participatory

relationship with onscreen traces of self (Rehak 107, 111). The user engages – via

their avatar – with its lack, seeking to consume new and newer virtual objects.

The SL avatar tends to take the form of something animate. Users do not tend

to encounter avatars of objects such as the monolith from the film 2001: A Space

Odyssey. Avatars usually resemble some organism, whether it is the likeness of a

cybernetic or biological organism. If one encounters an avatar, for example, of a

cellular phone, it will likely be clear that the cellular phone is animate – it will likely

have a mouth, eyes, and/or some other animate traits. Rehak identifies Pac Man

trans-subjective process of writing but a lack in the structrure, a lack which is the subject.”
(Žižek, Sublime 197) The Lacanian subject goes through life attempting to find “a signifier that
would be ‘its own’: the failure of its representation is its positive condition”. The subject tries
to articulate itself in a signifying representation; the representation fails; instead of a richness
we have a lack, and this void opened by the failure is the subject of the signifier…the subject of
the signifier is a retroactive effect of the failure of its own representation; that is why the failure
of representation is the only way to represent it adequately.” (Žižek, Sublime 198). A sustained
discussion can be found in Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject.
 147

(1980) as featuring one of the first organic avatars. Prior to Pac Man, games were

primarily focused on inorganic spaceships and missile launchers that would, anally,

expel missiles or rockets. For Rehak, the Pac Man avatar, which consumes through

his fleshy mouth rather than expels. In this sense, Pac Man is a

semiotically collapsed subject (a thing that eats) with

object (a thing that is eaten) to constitute a closed system
of desire. Equally important, Pac Man’s body acquires its
signification through a missing part (“the shape that was
left”); Pac-Man (is) recognizable as Pac-Man because of
what (is) excluded from its form. This pie-slice absence
also structure(s) Pac-Man’s agency within the game, its
ceaseless voracity. … Pac-Man was never at rest within
its infinite progression of mazes, consuming dots – his
own objets a, frail reflections, perhaps, of an eternally
missing slice (Rehak 115).

Since the 1980s, virtual games have evolved toward more complex instances of this

development, through Wolfenstein 3D (1992), Quake (1996) and now into virtual

worlds such as SL. Here avatars became explicitly organic and humanoid,

“confront[ing] players with detailed and lifelike ‘doubles’” (Rehak 118). Virtual

worlds such as SL utilize more complex ways of creating closed systems of desire for

increasingly organic doubles.

The SL avatar is far more organic than the consuming blob Pac Man. Whereas

the user has to proceed by analogy to understand that Pac Man plays with its desire,

playing with one’s SL alter-ego, which may or may not resemble the user, renders

that desire far more explicit. The SL user has a deeper relationship to their avatar’s

“lack of being”, than does the Pac Man manipulator. Not only is the SL user

responsible for tending to the consumption of the lack, they are confronted with the

fact that their initial sense of totality is itself an illusion. One does not question the
 148

form of Pac Man: he is a circle with a slice removed who appears once a quarter is

popped into the arcade machine. The user engagement with their SL avatar, however,

by continually questioning and constructing its form. Through the avatars of virtual

worlds such as SL, users come to recognize the terrible lack and instability at the

foundation of what and who they are.

3.1. Economies of Desire

In SL shops one can purchase everything from intricately detailed houses, to avatar

animations, to jewelry, plants and vegetation. But the most common SL shops cater to

the purchase and sale of avatar skins, clothing, animations, hair, etc…83 We might

consider this design, purchase and sale of scripts, clothing, and body parts in SL as an

economy of desire.

The phrase “economy of desire” has at least two meanings. One meaning

refers to the economic management of the user’s desire: the production, development

and management of the user’s subjective desire. Another meaning of the phrase

“economy of desire” pertains to the production, development, and management of

human desire in virtual worlds for profit in both real and virtual world currencies. The

first sense pertains to the effect that SL avatarization has on an economy of subjective

83
As this is not a thesis, or chapter, devoted to the specifics of the SL economy interested
readers may turn to Chapter 8 ‘The Fun Economy’ in Edward Castronova’s Exodus to the
Virtual World as well as Chapter 8 ‘Political Economy’ of Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in
SL. Likewise it seems obligatory, in the literature on SL, to want to shock the reader about a
few individuals – such as Anshe Chung – who have made tremendous sums of money in SL,
but while these individuals, themselves few and far between, are the subject of an interesting
study, they offer very little to our study (Ludlow and Wallace 77); (Hof).
 149

Figure 12 – Skin Theft! (Personal Screenshot from Second Life.)

 150

desire, the second pertains to the form that this economy of subjective desire has

taken; it has been rendered commensurate with the larger real-world financial market.

As has been demonstrated throughout this thesis, SL avatarization can be

understood as engaging with some interior psychical dimension of the human being.84

Through his or her avatar(s), the user manages his or her psychic resources in

economic terms, playing-out their endless (mis)recognition and interacting with the

remainder(s), the excess of the Real, leftover from their entry into the Symbolic.

Places, people and things in-world reflect back to the user the absence which

structures their subjectivity. Through avatars, users manage their subjective desire.

The purchase and sale of new and newer bodies and prostheses for asymptotic avatars

follows the Lacanian formulation .

A recent advertisement on a leading bit torrent site depicts a photograph of a

woman’s face next to a cartoonish 3D model of his face. Beneath the juxtaposed faces

reads: “Click here to see yourself as a cartoon!” [See Figure 13]

Why might this ability, so similar to SL avatarization, be so appealing to the

user? On one hand it could be lamented as a sign of the withering of the real body

into a sterile digital space, on the other hand it could be celebrated as offering the user

the ability to experiment with their body and try out new ones. But, what if there is

another option - namely that the cartoon self (and the ability to pay in order to

84
This distinction may be better understood by returning to the etymological root of the term
“economy”, the Greek term “Oikonemen”. “Oikonemen” designates “one who manages a
household”: “Oikos” designates “house” and “Nemen” designates ‘to deal out/to manage’. Our
first usage pertains to the affairs of the “oikos” (house), while the second usage pertains to the
‘nemen’ (management) of the house. This can also be understood in the dual sense of
“economic” as pertaining to both (a) the “management of a household or of private affairs, esp.
with reference to monetary means”, and (b) the “management of the affairs of a community,
etc., with reference to income, expenditures, the development of resources et cetera.
 151

Figure 13 – “Cartoonify Yourself” and “A Cartoon You?” (Personal Screenshot from

Facebook)
 152

“cartoonify yourself”) is so appealing and lucrative because it exposes the deep core

of human subjectivity insofar as it reflects a virtual self constantly unfixed and

incomplete? Following this option, the ability to juxtapose the real user with their

three dimensional avatar does not produce either an optimistic or nightmarish future

for the self, but reconfirms the endlessly desiring subject as it currently exists.

The production, distribution and consumption of virtual prosthetics – objects

that assist in the management of the user’s psychic economy – have value and worth

in the larger Second Life (L$), and world (US$), money economies. Linden dollars

(L$) can be purchased on the Linden Dollar Exchange (the Lindex); the current rate,

as of July 27th, 2009, is 259 L$ for 1$ USD. [See Figure 14] Many users convert

funds procured in the real world in order to participate in the psychic desire economy

of SL. The formula for this exchange of psychical and financial economies might

resemble something like: [i.e. refering to the way that the user’s

psychical economy and the financial economy exist, in SL, in relation to the objet

(a)].

Figure 14 – The L$ (Lindex) Exchange (“Second Life Market Data.” Second Life Official
Website. 17 Jul 2009. <http://secondlife.com/statistics/economy-market.php>)
 153

SL is free to join with a “basic” account, however this “basic” account does

not permit the user to own land or any objects; items a basic user creates are erased

from the SL grid every 12 hours (while remaining in the user’s inventory). In

contrast, a “premium” account, costing $9.95 USD/month, permits the user to own

land, receive a weekly stipend of SL currency, called Lindens (L$), and allows them

to build, store and display objects on their own land for as long as they please.85

Much of the SL (L$) economy revolves around the design, purchase and sale

of objects and body parts for avatars. It appears that the majority of SL users, myself

included, do not design the attributes of their avatar(s). While they can manipulate

their avatar with the customizable sliders, the avatar’s base hair, eyes, genitals et

cetera are usually purchased using L$ from SL designers who sell their wares in

virtual malls or shops. As in real-life, users who are skilled at building and crafting

sell their designs and objects to others, and users who own land can go into virtual

real estate, leasing or hoping to sell their land for monetary profit. Users can also

offer services (such as working in retail or the adult entertainment industry) in

exchange for L$.

