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.
The following file contains posts from the PreText Conversation's re/interviews with Greg Ulmer about his book, _Heuretics: The Logic of Invention_ (John Hopkins 1994). The posts included here appeared on REINVW@miamiu.acs.muohio.edu between 9-7 & 9-28-94.
Compiled by
Jim McFadden
Editorial Assistant
The Pretext Conversation
_________________________
Date: Wed, 07 Sep 1994 22:43:02 -0400 (EDT)
_____Do graduate students at Florida use heuretic methods in
writing their dissertations?
The basic question concerns if and in what way I use heuretics in
my own teaching. I have been using the CATTt heuristic for some
time explicitly as a way to structure my classes at all levels. The
required readings are selected to represent each of the slots
(Contrast, Analogy etc). The courses confront some major
problem at the beginning, and the assignments work through the
stages of the CATTt leading to the design of a poetics or method to
be tested as a solution to the problem. The mystory (in
TELETHEORY) and chorography (in HEURETICS) were first
worked out in my classes.
Students who like this way of working ask me to direct their
dissertations, which tend to be organized as experiments in
alternative approaches to academic research and writing. The
experiments are justified by reference to the grammatological
frame (the history and evolution of writing). What tends to
happen so far is that the students spend much of their energy
working through the historical and theoretical rationale for the
experiment, and end up giving only a sample of the experiment
(which is all I did in my books also). Since these projects break
with some of the conventions of dissertations, we always have to
go through a series of exchanges with the watchdogs in the
graduate school. This problem goes back to the days when they
kept changing < differAnce > to difference. So far the problem
has been solved by a letter from me officially declaring that the
odd formal bits are an indispensable part of the research. There
has never been any opposition from administrators or colleagues
(but then Florida has a very flexible program in general). My
students who have graduated have gone on to revise their
dissertations substantially, including elaborations of the
experiments. It so happens that three of these projects are
undergoing review at various presses right now.
As for hypertexts, a student who just graduated this year
authored a hypertext related to his dissertation, but it was not
directly part of what he submitted to the graduate school. Our
approach at this time is not to trouble the graduate school with
videos, hypertexts, photography and the like, even though our
students work in these media. They submit the scholarly part of
the project as the dissertation. Storyspace has not been the
important medium at Florida that it is at Brown, but that might
change now that we have our new computer lab. The
circumstances surrounding that lab and its impact on our
curriculum in general and my work in particular is a large topic
which we might return to if anyone is interested.
The general issue related to this question concerns the
publishability of experimental writing in the humanities
disciplines. I have seen many calls for alternative forms and
methods, but very few attempts to act on these calls. One
complaint is that such work is very hard to publish. That does
seem to be the case, but again hypermedia and the internet will
change things significantly. The grammatological rationale for
my experimentation has been the history of the language
apparatus (the interlinked evolution of technology, institutional
practices, and individual subject formation). Almost everything
we do in the academy today was invented to take advantage of the
capacities of print. This invention process needs to continue in
relation to the new technologies of language and memory. To look
to print to support the discourses of its own replacement might
be expecting too much. The power of print in the academy will
gradually (or maybe even rapidly) decline as the work done
electronically increases in interest, sophistication. Think of how
writing gradually replaced oratory as the basic medium and form
of intellectual production. So will computing (?) replace print
modes. My argument is that the forms and institutional practices
for this shift remain to be invented.
GREG ULMER
============================
Date: Fri, 09 Sep 1994 09:38:13 -0500
Where this book is really brilliant, Greg, is in allowing us (entreating us) to
think about text differently. As such, it is of course focused on method. But
could you speak more about how you think this is a teachable method? My
question (which is similar to Victor's last post) could be phrased as:
_____What is method and what is really style (or ethos or Ulmer)?
More explanation: What I respond to most in the book is the performative feat
of the method. That kind of theoretical writing as associational set has always
seemed an important compositional strategy to me. I would compare your method
to the one the painter David Salle has used. Salle talks about the pop-imagery
he draws on as his "vocabulary," his "inventory," and his method of juxtaposing
images he has referred to as "rhyming." This seems very much what you're
doing--the rhymes you ring on 1939, or the Geste/gest stuff, or method/Method,
etc. Salle, too, has been influenced by films--in his case Sirk's melodramas.
Your theme is very much Salle's theme as well: he speaks of the linguistic idea
of "the obligatory" (that set within which we're able to think, speak and act)
and he talks about his desire to "get outside of that, or to address the
possibility of transcending that, or at least making it so painfully visible
that you can think about what the world would be like if that weren't the case."
Out of the impossible comes the possible.
But I can't imagine a painting class which tried to replicate Salle's style.
Just as I can't imagine, really, how to teach the performative aspect of your
method. So could you talk more about it? Victor has noted that you are trying
to provide stepping stones to the chora, and I would echo that. It's like that
recording group that was popular years ago whose thing was transcribing Charlie
Parker's solos. It just didn't work. Imagine the dance-footstep diagrams to
replicate a Fred Astaire solo; it would look like those print-outs I've seen of
the bizarre link-screens (not sure of the term) for Storyspace stuff.
I asked above if it's not mixed in with an ethos, because so often it seems that
much of your associational net (like Salle's) is deeply personal (even though it
takes on very public issues). It is like one would almost have had to have the
same textual exposure or background (both grammatological and ecological) to
come to the kind of method you did.
A related question on the rhyming:
_____Why the reliance on the strictly historical in your associational rhymes?
Breton was writing at the same time Beau Geste was filming. So? Has this any
importance (historically) other than the accidental? I know that you talk about
the Surrealists' political responses, but isn't the reliance on conventional
chronology limiting? It prompts great connections, of course, so it's a kind of
chrono-tagmemic or something, but they seem inflected primarily by you--equally
charged non-historical connections could be inflected too, no? Is it that the
historical "accuracy" somehow lends them a patina of "truth"?
============================
Date: Fri, 09 Sep 1994 15:42:44 -0400 (EDT)
_____The relation of heuretics to kairos and the impossible?
1. Victor poses a question of considerable complexity. Before he
could pose it he had to step back, to supply background, the story
of how he came to think that question. I too must step back in a
preliminary way such that I can scarcely begin to answer the
question in this first response. Here I experience the pleasure
of the protocols for this list, which allow for the suspense and
digression of e-time/space.
2. This suspense allows me to interject a word of thanks to the
hosts and participants on this list for spending time with my
publications. I might add a word as well about what I think we
are doing with this reinvw (what I want to do). I am learning
how to perform in E. Electronic. My grandfather, Emanuel
(Boss) Ulmer, built and ran the electric plant in Hazen, North
Dakota, in 1914. He wired that very small town himself. Now I
am wondering how to conduct the discourse of learning in the
apparatus of electronic technology.
We are in a situation that resembles the circumstances Plato
addressed when he invented the dialogue form. His question was:
how to conduct the discourse of learning in the apparatus of
alphabetic technology? He designed an interface to give himself
and his students access to what the new technology could do.
Literacy made analysis and synthesis possible--what was named
< dialectic >. _Phaedrus_ is the first discourse on method, and
what it shows us about method is as simple and profound as what
Aristotle later showed us about narrative. When students read
Aristotles _Poetics_ they tend not to appreciate the depth of the
insight that dialectic made possible about tragedy: that all
tragedies have a beginning, middle, and end. This insight was
possible because Plato showed how method works: by breaking
an object of study into its simplest parts (analysis) and then
arranging these parts in a logical order (synthesis). The
interface metaphor Plato used was the face-to-face conversation
(Socrates chats with Phaedrus). The conversation was not one
heard in everyday life; it was the sort of conversation held only
in the new institution Plato invented to socialize the resources of
writing: school.
3. The Q and A structuring this reinvw is the heir of the
dialogue. The protocols of PRETEXT aim at assuring that the
reinvw stays within the frame of dialogue (a cooperative search
for the truth) and avoids eristics (flame wars). What interests
me about this reinvw is the opportunity it affords not only to
clarify what HEURETICS attempts to communicate, but which
tests it in a way having to do with the project here of inventing a
way to extend dialogue and dialectic into the electronic. Now
here is my question, posed in the suspense of Victors question
about the impossible:
_____does e-learning make interrogation as such (all Q A)
counter-productive or irrelevant?
I want to discuss in my next installment of this answer
comments about the authors Victor mentions. For now I will add
the name of Page duBois to the list: TORTURE AND TRUTH. I
have an article forthcoming in George Landows collection on
theory and hypermedia on the need for inventing an alternative
to interrogation, so I wont go into it here (and my one page of
space is about gone). The idea is that interrogation is the means
of inquiry native to alphabetic literacy, for better and worse,
from Philosophy through the Inquisition to Expert Systems. In
this transitional moment it is reasonable to continue with
interrogation as an interface metaphor, to facilitate access to
whatever it is that E makes possible (heuretics?). The
historical relay suggests, however, that this interrogation
should not resemble any that we are familiar with. SloterdijkUs
CRITIQUE OF CYNICAL REASON makes interesting reading in this
context. In my article I attempt to take up Seymour PapertUs
suggestion of the Samba school as an alternative model for
learning, in place of the Q and A. So Victor, you and I are dancing
now, and the floor still has plenty of room...
============================
Date: Sat, 10 Sep 1994 16:36:14 -0400 (EDT)
_____Is heuretics a teachable method or (only?) a style?
Sorry I missed the signature at the end of this question, so I am not
sure who is GMS.
When Plato invented method the challenge was to prove that
morality was teachable. The skeptics wondered indeed if anything
at all was teachable (_Meno_). The question for heuretics is if
creativity is teachable (is creativity and method a contradiction in
terms). The hubris of HEURETICS is to declare that I am playing
Breton to Derridas Freud. What saves this otherwise absurd
declaration is that it is offered as a claim that remains to be tested
by folks on this list et al: that undergraduates can use heuretics to
design and then apply original poetics without any more difficulty
than they now experience using hermeneutics to compose
interpretations.
