Electronic Monument Notes

*EmerAgency– “conceptual umbrella organization created to coordinate and to lend coherence to experiments in adapting arts and letters education to the Internet and to the digital or computing revolution in general” (xii).

– “a distributed, virtual, online consulting agency, meaning that emeragents (or simply egents, to signal that we are concerned with the changes affecting human agency in electracy)  are self-declared consultants without portfolio” (xiii).

– “a deconstruction of conventional consulting, meaning that it appropriates this existing and familiar practice for delivering expert knowledge to sites of need, and transforms it with a different usage” (xiii).

-problems are social constructs

*Witness/countersurveillance – observation alters what is observed, and the observer

– Mediated Witness- “consultant only has mediated access to the problems” (xxix).

*Catastrophe

*Electracy– “electracy is to the digital image apparatus what literacy is to alphabetic print” (xii).

*Imagined Community–  shared values that bring us together as a community

*(Internet) Civic Sphere– area to discuss societal problems and what to do to fix them

*General Accident– Virilio- an accident that happens everywhere  in the world simultaneously, related to the existence of the Internet (xii).

* MEmorial– a hybrid: as a composite of text and image, it combines features of the topical essay and the vernacular shrines that in recent years have become a common folk response to the disasters that befall a community (xiv).

– pages (117 – 118)

* Dromosphere– acceleration of reality by technology

*Tourism– “The EmerAgency approach is to intervene in tourism at the level of practice…to produce a new kind of tourist destination (destiny) and behavior, around which might form an electrate civic sphere” (4).

– “…analogy for how EmerAgency uses the information superhighway to participate in public problem solving…” (9).

– purpose of EM is to make tourists aware of creative, productive process of their behavior

-“…tourism is a relay, an analogy… for an internet-deconstructed consultancy- in particular that inventive aspect of tourism that produces some of the emblems of our collective identity” (31).

*Theoria– “implied a complex but organic mode of observation- a perpectual system that included asking questions, listening to stories/local myths, feeling, hearing and seeing…” (5).

*Rhizome– relation between plants and animals, insects, the wind, and people in order to propagate (12)

*Popcycle institution– “figures that represent their personalized or internal Rushmore…” (19)

– circulation of memes or ideas through all institutions

-personal databases

*Monuments– visual markers of national identity; variable, heterogeneous

*Chora– crossing of chance and necessity, whose nature may only be discerned indirectly in the names generated by a puncept rather than as a concept…” (39).

– “signifying a space that is sacred in classical Greek- was used by Plato in Timaeus to name the order of genos within which being and becoming could interact” (39).

*Traffic Sphere– “the goal of the traffic sphere is to make highway facilities  perceptible, thinkable, recognizable as sacrifice – to shift from the private sphere of one-at-a-time individual personal loss to the public sphere of collective values” (43).

*Peripheral/Testimonial– “Memorial consists of two parts: 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 mediation on the abject sacrifice) (57).

– page (119)

*Image Reasoning– “it is the experience of a neon sign, a metonym for the city as such, evoking the mood of an urban setting with its nightlife and street atmosphere” (58).

*Trauma– “The combined tasks of the MEmorial are to show how a consultation on a social issue articulated in a news report cohere around the rhetorical sense of trauma” (63).

– “the testimony is already incipiently present in my response to the news event…when the event is remembered- establishing a map positioning me in the pathic field of my world” (63).

*Aura– “Aura is a sign of recognition” (65).

– “…the caption gives it aura, so that it becomes an emblem pointing to something more and different from itself” (65).

*Simulacrum– maps spheres of discursive + social practice, each of which repeats the image differently

*Spectacle– “…names a condition in which actuality and images merge and become indistinguishable, leading, it is argued, to the destruction of civic life and the related benefits and responsibilities of a free, democratic society”  (83).

-“…the spectacle effect is a necessary collective defense mechanism, making it possible to deal with the immense amount of information that a postmodern citizen receives every day” (84).

*Cognitive Mapping– “needed to help citizens grasp their position within a historical field” (90).

*Gaze– “place where viewers experience themselves under scrutiny. The gaze is a mechanism through which the image imposes its meaning and thus creates constitutive effects” (101).

– what is the atmosphere, feeling, mood?

*Optical Unconscious– “the attitude toward truth as standpoint in the image apparatus of electracy is that clarity is an effect of repression, blindness (ATH)” (103).

– “…the vaunted cognitive transparency of the ‘visual as such’ is not an act of consciousness but the effect of what is repressed: the effect, that is, of seriality, repetition, the automaton. Which is to say, it is a function of caesura in vision, a gap.This gap is the “hole” traced by the memorial as a symptom signaling the location of chora- the sorting system of a society. The choral map brings the hole into the speed-of-light peripheral logic (reasoneon)” (104).

*Mystory– “The egents use mystory generate the parts of an emblem- locating the obtuse meaning, the personal sting of the disaster as image – to register the arbitrary and singular body that constitutes, in its obstinacy, the shadow blocking the light of empirical instrumental consulting on public policy issues” (116).

*Emblem- “The emblem is, properly speaking, a mixed form of comprising motto, a picture and an epigram…” (121).

–  page (138)

*Sign – page (125)

*Mourning– “Commemorative consulting supports the public-private circuit of mourning by taking into account the various embodiments of the bar line in the hypercon of the sign…” (130).

*Kindertitenlieder– “A first step of a memorial is to notice an abject loss that the community notices is a problem but that is not accepted as a sacrifice on behalf of a belief or value structuring a group subject” (134).

*Letter shape of Y – produces meanings effects in the collective beyond intent, without understanding, without individual consciousness

– Every question for every person raises the question “why”

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a comment