www.wix.com/ehprice/EMystory

Basically, I:

1. find a repeating motif throughout the juxtaposition of my popcycle themes, which I have grouped as themes anyway under the links

2. Figure out what it means, and adapt it to a specific scene (Ulmer had a scene from a movie, but I think it could be a scene from my own memory, and it probably will be).

3. Evaluate the atmosphere of the scene

4. Relate the nature of the outside world to this emblem

The wide image is a “constellation” of fragments repeated throught the popcycle (276).

The wide image may be expressed in any form/genre. It does not have to be a single symbol.

It can be “four to five realted primary images, and a secondary proliferation of these into an array of 50 to 100 variations. These images give access to the themata that are the core set of themes, the abstract version of the orientation of the world” (277).

So I can have multiple images…I feel like this would be a lot easier to embody if I was a film director. Static images seem that will be very difficult. Maybe I can make a slideshow? Seems wrong to me.

Template/worksheet for emblem (which Ulmer refers to as an outline, and as an exercise suggests that to find mywide image, I create two sentences for each, the second sentence in order to get under the surface and not overlook a deeper meaning):

1. Things

2. Material Attributes/Properties

3. Atmosphere

4. Feeling

5. Worldview

6. Morality

“The lesson for the wide image is in the relationship among the default mood of a culture, the details of the maker’s individual experience of the popcycle, and the ontology and ethics that may be inferred from this combination. The basic rule to extrapoloate from these realys to discover one’s own situation. What is my default mood?” (268)

“An emblem emerges through the repetitions in the sequence of scenes gathered by means of an associative passage through the popcycle: what resembles assembles” (271)

I will tell you one thing, the most recurring theme throughout family/career/entertainment/community (school) for me is Clemson-related. Within the theme lie family tradition, my career aspirations, the school I’ve attended for five years so far and six when it’s said and done, a large part of my history–particularly the period when I really started to come into myself–and though I didn’t include it in my entertainment section because it was already enveloped in my “Death Valley” section–I LOVE TO WATCH FOOTBALL AS ENTERTAINMENT. This all seems silly to me. I refuse to have some tiger paw as my emblem. Must. Dig. Deeper. And I will…

“The emblem as a hybrid of picture  and text is an image and an idea; in it the image and the idea exchange effects and enter into the tangle of felt” (275)  –So the emblem can include text…? I didn’t envision it this way. But considering my love for text really comes through in the Mystory (I have much more text than the other I’ve seen in class, I think), this will probably work out for me.

2. What other exercises are there for developing electracy other than the Mystory? When you were developing your theory of electracy, was the Mystory the first exercise that you considered? If not, how did your idea of the Mystory develop over time? What benefits does the Mystory have over other ways of developing electracy, such as more focus on technical skill, design, etc.?

3. To be truly electrate, wouldn’t it entail an awareness of personal overexposure on the internet? I would think so… so then why is the Mystory this psychoanalytic-laden, deeply personal, diary-type medium? How does this introspective investigation contribute to electracy more than something less psychoanalytic? Are there any dangers posed with the Mystory?

In the allegory of the map, he states that eventually the  ”Map precedes the territory” so that eventually, the map replaces the real, and the map depicting deserts, among other things, becomes ”The desert of the real itself.” Baudrillard discusses death a lot, and I didn’t get it really until I started blogging about this quotation. The real is dead because simulacra eventually kill it; the real is replaced by nostalgia for the real, and becomes so removed from us that death is the only appropriate way to describe it. Could we go so far as to say we murder the real with all of our (now digital) prolific renderings of the real? W.W.V.S. (What would Virilio say)? I think he would agree with this entirely. I don’t recall Virilio going so far as to say we murder the real, but he certainly says we replace the real with simulation to the point it’s quickly destroying reality (and therefore us).

“It is genetic miniaturization that is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control–and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these” (2).

Ironically, he wrote this before the immense explosion of the internet. I think he was probably writing about this concerning the printing press. But with the internet, this quotation applies even more directly. I love the connection he makes with these memory banks, etc. as models of control. This is kind of the beginning where he begins to sound familiar to Foucault; these methods we use to “archaeologize” and therefore simulate knowledge are both inadvertently and purposefully controlling what can be said and not said about the real; thwarting it and changing it. Then we take these representations as fact: “The latter is new and taken for more ‘real’ than the other” (3).

“But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra?” (4)

I know the historical issues with iconoclasty, and I don’t know why I never thought of this concept when we were discussing Second Life churches. Would Second Life churches, which are obviously simulations of churches, some even precise simulations of real churches, count? Anyway, this quote struck me, because this is exactly what I was interested in when we explored Second Life worship. Leave it to Baudrillard to put it best. In the same vein, he later says,  ”How can the simulation of virtue be punished?” (21), which is another question I sought to answer in our SL churches exploration. Should the simulation of virtue ever be punished? Can simulation be virtuous? I’m thinking less of hypocrits who pray in public to get attention and more worshipers who choose to attend Second Life church services…

“We have all become living specimens in the spectral light of ethnology…is is here, everywhere…in a world completely catalogued and analyzed, then artifically resurrected under the auspices of the real, in a world of simulation, of the hallucination of truth, of the blackmail of the real…” (8).

This was an interesting metaphor, though I don’t guess he meant it as a metaphor. I think he literally means we are ethnographers of our world. We examine, record, catalogue and analyze the real, with a distance from it that is becoming only increasingly distant the more we do this. This is exactly what Virilio was saying–we aren’t on the inside anymore, we aren’t inside the real–we are from the outside looking in, like an ethnographer.

“Simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland…Disneyland is represented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation” (12).

“The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp…This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the ‘real’ world, and to conceal the fact that trye childishness is everywhere” (13).

Here Baudrillard really starts to implode the real/imaginary binary. I think he’s pointing out that this binary of imaginary, which Disneyland represents, and the real, adult world is only a socially constructed concept; they aren’t REALly binaries at all. They are only represented this way because of our need to categorize and simulate, which then creates ideology, etc.

“It is ‘enlightened’ thought that seeks to control it by imposing rules on it” (15).

This echoes my Rhetoric class with Dr. Jacobi and Foucault all in one. The elitist, “enlightened” speakers of Truth vs. the social constructivists of truth. In this quotation particularly, Baudrillard seems to me to be a social constructivist. But then I get confused, because sometimes I flip-flop in between thinking that Baudrillard believe in Truth, or in other words the real/reality, but believes we can never know it again because we are so far removed, and sometimes I think that he believes Truth doesn’t exist at all. Which is it, class?

“Everything is metamorphosed into its opposite to perpetuate itself in its expurgated form” (19).

According to threfreedictionary.com, expurgate means “to remove erroneous, vulgar, obscene, or otherwise objectionable from a book, for example, before publication.” So this quotation seems to explain further Baudrillard’s concepts of us setting up Disneyland as our go-to place for childishness in contrast of the adult world, where prolonged childishness and constant play and whimsy are not accepted. Does anyone else see this connection? I’m just getting there.

“What every society looks for in continuing to produce, and to overproduce, is to restore the real that escapes it. That is why today the ‘material’ production is of the hyperreal itself. It retains all the feature, the whole discourse of traditional production, but it is no longer anything but scaled-down refraction” (23).

Virilio would definitely agree with the term “overproduction” here, and the view that we overproduce. And while doing so, we become further removed. We just reproduce reproductions, particularly when we compose online and link other compositions and paste images removed five times over that were taken of the real object, and it all happens virtually.

“Power itself has for a long time produced nothing but the signs of its resemblance” (23). This sounds just like Foucault’s conopticon discussion in Discipline and Punish, when he discusses inmates “behaving” because they believe they are being watched by the conopticon, even when there is no guard stationed within it. The simulation of power adequately takes place of power; as long as those being controlled believe they are controlled, it’s working. He further discusses this illusion of power with the following quotation, and then with his discussion of the nuclear bomb:

“For a long time now a head of state–no matter which one–is nothing but the simulacrum of himself, and only that gives him the power and the quality to govern. No one would grant the least consent, the least devotion to a real person. It is to his double, he being always already dead, to which allegiance is given” (26).

Even though the President is a real person, the way they present themselves and are presented through simulations of themselves via the media, their handlers, rhetoric and what have you create a simulacrum of the real man. The President becomes this distant symbol of power. How dare Obama fill out an NCAA bracket! He’s not a real person. He should be attending to pressing federal and global matters 24/7. And yes, the realization that the President is always technically a “normal,” middle-aged man can be frightening. He’s supposed to be so much more! He’s PRESIDENT.

“As is the fact that power is in essence no longer present except to conceal that there is no more power” (26). A third and Foucauldian-like and Discipline and Punish-like quotation concerning the illusion of power. But yes, the illusion of power is constructed through simulation, which is also that kills ‘real’ power. And lastly: ”Responsibility, control, censure, self-deterrence always grow more rapidly than the forces of the weapons at our disposal: this is the secret of the social order” (39). The socially constructed ideology of discourse grows much more rapidly than real power.

“One must think of the media as if they were, in outer orbit, a kind of genetic code that directs the mutation of the real into the hyperreal” (30).

It seems Baudrillard views that the media, both traditional and new, are primarily responsible for the mutation of the real. Since the media does everything from misrepresent situations to make us believe we need things that we really don’t, I would completely agree. Also, when we see things in the media, we often think that it’s the real. We get sucked in and often forget that it’s a representation, and often misrepresentation, of the real–just look at reality television. Perfect example–most of its scripted–and Baudrillard used a primitive, for lack of a better word, reality tv show as an example himself.

Furthermore, he states that “The media and the official news service are only there to maintain the illusion of an actuality, of the reality of the stakes, of the objectivity of facts” (38). They only APPEAR to be objective. Any rhetorically educated individually knows that nothing is truly objective. There is no neutral language. And since simulation is creation, often through language, it can never be neutral and therefore is always mutated.

“Nothing separates one pole from another anymore, the beginning from the end; there is a king of contraction of one over the other, a fantastic telescoping, a collapse of the two traditional poles into each other: imposion” (31).

This is where Baudrillard finally explicitly states his super post-modern, deconstructivist method of thinking. He implodes binaries. We can no longer speak in these terms–kind of a similar move to Foucault’s in The Archaeology of Knowledge.

www.emilysmystory.weebly.com

Here I added the sections concerning canines and the west. I found them both to be icons from my childhood, embodying much of my memory, and each had been unexplored critically until now. I found this to be somewhat therapeutic, but sometimes I felt like I was reaching for connections. Are we supposed to feel this way? Shouldn’t it be an entirely organic process? I feel like it’s supposed to just magically happen–the connections are, anyway, maybe not the writing–so I allowed these themes to naturally appear to me. I didn’t think for too long about what I might name my links, and I just began writing.

On to today’s readings, briefly:

“The Entertainment narrative template we are following is based on the archetypal pattern of the hero’s quest, which expresses in turn an ancient ritual of initiation–the achievement of individual identity. The motive for leaving home and entering the special world of adventure in this schema is some problem, some excess or lack, some trouble that disturbs the equilibrium of the Family situation” (126).