I liked the Salle analogy. I extend it to say that the point of
heuretics is not to copy someone elses style but to learn how to
develop ones own style. Where TELETHEORY failed, apparently,
was that readers mistook < Derrida at the Little Bighorn > for a
product, even a (bad) work of art, instead of as a relay, a demo, of
a method that requires extrapolation to ones own case to be
functional. Mystoriography and chorography (first and second
generation of the same thing) are an attempt to design a pedagogy
that simulates the experience of creativity. Reviewing a number
of studies of creative people, I noted that in every case innovators
turned to metaphors or analogies from their personal experience
or popular culture context for alternative interfaces that helped
them overcome impasses blocking their fields of study. I wanted to
give students the experience of the EUREKA that makes research so
exciting, so pleasurable. Creativity happens when
extradisciplinary personal peculiarities are brought into contact
with disciplinary discourses in the context of problem-solving. In
chorography I used the CATT (itself derived from an analysis of a
sample of the key discourses on method in the Western tradition)
heuristic to find an ANALOGY for teaching this projection of
personal-private into public-collective material: the analogy is
Method acting, in which the actor informs the lines of the public
play with emotions found by doing memory exercises (cf
psychoanalytic conversation). In principle then there is nothing
impossible (hello Victor; still thinking about your question) about
a hybrid private/public practice.
As for the step by step procedure of teaching this hybrid, I need to
return to it in more detail another time (especially regarding the
difficulties of the Tale, which requires a page of its own). The
short version concerns the POPCYCLE (HEURETICS) (on the road I
have done workshops that are a 90 min. version of the semester
course): 1--note the 4 main discourses of learning we all
practice (Family, Entertainment, School, Discipline); 2--locate a
key figure associated with a problem in each discourse (simulates
your superego); 3--enter information from each problem area;
4--look for puncept patterns in details across the 4 levels. That
there will be such a pattern or repetition of some details is
assured for the same reason all languages have puns: the sheer
material ratio of few signifiers to multitudinous signifieds.
Nonetheless, the effect of finding the figure in ones own carpet is
EUREKA; the arbitrary crossing takes on the shape of what
formerly suggested fate or destiny but which now has more of an
aesthetic quality. I have given such assignments at all levels and a
signature version of this line of work is included in the textbook
TEXT BOOK (Scholes, Comley, Ulmer, St Martins Press). When
students do such projects they do experience eureka.
The next step is to use the pattern as an _inventio_ for a
disciplinary problem. I have done this myself, and used it in
graduate seminars (not yet for undergrads). Example: taking as a
proof of the value and relevance for me of the cheeky method of
Diogenes (recommended in Sloterdijk, Deleuze, Serres) the
pattern of GALL generated in < Derrida at the Little Bighorn >.
This pattern logic (known as conduction) does NOT replace the
other ductions that guide linking (for such is the function of
logic), but supplements them. Which brings me to your second
question.
_____the limited historical periodicity of the associational
rhymes in chorography?
One of the pleasures of mystoriography/chorography (I need to
sort these out later), using the combination of method and fortune
(Hello again, Victor) is the surprises that emerge. The proof
effect (as a logic of invention) comes from the method generating
data that I would never have thought of otherwise. The challenge,
once such patterns emerge, is to use the analytic operations of
literacy to make sense of them (secondary elaboration). One such
pattern that emerged in < Yellowstone Desert > (which, once you
have read the book, you would pronounce deSERT) totally
unexpectedly was the periodicity you noted. I am open to the
achronos or non-historical linkings you mentioned, the
Benjaminian messianic history an example of which might be Greil
Marcus LIPSTICK TRACES. What happened in my case, however,
was a parallel across modes and genres such that almost every
thread I was working was relayed to me from the 1920s (Foreign
Legion war in Morocco; Surrealism; Freuds
Pattern, in any case, does give rise to a truth effect, in the manner
of intuition. HEURETICS lays out a rationale for chorography as a
way to write intuition, with the computer as the material support,
similar to the way dialectic was a way to write analysis with
literacy as the material support. The claim is that in the
electronic apparatus the particular and the general, the local and
the global, the personal and the public, the private and the
collective--all will communicate or interact differently than they
have in the apparatus of literacy. The paths or passages linking
these levels in literacy are the paths of inference (deduction,
induction, abduction). Hold on to these, but add to them conduction.
Hence the further claim that STYLE is the place from which
rhetoric begins to reclaim all the functions it lost to logic in the
era of print (the struggle for cognitive jurisdiction recorded in
the history of the trivium). Thus what seems impossible in one
paradigm seems obvious in another (oops, did I answer Victors
question by mistake?)
GREG ULMER
============================
Date: Sun, 11 Sep 1994 10:21:57 -0500 (CDT)
I have just received a very interesting exchange in
the REINVW sequence with Ulmer. The posting, however,
makes no mention whatever of who might have written it.
I have mentioned this matter before. Is everyone on the
list able to recognise the others from syntactic peculiarities
alone?
Hans Kellner
============================
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 1994 11:57:11 -0400 (EDT)
_____Is chorography an insane style and/or a sane pedagogy?
Victor is right to call attention to the parallels between the choral
method and psychotic dyscourse. In my part of the introduction to
GLAS (_Sounding the Unconscious_ in GLASSARY, Ed. John Leavey,
Nebraska Press) I analyzed Derridas compositional strategy by
comparing it to Lacans study of Schreber. The point of the Lacan
chapter in APPLIED GRAMMATOLOGY was that Lacan himself in his
lectures imitated neurotic and psychotic discourse, to put his
students in the position of analyst listening to the analysand (this
was Lacans solution to the problem of teaching a clinical practice
in an academic setting: his answer to the problem of whether
psychoanalysis was teachable). Freud was very defensive about
the resemblance between paranoia and psychoanalytic
interpretation, to which he himself called attention. Foucault said
that Freuds most important discovery was of the logic of the
unconscious. What the context of the history of invention allowed
me to realize about Freud was that he made explicit what had been
a buried part of every discovery of science/arts--the irreducible
contribution of the personal life of the inventor (which is his link
with Nietzsche).
_____why is chorography an impossible method?
Now Victor I can address the issue of the impossible method in this
context: the Unconscious is an impossible concept. It is to culture
perhaps what black holes are to astrophysics. Anyway, the form
that my electronic rhetoric has taken is due in part to my having
passed through film studies on the way. Film studies as you know
is heavily involved with Freudo-Marxist-Semiotics, using
Lacanian theory especially to describe and interpret film and
cinema. This intellectual situation is the baroque result of the
analogy that has been present from the beginning which is that
film is (like) a dream. Psychoanalysis and cinema arose
simultaneously and independently in the 19th century, but all that
rises must converge, no? Whether or not film is a language, or is
becoming a language, is much debated by makers as well as critics.
From the point of view of grammatology, however, the historical
parallel between the emergence of audio-visual recording in our
era and the evolution of literacy is very strong. The multimedia
equipment that is coming to our desktops (or is already there)
allows the individual to make compositions that involve not only
all the practices of literacy but also all the practices of
cinema/television. Hollywood is the Pharaoh of film work; when
writing was invented in Egypt only the Pharaoh could afford to use
it. But it got cheaper. Movies are Pharaoh projects. But as
interface designers are starting to realize, hypermedia design is
more like making a movie than it is like having a conversation
(hence the VITA in TELETHEORY: hybrid of AI and TV).
The point is that the logic of the unconscious (the condensations,
displacements, priority of the signifier etc of dreamwork) is
already the best description we have of the reasoning that is most
adequate to the resources of sound-image media. Not the
metapsychological in/de/ab-ductive reasoning of Freud et al
explaining Schrebers or the Wolf Mans discourse but that
discourse itself (or rather, psych is the grammar imposed on the
latters natural language). Nor is there any necessary relationship
between the clinical medical context in which this grammar was
invented and the nature of VITA making, because if you examine the
resources Freud drew on to establish his description you see that
it comes from the poetic resources and practices of the ages.
Chorography then involves the lifting of the psycho-filmic
practice from its native contexts (medicine and entertainment)
and an extrapolation to the context of schooling, where we need the
equivalent of the St Martins Handbook for applying
hypercomputing to learning. What happens when literacy is
embedded in internet hypermedia computing? Well, what
happened when orality was embedded in writing (that has been the
interface metaphor for 2500 years--which is at the heart of
hermeneutics)?
Chorography is an impossible method because in principle method
is literate; the degree of invention grammatology calls for is at the
level of method as such: Literacy : method :: hypercomputing :
_________? Which is why I started HEURETICS with the CATTt
heuristic. Heuretics does not fill in the blank; it is a way to make
the transition from method to whatever the blank might be that
guides learning (which is not in itself medium or apparatus
specific, OBVIOUSLY, n est-ce pas?) I consider grammatology to
be a (an impossible) science in that it is open to testing the claims
I am making. I do not know if I am right or not. the university is a
place of research and the humanities has a big part to play in the
new conditions coming into existence in relation to the electronic
apparatus. The pedagogy we have been discussing is a way to test
the hypothesis that educational practices in hypermedia will (by
the standards of literacy) appear INSANE.
The test of a pedagogy and curriculum is that students experience
real learning by means of them. A case relevant to the questions of
both Victor and Geoff: the development of TEXT BOOK, which was
field tested at UF (and at Queens and Brown). Take the 4th chapter
especially. The fragments of a students discourse and the signature
assignments. The readers for the press declared that the book was
unpublishable and useless because graduate students could not do
what TEXT BOOK expected of freshmen. I sent the press 30 papers
or so-- a representative sample covering several years-- of
signature assignments composed by Florida freshmen to refute the
readers reports. The signature assignment is a good test for
sorting out the categories we have been discussing--sane/insane,
method/style etc. Derrida observed that the proper names of
philosophers and poets recurred as common nouns and verbs
within the themes of their work. That indeed there existed an
isotopy across the levels from the authors name through the STYLE
of the composition to the key ideas governing the METHOD (or
poetic) The signature assignment assumes that this phenomenon
may be extracted from its occasions in the performance of experts
and adapted to learning for everyone; that it may be extrapolated
from a possibly accidental manifestation of the logic of the
unconscious into a predictive method for generating insights. The
signature as an *inventio* is especially useful, even if the
purpose of the *inventio* is simply to motivate the collecting of
stuff to use. Argumentation has its own methods of invention that
discover quite different stuff than does the signature.
My personal experience of using the signature to guide my
research, and the evidence of student papers composed with the
signature, is that researching in the manner of the psychotic
Schreber (or of the surrealist artists--cf. Dalis paranoiac-
critical method) produces a very strong learning effect. Again, the
idea is not to replace argument with surrealism, but to create a
hybrid. The CATTt suggests an initial way to explore this
collaboration of literacy and hypermedia: the Contrast would be
argumentation. In the computer lab we still assign a Handbook,
but it functions as a CONTRAST rather than as a rulebook. That is
the next assignment in my ENG1131 class (Writing With Popular
Culture) this term: to compose a chapter for any existing
Handbook that shows how to do a research paper using conduction,
to be distinguished from the existing chapter based on
argumentation. The ANALOGY for conduction is provided by Arieti,
CREATIVITY: THE MAGIC SYNTHESIS, which gives a psychoanalytic
account of the logic of creativity. The new edition of TEXT BOOK
(available by this October or so) has a new chapter at the end that
extends the signature assignment into a textual (mystorical)
approach to the research paper. More about this later.
