The EmerAgency as Graduate Seminar

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Previous: Memos for Undergraduate Education | Next: Arts Research: Creating the KaChing

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 The Florida Research Ensemble (FRE) was formed at the University of Florida in the mid-1990s by a group of colleagues from a number of different colleges brought together by a common interest in electronic technologies and new media. The question guiding our work was the possibility of using media for delivering knowledge to institutions outside the academy. Part of the object of inquiry from the beginning was the process of collaborative creativity itself. The present project (“Imaging Place”) began with an exhibition entitled “Imaging Florida,” curated by John Craig Freeman in collaboration with the University Gallery (University of Florida, 1996) that brought together the current membership of the FRE. From this collaboration emerged a virtual, on-line, distributed consultancy called the EmerAgency, a learning practice concerned with the Internet as a civic sphere. The premise is that netizens participate as consultants in the formation of public policy with respect to issues that affect their communities, and that this civic practice is at the same time an experience of self-knowledge of a group subject. The purpose of the practice is to establish care (Heidegger), an experience of relevance and responsibility between the microcosm (individual) and macrocosm (collective, historical) levels in the public sphere.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 A project relevant to the EmerAgency is Paul Virilio’s Museum of Accidents.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0
Unknown Quantity

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 “Today,” Virilio says, “the media no longer exists as narratives but rather as flashes and images. History is therefore being reduced to images” (Virilio, 1999: 57). Deliberative reason survives to an extent within the spectacle — the institutionalization of media as entertainment — through the consumption of semiotic mythologies. Events such as the disasters exhibited in the “Museum of Accidents” have no meaning of their own, but are put into pre-existing narratives and constructed as parables. As Steven Biel pointed out in his cultural history of the sinking of the Titanic, America (and other nations) use these narratives to think “out loud” about the social dramas of the day (Biel, 1997). Biel’s account of the construction of the Titanic disaster as an emblem or icon is a prototype for how this collective authoring works.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 The first processing of the event, bringing it into cultural discourse, is usually undertaken by journalists, as happened in 1912 with the reporting of the sinking. The event is domesticated by being cast in the form of an existing narrative — in this case, the topos of chivalry, noblesse oblige, in which the upper-class or “first cabin” males give up their places on the lifeboats to women and children, and thus sacrifice their lives. Once the narrative is in circulation, it is open to revision and counter-narratives. The meaning is contested — the selection of focus, the hero, the most relevant actions — in the course of working through the most important social issues of the day. America was undergoing the traumas of industrialization, urbanization, the shift from a rural to an urban society. The power of the WASP elite was being challenged by women, freed slaves, workers, and immigrants. American identity — the norms of gender, race, class, ethnicity — and the balance of political power underlying these values, were in play.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 The “myth” (in the sense established in semiotic theory by Roland Barthes) compressed this entire dialogical contest into an emblem — a metonym for the narrative: the scene of first-cabin men adhering to the code of the sea. The parable works as a proportional analogy. The scene on the sinking ship is the denotation, vehicle, or microcosm, whose connotation, tenor, or macrocosm is supplied by the audience addressed by the story. The action itself is legible through the binary oppositions structuring common sense. The position of identification is with the protagonists’ calm (not panic), courage (not cowardice), self-sacrifice (not selfishness), performing order in the midst of chaos. The binary structure articulates every level of the parable, with the connotations mapping the shifting values of the community, summarized in the tension between a Protestant versus a Capitalist hegemony, masking in this contest the synthesis described by Max Weber in his Protestantism and the Spirit of Capital. Weber explained how Protestant theologians, within the concept of predetermination, transvalued capitalist profit (usury) from a sin to a sign of election by God. In any case, the old values of thrift, hard work, and self-discipline were giving way to consumption, leisure, and self-indulgence. A culture of scarcity, character, and integrity was becoming subordinate to one of abundance, personality, and attractiveness (63).

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0
Titanic Lifeboats

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 The purpose of the EmerAgency is to open this collective mythography to a wiki-style distributed authorship, contributing to an Internet public sphere, against the Internet Accident warned of by Virilio. Individuals participate in the dialogical counter/hegemonic argument, by appropriating a public event or disaster as a parable for one’s own personal situation (the personal is political).

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 Blogging the Disaster

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 A basic version of the EmerAgency consultation was tested in my graduate seminar, Spring 2009. The reading strategy is the one Barthes applied to the maxims of La Rochefoucauld, treated as an oracle showing him his own situation in the manner of a parable (Barthes, 1980: 3). The disaster is treated as a maxim, “a for-me (and what an aim!)” Barthes says, marveling how a saying composed three centuries ago hits its target so accurately. The ultimate goal of the assignment was to create brand logos for a disaster, relative to a policy issue within an experience economy. The first step was to probe one’s own capacity to be affected (after Deleuze’s Spinoza), while exploring the dimension of experience that literature and the arts offer, to expand the notion of “experience” guiding commercial enterprise.

