heres the links: http://www.cas.usf.edu/journal/ulmer/ulmer.html
gregg ulmer speaks in tongues a lot. i cant remeber if this one is laced with ulmer-isms, but he usually explains what they mean and why he employs them.
heres an excerpt:
What the hypermedia is to argumentation, the choral word is to the concept. So the choral word says, I’m going to write with every meaning of this word, not just one. This is against the univocality of logic of the western tradition in literacy which c laims it can completely disambiguate the word. That tradition said, we know that words are homynyms and have multiple meanings, but we can completely eliminate all these other possible choices and get down to the bottom where there is no confusion. On t he other hand, the new apparatus, this hypermedia formation with which you write with all the information at once, says, o.k. what we’re going to do instead is to attack the extraordinary power of natural language. Turns out, one of the powers of natural language was that it could disambiguate in that way, but another of its powers is that it can go in the opposite direction and write with all the ambiguities, with all the meanings of the words. Derrida literally does this, and so I try to write with ev ery meaning of “desert.” In the last section of Heuretics, I finally get into the “Yellowstone Desert” after moving through the switches. The test of such moving about is I have to learn something, and one thing I learned is that I never ever thought of dessert when I looked at desert, even when I was studying Beau Geste and doing analytical kinds of research. The connection only occurred when I saw this guy in a bookstore with this big thing, a book about the desert, which I afterwards purchased for m yself. And it turned out to be a book about ethics and justice, which says, all right, there’s the right and there’s desert, and what we’ve got is problems. Afterwards, it goes into different theories of justice, and it keeps talking about justice in te rms of rights, when what is needed is to talk about it in terms of dessert. The whole point is what I can make out of this, it’s heuretics, it’s not hermeneutics. I don’t say that Derrida thinks what I’m saying, but that his discussion of responsibility can be understood in terms of dessert and that we can start looking at it that way. In Heuretics, I was trying to show how this works, how at the level of the word you write with every meaning and move through a field of information with your selection principle being whatever your choral word is, which is generated from within (just as Derrida takes terms from within the objects of his study, which he then works with in his paradigmatic way). And what that means at higher levels we already learned fro m structuralism; that the act of meaning is always above selection (the metaphoric axis) and combination (the metonymic axis). These are the two axes of language, and all writing is an act of selecting and combining that which means systematically in ter ms of what’s been left out. The sound of a particular phoneme is meaningful, not by some reference or anchor in the real, but by a systematic differentiation from all other possible choices. That’s the structural theory of meaning. You instantly recogn ize the significance of a style or of a certain look because it is distinguished from all others. There’s the grunge look and the Madison Avenue look. You say, I’m not that, I am this. When you make choices you leave others out. What’s interesting in the new paradigm is the idea that holistically we might show choices in hypermedia that wouldn’t ordinarily be suppressed. So in semiotics, you develop a critiqu� of structuralism by highlighting what was left out and by giving it a voice. So if women a re denied voice, you give them a voice by showing that their positions have been silenced. Such a critiqu� remains a powerful tool. But the problem is that we are still learning to read literacy and don’t know electronics. So the reason why you can sup press a voice and make it work is because people don’t know how to read it, so it works on them without their knowing. So in the paradigmatic way of working, which I describe in Heuretics, as my method, I looked at the “Eve of Departure,” in the museum exhibit and didn’t recognize it as important to me at all, only a vague mythical association with Columbus, until it occurred to me that it’s a metonym for the whole Columbus story and the age of discovery, with everything in it completely westernized for fifth graders. That’s the way schools work, etc. But then I thought wait, no, there’s a unit of meaning in that particular story, and in that whole story of Columbus we’ve actually, historically only ever articulated three parts. And in the course of turning them into language, we mythologized them. That all three were there from the beginning is the interesting part: they were there at the “Eve of Departure,” including the broken and destroyed Columbus at the end of his life (a completely differen t story) and the genocidal story with Columbus the murderer. All three were there. But what happened was, of course, that the one they chose to write with was the “Eve of Departure,” because it was the one that fit the idealogy of the frontier (the fron tier of knowledge, of which Francis Bacon wrote). Yet, all three were there from the beginning and available. So what the new apparatus allows is for you to write with all three, to tell all the stories at the same time, to keep them all together and sh ow the consequences of following one or the other. According to the logic of heuretics, I generate information by taking each unit of discourse and showing it in its paradigm. Take the paradigm of the avant garde for example. Actually, there are three avant gardes. The first originates in the military as the advance guard and is taken over by politics in describing revolutionary radical movements and finally picked up by artists to name their own revolutionary activities. So I had always thought in t erms of the avant garde of the artists and only started thinking more about the political avant garde as I got into cultural studies. Yet I still left out and simply took as a metaphor the military avant garde. So what my method told me to do is to incl ude the military avant garde with its strong association to the French foreign legion. What had to be faced was that the French foreign legion is just as much avant garde as Marxism or surrealism even though it was the opposite of everything I thought I believed in. As Derrida also shows, everything’s got its opposite, dragging it right along with it. Dragging right along behind the political and artistic avant garde is the French foreign legion and its equivalents, which is to say its opposites, which is the same. So it’s a kind of self critique. The technique is to recognize conductive discourse by what it does: how it allows you to see how all these things are articulated, thus to see the story that is told as a whole. You’ve got to see the whol e story of the avant garde, the whole story of Columbus, and not just what you want to find. The way concepts work, Nietzsche said, is you go out in the field and you hide something under a bush and you go back and draw a map and you say, I think I’ll go back out and discover these things. That’s concept formation. Invention can’t think that way. Writing with the paradigm is different. Semiotics is very helpful here, and I suggest that as soon as you identify the visible unit, then say, show me the p aradigm. Then research all three avant gardes, all the meanings of desert, all the Columbus stories. And you keep looking like that. It works by dream-work. So up comes Custer, or up comes Columbus. What you realize is it’s a dream, meaning it’s orga nized by condensation, displacement, secondary elaboration. That’s how it’s organized, not logically, but by dream-work. You follow the displacement, just as I did with the letters “CE FIL” when they showed up on the Custer battlefield. And these are w hat led me to the word ficelle. At first I thought the important word was the (Lacanian) use of ficelle, and I just sort of brushed off Henry James’ use of this word. He used it to designate secondary characters needed to keep a story going. You know, somebody’s got to discover the body, so you put a butler in there and he discovers the body, or whatever. You just need him and then you get rid of him, or it’s the guy that the monster’s got to kill , secondary figures, ficelle. At that time, I didn’t know quite what that meant. But now I realize it says look for the ficelles in your superego story. It’s not only Custer that’s important. Who are the other figures? In my case, I found Chief Gall, one of the three battlefield chiefs who beat Custer a t the Little Big Horn. So Gall tells me what I’m missing. My ficelles tell me what I’ve got to add to my judgments. If I’m identifying with Gary Cooper, the legionnaire, and my ficelle is Marlena Dietrich, that’s the figure I’ve got to add in, to facto r in to my identity structure, to make my identity a paradigm instead of a line.
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