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?