New Media Spring 2014 Week Two

Tuesday: Ulmer and Electracy

Today’s plan:

1. Address Ulmer’s Electronic Monuments

2. Ulmer’s interest in Haiku

To begin approaching Ulmer, I want to return to some of the binaries I laid out while we were discussing Ong. This will give us a sense of what Ulmer is after. 

Note: pairs marked with an * are taken from Lester Faigley’s Fragments of Rationality (Faigley, in turn takes them from Ihab Hassan’s “The Culture of Postmodernism.” The pair marked ** stems from Ulmer’s introduction to Electronic Monuments; while image connects to sight and the eye, Ulmer deploys it in the sense of the infinite–since a single image always conveys more information than words could ever totalize, realize, capture, contain.
 

“A nation, like an individual, can come to know itself better by learning how to remember and tell its dreams” (22). 

“The challenge to democracy is to educate an electrate citizenry” (47). 

Here’s a few questions in relation to Electronic Monuments:

1. What’s up with “EmerAgency”? xii-xiii, xv, xxxi, 9-10, 13 [new monument] 
2. What is a MEmorial? xiv [see also xiii, 16] , xxix, xxxiii-iv, 6-7, 14, 16 [trauma of individuation], 28, 42-43 [and/as abject], 48 [components of MEmorial], 65 [MEmorial and testimony, sample assignment], 66 [MEmorial and avant garde poetics], 77 [MEmorial and stock/ing photos–inspiration for tonight’s homework], 
3. What’s the difference between testifying and witnessing? xxvii, 7 [perspectivist window]
4. What is CATTt? [and don’t just say a heuristic…] xxxii
5. What is/constitutes a “subject” in electracy? xvii, xxi, xxx, 10 [nation], 18 [group subject], 19 [popcycle]
6. What is ATH (até)? xv [return of the repressed], xxiv, 21, 

Why the need for “electric” monuments? What kind of “consultancy” (analysis, critique) does the EmerAgency hope to accomplish? Ulmer writes:

Public discussion remained fixed on the events, rarely reflecting on the frame of the events, never raising the structural questions that might help us grasp the cause and function of private and public death. (35)

So, question: what does Ulmer mean here by “structure”? [Our rituals of morning contribute to the formation of a community] (34)

Discussion of chora: pages 39-40:

As reactivated in contemporary theory, chora names a secularized, personal sacred: it maps a relationship between an individual and those places that reveal the categories (classifying system, metaphysics) of a society.(40)

Discussion of traffic fatalities and the abject, 42-43:

The premise of the MEmorial is that traffic fatalities are not an anomaly in an otherwise rational order, as normal consultants would have it. 

The de$ign preimse, following Bataille, is that traffic fatalities are fundamentally “abject,” meaning that hey are a sacrifice on behalf of some “value” that is more important to the society than the annual loss of motorists. This value is not an ideal that may be named in a concept (justice, virtue, freedom), but remains inarticulate within the bodies and behaviors of individuals in the private sphere, untransformed, nontranscendent, untransposed, unredeemed, (what Bataille called “formless”). Call it an “abject.” What memorials are to ideals, MEmorials are to abjects. It is the case that every ideal is shadowed by an abject? the place to look for formless values is not in social narratives but in the habitus of behaviors. The traffic accident is a short circuit bringing into direct contact an abstract machine and the fluxes of matter, productive of group subjectivity. Bataille proposes the me as monster or remainder that refuses to be distracted by the glorious body of the ideal. (43)

Here, I want to argue, is a critical passage for coming to grips with Ulmer’s desires for the MEmorial. We will parse this passage out near the conclusion of class. 

Second, I want to spend part of class working with images. Source material, Ulmer’s Internet Invention and its discussion of Basho and haiku reasoning. 

Thursday: Inventing the MEmorial

In class today I will ask you to break into groups of 2. Working together, I will ask you to create a one page assignment sheet for the MEmorial project. This should involve the typical genre conventions of the assignment sheet. I will give you 20 minutes to do this. Please remember that whatever the process, and whatever else you want to do/make/perform/write/whatever, the final component of this process is a PechaKucha presentation. 

In part two of class… TOP SECRET

In the third and final part of class, we’ll return to the questions I posted on Tuesday (above) to talk about key concepts and passages. If we have time, I want to look at some of the Haiku’s (although these might have to wait until Tuesday). 

For homework, I’ll ask you to revise your Project One: Assignment sheet based on our class discussion and submit a finalized version, as a Word .docx, via Canvas. Also, I will ask you to collect material for your MEmorial (10 articles, 20 pictures). This material should form the “objective representation” or “studium” or “traditional” or “memorial” component of your MEmorial project. 

Heuristic: Parts of an Assignment Sheet

Purpose / Rationale: What is the purpose of this assignment? Why ask students to do this? Rationale is very similar to purpose, they might be combined. What is the inspiration for this project? Who are the important theorists? What are the key terms? (i.e., This project asks you to compose a MEmorial. Theorist Gregory Ulmer explicates the MEmorial as… He capitalizes the ME to stress…)

Medium / Materials: What do you need to do this project? What will the project be/ (i.e, in this project you will compose a MEmorial using the presentation application PechaKucha). 

Methods: How might a student begin the project? What are the steps / key points of the process?