SL objects are not bound by the same limitations as objects in the real-world.

Hair, skins, cars and prosthetic genitalia (to name a few of the items users routinely

purchase in-world) are constructed out of electronic “prims” rather than material

objects. Accordingly, designers are not faced with issues of material scarcity. As SL

user Tamara Kirshner explains:

85
The cost of owning virtual land depends on the size of that land: for instance, 1/128th of a
SL ‘region’85 (512sqm) costs $5 USD/month, 1/2 of a SL ‘region’ (32,768sqm) costs $125
USD/month). The SL ‘grid’ functions with 4000+ servers (and is growing) (Ludlow and
Wallace 75). Each server holds a 65,536 sqm ‘region’. Each ‘region’ is known as a simulator
or ‘sim’.
 154

When it comes to pricing, Second Life designers have a

definite advantage. While they have to invest in design
tools and spend a lot of time designing, just like real-life
designers, they don’t have to pay for materials. It costs a
Second Life designer the same amount to produce one
pair of shoes as one thousand pairs of shoes. What that
means for me is that Second Life designs are incredibly
affordable and that I can have the wardrobe of my dreams
in Second Life while shopping sale racks in real life
(Rymaszewski et al. 264).

Another user, Madison Carnot, explains “my virtual closet will expand to hold

whatever I can manage to buy…It’s pixels for the win in my shopping world”

(Rymaszewski et al. 265).

The virtual world has piqued the interest of real world corporations such as

American Apparel, Toyota, L’Oreal, Sony Music and H&M, all of whom have, over

the past few years, launched virtual world marketing campaigns (Ludlow and Wallace

77). In these instances, where attempts are made to create real profits, we find a co-

mingling of the real, virtual and psychic economies. K-Zero, the advertising company

responsible for an in-world L’Oreal make up campaign, described its job as

“metabranding” [See Figure 15].

Figure 15 - The L’oreal campaign offered make up and skins featured by popular
actresses such as Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson. (K-Zero Blog. “Virtual
Celebrities”. 12 Dec 2007. <http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/?p=1614>)
 155

K-Zero defines “metabranding” as working with a brand that is “created to exist

solely in a virtual space. It lives only on servers, is powered by electricity,

experienced only on a computer screen to provide a service, solution or product to

avatars living in a metaverse. A metabrand satisfies a demand that exists purely on a

virtual basis” (K-Zero). It is important to stress the description of a metabrand as

existing on a virtual basis, but also that it is for use by virtual objects; it is both the

virtuality of the avatar and the virutality of the user to which a metabrand appeals.

The avatar, as noted earlier, is marked by endless desire, and thus, can consume an

endless supply of things. It is sensible, then, that the avatar consumes metabrands,

which “satisfy a demand that exists purely on a virtual basis.” These virtual

commodities work with our psychic economy, playing on our lack as Lacanian

subjects. But this psychic economy can also yield financial profits in virtual, and

more importantly, real currencies. SL Avatar users are consumers whose demands are

endless, as the virtual world is constructed out of material prims that can be endlessly

produced and manipulated.86

SL provides advertisers and marketers the ability to do product testing,

giveaways of cars, boats, houses, skins etc… and data mining for application in real

life. Demonstrating the formula , the SL CEO Phillip Rosedale explains:

“If you launch a clothing line in SL and it’s hot in SL, you can launch it in the real

86
Thus, the economy of desire might be considered akin to something like Georges Bataille’s
“solar economy”, i.e. an economy that operates on the principle of jouissance-like excess
rather than “scarcity”. Like the sun, which brims forth without scarcity, the “lack” is endless.
See (Bataille, Visions).
 156

world… its telling you the same stuff. It’s telling you that it’s a cool, trendy, idea”

(Ludlow and Wallace 77).87

4. A(v)amorphosis

The argument that the SL avatar provides an awareness of the objet (a) is not without

precedent. Indeed, in Seminar XI, Lacan claims that works of art can provide

glimpses of the (a) through artistic/aesthetic devices that skew the viewer’s

perspective such as “anamorphosis”. Likewise, Žižek argues that cyberspace provides

the ability to traverse the fundamental fantasy (of castration). In this section I will

87
Steven Levine makes a similar observation to my as he reflects on his
typographic choice of the symbol “$” for the barred ubject and the symbol “@” for the
object a:
Although not sanctioned by Lacan’s own typographic practice, I believe the split
subject is appropriately designated throughout this text by the dollar sign – $ –
inasmuch as it is the global flow of capital that constitutes us as conscious and
unconscious consumers within the worldwide store of commodities on which our
modern subjecthood of lack so largely depends. Objecthood for us resides in the
empty form of the commodity itself – <> – for beyond it lies the unattainable
object of the endlessly circleing corporeal drive, designated by the typographical
sign for both an individual item’s price - @ - as well as a named individual’s
concrete e-mail link to a disembodied web of commercial cyberspace. Barbara
Kruger, an American graphic artist who escaped from the consumerist world of
advertising, challenges us with a huge photograph of an empty hand seeming to
hold a sign that declares, ‘I shop therefore I am’ (1987). … In the dollar sign the
subject of the desired commodity is cleft in twain, making it an alienated
Symbolic object - $ - to itself. Into the empty frame of the commodity is
projected the Imaginary object - <> - that is desired just because it is that which
the other is presumed to desire from among the ever-changing high-gloss and
hard-sell images of the mass media. And in its repetitive encircling of the Real
Thing - @ - as a popular cola calls itself, the corporeal drive pays again and again
the price of its mad roulette wager to recover the original stake it has irreversibly
lost. In the face of the unrelenting demand of the Other – $<>D – for me to be Its
lost object, I fashion for myself a fantasy – S <> @ – in order to protect myself
from being drawn into the Other’s lethal grip. In the variegated forms of artistic
sublimation I retrieve some abject scrap of materiality, which is all that remains
from the primal severing of the voice, gaze, and flesh of the Thing. Subject,
object, abject. Symbolic, Imaginary, Real. S<>@. (Levine 55-56)
 157

consider how SL avatars provide a glimpse of the objet (a) through a(v)amorphosis,

thereby allowing the user to teleport the fundamental fantasy.

The objet (a), as remainder of the lack, void, or absence that inheres within the

subject, resists specularization, or, is unspecular and is related to the jouissance that

defines the subject’s being (Fink, Lacanian 91). Throughout Seminar XI, Lacan likens

the (a) to a certain type of gaze or a certain tone of voice. For example, one can

discern the gaze in the act of looking (Fink, Lacanian 91-92). These partial objects

(gaze and voice) are unspecularizable; one cannot see them. Fink explains that at the

most basic level, the (a) is a “certain kind of look someone gives you, the timber of

someone’s voice, the whiteness, feel, smell, of someone’s skin, eye color, attitude…”

(Fink, Clinical 52). The (a) can also be discerned in an object that looks back at us

and reminds us of our own lack. The (a) is an instance of the uncanny, reminding us

of the lack that lies beyond our desires. The (a) pre-exists the eye. Prior to experience

we have, as the thrust of that experience, “the lack that constitutes castration anxiety”

(Lacan, Sem XI 72). The (a) shows up as a “stain” whose “track”, “thread” and

“trace” can be discerned in the scopic field (Lacan, Sem XI 72).

To offer an example of the object petit (a) (anamorphosis), Lacan looks to a

“partial object” located in Hans Holbein’s painting “The Ambassadors” (1533)

(Lacan, Sem XI 88). [See Figure 16]

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Figure 16 – Hans Holbein’s 1533 “The Ambassadors” (Holbein, Hans. "The Ambassadors".
1533. National Gallery, London. National Gallery 20 Jul 2009.
<http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk>)
 159

“The Ambassadors” is a painting that depicts two male figures. In front of them is a

skull, painted from a skewed, or distorted angle. The skull is painted using

anamorphosis, the systematically distorted projection of an optical image which can

only be glimpsed from an angle. Using anamorphosis Holbein attempts to paint the

unpaintable: death’s head – the ultimate symbol of the Real. The painting

demonstrates the “imperceptible fallenness of the Subject”, “the inescapable lack and

destitution that castration ordains for it” (Bowie 172). It also elicits uncanny

emotions, as it depicts a moment where the Symbolic order reveals itself alongside

the Real and the Imaginary. Amidst the vanity of the two wealthy figures in the

painting is a reminder of the real, the (a).

