This is one of 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
Happiness
How do we meet Agamben's challenge to simultaneously 1) treat identity like a dremel tool

photo credit: "Untitled (Self Portrait w/ Dremel) by Collin Mel

and 2) resist mere "spectacle" or commodification of identity?

How do we remove signifier from signified without merely falling into the trap that Westerners fall into when thinking of blues music? That is, how do we appropriate without oversimplifying (blues music is not just about sadness, as some would have us believe)?

The literate way of appropriating something like blues music (or wabi sabi, or deunde) is to cross over to this other cultural mood and return to the default mood with little changing. In literacy, I may explore other cultural moods, but I do so to appropriate these moods and make them fit my current worldview. Electracy takes a different approach by exploring other cultural moods in order to understand our own mood as constructed. When you explore the blues electrate-ly, you end up realizing that your own default cultural mood is constructed and that it has been brought to you via "cultural osmosis" (297).

In this chapter, Ulmer shows us how travel to other places can show us something about the default mood that has been largely invisible to us.

Remake/Ulmer File
Remarkable Meetings
Ulmer points us to the work of G.I. Gurdjieff who visits with "remarkable" people in order to find that "something" that makes people remarkable. Ulmer uses this idea to trace his own "encounters" with those who might provide sage wisdom.

The first encounter we hear of is when Ulmer sees a man in San Francisco dressed in a "madras shirt..., his Mexican sandals, his long hair, his sunglasses" (282). This was a new image for Ulmer. Note that he didn't have to speak to this man in order for the man to teach him sage wisdom. This man was a donor for Ulmer merely by walking past him on the street. The nameless man created a "vaccuum or vortext of instability" for Ulmer because it made this Montana boy see that that there were other images to be. How did he fill this vortext or void? With a sports car: "When I heard the TR3 accelerating through the gear changes the void created by the madras shirt became a shrine for a new desire" (283).

Geneaology of Morals
Ulmer's pondering of his own state of mind takes him back to Nietzsche, who reminds him that the founding question of philosophy is always "What is..."? That is, philosophy is always looking for concepts (think topos here). What he realizes is that this question is covering up the real question: "What is.....FOR ME?" This is the question that is ignored by literacy and the one we want to focus on in electracy.

But what was Nietzsche's gripe with the "ascetic ideal."

"If you except the ascetic ideal, man, the animal man had no meaning. His existence on earth contained no end; "What is the purpose of man at all?" was a question without an answer; the will for man and the world was lacking; behind every great human destiny rang as a refrain a still greater "All is vanity!" The ascetic ideal simply means this: that something was lacking , that a tremendous void encircled man—he did not know how to justify himself, to explain himself, to affirm himself, he suffered from the problem of his own meaning. He suffered also in other ways, he was in the main a diseased animal; but his problem was not suffering itself, but the lack of an answer to that crying question, "To what purpose do we suffer?"...In that [ascetic] ideal suffering found an explanation ; the tremendous gap seemed filled; the door to all suicidal Nihilism was closed."

So what's wrong with this? Nietzsche seems to be complaining that we fill in the gaps the same way Ulmer did. The man in the madras shirt created a gap - one he filled with the sound of the TR3's engine. Is this wrong?

"The explanation—there is no doubt about it—brought in its train new suffering, deeper, more penetrating, more venomous, gnawing more brutally into life: it brought all suffering under the perspective of guilt ; but in spite of all that—man was saved thereby, he had a meaning, and from henceforth was no more like a leaf in the wind, a shuttle-cock of chance, of nonsense, he could now "will" something—absolutely immaterial to what end, to what purpose, with what means he wished: the will itself was saved . It is absolutely impossible to disguise what in point of fact is made clear by every complete will that has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hate of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this desire to get right away from all illusion, change, growth, death, wishing and even desiring—all this means—..."

So what is Nietzsche's answer to this?

"let us have the courage to grasp it—a will for Nothingness, a will opposed to life, a repudiation of the most fundamental conditions of life, but it is and remains a will !—and to say at the end that which I said at the beginning—man will wish Nothingness rather than not will anything at all."
Translated from the German by Horace B. Samuel (1913)
[Source: http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/MODERN/GENEAL.HTM]

As Ulmer notes a few pages later, this critique of Nietzsche's is a "refutation [of]...the promise of self-overcoming. The lesson: no aphorism of thought without the anecdote of life. No telling without living. No direct access to either wisdom or experience, but always the gap between the two" (288).

