This morning I watched the city shake itself awake as the yellow cut into the gray, and I found myself trying to do the same.
These last few weeks have been a bit like that feeling you get right before you've had one glass too many, and last night, especially. You know, where the conversations around you and the clanking of silverware and the clinking of wine glasses melt together into a steady, low hum, and time slows down, just a little, and you begin to feel a bit flushed. You know, that feeling where the lights seem a little out of focus and you can't stop smiling and you find everything he says to be incredibly sweet and charming. Well, even if you don't know, that's the sort of happy buzz that so perfectly describes the (more) sober reality of recently; no matter where I am the cold doesn't ever really seem to touch me because my heart is always warm, and without realizing it I smile all the time now. But the best part is that he's that wonderful, even without a glass or two of chardonnay. So, while the new year signals the onset of another two blistery months and all sorts of endings, recently, everything feels like the beginning and possible.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Monday, December 20, 2010
I have no advice for anybody; except to, you know, be awake enough to see where you are
I've really got nothing to say this time, except that I've been listening to BBC radio nonstop all evening and that Mumford & Sons are rivaled perhaps only by the Mountain Goats in their ability to make music so incredibly beautiful that you barely notice that the lyrics are rapt with sadness.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
You Smell Like Winter
Change was the name of the game this past year and this year is winding down because it's suddenly dark by five and every night that I walk home my hair inevitably ends up smelling like firewood.
The sadness is always the easiest to write, at least that's how I've always felt. The happiness seems always elusive and slightly out of reach and I've always had a hell of a time putting it into words. But I've made a promise to myself to try to write more often. 2010 came and went way too fast, and so, in these last few days, my goal is to slow things down, to grab hold of what's left of 2010 and keep it, momentarily, close and still.
Tonight, at the JCC, a lady told me that my wrapping looked "like crap" and kept complaining about how overpriced it was. I wanted to say "Hey lady, it all goes to charity. Chill," but my palms kept sweating as all my corners went to shit.
But, despite that, the feeling of being surrounded by (mostly) friendly faces, as strangers within mere hours became more and more like friends, and the bustling sounds of shuffling feet and frantic chatter and the crinkling of wrapping paper made the walk home in the cold not only bearable, but exhilirating.
Tonight was busier than the last three days combined, and I wish every night was like this. It's true that I've never really learned how to fully relax, but I don't think I've ever really wanted to. I think that is why I have trouble with inbetweens, with breaks, and waiting because most of these brief periods are bookended by really wonderful places and people and big plans, like next week when I head to New York where we'll count backwards from ten to one and hug and pop corks. And while these moments of waiting inevitably lead to cleaner closets and (temporarily) more organized sock drawers, they also make me feel overwhelmingly restless.
So, with no work and no school, I've ended up doing the only thing I know how: I snagged several gigs tutoring non-native speakers at a little coffee shop around the corner from me that plays great music and serves a good brew. And so, once again, I've squashed in-between with right now and always, but I guess that's easy for someone who gets excited more easily than most about more things than you'd think possible.
The sadness is always the easiest to write, at least that's how I've always felt. The happiness seems always elusive and slightly out of reach and I've always had a hell of a time putting it into words. But I've made a promise to myself to try to write more often. 2010 came and went way too fast, and so, in these last few days, my goal is to slow things down, to grab hold of what's left of 2010 and keep it, momentarily, close and still.
Tonight, at the JCC, a lady told me that my wrapping looked "like crap" and kept complaining about how overpriced it was. I wanted to say "Hey lady, it all goes to charity. Chill," but my palms kept sweating as all my corners went to shit.
But, despite that, the feeling of being surrounded by (mostly) friendly faces, as strangers within mere hours became more and more like friends, and the bustling sounds of shuffling feet and frantic chatter and the crinkling of wrapping paper made the walk home in the cold not only bearable, but exhilirating.
