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Exposition in Ruins
Charles Sheaffer
University of Minnesota
Shea0016@umn.edu
(c) 2004 Charles Sheaffer.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Gregory Ulmer, Internet Invention. New York: Pearson, 2003.
1. Gregory Ulmer's Internet Invention can be accurately described as
a composition handbook for students working in an increasingly
visual culture--provided that one follows Ulmer in understanding
the newfound prevalence of the image not as a shift in the
relative status of specific media, but rather as the ascendance of
a particular set of signifying rules. These rules readily
accommodate the printed word while nonetheless exploding the
premises of expository discourse that the academy continues to
equate with the act of written composition. Indeed, the crux of
Ulmer's important and illuminating project could be said to reside
in his distinction between pedagogical instantiation and
technological potentiality: since the appearance of Applied
Grammatology in 1985, Ulmer has sought to delineate the growing
epistemological deficiencies of our print-based educational
apparatus in the face of its own digital-age contexts. Yet in
doing so, he has strived to avoid the easy conflation of
discursive structure with technological means--an effort that
manifests itself, for instance, in Ulmer's persistent
characterization of the academic essay not as the inevitable
legacy of alphabet technology, but rather as a particular form of
"interface," a specific code developed by Renaissance scholars as
one means of harnessing the cognitive properties facilitated by
the written sign.
2. In Ulmer's view, then, it is incumbent upon researchers working
within the contemporary humanities disciplines to craft the
digital-age counterpart to the essay itself--a project entailing
not only the development of specific technological prostheses (for
example, the extension of the print-based educational apparatus
into such settings as the video production studio or the networked
learning environment), but also the conceptualization of
altogether new forms of epistemological code, the
conceptualization, that is, of a specifically digital rhetoric
that would accommodate any technological medium, including paper
and pen. On this matter, it is worth noting the case of the
"mystory," the calculatedly post-literate genre that Ulmer first
fully adumbrated in his 1989 book, Teletheory, and that he and his
students at the University of Florida initially performed in
traditional (that is, un-wired) classrooms: the point of the
mystory has always been to think electronically regardless of the
medium in use--that is, to augment the modes of inductive and
deductive reasoning with the use of /conductive/ methodologies,
the formulation of knowledge through the associative channels
afforded by the function of the signifier.
3. For Roland Barthes, it was of course the photographic "punctum"
that best displayed the infusion of putatively expository
representations with individuated meaning and that demonstrated,
in turn, the linking of discrete chains of knowledge through the
short-circuitry inherent to the signifying field. And in
developing his own trope of "conductivity," Ulmer's intent is to
raise (or lower, as the case may be) this associative mode of
knowledge-production to the level of academic method. As such, the
purpose of Internet Invention is not simply to facilitate the
incorporation of sound and image within the context of the
expository text, but rather to cultivate a post-expository method
reflective of the polyvalent conduction of meaning explored by
Freud, Barthes, and Derrida and evident throughout the practices
that comprise the university's contemporary contexts. As Gerald
Graff began to argue in the mid-eighties, advertising has now
usurped the university as the arbiter of cultural logic; Ulmer's
contention, in turn, would be that academic writing lags behind
precisely because it has yet to allow for the metonymic
sliding--the repetition of sounds, images, and letters across
otherwise disjointed contexts--that comprises the fundamental code
of the advertising discourse as such.
4. In assessing Ulmer's commitment to the issue of pedagogy, it is
already enough to observe the quotidian circumstances surrounding
the appearance of the book in question: handled by the educational
division of Longman Publishers and featuring the kind of companion
website now more or less mandatory for college writing guides,
Internet Invention is indeed meant to serve as a student textbook.
Even more indicative of Ulmer's investment, though, is the site of
his departure from received pedagogical practices: while Internet
comprises a different kind of textbook, this difference has little
to do with its substitution of the webpage for the writing pad.
Much more to the point, Internet comprises a /first-person/
composition manual (to paraphrase Ulmer himself), a revelation of
methodologies through the enactment of the institutional,
conceptual, and personal problems that have spawned them. Hence,
while Ulmer joins a sizeable group of scholars in emphasizing the
growing gap between academic discourse and the practices that
surround the contemporary academy, he stands out for his enactment
of a distinctly post-expository method.
