Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video

Ulmers text offers a theoretical nexus among digital media, pedagogy, and postmodernism. Read this book. JS

In the "After Teletheory" postscript of Teletheory, Greg Ulmer gives a personal history of his thinking from graduate school to the present day that I found very refreshing. I especially liked his idea of the wide image as the generative force and ultimate revelation of the mystory: "Every person potentially possesses an image of wide scope (actually a set of four or five images supplemented by perhaps as many as 100 variations) that guide one's intuitions in every aspect of life across the popcycle. ... The wide image is an emergent phenomenon appearing at the point of convergence of the popcycle discourses, manifesting itself as a certain repetition of details or signifiers noticed in juxtaposing the documentations of one's position within each institution." pp. 299-300It's clear from "After Teletheory" that, as an educator, Ulmer has been working his way toward heuretics his whole career (the way Einstein worked his way to E=MC2 from his wide image of the compass needle) and that teletheory and choragraphy are Ulmer's mystory (more so than "Derrida at the Little Bighorn" or "Yellowstone Desert").His dedication to and vision of a new kind of pedagogy for the Internet/Video age is very inspiring. Concepts like the "my-story" the "me-morial" and the "wide image" make it clear Ulmer understands that the current and following generations awash in information need to be taught the courage to navigate their own path. The book is also a brilliant example of a person doing just that in the American system of higher education.

As new publisher I am honored to start our program with the second and revised edition of a ground breaking philosophical treatise from a leading authority on the theory and practice of electronic culture in the media age. Continuing the work of post(e)-pedagogy of Applied Grammatology , Ulmer's Teletheory is the second book of his trilogy on the modes of inquiry which concludes with Heuretics. Teletheory addresses the paradigm shift from literacy to electracy., using philosophy of science as well as Roland Barthes' design of an image rhetoric. The invention of a new historiography as experience of subjectivation results in a poetics extracted from philosophy of science, critical theory, and videography, which is tested with a sample of the genre: "Derrida at the Little Bighorn." The functionality of collage-montage as logic is probed, leading to a position of singularity. Gregory Ulmer is a Professor of English at the University of Florida and teaches Electronic Languages and Cybermedia at the European Graduate School (Switzerland). His students are full of praise for his skills as teacher.