The static figures and the room in Holbein’s painting can be compared to the

terrain of SL. Unless the user owns the land his avatar is currently on or flying over,

he cannot change or manipulate it. What can be manipulated is a small portion of the

screen: their avatar. Thus, using the appearance sliders, the avatar contorts and

transforms: it “gazes” back at the user as something different, while reminding them

of the Real. The whole of SL, the user’s entire screen, can become an instance of the

distorted skull in Holbein’s painting. This occurs when the user recognizes their sense

of self as an

effect of anamorphosis, a ‘shadow of nothing’; however

getting rid of this insubstantial spectre does not leave [the
user] with the simple reality of what [he or she]
effectively is…what we get if we look at it straight on is a
chaotic nothing. So what we get after we are stripped of
symbolic identifications, [de-self-ed], is nothing. The
‘Death’ figure in the middle of the crown is not simply
death, but the subject himself reduced to the void. (Žižek,
Lacan 70).
 160

My avatar, Dustin Mabellon, is a continually changing object through which I

navigate the (virtual) world and is the focus of my attention. In the moments where I

manipulate the avatar, attaching or detaching its qualities and attributes, I encounter

its nothingness.88

It is not by looking at the avatar that I encounter what Lacan refers to as “the

gaze”. Rather, this phenomenon has to do with intuiting the type of object the avatar

is. Through a(v)amorphosis, the objet (a) does not appear, but the user has a sense of

its functioning. Lacan explains that “man, in effect, knows how to play with the mask

as that beyond which there is the gaze: the screen is here the locus of mediation”

(Lacan, Sem XI 107). For this reason, we are not after art criticism, which would

amount to discussing the aesthetic attributes of the SL avatar (Lacan, Sem XI 109).

Rather, while each SL user has their own life experience and unique position within

their historical configuration, Lacan advocates considering “the function that the

88
In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek discusses the nature of the postmodern injunction to “be
yourself” (Žižek, Ticklish 458). What does it mean, he wonders to “be yourself”? When we are
isolated from our surroundings we are confronted with a paradox, namely that “if you are
completely isolated from your surroundings you are left with nothing whatsoever, with a void
of idiocy pure and simple.” (Žižek, Ticklish 458) He continues:
The inherent obverse of ‘Be your true Self!’ is therefore the injunction to
cultivate permanent refashioning, in accordance with the postmodern
postulate of the subject’s indefinite plasticicity … in short, extreme
individualization reverts to its opposite, leading to the ultimate identity
crisis: subjects experience themselves as radically unsure, with no ‘proper
face’, changing from one imposed mask to another, since what is behind
the mask is ultimately nothing, a horrifying void they are frantically trying
to fill in with their compulsive activity or by shifting between more and
more idiosyncratic hobbies or ways of dressing, meant of accentuate their
individual identity. Here we can see how extreme individuation (the
endeavour to be true to one’s Self outside imposed fixed socio-symbolic
roles) tends to overlap with its opposite, with the uncanny, anxiety-
provoking feeling of the loss of one’s identity – is this not the ultimate
confirmation of Lacan’s insight into how one can achieve a minimum of
identity and ‘be oneself’ only by accepting the fundamental alienation of
the symbolic network. (Žižek, Ticklish 458)
 161

artist’s original phantasy played in his creation” (Lacan, Sem XI 110). In this regard,

SL avatars are not “disproportionately interesting”, but are, rather, examples of the

“generality of desire” (Lacan, Sem XI 110); (Bowie 171).89 What stares back at us is

precisely the generality of our desire.

Thus, the perpetual as-if quality of SL does not interrogate reality and move

us to a place where reality is no longer at issue; rather it confirms, and makes explicit,

the lack that haunts reality. It demonstrates that even in virtual worlds where the real

is supposed to have been rendered simulacral, or hyper-real, what we encounter is

actually quite similar to our present non-simulacral reality. Rather than doing

anything to reality, SL brings the fundamental, obscured, lack that is intrinsic to

reality into focus; we are still working with subjects and objects, selves and others.90

In Cooper’s photo-essay Alter Ego, one juxtaposition of avatar and user, that

of Kimberly Rufer-Bach and her avatar Kim Anubus, stands out. [Figure 17] The

page portrays two versions of Kim(berly): on the left the physical Kimberly and on

the right the virtual Kim. At first glance one might think that both images were

photographs. Recalling that the death’s head in Holbein’s painting is “the subject

reduced to the void…stripped down of symbolic identifications”, the virtual Kim

leaves the reader with the unspecular virtuality that inheres within the physical

Kimberly. In her comments about the juxtaposition, Kimberly explains: “[Kim]

doesn’t have a separate persona or anything. She’s just an extension of myself in this

89
In this regard there is something intriguing about our new screens, wired into the internet,
with increasingly realistic graphics. In this sense as things become increasingly real – mediated
– what emerges not a breakdown of appearances (i.e. Virilio’s Open Sky) or a hell of the same
(Baudrillard’s Transparency of Evil), rather, the real emerges in new ways – perhaps en masse.)
90
One here would want to delve in the Žižek’s work, specifically his comments on virtual
reality in The Plague of Fantasies (especially the chapter “Cyberspace, or the Unbearable
Closure of Being”).
 162

virtual space” (Cooper). Despite the fact that Kim looks strikingly like Kimberly, she

is not equivalent with Kimberly: she is the externalization of the lack that subtends

Kimberly’s subjectivity. Thus, whereas Kimberly’s fleshy real hands would bleed if

they were amputated, one recognizes that Kim’s hands are made to be elongated,

thickened, or amputated. Kimberly does not become Kim. Kimberly is always already

(Kim)berly; to believe that Kim begins where Kimberly ends is to fall into the

“Posthuman” category. The avatar achieves the same function as the bony deaths

head in Holbein’s painting; it is an interactive, geometric, prim-based deaths head,

displayed on a digital canvas.

Here lies another example of a(v)amorphosis: The cover of Cooper’s book

displays two individuals holding hands on a bustling downtown street. [Figure 18]

Tilting the cover of the book reveals their avatars superimposed on top of them and

causes the individuals faces to blur with their avatars. Viewing the superimposed

images from different angles reveals real fleshy faces merged with the digital faces of

their avatars. The effect is unmistakably an uncanny anamorphosis. From one point of

view a digital metal clad fantasy avatar, from another point of view a fleshy exposed

body; beneath the fleshy exposed body is a digital metal clad fantasy avatar. Thus the

avatar may be read as far more than a harbinger of what so many critics have

described, either optimistically (Bostrom) or pessimistically (Fukuyama) as our

posthuman future.
 163

Figure 17 – Kimberly Rufer-Bach and Kim Annubus from Robbie Cooper’s Alter Ego
(Cooper. Robbie. “Kimberly Rufer-Bach and Kim Annubus” <http://www.robbiecooper.org>)
 164

Figure 18 – The two images juxtaposed on the cover of Robbie Cooper’s Alter Ego.
(Cooper. Robbie. “Cover of Alter Ego” <http://www.robbiecooper.org>)
 165

5. L.C.Desire: Teleporting the Fundamental Fantasy

In the weeks after I first downloaded SL, I spent a great deal of time with the sliders

in the appearance window attempting to create an avatar that looked like myself.

After spending hours adjusting the sliders one afternoon, and being content that my

avatar had a body as close to my own as I was going to get, I exited the appearance

window and began investigating the virtual world. The next time I logged in the

shape I had spent so long meticulously manipulating was nowhere to be found. I

panicked, quickly chose a pre-made body shape, and went to work again creating a

new avatar. But this time I had a different feeling about what I was doing. I realized

that what caused my panic to subside was adopting a new avatar body. My panic was

tied to not having a body. This causes me to ask myself “Is creating a look-alike

avatar really what I am doing with my avatar? Was I not, more fundamentally,

attempting to create something with which to identify that would cover over my lack?

