Notes for Gregory Ulmer Applied Grammatology

Key concepts: anasemia, anthonymy, antonomasia, bridge of analogy, cartouche principle, chemical senses, collage, concretization, decomposition, dehiscence of iteration, epistemological metaphor, epithymics, graphic element, hieroglyphic writing, interpretant, iterability, limits, moira, moire effect, morceau, paleonymy, parergon, passe-partout, rebus writing, sabotage.

Related theorists: Barthes, Beuys, Clark, Derrida, Eco, Eisenstein, Kristeva, Lacan, Landow, Mallarme, Ong, Sperber, Sterne, Turkle.

1
Grammatlogy
BEYOND DECONSTRUCTION
(5) A review of Derrida's program at the level of grammatology will reveal a mode of writing, and ultimately of pedagogical practice, that is designed to overcome the logocentric limitations of discourse.

MANIFESTO

Long quotation from page 9 of Derrida Grammatology ends with the statment entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing; here writing in computer technology is completely alien to the order of the voice, besides the simplified communication models used to describe them.

(9) Derrida notes that all the revolutions in philosophy, science, and literature during this century can be interpreted as shocks that are gradually destroying the linear model.
(9) The resurgence of the graphic element, escaping from the domination of the spoken word, is a symptom of the end of the metaphysical era.

SCIENCE

Define how other writing can function as knowledge without being theoretical.

(12) The challenge of an applied grammatology is to define how this other writing can function as knowledge without being theoretical.

BEYOND THE BOOK
(13) The book is perhaps the most charged, cathected object in Western civilization, representing, according to Freud's analysis of his own dream of the botanical monograph, the Mother.
(14) Derrida's interest in the media is an aspect of his general concern for writing as a “technology,” an evolving technology, constrained for three millennia in the service of language.

Derrida strategy of parodic repetition to let the book be thought as such, to get beyond the book.

(16) To pass through the book, repeating the lure at every point along the way, changes everything without anything having budged - such is the enigmatic power of repetition to expose the derived status of origins. This repetition refers to the fact that the closure of the book occurs when the book lets itself be thought as such (Writing, 296), a moment emblematized in Mallarme's project for The Book. This strategy of (parodic) repetition will play an important role in Derrida's texts.

HIEROGLYPHS
(16) Theoretical grammatology, thus far, has used the book format, although its genre, to the extent that the term applies in this case, is the essay. . . . The new essays are written in and for an age of electronic media, written both against the old model of the book and as a supplement to the new media, to assist and stimulate the transition to the new epoch.

Hieroglyphic writing model to produce cubist distortions in philosophy, deconstructing the look of logocentrism.

(18) Theoretical grammatology adopts hieroglyphic writing as a model, translating it into a discourse, producing thus in philosophy distortions similar to those achieved in those movements, labeled “cubist” and “primitivist” which drew on the visual arts of non-Western cultures in order to deconstruct the look of logocentrism.

SIGNING

Cartouche signing principle for studying author-text relation, scrutinizing images punning name of author to reveal motivated relationship between the name and the text.

(21) Briefly stated, the cartouche principle is used as a mode of analysis (a literalization of analysis, after all, which term means the breakup or dissolution of something) for studying the author-text relation, first by locating in the text the images whose terms pun in some manner on the author's name, and then by scrutinizing these concrete elements to the fullest extent, unlimited by notions of context or intention, for their theoretical potential. Such interrogation invariably reveals (and here lies much of the importance of the technique) that the name and the text do stand in a motivated relationship one to the other.

SEMINAR

The study of plant fecundation by Derrida is a terminal exercise, a metaphor (container, crutch, substitute) for another operation, anthonymy (combining study of flowers and anthology), which he reached via portmanteau.

Use electronic and computer technology information to learn something useful in addition to promoting the philosophical/grammatological lesson.

(24) Since the proper-common shift in Genet's text always involves the names of flowers, Derrida states that in Glas he will replace “antonomasia” with “anthonymy,” a portmanteau word combining authography - the study of flowers - and anthology - itself extended to identify a collection of verse from the original reference to a collection of flowers.
(24) Having educated his reader in the terminology of plant fecundation, Derrida declares, “One is not going to produce here the theory of pollen and of seed scattering [dissemence]” (Glas, 283). The botanical information, rather, as the “vehicle” of the analogy between flowers and rhetoric, constitutes a didactic model in a textual “seminar.”

Botanical information vehicle for didactic model in textuality study; recent reading recommending distinguishing vehicle and contents Clark highlights.

(25) The homophonic resemblance between “to sign” (ensigner) and “to teach” (enseigner) reveals the import of the entire demonstration, for in grammatology the theory of signing is also a theory of teaching.

Dehiscence limits what it makes possible without absolute rigor and purity.

(25) Dehiscence (like iterability) limits what it makes possible, while rendering its rigor and purity impossible. . . . Thus is the oval enclosure of the cartouche, separating the name from the text, broken, producing not “denotation” but “detonation.”

HOMONYMY

Applied grammatology generalizes cartouche principle of signature to concept formation.

(26) The premise of applied grammatology is that the cartouche principle of the signature, directing the relation of the proper name to common nouns (the images generated by “anthonomasic” dissemination), may be generalized to include the process of concept formation - the relation of an abstract term to the metaphors from which the term is “derived.”

Example of Derrida White Mythology as Bachelard psychoanalysis of objective knowledge, dialectical surrationalism in which noumenon explains phenomenon: theoretical fictions organized into a pedagogy.

(26) In “White Mythology”, Derrida allies his operation with Bachelard's “psychoanalysis of objective knowledge.” . . . Keeping in mind that light is the philosophic metaphor, any change in our understanding of its nature should affect its analogical extensions in such concepts as form and theory.
(27) Dubbed “dialectical surrationalism,” defined as the realm in which the scientific mind dreams, Bachelard's method does not abandon, but reorients, the theory of representation away from empirical or experiential reality. . . . In short, the traditional order of realist or empirical experimentation is inverted, so that the noumenon now explains the phenomenon (No, 53). Derrida's conceptual experiments function in a similar way, involving the movements of thought and language in a formal space entirely free of phenomenal, perceptual, or commonsensical reality. . . . theoretical fictions organized into a pedagogy that would collapse the distinctions separating teaching, research, and art might have also the power to guide transformations of the lived, social world.

Derrida alternative onomastics opens world of machine language.

(28) Against Aristotle's influential doctrine that “in non-sense, language is not yet born,” Derrida builds an alternative onomastics based precisely on what Aristotle excludes from metaphor.
(28) Derrida, with his interest in discerning and then transgressing the limits of philosophical discourse, takes his cue from Aristotle and builds an entire philosophical system on the basis of the homonym (and homophone).

Derrida system is built on the remainder of legitimate, sensible language as defined by Aristotle, exploring frivolities of chance, interval of the gap itself, dehiscence of iteration; is there any reason in taking it seriously beyond its exemplifying a method?

(28) The philosopher, and especially the teacher of applied grammatology, must learn like poets and revolutionary scientists to explore the frivolities of chance. The dehiscence of iteration, an economimesis that redistributes the property or attributes of names, is exemplified in its generalized mode is “Dissemination,” an essay that, as Derrida explains, is a systematic and playful exploration of the interval of the gap itself, leading from “ecart” (gap) to “carre, carrure, carte, charte, quatre, trace.” He calls this play of the interval, set to work within the history of philosophy.
(29) In the next chapter I shall submit the name of “theory” itself to this “anthonomasic” detonation.