It seems that Ulmer places the most stress on the Entertainment section–at least thus far. It also quickly became the most confusing for me. He got entirely too Freudian for me to understand, as his descriptions of superego and phallic symbols only struck distant chords of memory from my undergraduate Literary Theory course.

The above quotation, however, does depict to me why Ulmer places importance upon the development of the Entertainment section. It is this section where we explore our own, mapped out place in the world, and we deconstruct our identities. I think many of us probably began this earlier, but perhaps in the Entertainment section, where popular culture will be addressed, we situate ourselves in the realm of society instead of just the realm of career or family. It’s a little more expansive of territory, and maybe more data available to influene us in the general realm of culture/society/society’s communicative practices.

” ‘ When you determine your point of view–what you assume is true about the way the world works–you are establishing a belief system, a framework in which you operate. We all have belief situations and each of those beliefs is anchored in specific action’ ” (129).

In this excerpt from the quotation about Method acting, I agree with what’s being said entirely, but wouldn’t this theme be more fitting in the Family section? I guess I only think this because to me, Family = childhood, but in context, Ulmer wants us to apply this concept in recollecting a film we saw in childhood. Would films we saw when we were young and impressionable be more revealing about our belief systems than our families?

I do think it’s beneficial to uncover these belief systems, but why is it so necessary in electracy? Why is it so necessary when utilizing the art/science of digital publishing?

“If photos and stories of events (disasters) that we browse in newspapers and magazines leave us indifferent, Sartre argues, it is because we fail to fill the signs with our own imagination. Pictures, like words, must be actively read” (132).

“Socrates, the prototype of the literate pedagogue, is a mentor. This role is played for people becoming electrate by a favorite star or celebrity, who models what it is to become an image” (139).

I think the above quotations pair quite nicely together. We can’t help but read a favorite star or celebrity, who then becomes an image, and the point here is to use our imaginations to actively read images, correct? I think the two paired quotations exhibit Ulmer’s connection he’s making for us.

“The electrate dialogue must take into account this force of displacement and recognize that the face-to-face has always been a metonym for the interaction of whole bodies” (146).

What would Paul Virilio say about this? Ulmer is admitting that communciative technology is just a further removal of f2f, which is a further removal of what, sex??? I must admit, the whole discussion of face-to-face being a substitue for genitals-to-genitals…I wasn’t buying it. Or else I just didn’t get it.

“It is not that there is ‘no communication’ in electracy, but that the channel, the connection alone with the given circumstances of the senders and receivers, are in ruins; yet within these ruins arises a digital memory palace (Xanadu)” (155).

Everything that happens is instantaneously exposed. For example, events are simultaneously documented via camera and video phones with internet capabilities, people live “tweet,” etc. There are no longer seemingly static events, one following the other, that are revealed to us as stories. Revelation is instead a more active and constant process, with the information, responses, and other supplementary action/literature/what have you eclipsing the actual event or act faster that it really happened–at lightning speed, actually. Virilio goes on to say, “As for telecommunication tools…they are also eradicating all duration, any extension of time in the transmission of messages, images” (9).  There’s no pause, and with no pause, what wisdom or unhurried reflection can occur? I read a quote once by an author that has always stuck with me, and while I don’t remember it precisely, it said that when we don’t give ourselves a pause (which is necessary to gain insight), nature gives us one in the form of a car wreck, tragedy, etc. This is interesting in the wake of all of these debilitating earthhquakes that ruin cities’, and even countries’, infrastructures.

All the time we talk about watered-down information, and it’s not only because of the numerous burgeoning rhetorical fronts offered through self-publishing, but it’s because of this new standard of speed of information. There’s no time anymore for thoughtful communication, it seems. So while the amount of information has multiplied a thousand fold, what has this really done to quality? Or to preventing certain messages from being broadcast globally and immediately (such as the death of the young bobsledder?)

–”"Mass transportation revolution of the 19th century, broadcasting revolution of the 20th centurty–a mutation and a commutation that affect both public and domestic space at the same time, to the point where we are left with some uncertainty as to their very reality, since the urbanization of real space is currently giving way to a preliminary urbanization of real time”

The word “mutation” concerning public/domestic space is particularly haunting here, and accurate to boot. Regardless of one’s views of the benefits or detriments of technology on society, the difference between public and domestic spaces is becoming alarmingly difficult to decipher. While sitting in the home, numerous technologies constantly connect your domestic self to global society. Google has pictures of your house, likely with your car in them as well–bridging the gap of the domestic and public. This is only one example, and these changes are permanent, as mutations are. We rely now on an entirely new infrastructure and standard of communication, and it would be impossible to return to the simplistic days of Leave it to Beaver.

He goes on to say, ”Social organization and a kind of conditioning once limited to the space of the city and to the space of the family home is finally closing in on the animal body…the more the city expands and spreads its tentacles, the more the family unit dwindles and becomes a minority” (11-12).

Now, families don’t sit around the dinner table. They sit in front of the television, or stay connected through Skype! Single-parent families are now almost the norm, as are bi-coastal families. Kids sit locked in their rooms playing video games, or surfing the internet, choosing to “socialize” virtually than be present with their families and partake in physical activity.

–”Having been first mobile, then motorized, man will thus become motile, deliberately limiting his body’s area of influence to a few gestures, a few impulses, like channel-surfing” (17).

