Socrates/Barthes/Ulmer
If Socrates was a parser of words/concepts and Barthes
a parser of sign/concepts, Ulmer is a parser of Web/concepts, though he
incorporates much of the history of rhetoric and semiotics in (re)conceiving
the Web.
He is, though, alert to the perils of thinking ahead
of current use. He writes that the “narrative laws of oral memorization”
(30) discourage the kind of abstraction that Plato and Aristotle needed/created
to invent method. Similarly, the instrumentality and “critical distance”
of propositional logic discourages the kind of inferencing that may or may not occur
through images. The pattern that print writers find in a text is restricted
to LOGOS and (a negatively conceived) PATHOS. If we accept that pattern
is a repetition of “signifiers that is not perceptible” when one is in
the stream of communication (reading or viewing), you begin to appreciate
what Socrates, Barthes and Ulmer are up to: to arrest the flow of meaning,
or at least slow it down so we can be sensible to the themata, default
as well as idiosyncratic. Thus it is that Ulmer’s work is both in line
with (and departs from) the history of rhetoric/poetics.
