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.

STUDIO
In this section of the book (and the wide site), we turn our attention away from the interaction between donor and hero and toward "the scene in which this encounter most often takes place in entertainment narratives - the bar or 'watering hole'" (210). What mood is evoked by this scene? How does that mood infuse all of the interactions that happen within the scene? This scene is one of transition - much like the scene of transition from literacy to electracy.

Last Call (Reliable Sources)
Ulmer introduces a "policy question related to human behavior specific to the institution of the bar" (211), because it choragraphically related to the scene of "what is happening on the level of global events" (211). Thus, he takes us to the issue of under age drinking, not as a typical consultant but as an egent: "The consultation takes the form of testimony, even testimonial. As consultants we may testify to the desire of so many potential protagonists to enter bars, especially underage protagonists." The bar is a rite of passage for American youth - it is a space that they long for. Once access to this space (the bar, the street) is gained, the use of drugs and alcohol takes on a different meaning. In "official" spaces, such use is illegal - in the bar/street it buys a certain amount of credibility. How do we deal with this "aporia" (212)?

REMAKE
A Blues Legend (Robert Johnson at the Crossroads)
The key to the protagonist getting the "magic tool" is not just the tool itself or the goings on of the bar. The real key is the music playing in the bar - this sets the mood in which the exchange can happen. Johnson meets the Devil at the Crossroads and, legend has it, strikes a deal...sells his soul so he can play the blues. When Alan Greenberg writes this scene, he sets a certain kind of mood - we want to take note of this.

The Modernist Brothel
In the modernist literature of authors like James Joyce, the brothel/bar/bordello is a key setting. This setting is used throughout this literature, and Ulmer wants us to take note of how this setting affects what happens within it. This setting is note merely a container for events, it shapes these events:

The bar (and especially the brothel) is a liminal location on the boarders of established society...Ever society has liminal regions where rites of passage occur. The purpose of the following series describing or citing a sample of modernist bar scenes [Ulmer gives examples from Joyce, Picasso, and Checkhov] is to note the atmosphere or mood evoked by this setting in our culture. The bar is an allegorical place.

By giving us different examples of the brothel in modernist literature, painting, and theatre, Ulmer points out how "the brothel [is] the setting of a modernist sensibility" (218).

Song
Now we shift to the music being played in the brothel - Why? Ulmer answers this question: "the practice most relevant to the obtuse order of meaning, most revealing of mood and atmosphere as categorical states of mind, is music...[However,] the electrate dimension is not the music but the mood is supports and evokes" (220).

We move to a discussion of samba because it offers a complex mix of "bittersweet longing." It's not about happiness or sadness, but instead "longing or yearning for something or someone" (220). In this way, samba opens up a liminal space between hope and despair. Argentinian tango, on the other hand, provides a mood of "brooding that ammounts to a national institution" (220). This is a different kind of moode, one that evokes a feeling that one is lost and "not-at-home."

"Storyville"
The American equivalent to tango ("among the pimps and prostitutes of the bordellos and bars of the arrabal and orillas (slum districts) on the outskirts of Buenos Aires" (Broughton qtd. in Ulmer 223)), is jazz in New Orleans. Ulmer tells us that "jazz is a good example of how innovations arise and circulate through different institutions of the popcycle" (223). Just as slaves used music to cope with their situation, the modern Westerner has taken Jazz and it's conductive child Rock and Roll to deal with dehumanized modern life and the "onslaught of technology" (223).

The Tables have Turned
Ulmer has given us a complex and tangled history of music - same, tango, jazz rock and roll. Why?

The passage through the popcycle from Enlightenment condemnation of colonized civilizations through the 'primitivism' of the avante-garde (Picasso's reference to African masks) to the multiculturalism of postcolonial politics and the simulation of Hip-Hop within the teenage population of White suburbia, traces the emergence of a new paradigm" (224)

Ulmer's next question is: "Who will be the Augustine of electracy?" Augustine mashed up Greco-Roman philosophy with Christian doctrine. He made the two speak to each other in a way no one before had - few people saw the connections between the two before Augustine. Who will do this for electracy? We are being called to do it, but how? Ulmer says it will have to be different from traditional consulting:

"Conventional consulting works in a kind of booster mood of progress. Inventional consultants [egents], rather, frame problems in the mood of 'the blues.' The individual tuning of a problem zone specifies the image within this frame" (225)

This use of the blues is not a focus on sorrow or "feeling bad." What the blues offers us a way to deal with bad feelings: "Blues is not feeling bad, but what you do about bad feelings" (225).