GREG ULMER
Sorry these answers are getting so lengthy. Help! This one was
two pages single spaced. Now Im making it longer...
============================
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 1994 06:26:41 -0400 (EDT)
Fr: Jim McFadden (jmcf)
I appreciate your recognition of the object-of-a-discipline's
thrownness by its writers, and I agree that Freud stands as
a well recognized case of the autobiographical investment in
the maintainence and construction of the disciplinary object
(blah, blah, blah). I see the movement you are advocating
with CATTt as a method of invention, as I saw the earlier
mystory. I also see what you mentioned in your response to Geoff,
that some reviewers have mistaken the autobiographical content
of mystory as a specific of the method rather than a specific of
your own relation with your object's thrownness.
Yet, while I hesitate in part to raise a debate I ought to research
more than I have and can presently, I am interested in asking about
your take on the debate about whether or not electronic technology
and method "are" patriarchal/conservative.
I am struck by the uncomplicated boosterism advocated in _Heuretics_,
especially at moments of the book's interest in throwing. I see
your conduction autobiographically. But the method too is historical,
disciplinary, popular, and familial, hence I see it as conductive
as you do, but I wonder also that the method's politics go unacknowledged,
always deferred.
In your book, throwings are made:
1) by the Minnesota AIM leader, Vernon Bellecourt, who threw a pint
of his blood on the sail of the replica of Columbus's ship when it
visited at the Science Museum of Minnesota. It is his "gesture" you
say you "want to recieve" in this book. [Do you "receive" it? How?]
2) by Red Cryer, your "village idiot" who throws a piece of litter, some
cardboard, off a bridge into the wind which throws it back into his face
repeatedly. His throwing you see as postal, mythical, and a lesson.
& 3) by the clown who throws a pie in your face to disrupt your presentation
at Miles City which becomes apparently (but not as substitute?) this book.
Clearly, you announce your assumptions as patriarchial in the second half
of the book, but I am interested in the presumed ease of conduction those
assumptions are allowed in your method. Is conduction not inherently
conservative as a methodology? For example, what is the function of the
method's employment of familial, popular, and disciplinary discourses as
the voices of the conducting subject? How could a method that "employs"
Lacan's "Schema L" not be patriarchal? And, similarly, how could a method
that voices uncritically the popular, the familial, the disciplinary not be
patriarchially conservative? What is the popular function of your
conduction to us of these throwings by the Native, the "idiot," and the
clown? In what way, do you receive resistance by conducting those resistances
as follie? Is conduction too limited, perhaps, too patriarchal a method for
contemporary disciplinary needs?
Are there not accompanying metaphors that illustrate the overt politics
of your method in a manner reminiscent of the critique of ethnography.
Forgive my incomplete understanding of electronic technology but what might
be the value of using "resistor" rather than "conductor" as a metaphor for
your method? What does your method resist? Having put down the resistance
to autobiography in the construction of disciplinary objects, does your method
yet function to resist appeals like those made by AIM, that is by the
"unpopular" or "nonpopular"?
Jim McFadden
============================
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 1994 10:29:47 -0500
_____How do we establish credibility for table-work-as-text?
Greg, the talk so far has been (from Victor & I) very positive, enthusiastic, as
to the kind of text resulting from your method. Your invention is the kind of
invention I want, a *derive* through texts and lives and places. Intuitively,
it feels right; textually, it reads great. We've spent a little time talking
about how to try to teach such a method (and yes, I would like to hear about
your computer lab), but can we talk about how to actually give such texts real
force in larger university settings. Bove, in his article on "Theory as
Practice" (in _Works & Days_, Fall 1990) declares that "Our task as teachers is
to do whatever we can to let institutions hear what students and others know,
even though they often are saying it in ways the normative order of disciplines
cannot hear" (19).
Your method, Greg, is a powerful one for allowing students to drift through (or
across) disciplines at their own speed, to go where they want; letting their own
flaneurian trace count as text. It validates any point of attraction, and
de-privileges any point of repulsion (no matter how canonical). In short, it
satisfies Bove's call for circumventing "the ways in which students' and others'
expressions of need and desire are blocked by a constantly adjusting system that
tries to freeze their expressions and direct their energies and desires in ways
they have had no part in choosing" (20). Your Method lets them choose (star in)
their own Parts, reject certain Scripts in favor of others. Students become
their own Agents.
Now a story I just heard from a colleague who is going to address new TA's here
at Minnesota. She is going to tell them about a TA she had in the late 60's
(circa Bill Coles) who asked the class one day if they minded if he taught class
that day in the nude, since he was very comfortable in his body and he thought
there was a real pedagogical effect to be gained. No one in the class objected
(so it kind of passes the Iowa "unusual or unexpected" test). But when the
administration found out, they committed the TA to a psychiatric institution.
This story, then, is in keeping with our discussion of sane/insane pedagogies.
I could imagine Macrorie or Coles (and even myself on a really good nude day, as
Stallone calls it) teaching according to such a method. I could more easily
imagine myself pushing my already stretched notion of academic essays in the
direction of conduction/chorography, making the body of the writing itself more
naked. But Ulmer's version of such writing is more academically impressive, of
course--more traditionally cited, more analytical--than my students' would be.
So how do I become more intuitive, count more table-work as college writing, and
not get taken to the metaphorical looney bin? Because at this place, people in
other departments actually ferret out the identities of their students'
composition teachers, see what grades they got, and complain about how students
that can't write a coherent history paper got a B in first-year composition.
Then they call a series of confrontatory meetings to find out "just what you're
teaching those students over there in your writing classes . . ."
Geoff Sirc
============================
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 1994 10:57:26 -0600 (CST)
Rather than asking a question and backtracking to explain where I'm
coming from, I'd like to explain where I am and see if I can pull a question
out of it. I want to play off vjv's question about invention vs. style, but I
have, I think, different sources of possible dis/ease.
In Part II of _Teletheory_, you discuss the joke as particularly attractive for
your "project designed to integrate the cognitive styles of justification and
invention" (55). In the pages that follow, in describing the cognitive
process of jokes, it seems to me that you suggest (especially in your
analysis of Koestler's "bisociation of ideas") that what we generally call
"creativity" is not so much a radically different way of thinking as it is a
subset of a broadly-conceived theory of invention, a subset which has been
separated and had been largely forgotten in the same insitutional procedures
which divided off and privileged "left-brain activities." [This is not
problematic for me--just preamble-matic...]
One of the things I've been working with is the notion of catachresis, which
might be loosely defined in much the same way as creativity, although
definitions vary widely from source to source. I'm thinking of it in the
same way that koans are used pedagogically in Zen Buddhism, or at least in
certain sects. One of the walls that I run up against periodically is that,
when koans or catachretic techniques are applied, there needs to be an
uneven relationship between the teacher and taught. That is, in order for me
to know what will be catachretic for my student, I have to know what s/he
knows and more. What is catachretic for the student may not be so for the
teacher. Catachresis as a trope is not value-neutral (cf. Patricia Parker's
historical analysis to that effect in _The Ends of Rhetoric_, ed. by
Bender/Wellbery, Stanford UP, '90). It [catachresis] inscribes an
asymmetric relationship between the person and the material, in the same
way that a joke doesn't affect the teller as it does the listener.
I guess my initial question is this:
_____to what degree is the "Eureka experience" metaleptically inscribed in
the heuretic process you describe?
Does heuretics set up boundaries, work to fix students within them, and
then set up a program which simulates their aleatory transgression? Which
is the long way of asking whether or not heuretics creates "true" eurekas, or
simulated ones (without necessarily preferring truth to simulation). I want
to keep going, and ask whether eurekas themselves are inscribed in our
culture by precisely the type of left brain-right brain separation that you
spoke of in _Teletheory_. Is the concept of invention as it's currently
understood in American culture a function of our particular style? That is,
because of our focus on the individual, our emphasis on frontierism, etc.,
have we created a "false" theory societally which inscribes the "pleasures"
(and subsequent rewards in the form of authorship, patents, etc.) of
invention on what should be natural results of a broad-ranged, open mind?
This may do little more than to bring me back to the question you raised
about the possible oxymoron lurking in a "method of invention." But to ask
that question (or to deal with any oxymoron) is to grant some type of
solidity to the notion of invention, and I'd rather hear your thoughts on the
matter. Nor is this a critique of the method itself, which I've enjoyed (both
in reading _Heuretics_ and teaching from _Text Book_).
Saving that for later,
============================
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 1994 13:59:32 -0500
_____Circuits between Discipline and Entertainment?
Let's talk a little bit about John Cage. There's one thing I want to talk about
regarding Cage that I hope will advance our discussion of Greg's book. It has
to do with the content and style of Cage's prose. Reading Cage is incredibly
pleasurable for me. At the same time it's very enlightening. Often when I read
Cage, I feel that there is nothing else to say, that theory can't go any
further, can't deal with anything more significant. And I bet that Glue feels
the same way about Derrida. But there's a big difference between Cage and
Derrida, I think. Maybe it's a question of the difference between European and
American. Cage spent a lot of time in his writings thinking about how to
distance himself from the European tradition, and indeed there's something
strongly American about Cage, his sense of plain-ness, open-ness,
self-invention, democratic materialism. But I don't want to get into a
European vs. American thing, Cage is as Eastern as he is American, and I would
never fault Greg for his Francophilia. But where I see it as an issue here is
(in his reading and writing) Greg's reliance (which you don't find in Cage at
all) on dense, rare, privileged, undemocratic texts (even though they may be
tremendously liberating for an individual reader/theorist like himself). Greg
takes off from Brecht to allow him to read Wren and Derrida together, citing
this rationale: "The gap separating the discourses of Discipline and
Entertainment has to be crossed in both directions. The point is not to reduce
one to the other but to open a circuit between them" (102). Why is that the
point? Doesn't that ultimately privilege Derrida over Wren, Derrida as helping
explain, lending interpretive force to, inflecting the naive text of Wren?
Which has more scholarly cachet? Is there a "Wren" list on the Internet? Why
isn't the point to reduce any distinction between the two (hence, championing
the already accessible rather than the discipline-one that presumes so much
investment of time and labor)?
Cage's life was steeped in invention. His father was an inventor. He spent his
whole life inventing a method, a tradition of composition, and writing about
that invention. It's a method worth comparing to Greg's, since it's so similar.
Does Cage think about the impossible? "We musT do the impossible," he said.
