I WAS THERE: TALKING WITH MICHEL SERRES AND GREGORY ULMER

by Laurence Rickels

Fall Quarter 1994 was my performative piece as an administrator: I was the UCSB host with the most visitations from stars of intelligent life. Traffic jamming with our UCSB frequencies were Kathy Acker, who did two weeks; Klaus Theweleit, here for one quarter; and Gregory Ulmer and Michel Serres, who performed a changing of the thinkers ceremony with next to no overlap on Halloween weekend. This T:vc cyber-special feature covers the case of near miss between Ulmer and Serres. By splicing together the two separately conducted one-on-one interviews, what took two is now group formatted (as in three's a crowd). At the same time the family romance of this in-group-of-three jump starts, in the spirit of Internet, the constitutive possibility of each solo interviewee making a ghost appearance on the other's interview. Our own ongoing group psychologization or technologization that has by now dated and turned the timer on age-old institutions of coupling or one-to-one transmission is at the same time the stereo topic that both interviews shared and that now tunes in as one running in-group commentary.

Laurence Rickels: Given the division you set up on TV between information and advertising, and the privilege you accord, however ironically, to advertising, is it possible to say that, in the station break, in the interruption of the programming, in the word from the sponsor, that it's a transferential connection with "the truth" that gets across? In other words, the frontiers of advertising you address or colonize seem to frame the influence of psychoanalysis, even on your own thought. All advertising advertises psychoanalysis. Have the agencies studied Freud when they mix intra-psychic ingredients into the products we are asked to identify and identify with or was Freud right all along? This is already the question of haunting.

Michel Serres: We must really discuss "haunted," because some people say the opposite. Technicians say the opposite, that TV is a cold medium and that radio is a hot medium. On radio, you are close to a person's voice, and emotions are transferred in a refined way. It's a "fine" medium, very intimate. Someone speaks as if whispering in your ear. Whereas TV is a medium where there must be distance for it to reach you, because it's an "icy" medium, and that is why there isn't this idea of "haunting." That's what the technicians say, it's not my own analysis, I'm just reciting what they say.

LR: Do you see the destiny of transference, too, as following or falling for this hot and cold-war distinction?

MS: As soon as Brigitte Bardot was on TV or film, all the young French girls bought the same skirt as Bardot. Mimesis, which is how I prefer to address what you call the transference, seems stronger in this mass-media instance; but what you learned in math class or English with a professor who was present is conducted via the same type of mimesis. That is why I concluded my lecture on television by saying that the real question belongs to education. It was in that context that I used the word "prophetic," invoking it in two ways. It has two meanings, one is flat and the other is not. The flat sense concerns a certain interest in education as a long-term investment. And because it's a long-term investment, it has a propagating effect--it prolongs; that is the naive or flat reading of the term. The second meaning, which comes from monotheistic religions, is that of the prophet, who has always had the same function whether in Judaism, Islam, etc., to intervene in the ritual of sacrifice, to intervene in human sacrifice. That is almost the definition of monotheism. Monotheism in our culture is post-Abraham and Isaac. You will not kill your son. I argued that television, in showing murders, is sacrificial in the really polytheistic sense of the word. It devotes itself incessantly to human sacrifice. Prophetic in this context refers to the call that has been put through to stop these sacrifices.

LR: And the university is where we today pull out or put up all the stops?

MS: For four of five years now, I have been in charge of mapping out a report on the organization of an open university in France. We have a very old institution of this type which is called The Open Teaching Center, but which is not a university. In Spain and England there are open universities, and I believe in Germany too. There is one in Quebec, and in India as well. An open university implies opening the doors of the campus to all possible networks--telephone, fax, minitel, television, cable, e-mail, Internet--to attempt to organize a system of teaching that would reach people who are not accessible via traditional educational systems. I've worked a lot on this problem, and I learned very quickly that in all countries that I know and that I've visited in Western Europe this subject is already being considered So, I was supposed to study something that I've been studying for a long time, ever since, in fact, my first book, Hermes, which was already on the problem of communication. My real project is to create a university open to all these available networks. Why? In poor and rich countries, according to the UNESCO experts, applications to institutions of higher education go up 10% per year. It's enormous, just as big in poor countries as in rich ones. Also, the financial means of traditional educational institutions--high schools, colleges, universities--in all countries, have been stretched to the limit, at private as well as at public institutions. We don't see how it would be possible for even a rich country like Germany or the US to spend even more money on teaching and education.

