Emergent Ontologies:
A lecture by Gregory Ulmer,
August 2000

Schirmacher: We're very happy to have Greg Ulmer with us tonight, the guy who became famous by making sense of Derrida, with 'Applied Grammatology'. This action is of course at the core of our program, to apply philosophy it's not enough to have great ideas, to talk to your colleagues about certain theories, it's important to understand why being a philosopher, having thoughts in this direction, will enhance your life and make it better. We don't care that academic philosophy may not like it, because we have our own standards for applying thinking to life.

Ulmer: In the experience of coming to Saas-Fee I'm realizing that a fantasy I've had for sometime is being fulfilled. I know only by reputation Black Mountain College, this school in North Carolina that was associated with great artists, John Cage, Charles Olson, and of course it didn't last very long but its reputation lives on, and I thought wouldn't it have been wonderful to be there. I have a feeling now that this is the new Black Mountain. What I like is that when they write the history of the collective accomplishments of this group, they'll have to say that Ulmer was there. The only problem is that Schirmacher will probably claim all the credit. We're on tape now, I'll tell you that it was all my idea! I enjoyed very much Donna Haraway's lecture from last night and I wanted to use it as a point of departure this evening, because the term 'emergent ontologies' could be the title of my talk. What we were working on in class is a virtual consulting agency, a new consultancy, called the Emer(a)gency. The idea is to use the internet as the delivery medium for our consulting, the specific knowledge we want to apply is from the liberal and fine arts, and we want to address public policy formation, understanding that we are going to be consultants without portfolio for some time. So this Emer(a)gency take a particular approach to problems in the world, and we have to ask what should be our relationship to disaster, and to problem as such? I'll begin with a short bit from Walter Benjamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', where he says 'The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that keeps with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in our struggle against fascism.' But, 'improve' is the problematic word here, because at least from the position I've been working in, a post-Enlightenment epistemology, it's not clear that it's possible to improve the world. We're in a kind of fetish logic situation, which is 'I know I can't make the world any better, yet I want to try.' Both/and, still/ but. The issue is, what is the feeling we have about problems? What state of mind are we in? We know the state of mind of instrumental reason is that as soon as one experiences a problem, the feeling is 'solve it!'. We'll solve it, we'll improve it, make things better. So what does the Emer(a)gency bring into this condition? The methodology I'm interested in I call 'Grammatology'. Not my word, Jacques may be listening. Grammatology is how I grasp my position in the moment, understanding grammatology as the history and theory of writing. We know a great deal about the movement from morality to literacy, the shift from one apparatus to another, and when I use the word 'apparatus' I am referring not only to the technological organization of language, but also to the institutional formations of that technology, the experience of identity, the formation of subjects within that apparatus, all in a matrix, interrelated, not one causing one another, but a kind of mutual interdependence. I am going to be making some allusions regarding the invention of literacy as a way to configure the invention of electracy. Electracy is a term I've introduced simply to name the apparatus of digital technologies. Electracy is to the digital apparatus what literacy is to the alphabetic apparatus. Now, my approach to this has been to deal with electracy as not being good or bad, better or worse, but simply something that is happening. How can we as a consultancy give some direction to this invention? Part of what I'm working against is the notion of the decline of the public sphere. It's true that there is a decline of the literate public sphere. Critics of electracy claim that the cause of the decline of the public sphere is indeed the new media, the entertainment institutions they are inventing, and the behaviors that are related to practicing entertainment. Those new features of electracy are destroying the public sphere as we knew it within literacy, but there is another public sphere emerging, if we understand the public sphere to mean that process of monumentality by which a collectivity imagines itself. The community is still going to come together in some way. There must be a monumentality, there must be a mourning process, there must be a formation of a civic world within electracy, it's just not going to be the same as literacy, any more than literacy was the same as orality. In fact literacy was at war with orality, as we know in the contact of literate civilization with oral civilization in the period of colonialism. I thought well, if entertainment is the institution within which electracy is emerging, and this is the proposal, then I need to begin to work with that medium. The assumption here is that electracy is already emerging, just as literacy was already emerging when Plato came along and founded the first school. I decided to form a proposal and made at least one program of a series called the 'Mr. Mentality' show. This was based on the idea of Mr. Wizard, I don't know if you remember Mr. Wizard, but he went around the neighborhood and found kids who were playing with their bikes and he said 'Come over to my house, I'll show you the physics of the wheel', and he would explain the principles of natural science. I thought this is great but what we need is someone like Mr. Wizard who explains the principles of the cultural world. This would be Mr. Mentality. The problem is nowadays you can't go around the neighborhood luring kids over to your house. Finally I worked with my own kids and they stunk, so… What I was working on with the 'Mr. Mentality' show was the notion of monumentality, specifically the project of forming me-morials, not 'memorials' but 'me-morials', and at this point I have to reveal my shirt, it's a shirt I got at Mount Rushmore. Is the camera following me?

