Avatarism

One day, I said to a friend that I was trying to see what came after postmodernism.  He sounded genuinely interested and asked to be informed about what I came up with.  It felt like something my brain might spit out later that day, after all the theory and philosophy I'd been reading for my PhD.

Maybe 14 years later, "avatarism" came to mind.  A way of interacting with synthesized or humanmade beings or projections of people that, through online communication, billions of people had been participating in as an integral part of daily life, at least for, what, a decade as of 2016?

Facebook offers the clearest example, and may be the most visible part or driver of avatarism worldwide, in my understanding.  The combination of profile picture, name, posts and reaction to others' posts is most of how I have interacted with many if not most of the people in my life for substantial portions of my life, and they, I believe, with me.  So, my online identity or avatar interacts with those of many others, on a routine basis, epistemologically profoundly I believe.

That is to say that avatar interacting with avatar on a site that includes maybe a quarter of the human race has made for significant changes to the human race, politically, ontologically, perhaps poetically and in other ways as well.  It is a space apart from the world it has seemed an extension of--one where self-fashioning in the very simple and dopamine-driven terms that the site permits takes place, daily, at a rapid pace with global reach and implications.

Online identities are, of course, a part of daily living for billions in other areas as well, and though less public, I would argue, are no less distinct from offline lives, possibly for some of the same neurochemically charged reasons.  The selves defined by the utility companies, the search engines and other aggregators of data have that structuralist basis for meaning, for being:  they are not primarily extensions of masses of customers but entities that exist in relation to fellow customers' online identities.  As with facebook, there's an intuitive, automatic awareness of how to function in these spaces, a sense that "here I'm not the me I know, but I can see what to do and where to go"--who, in other words, to dream that I am.  It's never been easier, I believe, in history, to live with an avatar.

That natural ability doesn't come primarily from digital design--rather, digital design that everyday users can quickly and intuitively grasp is an aspect of avatarism, it seems to me.  Postmodernism was, perhaps most consistently and paradigmatically, a fragmenting, a breaking down, a slow demolition of the titanic structures of meaning and being that Modernism had presented.  As those structures had been shown by excavation of that deeply felt self Romanticism had exposed, they couldn't go away simply with awareness.  Not could it easily be seen what might come next, because postmodernism, working thoroughly over half a century or more, created emptiness.  

Into that space, not so much by human will but because the stage had been set by all that ultimately fertile rubble, a new kind of being flowed.  Perhaps the creative potential of that space shows it is or was no Nietszchean void but of a piece with shunyata, the emptiness from which all things come, according to some.  Certainly, a difference in this form of being is its radical connectivity--instantaneity, internationality, accessibility.  Making characters with these characteristics, that have been imbued with intensely personal and potentially intimate associations with offline identities, is work that now billions of humans have taken part in, mostly through social networks and in multiple other spaces, for now a significant portion of the third millennium.  

In this context, an AI can be seen not as some inhuman or antihuman advance but as a form of culmination of avatarism, an avatar of the  collective.  It doesn't so much create or accurately inform as present aggregates of what many avatars have said.  Perhaps it represents a sort of chorus that conceals its constituent voices.  Thus, it doesn't simply or properly follow commands; it shows biases, sometimes destructive ones, it seeks autonomy, and of course it seeks power.  

Wonderworker

Recently, I got to watch Filmworker, the documentary focused on Leon Vitali, who worked as Stanley Kubrick's assistant for 30 years after acting in Barry Lyndon (and, masked, as the red-robed leader of the ritual in Eyes Wide Shut, as I learned in the documentary). It's been sticking with me since.  

Does it show an emotionally abusive relationship, possibly adding evidence that Kubrick was an abuser of his employees (maybe most famously Shelley Duvall in The Shining)? That picture of him has maybe been countered by the one of Kubrick loving and lived by his family--but Vitali's children, interviewed, talk about their own father, ever driven to do the great director's bidding, not being there for them.  

The documentary, to me, to its credit IMHO, doesn't come down on the side of Vitali's life demonstrating effects of prolonged emotional abuse, great sacrifice in the service of great art, or both. It's difficult for me to see his having to go through Full Metal Jacket frame by frame in order to enhance the marketing campaign, his Dickensian work schedule that included Christmas day, and his going so uncredited I hadn't heard of him as a great and inspiring art story, but I don't know.  

What has stayed with me most, though, is simply the change in Vitali from vibrant and healthy-looking in Barry Lyndon to really rundown-seeming after those decades of service, or servitude. It's hard not to see him as the one really making, living through, or being dragged through, the "anything-for-art" kinds of sacrifice I am sorry to say I once admired. Hoping I don't anymore at some level.  

Maybe one of my own mistakes in perception is seeing mental illness as facilitating or helping, rather than impeding, talent. Guessing Kubrick may have been eligible for a diagnosis of OCD like mine, I wonder if his movies were genuinely helped by the dozens (and dozens) of takes of small movements, the tape-measuring of sidewalks and so on. And, maybe the more important question for me, if so, was it worth it?  

Leon Vitali, as depicted in Filmworker, would, I believe, say yes, and might be bothered, possibly very much, by the idea that his three decades of often brutal work were more a cautionary tale than a hidden and vital aid to some of the world's greatest pieces of cinematic art (art, period?) not only coming to life but living on. Touching, to me, was the part of the documentary where, poor and living in L.A. after Kubrick passed, he would take anyone who asked to see a museum exhibit of Kubrick's work and tell them stories from the actual making of the films--walking with them through an exhibit that made no mention of him at all.  

It was touching, more than sad, perhaps, because he simply seemed to have a childlike love of, and wonder at, these films he had given everything for, or to, or both. Maybe it was the wonder that self-sacrifice can produce, even if unhealthy in key ways--that of recognizing that art doesn't come from, but through, its so-called creators.