Halflives, A Mystory: Writing Hypertext to Learn
Lisa Gye
Media and Communications, Swinburne University of Technology
In what ways do electronic media, and, in particular,
online media or hypertext, have the potential to change the ways
in which we acquire and generate knowledge? How does writing hypertextually
transform the learner’s experience of the acquisition and dissemination
of knowledge in contrast to the kinds of learning that takes place
when students engage with the proprietary systems used for online
course delivery in universities. While online learning systems are
believed by many in higher education to be a viable alternative
to face to face teaching, many proprietary delivery systems neglect
the role of the student as learner, emphasising instead the student
as a consumer of course materials. Halflives: A Mystory (http://halflives.adc.rmit.edu.au)
was and continues to be a research project that has enabled me to
consider these questions from the perspective of a learner engaged
in constructing knowledge hypertextually. [1]
My approach to this investigation comes out of
Greg Ulmer’s research into the development of a rhetoric for the
electronic apparatus. Ulmer's interest in the ways in which the
transformation of rhetoric is brought about by new technologies
and the impact that this may have on educational practices does
not make him unique. [2] Nor
does his interest in the practical application of poststructuralist
theories to education. [3] What
really interests me with regards to Ulmer, and the reason I have
singled his work out in Halflives and in this paper, is that
his work is derived from and specifically targeted at the discipline
of media studies, while still maintaining an applicability across
of range of other disciplines. More importantly, Ulmer's understanding
of what constitutes media studies is far more expansive than what
is often recognised, within the academy and outside of it, as legitimate.
Rather than emphasising the study of media (aesthetically,
institutionally, politically, historically, philosophically) or
the acquisition of media related skills for the purpose of making
media, Ulmer emphasises the necessity of the integration of these
approaches. One can have one eye on Bataille and one eye on Photoshop
without any sense of disjuncture.
For that reason, I am interested in Ulmer’s description,
in his books Teletheory (1989) and Internet Invention:
From Literacy to Electracy (2003), of mystory as a way of inventing
electronic rhetoric because it allows for both the making/studying
of media and the making/studying of theory simultaneously. Constructing
a mystory, Ulmer suggests, helps us anticipate or actually invent
a rhetoric or poetics for electronic space, for it leads us to practice
the "picto-ideo-phonographic writing" fostered by electronic
technology and theorised by Derrida. He writes:
[Mystorys] were designed to simulate the experience of invention,
the crossing of discourses that has been shown to occur in the
invention process. (Ulmer, 1994: xxi)
Halflives: A Mystory is the product generated from the
process of attempting to think cogently about the possible pedagogical
impacts that mystory may have on learners as they simultaneously
write about media with media. It is also an attempt to think through
and practice a new kind of scholarship that is more suited to electronic
culture.
From literacy to electracy
The transition from a predominantly literate culture to an electronic
culture is already engendering changes in the ways in which we think,
write and exchange ideas. Ulmer has been concerned with the kinds
of changes that take place as a result of this transition and his
primary concern has been a pedagogical one – that is, he is interested
in how learning is transformed by the shift from the apparatus of
literacy to the apparatus of what he comes to term ‘electracy’.
The term apparatus is important here as it refers not only to the
technologies of print or computing but also to the ideologies and
institutional practices assigned to or produced by those technologies.
As Ulmer points out:
In terms of the academic apparatus, [theorists of the apparatus]
would relate the technology of print and alphabetic literacy with
the ideology of the individual, autonomous subject of knowledge,
self-conscious, capable of rational decisions free from the influences
of prejudice and emotion; and to the practice of criticism, manifested
in the treatise, and even the essay, assuming the articulation
of subject/object, objective distance, seriousness and rigor,
and a clear and simple style. The “originality” we require from
the students engaged in making such works as well as the copyright
with which we protect intellectual property are features of this
apparatus. (Ulmer, 1989: 4)
The question that Ulmer posits in Teletheory (1989) and
pursues in that book and in his subsequent books, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (1994) and Internet Invention: From
Literacy to Electracy (2003), revolves around how one might
go about inventing practices that may institutionalize the electronic
apparatus in terms of schooling, and to produce new subjectivities,
or ways of knowing about oneself and the world.