Given this, avatarization might be considered as “traversing the fantasy” - a

crossing over, or traversal, of the fundamental fantasy (Fink, Lacanian 61). This

fundamental fantasy is the trauma of primordial repression provoked by castration

(Kay 68). In order to traverse this fundamental fantasy, the avatar takes the role of the

objet (a): it embodies desirousness, subjectivizes trauma, and allows the user to act

out the impossibility of filling the lack in the Other (Homer 89). In this way, the

avatar allows us to consider the way the imagines him or herself in relation to the

(a) and the Other’s desire (either as or ). It allows us to experience the

process of obtaining our (second order) jouissance (Fink, Clinical 66). Furthermore,

insofar as it enables us to traverse the fundamental fantasy, the avatar allows us to

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recognize the objet (a) for what it is: “a contingent imposition of fixity and

consistency on the otherwise empty place of the subject” (Kay 68).91 Thus, far from

enslaving us as the post-Oedipal cybertheorists would have it, cyberspace “enables us

to treat [our fantasies] in a playful way and thus to adopt towards them a minimum of

distance — in short, to achieve what Lacan calls a, "going-through, traversing the

fantasy" (Žižek, “Cyberspace”). In SL, this interweaving of contemporary technology

and fundamental fantasy is rendered explicit.

Likewise, in one of her most recent pieces, “Computer Games as Evocative

Objects”, Sherry Turkle explains that computer games are objects to think with

(Turkle, “Computer” 267). These “evocative objects” allow us to see ourselves in the

computer and cause us to reflect on philosophical and psychological questions. The

computer, acting as a “second self”, provides opportunities to project ourselves into

the simulations we play on screen (Turkle, “Computer” 270). What is projected on

the screen before us is, indeed, an uncanny double, but as an “evocative object” it is

not something to be feared. Instead of looking at the avatar from the perspective of a

monstrous double, we could see our interactions with our avatars as revelatory and

91
In his discussions of cyberspace Žižek touched on the idea of traversing the (fundamental)
fantasy. He explains that the art of cinema arouses and plays with desire, but keeps it at a safe
distance, domesticating it (Žižek, Perverts 26:00). Interactive virtual mediums can also assist us
in confronting and “traversing the [fundamental] fantasy”, but, as opposed to cinema, they
“externalize our innermost fantasies in all their inconsistency, [and] open up to artistic practice
a unique possibility to stage, to ‘act out’, the phantasmatic support of our existence…” (Žižek,
“Cyberspace”). While this was initially planned as a fourth chapter, the undertaking proved to
be too large. Provided below, for the reader’s interest and use, is every sustained instance I
know of where Žižek discusses virtual technologies. The Reality of the Virtual (film), The
Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (film), The Plague of Fantasies (127-163), “From Virtual Reality to
the Virtualization of Reality”, The Indivisible Remainder (189-198), “A Cup of Decaf Reality”,
“Cyberspace, or how to traverse the fantasy in the Age of the Retreat of the Big Other”,
“Hysteria and Cyberspace”, Looking Awry. Serious engagements with, and criticisms of,
Žižek’s position on cyberspace can be found in Jerry Aline Flieger’s excellent Is Oedipus
Online?: Situating Freud after Freud.
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capable of rendering explicit underlying dimensions of our selves that evade us in our

day-to-day lives. In The Book of Imaginary Beings, Borges reminds us that the

double is not always an omen of ill fate. He explains that, for the Jews “on the other

hand, the apparition of the double was not a foreshadowing of death, but rather a

proof that the person to whom it appeared had achieved the rank of prophet” (Borges

62). Here the double is revelatory. Bringing this idea back to avatars, online personae

might be considered revelatory “objects to think with” that we manipulate in the

“spirit of self reflection” to search out, and play with, our desires (Turkle,

“Computer” 271).

Let’s not be overhasty and immediately celebrate these “traversals of the

fundamental fantasy” or revelatory “objects to think with”: perhaps avatars are not

only objects to think [about the fundamental fantasy] with but rather evidence that

contemporary mediums such as SL are examples of corporately owned technical

systems capable of manipulating our psychical – unconscious – desires as well as our

conscious ones. On one hand it can be liberating to act out what one really is, but

from a darker perspective, virtual worlds represent the commoditization of the

unconscious: a state where real world advertisers, SL merchants, and Linden Labs

itself (to whom [premium] users pay their dues) hawk us their virtual wares and tell

us that by consuming virtual objects we can “be who we really are”. Yee and

Bailensen’s study introduced in Chapter 1 called ‘the Proteus Effect’ aimed to

understand the flexible “protean” bodies of virtual worlds such as SL. But let us note

that Proteus, the mythical sea God from whose namesake the term “protean” derives,

changed form because he wanted to avoid capture by his opponent Menelaus. In

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response to the threat of capture by Menelaus, Proteus changed form and rendered

himself flexible and versatile. Proteus is not a God whose shape is formless; he has a

true shape but was changed to become “Protean” under duress. It is threat that calls

him to “cycle through” shapes. Likewise, there is order and structure to the Lacanian

subject, but it is also possible to obscure that order and structure by paying attention

to only the appearance of the self. When we focus on what we appear to be, we have

no sense of the ‘lack’ that subtends subjectivity. We can even make the error of

believing that all that exists is our appearance. Perhaps virtual worlds such as SL

represent a threat, like Menelaus was to Proteus, that causes us – like Proteus did – to

begin cycling through forms and identities. We know our most dear secret, that of our

subjectivity, is under threat and we work to obfuscate it as best we can: by changing

form compulsively and unconsciously taunting our assailant with cheers of “We’re

nothing”, “We’re what we think and say we are”, “You will never discover our

secret”. Meanwhile a whole new realm of control has been opened up where creatures

that refuse to return to some static form endlessly cycle through bodies and identities

come to live in corporately controlled reserves for contemporary Proteus’: virtual

worlds.

6. Performing a Striptease for the Gods: Avatars and the Future of

the (Post)human Drama…

What sort of tool is the SL avatar? As noted throughout the thesis, video games, as a

medium, “rework the formulas of cinema – and spectatorship”, offering novel

opportunities that other screen-based mediums, such as film, do not (Rehak 104). The

virtual game is different from film insofar as “[t]he game apparatus – a software
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engine that renders three-dimensional spaces from an embodied perspective, directed

in real time by players through a physical interface – achieves what the cinematic

apparatus cannot: a sense of literal presence, and a newly participatory role, for the

viewer” (Rehak 121). This participatory aspect of “[a]vatars enable[s] players to think

through questions of agency and existence, exploring in fantasy form aspects of their

own materiality” (Rehak 123).

Rather than regarding virtual worlds such as SL as techniques that take us

beyond the subject we have been attempting to regard SL as a technique that renders

explicit the deep core of subjectivity. In one famous selection from Marcel Proust’s In

Search of Lost Time, the narrator recounts his first telephone conversation with his

grandmother. Through the medium of the telephone Proust’s narrator recognizes, for

the first time, aspects of his grandmother’s voice that had always been present:

“Having her [voice] beside me, seen without the mask of the face, I noticed in it for

the first time the sorrows that had crackled in the course of a lifetime” (Proust).

Through the medium of SL, the avatar bodies we encounter that act as doubles for our

own, demonstrate our sorrows stemming from the alienation that has “crackled in it in

the course of [our] lifetime”. Our primary lack stemming from the Other’s desire and

our castration by the linguistic Signifier, issues that had been hitherto unimaginable,

peer through the virtual medium: that which was once well known returns. And it

does not return via some supernatural, or inexplicable, means. 92

92
Returning to our discussion of Hoffman’s “The Sandman” in Chapter 2, Nathaniel’s
symptoms are associated with different characters, either the Sandman himself (in the guise
of Coppola or Copellius) or professor Spalazani, confronting Nathaniel with a new tool. In
the first instance, Nathaniel is told of the Sandman’s dust and his children’s owl-like beaks. In
the second instance, Nathaniel encounters Copellus and his father tending to the hot coals of
the brazier. In the third instance, Copellius the optician sells Nathaniel weather glasses. In
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What has this chapter done to enrich our understanding of avatarization?

