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.
=================================================
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To: (rs) Richard Smythe
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Richard, I have reflected for a few weeks on your post that explains
choragraphy as equivalent to a chemical architecture. Perhaps you are onto
something with that fluid metaphor, although I understand you may see the
relationship between Ulmer's work and hybrid chemical structures as equivalent
not metaphoric.
_____ Or are you speaking metaphorically?
In the spirit of these lists, I seek clarification in an effort to
entertain or perform what I can with you of the protocal of concurrence.
_____ What do mean for me to hear when you say that choragraphy identifies
fundamental elements of language usage/textual production?
What do you mean by fundamental? How stable do you see this periodic table of
the elements of discourse--CATT(t) and/as the pop cycle? I appreciate your
perception of the "remake" and, since you have mentioned it in context with
"rhyzography," I connect it vaguely now to D&G's word-order and repitition.
It may be that I (ms.)read my exclusion when I find CATT(t) less representative
of what I know of lived experience than you seem to find it. I have had more
success in the past feeling that Deleuze&Guattari's "schizography" --I am
collapsing puns for clarity-- and its popular critique represent what I think I
know of lived experience and perhaps that explains my difficulty with both
choragraphy and protocals of concurrence.
_____ How similar is your "rhyzography" to Greg's choragraphy and
schizoscience?
You mention work of yours in "rhyzography" in relation to choragraphy. Please
expand upon that comment and draw out a little the connections you make between
your work in "rhyzography" and Ulmer's choragraphy. What connections are you
making? How is your rhyzography drawn from schizoscience?
_____ When you mention that Greg's work is similar to the practice of your
colleagues in chemistry who recombine elements of the periodic table "in order
to create new molecular hybrids, then testing these out in laboratory
conditions to see if they are stable, if and how they interact w/other
compounds, etc." Where do you see Greg doing work like this in Heuretics?
Is this work in chemical architecture that you see active in Heuretics or is it
work that you see as made possible afterwards? How many choragraphies or
discursive elements do you see as occupying the choragraphic or rhyzagraphic
table of the elements? Four? Five? Or are you looking to a science of
micros-copy that awaits other choragraphies to verify and accompany Heuretics
until we reach some level of sustained confirmation of a hypothesis? What
scientific method do you think will allow us confirmation of the five item
table of fundamental elements of discourse?
_____ You ask: if ulmer is right when he reads derrida as identifying the
visual metaphor of cognition, if ulmer offers us an alternative to this in
mystory and choragraphy, then how can we begin to incorporate such electronic
genres into our disciplinary discussions (e.g. this very list?). Would work
within protocals of concurrence perform or initiate such reactions here? With
or without catalyst? As you say: in other words, how can this discussion
itself become a choragraphy?
Jim McFadden (jmcf)
Offlist: jmcfadden@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu
=====================================
to: REINVW@miamiu.acs.muohio.edu
Jim McFadden raised a number of questions in his
2 Oct 94 post:
(warning: this is a long response)
1. _____am i speaking metaphorically when i compare
ulmer's work and hybrid chemical structures?
i'm not sure there's any other way of speaking. this is one
thing i've learned from decon/poststructuralism, under-
stood from the p.o.v. of grammatology [recall my example
of ulmer's claim that derrida discovers the visual metaphor
of cognition and suggests the alternative of the chemical
senses (taste, smell) as a metaphor of cognition]. since i've
just taught from chapter two of ulmer'sTEXTBOOK, i'm
thinking of the lakoff and johnson entry, which
identifies the metaphorical concept "argument is war" as
structuring our experience of argument and offers the altern-
ative "argument is dance" as a potential substitute. so the
question is not so much am i speaking metaphorically but
rather is my version of metaphoric speaking more effective/
descriptive of what's really happening?
2. this leads me to a second question concerning ...
_____what did I mean by saying HEURETICS identifies
fundamental elements of language use/textual production.
