Ulmer

Part of working heuretically is to use the method that I am inventing while I am inventing it, hence to practice hyperrhetoric myself. (17)

"What each one calls for at the same time, in different ways, is invention. It is time to craft some new means for thought and action" (20)

[CYBORG] I would argue that technology, the cyborg, "literalizes" or represents the material embodiment of the Chora.

Ulmer's Heuretics considers the technology of hypermedia, what he defines as the digitalized convergence of one "text" of words, images, and sounds" alongside Hayden White's reinvention of historiography which proposes to use the arts and sciences as models for historical invention.

Heuretics appropriates the history of the avent-garde as a liberal arts mode of research and experimentation. In other words, whereas avant-garde has thus far served as an object of study, Ulmer proposes that it can be used as a method of study. Combining the owrds critique and hermeneutics, heuretics is a generative practice.

Ulmer asks, crucially, how are these alternatives invented? He proposes that new discourses must be "tried out" and "considered as experiments in representation" in the same way a composition course presents models of the essay to teach the poetics of academic writing. The goal of heuretics, then, is not only to reproduce historical inventions (to learn about alternative rhetorics) but also to invent new ones. In other words, Ulmer shows that it is possible to write a theory of poetics in teh same way that one learns to write interpretations or critiques. (xii)

In the heuretic classroom, students become producers as well consumers of theory.

Opening the opportunity for a choratic pedagogy.

Ulmer calls his work a "generative experiment" "A generative approach to writing theory" He uses Andre Breton's invention of surrealism to suggest the ways in which Invention spreads by emulation (5).

According to Ulmer, who uses Roland Barthes, an "inventive culture requirse the broadest possible criterion of what is relevant" The chora makes this possible, it opens up the space of the classroom.

[DREAMS] "Everyday adult existence, organized by the demands of practicality, has suppressed all other modes of thought. The plan of the piece as a whole is anticipated in the general appeal to dreams as a resource for recovering a place for imagination in a world dominated by narrowly defined logic" (6)

Ulmer's work follows the tradition of discourse on method. He creates a mnemonic for the common set of elements in method CATTt.
[CONTRAST]"The theorist begins by pushing away from an undesirable example or prototype, whose features provide an inventory of qualities for an alternative method" Ex. Plato defines his position in opposition to that of the Sophists--I will not be trying to define the chora while other attempts have.
[ANALOGY] "Method becomes invention when it relies on analogy and chance. If methods tend to be practiced as algorithms, their invention is heuristics. To help invent the dialectic, Plato uses the analogy between the city and the country, while Derrida uses God, and Kristeva Freud, and Rickert the matrix.
[THEORY] "The theorist generates a new theory baed on the authority of another theory whose argument is accepted as a literal rather than a figurative analogy."
[TARGET] "The theorist has in mind an area of application that the new method is designed to address" PEDAGOGY;
[TALE] The theorist's invention, the new method, must itself be represented in some form or genre. It must be dramatized." WAY OF ENACTING IT/EMBODYING IT.
(pg 9)


[MEMORY] "Writing as technology is a meory machine"

[CYBORG] "Part of the contribution of hypermedia as Target for my method is the models of memory developed for it, in as much as individuals and societies tend to internalize as forms of reasoning the operations of their tools." (17)