EmerAgency
EmerAgency is a title. It’s the title of our archive.
Thinking the archive:
And it’s the title of Ulmer’s new experiment—his “institutional practice for an education for a civilization of the Internet” (p. xii). It’s the title for what he calls a “fifth estate,” which takes on the duty of witnessing, of observing and reporting, the relationship between knowledge, problems and politics. (By all means it is the title of a politics.) It’s the title of a disbursed, online consultancy committed to the humanities and the possibility to develop a self-knowledge that works to expose the value-systems of American culture in the 21st century. Yes, it’s the title of something that big, that ambitious. It's the title of a belief system that accepts observation of any kind will change that which is being observed (p. xiv). It’s also the title of a method for acquiring self-knowledge in conjunction with aesthetic thinking. It’s the title of a thinking that recognizes the self is always a subject as well as a "group subject." Perhaps the best way to describe EmerAgency is to say it’s the title of an overarching conception (but we like to call it a conceptacle) that holds the varying yet closely connected methods of electrate reasoning, of a new apparatus.
The EmerAgency, at root, is about creating institutional means to apply electrate reasoning to the “question of what is inside and what is outside [the idea called] America” (p. 121). It is the name of a consulting firm. But only conceptually. In fact, it helps to think of EmerAgency as a work of conceptual art—the idea or concept takes precedence because anyone, anywhere should be able to assemble it from a set of instructions. In conceptual art “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art” (LeWitt p. 7). EmerAgency is an idea, a machine, a consulting firm that works by employing anyone who takes up its practice of self-reflexivity and problem solving. We don't have a method.
According to Ulmer, traditional literate logic is still necessary, but it can no longer (and is no longer) be consulted when an individual seeks to solve problems. We have to approach problems with our new apparatus, electracy. EmerAgency is a conceptacle, a whole that houses, organizes, categorizes, and defines the parts of an institutional practice of electracy. The point, to be reductive, is that neither tragedy (a product of orality) nor traditional consulting (literate reasoning) are adequate to understand and bring to light the enviable blindness or even "dumbness" within our current chaotic value-system.
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