Deconsultancy
Ulmer's concept is a self-described of deconsultancy. The MEmorial works toward a deconsultancy. The deconsultancy is about practical ways to influence institutional policy and public values. The MEmorial is a type of tragic deconsultancy: "The MEmorial deconsultation uses commemoration to exceed the impasses revealed in disasters" (p. 250). The deconsultancy, Ulmer hopes, provides stability and permanence to public spaces online. He says, “The EmerAgency MEmorial is intended to expand this public participation in monumentality into a permanent Internet deconsultancy, to adapt the invention of tourist destinations as an analogy for authoring the images that underlie the group subject, and to make them available as sites of possible collective education” (p. 16). This collective education is a goal of the deconsultancy, which, like consultancy, is always seeking to control public opinion.
Ulmer claims that he is discussing deconsultancy as a hypothetical (p. xvi). However, as we have seen since the publication of his book, professors and students have used this hypothetical model to make very real MEmorials. So is that the goal of these deconsultancies? To touch from a distance (p. 58), to affect the emotion, and to spur into action an apathetic audience. It solves the problem of "compassion fatigue" while also allowing the participant to see a possible blindness (ATH). We are all a part of the same problems we encounter—there is no outside in deconsultancy. Other purposes of the deconsultancy "are suggested at once in this portmanteau word: figuring out what such an organization might accomplish involves extracting the terms condensed in the name-merge, emerge, emergence, emergency, urgency, urge" (p. 59).
"The chief alteration in deconstructive consulting," writes Ulmer, "is to add to instrumental knowledge the knowledge and methods of the liberal and fine arts disciplines" (p. xiii). Through the deconsultancy, those in the humanities can once again play their intended role in value formation. As Ulmer discusses, the humanities were often consulted by companies and governments for advice on issues like public conceptions. However, professional consulting agencies overtook that role to the, according to Ulmer, detriment of society. The deconsultancy is the humanities's chance to once again influence public opinion.
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