Time and Time Again

Paul Virilio’s book, Open Sky opens with a rather glum, though nonetheless true, quote that we discussed briefly in class last week: “Some day the day will come when the day will not come.” This quote, though seemingly bleak, is at the heart of Virilio’s discussion of the ways in which technology is changing—has been changing—our world. Writing in 1997, Virilio is somewhat disturbed by the changes he is witnessing with the advent of the internet, the cell phone, and other technologies that are ubiquitous to society only a decade later.

The similarities between Virilio and Ulmer are noticeable, particularly in the fact that they are both difficult reads. One of the overarching considerations of Open Sky is that current (current during his time and to an even greater degree, during present times) technologies actually have the ability to shape nature. He explains this notion by discussing our concept of time and the way that our understanding of time is changing based on these technologies. This doesn’t seem far-fetched to me at all, considering that “time” is a human construct anyway and that it was certainly changed based on technologies such as sundials and, to a greater extent, clocks. Of course, I don’t think Virilio is merely positing that our understanding of the notion of time is changing, but that time itself (if it exists outside of the human mind) is actually changing in some physical way. He discusses this change throughout the book and introduces it in the first chapter, “The Third Interval,” through a discussion of time, space, the speed of light, and through a discussion of a “’generalized arrival’ whereby everything arrives without having to leave” (16). This generalized arrival seems to be most perpetuated through video cameras, first by displaying pictures on a television (arriving in a metaphorical sense to the world on the screen) and now through webcams which allows a person to actually arrive without having ever left. Throughout his book his also talks about teleseminars, which, interestingly enough, most people in our class took part in over the summer during the Serious Games class… part of our class took place over Skype. We arrived in class without ever having to leave our houses. Virilio’s fear, it seems, is that the availability of this kind of technology will eventually eliminate the need to ever leave or arrive and, furthermore, to never have to move.

Our reading of Sherry Turkle was particularly interesting when considering a number of claims that Virilio makes throughout this book. One of the first, when he is discussing the transition of the human environment due to technology, he imagines “an urban environment whereby the image prevails over the thing it is an image of” (19). Though we haven’t exactly made it so far as to prefer the virtual over the real in terms of urban environments (at least in the sense that we’re not all Matrix characters, as far as I know), we’ve certainly moved that way in terms of people. It seems as though people have become taken over my their images, whether these images occur on Facebook or on webcam. Furthermore, images that we see, say, of celebrities are certainly privilidged and preferred over the celebrities themselves. First of all, most of us could never come in contact with them at all. Secondly, as Turkle’s book shows, we prefer this faraway interaction because we don’t have to see things we don’t want to see (for example, our favorite celebrity being rude, etc.). On that note, the people that we’ve come to love (celebrities) aren’t even the real people. Rather than seeing the real person, we’re seeing a Photoshopped image of that person—a particularly telling instance of the image prevailing over the thing it is an image of.

Virilio further discuss our love of the image over the thing it is an image of in his chapter called “From Sexual Perversion to Sexual Diversion” in which he discusses the ways that cybersex may eventually take over real sex (which he seems to equate with marriage and relationships—I’m not sure this is necessarily true anymore, but I think that most people would agree that they should all be lumped together). He writes that “To prefer the virtual being—at some remove—to the real being—close-up—is to take the shadow for the substance, to prefer the metaphor, the clone to the substantial being who gets in your way, who is literally on your hands, a flesh-and-blood being whose only fault is to be there, here and now, and not somewhere else” (104). I agree with Virilio that this is true in some aspects, but luckily I don’t think that technology is bringing us down quite as fast as he had expected. Though we certainly meet our lovers online, most people use online dating sites to find someone to meet in real life. Though I certainly believe that technology has the ability to negatively impact us (and it has in some ways) I don’t think we’re even close to the time when there will be no more time.

Questions:

Do you think that Virilo’s view of the world will ever exist?

Virilo speaks of an immediate memory. How do websites like Google and Wikipedia utilize this notion?

Do we only have generalized arrivals left?