According to Daniel E. Bassuk, Hindu avatarization and Christian incarnation are

associated with the reconstitution of a community’s myth in flesh and blood, a

“vehicle” the community uses “for expressing its own self understanding” (Bassuk

192). The avatarization, or incarnation, of the deity designates a “type of theological

strip tease, hinting that there is more beyond what is actually seen and tantalizing the

viewer with what is beyond the veil” (Bassuk 192-194). As noted in the introduction,

the SL avatar presents us with something of a secularized avatarization, whereby the

connotation of a “descent” to an earthly community is replaced by “ascent” to a

virtual world. We might argue that, while religious avatarization provides a “haunting

the fourth instance, Nathanel becomes aware that Spalazani’s ‘daughter’ Olympia is an
automaton. In the fifth, and final instance, the spy glass - purchased from Coppola - might be
understood as returning Nathaniel to the initial scene of his ‘castration’: having his
testicles/eyes poked out and burnt in the brazier by his father, also signifying the Law (the
lawyer Coppelus) of the Name-of-the-Father. But in each case it is a given tool (blinding
dust, knife-like beak, the brazier with its eye/ testicle-like coals and castrating/enucleating
poker, weather glasses that bring the eye/testicles into focus, the fragmented body of the
automaton Olympia, and the fatal spyglass) that, in its own way, reminds Nathaniel of the
fundamental fantasy - until his symptoms leave him in a fit of madness he leaps from the
clocktower. Each of these tools can be thought of as interrogating the idea of wholeness:
Nathaniel is confronted with enucleation (castration), and the loss of bodily stability (lenses),
and ultimately the entirely mix-and-match body of the automaton Olympia. Thus, I have
attempted to discern the ‘uncanniness’ of SL, locating it primarily in the sense of body
destabilization that the user encounters when navigating a virtual world through their avatar.
At one point near the conclusion of Seminar XI Lacan mentions the ‘mass media’:
Perhaps the features that appear in our time so strikingly in the form of
what are more or less called the mass media,…whose place I have
indicated to you in a fundamental tetrad, namely the voice – partially
planeterized, even stratospherized, by our machinery – and the gaze,
whose ever encroaching character is no less suggestive, for by so many
spectacles, so many phantasies, it is not so much our vision that is
solicited, as our gaze that is aroused (Lacan, Sem XI 274).
In the context of our discussion of avatarization this claim by Lacan that the mass media
arouses our gaze rather than our vision is striking and reinforces what has been argued
throughout this chapter; the user’s activity with their avatar offers an opportunity to engage
with their insatiable desires and to experiment with covering the void at the core of the
subject. SL speaks to Lacan’s thoughts on the “features of our time”; an uncanny comingling
of hi-tech machinery and the solicitation of the primordial, ancient gaze: the objet petit
(a)vatar.
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awareness of transcendental forces peering through the cracks of the visible [or

physical] universe”, secular avatarization provides a haunting awareness of the visible

[or physical] universe that peers through the cracks of the transcendental. In other

words, the secular myth of avatarization, or incarnation provided by the virtual-

avatar, is one whereby the community performs a “strip tease” for the Gods who

dwell “beyond the veil”, tantalizing them with the fleetingness of their flesh and their

lack. It provides a taste of linearity in a non-linear space. In this sense avatarization

remains a “vehicle” for understanding the processes of selfhood and subjectivity. As

we have demonstrated throughout the thesis, SL users garner understanding, not for

what is beyond the human or what the human is turning into, but rather for what is

all-too-human!

In spite of the fact that Dustin Mabellon looks physically different from

Dustin Cohen, my avatar bears tremendous psychical similarities to Dustin Cohen.

From the perspective of Epimetheus, my avatar is a self that is reflective of changing

historical structures; from the perspective of Oedipus my avatar is reflective of a self

that persists alongside, but is not reducible to, the contingencies of history. But, in the

end, Dustin Mabellon is neither one nor the other. Our virtual doubles are selves

situated at the nexus of a contingent History and the memories of a Time “old and

long forgotten” whose tendrils we can never entirely escape.

Thus, even the avatar, understood as a posthuman assemblage of haphazard

parts without recourse to Edenic, or Organic, wholeness, can be explained by what is

most human: the object (a) understood as the object-cause of the endlessly desiring

(a)vatar.
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On this note I want briefly to return to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus,

as the reader may have noticed that the prior paragraph contains both Oedipal and

anti-Oedipal elements. Although Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is “not the

proof of an original nothingness; nor is it what remains of a lost totality” the Lacanian

object (a) – which is generated by our ‘original nothingness’ and ‘lost totality’ –

undergirds an excessive body moving through an endless surplus of new

identifications and identities (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti 9). In other words, while the

desirious object (a) is necessarily a product of “lack”, its functioning seems to

coincide with the endless desire of a Deleuzian “desiring machine”. With respect to

the functioning of the object (a), I think that Deleuze and Guattari and Lacan are in

agreement.93 But whereas Lacan regards the object (a) as the rem(a)inder of the Other

left behind by the subject’s “castration” by the linguistic Signifier, Deleuze cannot

tolerate the subject’s object-cause of endless desire being tied to the barring of the

Oedipal mOther by the Signifier [Signifather].

In Anti Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari do distinguish between the Other and

the object (a):

Lacan's admirable theory of desire appears to us to have two

poles: one related to "the object small a” as a desiring
machine, which defines desire in terms of a real production,
thus going beyond both any idea of need and any idea of
fantasy; and the other related to the "great Other" as a
signifier, which reintroduces a certain notion of lack.
(Deleuze and Guattari, Anti 27)

93
Theorists such as Jerry Aline Fliger suggest that Oedipus “may actually be read as an
emblem of the very desiring machine in whose name the plaintiffs [Deleuze and Guattari] are
bringing suit” (Flieger 93).
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For Lacan, however, the two are inseparable. One cannot, from a Lacanian point of

view, have the “desiring machine” without the “notion of lack”. The excessive, and

endlessly desirous, object (a) cannot be separated from the big Other , the

Signifier, and the parental formula . The excessive surplus value of the

Lacanian subject functions insofar as it revolves around the Other’s lacking desire.

Without the impossible object of desire what would drive the subject’s insatiable and

excessive desire? And if the object (a) is itself a “desiring machine”, why would one

need to replace the generator of that desire?

In this thesis I have maintained that the (a)vatar allows the user to explore the

excessive surplus of his or her subjectivity, but I have not severed this from lack. The

Oedipal triad – when pushed to its logical conclusion – can be regarded as responsible

for a Deleuzian sort of desire: the mOther, blocked indefinitely from the Oedipal

subject by the Father, hovers on the horizon. As a result of the Father’s prohibitory

“no”, the subject orients itself toward a trace of the impossible mOther, becoming an

asymptotic, endlessly becoming, “desiring machine”. I have not felt obliged to engage

with Deleuze as I consider the ubject’s relation to the to be sufficient to

account for the vibrant, rich, desirous (a)vatars utilized in virtual worlds such as SL.

The avatar offers a prime opportunity to articulate a humanist posthumanist

investigation of technology that seeks to preserve the wisdom of Gilgamesh, Job,

Koheleth, Freud and Lacan: a 21st century marriage of Oedipal fallenness, suffering,

and lack, to Epimethean flux and contingency.

Davy Winder writes that in virtual worlds such as SL “the traditional

understanding of identity, which says we have a single, overriding, core personality

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that defines us as an individual is just no longer valid as we rush headlong into the

digital era” (Winder 223). I have been challenging such claims. This chapter has

aimed to demonstrate that a single, core, overriding Lacanian subject can be

understood as the motor for the vibrant difference of a postmodern mix and match

identity.

Mcluhan notes that “men at once become fascinated by any extensions of

themselves in any material other than themselves” (Mcluhan 63). In his reading of the

Narcissus myth, Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection, but rather does not

recognize his own reflection: “The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the

water for another person. This extension of himself by the mirror numbed his

perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated

image.” (Mcluhan 63). Technologies of avatarization can trick us, not merely into

narcissism and self-love, but into a numbness to, and blindness of, the resolutely

Oedipal and all-too-human self that pokes through the strange new “prim” bodies on

our monitors. The radically decentred and heterogenous appearance of the avatar

ought not to lead us, automatically, to toss the notion of a core subject out the

window. A mix and match identity, I insist, is not incommensurate with the

possibility of some kind of core personality.

