The PreText Conversations held a Re/In/View with Greg Ulmer about his Heuretics: The Logic of Invention during September, October, and November of 1994. [Sections of this log have been edited out. The individual responses have not be edited.]
#### REINVW ANNOUNCEMENT ####
_Heuretics: The Logic of Invention_. Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. (in pb. it is $13.95.)
In preparing for the re/inter/view, you might want also
to re/read Ulmer's _Applied Grammatology_ (1985) and
his _Teletheory_ (1989).
He has suggested that we also read his article "Metaphoric
Rocks," for it puts forth his "attempts to apply ... performance
strategies to research."
I previously sent this article as a file on this sublist. You can
either retrieve the article from the archives or send me a note
and I will send the file of the article to you. (The former would
give you a sense of how we previously conducted a reinvw;
the latter would save you time and be more direct.)
[CUT]
Along the lines of autobiography, which we have been dis-
cussing on PTISSUES, Greg has suggested that we might be
interested in an interview of his: "The Making of 'Derrida
at the Little Big Horn.' " _Strategies_ vol. 2 (1989): 9-23.
________________
**formatting** for REINVW
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They are rather simple.
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REINVW
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---------------------------
As I have read the book and your explanation of CATTt,
it appears to me that your procedure is situated somewhere
in between, that it might function as a possible bridge
between the two (be they analogically modernism [a nostalgia
for what was] and postmodernism [a desire for what will have
been]), etc....
[Or something like this, but the reflection could be much
longer, e.g., defining the difference between heuristic and
aleatory, at least, as you and your discipline might under-
stand them.]
Please put your *full name* at the end of your post.
If a question grows out of this question--is definitely
related to it--then, include it in this post. If not, then,
please send it in as a separate topic and question with
a reflection.
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The formatting is not set in stone, but we would
appreciate your following it. Also, we are open to changing
the formatting as we go along. If any of you have suggestions,
we would appreciate hearing from you.
Previously, we asked numerous questions and had a discussion
among ourselves ... and then invited
the author to respond. This did not work well. This time,
we will ask questions and have Greg think about them in
his own time and then respond as he wishes.
WHEN WE ARE READY TO START THE REINVW, WE,
OF COURSE, WILL MAKE AN ANNOUNCEMENT. UNTIL
THEN, ENJOY THE REST OF YOUR SUMMER!
--victor j. vitanza (moderator)
=============================================
In preparation for the PTc channel's Re/Inter/View with Greg Ulmer
later this month (or early next), I provide some excerpts from his
earlier work that are pretext to the book we are presently reading,
his Heuretics.
The excerpts provide introduction to both Ulmer's method and
"himself," as you will see. The introduction to the method
will be contained in three or four posts over the next few days
and, if all goes well, his "cunductive vitae" will follow in
another series of posts.
You may remember Greg proposed this strategy as an intro to
his work when we asked for his autobiography for the lists'
collection. It is customary on the PTc channel for members
to provide introductory autobiographies to encourage protocals
of concurrence. Clearly, for a decade or so, Ulmer has been
working to recast the genre of autobiography in the direction
that the lists' abios were channeled after much discussion
this spring.
The lists' collection of autobios can be gained from
the Pretext list logs. We are working on a separate
storage system for those abios but that file storage
is still some time in the future.
Finally, courteous welcome to the many new PTc subscribers.
If you need help subscribing to the sublists let me know
at the list address PRETEXT@miavx1 but remember all correspondence
to the listserver goes to the particular list name @miamiu,
for example Rhetchat@miamiu.
Enjoy and thanks!
Jim McFadden
_____
EXCERPTS
Conduction
1. The Voice of the Code
I am conducting an experiment defined orginally by Hayden White
to invent a new historiography. I have chosen to make this an
historiography of learning, called "mystory." An experiment in
mystoriography derives its guidelines from the sciences and arts
of our time, just as 'history' was invented based on the
naturalistic tenets of nineteenth-century science and art. In the
previous chapter we revieved the history of method and a
description of a mode of thought emerging or reemerging in our
time. Especially important for mystory is the insight into the
circulation through the oral and literate registers of sense that
occurs in the social and psychological development of inventions,
epitomized by Freud's invention of psychoanalysis, but equally
manifested in the natural sciences. This new style of thought,
called "oralysis," is writable in video, in the same way that
analysis is writable in alphabic literacy.
I do not want to move too quickly to a conclusion, nor will
turning to the sample at the end stand in for the work of making
the genre in general. Such is the pleasure of theory,
fortunately, since so far we have only seen the features of
electronic thinking from the outside, in terms of the arguments
justifying the existence of teletheory. The next step is to
specifically work out the features of the cognition that reasons
oralitically. The assumptions directing this question, following
the problematic of the apparatus, is that the age of television
is emerging in pieces, separated and scaterred through the
domains of technology, ideology, and institutional practices
specifically in video, psychoanalysis, and postmodernist art and
theory. The aim of teletheory is to assist this process, looking
for leverage in the area closest to hand--academic discourse.
There is no need to assume that I already know how to tell a
life story.
--Greg Ulmer
===========================================
(continued)
Whatever the fit between psychoanalysis and its object of study might
be, in teletheory the descriptions of primary-process discourse serve as
models for the "logic" suited to the video medium.
* * *
The issue of collective sanity and intelligence (the American mind),
continuing the split-brain analogy, according to teletheory, is that
television is not the cause but the cure for our half-wittedness, a condition
created by the dominance of analytical science. The privileging of the kind of
inteligence identified as "left brain" in our schooling and civilization had
to do, as we have seen, with the affinity of alphabetic literacy with critical
thinking. Alphabetic technology allowed ordinary people, by means of
schooling, to acquire and practice analytic reasoning "artificially," in the
mode of remembrance and routinization, if not in the style of living memory
necessarily. Alphabetic writing, whose dissemination required the existence of
schools, democratized, rendered teachable and available, analytical reason.
Perhaps this democratization is part of what Plato feared, given his conserva-
tive politics, when he expressed his opposition to writing. It was one thing
for a "natural" genius like Socrates to possess the powers of logic, even if
he was the son of a stonemason and a midwife. But what would happen to society
if the power of argument became available to the common man generally? Such a
dissemination would not be without political consequences.
Here we encounter a central thesis of teletheory, which
brings together under one heading the description of three
distinct processes--"primal" thinking (in all its variations),
creative invention, and videography. The thesis is that the new
electronic technologies relate to euretics the way alphabetic
literacy relates to analytic thinking. Just as the features of
alphabetic writing noted by Goody associated with the list,
table, and formula provided the prosthesis of analysis, so is the
prosthesis of invention available in video. The implication, and
this is a premise, is that video permits the institutional
dissemination of inventive thinking--its artificial simulation as
a routine conduct by ordinary students. Until now we culd not
institutionalize invention in the way that we have
institutionalized analysis, because we simply lacked the
prosthesis needed to democratize it. Certainly invention existed
in a wild state, in individual instances, and was practiced
within the rhetoric of method. The premise is that a collective,
artifical intelligence of the sort institutionalized as schooling
requires, just as much as does the individual mind, the
cooperative integration of the two modes of processing. We have a
better chance of producing a sane, intelligent civilization if we
reintegrate analysis with patterning rather than if we
"eliminate" (disavow) the technology and institution that have
made it possible to achieve a cognitively balanced culture.
Teletheory seeks the genre that might be the bridge capable of
conducting thought between the two technologies. What is at
stake, then, involves not just the introduction of video into the
classroom, but the formulation and practice of conduction, an
electronic mode of reasoning that is already available, and
necessary for using the full potential of our emerging apparatus.
By way of transition, let me say one more thing about
"vita"--the interdependence of "programming" in conduction. A
comparison of the two kinds of "program" indicate that AI is
becoming more and more like TV. The programmers have abandoned
their early efforts to simulate an abstract, logical description
of intelligence (modeled on an analysis of reason, tree diagrams,
and other book influences). In the alphabetic model, "concept" is
understood as a classification system in which knowledge is
organized in rigorous categories of shared properties. More
recent efforts in Al programming, however, have been based on
something that resembles an oral order
of knowledge, in which quotidian native routines are organized by
means of episodes and schemas. Roger Schank and Robert Abelson,
for example, designed a "restaurant script" that dealt with
intelligence not in terms of class-inclusion systems but by units
of an event sequence--actions and changes of state, expectations
and regularities that are episodic rather than "logical." If a
computer is to interact with people--and this is the measure of
its intelligence, just as the measure of any tool is its human
fit--it must first simulate the repertoire of stories by which
humans organize experience. How to negotiate a restaurant: enter;
be seated; menu; order; eat; pay; leave. The difference between
Al and the TV script--say a situation comedy--is that the AI
programmer wants the routine to match the norm, to be typical and
to pass unnoticed (if it is being tested by a native human),
whereas the TV program foregrounds the deviation, the error, the
mess of everything going wrong in the restaurant, as in the Monty
Python skit in which the customer's benign observation of a dirty
fork escalates into, yes, a massacre. We are prepared to
recognize now that these two versions of the story are two sides
of the same operation--logic and joke--and that it is difficult to
find one's way without the constant interplay between the two.
The computer, we might say, has its memory filled with
stories that aren't worth telling. I went to the restaurant, ate,
and left. So what?, we want to know, and yet that things normally
go right is the ground of attending to what happens when they go
wrong. Teletheory takes its point of departure from this
burgeoning of anecdotal material in modern texts, in relation to
the VITA. As Andrew Tolson argues, "an anecdotal effect might, to
some extent, be built into the structure of TV's discursive
regime: both within particular program formats and in terms of
the way many TV narratives are organized. Finally, this
possibility, that television's regime is anecdotal, might account
for some of its problematic pleasures" (Tolson, 24). Pursuing his
thesis that the anecdotal structure is specific to television,
Tolson finds that news shows, and by extension all uses of
interviewing and the like in documentaries--the format of
truth--fall within the anecdotal framing.
=============================================
(continued)
What are the consequences of differance at the more elaborated level of
discourse and logic? That is one of the motivating questions of teletheory.
For now I must confine the answer to the question of logic, in which
a new term is needed to replace induction, deduction, and even abduction,
in order to identify the electronic properties of differantial reasoning.
The term is conduction.... How should we conduct ourselves in the age of
television? Electronically. How might we keep current in education?
Electronically. ... Reasoning by conduction involves, then, the flow
of energy through a circuit.
