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Chora
In Ulmer's follow up to Teletheory, Heuretics, he remakes mystoriography through the concept of chora, which Derrida gets from
Plato's Timaeus. "Chorography" becomes Ulmer's new characterization of the practice of memory. As a "term," chorography is "a
rhetoric of invention concerned with the history of 'place' in relation to memory" (Heuretics 39). As a "strategy," it "consider[s] the
'place' and its 'genre' in rhetorical termsas a topos" (33). From a Platonic viewpoint, the chora is the space where the philosopher's
eternal truths are stored, a metaphysical memory bank, and the topos is the situated, literal place the sophists use as memory aids. In
Teletheory, memory as topos is already in use: Miles City, Little Big Horn. A personal place that resides physically on the earth and
in the person's memory is used as the scene for invention. In Heuretics, the two concepts are more explicitly conflated: literal and metaphysical
come to share the same space.
- "The strategy of chorography for deconstructing the frontier
metaphor of research is to consider the 'place' and its 'genre' in
rhetorical termsas a topos. The project is then to replace
topos itself (not just one particular setting but place
as such) with chora wherever the former is found in the
trivium. In order to foreground the foundational function of
location in thought, choral writing organizes any manner of information
by means of the writer's specific position in the time and space of a
culture" (33).
- "The choral strategy of writing with the paradigm [is] to include the
'set' of possible terms collected under the heading of a given concept
or category, rather than to select one part and suppress the remainder"
(85).
- "Chorography adds to the notion of 'value' the sense of the 'remainder'
to suggest that the absent terms [meanings] have been suppressed
because their availability as substitutes seemed 'impossible'"
(86).
- "Chorography is an impossible possibility" (26).
- "The 'timing' of chorography is important because hypermedia still
lacks a 'rhetoric'. 'While the teaching of classical rhetoric may have
waned over the years, an accepted set of conventions about style,
syntax, and structure still exists. . . . No such rhetoric exists for
hypertext'" (27).
- Writing with the paradigm is to use "a set of abstract manipulable
elements ready to be harmonized with a plethora [ple-chora?] of
other electronic flows" (128): TV, film,
telephone, WWW, e-mail, MOO, radio, video, MP3s, et al.
- "A principle of choral research [is] to collect what I find into a set,
unified by a pattern of repetitions, rather
than by a concept. Electronic learning is
more like discovery than proof" (56).
- "The chorographer . . . writes with paradigms not arguments" (38).
- "Chora receives everything or gives place to everything, but
Plato insists that in fact it has to be a virgin place, and that it has
to be totally foreign, totally exterior to anything that it receives.
Since it is absolutely blank, everything that is printed on it is
automatically effaced. It remains foreign to the imprint it receives;
so in a sense, it does not receive anythingit does not receive what
it receives nor does it give what it gives. Everything inscribed in it
erases itself immediately, while remaining in
it. It is thus an impossible surfaceit is not even a surface, because
it has no depth" (Derrida, qtd. 65).
To read/write with images is to include all possible metaphorical
readings/meanings/connections as possible and to gather them into a set,
rather than to read/write with words, which are typically perceived to have fixed meanings
and limited connections. Words, however, are images too. So are places. And in Heuretics,
Ulmer invents a heuristic to place in this space.
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