I was thinking here of how the CATT and the popcycle each
creates categories or slots that need to be filled (to put it crudely).
the CATT, for instance, identifies the common denominators
of all theories or methods (or let's say a set of common denomi-
nators), so that one can see in chapter one (p. 8 ff) how the CATT
was "used" by Plato and then by Descartes. these categories,
then, i see as "fundamental elements" of making new methods.
the popcycle, too,has the four fundamental arenas/discourses of
our lives--home, school, discipline,entertainment;
the popcycle, as i understand it, attempts to map or trace the
slippage of discourses from one realm to the next, and is meant
to be agenerative device--a heuristic--for electronic textual pro-
duction (see definition of "conduction" on p. 195). the chart on p.
195 of HEURETICS functions like a periodic table of sorts, i would
argue; it seems to reduce the various discourses to their funda-
mental elements (reason, proof, medium, form).
3. _____how stable do i see this periodic table of elements?
as far as its power in terms of explanation (the CATT convincingly
works when applied to Plato and Descartes, as far as i'm con-
cerned) and creativity (its capacity to make something new), it
seems quite stable to me. i wrote earlier that i should call it "a"
set of common denominators " to suggest that there may be
others as yet undiscovered. the popcycle is probably a little less
stable in that there are other institutions that might fit/work/
substitute. i don't know what they might be.
4. i suggested that hybrid chemical bondings could provide a
metaphor for the invention of new genres and mentioned my
"rhizography" in the same breath as ulmer's "mystory" and
"choragraphy." i see rhizography and choragraphy as being very
similar in certain ways, such as in the conception of space that each
invokes. the difference is in how we arrived at our conclusions:
ulmer used derrida, i used d + g (deleuze and guattari).
i understand the distinction between derrida's notion of the chora
and topos in terms of the debates between artificial intelligence
programmers and connectionist theorists; as ulmer writes in
HEURETICS: "chorography as a practice corresponds to recent
developments in computing, such as connectionism. opposed to
the classical concept of memory as storing information in some
specific locale from which it may be retrieved, connectionist designs
of computer memory are based on a different characterization:
'Information is not stored anywhere in particular.
Rather, it is stored everywhere . . .'" (36). so topos = the classical
concept, and chora = the connectionist concept. d + g's notion
of the rhizome is similar: connectionist models seem to literally
manifest a rhizomatic principle of organization. The similarities
get more complicated and would take up some real computer space
to establish; if anyone is interested I could pursue this in future posts.
I will say something about how rhizography and chorography are
similar. both are theories of hypertext/media (hereafter HT) compo-
sition. each haselements of autobiographical writing that fuse with
other generic (genre-ic) possibilitiesQessay, fiction, poetry, etc.
rhizography is the name i gave to the texts i was creating in STORY
SPACE (a hypertext authoring software created by eastgate
systems inc.), texts i could not label with current literate generic
categories. the combinatory power and associative linking that
HT allows draws together all forms of textual production--all genres
--into one: rhizography; it breaks generic as well as
disciplinary boundaries and as such becomes thepostmodern
medium.
the interesting thing is that both of us came up with similar
conceptions of electronic writing: we were both "targetting"
electronic composition; thedifference was in the THEORIST (the
first "t" of the CATT) we chose as mentor. the similarity between
the two concepts of space (rhizome and
chora) suggest a degree of continuity among poststructural
thinkers that may be paradigmatic. rhizography is the name i
give to the kind of writing that occurs when one composes in
hypertext, in particular STORYSPACE, a particularly powerful
kind of hypertext authoring software that is becoming quite popular.
i could go on about "rhizography" (i wrote my dissertation
about this) but i do not want to stray from our purpose. it might
help to note that greg was the director of my dissertation. but i
would reiterate that we arrived at our conclusions separately: i was
not aware of his work in HEURETICS at the time and came up
with my name quite independently of his "chorography." i think
the fact that we both came to similar conclusion is testimony to
both thepower of his method and its generative
ability as well as whatever continuity can be said to exist in
poststructural thought.