His whole rational for composition is "to hear the music [he] hasn't yet heard,"
to look for "something [he] hasn't yet found." Why do the impossible? For
Cage, it comes down to his belief that "revolution Can/nEver/Stop" (_X_, 151).
In _I-VI_ he wrote about his performative philosophy: "the performance of a
piece of music can be a metaphor of society of how we want society to be
[breathe] though we are not now living in a society we consider good we could
make a piece of music in which we would be willing to live." Take his piece
_Musicircus_ which he outlines as "maNy/Things going on/at thE same time/a
theatRe of differences together/not a single Plan/just a spacE of time/aNd/as
many pEople as are willing/performing in The same place/a laRge/plAce a
gymnasium/an archiTecture/that Isn't/invOlved/with makiNg the stage/dIrectly
opposite/the audieNce and higher/Thus/morE/impoRtant than where they're
sitting/the resPonsibility/of Each/persoN *is*/marcEl duchamp said/To
complete/the woRk himself . . . theRe will be too many musicians/to
Pay/thE/eveNt/must bE free/To the publis/heRe/As elsewhere/we find That/socIety
needs/tO be/chaNged" (X, 141-142). I think Greg wants these things--electronic
writing in which we are willing to live, a better society than we have now
(e.g., he wants to re-write *geschlecht* in Cornel Westian, Musicircusian
terms). But here too I would question whether Greg's dense-ness fights his
revolutionary message. Who will pick this book up and read it and have their
life changed? Who will want to live in it? The possibility is there, but the
probability? Scholars, yes, might want to teach in it, and they might relay the
message, the revolutionary force, to students, etc. But I urged this book on a
colleague in journalism who came very close to stopping after the first few
pages. This is unreadable, she told me. Isn't framing the debate in such
specialized terms antithetical to the powerful force of invention you want to
theorize? I'm in no way singling you out, I think your prose is much more
readable, more playful, than some, but what I'm trying to do is question the
inevitability of disciplinary discourse.
My question, then, is: Why maintain the distinctions between discourses? Why
do we want to recicrculate such rarefied, thoroughly specialized, academic texts
as Derrida? I dream of a world where we don't need Derrida (or Cage for that
matter). But I can't help but think Cage would get more of us there faster.
Cage claimed his philosophy was "get out of whatever cage you find yourself in,"
and do we want to think this pertains to everyone but us? Isn't Derrida a cage?
Plato? I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a colleague in San Diego at
4Cs, on our responses to Victor's speech on the C's. My colleague's reaction
was "My millworker friend wouldn't understand it. It's a Faberge egg." Now,
specifically this is a bullshit comment cause my colleague reads/uses trendy
high-toned theory exclusively, stuff most millworkers would probably pass on.
But I think the criticism is a good one. It's the spirit of, say, Patricia
Williams' comment about how she read all this theoretical stuff and it changed
her life, but she couldn't imagine the average reader (whose life might really
need changing) reading it. So her book consciously avoids citing it, theorizing
instead articles and anecdotes from the NY Times. I think here we can learn
from the situationists, who spoke in some high-toned texts to be sure (Debord's
_Society of the Spectacle_, e.g.), but who also knew the benefit of striking
with millworkers and so who knew how important it was to work in genres like
grafitti and leaflets and parody and film soundtracks (_On the Passage of a Few
Persons etc._). Now, the claim could be made that Cage (by now) is an academic
text too (who else but those in the academy read Cage anymore)? But back in the
days, a whole bunch of people read Cage. I think we would do better in getting
more people to read thoery, to entertain the crucial questions about life today
embedded in the best of theory, if more Gregs wrote more in the style of
"Metaphoric Rocks," maybe, than the denser parts of _Heuretics_). Greg, you
should be a movie critic or a TV critic, writing your theory in the guise of
popular culture crit--i.e., going all the way away from the discourse of
Discipline, into the discourse of Entertainment, fusing them rather than
bridging them. No more distinctions between Nations/Discourses!
Geoff Sirc
============================
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 1994 18:18:12 -0500 (CDT)
Geoff, I have to respond not to what you said, but to what your colleague in
journalism said about Heuretics: that it's unreadable. Generally I agree with
you about accessibility. I like Terry Eagleton better than Julia Kristeva,
because one is trying to be understood by me and the other seems not to be.
But my reading of Heuretics was a pure pleasure, even though I have more in
common with your millworker when it comes to reading texts on invention than I
do with your journalist friend.
When I finished the book I felt a distinct urge to start over; to remind
myself what claims glue had made in the opening and to see how he defined his
terms. But I also simply wanted to reread it, just for the fun it gave me.
But there were two friends of mine lined up to read it when I finished, so I
handed the book over. One, Jim Krause, who was part of the NEH summer seminar
on Ezra Pound, cited the book in his final presentation, and used it in its
preparation.
I had the advantage over your journalist friend of looking forward to the
reactions of others to fill in those parts of the book I didn't understand, not
that they weren't clear, but because I don't have the background. There's
something really motivating in reading together, and knowing there will be
discussion afterwards. Heuretics made me smile a lot, burst out laughing
occasionally (to the amusement of the taciturn German tourists who populate the
Tyrol) and think. Just as I wanted to go the exhibits of the fictional artist
in Atwood's _Cat's Eye_, I wanted to see the tableau vivant and watch the
reactions of the crowd.
Paula (Pollyanna) Gillespie
============================
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 1994 12:32:44 -0500 (CDT)
"It is better to approach 'deconstruction' by means of usage rather than
definition," says Greg.
Derrida has been repeatedly asked to define what the term
"deconstruction" means. Seemingly frustrated by society's need for a
definition he has dismissed this importuning with the statement, "it just
happens." "Deconstruction just happens." He also says though that "It's
not only a way of reading texts in the trivial sense; it's also a way of
dealing with institutions."
Let's ask some questions. How much deconstruction does Greg need to teach
before he can get his students to do things with deconstruction? Does he
conflate the terms "deconstruction" and "grammatology"? Is applying
grammatology, applying deconstruction or is it applying a part of
deconstruction? This in turn begs the question: can deconstruction be
divided into parts? (for example, 1. take apart 2. put back together in
a new and hopefully ingenious way)
I'm currently involved in looking at the relationship between
deconstruction and institutions especially the institution of pedagogy.
As an English teacher I am obviously involved in interrogating literary
texts, but although careers are constantly being constructed with this
project in mind doesn't the activity of endlessly interpreting canonical
and non-canonical texts (the hermeneutic project, I suppose) need to be
seriously questioned? Is it ethically sound to just do it? Obviously
Graff, Lentrichia, and others are already examining these issues, but
let's spend more time looking at the institution that surrounds most of
us, that is to say the pedagogical institution. Deconstruction then,
according to Derrida, can help us to read the institution--presumably not
just the academic one but other institutions too. This brings me to my
last question, the one that follows--Can deconstruction ever be separated
from institutions or isn't it always already inherently institutional?
============================
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 1994 15:24:18 -0400 (EDT)
_____Is chorography too patriarchal for the needs of
contemporary disciplines?
I substituted
1. Jim poses the hot-button question. What about politics? This
question is extremely important and takes us into issues that I find
very confusing, perplexing, troubling, about which I have a great
deal of ambivalence and uncertainty. We are in the zone of the end
of the Enlightenment problematic (Lyotard-Habermas debate etc).
My work is committed to testing the poststructural version of this
situation, to see where that might lead (I will try to account for
this bet or choice briefly in what follows).
To put the question of conservativism or patriarchality in
perspective I have to step back from conduction and even
choragraphy to method itself. Method as such is an invention of
patriarchal Western civilization. Radical feminism, represented
by the early Laura Mulvey, went through a phase of reasoning that
narrative as such had been totally colonized by the patriarchal and
therefore progressive authors had to give up the pleasures of the
text, abandon the seductions of storytelling, and find alternative
forms for creative expression. As fruitful as such avant-garde
experimentation has been, most folks have abandoned that
extremism to argue that giving up narrative as such is giving up
far more than is necessary: there is nothing inherently
conservative or progressive about narrative.
The same sort of reasoning might be applied to method as such:
JimUs question is in fact: is method as such too patriarchal, too
conservative, for contemporary disciplines? I suggested in a
previous post here that one project for heuretics is to find the
other of method. What distinguishes the case of method from the
case of narrative is that narrative crosses all apparatuses, while
it is not clear that method as we understand it existed in a truly
oral civilization. This point needs much more discussion: The
history of dialogue shows that Plato drew heavily on the rituals of
the Eleusinian mysteries for articulating his invention, and there
is plenty of other evidence to suggest that ritual is to method as
epic is to novel. In short, every apparatus has its specific
practices of discourse: story, argument, poetic--which may serve
any politics whatsoever. As Alexander Kluge as argued about the
German lesson, the left abandoned all too quickly the ground of
myth and story to the right (it let the devil have all the good
tunes). That was a fundamental mistake not to be repeated.
PROBLEM: critique is hopeless as a means for working with myth.
To extend this hopelessness to the context of the apparatus:
discipline itself is an invention of literacy and totally dependent on
method: to be a discipline by definition requires a discourse have a
methodology and an object of study. These elements are the sine
qua non of being a legitimate part of the institution of school. But
wait: school is an invention of literacy. In short, it is not possible
for one part of the apparatus to change in isolation leaving
everything else in place. Discipline as such is in no position to
evaluate its own foundation (this is the remainder that Derrida et
al insist on taking into account). Jims question could be reversed:
_____Are the needs of contemporary disciplines too patriarchal,
too conservative, to be relevant to the problems of electronic
culture?
2. Stopping at this point would be too easy, for it ignores the more
specific levels of the problematic. If method or discipline as such
are not too patriarchal (or maybe they are?), then what about
choragraphy? If the problem does not lie with method, then
heuretics may be used to design a poetics/rhetoric that is more
progressive than choragraphy. I wanted that option in HEURETICS
precisely because I am uncertain about the politics and ethics of
choragraphy myself. At this level (the second layer of the
question), I have to disagree with JimUs characterization of the
boosterism in < Yellowstone Desert > as UNCOMPLICATED. Jim is
right to worry about uncomplicated boosterism and about what
appears to be the EASE with which conduction passes across
borders of the popcycle, all of which risk an UNCRITICAL voicing
of the different registers of discourse. These are serious
reservations, given the climate of opinion currently organizing
cultural studies, so it is well worth trying to sort out the
poststructural gambit (which is how I understand the positioning
of choragraphy in the triangular debate among humanists,
deconstructors, and marxists-the labels, however unfortunate,
that have evolved as names for the camps).
