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 [1] for those who want to see them all in one place.

The Ulmer File: Vision Quest (Ulmer's Mystory)
Ulmer is trying a "do-over" in terms of identifying with the storry of Big Horn. Whereas he was taught by his community discourse (the history textbook) that Custer was a hero, he is now wondering if he can identify with one of Custer's enemies - Black Elk. Can Ulmer identify with Native Americans now in the ways he identified with cowboys as a child? The idea here is not to turn back the clock or deny that we participate (unknowingly) in certain historical narratives - Ulmer admits that he is part of colonialization. He has no say in that. However, he can revisit the narratives that shaped him in the interest of "reworking" a "recognition plot" (200). He has new information now, information he didn't have before.

This reworking or second encounter is about dealing with the sting of the punctum or the Stimmung, but we always deal with it after the fact or too late. The sting is like a trauma, it happens to us before we can make sense of it. We attempt to write it with the mystory, but that writing is inherently violent. It is violent because it imposes an order on something that cannot be completely represented. When we experience trauma, a great deal is happening that we don't quite understand, and this is how we can think of our introduction into a community discourse. The history of our community is related to us over and over (through conscious and unconscious channels) before we can really make sense of it. As we revisit the community discourse through mystory, we impose an order on something that is like an amorphous blog. Imposing this order means that things will probably be left out. This is how writing can be violent - it always leaves things out.

Ulmer's revisiting of the Custer/Black Elk showdown is an attempt at a second encounter with the oral state of mind. His literate education has led him away from orality. While Black Elk learned via orality, Ulmer learned via literacy - this meant that they took on different kinds of identities. Ulmer learned via a "self" while Black Elk learned via a "spirit." Ulmer wants to try to think from the perspective of orality, but he doesn't want to do so by merely trying the Native American vision quest. He notes the silliness of some people who try to do this on page 205: "foolish Wasichus [white men] who demonstrate the pitfall of primitivism when they attempt the quest literally" (205). Merely mimicking the oral perspective is in the realm of primitivism, it tries orality out in the form of a model rather than relay. Ulmer is not interested in this. He wants to combine orality and literacy (syncretically) in the name of creating electracy.

"It is not a question in any case of a literate person undertaking a fundamental practice of the oral apparatus. Rather, my question is: What syncretic formation might combine the 'vision' in 'theoria' and 'hanblecheyapi' (Lakota 'crying for a vision') - the literate and oral modes of insight" (201).

At the beginning of the chapter, Ulmer relates a story about coming home from school - this story is triggered by another story about a medicine man named "Creeping." "Creeping triggered in me a memory of winter..." (198). This is the sting, the punctum for Ulmer. It leads him to relay a story about coming home from school through the snow and coming into an empty house. Normally, his mother would have been there. The empty house and the howling winds and he hears a voice calling: "help. Help! HELP!" (199). The end of the chapter takes us back to this episode for a second encounter: "Why did I hold on to this memory, one of the few that survived that time (or is it a 'screen memory')?" (207). Ulmer wonders why this call came at age 4 or 5, and he speculates that it might be that this was before he had learned to tune out orality in the interest of learning literacy. That is, in school he would eventually be taught that "hearing voices" is crazy and mystical. That voices should be ignored or that voices are something we should be scared of: "Is one implication of Wallace's warning about the interference making oral and literate knowing incommensurable that to become fully electrate requires avoiding school?" (207). A strange thought, but an interesting one. Does the "literacy" taught in school prevent us from becoming electrate?

All of these thoughts lead Ulmer to re-read the voices he heard that day. Knowing what he knows now, he can consider something he didn't consider before: "It never occured to me...that the voice was not asking for help. Perhaps if I had learned sooner the keywords of the Sacred Pipe ('health' and 'help'), the event would not now seem so uncanny. The voice was not asking for help but (impossibly) offering it (207).