Ulmer’s response to this question in both of these books relates
to the role of invention in the process of learning. In Teletheory,
he calls for the invention of a new genre of academic writing, which
he terms ‘mystory’. In Heuretics, he argues for the supplementation of the currently dominant critical
and interpretative modes of inquiry in learning (critique and hermeneutics)
by a more experimental mode known as heuretics (Ulmer, 1994: xii).
Taken together, Ulmer posits mystory as a new genre of writing that
can be generated by the application of a process of working heuretically
rather than through critique and hermeneutics. His reasons for doing
so lie in his argument that:
[t]he modes of academic writing now taught in school tend to
be positioned on the side of the already known rather than on
the side of wanting to find out (of theoretical curiosity) and
hence discourage learning how to learn. (Ulmer, 1994: xii)
Ulmer’s complaint in relation to the inadequacy
of current modes of learning, and his invocation of heuretics as
an alternative to the currently dominant processes of knowledge
acquisition, draws attention to the role that rhetoric or composition
plays in the formation and dissemination of knowledge through writing.
The purposeful use of language makes knowing
possible. As the Sophists (and many others subsequently) noted,
language necessarily affects the truths that it can say or name.
How we write is as important as what we write. From this perspective, rhetoric aims at knowledge, or makes
it available. How it is made available will vary according to the
apparatus in which it is generated. It could be argued that the
academic essay, as it has come to be institutionalised within the
humanities, is a writing that demonstrates all the virtues of mainstream
literacy - unity, coherence, perspicuity, closure and correctness.
However, what students learn from the process of writing essays
which, rhetorically, have been stripped of the art of invention,
is to close discourse down, to let the conclusion dictate their
thinking and to necessarily censor whatever imagined possibilities
seem irrelevant or inappropriate. 'What they learn is a trained
incapacity to speculate or raise questions, to try stylistic and
formal alternatives' (Corvino, 1998: 210). Ulmer points out that,
in this sense, the privileging of the essay/treatise in school is
ideological in that it promotes the development of a particular
kind of subjectivity in the learner – a subjectivity that is aligned
closely with the desires of Enlightenment logocentric reason.
The move from the apparatus of literacy to the
electronic apparatus means more, then, than merely a change in technology.
It involves changes also in the ways in which we produce and assess
the process of knowledge acquisition and, as a consequence, changes
in subjectivity. The kinds of subjectivities that might be produced
by an electronic apparatus are difficult to determine in advance.
As Ulmer argues:
In the same way that the practice of reading privately and silently
contributed to the formation of “self”, so too will performing
hyperrhetoric contribute to a new subjectivication in the electronic
apparatus (in which one will have to find a new term of self-reference,
neither “parrot” [to use Lacan’s example] as in the clan identity
of the oral apparatus nor “me” in the individualism of literacy.
(Ulmer, 1994: 38)
Ulmer argues that the introduction of electracy to schooling has
the potential to overcome the impasse that faces anyone seeking
to move beyond the limits of Enlightenment reason. The necessity
for such a move is determined by the desire to formulate not only
new knowledge but also new ways of generating knowledge. As he points
out:
Most of the writers calling attention to the symptoms of the
closure of conceptual reason do not want to abandon the principles
of the Enlightenment. They retain a desire to act in the world,
to make life better for all humanity, but they admit to an experience
of impasse. (Ulmer, 1994: 20)
This impasse is brought about by the realisation
that knowing and knowledge can, in fact, be resisted. He argues:
We have been aware for some time, after all, of the limitations
of the finest institutional instantiations of logical and conceptual
reasoning – of critique and hermeneutics in the human sciences
and of empiricism in the natural sciences – to the point that
critique has become cynical. As Peter Sloterdijk explained, what
was not foreseen in the invention of conceptual reason was the
possibility of 'enlightened false consciousness', which arose
when the enlightened got into power. What these Aufklärer
learned was that knowledge can be resisted; that knowing can leave
people unaffected; that 'people can stick to their positions for anything but "rational"
reasons'. (Ulmer, 1994: 19)
Ulmer’s project then is a political one in the
sense that his call for the invention of new modes of knowledge
acquisition and dissemination is grounded in a desire to overcome
the impasse produced by this critique of the limits of conceptual
reason.
Hyperlogic, invention and the electronic apparatus
While many hypertext theorists have been prepared
to argue that hypertext, as a technology of electronic writing,
is by its very nature revolutionary – embodying a poststructuralist
view of language – Ulmer argues that we need an electronic theoria.