2
Theoria
LIMITS

Concept of limits fundamental issue to poststructuralists.

(30) The concept of limit is one of the fundamental issues, not only for Derrida, but for that group of writers currently identified as “poststructuralists.”
(31) The machinery of this power of appropriation is the Hegelian Aufhebung, the dialectical sublation that permits philosophy to talk about itself and its other in the same language, essentializing the accidental and sensible into the substantial and intelligible.

Generative power metaphorical, not actual.

(31) With this homohymic relationship (in the word sens) between the sensible and the intelligible in mind, we may understand the phrase placed at the opening of “Tympan” which, Derrida says, is capable of generating all the sentences of the book: “l'etre a la limite.”

THEORY

Applied grammatology informed by chemical senses of contact that link Derrida to Einstein and electronics to guide writing with video (ironically, since there could be tactile and other language machines), as visual and aural senses link Kant and Hegel to Newton: electronics worth studying to help with this understanding.

(34-35) Derrida's move is simply to hypothesize a thinking, an intelligibility, that would function in terms of that part of the sensible excluded from consideration—the chemical senses (“why not?”).
(35) Derrida, interested in the techne as enframing (the essence of technology, which is not itself technological but artistic), examines the science of electronics, which reveals that a major difference between Newtonian and Einsteinian physics is that the former is a theory of action at a distance, while the latter is a theory of action by contact, based on the experiments of Faraday and Maxwell in electromagnetism.
(35) Derrida's conceptualization of the chemical or contact senses, then, correlates with Einstein's physics just as Kant's and Hegel's idealizations based on the objective senses correlate with Newton's.

Writing with video directed by new epistemology and set of philosophemes whose metaphors derived from chemical senses.

(36) Writing with video (or in any medium in the video age) will be directed (in applied grammatology, at least) by a new epistemology and a new set of philosophemes whose metaphors are derived from the chemical senses.

ARTICULATION
Moire.

Moire analysis sounds like Nietzsche philosophizing with a hammer.

(38) In terms of the homonymic event (dehiscence of iterations or articulations), the destiny of language, its relation to Moira and the Moirae, may be solicited in the same way that structural engineers, using computer analyses of moire patterns, examine buildings (or any structure) for defects. The cracks and flaws in the surface of philosophy may thus be located.
(39) The experimental production of optical illusion directly in abstract forms (rather than indirectly, as in the mimetic tradition, in forms subordinated to representational demands), is relevant to an understanding of Derrida's attempt to identify the illusory effects of grammar in a similarly pure way.
(40) The moire effect alone serves not only as a didactic model for “solicitation,” but constitutes—by virtue of its peculiar feature of being a static form that produces the effect of motion—an emblem of Moira, destiny, whose nature is to be at once the motion of Becoming and the rest of Being.

Ornament.

Center of structure not fixed focus but a function, evident from features and history of ornament.

(40) Derrida's interest in the features and history of ornament is evident in his concern for everything marginal, supplementary, everything having to do with borders rather than centers. . . . Derrida proposes that our era is beginning to think of the structurality of structure, realizing that the center is not a natural or fixed locus but a function.
(43) Op writing exploits for its effects the tendency to receive concepts in terms of presuppositions and the encoded habits of expectation, in the same way that op art exploits the fact that the eye “is good in recognizing continuities and redundancies, but bad in 'locking in' on a particular feature of repeated elements.” Thus, an art—or a philosophy of writing—based on repetition will cause problems for the habits of seeing or thinking.
(44) Op writing has available in the history of ornament an index of devices all potentially translatable from geometry to the graphics of grammatology.

Moire-Moirae.

Systematic exploitation of puns, especially antonomasia, as nondialectical entry points for deconstruction of philosophemes.

(44-45) Derrida gets his ideas from the systematic exploitation of puns, used as an inventio to suggest nondialectical points of entry for the deconstruction of the philosophemes. His best-known version of this strategy involves the deflation of proper names into common nouns (antonomasia), as in Glas, in which Genet's texts are discussed in terms of flowers (the flowers of rhetoric), beginning with genet (a broomflower).
(46) Derrida's deconstruction of theoria reveals what Moirae-moire knows.

Science of old names (paleonymy) highlights rhythm of multiple meanings and spellings like flicker of moire effect.

(47) The strategy of paleonymy (the science of old names) extends this beat, or rhythm, set in motion by the proximity of two meanings, two spellings, that are the same and different, offset, like the two overlapping but not quite matching grids that generate the flicker of the moire effect.
(48) Derrida is particularly interested in the way the shuttle motion (the soliciting vibration, whose homophonically overlapping terms offer an alternative metaphorics that challenges the logocentric structure of concept formation), is manifested in other systems of thought, especially in psychoanalysis (the science, along with geometry, that Derrida uses to think his way toward grammatology).
(49) That the between is also a grotto (entre-antre) is important for understanding the place of grammatology in the history of ornament, since it suggests that op writing is a form of grotesequery.
(51) As suggested by antre—the grotto, recalling the Italian grottoes in which the ancient decorations were discovered, hence their dubbing as grotesquery—the “betweenness” of grammatological space is a zone of license. . . . Nonetheless, the moire effect of op writing, giving rise to grotesque etymologies, constitutes a new theory of mimesis. . . . The new mimesis, in short, is based on homophonic resemblance.

New mimesis based on homophonic resemblance, replacing traditional concept formation with epithymics and moira.

(51) Derrida is redefining idea, working on its image of the wheel of fortune. Derrida is redefining, working on its root metaphor of sight and light, analyzing it no longer in terms of its effect (the light bulb that lights up when we have an idea in cartoons and advertisements) but in terms of its physics, energy waves (the vibrations mediated by the air, the level at which light and sound are equivalent, identified in relation to the body in terms of the “objective senses” of sight and hearing). What electricity is to light, Moira is to language.

DECOMPOSITION
Voice.

Decomposition continues by seeking analogy for thought that does not depend on touch, sight or hearing.

(51) The second step in Derrida's solicitation of the founding metaphors of Western thought (the philosophemes upon which are based our notion of theory, idea, concept, and of metaphor itself)--decomposition--extends articulation to the chemical senses by finding an analogy for thought that does not depend on touch, sight, or hearing.

Taste.
(53-54) Experimenting with a non-Hegelian speculation, Derrida begins to define a conceptual system that would be based on the nontheoretical senses, which would efface the contradiction between theory and desire. . . . “Epithymics,” then, is to “taste” (within the operation of decomposition) what “moira” is to “idea” (within the operation of articulation). Epithymics and moira name Derrida's alternative strategy, replacing our traditional understanding of concept formation.

Experimental conceptualization via taste, fart, vomit as challenges for ontology.

(55) A logical place to begin the deconstruction of the logocentric privilege of speech is to take note of the other function performed by the same organs that make speech possible—to explore the surplus of operations excluded from the philosopheme. . . . [quoting Glas, 69-70] How could ontology get hold of a fart? . . . The larger issue, relevant to the entire tradition of Western thought, concerns the consequences of the rigid spearation of the intelligible from the sensible.
(57) The effect of the vomi is the destruction of representation and the pleasure associated with it, exposing one instead to the experience of jouissance (beyond pleasure). . . . The vomi, in its essence, then, is the effacement of the distinction between the fictional and the real, between art and life. And it is also the “gag” alluding to the tongue-in-cheek bit of this alternative voice.

