KONSULT

Gregory L. Ulmer

Description

A motto guiding Gregory L. Ulmer's career is from the poet Basho: not to follow in the footsteps of the masters, but to seek what they sought. The responsibility of humanities disciplines today is to do for the digital apparatus (social machine) what the classical Greeks did for alphabetic writing. Ulmer frames online learning as a mode of invention (heuretics), beginning with the invention of konsult itself. Konsult: Theopraxesis describes the invention of a genre of learning that is to digital media what Plato's dialogue was to alphabetic writing.
The Greeks invented the practices of writing (rhetoric and logic) native to the new institution of school (the Academy), fostering a new behavior of selfhood (Socrates). Ulmer adopts this historical precedent as a relay, an inventory for what must be invented again today: a genre of learning, an educational institution, identity behavior. The insight of electracy is that each apparatus augments and institutionalizes one of the primary faculties of human intelligence: theoria in literacy; praxis in orality; poiesis in electracy.
Needed today are not practices of writing, but "theopraxesis" of media. The analytical information economy of literacy required separation and isolation (siloing) of institutionalized intelligence. The multimodality of electracy enables syncretism of faculties into holistic performance: thinking-doing-making; knowledge-purpose-affect. The interface metaphor of Plato's dialogue was an oral conversation during which the illiterate interlocutor is introduced to dialectical reason as Idea. The interface metaphor of konsult is scientific consulting during which anelectrate students encounter plasmatic desire as simulacrum. This new learning is organized around an updating of Justice native to electracy.

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 02 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781643170701
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Electracy and Transmedia Studies
Series Editors: Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes
The Electracy and Transmedia Studies Series publishes research that examines the mixed realities that emerge through electracy, play, rhetorical knowledge, game design, community, code, and transmedia artifacts. This book series aims to augment traditional artistic and literate forms with examinations of electrate and literate play in the age of transmedia. Writing about play should, in other words, be grounded in playing with writing. The distinction between play and reflection, as Stuart Moulthrop argues, is a false dichotomy. Cultural transmedia artifacts that are interactive, that move, that are situated in real time, call for inventive/electrate means of creating new scholarly traction in transdisciplinary fields. The series publishes research that produces such traction through innovative processes that move research forward across its own limiting surfaces (surfaces that create static friction). The series exemplifies extreme points of contact where increased electrate traction might occur. The series also aims to broaden how scholarly treatments of electracy and transmedia can include both academic and general audiences in an effort to create points of contact between a wide range of readers. The Electracy and Transmedia Series follows what Gregory Ulmer calls an image logic based upon a wide scope—“an aesthetic embodiment of one’s attunement with the world.”
Books in the Series
KONSULT: Theopraxesis by Gregory L. Ulmer
Exquisite Corpse: Art-Based Writing Practices in the Academy, edited by Kate Hanzalik and Nathalie Virgintino
Tracing Invisible Lines: An Experiment in Mystoriography by David Prescott-Steed
The Internet as a Game by Jill Anne Morris
Identity and Collaboration in World of Warcraft by Phillip Michael Alexander
Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies , edited by Vicki Callahan and Virginia Kuhn
Play/Write: Digital Rhetoric, Writing, Games , edited by Douglas Eyman and Andréa D. Davis
Sites
Gregory Ulmer’s Konsult Experiment : http://konsultexperiment.com/




konsult
Theopraxesis
Gregory L. Ulmer
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA
© 2021 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on File
978-1-64317-067-1 (paperback)
978-1-64317-068-8 (hardcover)
978-1-64317-069-5 (PDF)
978-1-64317-070-1 (ePub)
1 2 3 4 5
Electracy and Transmedia Studies
Series Editors: Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes
Cover image: Gregory L. Ulmer
Cover design: David Blakeslehy
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email [e-mail].


Contents
Preface
1 Justice
Interlude
Murphy’s Well-Being (1)
2 Allegory
Interlude
Murphy’s Well-Being (2)
3 Enjoyment
Interlude
Murphy’s Well-Being (3)
4 Trace
Interlude
Murphy’s Well-Being (4)
5 Choragraphy
Interlude
Murphy’s Well-Being (5)
6 Rhythm
Interlude
Murphy’s Well-Being (6)
Works Cited
Index to the Print Edition
About the Author


for Hayden, Claire, Raya, and Anjali


We can thus hope to reach a plane where logical properties, as attributes of things, will be manifested as directly as flavors or perfumes.
— Claude Lévi-Strauss



Figure 1. “Installation.” Murphy’s Well-Being , Florida Research Ensemble, in “Region4: Transformation through Imagination,” Gainesville, Florida, February 2012. Photo by Jack Stenner.


