The avatar haunts media and cyperspace in multiple guises. No theory of the avatar can be divorced from theories of the subject. Subject theoryββbuoyed in successive waves by the time-lag of French and German translationsββpredominated in the human sciences from the postwar period through the mids. What distinguishes these works from a host of other titles at the juncture of philosophy and media theory is their default to techne as conceptually constitutive of thought, being, and agency.
Subject technics also redounds to an earlier history of systems theory and cybernetics that flourished across disciplines during the Cold War.
The short list of references includes Talcott Parsons whose The Social System , a foundational work in social theory, appeared in , Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Warren McCulloch celebrated for mathematical modeling of neural networks , Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, and John von Neumann the legendary inventors of information theory, cybernetics, game theory, quantum mechanics.
Starting in the early s, and following in the steps of Chilean cognitive scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann linked autopoiesis to social systems The Autopoiesis of Social Systems appeared in The concept does not have a logical, but rather a symbolic relevancy, in that it proves that in a society characterized by predominately impersonal relationships it has proved difficult to find the point at which one can experience oneself as a unity and function as a unity.
I am prepared to argue, in accord with Peter Sloterdijk in his short book Derrida, An Egyptian , that subject technics is that unlikely place where Luhmann and Derrida meet. He also means that the movement of expression is itself subjective, in the sense that it is self-moving and has determinate effects. The character could, in this respect, be identified with the avatar. The avatar might also be identifiable as a totem; less a second self or alter-ego than an animal companion or emblem.
