Readings for 11/17/11: Ulmer Part Three: The Categorical Disaster

Source:

Ulmer, G. L. (2005). Electronic monuments. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Excerpts:

Chapter 5: Formless Emblems (Testimonial)

Chapter 6: The Agency of the Image (Upsilon Alarm)

Overview & Synthesis:

Chapter 5:

            In this section, Ulmer goes through a MEmorial construction for child abuse to illustrate to reader how to construct their own. He points out that “Electronic monumentality addresses the responsibility of revising and registering within the digital apparatus the borers and boundaries of an American national identity” (115). The goal then is a recalibration of distinction at every level of being, including logical, psychological, ethical, and political. (115)The MEmorial should reduce resistance my supplementing literate tourist experience with electrate image designed to “expose one’s own presences as shadow or blind spot in a collective field of value” (116). The heterogeneous standpoint is at the core of the methodology and looks at the paradox of group subjectivity in and through electracy, as the space is not geometric but warped (118). By looking at the question of borders and categories and connecting associated fragments with signifiers and themes, MEmorials treat the event as both an idea and atmosphere or mood.

            In terms of the Gift or Concetto Ulmer explains that a sign provides meaning by the relationship between its parts – a material element and a concept (120). In electracy, chora replaces topos as the mode of organization and classification. The basic unit of signification in Lacan’s theory is not the sign but they emblem, which is intended to convey knowledge and truth in a brief and compelling form to persuade the reader and impress itself upon memory (121). Ulmer continues on to explain that the emblem “is a specific divide used within the allegorical mode” and within a MEmorial it juxtaposes abject values with social ideals (124). The emblem is a way to make the literate sign something electrate (125). It embodies the abstractive power of writing in a specific social rule and place, this preventing the sign from collapsing when it is brought down to earth (125). “The choral emblem situates meaning generation materially within the practices of an institution” (125). He discusses Lacan’s L-schema saying that the main point of the schema is to demonstrate that the symbolic relation is always blocked to a certain extent by the imaginary axis (128). This shows the “outside-inside or extimate nature” of subject formation as alienation. Therefore the benefit of the MEmorial is that it reveals to its makers “the location of the border that passes through them” (129).

By discussing mourning, Ulmer explains that the purpose of the MEmorial peripheral is to open further through to the relation between private and public experience, individual and collective actions, events, and behaviors (130). This is contrasted to a conventional memorial that simply commemorates loss as sacrifice on behalf of a public, collective value. The point he makes is that this usually leaves out recognition of the specific behaviors brought about by sacrifice. He further explains the purpose of the peripheral as “to make a case for losses of life (or other kinds of expenditure) whose public, collective relevance as sacrifice are not recognized” (131).

            In terms of what he calls “formless value,” Ulmer explains that the formless operations of base materialism, horizontality, pulse and entropy bring abject experiences into discourse without uplifting them into beauty or significance (132). This gives access to the abandoned and neglected modern sacred so that the MEmorial can follow up and articulated the unacknowledged values found at this level of experience (132). He suggests that the formless quality does not resemble anything but instead has disparate properties by accidental features (134). He comes back to the idea that a premise of the MEmorial is that the affect of abjection is felt collectively as well as individually (135). Thus, the first step in designing it is to notice that abject loss that the community acknowledges is a problem but has not accepted as a sacrifice or value (134). “The MEmorial addresses abjection in both individual and national identity, having to do with a lack of fit, a certain disparity between the two sides of what is compared in an identity condition” (134).

Ulmer explains that “the purpose of a MEmorial is to witness and testify regarding the event of a public problem, to shift it from the private individual status of one at a time, each case in isolation, to a cumulative public status of sacrifice on behalf of an unrepresented national value” (136).  We should attempt to bring abject losses to attention without transposing them into abstractions or ideals. For example, in his child abuse example, Ulmer reminds us that the abuse is not the value but the sacrifice necessary to maintain the value. The “sublime” he mentions names a feeling that the MEmorial exposes, externalizes, and articulates (137). This feeling of the sublime, he explains, “augments the initial sting of recognition that motivated its selection and transforms the process of design into an ethical encounter” (138).