* * *
For now we should confine ourselves to the short-circuiting of this flow,
which gives us a new definition of truth as "a relationship of conduction
between disparate fields fields of information," as illustrated here in the
conduction between the vocabulary of electricity and that of logic.
* * *
This context clarifies an important point: that electronic
thinking does not abandon, exclude, or replace analytical thinking;
it puts it in its place in a larger system of reasoning (63+).
===============================================
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 1994 18:53:00 -0400
(continued)
It is now possible to begin to formulate the principles of
the genre which it is the purpose of teletheory to invent. The
emergence of a regionalized epistemology, the dysfunctioning of
the grand explicating metanarratives, and the effectiveness of
feminist appeals to personal experience are among the trends
encouraging the development of mystory--a term designating the
nexus of history, politics, language, thought, and technology in
the last decade of this millenium.
A. History. In her contribution to the authoritative (for an
earlier generation) Relations of Literary study, the late Rosalie
Colie explained the difference between history and mystory:
B. Herstory. The progress from history to mystory is a
classic example of the growth of language, of word formation by a
certain mimesis. Feminism in any case, makes mystory possible, and
shows how to include race, class, region, nation in the formula
along with gender and sex, while also manifesting the very limited
ability of the received genres of criticism to represent alternative
styles of thinking.
* * *
Feminist critiques of method--especially those exploring the
slogan "the personal is political" and the emotional foundations
of reasoning--are an important model for locating the precise
place of mystory as a genre of learning.
What kind of writing can replace the treatise which held the
subject apart from the object of study? The search for a
feminine aesthetic contributes to the intelligibility of an
alternative, to the invention of a mode of knowing and
representation knowledge that is not organized in terms of an
object presented to a subject positioned as the observer of
spectacle.
* * *
The problematic relationship between ideology and critique
concerns the place of the individual in collective history, to
which the feminists have contributed by insisting on the value of
oral history and popular autiobiography.
* * *
The legitimation of the personal and the popular as knowledge
within the doamin of historiography is an important precedent
for mystory, making available experience as an alternative to the
rule of method.
C. Mystery. The function of narrative in historiography is a
major question for mystory, which seeks an alternative to the
manipulation of enigma and delay, and the exploitation of
identification and recognition, that informs realistic narrative
in fiction and history alike in the paradigm of referentiality.
Mystory continues to include narrative knowledge, but prefers to
work with form as the anecdote and joke in order to expose the
way the grand metanarratives position the subject in a
particular ideology. The anecdote is a more approporiate form
in which to investigate the future of academic discourse, about
which there can be no authoritative account (mystory is not
science).
To write a mystory about the future of theory is not to
create an expectation of resolution, the illusion of an
explanation; not to predict, assert, or attack, neither in the
tone of science nor manifesto. Rather, the mystorical voice
derives from Freud's discoveries. Post-Freudian, it is less a
matter of learning a secret and more an effort to think outside
living memory, with the artificial or "dead" part of memory. The
experiment exploits the emerging middle voices in Western
languages.
D. My Story. ...
Positioning oneself thus in a tradition suggests a rationale
for the ghosteffect, as an alternative to the monumentality of
academic mourning. In the pagan version, "every narrator presents
himself as having first been a narratee: not as autonomous, then,
but, on the contrary, heteronomous" (Lyotard, 1985: 32). The
speaker is bound to retell the story heard, but not to the one
from whom it was received. "I am obligated in the way of a relay
that may not keep its charge but must pass it on" (35). This is
the charge of mystory, reasoning in the mode of conduction.
Equally important is Lyotard's clarification of the relation
to time reflected in the Cashinahua "tradition." It is not a
relation of preservation that rejects the new, he notes. "The
relevant feature is not faithfulness: it is not because one has
preserved the story well that one is a good narrator, at least as
far as profane narratives are concerned. On the contrary, it is
because one 'hams' it up, because one invents, because one
inserts novel episodes that stand out as motifs against the
narrative plot line, which, for its part, remains stable, that
one is successful." Like the pagan story teller, people in our
culture, according to Lyotard, "get into language not by speaking
it but by hearing it. And what they hear as children is stories,
and first of all their own story, because they are named in it.
This implies the very opposite of autonomy: heteronomy" (35). The
middle voice is heteronomic, in which the teller designates him
or herself as someone narrated by the social body and in which
one has a place of one's own--a proper name. Such is the discourse
of mystory. The student and teacher are the object of the
explanation, engaging their own stories in the information set
forth as scholarship.
E. Envois: Mystory includes, then, history, herstory,
maistrie, mystery, my story, paganism. Roland Barthes's
novelesque of the intellect may be recognizable in the conceptual
neologism elaborated here "concepts that come to constitute
allegories, a second language, whose abstraction is diverted to
fictive ends" (Barthes, 1 977a: 124). The embedding of the
narrator within the narrative, such that the sender always speaks
from the position of the receiver of the story for which one
serves as a relay, may be associated with the "scene of writing"
described by Derrida in terms of the envois (see The Post Card).
Derrida has investigated the peculiar temporality of theory,
its already-not-yet structure, which, liberated from the
metaphysics of teleology, may tell us something about the
temporality of mystory. To understand the operation of theory we
must remember, Derrida advises, that (for example) Freud, "the
first and thus the only one to have undertaken, if not defined,
self analysis, did not himself know what it was" (Derrida, 1978a:
121). The question Derrida poses with respect to Freud's
example--a founding question of mystory--is: "how can an
auto-biographical writing, in the abyss of an unterminated
self-analysis, give its birth to a world institution?" (121).
I want to take note of two aspects of this question. First,
part of Freud's lesson for the genre of theory concerns the time
of understanding for the writer or teacher myself. Theory as
mystory is written with the apostrophe of self-address inherited
from the essay tradition. A mystorical essay is not scholarship,
not the communication of a prior sense, but the discovery of a
direction by means of writing. It includes an assertion of
comprehension that has more in common with the manifesto than
with the essay.
* * *
The envois, in other words, concerns the invention of a theory
and its institutionalization. Freud sends off a mystory couched
as a contract and it comes back to him, to his name and credit, a
science (or at least a discursive formation). This sending occurs
in the middle voice (Freud is writing to himself via the
apparatus) and in the register of the Symbolic code (which
organizes discourse through the contracts governing exchange).
Teletheory seeks a pedagogy that positions the student and
teacher in the relationship to knowledge that Freud had to
psychoanalysis. Mystory, that is, intervenes on the side of
discovery, within the problematic of the subject of knowledge.
I am telling not only how to make a mystory, but why I want
to make one. I do not expect to be able to persuade anyone by means
of argument that conduction is an effective inventio, but it is
important to not that this argumnet itself is constructed
conductively, as well as inductively and deductively (as is
usually the case in descriptions of genre).
(82-89)
==============================================
(continued) long post.
The next two posts in this series will be Ulmer's
"Derrida at the Little Bighorn: A Fragment"
Each post runs 500+ lines. If such long posts fill
your filespace and you have to delete them but want
them again when you have room, please let me know
and I can repost to you.
Jim McFadden
Assignment Sheet: Class Project
---------------------------------
Does anyone want to make a mystory? Why not give this assignment
to a class, or try it myself as an experiment (since only the
genre, but not its exemplars, are transferable).
1) vita minor: a resume including entries representing
the sources of your "images of wide scope" in your personal
and community background. The vita minor lists those aspects
of your experience that tend to be excluded from the
conventional resume presented to prospective employers or
granting agencies.
2) puncepts: sets of the fragments collected on the
basis of a single shared feature.
In both orders the disciplinary discourse may be drawn from
your major, or from a discipline in which you have a
potential career interest. You may substitute for, or
intermix with, this disciplinary discourse fragments on the
topic of a major catastrophe (which may or may not be the
catastrophes of Auschwitz or Hiroshima). If you are making
the mystory not simply to represent to yourself the
generalization of your signature into an inventio, but to
discover new points of entry into a specific problem,
replace the catastrophic materials with information on that
problem. The same format may be used to translate between
expert and popular discourses."
It is worth noting that the public mind, or popular culture
expressed in the media of everyday life, seems to produce
mythology in a similar kind of compilation process, working with
historical events the way an editor works with old newsreels.
One rationale for writing in this manipulative way,
selecting and combining a montage text out of the archive of
personal, popular, and specialized material, is that in the age
of Artificial Intelligence, we are learning the lesson of the
integration of artificial and iiving memory. The technology of
print and all its apparatus"the archive of libraries, journalism,
the entire great machine of information storage and retrieval"is
a prosthesis for the living mind of the student. There are
several ways to relate to this apparatus, but the way promoted in
teletheory is this operation of taking what is to be found there
and using it again in order not to repeat the old work but to
make another one that is at least a mystory.
What especially recommends compilation scripting as a
practice for academic writing is its simplicity of execution. The
historiographical rationale comes from Benjamin: "To write
history therefore means to quote history. But the concept of
quotation implies that any given historical object must be ripped
out of its context" (Benjamin, 1983: 24). The research will be
guided by the principles of mystory. Once the inventory is
brought together, the arrangement follows (writing as selection
and combination), including images as well as words. The
resulting composition may or may not be of interest to an
audience; may be more or less aesthetically or argumentatively
coherent. Since mystory is not a text of justification, but of
discovery, such judgments are secondary to its primary purpose,
which is to help the composer articulate the ground of invention.
In this discourse there is a deliberate conflation of the senses
of invention, compressing the rhetorical notion of inventio
together with the scientific sense of original innovation. In the
age of mechanical reproduction, in any case, it turns out that
exact repetition generates complete difference. The first reader
of a mystory--the primary addresse--is the writer. The desired
effect is surprise, as if one could tell a joke to oneself for
the first time, which is to say that there is no originary time
for the mystory. Or its temporality is that of the confluence of
the social and psychological imaginaries. One's surprise at the
association, produced by the juxtapositions marks the operations
of bliss-sense. The third party of this joke, exposing one's
image-repertoire, is myself. I am the target of the aggressive
wit that replaces the monumental melancholy associated with the
pedagogy of specialized high culture.
The following example, then is included to demonstrate one
approach to a mystorical compilation. It is valuable only to the
extent that it encourages others to turn to their own archives"as
a relay and not as a model. (from Teletheory 209-211)
____
My 111 students will be encouraged to create two vita's this term,
one the traditional death-mask form and this other. I'll let
you know how it goes if you are interested.
Jim McF
============================================
File trait: Some quotation marks here may be dashes in the original.