Mouth.

Decomposition via morceau releasing versus concept referenced in Landow also has great relevance to my interest in citing program source code as well as basic comparison to subroutines and similar machine operations.

(57-58) The first step in decomposition is the bite. To understand the rationale for all the interpolations, citations, definitions used in Glas, Derrida says, one must realize that “the object of the present work, its style too, is the 'morceau' [bit, piece, morsel, fragment; musical composition; snake, mouthful]. Which is always detached, as its name indicates and so you do not forget it, with the teeth” (Glas, 135). The “teeth,” as Derrida explained in an interview, refer to quotation marks, brackets, parentheses: when language is cited (put between quotation marks), the effect is that of releasing the grasp or hold of a controlling context. With this image of biting out a piece, Derrida counters the metaphor of concept—grasping, holding (Begriff).
(58) “I see rather (but it is perhaps still a matrix or a grammar) a kind of dredging machine” (Glas, 229).
(58) Decomposition, then, is another version of what Derrida describes as the most fundamental feature of language—iterability, the principle shared by both speech and writing. . . . The grapheme—the restance, or nonpresent remainder of the differential mark inaccessible to any experience, cut off from the origins of a receiver or ends of a referent, from a signified or a context—remains iterable and still functions as sense (because language is a system).

Iterability as collage, which makes creative unconscious writing possible.

(59) Derrida in fact takes this possibility of cutting free and regrafting as his (de)compositional principle. Iterability, as a mode of production, may be recognized as collage.
(59) The efffectiveness of collage is that, like metaphor, the piece, displaced into a new context, retains associations with its former context. The two operations constituting the collage technique—selection and combination—are the operations characteristic of all speaking and writing. . . . Derrida's grammatology is to the collage what Aristotle's poetics was to Greek trajedy. The comparison is also a contrast, since decomposition (deconstruction extended from a mode of criticism to a mode of composition) as a practice relies on the very elements Aristotle excluded from metaphor—articulation and the homonym.

Orality.
(60) Collage, that is, makes possible a rigorous yet creative unconscious writing.
(61) Incorporation—the nourishment process of taking things into the mouth, but also the spitting out of the breast—provides a model for relationships with the external world in general.

Challenge philosophemes by taking founding ideas literally; I feel a connection to technological instantiation noted by Turkle.

(62) Epithymics, that is, challenges the catachreses of the philosophemes by taking the metaphors of the founding ideas literally.

Signature.

Invention through mechanical writing in which the intentional subject is minimized similar to McGann deformation experiments; example here is Glas.

Theoretical foundation for new set of techniques leveraging machine cognition and Hayles style intermediation: see page 107.

(65) The idea put to work hypomnetically . . . is not the signified concept, then, but the letters/phonemes of the word itself, which are set free to generate conceptual material mechanically (without the intention or presence of the subject) by gathering into a discourse terms possessing these letters (often using the pun or homophone).

Unity of signified dissolved into component usages, chemical rationale of grotesquery, linguistic symptoms of schizophrenia exploited by applied grammatology.

(65) The unity of a signified (whether of a proper name, or the name of a concept) is dissolved into its component usages.
(66) The capacity for metamorphosis within words may also be recognized as the chemical rationale of grotesquery.
(67) The loss of subject and of identity in schizophrenia (and its linguistic symptoms) provide a further model—foreclosure as dehiscence—which an applied grammatology can exploit in its search for a new writing.

3
Mnemonics
HYPOMNESIS

For using hypomnesis Plato condemning whole theory of relation of memory to thought through example of writing as he does also with pharmakon.

(69) A review of Derrida's argument in “Plato's Pharmacy” reveals that Plato is condemning writing not just as “writing-down” but as a whole theory of the relation of memory to thought.
(70) It is worthwhile, then, to review some of the features of the history of artificial memory before discussing the function of mnemonics in grammatology.

PLACE

Goal of grammatology to reverse phoneticization that privileges ideographic via transduction to visual program; rebus writing principle model.

(71) The reversal of phoneticization—the reduction of the phonetic in favor of the ideographic element in writing—which is the goal of grammatology, takes as its model the principle of rebus writing, both as it appears in the historical analysis of nonphonetic scripts and (as we shall see) as it is theorized in psychoanalysis.

Ancient artificial memory procedure based on locus as similar technique as Derrida rebus and cartouche writing: use autobiography as contextual, situated thought constituent.

(71) The only full account of the technique is that given in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a textbook compiled in Rome (86-82 B.C.--long thought to be the work of Cicero, though now attributed to the otherwise unknown Cornifucius and dedicated to one Herennius), and which was enormously influential throughout the Medieval and Renaissance periods. It contains what became the stock definition of artificial memory, a procedure for relating places to images.
(72) In short, one used one's autobiography to think and write with.
(73) The images for a word or term were generated by techniques similar to those Derrida uses for his rebus or cartouche writing—antonomasia, puns, paragrams.

Strange virtual worlds generated by mnemonic techniques again more thinkable in programmable instantiations.

(73-74) Memory for words was a more difficult, awkward practice, yet, as Yates notes, combined with memory for things, it served as a hidden generator of much imagery in Medieval and Renaissance works that otherwise (to those unaware of their mnemonic function) seems completely esoteric, secretive. Thinking of the unusual, even surrealistic text that such a procedure might generate, Yates remarks, “What scope for the imagination would be offered in memorizing Boetheius's Consolation of Philosophy, as advised in a fifteenth-century manuscript,” whose memorization by word hieroglyphics would produce the Lady Philosophy coming to life and wandering, an animated Prudence, through the palaces of memory.

THE MYSTIC PAD

Writing secondary as logic of simulacrum.

(81) For a sign to be a sign, in other words, it must be repeatable, must already be a repetition (hence the mystery of the origin, the paradox of the first sign). Retracing the historical and structural nature of this mystery, grammatology sets up writing's secondarity as the logic of the simulacrum, of the originary ersatz.

ANASEMIA

Mystic pad model tied to Freud autobiography.

(81) Part of the interest of Freud's theory of memory for grammatology is his very use of a model (the model as prosthesis for the mind)--both that he uses a model and the specific nature of the model (the Mystic Writing-Pad, like the bobbin of the fort-da scene, is a toy). . . . The functioning of the analogy of the memory to a toy slate, in other words, opens up the entire problematic of how any knowledge achieves presence.
(82) Derrida's analysis of the metaphorics in philosophical writing points out that this reversibility or defamiliarization (akin to Max Black's “interaction”) is a potential inherent in the structure of metaphor, a potential that Derrida intends to radicalize.
(88) We encounter here one of the chief reasons why, not just in Derrida but in poststructuralist and deconstructionist writing in general, there has been a resurgence of interest in allegory.

Resurgence of interest in allegory by poststructuralists, deconstructionists, postmoderns; coming from other direction is Tanaka-Ishii.