Ulmer again returns to the emblem, explaining that we use it to write a disaster that we cannot think or feel (138). He points out that electrate writing is not as clear and simple as the truth, but obtuse and complex as the real. Therefore, the egent must write in a deconsultation: a memory, a disaster, a morality (139). It is electracy that makes it possible to revisit our relationship to disaster and to events that resist every effort of problem-solution (140). Ulmer explains that the Jacobin mode of vanguard problem solving is to establish Committees of Public Safety in your area of interest (142). However, the EmerAgency approach to policy problems is neither from this nor the perspective of instrumental engineering (143). Instead, it is to find oneself the feeling of a Committee of Public Safety.

Chapter 6:

            Ulmer explains that what makes writing the disaster reproducible as a practice for egents is the simplicity of the means (147). Simply, it is to make an allegory, juxtapose some documents, and the human sensorium does the rest. Commemoration is the kind of memory supported and augmented by digital technology and the educational practice of the MEmorial (149). By dreaming beyond any concept we are able to witness the relationship between language and the real and become aware (149).

In terms of agency, Ulmer explains that the MEmorial does not define or analyze the disaster but discovers its mood and through attunement makes it matter to ‘me’ (154). The mood here is virtual. The MEmorial is just a way to map and participate in this mood construction by tracing the series of pain (154). Thus, the egent writes the field of justice “following the metonymic connectivity, contiguity, the intensities of desire indexed in machinic assemblages” (155). Each MEmorial introduces a set of machinic indexes into the Internet prosthesis where they can be added to the virtual map and collaborative deconsultation (155). The MEmorial also addresses the gap between the disaster and the public’s ability to respond (157). However, it does not offer a reason, but simply marks this blank with a temporary, abject hypothesis (157).

            In his discussion of the “Y,” Ulmer mentions that spontaneous disaster memorials are the vernacular point of departure for the MEmorial (158). He says that in the conductive logic of choragraphy the “why” posed rhetorically in the wake of every disaster is juxtaposed with the Pythagorean “Y” and its revival in “The Agency of the Letter” (159). In reference to the CATTt, he proposes that every tree structure of literate analysis become a rhizome of electrate feeling and that every Y-binary becomes a multiplicity (160). He later uses the anecdote comparing the Y to a wishbone.

Ulmer points out that “the testimonial linked to the peripheral takes the designated public problem as a vehicle, a semantic domain figuring virtually a portrait of my political unconscious” (160). With this, we should not explain the issue at hand, but let it explain us for the testimonial. We are testifying by mapping the recognition scene (160). Ulmer puts the first step for testimonial as “passing through customs,” where one begins a transversal to map the entanglement of the private and public dimensions of an event looking for the scene of recognition where disaster becomes self-portrait (161). Ulmer points out that the MEmorial attempts to provide an image that holistically evokes the tangle of competing stories in a matrix, a block that brings them into a network (166). This comment connects his comparison to the MEmorial as “felt” and interlocking. He says that “Memorials are not texts but felts, including the punning overtone of a category that cohere around a feeling or mood” (167). The disaster is not written by weaving, but instead filling the gap between things, like finding the hooks and eyes in felt to form digital links. He points out that the point of communication between the sender as a representative of cultural values and the receiver as a character in a narrative diegesis is similar to the analogy the monster is to the story what the problem is to society (169). 

            Ulmer once again reiterates that the MEmorial is self-addressed in the middle voice and the action is reflexive, extended through a networked environment to become a group subject (171). The identity of collectivities and groups is found precisely in behavior or at least that is where to find values that do not speak their name – those that are abject, formless (174). The rule of a MEmorial is that it must be attached to an extant memorial for acknowledged sacrifice so that the juxtaposition establishes the public and collective nature of the abject sacrifice (175). The mood is not in us, but we are in it. We are testifying, not arguing. Therefore, the MEmorial shoes us not our fate, but our situation as the Internet serves as a living monument (176).

