Our sense of identity is rapidly changing in the age of digitization. How will this identity be formed? Where will our new sense of reality take us? Gregory Ulmer’s theory of electracy provides the backdrop by which to answer these questions. What is electracy? If the first epoch is characterized by orality (made practical by oral discourse) and the second epoch is characterized by literacy (made practical by the invention of the alphabet and written discourse), then the third epoch can be characterized by electracy (in which digital imaging supports extensive complexes of mood atmospheres beyond organic capacity, much the same way that alphabetic writing supports long complex chains of reasoning possible to sustain within the organic mind). Electracy is to digital media what literacy is to print. In the words of Gregory Ulmer, "What literacy is to the analytical mind, electracy is to the affective body: a prosthesis that enhances and augments a natural or organic human potential." By using Ulmer’s Internet Invention as a vantage point for this discussion, we can say that Ideology plays a key role in forming identity both in terms of the present and the future.

Ideology is fundamental to present identity formation. Let’s begin by defining Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatus. Because Althusser wished to show how ideology was more pervasive in industrial capitalist societies, he developed the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), complicating Marx’s theory of society as being comprised of “levels.” According to Marx, the infrastructure was the economy. The superstructure was comprised of legal institutions (such as the law and the police), and ideology (religious and moral, for example). Althusser later defined the legal institutions as RPAs (Repressive State Apparatuses) and ideology in terms of the ISA. The purpose of both was to maintain the order of society. According to Althusser, the major ISAs were Religion, Family, Community, and Education. What is important regarding the ISA in Althusser’s context is that in creating the illusion of free will, it caused its subjects to think and behave in socially acceptable ways, unlike the RPA which could wield its power in the form of material violence if necessary. Furthermore, the hegemonic tendency of the ISA strengthened its power as a basis for ideology in that the context of one’s identity in one was undifferentiated in the others. In other words, how a subject was defined in any one ISA was automatically carried over into every other ISA. And so was (and is) the power of the ideological state apparatus in subject identity formation.

Ideology can be more of a difficult concept to grasp. In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” Louis Althusser states that “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (294), later reiterating it in terms of the subject: “in ideology ‘men represent their real conditions of existence to themselves in imaginary form’” (294). The “allusions” to reality by which we live are essential to our formation as subjects. According to Althusser, “you and I are always already subjects, and as such constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition, which guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and (naturally) irreplaceable subjects” (300). In the quote that may have very well become the cornerstone theory of Cultural Studies, the individual is made into an object, a material thing over which power is to be exercised. The fact that “ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time…it is nothing but outside (for science and reality)” (301), suggests it to be a created thing that assumes no other logic but its own. This suggests a powerful connection between creativity and subject formation. This bares a striking similarity to Lacan’s fundamental question: “What is it like to have the outside inside?” (Ulmer, 203).

Regardless of whether we have in-depth knowledge of Ulmer’s academic history with regard to ideological theory, it is clear that his work is linked to Cultural Studies, and more specifically Althusseran theory. His references to “interpellation” as being “a specialized term in [his] field” (24) and ideology as something that classifies identity can be compared to (although not mirrored by) Althusseran ideology. According to Ulmer:

“[I]deology” (which is to my domain what “evolution” is to the life sciences) classifies our identity into such categories as race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, sexuality, nationality. We enter into or learn the beliefs and behaviors named by these terms in an interrelated set of institutions (25).

Ulmer continues by including Family, Community (History), and Entertainment (supplemented by Career) in that list of institutions, also referred to as the “popcycle” (24). Although Cultural Studies has not recognized Entertainment as an Ideological State Apparatus, the debate as to whether or not Mass Culture constitutes one is nearly as old as the definition of ISA itself. The hegemony of Althusser’s ISAs can be seen in Ulmer’s institutions: “…[I]deas important to the culture may arise in any one of the institutions and then circulate through the others…” (27). Also, “interpellation may be understood as the provisional acceptance of the default or ready-made images and themes of the popcycle” (247). This “interpellation” suggests that we are always already subjects in the context of electracy as well. It is also important to recognize these “core or dominant institutions” as being “identified by being capitalized” (25). Capital as a defining attribute clearly creates a bridge between Ulmer’s ideology and that of Althusser.

Perhaps the strongest link (at least for the purposes of this discussion) between Althusser’s subject formation and that of Ulmer, is creativity. Ulmer states that “the one negentropic force in the world is human intelligence (creativity)” (5). Negentropy is the antithesis of entropy, in that it can be thought of in terms of increased organization (of information), rather than the randomness of events. The fact that human creativity is seen as a force that promotes organization suggests it to have memory, to draw on past and present associations, to work within its own logic.

While it is not certain (and perhaps irrelevant) as to whether Ulmer wishes to undermine Capitalism as Althusser (and Marx before him) did, the idea of communal society (to be differentiated from Communism) shows through in Ulmer’s work. The EmerAgency is perhaps the cornerstone example of this:

The EmerAgency is a consultancy ‘without portfolio.’ We imagine it as an umbrella organization gathering through the power of digital linking all the inquiries of students around the world and forming them into a ‘fifth estate,’ whose purpose is to witness and testify, to give a voice to a part of the public left out of community decision making, especially from policy formation (Ulmer, 1).

EmerAgency can be seen as a new institution whose purpose is to solve the problems of society, much like the School is today: “The EmerAgency is an institutional form, with the mystory as one of its practices, designed to work with the internet as the larger institutional context that will be to electracy what school was to literacy” (29). The disciplines represented in modern educational institutions “contribute as a mode of collective intelligence” (5). The purpose of the EmerAgency is much the same, with the core similarity of these two systems being the importance of communication in both.

