EmerAgency
All the image reasoning that students with mystory and
wide image trains them to be "consultants" or "egents" to their career fields,
critical thinkers who open up avenues of creativity. Ulmer contends that
“problem solving in a career domain is guided by one’s experience with
problems in the other institutions of identity construction such as family,
Entertainment, and Community History" (xiii). So, the more one knows about
how you are creative, the more you can contribute to your career field.
Ulmer suggests also that “memories gather around problems, and our premise
is that problem solving in your career discipline and in society at large
(public policy) revolves around the specific experience of problems and
their solutions across the areas of your experience” (94).
The EmerAgency is also “a new approach to community problem
solving and public policy formation” (174) which seeks to intervene in
the various crises/predicaments in society, to extend art and poetic imaging “into a general practice of language, used by
all citizens for quotidian, personal and specialized thought and expression” (47). The wide sites perform
humanist/peace making duty when they are archived in a "curated" Web site
or Web ring that brings together course ezines from different semesters
and, conceivably, from across the country.
The concept of EmerAgency really explodes the binary so
deeply ingrained in students between objective and expressive writing.
Writing that is about the world in a serious, objective way and writing
that emotes and opines and does so from a (biased) point of view and without
real consequence for the world unless of course the person opining has
money or political power and can wield this to achieve his ideas.
Most students have a utilitarian view of language; the only connection
between language and the structures of power and privilege in society is
that sometimes people who have power use language to extend their power
by "spinning" events/situations.
EmerAgency does not approach the world as an endless agon;
it organizes students writing so as to “use the Internet as an invention
bank, using the database and search capability of digital networking to
match wide images with problems confronting both specialized disciplinary
and public policy arenas” (18). To respond to the world’s patterns
of conflict, desire, aporia intelligently may mean more than researching
what other people have said and analyzing their use of evidence and inference.
Ulmer asks: "Might it not be possible to apply to new circumstances the
details of a solution arrived at in completely different circumstances?" (307)
I imagine that some students in advanced courses could
do this work of sorting/sifting ("matching") wide images to different problems
and making (traditional) proposal arguments addressed to people who have
the power to make changes in policy. Ulmer considers the EmerAgency the equivalent of Plato's
Academy or Aristotle's Lyceum (28-29).