Tonight was busier than the last three days combined, and I wish every night was like this. It's true that I've never really learned how to fully relax, but I don't think I've ever really wanted to. I think that is why I have trouble with inbetweens, with breaks, and waiting because most of these brief periods are bookended by really wonderful places and people and big plans, like next week when I head to New York where we'll count backwards from ten to one and hug and pop corks. And while these moments of waiting inevitably lead to cleaner closets and (temporarily) more organized sock drawers, they also make me feel overwhelmingly restless.
So, with no work and no school, I've ended up doing the only thing I know how: I snagged several gigs tutoring non-native speakers at a little coffee shop around the corner from me that plays great music and serves a good brew. And so, once again, I've squashed in-between with right now and always, but I guess that's easy for someone who gets excited more easily than most about more things than you'd think possible.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
According to Plan
It’s been too long, but not because nothing has happened. No. This summer was the brightest and the bluest and how do you write always sunshine and the longest days turning into longer nights and the hazy happy blur they all became? And now it's already winter and even though that blue has turned to gray, I can't imagine being anywhere else than home, in DC.
On most days, I have no need for elsewhere because here, yes, home, is where I only ever want to be.But on some days, the idea of elsewhere seems alluring and exciting and a little bit dangerous.
I've been meaning to write about my trip to New York for the last few days, before the memory of those sights and those feelings and those conversations and the sound of that laugh slip too far away from me.
And I couldn't help but notice how that feeling of journey, of travel, of departures and arrivals seemed so familiar. It feels like I spent so much of last year in transit--going back and forth from DC to Williamsburg. And after a short weekend away, I can remember how it felt to first glimpse the purple and white lights of the city in the distance, to put away my book and button up my coat, to will the train to race into the station.
This time, though, I wasn't traveling alone and I barely did any reading. Flying through those anonymous cities, blurred green and brown landscapes, the anticipation and delirium brought on by the prospect of a new city made the trip more exciting than any of those train rides I took last year. And it was a whirlwind. There was Times Square and weirdos, and even weirder weirdos, and there were tourists who never quite learned how to walk properly and taxi drivers who have no shame; there was a smelly subway station and an even smellier bus station; and there was a long drive back to not look forward to and a noticeable lack of hand sanitizer
And while there wasn't a trip to Rockefeller Center, there was a free Broadway show and easy conversation and belly laughs and neurotic banter, and the oldest friends I've got, not to mention there was even a new friend too. There was spiked apple cider and a holiday party and the plotting of an escape from said party under the influence of said cider; there were toasted bagels and Thai food and sandwiches, so many sandwiches. And most of all, there was spontaneity and an overwhelming sense of freedom.
The city was like a dream this past weekend, as we made our way uptown and down and back up again, and finally out. My head was spinning the whole time and my heart was thumping so hard I thought it might spill out of my chest, and even though I complain about New York, I still think that it was the gritty charm of the city that finally got a hold of me; there really is something about New York that makes it a hell of a place to visit.
On most days, I have no need for elsewhere because here, yes, home, is where I only ever want to be.But on some days, the idea of elsewhere seems alluring and exciting and a little bit dangerous.
I've been meaning to write about my trip to New York for the last few days, before the memory of those sights and those feelings and those conversations and the sound of that laugh slip too far away from me.
And I couldn't help but notice how that feeling of journey, of travel, of departures and arrivals seemed so familiar. It feels like I spent so much of last year in transit--going back and forth from DC to Williamsburg. And after a short weekend away, I can remember how it felt to first glimpse the purple and white lights of the city in the distance, to put away my book and button up my coat, to will the train to race into the station.
This time, though, I wasn't traveling alone and I barely did any reading. Flying through those anonymous cities, blurred green and brown landscapes, the anticipation and delirium brought on by the prospect of a new city made the trip more exciting than any of those train rides I took last year. And it was a whirlwind. There was Times Square and weirdos, and even weirder weirdos, and there were tourists who never quite learned how to walk properly and taxi drivers who have no shame; there was a smelly subway station and an even smellier bus station; and there was a long drive back to not look forward to and a noticeable lack of hand sanitizer
And while there wasn't a trip to Rockefeller Center, there was a free Broadway show and easy conversation and belly laughs and neurotic banter, and the oldest friends I've got, not to mention there was even a new friend too. There was spiked apple cider and a holiday party and the plotting of an escape from said party under the influence of said cider; there were toasted bagels and Thai food and sandwiches, so many sandwiches. And most of all, there was spontaneity and an overwhelming sense of freedom.