5. _____where do i see greg doing work like colleagues in
chemistry, testing hybrids in labs?
i see HEURETICS/chorography as one example of an experiment
(the title of chapter three), MYSTORY as another. having taken
courses with greg, i haveexperienced his "textshop" approach
(see his essay "textshop for an experimental humanities" in
REORIENTATIONS: CRITICAL THEORIES AND PEDAGOGIES,
eds. bruce hendricksen and thais e. morgan, the first subtitle of
which is called "thehumanities laboratory") and have worked to
experiment with the CATT on assignments as far back as 1987
(more on this soon). this is the nicest
thing about his pedagogy: he does the work he asks his students
to do. he also models chemistry instructors when he asks students
to replicate and test pastexperiments in literature, the avant-garde
texts of past and present. HEURETICS, as the subtitle suggests,
attempts to identify the logic of invention: it is a "how to" be
creative instruction manual.
6. the scientific method of confirmation will emerge i think over
time: "the proof will be in the pudding" comes to mind, though
i'm not sure what that means. he directly calls us to experiment
on p. 39 of HEURETICS. i willoffer one example of my success
with the CATT to demonstrate its potential power: using the
CATT, i contrasted the five-paragraph theme, chose Dziga
Vertov the russian avant-garde film-maker as my theorist, and my
(assigned) target was freshman composition. one day i stumbled
on my analogy as i looked at an avocado seed as big as a baseball
growing in a jar: it had split, and a single thick root was emerging.
this became the analogy of the five-paragraph theme and its
emphasis on a single thesis, one
five-page unified essay. i then thought of watermelons as
fruit with many seeds that grows on the surface. so i invented
an assignment based on the contrast of a five-paragraph theme
and based on these botanical metaphors, calling it the
"anatheme"--students write fiveone-page papers, using
different genres, different voices, and asserting five different
theses. in effect, i discovered d + g's concept of the rhizome
on my own, using the CATT (the watermelon
shares characteristics of rhizomes). it is now firmly *rooted*
in my mind, and perhaps this is why i am fond of d + g's
1000 PLATEAUS.
i hope this long post was helpful in clarifying my previous post.
richard smyth
==============================================
_____To what degree is the "Eureka Experience"
metaleptically inscribed in the heuretic process?
Collin poses a fascinating question having to do with the
relation of the eureka intuition to the way a culture,
society, civilization organizes all its boundaries. Is
there something about the way literate societies divide
up experience that facilitates the bisociational effect,
the unexpected juxtapositions that create the event of
insight? He goes on to wonder about the perhaps
artificial nature of heuretics which further fabricates
the illusion of having an insight... (I am distorting
the question somewhat so I can get around to my reply).
The hypothesis here might be that the more differentiated
a society becomes the more opportunities develop for a
necessary forgetting to exist (different parts of society
do not know what other parts are doing, and individuals
within themselves do not know what they are doing in
general): in short, the condition of the UNCONSCIOUS.
the history of literacy in any case suggests that the
unconscious that is the experience of depth, of the ghost
in me, is specifically Western and an emergent behavior
related to the socialization and institutionalization of
literacy.
Now various students of creativity have described the
event of EUREKA, which is a personal experience, an
emotion, in terms of the UNCANNY--recognizing the
familiar in the unfamiliar. This experience is the one I
describe in < Derrida at the LIttle Bighorn > and in
HEURETICS when I recognized my fathers Sand & Gravel
Plant in Derridas theory of _chora_. Psychoanalysis is
the best theory of the uncanny we have to date, and it
might be interesting to use it to think about the
relationship between selfhood, literacy, and invention.
Anyway, Every civilization possesses a system(s) of
classification. The continuing value of structuralism is
that it attempts to map these systems and to show how
individuals internalize the structuration of their
society. The whole study of ideology is about nothing
else than how identity emerges as the arrangement or
interface between inner personal and outer collective
experience. A quick way to demonstrate the nature of what
ideology attempts to account for is to tell a joke.
Jokes are the markers tracing the articulating of the
body by the categories of identity (race, gender,
relation etc)
BORDERS. Structuralism suggested usefully that there is
a kind of homology or isotopic relationship at all the
levels of existence, from the organization of the organic
body into erogenous zones (the letter of the unconscious)
through the logical methods of reason, the aesthetics of
design of objects, the plans of cities, to the political
organizations and so on. It is very difficult to grasp
this complex pattern from inside (but there is no
outside). Choragraphy is a poetics for making a map of
the specific pattern that marks ones position in this
network (and for navigating or negotiating).
