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?