Teletheory by Greg Ulmer

By Stacy Cacciatore 

Questions for Stacy to bring up

• Technology – why do we always devalue the value new technology brings to society?
• Memorization –He brings up that this has changed, I wonder, will it go away? If we don’t exercise this muscle, will it atrophy? Will that matter? (pp 19-20)
• Mystory –Freud – used personal experience to develop his theories/writings. And Kekule – This story of Kekule is amystory– the contribution of personal anecdotes to problem-solving in the field of specialized knowledge.
• The question of – can innovation be taught?

 

 

 

Gregory Leland Ulmer (born December 23, 1944)^[1] is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Florida (Gainesville) and a professor of Electronic Languages and Cybermedia at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.^[2]

 

Many of Ulmer’s theories grow out of his home-spun “puncepts” like textshop, choragraphy, applied grammatology, mystory, heuretics, and post(e)-pedagogy.^[4] His explorations into what he refers to as an “anticipatory consciousness” designed to utilize the force of intuition as a way to invent emergent forms of knowledge are methodologically remixed by Ulmerian disciples all over the world.

 

Ulmer’s work focuses on hypertext, electracy and cyberlanguage and is frequently associated with “emerAgency,” “choragraphy,” “mystoriography,” heuretics, and concept avatar. Following his motto (from the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō) “not to follow in the footsteps of the masters, but to seek what they sought,” Ulmer developed a mode for research and pedagogy that does for electracy what the argumentative essay (paper) does for literacy.

 

 

Chapter 1

• Derrida at the little bighorn
• Television is a rival didactic institution
• Television = medium to manage and distribute video
• Effect of television on students was to raise their desire to make texts in video
• Teletheory is a response to this “effects research” investigating the possibility of electronic thinking that is not dependent upon video equipment, that is not medium specific. (11)
• Part One – Theoretical rational
• Part Two – brings together a set of texts from several different arts and media to serve as an example for discourse. The assumption is that oral, literate, video…discourse shouldn’t be kept apart
• Part Three – example of mystory – an alternate way to represent research
• Heuretic – concerned with invention and making
• Neologisms – “mystory”, “heuretics”, and “oralysis”
• “one of the primary tasks of grammatology as a disciplinary field is not only to study, but to practice a cognitive style articulating these three orders of discourse

 

Theory

• “Derrida at the Little Bighorn” is not a book, it’s a video”
• “I leave each time with a sack of books, but with the desire unsated. That is what makes it desire. If I can say that what I desire is a tape rather than a book, will that change my experience of making a text? No, because it’s the desire, the love of knowledge that drives academic discourse, is not medium-specific”
• Telethory – as the work of mourning
• What is the ‘force’ of theory?
• Could a theory be learned theoretically? Features of the approach that are distinctive enough to deserve a different name: telethory
• This book is an account of this pedagogy
• Neologism – “mystory”
• Derrida at the Little Big Horn is an example of a mystory
• In the age of television, academic discourse in the humanities will function mystorically
• “tele” – concern with how discourse might be affected by electronic technology
• Cognition switch to electronics
• Jack Goody’s Domestication of the Savage Mind – a direct correlation between alphabetic writing and critical, analytical thinking
• Alphabetic literacy – made it possible to scrutinize discourse, giving oral communication a semi-permanent home
• Ulmer, against the ‘critics’ of new technology as ‘uncritical’ Ulmer says, “teletheory offers this proposition: video can do the work of literacy, but no better than literacy can do the work of speech. It has its own features and capacities that are fully cognitive, whether or not they are critical” (19).
• Teletheory to define those areas
• School is the institulationation of literacy as writing as an “ongoing activity”
• Television is the institutionalization of Video in our society
• Change of memory and storage
• Techniques of mnemonics or artificial memory were replaced with new ones “based on dialectical order” as worked by Peter Ramus
• Walter Ong – noted in his book on Ramus – shift to print includes new attitude – young students to enter advanced and prestigious courses in scholastic logic
• Marshall McLuhan – earlier generation of grammatologist – theorist of apparatus approach our question in terms of the relationship between technology, ideology, and institutional practices
• Heidegger’s point – modern age essence of man has changed becoming subjectum
• Heuretics – the convergence of rhetorical inventio with the innovation of rhetorical and aesthetic invention with modes of discovery in all areas

 

