Heuretics

In science, the most exciting expression isn’t “Eureka!” It’s “Huh?” Michael Hawley.

Self-Portrait

This bulletin board was in my office from 1980 until just the other day, when I moved to a new space.  This blog is a kind of inhabitable assemblage, whose point of departure is whatever that collection amounted to.  The dynamic here is an unfolding of an inquiry that  cyrstallizes regularly into seminars.  Comments welcome.

“Heuretics” refers to the use of theory for the invention of new texts (poetics of any sort). It is listed in the O.E.D. as obsolete or rare, and paired with “hermeneutics,” the use of theory for the interpretation of existing texts. The purpose of this blog is to develop and apply heuretics. The primary target of this experiment is “electracy,” the apparatus of digital technology.

Blogetics

This blog is approaching a formal limit, a turning upon itself signaling closure.  The number of posts here make it difficult to grasp the unity of the project, even while acknowledging that the project itself is a work-in-progress (discovering its shape).  Heuretics is not intended as a “news” site tracking the vicissitudes of this approach to inquiry (perhaps there is a need for such a site).  Nonetheless, there are a few elements that still need to be addressed, for the site to achieve coherence, and I will continue to update the blog accordingly.

One new thread is to explore the potential categorial role of alchemical and related hermetic semiotic systems.  Is it possible to classify disaster by means of Earth Air Fire Water (EAFW) relationships, retrieving for contemporary thought the emblematic coherence, if not the mythology, of this history?  Gaston Bachelard is one resource for this inquiry, as is Jung, not to mention the arts applications by such figures  as Duchamp and Ernst.  This thread is organized around Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of “element” as the category of “flesh,” for an image metaphysics derived from modernist painting, especially Cezanne and Klee.  A framing question concerns the oracle strategy of EmerAgency consulting.  The KaChing cloud syncretizes Asian and Western oracles with poststructural and vanguard arts innovations as a delivery practice for flash reason.

Meanwhile, the project at the core of this blog is based on an assignment to a graduate  seminar in theory (Spring 2009).  The blogs listed in Blogging of the Disaster were composed by some of the students in that seminar. The heuretic and grammatological methods used to undertake the experiment are recorded here explicitly in the category  Seminar, as part of an effort to bring more shape to the sprawl of categories and tags.  Shape (Eidos) is achieved in part by pattern, and in part by stopping at some point.  I am also documenting the CATTt operations of the 2010 & 2011 seminars in the blog Routine.

________________

What is the significance of the header scene?

(Gregory Ulmer is Professor of English and Media Studies at the University of Florida).

[*One who practices heuREtics.]