I wanted to mention the other project relevant to your question. This project was also developed for a seminar, resulting in a method for online authoring called "fetishturgy" (to replace dramaturgy). I won't go into the fetish part just now, but the basic idea was to deconstruct the interface metaphor of "homepage" used for the Internet.

Both terms in the compound name were substituted. "Page" became "screen," obviously. The theoretical context in this instance was the history of writing -- the work done by Ong, Goody, et al on the inventions of writing practices needed to adapt rhetoric and logic to the space of the printed page: the outline, the paragraph. The question was: What practices are needed to adapt rhetoric and logic to the space of the screen? What is screen space?

The replacement for "home" may seem less obvious, but my choice of "street" was motivated by the theory of the popcycle, referring to the institutions and their discourses that interpellate a person into a society, the principal ones in modern America being Home, Entertainment, School (community history), and Career (specialized knowledge of a discipline field). Most American identities are constructed within these four discourses. Church is a fifth discourse, in conflict with Entertainment. Street is also an institution, in alliance with Entertainment and in conflict with Home. An example of the above politics may be seen in the emergence of hip hop in Street culture, and its appropriation by Entertainment. The physical plant location or gathering place for Street is the bar (saloon). The bar-saloon-brothel played host to the invention of jazz, which shows the importance of Street in the popcycle.

For the fetishturgy experiment, I tested the possibility of replacing homepage with barscreen as the interface metaphor for online authoring.

I can appreciate the dialectic leading to the term "barscreen". And, the mentioning of jazz seems appropriate to me in regards to the online document because it is played, improvised upon by the user of the document.

I have to say, when I first started making literary hypermedia work I thought of the document as being full of holes and the coding and scripting as formal punctu(r)ation of the document. These days I am more inclined to see the document in terms of space. By this I mean that the document is not solid, and things are not written/placed upon it so much as placed within it -- to the point that I see huge carryover from my experiences making installation art.

Lately I haven't thought much about the homepage itself. It is, by now, an institutionalized term. But, I have been doing some serious play with the notion of the document So to a certain extent I see the phrase "from page to screen" more appropriately written for electronic work as "from ortho.doc to hetero.doc".

Now, to change the subject slightly. Besides the writing apparatus the Net provides, it has also altered writing itself. At least for those working in the media/um. Code and scripting fragments make their way into the superficial text of a work, technical information is used metaphorically, and the use of neologisms has seemingly exploded. I am wondering if you see this sort of "creole" as an element of our fascination with the new communication technology, something that will be natrualized in our language use, or would you say this is a bit of an indication of a move to electracy?

Maybe something else...

I think about the question of "What is happening to writing?" in the context of my position in an English department that is developing a track in new media, with an eye toward defining the contribution that the literature and composition disciplines might make to intermedia authoring and design.

To reiterate the approach of grammatology, such a question is formulated by means of analogy with the shift from orality to literacy, by reviewing what happened to speaking in that apparatus shift. Plato's dialogue (as I mentioned previously?) was a practice invented specifically for his new institution, the Academy (the first school). The dialogue as writing was a hybrid of oral and literate elements, and I pointed out before that the drama of a face-to-face conversation was a kind of interface metaphor to bring oral learners into contact with dialectic (the essence of literacy). The conversation was new, as the historians say, not a transcription of some way of talking that already existed, being structured as it was by the step-by-step reasoning of analytic logic, the interface for which was the steps of ritual. To read PHAEDRUS grammatologically is to notice this hybridity.

We do not yet have an electrate PHAEDRUS, but it is possible to list the elements available for the hybrid. The literate theorists have already selected and foregrounded that part of "writing" that is still relevant to electracy. I am thinking of such works as Blanchot's WRITING THE DISASTER, Cixous's THREE STEPS ON THE LADDER OF WRITING, Howe's THE BIRTH-MARK, and beyond that all the work on "text" within poststructuralism, on "ecriture," feminist or otherwise. These examples indicate that the relevant part of writing for electracy is aesthetic -- not about aesthetics, and not aesthetic practices confined to "art" or "creative" literate practices, but the practices exploiting the sensorial, figurative, narrative, imaging capacities of language. As for all that great body of work devoted to hermeneutics and the fine points of argumentation -- as powerful as it is -- it is irrelevant to the new apparatus, just as the achievements of ritual were irrelevant to the Academy, or the memory palaces were irrelevant to the print essay, or scholarstic theology was irrelevant to empirical physics. In the future, the only books of theory still comprehensible will be those in the "Beginners' Guide" series -- cartoon ideas.