Chapter 1 Experiment

Historiography

• Heidegger’s discussion of Historiography
• Tropics of Discourse
• Teletheory approaches the artistic text as models for representational practice adaptable to education
• Periodic table – arrange chemical elements into rows and columns – the natural order
• Heuristics do not interpret art it uses art for the making of theory (37)
• Freud: The New Instauration
  • Phaedrus
  • Resemblance or patterning
  • Analytico-referential mode is arbitrary – allowing concepts to be serialized into a grammar
  • Insaturation – Francis Bacon’s Renaissance Project
• Feyerabend – Against Method (1975) – see the interrelationship between style and cognition and appropriate level of generalization focusing on the Ancient period
• Linde’s study – important for teletheory:
  • Observation human identity is a function of a life story that people believe in and tell about to themselves. Myth not history. Oral not written.
  • The interdependence of diff levels of models. 1^ststep in development of new expert explanatory system – move from common sense and accepted theories
• Sperber – how a student receives discipline. Problem is, with ‘half-understood ideas” the “argument of authority” carries full weight (55)
• Life story – research on science as an institution
  • Inmixing of three levels (private, public, disciplinary)
  • Cultural literacy – lies above everyday knowledge
  • Freudian slip – common sense
• Telethory approaching pedagogy in terms of academic apparatus – must design with institutional frame in mind
• Half-understood concepts – like children don’t fully understand death
• Schooling – student acquires knowledge of the discipline
• An image is wide when it functions as a schemea capabile of assimilating to itself a wide range of perceptions, actions, ideas (58)
• One purpose of teletheory is to make personal images accessible, receivable, by integrating the private and public dimensions of knowledge – invention and justification (58)
• In electronic age, the academic apparatus may stimulate the knowledge cycle that joins public, private, popular and disciplinary cultural models.
• Exploration of personal analogy is one strategy for mapping across domains needed in the pedagogy of teletheory (61)
• The story of mourning always comes up in the drama of men and their fathers (Kekule) P 62
• **Very interesting – he tells the story of Kekule, who basically wants to be a chemist, and his father is pissed. So, one day he’s staring into a fire, and comes up with ‘benzene molecule’. The was thinking of chemistry and his own personal circumstances. This example is used to say that invention can’t be institutionalized. “This story is usually invoked in the philosophy of science to indicate the impossibility of institutionalizing the discovery or invention of process in formal schooling. My (Ulmer’s) purpose is to prove the opposite conclusion is necessary – that we must learn how to include the dimension of invention if we are to have a complete education – and reasonable, now that we have a technology that does for the cognition of invention what the alphabetic literacy does for critical analysis,” (62)
• “Video is the prothesis of inventive or heuristic thinking, just as literacy is the prothesis of hermeneutics. Such is the premise of teletheory (and one of my objects of explanation)” (p 62).
• This story of Kekule is amystory– the contribution of personal anecdotes to problem-solving in the field of specialized knowledge.
• Freud – significant as first innovator to propose a system of knowledge and an institution (psycnoanalysis) whose subject and object are one and the same: Freud’s own story (62).
• Freud’s invention: a generalization of his peculiar, personal, familia story, mediated through literary text (and myth) into an expert system of medical science.
• The death of Freud’s father – motivated his self-analysis and the writing of The Interpretation of Dreams – cultural text and unsolved problem in a discipline of knowledge (sexual dysfunction, hysteria)
• “Mystory brings this process into academic discourse so that it may be artificially developed, democratized, extended into normal schooling for everyday use.” (63)

 

Chapter 2 – Conduction

• The voice of the code
• Historiography of learning called “mystory”
• Oralysis – writable in video, the same way analysis is writable in alphabetic literacy
• 5 codes
• Code – oral form – parallel
• Barthes – identify the sentence-model of codes:
  • Code of action = anecdote
  • Code of Enigma = riddle
  • Code of Semes = figures (metaphor/metonym)
  • Code of Reference = proverb
  • Code of Symbol = joke
• Lacan’s theory
• Psychoanalytic concepts of Oedipal stage
• Labov’s analysis
  • Abstract: short summary of the story, encapsulating the point of the story and alerting the listener that a narrative is about to begin
  • Orientation: identifies the time, place, persons and their activity or situation, occurring immediately before the first narrative clause
  • Complicating action: a temporal sequencing between narrative clauses involving the core of the story
  • Evaluation: interruptions in the story that reaffirm the tellability of the narrative or assess the situation, either in the form of an external commentary or by statements embedded in the story itself
  • Resolution: the conclusion of the narrative:
  • Coda: closes the sequences of complicating actions, completing the story such that everything has been accounted for
• Juxtaposition of Barthes’ code with elements of classical rhetoric extend this parallel

 

Narrative	Argument
Action code	Reasoning
Enigma	Problem
Semes	Ethos
Reference	Paths
Symbolic	Logos
Ordering by antithesis; narratives pose and resolve contractions or paradoxes (mythology_	Contradiction: a principle resource of argument is to locate contradictions in a target text; enthymemes (suppressed premise_
Ordering by exchange; contracts govern three levels of relationships among the characters: language, economics, kinship	Address: direct or indirect commentary, evaluation, favoring exchange of values; position reader dependinet on expert

 

 

	Interrogative	Indicative	Silence	Imperative	Optative
Realist	Case	Saga	Riddle	Proverb	Fable
Idealist	Myth	Anecdote	Joke	Legend	Fairy Tale

 