[4] That
is, writing electonically does not automatically take us outside
literate practices or involve the development of new rhetorical
strategies. Any cursory glance at the metaphors used in computing
– the desktop, folders and files, webpages, and so on – indicates
the ways in which electronic writing is still tied up with the practices
of print literacy. What is needed to achieve the transition is the
invention of new modes of writing specific to the electronic environment
itself, taking into account the full potential of literacy as it
converges with a new apparatus, and remembering that the technology
of electronic writing is only one aspect of the apparatus. It would
be useful at this point to examine what constitutes a mystory and
how it aims to transform rhetoric in the name of electracy.
The greatest difficulty one has in attempting
to write a mystory (or even understand what it is) lies in Ulmer’s
refusal to provide his readers with a model from which to work.
This is brought about by Ulmer’s articulation of the difference
between reproduction and exploration. In arguing that ‘[r]eproducing
as a method or way has to do with the power effect of subject positioning
in a dominant ideology’, Ulmer is alluding to the tendency in pedagogy
to reproduce in students not only knowledge but ways of approaching
and disseminating that knowledge (Ulmer, 1989: 170). The invention
of hyperrhetoric, of which mystory is an example, positions the
student differently in relation to language and discourse as neither
a writer nor a reader but as an ‘active receiver’ capable of receiving
and generating ideas according their specific relation to
knowledge rather than to a general principle. Mystory, then, attempts
to act as a relay rather than as a method. He states:
This alternative – the relay organized by speed, rather than
the gravity of the monument – will be one of the most difficult
and important issues for teletheory: how to bring the particular
or singular into relation with the general or global in the manner
of the relay rather than the model. Is there a contradiction,
then, in trying to invent a genre for teletheory (mystory)? Perhaps
not, if we keep in mind that unlike the treatise, or the conventional
genres of academic scholarship, the mystory does not repeat, is
not reproduced, in that no two are alike. (Ulmer, 1989: 170)
That said, Ulmer does provide us with a range
of parameters which contribute to the invention of mystory as a
genre. In Chapter Three of Teletheory, under the heading of Mystoriography, Ulmer states:
As a conceptual neologism, "mystory" is the title for
a collection or set of elements gathered together temporarily
in order to represent my comprehension of the scene of academic
discourse. It is an idea of sorts, if nothing like a platonic
eidos, whose name alludes to several constituent features (generated by the
puncept of "mystory"). (Ulmer, 1989: 83)
These elements are history, herstory, mystery,
my story and envois. Each element contributes part of itself to
the invention of the word mystory and each element deals in part
with the concerns of mystoriography. The following section elaborates
on each element of mystory and how they relate to the composition
of Halflives as a mystory.
The first element, history, serves as a reminder
of the way in which patterning as a form of referential cognition
is suppressed in a traditional historiography that emphasises and
privileges the analytico-referential discourse of science. Where
traditional historiography seeks to produce treatises bound to the
demands of rigorous procedures of verification and justification,
mystory attempts to reintroduce the particular into historiography
by allowing the mystoriographer to focus on the patterns that they discern in the materials that they uncover, emphasising the individual
learner’s role in the construction of knowledge. Mystory allows
for the idiosyncratic generation of knowledge in ways that are meaningful
for the learner. This process contributes to the formation of what
might be termed ‘electronic cognition’ in that it mimics the way
in which memory is organised in computing. As Ulmer argues in Heuretics:
In the hardware of computers, connectionism or parallel processing
(multiple low-level memory units linked in a network) is replacing
(experimentally) the more standard serial processing (a central
processor addressing large storage units). In short, the change
in thinking from linear indexical to network associational – a
shift often used to summarize the difference between alphabetic
and electronic cognitive styles (or between masculine and feminine
styles, for that matter) – is happening at the level of the technology
itself. (Ulmer, 1994: 36)
Another way of describing this kind of thinking
is hyperlogic, a term used by Darren Tofts in his essay 'Hyperlogic,
the Avant-garde and Other Intransitive Acts' (Tofts, 1999). Where
traditional historiography is bound by the linearity of logic, mystory
is made possible by the introduction of hyperlogic to historiography.
