grammatology

An overview of Gregory Ulmer’s thought by Victor Vitanza.

1. How do we not know we think, yet think?

Gregory Ulmer (a.k.a. ‘Glue’) has been for some time developing a theory of invention that would be appropriate and productive for those cultural theorists who have an interest in electronic media. (Invention, classically defined in oral and print culture, is the art of recalling and discovering what it is that one would think or say about a given subject. In electronic culture, invention takes on new ramifications). In his Applied Grammatology (1985), Ulmer moves from Derridean deconstruction (a mode of analysis that concentrates on inventive reading) to grammatology (a mode of composition that concentrates on inventive writing); that is, he moves towards exploring “the nondiscursive levels - images and puns, or models and homophones - as an alternative mode of composition and thought applicable to academic work, or rather, play.

The question of electronic literature – its definition, existence, significance, relationship with literature (plain and simple) – has always been bound up with questions of media and medium. New media. Electronic media. Media qualified by digital, computational, networked, programmable and so on. And all of these terms hypostasize practices while encapsulating and concealing an even more fundamental problem concerning their medium in the sense of artistic medium. Historically, as of this present, an electronic literature exists. It exists significantly, as corpus and practice, and as an institutionally supported cultural formation. It has established a relationship to literature as such, and this is also, to an extent, institutionally recognized. However, questions and confusions concerning media – signaled understandably but inappropriately by the absurd, skewmorphic misdirection of “electronic” – remain encapsulated in “literature” itself. The medium of literature is not letters or even writing. The medium of literature is language. And this latter statement is a contradiction, arguably an assault, by literature, on language itself, as if the art of language could be entirely encompassed by an art of letters. The future historical role of “electronic,” digital, computational and programmatological affordances will be that of enabling artists and scholars to overcome our long-standing confusions concerning literature and writing, but not by replacing literacy with digital literacy. It has become a commonplace of the discourse surrounding electronic literature to say that the predominant practices of aesthetic language-making are currently produced in the world of (print) literacy and that this has been problem since the advent of “electronic” literacy. It has been a problem for far longer than that. Our predominant art practices – of visual or fine art – are currently produced, chiefly, in the world of visuality. Qualifying (visual) art with “digital” or “electronic” is less and less necessary because “digital media” simply allow visual artists to explore visuality in new ways, continuous with those of previous practices and institutions. For art, media may have changed but the artists’ medium is consistent. By contrast, digital media will enable us to discover that aesthetic, artifactual language-making may also take place in the world of aurality, in the world of what we can hear and, in particular, of what we can hear as language, and faithful to language as artistic medium, as aurature. (source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This presentation looks at electronic literary practices and the modes and methods of meaning-making there in. Using his own creative work as an example, Memmott discusses how the poetic formation and rhetorical outcomes of the work are integral to the ‘text’ of the work, and integrated into what could be called an environmental grammatology. From programming to visual design, the word to the image, user interaction to instrumentality -- we have moved from “Work to Text” to Work...

Tracing a journey from the 1950s through the 1990s, N. Katherine Hayles uses the autobiographical persona of Kaye to explore how literature has transformed itself from inscriptions rendered as the flat durable marks of print to the dynamic images of CRT screens, from verbal texts to the diverse sensory modalities of multimedia works, from books to technotexts.

Weaving together Kaye's pseudo-autobiographical narrative with a theorization of contemporary literature in media-specific terms, Hayles examines the ways in which literary texts in every genre and period mutate as they are reconceived and rewritten for electronic formats. As electronic documents become more pervasive, print appears not as the sea in which we swim, transparent because we are so accustomed to its conventions, but rather as a medium with its own assumptions, specificities, and inscription practices. Hayles explores works that focus on the very inscription technologies that produce them, examining three writing machines in depth: Talan Memmott's groundbreaking electronic work Lexia to Perplexia, Mark Z. Danielewski's cult postprint novel House of Leaves, and Tom Phillips's artist's book A Humument. Hayles concludes by speculating on how technotexts affect the development of contemporary subjectivity.

(Source: Publisher's description)

Designed by Anne Burdick.

In his famous essay entitles “Linguistics and Poetics” (1958) Roman Jakobson asserted that the “[poetic function] stresses the palpable side of signs”. Paul Valéry states that “a poem […] should create the illusion of an indissoluble compound of sound and sense”.

We traditionally call poetry an artistic experience related to the word both in oral and written form, whose composition unity is the verse line (alexandrine verse, free verse, etc.). The oral medium should be normally richer. The written poetry, in fact, translated into the page only the segmental part of a text, but it is not able to show the over-segmental part as the tone, modulation, etc. However, we can say that this discrepancy has been cancelled: for instance, emphasis, oral procedure concerning duration, has its graphic form highlighted.

The written poetry has always searched for visual figures that were comparable to prosodic variations of the oral poetry. The possibility to force the rigid imposition of printed page has freed the written verse line. Especially the computer opportunity gives back to poetry a new materiality of letters and through this a new expressive form, which are both palpable, for instance, in Arabic or oriental poetry.

Based on ideogram writing, the Arabic and oriental poetry stresses on the visual aspect of words. An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek idea “idea” + grapho “to write”) is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or a strictly representational picture of a subject as may be done in illustration or photography: ideogram appeals to nonverbal communication.

“The iconic force in language produces an enactment of the fictional reality thorough the form of the text. This brings] realistic illusion to life in a new dimension: as readers […] we enter into it iconically, as a dramatic performance, through the experience of reading”.

By focusing on the palpable side of signs and on entax, this paper will try to to identify and analyse the strategic elements which constitute the poeticity of e-poetry: the infographic images, the poeticity of the elements, theirs [il]legibility, the pluri-signification of the relation image-text, the flow of the reading process in the textual rearrangement.

If syntax covers the assembly operations of both figures and signs along the external space of a sign system, a word is needed to indicate the system of the operations which allows assembling the letters inside the figures: it is the entax. The entax chairs for example the combination of features, points, etc. which compose a letter or an ideogram. The entax extends its influence on interior space, syntax on external one. E-poetry often proposes a new entax that breaks the regular grouping of the segments, thus altering the order of the verses on the page and transforming the regularity of the characters. Finally this paper will trace a possible “grammar” of entax.