Clinamen

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
The gift of Aporia

“The slogan of the EmerAgency is ‘Problems B Us.’ An egent treats a public issue not as a ‘problem’ but ‘aporia.’ The difference is that conventional consultants look for that aspect of social difficulties that lends itself to pragmatic solutions, while inventional consultants (egents) might look at the same difficulties but call attention to that in them which is impossible” (299)

The human condition is aporetic – it is, at bottom, not really explainable. This is how the egent is different from the conventional agent:

“With problem one knows what to do; there is a method for working the puzzle. Aporia, however, Derrida defined as ‘the point at which the problematic task becomes impossible and where we are exposed, absolutely without protection, without problem, and without prosthesis, without possible substitution…in this place of aporia, there is no longer any problem’” (301)

Jameson speaks of "an absent cause, which cannot be directly or immediately conceptualized by the text" (301). That is, there is a something (a whatever Agamben might say) that is left unexplained by the text. Whereas the social contradiction of the text (class struggle) can be addressed by praxis, the more primary undecidable feature of the text - the aporia - can only be addressed by contemplation. The latter cannot be unknotted or figured out.

An example of the aporia of the human condition is Marilyn Monroe’s “charisma” as described by Richard Dyer:

“Monroe’s combination of sexuality and innocence is part of that flux, but one can also see her ‘charisma’ as being the apparent condensation of all that within her. Thus she seemed to ‘be’ the very tension that ran through the ideological life of fifties America. You could see this as heroically living out the tensions or painfully exposing them” (302).

Images can embody the aporia - they point us to it. However, they don't necessarily provide an answer in the sense of a "solution." The answer they provide is this: they open up to various meaning making opportunities. Marilyn Monroe's image didn't praise or condemn innocence or sexuality - the pointed viewers to this aporia. The question becomes, now what? That's the question an egent attempts to address (though, an egent realizes that the question is unanswerable).

The widesite can be a tool for dealing with the aporia. Take a policy issue (outside) and see what the widesite (inside) can do with it – this is attunement:

“The purpose of the widesite is to prepare the place in which the magic tool may be found as a gift…The ‘tool is just this moment of encounter, of extimacy, between outside and inside, and the realization that metaphor and metonymy, figuration, (poetry and design) are the divination system with the uncanny capacity to find and map the borders of identity” (303)

LECTURE
Master-Slave (Again)

Continuing with the discussion of the postcolonial situation, Ulmer takes us to a discussion of “cool” and “funk.”

Deconstruction
Ulmer’s discussion of deconstruction – a philosophical mode of inquiry that seeks out hierarchies and attempts to replace them with new modes of thinking – shows us how hierarchies inevitably end in domination – in power relations. As David Hawkes notes:

“From the presupposition that the mind’s subjective ideas are naturally superior to the objective material body, Aristotle proceeds to deduce the necessary dominance of masters over slaves, of Greeks over barbarians, and of men over women. A bias in the relation of the ideal to the material gives credence to the claim that certain human beings are fit only to be ruled by others, as well as to the assertion that certain forms of consciousness are systematically false” (305)

W.J.T. Mitchell hits on this as well when he speaks of the phrase “Children should be seen and not heard.” He notes how this silence can easily be transferred from children to women and colonized subjects. Whereas whiteness is “unmarked” and “invisible,” while others are marked as flawed. Binary leads to hierarchy, and hierarchy ends in one term being placed above another.

Heuretics
Ulmer notes that changes in how we think are linked to the aesthetic assumptions of the historical moment. So Copernicus’s revolution can be linked to the art of Kepler by Fernand Hallyn to find a “poetics of discovery.” What is the poetics of a certain historical/cultural moment that allows for certain discoveries to happen? Ulmer sayss that our method of mystory allows for a similar kind of path: “In principle the instructions say to juxtapose the semantic domain of a given problem with the semantic domain of contemporary aesthetics” (307). This is what the widesite allows us to do – make connections (juxtapositions) that don’t seem to make sense and see where they take us. These connections are defined by an aesthetic mood, and they are sought out via artistic avenues.