(89) Nonetheless, allegory is the mode of representation most adaptable to Derrida's purposes, especially when one realizes that the essential linguistic structure of allegory, according to recent studies, is the pun.
(89-90) Not the metaphor of plot (and even less what such a plot might symbolize), but the language itself in terms of sounds and spellings, contains the key to meaning.

Pun strategy to liberate allegorical narrative from ontotheological ideology, since the foundation of analogy for sustaining reasoning is in question.

(90) Here Derrida's use of the punning strategy departs from the intention of the genre, for grammatology pushes beyond the polysemies displayed in Quilligan's analysis to dissemination in order to liberate the allegorical narrative from its ontotheological ideology.

FRAMES
(90) Derrida attempts to carry the theory of mimesis, with respect to the relationship between signifier and signified, beyond the opposition imposed on the debate from Plato to Saussure—between the signs as having naturally motivated (necessary) relations to meanings, and signs as being arbitrary products of convention.
(91) In a sense, then, Derrida treats his object of study (whatever it might be) as if it constituted a “found” hypomnemic scene—a scene for which the rebus key has been lost or forgotten, but whose allegorical, nonrepresentational writing (as tableau) remains open to a remotivating translation.

Parergon as structure can be transported across fields mechanically, without self-presence of living memory: sounds like a basis of arbitrary unit operations; will still permit focus on uniquely human operations in writing in the midst of fashioning human machine symbioses.

(94) The parergon—that “supplemental out work”--is itself just such a relational structure, designating “a general, formal predicative structure, which one can transport intact or regularly deformed, reformed, into other fields, to submit it to new content (Verite, 64). Derrida's experiment with an epistemology of Writing, based necessarily on hypomnesis rather than anamnesis, working mechanically without the self-presence of living memory, depends upon the relational capacities of items like the parergon and on the history of research into ungraspable experience—like that of Kant on the sublime or Freud on the fetish—for its enabling operations.

OL-FACTORY

Maintain focus on irreducibly human components of intellection along with overall growth of knowledge areas associated with smart computers.

(95) While such an approach obviously is in sympathy with the developments of mental prostheses such as “smart computers,” it also assumes that Writing continues as a human operation and the the goal of education in a man-machine symbiosis is to explore the specific and irreducibly human resources of intellection needed to direct our technological-scientific ecology.
(95-96) Although smells are symbols par excellence, giving rise to thoughts of something other than themselves, they have been ignored as a model for a theory of symbol because semiology cannot deal with that which cannot be coded (the very reason for its appeal to Derrida's search for a nonsemiotic epistemology). Rather, the smell functions as a means of individual symbolism (similar to the necessity in mnemonics to select loci from one's autobiography), evoking recollections and sentiments that are withheld from social communication.

Sperber bricoleur of the mind cognitive evocation treats ideas as evocative objects for olfactory response rather than encyclopedic recall, leading to bite based epistemology: again, computational unit operations from databases, protocols, down to assembly code exemplify this contextual, situational, nonconceptual component of cognition.

(96) Part of the interest of Sperber's argument is his depiction of ideas or theories as themselves symbolic—the statement of a doctrine or hypothesis (Sperber uses Lacan's “The Unconscious is structured like a language” as his example) is received symbolically, not epistemically, and hence works by processes of evocation (setting in action metonymic chains of association, for which the response to smell is the chief model) rather than by direct invocation of the concepts of the encyclopedia, which alone are empirically verifiable.
(97) For Sperber, the symbolic mechanism is “the bricoleur of the mind” working with the debris of concept formation, saving the remains of information not for decoding but for elaboration.
(97) Grammatology, I suggest, works in a similar manner, is a strategy of cognitive evocation, modeled on the effect of olfaction, which, as Sperber describes the operation, puts the elements of the encyclopedia in quotation marks. . . . Such is the function of the bite, the tenterhooks of citation, fundamental to Derrida's principle of iteration or articulation described in the previous chapter as the epithymics of taste.

4
Models
PICTO-IDEO-PHONOGRAPHIC

Graphic rhetoric trying to establish contact qualities in audio-visual media.

(98) The program of applied grammatology which I am outlining takes as its point of departure Derrida's deconstruction of the Book. Derrida's antibooks, at the same time that they work theoretically and thematically to subvert the final obstacle to grammatology—the metaphysics of logocentrism—also demonstrate a certain “graphic rhetoric,” the essence of which is a double-valued Writing, ideographic and phonetic at once, which puts speech back in its place in relation to nonphonetic elements. . . . As we shall see, audio-visual productions may be written within the enframing of a sensorium reorganized to reflect the contact qualities of the chemical senses.

Imagine what can be done adding sound to picto-ideo-phonographic, following first generation visual focus of electracy.

(99) Derrida similarly elaborates a tripartite script—picto-ideo-phonographic—which, in recent books, consists of the following elements: a discursive commentary (the phonetic level); examples interpolated (“pinned”) into the discourse (the ideographic level); and “found” pictorial material (such as the art works “translated” in La verite en peinture or the post card from the Bodleian Library feature in La carte postale). . . . The purpose of an applied grammatology, that is, is less concerned with the deconstruction of the philosophical tradition (the task of theoretical grammatology—perhaps interminable) than with the grafting of visual items to texts, as executed in The Post Card.

Interested in invention of intermedia Writing, pointing toward The Post Card.

(99) such works he does not deconstruct but translates, looking toward the discovery of an intermedia Writing.
(99) Derrida's innovation is to expand this band, giving it at least equal status with the conventionally discursive portions.
(100) In this chapter I shall review the lessons of Derrida's theory and practice for this grafting of discourse to exemplary and pictorial material. This will be followed in the next chapter by a reading of Derrida's most elaborate composite production to date—The Post Card.

EXAMPLE

Go beyond Ulmer with practical electronic examples from 1985 and earlier machines that effectively teach about electronics while reterritorializing philosophemes; think with Clark on virtual having sense.

(100) But to realize what is at stake here we must keep in mind that the logic of examples is a special case of concept formation—of relations between the particular and the general, the sensible and the intelligible. In the Western tradition, the only objects that have sense are those that “fall under” concepts.

Think with Clark on virtual having undones begging the question how the concept is comprehended by multipurposively making these instructional examples: again, electronic computer technology provided an outlet for otherwise ridiculous attention to style, which is why Turkle and others declare the examples drawn from engineering problems in the machine world better exemplify postmodern concepts than human expressions in written, cinematic, and aural productions; rethinking emergence of programming as a way of thinking like using other cognitive evocative objects explodes intermedia writing Ulmer posits as Derridaean ultimate fantasy, where failure of bridge of analogy inconsequential due to multiplicity of nonhuman causes for powering passage from symbol to symbol, which he asymptotically approximates with least quantity of connection examples like homonym, puns, and other frivolous examples where iterability is the only connecting thread.

(100-101) Derrida radicalizes the homonym, as we have seen, in that his economy dispossesses having by halving it, exploring not only halving as division, articulation, hinge, but also as jointing in the language of framing.

Framing component of radicalized homonym doing ontological bricolage producing subjectless mechanisms of cognitive evocation.

(102) The problematic of the narrator in literature, as we shall see, applies equally to the author-narrator in academic discourse, making the frame and the signature the same question.

INVAGINATION
(103) A glance at a general description of the concerns of catastrophe theory suffices to indicate its relevance to Derrida's interests in boundaries and borderings as they exist in the humanities.