The further claim of choragraphy is that it is possible
not only to grasp the pattern or style of ones
civilization, but to use that understanding to go beyond
the given, to intervene in culture at the
\ /
\ /
\ /
\ /
\ /
\/
/\
/ \
/ \
/ \
sChoragraphy in the context of schooling could be said to
be a (pseudo)-eureka in that as a pedagogy it usually
takes place before the students have acquired a
discipline. As the history of invention shows,
inventions are not produced in general but in contact
with specific disciplines. Why go thought the motions of
inventing before one invents? Let us say that students
who put together a mystory do in fact have the emotional
experience of the uncanny called Eureka. they have not
invented anything in the sense of innovation, but they
have acquired training or experience in the emotional
dynamics of creative thinking. Heuretics is no more and
no less of a set-up (a controlled experience to create
the effect of learning) than is any other pedagogy.
The test of choragraphy is whether or not real learning
takes place when it is practiced. The further claim is
that, once the method is fully implemented rather than
simulated in models such as mine (when it is supported
and augmented in an educationally institutionalized
computing) children will be able to do what only experts
are able to do now. That is, the separation and
isolation of practices that we experience in literacy
have created conditions that require specialization,expertise (experts are to
knowledge what politicians are
to government).
At the same time, the grid of specialization currently
organizing knowledge is potentially favorable to
inventiveness. The institutions within which these
distinct practices exist are now being wired for
interaction one with the other. What remains to be
designed is the interface, the means of articulation
(choragraphy is an example of such a means). Once the
circulation or flow through the popcycle gets underway
(when the flow is not only across the borders of the
divisions of knowledge, but also across the border
separating school from the other institutions of
society), learning and life may be reintegrated (the
dream of virtual reality--to map the interface--the
intelligent system--directly onto the real: not only no
paper, but no screen either: no representation).
Which is not to say that we will be done with
classification (or done with identity), but that the
organizing categories will be other than they are now.
Before I go any further into the zone of science fiction
I better quit. Psi/Phi.
GREG ULMER
============================================
_____How useful is the analogy linking the CATTt to the periodic table?
Richard and Jim's exchanges about the chemistry combinatorial of
elements reminded me that in TELETHEORY I used as a point of departure
Hayden White's call for the reinvention of historiography using the
arts and sciences of our own moment in the same way that Ranke et al
used the arts and sciences of the 19th century. White in METAHISTORY
used the structure of the four tropes, the four modes of emplotment,
that could be used to tell the same story to different (tragedy, comedy
etc). Historians did not disagree about the facts constituting the
event called "The French Revolution." They did relate these facts in
quite different ways, giving different interpretations. White speculated
about the possibilities of replacing these classic genres or modes with
the experimental forms of the 20th century. He warned that certain
combinations were unstable, even destructive, in the manner of the
elements of the periodic table, with the absurd being in the nuclear
range.
Part of the experiment in TELETHEORY was to challenge or test White's
claim of the unviability of the experimentalist line in contemporary
letters. The CATTt heuristic itself, nonetheless, owes much to White's
tropology. The neologism of the *catastropics* pushes White's
table into the zone of instability. White turned out to be right in
that mystories are singular and nontransferable. The vita form of
< Derrida at the Little Bighorn > is accidental and temporary. The
effect of proof available in mystory is accessible primarily only
by making one's own. Mystories do not travel. Note that the few
reviewers of TELETHEORY have dismissed the experiment ( D at LBH ) as
insignificant, unworthy of comment (I am referring to Richard Lanham
and the Brunette and Wills review essay in DIACRITICS).
In HEURETICS the combinatorial table is evoked again in the relay of
Bernard Tschumi's MANHATTAN TRANSCRIPTS. For Tshumi, no combination
is ruled out. The value of the periodic table for me is in its
suggestiveness. At the same time, I recall Jack Goody's point in
THE DOMESTICATION OF THE SAVAGE MIND that the periodic table is
the crowning achivement of literacy. The systematization of lists
into tables is a feature of writing as a tool of visualization.
As such it is an interface metaphor (like the Mac destop) for the
visualization operations that remain to be invented/designed/
discovered available within the operations of computing. the
instructions for my assignments are figurative, indirect, not
literal.