So, we are facing a very strong contradiction right now, the conflict, really, between the rise in demand and the impossibility of financing it. The "campus" solution will be extremely costly, too expensive. We are at a key point in time in which either we will no longer share knowledge--it will once again become the property of a very small group--or we will disseminate it by other means. We have the means to work through these contradictions, namely, all the new channels that emerged in the 1950s and continue to be born, but which we are not using now. If we look prospectively at what could happen, I think that in the next few years, a big part of professional pedagogy will occur along these channels, and this will represent a crisis in our profession. In contrast to the old TV I talked about yesterday, what I dream of is TV that is aware that it truly is a pedagogical channel, because it took that path, and that there is no longer any separation between TV's job and the teaching profession. We must conquer the new media much like the scholars of the 15th and 16th century took over the writing channel. Each time there is a new medium, we have something new to do. Just as Wolf Kittler in his interview with T:vc says that we must do something with computers.

Gregory Ulmer: Yes, literacy has been a powerful democratic force. America was founded on people who had encyclopedias that were so good that when they transported them along to the new world they could use them to build mills and other tools and machines that they needed, even political systems and social organizations. But what we've discovered in the American experiment, which is an experiment in mass education, is that finally we have come up against the limits of literacy, that it finally cannot extend to everybody, it's just too complex, too painful. The technology, paper and pen, is cheap; but the education needed to use that 22 cents worth of technology costs right now around $100,000. And you're just out of high school at that point.

Still with our university systems we are able to get some fair portion of the population, some 25%, through college. But we've reached this limit, and certainly the rest of the world, if it's going to participate in modern democratic revolutions, is going to have to have some kind of educational system that does better than book-based literacy in bringing everybody up to the same level of education.

Computing offers the next breakthrough. Certainly the alphabet and then everything that led up to the book represented an extraordinary educational revolution in world civilization. The computer now offers to support the next step of that revolution in the invention process of thinking, of reasoning. Concept formation as invented through literacy allowed us to move beyond myths and storytelling into philosophy and analysis. We're now at a stage where we have equivalent support to move beyond the concept--now three thousand years old--and we're ready to develop a new dimension of reasoning that's a practice and not something that's in the brain; it's in the practice of the culture supported by the technology, the computer, artificial intelligence, the design of expert systems.

So that when we're talking about a computer environment we're not just talking about long distance telephone calling, we're talking about an environment that can be made intelligent in the way that artificial agents make things intelligent. So that I can have available to me as a citizen through this equipment potentially all the knowledge that experts have.

Right now one of the limits of literacy lies in the way we've sought to overcome literacy's extreme complications: we have developed experts specialized in institutions, we have tax accountants, we have lawyers, we have surgeons, we have philosophers, we have consultants of all kinds. The promise of the computer is that we know that expert knowledge is really much easier to program or simulate through artificial intelligence than common sense is. It's easier for a computer to figure out your taxes than buy a hamburger. So we'll leave the common sense to the citizens, and we'll make available to them by means of their common sense, the expert systems that are rapidly being put into computers.

Through computing the citizen will be able to be his or her own expert just as the Bible and the encyclopedia in print culture allowed people to become their own priest during the Protestant Reformation or, in the eighteenth century, their own craftsman. This process of evolution will continue with the computer. There'll be a prosthesis of expertise that will be available to the citizens and that will no longer depend on the experts. We need to design school practices covering the same sorts of general education practices we have now which will allow people to use that expertise intelligently and in their own interest. Because the potential again for abuse and destruction is of course enormous.

LR: Among the architectural metaphors that deconstruction has used there's the "defective cornerstone" which refigures overriding structures, like the patriarchal one we're given to refer to within such dominant ideologies of the university as feminism, in terms of something already inside thinking or grammar that thus organizes the bottom line of its public address but also and already disbands it, disseminates it. That's still in line with tensions familiar to us from psychoanalysis. Does your project presuppose a going beyond that, or a reorganization or redistribution of post-structures?

GU: The point of departure for the design project for a new computeracy is the existing practices of schooling, to see how writing has evolved up to this point. What are the practices that have been institutionalized to tap these resources? Let's use that as a point of departure for thinking further, for reinventing or pushing history further. This is necessary because you're teaching people who've been trained in literacy. The idea would be not to have them junk all that, the power of that, but precisely to use the analytical power of literacy to continue the invention process, to bootstrap into a new kind of thinking.

