How It Works
It is possible to suggest that Ulmer's work guides writers, neophyte and veteran, on a bildungsroman, an education quest in which the hero must overcome the considerable perils of reading High Theory (e.g., Barthes, Jameson), Cultural Theory (e.g., Black Elk, Heidegger), Rhetorical Theory (e.g., Plato, Ong, Turner) and, especially, Art Theory (e.g., Plato, Lorca, Benjamin) in order to find or invent a "magic tool" capable of unlocking the enigma of one's multiply positioned (postmodern) self (166). The magic of Internet Invention's theory/exempal derives from our ability to gesture towards rather than name the values interpellating us, with the understanding that "values are not whims or tastes but worldviews" constructed through institutions and discourses (190).
Just 'imag/engine' it...
Rather than reading essays in order to formulate arguments about issues, Internet Invention asks students to read fragments of theory, produce Web pages that decant their relationships to various discourses and institutions, and then (though this is more implied than explicitly addressed) use this 'screened' information to re-think internal conflicts ("Do I want to be a lawyer?") as a preamble to rethinking the interest-based conflicts in the world (e.g., public policy). This revision – seeing again or recasting – would take hold (not place) through what Ulmer calls a "wide image." A wide image is the pattern that emerges after students assemble the four installments of the mystory (four separate Web pages over the course of a semester) using various hermeneutics (see my list of theories above) to foreground and then decipher the "figures in the carpet" of their own reactions to, or memories of, Career, Family, etc. Each installment consists of pictorial and verbal images (and, to some degree, exposition of the self-same) all relating to what Ulmer calls the "popcyle": the discourses/institutions (Career, Family, Entertainment, Community) that shape identities, entrench subject positions, and generally speaking (or 'generally imaging') imprint on people ways of identifying and solving problems.
These four pieces of the puzzle are not critiques but "prosthetic" extensions or amplifications of writers' perceptions within these spheres/discourses; these heavily visual/poetic compositions make it possible for the writer to apprehend when surveying a few of these a pattern, a "wide image," that captures (again, in pictorial and verbal image) the words/signifiers that repeat across the four discourses/institutions. So, in essence, the wide image is an imagistically-rendered thesis that emerges from one's deeply felt inquiries into the discourses/institutions that shape us.
The wide image is to electracy what the thesis is literacy: a crystallization of thinking in this medium, of a dynamic process "struck into stability" (as Virginia Woolfe put it). According to Writing Analytically, a good print/literacy writing textbook, a thesis is 1) "an idea you formulate and reformulate about your subject"; 2) "a theory about the meaning of evidence that would not have been immediately obvious"; and 3) a means of "focusing inquiry" (118). I would imagine that Ulmer could use any of these definitions to describe the wide image, with the proviso that we understand the "subject" in the first definition to be the writing subject – the writer as social agent.
In contrasting electracy with literacy, he would also want us to note that the "audience" for electronic compositions is not the audience for print compositions. The audience is not that presumed by Aristotlean agonistic rhetoric; it is the Other in ourselves – the discursive imbrication in the "I" that we deploy in various contexts. Ulmer contends that what is potentially revolutionary about imagistic, hypertextual and connective aspects of writing on-line is that we can use these features to compose a 'synthetic' approach to the (multiply-positioned) self; thus, his poetics-as-rhetoric does not so much equip/armor students for the agon (or the manipulative mass media) but rather prepares them to be sensible to the interrelations, the overlaps, the repeating themata (both "default" – or hegemonic – and "punceptual" – or idiosyncratic) in our major discourses/institutions.
The pedagogy here though is founded on the possibility that poetics, not rhetoric, image-reasoning not informal reasoning, pathos, not logos, can unlock the grip of ideology on the language speaking us. Ulmer says: "our examples are "relays": the poets and philosophers are to mystory as pedagogy, what professional athletes are to physical exercise. They are experts but what they are performing is possible and necessary for everyone" (69).
One definition of "analysis" is finding a pattern in the evidence, but instead of using entrenched methods of observation and rendering a public text accessible/assailable through summary and logical analysis, Ulmer presents us with an array of poetics, of hermeneutical approaches to the personal texts of memory and impression, and asks us to use them as heuretics (procedures for generating new work), to pose the question to ourselves (but within screen shot of others in a network dedicated to the same work): "So, what?" Or, as he puts it: "What is this for me?"
Self-understanding, the "examined life," or the vision quest is the writer's purpose in creating a wide image but this composition is not an end in itself (just as self-knowledge wasn't the end-all for Socrates – it was greater realization of one's social being, of one's striving for justice – see James Kastley). The wide image is a prerequisite for engaging the world critically, for taking on in a conscious way one's subject positions within various discourses and institutions and understanding the repeating motifs across discourses/spheres. Now, it could be said that all essays (especially the exploratory sort monumentalized by Montaigne) permit writers to compose themselves by testing their knowledge of the world against a backdrop of disputes and consequences. But, truly, most analytic essays exude a Cartesian sense of method as a means of arriving at certainty, clarity, and precision.
There's a new dramatic role/part for contradiction to play in Ulmer's approach to composition. In informal logic (practical argumentation), an analyst slices and dices a piece of discourse in order to get at its skeletal logic; the focus is overwhelmingly on the pattern of inference from the evidence (logos). Finding real or potential inconsistencies and contradictions in a piece of rhetoric amount to a judgment against that discourse as "compelling." But in the production of mystories, a contradiction/inconsistency, especially if it repeats across discourses, reveals not a flaw in the object under scrutiny but a nuance in the subject seeking its (imperfect) reflection in discourse. A contradiction/inconsistency is valuable because it affords us a glimpse of how we might be locked into binary oppositions that may constrain our thinking/being.
This all seems, well, radical. But I don't think Ulmer believes that his project eclipses, or relegates to the dustbin of grammatology, the communicative contexts that have institutionalized print conventions of writing and supply justification for how most rhetorics teach FYC students to invent with library sources, formulate and challenge inferences, select and deploy (and destroy) rhetorical strategies in disciplinary, professional and public contexts. The traditional modes and methods and stylistic conventions still matter, but matter less. Just as Plato's dialogues recapitulated aspects of the oral matrix by having two people "talk" to each other in a piece of writing (which, as Socrates famously points out, cannot itself speak/respond), the mystory assemblages could include expository writing – writing that explains/unpacks/logically analyzes the implications of the fragments one has grabbed from the stream/dream of imagistic thinking.
Finally, Ulmer cites two previous paradigm changes in communication technology (orality to print, print to printing press) to suggest that the great achievement of Western philosophy and science, literate specialized knowledge, will be translated into the new medium of the net and there undergo revision/recasting. The primary revision Ulmer predicts concerns the relative weight we afford idiosyncratic linkage as opposed to those linkages authorized by what Lyotard called the grand narratives. The cure for an ailing democracy and an alienated population, Ulmer believes, is not a better apparatus of demysitification – a better way of doing critical thinking. Rather than decode a "specific experience of problems and their solutions," in Ulmer's composition regimen we set out to find linkages (details, punctum) in the images that suffuse and surround verbal/print texts that "sting" us into awareness of the world/signifer's embeddedness in "us." The only way out is through. So let it be unwritten, so let it be undone. With a program this ambitious, the only proof is in the pudding.