• Joke in same modality riddle but without the constraints of truth (simplist form)
• Joke as psychoanalysis
• Freud – Jokes
• Joke = logic, false reasoning
• Joke in teletheory isn’t an embellishment, it’s a textual structure
• Joke is false reasoning
• The cusp is the eidos – the shape of the joke (76)
• Analogy between psychoanalysis and television in teletheory – continuing from Freud’s discovery/ invention of logic of the unconscious for the purpose of describing the logic most compatible with the format of video technology

VITA/TV/AI

• Teletheory is concerned with discovering and inventing the kind of thinking and representation available for academic discourse in an electronic age
• Ground of teletheory is the research pun – bringing together two unrelated semantic fields on the basis of one or more shared words
• Research pun in teletheory is “program” concerning the change in memory that accompanies the hypomnemic capabilities of computer and video

 

Left brain and right brain Roukes, 1984

 

Right Brain	Left Brain
Intuitive	Intellectual
Perceptual	Rational
Creative	Analytical
Experimental	Verbal
Felt Thought	Computation
Spatial / Pattern Recognition	Sequential / Linear
Simultaneous Processing	Routinzation
Emotion	Reason
Active during dream state	Quiet during dream state

 

 

The kind of cognition that is important is not taught in schools. The following have been shown in creative people regardless of profession

 

Roukes

• The training and practice of activities that largely involve right-brain functions
• Suspension of judgement; making disconnected jumps in thinking
• Openness to new stimuli, new ideas, new attitudes, new approaches
• Willingness to take risks, making ‘leaps of faith’; lessening inhibitions
• Freedom in subjective thinking; expression of emotions and personal realities
• Intuitiveness, ‘playing hunches’ to generate spontaneous ideas
• Rejecting destructive criticism, prejudices, indiscriminate praise
• A childlike attitude of creative play, tinkering with ideas, materiasls, structures
• Freedom to fantasize, unconventional imagining
• Divergent thinking, simultaneous processing of ideas; fluency of ideas
• Acceptance of non-ordinary realities, contradictions; ability to tolerate and manipulate puzzles; ambiguities

 

Central thesis of teletheory – brings together under one heading the description of three distinct processds – ‘primal’ thinking, creative invention and videography

 

Thesis is that new electronic technologies relate to heuretis the way alphabetic literacy relates to analytic thinking. Just as the features of alphabetic writing notesd by Goody associated with the list, table and formula, provided the prothesis of analysis, so is the prothesis of invention available in videol

 

MyStory

• Mystoriography
• Difference between history and mystory – history: words are important that I happened to unearth. One should not bank on the reliability of Pasteur’s axxium in relation to oneself. Herstory-history to mystory – classic example of the growth of language, of word formation and certain mimesis.
• Feminism – makes mystory possible
• Feminist critique of film narrative addresses patriarchal ideology at work in the philospheme of theory as seeing
• Derrida – attempted to articulate the middle voice as a new condition of enunciation (110)
• Derrida’s difference – the mode of oralysis seeks a notion of representation capable of electronic cognition
• Mystory works in the middle voice – the voice of pedagogy foregrounded in the new instauration
• Conjectural thinking is not learned from books – based on experience – listening
  • Inference
• Frued’s borrowing of Oedipus story from Sophocles
• The envois – concerns the invention of a theory and its insitutalization
• Freud sends off a mystory couched as a contract and it comes back to him
• Teletheory seeks a pedagogy that positions the student and teacher in the relationship to knowledge that Freud had to psychoanalyze
• Mystory intervenes on the side of discovery
• In principle, every object is available, capable of being separated from its original justification
• Film or camera makes it possible for anyone to be an Arcimboldo – to write the objects of the world

 

Theory Dieges

 

• Mystory does not impose narrative on theory, but simply expands or elaborates on the narrative codes and their simple forms already available within theoretical discourse

 

Review of Teletheory

• Ulmer’s aim was to explore, thorugh Derrida’s writings, the “nondiscursive levels” images and puns or models and homophones as an alternate mode of composition and thought applicable to academic work
• Applied grammatology – surprising emphasis on the development of grammatological pedagogy
• Interesting that literary theorists spend a great deal of time teaching, but how seldom they make pedagogical experience the focus
• Teletheory emphasizes pedagogy
• Teletheory is a persuasive, erudite attempt to implement a new pedagogy that is responsive to what Ulmer sees as a fundamental paradigm shfift in the way that knowledge is constructed
• He argues (convincingly) that the privledge of the essay/treatise in school is ideological
• Distinguishes between science as discovery process and science as methodology
• Ulmer wants to counter “pathological melancholoy” with humor and jokes as a way of reinscribing emotion into significance
  • The desire to know, the love of learning and stories at the level of memory is experienced emotionally
• Two things are fundamental to the development of this new pedagogy:
  • Audio visual media
  • Psychoanalysis
• Throughout his book, Ulmer emphasizes the special role of psychoanalysis in the advent of electronic cognition or what he calls teletheory
• Alphabetic mining of a filmic mode
• He combines persona/memoir with