Gregory L. Ulmer

The Euretics of Alice's Valise

Marcel Duchamps Valise provides an organizing vehicle for a demonstration/explanation of “euretics” as a mode of research and teaching. Euretics applies to educational practices the tendency of avant-garde artists to use theory generatively. Euretics extends this productive relationship between theory and practice by adapting experimental art strategies to the exploration of theoretical questions. The question explored here is the supplementary relationship of two theories of meaning—communication by code and evocation by inference. The interdependence of the two modes (semantics and pragmatics), as they might be exploited in making an assignment to a class or conducting a research experiment, is demonstrated by borrowing the “valise” project as a version of packing a form with heterogeneous contents. This valise contains the intellectual ingredients needed to compose a discourse on method (giving an account of the invention of a new method, the method of euretics itself).

Beyond the Virtual Public Square: Ubiquitous Computing and the New Politics of Well-Being

In this chapter Gregory Ulmer theorizes augmented reality, and ubiquitous computing in general, while John Craig Freeman presents examples of his work in place-based augmented reality public art and describes the work within the framework of electracy (the digital apparatus). Apparatus theory correlates technological innovations with the corresponding inventions in institutional practices, including individual and collective identity behaviours. Ulmer and Freeman, working with an electrate consultancy–the EmerAgency–test an augmented deliberative design rhetoric intended to overcome individual alienation from collective agency. It is an electrate equivalent of the ancient Theoria, a community practice in which a team of trusted citizens travelled to sites of events to sort out fact from rumour. Results of this theory tourism were reported in the public square and certified as truth. Theoria, augmented by literacy, became journalism–the fourth estate of a democratic society. The konsult practice described in this essay updates Theoria for a fifth estate with a new function supporting collective well-being, in the global experience of a potentially ubiquitous public square.

Barthes's Body of Knowledge

Roland Barthes invites a reading of his own texts in terms of the same methodologies he employs in his criticism. The «Biographeme»—those few details, preferences, inflections—which Barthes identified in his favorite authors, may be sought in Barthes as well. Barthess biographeme, for me, consists of a glutinous effect associated with the organs of the mouth and throat as presented in several images, some of which belong to his tutor texts (Poe and Réquichot). An analysis of this biographeme reveals Barthess strategy for disseminating the subject of knowledge—the authors fantasmatic body—through the signifiers of writing, fusing the heterogeneous singularities of the knower and the object of study. The metaphorical discourse that results opposes normal academic preoccupations in favor of knowledge of/as desire. Knowledge itself in Barthes becomes a second order signifier caught up in a catachretic process for naming the real. Barthess procedure for exploring the real affectively, in terms of the body as it is defined in psychoanalysis, imposes on the reader a similar obligation to bring his or her own body into play in the learning experience. Barthes offers a model for a new genre of academic writing, combining science with autobiography, that has important implications for teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences.

Derrida in Miami (Miautre)

Jacques Derridas Politics of Friendship is adopted as a theoretical guide to the mutation of metaphysical categories under way in the shift from literacy to electracy. The politics is embodied in the design of a digital “memory palace,” created by the Florida Research Ensemble (FRE), whose setting is the city of Miami, Florida. Listening with an ear attuned by Derrida, through Freud and Heidegger, one hears in “Miami” a creole phrase “my friend” resonating with the aphorism by Aristotle—“O my friend, there is no friend”—whose “event” (Ereignis) Derrida traces to the “other” beginning (Miautre, my other). His alternative politics of hospitality is articulated with the history of prudence (phronesis) and the possibility of an image category supporting digital deliberative reason in an Internet public sphere.

Miami Miautre mapping the virtual city (a preview)

The Florida Research Ensemble is a creative research group formed at the University of Florida in the late 1980s to explore the possibilities of image technologies. MIAMI MIAUTRE (MM) details the invention of an institutional practice - testimonial - specifically intended to help produce a virtual civic sphere. As a deconstruction of conventional consulting, the FRE established the EmerAgency - an online, virtual, distributed, agency - whose purpose is to add a new voice to the collective pedagogy of consulting. The prototype consultation addresses the Miami River, site of every policy issue in the state of Florida: pollution, tourism, crime, gentrification, historic preservation, drugs, immigration, corruption, and the like. Jo Revelle documented the river scene during a five-week stay in the summer of 1998, motivated by her ‘burning question’ (‘what is my situation with Ron?’). The photographic answer, entitled ‘Crossroads’, attunes the place into a chora, manifesting the ordering principles of the civic sphere. Revelle’s mapping of the zone uses Ulmer’s theories of choragraphy and mystory to extend Situationist psychogeographic mappings based on urban moods. Photographic images become categorical through a singular correspondence of individual/collective mood.

Traffic of the Spheres

this proposal for a new kind of memorial (a MEmorial) is addressed to the combined agencies of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The proposal is part of an emerAgency (a virtual Internet-based distributed consultancy) consultation on a problem stated by theorists of architecture (among others). This problem states that the entertainment media in general, and television in particular, bear responsibility for the decline of the public sphere in mediating the relationship of private citizens with the State. Monumental architecture once played a large role in maintaining this public sphere, having to do with the forming and preserving of a community. But is it really the case that the electronic excludes monumentality?