The city was like a dream this past weekend, as we made our way uptown and down and back up again, and finally out. My head was spinning the whole time and my heart was thumping so hard I thought it might spill out of my chest, and even though I complain about New York, I still think that it was the gritty charm of the city that finally got a hold of me; there really is something about New York that makes it a hell of a place to visit.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Byron Hawk
Berthoff as "romantic"
"The binary heuristics/chance excludes the possibility that there can be a heuristics based on aleatory procedures or methods" (2)
"Compositionists use vitalism as a term that denotes an 'anything goes' approach to writing and thinking, an an ahistorical category that subsumes multiple divergent practices and as an assumed negative counterpart to preferred rhetorical practices that establishes a binary between rhetoric and poetics" (3)
"[Critiques] rest on romanticism, vitalism, and postmodernism being equivalent to the narrow, ahistorical notion that vitalism equals a subjectivism based on genius and irrationalism, as opposed to The New Rhetoric which is "a rhetoric for the real world, and as such teachable" (Kennedy, 231)
"Networking or being connected has a whole new set of connotations and practices. Hawk argues that postmodern space, hyperspace or cyberspace is different from place: distance and speed are no longer determined by geography alone and face-to-face meeting. /.../"Such nonplaces are constellations of spatial fragments and social engagements are detached from local surroundings and roughly equivalent no matter their geographic location--they are connected globally but locally disconnected." (204)
Berlin in Contemporary Composition: The Major PEdagogoical Theories" argues that process pedagogies are no better than produt pedagogies.
Freire specifically argues against those who universalize pedagogy. Freire undertand that teachers should not turn his pedagogy into law but rather should look to their speific contexts to invent and develop pedagogoical practices, processes and methods. (210).
In his introduction to _Between Borders_ Lawrence Grossberg posits/.../the goal of a pedagogoy of articulation is not to "save the world" but to get the students to invent and link, to make connections and map articulations. "
"Such a pedagogy must leave the field of articulation as open as possible (216)
Sirc's approach is that of "Godless Composition" It's a throw of the dice.
"A teacher's pedagogical desires typically have nothing to do with a student's emergent desires--whether our desires take the form of programs, courses or subjects" 217
Thomas Kent in Post Process Theory: writing is public, writing is interpretive, writing is situated.
In Writing/Teaching: Essays Toward a Rhetoric of Pedagogy, Paul Kameen povides/.../an example of using the ecology of the classroom to foreground invention and imagine a more open pedagogy beyond social-epistemic and post process (224): "This space between question and answer is filled with possibility"
Colerdige's method operates from no set starting point and progresses to no predetermined end point other than inquiry and invention.
I am working to find a pedagogoical method that itners into the ecology of the classroom and utilizes its complexity for rhetorical production.
229--"we take dwelling and building as two separate activities, an idea that has something correct in it. Yet at the same time by the means-end schema we block our view of the essential relations. For building is not merely a means and a way toward a dwelling--to build is in itself already to dwell (Heidegger quoted in Kameen). To move out of theories of composition taht separate self, world, audience and langauge as just so many means to a text, it is important to realize that to write/teach is in itself already to dwell. /.../To dwell in building a text is not to master self, world, audience, or langauge but to lie in them, listen to them, and emerge with them. (230).
"SIlence operates intuitively and purposively. Intensive listening oepns a space or a path for our own speaking and invention to emerge. Listening to the ecology means intuitively linking ourselves to the lines of flight taht are emerging and being a good rhetor or teacher means letting this movement inform our decision to stay silent or speak. Teachers ahve to let wahtever "arises out of the omoment" emerge, let kairos take over and work 'to perfect what the student has to offer' and put his or her 'considerable resources somehow in the service of [the students]' (Kameen, Writing/Teaching, 251).