I is sometimes read for J & l, and vice versa.
Sorry, I could not edit each instance out.
jmcf
______
Gregory Ulmer
______
1 Part One: Vita Minor: "Gregory L. Ulmer"
Languages
French.
CUSTER'S FRENCH [Map of "Custer's Hill," site of the Last Stand, showing
the deployment of the Companies that fell with Custer"C (T. Custer), E
(Smith), F (Yates), I (Keogh), L (Calhoun)l
He wrote on the hillside in French, with the letters of his Companies: ce fil,
"this yarn." Fil gives "thread, wire, yarn, edge, grain, vein (in stones
etc.); (fig.) clue, thread (of a plot etc.); nexus, thread (of an argument
etc.).
Anything else?
ficel. We could take this as the root of ficeler, "to bind or tie up
with string? Or as a pun on ficelle (he only had so many Companies to work
with) or he changed its sex: "string; (fig.) dodge; (Theat.) stage-trick;
(Mil. slang) stripe. Montrer la ficelle, to betray the secret motive;
connaitre les ficelles, to be up to all the tricks (of the trade), to know the
ropes."a. 11 est ficelle, he's a trickster."
He could have read Henry James, you know, the prefaces to the novels, in
which he says, "Half the dramatist's art, as we well know--since if we don't
it's not the fault of the proofs that lie scattered about us--is in the use of
ficelles; by which I mean in a deep dissimulation of his dependence on them.
Waymarsh only to a slighter degree belongs, in the whole business, less to my
subject than to my treatment of it; the interesting proof, in these
connexions, being that one has but to take one's subject for the stuff of
drama to interweave with enthusiasm as many Gostreys as need be" (James).
No, he couldn't have. You have your dates wrong.
214 / ~Derrida at the Little Bighorn"
And le fic?
"Fig'? Could be a macaronic code for "figurative." Or for the insult,
"to give someone the fig' (thrusting the thumb between two fingers, or into
the mouth) meaning "you aren't worth a fig." But in French they use dalle (a
worthless bit of floor tiling, a small coin) rather than fic. The gesture
means
"I spit on you."
What about ce fils? He didn't have an "s," but he was known as the "Boy
General," and Whittaker mythologized him as the All-American Boy. Or fille?
The ambiguity of his gender image is often noted, with the long yellow hair?
Did Custer speak French?
He found gold on "French Creek" while making an armed reconnaissance of
the Black Hills, which led to the treaty violations and the last Sioux war.
Maybe it wasn't Custer who was writing, but Sitting Bull? Didn't he go
to France with Buffalo Bill?
FORT LINCOLN. FORT KEOGH. FORT DA
This good little boy had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any
small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into
a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and
picking them up was often quite a business. As he did this he gave vent
to a loud, long-drawn-out "o-o-o-o,"
"Derrida at the Little Bighorn" / 215
accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother
and the writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this
was not a mere interjection but represented the German word "fort"
I"gone"l. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use
he made of any of his toys was to play "gone" with them. The child had a
wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it. What he did was to
hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge
of his curtained out, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time
uttering his expressive "o-o-o-o." He then pulled the reel out of the
cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful "da"
l"there"l. This, then, was the complete game"disappearance and return.
The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to
the child's great cultural achievement"the instinctual renunciation
which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting.
(freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle)
"The formation of the I is symbolized in dreams by a fortress, or a
stadium." {Lacan. 1 977)
Education
CUSTER COUNTY HIGH SCHOOL, MILES CITY, MONTANA, 1962. [MAP: Custer's
route from Fort Abraham Lincoln at Bismarck to the site of the battle.
Also showing the convergence on the Little Bighorn from the south
(Crook) and west (Gibbon)1
My father grew up in Bismarck, and we lived in Mandan, across the river,
until I was five, when we moved to Miles City. There is a symmetry in time and
space that I first noticed when I returned home for my father's memorial
service. He died on May 17, the same day Custer, in Terry's column, started
his march in 1876. The service was delayed (autopsy, cremation, and so forth)
until nearly the day of the Last Stand (June 25). In thinking about that
coincidence it occurred to me that the movement of our family replicated
Custer's route, in that Judy (my sister) after she got married lived in Lodge
Grass for about five years (one of the translations of the Indian name for
"Little Bighorn," the other being "Greasy Grass"), near the site of the
battle. The new Chair of my Department is a Gibbon specialist.
Miles City
Work on the railroad in the Yellowstone Valley in 1872 had to be stopped
because of the Sioux and Cheyennes. A surveying party was sent out the next
year with a strong military escort, including part of the Seventh Cavalry.
"While Custer's men were in the vicinity of Lock Bluff, a few miles above the
present location of Miles City, Rain-in-the-Face killed the veterinary surgeon
and the regimental sutler, thus beginning an incident which lasted
216 / "Derrida at the Little Bighorn"
three years and ended in a myth which has been perpetuated to the present day"
(Brown and Felton, The Frontier Years).
What was the myth?
Custer sent his brother Tom to arrest Rain-in-the-Face for the killings,
Rain swore revenge on the Custer brothers for this, and he is said to have
been the one who cut out Tom's heart at the Last Stand.
The response to Custer's defeat was a rapid military build-up in the
region, fueled by a national passion for revenge. Fort Keogh, named after the
owner of the horse that survived the massacre, was established in the fall of
1876, with Nelson Miles in command.
Milestown was born in the fall of 1876 when Colonel Miles, becoming
tired of having the coffee-doolers loafing at the Tongue River
Cantonment, had a stake set about two miles east of the post, and
ordered all the hangers-on to move to the other side of the marker. By
evening on the day Miles had issued his ultimatum, these civilians had a
few tents set up and two saloons and a gambling house in operation. This
infant village was a vigorous, lusty, man's town which provided its
customers with alcohol, the necessities to support life on the frontier,
and women. (Brown and Felton, The Frontier Years)
When Brown and Felton, the biographers of L.A. Huffman, the "photogra-
pher of the plains" whose home and base of operations was Milestown during the
frontier years, tried to imagine what Huffman might think about in recalling
his own life story, one of their suggestions was, "the Seventh Cavalry on
their way to that sagebrush-covered ridge along the Little Bighorn River from
which almost half of them never returned."
[Photograph, Huffman collection, "First Monument. Custer Battlefield"l
"Hell with the fires out." (General Sully's description of the
badlands).
Like Huffman, my father was a County Commissioner. One of their responsi-
bilities was to keep the roads clear and in good repair. It being Custer
County, the County vehicles all had this portrait of Custer on the door, in
Romantic style, yellow hair and white hat, red scarf and shoulders of the
buckskin jacket. It was the Errol Flynn look. He would drive one of these
pickups out to check on the roads.
[Photograph, still, Errol Flynn as Custer.
Still: Ronald Reagan as a young Custer (Santa Fe Trail, 1940).
Painting: "Custer's Last Stand"l
Most Americans know Custer and his Last Stand through the F. Otto
Becker depiction than through any other medium. Anheuser-Busch has
produced nearly
"Derrida at the Little Bighorn" / 217
one million copies of Becker's work, a number that rivals the Mona Lisa
or the Last Supper. (Rosenberg)
With the exception of Stuart's Washington, no American picture has
been reproduced more often. Millions of school children have gazed up at
Washington enduring the discomfort of wooden teeth while millions of
fathers have peered drunkenly at the other George battling a cloud of
Sioux. (Connell)
B.A. UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA, MISSOULA, 1967.
ENGLISH AND HISTORY.
When I arrived in Missoula in 1941, a new Assistant Professor in the
English Department at the University of Montana, I was met unexpectedly
by the Montana Face. What I had been expecting I do not clearly know;
zest, I suppose, naivete, a ruddy and straightforward kind of
vigor"perhaps even honest brutality. What I found seemed, at first
glance, reticent, sullen, weary"full of self-sufficient stupidity; a
little later it appeared simply inarticulate, with all the dumb pathos
of what cannot declare itself: a face developed not for sociability or
feeling, but for facing into the weather. I felt a kind of innocence
behind it, but an innocence difficult to distinguish from simple
ignorance. In a way there was something heartening in dealing with
people who had never seen, for instance, a Negro or a Jew or a Servant,
and were immune to all their bitter meanings; but the same people, I
knew, had never seen an art museum or a ballet or even a movie in any
language but their own, and the poverty of experience had left the
possibilities of the human face in them incompletely realized. (Fiedler,
Montana; Or the End of Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
I took a humanities class with Leslie Fiedler near the end of his tenure
at Nontana. We learned about the Western tradition.
Ph.D., BROWN UNIVERSITY, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, 1972.
DISSERTATION: The Rousseau Tradition.
Each of us is fashioned by three kinds of teachers. When their lessons
are at variance the pupil is badly educated, and is never at peace with
himself. Of these three educations the one due to nature is independent
of us, and the one from things only depends on us to a limited extent.
The education that comes from men is the only one within our control,
and even that is doubtful. May I set forth at this point the most
important and the most useful rule in all education? It is not to save
time but to waste it. It follows from this that the first education
should be purely negative. It consists not in teaching virtue and truth,
but in preserving the heart from vice and the mind from error. Do the
opposite of what is usually done and you will almost always be right.
(Rousseau, Emile)
"Derrida at the Little Bighorn" / 219
I bought a copy of Derrida's De la grammatologie in 1970, thinking it was a
book about Rousseau.
The first year we collect images and sounds and experiment. Return to
zero. (Jean-Luc Godard, Le Gai Savoir [1968], a remake of Emile)
Travel
Vacation: Custer Battlefield National Monument, 1953.
[Photograph: "Custer Hill," showing the marble markers or headstones
indicating the location where bodies were found after the battle]
Today marble markers resembling tombstones dot the landscape where
Custer and his men died. The stones, set in 1890, stand up in the
grasses and sage like soldiers frozen in battle. They more than anything
else fix in the imagination of visitors visions of the death struggle.
Each says in a bold inscription that a soldier or a civilian fell there
on a fateful day in June, 1876. (Scott and Fox, Archeological Insights
into The Custer Battle)
Then out of the dust came the soldiers on their big horses. They looked
big and strong and tall and they were all shooting. Then another great
cry went up out in the dust: "Crazy Horse is coming! Crazy Horse is
coming!" Off toward the west and north they were yelling "Hoka Hey!"
like a big wind roaring, and making the tremolo; and you could hear
eagle bone whistles screaming. The valley went dark with dust and smoke,
and there were only shadows and a big noise of many cries and hoofs and
guns. There was a soldier on the ground and he was still kicking. A
Lakota rode up and said to me: "Boy, get off and scalp him." I got off
and started to do it. He had short hair and my knife was not very sharp.
