Readings for 12/1/11: Ulmer Part Four: Soft Justice

Source:

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

Excerpts:

Chapter 7: Justice Miranda (A Conceit)

Chapter 8: Soft Wishing Y (A Collaboration)

Conclusion: The Web of Changes

Overview & Synthesis:

Chapter 7:

Ulmer starts off by describing the Turing test as a point of transition from literacy into electracy (181). He discusses the imitation game that demonstrates a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior, where a human judge engages in conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. Continuing on, he describes the initial feeling produced by the sting of a news story as “justice” or “injustice” (184). He then points out that justice was the first concept and practice to pass from the oral mod of representation to the literate, and that this transformation is one of the touchstones of electracy (184).“What needs to be invented for electracy is not only a thought adequate to the continuing demands of injustice, but an electrate state of mind equivalent to the skepticism that informed the classic stand of philosophy” (186)

Samba's Carmen Miranda

In a twist on Miranda, Ulmer introduces both police interrogation and dancing the samba to illustrate the application of justice in an electrate approach to inquiry. He says that Miranda intervenes in the history of justice, shielding the illiterate from the third degree and also shielding everyone from self-incrimination (197). At the same time “Miranda” is synonymous with “samba,” since it is a metaphor as well as a metonym for it in that the meaning of samba music is precisely “freedom” (198).

Ulmer uses “Miranda” as a switch word, or “paradoxical entity” conducting information and also serving as a figure for a demonstration of concetto des$ign (196, 197). From Miranda emerges a specific patter in X/Y-logic crossing of two series, racing and electric learning style (206). He describes miranda as not only a means of storage and retrieval of information, but also a means of generating new texts or speeches of invention (197). Thus, he states, “The MEmorial functions as miranda, selecting certain “gems” from the flood of materials available in each of the popcycle discourses” (197). Continuing on with the imitation game demonstration, Ulmer says that this improvisation shows how to locate the games and string them together into an associative series that is felt, providing a simulacrum that is apprehended through feeling (197).

Therefore, Miranda moves between two styles, moods, modalities, and attunements on memory and freedom. Ulmer states that electrate citizens need all the mirandas for reasoneon about justice (199). In miranda formation, unconscious premises of judgment are included with intuition and analysis to produce conductive inferences (209). He hopes that “In the electrate era of “justice” becoming “Miranda” (of topic becoming chora), perhaps every institution will have its own Miranda warnings (209).

           

Chapter 8:

In this chapter, Ulmer introduces divination as an interface for consulting that makes mystory intuitively intelligible by connecting the personal problems with the collective cultural archive. Divination offers “a relay for composing cognitive maps connecting individual existential problems with collective information resources” (215). By using it, consulting can apply to both expert knowledge and divination practices. Together mystory and divination share the effect of destiny relative to their respective cultural frames of reference (214). This combines two kinds of consulting: scientific and magical. Ulmer demonstrates this by saying that the EmerAgency used a public policy issue database as the cultural archive and the mystory as the connection between the personal situation and collective wisdom (214). Within this hybrid, the methodological principle “is netither to speak for the “other,” nor to turn over discourse responsibility to the “other,” but to syncretize the ways of knowing native to the two cultures” (214). Overall, the goal of deconsultation Ulmer says, is not only to solve he querent’s problem, but also to use hyrid divination to test the categorical power of images to configure the site of the disaster in another way (227).

Pom Poms

            Another thing Ulmer focuses on in this chapter is the wish. The wish “takes up where practical utility leaves off” (216). As a consultation, the wish works as the fourth mode of inference, conduction, which is the reasoning specific to image (216). Ulmer says that when we make a wish, we are performing a ritual of fortune that has atrophied and all but disappeared from awareness and behavior in modernity (231). The wish counts as a commemoration and acknowledgement of fortune (232). Whatever wish one makes, the wishing Y serves as an opportunity to commemorate the wish manifested in the trace one makes through life (232). Connecting this back to divination, he says “the modality of the wish is that of a question in a contemporary divination practice, whose purpose is to rebuild the cognitive map connecting individuals with collective historical forces” (233). Ulmer discusses Pappenheimer's Pom-Pom trail in conjunction with 9/11 to illustrate the connection to the wish. 

Conclusion:

            Something important that Ulmer discusses in the conclusion is the idea of Cha-Ching as an American wisdom for a global era. Ulmer introduces the Cha-Ching in several different contexts and then describes it as “a hybrid, a syncretic or postmodern formation drawing on the history of the world’s wisdom traditions as an interface metaphor for designing an Internet civic sphere” (255). The purpose of it is to make legible the traces of compossibility (255). The ambition of the Cha-Ching is to transvalue common sense itself and not to propagate conformity (258). Therefore, the purpose of the EmerAgency is to compose rather than receive this wisdom – “to enlist netizens in the creative process of designing contemporary wisdom, and to relate wisdom with knowledge” (258). Ulmer proposes that the next step then for the EmerAgency is to move beyond the memorial or develop a poetics capable of generating the Cha-Ching from the accumulative Memorials (258). What is left to be explored in the Cha-Ching is the usefulness of a hybrid oracle interface in reeducating world common sense (260).

Questions & Reflections (more general for Ulmer’s class visit):

1. Your book provides not only ideas but also a kind of guide or set of instructions to put these into action. When teaching your concepts in your classes, what are some of the most memorable or notable things that your students have created using your ideas?

2. I feel like a lot of MEmorial ideas proposed, while good in theory, would be almost impossible to achieve, either by sheer difficulty or because of public opposition for one reason or another. Do you feel like this holds your ideas back? Since it might be more difficult to actually put them into action, at least on the large scale, do you think that makes more people unwilling to experiment with or accept them?

3. Where are you now in the process of developing your ideas? What is the next step in your work? Where do you hope to go in the next few years?