Clinamen

This is one in a series of posts about Greg Ulmer's Internet Invention. These posts will serve as lecture notes for a class I'm teaching, but my hope is that they could also be a resource for others using Ulmer's text. I have tagged all of these posts internet invention for those who want to see them all in one place.

LECTURE
Virtual Feeling
Whereas education in Plato's Academy "relied on an atmosphere of friendship and trust" the electrate institution is the internet. On the internet "the interbody metaphor must mediate a global encounter among strangers" (155). The revision of the face to face metaphor doesn't mean that we can't "trust" people anymore, that things are inauthentic, or that communication can't happen. Instead we should recognize that "the channel, the connection along with the given circumstances of the senders and receivers, are in ruins; yet within these ruins arises a digital memory place (Xanadu)" (155).

One useful way to think about what Ulmer is saying here is David Weinberger's description of the Web as "small pieces loosely joined." Whereas the print text seemed whole (even though, in many ways, it wasn't), the web explodes texts into small chunks that are linked together. Does this mean that "meaning" and "literacy" are out the window, or that communication can't happen? No, in fact it means that we have infinite ways to communicate and make new meaning by putting all those small pieces together in new ways.

This way of thinking is especially important in our postcolonial moment. What the Web does is put a number of cultures in contact that have not previously been in contact. How can these cultures communicate with one another? Ulmer claims that cyberpidgins - new languages that allow different cultures to speak to one another - are necessary. How do we develop these cyberpidgins? Ulmer claims that the Entertainment discourse offers one possibility. The grammar of electracy is Entertainment - the different images that we can learn to be. If we can speak to other cultures, it may be via images and the Entertainment discourse.

From Pidgin to Creole
Pidgin languages arose in colonial situations when two cultures clashed. It was a way for two cultures to "do business." No one is a "native speaker" of such a language, but as it becomes codified it becomes a "creole" language and people can learn to speak it. Ulmer claims that the widesite provides "a creole passage between literacy and electracy" (158).

The Liminal
Dialogue is liminal - it is always sitting in between two states/two people/two ideas. This was what Plato was dealing with, a Truth that somehow sat liminally between two. Some would say, this is what makes big T Truth impossible to achieve. The moment we collapse the liminal space and choose a side, we've lost the truth of the liminal. If we choose one, we lose the other.

Fetishturgy
"The analogy between the destroyed network of military command still able to function after suffering a first nuclear strike, and the ruined messages of dream work, scrambled into nonsense by repression yet received and understoon in a way by the dreamer, is one of the operative 'packets' of choragraphy. The equivalent ruin at the sociohistorical level is the Black Atlantic - the persistence of African culture through the catastrophe of the middle passage" (159).

Ulmer notes that African culture persisted regardless of the ways in which it was ripped apart, and this is an example of how meaning persists in our current "postcolonial" moment. Those taken from their homeland and brought to America as slaves continued a number of cultural practices, practices that were also changed (and creolized) as they came to America. Part of the reason for these cultural practices was to protect culture from being lost or forgotten. Often "fetish charms" were used for this reason. These fetish charms lead Ulmer to invent yet another word - fetishturgy. Fetishturgy is what we're doing as we make the widesite. We are "fetishwrights" rather than "playwrights" because we don't know who our audience is in the same way a playwright might (160).

(Post)Colonial Fetish
"'Cyberpidgin' is a neologism naming the effort to appropriate self-consciously the dynamics of pidginization and creolization and apply them to international internet interactivity. Fetishturgy is the means of writing cyberpidgin" (160).

The word fetish has some negative connotations for us, but that is only because we left out many of the meanings of the word along the way: "the negative inflection of this genealogy [of the word fetish] reflects the European or Western sense of identity, based on the distinction between the presumed superiority of literate institutions as opposed to the superstition of oral, fetishistic peoples" (160). As we should know by now, Ulmer is looking for a way to re-introduce those forgotten meanings of the word fetish. This is his method.

Primitivism
Ulmer notes that as much as Western culture maligned fetish objects (as backwards or primitive), they incorporated such objects into their art and culture. Thus, the fetish was simultaneously maligned and praised (it's truth lies somewhere in between, in a liminal space).

Crossroads
Using his method of chorography, Ulmer opens up the term fetish and reveals all of its forgotten meanings. He then appropriates the terms to explain (in yet another way) what is happening in mystory on the widesite. Dialogue for Plato searched for "the X eidos." X marks the spot of the ideal form - truth. Ulmer traces this X as a cross through African diasporic culture. What do the various crosses and X's tell us?

Logic Switch
"Electracy adds to orality and literacy the possibility of writing the unconscious (and hence of wriging what we do not know - with our stupidity and with our trust). The question becomes: in what setting does this conversation occur?" (163).