Invaginated analogy deconstructs language as container for ideas.

(104) The bridge and its potential collapse that concerns Derrida, of course, is the bridge of analogy, as discussed in Kant's aesthetic of the Sublime. . . . But Derrida is interested in a discontinuous model of innovation and change. . . . The homonym, to be sure, is the most frivolous relation of all because it produces a crossing with the least “quantity of connection,” being an empty repetition of the signifier.
(105) Iterability, the sheer possibility of quotation, of repeating, creates the catastrophic fold in any text, giving it the structure of a Klein bottle . . . by opening the inside to the outside. . . . The invaginated analogy, in short, is a deconstruction of the notion of language as a “container” for ideas.

Ulmer plays upon Derrida critique of Lacan famous discussion of Poe as foundation to his erroneous trajectory.

(106) Thus, the enfolding that most interests Derrida is precisely the interlacing chiasmus of the narrator and the narrative with the “content” of his story or discourse—the very liaison of form and content missing from Lacan's discussion of “The Purloined Letter.”
(106) His procedure will be, he says, to “endeavor to create an effect of superimposing, of super imprinting one text on the other,” a version of “the double band or 'double bind' of double proceedings” used in Glas, for example, which breaks with the conventional assumption of pedagogy.

Grafting experiments of superimposing encounters with other texts, Derrida Glas and Sollers Numbers, like a dramatic performance of them, so that others texts are models to think with rather than to exhaustively interpret. Imagine programmed superimposition, as dramatic is example of dynamic, processual textuality, with emphasis on generation rather than concept formation.

(106) The alternative with which Derrida experiments is that of writing as “grafting,” as demonstrated in Dissemination, in which Derrida's discourse is interlaced with frequent citations from Sollers's Numbers.
(107) Numbers is a model to think with rather than a work to be deconstructed, and as such displays and explains itself, thus rendering interpretation and formal description superfluous. . . . The strategy, that is, is not hermeneutic or semiotic, but dramatic, a performance of a certain kind. . . . Writing in the hypomnemic mode, we recall, can only mime knowledge (its monuments and archives); or it need only mime it in order to generate, by means of translation, something other, the new.

PASSE-PARTOUT

Passe-partout collection is passkey serving auto interrogation as another form of agentless, subjectless concretization of sense.

(108) Derrida's strategy (similar to that used to deal with “the flowers of rhetoric”) is to examine the vocabulary or terminology or painting, indeed all words associated with painting (titles of pictures, letters written by painters, catalogs, notebooks, aesthetic philosophy—the archives of painting), as a passkey to the art of painting itself.
(108) The first word-thing he interrogates is the idiom “passe-partout,” reflecting the critic's inclination to seek a universal method or passkey that might open every question.

Example function of matting and framing is anasemic metaphor of Heideggerian enframing.

(109) Derrida's technique is to investigate the function or features of matting, not as an illustration but as a model, to discover in framing an anasemic metaphor of enframing. . . . The example, that is, rests in its discourse like a picture in its matting (with both circumstances subject to further framing).

What is hard to describe forcing Ulmer into extracharacter symbols bordering inline diagram is easy to instantiate and is essence of fetch and execute cycle, Turing machine phenomenological field, data structures and finally object operations: this recurring theme of Derridean philosophy articulated via technological examples a happy epiphenomena of more important function as quintessential instructional examples.

(110) The square, that is, alludes to the taking place of the present, that to which we can attend, permitting the intersection of meanings (networks, switchings, etc.), which is to say that what is displayed in the square is the is or copula itself as liaison or syntax.
(111) Two forces are at work in the anasemic analogy, therefore—the copula and the chiasmus.

FETISH

Again, very computational model of fetish based on auto-affection as closed loop feedback control example, going back to practical examples above on page 100.

(111) Given that Derrida's (phonetic-theoretical) discourse works in the place of the passe-partout, the next step is to consider how the items mounted in this frame—the examples (as opposed to the discursive subject matter)--function.
(112) They function this way because the mounted items have the status, for whoever selects them, of fetishes (adding thus cathexis to the autobiographical motivation of the loci used in mnemonics).
(113) The lacing movement is another model of the shuttle, the oscillating rhythm or vibration of superimposition which is the syntax of all Derrida's articulations, including the relation between discourse and examples.
(113) What the lacing calls to mind for Derrida is an alternative to structuralism, which he wryly dubs “stricturalism.”
(114) The sudden shift of “size”--the “taille” of de-tail—demonstrates the effect of invagination—and of fetishism.

Example as fetish: a machine operation exemplifying invention itself, sublime invagination magic of inside out glove, along with the transformative circumflex accent mark, approximating the bootstrapping, self-compiling wonders that are the norm in programmed systems.

(114) The things are not offered as models of any particular position but as models of the invention process itself, productive and restrictive at once, of any exemplarity whatever.
(114) The “lowliness” of the objects used as examples—alluded to in the homonym “bas” (“low” and “sock”)--suggests a point of departure for a futher comment on the example as fetish.
(116) The circumflex accent mark, the mark that transforms Genet into genêt, is the wound marking the detached (detachable) phallus: “The signature is a wound and there is no other origin for the work of art” (Glas, 202, 207). The fetish works not on the scale [the scales of judgment] of the pyramids, then (Kant's example of the Sublime), but of the circumflex.
(117) In grammatology the distinction between thesis and prosthesis becomes undecidable.
(117) Moreover, the texture of Writing is a prosthesis not so much for the mind but for the genitals (not for the consciousness but for desire). . . . We know from Derrida's elaboration of the hymen as a “quasi-concept” that Writing in the coming epoch should be more vaginal than phallic—or at least invaginated.

TRANSDUCTION
(117) The other kind of item placed in Derrida's passe-partout is visual art, constituting the pictographic element in Writing.
(118) Unlike Heidegger, who declared that art “speaks,” Derrida insists on the muteness of the series, or on its capacity to work without concept, without conclusions, coming to inhabit discourse the way the death drive does without calling attention to itself, yet submitting the “master” to its service.

Transduction also a central concept to Sterne for historicizing sound studies.

(120) Derrida's science employs neither deduction nor induction, but transduction.
(121) Motivated by Adami's drawings addressed to Glas, Derrida sets out, as he terms it, to translate (transduct) Adami's drawings in turn.
(122) The principle of the anagram or paragram is, in fact, the mode of transduction Derrida uses to invent a simulacrum of the drawings. . . . To transduct line to letter, Derrida proposes to adopt the rhythm of the tr phonex in order to write about Adami in the same way that he used the gl phonex in Glas.

Hypomnesis like a computer search algorithm, foreshadowing fount of examples discovered in programmable media in recommending film and video theory along with psychoanalysis, which is the limit of Zizek stake in this trajectory.

(122) But, Derrida adds, do not mistake the work with syllables or sounds for a return to logocentrism, reabsorbing space into voice, painting into philosopheme, as in a form of hypercratylism. What is involved in the technique, rather, is hypomnesis, giving the lead to the artificial memory in writing, setting to work the tr in a computerlike search of vocabulary, keyed not for meanings, but for the drawn letters.
(123) This statement by Derrida suggests (a major consideration for an applied grammatology) that the best method now available for extending grammatology, for putting it to work, includes film (or video) theory and practice as well as psychoanalysis.

