Writing under erasure is similar to writing the paradigm in that it is "the strategy of using the only available language while not subscribing to its premises [i.e. set sets]. . . . Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary it remains legible" (Spivak qtd. in Heuretics 124). This is how I feel about Texas. I don't necessarily subscribe to everything the place stands for, but I can't completely erase it as my point of emergence. As Ulmer notes, "Heidegger speculated on the Ort [the german word for place] in terms of chora, not as a 'point' but as a place of convergence, figured in the X of Chi crossed through 'Being,' putting it 'under erasure'" (Heuretics 89). Derrida writes,

The ordinary sense of chora, meaning land or country, in turn presents a coherent picture of how the many things may be organized by nature or by law, into a unity which does not abolish the individual differences of the things it embraces. Given some common measure, the composite deserves a name that shows the bond joining its component parts. Household, city, land, country, a singular term naming a gathered plurality instantiates what spaciality effects. (qtd. in Heuretics 74)

Ulmer uses David Lynch's Eraserhead as an example of this sense of place. Lynch used a dream image of Philadelphia, putting the actual place under erasure, as a model for the construction of the film. But the Schwarzenegger film Eraser almost seems a better example of erasure as chora. In the movie, Schwarzenegger works for the FBI (but of course retains his autonomy and anonymity) as a one man witness protection program. America provides the "place" in which people are erased from social memory. Their identities are wiped clean by faking their deaths, but their bodies are reinscribed. They are under erasure but still readable. Personal identy as well as geographic identity are erasable. Of course the protagonist is a member of the FBI. The government is corrupt, marked out, so Scharzenegger has to reinscribe it as he reinscribes the witnesses under his protection. The truth, the meaning, of America is called into question, put under erasure; but its choral space remains readable, still produces meanings, and contains the potential for infinite reinscription.

Ulmer picks up on the X of America's reinscription: "This X is the mark and point of chora in Discipline discourse. As for the good timing of chorography, one need only observe the magical appearance of the X everywhere in America in 1992, whose vehicle was Spike Lee's Malcolm X, the X announcing that 'America' is under erasure" (Heuretics 90).

If America is becoming the land of the free and the home of electricity, the land under erasure, it is only fitting that the new metaphor for our age is videocy. The age of the idiot boX. Xtreme sports. Xtreme dating. And shouldn't the X-files be a hit show?

In teXas, X marks the spot, my place as chora.

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