He ground his teeth. Then I shot him in the forehead and got his scalp.
I thought I would show my mother my scalp, so I rode over toward the
hill where there was a crowd of women and children. There were so many
of us that I think we did not need guns. lust the hoofs would have been
enough. Many of our men were killed and wounded. They shot each other in
the dust. I did not see Pahuska, and I think nobody knew which one he
was. (Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks)
There does seem to have been a regimental dog alive on the field
after the battle. (Connell)
220 / "Derrida at the Little Bighorn"
Research Interests
COMMUNICATIONS STUDIES
1. Messages
THE SHELL AND THE COLONEL
This is why psychoanalysis, as a result of the treatment, uses
discourses to multiply instances of auto-affection and prises de
conscience, providing proofs to the listener that they are dependent
upon a beyond that Freud named the Kernel of Being: the Unconscious.
(Abraham, "The Shell and the Kernel")
Freud's anasemic procedure creates, thanks to the Somatic-Psychic, the
symbol of the messenger and further on we will understand how it serves
to reveal the symbolic character of the message itself. By way of its
semantic structure, the concept of the message is a symbol insofar as it
makes allusion to the unknowable by means of an unknown, while only the
relation of the terms is given. What is the precise content of this
symbol of the messenger, of the representative, that we have just been
considering? It is called either instinct or Drive with its cortege of
affects, representations, or even fantasies. Just as drives translate
organic demands into the language of the Unconscious, so does the latter
utilize the vehicle of the affect or the fantasy in order to move into
the Conscious. Thus a passage is enacted each time by appropriate
emissaries from a Kernel to its Periphery. Now, would there be messages
going in the opposite direction, from the Envelope to the Kernel? This
should be the case of memory traces in particular. (Abraham)
Custer's rank at the time of his death was Lieutenant Colonel.
One of the fantasies to emerge from the battle was Custer's alleged call
for help. Sergeant Butler, whose body was found well west of the field,
was one of the many thought to have been the last man to die, though he
is better known as the battalion's messenger sent with a desperate
S.O.S. to Reno and Benteen. (Rosenberg, Custer and the Epic of Defeat)
Marker 174 stands near the east boundary fence of the monument, and it
is two ravines east of the markers which denote where Captain Keogh and
his men fell. A boot nail, three spent .45/55 carbine cartridge cases, a
Colt cartridge, a Colt bullet, and a deformed .50170 bullet were found
around the marker. All three carbine cases were fired from the same
weapon. These data suggest that the trooper who fell at Marker 174 was
trying to escape the melee of the battle. Perhaps he was one of the last
survivors, or perhaps he had feigned death among the dead around Keogh
and was trying to get away. Perhaps he was a last messenger. As the man
dashed across the ravines and up the final side slope, he drew fire from
the Indians. He returned fire with his carbine, perhaps his last three
rounds, and then fired with his Colt revolver just as he was hit by an
Indian bullet. His Colt round struck the ground near where he fell. The
bullet that may
"Derrida at the Little Bighorn" / 221
have struck him was a .50/70 bullet of the type loaded by the army for
its Model 1868 and 1870 Springfield rifles. Surplus ammunition did the
soldier in. (Scott and Fox)
Thus mutilation of the sexual organs does not entail the elimination of
the homologous nucleic function and vice versa, anasemic castration does
not imply the excision of the genitals. It is by virtue of this
correspondence between the Envelope and the Kernel that Freud localized
the source of sexual drives in the somatic zones, meaning thereby the
Erogenous Zones, with capitals, that is, originating in the Colonel.
(Abraham)
Godfry described his first visit to the Custer battlefield. He
seems to have been startled by the colors: "The marble white bodies, the
somber brown of the dead horses, tufts of reddish brown grass on the
almost ashy white soil." He observed that from a distance the stripped
men resembled white boulders. More than two hundred bodies and about
seventy animal carcasses had been exposed to the June sun for two or
three days when burial parties went to work.
Mutilations.
Eyes torn out and laid on the rocks. Noses cut off. Ears cut off.
Chins hewn off. Teeth chopped out. Joints of fingers cut off. Brains
taken out and placed on rocks, with members of the body. Entrails taken
out and exposed. Hands cut off. Feet cut off. Arms taken out from
socket. Private parts severed. (Connell)
A tribe signed the bodies of its victims with a wound. A cut
throat, for example, was the Sioux signature. (Connell)
Neither The Colonel nor Keogh were mutilated.
Repressed, the trace continues nonetheless to act in relation to the
unconscious Colonel, but henceforth obeys its laws exclusively"both to
attract into its orbit the other traces that concern it and to erupt
into Consciousness as the return of the repressed. (Abraham)
New York Herald, July 23, 1876. "A VOICE FROM THE TOMB"
(headline). (Letter written by Custer just before the regiment
left on its march up the Rosebud June 22).
My last letter was sent from the mouth of Powder River and described our
march from the Little Missouri. I fear it may not have reached its
destination, or if it did it was in such a condition as to be illegible
owing to a sad accident which befell our mail party. Just as the
sergeant with the mail bag on his arm stepped aboard the small boat and
was about to push off the boat overturned, throwing all hands into the
water. The sergeant at once disappeared below the surface and was never
afterward seen. When the sergeant disappeared in the water the mail sack
went with him, but fortunately floated between the steamer and the
shore, before sinking below the surface. By means of boat hooks the bag
and its contents were
222 / "Derrida at the Little Bighorn"
recovered, but not until they had been under water several minutes. When
opened on shore many of the letters were found opened by the influence
of the water, and all the stamps displaced .... (Custer, in Graham. ed.,
The Custer Myth)
Who was the one, besides the biographer, Whittaker, who contributed most to
the creation of the Custer myth?
It was Bennett, editor of the New York Herald.
You don't mean William Bennett, Secretary of Education under Reagan? Of
course not. I mean James Gordon Bennett.
Custer was the perfect hero and spokesman for Bennett's views. The death
of such a hero did not suggest forgiveness of enemies; rather it implied
the need for revenge. The Herald 's own exterminationist rhetoric now
escalated and began to ramify and reach out to include social conflicts
other than the Indian war. The metaphorical connections thus developed
are completely interrelated with each other; and all are recurrently
associated with the stories that now centered particularly on the
personality and heroic fable of Custer himself. It became the text for
yet another sermon on the character of savages and the best means for
governing them. Through the familiar devices of language- and
image-borrowing and the physical juxtaposition of articles and
editorials, the Custer-Sitting Bull material is related to the
grandscale war of races and religions then materializing in the Balkans;
to the continuing problems of "Red" agitation and violence among the
"laboring classes and dangerous classes" of the city; to the proposal to
build a Custer monument; and to the issues and personalities of the
upcoming presidential canvass. (Slotkin, The Fatal Environment)
2. Jokes
The most popular and enduring subject of Indian humor is, of
course, General Custer. There are probably more jokes about Custer and
the Indians than there were participants in the battle. All tribes, even
those thousands of miles from Montana, feel a sense of accomplishment
when thinking of Custer. Custer binds together implacable foes because
he represented the Ugly American of the last century and he got what was
coming to him. Some years ago we put out a bumper sticker which read
"Custer Died for Your Sins." Originally the Custer bumper sticker
referred to the Sioux Treaty of 1868 signed at Fort Laramie in which the
United States pledged to give free and undisturbed use of the lands
claimed by Red Cloud in return for peace. Under the covenants of the Old
Testament, breaking a covenant called for a blood sacrifice for
atonement. Custer was the blood sacrifice for the United States breaking
the Sioux treaty. That, at least originally, was the meaning of the
slogan. (Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins)
Tom Custer: "I don't think this attack was such a good idea."
George Custer: "So? Sioux me!"
"Derrida at the Little Bighorn" / 223
[GRAPH: "CUSP CATASTROPHE"]
As a part of mathematics, catastrophe theory is a theory about
singularities. When applied to scientific problems, therefore, it deals
with the properties of discontinuities directly, without reference to
any specific underlying mechanism. This makes it especially appropriate
for the study of systems whose inner workings are not known, and for
situations in which the only reliable observations are of the
discontinuities. (Saunders, An Introduction to Catastrophe Theory)
Why is Custer's Last Stand so funny?
The essence of humor is defined as expecting "A" and getting "B."
Custer's greatest fear was that the Indians would flee upon discovering his
approach, their general practice being to avoid direct confrontations. His
entire strategy was based on preventing the Indians from escaping.
Thus the cusp catastrophe combines the cognitive incongruity theory and the
various psychological theories of humor with the release theory of
laughter"all in one parsimonious model. An incongruity of a pair of
possible interpretations is of course necessary. This incongruity must,
however, be such that its resolution releases emotional energy (from
sexual anxieties, "sudden glory," playfulness, or whatever). Moreover,
the model is at least consistent with the derailment theory of humor,
since the second (hidden) meaning (x coordinate) often depends
critically on the context. (Paulos)
According to the Italian trumpeter Martini, who carried Custer's last message
to Benteen ("Come on. Big village. Be quick. Bring packs"), and who admit-
"Derrida at the Little Bighorn" / 225
tedly didn't understand English too well, Custer's plan was to sneak into the
village unnoticed
Grants
National Defense Education Act, Title IV, Brown University, 1967-1970.
The Space Age began on 4 October, 1957. On that date the Soviet Union
successfully placed Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite,
into orbit round the Earth. The 84-kilogram sphere, 58 centimeters in
diameter, travelled round the Earth in a period of 96 minutes, its
altitude ranging between 229 and 947 kilometres, and all the while its
battery-powered radio transmitter emitted the characteristic 'bleep,
bleep' signal so vividly imprinted on the minds of all who recall the
day the Space Age dawned. (Nicolson, Sputnik to Space Shuttle)
The American program to launch a satellite was called "Vanguard."
Teaching Interests Vanguard theory, arts, pedagogy.
[End Part 1]
================================================
(continued)
File Traits: As before.
If anyone is forced to delete these files for filespace and wants
a copy later please let me know at pretext@miavx1
Jim McFadden
________
Gregory Ulmer
Part Two: TV/AI
(whisper) What is a tv/ai? It's the same as a vita minor, except it uses
punceptual series.