Model and example selection autobiographical, which Ulmer develops as a pedagogical tool in Internet Invention.

(134) The use of the post card is the most elaborate instance yet of the incorporation of the pictographic element in Derrida's Writing. What remains to be clarified in the following discussion is the relationship of Derrida himself to the examples he chooses. . . . Like the images in mnemonics, the pictorial element in Writing is “autobiographical”--the examples choose the writer but then are remotivated as models of the exemplification process as such. They demonstrate, in the maternal position, what Derrida is unable to say in his discourse, showing “en abyme” that back side. Just how Derrida signs his models will be the subject of the next chapter.

5
Speculation
LETTERS

AUTOGRAPHY

D-E-R-R-I-D-A

F-R-E-U-D

POST CARD

Sabotage method shifts teleology from destiny to luck, simulacrum generating new insights from repetition.

(144-145) Novelty in this conception is negentropic, counters the tendency to run down, ear out. But in Derrida's practice of the simulacrum, sheer repetition itself generates the new, opens the gap of novelty. To transform the postal principle there is no need to find some original or novel position outside, elsewhere. Following the steps of deconstruction, rather, Derrida shifts the polarity of teleology as a concept, replacing destiny with chance–the luck, for example, that brought to his attention Matthew Paris's fortune-telling book. His strategy in general is sabotage–“learning on a well-placed lever to force a disconnection, derailment, a ringing off, to play with the switching and to send elsewhere, to reroute” (Carte, 174).

SCRIPT

Changing assumptions quoted by Landow, who suggests hypertext also concretizes certain political assumptions.

(147) the use of communications technology is a concretization of certain metaphysical assumptions, consequently that it is by changing these assumptions (for example, our notion of identity) that we will transform our communicational activities.

APEIRON

Electronics symbols like hieroglyphs; need to perform Derridean study of device names.

(152-153) Grammatology, then, does not so much interpret models as Write with them. The model in science, that is, is yet another incarnation of hieroglyphics. “The symbols used for electronics since the beginning of this century parallel the development of the pictograms of ancient languages,” R. L. Gregory notes. . . . Tied as he is to a representational theory of models, Gregory fears that human perception may prove an obstacle to survival, unable to adapt to “non-sensory data, and the resulting non-perceptual conceps of physics.”
(153) Grammatology in its next phase will Write with models as well as model the scene of writing.

PART II
Post(e)-Pedagogy
6
The Scene of Teaching
EDUCATION

What are pedagogic principles associated with poststructuralist epistemology: television-centric rather than ECT because he is writing in early years of personal computer revolution/commodification.

Developing critical programming will require a similar declaration of pedagogy.

(157) My argument is that applied grammatology will be characterized by a picto-ideo-phonographic Writing that puts speech back in its place while taking into account the entire scene of writing. Now, in the second half of the book, I will attempt to clarify the pedagogical principles associated with applied grammatology. The question to be posed has to do with the pedagogical rationale for the Writing described in part I, a rationale more accurately termed “post(e)-pedagogical,” in order to indicate that it is both a move beyond conventional pedagogy and a pedagogy for an era of electronic media (with poste meaning in this context television station or set). My purpose in this chapter is to open the question of the nature of the educational presentation (the manner of the transmission of ideas) adequate to a poststructuralist epistemology and to air some of the rhetorical and polemical notions relevant to a pedagogy of general writing.

Can Derridean popularization of knowledge develop arguments and techniques to encourage programming knowledge in public schools?

(160) The paradox operating here, to put it bluntly, is that while Derrida's texts appear to be among the most difficult and esoteric works of our time, they nonetheless call for a program or practice that can only be described as a popularization of knowledge.

The Age of Hegel

Against Reproduction

Facilitate postmodernized education by retracing paths broached by experimental arts like Beuys.

(168) Briefly put, the emergence of a postmodernized education (the entry of education into the contemporary paradigm) can be facilitated by a retracing of the paths (facilitations) already breached by the experimental arts of this century.

Reference to Bourdieu and Passeron analysis of education as instrument of class power.

(169) One of the most concise analyses of education as an instrument of class power (the kind of strategy with which Derrida is willing to temporarily ally himself) is Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron. . . . The error of the avant-garde, Derrida says, is to imagine that the system has an “outside.”

THEATER
Mise en scene

Mime

Spacing

Sovereignty

Relationship between idiom (unique individual situation) and general principles of science, for example Wittgenstein temptation to commit suicide.

(187) Grammatology, then, is interested in the relationship between idiom, the “unique” situation of the individual (Wittgenstein's life situation, which included the temptation to commit suicide), and the general principles of a science with which the individual chooses to interact.

7
Seminar:
Jacques Lacan

Use Lacan presentational mode for technological poetics: retaining structure while abandoning reference.

(189-190) a grammatologist could use Lacan's technique the way Mallarme, according to Derrida, used mimesis: retaining its structure while abandoning its reference. In fact, Derrida Writes the way Lacan lectured, with the double science and the contra-band being a version of Lacan's “double inscription”--both address and draw on the resources of the conscious (secondary process, discursive, logical) and the unconscious (primary process, non-sense) mind, combining in one operation the scientific with the poetic.
(191) That Lacan managed to satisfy both groups (he comments at one point that nothing he could do seemed to scare them off) establishes his presentational mode as a laboratory for developing a discourse that is at once popular and learned—a major goal of grammatology.

Compare grammatological evocation of unknowledge to McGann learning what he did not know.

(192) The pedagogical effect Lacan himself wishes to achieve corresponds to the grammatological evocation of unknowledge.

Hypomnesis versus anamensis for finding truth in body as monument, archival documents, semantic evolution, tradition, traces.

(193-194) These resonances may be evoked in two ways, at least, one being by means of the sound of language itself (the exploitation of homophones, the level at which Lacan prefers to work, to be discussed later with respect to lalangue), and the other the presentation of nonverbal materials (relevant to Lacan's pedagogical, if not to his clinical practice). . . . All of these “external” resources may be drawn on--”mimed,” Derrida would say—in a double inscription in order to say “something else,” to provoke the desire to know and the desire to investigate this desire itself.

ST. THERESA

Resemblance of Lacan presentation to Derrida picto-ideo-phonographic Writing.

(194) Keeping in mind that the book to which I refer is the transcript of a seminar, we can see that Lacan's presentation bears a significant resemblance to Derrida's picto-ideo-phonographic Writing.

IGNORANCE

Now what does the machine other want could be a new impossible question for digital humanities, when including desire of the subject in science; nod to mice in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

(199) We can say, then, that Lacan posed the question “Was will das Weib?” precisely because it is the most extreme version possible of an impossible question, impossible because the woman's bliss represents for Lacan the impossible knowledge of the Other. By setting such a question for the seminar, Lacan turns the research back on himself, delineating all the more clearly the special features of psychoanalytic knowing.
(200) Part of the lesson of the liaison of bliss and knowledge is always to include in science the desire of the subject. The behaviorist experiments of the rat psychologists, for example, are interesting not in terms of the rats' behavior, Lacan says, but in terms of the scientists' behavior—their relation to the labyrinths they build (Encore, 129). In short, the irruption of the unconscious into science opens knowledge to engima. The method Lacan devises to work with this enigma represents his greatest affinity with Derrida's Writing and provides a model for using speech in the classroom, for lecturing in a way that puts speech back in its place.