[Ulmer reveals that he is wearing a tourist t-shirt of Mount Rushmore, with a photo of his own head superimposed over that of George Washington. Beneath the photo is the caption 'Florida Rushmore]

If you go to South Dakota and to Mount Rushmore, you can get your own head placed on any one of the four heads. I think I look a little more like George Washington than any of the others. I've been very inspired for a long time by Mount Rushmore, I grew up in Eastern Montana, visited Mount Rushmore many times, and looked a little bit into the history of Rushmore. Actually, it started as a tourist attraction. There was a guy in the state government of South Dakota in the nineteens and twenties, he loved the granite hills of South Dakota and he wanted other people to appreciate these granite hills, so he thought 'What could I do to make people come to South Dakota?' So he got the idea of carving these statues in the granite cliff, ultimately this lead the sculptor to come take over the project and ultimately we got Mount Rushmore, the shrine of democracy. What's interesting to me is that this started as a tourist attraction and became one of the true monuments of the imagined community, the symbolic capital of the U.S., as a national identity. If we ever had a revolution and people wanted to destroy signs of the regime they would blow up Mount Rushmore. Recently, the Emer(a)gency was looking around for some way to make some money, for a way to get a consulting job, and Gainesville, Florida, my local community was calling for proposals for ways to attract more tourists to Gainesville. We proposed the Florida Rushmore, because it is our belief that the geology of Florida is a much better metaphor for the postmodern condition of American national identity than the granite cliffs of South Dakota. If you know anything about the geology of Florida then you know it is a limestone floating on the acquifer, completely riddled with underground rivers, lakes and caverns, in fact frequently sinkholes form. The minute I signed my mortgage on my first home, I had visions of sinkholes opening up and swallowing it, which does happen all the time. In fact right outside Gainesville there is the Devil's Milhopper State Geological Site which has a sinkhole ten thousand years old or so, it's about five hundred feet across and one hundred and twenty-five feet deep. What we proposed is that what we would do is get a laser projector projecting a holographic beam into the sinkhole, and it would make a head the same size as the Rushmore heads, one head sixty feet high. We would be using Nancy Bursen's technology she developed for making composite photographs, the same technology the FBI uses to find missing children by artificially aging photos. The idea would be that citizens would come to this shrine, we would do a quick holographic image of them, we would figure out their superego, the idea is that every person has a superego which is your internal Rushmore, the figures with whom you have identified in the formation of your identity, and instead of having just one monumental figure of the four presidents, there would be a new holographic projection of a citizen's superego every fifteen minutes. We thought that tourists would definitely come to see that, to be Mount Rushmore for fifteen minutes! But we didn't get any funding. I've been working on Florida Rushmore really as more of an internet project anyway, the idea is that the internet is a monument to inhabit, an inhabitable, distributed monument. We don't need archeological, architectural monuments, we have this living electronic monument. If the computer has been associated with artificial intelligence in terms of expert systems and all that, the internet is the prosthesis not of the conscious, expert mind, but of the unconscious mind. 'Artificial stupidity'. You must have this to be human. So the me-morial is the monumentality of this inhabited monument. How does this work? How do you make a me-morial. Here's a case. The way it works, we hear news reports through entertainment media about disasters, death, destruction, misery and suffering twenty-four hours a day. There's no lack of information about disaster and problem. But what we know from our experience is that the way the information is packaged is that it is designed precisely so that we don't care, and it has to be so. This is a prosthesis of our sensory mechanism, and our senses are designed to filter our information so that we're not overwhelmed, certainly we don't want to be overwhelmed by misery, so we're all in shock. Basically post-traumatic stress disorder is the condition of the modern techno-scientific world. Our ethical intuitions are anesthetized, but not quite completely. Here's the way it works. Through the news you may here a report. For example I heard about the case of young Bradley McGee, two years old. This is a case I couldn't simply forget about. It stuck with me like a sliver under the nail. A toddler. His father, young, uneducated, working-class. Bradley is in toilet training, which is one of those abject conditions fundamental to becoming human. During toilet training young Bradley was soiling his pants, out of season or whatever. The father became enraged. This rage is interesting, The Greeks called it ATH-ate. When applied to an individual means foolishness, blindness, one is overcome and later on thinks better of it: 'How could I have been so stupid?' To the collectivity Ath-ate means catastrophe. The way Greeks related to problem was Ath-ate. This enraged father was going to execute a swirlie. My sons tell me this is how camp counselors deal with unruly children, take them to the bathroom, stick their heads in the toilet and flush the toilet. This man executed a rather extreme version, he picked Bradley up by his heels and used him like a toilet plunger into the porcelain bowl and killed him, bashed his brains out. I read about that account in the daily news, later on sure enough the father was regretful, Ath-ate. The effect of this on me is that of abjection. This is how I understand abjection, which is to say I ab-ject. I cannot accept it, I throw it out, it's revolting, I can't stomach it, it touches me, it sees me. For example, because I felt that rage myself. So what do we do if we're going to consult on this matter? What is the electrate method? We're not allowed to turn to instrumental reason, even if we want to. 'It's an anomaly, we're going to fix that.' That's not our approach, nor can we simply leap to some alternative, but it has to be invented. The invention at first is going to be crude. I brought with me some examples. Some advertisements.

[he holds up an Apple computer ad featuring a photograph of Gandhi].

This is the Apple ad campaign. It's a picture of Gandhi. Up here is the Apple logo and the slogan 'Think Different.' Down here the URL. We have others, Einstein, 'Think Different.' We have Gap. 'Kerouac wore khakis.' All of us who know that photo know that the word behind him says 'Bar'. But it could say 'Gap.' 'Eva Gardner wore khakis'. Here is my absolute favorite.

[Holds up photo of Marilyn Monroe].

