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"?