This article sets out the rationale for a videographic scholarship (the audiovisual study of screen media) that adopts constraint-based or ‘parametric’ procedures, and concludes with a short manifesto composed according to the simple constraint of division into ten equal segments of 50 words each. The article situates a parametric practice in relation to OuLiPo (a group founded in the early 1960s to explore constraint-based approaches to writing), to pataphysics (an absurdist branch of knowledge concerned with what eludes understanding by conventional means), to themes in the digital humanities, and to the posthuman. And it issues a call to forge an ‘agonistic society’ of videographic scholars who goad each other to greater achievement through the conspicuous and wasteful expenditure of resources of knowledge.
