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
The Donor
We are at the stage in the mystory when the protagonist meets a "donor": "Here they meet a character whose function is to test the worthiness of the hero to undertake the quest - their desire and their competence" (180). Ulmer is quick to point out that the donor can be a monster or an angel - that is, the donor doesn't have to be a "good guy." However, just when we think we've got what Ulmer is saying, he throws another curveball: "Perhaps more difficult to understand is that while one makes the wide image from the position of hero, one consults in the position of donor" (180). He uses Silence of the Lambs (Clarice and Hannibal Lecter) to show the hero-donor relationship.

Comment
The horrific crimes of Jane Gumb in Silence of the Lambs - skinning victims to make a suit that will allow him to pass as a woman - is an example of how the entertainment discourse represents "life problems in terms of their most extreme or worst-case potential" (182). The film deals with the transgression of gender norms with this horrific plot as a "defense against the emerging mutation identity experience associated with electracy (becoming image)" (182).

"That so many of our narratives are framed as crime stories...is an expression of the literate frame of mind" (183). In literacy, we are searching for the secret.

"Narratives allegorize the experience of achieving identity, of individuation, or of subject formation that is specific to each apparatus. We are borrowing this structure in turn as a relay to become an egent" (183).

Frederic Jameson: The donor shows us that the hero is never able to complete the quest him/herself - the hero always suffers from a lack: "the donor is the complement, the revers, of [the hero's] basic ontological weakness" (184). The donor is a "mediator or catalyst" who sometimes "wear[s] the functional appearance of the protagonist in order to perform his quite different actantial function" (185).

Hannibal Lecter has been read in contradictory ways, no one quite knows whether he's a protagonist or antagonist. This signals that he serves the donor function and thus his status shifts or is masked at points in the narrative.

Value
The "value" of a narrative lies in its ability to dramatize a diagetic world with which we can identify: "the task of the egents in composing the wide image is to map their individual relationship to this force, this source of value" (186). All narratives are infused with messages (ideologies) that shape us and tell us how to live...how to be an image. However, we should also remember that we are not meant to merely identify with the protagonist of these narratives. As egents, our relay is not only the "hero" but rather the relationship among all the characters in the story. Think of all of these characters as different parts of your self (different identifications) - we are not merely identifying with the hero, we are also identifying with the villains, the donors, and the extras.

Ulmer provides examples of "the sender function": Mieke Bal (narratology), Bob Foss (film), Mark Turner (parable and values), Greimas. In each of these accounts, we read about the sender in a couple of ways: senders within the narrative, and the senders who create the narrative. In both senses, the sender intends to do something and is in some way thwarted. This is the "axis of communication" that Jameson references, and it shows us that 1) ideologies are being communicated over, above, and beyond any intention on the part of the author/filmmaker; 2) Certain messages are fighting to get through the noise. We never interpret something exactly as it was intended.

Assignment: Community Discourse
Document an "exemplary story from your community, that is a story about a person or event that your community identifies with and tells about itself in its celebrations, festivals, naming practices (of streets, buildings, parks), memorials" (191).

Examples: Relating History and Family
Ulmer provides examples, and it's important to note how he presents them to us. He gives us descriptions of art installations by curators rather than actual images of the art installations. We might argue that he does so to show us how language can serve the "imaging" function called for by electracy. Further, he gives us a curator's account to gesture back toward the discussion of "intention" earlier in the chapter. This curator offers a particular reading of the art installation, giving us particular details, and no doubt leaving a few out. Then we hear from the artist about how he was trying to make connections between historical experience and his own identity. The art work is not pictured, but it is brought to us via interpretation and stories...this is how language can image (image is a verb here).

Ficelle
Slavoj Zizek points us to how anti-semitism creates a scapegoat around which a community (in the most extreme case, the Nazis...but this is not the only case) a community. That is, the scapegoat serves as a way to create a border between inside/outside or us/them. The scapegoat function operates as a forgetting or as a blindness. The idea is to figure out this "other" around which we build an ideology, and to do this, we have to get a different angle on things - step away from things:

"The formula for the syncretic project of electracy is to locate the ideological other quilting or suturing ('sutra') together one's cultural point of view, and then switch the dominant focalization (usually so familiar that one does not even experience it as such) for an unfamiliar one associated with ficelle" (195).

One way to think about this is Holbein's painting The Ambassadors...

What is the "ideological other" in this painting...the thing that is so close to us we can't even see it? We have to back away from the painting and look at it from an angle to see it...

Riddles of Sense
The donor operates in riddles and "the logic of riddles manifests the basic structure of conductive sense through which the hero may receive the magic tool" (196). Remember that conduction allows us to put two things side-by-side (or even equate them) to create new meaning. This is what the riddle (metaphor) does: X is Y. It works best when the two things seem completely separate. Once we see how they can be brought together, the effect is useful. The idea of a "high concept" of a film is one of Ulmer's examples of this: "Love Boat meets Animal House" (197). We take two things that we know, smash them together, and create new (humerous, ironic) meaning.