Value Systems
INTERRUPTION: HARIMON AND LUCAITES
This is a small, but crucial collection in the EmerAgency archive. The items collected here are products of what happens to a value system, or at least a value system perceived through the lens of electracy. Traditional monuments, such as a common war memorial, recognize and emphasize the sacrifices that have been made for a dominant value. Soldiers died so we could live freely, or a great leader was killed but their work carries on (such as the case of Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln). Traditional memorials “tell the official narrative of the nation” (Morey par 7).
Emotion under erasure
The Value-System collection expands the notion of sacrifice and dominant values. In many ways this is a collection of what is not represented by the “narrative of a nation.” Although this collection is part of EmerAgency and so connected to ideas of electracy rather than literacy, it’s important to note that what’s here is similar to what a researcher might find in Cultural Studies. The Value System that individuals take for granted is put into question. MEmorials, like the work of Cultural Studies, are designed to highlight values that otherwise go unmarked. They both want an individual to come to terms with the concept that values are produced and can also produce individuals. Values are a kind of productive power.
But unlike Cultural Studies, this collection is not about recognizing latent cultural values in order to resist them. This has little to do with understanding the concept of a value and how it has produced the concept of the individual—such thinking is tied to literacy. Here, the producer of a MEmorial explores value systems by engaging and reflecting on a mood, not a concept. The egent (maker of the MEmorial) makes it [the value] recognizable as a specific kind of value, belief, commitment, with the purpose of helping the public understand itself in its collective identity” (p. 50). Before a individual or a culture can change (like Cultural Studies wants), it has to know a little about what it is and what it values. More importantly, EmerAgency is an archive that contains an awareness of what a value-system produces.
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- Introduction
- EmerAgency
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- MEmorial
- Deconsultancy
- Egent
- Value Systems
- Works Cited
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