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
The Second Threshold
We’ve been working backwards – dealing with each popcycle discourse in the interest of arriving at a wide image: “the image must be sorted out or winnowed from the collective moods and themes circulating through the popcycle” (247). But finding this image puts us in a double bind. It should be easy to find since it defines our “default mood.” However, it’s difficult to locate since we have “internalized [it] as our very own personal state of mind” (247).

But what is the Wide Emblem? Ulmer assigns this to us before explaining what it is (and he won’t ever actually explain it – there’s no model here). We’ll have to invent it. At each stage, we’ll figure out what each of these emblems he describes is for us: “What is that for me?”

Advertising Emblems
Peter Daly (a Renaissance scholar) draws parallels between the emblem tradition of the 16th and 17th centuries and advertising. This should allow us to see how this mode of writing is linked with literacy – the literate mode of thinking extends back to the Renaissance and to the present. The Renaissance emblem provides an image and a motto – this leaves a gap, a hole, an enigma. This hole is filled by the epigram.

To read such emblems, audiences draw on cultural literacy. We have a grammar of images, a bunch of stock images that we recognize and can read. We interpret emblems based on this index of images. In literacy, we know the moral of the story ahead of time, and we draw on this moral when creating the emblem. In electracy, we work backwards:

“The mystorian may not construct the emblem in the same way as the allegorist, who knows the moral in advance, has the concept anagogically provided in advance from which a suitable image must be found. The mystory inverts this process, beginning with the mapping of the popcycle, locating a repeating pattern across the discourses, and isolating the signifiers found in this pattern” (250).

The Readymade
Artists of the Readymade (particularly Duchamp) perform how the emblem as “pure language” (252). Duchamp took objects and put them in new contexts:

He was a precursor to Warhol:

There is no explicit message in this work. Instead, it works by juxtaposition: “Nothing is communicated to me, no message at least, but I am oriented in a certain direction. Juxtaposition. X+Y” (253). Meaning is created by juxtaposing X and Y. We don’t say “X is like Y” necessarily. We just set them side by side and see what new meanings are made.

Duchamp called this "found art," and a more recent example of this is the Found Footage Festival.

REMAKE
Neocowboys (Marlboro Man)
In the 50s, Marlboro needed a way to make filtered cigarettes “tough,” so they used a virile image: the cowboy. This made it okay for men to smoke filtered cigarettes (previously, only women smoked them). The ad is in the role of sender saying: “This is what a man is like.” It does this by binding together two different images – cowboy and filtered cigarette. These two get bundled together to make meaning, but in electracy we want to notice that there’s nothing “necessary” about this connection and how it’s made. We pull these signifiers apart because we can (because this is how language works), and we realize that “man” and “tough” are not necessarily synonymous – they are merely put together in this way to interpellate us in a certain way.

Ads and artwork do similar things by creating new meaning with juxtaposition. However, the difference is that ads present a problem (How do we make a filtered cigarette tough?) and easily tie up the problem – in a neat way (We give the cowboy a filtered cigarette). Artwork doesn’t bundle things up so neatly. Often, artwork will merely ask the question and not give us an answer to it. Mystory draws on both of these modes – it sits somewhere in the middle – but it is more in line with the artistic means of solving problems.

To create our emblem, we put ourselves at the “unknown point” between X and Y. We are the gap between the two signifiers that we bring together. We are the bar,

“Advertising and art work at opposite poles of meaning creation, however: advertising persuades individuals to adopt a ready-made norm, while art persuades a collective to accept a private or personal theme as having a collective or universal relevance…The mystory must turn from the ad to the artist to learn how to design an emblem for the wide image” (257).

Ads “[displace] the threatening , anxiety-producing possibilities of the problem toward a sense of well-being, reassurance, safety…The problem is raised, but the ‘consultation’ or advice provided by advertising (or the spectacle as a worldview in general) gives the default solution, based on the hegemonic norms of the culture” (258).