"The binary heuristics/chance excludes the possibility that there can be a heuristics based on aleatory procedures or methods" (2)
"Compositionists use vitalism as a term that denotes an 'anything goes' approach to writing and thinking, an an ahistorical category that subsumes multiple divergent practices and as an assumed negative counterpart to preferred rhetorical practices that establishes a binary between rhetoric and poetics" (3)
"[Critiques] rest on romanticism, vitalism, and postmodernism being equivalent to the narrow, ahistorical notion that vitalism equals a subjectivism based on genius and irrationalism, as opposed to The New Rhetoric which is "a rhetoric for the real world, and as such teachable" (Kennedy, 231)
"Networking or being connected has a whole new set of connotations and practices. Hawk argues that postmodern space, hyperspace or cyberspace is different from place: distance and speed are no longer determined by geography alone and face-to-face meeting. /.../"Such nonplaces are constellations of spatial fragments and social engagements are detached from local surroundings and roughly equivalent no matter their geographic location--they are connected globally but locally disconnected." (204)
Berlin in Contemporary Composition: The Major PEdagogoical Theories" argues that process pedagogies are no better than produt pedagogies.
Freire specifically argues against those who universalize pedagogy. Freire undertand that teachers should not turn his pedagogy into law but rather should look to their speific contexts to invent and develop pedagogoical practices, processes and methods. (210).
In his introduction to _Between Borders_ Lawrence Grossberg posits/.../the goal of a pedagogoy of articulation is not to "save the world" but to get the students to invent and link, to make connections and map articulations. "
"Such a pedagogy must leave the field of articulation as open as possible (216)
Sirc's approach is that of "Godless Composition" It's a throw of the dice.
"A teacher's pedagogical desires typically have nothing to do with a student's emergent desires--whether our desires take the form of programs, courses or subjects" 217
Thomas Kent in Post Process Theory: writing is public, writing is interpretive, writing is situated.
In Writing/Teaching: Essays Toward a Rhetoric of Pedagogy, Paul Kameen povides/.../an example of using the ecology of the classroom to foreground invention and imagine a more open pedagogy beyond social-epistemic and post process (224): "This space between question and answer is filled with possibility"
Colerdige's method operates from no set starting point and progresses to no predetermined end point other than inquiry and invention.
I am working to find a pedagogoical method that itners into the ecology of the classroom and utilizes its complexity for rhetorical production.
229--"we take dwelling and building as two separate activities, an idea that has something correct in it. Yet at the same time by the means-end schema we block our view of the essential relations. For building is not merely a means and a way toward a dwelling--to build is in itself already to dwell (Heidegger quoted in Kameen). To move out of theories of composition taht separate self, world, audience and langauge as just so many means to a text, it is important to realize that to write/teach is in itself already to dwell. /.../To dwell in building a text is not to master self, world, audience, or langauge but to lie in them, listen to them, and emerge with them. (230).
"SIlence operates intuitively and purposively. Intensive listening oepns a space or a path for our own speaking and invention to emerge. Listening to the ecology means intuitively linking ourselves to the lines of flight taht are emerging and being a good rhetor or teacher means letting this movement inform our decision to stay silent or speak. Teachers ahve to let wahtever "arises out of the omoment" emerge, let kairos take over and work 'to perfect what the student has to offer' and put his or her 'considerable resources somehow in the service of [the students]' (Kameen, Writing/Teaching, 251).
Ong
In 1986, Walter Ong in his essay _Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought_ writes that "without a deep understanding of /../the noetic economy of humankind before writing came along, it is impoosible to grasp what writing [has] accomplished"
In relation to the ability to "re-begin" again: "[In an oral culture] everybody, or almost everybody, must repeat and repeat and repeat the truths that have come down from the ancestors. Otherwise these truths will escape and culture will be back on square one where it started before the ancestors got the truths from their ancestors. "
"Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can only be in the mind. Writing is simply a thing, something to be manipulated, something inhuman, artificial, a manufactured product. We recognize here the same complaint that is made against computers: they are artificial contrivances, foreign to human life" (11)
"As Eric Havelock has beautifully shown in his Preface to Plato (1963) Plato's entire epistemology was unwittingly a programmed rejection of the archaic preliterate world of thought and discourse. The world was oral, mobile, warm, personally interactive (you needed live people to produce spoken words). It was the world represented by poets, whom Plato would not allow in his Republic, because, although Plato could not formulate it this way, their thought processes and modes of expression were disruptive of the cool, analytic processes generated by writing...." (22)
--> Plato's multiple designations of the Chora seem to suggest a flawed memory. One that cannot remember past designations and thus is always reinventing, misremembering.