When we look at our practices now--say, the practices of argumentation, the practices of narrative, however they're manifested from disciplinary work to popular storytelling or whatever--we find that what they have in common is that their energies are organized around a point of dilemma. So, in argumentation one of the most common strategies is to take arguments and essentially tie a knot around a particular dilemma and pose the dilemma (which is a kind of set of paradoxical alternatives) to your opponent in the argument, a kind of either/or. Of course if they accept this dilemma they'll lose because they're going to look bad either way it comes out. Narrative does a very similar thing in the posing of the conflict; the story turns on and around a conflict or otherwise there wouldn't be a story. Something's gone wrong, something has been violated, transgressed, there's an absence, something is missing. It's this conflict that has to be resolved.

Now both in the argument and in the story the resolution either of the dilemma or of the conflict is always arbitrary and artificial because it's related to the structure of the process, it's not something in the real. And the solution is always illusory in a way; it's kind of a trick of the system, a feature of the form. It's the power of the form to untie the knots that it ties up. And this would be something like the defective cornerstone.

Let's consider the materiality of the form that we're using, the materiality of our linear, literate forms, like argumentation in the essay or the novel. The ability to win an argument is the ability to create a complex form in which people can't see that it's a suppressed premise that is the thing that allows you to persuade them; or they can't find out what your suppressed premise is, and are thus unable to respond adequately to what you're saying. In the story it's the enigma, that narrative mystery that sustains the interest, that draws in the reader or the viewer, gets him to identify with the story, gets him caught up with trying to understand what's happening in the plot, not noticing meanwhile the logic of the cause-and-effect interrogation, Why did that happen, Why did the person go into the haunted house? While their analytic thinking is distracted by that enigma a kind of dreamwork myth or mist is being laid over the distracted part and what we're given is sort of an illusory satisfaction of our reasoning processes. We say, "ah hah, well there's some reason for that to happen," when in effect what was happening instead was internalization of a kind of dream image, the image of the myths of the culture.

Within our current practices we can get down to this fundamental organization of our forms around a dilemma that's really an enigma, really a dream structure, then we can accept and see through that and say, "well, that's the point of departure now for redesigning our thinking." The problem of the dilemma (and the enigma) for literacy has been that propaganda experts were extremely efficient at exploiting these so-called defects or defective cornerstones of the materiality of our literacy. Can we design formal practices of computeracy in such a way that it would be possible, in a week let's say, in the simplest sort of way, at the first-grade level, to expose the formal features of dilemma and enigma, so even a school child could see through the tricks of storytellers and propagandists and arguers who are all in effect exploiting the weaknesses of the formal system? How do we do that?

That's where the design comes in. In one stroke, with the invention of outlining, the privilege of intellectual men trained in the church schools collapsed, withdrew into hermetic practices and had a life there, but no function any longer in the mainstream of educational practices in the modern world. Compared to the extensive training practices and extraordinary amount of time required for the development of their memory powers in the service of winning debates, outlining and indexing proved a much better way to organize information. We're at a moment like that when the promise of computing is the development of a logical system that's so much simpler than argumentation that it will do to the complexities of argument on which we have depended in literacy what say outlining and indexing did to the complex mnemonic systems of the church school in the middle ages. The computer promises to overcome what has turned out to be the limits of the page.

LR: I can't help but wonder why you decided to refer to your electronic project as the "case of Florida."

GU: I meant for it to resonate specifically with your book The Case of California to call attention to the shift that is taking place along the axes of cultural life in America. The first century of our intellectual history is organized along a north-south axis, from Massachusetts to Virginia. The figure often associated with that axis is Edgar Allan Poe. The second century of our intellectual history is organized along an east-west axis from New York to California. The associated figure is Woody Allen. The case of Florida hypothesizes that the third century of American culture will have been organized along a third axis--between Florida and Latin America--that tips off balance the other two axes without replacing them, an off-balance that alters fundamentally the character of our culture. A possible figure or figurehead for the new configuration I'm working out, one that makes the jump from your case to mine, could be old Walt Disney himself, considering that the transition from California to Florida has already been conducted in the transit between Disneyland and Disneyworld.

LR: Indeed Disney exercised his political influence most explicitly in Latin America, which is also where the next greatest critical reception of his magic rose up (following the German one).

