The Object of Post-Criticism

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The Object of Post-Criticism

• Gregory Ulmer

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Keeping post-criticism (-modernism,
-structuralism) in mindwhy 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 Ulmers 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 societys hegemonic structures)?
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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.
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Modernism

• A work of art claims to represent an authentic
  vision of the world. Such authorityrather than
  residing in the uniqueness or singularity of
  the artworkis 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 immediacyproclaimed the autonomy of
  the signifier, its liberation from the tyranny
  of the signified (67).

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

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Postmodernism

• 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).

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

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Deconstruction
Sign

Tree
Tree (Signifier)
(Signified)

• Signified, Signifier, Sign

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Collage/Montage
Collage the transfer of materials from one
context to another Montage the dissemination
of these borrowed materials through the new
setting Relating this to Ulmers notion of
electracyMy 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).

• 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).

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Photography

• 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 elseit 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_Pote
  mkin

• A useful model for the mode of representation
  adopted by post-criticismif it is understood not
  as the culmination of linear perspective, but as
  a means of mechanical reproduction (95)

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John Heartfields The Meaning of the Hitlerian
Salute (1933)
Walter Benjamin Speaking of the procedure of
montage the superimposed element disrupts the
context in which it is inserted (qtd. in Ulmer
96).
I have millions behind me.

• Photomontage

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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?v6gmP4nk0EOE
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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

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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 languageIt 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.
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gram versus sign
Grammatology replaces sign with gram (a more
basic unit) New concept of writing, in which
nothingis anywhere ever simply present or
absent. Trace- a rupture, or contradiction,
from within a text it is not projected onto a
text in ones 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
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Royce, Kristin. steal my heart. pop rock art
gallery. Kristin Sunshine, 2007.