As such, I challenge cyber optimists and critics of cyberspace. In The Ecstasy

of Communication, Baudrillard claims that the “screen and the network” have

obliterated the opposition between subject and object, an opposition previously

guaranteed by the “mirror and the scene”, an explicit reference to Lacan’s mirror

stage. Baudrillard’s argument that the “screen” (where the entire universe unfolds)
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has destroyed the “stage” (that which was “once preserved through a minimum

distance and which was based on a secret ritual known only to its actors”) does not

hold in the case of SL (Baudrillard, “Ecstacy” 21). His worry that we have lost “the

private universe [that] was certainly alienating, insofar as it separated one from

others, from the world in which it acted as a protective enclosure, as an imaginary

protector” does not appear to be the case (Baudrillard, “Ecstacy” 21). This thesis has

attempted to demonstrate that this shift from the mirror to the screen, and from the

scene to the network, is not a total one; it does not move us from reality to the

“absolute space of [virtual] simulation”. Instead, we might think of virtual worlds as a

mirror-screen and a network-scene; the stage is the network and the screen acts as a

mirror. In SL, a subject exists who is at “odds with his objects and his image” and this

thesis has articulated SL as a space where otherness and alienation thrives

(Baudrillard “Ecstasy” 16). To read SL as an “obscene” site, where “every-thing

becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of

information and communication” would be simply incorrect (Baudrillard “Ecstacy”

22). Everything is not immediately transparent and exposed; the body of the avatar

may be manipulated in a way that seems “obscene”, but it is also possible to read that

manipulation as reflective of a deep, lingering alienation. Rather than a space “where

we no longer partake in the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of

communication”, it is possible to read SL as a space where the (Oedipal) drama of

alienation is rendered explicit and heightened.

This chapter, in particular, attempted to show that the gaze exists in SL, and

that one can still discern, in the newest screens and networks, the “secret” that
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Baudrillard claims has been rendered “entirely soluble in information and

communication”. As Anthony Elliott notes, “the modern sense of self [i]s constructed

around subjective elements, such as the passions, guilt, and conscience, or the

Freudian unconscious; against this backdrop meanings (are) attached to identity, as

concealed or hidden, with depth of self or interiority as a key theme” (Elliott

“Concepts” 150). In this context, Baudrillard’s position – sure that the modern sense

of self is no more – neglects to focus on what remains, or persists, of a depth of self

or interiority in the contemporary information technology user. The virtual space may

contain obscenity, but it is not obscene. Treating the user as if he or she were an

obscene “servomechanism” (Mcluhan) of technique, as Baudrillard does, ignores the

otherness that the corporeal, alienated user brings to that technique. After all, a

medium mediates users as well as information, and for this reason it is important to

recognize that new mediums, such as virtual worlds, make it clear that technology

does not exist in some realm cut off from human subjectivity. Thus, while something

like pornography is obscene, pornography is not entirely reducible to obscenity: it is

littered with codes, plot devices, and angles that speak to alienated subjects, not

obscene servomechanisms of the object.

While it is not outside the realm of possibility that everything may – in the

near future – become obscene, and that the stage may become saturated with the

plasma of the new screen, we are not nearly there yet. While the future may well be

that of the obscene inhuman cyb-ject, at present, we risk throwing away the all-too-

human subject just at a point when technologies, such as Second Life, can teach us so

much about its secrets. This chapter has attempted to demonstrate that the accusation
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levelled by cyber optimists and pessimists that communication technologies such as

Second Life override or “free us” from “the void of our own [all-too-human] mental

screen” ought to be re-evaluated (Baudrillard, Transparency 14).

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Conclusion – Humanist Posthumanism: Epimetheus and Oedipus in

Second Life
Using Freudian and Lacanian concepts, as well as observations and data collected

from Second Life users and recent scholarly work conducted on the virtual world, this

thesis has attempted to articulate an Oedipal dimension to the SL avatar. SL “skins”,

customizable bodies, attachable/detachable limbs, “prims”, in-world activities,

relationships, and the virtual world economy are considered as uncanny reminders of

a time of infantile fragmentation, imaginary (mis)identification and as evocative of

our real, human lack. In contrast to claims that the avatar represents a posthuman

body, the Oedipal reading attempted here proposes that avatarization is not (for better

or worse) an overcoming of any human condition, but rather an interactive technique

that works with the unconscious drives that persist in comprising our complex

humanity. Whether ones impression of avatarization is pessimistic or celebratory,

both positions could be enriched tremendously by at least a consideration of the

Oedipal dimension of the self, something both positions, hitherto, have tended to

consider outmoded or invalid.

This analysis of Second Life proposes that Oedipus ought always to be

thought alongside Epimetheus. A binocular approach, merging humanist Oedipal

conclusions with a posthuman Epimethean position, regards avatarization through the

lens of a humanist posthumanism. This humanist posthumanism challenges us to

reconsider the virtual avatar as symbolic of the transubstantiation implied by

“avātara” or “incarnation” without neglecting to account for the ways the virtual

avatar does alter the user’s sense of self, and is reflective of the contingency of social
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life. The conclusions yielded by this binocular merger of Epimethean and Oedipal

readings of avatarization, suggests three general tenets of a humanist posthumanism

that might be applied to future studies of media technologies.

Humanist posthumanism welcomes the always-already posthuman and its

perpetual overcoming of new types of bodies and senses of self only insofar as it also

recognizes that all-too-human lack and psychical structure are associated with these

processes. A humanist posthumanism regards the self as both a “thingless thing”, a

“wind being…between jouissance, which longs for words, and the Name-of-the-

Father, which orders them” and the historically contingent articulations of this

“thingless thing” (Lander 44). Read through this lens, the SL avatar can indeed be

considered a harbinger of the new and different, but only insofar as the new and

different act in concert with what is old and long familiar.

The Epimethean position holds that the human being does not have a fixed

nature or way of being and acting. It does not, in other words, have an Edenic point to

refer back to. As such, the human is, and has always been, posthuman. Using

techniques, the posthuman continually fabricates, transforms and (re)negotiates its

sense of itself and the world. It follows that the Epimethean position looks to the

external forces to which our “docile” posthuman bodies are subject in order to answer

the question of what we are (Foucault, Discipline 136).

Chapter 1 noted a number of “Posthuman” theorists whose engagements with

SL avatarization appear to fit into this Epimethean category. For example, SL is

described as a place with “little true form” and “only a series of associations” (Doyle

and Kim 214) and the avatar is described as “artificiality writ large, fabrication”
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(Boon and Sinclair 21). In this context, the avatar is regarded as an artistic object that

prefigures an entirely malleable and reconfigurable body being endlessly switched-

about reminiscent of Heideggerian “standing-reserve” (Heidegger, “Question”). Other

“Posthuman” theorists consider the SL avatar in relation to contemporary forms of

labour and modes of production as a body “free of nature and any particular way of

being and living” and characterize it as a means of experimenting with “different

identities, experiences, and modes of life” (Vicdan and Ulusoy 17). Another

“Posthuman” branch of theorists claim avatarization allows the user to recognize that

they have always been in a “performative” process of reconstitution. Here virtual

worlds are “created space(s) for becoming” and avatarization provides a means for

experimenting with new gender roles and/or identity positions (Morie 134); (Fron et.

al). While the “Posthuman” theorists and some of the “Performative” theorists noted

above tend to maintain that there once was a discrete thing called the human, Tom

Boellstorff provides an Epimethean-posthumanism that regards this idea to be a

fantasy, claiming that, from the outset, we have been re-negotiating what the human

is without the hope of arriving at finality. For Boellstorff, avatarization is not a

posthuman endeavor, but one that is profoundly human (Boellstorff 5, 28).

In contrast, the Oedipal position holds that a current of psychical desires and

drives structures and governs the human being. The Oedipal position looks to bring to

light the functioning of these internal forces. Chapter 1 references theorists whose

research demonstrates that psychical forces are not dispensed with in virtual worlds

(Heider); (Yee and Bailenson); (Varvello et al.); (Velleman). The chapter also notes

the “Human (Oedipal)” position that avatars have been likened to “digital mirrors”
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capable of reflecting back a phantasmatic element of the real object or living being

(Cleland 43). Bringing the Epimethean and Oedipal together, suggests that virtual

worlds engage with our always-already Epimethean-posthuman qualities and our

Oedipal humanity; despite being always-already post-human, the (virtual world) user

encounters a structural humanness.