This is a brilliant campaign by Mercedes-Benz. Her beauty mark is the Mercedes-Benz logo, and that's it. Let's not forget United Colors of Benetton. This is 'Sentenced to Death: Jeremy Sheets, sentenced to death by electrocution for first-degree murder' What's going on with that? So we say in the Emer(a)gency is that this is electracy. Somebody says I'm talking to you now, here I'm saying this. There isn't any interpretation of this. There's no 'what's that mean in literacy?'. This is electracy. So I'm going to try to unpack a little in our admittedly literate way what is being said. I'm going to begin again with Walter Benjamin, from 'One-Way Street'. 'Fools lament the decay of criticism, for its day is long past. Criticism is a matter of correct distancing, it was at home in a world where perspectives and prospects counted, and where it was still possible to take a standpoint. Now things press too closely on human society. The innocent eye has become a lie, perhaps the naive mode of expression, sheer incompetence. Today, the most real, the mercantile gaze into the heart of things is the advertisement. It abolishes the space where contemplation moved and all but hits us between the eyes, with things such as a car growing to gigantic proportion, careening at us out of a film screen. Just as the film does not present furniture and facades in completed forms for critical inspection, its insistent jerky nearness alone being sensational, the genuine advertisement hurtles things at us with the tempo of a good film. What in the end makes advertisement so superior to criticism is not what the moving red neon sign says, but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.' So we need to work with the fiery pool. We may say something, but the fiery pool has to be the means by which we address the death of Bradley McGee. Let's look at the Gandhi ad. This ad is a very good example of the apparatus of electracy. The technology of literacy is the alphabetic apparatus, developed over several thousands of years. What is the institutional formation of literacy? We said the school, founded by Plato, here we are still today, to nurture and foster literacy, what is the equivalent institutional practice of electracy? It is entertainment. What about the identity experience? In identity experience within an oral civilization, people experienced their thoughts not as coming from within themselves, so that they get credit, but as spirit. A thought seems to come from the gods, or a tree or a bird, from the outside. This is spirit and is one of the great inventions of orality. The collective expression of the oral institution is the tribe. Keeping in mind that the technological invention of oral civilization is language. 'Natural' language, the kind we're speaking now, had to be invented. Literacy moved us into a different experience of the subject, precisely the experience of self, where the ghost comes inside, as they say, psyche is the ghost in me. I now experience thought as coming from inside. It's a vast reduction in my relationship with nature, but winning a kind of liberty, of self-reflection that comes with being a self. The collective expression of this apparatus is the nation-state, ultimately made possible by print, and when we name self-hood, literacy and the nation-state, we realize why the critics of electracy are so upset, because indeed self-hood and national democratic politics are features of literacy and they will not persist in electracy. Or they will have the status that tribe has within literacy. The big question mark here is, then what is happening? What is the emergent condition? What is the experience of being a subject in electracy, and what is the collective development of a political organization as following from that? Who is the first literate person? We all seem to agree it was Socrates, even though he didn't write. At least the way he's represented in the Dialogues, he is using dialectical reason, that is to say he's using literacy. Who is the first electrate person? Who is the person who is having the experience of being inside electracy fully, for Socrates was somehow inside literacy at the very beginning of it. The proposal is that the best place to look for such people is among celebrities. I've been following this for a while and I've noticed that celebrities often speak of their experiences in very similar terms. The best example I have is from Mariah Carey. Mariah Carey had just broken up with some love of her life, and there was a great deal of gossip in the press and so forth about who her current love was, she got on a plane and the flight attendant said 'Oh, I heard you were seeing so-and-so.' And she said 'I'm not seeing him, my image is having much more fun than I am'. This is a very common experience of celebrities, that is, somehow their image has come free of the body and is moving about the world enjoying itself. This is a cyborg condition. 'Terminal identity' is Scott Bukatman's phrase for this experience of the ghost having left the building, the psyche is moving out once again, where is it going, the borders are shifting, inside and outside are changing, we're not quite sure. People suggest maybe Elvis is the first electrate person, maybe Diana, even better, because she didn't actually do anything, at least Elvis sang. Maybe Gandhi or something. Actually, what I learned from this Apple ad is that the first electrate person isn't any one of these individuals, but the Apple corporation itself. Because what the Apple Corporation is doing is gathering up the faces, notice what it's doing, it's just saying 'Apple'. They're gathering up all these celebrities to themselves, these icons and stars, and I'm not sure whether Apple's becoming Gandhi or whether Gandhi's becoming Apple, but there's this corporate kind of entity emerging, and it's that corporate collectivity that is the new subject formation of electracy. With that in mind the Emer(a)gency says that citizens or netizens need their own collective corporate identity, in order to deal with these Apple corporations and IBM corporations, these other collective identities gathering unto themselves this sort of being. We need a corporate subject position which is free. The way I like to think about this is to use the ideas of George Bataille and say that the Apple corporation is forming its identity based on the restricted economy. This is the economy of accumulation, where the G4 becomes the G5, the G5 becomes the G6, we get gigahertz, better and better, accumulation, progress. What Bataille pointed out is that there's also a general economy, which is the economy of expenditure and loss. If corporate identities are forming in the restricted economy, the me-morial positions itself in the general economy, and becomes a strange attractor for gathering these corporate identities in the general economy, which is the economy of loss and waste. This is how it works, but still we have this problem, what is the form for that? How is the me-morial going to take a form? Again this is where grammatology helps us. We look back and ask what happened when literacy got it together? How was that invented? Of course we know a great deal about this. The first concept was justice, of course it had a long history with Hesiod and on back, but Plato gets credit because he finally invented the first pure concept. As