The Object of Post-Criticism

Gregory Ulmer

Keeping post-criticism (-modernism, -structuralism) in mind…why may Ulmer, in “Foreword/Forward (Into Electracy),” be suggesting that “poststructuralism has the most to offer” in terms of “generating effective new practices” (xi)? In other words, can you identify ways in which Ulmer’s concept of electracy relates to poststructuralism?

How may electracy, as a social and technological apparatus, embrace what Edward W. Said identifies as the “Other” (i.e. he or she who remains outside society’s hegemonic structures)?

In comparison to how literature and the arts were transformed by the transgressive ideology of the avant-garde movements, Gregory Ulmer argues that criticism, with specific regard to its conventions of representation, is transformed today.

Modernism Owens, Craig. “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Post-Modernism.” Foster. 65-92. Print.

•A work of art claims to represent an authentic vision of the world. Such authority—rather than residing in “the uniqueness or singularity” of the artwork—is “based on the universality modern aesthetics attributed to the forms utilized for the representation of vision, over and above difference in content due to the production of works in concrete historical circumstances.”

•“…sought to transcend representation in favor of presence and immediacy…proclaimed the autonomy of the signifier, its liberation from the ‘tyranny of the signified’” (67).

Postmodernism Owens, Craig. “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Post-Modernism.” Foster. 65-92. Print.

•“The postmodernist work attempts to upset the reassuring stability of that [i.e. the dominant representational system] mastering position.”

•“…generally deconstructive…”

•“…expose the tyranny of the signifier, the violence of its law” (67).

•Postmodernists do not seek to “to transcend representation”; rather, they seek “to expose that system of power that authorizes certain representations while blocking, prohibiting or invalidating others” (68).

Deconstruction Smethurst, Cortney. "Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction." PrestyGomez. Derrida-defining deconstruction. YouTube. 6 Sept. 2008. Web. 7 Feb. 2010.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgwOjjoYtco

Deconstruction Signified, Signifier, Sign

“Tree”(Signifier)

(Signified)

“Tree”+

Sign

Collage/Montage“…these tangible and non-illusionistic objects presented a new and original source of interplay between artistic expressions and the experience of the everyday world” (Wolfram qtd. in Ulmer 94).

Collage: the transfer of materials from one context to another

Montage: the ‘dissemination’ of these borrowed materials through the new setting

Relating this to Ulmer’s notion of electracy…”My research and teaching is organized around this effort to extract from a number of different discourses and practices a rhetoric and pedagogy that adapt schooling to electracy.”

Electracy-supplementing, not supplanting, “the pedagogy of verification that structures most literate education” (Ulmer, “Toward Electracy”).

Photography:“A useful model for the mode of representation adopted by post-criticism—if it is understood not as the culmination of linear perspective, but as a means of mechanical reproduction…” (95)

•Photography is “a collage machine (perfected in television), producing simulacra of the life-world: Photography selects and transfers a fragment of the visual continuum into a new frame” (95).

•“…the photographic image signifies itself and something else—it becomes a signifier remotivated within the system of a new frame” (96).

•“intellectual montage”- Sergei Eisenstein*the real is used as an element of a discourse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battleship_Potemkin

The Battleship Potemkin (1925)teachertubeFineArts. “Battleship PotemkinOdessa Steps.” YouTube. 21 Sept. 2009. Web. 7 February 2010.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVfziaY3fGg

John Heartfield’s The Meaning of the Hitlerian Salute (1933)

Photomontage

I have millions

behind me.

Walter Benjamin: Speaking of the procedure of montage… “the superimposed element disrupts the context in which it is inserted” (qtd. in Ulmer 96).

“Montage does not reproduce the real, but constructs an object (its lexical field includes the terms ‘assemble, build, join, unite, add, combine, link, construct, organize’) or rather, mounts a process (‘the relation of form to content is no longer a relation of exteriority, the form resembling clothes which can dress no matter what content, it is process, genesis, result of a work’) in order to intervene in the world, not to reflect but to change reality” [italics mine] (Ulmer 97).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

“Participation without belonging” (Derrida qtd. in Ulmer 102)

EmerAgency: “a virtual distributed online consultancy, whose purpose is to deconstruct instrumentalist approaches to applied problem-solving by placing them in the context of electracy” [italics mine] (Ulmer, “Toward Electracy”).

•an effort to make improvements in the world

“Paraliterary”

“…categories of literature and criticism could no longer be kept apart, that now there were only writers” (Ulmer 97).

*Rowland Barthes “touched language directly”.

Derrida: “What the institution cannot bear, is for anyone to tamper with language…It can bear more readily the most apparently revolutionary ideological sorts of ‘content,’ if only that content does not touch the borders of language and of all the juridico-political contracts it guarantees” (qtd. in Ulmer 98).

*Postmodernist challenge this form (i.e. the “logocentric” perspective that there exists a transparent relationship between signifier and referent, language and meaning.

gram versus sign

Grammatology: replaces sign with gram (a more basic unit)New concept of writing, in which “nothing…is anywhere ever simply present or absent.”

*Trace- a rupture, or contradiction, from within a text; it is not projected onto a text in one’s attempt to analyze or interpret the text (see also pg. 105)

The heterogeneity of a collage stimulates the production of “a signification which could be neither univocal nor stable.”

Each element: *breaks the continuity or the linearity of the discourse*lead necessarily to a double reading: element in

relation to its origin and as supplemented into a new whole/totality

Royce, Kristin. “steal my heart.” pop rock art gallery. Kristin Sunshine, 2007.