The Alienated Sage

What drove Ulmer toward the ‘wise old man’ image: “How did it come about that as a young man I identified with an image of ‘the wise old man’? In my “Custer’ phase I wanted to be a soldier. But at some point I wanted to be a sage the way my friends wanted to be doctors, lawyers, or cowboys” (285).

Ulmer sees the sage as “cool” and the locus of wisdom – he thought there would be sages at the university. However, he recognizes that this was a mistake. Gurdjieff says that, “wisdom does not declare itself as such; that it might be anywhere; that it is not housed at the terminus of the search, but is the environment, the diegesis with its primal acquaintances composed in the telling of the disappointed search, the atmosphere, a mood” (286). Wisdom does not lie in a person but rather in a mood.

Ulmer relays a story about his trip to Mexico in a sports car. While in Mexico, he meets people making a documentary about Siqueiros, a Mexican artist and activist. Is this Ulmer’s opportunity to meet a sage? Ulmer remembers few details about this meeting, but he remembers Siqueiros mentioning that he had made the right decision when he decided to remain a militant activist. His rival, Rivera, focused on aesthetics rather than politics, and Sisqueiros was glad to have not followed this path.

The Ascetic ideal
Ulmer asks: Why was he drawn to the vision of the sage – the isolated genius academic? He fantasizes about Nietzsche as a sage, but then he realized that N. despised this notion of the sage. In The Genealogy of Morals, N. rails against “the ascetic ideal, the romantic version of which contributed to [Ulmer’s] decision to go to graduate school” (288).

Predestination
Ulmer ultimately traces his desire for the ascetic ideal to the Protestant work ethic. Weber’s study of the link between Protestantism and capitalism showed Ulmer that his desire to work constantly (by publishing, studying, reading, writing) was linked to the Protestant notion of “predestination.” Predestination is a religious doctrine that teaches that we are “predestined” for a certain kind of afterlife, and Weber says this “must above all have had one consequence for the life of a generation which surrendered to its magnificnent consistency. That was a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual…[man] was forced to follow his path alone to meet a destiny which had been decreed fro him from eternity. No one could help him” (Weber qtd. in Ulmer 289). This is the default mood of capitalism – isolation, aloneness, solitary work, and Weber’s discussion shows Ulmer the core of his default mood. This is the foundation of his compulsion.

The March of Humanity
When Ulmer visited Sisqueros, he was working on a mural called “The March of Humanity.” This is a mural that Sisqueiros was criticized for because it was displayed on the side of a hotel during the 1968 Olympics: “Had he outlived Rivera [his rival who avoided politics for aesthetics] for this—to decorate a tourist pavilion?”

Ulmer notes that for him, this became a riddle: “What is the difference between a revolution and a tourist attraction?” (292).

The Wall
Ulmer gives us a selection from Ken Hillis about “the wall.” Hillis explains the wall using another text by Norbert Elias. The wall is one between animal instinct and human being. The wall says: it does not make sense for me to kill this person in a moment of rage because I need their products and their labor. Hillis carries this notion of the wall to virtual environments: “Users, immersed and interactive, can forget momentarily that they are interacting with representations of other people and things, and that the transparent screen in many ways reifies Elias’s wall even as it appears to offer a way to vault over it” (293). Hillis seems to be arguing against those who call virtual environments a way beyond the “wall” between subject (me) and object (you). Hillis says that virtual environments don’t provide such an escape.

Ulmer says the wide image is a kind of wall: “The wide image may be thought of as a series of murals decorating the border of identity” (293).

In his return to Sisqueiros’ work years later, Ulmer is drawn to mural that depicts capitalism as a “monstrous mechanism, crowned by the imperialist eagle” (293). Ulmer argues that this is a misunderstanding of capitalism: “His misunderstanding is typical, Weber could say, of those who fail to see that it is not greed that constitutes the spirit of capitalism (such vice is a powerful force in every form of economy) but the domination of one’s inner wolrd by the obligations of duty experienced as a spiritual calling” (293). It is this call to duty that Ulmer is tracing in his own mystory as the default mood.

Ulmer also traces out how cliché his experience of “flight” to grad school is. He saw himself as leaving the hypocrisy of his hometown for something higher, but he now realizes that this was “no less bourgeois” than the down he left. We’ve all been there – thinking we are embarking on something brand new and exciting. Then we find that everyone had the same experience. I’m reminded of a line from a Clem Snide song: “The first thing every killer reads is Catcher in the Rye.” This is not a unique experience, no matter how unique we think it is as it’s happening.

This is why Agamben’s task is so difficult. How do we escape this homogenous kind of experience?