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?
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