Rather, choragraphy may have a political effect, but it does not
have an established politics. It does not start out with an
assumption about what is true and right and beautiful, but it is
designed to discover the premises, the assumptions about these
values and concepts actually functioning in the inventors
subjectivation (identity formation). The idea here is that these
premises are often buried and go unrecognized in most politics. A
politics may not be taken at its word as to whether it is
progressive or conservative. Methods are political in that they
have ideologies. Althusser claimed that a certain marxism was
exempt from this limitation (this area of blindness) but his
alternative was science. Critique is now doing to science what it
once did to religion. As powerful as critique is (to use that term as
a shorthand for what passes now as a method that would supposedly
not be described in the way Jim describes choragraphy), its
premises are literate, which is why it is inadequate for electronic
reasoning.
What do I mean
Why? Althusser said that all the institutions of a society serve the
interests of the state ideological apparatus. Whether or not it has
to be that way is another question; the popcycle juxtaposition
shows that he is even more right than he realized, since for a time
discipline was crowded with Althusserians (fans of Althusser). I
am a fan of Derrida. I dont mean *fan* in an uncomplicated way,
however. Rather, the theory of mourning helped me understand
my fandom. As you know, mourning is the psychoanalytic poetic
way of describing the entry into language. I have argued that all
the dynamics of the entry into language (everything to do with the
formation of superego and its operations in identity) provide the
relay for every future specialized language that we add to our
repertoire (in the way that the superego or mourning process adds
to the parental figures other authorities with whom we identify).
The interest of the theory of mourning is that it includes the
operations of the unconscious in all behaviors of modern citizens.
Part of the argument of HEURETICS is that the computer is the
support of the unconscious--it augments what has bee theorized in
the name of this term and makes that process--conduction--
available as a practice. In these terms the condition of modernism
or critique in which the divisions of society are kept apart is a
condition of blocked mourning (making the case of postwar
Germany exemplary for all modern states). In short the problem
of modernist society is not the ease of movement through the
popcycle but on the contrary the resistance to such flow caused by
our institutional formations (constructed in the same way as
concepts--a yes-no, inside-outside, included-excluded, proper-
improper). As for the electronic metaphor, then--Lacan used the
image of the resistor--of the filament in the lightbulb to be exact-
-as an analogy for the ego. In this electronic allegory for logic,
conduction is the primary process circumventing the critical
police of the ego (defense mechanisms). In this sense Jim is right
to call conduction specifically uncritical.
I have been speaking in general terms. On an individual level, the
problem I have with some of the persons who practice critique is
that they seem to be unaware of the omnipresence of boosterism in
all discourses: they practice critique in an uncritical way. That
is, they are not very self-critical. They say all the *right* things
(progressive things--I guess it depends on which crowd one hangs
out with) but their behavior contradicts their words.
*disfairance* is a way to check saying against doing, not only in
writing but in behavior. I have read and heard respected folks
declare themselves to be < with the homeless in the streets > (etc)
but who do nothing other than publish disciplinary books about
this question. It is just too easy to say such things, if nothing
follows from it other than the improvement of ones own career. It
does not make what is said less true in itself, but it raises the
specter of the right hand not knowing what the left hand (or brain)
is doing. It leaves untouched the question of how to make these
progressive ideas effective in the conduct of life. Which brings us
full circle to the impasses of the Enlightenment, in that <
contemporary disciplines > are losing confidence in progress as
such. Knowledge may not help. Choragraphy, finally, is a method
for self-critique; it is precritical or preliminary, as a means to
map what otherwise eludes conscious critical thought: ones own
premises--understood now in terms of the unconscious, which is
understood in turn as the symbolic order. Every political method
is an enthymeme (its major premise is suppressed).
3. I come now to the third register of the problematic: If method
in general and choragraphy in particular are not in themselves
inherently too conservative, it may still be the case that <
Yellowstone Desert > or Ulmers own practice is too conservative or
patriarchal to be of any use to contemporary disciplines. This
charge (if it is a charge) may well be correct. When I said in
HEURETICS that my eureka moment was not very pleasant, I was
referring to the fact that choragraphy had forced me recognize in a
fundamental way what intellectually everyone should know
anyway--you can take the person out of the country (city,
whatever), but you cant take the country out of the person. When I
found the Sand & Gravel company in *Chora* I realized that a lot of
ideological baggage I thought I had educated my way out of was still
with me (identity as overly competent baggage handler, always
forwarding ones past).
Choragraphy also suggests that identity is not destiny (to borrow a
phrase). My autoportrait with popcycle shows that my
subjectivation is as patriarchal as can be. At the same time, the
historical context shows that this outcome is entirely predictable
(to show any surprise at it would naive, as if it were amazing that
I am a native speaker of English). The key to choragraphy is that it
helps its user to map the domain of TASTE, judgment, intuition. I
do not identify with Custer intellectually, conceptually, politically
in that conscious sense. But I learned that I do identify with him in
the dimension of mythology, in the experience of identity
formation (the forced choice). In < Derrida at the LIttle Bighorn >
I found a message left for whomever had eyes or ears to read it:
*FICEL* (anagram of the letters of the companies of cavalry under
Custers immediate command). The authors of the tourist guide to
the battlefield marked the site of the Last Stand with these letters,
showing the final positions of the troops. I immediately recognized
the term as important to LacanUs theory (*ficelle*). I also noted
that Henry James used the term in a different way in his writings
on the novel: for James, *ficelle* referred to supporting
characters whose presence in the story was motivated by the needs
of the form (expendables, one might say). As I learn how to
read/interpret my own story--or rather, as students of the life
story might say--as I continue to rewrite it, I am beginning to see
that the James version of the term is as important as Lacans. Look
to the minor characters, is what it says-- follow the
displacements away from the superego figure to the ficelles of the
superego. Who else is in the whole diegesis of the scene? Gall for
example. Chief Gall. Or, in < Yellowstone Desert > the Dietrich
character. Or it may be an object or prop--look away from the
action of the anecdotes to notice the gravel washer thrashing away
in the background. Displacement and condensation: conduction.
With this map if I want to I may education my judgments, take my
superego to school. The map shows me not only my own position
(as colonialist etc) but also the territory (the paradigm, the set of
possibilities, the others who are also positioned) and this very
articulation opens up the possibilites for overcoming the
differends of judgment.
Yet, is the superego a necessary element of subjectivation? The
answer has to be no. It is as literate and modern as critique (it is
the incorporation of critique). What is too patriarchal and
conservative for an electronic apparatus is selfhood, of which
psychoanalysis is one of the best accounts we have. The three
throwings Jim observed so well (the blood on the sail etc.) connote
something here. One of the pleasures of mystoriography is to see
the pattern of fate, style, identity in ones existence. I did not put
the throwings into HEURETICS, but they were there when I
finished. Actually there is one more: The AIM leader also throws
the mannikin of Columbus off the prow of the replica--the
mannikin that stood just where my son Tyson stood on his Sunday
in the museum tableau. Jim implies that DASEIN--the very mood
grounding and mediating my encounter with reality--is performed
in these scenes. That line of interpretation is very promising. As
I understood it during the writing, the blows I want to receive (to
be affected by at the level of intuition and judgment) are wounds
that weaken the hold of selfhood on my subjectivation. Does what I
just wrote make any sense?
What is controversial about poststructuralism is its account of the
ends of man (the end of the humanist subject). Grammatology puts
that end of humanist selfhood in the context of the apparatus to try
to think the transformation of subjectivation within the matrix of
technology and institutional practices. The *self* in these terms
is fundamentally a construct of a certain literate apparatus.
Chororography is a way to map the construction of the self within
the symbolic order (institutional discourses). No determinism
here since the theory also indicates that the behaviors of
subjectivation have to be invented in the same way as the other
elements of the apparatus.
4. Now comes the final question about the politics of < Yellowstone
Desert >. Even if it were reactionary according to some standard of
evaluation that we might agree on, would this preclude its effect
from being something other (depending on the RECEIVER?) For
example, consider the case of NEUROMANCER. One of the most
interesting points in the collection edited by Michael Benedikt,
CYBERSPACE, concerns the dissemination of that concept
(cyberspace). The term and vision of cyberspace originate in
NEUROMANCER which, as the essayists agree, is a teenage boys wet
dream--the adolescent (or simply heterosexist masculinist?)
fantasy of getting inside a supercharged female body without losing
ones own distinct corporeal identity as a male and being able to
experience everything from both sides of the sexual divide
simultaneously. Hmmm. Tiresias? Anyway, what cyberspace is
becoming as a technology and as an institution and as the behaviors
of subjectivation is not necessarily limited to the ideological
construct that motivated its creation. Or is it? Are we not dealing
with a *pharmakon*?--no guarantee nor any possibility of
assuring the better will exclude the worse? My provisional
conclusion is that the nature of invention is such that creativity
draws on the whole person--sexist or saint or whatever. And this
is the risk (still an adventure) of heuretics. Maybe there is a
reason why our schools are so uncreative?
My self-assessment is that I am a ficelle in this story, and that is
for the best. A minor character.
GREG ULMER
(I am falling behind in my answers; meanwhile this process allows
other answerers, as has already started happening. Excellent).
============================
Date: Sun, 18 Sep 1994 16:30:21 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jim McFadden (jmcf)
I would like to respond to Greg's response to my query point-by-point
in part because his detailed and thoughtful response clarified
for me his work and my response to it. But I see a line of reinvw
queries in front of Greg as long as the line of planes waiting to take
off each hour at the Dallas airport. So I won't write Greg directly
except to thank him for the time and value of his reinvw here on
PTc as we work to explore the possibilities in the epparatus.
I follow his sugestion and Paula Gillespie's contribution, then,
and write outwardly after reflection on the reinvw.
Assuredly, Greg, I do not know anyone, including myself, whose
behavior does not contradict their words, but anyway I want to
respond to your characterization of "respected folks" who
I have thought for a few years now about a point that Greg makes
in his response to me, which seems a stock reply to stock arguments
in my query. I suggest making here what I wish would become or may
well already be a further stock argument.