Questions & Reflections:

1. Ulmer says that society already recognizes this problem of child abuse and tries to fix it but the MEmorial may bring a new dimension to the attention to it. However, if one of the intents is to affect public policy, how will this be any different? Public policy has already attempted to address it – will any attempts caused by the MEmorial have any more influence or would they be just as futile toward change? I feel like they may only be able to give more recognition and appreciation rather than actual large-scale change.

2. I’m having trouble seeing how Ulmer’s proposed peripheral of the Upsilon Alarm relates the children’s names to the Challenger memorial. Yes it draws attention to the issue, but how is it related? Wouldn’t some people think that it is wrong to combine the two memorials as it takes attention away from the original commemoration? I think I need this further explained to me. 

3. I feel like Ulmer’s connection of the Y and why here is important, but I only partially comprehend it. What is the background? I’m having trouble connecting this fully without this knowledge. 

Readings for 11/10/11: Ulmer Part Two: Make It New(s)

Source:

Ulmer, G. L. (2005). Electronic monuments. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Excerpts:

Chapter 3: The Call (Abject Monuments)

Chapter 4:Transversal (Into Cyberspace)

Overview & Synthesis:

Chapter 3:

This chapter looks at the MEmorial in context, in order to illustrate its two constituencies of the peripheral and the testimonial. The main goal in this section is to illustrate how a news event may provoke an egent into action.

First, in a term called reasoneon, Ulmer discussed how reason and neon merge in a hybrid modality. He explains that the neon sign “forms an emblem that anticipates the consulting practice that remains to be invented” where the egent conducts and inquiry into the unending disaster (61). Here, the EmerAgency proposes to apply an electrate mode of knowledge to the dilemmas of contemporary (in)justice (60).

Ulmer then goes into discussion of the auratic axes in order to explain how one writes a disaster. He describes that what clarity is to literate truth, aura is to electrate truth (61). Commemoration in electracy therefore becomes intelligence not confined to mourning, but instead extended to personal and public reasoning (62). Because the MEmorial consists of two parts, peripheral and testimonial, these combined takes are able to show how a consultation on a social issue articulated in a news report cohere around the rhetorical sense of trauma (63).  Ulmer brings up the challenge for the transition of literacy to electracy as how the emotional fallacies in contrast with critical reason created a new mode of reason for the categorical image (62). He counters this by saying that because designed as a corporate or collective entity, the EmerAgency is able to construct another abstract machine “capable of intervening at the same level of the group subject addressed by the spectacle” (63). This begins with news. The MEmorial is able to translate an invent into an emblem, where the formula is news + art = testimonial (63). Because the aura is a sign of recognition, the MEmorial becomes testimonial when “the egent designs it as an image, figure, parable, emblem, using some feature of the news event as an objective correlative for the witness’s state of mind, mood, attunement to the world” (65). Ulmer then proceeds to include examples in he chapter to show contributions to the MEmorial tradition and offer insight into the EmerAgency consulting. These readings help to show us an arts approach to monumentality. They demonstrate how artists think about news events using medium and style, and then how they are able to create a movement contrary to the appropriation of the image of disaster into the spectacle. In terms of this counter-monumentality, Ulmer comments that MEmorials are not only reflexive but transitive, as they are intended as interventions in public policy formation (74). By including a critique of values and beliefs, counter-monumentality provides the potential to contribute to a deconsultancy on public policy. The MEmorial is intended to bring out an extra dimensions, he human question, the disaster as a collective self portrait, in order to contribute to this (74).

Chapter 4:

            In this chapter, Ulmer looks at the news as a part of entertainment. He then attempts to provide context for the MEmorial by illustrating the potential for arts and entertainment practices to produce a methodology capable of grasping a situation holistically in an image. He points it out as a transversal series and seeks to explore it throught the conductive inference logic of electracy.

            He describes news as a “feature of the institution of entertainment, meaning that the information is structured as a commodity” (83). Because it is structured this way, he says, we know more but care less about what happens in these events (84). The MEmorial attempts to counter this by implementing an abstract machine. This means writing images for group subjects in order to make intelligible the collective status of a multitude of individual behaviors (84).

