Avatar Emergency (New Media Theory)

NEW MEDIA THEORY | Series Editor, Byron Hawk | 327 pages, including photographs, bibliography, and index. © 2012 by Parlor Press | AVATAR EMERGENCY is Gregory L. Ulmer's fourth book featuring the EmerAgency, an online virtual consultancy for the digital age. This time his point of departure is Paul Virilio's Generalized Accident from which he develops and theorizes the new concepts of Flash Reason, and specifically Avatar, which serves as the site for electrate identity formation in the twenty-first century. I have taught Ulmer's work on electracy for years, and his theoretical sophistication as well as the practical ambition and applicability of his work never ceases to amaze me. With Avatar Emergency, Ulmer shows once again that he is at the top of his game; I am positively thrilled to share this new and very timely treasure trove of a book with my students. -JAN RUNE HOLMEVIK, author of Inter/Vention: Free Play in the Age of Electracy | Ulmer advances a ratio: "Avatar is to electracy what 'self' is to literacy, or 'spirit' to orality." He explores this "emergent logic through the invention of concept avatar." He begins, urgently, by asking: "What might wisdom be today, upon what authority might it be grounded, . . . what vision of well-being?" Perpetually asking the questions, Ulmer searches for "a vital anecdote" as an antidote to the "internet accident" by way of "flash reason." He claims, "Within this frame I present, in the genre of Mystory [Internet Invention], what I have come to understand about living, my decision to become a professor of the Humanities and the lifestyle embraced as part of that choice." He invites his readers, thereby, to discover their own Mystory (mystery). Their own wisdom. After all, he explains: "Concept avatar must be not only understood, but undergone." My advice: Undergo the book! -VICTOR J. VITANZA, author of Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric and Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing: Chaste Rape | GREGORY L. ULMER is Professor of English and Media Studies at the University of Florida, where he teaches courses in Hypermedia, E-Lit, and Heuretics. He is also the Joseph Bueys Chair in the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Ulmer's books include Applied Grammatology (1985), Teletheory (1989), Heuretics (1994), Internet Invention (2003), Electronic Monuments (2005), and Miami Virtue (2011).