From 1982 to 1991, at least (the terminal date seems fuzzy to me),
I worked full-time as a volunteer for five years and as a paid worker
for four years in a expanding series of volunteer and professional social
welfare organizations, crisis agencies, emergency shelters, long term
shelters, glass houses, half-way homes, safe houses for sexually exploited
children, child abuse investigative services, etc. I got involved in that
work because I admired Mitch Snyder's work in Washington D.C. To support
myself during much of that time I worked four hours a night 10-2 am in
bakeries, coffee houses, and shoestring catering companies, one of which I
owned and used to employ transients after prison release and addicts after
hospitalization. It worked out that we ate where we worked and slept often
in rooming houses or shelters. I soon became recognized in the local social
welfare community as a volunteer (one among many such) who would sit up all
night in the shelters and answer the lines when it was least safe to be doing
so, although we volunteers often buddied up. I have been one who sat in
bed with addicts and held them through days and nights of sweaty withdrawal
without asking for sex or pay. I can not count the number of assaults by
psychotics, the set fires, the feces on walls, the reports to police, or the
thefts of personal property from my homes that all come with the territory.
In the last year of paid full-time work I worked as a child abuse
investigator in the downtown area of a major US city. In that post I
did a good deal of family advocacy work in local courts. My current
reflection on my experience disagrees with Greg's critique of
"respected folk" who write critical books and don't get into the kitchens
or the shelters, etc. I think Greg voices a popular "Schema L" critique
that is part of a stock cultural critique made against liberal authors:
They write but do not feed the hungry, etc.
In the last year or two of my long sabbatical from this discipline,
I spent a great deal of time with violent and sexualized families,
[as if there were any other kind, right.] rich and poor, a lot of
sexual transgression, a lot of acting out against one another. When
we went to court, I appeared either as advocate for the family, for
the mother, or advocate for the child (often against family alliances).
I needed relationships with the families and the courts, but easily as much
I needed voluminous arguments. I needed huge bibliographies. More so
I needed a well perpetuated and maintained progressive or feminist
discourse, in the Foucaultian sense of the term. I needed a body of
liberal knowledge in print about local systems of representation, about
systems of oppression that were well studied over long periods of time.
I needed liberal texts from law, linguistics, feminism, systems theory,
in short, from all disciplines that could critique the roles involved,
to the police, to the judges, to the attorneys, to the families, and
to the advocates. I needed research that critiqued local systems of
resource distribution and systems of identity construction (like
"Schema L" discourses) that were all at work against humans locally.
I found that critical texts which located national history
in the locally specific context were most helpful. How did the 1981
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act effect the city, the neighborhood,
this family, and the local courts? How did the local sense of
boosterism change after Nixon's Federal Revenue Sharing funds were
withdrawn from this or that family's neighborhood? How is this family
constructed as a site of public aggression made private?
We know, for example, that CRIP is the
Nixon era acronym for one of the development projects Nixon's federal
revenue sharing programs helped to install in LA. We know that
a populist neighborhood leader organized a neighborhood center
in LA and called it Community Resources for an Independent People--CRIP.
LA newscopy records the group's active resistance to city hall's
transgressive support of "slum landlords," of inadequate trash
removal, of inopportune highway and public transport planning, etc.
We have the copy and the photos of hundreds of neighbors at the
CRIP neighborhood center shouting their resistance to local government
systems that they insisted worked against them.
In those pictures and records we can see what we might call organized
resistance, active identification with group action for group interests.
We also have record of the sudden withdrawal of federal funds at the
city's, actually many cities', insistence. We have copy on the
neighborhood alliances organized when the neighborhood center opened.
And we have the oral history from the people who used the neighborhood
center, again, called Community Resources for an Independent People,
who at the time, called themselves CRIPs happily, joyfully, in celebration
of their anger, new power, and the center. Today we have the ironic
inheritance of that withdrawal of federal support from the neighborhood
center closed inone versioon of the story by the loss of financial support.
Today, "Schema L" discourses have taught some of us to hear CRIP in that
same tone that haunted the ears of city hall before the center failed.
What a difference a local leader with a building can make.
[You remember the slogan "Make a differance"?]
But the story, maintained outside the academy by the CRIPs, portrays
the systematic support of certain kinds of families by certain kinds
of discourses and the consequent, irregular, and rare support of other
human needs in other kinds of families. That disfiguration is a function
of popular or "Schema L" discourses, ones that have my son standing somewhere
quite back from the prow of the ship. Two weeks into kindergarten and he
is for the first time ashamed of the color of his mother's skin and already
confused about his own.
My own liberal guilt for the civil expense of even this appartus I write
in right now must not keep me from the addicts and homeless men I
am working with in my neighborhood today, although they need more time
than I am able to give them and I no longer bring them into
my home where my son needs to play safely. But I now realize how
dire the situation is perhaps in part because liberals are swayed from
the production of liberal knowledge, driven from the production of critique,
leaving unchallenged the local systems of representation that throw a
conservative, often culturally popular and individualist, now "Schema L,"
boosterism onto the object and subject of disciplinary study. Are
"Schema L" discourses to be entrusted with their own critique? Under
what regime do we come to believe that a more wholistic, (hence modern?),
portrait of "one's" cultural position will by itself fail to perpetuate
and maintain the historic silences that it has always claimed to transcend?
What is the sound of blood hitting a sail?
Christopher Columbuses swam briefly toward Key West this week after
Floridian's in speed boats upset their rafts of barrels and logs.
Christophers flooded the Rio Grande, wading north not to annex
Taylor's or Cross's surname and mourn their arrival in language
but to eat in the lush valleys of their lost homeland and to
breathe upwind less sulfurously. What is their relation with
the sullied image of discovery mourned on the Minnesota museum floor?
Like hatcheted Haitians found at dawn dried-blood-stuck to the curb
too long in deprivation and hunger's dizziness to outrun the knife?
Real quick: Eight years ago I spent three years with a young addict almost
daily on the street & in my home, part of the family and small business.
Talked him into treatment, aftercare, outpatient, maintainance. Now
he's a young attorney, clean, no shakes, no drugs, no longer so directly
violent against women (?) (o pain). His conservativism is extreme,
this new Columbus, probably always was I guess, after all, he says to me
now, he pulled himself up into the American dream from the nightmare.
"Anyone can."
Today, he is having a conservative impact on local interpretation
of community standards against the right to freedom of speech [not porn]
in his community. Certainly, the community is safer with him clean.
And I love him and would do it with him again. But the resources,
the liberal books I need to inform my debate with him are too often
too arcane to give him. Too rarely are those books informed,
sustained critique of the local particulars he addresses. They
are too often too mute of a discourse to be heard, even too
self-critical to be credited in court.
Books like Discourse and Discrimination on local representation
of MOVE in Pennsylvania and Linda Gordon's Heroes of Their Own
Lives on local representation of families in Boston can be helpful
to liberals in the courts. Such research can help to inform decision
making about local resource distribution and also help maintain feminist
and liberal discourses at large by their installment and subscription,
by their presence in their discourse.
My experience: Liberal knowldege can well inform
court decision making and representation, regardless of whether
or not the reseacher has been on either side of the shelter
soup counter.
For example, a neighborhood here is briefly mentioned in Kozol's
Savage Inequalities. The book had an effect on the schools and the
courts here. Family advocates successfully employed that voiced
knowledge on behalf of their interest in day-to-day neighborhood
services.
Today, liberal legal theory about systematic and discoursive systems of
oppression employed against gays and lesbians, against the gay couple, and
the gay family are having a impact in courts here.
The courts are extending that impact to reform the behavior of the police.
Even on a.m. radio some former victims of police violence here say they feel
safer when in the courts and with the police here because of that liberal
knowledge production used in courts.
Guilty liberals, quite like me or not, can not afford to defer our writing
and research. We need not be deterred from it by calls to the soup kitchens
that are made against our rhetorical power.
Jim McFadden
============================
Date: Sun, 18 Sep 1994 17:03:47 -0700 (PDT)
_____What repatternings of physical competencies do you foresee
coming into focus with the transformation of the literate modern
culture into the splattered mental gesticulations of
postmodernistic conduction?
When John Kuno taught literacy to tribes north of the
Congo in the 1890's, he noticed that as an individual became
literate the individual also sustained a loss of physical
endurance. At the same time, Conrad's Marlowe, analysing the
fall of Kurtz, ascribed the onset of "the horror" to Kurtz's lack
of civilizing restraint. Today, those of us physically working
in construction understand the dis-aster (extraditing Caputo's
sense of the word into kinetics) that a college educated new
worker brings to a jobsite. - Years of learning to think second
hand shunt and garble natural rhythmic movements.- Meanwhile
that ultra watcher of tv, the young urban black, devolves into an
early maturing and physically adept sociopathic savage. Towards
what configurations (not individually, but genericly) are we
impelled by conduction?
frank murray
eddress:
==========================================
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 1994 08:50:59 -0500
I've asked this question one way before. I'll ask it another way here, because
I think it's important in terms of talking about the potential of Glue's method:
_____What exactly are the ties between material and method?
Materially, the components of Glue's method--personal experience, popular
culture, left-leaning ideology, contemporary critical theory--are very much the
parameters of CCCC. I never think CCCC gives birth to too much of the new, the
impossible, because it seems there's only so much you can do with those
materials perhaps. (Even personal experience, which is so often the
what's-been-done, not the what's-never-been-done.) Rather than cite the common
Audre Lord quote here, how about the uncommon Roxy Music one--remake/remodel.
Glue's insistence on the remake is postmodernistically irresistible. But does
remaking/remodeling (even deconstructing/reconstructing) ever lead to the needed
new buildings? If the new materials aren't there, are new structures possible
(even with new methods)?
I think of my class. I think of how the room is so samey for so many of us in
there. I try to lead us out, as best I can. Malcolm X helps very often, Snoop
Doggy Dogg has been helping lately. I think of a few students--the young,
nicely-mannered, tall, good-looking African-American male, wearing the latest
Guess or Nautica, trying hard to master the white/power language, but hating it,
hating me, even though he really likes me. I think of the fat, acne-scarred kid
in the Nine Inch Nails shirt who only comes alive when we talk about the trouble
I have with Trent Reznor ("I really love his stuff," I say, "but I really can't
stand it." "Trent . . ." he smiles knowingly, and then shakes his head--at
what? at me? at Trent? at the old order Trent is trying to bring down? at
the new order he'll nebver bring about?). And I think most of all of the young
woman who's grunge the way Rita Hayworth would be grunge. Who's in my class as
much as she can be, but who rarely says anything and I can't tell you how much I
want to hear what she says. I think if she said one thing it would become a
pulse strong enough that we could follow it out of this old room into the right
room, the room that would let us start figuring out how to get out of this awful
modern mess. I strain so hard I can just faintly hear her, I think. And what I
hear is a remake, a tape loop of Sonic Youth's version of "Superstar" playing
over and over in her head. All through class, whenever I look at her (and after
class, whenever I think of her) I hear the chorus: I hear Thurston Moore's
creepily echoed voice (a kinder, gentler Bob?), soothing her, taunting her
("Don't you remember you told me you loved me baby? Said you'd be coming back
again, oh baby? Baby baby baby baby, oh baby . . ."), like the voice in Karen
Carpenter's head must have soothed her and taunted her until she couldn't take
it anymore, until she just withered away--a National Enquirer horror-image and
then poof, she was gone. I can't help but see bad patterns repeated by remakes,
over and over the same sad stuff. Am I missing something?