I love the distinctions here of mobile, motorized and then motile. We’ve evolved (or devolved?) from wandering nomads, hunters and gatherers, cowboys–essentially physical doers–to having the assistance of machines that motorize manual labor and transportation, to not even having to get up to watch the latest movie release in the latest technology, to turn on the lights, chop an onion, or to even facilitate a conference with a company in China that subsequently rakes in millions.

Rising obesity rates is a side effect of this, remniscient of the movie Wall-E that depicts all the fat people riding around a massive mall in private motorized cars, with robots waiting on them. Pure laziness will soon become inability, and maybe even evolutionary issues of lost physical ability.

–”not the exclusive concern of travel agents…but a special concen of the unemployment agency, since the greater the speed of exchanges, the more unemployment spreads and becomes mass unemployment. Redundancy of man’s muscular strength in favour of the ‘machine tool’…permanent unemployment, of his memory and his consciousness” (19).

I don’t even consider this extreme technological revolution an issue for travel agents. If anything. it motivates me to travel, because it’s easier. Travel is more accessible. I don’t feel fulfilled reading about Tuscany on the internet. I’m sure business travel has regressed.

But this idea of unemployment due to the introductions of machines is nothing new–entire cities/towns enter poverty because blue collar workers, various manufacturers, assembly line workers, etc. have no work. The abandoned mill towns with dilapidated mill housing scattered acround Clemson are testament to this.

Certain manual skills have faded out, because no one knows the trade anymore aside from a certain machine. Virilio’s extension of the idea of unemployment of memory and consciousness it fascinating. I don’t remember directions, or phone contacts. I’m often not conscious of my surroundings when consumed by my phone/computer/television. The effects are only begininng to reveal themselves.

–Much later, physicologists will discover that the faster you move from one place to another, the further ahead your eyes adapt” (29).

This echoes the Heidegger’s argument we discussed briefly in class that day–people are far removed from their state of being, of place and of presence. Our eyes are always ahead, turned toward our destination and ignoring the journey, seeking instant gratification in all things. Instead of appreciating the act and journey of becoming, it’s considered a nuisance. And as we continue to receive instant gratification offered to us by technologies, we will neglect our state of being and presence (particularly physical, but mental and emotional as well) even more. Virilio later poses the question, “How can we really live is there is no more here and if everything is now” (37)? Physicality is more and more often sacrificed for speed (such as teleconferences instead of physical, traditional conferences).

“We are effectively seeing the beginning of a third revolution: following the transport revolution of the 19th ceuntry, which saw the flourishing of the railway system, followed by the automobile and aviation, we have, in the 20th centruy, seen the transmission revolution…Behind closed laboratory doors, the transplantation revolution is secretly gearing up” (50).

This a) scares me; we’re all going to walk around with machines in our bodies that lead to cancerous growths; and b) made me remember that I put a microchip in my dog, so that if he disappears he can be scanned at the back of the neck, and mine/his information comes up. I have for a while wondered when they’d start doing this to children.

“Alongside the pollution of substances that make up our environment, which ecologists are always harping about, surely we should also be able to detect the sudden pollution of distances and lengths of time that is degrading the expanse of our habitat” (58).

The world has lost a level of sanctity, because it’s constantly shrinking due to our global connectedness. There’s a loss of respect and revelry, which are typically present in the midst of the unknown, or in the midst partially-revelead mystery.

When once Columbus sailed the sea in search of a “New World,” and the journey probably lasted a year or more, we have every mound of dirt on the planet mapped by Google Maps. Trips are now about the destination only; not the journey. The journey is supposed ot be as painless as possible, and the fact you have to take your shoes off in the airport is an utter travesty. It holds you up! You’re in a hurry to get through and move on, as painlessly as possible.

When he calls for “grey ecology,” he embodies this problematic state of mind we are in best: “So drompspheric pollution is pollution that attacks the liveliness of the subject and the mobility of the object by atrophying the journey to the point where it becomes needless” (34).

www.emilysmystory.weebly.com

I found it very appropriate that after I created the first quarter of my mystory, I played with the theme of a “journey” with both my pictures and my words. Then lo and behold, I begin the reading for today’s class, and Ulmer says, “The subject enters into action, begins a journey” (73).

I guess it isn’t some huge coincidence, because these explorations of themes and images in the different discourses of which we take part is a journey that helps us more clearly understand our position of being.

I did notice that in the bystory, he quotes, “The circular journey starts at home” (75). To consider the maneuvering of a website as a “circular journey” is an easy way to understand, particularly since it seems that later, when we work on hypertext and linkages between our four quadrants, the journey will indeed bring us full circle.

But the quotation, and all the discussion of homesickness in the beginning of Chapter 3, did confuse me as to why we had no real direction on the construction of the “home” site. I felt like I was just grasping for nothingness when I created the homepage, and then after I constructed it, I began reading how important “home” is.

Then I realized that maybe the real “home” I should be considering is the place where I first began “becoming” something. My home that was a structural building with warm things inside, and people and food.

So when I began reading about the home/family quadrant, I felt like it would be so much easier for me to create than the career quadrant, which I felt totally lost with. Maybe that’s a pretty strong sign–I feel lost in career discourse. I don’t really have a career right now. I have an ideal of what I would like my career to be, but I have my doubts on attaining it.

Anyway, Ulmer actually defines home later on: “To learn electracy means to leave home, with ‘home’ referring to the familiarity of your ‘natural standpoint’ ” (95). Maybe that’s why I feel so uncomfortable with what he’s asking us to do. And he says homesickness is a feeling we’re seeking, right? So maybe I’m doing it right after all…MAYBE.

I’ll approach this blog by listing several quotations I chose to star, and reflecting on why I thought they were so special when reading.

