Fit Wit

In the last century, we were treated to an intriguing practice. Interrogation of how academic discourse would be inflected. See Gregory Ulmer Teletheory: Gramatology in the Age of Video

Teletheory is concerned with discovering and inventing the kind of thinking and representation available for academic discourse in an electronic age. My working assumption is that the mode I seek is modeled in the simple form of the joke. This possibility is suggested in part by an opposition to the melancholy seriousness that has been associated traditionally with the emotional experience of academic work; and in opposition to the nostalgia that Jameson and others have identified as the predominant emotion of culture in the period of late capitalism. Why should wit be the best response to these moods? [p. 61]
Fast forward.

Ulmer elaborates a practice of mystory and as to be expected by the subtitle weaves in Derrida. This particular passage drawing on Derrida's memorial lectures about his friend Paul de Man and the possibilities of an account of "deconstruction in America" is interesting by its invocation of the turn.
The turn to the anecdotes is required by the impossibility of accounting for somehting still being invented. While confessing his own exclusion from narrative ability, Derrida suggests that there is a story to tell. [Ulmer then quotes from Derrida Mémoires for Paul de Man trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava] But is there a proper place, is there a proper story for this thing? [We skip ahead in the quotation to its end.] If I had to risk a single definition of deconstruction, one as brief, elliptical, and economical as a password, I would say simply and without overstatement: plus d'une langue—both more than a language and no more of a language. [Ulmer continues in the next paragraph in his own voice.] I repeated this definition because it is fundamental to the strategy of mystory as a transduction between the different registers of culture. This password is nonsesne, Derrida admits [...] [p. 202]
My own marginal annotations in my copy of Teletheory inscribe the remark "no more from a language" and a cross-reference to see page 203 (the next page) where one finds another marginal annotation that reads " form from see p 202). And underlined on this page is Ulmer's or his typesetter's rendering "to extract form it the wit". Typo, no doubt. Here at play with nonsense and sense. A coming and leaving of language. More flavour and more context:
But if transference is involved, how is the story to be told without mourning? We return here to the problematic of the emergence of electronic discourse specifically in the Symbolic register of narrative, organized by the scene of the entry into language and the internalizations associated with mourning. Mystory attempts to work with and through this scene of mourning, to extract form it the wit generated by the transgressive exchanges also operating in this register.
Form it.

And so for day 1160
15.02.2010