Do Avatars Dream of Electric Sheep? Resituating becoming-animal in the digital age

Abstract

The theoretical insight taken from Deleuze and Guattari's ([1987] 2005) concept of becoming-animal has retained relevance in the digital age. Traditionally, the concept of becoming-animal has been found in alliances between two disparate entities that each possess a distinct molar form. In the process of becoming-x, each party undergoes an involution to take a line of flight into molecularity, exchanging particles on the plane of immanence. By heeding advancements in the digital realm, we potentiate a recapitulation of becoming-animal that affords the concept expansive reach. We need to account for a new composition that has emerged; this exists between the somatic avatar and the digital avatar. The somatic avatar exclusively encapsulates action taken in the physical world and is clearly segmented on a number of different axes. The digital avatar is a primarily molar form that is still striated even though it has no discernible physicality. Rather than blood, running through the binary veins of the digital avatar is the totality of one's internet usage. Our digital representations may not impart the same affective directives that our somatic avatars embody. Our online etchings are transmitted over material fibres, creating imprints that serve to broadcast an affective message which remains linked to our somatic avatar. In the becoming-digital of the somatic avatar and the becoming-somatic of the digital avatar we find a place of smoothness, an absence of the burden borne by the segmented subject beholden to identity. We locate a body that has relinquished organs to allow for pure relations that exist beyond the banality of routine bureaucracy. The womb of the physical world has been impregnated by the sperm of digital space and this less than immaculate conception has birthed the somatar. I conduct a schizoanalytic autoethnography, situating aspects of my somatic and digital existence within the world. The goal is to find myself on the plane of organisation, so I can loosen the shackles of my own subjectivity and locate the collective assemblage that is the somatar and identify what it can do.