Electronic Monuments, Part 2

FROM SPECTACLE TO MEMORIAL

Ulmer quotes Walter Benjamin in the beginning of chapter 3 and it made me stop and ponder the simple veracity of the claim, "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule." (58). I immediately wondered if this was a hyperbole created for the sake of scholarship, but as I read further into the chapter and came across the paradox of compassion fatigue, I began to realize that there is no exaggeration in Benjamin's claim. All one really has to to do is turn on the TV and go to the news channel of his/her choice and you will see this persistent state of emergency. There's always a scandal, or some economic trouble, or a natural disaster, or an example of the depths of human evil and depravity. There seems to be no shortage of Chicken Littles running around the world declaring to us all that the sky is falling. We are surrounded by emergencies. In a way, it could be said that we even thrive on these emergencies, or at least that we use them as a form of entertainment. I'm a little ashamed to admit this, but each morning when I wake up I turn on the TV in order to see what's wrong in the world. As I compose this very blog, I'm watching HLN and find myself bored that there's no new tragedgy, just a rehashing of the current scandal at Penn State involving child molestation. It's not that I want bad things to happen; it's just that bad things are...more interesting. They are a spectacle.

That leads me back to what Ulmer refers to as compassion fatigue, "We know more about worldwide catastrophes than ever before, and care less. Or rather, we are unable to conjoin our intellectual understanding and our emotions, and this disjuction of discursive and pathetic knowledge is systematic, structural, and seemingly irreducible." (61). Because emergencies become a spectacle, and because we are constantly inundated with these tragic spectacles due to their worldwide immediacy (by way of the internet), we become desensitized to human suffering. So how do we reverse this trend? Ulmer proposes that a way to counter this paradox is the creation of MEmorials, and in particular, the MEmorials' testimonial component. By finding what Barthes refers to as the punctum (the obtuse and indirect third meaning of an image that provokes an involuntary memory or association in the viewer), MEmorials create a testimonial that situates us within a tragedy, thereby enhancing its importance and negating its trivialization. As Ulmer says on page 65, "The MEmorial becomes testimonial when the egent designs it as an image, figure, parable, emblem, using some feature of the news event as an objective correlative for the witness's state of mind, mood, attunement to the world."

SPIRITUAL NO-CALL LIST

We've already seen that being heavily inundated with tragedies desensitizes us to them. These tragedies become spectacles that, according to Ulmer, "...name a condition in which actuality and images merge and become indistinguishable, leading, it is argued, to the destruction of civic life and the related benefits and responsibilities of a free, democratic society." (83). Why would we do this? Ulmer says that it is a defense mechanism to protect ourselves from the severity of these tragedies, to protect us from the ugly truth, and the immense amounts of information that we are constantly subjected to. In short, it's too much to deal with and we very much want to be left alone so that we don't have to deal with it. "We want to be on a spiritual no-call list." (84).




photos:
http://www.artizans.com/image/GRA392/chicken-little-claims-sky-is-falling-over-bird-flu/
http://www.kachina.net/~alunajoy/2009nov.html