–”These discourses constitute the ecology of your lifeworld.”

I actually understood it this way before he said it. YES! I do like the term “ecology” used here, which is defined by thefreedictionary.com as “the relationship between organisms and their environment.” These discourses are organisms in my environment, which is my state of being.

“Mystory does for postmodern persons what allegory did for medeival persons” (79).

Basically, the mystory takes symbols in our super complex, postmodern lives and represents them in a clear way so that we can better understand them. But don’t allegories create symbols? Aren’t we recognizing symbols and deconstructing them in this mystory? A little different, I think.

“Write an epiphany by juxtaposing allegorical situations from our lives” (81).

He’s forcing us to write an epiphany. Isn’t that a little presumptuous? I am still doubtful that all of this intense introspection and psychoanalysis, and extraction of life symbols that could also just be there by coincidence, will ever create me to have some huge epiphany. But hey, Ulmer seems like a smart guy. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised. I still don’t understand, though, how uncovering these “symbols” in our lives directly relates with digitial literacy.

“Memories gather around problems, and our premise is that problem solving in your career discipline and in society at large (public policy) revolves around the specific experience of problems and their solutions across the areas of your experience” (94).

Just the idea of “memories gather[ing] around problems” fascinates me. I agree that many memories are spawned from problems, but what about happy memories? Do we only remember the happy times because we consciously notice an absence of problems, so we remember being truly happy? I don’t know…

But then he says:

“It is useful to see how something trivial in itself, if it sucks in memory, may be significant” (91).

So maybe if a memory isn’t contingent on some problem in my life, there is a reason it became a memory. Ulmer is just asking us to explore this significance. This sounds just like something from my creative writing of poetry class.

He wants us to identify and explore through electracy our endocepts, or “unshaped private glimmerings” (89).

I thought the family album exercise seemed like a great approach to tackling the family quadrant, and I really enjoyed the example offered. Looking at family photos is a tangible springboard, and that brings me relief. I think it’s important to remember he asks us to be “less interested in drama or idea, and more interested in mood and atmosphere” (89).

But to me, drama=problems. Why not consider the drama? Are we too look at the subtleties? We are to consider the subjects, positions of subjects and props, the photograph’s production (such as who took it), and “consider the photograph’s currency in context.” (Doesn’t that refer more to idea? I don’t understand his distinctions here between drama/idea/mood/atmosphere.)

When negotiating our web of discourses through the world wide web’s medium (I love puns!), Ulmer says, “They spread into an extended network of meaning that bring together the personal with the familial, the cultural, the economic, the social, and the historical” (87).

I have already noticed this happening in my “Death Valley” section. I realized that so much of what has nudged me into this career path has to do with past familial experiences, which I found I couldn’t avoid talking about in this section.

And ultimately my favorite quotation from this section of Ulmer:

“When we are born into a family, we enter in the middle of an ongoing narrative. We already are a character in the stories of our parents, who have plans, hopes, fears, for us that they project into our care or neglect as sons or daughters…parents pass on to children the cultural and social expectations regarding race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, sexuality and the like” (86).

Negotiating my specific location in their ongoing narrative reminds me of this poem I read sophomore year of college: 

This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

]]>

This time we’ll be discussing the statement… so something in order to read that concept would work. It is interesting that Foucault doesn’t give examples of his work. He leaves it pretty conceptual. That is, until later when he reads closely things like madness, prisons, and sexuality in light of the foundations he’s established.

Maybe this will help, though: “it is not in itself a unit, but a function” (87). AND it’s a function that “reveals [structures and possible unities]” (87).

I can’t help but think of a ‘statement’ in a normal way that I would — about somethign “making a statement,” or something “saying something.” Like Avatar “making a statement” about war. I feel like that’s a rather over-simplified understanding of it… but because Foucault does his best to NOT give us a clear understanding, I feel like that’s what I am left with.

The University of Phoenix instructs of faculty to use Emoticons. Perhaps this pertains to the statement in an interesting way. Emoticon as statement.

So we have symbols that make up statements that then create discursive formations. Wikipedia is a discursive formation.

And as I take it, we can’t have statements without symbols. Because statements have to have a level of materiality to exist–whether it’s oral, written, etc.

Although, as far as I can tell, Foucault doesn’t give examples of visually rhetorical statements… they are primarily linguistic for him.

Statements exist in a complex web with other statements and absolutely cannot stand by themselves in order to be a statement; their existence depends on the existence of the other statements with which they relate. Although this connection to other statements is distinguished from “context.”

Also, a statement cannot be defined by a proposition or an author, but can contain both. I am not sure at this point if it can contain just one or the other, but I think so. Sometimes the creator of a statement is an actor or even a reader… So an “author,” in its broadest sense, is very likely always there in some sense.

This is all just background to get my head about it. I think statements in Wikipedia definitely qualify because a. It’s a level of materiality 2. There are other statements to create a web of meaning 3. There are authors and propositions but they don’t alone define the statements 4. There are rules with which the statements in Wikipedia must operate, or actually Wikipedia will throw them out or write a note that the sources aren’t adequate…what else

One thing I was confused about is in the Enunciative Function chapter, Foucault discusses how statements can’t exist alone–like I mentioned previously–but how did statements ever even begin? I mean in terms of Wikipedia, that concept isn’t hard to digest. Also, in relation to Wikipedia–multiple authors/ enunciators / what have you can repeat the same statement, just a different occurrence of enunciation. It’s like, someone goes into Wikipedia, gets some information/ meaning /group of statements, and passes that information on to a friend or a report…same statement, different enunciation.