GREG ULMER
================================================
_____What is the nature of the circulation between Discipline and
Entertainment? (What is a popcycle? )
_____What exactly are the ties between materiality and method?
1. Geoff s question is posed a couple of different ways and cuts to the
heart of the vision of grammatology. In one post Geoff set up a
contrast between Derrida (esoteric impenetrable theory) and John
Cage (the opposite?). Cage s writings are more accessible than
theory, in a way, but the ideas and practices are equally alien to the
popular audience: the avant-garde works by that effect of
estrangement the Russian formalists analyzed so well. Anyway I
love both theory and the vanguard and in < The Object of Post-
Criticism > in a book edited by Hal Foster (THE ANTI-AESTHETIC) I
brought Cage and Derrida together in the context of the century-long
commitment to collage-montage. I am sympathetic, in other words,
to everything Geoff says about John Cage (whose signature anagrams
modestly to Jo Change). A wonderful dissertation/book could be
written bringing together Cage, K Burke, McLuhan, and Bucky
Fuller as the spokespersons of a North American continental
parallel to the European theory/vanguard alliances we read so much
about. When some of my colleagues, impatient with the European
invasion, wonder if there isnt some homegrown movement just as
good, the Cage et al group is the one I remind them of. Cage said he
wanted Mao AND Fuller.
2.
_____What is the place of theory in modernist civilization (who
needs it)?
Answering this question reminds me of some discussions I had with
Walt (my father) after I got to college and discovered the
humanities existed as a division of knowledge that folks could major
in (my experience at home and in school led me to believe that
university consisted of the fields of engineering, agriculture, and
the professions). There was one especially memorable evening I
recall when Walt, a family friend named Mr. Richards who was a
local rancher and also chairman of the board of regents of the state
of Montana, and myself got to conversing (I wont say arguing
because the exchanges were always good natured) about the
uselessness of pointy-headed intellectuals (like the faculty in the
English Dept at the u of MOntana, folks such as Leslie Fiedler).
Walt and this rancher used a kind of base-superstructure argument:
Mr Richards cattle, or dads sand and gravel, were raw materials to
which ranching or gravel planting added real value by making these
products useable and available for real survival activities such as
food and shelter. Parasiting on this economy were the bookish sorts
who added nothing of value to anyone and just criticised America
(love it or leave it).
During Walts ten years as a state legislator in Montana he was
involved with the sponsorship of several education-related bills,
including one to limit the salaries of faculty to $15,000 a year (he
never made more than $10,000 himself) and to fire Leslie Fiedler
(anyone who thinks we dont need tenure etc to protect academic
freedom might want to review the career of Leslie Fiedler --at
Buffalo as well as at Missoula) as a reminder about the fragility of
intellectual work in a culture as anti-intellectual as ours). And my
father was a moderate Republican. His district (Custer County) and
the whole of Eastern Montana had a strong John Birch Society
following (John Birch, the first man killed in World War Three).
_____How did we get in this fix of resenting the experts we can't
live without?
The humanities are organized as disciplines just like every other
branch of knowledge, as paradoxical as it might seem. If English
were not a discipline it would not be established in the university
(or it might be a < leisure course >) Why? LITERACY. Plato,
founder of the first school, inventor of method, gave us the practice
and the institution to do it in. What is the Platonic model of
knowledge that represents the nature of the technology of alphabetic
writing? The split between doxa and episteme, opinion and
knowledge. To know in literacy it does not suffice to have know-
how in the manner of a craftsman, but the meta-knowledge of
knowing-that, made possible by the invention of conceptualtiy. To
acquire this meta-knowledge (knowing what you know and how you
know it) is an arduous task, made increasingly difficult by its own
success (by the accumulated discourses of the learning process).
After a long period of denial I have come to the conclusion that
training in literacy is hard, painful, boring due to the nature of the
tools (granting that it is always possible to ameliorate the pain to
some degree and that some people are so curious that nothing can
deter them from gaining pleasure from learning). In more
optimistic moments I consider that the difficulty and boredom that
are features of schooling are not necessary, but are the solution
devised by a technically sophisticated yet anti-intellectual society
to produce experts who hate thinking (they are very good at their
speciality but refuse to think an inch beyond the borders of their
mastery). The result? No philosophers sitting around coffee
houses fomenting revolution.