GU: I'm counting on your new work on "Nazi Psychoanalysis" to help me out with the "axis" pun. But seriously, I am considering the Florida-Latin America link along the lines of the California-Germany link that you established. This topography is conceptual after all. And within this conceptual space you were the first to enter; it's the psychoanalytic theory of mourning that is most helpful in hypothesizing the nature of century three. The Case of California suggests that while literate subjects are organized as selves (characterized in terms of superego formation), televisual subjects are not. The appeals to character and values and responsibility of the sort associated with the current Republican shift away from liberal humanism to communitarianism have failed to take this new subjectivation into account.

As most people know by now, the Internet was designed as a decentered communications network, such that it would continue to function in the event of a nuclear strike. This pre-ruined or pre-smashed system is irresistibly evocative for postmodern theories. For me the resonance comes with the psychoanalytic account of the way the unconscious continues to communicate with the conscious mind, despite the smashing successes of repression: dreamwork as a kind of packet switching. The importance of this homology or generalized analogy between Internet technology and the discourse of the unconscious is the way it supports the post-structural theory of computing. Not least among the reasons why poststructuralism seems so relevant to computing is that the former allows us to recognize that the latter is a prosthesis of human mentality all right: precisely the prosthesis of the unconscious. The fact is that literacy--all the practices of alphabetic writing mounted in the institutions of science--has been quite adequate as a prosthesis of conscious cognition. The electronic practices emerging now promise to supply a similar support to augment and direct unconscious reasoning. The premise of the case of Florida is that the practices that would allow education to tap into this interface between electronic technologies and the unconscious remain to be invented.

LR: You mean at the same time that "Florida" is no place, a construct.

GU: That's a problem, that each utopia is a dystopia. Theory tells me that wherever we encounter topos we add the other notion of place that Derrida rescued from Plato, namely chora. So it's uchora and/or dyschora. But we don't know what that would be yet. But yes, every place is potentially such a node. This is the promise of the electronic. You don't have to be in a particular central place to be in a creative place. Our equipment shows us that memory spread through many small but linked computers is much more powerful and much more like human thinking than what huge central processors attain or retain by in effect limiting the memory of a system to a line rather than opening it across a network.

LR: But this chora is not just the place in which you find yourself when you type into the computer but it's inside the computer at the same time, it's part of the program.

GU: The "case" is a test to see what happens when we redesign at every level the relationship between the particular and the general. We can all get on line and be in MOO space, in virtual space together while locally grounded in some other way. How do we internalize that? From orality to literacy to computeracy we internalize our equipment only to put it out again into the organization of our social space. There's a correspondence between our logical relations and our international relations.

MS: We were taught, my generation as well as yours, to restrict problems to the most local definition possible. We were forbidden to think universally. Universality was banned, and for good reasons. Universal laws always seemed imperialist to us, and it's our generation that created this suspicion, and rightly so. As soon as there is a universal law we would think or analyze that it was an inflated local law, and therefore that it was unique, and in need of criticism. I adhered all my life to this type of analysis, except on one point. The reason being that I am originally a mathematician, and I never stopped studying mathematics while working on my books, since a large part of my books were also based on mathematical models and demonstrations. I also held on to analyses of mathematical cases, because this is a universality that is acceptable, and in a way is not imperialist. In the fifth century BC an inevitable universality was born: whether we're Sri Lankan, New Zealander, German, or French, we are mathematicians.

And this is a universality that sticks its tongue out at supporters of the "local." And I've always lived within this tension, because my work forced me to look at local spaces, but I always had in my head the notion of universality that I was at the same time fighting. Therefore I feel that at the close of this century we must ask ourselves if these local, singular, multi-cultural studies, etc., if it won't some day open up for us a new way in which to conceive the universal. That is the question I ask myself. I have not abandoned the old philosophical idea that we need to conquer everything. When I talk about geometrical education, I mean that no matter what culture I address, I will always teach them math. No matter what. And there is something there that reunifies.

Today the world is coded. In the fifth century BC, all we had in our heads was the notion of universals. And today ... even Newton's universal laws are contested, because there is chaos, etc.; but geometry still stands. We risk an ancient universality today, given that television is an educational channel that is culturally unique, and this is very serious. There are very powerful people who have already bought all the networks in question, and if one day there is a world university, it will belong to them. Imagine a world university owned by Philip Morris or some other company: can you imagine? It would teach its own truth, teach everyone to obey its laws, never before has such a danger hung over our heads. This is worse than any ancient conceptions of universality. And the only thing to fight back with, would be other types of universality. The big debates today are universal in nature.