Also, since Foucault says a statement is deeper, structurally–though not always meaningfully–than some sort of psychological function (such as a speaker acting on a rhetorical situation, I guess, or a certain motive), it would make sense that Wikipedia is a collection of statements. At the root of Wikipedia is something much deeper than a rhetorical situation–some sort of more unmoving meaning to things. Fact, I guess, for lack of a better term. Would statements be that term I am looking for?

Wikipedia is a classic example of social construction, so yes it is a much deeper rhetorical situation. Maybe that is where the enunciation comes into the discussion.

Also, I like on page 104 where he uses the term “agreed code” when discussing statements. I feel like Wikipedia, in all its socially-constructed glory, centers around this “agreed code” or what is truth. I think that “agreed code” is what Foucault means are statements–meanings that follow establish rules, codes, ideologies, etc. of other units of discourse, and form a complex web of meaning–but meaning nonetheless. Or perhaps that statements exist in relation to this agreed code, both abiding by it and creating it. For a discourse to exist, those involved must be “talking about ‘the same thing’, by placing themselves at ‘the same level’ or at ‘the same distance’, by deploying ‘the same conceptual field’” (126).

[Though, for all the social-constructioniness of Foucault, I can understand how one would read him as a structuralist, with Foucault saying things like: "there are not, in such cases, the same number of statements as there are languages used, but a single group of statements in different linguistic forms" (104). I don't think Foucault was really trying to be structuralistic there, as there is context to that sentence, but I can see one viewing that extracted statement as a logical unfolding of Foucaultian thought.]

Another quote I like: a statement is “too bound up with what surrounds it and supports it to be as free as a pure form (it is more than a law of construction governing a group of elements), it is endowed with a certain modifiable heaviness, a weight relative to the field in which it is placed, a constancy that allows various users, a temporal permanence that does not have the intertia of a mere trace or mark, and which does not sleep on its own past” (105).

I feel like this quote has social construction of truth written all over it. (No pun intended). First of all, a statement cannot ever be merely relative even though it can change itself to become a new, more meaningful statement. Or newly meaningful statement…anyway–a statement has ”temporal permanence.” Semi-permanence in that it belongs to a field, is caught up with other statements that are the basis for it’s definition, etc.–but it’s only “temporal permanence.” Such as his example for what the theory of the Earth being round meant before they actually discovered it…how that statement changed because the field changed. In terms of Wikipedia, just think of all the statements that will change and become new statements over time. Because as he also says on page 105 as well–”"men produce, manipluate use, transform, exchange, combine, decompose and recompose, and possibly destory.” It’s not something “said once and for all.” And if there was any Truth with a capital T behind a statement, it would be once and for all, and have that finality. Which is so great about Wikipedia–there’s no finality at all. We can go in there and change any entry we want right now. I feel like it embodies a collection of statements in Foucault’s terms even better than an old school encyclopedia.

The discussion of Wikipedia is an interesting example because it exists at this intersection of some important Foucaultian concepts. On one hand, Wikipedia is an opening up of discourse – affording individual voice that counters hegemonic institutional knowledge. Wikipedia is not the same as Encyclopedia Britanica. Yet, it is bound by institutional practices – even discipline. Foucault could almost have been defining Wikipedia on page 130, saying, “the archive defines a particular level: that of a practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge [...]; between tradition and oblivion, it reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements.”

And let us not forget that the word archive is etymylogically connected to the word, archon, which means ruler. Thus, our archives have attained a kind of rule over our ways of thinking. See my project concerning this issue at http://theyellowrobot.com/foucault.html.

Lastly, we may consider how the statement, while interstingly explored through the constructs of Wikipedia, may exist without meaning, context, or referent at all. Foucault writes, “Nor is it [the statement] superposable to the relation that may exist between a sentence and its meaning” (90). Foucault’s example of AZERT shows that there can be a statement that exists aside from traditionally held conceptualizations of reality or intended thought. So, while Wikipedia includes many, many carefully and socially constructed statements, there may be statements out there that lack many of the aspects that are necessary for the language to be used in a distinctly encyclopedic manner.

