Wrapping My Head Around It (poorly)

Ok, so reading Ulmer, I am not afraid to admit that I am having some problems following.  Part of this is because I know my mind thinks of things in lines, and I was raised doing analysis using methods that predate deconstruction.

Deconstruction itself doesn’t bother me (I find it very amusing at times), but Ulmer’s working from deconstruction and his move to his new method of chorography is difficult.  Originally I thought about trying to map the associations between the different things that he discusses in trying to create his project, but I got too confused to even know where to begin.

So, instead, I did something I know that he really wouldn’t want me to do.  I keyed into the moments where he gave me something more general to work from. 

Here’s what I think I get: Traditional (and by traditional I mean print) media critique works from a certain framework that has prevailed since ancient Greece.  It has been modified, especially around the time of Ramus, but it hasn’t changed completely.  One of the big changes that happened with Ramus is the separation of delivery and memory from the rhetoric, focusing instead mainly on invention and arrangement.  Ulmer contends that this model does not hold up in the face of the new media possibilities of what he calls “hypermedia” that integrates words and images and sounds all together in one.

Heuretics, then is Ulmer’s performance of what he views as a new method for viewing texts as well as creating new methods.  He calls this new method chorography.  He relates this method to two important principles:

1) “Do not choose between the different meanings of key terms, but compose by using all the meaning (write the paradigm)” (48).  He also discusses these different meanings for important key terms to his project:

Chora: the concept of “place” as seen in Plato’s Timaeus. and from F.E. Peters: “an area where genesis takes place” (in Ulmer 48).  He also has a whole chapter devoted to explaining the many meanings of this term (too long to sum up here).

Premises: “‘Premises’ in logic are propositions that support a conclusion, explicit or implicit assumptions, or a setting forth beforehand by way of introduction or explanation” (48).  Also, “a tract of land–a building together with its grounds and appurtenances” (48).  appurtenance: (from dictionary.com) 1. something subordinate to another, more important thing; adjunct; accessory; 2. law a right, privilege, or improvement belonging to and passing with a principle property; 3. appurtenances, apparatus; instruments.

Folies: “seventeenth-century ‘extravagant house of entertainment’” and “‘contemporary psychoanalytic discoveries’ (folie = ‘madness’) (50). Also, a place where secret lovers would spend evenings (50) and “a place for dancing, drinking, and watching entertainments” (50 – 51).

Vanguard: military “the foremost division or front part of an army–shock troops, the probes” (88). political like Abd-el-Krims leadership of the Moors in the Rif War with France (88).  artistic like the surrealist opposition to the Rif War (88-89).

Gest: old english ” ‘ bearing, carriage, mien, a mixture of gesture and gist, attitude and point’ (Bullock and Stallybrass, 365)” (102). also “a tale, a deed or exploit, deportment or conduct, gesture, and even ‘the stages of a journey’  (102).

There are more, but these are a start.  Ulmer gives another principle of Chorography for him to follow:

2) “to collect what I find into a set, unified by a pattern of repetitions, rather than by a concept.  Electronic learning is more like discovery than proof” (56).  A while later he gives a very clear example of what he means here, though throughout he organizes things into repetitious sets.  The most obvious example that he points to himself:

“To write with the paradigm, chorography might take as a point of departure the series beginning with the term Rif ( a mountainous coastal region in norther Morocco); Riff ( a member of a group of Berber-speaking tribes living in northern Morocco); riff (in jazz, a melodic phrase, often constantly repeated, forming an accompaniment for a soloist).  The project is to learn to write with patterns that function more like music than like concepts” (91).

The last sentence leads me to the general statements I mentioned before.  Throughout he makes statements about what the method should do, should look like, etc.

“choral writing organizes any manner of information by means of the writer’s specific position in the time and space of a culture” (33).

“The chorographer, then, writes with paradigms (sets), not arguments” (38).

“How to practice choral writing then?  It must be in the order neither of the sensible nor the intelligible but in the order of making, of generating.  And it must be transferable, exchangable, without generalization, conducted from one particular to another” (67).  Ok isn’t this statement in of itself making this exercise not choral since he feels this generalized statement is necessary?

“being neither intelligible nor sensible, it has to be approached indirectly, by extended analogies” (67).

“Indeed chorography suggests the possiblity of a method that is never practiced the same way twice” (75).

“Chorography is a response to this appeal for invention, however impossible, based on the assumption that invention may not be undertaken ‘in general,’ solely by means of abstractions that leave out the foundation of thought int he practices constituting the cultural identity  and ideology of the inventor” (84).

“The transformation of this temporality from the mode of mystery (interpretation, truth) into the feeling of eureka (invention) is an important goal of chorography” (100).

“the chorographer introduces empathy, projection, and identification effects into critical theory” (102).

“Chorography is designed to introduce into the narrativesand arguments of the print apparatus a Heuretic code, to supplement and replace the Hermeneutic code and its drive to reduce enigmas to truth” (106).

I end with this one, though there are more, because I feel like this is exactly what I am trying to do here; unfortunately, I am not practiced well enough in any other way.  What I am trying to do, even though I have all of this, is to not come up with some sentence (my own axiom if you will) that can boil all this down into something digestible.  It simply isn’t right now for me.  I’m working on it though.

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