"Once reduced to space, words are frozen and in a sense dead. Yet there is a pradox in the fact that the deadness of the written or printed text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visual fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a limitless number of living readers. The dead, thing-like text has potentials far outdistancing those of the simply spoken world. The complementary paradox, however, isthat the written text, for all its permanence, means nothing, is not even a text, except in relationship to the spoken world. For a text to be intelligible, to deliver its message, it must be reconverted into sound, directly or indirectly, either really in the external world or in an auditory imagination. All verbal expression is ineluctably bound to sound forever" (23).
[Chora/Writing as (already) Alien] Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the wod. Such transformations of consciousness can be uplifting at the same time that they are in a sense alienating. By distancing thought, alientating it from its original habitat in sounded words, writing raises consciousness. Alientation from natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential fuller human life. (23)
In relation to the ability to "re-begin" again: "[In an oral culture] everybody, or almost everybody, must repeat and repeat and repeat the truths that have come down from the ancestors. Otherwise these truths will escape and culture will be back on square one where it started before the ancestors got the truths from their ancestors. "
"Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can only be in the mind. Writing is simply a thing, something to be manipulated, something inhuman, artificial, a manufactured product. We recognize here the same complaint that is made against computers: they are artificial contrivances, foreign to human life" (11)
"As Eric Havelock has beautifully shown in his Preface to Plato (1963) Plato's entire epistemology was unwittingly a programmed rejection of the archaic preliterate world of thought and discourse. The world was oral, mobile, warm, personally interactive (you needed live people to produce spoken words). It was the world represented by poets, whom Plato would not allow in his Republic, because, although Plato could not formulate it this way, their thought processes and modes of expression were disruptive of the cool, analytic processes generated by writing...." (22)
--> Plato's multiple designations of the Chora seem to suggest a flawed memory. One that cannot remember past designations and thus is always reinventing, misremembering.
"Once reduced to space, words are frozen and in a sense dead. Yet there is a pradox in the fact that the deadness of the written or printed text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visual fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a limitless number of living readers. The dead, thing-like text has potentials far outdistancing those of the simply spoken world. The complementary paradox, however, isthat the written text, for all its permanence, means nothing, is not even a text, except in relationship to the spoken world. For a text to be intelligible, to deliver its message, it must be reconverted into sound, directly or indirectly, either really in the external world or in an auditory imagination. All verbal expression is ineluctably bound to sound forever" (23).
[Chora/Writing as (already) Alien] Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the wod. Such transformations of consciousness can be uplifting at the same time that they are in a sense alienating. By distancing thought, alientating it from its original habitat in sounded words, writing raises consciousness. Alientation from natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential fuller human life. (23)
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Vitanza
In other words, what Plato is doing is very post-modern. Like Lyotard, a child of the post-Enlightenment, a postmodernist who confronts the crisis of rationality, the fortunate fall from a loss of overriding (grand) narratives or accounts of knowledge, science, literature, morality, or the arts, Plato, in offering a series of definitions for the Chora which contradict each other--he is creating a discourse that disrupts the potential for what Habermas calls "the universal conditions of possible understanding" (vitanza 144) Its nature queestions any possible universal conditions of knowledge.
Thus discourse on the Chora foremost reveals the chorology to center on the age old issue of whether knowledge can be grounded either on some universal, ontogenetic theory (that is some universal law or physis) or rhetorically on consensus theory (that is on homology, or local nomos). I am taking a cue from Vitanza who cites Gorgias' famous proposition that "Nothing [of essence exists" (145). Thus the Chora is not foundational. However, that does not mean the Chora must be seen along the lines of antifoundationalism.