The question is just how bare bones can a statement be? I tried to look for a statement this morning at 5:30 a.m. in the water droplets on my shower curtain, but couldn’t find one there. But maybe someone else could have…Maybe this will help, though: “it is not in itself a unit, but a function” (87). AND it’s a function that “reveals [structures and possible unities]” (87). I can’t help but think of a ‘statement’ in a normal way that I would — about somethign “making a statement,” or something “saying something.” Like Avatar “making a statement” about war. I feel like that’s a rather over-simplified understanding of it… but because Foucault does his best to NOT give us a clear understanding, I feel like that’s what I am left with.The University of Phoenix instructs of faculty to use Emoticons. Perhaps this pertains to the statement in an interesting way. Emoticon as statement.:)So we have symbols that make up statements that then create discursive formations. Wikipedia is a discursive formation.And as I take it, we can’t have statements without symbols. Because statements have to have a level of materiality to exist–whether it’s oral, written, etc. Although, as far as I can tell, Foucault doesn’t give examples of visually rhetorical statements… they are primarily linguistic for him.Statements exist in a complex web with other statements and absolutely cannot stand by themselves in order to be a statement; their existence depends on the existence of the other statements with which they relate. Although this connection to other statements is distinguished from “context.”Also, a statement cannot be defined by a proposition or an author, but can contain both. I am not sure at this point if it can contain just one or the other, but I think so. Sometimes the creator of a statement is an actor or even a reader… So an “author,” in its broadest sense, is very likely always there in some sense.This is all just background to get my head about it. I think statements in Wikipedia definitely qualify because a. It’s a level of materiality 2. There are other statements to create a web of meaning 3. There are authors and propositions but they don’t alone define the statements 4. There are rules with which the statements in Wikipedia must operate, or actually Wikipedia will throw them out or write a note that the sources aren’t adequate…what elseOne thing I was confused about is in the Enunciative Function chapter, Foucault discusses how statements can’t exist alone–like I mentioned previously–but how did statements ever even begin? I mean in terms of Wikipedia, that concept isn’t hard to digest. Also, in relation to Wikipedia–multiple authors/ enunciators / what have you can repeat the same statement, just a different occurrence of enunciation. It’s like, someone goes into Wikipedia, gets some information/ meaning /group of statements, and passes that information on to a friend or a report…same statement, different enunciation.Also, since Foucault says a statement is deeper, structurally–though not always meaningfully–than some sort of psychological function (such as a speaker acting on a rhetorical situation, I guess, or a certain motive), it would make sense that Wikipedia is a collection of statements. At the root of Wikipedia is something much deeper than a rhetorical situation–some sort of more unmoving meaning to things. Fact, I guess, for lack of a better term. Would statements be that term I am looking for? Wikipedia is a classic example of social construction, so yes it is a much deeper rhetorical situation. Maybe that is where the enunciation comes into the discussion. Also, I like on page 104 where he uses the term “agreed code” when discussing statements. I feel like Wikipedia, in all its socially-constructed glory, centers around this “agreed code” or what is truth. I think that “agreed code” is what Foucault means are statements–meanings that follow establish rules, codes, ideologies, etc. of other units of discourse, and form a complex web of meaning–but meaning nonetheless. Or perhaps that statements exist in relation to this agreed code, both abiding by it and creating it. For a discourse to exist, those involved must be “talking about ‘the same thing’, by placing themselves at ‘the same level’ or at ‘the same distance’, by deploying ‘the same conceptual field’” (126).[Though, for all the social-constructioniness of Foucault, I can understand how one would read him as a structuralist, with Foucault saying things like: "there are not, in such cases, the same number of statements as there are languages used, but a single group of statements in different linguistic forms" (104). I don't think Foucault was really trying to be structuralistic there, as there is context to that sentence, but I can see one viewing that extracted statement as a logical unfolding of Foucaultian thought.]Another quote I like: a statement is “too bound up with what surrounds it and supports it to be as free as a pure form (it is more than a law of construction governing a group of elements), it is endowed with a certain modifiable heaviness, a weight relative to the field in which it is placed, a constancy that allows various users, a temporal permanence that does not have the intertia of a mere trace or mark, and which does not sleep on its own past” (105).I feel like this quote has social construction of truth written all over it. (No pun intended). First of all, a statement cannot ever be merely relative even though it can change itself to become a new, more meaningful statement. Or newly meaningful statement…anyway–a statement has “temporal permanence.” Semi-permanence in that it belongs to a field, is caught up with other statements that are the basis for it’s definition, etc.–but it’s only “temporal permanence.” Such as his example for what the theory of the Earth being round meant before they actually discovered it…how that statement changed because the field changed. In terms of Wikipedia, just think of all the statements that will change and become new statements over time. Because as he also says on page 105 as well–”"men produce, manipluate use, transform, exchange, combine, decompose and recompose, and possibly destory.” It’s not something “said once and for all.” And if there was any Truth with a capital T behind a statement, it would be once and for all, and have that finality. Which is so great about Wikipedia–there’s no finality at all. We can go in there and change any entry we want right now. I feel like it embodies a collection of statements in Foucault’s terms even better than an old school encyclopedia.The discussion of Wikipedia is an interesting example because it exists at this intersection of some important Foucaultian concepts. On one hand, Wikipedia is an opening up of discourse – affording individual voice that counters hegemonic institutional knowledge. Wikipedia is not the same as Encyclopedia Britanica. Yet, it is bound by institutional practices – even discipline. Foucault could almost have been defining Wikipedia on page 130, saying, “the archive defines a particular level: that of a practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge [...]; between tradition and oblivion, it reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements.” And let us not forget that the word archive is etymylogically connected to the word, archon, which means ruler. Thus, our archives have attained a kind of rule over our ways of thinking. See my project concerning this issue at http://theyellowrobot.com/foucault.html.Lastly, we may consider how the statement, while interstingly explored through the constructs of Wikipedia, may exist without meaning, context, or referent at all. Foucault writes, “Nor is it [the statement] superposable to the relation that may exist between a sentence and its meaning” (90). Foucault’s example of AZERT shows that there can be a statement that exists aside from traditionally held conceptualizations of reality or intended thought. So, while Wikipedia includes many, many carefully and socially constructed statements, there may be statements out there that lack many of the aspects that are necessary for the language to be used in a distinctly encyclopedic manner.The question is just how bare bones can a statement be? I tried to look for a statement this morning at 5:30 a.m. in the water droplets on my shower curtain, but couldn’t find one there. But maybe someone else could have…”>

The discursive regularities are many, and include objects, enunciative modalities, concepts, and strategies. Foucault presents us with the methodology to deconstruct the formations of these regularities, and to realize the restrictions they impose on the understanding of “things.”

Books, or documents, are just a way of dividing information, labeling it, constricting statements to constitute an entity, a “thing.” These are just a more obvious example of how we compartmentalize knowledge in a category, in order to make it a tangible thing. But just as cannot separate the book from it’s statements, and the book still exist as a book afterward, we cannot separate discourse from things. The discourse does define certain things, but the mere definition limits the thing as to what it can be. Our ability to define through discourse makes us lazy, because we often don’t question anything further.