Cyber Duende
Spanish Poet describes "duende" with a story about a singer who is struggling to find her voice: "She sparred with her voice - now shadowy, now like molten tin, now covered over with moss" (227). This performance fell flat with her audience, and this led her to rise up "like a woman possessed, her face blasted like a medieval weeper...and settled down to singing - without a voice, without break, without nuance, throat aflame - but with duende" (228).

Liquid Architecture
Ulmer references the work of Marcos Novak to speak of "liquid architecture" and "inhabitable information." Novak makes use of the notion of "duende" to discuss how databases should be designed and organized with a "poetic" logic. This logic frees language from its "one-to-one logic" - it opens up words to their various (marginal, obtuse) meanings. Whereas databases are typically thought of as logical, binary enterprises (data value X goes in box 1), Novak is asking for something more fluid and poetic: "In the realm of prose, the world lines of similar concepts are not permitted to overlap, as that would imply that during that time we would be unable to distinguish one concept from another. In poetry, however, as in the realm of quantum mechanics, world lines may overlap, split, divide, blink out of existence, and spontaneously reemerge" (230). This is also what William Gibson is getting at with his discussion of language in Count Zero. One character is attempting to describe the concept of "metaphor" to another. The implication seems to be that in the future, the "cyberpunks" will have lost a poetic understanding of language. If computer logic is taken too far, all we'll have is the "one-to-one" notion of language.

LECTURE
The Bar as Such
This lecture section demonstrates the logic of conduction. Here Ulmer moves from a discussion of the "bar" in terms of a saloon to the "bar as such" - a discussion of the "slash (/) of division that is the operating gesture of articulation, separating and relating signified to signifier in the sign" (233). The "bar" here should be thought of as the "no" that transforms a child from a sort of blob to a subject. The newborn child is not conscious and, in many ways, does not even see itself as separate from the mother's breast. Until there is a "no" ("No, you cannot have the breast"), the child sees little differentiation between itself and it's mother. This no - this bar - is the founding moment for a subject. This bar (this "no") splits the "I" from its unconscious - it puts a bar in between the conscious and the unconscious. The gap in between these two is never "closed or filled" (233).

Agamben's "Whatever"
Commodifying the body (noticed in the 1920s and continuing through the present) meant that it was "breaking away from the double chains of biological destiny and individual biography" (234-5). The body became a dremel tool, one that allowed for different attachments (identities). Bodies circulated via various media and became something "truly whatever" (235). These circulations were not the "body," but images of the body: "Thus the glorious body of advertising has become the mask behind which the fragile, slight human body continues its precarious existence" (235).

Agamben's whatever is "an extension and augmentation of Roland Barthes's...'sting'" (236).

The Task
Extremely quick and dirty synopsis of Oedipus: He kills his father (though he doesn't know it's his father). He happens upon Thebes and meets the Sphinx, who poses a riddle. Anyone who gets the riddle wrong dies. Oedipus solves the riddle and enters Thebes. The people of Thebes are so happy that they make Oedipus king - he thus ends up marrying his mother (who is the Queen). A plague besieges the city and no one knows why. It is the Gods punishing Oedipus for killing his father and marrying his mother. Oedipus claims he'll banish whoever is being punished (that is, whoever killed the king). He then finds out that he was the one who killed the king - he banishes himself.

Ulmer says that the traditional consultant happens up on Thebes and is "not even aware that there is a sphinx, let alone that it poses to them a riddle." The EmerAgency augments the traditional consultancy through the use of blues music. We come into a situation and are asked to fix it, but we don't even really understand the problem - it was in place before we got there. We are not (in the traditional sense of the word) responsible for it. The world is "sad or happy, atrocious or blessed...this is irreparable" (240). But in the "so be it said to the world when ever legitimate cause of doubt and hope has been removed, sadness and joy refer not to negative or positive qualities, but to pure being-thus without any attributes" (240).

So what is the task that Agamben gives us?

"if instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and an individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity - if humans could, that is not be thus, in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable." (Agamben qtd. in Ulmer 241)

The goal is to experience identity "not as 'individual' but 'singularity'" (241).

By forming communities based on "essence," we are trapped in a system that excludes - that is violent. Instead of grouping around race, gender, nation (essences, categories, topos), we might note that all we really share as human beings is not even the handle end of the dremel tool. Rather, all we share is the liminal - THE BAR - space between the dremel tool and the attachment.

[Image Credit: Jemar Show and Pet Supply]

We are all learning how to be images (via media, family, community, career), and this should be a signal that there is no "essence" behind a human community. A community based on nationality shares only one thing - that they have learned to be similar images (from similar sources). If we recognize that our "selves" are the result of learning how to be an image, then we can at least attempt to avoid the violence of community - a violence that happens in the form of exclusion.