How do we write this? With the body. Our body knows as much (if not more) than our mind. We engage bodily memory as a way of writing the unconscious. This is why we get Ulmer's discussion of the "truth table" (the mind) and the dinner table (the body). Somewhere in between (if we push these tables together, it would be on the crack) is "interbody design."

Additionally, we can think about the hyperlink as the liminal space between ideas. Thus, electrate writing is about fragments: "The key feature/experience of the 'fragment' as a compositional unit that is to electracy what the paragraph is to literacy, is 'interruption.' 'Interruption' is not a thing or an act but a relationship" (163). The hyperlink isn't a think - it's a relationship.

First Encounters/Ju-Ju
We have ceased to see it, but we should recognize that the apparatus of print is a fetish: "seen from the point of view of oral peoples, the page itself is a fetish" (164).

"We have to imagine the shift from literacy to electracy from a point of view that encompasses both sides of the movement, rather than simply fro one side or the other. The habit of literacy is problem solving, method, investigation, and inquiry - science, in short. Our habit in discussions of electronic technology is to worry over whether or not we are being critical enough in our collective adoption of the new equipment" (165).

Alien Encounters
The entertainment discourse is developing its own grammar of impersonations - different ways of being an image. It is "evolving its own manner of complexity. It is learning how to write with its own system, with an intertextual allusiveness of the sort that will eventually give it th same degree of richness produced within literature over its multimillennial history" (166).

Pop Syntagms

[Image courtesy of Wikipedia]

"The entire tradition of the readymade from modernist collage to the present may be understood as a miming in existing media of the recording properties of the new media: the capacity to write not just with words, but directly with images of objects and actions" (167).


Turntable
Ulmer references the "Think Different" ads from Apple:

This is different from the "testimonial" of a product (a doctor claiming that she prescribes Advil) - it is not even about these famous people having anything to do with Apple. Instead, "celebrities may be used to create the effect of ethos. We are learning from our pop stars in general how to write a persona" (169). Americans are "exporting" celebrities, and this means that the pidgin language of the entertainment discourse is slanted in favor of the "powerful group" (Americans). However, the subordinate group enters into dialogue with the ability to transform things. The pidgin language is a space for (dangerous) negotiations.

Embelematics
What is the grammar of this new language? The grammar of this new cyberpidgin language begins with all the various impersonations available and circulating via the internet and other media.

Frank Caliendo has mastered this new grammar by doing multiple impersonations: George Bush, John Madden, Al Pacino, and others:

Switch Words
"In electronic dialogue two semantic domains are juxtaposed, two orders of information are set in motion as two series, which is the equivalent in pattern of the step-by-step linear...Such 'tangles' hold together a felt" (172).

Alice in Cyberspace
Ulmer takes us through a number of appropriations of Alice in Wonderland to show that it's not the content of the story that is important but rather the "form" of Alice: "It's not that [Alice] 'explains' anything, but that she produces a shape, a coherence" (173). Various writers come away from Alice in Wonderland with different ideas, they appropriate the story (as a relay) in infinite ways. Thus Alice becomes a way to make new meaning rather than a story/character that means any one thing.

The Categorical Joke
"Part of the optimism of the EmerAgency project about the capability of the internet and electracy to support a new kind of consultancy, offering a new approach to community problems solving and public policy formation, is this homology across entertainment forms, creative logics, and digital technology" (174).

The clash of various cultures on the Web might make for some contentious interactions, but Ulmer is offering some hope here: it's possible that homologous stories/fables (stories that repeat across cultures) offer a space for different cultures to communicate.

Ulmer then poings to Silvano Arieti's discussions of creativity and palegologic thinking. Creativity is very much about creating links that other people don't see (in extreme forms, this is schizophrenia). This should remind us of choragraphy and the method of mystory. The widesite is a place where we create links that others don't in order to make new meaning.

No Guarantees
Ulmer closes the chapter on a cautious note. Yes, there may be some hope that electracy can point the way to communication amongst various (often clashing) cultures and ideologies, but there's no guarantee. He points to September 11, 2001 as an example:

"In our terms [the terms Ulmer lays out in the text], Osama bin Laden represented an oral worldview manipulating the products of science as a rhetoric. The gambit of the EmerAgency is to virtualize the debate, by democratizing the lesson of Dante: he hated the rulers of his hometown, so he wrote them into Hell. Today we see his contemporaries through his eyes. It is not a matter of eliminating hatred from the world (a utopian goal). A challeng for the EmerAgency rather is to make this virtual option a viable one for political and ethical action, to help write 'murder' out of the equation" (177).