Avatars (Again)

There's been a fair amount of discussion of the idea of "avatars" or created personas, mostly in reference to Hayles' Writing Machines. I think it's interesting in that it makes Hayles' critical process into a narrative, with the critic (and the authors) as characters as opposed to disembodied voices, which I would say is the more typical model. Beyond making the book a lot more readable, I also think that this decision represents literary criticism as a personal process, not a purely rhetorical one.

It is interesting given the personal tone that this decision gives the criticism that Hayles decides to insulate herself from it by working through a persona that she insists is not purely autobiographical. She mentions in her explanation at the beginning that she is repelled somewhat by "self-display," which seems to me to stem somewhat from an idea that the critic should not speak with a personal voice, a convention that I've encountered at Pomona on many occasions. Perhaps Hayles' refusal to engage in overt autobiographical narration is a recognition of the fact that even in such writing there is a degree of mediation owing to the fact that such works are written reflectively, and therefore represent the persona or image of the writer that they have developed in their own memories. An assumption that the image of oneself is not to a degree a created persona, doesn't seem sustainable, so perhaps it is fitting that Hayles doesn't try to maintain that illusion.