Preface
Electracy
I n recent years collaborations with my colleagues have taken the form of an effort to revisit heuretics as pedagogy, to clarify and reconfigure it to serve as the basis for learning in the emerging conditions of global online education, including MOOCs, ubiquitous computing, mixed reality, and related initiatives. These chapters originally were addressed less formally to my colleagues and students (the “we” of this text), as theorizing how to teach the invention of electracy online. The proposal is that learning includes the construction of a genre called konsult (pronounced KON-sult) that in turn mediates all learning, relative to the complete interactive environment of systems and institutions, not only for degrees but also for life-long education and citizenship.
What is the role and future of literate school (a redundancy) in electracy? Perhaps it is not surprising that not everyone thinks education needs to change, or not in the way that we envision. We know in advance and in principle how the world works — that change happens in a certain way (the propensity of things). There seems to be an isotopy of being across all levels of existence, from atoms to galaxies, including the human dimension both biological and cultural, intuited in the design of mandalas. Any one level in this cosmology may function as a mise en abyme (miniaturization) figuring the organization of the whole (if one has the craft of allegory in mind). Here for example is an account of change in this holistic perspective, with reference to the atomic level, that resonates with cultural history.
Change begins slowly, uncertainly, and in places that are highly dependent upon local circumstances because the nuclei necessarily are misfits in the existing structure or orthodoxy. The nuclei are unpredictable (except perhaps by the Witch of Endor of whom Banquo demanded “If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grains will grow and which will not, Speak then to me”) because no system can by itself know ahead of time what, if any, new structure can supplant it. Nuclei do form, however, in those regions of the old structure that are least contented. A phase change is analogous to a political revolution; not the destruction of all individuals but the rearrangement of most of them into a new pattern of interaction. A revolution, driven by the injustices of the old regime, needs its formative nucleus, and its growth (which occurs in an interface of high disorder) is slowed by the need to accommodate or eliminate dissenters. Eventually, however, the structure that began as the highly creative work of a successful innovator becomes an ideology and as it spreads it becomes indoctrination, not creation. (Smith 42)
What remains for us to decide is not whether to participate in change, but the locus of our position in the array: with the normative lock, the gaps, or the misfits (the resistance, the opportunity, or the trouble).
Our collaboration begins with a review of the rationale for undertaking a more radical reform of education, to be practiced as a transition from literate to electrate learning. The first reason to change education (“Apparatus”) is the historical analogy, associated with the reality of the migration of the archive accumulated during the 2500-year epoch of literacy due to information overload. Historically, each apparatus first put its archive into a new medium of storage, and in the process invented a fundamentally different metaphysics (orientation to reality). School itself is a product of this invention within orality of the institution that created literacy. School is relative to the apparatus of literacy, and as such will continue within electracy, even adapting to digital technology, while having to accommodate the new dimension of civilization emerging within electracy. Part of the purpose of Konsult is to articulate the nature of this new metaphysics, to determine the most appropriate and effective operation of school in this transforming reality. We speak from within the institution of school, looking back on the historical relationship of school with church and religion, and forward to the emerging relationship of school with corporation and entertainment
Heuretics
Although Digital Humanities is a disciplinary location most immediately relevant to this proposal, it also concerns the leading institution of STEM education, which is on record as intending to reform its curriculum for a digital apparatus. The task force on the future of MIT education produced “Recommendations” that are a useful point of departure for innovation. The list of intentions is insightful, relative to projections of apparatus theory. For now, the point to emphasize is that however appropriate the recommendations are, they do not attempt to describe, let alone prescribe, the nature of the innovations in pedagogy and curriculum they call for, beyond reminders of the traditions and commitments that historically made MIT successful. This hesitation at the threshold of invention is not a shortcoming but an invitation to the institution at large to begin the process of invention. This invitation i s intriguing and challenging in referring to “the magic of MIT” (an emergent and unpredictable effect of a complex system), and in implying that MIT as an institution or collective entity is as intelligent and creative as are the individuals who staff it. The basic assumption is that MIT twenty years from now will functio