Geoff Sirc
=======================================================
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 1994 13:55:52 -0400 (EDT)
_____What is the credibility of an English/Language Arts
becoming electronic within the present institutional configuration
of disciplines?
Sorry for the delay in my posts. Perhaps the deferral allows time
for reflection; a leisurely pace. Why be in a hurry in any case;
let the time of understanding work over a series of questions that
cut to the heart of this complex moment.
A number of the questions are getting at a similar issue from
different angles: the intra- and inter- institutional status of a
heuretic pedagogy. I will address this issue in several parts,
beginning with the university institution and the internal
relations of English and the humanities with the other divisions of
knowledge. I also apologize for the rather dry style of these
answers so far, which I rationalize with the idea that we are
establishing a kind of FAQ for a grammatological heuretics.
1. Anecdote. When the powers-that-be who negotiated the IBM
grant to Florida of a computer lab decided to dedicate it to the
teaching of writing, everyone was surprised. The reps of IBM had
in mind a lab for sciences, or at least for technical writing. One of
the stipulations of the grant is an evaluation process designed to
show that the lab actually improves students performance. The
methodology for the evaluation in the original version of the grant
called for a comparison of sections (a control group taught in the
usual way, compared with a class taught in the lab). Each teacher
participating in the test would teach two sections--one in a
normal classroom and one in the lab. Identical essays would be
assigned. Papers from the two classes will be mixed together and
evaluated by an outside reader not participating in the program.
The expected outcome is that the papers rated higher by this
From the point of view of grammatology this test is seriously
flawed. What the theory predicts--that writing in an electronic
environment will not be better or worse than that produced with
print practices, but *different*--has been verified by reports
from teachers working in networked labs using pedagogies not
influenced by poststructuralism. New conventions and practices
adapting to the screen as the support for writing are emerging in
these labs--conventions that make the writing legible and
intelligible on a screen but that, when printed out and compared
with an essay composed for paper, are less effective.
When the comp teachers at Florida were finally brought into the
process and introduced to this < gift horse >, we pointed out the
problems with the proposal and offered a counter-proposal: that
we have a responsibility to help IBM understand what it *really*
wants (as opposed to what it thinks its wants). What it really
wants is a workforce/citizenry prepared to operate effectively in
a computerized world, which is coming to be something quite
different from a print world. The computer is not ultimately a
paper-based machine (the transition of the Mac from a computer
designed to print-out to an AV machine is one sign of this
evolution).
We have to resist the pressures coming from other institutions
and instead apply what our discipline knows (or what
grammatology knows, for me) to the design and implementation of
a computerized humanities. The immediate result, in our case, is
that the test has been changed. While sticking with the comparison
of standard/lab classes, the testers--instead of deciding in advance
what is expected--will compare outcomes whatever they are,
letting the design of the course determine the product rather than
the assessment tool.
2. _Cognitive Jurisdiction / Debtor-Creditor Disciplines_
Geoffs question concerned how other disciplines might judge us if
we pursue a heuretic pedagogy. Would choragraphic design seem
crazy to our colleagues?
_____What is our responsibility to the other disciplines in the
university?
These other disciplines are in the position of the IBM
representatives. English is a servant to the sciences, in the
present CONFIGURATION. We wear our methodology-and-object-
of-study organization as a kind of *livery* that allows us to mix
with our betters. Not that our service is not appreciated (even if
not valued). English is the interface course that teaches access to
the apparatus of literacy (print technology, school practices
codified in our handbooks, and indoctrination in humanistic
values). What we teach in composition--use of the library,
strategies of research, argumentative logic, formal organization
etc--constitute the tools and craft of learning in all divisions of
knowledge, to the extent that English is the language of instruction
and the book and library the means of storage of knowledge in all
disciplines. We can and should continue to serve these needs, as
long as they are relevant to the current organization of collective
memory.
At the same time, we should begin to invent the electronic
replacement for print literacy. We are now talking about the most
controversial and even IMPOSSIBLE features of grammatology (the
most difficult to accept or even to perceive). The very
organization of the institutions of school and of disciplines (not the
same thing) into specializations is part of the print apparatus
response to the information explosion of which it is the cause. The
institutional formation of majors, departments, general education
versus specialization, discipline identification and the like are
necessary not in relation to learning, knowledge, application as
such but in relation to the print apparatus. As the apparatus
begins to change, the justification for the current arrangements
comes into question.
In the current institutional circumstances, English is a colonial
subject of the sciences (to continue this analogy). Our practices
ape a positivistic model of knowledge to the extent that we have
accepted that view of ourselves in our desire for Cartesian clarity,
univocality, unequivocality, nonambiguity of intention, complete
transfer from sender to receiver of a fully intelligible meaning.
(Here is the question of dense or elitist style etc that I will treat
in a separate post) These are not the features of our object of
study (the arts) but of our methodology (borrowed social science).
Symptom: student behavior--the reading of Cliff Notes preferred
to the reading of literature, since what is tested and evaluated
tends to be information about the arts. Nor is the answer a retreat
into disciplinary creative writing, dominated by a romanticism
that rejects theory and method as killers of the muse.
Rather, the challenge of heuretics is to commit ourselves to the
oddities of natural language in all its living usage and the poetic or
aesthetic resources of the arts as constituting the CALCULUS of the
humanities. Heuretics is an attempt to design a pedagogy and
curriculum that researches culture wholistically from within the
quotidian and aesthetic resources of language arts. In short--
figuration, metaphor and metonymy, CATACHRESIS, and the rest.
The natural and social sciences are right to use the methodologies
of mathematics to investigate the physical and cultural
(collective) worlds. But as the philosopher said, we may solve all
the physical or material problems of life and still not have touched
the human question. Figuration (shorthand for image, story,
analogy, metaphor, rhythm, etc) is our mathematics. Hence the
indirectness of choragraphy (a pedagogy that puts teacher and
student inside of story and image without leaving method behind).
In the new epistemological circumstances of POSTMODERNISM,
some groups within the natural and social sciences have recognized
the poetic or aesthetic foundation of their disciplinary
methodologies. The poststructural turn within certain sciences
(or at least within the history and philosophy of science) has
motivated a shift in the status of letters and arts from debtor to
creditor disciplines (potentially) in that the *mysteries* of
figuration and design are suddenly irreducibly relevant to the
computerization of knowledge. What we have to offer these
revolutionary scientists is not the pale reflection of their own
(former?) prejudices about natural and aesthetic language, but
precisely what until now it has tried to avoid--figuration and the
emotional body that goes with it. In this new situation arts and
letters slough off the livery of discipline to become not only the
interface practice that it currently is as a service discipline, but
as well a practice within the sciences. In effect, this adaptation of
aesthetics and poetics into the sciences repays the debt the
humanities owes to the sciences for our present methods. This
reversal of flow is merely a symptom of much larger
transformations of the institutional arrangements of learning that
the theory predicts are coming. Meanwhile, those colleagues Geoff
and others mention who hold English to the practices of literacy
and condemn our experiments may be recognized as the equivalent
of theologians who demanded from Renaissance logicians a
scholasticism that the new science made irrelevant to the emergent
paradigm.
In the entertainment institution of popular culture, the
exploitation of the emotional body left out of school is everywhere
in evidence. Or rather, we are expected to think with our
emotional bodies, those being the addressees of fashion,
advertising, commercial entertainments, and propaganda of all
kinds, all of which ignore the first dictate of school handbooks:
avoid logical fallacies. The lesson of the history of critique is that
intellectual training in logic leaves untouched the emotional effects
of discourse. The division of labor that assigns cognitive
jurisdictions--that gives intellectual education to the school and
emotional education to entertainment and treats the family as a
private sphere--has reached a point of diminishing returns, if not
complete dysfunctionality. But that brings us to the
interinstitutional dimension of grammatology, which is the
subject for a separate post.
GREG ULMER
===============================================
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 1994 18:04:12 -0500
_____How will this new method help us (as researchers and participants in
discourse), our students, and other writers move to a different, more
"democratic" ideology?
2) _____How will this method address/change the content of discourse, rather
than just the form in which it's addressed?
Language itself, not just the forms that language takes when it's inserted into
discursive conventions, is value-laden (see, for example, Voloshinov, trans.
1986; Hall).
Linda Adler-Kassner
==================================================
Geoff (?) identifies or employs an architectural method in his most
recent posting: "if new materials aren't there, are new structures
possible?"
My sense of what "glue" does in HEURETICS is to identify fundamental
elements of language usage/textual production in the same way that the
periodic table does in chemistry: the CATT(t), the pop cycle are the
charts. they organize the elements of discourse/theorizing in the same
way that the periodic table assembles like kinds of elements (gases to
the right, heavy metals to the left, etc.). HEURETICS does to these to
these elements of textuality what my colleagues in the
physical/biological sciences do with the elements of matter (recognize
this structure?): they are recombining 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.
i would argue, therefore, that the kind of "remake" glue refers to should
not be confused w/ the typical form that many "remakes" take in the
entertainment industry--to repeat geoff, "bad patterns repeated by
remakes" or, as I see it, the same old thing w/heavy bass guitars and
lots of power amps.
i see his sense of remake as equivalent to these chemical manufacturing of
hybrid structures.
i have found this chemical metaphor to be useful in thinking about the
invention of new genres for the electronic media (ulmer calls his
"mystory" and "choragraphy," I call mine "rhizography"). this list in
itself demonstrates how the electronic writing space allows for different
kinds of texts--here, the fusion of review w/interview. i would point
out the visual metaphor underlying these literate modes and suggest, in
the spirit of APPLIED GRAMMATOLOGY, that we set about doing this by
allowing the metaphor of the "chemical senses" (smell,taste) to shape the
way we participate in this discourse. 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?).
in other words, how can this discussion itself become a choragraphy? is
collective choragraphy possible?
Richard Smyth
==============================================
_____What is the usage of deconstruction in heuretics?
Nicholas picks up on the vexed relationship between grammatology,
deconstruction and heuretics. In APPLIED GRAM I insisted on
distinguishing grammatology from deconstruction in order to take
up an aspect of Derrida that interested me more than did Yale School
criticism--the history of writing. Some Derrideans were quite
critical of this move and asserted that Derridas work is all of a
piece, whereas I was saying that there were at least two
operations--one conventionally philosophical in form, method, and
argument (however bold the themes), and the other experimental
in every way (GLAS et al). The history of writing is a very large
cross-disciplinary field to which Derrida contributes in a
fascinating way, while deconstruction is a notion more specific to
Derrida, fascinating in its own way regarding the phenomenon of
dissemination (how ideas arise and spread).