In conjunction with this, he introduces the idea of the simulacrum, a term related to the transversal assemblage of abstract machines (85). Ulmer then proceeds to provide us with a set of documents, including a news story, to illustrate the features of machinic assemblage. These show an image category, its transversal, and the simulacral effect of virtuality emerging as an effect of a series. Ulmer’s point is to show how images mediate individual and collective experience in electracy (87).

Ulmer also introduces the idea of a cognitive map, which in a MEmorial helps citizens to grasp their position within a historical field (90). In terms of cyberspace testimony, he describes how transcendence serparates the image of the body from the material body (95). Therefore, the news event is able to serve as a metaphor for evoking the feeling of what it is like to be in someone else’s situation (95). It is this agenda setting power of pop culture that is able to transform a set of images and narratives. He comments that “the notion of cyberspace is relevant to us to the extent that it provides some insight into the transformation of human experience in electracy and the era of the spectacle” (96). In terms of the spectacle, the goal in becoming images is not to eliminate categories, but to renegotiate them.

Ulmer comments that commemoration in the public sphere is dominated by this idea of the spectacle. He explains that commemoration is a “collective process that sanctions certain images and not others, around which group subjects form” (100). It is the intent of the MEmorial to intervene in this process to democratize selection and sanctioning of the icons that influence national identity (100).

In terms of identity, Ulmer brings up the idea of the gaze. He comments that the self-scrutiny of the gaze is the basis within electracy for the emerging group subject (101). Because cyberspace is customizable, communicative capacity is enhanced. Therefore, in the new electrate apparatus, the clear distinction between subject and object is replaced by choragraphy (103). In it, the observer is no longer part of the subject-object binary gaze, but instead only one part of a network. Then, the challenge for the MEmorial is to learn how to write from this standpoint of only being a figure within a field of warped space (105).

Ulmer continues on to bring up the ideas of the impresa and emblem for how the egent testifies with respect to disaster. The impresa represents the principle of individuation and the emblem is more general and addressed to a larger audience (107). In terms of the transvaluation of virtue, the MEmorial treats a disaster as a source for understanding contemporary values. It does this as a mode of self knowledge rather than attempting to impose on this disaster a predetermined meaning (109).

In summary, Ulmer points out that though his model, we are under the assumption that digital imaging is a social machine.

Questions & Reflections:

1. On page 69, Ulmer mentions the idea of collective memory. And this ties into the idea I’ve gotten from his work as us working together in commemoration to form that collective memory. Do you think that this idea ties back into the idea of collective intelligence that Jenkins mentions? We might be working together to form this collective memory, but isn’t it just as important to tie it into the sense of the individual?

2. I’m slightly confused as to Ulmer’s connection of reasoning and neon into reasoneon. I think I get the neon effect he is talking about, but how are the two connected?

3.  I am interested in exploring further this idea of how cyberspace is customizable and therefore able to provide this communicative capacity. Without cyberspace do you think Ulmer’s same ideas could be adapted to still be applied for the same purposes, maybe in a different way? Or are they unique?

Reading for 11/3/11: Ulmer Part One: Theory Tours

Source:

Ulmer, G. L. (2005). Electronic monuments. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Excerpts:

Preface

Introduction: The EmerAgency

Chapter 1: Metaphoric Rocks (Founding Tourists)

Chapter 2: The Traffic Sphere (A MEmorial Prototype)

Overview & Synthesis:

Preface

            Ulmer opens by calling attention to the power of catastrophes to motivate collective as well as individual reflection on the meaning and purpose of life (x). He introduces the idea of the MEmorial as a hybrid combining image and text. It combines both the features of a topical essay and the vernacular shrines that people have used to respond to disasters (xiv). As an analogy, he compares this project as being to the networked classroom what the argumentative paper is to the literate classroom (xvi). By aligning subjects with problems and public policy he suggests that EmerAgency adds to the existing arrangement by contributing this “dimension of the fifth estate whose purpose is to witness, monitor, the process relating knowledge, problems, and politics” (xiv). He describes mourning as a behavior of both individual and collective identity formation, psychologically and socially. Tourism plays and important role at both levels and contributes to the invention and maintenance of American national identity. Thus, we could use the new transinstitutional reach of the Internet to contribute to a new dimension of civic sphere with this (xv).