We match a problem with an aesthetic. Whereas Kant thought that a change in perspective didn’t change the material being looked at, we are noting that this change in perspective is important – it changes things aesthetically. Such a shift is “traumatic” for a culture because it messes with all of that culture’s underlying assumptions.

The Funk
Western culture has attempted to hold the line of “rationality” and “pomp” and stay away from “funkiness.”

Cool
Cool is what some African-American males have taken on (continue to take on) upon being excluded from “mainstream avenues of success” (Majors and Billson). Thus, cool has a certain machismo to it – who is the toughest guy on the street? The pimp.

Teen Spirit
So what happens when the bourgeois body takes on “cool.” Cool becomes a commodity that advertisers can tap into.

The Corporate Actant
Socrates::Literacy
????:: Electracy

One answer is Elvis, but any celebrity performs the electrate experience of identity (i.e. Mariah Carey saying that her image was having more fun than her). However, we might also note that the “new subject formation is that of the corporation itself” (312).

Ulmer takes us back to the Apple “Think Different” ads again. The Apple logo is juxtaposed with several “great” people – Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, etc. Ulmer suggests that the repetition of such images indicates “a failure of internalization, of ‘introjection,’ as if each act of introducing the outside icon into the inside of the entity failed (there was no inside), and therefore was repeated with a sequence of different icons, to give an effect of ‘papering over’ or of graffiti” (313).

Why focus on corporations and corporate identity? “The reason for dwelling on corporate identity is that the EmerAgency test posed by Agamben requires us to challenge advertisers for the position of Sender in the national narrative” (314).

Value Reserves
“The point is not to critique Entertainment discourse but to learn from it how to image” (315). We are witnessing “the effect of corporate sponsored entertainment to strip funk from cool, to retain the defense and ignore the body, thus preserving the public in its anelectric condition.” The goal is to learn the rules of advertising and use them for electrate purposes:

“Either way, what we want to learn is the rhetoric of imaging, to appropriate it for our own purposes of education and the virtual civic sphere” (315).

From Thing to Thang
Aristotle created “things.” Now “the thang” is important: “The Funk is whatever [Agamben], negotiating the treacherous passage between pornography and the commodity ushering the bourgeois body (my body) to the grave, as Agamben said” (316).

How to forget a Cowboy

“Free your ass and your mind will follow” (318).

“The electrate apparatus challenges a fundamental presupposition of the literate world view. The presupposition is reflected in the normative hierarchy of mind over body, reason over emotion, spirit over flesh, and the other pairs that this binary opposition entails, including an iconoclasm that traces its heritage to both the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman branches of the Western tradition” (318).

“Any picture, any scene, any text, is a site of tension, open to a struggle for control of meaning, which we know means a struggle over the narrative chain of signifiers, since any item or signifier means only in relation to another signifier” (318).

Syncretism
Bill Clinton and George Clinton are linked by “signature” and Ulmer says this is a sign of the coming community – they are also linked by President Clinton playing the sax. Clinton was both funky and cool. “In the coming community will the Monica Lewinsky affair be an asset to Clinton’s legacy?” (320).

“We have to imagine instead the mores of a ‘base materialism,’ in a society that understands itself in what is abject, through monuments that are repulsions more than attractions. And here is where the battle lines of a culture war will be and are being drawn. The theorist of this ‘lowering’ of everything that is elevated or ideal is Georges Bataille, who advised us to consider blogs of spit and the big toe if we want to have an impact on public problem solving. The cartoon version is Southpark. The slogan of this formless mood is ‘no more transpositions’” (322).

“literacy did not have enough computing power to think formless, or to exploit the holistic moods of categorical images. The mathematical order of chaos emerged only within the patterning made legible by the computer” (323).

How do we apply “formless funk” to policy questions? This is the project of the sequel to Internet Invention, Electronic Monuments.