On Fri, 18 Jul 1997, Bracha Lichtenberg - Ettinger wrote:
> otherplace touches upon something personal. It touches one of my
> childhood's "over there", one of my childhood haunting noplace, more real
> then reality and yet a noplace spreading between trauma and phantasy I
> share with my unknown others. For many years my mother told me how the
> sister-in-law that was too sick to walk. My mother is now 81, and starting
> last year something in her mind wouldn't let her carry this mental image
> anymore, so she now says: "You know, when the Russian approached, the Nazis
> put all the sick people on a boat and sent them to the sea. That's how my
I would like to ask for your help and advice regarding how to enact the
emerAgency. The principle we will explore is the possibility that PTSD
(Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) is in fact generalizable as the model of
memory that best characterizes the emergent electronic apparatus.
What I need help with is in understanding how to inquire into this
possibility. In my discipline (English Department Media Studies) the norm
is to do research, to amass information, develop interpretations, in
short, to master a topic by means of knowing-that/knowledge about.
I do not want to work that way. Moreover, the traumatic model of memory
applied to disaster (collective blindness) suggests that we could not
think about problems with this sort of directness anyway (that is the
blindness of instrumentalism).
I admire, even idealize perhaps, what I understand to be an arts approach
to the sort of question I am asking. From the arts I am trying to learn a
different relation to an object of study, the "project" poetics. take the
volume of __Zone__ devoted to the city; the difference between the
article-essays and the "artists' projects". The claim of the new
consultancy is that current instrumental/social science approaches to
policy formation or problem solving would benefit from the alternative
articulation of problems using the "artists' projects" methodology.
What is that methodology? Is there a "poetics" of the "artist's project"?
Advice appreciated.
thanks
Greg Ulmer