LALANGUE

MATHEME

LOVE

KNOTS

SHAMAN

Use of models of pictures and puns to provoke thought: Lacan as shaman.

(223-224) The lesson of Lacan's seminar for applied grammatology is just this use of models—of pictures and puns—to provoke thought, working through a double intervention.

8
Performance:
Joseph Beuys
(225) Lacan provided an example of how to lecture in a way adaptable to applied grammatology. What we need now is an example of how to perform in a grammatological classroom in a way that fulfills the possibilities outlined in Derrida's notion of the Mime, including the use of mnemonics and models. Examples of what an applied grammatology might be like—of a picto-ideo-phonographic Writing put to work in the service of pedagogy—are already available in the intermedia practices of certain avant-garde artists.

Beuys is for performance what Derrida is in philosophy, so select as classroom ideal along with Lacan for lecture.

(226) Working in the spirit of Foucault's observation—that in our era the interrogation of limits has replaced the search for totality—I find in Beuys someone who is as extreme, as singular, as exemplary in the field of performance art as Derrida is in philosophy.

SHAMANISM
(230) The most salient feature of Beuys's work is his adoption of shamanism as his presentational model and even as his lived attitude.

THE CALLING

SCULTPURE

MNEMONICS

Beuys Fat Corner exemplifies what could only be articulated negatively in texts and language; clearly machine phenomena fit the bill as well.

(254-255) Beuys, however, not restricted to texts and language, is able to provide an image of force, which, along with “energetics,” is one of the chief descriptors of the fat in his Actions. . . . Fat Corner makes directly accessible in applied grammatology the processes of movement and energy—force--which could only be articulated negatively in theoretical grammatology.

GRAMMATOLOGY

Besides displacement of root metaphors of Western thought, stimulate desire to create in lived, sociopolitical world.

(264) The method of grammatology, then, shared by Derrida and Beuys, is the display and displacement of the literal sense of the root metaphors of Western thought—dialectic and rhetoric, science and art. At the same time that this analytical function is at work, a further pedagogy of creativity is also set in motion, intended not only to show people the principles of creativity and how to put them into practice but also—and here is the particular power of the new pedagogy, beyond deconstruction—to stimulate the desire to create (not necessarily in “art,” but in the lived, sociopolitical world).

9
Film:
Sergei Eisenstein
(265) The import of the hieroglyph as an emblem of the new pedagogy is that teaching must now include in its considerations the non-discursive and imagistic dimensions of thought and communcation. The lesson of the Rosetta stone for AG is that academic, specialized discourse is open to translation into the popular, mass media. AG is, among other things, a strategy for popularization.

Language continuously exposed to cinema and television means heavily influenced by word-things and images, for which multimedia writing becomes the natural context, just as Turkle finds computers the natural context for instantiating postmodern ideas.

(265-266) Film and video (audio-visual writing) are in fact the media in which the word-things of AG—seemingly so bizarre in Derrida's books, Lacan's seminars or Beuys's performances—find a natural context. The pedagogy of grammatology is, finally, an educational discourse for an age of video. Its instructional procedures are the ones appropriate for students (for a culture), whose experience of language is largely shaped by continuous exposure to cinema and television. . . . That Eisenstein first worked out his theory of montage using analogies drawn from hieroglyphics in general, and Japanese ideograms in particular, makes his work a good point of departure for this articulation.

THE LANGUAGE OF CINEMA

Imagines film essay maturing an intellectual medium like philosophy out of myth: what has happened with digital media, can software be the site for the double inscription?

(266) AG assumes that teachers-scholars will not only perform the double inscription in the classroom but that they will turn to film/video as the means most adequate for a postmodernized academic essay (in any case, video makes the teaching performance publishable). . . . The second phase marks the maturing of film into an intellectual medium capable of carrying out the work of the disciplines of knowledge (rehearsing thus something similar to the emergence of philosophy out of myth).

Kristeva semanlysis seeks to dissolve the sign as basic culture thinking unit.

(269) Julia Kristeva helps explain the importance of Eisenstein's theories of montage is ideogrammatic and hieroglyphic writing as an example of grammatology (a theory itself formulated as a repetition of the history of writing) when she defines the fundamental task for “semanalysis” as the investigation of the constitutional kernel element of semiotics—the sign—in a way that would “dissolve” it, thus breaking with the Stoic notion of the sign which has dominated Western thinking. . . . AG, of course, proposes to extend the semanalytic intervention in the history of the sign to the discourse of the school.

DAS KAPITAL: THE MOVIE

Video-text as performance of Marx suggesting other translations projects of written works to multimedia as tasks for AG; compare to McGann call for digital editions.

(271-272) One of the most interesting ideas of the twentieth century, from the perspective of AG, is Eisenstein's project to make a film of Marx's Capital. This project is at least as fecund as Saussure's hints about the possibility of a science of signs, although it is only now beginning to find its practice. This film was intended to be a popularization of the central theoretical work of the Russian revolution, and as such it suggests what might be the first task for a pedagogy of the video age—the translation (transduction) of the principal intellectual works of Western civilization into the language of cinema/television.
(273) In terms of its content, Capital would have been something like a filmed version of Roland Barthes's Mythologies; that is, a “collection of essays” exposing the myths (ideologies) of bourgeois society.

Pedagogy of change; my suggestion is turning these intellectual works into FOSS.

(280) What is valuable here is the pedagogy of change, addressing concept formation by means of film. But in reopening the discussion of montage imagery, contemporary textualists have already shifted Eisenstein's devices from dialectical to deconstructive ends. AG intervenes at this point, to carry the device beyond deconstruction.

OCTOBER
(280) There is general agreement among critics interested in the problematics of film language that October is perhaps the most representative example of a cinetext.
(280) Ropars designates the gods sequence as the best example of Eisenstein's break with visual denotation, demonstrating in one sequence how October as a whole renounces any attempt to recount the events of the revolution, to represent in in a historical reconstruction, electing instead to perform its signification or meaning.

INNER SPEECH

Foregrounding homonyms, homophones and puns anticipating everyday computational phenomena doing work formerly attributed to rich subjectivity.

(285) The point to be emphasized is that the aspect of Eisenstein's experiments which has been renewed—his use of filmic meatphors, the montage imagery of the gods sequence—is precisely the dimension of his work most relevant to AG. The most innovative or experimental feature of grammatology—the foregrounding of the homonym, homophone, or pun—may be recognized in this context as the enabling device for the rhetoric of filmic writing.
(289) Eisenstein was interested in a kind of “arche-writing,” then (to use Derrida's term). Joyce, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, had developed the double method, combining subjective and objective presentation as far as it could go in literature.

THE VERBAL IMAGE
(292) The main point of contact between the Russian theories of inner speech and the cinetextualists, working with Lacan, is the notion that the unconscious is structured like a language.

Barthes S/Z connection to develop inner voice developed through verbal images.