Series "H"
EMPLOYMENT
STANDARD TRANSMISSION
Truck Driver, Miles City Sand & Gravel/Concrete Products. (Walt Ulmer,
proprietor)
I was eleven the winter Dad bought the Sand & Gravel from an alcoholic
who had let it fall into ruin. But the gravel pit was worth something. On
Saturdays I went to the plant to help him. It was bitter cold that winter,
skifted snow, the Yellowstone frozen solid, with a wind whistling down the
prairie all the way from the arctic. Mostly I stayed in one of the two sheds
cleaning truck parts. The shed was about the size of a double garage, two
garages deep, with no windows except in the front doors. There was one
overhead bare bulb, and a neon light over the tool bench in back. The walls
were lined with old Saturday Evening Posts for insulation; the floor was bare
concrete heavily stained with grease and oil. The only heat was from a floor
heater. I wasted quite a bit of time playing with a truck transmission that I
found
226 / "Derrida at the Little Bighorn"
there-"a floor shift for a dump truck, with the "H"-pattern marking the gear
locations still visible on the worn knob. I oiled it up a bit and then shifted
through the gears pretending I was driving. The transmission is a mechanism
that helps deliver the power of the engine to the wheels.
Pedagogy: the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next.
THE YELLOW HAT
The summer I graduated from Custer High I was driving trucks for Walt. I
was the only kid working that summer, and I was worried about holding my own
with the regular drivers. Hoping to blend in with these professionals I
developed a costume and style of conduct that I supposed to be very masculine.
These consisted of boots, jeans, sleeveless T-shirt, and a short-brim yellow
hat, grease-stained, with one side of the brim pinned to the crown by a button
that said "Go Naked." Chewing tobacco like the other men was beyond me, since
it made me get dizzy and vomit, so I kept the stub of a fat dead cigar
clenched between my teeth through which I spit frequently. My speech was
peppered with the phrases "summbitch," "horseknobs," and "douchebag."
I had to deliver a yard of sand for a kid's sandbox. When I pulled up in
the alley of the address the kid was waiting for me. About six or seven years
old I would say, holding a big stick. He watched me maneuver the truck into
the designated space, run the box up with a roar of the engine, pulling the
trip lever as the box went up. While the box was still up I went around back
to give the door a bang. The kid is really taking this all in and I'm thinking
he's impressed with how it's going. He says to me, poking his stick in my
direction: "Are you a boy, or a man?"
THE LOW HOLE
One day that summer Walt got a call from Baker for a load of pea gravel.
The regular drivers were all out on jobs and because the rains had finally let
up they needed the gravel at their drill site right away. I loaded ten yards
of rock on the International cab-over and headed for the highway. Dad's orders
were to ask at the gas stations for directions, and to remember to have
somebody sign the ticket accepting the delivery.
The road between Miles City and Baker is hilly, so I had to actually
come to a full stop many times because I just couldn't seem to hit the low
hole" first gear"while the truck was moving, no matter how I double-clutched.
Anyway I did not have a chauffeur's license and I had never made an out of
town delivery before. This was my opportunity to show I was up to the job. The
first challenge was just to get to Baker and find the drill site before it
started raining again.
At the station they told me the place was along the river. Take the
gravel road, turn at the third cattle guard. I caught sight of the rig and
swung through
"Derrida at the Little Bighorn" / 227
the next cattle guard without really counting, only to find that the ruts did
not lead toward the river but off into a field. I realized at once by the way
the engine started to lug down and labor that I was on muddy ground with the
land on either side looking even softer than the trail I was on. I knew if the
truck stopped I would be stuck. I would have to dump the load there to even
have a chance to get the truck out, turning the mission into a failure.
It was do or die for Custer High. I would try to make it into first gear
without stopping; if I missed the shift the day was over. I double-clutched,
red-lining the tachometer, cranked the transmission lever over-down-back, and
hit the low hole clean. Swinging off the trail out into the field I floor-
boarded the gas, slowly circling with enough power now to get back onto the
road. Feeling tremendously relieved and proud I made it to the drill site
without further problems. I backed up toward the rig, guided in the dual
mirrors by a man wearing a hard-hat and rain-slicker. He waved me stopped and
I did the levers, revved, tripping the back gate as the box went up as I
always did. But the guy started screaming. I could hear him over the engine
and the rush of the rock. I was out of the cab and around back, thinking maybe
I'd buried him somehow. By that time the box was empty. I was amazed to see
however this little bit of a heap of rock where there should have been a great
pile, twelve tons or so. The guy was fine, just standing there staring at the
ground. "Where's the rock?" I asked. When he pointed at the ground I finally
realized most of it had gone down the drill hole. I'd forgotten how fast
pea-gravel comes out of the box, like water through a sluice, flowing further
out onto the ground than you would expect.
The foreman was running toward us. I put the clipboard with the ticket
into the guy's hands, who was starting to curse loudly. He signed the ticket
automatically and I took off. When I got home I told Dad about the accident.
All he did was give me this look, you know. Indescribable. I never got any
more out of town assignments.
SPORTS
Letter, Football, 1960-1962, Custer County High School.
POST-GOALS
The goal posts for a football field form a giant "H." There is one of
these "H's" at each end of a field. Games are often won by kicking a ball
"through the up-rights."
The players on the field are the nuclear core of this macroscopic
structure of perhaps 100,000 people. Although the activities of the
nuclear core are dominant in determining coherence of the structure as a
whole, the energy levels of the players and of the spectators are
nevertheless interdependent. One example of this is the home-team
advantage: Namely, in general the higher level of excitation
228 / "Derrida at the Little Bighorn"
of the fans in the home stadium gives the home team an advantage in
competitive sports. The more aggressive the sport, the greater is this
advantage. Because the information fed into this nuclear core of players
by the activities of the spectators both affects and is effected by the
players, this entire stadium"players and fans"constitute a single,
highly integrated nucleate social structure. (Brent, Psychological and
Social Structures)
Everyone remarked on Custer's athleticism. Even when he had good evi-
dence that there were far more than the thousand Indians first reported Custer
was not concerned. The Seventh Cavalry was the best; number one. It could whip
all the Indians in the Northwest put together.
Somehow, within hours, Crook's scouts did learn there had been a fight;
of this there can be little doubt, and from their sullen demeanor it is
evident that they knew they were on the losing team.
The Custer story is exemplary in two ways: as a model of heroism;
as a warning of what happens if one fails to be a team player. (Connell)
THE SPIRIT HAND
The fans of the Florida Gators want to be number one. The President of
the University wants it to be number one, and all the programs want to be the
best in the country. For example, The Florida Department of English is number
one in the country.
Entering the University bookstore the other day I saw as if for the
first time a row of Spirit Hands, giant, oversize, pulsing with the orange and
blue school colors, index finger extended, inscribed GO GATORS on one side,
with the logo of the university on the other. The full meaning of logocentrism
became clear to me at that moment. One half of the floor space in the store is
devoted to selling books required by the faculty, and the other half is
devoted to selling the name and emblem of the school. That side of the store
glows with orange and grinning alligators of every description, topped by the
row of Spirit Hands.
Every school sells these hands, manufactured out of foam rubber by the
Spirit Hand Corporation of America, to permit the student fans to emphasize
the gesture meaning "we are number one!" regardless of the ranking of the
team. The students, that is, are encouraged to identify with their school"to
have school spirit. Later, as alumni, they are expected to support the school
with gifts, nor is there any evidence to suggest that graduates of one
university would respond to solicitations for gifts from any institution but
their own. I know this for a fact because we tried it. We also tried to find a
school that applied Brecht's epic approach of distancing and estrangement to
alumni relations. Maybe Black Mountain.
"Derrida at the Little Bighorn" / 229
THE MAGISTERIAL GESTURE
The Spirit Hand in the classroom"a gestural pun. In The Post Card
Derrida describes a card he had considered including as an illustration in the
book along with the one displayed on the cover, depicting Plato dictating to
Socrates.
What is the relationship between the two gestures"of the fan's Spirit
Hand and the magisterial point? Freud once mentioned that he always looked for
the sign-painter's hand that could be found in the margin of a dream, indicat-
ing a point of concealment, displacement or condensation, indicating the
operations of repression. Is it best to look in the direction of the point,
following the habits of ostension? Or to look at the hand itself?
The hand's being does not let itself be determined as a bodily organ of
gripping. It is not an organic part of the body intended for grasping,
taking hold, indeed for scratching, let us add even for catching on,
comprehending, conceiving, if one passes from Greif to begreifen and to
Begriff. If there is a thought of the hand or a hand of thought, as
Heidegger gives us to think, it is not of the order of conceptual
grasping. Rather this thought of the hand belongs to the essence of
"Derrida at the Little Bighorn" / 231
the gift, of a giving that would give, if this is possible, without
taking hold of anything. (Derrida)
The metaphor of the hand in concept formation "in the German word for
concept"is open to further elaboration. The decision to write about the hand
was due to its status in Paul de Man's signature (de main), macaronically.
Have you detoured? What is the "H" in Derrida, explicitly?
It has to do with an epilogue from Ponge, the source of Derrida's tutor
texts for invention, in which a tree "inscribes on a leaf the common noun that
is closest to the proper given name of the author, except for a gender and an
aitch, a hatchet. 'Now then, this tree, who is my friend, thought that he had
written on his leaves, on each of his leaves (in the language of trees,
everyone knows what I mean), that he had written franchise on a leaf.' "
Now the sequel to the epilogue tells how, in brief, the tree becomes an
executioner and a victim at one and the same time, signing itself and
bleeding to death from the very moment that the woodcutter, after making
off with one of its branches, turns it into an aitch, a hatchet with
which he then tries to cut down the tree. The eyes of the tree "fasten
on the hatchet, the aitch held by the woodsman and it recognizes, in the
brand new handle of the hatchet, this aitch, the wood of the branch that
was removed in the first place."
What comes back to cut the tree, and then to put it to death, is
thus part of the tree, a branch, a son, a handle, a piece detached from
the tree which writes, which writes itself on itself, on its leaf, its
first leaf, franchise. The tree itself, the signer, cuts itself, and the
torn-off piece with which it cuts itself to death is also a hatchet, an
aitch, a letter subtracted from the franchise written on the tree, what
has to be cut away from this common noun so that the noun can become a
proper given name. But the supplementary hatchet, the aitch, by making
dead wood, confers a monumental stature on the apologetic tree.
