Technics of the Subject: The Avatar-Drive

Abstract

This essay considers the digital avatar not simply as a name for a virtual double of the player of videogames, but as bound to or manifesting psychological drive, a kind of homunculus of the drive. Drawing on a wide range of theories that have informed technical constructions of the subject, it applies in particular an important moment in Lacan's description of the drive to the concept of the gaming "avatar." It argues that the avatar is a variant of precursor representations of the drive specific to the technical imaginary of videogames.The avatar haunts media and cyperspace in multiple guises. Nested in online chat rooms and seminars, internet commodity arcades, art installations, game worlds, architectural models, data-shadows, and program algorithms, the avatar has become the face of it-ness, who-ness, and what-ness mediating community and unseating the subject's Eigentlichkeit (self-possession, the "having" of what is my own). 1 As the visible interface of the psychic drive, the avatar is not so much the double of the subject in the digital field as a kind of "puppet-homunculus" or totem that "drives" the drives. Freud's notion of psychic drive as "constant force" (konstante kraft), instrumentalized in its goal-directed motricity, becomes newly relevant to the object-oriented worlds of games and internet markets in their subsumption and transformation of subjective properties. 2 Like the Aristotelian hyle (the causative and self-circular property of a form), avatarity, as I develop the concept here, bears on post-poststructuralist accounts of the destinations of agency in a technical milieu.