Introduction

Ulmer begins by introducing Virilio’s ideas. Virilio argues that new technology and instantaneous interactivity presents a threat to democracy. He also points out that public space in real time becomes an image in some medium and poses the transformation of the worldview each individual holds into one single perspective (xviii). Ulmer counters this by arguing that it is not the mind being overwritten but its boundary, the border between the self and the “collective” of human existence. He uses the EmerAgency experiment as a response to Virilio by designing a practice to address the loss of borders experienced in the virtual city (xix).

Chapter 1

Ulmer introduces the Florida Rushmore project to illustrate the application of the MEmorial. The purpose of the EmerAgency is to use the concept of tourism to produce a new kind of tourist destination and behavior around which we might form an electrate civic sphere (4). The MEmorial pushes beyond idea into mood, feeling, and desire (6). While MEmorialization is not tourism, this provides an analogy for how to use the information highway to participate in public problem solving (9). It shows how new communications technologies can help people participate in public problem solving. Ulmer suggests to think of it more like a permanent, pervasive town hall meeting rather than travel. The MEmorial is intended to expand this public participation in monumentality into a permanent Internet deconsultancy. Additionally, it could help to adapt the invention of tourist destinations as an analogy for authoring the images that underlie the group subject and to make them available as sites of possible collective education (16). Then, the task of the EmerAgency to produce an electrate practice capable of focusing attention on our collective behavior (30).

Ulmer comments on several works that influence his creation and adaptation of the EmerAgency. He first applies the idea of “theoria” by discussing how theorists in Ancient Greece were also tourists since they traveled to a site of importance to see the sights and get their own world view (5). Ulmer uses the classic tourist guidebook as an example of old literacy that only conveys information. He points out that the MEmorial will have to have a new form or rhetoric by saying it must “bring into composition the qualities of modern (electrate) space” by demolishing the perspectivist window and metaphors for thought (7). Ulmer goes on to connect this by saying that the MEmorial visualizes at least a part of this formation of coherence, in which electrate society is held together by collections of meaningless signifiers (28). Ulmer comments how these monuments may be examples of the rhizome that Deleuze and Guattari propose as the result of the “abstract machine” that creates collective identity from group subjectivity (12). He says that tourism is rhizomatic because it “offers a possible point of access to a group subjectivity” (12). He also draws from Joseph Beuys’s “social sculptures” (Show Your Wound, Tallow) to illustrate how by representing the wider context of social failure, the sore spots of the community may be grasped pathically as features of identity (27). And finally, he discusses Lacan and the three exigencies, Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary as being held together by the Symptom, which he describes as “the peculiar notation of the human dimension” (28).

Chapter 2

This chapter goes into the MEmorial as a prototype. Ulmer says that the challenge to democracy is to educate an electrate citizenry that could navigate the new cyber cityscape without losing agency. Ulmer uses the controversy over the Vietnam Wall memorial before its construction to highlight the dangers of hegemony in a post-cyber world. He also provides a link between car crashes and war. Similarly, with his illustration of the NRA, he points out that citizens may instead worship the object and not the ideas behind the object. He argues that the MEmorial compensates for these things because it seeks to memorialize those which has been categorized as formless values, things that are not worthy of public recognition except as anomalies, errors, or accidents (50). These untransformed, nonstranscendent, untransposed and unredeemed things he calls “abjects” (43). But “What memorials are to ideals, MEmorials are to abjects” (43). Ultimately he argues “the relationship between catastrophe and memory must be reorganized once again for an electronic apparatus, which continues the mnemonic tradition in its own way” (45).

Questions & Reflections:

1. Do you think that some of Ulmer’s ideas could apply to existing Internet outlets? If so, which? If not, do you think that any might have the potential to be altered to fit the prototype he portrays?

2. Do we normally make connections between our actions (such as driving) and our freedoms (that we indirectly gain from war)? If not, do you think adding an abject to this would be beneficial or not for society?

3. When Ulmer mentions the use of the peripheral in chapter 2, this brings up the idea of a mass communication theory I have studied, the Elaboration Likelihood Model. Could the ELM be applied to guide the application of the MEmorial to make it more effective?