Tofts argues:
One of the advantages of this kind of historiography, as Greil
Marcus has demonstrated, is the formation of alternative histories,
generated according to the principles of serendipity, audacious
comparisons and unexpected links. (Tofts, 1999: 23-24)
To illustrate this concept, Tofts quotes from Greil Marcus’ history
of punk rock, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century:
...late in 1976 a record called Anarchy in the U.K. was
issued in London, and this event launched a transformation of
pop music all over the world. Made by a four-man rock ‘n’ roll
band called the Sex Pistols, and written by singer Johnny Rotten,
the song distilled, in crudely poetic form, a critique of modern
society once set out by a small group of Paris-based intellectuals.
First organized in 1952 as the Lettrist International, and refounded
in 1957 at a conference of European avant-garde artists as the
Situationist International, the group gained its greatest notoriety
during the French revolt of May 1968, when the premises of its
critique were distilled into crudely poetic slogans and spray-painted
across the walls of Paris, after which the critique was given
up to history and the group disappeared. The group looked back
to the surrealists of the 1920’s, the dadaists who made their
name during and just after the First World War, the young Karl
Marx, Saint-Just, various mediaeval heretics, and the Knights
of the Round Table. (cited in Tofts, 1999: 23-24)
Tofts goes on to argue:
Alternative histories are interesting in that they provide another
way of conceiving a particular terrain, in the process uncovering
the assumptions that underlie "official" histories.
(Tofts, 1999: 23-24)
Mystory is capable of activating hyperlogic, situating the mystoriographer
within a designated subjectivity that is context sensitive. It does
not aim to produce universal truths but rather lets 'specified subjectivities
speak in the full context of their localities' (Tofts, 1999: 24).
The pedagogical value of this lies in the positioning of the learner
as an active participant in the production of knowledge rather than
as a consumer of already decided "truths".
Halflives addresses this notion of history
in a number of ways. The interpolation of genealogy and traditional
historiography in the site derived from my interest in the way that
these two approaches attempt to bring the past ‘back to life’. In
both instances, the emphasis lies in trying to recreate the past
through evidence and thus remain immanent to themselves. However,
as the term ‘back to life’ connotes, historiography and genealogy
are both haunted by a spectrality that challenges their epistemological
certainty. Derrida’s invocation of the revenant in Specters of Marx seemed an apt way of investigating this spectrality which
haunts historiography and genealogy. In particular, the ghost as
revenant, that which exists only by virtue of its return, reminds
us that past and present cannot be neatly separated from one another,
as any idea of the present is always constituted through the difference
and deferral of the past, as well as anticipations of the future.
Hence, one of the main themes of Halflives draws on Derrida’s
theory of hauntology as a way of unsettling the epistemological
certainties of historiography and genealogy.
Thinking hyperlogically about hauntology then
suggested thinking about the kinds of things that are suppressed
within historiography and genealogy. This then led me to haunting,
spiritualism and spirit photography. This in turn led to the analogy
between genealogy and ghost hunting (in particular, see http://halflives.adc.rmit.edu.au/hl053.html).
Rather than resist these flows of thought as "illogical",
a mystoriographical approach helped me to focus on the patterns
that I began to discern in the material I was encountering in my
research. The idiosyncratic nature of those connections, both specific
to my experience and the context of their production, is an important
outcome of mystoriographical production and its contribution to
the formation of electronic cognition.
The second element of mystory, herstory, directly
relates to this element by emphasising the role that mastery plays
in the institutionalisation of knowledge acquisition. As Ulmer argues:
The pun on maistrie ... suggests the problem, shared with feminism, of finding an alternative
to mastery and assertion as they are practiced in conventional
academic discourse. How to think that which, being a scholar,
scholarship takes for granted? What has been given to us, in what
place, compromising every question we ask? (Ulmer, 1989: 83)
Feminist desires to reintroduce experience to
the practice of knowledge acquisition by legitimating both the personal
and the popular as knowledge is also an important aspect of mystoriography.
In mystory, the subject and the object of knowledge are brought
together allowing the learner to bring their own culturally specific
experiences in terms of class, gender, nationality, popular culture
and private life.
The theme of family history in Halflives
attempts to legitimate the popular activity of genealogy as
a form of knowledge acquisition within academic historiography.
