Two Drops of Glue

Glue > GLU > Gregory L. Ulmer

The first is Will Pappenheimer’s image taken from the preface to Glue’s Electronic Monuments (2005).

The second is from Joel Weishaus’s interview with Glue that appeard in Postmodern Culture in 1998. I was reading it this morning and struck by how current and helpful it is. I could work through it, comment on it, and do an analysis, and all that, but that would ruin it. This is the ethical position of listening. As Byron Hawk describes recently in A Counterhistory of Composition, it’s when the writer or teacher knows well enough to listen to something other than her own voice.

Glue here talks about methods and reimagnings of solving problems. Early on in the essay, as he’s talking about his development over the years, Glue refers to, when he was in high school, that he had this vague feeling that for his life to matter, he had to “improve the world.” But it remains vague. Funny, sometimes you talk to people and they are very clear about how they do not care about issues larger than themselves. Of course, I can understand my own narcissism to varying degrees, and so I can empathize–to varying degrees–when others are brutally honest, but what I like very much about Glue’s description is that he works specifically with that feeling of ambivalence (I should save the world but I don’t wanna stop watching sponge bob) and integrates that narcissism into the process of working with societal problems.

Conventional consulting, based on the positivist preconceptions about utility, addresses a middle dimension of problems: things are going wrong, how can we fix them. The history of these fixes is not impressive, with each new solution producing further problems, as if entropy itself were the “problem” consulting was trying to fix. A shorthand version of this view would point out that the Holocaust, after all, was a solution (the final solution). The point of evoking this context is not to discredit rational problem-solving as such, but to call attention to a feature of it that is never absent from the process, no matter in how benign a form. The Copernican revolution in consulting is to step back from this direct approach to problem-solving in public policy formation (for example, “throwing money” at a problem).

The new consultancy attempted in Imaging Florida [one of Glue's projects] proposes that instead of the idea that the consultants’ knowledge explains the problem, it is the case that the problem explains the consultant: a reversal of the hierarchy, similar to the shift of point of view from the geocentric to the heliocentric theory of the solar system. The phenomena look the same from either perspective, but the understanding of the situation is radically different between the two positions.

Here is the point of intervention for arts and letters. The entire modernist project in poetry, for example, beginning at least with Baudelaire, has worked with the premise that the outer material world may serve as a metaphor or figure for the internal or spiritual experience of a person. The tradition of correspondences is a principal part of the Western tradition in general, of course, all the way back to the Pythagorean music of the spheres. I could cite Walt Whitman here, but Rilke’s “Spanish Trilogy” comes to mind as just one example:

From me and every candle flickering
in the dimness of the many houses, Lord:
to make one Thing; from strangers, for I know
no one here, Lord, and from me, from me,
to make one Thing; from sleepers in these houses,
from old men left alone at the asylum
who cough in bed, importantly, from children
drunk with sleep upon the breasts of strangers,
from so much that is uncertain and from me,
from me alone and from what I do not know,
to make the Thing, Lord Lord Lord, the Thing
which, earthly and cosmic, like a meteor
gathers within its heaviness no more than
the sum of flight: and weighs nothing but
arrival. (ll. 7-24)

Consultants who have not made one Thing out of themselves and the life situation they are attempting to understand will never know what they are doing (are blind, suffer ATH). This lyrical practice does not replace the empirical but supplements it, to produce a hybrid (the emplyrical).

The new consultants ask what disaster might reveal about us individually and collectively. What tragedy brings into intelligibility or at least into representation is that folly in individuals, mistakes, errors, magnified collectively, produce historical disaster. The timing of the remake of the Titanic disaster is significant for us, carrying as it does a lesson similar to that of the tower of Babel. Commentators point to the Titanic as exemplary for what it reveals about the limitations of human efforts to master nature and life itself. The theory guiding the emerAgency is that the problems addressed by conventional consulting are only one dimension of what in fact is a three dimensional phenomenon. Every problem coexists with a potential disaster (the limit of human power that marks the borders of the Real) and with the trauma that founds human identity. This way of characterizing identity formation as traumatic signals the psychoanalytic theory we are using (an explanation of which is beyond the scope of our conversation; the psychoanalytic metaphor for it is “castration” anxiety).

The upshot of this understanding of the tripartite character of problems is the recognition in our method that we ourselves are part of the problem, and our blindness (ATH) about the true nature of this participation accounts for why we are unable to make good on the Enlightenment goal of putting an end to error. Our method is to study problems with the same analytical care of conventional consultants, but with the motive of seeking in this information possible correspondences for the feeling we have about the world to find out our disposition, our attunement, to bring into understanding the state of mind, individual and collectively, that is complicit with the forces that resist us. We do not expect utilitarian consultants to take this reversal of the explanatory direction very seriously; it is aimed at education, the public schools, as a practice that might be able to bring institutionalized learning into the process of making public policy. One important reason why collectively we allow ourselves to cooperate so much with the forces of entropy is because the people responsible for it work anonymously. If the emplyrical study of disaster were a feature of the standard curriculum, a great many people in positions of authority would come under a new kind of scrutiny, not after the fact (what did you do in the war, Daddy?) but during the process.

At the heart of the pedagogy is a certain view of human motivation: a young person might be more interested in investigating the superfund cleanup in her community if she recognized the lyrical principle that the details about the dangers to the environment provided a complex expression of her own sense of being. I hesitate to call the kind of writing or production such a student might undertake “poetry” or “art,” but there is no doubt that these aesthetic practices must be combined with the empirical ones before we are able to grasp holistically the true condition of our problematic world

These are the terms that I’ve been thinking about for quite some time and have been struggling to integrate into the first year course. There are various exemplars of folks who have attempted, primarily working out of Glue’s Internet Invention, but none of those exemplars have so far been a strong fit. I’ll be working on this problem over the summer as I prepare Fall classes with the goal of integrating many web 2.0 technologies.