(295) The practical value of inner speech may be better appreciated when it is realized that Roland Barthes's S/Z expounds a version of this theory. In this context, S/Z may be recognized as a useful text for AG in that its theory of codes is as applicable to pedagogical narratives as it is to literary and cinematic ones. It suggests how the psychoanalytic dimension (the symbolic code) interacts with the Cultural or referential code (the domain of inner speech).
(296) “What we hear, therefore, is the displaced voice which the reader lends, by proxy, to the discourse: the discourse is speaking according to the reader's interests. Whereby we see that writing is not the communication of a message which starts from the author and proceeds to the reader; it is specifically the voice of reading itself: in the text only the reader speaks” (151).
(299) The key signifiers organizing a film-essay, as opposed to a narrative film, will, of course, be theoretical terms, philosophemes, concepts or proper names treated as literalisms.

THE ELECTRONIC PARADIGM

Transpose hypomnetic operation from writing to TV to ECT, and blend in Clark extended cognition: suggests my original motivation for the symposia project.

(301) The necessity justifying AG is the existence of a new technology of writing. Every teacher today, at every grade level from kindergarten to graduate school, is in a position similar to the one Socrates confronted when he caught Phaedrus with the written speech concealed in his robe. The television set, the poste, is the concealed (unacknowledged) device that, with or without Derrida, is transforming our situation.

The new stage beyond filmic writing is writing with computational objects that are themselves capable of performance, generation of new texts, and so on, approaching the ideal of living writing of Phaedrus.

(302) Debray's mistake, form the point of view of AG, is to imagine that the traditional mode of philosophizing, which developed out of alphabetic writing, is the only kind of philosophy possible, instead of considering that the philosophical project, in order to operate within film/video, should be rethought, redefined, redesigned to exploit the virtues specific to these media (the same point applies to deconstructionists who can think only in terms of literary criticism).
(303) Following Ong, if Plato marks the turn form a civilization based on orality (speech) to one based on alphabetic writing, Derrida marks a similar shift from alphabetic writing in its print stage to filmic writing.

See Ong Interfaces of the Word for open-system models.

(304) Walter Ong's observation that our culture is now drawn to open-system models for conceptual representation, which he links to our “new orality,” identifies what is at stake in AG. . . . Ong adds that open-system thinking, defined as being interactional, transactional, development, process-oriented, has already deeply affected the university curriculum in the form of interdisciplinary courses of study and “open” classroom procedures.

Replace hope that media specific affordances for deep processing of thought can be discerned for television with wholly new media types, such as Internet technologies that leverage writerly reading.

(305) Another point in [Gavriel] Salomon relevant to AG is that the new media should not be used (or are ineffective when used) for purposes originally devised for other media. Rather, new ends that exploit the strengths of the new media should be developed. . . . television has the potential for deep processing of thought, but for this potential to be realized new compositions must be devised that make use of the specific capacities of the medium for cognitive ends.
(307-308) Although Jacquinot points out that there are almost no available examples of “modernist” educational films, she mentions Eisenstein's intellectual montage and Brecht's “learning plays” as possible models for a practice, with the theories of Levi-Strauss and Umberto Eco offering a rationale for the project. It may be useful to conclude my study with a discussion of Eco, since he has explored most fully the “openness” that must inform the new pedagogy. Moreover, if deconstruction (as in Culler's discussion mentioned at the beginning of this book) tends to emphasize the negative or critical relationship of Derrida to semiotics, grammatology explores the positive dimension of this relationship (in which the gram subsumes the sign).
(308) The chief link between Derrida and Eco is that both see Finnegans Wake as the touchstone for thinking about language in our time. . . . Eco believes that works constructed in accord with an open aesthetic are inherently didactic, are “epistemological metaphors.”
(308) If traditional pedagogy attempted a transparent, univocal transmission of a body of information, understood as the content or signifieds of a discipline, an open pedagogy concerns itself with information as it is understood in General Systems Theory, cybernetics, and the like, defined in terms of the probability or improbability of a message within a rule-governed system.

Finnegans Wake a tough text yet is the exemplar for Derrida and Eco; epistemological metaphors built into works in progress easier to find in Internet media and FOSS, just as programming languages provide rich place for unit operations for which puns and homophones best examples in human languages.

(310) The Wake is an epistemological metaphor showing the consequences for cognition of field theory. . . . The encyclopedia is the final stage of the book as hypomnemic device, which is giving way, in the electronic paradigm, to the computer. Indeed, the homophonic structure of the Wake anticipates a computerized version of reading.

Treat reading as computing to allow open system, interpretant form of cognition.

(311) The question for AG concerns how the student might operate in accord with the hypomnemics of the electronic paradigm. At this stage of transition, the fields of knowledge, as represented in encyclopedias, textbooks, and the like, may be manipulated by the learner as if reading were computing. . . . AG distinguishes itself from the psychologisms of current reader-response subjectivism by concerning itself not only with the “field of oriented possibilities” (that which actually or phenomenologically occurs in the inner speech of a student) but with constructing connections among the systems in relation to the field of all possibilities.

Eco interpretant related to Pierce dynamic object, in which reality is result rather than datum; also fits Suchman and Gee situated knowledge; important for rethinking subjectivity in age of ECT.

(311-312) One consequence of the open aesthetic on which the open pedagogy is based is a new definition of “form”--”form as a field of possibilities” (Obra, 156). . . . In Pierce's pragmatism, Eco notes, reality is a result, not a datum. To understand a sign amounts to learning what to do in order to gain acquaintance with the object of the term. This object is not the item itself in reality, however, but is the “dynamic object,” constituted by “all the information available about the object,” the semantic spectrum through which many possible paths may be taken. “A term entails the globality of information about it” (Role, 188). The interpretant is that part of the global possibilities activated or selected by the knower.
(312-313) The notion of the interpretant, as Eco explains, solves all the problems of meaning raised by the spectrum of positions from subjectivist psychologism to behaviorism. . . . [quoting] Once the interpretant is equated with any coded intentional property of the content, since these properties cannot be isolated but under the form of the other signs, the elements of the content become something physically testable (Role, 197). . . . Moreover, these interpretants require a combination of word and thing presentations. . . . In short, Eco's account of the interpretant indicates how the principle of inner speech connected with montage imagery might be extended into a new, heterogeneous construction. These constructions, built in terms of the open aesthetic, offer a clue to the pedagogy of grammatology.
(313) AG proposes to supplement the conventional means by which scholarship works this knowledge with strategies derived precisely from the history of hypomnesis (from the Ad Herennium to the computer).

Insight that verbal images line every discourse further confounds good old fashioned AI epistemological assumptions about language and thought.

(314) AG as a methodology works in accordance with the situation Eco describes, operating on every manner of inscription, circulating in the universe of discourse as an interruption, a disturbance that excites (incites, not insights), generating “information.” The initial move is to examine the metaphors (verbal images) lining every discourse, in order to decompose or unfold and redirect the possibilities of meaning inherent in the material.

Start exploring video and computer technology by examining computer technology devices and terminology, trace Ulmers progress through subsequent books; consider Derrida Archive Fever in which he muses about working with a long enculturation with particular computer combined with specific image through a chance occurrence versus being overdetermined by milieu, as summoned by Kittler in GFT, where souls are encased in network phenomena.

(314-315) AG's approach to this metaphorical speculation, following Derrida's lead in a piece such as “Tympan” (which exercises the terminology of the printing press), would be to explore video and computer technology, both as things and as vocabularies (word-thing presentations of hypomnemic devices), and then to cross-reference this “information” with the semantic field of cultural studies. Let that be our first assignment, to let language do some thinking for us.

Ulmer, Gregory. Applied Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Print.