In particular, Halflives emphasizes the ways in which personal memories and public histories
matter less than the manner in which our desire shapes and remakes
the past in ways to suit the present. Whereas the disciplinary role
of the historian in historiography supposedly keeps the historian
and the history they produce separate, the family historian is always
the subject and object of knowledge in their endeavours – they are
part of the history that they desire to create.
The third element of mystory is that of mystery
– a speculative mode that requires that the mystoriographer approach
her material in a way that promotes conjecture, as a mystery, rather
than calculation. Calculation involves a set of rules or the imposition
of an empirical grid that delimits the possibility of chance encounters
by relegating intuition to the margins of inquiry. Intuition, on
the other hand, is more personal and visceral, relying as it does
on feelings. As Ulmer, quoting Carlo Ginzberg, argues:
The key term to identify the kind of knowledge that defies all
rules, that enables the lover to identify the beloved as unique
is "intuition", which has its "high" forms,
as in Arabic firasa (‘the capacity to leap from the known
to the unknown by inference on the basis of a set of clues’),
and its "low" forms (rooted in the senses). (Ulmer,
1989: 88)
To write intuitively requires the development
of the ‘middle voice’, described by Roland Barthes in 'To write:
An intransitive verb?' and recalled by Ulmer:
In the case of the active voice, the action is accomplished outside
the subject. In the case of the middle voice, on the contrary,
the subject affects himself in acting; he always remains inside
the action, even if an object is involved....Thus defined, the
middle voice corresponds exactly to the state of the verb to write: today to write is to make oneself the center of the action of speech;
it is to effect writing in being affected oneself; it is to leave
the writer inside the writing, not as a psychological subject,
but as the agent of the action. (Barthes, 1989: 164-165)
One does not remain outside, at an objective
distance from the object under examination, but is always within
the work when working intuitively by means of conjecture – and all
research relies on conjecture to some degree. Mystory encourages
the mystoriographer to develop the capacity for conjecture by learning
to leap from the known to the unknown by inference on the basis
of clues, thereby writing themselves into the writing. This kind
of reasoning is suited to hyperlogic’s tendency towards "lines of
flight" rather than the linear, hierarchical model of analytical
modes of reasoning.
Writing as intuition rather than as analysis
is well suited to the electronic environment, as Ulmer argues in
Heuretics:
The multichanneled interactivity of hypermedia provides for the
first time a machine whose operations match the variable sensorial
encoding that is the basis for intuition, a technology in which
cross-modality may be simulated and manipulated for the writing
of an insight, including the interaction of verbal and non-verbal
materials and the guidance of analysis by intuition, which constitute
creative or inventive thinking. (Ulmer, 1994: 140-141)
Intuitions may not always be, in the end, “right”.
But they can provide an avenue for experimentation that allows the
learner to speculate – remembering that the root of the word speculate
is spectare, to see – and to find a direction through writing
rather than writing coming "after the fact", so to speak.
This ability to find a direction through writing is helpful when you consider that electronic rhetoric
has yet to be invented, or rather, is only in the process of being
invented, unlike the rhetoric of print, which is well established
(though, of course, open to constant revision and experimentation).
|
Figure: Lillian Swan and the ghost of my grandfather
|
The application of intuition to the composition
of Halflives allowed me to speculate on possible connections
within the material I was researching. This included such
connections as those between genealogy, historiography, hauntology
and spiritualism. It provided me with a way into the material
by focussing my attention on the photograph with which the
project begins – that of my grandmother and my grandfather’s
shadow (see left). My identification of the punctum of that
photograph, my grandfather’s shadow, was the catalyst that
led me to see other connections in the site. The photograph
suggested my grandfather’s presence by virtue of the shadow
in the lower right hand corner. But it simultaneously suggested
his absence as well. His ghostly presence led me to think
about Derrida’s concern with revenants or ghosts in Specters
of Marx (1994), where he discusses the spectrality of
many areas of meaning, seeing ghostly hauntings as traces
of possible meanings. This connection to hauntology then led
to me to thinking about the ways in which ghosts have figured
more generally in our culture, which led me to both spiritualism
and spirit photography. The application of intuition generated
the very personal nature of these associations allowing me
to write myself into the research.
