Ulmer and Bradley McGee: Monumentality, Emblems, and Egency

In the two chapters for this week, Ulmer discusses the way emblems are supposed to be considered for the monument, as well as the way we might some new form of agency in the age of electracy. Ulmer also draws out the MEmorial for Bradley McGee, a two year old boy who was tortured and killed by his father for soiling his pants. Ulmer weaves the abjection of child abuse throughout these two chapters while continuing to expand on the method for creating a MEmorial, oftentimes quickly oscillating between the two. The effect, it seems, is purposeful: to draw us into the chorography by so quickly switching between these two distinct narratives.

The Emblem

In some ways the emblem is the same kind of logics Ulmer has been working with all though the book, except in this case the productive element is more imagistic than verbal or technological. The idea is to mix a motto, a picture, and an epigram in order to create/illuminate meanings that might not be captured through traditional narratives. This relationship, or this disruption, comes from semiological reasoning where words become connected to visual items, most famously a tree in the case of Saussure. The meanings of each of the parts need to correlate with the meanings held by an audience, so it seems like the emblem (for the moment?) is less about the ME and the punctum, and more about the production of new relationships and ideas between these items in order to translate the narrative forms of literal argument to the tangled meanings of an electrate creation.

Where this does connect back to the ME in the MEmorial is that to create an emblem it takes a step toward the testimonial, which is to say a step toward an electrate documentation of the disaster. Part of both the chapters move to Maurice Blanchot’s Writing the Disaster in order to talk about violence in the way we typically do, as people getting hurt or killed, and the violence that is inherent in language, which is to say the way defining words is an act of confinement (and even etymologically, death). This connection between writing and disasters brings an interesting point of contact between literacy and electracy as they function toward violence.

In an extension of writing metaphors, as well as the Brian McGee story, Ulmer draws out the connection between writing, excrement, and childhood. Fecal matter, in some ways, is deeply personal in that it comes from inside of us, plus it allows for us to enter into a relationship with our bodies where we are both putting intense pressure on our bodies and relieving ourselves—this can be seen as a pleasurable thing. All through the chapter, Ulmer highlights stories of children who were tortured for “soiling” themselves, and helps us make the inference between the abuse and the fecal matter. But the analogy doesn’t stop there. Ulmer also works through some of the ways that pooping and writing can exist as a similar process. With great difficulty and social pressure we push our writing excrement into the world, and then we take this deeply personal thing and push it as far as we can away from ourselves. This connection, and possibly the lesson that we’re supposed to learn from these connections between abuse, feces, and writing, is that we need to connect the abject emblem together through the concept of “formless value.” This is to say that we should not force the parts together because we want or need them to go together, but allow them to more naturally come together in order to create the emblem, or the memorial.

The Agency of the Image (Upsilon Alarm)

This chapter, for me, appears to further elaborate on the theme of what is “formless” but in order to talk about how we, as individuals, create a sense of agency, and less about how the bits exist together on their own. It is not our own agency that constructs the connections, then, but the image itself. In line with the idea of puncepts and conductive reasoning, Ulmer advocates for inventing via the crossover between the mood in our state of mind and the mood in our language. This brings Ulmer to talk about the letter Y at length, ultimately to intertwine the letter with the word “why.” This connection works to talk about the letter Y as a metaphor for the separation and re-tangling that happens when the concepts come back together. The project is to not aim for a “w/hole” that memorialized the abject in totality, nor is it to separate off the different parts of the abject into “branches.” Instead, we must turn to the tangle of meanings that work together.

Questions:

What is the difference between what is “spiritual” and what is “felt”?

How are we “letting the being be” if the MEmorial is always our application of the disaster to our selves?

If the writing process can be compared to the digestive process, how do online spaces work to remove the “poop”?


photos @:


 http://www.needlenthread.com/Images/patterns/Monograms/monogram_1_y.gif

http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/toilet-new.jpg

Ulmer Week 2: The Projects Keep On Coming

In the Ulmer reading for this week we went through “The Call” and “Transversal.” Both of them interspersed the theories throughout with assignments which mean to help bring practical application to the reading. “The Call” had more to do with a new way of thinking about how we are hailed by the objects that we need to be “punctured” by. “Transveral” seemed to deal more with reconsidering the way we conceived of the relationship of our subjectivities (in whatever capacity that might be) to the images that they take in. There also seemed to be a greater emphasis on the postmodern (electrate) turn in “Transversal.”

The Call

One of the interesting moments in this chapter was the way that it dealt with a turn from images as a news source to images as an advertisement in the concept of the reasoneon. The reasoneon is a puncept from the words “reason” and “neon” in order to combine a hybrid between the things that we think about and the things that catch our attention. The specific example in the text is that it is not the neon itself that interests us, and that shapes us. Instead it is the shimmer of the neon light in a puddle that truly has an impact. This relates to the relationship between reason and advertising, where the images have reason included, but have only appropriated reason in order to accomplish other ends.

Speaking of impact, Ulmer sets up another concept is with Roland Barthes breakdown of images. One of these necessary concepts is the punctum, which is how the image pierces through cynicism and critical distance in order to impact the viewer. Ulmer also appropriates Barthes in the concept of the obtuse which is a third way of looking at an image that is indirect and more importantly involuntary. In taking an obtuse perspective to an image, especially one which reaches out to the punctum, images have the potential to “open wounds” in Ulmer’s definition. This connects the spectacle of tragedy to the social machine of public action, which can be a good thing. MEmorials are supposed to open up the space for those wounds.

