Clinamen

While revisiting some of historian/journalist Marshall Poe's comments on Wikipedia, I found out that Poe leads a project called MemoryArchive. MemoryArchive is a wiki, but unlike Wikipedia it isn't an attempt to use "NPOV" or to focus on what is "verifiable." Instead, its front page asks us to contribute a memoir: "Everyone has a Story. Make Yours History."

I have discussed Wikipedia with Jeff in terms of electracy, and I find his take persuasive: Wikipedia is not an electrate project - it lacks the "felt" (in all the choragraphically complicated meanings of the term) aspects of writing that electracy seeks out.

At the level of content, Wikipedia is in many ways an extension of the apparatus of literacy. It attempts to catalog all human knowledge by settling on "common knowledge." It leaves aside the affective in the interest of defining and drawing fairly clean lines around chunks of knowledge. Ulmer's electracy asks us to note that the affective exposes the limit of any project hoping to define objective, shared knowledge. How can the affective be reintroduced into writing? I would argue that at the level of structure, Wikipedia has electrate underpinnings. By putting writers into relation with one another (via a structure of hospitality), Wikipedia exposes us to one another and thus exposes a "coming community" that can never complete itself. Further, while Wikipedia discussion pages provide a space for hashing out disagreements, they also allow a space for working through a writing process that would typically be left out of encyclopedic texts. Edit wars on Wikipedia are very much about "felt" writing - there are libidinal investments involved. What keeps these writing practices from being truly electrate is that they are done in the name of "rational" discourse and objectivity.

This is where MemoryArchive becomes interesting. If Wikipedia leaves out the memory work of history/mystory, then MemoryArchive reintroduces this work by asking people to submit memories about "Playing B-ball With Barack" or Chia Pets.

But this only gets us partway there. Poe's project seems to be a kind of negative deconstruction of Wikipedia in the sense that it flips Wikipedia on its head. However, it doesn't take the second step of attempting to rethink writing, history, thinking, or problem-solving practices via memory work.

I want to be clear: this is not a critique of MemoryArchive. It's not as if Poe set out to create an electrate virtual-textual community and failed. However, I think the impulse behind this project is electrate, and I think it has some potential to enact some of the things Ulmer is asking us to enact. If we wanted to make MemoryArchive electrate, the question would become: How could MemoryArchive be put to work in the interest of rethinking the practices of rhetoric, writing, history, and/or problem solving?