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The fourth element of mystory is My Story, an
element which again invokes the register of the middle voice by
requiring that the mystoriographer relate their material to themselves
in the manner of a relay that may not keep its charge but must be
passed on. Remember that the relay (as opposed to method) positions
the mystoriographer differently in relation to language and discourse
as neither a writer nor a reader but as an “active receiver” capable
of receiving and generating ideas according to their specific relation to knowledge rather than to a general principle.
Rather than the autonomous narrator of a series of ideas, the mystoriographer
occupies a heteronomic position, engaging their own stories in the
information set forth as scholarship. This, Ulmer argues, is the
charge of mystory, reasoning in the mode of conduction. In contrast
to the established movement of inference between things and ideas
in academic discourse (abduction, deduction, induction), conduction
involves a movement between things. Where abduction, deduction and
induction all involve a relation between the general and the particular,
conduction remains at the level of the particular. The mystoriographer
is not concerned with getting to the bottom of things, in the manner
of Sherlock Holmes, but rather in seeing the possibility of connections
between things without having to expand or reduce particularities
to general principles.
Conduction has a double meaning for Ulmer, alluding
to the type of movement produced by a relay and the way in which
we "conduct" research.The allusion to movement brings
to mind the conduction of electricity moving at speed from one relay
point to another. Perhaps even the movement of information packets
across a network. Or, to use an example Ulmer provides, the flow
of energy through a circuit. But the allusion to the way in which
we conduct research reminds us that this process is “autographical”
– that we write ourselves into our own research.
This relates to the fifth element of mystory
and the idea of envois – that is, the present of any idea as always pre-sent. Using the example
of Derrida’s description of Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis,
Ulmer argues that mystory belongs to a genre of writing that invents
and discovers as it writes itself. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud opens with the words, ‘In psychoanalytic
theory ...'. In doing so, Freud signals that psychoanalytic theory
exists, even though it only makes it first public appearance with
the publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud
thus positions himself as both the subject and the producer of psychoanalytic
theory. The autobiographical and anecdotal status of Freud’s text
are significant here as Freud simultaneously undertakes self-analysis
and invents it. Derrida’s, and latterly Ulmer’s, interest in this
lies in the possibility of taking psychoanalysis ‘as a potential
model for a new order of reasoning, suggesting how individual idioms
may be generalized into theoretical formations’ (Ulmer, 1989: 91).
The performance and production of “psychoanalysis” occurs simultaneously,
and the acknowledgement of this suggests of a way to think about
the temporality of mystory. As Ulmer notes,’[t]he mystorical essay
is not scholarship, not the communication of a prior sense, but
the discovery of a direction by means of writing’ (Ulmer, 1989:
90).
Halflives did not present itself to me before the fact
with a ready formed structure and set of relationships within itself.
It only became so in the process of being constructed.
Taken together, these elements suggest that the
methodology for how to write a mystory is analogous to the recipe
rather than a model. This analogy of the recipe is a useful one,
for whereas models aim for reproduction, recipes are more like relays
in that they require the input of a range of ingredients, including
the cook, to make them work. It is the role of the cook to apply
a technique to the process in order for some transformation in the ingredients
to occur. The use of the word technique rather than method is critical
here. A method is referred to in the Shorter Oxford dictionary as
a ‘systematic arrangement’ and the ‘orderly arrangement of ideas
and topics’. This objectivity of the method is perfectly suited
to the apparatus of literacy in its application to academic discourse
as it currently exists as it matches the rhetorical strategies used
by that discourse. However, mystory, intervening on the side of
the apparatus of electracy, requires, not the application of a method,
but rather the application of a technique where technique is taken
to mean the ‘manner of artistic execution or performance in relation
to practical details’ (OED, 1973: 2253).
Remembering that mystory seeks to put into question
‘[reproduction] as a method or way [which] has to do with the power
effect of subject positioning in a dominant ideology’ (Ulmer, 1989:
4), the manner in which the artistic execution or performance of
mystory takes place, according to Ulmer, is the collage. Whereas
representation reproduces, collage, Ulmer argues, works to reactivate
as in the manner of a relay. In the visual arts, collage is an abstract
form of art in which various elements are juxtaposed on the same
pictorial surface. ‘In critical theory as in literature collage
takes the form of citation’ (Ulmer, 1989: 147).
