An Introduction of Sorts, Part I

This blog is the first project for Digital English, a class taught by Dr. Greg Ulmer during the spring 2010 semester at the University of Florida.

We are using a system called the CATTT (which I'll explain in the second post) as a heurectical experiment to create a "concept" for the internet environment.  The central premise is that while the book format is a superb way to work out theoretical ideas in literacy, it is not the right one for electracy.  This all is based on a discussion of three apparatuses for knowledge- orality, literacy and electracy- which create/solicit/demand different methods and tactics.

The experiment asks, "what parts of theory work on the internet?  what parts do not?" One of the motivations behind this experiment is to take back the concept factory back from commerce.

We are using five texts, but Part I (Project I) focuses on two texts and a public policy issue. The texts discussed in this blog are What is Philosophy? by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity 1920 to 1940 by Roland Marchand. The public policy issue, often but not always a disaster, is different for each student. My public policy issue is obesity. As the blog has progressed I have focused my attention on the question of calories- too many, good versus bad, teaching people about calories.

An Introduction of Sorts, Part II

For both Projects/Parts I and II, we are using the CATTT. Unfortunately, I cannot find my notes from the first day of class, which were quite detailed about what the CATTT is/does, so I am having to hodge podge based on my notes from other class sessions, scanning of Dr. Ulmer's blog and my recollections.

The CATTT is an acronym for a five stage "device" for developing ideas heurectically. Ulmer compared the CATTT to the positions (past, present, future) in a three card tarot spread.  The CATTT becomes OUR CATTT as we place "cards" into the "five card spread."

Below I'm listing the names of the CATTT's slots as well as the particular idea/text slotted in our CATTT (so far) and some rationale, where appropriate:

• Contrast: Commerce as detailed in Marchand's Advertising the American Dream. Deleuze and Guattari fix commerce as our contrast in What is Philosophy?
  
• Analogy: Appropriation
  
• Theory: the idea of the concept and how to develop it, from WIP? by D&G
  
• Target: a public policy issue/disaster (in my case obesity), this gives us a handle to crank the other parts through
  
• Tale: site of sythesis (this is the one that seems simplest and yet I'm not quite sure I've got it).

This table from Ulmer's blog is helpful for Part/Project I.

An introduction of Sorts, Part III

Part or Project I for the class is to develop a poetics, a set of instructions, out of ideas found in D&G and Marchand. We elaborate those instructions by using five categories to define our posts. Those five categories are proper name (self contextualization), target/event (our particular policy issue), concept (ideas from D&G), commodity (ideas from Marchand), heurectics (our attempts to define specific instructions for our poetics, with some background) and blogetics (tale, meta on how the blog works as a medium for thinking/developing theory).

I have found that most of my posts end up combining more than one category; the category of "proper name" seems much more interesting to me woven into a posts covering at least one of the other categories.