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?