Chapter 2 argues that SL avatarization can be considered as an uncanny

technique that provides the user with a sense of their forgotten (or repressed) past of

infantile fragmentation and castration anxiety. The user engages with the dialectic

experienced in their early years between the body as fragmented and as a stable ideal-

ego. Thus, instead of doing something new to the user, avatarization takes the user

back to what was once known and long familiar (Freud “Uncanny” 124). From the

perspective of Epimetheus, avatarization provides the ability to engage with new,

flexible, and manipulatable versions of the user’s self. Indeed, a user’s experiences in

SL are conditioned by contemporary social conditions. Bringing the Epimethean and

the Oedipal together, this chapter suggests that interacting with new types of (virtual)

bodies and senses of self involves tarrying with the return, and a reminder of, a fixed

set of psychical structures: we encounter the new but the old returns or remains.

Chapter 3 argues that the SL avatar represents a “more-you-you”, an endlessly

wandering body, which, like our desire, is asymptotic. Thus, the avatar is similar to

the Lacanian subject, which can never be complete or whole. An Epimethean

position, however, would emphasize that the more-you-you demonstrates not our

nothingness, or lack of wholeness, but our perpetual ability to modify ourselves and

become something else. For example, while virtual prims are capable of externalizing
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our phantasmatic desire, they are also undoubtedly new types of objects with which to

interact. Bringing the Epimethean and Oedipal together, this chapter suggests that

the Epimethean overcoming of a fixed body or solid sense of self is due to the

presence of the user’s psychical lack: we are always overcoming, but we do not

overcome lack itself.

Given the three tenets of a humanist posthumanism outlined in the paragraphs

above, the Lacanian study presented throughout the preceding chapters ought to be

considered alongside an Epimethean reading of what is new about avatarization. This

binocular reading could align Foucault’s assertion that “man” is only one historically

distinct form of the human with the claims of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It becomes

possible to fuse the potential latent in a reconfiguration of subjectivity as a materialist

process with Lacan’s conception of the subject of the “lack”. Reading these positions

together invokes a view of the subject as it is constituted through relations of power

and its inner psychic dimensions.94

94
I do not think my views regarding a place for limitation and structure alongside becoming
and contingency are in disagreement with posthuman/cyborg scholars such as Haraway and
Hayles. For Haraway, remaining open to the unexpected does not come without conditions.
The “death of the subject” (that is, “the opening of non-isomorphic subjects, agents, and
territories of stories unimaginable from the vantage point of the cyclopean self… the satisfied
eye of the master subject”) is, for her, a “painful” process (Haraway, Leaf 113). “Such
considerations” she writes “are always about coming back to a consciousness about finitude,
about mortality, of limitation not as a kind of utopian glorification, but a condition of
possibility of creativity in the most literal sense, as opposed to negation. And I feel this is
something I learned from feminism too… The insistence on a kind of non-hostile relationship
of the mortal body with its breakdowns [denaturalizations].” (Haraway, Leaf 115). She
opposes radical transgression, without consciousness of finitude, mortality, and limitation: the
“…affirmation of dying is absolutely fundamental. Affirmation not in the sense of glorifying
death, but in the sense – to put it bluntly – that without mortality we’re nothing. In other
words, the fantasy of transcending death is opposed to everything I care about” (Haraway,
Leaf 116). Neither does Katherine Hayles advocate a full blown posthumanism where
anything goes. Consider her comment that “If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by
posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather that the ground of being,
my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information
 183

An individual today looks out their window and sees a different vista than the

one they would have seen a hundred years ago. Smart Cars zoom by instead of

horsedrawn carriages, but both the Smart Car driver and the coach driver could

appreciate Swann’s desire for Odette, or Koheleth’s lamentations in “Ecclesiastes”.

Likewise, the Pac Man user and the SL user both are high-tech externalizations of the

all-too-human search for lost wholeness (Rehak). This humanist sense of something

persisting throughout the succession of techniques and ways of life ought to be

thought akin to the ebb and flow of the tides. The tide flows out only to return to the

ocean, each surge forth is a surge back. I have tried to argue throughout this thesis

that life does not only appear to be endless flow, but that it also entails endless ebb.

Nietzsche’s much misaligned Overman is not he who embraces merely the

flow of life, but he who can stand between the world’s flowing contingency and its

ebbing which prohibits endless contingency, namely the eternal recurrence of the

same. That is to say, while the world always changes, one has to confront the

possibility that what is has been, that what is new is linked – in some way – to what

has already occurred. On one hand the world flows, it is “a play of forces and waves

of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time

decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing…”

(Nietzsche, Will 550). On the other hand the world ebbs, it is “…eternally flooding

back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms”

(Nietzsche, Will 550). With the right framework, an analysis of the flow of virtual

technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied

immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being…”
(Hayles 5)
 184

technologies reveals an uncanny ebb.95 Despite that I have insisted throughout this

thesis, that we, as posthumans, are subject to new and different Epimethean ways of

being and knowing the world, my sense is that we remain hardwired into Oedipal

triangulation.96 Hidden Oedipus remains coiled around the frenzied, in-your-face,

Epimethean, succession of new media technologies. Throughout the preceding three

chapters I have attempted to raise this problematic, and articulate a theoretical

framework capable of evaluating techniques such as SL avatarization in relation to

this often overlooked Janus face of (post)human subjectivity.97

The notion that electric culture initiates a break – for better or worse – from a

linear sense of time, Cartesian subjectivity or the regime of vision unravels

95
It reveals, in Heraclitian terms, that the variability and plurality of human beings can be
explained as a systematic (river) flowing toward a trace of otherness directed by the structural
Signifier (the riverbanks).
96
Perhaps we could inquire further into the question of whether a user’s avatar is “really”
them. Here lies one possible answer: The Epimethean dimension, I suggest, is phenomenal
and visible; the Oedipal is intellectual and invisible. The Epimethean sociologist turns his
attention to understanding, and making sense out of phenomenal and visible data; the Oedipal
playwright attending to what is intellectual and invisible. So which position is concerned with
what is the real truth? Are there two realities, and so are we to conclude – as Plato does with
his Forms – that one trumps the other? And where does this leave us given that the avatars
found in virtual worlds such as SL are so frequently discussed in terms of their similitude to
real life? Georges Bataille cites Georges-Henry Luquet’s suggestion there are both “visual”
and “intellectual” forms of realism: “An image is a good likeness for an adult when it
reproduces what the adult eye sees, and for the primitive when it translates what his mind
knows.” (Bataille, Cradle 38). This thesis has, using Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis,
demonstrated that the relationship between the real user and her virtual avatar is a dual one,
co-responding to visible and intellectual, Epimethean and Oedipal, historical and entropic
forms of realism.
97
Readers interested in approaching the question of the human, posthuman, and inhuman,
from this standpoint will find Dominique Janicaud’s On the Human Condition of interest.
Janicaud argues that humanity occupies a chronically unstable middle ground between the
“inhuman” and the “superhuman”, between regression and overcoming, beastiality and
angelism. Once we recognize this, he argues, we are in a position to consider a cautious
humanism that can open up to the disturbing, strange, and radically creative (and cooperative)
forces that lie dormant in us. Evoking Freud’s uncanny, Janicaud writes: “…man thinks he
can leave his condition behind, whereas all those ‘departures’ only take him back to his
fundamental truth. Humanity is the unfathomable overcoming of its limits.” (Janicaud 30).
 185

spectacularly upon a posthumanist humanist analysis of a virtual world like SL. This

is not to argue that new types of identities are not engendered and one does not see

the stirrings of new forms dynamic life. However, the mutations and transformations

of body and self that users experience through their avatar(s) appears to remain

intelligible against the horizon of linearity, identity, tragedy and myth. Something

ancient stirs in the fibre optics.