Mcluhan pointed out, the content of the new medium is the old medium, so when the Greeks got the alphabet, the first thing they did was write down their epics. When they wrote down their epics, they lost a great deal, no more singing, no more dancing, no more of that type of beauty of lived performance, but instead they got this text. The text could be visually scanned, as it was visually scanned they could read Achilles and Agamemnon having it out and disagreeing over the question of injustice and so forth, asking what was justice, and what the Greeks noticed was all the terminology, all the nouns and verbs and modifiers relating to justice. Finally it was Plato who said forget Achilles, all that crap, what was justice all by itself, purely, without any drama? Just justice itself? That's the first concept. This is an extraordinary invention. He took the verb to be, which was just a way to get from the subject to the predicate, and turned it into ontology, asking the first philosophical question, what is justice? That is to say, what are its features, what is its essence? How do you define it? What are its properties, apart from the active world. Having that in mind, in the Emer(a)gency we say well there must be something happening like that now with all our recorded media. We've got audiovisual technologies that are not fixed but evolving with extraordinary rapidity, they're all doing the same thing which is to say they're taking Mariah Carey's body and voice and they're recording them. Now we're writing with the body and voice of a person, as we know this recording is going around the world and having more fun than she is. Then we say, I wonder if something similar is happening, now that we have something called the optical unconscious. The Greeks didn't notice justice. It's not that they didn't deal with it, believe me they did, they didn't notice the concept, it didn't exist. So with the flow of images, now that we're recording them, and scanning them back and forth, and we're able to manipulate them, wouldn't be likely, grammatologically, that something like the concept would emerge, except it wouldn't be the concept, it would be whatever it is that's native to electracy. Sure enough, our theorists are working on this. Roland Barthes, 'The Third Meaning.' Here is our Hesiod. I'm saving Plato for myself. Barthes says, in a photographic image, there's the first meaning, for example in a picture of a worker we recognize that it's a worker. Or it's Gandhi or it's Einstein. The second meaning, the studium, the topos: in the case of the worker, it might be revolution. Then there's the third meaning, the obtuse meaning, which is emerging. It's a signifier without a signified meaning, so it's not a concept, and yet it means, by evoking a memory. It produces a feeling not intended by the person who took the photograph, because what evokes that memory is not seen, only the camera sees it. This is the optical unconscious. It's pragmatics, it's a perlocutionary effect. This is the moment of the emergent ontology of electracy. This is the metaphysical moment, the invention of a new metaphysics. I want to move on to another theorist, quite simply I want to be registered as being on the 'Giorgio Agamben Bandwagon' in a timely way. I can't tell you how many times I've heard 'The Coming Community' cited this year. So Agamben moves on from Barthes, he's saying that there's something that only a lenses can capture, and he can't figure out how to name it. He goes back to a medieval discourse that's completely obsolete, a discourse developed to itemize the features of mystical experience in medieval theology. He says that if we bring this discourse into our time and apply it to phenomena, it may give us a way to begin to name this emergent ontology, this obtuse meaning that Barthes has noticed, and which I understand to be the new category system of electracy. This is the way I understand metaphysics, by the way, not as theology but as a category system, because metaphysics determines what is. The location of Agamben's 'whatever' in the image is that of special effects. I'll give the example that Agamben gives. He'd seen this TV ad for stockings, and using special effects the dancers are shot separately and then are digital combined into one image with one soundtrack, but there was something strange. 'That facile trick, that calculated asymmetry of the movement of long legs sheathed in the same inexpensive commodity, that slight disjunction between the gestures waifed over the audience, a promise of happiness unequivocally related to the human body. The commodification of the human body, while subjecting it to the iron laws of massification and exchange value, seemed at the same time to redeem the body from the stigma of ineffability that had marked it for millennia. Breaking away from the double chains of biological destiny and individual biography, it took its leave of both the inarticulate cry of the tragic body and the dumb silence of the comic body, and thus appeared for the first time perfectly communicable, entirely illuminated…to appropriate the historic transformations of human nature that capitalism wants to limit to the spectacle, to link together image and body in a space where they can no longer be separated, and thus to forge the 'whatever' body, whose physis is resemblance, is the good that humanity must learn how to wrest from commodities in their decline. Advertising and pornography, which escort the commodity to the grave like hired mourners are the unknowing midwives of this new body of humanity.' This is exactly what Mariah Carey wants. She wants her physis to be resemblance, so she can have fun too. So we come back to Gandhi, the whatever body of Gandhi, the obtuse meaning of Gandhi. In honor of Bradley McGee, I'll point out that Gandhi wears a diaper. That white loincloth. An abject diaper. In making a me-morial I'm going to try to reason with neon. Instead of reason I have reasoneon. I'm working my way to telling you the design of the me-morial, but I have to tell you more importantly, what is the category, the method, the logic that is being developed around this project? It has to do with this neon sign of advertising. Being a scholar I have to muster a little evidence. I'm referring to Jacques Lacan at the famous Baltimore conference, when he said that 'The best thing to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.' He's referring to a neon sign, a clock that was blinking on and off outside his hotel window. Lacan was talking about the L-schema, which is how he explains the relationship of the subject to the other, modulated by the ego and the petit a. He said 'I want to clarify the unconscious by means of an image, that of a triode vacuum tube. If the tube is filled with an electric gas such as neon, it will light up only when the flow of electric current is interrupted, and forced to move back onto itself. The lighting up is the relationship to the other by means of transference.' This is reasoneon directly. The image of the unconscious is the neon sign itself, but we have to go the abject direction that Bradley McGee has given us. Bradley has shown us that unfortunately the toilet is the scene where the invention has taken place. Again I have to cite an example from Lacan, I don't know if you remember this famous example, I actually got these in England.

