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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 terms—as 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 terms—as 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 anything—it 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 surface—it 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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