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.