GU: I do think that there's a considerable risk here. And this has to be thought through very carefully. And that's why I say the Florida project is still an adventure. My optimism is partly and simply a decision to take a certain kind of attitude towards the situation we're in, which is to say that as an educator I believe in the values of American democratic education. But what we're saying is mythic too; that if we don't participate in the design of these practices as educators we will have surrendered even these newest media to the designs the entertainment industry, the military and other kinds of institutions already have on them: all these institutions are very busily designing the practices for these new technologies. Educators have a responsibility to engage in this process. And the optimism is not so much an optimism of the outcome as that of a willingness to take on the project. There's nothing that says that it will come out badly or that it will come out for the best. We know from the history of formal change that the forms of the practices we're talking about will support any kind of ideology.

Part of my optimism is related to the multi-sensory nature of the equipment, to the way it supports, brings together, makes sense out of quite different areas of knowledge. If you compare what we know about the equipment with all the books I've read about creative thinking, you'll see that both descriptions, how the new equipment and how creativity work, are virtually the same. Creative thinking and the latest equipment are on the same wavelength in a functional and conceptual way. We need to exploit that fit, that possibility. And we must apply our efforts to the schools. They're like the roads of Rome, already there, already spread out throughout society, we already believe in and support them as a society, and we've already been putting the equipment in there not knowing really why, just wanting it there somehow. This equipment is precisely the thing that will turn our children into creative thinkers, a goal the school system never supported before, never wanted, and never tried to teach. We've always only taught the verification of the other's creativity. But it's still a mystery how it gets invented.

A second part of my optimism comes down to the way our worst and best policies, for example capitalism, remain absolutely adaptable. Capitalism really doesn't care; it'll sell little red Mao books if those are hot. It doesn't care what it sells as long as it sells something.

LR: But would capitalism rather sell "nothing" than not sell?

GU: Capitalism, I think, can learn, which is a fundamental reflection on the intelligence of the human species. Let's figure out how to teach capitalism something. Some of the most promising practices for accessing the creative thinking inside the equipment comes from other cultures. Some of the models that we need are lying around already available but not yet plugged in; they are the models brought to our culture by the black diaspora, such as various African spiritual modes of divining. Then we have our own pattern-making intelligence; we call it mathematics or we call it poetry. With the computer we can map any two systems one onto the other. It doesn't matter what the systems are, a kind of explanatory effect results from taking say one completely unknown system and another completely unknown system and simply mapping one onto the other. Suddenly human beings understand something. So the sound spectrum is like the light spectrum. We don't really understand either one but now we have a way of coordinating them so that bright colors and sharp sounds seem to go together. Those kinds of coordinating patterns, the extraordinary richness of them, is available in all kinds of non-Western practices. The motivation for learning about non-Western cultures has become quite different than it had been. Whereas before in the colonial literate history of the West there was only the complete incompatibility of other civilizations, the cultural practices of the non-Western world now begin to make a great deal of sense--to compute--in our newest techno contexts.

To complete this point about the homology linking the pre-smashed design of the Internet with the concept of repressed communication, my recent book Heuretics: The Logic of Invention describes a heuristic generator that may be applied to this question. The idea is that the system of most intellectual inventions may be understood in terms of a heuristic generator mnemonically identified by the acronym "CATTt." The letters stand for Contrast-Analogy-Theory-Target-tale. As an attempt to invent a practice for an electronic culture, the case of Florida is being generated out of a Contrast with the literate apparatus; the Theory comes from poststructuralism; the Target is the Internet; I won't go into the whole business of the "tale" just now. The point I want to make in our context is that the Analogy in our generator (the extant practice that serves as a figurative model for designing our new discourse) derives from the process of pidgin linguistics.

It is rather a double metaphor, to say that what is happening in contemporary music, the formations of hybrids out of the contact of different cultural traditions, is a relay for a process that may be applied to other dimensions of culture as well. This question needs much more contextualizing than I can provide here, and I apologize for the crudeness of these remarks. But the validity of this line of thinking--confirming that the device of appropriation at the heart of postmodernism is something more profound than a stylistic fashion--comes from the homology I have been elaborating here. What is the most smashed discourse we have at the historical level, the social level, to complete the pattern offered by the Internet and the unconscious, technology and psychology? It is the music of the African Diaspora. The process by which Africans integrated their cultural practices with the materials of whatever place they found themselves offers a frame for understanding how literacy becomes electronic.