[Ulmer holds up British-style 'ladies' and 'gentlemen' signs, each one being a red circle with a white interior, bisected by a blue line].

Lacan noted that the public life of western man, like the great majority of primitive communities, is subjected to the laws of urinary segregation. He illustrates this with a story of two children on a train arriving at a train station. The little boy looks out the window says 'we've arrived at Ladies', and the sister says 'you idiot, we've arrived at Gentlemen.' In the Emer(a)gency we have to take seriously the fact that it was specifically urinary segregation, specifically the bathroom as the site of sorting out the community into men and women. When I started thinking in those terms, and of course Michel Leiris came to mind, and his example of the personal sacred. He says the only place the sacred can occur in a secular world is in the private sphere, and for him it was the bathroom. Leiris says about he and his brother going into the bathroom and locking themselves in, 'There was something more or less forbidden in what we were doing, and moreover brought us scoldings if we stayed shut up in there for too long, as if on some island in Oceania, in a place where the initiates gather and from mouth to mouth and generation to generation, secrets and myths are passed on, we endlessly elaborated our mythology in this, our clubhouse, and never tired of seeking answers for the various sexual riddles that obsessed us.' Wittgenstein told some of students later in life that one of the strongest memories from his childhood was the bathroom in his parents' house, there was a discolored patch of broken plaster on the wall, and it evoked a duck by Hieoronymous Bosch, a terrifying duck, no wonder he was attracted in his theories of the image of the duck and the rabbit, he kept making that duck turn into a friendly little rabbit. And then, isn't the most influential work of the twentieth century Duchamp's fountain? The inverted urinal? I happened to see a video piece by Lee Bowery, called 'Death in Vegas', He's imagining Elvis' final hours, he dresses up like Elvis in a gold lame suit, sitting on the toilet, shoots up and falls off, with his pants around his knees. I cam across an article about a video tape, by a British artist named Steven Pippen, a toilet bowl traveling on the train from London to Brighton was converted into a camera, and so forth. This list could go on and on, and in the context of the strange attractor, which is the category that we're working with, I was noticing that the toilet was gathering to itself a great deal of energy, to the point that a less cautious scholar than myself might venture to say that in fact twentieth-century theory is all about toilets, which is to say all about the abject. One more point before the design of the me-morial itself: it's a required part that I have to give some personal testimony. When my son was in the fifth grade, he was in this group, the crossing guards, they wear these day-glo colored bands over their shoulders, they help kids get across the streets at the intersections around their school, and at the end of the year they get a trip to Washington D.C., the national capital, to visit all the monuments obviously to indoctrinate them into being citizens. I agreed to be a chaperone. This was an amazing experience. We left Gainesville on the train at night, it took about fifteen or sixteen hours, then I realized the train emblem. As Lacan says about his example in the train station, the rails in the story materialize the bar in the Saussurian algorithm, meaning that split between the signifier and the signified, and the bar is what constitutes repression and produces meaning. Those day-glo bars on the children's uniforms, I realized they were all running around with these day-glo L-schemas on their bodies, they were performing the unconscious, which is to say they were sorting themselves out into categories. This is the behavior that I want to witness. The sorting existed in two dimensions. First of all within each gender there was a sorting, within the girls and within the boys. The sorting was into the included and the excluded. The cool and the dorks. What was especially excruciating for me is that my son got sorted into the dorks. No matter of intervention from the adults, matching cool with dork, worked, the minute the adult leverage was off, the sorting went back. Then there was a second sorting, the dorks sort of accepted their fate and went off with each other, their lives destroyed forever. The cool ones then got together, boys and girls. The bathrooms on the trains are different than those in Switzerland, they are these enormous bathrooms, and they're unisex, anybody can go in there and lock the door, and you can get quite a few people in one of those rooms. So groups of these boys and girls were trying to get into the bathroom and lock the door…now they're in the fifth grade, what are they going to do? I got appointed to sit there and force urinary segregation. It was only later that I realized that the position of the chaperone is precisely that of the objet petit a, that is to say the lure around which the drive circulates. It is at that abject level that the community forms itself. Bradley McGee, killed in training, what's the me-morial for him. What we're dealing with is a shift in attitude that we've been working with in my class, working with Bataille's idea that death is necessary. Instrumental reason says 'Yes in the United States there are fifty thousand traffic deaths, a year, half of them drunk-driving related, thirty thousand gun deaths, one hundred and six thousand deaths due to reactions to prescribed drugs.' To get into the sheer economy level, fifty three billion-dollar loss due to traffic congestion. This is in the general economy, of expenditure. Bataille's insight is, and I'm going to say the truth now, that the way we should look at the death of Bradley McGee is not as anomaly that should be fixed but as a sacrifice on behalf of a value more important than his life. We could say that with any of these losses. It's worth fifty-three billion dollars in traffic congestion in order to have this other thing that we value more. The me-morial is designed precisely to bring into visibility this 'more'. The memorial for Bradley McGee is called the Y psilon project. First you have to pick an official monument that already exists, that acknowledges a sacrifice for a value that society already believes in. The one that we picked for Bradley McGee and for child abuse was the Astronaut's Memorial at Cape Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The astronaut's memorial was built to honor those who died in service of their country. You make a peripheral that attaches to this monument, it's the same term as in computing, the way a printer peripheral adds functionality to your computer, the me-morial adds functionality to the astronaut's memorial, in order to bring out and make visible this sacrifice that Bradley McGee has made. The first question we have to ask before we talk about the specifics of the design is, what is the value that is more important than the life of this child? The answer is that it's not so much as a value to be named as an abstraction, but as a behavior. I experienced the behavior myself. What happened was that when we had kids, a few days after my wife gave birth, they handed us these children and we were send out the door. We were not escorted home by police and a body of experts. No one came by to see if everything was going right. They just gave them to us. This is what happened to Bradley McGee, he was just handed to his father and away they went. You can do anything you want to your kids, in America. You can brainwash them, you can make them philosophers, you can kill them, you can do anything you want. Of course if you break the laws, you have to pay, but basically what Bradley McGee died for is that I have the right to raise my child any way I want. That's what's worth how many thousands of child abuse-related deaths there are every year, yes we could fix them, but what we would have to do would destroy our way of life. So it's going to take a few thousand dead kids. We want to witness that sacrifice. The astronaut's memorial is called the Space Mirror, it's quite impressive, it's black granite, forty-two feet high, fifty feet wide, polished to a reflective finish, mounted on a rotating platform, so that as the earth turns, so does the slab of the Space Mirror, so that the sun is always at the back, and the sun shines through the names of the fourteen astronauts which are carved through the granite, and which thus appear to be glowing. Quite impressive. The peripheral is an electronic red panel, with glowing neon, which comes on at the time of a eclipse. No sun, astronaut's names blanked out, on comes the neon panel, Bradley McGee's name first, as many more names as we can get on during the eclipse, off it goes again. Why Y psilon? The inspiration for the Space Mirror came to a Florida architect named Alan Helman, he said that actually the best memorial for the Challenger explosion was the tape showing the vapor trail in the sky, where the vapor trail of the Challenger bursts into a Y-shape, it was replayed many many times on television, so he named it the Y psilon project reminding us of this y, reminding us of the question why, and in the case of the sacrifices we're talking about, there is no why. Or as the Pythagorean Y, which was the image of the crossroads, which the Christians took over and set up as a choice between vice and virtue. We think of 'Y', meaning a choice, not answering an instrumental question but saying here's a choice that we've made. What's the conclusion? Where do we go from here? The memorial is made as a peripheral, websites are attached to that as asterisks, as people begin to join in the witnessing of these events in different ways, as they do with those spontaneous memorials that sprout up as offerings at the sites of great disasters, such as the Oklahoma City bombing or at Columbine High School. People stuffed their toy animals, flowers and cards into those metal fences, for some time now people have been leaving objects at the Vietnam Wall. The internet is going to take over that kind of vernacular memorial process, and of course we're only at the very beginning of the Emer(a)gency consultancy, so for now we'll just say, in memoriam, Bradley McGee. Thank you .