How long will Oedipus remain an issue? Nothing is to say that techniques, or

forms of society, may emerge that succeed in obliterating the horizon of tragedy and

myth. As Lacan notes “[the] Oedipus complex cannot run indefinitely in forms of

society that are more and more losing their sense of tragedy.” (Lacan, Ecrits 668). A

life-form of mutating and transforming pure difference, no longer beholden to logics

of Capitalism or Fascism, does come into focus as nature and the body are

increasingly experienced, and acted upon, as technological entities. Optimists may

celebrate this as the liberatory point where Western metaphysics, tragedy and myth

are brought to their conclusions.98 Pessimists may consider the technologically

mediated hybrid of self and the world, without the authority of having set (albeit

ultimately contingent) boundaries, as nihilistically whirling around99 in a ceaseless

technological orgasm. Posthumanist humanism reminds us that we have something to

lose and – rather than celebrating or despairing in the face of technologically

mediated forms of life – leaves us on the shores of disturbing, yet productive,

98
This form of life could no longer be understood in relation to Heraclitus’ ancient maxim of
the “same river” where “different and again different waters flow”.
99
The image I am trying to convey here derives from the punishment of sinners in the “Circle
of the Lustful” found in Canto II of Dante’s Divine Comedy I: “Like the starlings wheel in
the wintry season / In wide and clustering flocks wing-borne, wind-borne / Even so they go,
the souls who did this treason, / Hither and thither, and up and down, outworn…” (Dante 99)
 186

biopolitical questions: “Is the posthuman gamble on pure difference worth the risk?”

and “Can we resist forms of government and economic systems that use logics of

identity and repression for destructive purposes without discarding the identity and

repression that has hitherto been a central feature of the human subject?”
 187

APPENDIX 1 – FREUD’S SYNOPSIS OF HOFFMAN’S ‘THE SANDMAN

This fantastic tale opens with the childhood recollections of the student Nathaniel. In

spite of his present happiness, he cannot banish the memories associated with the

mysterious and terrifying death of his beloved father. On certain evenings his mother

used to send the children to bed early, warning them that ‘the Sand-Man was

coming’; and, sure enough, Nathaniel would not fail to hear the heavy tread of a

visitor, with whom his father would then be occupied for the evening. When

questioned about the Sand-Man, his mother, it is true, denied that such a person

existed except as a figure of speech; but his nurse could give him more definite

information: ‘He’s a wicked man who comes when children won’t go to bed, and

throws handfuls of sand in their eyes so that they jump out of their heads all bleeding.

Then he puts the eyes in a sack and carries them off to the half-moon to feed his

children. They sit up there in their nest, and their beaks are hooked like owls’ beaks,

and they use them to peck up naughty boys’ and girls’ eyes with.’

Although little Nathaniel was sensible and old enough not to credit the figure

of the Sand-Man with such gruesome attributes, yet the dread of him became fixed in

his heart. He determined to find out what the Sand-Man looked like; and one evening,

when the Sand-Man was expected again, he hid in his father’s study. He recognized

the visitor as the lawyer Coppelius, a repulsive person whom the children were

frightened of when he occasionally came to a meal; and he now identified this

Coppelius with the dreaded Sand-Man. As regards the rest of the scene, Hoffmann

already leaves us in doubt whether what we are witnessing is tee first delirium of the
 188

panic-stricken boy, or a succession of events which are to be regarded in the story as

being real. His father and the guest are at work at a brazier with glowing flames. The

little eavesdropper hears Coppelius call out: ‘Eyes here! Eyes here!’ and betrays

himself by screaming aloud. Coppelius seizes him and is on the point of dropping bits

of red-hot coal from the fire into his eyes, and then of throwing them into the brazier,

but his father begs him off and saves his eyes. After this the boy falls into a deep

swoon; and a long illness brings his experience to an end. Those who decide in favour

of the rationalistic interpretation of the Sand-Man will not fail to recognize in the

child’s phantasy the persisting influence of his nurse’s story. The bits of sand that are

to be thrown into the child’s eyes turn into bits of red-hot coal from the flames; and in

both cases they are intended to make his eyes jump out. In the course of another visit

of the Sand-Man’s, a year later, his father is killed in his study by an explosion. The

lawyer Coppelius disappears from the place without leaving a trace behind.

Nathaniel, now a student, believes that he has recognized this phantom of

horror from his childhood in an itinerant optician, an Italian called Giuseppe Coppola,

who at his university town, offers him weather-glasses for sale. When Nathaniel

refuses, the man goes on: ‘Not weather-glasses? not weather-glasses? also got fine

eyes, fine eyes!’ The student’s terror is allayed when he finds that the proffered eyes

are only harmless spectacles, and he buys a pocket spy-glass from Coppola. With its

aid he looks across into Professor Spalanzani’s house opposite and there spies

Spalanzani’s beautiful, but strangely silent and motionless daughter, Olympia. He

soon falls in love with her so violently that, because of her, he quite forgets the clever

and sensible girl to whom he is betrothed. But Olympia is an automaton whose clock-
 189

work has been made by Spalanzani, and whose eyes have been put in by Coppola, the

Sand-Man. The student surprises the two Masters quarrelling over their handiwork.

The optician carries off the wooden eyeless doll; and the mechanician, Spalanzani,

picks up Olympia’s bleeding eyes from the ground and throws them at Nathaniel’s

breast, saying that Coppola had stolen them from the student. Nathaniel succumbs to

a fresh attack of madness, and in his delirium his recollection of his father’s death is

mingled with this new experience. ‘Hurry up! hurry up! ring of fire!’ he cries. ‘Spin

about, ring of fire — Hurrah! Hurry up, wooden doll! lovely wooden doll, spin about

— .’ He then falls upon the professor, Olympia’s ‘father,’ and tries to strangle him.

Rallying from a long and serious illness, Nathaniel seems at last to have

recovered. He intends to marry his betrothed, with whom he has become reconciled.

One day he and she are walking through the city market-place, over which the high

tower of the Town Hall throws its huge shadow. On the girl’s suggestion, they climb

the tower, leaving her brother, who is walking with them, down below. From the top,

Clara’s attention is drawn to a curious object moving along the street. Nathaniel looks

at this thing through Coppola’s spy-glass, which he finds in his pocket, and falls into

a new attack of madness. Shouting ‘Spin about, wooden doll!’ he tries to throw the

girl into the gulf below. Her brother, brought to her side by her cries, rescues her and

hastens down with her to safety. On the tower above, the madman rushes round,

shrieking ‘Ring of fire, spin about!’ — and we know the origin of the words. Among

the people who begin to gather below there comes forward the figure of the lawyer

Coppelius, who has suddenly returned. We may suppose that it was his approach,

seen through the spy-glass, which threw Nathaniel into his fit of madness. As the
 190

onlookers prepare to go up and overpower the madman, Coppelius laughs and says:

‘Wait a bit; he’ll come down of himself.’ Nathaniel suddenly stands still, catches

sight of Coppelius, and with a wild shriek ‘Yes! “fine eyes — fine eyes”!’ flings

himself over the parapet. While he lies on the paving-stones with a shattered skull the

Sand-Man vanishes in the throng.

 191

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DUSTIN CHARLES COHEN

cohendustin@gmail.com
EDUCATION

University of Western Ontario, (London, Ontario, Canada) 2007 - 2009

Media Studies, M.A.
 Thesis: “Object Petit (a)vatar: Posthumanism, Psychoanalysis and the Question of
the Self in Second Life”
 Independent Readings Course “Psychoanalysis, Avatars and Virtual
Communities”, 2008.
 Relevant Courses: Visual Culture, Advanced Social Theory.

University of King’s College, (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada) 2003 - 2007

Contemporary Studies Programme and International Development Studies,
Honours B.A.
 First Class Honours
 Thesis: “Self Identity in the Age of Avatarization”
 Independent Readings Course “Technology, the Body and the Transhuman”, 2007
 Relevant Courses: Philosophy of Technology, Bio-Politics, Science and Culture.

AWARDS
University of Western Ontario Graduate Student Research Scholarship
Awarded 2007-2009
University of King’s College President’s List
Awarded 2006-2007
University of King’s College In-Course Scholarship
Awarded 2006-2007

ARTISTIC WORK

Ancient Wisdom: Reflections on Virtual Technologies. By Dustin Cohen.

Written for Broken Pencil Zine Fair and Festival of Alternative Culture. The
Gladstone Hotel, Toronto, Ont. 26 October 2008.

PUBLICATIONS
Non Refereed Publications

Cohen, Dustin C. “Self Identity in the Age of Avatarization.” Hinge 13 (2007): 72-
88. April 2007