The natures of conceptuality, method, and school produced
ultimately the society of experts--specialists who do our meta-
knowledge for us. In an egalitarian society, one founded precisely on
the rejection of elites and their fancy-shmancy court culture and
mumbo-jumbo ritualized religion--the new expert elites of
modernity are accepted with a great deal of ambivalence.
In this context Derrida (or whichever critical theorist) plays the
same sort of role in the humanities that an Einstein plays in physics
(or any other theorist plays in any other specialization). Derrida,
that is, is the master of a highly evolved peculiar way of using
language (method). Such *is* the nature of discipline; it is
artificial intelligence; the reasoning sustained within the evolved
practices of philosophy are possible only in that discourse
(calculus). In modernity, discipline does not entertain, and
entertainment does not solve problems.
While disciplinary institutions are elitist by definition, still, the
logic of the institution of expertise includes the delivery of the
expert knowledge to the general population of citizens in the form of
medical treatment, agricultural extensions divisions, statistical
evaluations and the like. A major problem for the humanities is
that we have never quite figured out how to deliver what we know,
how to circulate it in mainstream culture. Within the institution
we do as well as any other discipline (we all teach our classes).
Where we break down, however, is interinstitutional--the
circulation of our knowledge into general practice (the APPLIED
question).
3.
_____What is the place of expertise in the emerging electronic
apparatus?
I have passed over this ground in some previous posts. In the
context of grammatology (the history and evolution of the
apparatus, the organization of language in terms of the interactive
relations among technology, institutional practices, and individual
identity formation) modernism is the culmination of the epoch of
alphabetic literacy, in which the analytical nature of our tools was
expressed in every dimension of our civilization from mental
operations through the division of labor to the nation-state
republic. Now the promise of the new apparatus (the promise but
not the guarantee), is of a (re)convergence, perhaps a synthesis (a
hybrid) that would produce the collapse of levels that Geoff suggests
is desirable. Indeed, it has been the dream of intellectuals for some
time to overcome the alienation of analytic society and rejoin the
mass public (this is the dream of the avant-garde, despite the
epater le bourgeois practices of some movements).
Electronic equipment supports this dream of convergence by means
of artificial intelligence. Understanding that the apparatus
constitutes a PROSTHESIS of the human sensorium, that it is a social
machine, as much institutional and behavioral as technological (the
point Linda Adler-Kassner made in her question) the electronic
apparatus will (promises to) make all persons their own experts,
just as the availability of the printed bible made it possible (if not
necessary) for all persons to be their own priests. Interestingly
enough, it is much easier to automate expertise than common sense.
Which brings up the other dimensions of the apparatus: the
creation of equipment that automates disciplinary expertise
involves the invention as well of institution and behavior that
supply an interface; that make it possible for laypersons to apply
the expertise properly. Cyborgism? We are already cyborgs of
course (I am thinking now in the prosthesis of literacy). On either
side of the interface is a memory, one organic and the other
machinic. The location of the design problem addressed in
choragraphy is here, concerned with a mnemonic system that I may
use in my living mind to keep track of what I am doing with my
prostheses. Argumentation is a mental map that school provides to
literacy Choragraphy aims towards being the mental map for
electeracy.
4.
_____What is the pedagogy for helping the grunge Rita Hayworth
learn to speak?
Geoff vividly established a test case, the young woman sitting
silently in class with Sonic Youth looping in her consciousness. She
might be a more benign version of the urban black Frank Murray
mentioned, devolving via 70 hours of TV viewing per week into a
sociopath. My thinking about how to teach such students or in such a
culture is guided by the popcycle and the theory of mourning. Freud
made his theory about the civilizing effect of language learning vivid
by using the metaphor of castration. Children are able to tolerate
separation from parents because images of the parents are
internalized (introjection and incorporation): the superego
formation. This initial entry into language is just the beginning and
supplies the model for all subsequent entries into the discursive
formations of civilization. We enter natural language within the
institution of the home/family.