(Derrida, Signsponge)
H-BOMB
"Nuclear Criticism," like Kantian criticism, is thought about the
limits of experience as a thought of finitude.
Such a criticism forecloses a finitude so radical that it would
annul the basis of the opposition and would make it possible to think
the very limit of criticism. This limit comes into view in the
groundlessness of a remainderless self-destruction of the self,
auto-destruction of the autos itself. Whereupon the Colonel, the nucleus
of criticism, itself bursts apart. (Derrida, "No Apocalypse, Not Now:
(full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives")
The idea of the war of extermination is the central theme of the
Myth of the Frontier. The catastrophic reading of the Last Stand held
that it represented the
232 / "Derrida at the Little Bighorn"
possible destruction of civilization and progress by an uprising of
human savagery from below. The optimistic reading emphasized the
sacrificial aspect of the battle, showing that Custer's death struggle
wounded the Indians and aroused the slumbering spirit of the American
nation, leading in the end to revenge on the Indian and the triumph of a
chastened and purified people. (Slotkin)
In his book Custer reproduced a telegram from Sherman to Grant,
dated one week after the slaughter [the Fetterman fight], which says in
part: We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to
their extermination, men, women, and children. Nothing less will reach
the root of the case." If one word of this extraordinary telegram is
altered it reads like a message from Eichmann to Hitler. (Connell)
When writing articles for a sportsman's journal, Custer used the
pseudonym "Nomad." (Connell)
Then what was Edward Teller's design that, all at once, made the
thermonuclear bomb feasible? The core of the device consisted of the
thermonuclear fuel itself"in this case liquid deuterium and tritium.
These two hydrogen isotopes were surrounded by liquid hydrogen that was
the cooling agent to keep the deuterium and tritium in a liquid state.
This core of thermonuclear fuel, plus hydrogen coolant, was then
surrounded by fissionable material of the kind used in the existing
atomic bombs. And, finally, the fissionable material was encased with a
conventional explosive.
When the Mike device was detonated, the following sequence of
events occurred: The conventional explosive drove the fissionable
material inward, compressing it into a critical mass and creating an
atomic explosion. This in turn compressed and heated the hydrogen
isotopes (deuterium and tritium) to the point where thermonuclear fusion
occurred, releasing unprecedented quantities of energy. (Blumberg and
Owens, Energy and Conflict: The Life and Times of Edward Teller)
Let us start with a description of what is meant by isotopes:
"most chemical elements are a mixture of several components identical in
chemical properties but different in atomic weight. They received the
name of isotopes, that is, substances occupying the same place in the
periodic system of elements." Thus we may conclude that the isotope is
one of a group of nucleids which have the same atomic number (2) but
differ in both their neutronic number (N) and mass number (A).
Looking now for the linguistic counterpart of isotopes, we find a
striking similarity between the latter and some aspects of the
linguistic phenomenon called homonymy. Semantically, it is completely
irrelevant whether we classify French "louer" [praise, eulogize] from
Latin "laudare," and French "louer" [to rent, to book] from Latin
"locare" as etymological or semantic homonyms. Both linguistic forms
have the same phonetic value and the same spelling, so that the semantic
difference may be determined only by a context or a definition. There
"Derrida at the Little Bighorn" / 233
fore for our purposes we shall call homonyms all those linguistic forms
which have at the same time an identical spelling and an identical
phonetic value, but whose semantic variations can be determined either
by a context or by a definition. In other words, our "homonyms" are
simultaneously "homographs" and "homophones." (Grava, A Structural
Inquiry into the Symbolic Representation of Ideas)
Francis Ponge"d'ici je l'appelle, pour le salut et la louange, je
devrais dire la renommee. (Derrida, Signsponge)
Celebration, praising the name, which may be done by "booking' space in
the celebrity's text.
Exultantly watching the seismograph register the expected shock waves
from Eniwetok, the delighted Teller, "father of the H-bomb," sent off a
self-explanatory three-word telegram to Los Alamos-"It's a boy."
(Easlea, Fathering the Unthinkable: Masculinity, Scientists, and the
Nuclear Arms Race)
SERlES "GALL"
Humor"Gall
This is the humor that is not funny.
A humour is a liquid or fluent part of the body, comprehended in
it, for the preservation of it; and is either innate or born with us, or
adventitious and acquisite.
Blood is a hot, sweet, temperate, red humour, prepared in the
meseraick veins, and made of the most temperate parts of the chylus in
the liver, whose office is to nourish the whole body, to give it
strength and colour, being dispersed by the veins through every part of
it. And from it spirits are first begotten in the heart.
Pituita, or phlegm, is a cold and moist humour, begotten of the
colder part of the chylus (or white juice coming out of the meat
digested in the stomach) in the liver; his office is to nourish and
moisten the members of the body.
Choler is hot and dry, bitter, begotten of the hotter parts of the
chylus, and gathered to the gall: it helps the natural heat and senses,
and serves to the expelling of excrements.
Melancholy, cold and dry, thick, black, and sour, begotten of the
more faeculent part of nourishment, and purged from the spleen, is a
bridle to the other two hot humours, blood and choler. These four
humours have some analogy with the four elements, and to the four ages
in man. (Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy)
The theory of melancholy became crystallized around a number of
ancient emblems. One of the properties assembled around Durer's figure
of Melancholy is the dog. The similarity between the condition of the
melancholic, and the
234 / "Derrida at the Little Bighorn"
state of rabies, is not accidental. According to ancient tradition, "the
spleen is dominant in the organism of the dog." (Benjamin, The Origin of
German Tragic Drama)
Sir William Ramsey, one of the leading experts in the new field of
radioactive substances, thought there were no limits to what radium
might mean to the world. He wrote that the "philosopher's stone will
have been discovered, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility
that it may lead to that other goal of the philosophers of the Dark
Age-"the elixir vitae." (Hilgartner, Bell, and O'Connor, NUKESPEAK)
After the rise of the explicitly "masculine philosophy" in the
seventeenth century and further disparagement and repression of the
"feminine," only the manipulative aspect of alchemy remained of what had
once been a more holistic endeavor. The role of the true alchemist as
man-midwife to "mother nature" had been replaced by the goal of the
masculine philosopher to be master and professor of brute (female)
matter. In his sympathetic account of alchemical practice, F. Sherwood
Taylor, the then Director of the Science Museum in London, has not
inappropriately written: "The material aim of the alchemists, the
transmutation of metals, has now been realized by science, and the
alchemical vessel is the uranium pile. Its success has had precisely the
result that the alchemists feared and guarded against." (Easlea)
The ancient Greek scientists thought of the sun as a great big fire in
the sky. By the 1930s, it was known that the energy of the sun, and
therefore all the other stars, came from atomic reactions, the fusion of
very light atoms to release energy. Enrico Fermi made the connection one
day early in the year, as he and Teller walked back after lunch to their
laboratory at Columbia University, where they were then employed on the
bomb project. "Couldn't such an explosion be used to start reactions
similar to the reactions of the sun?" (Moss, Men Who Play God)
FIRE is the material associated with choler, along with masculinity and the
color yellow. To write the anatomy of choler, now, after Burton's anatomy of
melancholy: "to anatomize this humour of [choler], through all his parts and
species, as it is an habit, or an ordinary disease, and that philosophically,
medicinally, to shew the causes, symptoms, and several cures of it, that it
may be the better avoided."
What is the temperament of choler?
Such are bold and impudent, and of a more harebrain disposition, apt to
quarrel and think of such things, battles, combats, and their manhood;
furious, impatient in discourse, stiff, irrefragable, and prodigious in
their tenents; and if they be moved, more violent, outrageous, ready to
disgrace, provoke any, to kill them
"Derrida at the Little Bighorn" / 235
selves and others. Cardan holds these men of all others fit to be
assassinates, bold, hardy, fierce, and adventurous. (Burton)
WHEN ANGER BECOMES TOO INTENSE, THE PERSON EXPLODES.
When I told him, he just exploded.
She blew up at me.
We won't tolerate any more of your outbursts.
WHEN A PERSON EXPLODES, PARTS OF HIM GO UP IN THE AIR.
BOCCKQUOTE> I blew my stack.
She flipped her lid.
He hit the ceiling.
ANGER IS FIRE. (Lakoff and Kovecses, "The Cognitive Model of Anger
Inherent in American English. In Holland and Quinn)
Gallbladder: Walt Ulmer, 1916-1983
How did Walt die?
His gallbladder, which they knew was infected, also turned out to be
cancerous.
Has his ghost been the problem for you that it was for Hamlet?
What did he want, as a ghost?
Remember what Hamlet said when he saw the ghost of his father?
Oh, answer me! Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell why thy canonized
bones, hearsed in death, have burst their cerements, why the sepulcher
wherein u e saw thee quietly inurned hath oped his ponderous and marble
jaws to cast thee up again. What may this mean, that thou, dead corse,
again, in complete steel, revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon,
making night hideous.
"What are these rites, really, by which we fulfill our obligation
to what is called the memory of the dead"if not the total mass
intervention, from the heights of heaven to the depths of hell, of the
entire play of the symbolic register." (Lacan, "Desire and the
Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet." Yale French Studies 55/56 1977])
Walt's Sand and Gravel plant reminded me of "Hamlet's Mill." Hamlet's Mill is
that book by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend on the transmission
of knowledge through myth. Amlodhi in Icelandic legend was another melancholic
intellectual, forbear of Hamlet. He owned a mill that originally ground out
peace and plenty, then, in decaying times, salt, and finally, in the last age,
rock and sand, creating a maelstrom at the bottom of
"Derrida at the Little Bighorn" / 237
the sea that opened a way to the land of the dead. One of my first jobs when I
worked at the plant was to clean the grids of the screens used to grade the
gravel into sizes. Eventually the screens plugged up with stones and I had to
knock them loose with a hammer. The pea-gravel screen could be cleaned by
running the tip of a large screwdriver along the meshed grids, which produced
an almost musical sound. This was the actual "gravel plant." The washer with
its three grades of screen, one on top of the other, was fed by a conveyor
belt carrying the "pit gravel" from the quarry, and fed in turn three piles of
sized rock, with the sand coming out the bottom, to be run through another
washer for further grading. The whole contraption made a terrible noise and
shook violently.
There was this huge pile, a mountain, of oversize rock that came off the
side. Too big for anything, unless we had a crusher, which we couldn't afford.
So it just sat there and piled up over the years, always with a few rockhounds
climbing over it, looking for agates. You could get a full cubic yard, over a
ton of this rock, for two dollars.