The elements of electracy that are most functional for the new practice of media authoring have been nurtured for some time within cinema and then refined in advertising. I am referring to the ability of audio-visual technology, as developed in narrative forms, to establish a diegesis (imaginary space and time of a story). In time-based media this PLACE is sustained by and secondary to a linear (or even non-linear) plot structured by the enigmas of literate narrative. The short form of advertising reveals what is the future of meaning, however, which is not the hermeneutic line of dramatic action (the element that is actually a survival from orality). What is important for electracy is the creation of MOOD or atmosphere, the logic of which is fundamentally poetic or imagistic. Mood is an holistic, emergent kind of order. I have theorized this PLACE by means of "chora," and proposed in HEURETICS "choragraphy" as a hyper-rhetoric.

Which brngs me to installation art, your original practice. The experimental arts tradition is a major source of potentially electrate devices and practices, beginning (as I said) with collage/montage, whose poetics offers a logic for the cut-and-paste features of digital media. The kindergarten curriculum and pedagogy probably needs to be transposed to the high schools, or at least that would be a shorthand way to suggest how schooling could become electrate. Meanwhile, installation art wants to be Virtual Reality, or provides prototypes that show the way to the design of PLACES that function as categories for organizing the chaos of information overload into an holistic order. The new Phaedrus will most likely be an online site that shows the method that maps installation art onto VR-type technologies. To say this is to note the gap that still exists separating all the parties to this merger, but also to note the direction, the convergence, that is already in progress.

Our thinking on much of this is very similar. I can certainly appreciate the notion of kindergarten curriculum carrying a lot of weight with the emerging apparatus. As well, I understand much of this as direction, some place we are heading, a new heading under which we can organize. I am also grateful for the historical information related here -- Benjamin, the Phaedrus -- as I see these as important resources for the understanding of hypermedia as it is, and where it is headed.

I am inclined to think that the critiques of hypermedia that recognize the current state of hybridity, which is relatively exposed anyway, are grammatological views of electrate potential. I am intrigued, though understand your comment that the only theory books that will be comprehensible will be "Beginners' Guides", or cartoon ideas...I don't want to minimize that statement because I think it makes an important point. For one, the network as it is is not necessarily receptive to lengthy works, or at least lengthy works that do not take into consideration choragraphy. The acceptable length of a work, and the duration of time someone will spend with a piece on the web is directly related to just how much it does exploit the aesthetic potential of the apparatus. Some may say this is related to a cultural attention deficit disorder brought on by TV. What is not understood, I think, in that critique is that the apparatus itself is in flux, and to pin problems on progress, however tangential, is to remain static, become historical. Or, to become increasingly irrelevant.

All in all, I find this to be an exciting time to be a writer, artist, philosopher -- anyone involved in or interested in the development of concepts. I get the feeling that currently there is no solid ground. So, the only thing to do is to keep moving...

Most of the critiques of new media or of new technologies in general seem to lack the historical perspective that grammatology provides -- for example, the issue of access, in relation to which people raise problems of ethics and politics because there are not even phones in Africa, let alone modems. This point is significant, but we also have to keep in mind the state of literacy 200 years after the invention of the alphabet. We need to notice the direction, as you say, the propensity of the apparatus. So when I say that the kindergarten curriculum has much to offer the high schools, I am not saying to forget literacy, but to include aesthetic and performance experience in the educational process. K-3 teachers include in their literature pedagogy what are called "story stretchers" -- activities related to the story that the teacher has read, that allow the children to do themselves some of the things related in the narrative. They relate to the story not so much in terms of meaning but doing. High schools to become electrate need to add this aesthetic performance dimension to learning as well.

In fact "meaning" is a feature of advanced critical practice that will join scholastic questions about the nature of angels in the storeroom basement of civilization. Which is not to say that meaning is not important or that it will not have its day some time again in the future. A good example of how this cycle of ideas works may be seen in Giorgio Agamben's THE COMING COMMUNITY. In this important study Agamben theorizes the specific nature of the photographic image and its manner of signification. As you know, part of his problem is that he is using conceptual literate method and discourse to inquire into the nature of that which is native to the pictorial, and which falls outside the reach of concepts and conceptualization (the cognitive mode of literacy). Two features of Agamben's solution to this difficulty are relevant to our discussion of electracy. First, he revives an obsolete notion from Scholastic metaphysics -- "quodlibet" (whatever). In our context, this term could be used as follows: What "meaning" is to words, "whatever" is to photographs. "No whatever without a lens," he says. To convey the nature of image/Whatever Agamben resorts to that indirect, "bastard" discourse (as Plato called it when he had to resort to it in the TIMAEUS to communicate the nature of "chora"). Agamben does not "define" Whatever (since definition is a literate practice used to articulate concepts), but he gives nineteen metaphors or analogies, many of them derived from religious discussions of spirit, as well as various sources in literature. The import of Whatever is the holistic coherence the reader infers from this set of discursive figures. Barthes often used a similar strategy to explain things. This imagistic feature of theory will survive in electracy.