Carmen Miranda Rights

If literacy, as Ulmer and others have said, gave us the ability to recognize a “self” then it seems that electracy has given us the ability to recognize the ways in which everything in the world can be related to the self and to each other. Electracy shows us that everything is interrelated. Ulmer best described this phenomenon in his discussion of the “Y” in previous chapters. Rather than asking “why” and thus separating events, we should find out “Y” by taking two seemingly unrelated events and bringing them together. This is, ultimately, the idea behind the MEmorial.

Though Ulmer discussed the Why/Y concept in previous chapters, one of the most interesting examples of this concept was discussed in part four (“Soft Justice”) and more specifically in the chapter titled “Justice Miranda (A Conceit).” In this chapter, Ulmer connects two seemingly unrelated things (as is his way) to show that electracy is, at least in part, a new way of thinking that can show these interconnections—this is aided primarily by the Internet which has become a civic sphere. Ulmer explains: “in the same way that alphabetic literacy made conceptual thinking possible, electracy requires another means for arranging diverse particulars into classes, sets, and categories. The new arrangement has to be invented out of the old one, involving a new form and a new style of reasoning” (185).

In chapter seven, Ulmer follows the “Y” path in order to connect Carmen Miranda and Miranda rights. He explains how Miranda rights came to be—a synthesization of four separate trials in which the accused needed a “shield” that protected “the ignorant or, more significantly, the ‘illiterate’” (197). Ulmer then gives the backstory of Carmen Miranda: a young Latina woman made famous by her dancing and appearance in what Ulmer describes as campy films. One of the interesting ways that these two things come together (though they seem to have little in common besides name) is that they are both, in a way, epitomes of American culture. They represent the values of our way of life. (Innocent until proven guilty, sexualized Others, etc.) Ulmer describes the way these two come together (Carmen Miranda Rights) and the ways literacy and electracy are related: “I have two metaphors now, two scenarios, two series producing a gap: In the scenario of literacy, finding out something, doing research, learning the truth, is like giving someone the third degree (putting him or her in the hot seat). In the electrate scenario, learning the truth is like dancing the samba during carnival” (191). Ulmer seems to be looking for an electrate truth—one that comes about through the Y. Further along, Ulmer notes that truth, according to the Greek idea of the concept, is something “hidden, buried, a secret, a secret at first associated with the slave’s body and then with a woman’s body” (191). Truth, in the instances of the Mirandas (Carmen and Rights) exists somewhere inside the person/concept in question. Truth, in regards to Carmen, is, as Ulmer explained, embodied by her actual body which is hiding a truth. Miranda rights are supposed to be a means for us to locate the truth when a question of crime comes up. Oddly enough, neither actually occurs. In terms of Carmen Miranda, the truth that is supposed to be hidden by the woman’s body cannot exist because her personality is so easily reproducible by cross-dressing men (because, Ulmer notes, she is so campy). Ulmer also points out that the Miranda Rights often lead to protection of the guilty party rather than the innocent (especially when the person in question isn’t “ignorant”).

I think that all this relates back to Ulmer’s understanding of ATH. He explained in the introduction that “The aspect of tragedy of most interest in our context is (in Greek) ATH . . . which means ‘blindness’ or ‘foolishness’ in an individual, and ‘calamity’ or ‘disaster’ in a collectivity” (xxiv). This directly relates to Carmen Miranda Rights—at the point where individuals believe that Miranda rights could uphold truth, we have foolishness, but when it becomes a part of our culture as a whole, this foolishness turns to tragedy. Ulmer writes “the basic insight of ATH—that a seemingly inconsequential detail of behavior may have unforeseen and immense consequences for the community—is echoed in chaos theory (the butterfly effect)” (xxv). Once again, we see that everything is interrelated, as chaos theory posits. It is through this notion that we can say “Carmen Miranda Rights” and have it become a meaningful concept rather than a string of similar words.

Questions:

In what ways are our notions of gender undermined throughout chapter 7?

Was Pappenheimer’s MEmorial useful in “the real world” or more so on the Internet/in the civic sphere?

How do tragedies explore the way individual foolishness or blindness produces collective catastrophe? 