Now that the TV set is in the home, the institution of entertainment
is colonizing the home. The majority of children in America now
learn their first language by watching television in the company of
peers, rather than by interacting with the mother. It is not clear
whether Freuds account applies to this new condition; certainly
school ignores it entirely. (See Larry Rickles, _The Case of
California_, on the absense of superego formation in LA gang
culture). The serial relationship between the housewife mom
sending her child to an elementary classroom with a mom-like
teacher is disintegrating.
The point of the popcycle is that modern citizens continue and repeat
the introjection process, building layer upon layer of discourses
beginning with native language followed by entertainment, school,
and (for some) discipline. Each is a fully formed discourse, but
none is self-sufficient. Grunge Rita in Geoffs example is in a
position in which the popcycle square has been given a quarter turn:
she is thinking entertainment in the place of school. In the
conditions of purism and separation featured in modernity, the girl
is doubly dysfunctional: first because entertainment does not
compute in school (it does no useful work there); second because
she does not even know that school has its own language, and that
language is in turn different from while mediating the language of
discipline (discipline long ago colonized school the way
entertainment only recently colonized the home). Literacy requires
that this quarter turn be undone, but electeracy suggests that we can
spin the mystorical square on the popcycle circle of institutions.
Talking in school had and has to be learned/taught; it is not the
same as talking in entertainment or the home (it is as different
from it as theory is different from Popeye). (Cf. my discussion in a
previous post about the invention of the dialogue as the interface
metaphor for accessing the analytical powers of writing). Perhaps
one of the biggest reasons why our population is so ambivalent about
school is that they never learned its discourse. That is, they kept
expecting or assuming that they were communicating in some
hybrid of home and entertainment, and so were always disappointed
(and intimidated), the whole experience being like that of an
illiterate gifted at pretending to be able to read. Teachers, for their
part, often seem not to realize that the students have not been taught
school (discipline is passed through it transparently) and so behave
like bad tourists in foreign lands who, when the natives fail to
understand them, speak more loudly until they are shouting:
BUTTER! H-A-V-E Y-O-U N-O B-U-T-T-E-R? Or,
similarly, this is the way critique speaks in the institution of
entertainment, becoming infuriated when its discipline concepts are
heard as gibberish.
Geoff is right to stress that HEURETICS is a work of discipline and so
by itself it is an incomplete project. At the same time, for me at
least, it is the pay back for a long term investment. It is the detour
that might be a short cut in a certain sense: I had no idea what to do
about the classroom Geoff described, and that I have been in myself;
nor did I have, without theory, have a means to think my condition.
Now I have an idea, even if it is one whose value remains to be tested
(with this reinvw being one approach to this test). The mystory,
the popcycle, and choragraphy are ways to design a school practice
that puts the different discourses introjected by the students into
circulation, contact, convergence, interaction, and allows all of
them to function holistically. Whichever one a person starts with,
it supplies a model for learning the others. And that is the point for
our moment--already post yet still modern. The four discourses of
the popcycle will be with us for a while yet. Just how this
circulation conduction works needs considerably more theorizing,
testing, experimentation. My work at this point proposes that
choragraphy is the school practice, and the internet is the
institution, that go with the new electronic technology.
In a future post I would like to get around to talking about what
actions I am taking as a result of my own reading of HEURETICS.
GREG ULMER
==============================================
Greg,
I suppose that the best place for me to begin is to second your own
motion that you
_____What pedagogical strengths of your own does a project like
Heuretics cater to? And what weaknesses does it cover up?
I guess the better way to write that is along the lines of "what areas has H
caused you to improve or change?" Oh well. It's still valuable on
occasion to view strengths as strengths, and that means....
Not necessarily an appropriate interview question, asking about the
interviewee's self-perceived weaknesses, but I want to ask about what
can and can't be done pedagogically with H without asking you to "tell
me what to do." Part of what I'm asking is whether or not any part of H
fell outside what you had (or do) perceive(d) as your own pedagogy.
A related question:
_____Are there parts of the book that we don't see? And I don't simply
mean unpublished chapters. I mean were there false starts, and if so,
how did you deal with them?
I was left a little uneasy after H, because everything fit together so well.