One day the hired man, George, came back from lunch with a present for
Walt, a birthday present, something he found at the drugstore. Walt opened it
and there was this box and inside that was a pet rock. Now there was no
difference between this pet rock and the rocks in the oversize pile, except
that the pet one had a face painted on it, sort of a frown, as I recall, and
it came in a little box. And the pet rock sold for two dollars apiece.
Dad stared at that rock, and this look came over his face.
Anyway, Amlodhi's maelstrom agrees with the anagram of "Ulmer," "lemur,"
which, in Roman religion, referred to "the ghosts of the dead of a family." I
live now about a mile or two from the "Devil's Millhopper," "a huge sinkhole
which formed when a cavern roof collapsed. The bowl-shaped cavity which
resulted is 500 feet across and tapers to 100 feet on the bottom. Its depth is
120 feet. The Devil's Millhopper was created through the erosion of
underground limestone deposits which formed a cavern and the subsequent
collapse of the cavern roof. This natural phenomenon has been visited by the
curious since the early 1880s."
Simonides invented mnemonics. He was able to identify the bodies of the
party guests killed when a roof collapsed on them by remembering where each
had been sitting.
What did the ghost of Hamlet's father want?
Revenge.
If melancholy is tragic, is choler comic?
Walt was cremated in Minnesota, which we all thought was appropriate,
considering that his favorite poem was "The Cremation of Sam McGee" by Robert
Service. The hospital was shipping the ashes to us, so Judy and I waited for
the mail every day, since we didn't want Mom to be the one to get the package.
Finally the package came, a heavy metal box wrapped in
238 / "Derrida at the Little Bighorn"
brown paper. Judy looked at the registered stamp. $5.95. "If Dad had known how
cheap it is to travel this way, he probably would have gotten cremated a lot
sooner." (Laughter)
HANK WORMWOOD
Wormwood: "an emblem or type of what is bitter and grievous to the soul." To
be wormwood or gall and wormwood: "to be acutely mortifying or vexing."
Gall: (fig.) with reference to the bitterness of gall. Bitterness of
spirit, rancour (supposed to have its seat in the gall). Spirit to
resent injury or insult. (slang) Impudence. (transferred uses) Poison,
venom. Name given to the Lesser Centaury, and to other plants. Barren
spot in a field, flaw or rotten place in a rock. Part of the carcass
that has to be removed as useless and offensive. A painful sore or
wound. Something exasperating, galling; a state of mental soreness or
irritation. A person or thing that harasses or distresses. A place
rubbed bare. A breach, a fault, dike. Filth, impurity, refuse. An
excrescence produced on trees by the action of insects. Oak-galls are
used in the manufacture of ink and tannin. (O.E.D.)
HIDER
One day George, the hired man, came out of the root cellar at the plant
with his arms full of puppies. The yard dog had hidden her litter down there.
A gravel plant is not a very sentimental sort of place, so the ones that
nobody
"Derrida at the Little Bighorn" / 239
wanted were drowned in the Yellowstone. After all the puppies were gone Dad
found one more hiding in the cellar. He named it "Hider."
Hider hid himself for a good reason, it turned out, because when he grew
up, and he did get very large, he was the ugliest dog anyone could remember
seeing. He was pitch black, and his hair (his old man must have been a wire-
hair) stuck out like a bed of nails, like you could use him to scrub rust off
the plant. He lived under the trucks, and never got used to being big, so he
had this streak of grease all along his back, where he rubbed the underside of
the trucks. He was very shy. He'd keep off from people a good thousand feet,
and if you called to him he would grovel the whole way, wiggling across the
yard on his belly, whimpering, until, ashamed of ourselves, we finally gave up
calling to him. That was after George threw him in the Yellowstone, to try to
clean him up. Then Hider stayed off two thousand feet, and had twice as far to
grovel.
One morning we came to work as usual, about six, and we saw Hider laying
dead in the road, run over, probably by one of the cattle trucks that went
that way. Walt went over to him, to see if he might be alive, and there was
this look on his face.
Gall"War
[photograph: Chief Gall, an Unkpapa Sioux, one of the leaders,
along with Crazy Horse and Two Moon, in the defeat of Custer]
His name in English is a literal translation of Pizi, given to him by
his mother when she came upon him tasting the gall of a dead animal. But
he was known also as Red Walker and The Man Who Goes in the Middle.
Most Unkpapas considered him a peaceable sort who lost his temper that
Sunday after Reno's troops shot two of his wives and three of his
children. The act turned his heart bad, as he confided to a journalist
many years later, causing him to ride among the soldiers and split their
heads with his hatchet. "I killed a great many," he said. (Connell)
240 / "Derrida at the Little Bighorn"
From above, as one views the battle field on the museum topographical
map, they give the impression of being loosely arranged in the shape of
a V"an arrowhead, if one chooses to see it like that"with General Custer
at the northern point. Pointing slightly northwest, to be exact.
The needle of a compass never points true north.
The Sioux worshipped the sun. A male proved his manhood by participating in
the Sun Dance.
Gaul"Gallic Philosophy
DERRIDA
At the insistence of his collaborator, Peter Eisenman, in the design of their
"folie" in the Parc de la Villette, Derrida provided a drawing for a sculpture
based on the metaphor informing the passage in Plato's Timaeus that he finds
most resistant to interpretation"the chora as crible, sieve or sift:
I propose therefore the following "representation," "materialisation,"
"formation": in one or three exemplars (if there are three, with
different scalings), a gilded metallic object . . . will be planted
obliquely in the ground. Neither vertical nor horizontal, a most solid
frame will resemble at once a mesh, sieve, or grid and a stringed
musical instrument. An interpretive and selective filter
"Derrida at the Little Bighorn" / 241
which will have permitted a reading and sifting of the three sites and
the three embeddings (Eisenman-Derrida, Tschumi, La Villette). (Derrida,
1987)
But isn't that a description of the gravel plant, which is a
three-layered grid for sizing rock?
Not long after I returned from the memorial service in Montana I
received a copy of Feu la cendre from Derrida. He was still at the Ecole
Normale at the time, and I noticed really for the first time the return
address on the stationery "45 Rue d'Ulm." He worked on Ulm Street. I
felt the same sort of shock when I read that old interview by Godard:
"In other countries Cahiers has an enormous influence. People wonder if
we're serious. It was bad enough to admit that guys like Ray and Aldrich
have genius, but when they see interviews with someone like Ulmer"I am
for the Politique des Auteurs, but not just anybody"I find that opening
the door to absolutely everyone is a very dangerous thing." Alexander
Kluge is associated with the Ulmer Dramaturgien. In the same way, lots
of towns and other places are named for Custer.
I read Derrida's text right away, in which he says, "I now have
the impression that the best paradigm of the trace is not, as some have
believed, the track of a hunt, a marking, a step, and so on, but ashes,
that which remains without remaining of the holocaust, of the burn-all."
Not senders and receivers, then, in a theory of communication, but
cinders. In an idiom referring to the "late," the deceased. A writing
without debt that is as good as a burning. No monument, no Phoenix. The
"late" is also the "fire" in the idiom, the fire that cannot be effaced
in the cinders as trace. It is a word that is in question, that is to be
put in place of memory, in the place of memory, to which we are to
listen; to take the word into the mouth and ears. Fire. Choler. But it
could be any word, any black on white letters. Not icons, but indexes,
in this writing. A text will not resemble what it is about, but be
caused by it, the way smoke relates to fire.
What did Derrida say to the driver of the charter bus, taking him on a tour of
the (Custer National Battlefield Monument?
(We commute already with the "bus" that I have just named, in
translation and, according to the principles of transmutation, between
Ubertragung and Ubersetzung, metaphorikos still designating today, in
what one calls "modern" Greek, that which concerns means of
transportation). We are in a certain way" metaphorically of course, and
as concerns the mode of habitation"the content and the tenor of this
vehicle: passengers, comprehended and displaced by metaphor. (Derrida,
"The Retrait of Metaphor").
"Derrida at the Little Bighorn" / 243
I came home late from the university one evening. It was dark on the
front porch. I was fumbling for my keys when suddenly I felt I wasn't
alone. Someone was standing next to me. After a moment I was certain it
was an animal: a large one. It hissed or growled in a way that seemed
like the beginning of a word or a speech, and then seemed to wait for a
reply. I tried frantically to get into the house so I could turn on the
light to see what it was. It waited a moment longer, while I dropped my
keys on the steps, and then began to stalk away, as if in disgust, at a
deliberate pace, with a scraping noise. I finally got inside and turned
on the porch light, but the creature had disappeared. We got out
flashlights but the thing was gone without a trace. The next day Kathy
called me at the office to tell me that the creature had been found
about mid-morning by the neighbor's dog, hiding in the bushes by the
back fence. The animal control officer identified it. "It was a Bittern,
an American Bittern."
"I told the officer on the phone we had a large shorebird in our
yard. When she arrived she was carrying several leashes and asked:
'where's the large shepherd?' "
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 1994 17:35:42 -0600
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor Vitanza
Subject: REINVW Announcement: ULMER re/inter/view
--------4th
Notice------
++++++++For new subscribers on the sublist:
Greg Ulmer has agreed to do a RE/INTER/VIEW with us.
The best time for him is late August or early September,
which will give us time to carefully read and think about ...
E.g.,
REINVW vjv : heuristic vs. aleatory procedures?
E.g.,
_____Greg, is your "heurectic" procedure a heuristic
procedure or an aleatory procedure? Or a combination
of both?
2. Question: Introduced with 5 of these <_>, _____, then the question
3. Reflections on the question.
4. Your full name.
Date: Sun, 14 Aug 1994 15:10:10 -0400
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject: REINVW jmcf: Greg Ulmer, method & autobio
Editorial Assistant
The PreText Conversation
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 1994 18:13:43 -0400
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From: PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject: REINVW jmcf: Greg Ulmer, method & abio #2
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 1994 04:44:02 -0400
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject: REINVW jmcf: Greg Ulmer, method & abio #3
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject: REINVW jmcf: Greg Ulmer, method & abio I have often been forced, by myself and by kind friends, to
give up some beautiful theory which depended on material I
happened to unearth. The words are important: that I
happened to unearth, and that I happened to unearth. Though
it is demonstrably true that chance favors the prepared
mind, and serendipity is rarely arbitrary, one should not
bank on the reliability of Pasteur's axiom in relation to
oneself. After all, as medieval allegorists and Renaissance
mythographers amply demonstrate, anything can be made to
connect with anything: the trick is to distinguish the real
from the illusory connection. (Colie, 1967: 20)
Colie knew about the tradition of patterning displaced and
suppressed by the analytico-referential discourse of science, but
she could not admit that the former constituted a legitimate model
of cognition. Colie's attitude admitting patterning as an object
but not as a subject of knowledge, manifests the exclusionary
ideology of referential cognition in the discipline of histography.