I find Ulmer’s invocation of collage as a technique
for the production of mystory is problematic. [5]
Ulmer’s preference for relays that retain
the flavour of high cultural production (video over television,
for example) undercut the desire for an integration of the popular
into mystoriography. As Niall Lucy argues in Beyond Semiotics:
An effect of this preference is to lessen what might be learned,
if only because the context in which pedagogy is developed is
rather more a schooled than a schooling one. By this I mean that
the Ulmer of Teletheory seems far more at home reading
Derrida than watching telesoap, more comfortable with John Cage
than Johnny Rotten. When he does refer to popular texts and performers,
these tend to have be approved already by high culture as worthy
of interest: Barthes on the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the
Opera, for instance, commands several pages of Ulmers’ attention,
outweighing that paid to any other instance of the popular. (Lucy,
2001: 129)
Rather than collage, I prefer decoupage as a
technique for mystoriography. Decoupage, derived from the French
decouper, means ‘to cut out’ usually with the intention
of reassembling , pasting and varnishing onto objects for the purposes
of decoration. As far back as the 12th century, Chinese peasants
were creating paper cutouts in vivid colours to decorate windows,
lanterns, gift boxes and other objects.
The origins of decoupage in China appeal to me
for personal reasons that relate to my family’s history. But it
is the fact that decoupage is considered l’arte del povero
(the poor man's art) that suits my intentions in Halflives.
Decoupage is an amateur rather than an expert art. Like all crafts,
it is a technique that can be easily learned and applied. The grafting
together of disparate elements is an important feature of the craft
and depends heavily on what is to hand. A reliance on ready-mades
is well suited to mystory where the mystoriographer works with materials
that they 'happen to unearth' (Ulmer, 1989: 83).
And so, the technique that guides the compilation
of the mystoriographical recipe in Halflives is decoupage, fusing together the ingredients of Ulmer’s
mystory with my family’s various histories and archives, Derrida’s
hauntology, 19th century Spiritualism and Spirit photography,
Barthes ruminations on photography and speculations about the importance
of genealogy and memory to traditional historiography.
From Here to Electracy
The object of the research undertaken for the
Halflives project was to uncover the possible pedagogical
impacts that mystory as a mode of online or electronic writing may
have on learners, using myself as the testing ground. Halflives is a mystory composed as an experiment to find out about
how we might begin to invent an electronic rhetoric suitable for
the apparatus of electracy. Writing Halflives helped me
to think about what it means to undertake research in an electronic
environment and also what it means to think electronically. It also
raised questions more generally about the scene of teaching and
learning as it currently exists in first world institutions of higher
education. How does learning currently take place? What is the impact
of new technologies on the learning environment? Will they open
up new modes of teaching and learning that promote the application
of inventive strategies to knowledge acquisition over the more reproductive
strategies currently in place? As an academic working in a field
fundamentally impacted by new technologies but whom, like many of
my peers, is not an educational researcher, these questions are
crucial. Not only in the sense that they ask about possibilities,
but also in the sense that they draw our attention to the modes
of teaching and learning currently in place and prompt us to consider
the most productive ways to respond rather than react to the changing
environment. They offer, I believe, a path of resistance to the
kinds of corporate product driven education currently being forced
upon academics across a range of disciplines, not just in media
and new media studies.
In 1992, one hundred and forty years after John
Henry Newman’s classic discourse of the university as an institution
(Newman, 1952), Jaroslav Pelikan revisited Newman’s ideas in his
book, The Idea of the University (1992). He identified four
knowledge management roles played by the university, assigning each
role equal importance:
[T]he advancement of knowledge through research, the transmission
of knowledge through teaching, the preservation of knowledge through
scholarly collections, and the diffusion of knowledge through
publishing are the four legs of the table, no one of which can
stand for very long unless all are strong. (Pelikan, 1992: 16-17)
The separation of knowledge advancement through
research and the transmission of knowledge through teaching, one
that is maintained in many Western universities, positions the academic
as the advancer of knowledge and the student as receiver of knowledge.
It does not promote active learning in the sense of allowing the
recipient of teaching, the student, to participate in the production
of knowledge. Mystory, I believe, allows the learner to straddle
these roles more effectively by positioning the student as an "active
receiver".
The greatest test facing the application of mystoriography
to learning in the electronic classroom, however, lies in the ways
in which knowledge advancement through research is currently taking
shape in our culture as a result of fiscal and technological pressures.