For the purposes of the book, obviously, they should. But did you
pursue the anagram lemur as well as le mur? Are any of these African
monkey-foxes climbing the walls of Fort Da as we speak? What
happened when there was no Eureka?
_____Likewise, how do you deal with students who don't participate in
the exploratory (vs. justificatory) discourse that you propose? In part, I
am asking a question about resistance, but I want to distinguish between
conscious and unconscious. Do students respond to it as (yet) an(other)
disciplinary trick? I don't mean to cast this in a right/wrong framework,
and to exclude some student reactions as "wrong," but assessment is a
question most of us have to deal with...
Some unrelated questions (it's been a while!):
I might propose that literacy created experts by the standards of orality--
that is, memory, arrangement and style were simulatable by the fact that
the person could carry the language around inscripted. And you yourself
take the next step, when you write
_____Have you thought about the qualities which would characterize
expertise in electeracy?
I'm tempted to expect an answer which disavows expertise altogether,
but I wonder if such a move can be made when so many people
(ourselves included) place so much personal stock in being expert.
One more, and this is very practical. it's a question which, in part,
comes from having just read Geoff's article in P/T, where he offers
models of composition taken in part from student activity (LANtalking).
My question concerns the problem that I think many teachers who teach
in computer classrooms run into--namely, how does technology change
the teaching of writing? Many of the answers I see suggest that they
simply make us better at what we're already doing. That is, the process
is computerized (i.e., accelerated), but the product is still firmly targeting
a culture of literacy. I can imagine a newly literacizing society
envisioning print entirely in terms of how it will improve orality--that is,
I may be asking the question from a position too firmly entrenched in
literacy, but
_____What kinds of speculation can we make about the products of
electeracy? I constrain myself to the speculative in a direct attempt to
keep away from an un-self-conscious "what does it look like" kind of
question, but I don't really know how to avoid it.
In a postscript to this last question, I would admit that H gives me a
pretty good idea of what it can look like, but what happens when
electeracy is completely here and those barriers/borders no longer
function. That is, doesn't your own project as it's currently drawn rely
upon the separation of entertainment from discipline? And yes, I agree
that those borders aren't going to disappear overnight, but I'm still
wondering where your project goes when they do. (because I assume
they will) Perhaps I ought to count my future anterior blessings first! :)
Collin Brooke
==============================================
glue, while you are thinking about Collin's questions,
i would venture to ask you the question that usually
pops up in these situations ...
_____What have we not asked you about the roads ...
avenues ... serpentine movements ... towards your
writing *Heuretics*?
_____Or was it "your writing"?
_____Or did *Heuretics* write its various selves, if
selves, which I do not think it has.
_____In other words, Is *Heuretics* composed of or
by SIGNS? Hence, by the semiotics of the negative?
Over a month ago, when we started this
_____Is there any room in what you are "doing" or being
"done" to ... for the middle voice (Barthes, Lacan, etc.)?
... which, then, gets me to asking ...
_____How much, if any, of the Lacanian third term
"_lalangue_" is there in the "writing" of *Heuretics*?
The third term ... you refer to it in *Applied Grammatology*
... is a reference to what is excluded, purged, when
system and an individual speeh (writing) act takes place.
Another way of asking this question is ...
_____How much of the third principle of reason--i.e., the
excluded middle--is excluded here; How much is nega-
tion negated here in *Heuretics*?
In many vvays, all these aboVe questions are the same
question.
_________
victor = conqueror
vita = life
anza = against
(victor against life)
victor, conqueror of death!
OR
Victa Nyanza
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> get around to talking about what actions I am taking as a result of
> my own reading of HEURETICS.
In fact, I want to expand the notion to include your own speculation
about actions that other teachers might take as well. I want to drain off
right away the servile-quest-for-authorial-intent aftertaste that such an
expansion entails, though, by approaching it from a different angle,
namely:
> the electronic apparatus will (promises to) make all persons their own
> experts, just as the availability of the printed bible made it possible (if
> not necessary) for all persons to be their own priests.
And so:
CGB1046@utarlg.uta.edu
The University of Texas at Arlington
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victor vitanza:
(_Finnegans Wake_, 558.27-28
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