> concerning the hypothesis of the emerAgency, the question is how you
> conceive this triangulation, how do you put these three elements together
> and what is the function of "famous disasters": are they mythologicl
The emerAgency attempts a deconstruction of the received notions of pure
and applied research, of useless and utilitarian practices, and challenges
jurisdictional claims about which problems are assigned to which
disciplines. The challenge of the new consultancy is that it offers
advice that noone wants.
The first task of the emerAgency is to locate, visualize, augment the
intractable dimension of public problems. What exactly do the arts and
letters disciplines bring to such considerations that the instrumental
disciplines lack? Perhaps LACK itself. Or knowledge of the extime.
Famous disasters show the shape (Eidos) of the extime. The O-ring of
the human heart. ATH. blindness of the individual consultant; calamity
of the community. The disaster is not the object of study but its
subject. This outside material supports the
signifying chain, so that the missing place emerges. The
disaster holds the place of this missing solution; only in the prosthesis
of interactive technologies may the missing place emerge (an emergent
phenomenon, like time itself).
the map of the extime created by the encounter of a consultant with a
famous disaster then becomes the basis for analysis of a local community
problem (to locate the public collective signifying chain that carries
away always the instrumental solutions in order to preserve the calamity).
The unacknowledged death drive in the public sphere. The emerAgent tells
the community: if you have an identity, you necessarily have a death
drive (to speak crudely).
One goal of emerAgency consulting is to add the register of
tragedy to public policy formation, with the premise that the ratio of
fate to will is different in electracy (post-literate civilization) than
it was for the Ancient Greeks, Medieval Christians, Elizabethans... The
notion of the extime (outside inside) opens to research the shifting
borders of subjectivation underway in electracy (the apparatus that is to
computing what literacy was to the alphabet).
for the emerAgency
Greg Ulmer
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