But Foucault contents we must change our relationship with documents and of things (6), as he gets into in the later chapters of Part I.

“History is one way in which a society recognizes and develops a mass of doctumentation with which it is inextricably linked” (7). History is only the disciple Foucault opens with, yet this idea can be applied to any discipline. We can’t unlink this tightly wound relationship of disciple and the mass of documentation that constitutes the building blocks of said disciple, but we must recognize this co-existence that defines things.

Foucault defines his enterprise as this: “An enterprise by which one tries to measure the mutations that operate in general in the field of history; an enterprise in which the methods, limits, and themes proper to the history of ideas are questioned; an enterprise by which one tries to throw off the last anthropological constraints; an enterprise that wishes, in return, to reveal how these contraints could come about” (15).

“We must rid ourselves of a while mass of notions” (21), Foucault says; notions that blind us from getting at “the thing,” and recognizing what role discourse plays in definition.

One of these notions Foucault lists early on is tradition, which “makes it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of the same; it allows the reduction of difference proper to every beginning, in order to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for origin” (21).

“We must also question those divisions or groupings [such as tradition] with which we have become so familiar”(22), he says. We inherit distinctions, groupings, biases, disciplines, textual definitions–a whole book of them, such as Webster’s, which allows things to exist only in what they have been previously defined in relation to other things, and disallows them to be anything outside of that particular series of statements.

“The frontiers of a book are never clear cut” (23), says Foucault, because a book exists in it’s discursive relations to other things, such as books, or authors–and the fronteirs are never clear cut, even if a book has a beginning and an end. Nothing else can really be clear cut, either–everything is caught up in a system of references to other things. Unlike books, the internet puts network of tangible references right at hand–such as hyperlinks–and the internet offers no pretense of “clear cut frontiers,” such as the covers of a book.

By the way, I had to look up the definition of “oeurve,” which I found quite ironic given the circumstances. According to Merriam-Webster, it’s just as I figured from contextual clues, though I don’t know why it couldn’t be translated; it’s “a body of work constituting the lifework of a writer, an artist, or a composer.”

 Foucault frequently reminds me of what little I’ve read of Ulmer, and the way Foucault discusses an oeurve sounds much like a mystory: “there must be a level (as deep as it is necessary to imagine it) at which the oeurve emerges, in all its fragments, even the smallest, most inessential ones, as the expression of thought, the experience, the imagination, the unconsciousness of the author” (24). Isn’t this what Ulmer is going for through the psychoanalytic discovery of a Mystory? Though Foucault says an oeurve cannot be considered as a unity.  There are no secret origins to Foucault–he contends we can get at any origin when we find the birth of the term, right? So is Ulmer on this same plane of understanding? There are no secret origins to us, because we can discover them by understanding our place in the intersections of various discourses?

When Foucault says, “We must renounce to linked, but opposite themes” (25), I assume he means we must “renounce” binaries as a way of defining a thing–as a way “of disconnecting the unquestioning continuities by which we organize.” Discourse creates “never saids.” This is similar to where Ulmer challenges us to define by the anti-definition, which contrary to what the term “anti-definition” might imply, is not a definition by binaries. It is instead a more desciptive discursice practice that takes the thing’s relations and influences into account–seemingly Foucaultian.

” These pre-existing forms of continuity (25), all of these syntheses that are accepted without question, must remain in suspence. They must not be accepted without question,” says Foucault, because then an “entire field can be set free” (26). Not that we can ever free a field completely from discourse–that isn’t his goal. To unpack the discursive practices that define a field is his goal–but not to unpack them and throw that part of the thing’s definition out the window. I think he means “free the field” of it’s false simplifications–free it to be as complex as it has to be. Because “a statement is always an event that neither the language nor the meaning can quite exhaust” (28) because of the ideology, the relations, etc.; so if we understand these continuities of statements, we can free up the other things the language and meaning can’t exhaust alone.

Disciplines, among other things such as those who are certified to speak on subjects, etc., ”conceal other unities” (31). Our need to compartmentalize, and group and name in order to what we think more fully describes attributes, doesn’t justify the things themselves. It transforms the things, and defines them in part. But the rest is a mystery–and it doesn’t have to be.

Though our discourse characterizes the object, Foucault doesn’t want to get beyond discourse. He wants to operate at the level of discourse–not in it’s exteriority or interiority. We can’t operate in discourse’s exteriority–we can’t be objective, letting things operate in and of themselves, because they don’t entirely define themselves. But likewise, operating strictly within discourse lets us fall victim to accepting inherited notions at face value with no idea what else is at work, because things only “appear to form a coherent figure” (35).

As he says, per my previous assertion: “Discursive relations are not “internal to discourse..they are not relations exterior to discourse..they are, in a sense, at the limits of discourse” (46).

So we go about this investigation of discursive formation–”the conditions to which the elements of this division (objects, mode of statement, concepts, thematic choices)–are subjected,” (39) and through doing so, “one is forced to advance beyond familiar territory, far from the certainties to which one is accustomed, towards an as yet uncharted land and unforseeabole conclusion” (39).

Isn’t this what Ulmer seeks for us to do through electracy/Mystories?

In the pursuit of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, we seek to trace the origins of disciplines?

He doesn’t want us to neuter discourse, but to unleash the realness and richness and complexity of things that are stifled by discourse “to make it emerge in its own complexity–” not make things less complex, but make things as complex as they are by revealing their relations and ideologies, etc.; to understand the difference, yet necessary relationship, of signifier and signified thing.