Ulmerder

From what I’ve learned about MEmorials thus far (which is, granted, probably not much) I’ve gathered that each MEmorial begins with a punctum that eventually becomes the abject sacrifice. The third part of Ulmer’s Electronic Monuments entitled The Categorical Disaster further explains the MEmorial and the punctum/abject sacrifice by, itself, presenting the reader with the abject. Throughout chapter five (“Formless Emblems [Testimonial]”) Ulmer describes his personal experience with the abject sacrifice within his MEmorial. By describing in great detail the murder of Bradley MeGee (Ulmer’s punctum) the reader him or herself is introduced to the feelings that Ulmer must have felt when reading about the incident. In reading this section I certainly experienced a the punctum.

One important aspect of this section, for me, was that Ulmer finally explains in brief detail why he is so fond of the “puncept” or pun + concept. He explains that “Puns supply the digital jumps between semantic domains” (116) which is an important part of electracy. Our understanding of the world changed as we moved from orality to literacy, and so it must change as we move from literacy to electricy. The way, it seems, that our brains must change to accept this new form of thinking is through the understanding of these punceps—through our ability to see all meanings and all related meanings to a given topic. Ulmer also addresses one of the questions I’ve had since beginning reading his Electronic Monuments. Where is the “me” in MEmorial? For a while I was wondering if the puncept wouldn’t function better as memeorial. (In fact, I think I’ll starting using that puncept myself.) That aside, Ulmer explains that the “me” in MEmorial actually comes from the punctum, which he describes as a sting—the sting one feels when reading, say, the story of Bradley McGee. Ulmer mentions borders and categories in describing the “me” in the concept of the MEmorial and I find this to be particularly helpful. When does the story stop and me begin? If I’m reading, for example, about Bradley McGee and I feel this sting (the punctum) then I become part of the story of Bradley McGee. This is, I believe, where the idea of the MEmorial begins to take shape. At this point, Ulmer explains how the MEmorial then becomes useful. He writes that “I will bear witness to this mediated scene by filling out the sting, expanding it into a chain of associations, gathering information from various discourses (news, theory, art, history), in order to map the degrees of separation between me and Bradley McGee” (119). This part of the MEmorial is best presented online, Ulmer further explains.

Throughout my personal experience with the MEmorial I’ve struggled with the understanding of the connection between the “abject” and the “freedom” it affords us. Though I admit that we certainly value these freedoms, I questioned whether or not they were worth the abject sacrifice. While working through my own MEmorial (regarding men with breast cancer as the abject and their sacrifice for us to have gender binary) I found a few of Ulmer’s statements to be particularly helpful. First, Ulmer writes that “The premise of a conventional memorial is that that loss it commemorates is recognized as a sacrifice on behalf of a public, collective value” (130). I wondered how we could allow even one child to die as a result of this value, but of course Ulmer explains that we must allow it in order to have the freedom to take care of our own children. However, I couldn’t work through my own personal issues with the freedom to have gender binary. I don’t think that gender binary is a particularly good value to have (I think it creates a lot of problems, a lot of sexism, a lot of hatred, for example). Ulmer, however, makes a good point when he is, once again, discussing Bradley McGee. He writes “The community is outraged by Bradley’s murder, but it does not recognize it as a sacrifice, that is, as a necessary consequence of the way of life we currently embrace as a civilization and hence fundamental to American national identity, at least as it is presently constituted” (137). The understanding that these values aren’t necessarily values that we will forever embrace makes me feel more comfortable about my own MEmorial which is recognizing gender binary as a value. It’s not a value I hold to be particularly helpful (other than, of course, as a categorization mechanism) but America as a whole certainly thinks that it’s important to our way of life—as we’re proving through our MEmorial. I think that this idea—that the values that we hold should be reconsidered—is at the heart of what the MEmorial is attempting to do.

Questions:

How does the McGee case show that the MEmorial confronts an aporia?

How can record (re-cord) be deconstructed?

How are our blogs excretions?

Ulmer Blows My Mind

Though Gregory Ulmer and his book Electronic Monuments are still enigmas, there are a few interesting things in Part II of the book called “Make it New(s)” that I understood, at least superficially.