Within the history of writing Derrida remotivates several things
that I explored in turn, such as the metaphor of writing itself. This
strategy (heuristic) of following the metaphor has been called
deconstructive. The treatment of the metaphor of < the frontiers of
knowledge > in HEURETICS I thought of as deconstructive. Derridas
references to institutions reflects his awareness of writing as an
apparatus including technology, institutions, and human subjects,
all of which have to be taken into account. He has focused on
Philosophy as an institutional practice in this sense, and much of
his politics is of the same sort as the political art of conceptual
artists, say Hans Haacke for example, whose exhibitions are
critiques of art as institution (the gallery system, the economics of
art etc). Haacke deconstructs the exhibition practice. For me this
means Haacke, or Derrida, work immanently--they work within
the discourse, practice, and use it and explore its possibilities
against itself which is not destructive but which remakes the
practice. Choragraphy experiments with this deconstructive
remake, the ad hocism or concrete science that writes from the
position of receiver--not the owner of the press, station, or studio
(alluding to GeoffUs question--I will get back to the remake another
time). Deconstruction is not hermeneutic (hermeneutics is the
contrast in Derridas CATT)
_____How much deconstruction does one have to teach before
students can then do it?
Any attempt to < cover > theory is probably hopeless-- the quantity
and the nature of the material do not lend themselves to
specialization. To try to learn theory in the style of mastery, from
the outside so to speak, as a body of knowledge, can be done, but
which may leave the master as far away from being a theorist as is
the beginning student. Instead, I teach theory as a mode of thought
of its own sort, distinct (neither better nor worse) from
scholarship. My courses pose some seemingly impossible or
irreducible problem derived from the disciplines. The students
are challenged to compose a method for solving this problem (for
making something that meets the needs of the case). For example, I
have used recently the problem of redesigning < dialogue > for the
electronic apparatus (to remake the _Phaedrus_). the notion of <
remake > is deconstructed in the process (cf. Richard Smyths
point) I use the CATT to select the materials, so that theory is only
one part of the mix. Students have to work with the theory I assign,
along with materials for the other categories, and the goal is not to
make them specialists in that theory (eg Derrida) but to undergo
the experience of what it is like to think theoretically.
For me theory is precisely not mastery, that feeling of knowing it
all (of knowing everything about Derrida) but the opposite--of
being perplexed and confused, but because one knows some
heuristic ways of working, feeling that it is possible to carry on
just the same. This puzzlement requires me to trust to the CATT--
let the readings and relays generate something, the value of which I
may then consider based on what I know about the discipline.
Students new to theory can do quite well with such a project. At the
end of the seminar they have experienced theoretical work (at least
as I have framed it) and if they have a taste for it are now motivated
to do all the infernal career-long amounts of reading that are in
fact necessary. In short, theory does not come at the end of a
sequence, as it usually does in hermeneutic pedagogies. In
heuretics, one may start with theory because the point is not to be
right but to make something. Hence it is useful with undergrads.
The related question is how much < whatever > does one need to
know to work with anything in the era of information explosion?
The problem is not limited to deconstruction or Derrida. Cultural
Studies is an impossible field for example. Despite some claims to
the contrary, most of the work I see in cultural studies manifests
all the features of academic specialization. Part of Derridas point
about institutions has been that progressive fields of study, to the
extent that they leave the institutional practices untouched, are
merely recuperated. PostColonial, feminism, minority studies,
etc, to the extent that they become specializations with all the
trappings, exist in a state of contradiction. Again this line crosses
GeoffUs questions. The problem of method I am addressing with
heuretics, mystory, choragraphy and the like concerns this issue of
impossibility--the search for an alternative to specialization. Is
there a wholistic way to know, decide, act? The problematic of the
popcycle (it has to be invented).
The point is not to leave institutions behind, but how to invent new
ones, or new practices for the ones that we have. Meanwhile we
could ask some questions about specialization: how much of the
information produced within specialization is redundant, empty?
How much is produced for administrative reasons? reasons of
bureaucracy, management, career (institutional support). If we
could zap all that stuff, how much would be left? Yet, without that
practice of overproduction we would not have the valuable
important things that also exist only because of the institution.
GREG ULMER
===============================================
I am enjoying very much the autobiographies posted to the list. A great
idea for overcoming some of the anonymity of the discussion,.
Given that we are working just now in the context of HEURETICS and
TELETHEORY, < Derrida at the Little Bighorn > and all, I would be interested
in having experimentally inclined folks post or repost their autobios in
the mode of mystory.
In brief, mystory is a means to map your position in the circulation
of discourses through the popcycle. We all inhabit at least four
discourses (institutions)--family, entertainment, school, and discipline.
each has its own logic, genres etc (as explained in my books). Locate
a problem that interests as formulated in each discourse, enter data
reflecting that problem in the style/genres of the discourse. then see
what pattern emerges in the accidental punceptual links that occur due to
the juxtaposition. is there a superego figure with which you identify
in each of the zones? (make you own Mount Rushmore).
Once you locate these patterns they keep popping up like roadsigns
to SOUTH OF THE BORDER (if youve ever been through So Carolina). Just
the other day I showed HIGH NOON in class as an example of < the movie
that changed my life > (Im using the book by that title edited by
Roserberg, now out of print I understand). Will Kane is the protagonists
name (Gary Cooper). For the next section of the course I showed a
documentary on the search for the Atocha (incidentally, turns our
Mel Fisher was a chicken farmer in the midwest before he cut loose to
follow his dream!) as a metaphor for the creative method. Mels older
son Dirk died in an accident during the search, and the younger son
carries on and follows a trail of clues that leads finally to the
wreck site. The sons name is Kane and they called the trail Kanes
trail. I also associated the silver star worn by (and thrown away by)
Will Kane with the 40 tons of silver and gold found with the Atocha.
Gary Cooper is the superego figure of my Entertainment discourse.
Any experimenters want to give it a try?
copyright 1994 Victor J. Vitanza, James J. Sosnoski, and Gregory Ulmer.
Feel free to link to this page, but do not publish otherwise in part or whole
without prior written consent from copyright holders and from particular posters.
PRETEXT has an agreement with its subscribers to protect their posts
from being published in pulp versions without first their written permission
being given.
To REINVW Archives
From: Greg Ulmer
Subject: glu -> vjv: heuretic dissertations
From: "Geoffrey M. Sirc"
Subject: REINVW gms->glue: pedagogy
To: REINVW@MIAMIU.ACS.MUOHIO.EDU
From: Greg
Subject: reinvw glue -> vjv: impossible
From: Greg
Subject: REINVW glue -> gms: pedagogy
From: Hans Kellner
Subject: Re: REINVW gms->glue: pedagogy
From: Greg
Subject: REINVW glue ->vjv: insane/impossible?
From: Jim McFadden
dSubject: REINVW jmcf-> glu: A conservative method?
To: Greg Ulmer (glu)
____ Is conduction too limited, perhaps, too patriarchal a method for
contemporary disciplinary needs?
Miami University
jmcfadden@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu
From: "Geoffrey M. Sirc"
Subject: REINVW gms->glue: credibility
To: REINVW@MIAMIU.ACS.MUOHIO.EDU
From: CGB1046@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: REINVW cgb->glue: invention (sub)versus ?
To: reinvw@miamiu.acs.muohio.edu
Collin Gifford Brooke
CGB1046@utarlg.uta.edu
From: Geoffrey Sirc
Subject: REINVW gms->glue: disciplinary discourse
To: REINVW@MIAMIU.ACS.MUOHIO.EDU
From: GILLESPIEP@VMS.CSD.MU.EDU
Subject: Reinvw pfg -> gms Reading Heuretics
To: reinvw@miamiu.acs.muohio.edu
gillespiep@vms.csd.mu.edu
From: Nicholas O Pagan
Subject: questioning deconstruction
To: reinvw@miamiu.acs.muohio.edu
From: Greg
Subject: REINVW glue ->jmcf: A Conservative Method
To: reinvw@miamiu.acs.muohio.edu
From: Jim McFadden
Subject: REINVW jmcf-> glu, et al: Why write critique?
declare themselves to be < with the homeless
in the streets > (etc) but who do nothing other
than publish disciplinary books about this question.
It is just too easy to say such things, if nothing
follows from it other than the improvement of ones own
career. It does not make what is said less true in itself,
but it raises the specter [specter of Schema L?] of the right
hand not knowing what the left hand (or brain) is doing.
_____ Is their actually something mistaken about just publishing
disciplinary books about this question given the resolve those
books can contest? Are we all to give up our pens and keyboards
for ladles?
jmcfadden@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu
From: "frank murray (threeform)"
Subject: Re: REINVW fjm configurations?
fmurray@tribnet.com
--Boundary (ID 77nxhXVhOLuuG/uqhbV88w)--
From: Geoffrey Sirc
Subject: REINVW gms->glue:materials/methods
To: REINVW@MIAMIU.ACS.MUOHIO.EDU
From: Greg
Subject: REINVW glue ->gms et al: Credibility
To: reinvw@miamiu.acs.muohio.edu
From: linda adler kassner
Subject: reinvw question re: method la-k
To: reinvw@miamiu.acs.muohio.edu
There are two parts to this:
1) Computers and hyperspace, central to this new method, _are_ a new medium (see
Ulmer, 28-29), but come from a hegemonic culture/ideology. _____Can we ever
completely escape this culture/ideology when we use products that come from it?
(For ex.: the "logic" of computing, from the way a screen is set up to the drive
paths through which data travel, reflect the culture from which the technology
comes...)
University of Minnesota
General College
612/625-6383
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 1994 12:44:07 -0500 (CDT)
From: Richard Smyth
Subject: REINVW RS->GMS CHEMICAL ARCHITECTURES
==================================================
Hamline University
rsmyth@piper.hamline.edu
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 1994 22:14:59 -0400 (EDT)
From: Greg
Subject: REINVW glue ->nop: Questioning deconstruction
To: reinvw@miamiu.muohio.edu
==============================================
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 1994 13:57:37 -0400 (EDT)
From: Greg
Subject: PTissues: glue--> autobiographies
To: PTissues@miamiu.muohio.edu
===============================================
all best
GREG ULMER
All Rights Reserved.
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