Schirmacher: Yes, that was quite interesting. It is quite something to invent something new. Last time I heard him he had a fetish in his hand, saying: "This is how I feel. I feel like 'High Noon' and had to throw my star into the sand because I got so disgusted about life.' Now you still could be disgusted about life but this time you wanted to make a public statement and not just to fetishize your personal condition, you wanted to speak not just about personal feelings but about how public issues can be shared and transformed into a new language, and how the idea of the fetish relates to this language. You asked, how can we speak this different language which is no longer an individual language? Let us see what the others who haven't been your students have to say.

Audience: At one point when you compared Apple computers to Socrates as the first embodiment of electracy, I thought of an article in the New York Times magazine section few months ago when they said the latest and greatest thing in New York City is the corporation of one person. Instead of the worker they speak now about the agent. You only form business relationships on a project-by-project basis, and different modules constituting the resources required to put that single business enterprise together. How would you account for the agent-corporation of the one person who cannot afford advertising?

Ulmer: Well, I am assuming that these institutions are in a state of evolution, so it is difficult to say with certainty what form the corporations are going to take as things evolves. Will the corporate form become the generalized form? One might say as well then that everyone has to be a corporation. I already itemised my taxes and I call myself Ulmer or something. I am not incorporated but I am an entity in that kind of business sense, in a restricted economy. I think a related issue that interests me, I did some consulting with Andersen WorldWide at one point, they took me to their leadership school near Chicago, which has about 25,000 students or so that they process very quickly, three weeks at a time. They train them in the franchising of knowledge and send them out in the world to create e-business, and this was the corporatising of the kind of knowledge which even interests us. There are ways to put that into the restricted economy. The most interesting part of that was they took me to their production division, of course my mouth was watering over all the extraordinary equipment they had, all their Avid editing suites. They had hired the best people, people with MFAs from the best places, very talented digital artists and so forth. The particular problem they were working on was precisely the identity of Andersen consulting. They said 'What we found is that the kind of website and brochures and other materials like that which attract our customers don't attract the kind of potential employees we want. The kind of people we want to attract to Andersen don't like that kind of business identity.' The problem that was given there was that the highly-trained well-paid staff of designers was to come up with the website that will look and feel like Andersen, but will attract a different sort of people, people who want to come and work for Andersen. Here the key issue is the whole idea of bringing identity to the corporation. This is where I see the application of electracy, that is to say using image and all this metaphysics as a way to create identity. So I do see a new kind of identity emerging in this kind of collective and corporate way…

Audience: Except that the corporation of one person would be more of an advanced sacrifice than Apple computers, because clearly there are some very attractive, cool things about being a corporation of one person.