One of the first (and most useful) things that Ulmer discusses in this second section is what exactly constitutes the MEmorial, which is significantly important since our groups in class are supposed to be creating our own MEmorials. One of the things that I’ve noticed about Ulmer is his love for the “puncept” and the need to deconstruct words constantly while reading his text. Interestingly, the name he gives to this is, paradoxically, a puncept. Puncepts, deconstructed, are puns + concepts. Once the reader realizes the importance of the puncept to Ulmer’s writing, he or she can begin to deconstruct the MEmorial. Of course, MEmorial is easily deconstructed into a me + memorial, but Ulmer’s description of the MEmorial  doesn’t exactly explain where the “me” comes into play. Ulmer begins his discussion by explaining that “a MEmorial consists of two parts: a peripheral (proposal for an electronic device to be placed at the site of an existing monument associating it with an abject sacrifice) and a testimonial (a Web site representing a meditation on the abject sacrifice)” (57). Have read Kristeva in passing, I am superficially aware of the abject (which she discusses in relation to vomit, and Ulmer brings up in passing). Ulmer, however, describes the abject in simplier terms. He writes that  a “MEmorial[s] function [is] of calling attention to abject (unacknowledged) sacrifices” (57). This makes sense in terms of Kristeva’s abject example of vomit… we certainly do not like to acknowledge that. Furthermore, and I’m sure Ulmer recognized this and used it to his advantage, Kristeva’s understanding of the abject refers to the human reaction to a threatened breakdown of meaning caused by a loss of distinction between the subject and the object or between self and other. (I’m not sure how to cite this… it was in my notes, but there’s no mention of who said it.)

This understanding of the abject moves into Ulmer’s forth chapter, “Transversal (Into Cyberspace)” and his discussion of “transsexuality.” Before getting into that discussion, I’d like to try to tie in his writing about the simulacrum in which he writes “in the spectacle[,] original and copy merge, rendering moot most models of literate truth  . . .” (85). Though the original sentence has no comma, I read and understand it as having one. I’m not sure if this is correct, but either way, I find this to be true and believe that in the MEmorial, abject and spectacle are similar concepts. I found Ulmer’s discussion of Dog Day Afternoon and Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory to be profoundly interesting following this understanding of the abject and the understanding of truth, which has frequently been called into question in Ulmer’s book. In his discussion of The Third Memory, Ulmer notes that John Wojitowicz (the “real” bank robber”) has seen Dog Day Afternoon—the retelling of Wojitowicz’s robbery. In The Third Memory, Huyghe examines the reactions of Wojitowicz’s recounting of the robbery after his relase. Unfortunately, there was no way to tell what was real and what was fiction as the “real” robber went through the re-telling. He’d seen the film. Was he acting out his real actions or the actions he’d seen on the film? Did he even know the difference? Furthermore, as Ulmer quotes Daniel Birnbaum: “The situation is complicated: Not only were Wojtowicz’s looks compared to Pacino’s in the press at the time of the robbery, but it was Pacino, along with Marlon Brando, who provided the fictional model for how to be a crook” (90).   This problematic issue regarding memory is further fleshed out in Martia Sturken’s discussion of Film as Memorial. She writes: “The personal memories of Vietnam veterans are merged with the cultural memories produced by documentary images of the war and the reinscribed in narrative cinematic representations that make claims to history” (100). If this is the case, then what is history? His/story… Is there one true history or is it a collection of the stories we’re told about it. Do we actually remember anything? Ulmer notes that “the history of writing shows that the experience of reading a text to oneself produced an experience of self-awareness that eventually produced the behavior and identity formation of self” (99). If writing produced the self, then has writing produced history? It seems that both exist in some form or another without writing or reading, but that the understanding of both are formed through those two tasks. Though I don’t have enough space to discuss it here, I’m always interested in sexuality and gender, and wonder if our writing about the two have created them as well? (I know for a fact that homosexuality is a construct of language… before the 1800s, there was no such thing. The act existed of course, but not the concept.) I think that, as we learned in class, Ulmer’s book will never be able to be summed up in 800 words…

Questions

Is there a true “history” that exists outside of the mind or is history literally his-story?

If history is HIStory, then how does this play into gender constructs and sexism?

Could transgendered people be considered an abject sacrifice to gender constructs? 