Communal nature, according to Ulmer, is something that has always manifested itself through communication. Whether it was the formation of tribes during the age of orality or the formation of nation states during the age of literacy, collective organization was key. Ulmer suggests that “electrate peoples who experience thought as virtual image will organize collectively in some new way that as yet has not come fully into view…” (8). Furthermore, the collective plays a strong role in electrate identity formation: “Mystory in the context of the EmerAgency brings the egent into an explicit relationship with the process of identity formation, both individual and collective” (Ulmer, 72). If the collective is central to identity formation and identity is central to the electrate being, then what does electracy mean for identity?

To answer the question of “what does electracy mean for identity?” let’s first discuss identity’s centrality to Ulmer’s electrate being. Taking Native American medicine into account, “the vision quest was meant to answer the question ‘what do I want to be,’ and the answer, received in the form of a dream or vision…usually required a ritual of considerable hardship” (Ulmer, 205). While the ritual described here (whether literal or figurative) can be interpreted in many ways, the fundamental question of “what do I want to be?” resonates well with many in that it naturally precipitates the question of “why am I here?” By composing a mystory, “students map or document their situations or relationship to each of the four [popcycle] institutions” (6). Furthermore, mystory’s approach calls for producing work offline that is “superior to work originating online” (7).

This suggests that we base our electrate identity on our established identity in the real world, or at least the world we have created (think back to Althusser). This poses a question: If electracy is, in a sense, virtual, then how do we base our electrate identity on our established identity in the real world? If we think of reality in terms of post-modernism, there is no reality. Or rather, reality now mimics the reality that came before it. We are a mirror of ourselves. Reality is, in essence, a constructed thing. While Althusseran theory puts this concept in “tangible” terms for the purpose of understanding our existence, Ulmer’s theories allow us to rediscover invention during the third epoch of communication. Because we now know reality to be a “constructed” thing, it’s easier to understand how “[a]n electrate state of mind includes a tolerance for nonutilitarian, inefficient, irrelevant events and experiences” (Ulmer, 76).

It also may be easier to understand how electrate identity is disembodied from current “reality.” Upon returning to Ulmer’s Native American metaphor, we see that “Black Elk experienced his identity, his subject: not as ‘self’ but as ‘spirit’” (203). What could this mean for electrate identity? The electrate mind is abstractive, disembodied, meaning that while existing outside linear boundaries it is able to make new associations. If we think of our existence in terms of cyberspace, where a limitless expanse represents the closest we’ve ever come to reality outside of reality, our existence in fact becomes abstract.

More importantly perhaps, is the fact that online, we assume new and many identities, which may or may not be representations of the “real” thing. In her book Life on the Screen, MIT professor Sherry Turkle investigates Multi-User Domains (MUDs) in order to describe identity in terms of our “online presence.” “MUDs are dramatic examples of how computer-mediated communication can serve as the place for the construction and reconstruction of identity” (Turkle, 14). Because “your identity on the computer is the sum of your distributed presence” (13) and cyberspace allows us to be in multiple places at one time, we can imagine our identities as being open to proliferation (at least in the sense of Ulmer’s “image”). What could this mean for subject formation in terms of its relation to society? Perhaps this is what Ulmer referred to when he stated that “[t]he modern person inevitably is in an alienated state of mind” (p77). Alienated from reality is a prerequisite for flourishing online. After all, in order to engage in a simple hypertext search we are required to leave linear laws behind. Because we no longer think with a “start to finish” mentality, we may no longer be tied to a single identity (i.e. birth to death constitutes one lifetime and therefore one identity). The ability to engage cyberspace in several windows simultaneously also normalizes the proliferation of identity. In referring to his activities on three different MUDs, Turkle’s subject Doug says it best: “I split my mind. I’m getting better at it. I can see myself as being two or three or more. And I just turn on one part of my mind and then another when I go from window to window” (13). How do these multiple virtual identities affect what we as subjects consider real life? One subject’s attitude toward real life (RL) is described in the following passage:

As more people spend more time in these virtual spaces, some go so far as to challenge the idea of giving any priority to RL at all. “After all,” says one dedicated MUD player and IRC user, “why grant such superior status to the self that has the body when the selves that don’t have bodies are able to have different kinds of experiences?” When people can play at having different genders and different lives, it isn’t surprising that for some this play has become as real as what we conventionally think of as their lives, although for them this is no longer a valid distinction (14).

It is apparent that the entity of cyberspace (with its relation to electracy), is causing us to rethink the concepts of identity and reality. Because we are able to change our identity and engage in virtual reality online, we are able to broaden our abstract scope of mind while naturally adhering to various concepts that give our existence its purpose. How many identities can we take on at the same time? What kinds of new identities will we assume? Our post-modern fascination with fusing artificial with organic (as seen in various representations of Mass Culture) is perhaps the key to finding one answer. Whatever the case, the future of communication (and identity and reality) can be better understood in terms of electracy. One thing remains highly probable: to get wherever it is we’re going, we’ll need to be in an electrate state of mind.

SOURCES

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Literary Theory: An Anthology Eds. Rivkin and Ryan. ( Oxford . Blackwell, 1998). 294-304.

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon & Schuster. New York , 1995).

Ulmer, Gregory. Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy (Longman. New York , 2003).

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