Gregory L. Ulmer - Böcker

In Heuretics-a word defined as "the branch of logic that treats the art of discovery or invention"-Gregory Ulmer sets forth new methods appropriate for conducting cultural studies research in an age of electronic hypermedia.

Originally published in 1984. In Applied Grammatology, Gregory Ulmer provides an extraordinary introduction to the third, "applied" phase of grammatology, the "science of writing," outlined by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology. Ulmer looks to the later experimental works of Derrida (beginning with Glas and continuing through Truth in Painting and The Post Card). In these, he discovers a critical methodology radically different from the deconstruction for which Derrida is known. At the same time, he finds the source of a new pedagogy for all the humanities, one based on grammatology and appropriate to the era of audiovisual communications in which we live. Detractors of Derrida often accuse him of superficial wordplay and of using images and puns as nonfunctional subversions of academic conventions. Ulmer argues that there is, in fact, a fully developed use of homonyms in Derrida's style, which produces its own distinctive knowledge and insight. Derrida's experiments with images, moreover—his expansion of descriptions of everyday objects such as umbrellas, matchboxes, and post cards into cognitive models—serve to reveal a simplicity underlying intellectual discourse, which could be used to eliminate the gap separating the general public from specialists in cultural studies. Comparing the stylistic innovations of Derrida with Jacques Lacan's use of puns and diagrams, with the German performance artist Joseph Beuys's demonstration of models, and with the "montage writing" of the films of Sergei Eisenstein, Ulmer explores the possibility of deriving a postmodernist pedagogy from Derrida's texts. The first study to suggest the full potential of the program available in Derrida's writings, Applied Grammatology is also the first outline of a Derridean alternative to deconstructionism. With its shift away from Derrida's philosophical studies to his experimental texts, Ulmer's book aims to inaugurate a new movement in the American adaptation of contemporary French theory.

The Florida Research Ensemble (Ulmer, Revelle, Freeman and Tilson) is an interdisciplinary collaborative arts and research group developing choragraphy, a method of inquiry which applies modernist arts practices and poststructural theory to the design and testing of image as category. The authors argue that image categories functions for networked digital media the way Aristotle's word categories functioned for literate concepts. “Chora” was retrieved for contemporary philosophy by Jacques Derrida, in the context of his deconstruction of Western metaphysics. Grounded in grammatology (the history and theory of writing), Derrida’s critique of Being and Becoming as primary concepts of reality is that the category or classification system invented within literacy is not adequate for the apparatus of electracy that has developed since the industrial revolution. The FRE project in Miami designed and tested a prototype for a choral category, capable of coordinating real places, cultural collective information, digital technologies, and personal experience. Miami Virtue tested choragraphy as a method for adopting a particular region (the Miami River), including primary discourses organizing its lifeworld, and articulating it as a category of thought. The designed and recorded virtual site functions for electracy the way concepts function for literacy: as a navigable set supporting holistic intelligence and public discourse.