ABSTRACT
One of the first actions taken by the newly formed virtual consultancy known as the emerAgency was to invite proposals for the creation of a new dimension of memorial – an electronic monumentality – with responsibility for revising and registering the borders and boundary areas of American National Identity. The question is: what is inside, and what is outside (of anything)? The purpose is a recalibration of this kind of distinction at every level of being, beginning with logical, psychological, ethical, and political categories. Mourning is as important to national as to individual identity, with the me-morial constituting a specifically electronic monumentality, creating a circuit, like that of the triode tube, between the private and public dimensions. A basic analogy guiding the project is the figure of a symptom as a ‘monument’ marking the site of a repressed trauma. The superego too has been characterized as an internal monument. An image of how an individual identity comes into formation around certain paradigmatic experiences may be found in the way tourist sites are created through a process of ‘site sacralization’.5 A me-morial is to the information highway what a tourist attraction is to the interstate highway system.