The chapter is also critically connected to the idea of news, and Ulmer’s assignment for the chapter involves finding a news article that has “punctured” you and creating a website around the news story. As the chapter progresses, Ulmer goes into several examples of these kinds of news stories and ways to give a small memorial to them. There is another assignment that asks the reader to then try to turn the news story into a “scene.” This turn is fascinating in that it seeks to take a tragic even or circumstance (or maybe not tragic, but at least one that has a little punctum) and turns the event into a form of scene, which, for me, is most interesting in the case of the proposal for New York City’s homeless population. The example goes into some detail on the way that the homeless are created as a characteristic of space, specifically in conjunction with the tall skyscrapers. In the end the author, Krysztof Wodiczko, proposes making models of the homeless that are as tall as skyscrapers in order to accomplish a number of tasks.

Transversal

Though Ulmer starts this chapter at a place I understand, that news only a sub-genre of entertainment, the chapter heads in a direction that I don’t fully understand. He considers the simulacrum, which is the way images are expanded as a series of repetitions instead of as a set group of “wholes” in a category. Ulmer then goes on to demonstrate this simulacrum in the form of four different stories, each of them relating to a transgender moment, and the majority relating to the story of a gay man who robbed a bank in order to get money for a sex change operation. One of the articles is about the event itself, one is about a different incident with transgendered experience, and the other two took different lenses on the bankrobbery, the “place,” and the “person” respectively. The assignment then follows that the reader is supposed to compare these four textual moments and then expand on the move by performing the same motion with their example from the previous chapter.

Ulmer also puts a fair amount of emphasis on the relationship between images and identities, claiming that “the move to transverse [the real] has less to do with technology itself than a desire to transcend the body.” Though there was some important work going on here to talk about the relationship between images and identities, I couldn’t quite grasp where Ulmer was taking the idea. Also confusing were the two columns of words which seemed to correspond to a new vocabulary that reflected our appropriation of old categorical elements into new positions

Questions:

1)     

To what extent does Ulmers reference to the “optical unconscious” throw off a number of faulty visual associations, and it what way is he expanding those associations past purely the realm of the image?

2)      What does Ulmer mean in saying that news is “something that I already know or should know”?

 Why is that chapter named transversal? 

The Internet Accident and the Memorial

While these chapters by Ulmer were difficult to negotiate at times, one place to start might be the idea of the accident. Ulmer draws upon the notion that we are entering into a new age of communication which differs from either orality or literacy in important ways. Ulmer briefly outlines a few ways in which the age of literacy, in terms of the consideration of reading and writing texts, is coming to a close, and that the age of electracy, which is based on instant communication and visual communication, is coming into play. Ulmer’s goal in Electronic Monuments is to rethink our conceptions of education along these new lines of electracy.

One of the byproducts of dawn of electracy is the ability for there to be what Paul Virilio calls a “general accident” which is to say that the accident occurs immediately and across the entire world. This type of accident, then, makes the processes of democracy impossible, since the new modes of communication are leaving us unable to consider the idea of community in the same way. We then need to rethink the way that spaces and places interact, the way we compose and connect the different abstract machines in our environment. The idea of the abstract machine is especially pervasive throughout Ulmer’s consideration of electronic monuments, possibly because electracy involves a turn from the usual models of representation to a conception to the processes that underlie events and issues.

Toward this task, Ulmer points to an EmerAgency, which seems to be an electronic site for collecting and demonstrating the idea of deconsulting (which is the combination of deconstruction and consulting). This EmerAgency then creates MEmorials, which seem to be concerned with connecting elements of the individual with the group in order to enable a revisioning of the public sphere. MEmorials, then, are places for community to grow and respond to, and have a similar structure to what we normally consider in the building of a memorial in terms of what we often think of in terms of entertainment as well as the way that we consider tourism. MEmorials, then, build off the concepts that we already know, but often apply a new consideration of processes and technology with respect to the unconscious.

Examples of Disasters, Memorials, MEmorials

As a way of introducing the idea of these accidents/disasters Ulmer points to the idea of tourism. It starts by connecting disciplinarily to a move against tourism, in that once a person studies within a specific discipline they are given less reign to think outside of it. He connects the earliest theorists to tourists with the Greek term theoria, which connects our considerations of space, cognition, and ethics. The literate view, Ulmer contends, wants us to write in order to represent the sense of place as a certain kind of user interface that is problematic in that it separates the things being written about from the writing itself. When we are faced with an accident, we create memorials which in some ways try to operate on this same logic. We go to the memorial in order to mourn what happened on that day and thus get some kind of false catharsis from our false experience. What we are truly experiencing in those instances is the (w)hole of the accident, not the whole accident. The confusion, as usual, comes from our training in literacy.

One of the next places that Ulmer points us toward is the holograph as a way of making composite images which will not recede into being simply presentations of a happening. For Ulmer this is a way to consider the unconscious processes that push through the holographic composite by presenting an image that is both clear and unclear at once. It is this step into the unconscious which seems to get us beyond the problems of the individual to the problems of the collective as well, though his argument at that point is a bit more difficult to parse through.

Through the end of these chapters Ulmer also considers the relationship between sinkholes as a “karst topography” and human facial expression. This might be a connection between the idea of tourism as a consideration of geographic places and tourism as a consideration of expression. Indeed, one of the first examples of a MEmorial includes holographic faces which fade in and out of one another, much like we might think about a sinkhole. Through this description, Ulmer moves us farther away from what we typically think of as a memorial, since memorials are often thought of as constructed buildings in the memory of some great ideal or purpose. Ulmer, in pushing us toward the MEmorial, wants us to think of the concept of absence and the abject values as more important place for (de?)constructing, as (it seems) this will call greater attention to the “global” accident.          

Questions: 

So how does the process of constructing (?) a MEmorial help us to think about the idea of immediate accidents?

Why/how does Ulmer reference a "global America"?