In teletheory, the two styles of cognition--analysis and pattern--are
not mutually exclusive, but in alliance. Thus, mystory emphasixes pre-
cisely what I happen to unearth.
Date: Wed, 17 Aug 1994 14:47:24 -0400
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From: PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject: REINVW jmcf: Greg Ulmer, method & abio
Editorial Assistant
The Pretext conversation "Write a mystory bringing into relation your eiperience with
three levels of discoursc- personal (autobiography), popular
(community stories, oral history or popular culture), expert
(disciplines of knowledge). In each case use the punctum or
sting of memory to locate items significant to you; once
located, research the representations of the popular and
expert items in the collective archive or encyclopedia (thus
mixing living and artificial memories). Select for inclusion
in your text fragments of this information most relevant to
the items in your oral life story. Arrange the entries to
highlight the chance associations that appear among the
three levels. Organize the fragments by means of one or the
other (or both) of the following formats:
This version of "Derrida at the Little Bighorn" is provided as an
example of an alphabetic miming of a film mode--the compilation
of a film. Like films
made from other films, the compilation text is made from other
writings, consisting primarily of citations. The "originality" of
the piece rests with the actions of selection and combination,
treating the archive of extant works as a vocabulary of a higher
order discourse. To cite one of Jay Leyda's authorities:
In this paper I want to consider the film as source material
for history in the sense that palimpsest and parchment,
hieroglyph and rune, clay tablet and memorial roll are
source materials"fragments, sometimes fragments of
fragments, often defaced by time, and applied to purposes of
historical reconstruction rarely contemplated by the
original authors.... films can be used, as other historical
source material can be used, for various and different
historical purposes. (Leyda, 16)
The basic source material for the compilation film, Leyda noted,
is the newsreel. Manipulation of the newsreel resulted in a new
text"a documentary. This arranged reality could be turned to
serve the interests of art, propaganda, instruction, or
advertising (10).
Myths are stories, drawn from history, that have acquired
through usage over many generations a symbolizing function
that is central to the cultural functioning of the society
that produces them. Historical experience is preserved in
the form of narrative, and through periodic retellings those
narratives become traditionalized. These formal qualities
and structures are increasingly conventionalized and
abstracted, until they are reduced to a set of powerfully
evocative and resonant "icons"-like the landing of the
Pilgrims, the rally of the Minutemen at Lexington, the
Alamo, the Last Stand, in which history becomes a cliche. At
the same time that their form is being simplified and
abstracted, the range of reference of these stories is being
expanded. Each new context in which the story is told adds
meaning to it, because the telling implies a metaphoric
connection between the storied past and the present.
(Slotkin, 16)
In teletheory it is important to learn not only to perform
critique, but also to perform mythology. A mystory may be myth
and critique at once, functioning for the composer the way
Brecht's "learning plays" were intended to educate the actors,
and were not meant to be performed for an audience. Hermeneutics
may be brought to bear on a mystory at any time, although there
is no explicit interpretation of the sample offered here.
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 1994 14:30:29 -0400
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From: PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject: REINVW jmcf: [LONG FILE] G. Ulmer, abio 0.5
Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video
Chapter 6
"Derrida at the Little Bighorn"
A Fragment In 1878 the Chicago printing firm of Knight & Leonard published a
thirteenpage pamphlet, The Works of Sitting Bull in the Original French
and Latin, with Translations Dilligently Compared, to which was appended
an elevenpage supplement, The Works of Sitting Bull, Part 11. (Connell)
String Stories [Two children, playing "Cat's Cradle." The hands, the string. They begin
making the loops, and narrating. "There was once/ a little boy/ who
slept in a cradle./ But it didn't take long to grow up and when he
became a young man he had to go off and serve in the army. Then he
slept/ in a soldier's bed. . ." etc.]
Strings can be described as one of the earlier forms of the book. Quite a
number of peoples are known to have used strings for record-keeping and
historical accounts. The most famous of these string "books" were the quipu of
the Incas: long strips of leather knotted and twisted in patterns that told of
events in the life of the tribe. In order to tell string stories, one has to
study carefully the typical patterns and their names in each culture and then
try to re-create the tales imaginatively from the bits and pieces recorded by
ethnographers, folklorists, and string figure hobbyists. (Pellowski, The Story
Vine) "This structuralist thematic of broken immediacy is the saddened,
negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play
whose other side would be the Nietzschean affirmation." (Derrida,
Writing and Difference)
Note that if both rage and fear are high, the behavior exhibited depends
on the way the fear and rage were built up. Thus, if at first a little
fear was induced and then both rage and fear were increased to certain
levels, say x and y, the resulting behavior might be flight. But if a
little rage was first induced, and then both rage and fear were
increased to the same values x and y, the resulting behavior might well
be attack. This property, called divergence, makes the cusp catastrophe
particularly useful in the social and biological sciences, where
behaviors, responses, attitudes, in addition to being subject to abrupt
and discontinuous changes, sometimes vary greatly despite almost
identical "causes." (Paulos, Mathematics and Humor)
When Custer at last caught sight of the village extending perhaps four
miles" he studied the encampment through DeRudio's field glasses, then
waved his hat to the troops and shouted: "Hurrah, boys, we've got them!"
This is what the Italian trumpeter told Benteen the general said. If
indeed Custer made such a remark after sighting the greatest
concentration of militant Indians in the history of North America it
sounds like a joke from an old vaudeville routine. (Connell)
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 1994 23:59:39 -0400
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
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Subject: REINVW jmcf: [LONG POST] Greg Ulmer, abio 2/2
Editorial Assistant
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Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video
Chapter 6
"Derrida at the Little Bighorn"
A Fragment
The Interest of this other one is that it figures as the inversion of
the Sp, its back if you will. It is a photograph of Erich Salomon,
entitled The course of Professor W. Khal: seated at his table (rather a
desk, slightly oblique), a bearded professor raises his finger
(remonstrance, threat, authoritative explication?) while looking toward
the back of the class which is out of sight. On the back of this card, a
word from [Bernard] Graciet: "He speaks, alone, professorially,
barricaded behind the elevated magisterial desk, strangely near,
terrible, raising his right index finger toward I don't know what final
knell [glas] of the question." (Derrida, The Post Card)
A student may be seen in the photograph as well, neck bent before the judge,
silent, taking notes.
But the words "I see" in our sentence are redundant. t don't wish to
tell myself that it is l who see this, nor that I see it. This comes to
the same as saying that I can't point out to myself by a visual hand
what I am seeing; as this hand does not point to what / see but is part
of what I see. (Wittgenstein, The Brown Book)
Derrida raised such questions in a discussion of Geschlecht, inquiring
into the idiomatic usages of this term in Heidegger's texts. Referring in an
untranslatable way to matters of sex, race, family, generation, lineage, spe-
cies, genre, Geschlecht is associated with thinking as handiwork, craft, and
finally as technology, through the Schlag or blow, the imprint of impression,
the beat, in which I hear that beating that a team takes when losing. Derrida
is studying Heidegger's hands in photographs.
Henry"better known as "Hank""Wormwood was the first town marshal in
Miles City. Hank had one personal peculiarity which set him apart"he
wore his sandy-colored hair long, like a dandy who wished to attract
attention. One evening the report reached Hank that a swaddy in
Strader's saloon and gambling hall was getting "tough drunk" and
swearing to his friends that "no red-headed, long-haired son of a so and
so could do anything to him. Hank, realizing that his hand was being
called, stepped into the saloon and, being careful to keep his hand away
from his gun, walked straight up to the soldier in a friendly fashion.
All activity stopped immediately and an ominous quiet settled on the
room in which there were at least 25 other soldiers. Looking the soldier
straight in the eye, Hank said, "What's this I hear? You wouldn't do
anything to hurt me, would you?" The soldier, a powerful man but not as
tall as Hank, hesitated, and while he hesitated Hank's hands suddenly
shot out and his long fingers encircled the man's neck. The marshal
quickly lifted him off the floor and held him against the wall with a
grip like a hangman's noose. The soldier choked, his tongue popped out
of his mouth, and his face went purple. Supporting his victim with one
hand, the marshal took the soldier's gun and then set him down. Holding
his prisoner at the point of a gun, Hank glanced coolly around the
saloon and then addressed those present: "I'm goin' to take this boy
back to the fort. I advise you fellows not to interfere." Not a man
moved as the marshal walked his man out the door. (Brown and Felton, The
Frontier Years)
The Bismarck Tribune had reported that a trader bought from Chief
Gall "the worst Indian living" an odd little matchbox-compass-whistle
device that Custer carried in his pocket. How did this worst of all
possible Indians get it? Gall could not have been Custer's angel of
death. For one thing he fought with a hatchet and beyond doubt Custer
went down with a bullet in the side.
What about the compass Gall took from Custer? Connell reads the deployment of
the Companies on the hill in a way that suggests the needle of a compass.
The Sioux arbor usually was about 150 feet across with a twenty-foot
pole in the middle from which dangled an array of rawhide or buffalo
hair lariats. A medicine man, after having gashed a dancer's chest,
would shove sticks beneath the muscles. These sticks would be attached
to the dangling lariats and tightened until the brave was forced to
stand on tiptoe, which might draw the chest muscles three or four inches
out of his body. (Connell)
my verdict is that being and space and generation, these three, existed
in their three ways before the heaven, and that the nurse of generation,
moistened by water and inflamed by fire, and receiving the forms of
earth and air, and experiencing all the affections which accompany
these, presented a strange variety of appearances, and being full of
powers which were neither similar nor equally balanced, was never in any
part in a state of equipoise, but swaying unevenly hither and thither,
was shaken by them, and by its motion again shook them, and the elements
when moved were separated and carried continually, some one way, some
another. As, when grain is shaken and winnowed by fans and other
instruments used in the threshing of corn, the close and heavy particles
are borne away and settle in one direction, and the loose and light
particles in another. (Timaeus)
Derrida comments, describing his design based on this metaphor.
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