Category

Avatar Emergency, continued:  Part 3:  Category

Avatar operates in the imagined community.  Citizens have avatars the way they have cars and driver’s license.  Avatar consulting addresses several layers of wisdom formation:  witness (accumulation of observations); scenario construction for mythography; category in image metaphysics.  Avatar attunement of a zone (as demonstrated by Revelle in Miami) is to electracy what definition of a concept is to literacy.  The analogy for the vicissitudes of avatar as image category is Blanchot’s updating of Orpheus’s descent into Hades to rescue Eurydice.  The insight is “descent,” that the experience of being/having an image in cyberspace is understood as

Orpheus

“mourning,” or the “entry into language.” To say that avatar is to electracy what category is to literacy means that imaging must function as measure, as organizing system articulating reality out of the Real, for me (distributed metaphysics).  Metaphysics is singularized, but reassembled and correlated in the KaChing. This chapter outlines the logic netizens learn in order to function categorially in cyberspace.  The practice of tagging and formation of folksonomies now commonplace online are the behavior to be augmented by this metaphysics.

The formal operator originated with Plato’s account of chora, a third order introduced to mediate Being and Becoming, a measure sorting chaos into order.  The chapter retraces the genealogy of chora through several key moments of invention and development:  Aristotle’s “categories,” the commonplace and topical pedagogy of manuscript culture, especially its use of the virtues and vices as primary categories; the icon in Byzantium.  These instances of chora are used to offer a vantage point on the society of the spectacle (the dromosphere).  Kant’s introduction of aesthetic judgment as a bridge between Being and Becoming (Pure and Practical Reason) updates choral measure for modernist art as the basis for an image logic.