Ulmer: Well again, the way I come to that question is that the corporation of one person seems to me like an animal of one cell. What I am trying to get at, in relation to Donna's talk last night when we were talking about symbiotic systems, is that the subject formation of electracy is not going to be individual. In fact it will not even be located in an individual person but rather the inside-outside continuum that is developing in the experience of the subject within electracy, for which I use Mariah Carey as the example. We can use Bukatman's phrase, 'terminal identity', meaning that our identity exists in the relationship between ourselves and our equipment. 'Terminal' in the sense of computer terminal. The idea is that individual persons will form into groups and the experience of the subject will be the experience of the group. We are already seeing the implications for this in education where the working situation is almost always that of collaboration. The old romantic notion of the artist that goes off to Paris and writes the great American novel all by herself or something, that is not way meaning systems in electracy are going to made. They are going to be made in a corporate way, by which I mean aggregate bodies of people - so what is going to be the nature of that experience, what is the nature of that subject formation?

Audience: I understand having a website, but I can't quite understand how building a physical memorial is legitimized by electracy.

Ulmer: Let me first just say that electracy is bootstrapped out of literacy, it doesn't go off by itself. It is an emergent phenomenon within the existing apparatus, and the existing apparatus builds monuments, Mount Rushmore, the astronaut's memorial, the Statue of Liberty, but also another kind of monuments. In fact, the strongest critics of electracy come from architecture. The critics in the public sphere are supportive of the kind of public life created and sustained within our civic buildings, which have a monumental function, meaning a memorial function. The memorial function, however it is carried out, is theoretically described in the terms of mourning: how does the collectivity maintain its identity through and beyond the death of an entire generation? From one generation after another, as the people say, if we can't remember our past how do we know who we are? We have to know who we were. The founding fathers are still there, they are long dead but we build a memorial we remember them and that is how we develop our imagined community. The United States of America is an idea.

Audience: There's also a contrary theory to memorialization and monumentalization, which is that actually the more we build monuments the more it allows people to forget on a personal level.

Ulmer: Yes, that is not a contrary. Precisely the function of the memorial is not to get everything straight, it's to allow to people to live together. That is the point. So yes, it definitively forgets at the same time it remembers. It remembers in a certain way so that people can stay together despite the fact of civil wars and atrocities and injustices. So yes, that is definitely the type of memory that retains everything but rather it is the type that holds the community together. It is the type that supports the symbolic capital.

Audience: To a large extent it sanitizes the nation-state, in a way that is completely at odds with the experiences of the people involved…for example the Vietnam War memorial…

Ulmer: Well, it is not the function of the monumentality to write the wrongs of the world. It is not that that is not an important function, but it is not the function of monumentality. The function of monumentality in a civilization is to maintain the identity of the civilization through the loss of one generation after another. Mourning, that's its function.

Audience: I would say the promise of monumentality is to do that. The function of monumentality when you're talking about a highly-developed federally funded system that decides what stories are told and what stories aren't told, how stories are told, in the case of the Vietnam war memorial the committee in Washington that made all the decisions was composed of artists and architects and historians. Once the debate took place over the Vietnam war memorial that was slammed down and from that day forward all war memorial architecture in Washington DC would be decided only by the Pentagon and the White House.

Ulmer: That is called politics. Meaning you can't do everything, so you make choices. Right, so that was the choice the society made. We are not trying to totally change the world, we're just saying how does monumentality function, how does the collectivity holds itself together? The particular way we're doing may be the way you are describing. This might be bad or wrong. It is the way it works.

Audience: I do a lot of political activism, and in designing political activism basically what you're aiming for is creating an event that has a recognizable moment. That moment has everything to do with one's own locus in an incredible community. How do you create an event that actually supports that event in such a way that it respects the people who are most directly affected? Additionally, things like the people leaving flowers for their high school friends, or for Vietnam soldiers or the AID quilt, in most cases they take place without planning, but because of a singular correspondence to the people affected, it's not a design so much…

Ulmer: Well, the key example you gave us is the names project, the AIDS quilt, which of course involved a huge amount of planning. The point I want to make is that you shouldn't be too pessimistic about monumentality if you take the AIDS quilt as an example of a monument which I certainly would, and which was displayed on the Vietnam wall in Washington along with the other monuments to call attention to its function. I would see the AIDS quilt as being precisely a peripheral. It is a transitional monumentality that moves us from the built or constructed civil sphere into cyberspace as the space of civic life. The key point of the project is to counter the notion that after the decline of the literate public sphere there is no public sphere, there is only gross exploitation of people's desires by a commodified culture. Something like that. Yes, that is a risk, but the project of the me-morial says, well it doesn't have to be in that way, if we all enter into the same space and develop our own kind of corporate general economy, we can maintain an alternative identity, other than the one simply foreseen, as Agamben says, by pornography and advertising.