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 Students composed an anecdote based on an incident that they recalled as the first awakening of self-awareness (a childhood memory). The relay was the “primal scene” in Blanchot’s “The Writing of the Disaster” (his memory, at the age of seven, of looking out a window at an overcast sky, and intuiting that the world is without purpose). In Readings, Helene Cixous used Blanchot’s primal scene as a probe for defining the poetics not only of Blanchot but also of Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva (Cixous, 1991), thus establishing the generic potential of this topos as a form. Her hypothesis is that this early experience of self-awareness is the beginnings of a drive to write. The instructions are to focus on the materiality of the scene of memory, not to reconstruct one’s thoughts. The disaster (already selected using the criterion of pre-existing interest) is then adopted as an archive from which to extract the “myth” of this primal scene, specifically to create a figure that evokes the feeling, the affective register of the scene of memory. The figure is composed in a blog, using principles of montage cross-cutting between the two scenes (of memory and disaster), which produces the constellation of aesthetic coherence. The montage is guided by feelings of recognition. You know you have it right when you get the feeling: the disaster (the outside) in me. This attunement creates an ontological image that “defines” the event (picks out the traits of mood).

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 Included below are extracts from my readings of a few of the blogs (plus URLs for fuller review), to give a flavor of the figures produced.

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Mauro Carassai
Memory: After his obstinate behavior at a picnic, M.C.’s parents pretend to leave him behind.
Event: Mariner 1 launch abort.

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 The success is due to a number of factors. 1) Your tone throughout is thoughtful, reflective, questioning, perplexed, maintaining the right distance from what you are reporting. 2) The way the vehicle and tenor events are documented, juxtaposed. There is a balance of the range of materials included, theme and variation, and the repetition of certain elements distributed throughout the posts. 3) The focus within this range, zeroing in on the tiny error, the misplaced hyphen in the computer programming, that was the material cause of the aborted mission. In the context of the memory and updated personal reflections, the minute character of the mistake resonates all the more strongly with its allegorical parallel in your emotional world. 4) A good move to include the short story of the lovers, which mediates between the two sides of the figure, and suggests what the stakes are, what the existential consequences of the primal scene may be. I wonder if it would be good to make more of the fact that the space mission was precisely to Venus? To bring out the suggestive connection is legitimate, in the context of your short story. The implication overall is that your decision or self-judgment is a condition of self-destruction, of aborted missions. That is the shorthand in any case, what the materials suggest, and then the nuance comes from the concatenation of the assemblage.

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 Emily McCann
Memory: E.M. defends her mother during one of her parents’ fights at the dinner table.
Event: The banking collapse in Iceland.

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 Your documentation is dense and varied, so it took me a little longer to get your point, in comparison with some of the others, which makes me think that more repetition or variation on the primal scene might be in order. The feeling hit when I got the connection between Emily rising to protest the dominant male’s abuses, and the protesters in Iceland. Then I could follow the nuances of your decision, your attitude to the decision, and its consequences for your adult decision and state of mind. Featuring the term “meltdown” in the header is a cue or clue, juxtaposed with Iceland: in the allegory the vehicle suggests a cause of the family quarrels, but also the coldness of emotional life, and its possible thaw. Nice move to expand immediately the relevant documents of the disaster, essentially to include Iceland as such, through its culture (the Eddas = father); and more suggestively perhaps, the landscape, with its frozen beauty, suggesting an emotional equivalent. Even the theme of blogging was brought in, as part of a reflection on writing, with Odin and the runes, suggesting that your career choice and writing craft have been purchased at some price. We believe of course that it is worth it, or that the good thing about being a writer is that bad events make good stories.

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0
Blog Figure

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 Charles Newsom
Memory: The death of C.N.’s great grandmother
Event: The fire at Universal Studios.

¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 What you select, and then feature through further selection, repetition, variation, accumulates into a pattern. There is a core significance established, and then nuances, qualifications, and further indications around the core. The initial figure is the basic connection between this particular disaster, the fire that destroyed the studio, the films, the rides etc, with your memory of the loss of your great grandmother (ggm). The connection is made more intense, and personalized to an unusual degree, because of the family history of your visit to the site, including photos of a place or parts of it that no longer exist. Just a few attributes of the scene are emphasized and repeated, making them salient, and augmenting as well as pointing out the feeling: the fire itself, and specifically a burning reel of film; the King Kong ride/exhibit. Each of these features is loaded with further associations, whose unspoken power adds resonance to your expression. In the context of your interpretive comments distributed through the writing, the feeling expressed – the allegory – is that the fire is your desire, specifically your desire to create something, anything: the desire came first, and then the search for how it might find its medium or channel. The loss of the ggm, her death, and her backstory as a creative person, connect with the destruction of a shrine of the film arts. The overtone of the feeling is the fear that you may be a kind of King Kong, enormous in inherent power, but doomed to failure or loss, finding no appropriate form for the world as you find it (Kong in New York). There are further nice effects: the introduction of chance in various ways, plus the framing of the experiment with insightful selections of citations from our readings and other sources.

¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 John Tinnell
Memory: J.T. with his mother at a grocery store that had to be evacuated due to a bomb threat.
Event: The disappearance of bee colonies.

¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 The figure is nicely developed, creating a strong personal feeling, and also a range of overtones and nuances. Your use of images, videos, citations and other documentations proves the thesis of “figure” as addressing the senses, and the capacity of the figural to achieve precise signification. The nuance begins with the nature of your disaster, the disappearance of bee colonies, which in itself is mysterious. The reason for the collapse in some areas is unclear, although the connections with the eco-crisis are obvious. The impending ecological collapse is itself vague, at least to the extent that it seems futuristic, something for other generations to worry about, and yet a real threat. This situation is paired with your primal scene, the bogus bomb threat that cleared the supermarket. You do a great job with selection of the parking lot, and then the repetitions. The affective character is established just through the atmosphere of the parking lot as a nowhere holding area. The use of Beckett’s Godot is superb, the equal of Blanchot’s Bartleby, in its communication of a complex state of mind. Adding Rimbaud’s career produces further overtones, relative to the theme of the sublime: the disappearance of a poet, perhaps of poetry itself (implicitly)? You make some nice connections, using the cultural symbolism of the beehive, the lives of bees as allegory of utopia/dystopia, to evoke the larger import of your disaster. The most important effect, finally, is the recognition that the feeling is existential, not confined to this particular threat, but to Threat as such, death, the unforeseeable. Your answer is: “so we should stand around in parking lots? I don’t think so.”

¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 Jong Chul Choi
Memory: Racing ahead of trains in a tunnel.
Event: Rwanda genocide.

¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 A strong feeling is created to begin with simply due to the disaster you chose: Rwandan genocide. The extremity of the case, mounted as the vehicle in your allegory, signals a strong feeling. The disaster is documented effectively, including gathering the pop culture treatments — the movies for example. The complexity of your figure arises through a dialectical or more dialogical relationship between the vehicle (disaster) and tenor (primal scene). Part of the interest of your primal scene is the universality of the boys’ dare-devil game that you describe. In the United States the prototype is boys racing trains on a railroad bridge across a river. In your figure, you are running from the oncoming event. The genocide then figures the terror of that event, which is the existential realization of death, mortality. There is more to it, as your use of philosophy effectively indicates: the other, and your responsibility ethically for the inhumanity and unfairness, the injustice of life. The historical association of the tunnel with the Korean War personalizes even the collective level of the comparison, given the split in Korea that turned one part of the nation/people against the other, as happened in Rwanda. The inclusion of Jaar as your intermediary, your witness who mediates the event through art, make precise your present stance, the attitude you hold toward these histories: maintaining a distance, but serving as witness.

¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 Proverbs of Disaster

¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 Giorgio Agamben explained what is at stake in these consultations, which is the restoration of the authority of experience against the disenchantment of the world due to utilitarian hegemony. The chief complaint of critique against modernity is the destruction of experience. Wisdom disappeared when the authority of accumulated tradition was undermined by science. The locus of truth shifted to what was beyond human experience (such as the sub-atomic realm). The commodity took over the level of culture abandoned by wisdom, replaced the maxim with the slogan, and appropriated the question of well-being for its own purposes, thus usurping the realm formerly occupied by prudence. An emblem of the effect of this usurpation on collective judgment is the fact that the swastika, adopted from ancient sources to serve as the logo of National Socialism, originally meant in Sanskrit “well-being.” The equivalent for Kant was the notion of Wohlgefallen. The “experience economy” touted by promoters and developers places the consumer, or individual desire, at the center of design, but the “economy” referred to is what Bataille called “restricted.” It attempted to confine exchange to the profit motive of capitalism, while denying the force of “expenditure” that is another version of Virilio’s General Accident. Economimesis, meanwhile (Derrida) shows that the Restricted (accumulation) and General (expenditure) economies are intrinsically interrelated. Disaster indexes the temporality of interruption, the new temporality adequate to the immediate Now.

¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 The EmerAgency positions its distributed deliberation at this threshold dividing the Restricted and General economies. Baudelaire, as the prototype of modernist poets, set a precedent for the new wisdom potential within electracy, as Agamben explains.

¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 In Baudelaire, a man expropriated from experience exposes himself to the force of shock. Poetry responds to the expropriation of experience by converting this expropriation into a reason for surviving and making the inexperienceable its normal condition. In this perspective, the search for the new does not appear as the search for a new object of experience; instead, it implies an eclipse and a suspension of experience. New is what cannot be experienced, because it lies “in the depths of the unknown”: the Kantian thing-in-itself, the inexperienceable as such. Thus, in Baudelaire this search takes the paradoxical form of aspiring to the creation of a “lieu commun” – a common place [...] But in a state where man has been expropriated of experience, the creation of such a “lieu commun” is possible only through a destruction of experience which, in the very moment of its counterfeit authority, suddenly discloses that this destruction is really man’s new abode. Estrangement, which removes from the most commonplace objects their power to be experienced, thus becomes the exemplary procedure of a poetic project which aims to make of the Inexperienceable the new “lieu commun,” humanity’s new experience. In this sense the “Fleurs du Mal” are proverbs of the inexperienceable” (Agamben, 2007: 48).

¶ 29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 Here is another way to state our project: the proverbs of disaster. It is the point of departure for the electrate equivalent of the commonplace topics in literate education.

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