The point is that the invention process now underway must work in this ad hoc, bricoleur sort of way, picking up inspiration from ideas and practices that are marginal, obsolete, nascent. What is the propensity discernible in our moment? When I say that the cartoon version of theory is what will survive, I have in mind the dynamic evolution of manga. We have to imagine manga practices enhanced by digital technologies plus 2000 years more of refinement. Think of how literacy went from Aristotle and his students in the Lyceum working out the definition of "man" as "a featherless biped," to quantum mechanics today. The history of analysis is impressive. Electracy is still in the "featherless biped" phase, but one day will have its own equivalent of quantum mechanics, except that the kind of knowledge that will emerge in this process will have the same relation to science that science has to religion.

This analogy is intriguing because it suggests a further simplification or reduction may be expected. At one time scientific method and religious theology were combined in the same procedures and beliefs. The insight of the Renaissance was that the method worked as well or better without the religion. The implication is that electracy will learn the same thing about science -- some part of science that seems indispensable now may be stripped off and left in the academy, where it will be preserved in the protocols of rigor. But Whatever will go its own way, within its own institution and its own mode of knowledge that still will have to prove themselves capable of producing results for real people and communities. Or, perhaps in a Whatever world people will discover that results are not the solution but the problem.

Though I am not familiar with the Giorgio Agamben you mention I see quite a bit of relevance between "whatever" is being done there and how I approach my own work. In my own version of "literary hypermedia" I tend to supply metaphors through interactive definition rather than through a straight text definition, and by text I mean words only. Of course, my view is that the words in hypermedia work are only part of the text.

I'll let you comment if you'd like, but I want to thank you for sitting down with me (at opposite ends of the American continent) to discuss where we are headed. Like I said, I find this an exciting time to be dealing with the concepts of meaning, communication, literacy and literature as it seems the can of worms has opened. I only hope this humble "featherless biped" survives the electrate evolution.

I am optimistic about the shift in the apparatus that is underway now, although there is no guarantee about how things will work out (no technological determinism). The reason for my optimism is the correspondence that I may have mentioned before that connecting hypermedia technologies to the "logics" of creativity (lateral, right brain, bi-sociative, associative...). My research and teaching is organized around this effort to extract from a number of different discourses and practices a rhetoric and pedagogy that adapt schooling to electracy. The principal resources for this adaptation include entertainment uses of audio-visual media (especially advertising), psychoanalytic dream work (Freud and Lacan), experimental or avant-garde arts. Electrate learning is structured like creativity, and does not replace the pedagogy of verification that structures most literate education, but supplements it with the structure of discovery.

To get an idea of how I apply this pedagogical electracy to my teaching you could look at some of the course materials posted on my website (web.nwe.ufl.edu/~gulmer/), especially the student projects gathered under "Mystory/Myseum." Two courses especially are notable as adaptations of "creativity" to pedagogy: the Freshman level "Writing Through Media" course and its projects entitled "Image of Wide Scope," and the course I am just finishing on Hypermedia. Those student projects won't be available until after the new year, but they represent an upper-division exploration of the image of wide scope. I borrowed the "wide image" from Howard Gruber, et al, and adapt it to the mystory pedagogy I introduced long before I taught in networked classrooms. Mystory is a genre that provides the learner with a "cognitive map" of her place in the popcycle of institutions and discourses constituting the symbolic order of society.

By means of the mystory students locate a fundamental mood or attunement that is the atmosphere of their life, a feeling and a metaphysics (showing how things ARE, irreparably) that may be embodied in a material, poetic image. My wide image, for example, is evoked by the "tin star" worn by Gary Cooper in HIGH NOON. In any case, the mystorical pedagogy inverts and displaces (deconstructs) literate "scientific" practice that aspires to objectivity and the setting aside or exclusion of the other popcycle discourses from education. In mystory, the research is motivated by a search for one's wide image, for the emotional atmosphere that mediates one's experience of knowledge or expertise. The effect of researching such fields as history, physics, art and the like through the personal sphere of the wide image is an effect of memory and category. The mood located by means of the search actually serves to hold in memory (the living memory of thought and imagination, and the prosthetic memory of hypermedia) a heterogeneous quantity of information that defies and dissolves all the known genres of literare study. Not that there are not predecessors for this open practice -- the "anatomy" for example. At the same time, it must be said that the "heterogeneity" of what comes together is an effect of considering the gathering in terms of literate categories. Digital imaging supports a holistic mode of category that classifies by means of aesthetic coherence.

When the work from the hypermedia course is posted I would love to have some interested folks take a look. The site includes the syllabus and an email archive that shows the progress of learning that took place throughout the semester as the students figured out what they were doing and how to do it, along with the website wide images themselves. Since I was using Vera John-Steiner's NOTEBOOKS OF THE MIND to introduce the nature of creativity, we called our websites "notewebs of the mind."

I have carried on long enough, and imposed on your hospitality and the memory of your server too much. I appreciate this opportunity to have this conversation, and I look forward to our continuing dialogue here and in other venues.