Audience: You started by discussing our relationship to world disaster and then you went on to discuss the memorial, you start by personalizing disaster and raising one's consciousness through one's personal experience and you talk a little bit about collaboration, and I wonder can you offer the next step that could impact the creation of deeper collective awareness within the community, and then how do you propose to initiate that kind of collaboration which might lead to improving the world…

Ulmer: Yes, absolutely. Where we are going in the class is the next step, the specific application of the memorial into what we are calling the testimonial. Specifically we are soliciting participation of school districts, we're trying to appeal to them at the same level as the trip to Washington D.C. I spoke about. The school systems of America have this idea of national identity which is part of their training purpose. The statistic I read the other day is that 85 % of the schools in America are wired, meaning not just the principal has a computer on the desk but there are wired classrooms and there are teachers who are given the responsibility to involve the Internet in their classrooms. What is being left out is any teacher training, any pedagogies, anything to do with these new technologies. The way we want to get into the door is to say is here is something you can with that new technology, let's do a testimonial project. The testimonial project would be to have school kids, in relationship to whatever their curriculum might be, scientific, mathematical, historical or whatever, design websites that would make the witnessing of these disasters possible. The kids will visit these web sites and they would bear witness by doing testimonial projects. The basic methodology of these testimonies is that of poetic encounter. The principle is that the expert doesn't explain the problem, the problem explains the expert. The motto of the Emer(a) gency is 'problems be us'. We are the problem. The problem is inside us, we are it. To have that experience you don't have to think it in the abstract. The idea is we are going to use actually a structure of divination. The student poses a question, visits the website and would use various chance techniques of the web, Java script and so forth and the answer to the question would be, as in a divination system, some part of the problem, and this problem will constitute a metaphor for the student's witnessing. To make a long story short, the idea is to get school kids involved in paying attention to ongoing disasters. The assumption is that such witnessing will change the atmosphere in which public policy formation takes place. It is not that the students will second-guess the experts and have better instrumental solutions to the problem, but rather they will go home to their families and say 'Do you know what Big Sugar is doing to the water supply in Florida? We have a bet going on our website as to the day, hour and minute when the acquifer will be penetrated by the pollution and we can't use our water supply anymore. I am saying it is going to be 2004, February 6, 8:00 in the morning and I win a hundred thousand dollars if I'm right.' Suddenly the policymakers say: 'You know what, school kids all over America are keeping track of when Big Sugar is going to destroy the planet.'

Audience: It sounds good and yet what about access to computers for communities that experience disaster on a daily basis, that have antiquated computers and teachers who don't know how to use that kind of equipment…that's the thing that never gets talked about.

Ulmer: Actually it gets talked about endlessly - it's the first question I usually hear. The Internet became widespread in 1994. I moved into an Internet classroom in 1994. This pen costs three-nine cents. To learn how to use it costs one hundred thousand dollars, and that just gets you through high school. That is what the state puts into literacy training, to get you through high school per kid. Another hundred thousand to get you through college education. All I hear in English departments is that people can't write. So this is damn expensive equipment.

Audience: I am just trying to understand some of the concepts, not so much the application. The phrase that keeps coming back to me is Kant's phrase, 'the critical path is still open'. In the way you presented it, I feel this tension between this kind of onrushing technological change and the consequent changes in the identity formation. At the same time there is this sort of implicit acceptance of the fact that we are still operating within a critical perspective, and I wonder whether if isn't the case that this space of critique is not totally obviated. I'm thinking specifically of different forms of memory, particularly around the Holocaust which I think has been memorialized and monumentalized…to death, if one can say such a thing. I think of comparing something like 'Schindler's List', which I think was a total way of creating oblivion of the Holocaust in the minds of viewer, with the work of someone I know named Simone Ati who is a photographer. What he does is he takes images of pre-war and war-time Berlin and he projects them onto the facades of buildings in the contemporary city. This juxtaposition of the memorial image with the current anesthetized reality creates a powerful jolt in the mind of the ordinary person in the city. I wonder if the critical path isn't still open?

Ulmer: Yes, I definitely agree and I think it should be made very clear that there is meant to be a very strong critical effect of the memorial. The point is that it has to take place in the critical dimension, as Walter Benjamin said. Does anybody doubt that Walter Benjamin had a critical mission in mind when he said that the age of criticism is over? The goal is that if we are going to have a voice in this new apparatus it has to be an electrate voice. No amount of critique no matter how sophisticated will make one bit of difference at the level of desire. We know that the only people who aren't taken in by political advertisements in American political campaigns are PhDs in rhetoric. Everybody else is completely, you know, 'Can you trust that guy really? Look, he gave those furloughs', or whatever. So we have to get into that dimension of the image. Now what we want to be clear about is that when we say that child abuse deaths are sacrifices for the family values in America, we don't mean to say that we're glorifying the death of these children. We're not saying 'Isn't it great, let's celebrate that.' Rather we're saying 'Is that what we really want?' The critical awareness is raised, part of the problem is that we simply can't see the disasters that are happening in the private sphere. This is the argument we had in the class, this is the argument about the Vietnam wall Tracey refers to. When the Vietnam wall was built there was a huge debate, as you point out Tracey, and the critics of the design said: "If this black slash of shame is built it will mean that the death of all those soldiers was not more meaningful than people killed in traffic accidents." Meaning that people who die in traffic fatalities are just nothing, it just happens in the public sphere, it is just like garbage. The soldiers aren't like that, they do it for the duty of their country. The point of the memorial is to say no, no those traffic fatalities equally take place in the collective sphere on behalf of a value that is fundamental to our way of life. We must honor that sacrifice. That is the theoretical point, that is the point of the critique, we must recognize that disasters are not anomalies in the march towards progress. They are fundamental, they are in the very structure of the system necessary to a survival. If we don't want to make that sacrifice, then we have the political choice to make, to take the 'Y' path the other way. But you can't make that choice if you don't know there's a choice to be made. So the function of the memorial is critical in the sense that it creates a new category and in doing so makes it possible to think about that new category and then take action. However, the taking of the action, if we are talking of the democratic society, can't be imposed by an elite group, we're not looking for is Jacobin elitist groups to tell others what to do. We hope that an electrate culture will still be democratic.