[-empyre-] introducing Greg Ulmer and Marco Deseriis

[Gregory Ulmer]

Anna Munster wrote:
>
> Let's start with a question for Greg: in your chapter (and elsewhere) you introduce the term 'electracy'. Why do we need a new term such as when thinking about writing and aesthetics in/online? I'm also wondering why, if we need such a new term, we also need (as you outline in your pedagogical approach to 'e-li') to use print literature as a reference point for new media/networked literature?
>
>   
Thanks Anna

    The term "electracy" reminds us that digital technologies are part 
of an "apparatus" or social machine, which includes creation not only of 
technologies but also of institutions and their practices, identity 
formation individual and collective. It is not a question of "media 
literacy" any more than literacy was a matter of "alphabetic orality." 
Invention must take place and is taking place in all these dimensions, 
nor do these cultural inventions simply follow in some deterministic way 
from the properties of the equipment.  Our civilization as a whole is 
undergoing transformation, on an epochal scale similar to the shift from 
orality to  literacy that happened over hundreds of years in Classical 
Greece (China offers a different but also relevant history).  The 
usefulness of a name for what is replacing literacy is that it provides 
an historical relay to help understand what is happening in our own 
moment, and where likely points of intervention might be.  Many of the 
posts this month have expressed dissatisfaction with the existing forms, 
practices, and models available for communicating, creating, 
collaborating in this new environment.  The inviting side of electracy 
is that it says:  invent (and also shows how).  The threatening side is 
"be careful what you wish for," since what is in play is not just cool 
apps, or even new institutions, but human identity itself (the "posthuman").

    An immediate advantage of the historical analogy is that it 
indicates that electracy has been underway for a while.  It is part of 
the industrial revolution, the rise of the modern city in the nineteenth 
century, the bourgeois revolution in France, and of course the invention 
of the various new recording technologies beginning in that century.  
Indeed, Paris is to electracy what Athens is to alphabetic literacy. The 
Greeks invented the institution of School (Plato's Academy) and within 
school they invented the practices of literacy:  not only logic, 
rhetoric, poetics, but also method, the concept, and category formation 
(metaphysics).  The Academy and Lyceum did not invent alphabetic 
writing, but they invented the practices for using it in a native way, 
the name of which is "science."  The historical frame suggests that 
electrate practices are emergent within the revolution in representation 
that took place across the disciplines in the nineteenth  and twentieth 
centuries.  The turn against "representation" is in fact an effort to 
shed literacy (we have outgrown our conceptual skin). A motto for 
invention may be appropriated from the airlines:  be aware that the 
closest exit may be behind you.

     My work focuses on  the invention of the "practices of imaging" 
needed to integrate digital technology into culture and society.  Two 
immediate inferences from the above paragraphs:  1) the last vestige of 
Aristotle's literate category (substance) and propositional logic 
persists in relational database design, and is doing for contemporary 
datamining efforts what Aristotle's animism did for physics leading up 
to the scientific revolution (preventing the breakthrough); 2) the 
principles of electrate thought are already available in such places as 
the historical avant-garde and poststructural philosophy.  The challenge 
now is to undertake at the level of institutions a convergence like the 
one that digitization made possible for media.

    I have some suggestions for how to address that challenge, but I 
will save them for another post or two.
   
best
Greg

-- 
*Gregory L. Ulmer*
http://www.english.ufl.edu/~glue
http://heuretics.wordpress.com
 University of Florida