In a recent article for Southern Review, Mads Haahr argues:
Knowledge advancement can be seen as a three-step feedback loop
where researchers receive impressions for example through journals,
books and conferences (input); reflect and develop hypotheses
and conduct experiments to support or explode them (process the
input); and eventually document and diffuse the findings (output).
Feedback loops such as these are found everywhere, and as discussed
elsewhere (Haahr 2001), there is a strong trend in current society
to focus on the input/output portions of these loops, rather than
the reflection/processing portions. For the loop associated with
knowledge advancement, all three steps are important: the input
stage because good ideas require proper stimulation and meaningful
analysis can only be performed on carefully collected data; the
processing stage because this is where the insight and understanding
takes place, where information is turned into knowledge; and the
output stage because this is where the findings are communicated
to peers and students. (Haahr, 2002)
Mystory is dependent upon students and teachers
having the time and space to be able to adequately engage in the
reflection/processing stage of the loop. With increasing student
numbers and the greater demands made on academics, engaging students
in the kind of extensive experimentation required to write a mystory
is time consuming.
However, on the basis of my experience of the
process, it is time that must be found. The evolution of a new
apparatus of electracy will proceed with or without our input. However,
we would do well to ensure that its evolution is guided towards
the ends that we would value rather than leaving it to chance.
Writing Halflives opened me up to thinking
about my own strategies as a learner and helped me to understand
the value of a heuretic approach to knowledge. The process was an
empowering one in that I was forced to rely on my own resources
in the construction of the site. By choosing to not follow an established
rhetoric, which was driven by the desire to experiment with the
apparatus of electracy, I was able to write myself into the site
on the basis of the decisions I made for what would and wouldn’t
be included and for the directions I allowed the research to take.
There were moments of true pleasure when I stumbled across unexpected
links and directions. Whether the reader feels these moments in
the text is beyond my control however, given that mystoriography
is a learning process and that mystorys are not intended to be didactic,
this is irrelevant to what I have learned from the execution of
Halflives.
Mystory may prove to be difficult to institutionalise
as a way of experimenting with electronic rhetoric and the impact
this may have on the way we acquire and disseminate knowledge. The
very few who have taken it up since Ulmer began to write about it
in 1989 is perhaps evidence of this. [6]
It is, in many respects, the antithesis of the packaged online learning
systems, like Blackboard and WebCT,
currently favored by many institutions of higher education in Australia.
However, I believe it is a valuable approach that opens up new possibilities
for thinking about how we learn and express our learning in an electronic
environment.
Author's Biography
Lisa Gye is a lecturer in Media and Communications at Swinburne
University of Technology. She recently completed postgraduate research
at the AIM (Animation and Interactive Multimedia) Centre at RMIT.
Halflives (http://halflives.adc.rmit.edu.au/),
is currently touring Australia as part of the Elastic exhibition
produced by the CCP. Lisa's scholarly interests include critical
theory and new media, media arts, media production, alternative
media practices and authoring for new media. She is currently co-editing
(with Darren Tofts) an ebook titled Illogic of Sense: The Gregory
L. Ulmer Remix for Alt-X Press. She is also the webdesigner
for the Fibreculture Journal.
Notes
[1] This paper serves as an adjunct to the web-based
research performed in Halflives
and readers would undoubtedly find it useful to read and engage
with the site while reading this paper.
[back]
[2] See Cole (2000) as one example.
[back]
[3] See, for example, Peters (1998).
[back]
[4] The earlier work on hypertext of scholars
such as George Landow and Jay David Bolter were good examples of
the kind of euphoric optimism to which I'm referring here. See,
for example, Bolter (2001). Interestingly, both Bolter and Landow
and many others like them have recently toned down their initial
enthusiasm for the revolutionary powers of both postructuralist
theory and hypertext.
[back]
[5] George Landow also favours collage as a metaphor
for thinking about techniques of hypertext production. See Landow
(1999).
[back]
[6] Ulmer himself is cognisant of the fact that
experiments with regards to mystoriography are thin on the ground.
His most recent publication, Internet Invention: From Literacy
to Electracy, seeks to redress this by offering the reader a
textbook that demonstrates how mystory is built in to the curriculum
in the Networked Writing Environment at the University of Florida.
[back]
References
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____. Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy (New
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