Electracy

This blog will be completely different than others because, frankly, I have no idea what I’m talking about. In his book Electronic Monuments, Gregory Ulmer discusses our move from literacy toward electracy (in the past we moved from orality to literacy) and the ways in which our understanding of the world is changing because of this. In his book Orality and Literacy, which made much more sense than Ulmer’s book, Walter Ong discussed the ways that thinking changed as our cultures changed from one’s that relied primarily on orality and became one that was literate. I get a sense that Ulmer is attempting to do the same thing: trace some kind of path between literacy and electracy.

In fact, Ulmer uses as one of his main examples in his introduction (which I found to be the most easily understood) the move from orality exemplified in pre-Socratic understanding toward literacy that was exemplified by Plato (and beginning to be understood through Socrates). Though Socrates never wrote anything, his understanding of the world was shaped by literacy. This example is very similar to the example used by Ong (and many theorists that discuss the different between written and spoken word and the ways in which the spoken word is often privileged over the written even today). In another similarity to Ong, Ulmer discusses the ways in which memories are shaped thanks to literacy and, now, electricy, and I believe this is the point of his Electronic Monuments though I have a hard time understanding it. Ulmer writes that “memory and identity have evolved with the changes in the language apparatus of civilization” (x), but I don’t believe that they have changed entirely. Memory is still fallible, as is language, and Ulmer discusses this throughout his book.

One of the most interesting aspects of Ulmer’s book is discusses throughout the first few chapters but explained best in his introduction. This is the idea of the “general accident,” a term which was coined by Paul Virilio. Ulmer explains that a general accident is “an accident that happens everywhere in the world simultaneously, related to the existence of the Internet” (xii). I think that this is a fascinating idea—the idea that an accident can happen everywhere in the world simultaneously because of the interest. I definitely agree that this is possible. Ulmer frequently uses the example of 9/11, but I think that a more recent example would be, say, the death of Steve Jobs. While many would argue that one person’s death is not nearly the same as the tragedy of 9/11, the news of Job’s death certainly spread quickly and similarly to that of 9/11 and this was, most of all, because of the internet. Almost simultaneously, people around the globe were learning of his death—not through news sources, radio, or television, but through social networking cites such as Facebook and Twitter. (I myself learned of Job’s death from Facebook.)

Though Job’s death certainly wasn’t “unremarkable,” the fact is that, without the internet, it probably would have been. Ulmer writes that “the appropriate site for mourning these ‘unremarkable’ disasters is the Internet as a living monument” (xv). These ‘unremarkable’ disasters he is discussing are traffic fatalities, which he discusses in chapter two of his book. He discusses the ways in which traffic related deaths can be memorialized by having a real-time print off of these deaths. What was once unremarkable suddenly becomes much more remarkable.

Technologies such as these create what Ulmer describes as “a single time—real time” that wasn’t possible years ago. This involves, I imagine, the idea of a socially constructed time. Without our label of “time” or the hour or what have you, there is a “real time.” Interestingly enough, while language created this time, it is technology that is attempting to break it down. Now that we realize that disasters in one part of the world can be experienced all over the world at the same time, the idea of a liner time seems much less important. Furthermore, the problems that arise are, in themselves, social constructs. Ulmer writes: “The basic premise of the EmerAgency is that problems, no less than the policies devised to address them, are social constructions” (xix). He then goes on to mention an example that Ian Hacking first noted: that of “women refugees.” Obviously, now that we’ve created such a concept, it’s easy to see that women refugees exist; however, without these words to describe this group of people, the idea doesn’t permeate our psyche.

Ulmer’s next chapters, which I don’t have much space to discuss, begin the dialogue regarding electronic monuments, which I haven’t been able to wrap my head around just yet. Though we were warned that Ulmer would be deep and difficult, the fact that my first blog regarding him was only able to cover a few points of the introduction is telling in an of itself.

Questions:

Have we moved completely from orality to literacy to electracy, or do we continue to show some semblance of them all?

How does the idea of the “general accident” shape our notion of truth? How does it call it in to question?

Ulmer writes that “societies from ancient Egypt to contemporary America have embodied their experience of death, loss, and separation in built constructions” but he is discussing society in general. How do individuals do this?