5. Here, though, we must proceed by way of caveat: the revelatory act
in question has less to do with the kind of personal agency
espoused by Peter Elbow than with the retroactive effect denoted
by Lacan as the mechanism of /capitonnage/; what's to be revealed
to the student of Ulmer's digital pedagogy is the instantaneous
linking of public and private modes of experience through the
repetition of signifiers across conceptual contexts. In Internet
Invention, this form of revelation, as it were, is demonstrated
through the same mix of popular and personal discourses that has
marked Ulmer's previous books (with topics ranging from Derrida to
Elvis to Ulmer's boyhood in Eastern Montana). In this case,
however, these fragments serve to guide the student's movement
through a four-step cycle of "career," "family," "entertainment,"
and "community." Through various exercises interspersed amongst
the aforementioned mosaic (the complexion of which is unabashedly
mediated by Ulmer's ample formulations of both the principle of
conductivity itself and the forms and methods by which it might be
exploited), the student is directed toward the production of four
correlative websites.
6. Significantly, this progression is to be driven not by the
employment of subtending concepts but rather through the
recognition of isolated, trans-contextual details (through the
circulation, that is, of the gram, the signifier removed from the
presumption of fixed subtending meaning). The hoped-for result is
the production of a "widesite," a constellation of text and image
derived through the aforementioned succession and used, in turn,
as a /themata/ in the formulation of public or professional
problems. In one of Ulmer's many personal examples, the sound of
the steel guitar links the country-western music of his boyhood
Montana to the hybrid pop music of the contemporary African
continent (the sound in question having traveled to both locales
from its origins in the Hawaiian method of slack-string guitar
tuning). The resulting connection affords Ulmer an idiosyncratic
structuring of the various problems connoted by the disciplinary
concept of postcolonialism. In this manner, Internet Invention
mounts an epistemological formalization of the generative use of
extra-disciplinary patterns that researchers of intellectual
creativity have ascribed to the work of innovative thinkers in
every field. Here, then, resides the site of Ulmer's intended
break: despite its delivery through the familiar interface of the
expository text, Internet Invention asks the student/reader to
perform a distinctly extra-expository blending of word, sound, and
image, a gesture that does not usurp the writing of literate
discourse so much as enlist it in a process otherwise obfuscated
through the academic espousal of expository knowledge production.
7. As already suggested, Ulmer's project rests not so much upon the
putative obsolescence of literate epistemology as on the
mobilization of methods previously excluded by the pedagogical
extolling of expository ends. And as such, the difference between
the subtending presumptions of the academic essay and the
generative code inherent to the "widesite" cannot be plotted
temporally. Media theorist Rita Raley makes a similar point in a
productively different manner: in her analysis of the widespread
endeavors to discern between (analog) text and (digital)
hypertext, Raley notes that any attempt at the binary
classification of the two (in terms of their material or
ontological differences, for instance) already signals the default
invocation of a decidedly analogical method. Alternately, then,
Raley formulates the distinction in question through a conceptual
inversion of sorts: beginning with the notion of the textual
object as that which bespeaks its disciplinary and/or
methodological foundations, Raley characterizes hypertextual
production as that for which the condition of textuality has
simply become prerequisite. As Raley puts it, the analog/digital
divide can be said to exist strictly as the /precipitate/ of the
movement from the one to the other--with the caveat that it is
precisely this anchoring of meaning upon its own anamorphotic
trace that defines the hypertextual experience as such.
8. Where this inversion becomes illuminating with respect to Ulmer's
project is in its implicit formulation of analog representation as
a foreclosure of sorts, as a deviation from the "baseline"
condition of the hypertext. Within Ulmer's /oeuvre/, this same
conceptual reversal becomes evident in his frequent references
(particularly in his earlier works, such as Teletheory and
Heuretics) to the modern suppression of metonymic methods of
knowledge production. It is not simply that Ulmer advocates a
digital-age return to the pre-literate use of poetics; rather, the
point not to be missed (a point that Raley can be said to
illuminate by way of analogy) concerns Ulmer's differentiation
between method and potential--his realization, in other words, of
the delimited status of the expository code relative to a range of
potentialities that was already inherent in the era of literate
discourse.
9. What this analogy underscores in turn, however, is the internal
horizon of the mystory itself, the /lacuna/ of Ulmer's own
pedagogical narrative. For once we differentiate between
rhetorical interface and technological potentiality, then why
wouldn't we want to locate this split within the literate
apparatus itself? In other words, having learned from Ulmer the
importance of distinguishing between epistemological method and
material specificity, why should we necessarily look to generic
alternatives to the essay? Shouldn't conductive
knowledge-formation be expected to function within the form of the
modern essay despite this form's pedagogical subordination to the
fantasy of exposition?
10. We can pursue this point further by way of a quick return to
Ulmer's core impetus. As Ulmer suggests, one of the best
rationales for the widesite is the growing need for a means of
knowledge production that would effectively mime the
postapocalyptic condition of ruin in which we now operate. In
delineating his method, then, Ulmer takes as one of his models
Freud's schematization of the dream mechanism--that is, the
psychoanalytic theorization of the linking of latent and manifest
fragments (or ruins) through the purely associative interactions
of visual and textual signs. In the aforementioned case of the
disciplinary problem of postcolonialism, for instance, Ulmer's
point is that his investment in the issue derives not from an
objective survey of the global cultural-historical landscape but
from the conductive linking of discrete contexts through their
confluence within polysemic signifiers ("I hated the piles of
rocks at the Sand and Gravel plant, but I loved the new rock music
on KOMA that we could hear in Montana at night" [116]). In Ulmer's
words, it is the metonymic pursuit of the signifying thread that
leads to conceptual epiphany.
11. Here, then, lies the essence of Ulmer's crucial contribution. In
conclusion, however, the trajectory of his most recent offering
can be both corroborated and qualified through a consideration of
our academic responses to the public crisis of the 9/11 attacks.
As we now know, attempts to place the attacks within pertinent
historical contexts merely tended to feed the hegemonic fantasies
that our various historiographical expositions sought to dispel
(as evidenced, for instance, by the backlash against Susan
Sontag's New Yorker commentary). But consider, in turn, Seattle
journalist Charles Mudede's chronicling of African-American
reactions to 9/11. Throughout the wide range of views represented
within Mudede's September 2001 article, one begins to recognize a
recurrent expression of anger toward the attackers' disregard for
the /domestic/ victims of American policy. In other words, the
position that emerges in Mudede's piece effectively circumvents
the false choice between patriotic solidarity and global
sympathy--and it does so through the generative "revelation" of a
new chain of knowledge.
12. Mudede's article is entitled "Black Flag," a nice example of
conductivity in and of itself. But one could argue that the
epistemological significance of the position described in Mudede's
narrative becomes clear only once it is read alongside, say,
Martin Luther King Jr.'s proclamations of a violated American
dream. King's strategy was to invoke the American way itself as
the context for a new articulation of its own antagonistic
failure, its own intrinsic incompleteness. As such, King's
rhetoric further exemplifies the tenet of generative epistemology,
the associative linking of fragmentary "ruins" toward the
intervening reformulation of public issues.
13. The point, though, is that in doing so King merely mobilizes the
very form of logic that afforded the emergence of the national
community in the first place: the predication of new discursive
fields upon their own /lacuna/, upon a condition of purely
intrinsic antagonism. Here then, it perhaps becomes necessary to
augment the mechanisms of condensation and displacement with the
function of the impossible "navel" that Freud posits as the anchor
of the dream structure itself: in the seminal case of the
emergence of the French republic, for instance, the experience of
nationalism erupts precisely as a generative expression of its own
incompleteness.[1 <#foot1>] Likewise, in Raley's analysis of the
comparative status of digital representation, it is precisely this
retroactive emergence of the trace that becomes recognized as the
zero-degree of the hypertextual field itself--with the important
caveat that it is this "field," as it were, that comprises the
logical foundation of the modern episteme as such. With respect to
the implementation of Ulmer's project, the above juxtapositions
underscore the possibility of recognizing conductivity as a
function that already subtends the modern act of writing. In light
of Ulmer's own demonstration of the distinction between electronic
thinking and electronic media, then, the continuation of the
project enacted in Internet Invention appears too important to
remain displaced onto the anticipatory form of the mystory. In the
immediate future, the range of the widesite might well be
gainfully extended to the domain of the freshman research paper.
Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
University of Minnesota
Shea0016@umn.edu
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. This formulation of the generative basis of nationalist
discourse is derived from chapter three of Laclau and Mouffe's
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.
Works Cited
Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy. London: Verso, 1985.
Mudede, Charles. "Black Flag: The Black Response to America's
Tragedy." The Stranger. 25 Oct. 2001. 14 Dec. 2002
.
Raley, Rita. "Reveal Codes: Hypertext and Performance." Postmodern
Culture 12 (2001). 26 Nov. 2002
.
Sontag, Susan. "Talk of the Town." The New Yorker. 24 Sept. 2001: 24.
Ulmer, Gregory. Applied Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1985.
---. Heuretics: the Logic of Invention. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1994.
---. Internet Invention: from Literacy to Electracy. New York:
Pearson, 2003.
---. Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video. New York:
Routledge, 1989.