Lyotard speaks against a universal theory of pragmatics for two primary reasons: "Firrst he says that such a universal theory is currently not possible because of the loss of grand narratives, which oriinally founded knowledge claims/.../Lyotard's second reason for opposing a universal theory is quite simply that it does not emancipate but only enslaves and impoverishes us. Consensus is only a particular state of discussion, not its end. Its end, on the contrary, is paralogy" (146).
"Paralogy can be seen as a means of discovering "what is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics." It is "to bear witness to differends; that is, it is to bear witness to the unintelligible or to disputes or differences of opinion that re systematically disallowed by the dominant language game of homological science and are therefore "silenced;" it is to bear witness "by finding idioms" for these differends. " (146-7)
"Paralogy for Lyotard means legitimation. In this ense, I distinguish paralogy from traditional or modern 'invention' which is smooth, continuous, and controlled and accounted for by a system or paradigm of knowledge which is used to promote a system or paradigm. Paralogy however is "discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical" It returns that is radically tropes--against the system or paradigm of knowledge, "changing the meaning of the word knowledge. I hereas invention is used for traditaional or modern science, paralogy is used by postmodern science." (147)
Deleuze and Guattari "aspire not only to local knowledge (nomoi) but also to radical noncodifiable (nonrational minoritarian) ways of knowing or in other words to great levels of noise.///.Specifically, their antimodel then includes a third (dis)integrating element beyond the binary (of the two general models) an element that I have alled "Third Sophistic possibilisms" and tat can be seen as "the demon, the prosopopoeia of noise" (155).
"The question Who speaks? is a question of origins, groundings, sources, capacities. If we conceive of it in this manner, we end up (or begin again) with some groupings that are not true to waht is commonly thought. (To simpify and to root the distinction, f only temporarily, I will use Berlins labels from "Rhetoric and Ideology" along with others from traditional pragmatics, a Lyotard already does). /.../The first answer to the question Who speaks? then is to be found(ed) in the addressor who shapes the world when he or she speaks. The second answer, however, is found(ed) "relationally" between an adressor and the addressee or an addressor and the code/signal, who speak only by virtue of conventions of discourse, situations, contexts, interpretive communities." (156).
VITANZA: "iT IS A QUESTION OF STUDENTS' RESISTANCE TO AND DISRUPTIONS OF [THESE] SO CALLED RIGHTS AND OTHER SELF (157).
Bartholomae shifts the conceptual starting place for a theory of composition from the self as inventor to the community as inventor.
"Whereas Bartholomae speaks oa position of privilege, of being an insider, Lyotard is against privilege and all that it entails. he is diametrically oppposed to writing from such a position, within academic discourse, because it does, indeed, finally exclude others (that is both people and ideas) from being "expressed" within that discourse. Lyotard attempts to extend the boundaries--if not tear them down--of what stands as academic discourse" (158-9)
"Academia and its discourse, no dobut, foster a private club: it excludes not only nonacademics but also nonacademic academics and their ideas. My position with respect to Barthoolomae's therefore is not that of inventing the university but that of paralogizing (the oppposite of paralyzing) the university so that it might become a (polymoprhous) perversit (159).
De Man is instead an advocate of an unstable--postmodern, third sophistic--paraepisteology and pararhethoric, both founded, but unfounded, on the perversity of a rhetoric of tropes: those specifically that resist unified theories and consequently resist totality and totalitarian knowing-doing-making. Like Lyotard, de Man is against a stable topology--that is, a rhetoric of persuasion--and for an unstable "tropology" he is against the game of knowledge as a means of totality and for the game of avant-garde theory-art as a means of resistance" (160).
"What we want, then, is a pedagogy other(wise), what we want is a pedagogy without criteria, what we desire is a counterpedagogy, which exprsses the "desire to escape the pedagogical imperative: a desire...to do away with pedagogy altogether" (berthof "Teaching" Vitanza 161).
Everything I have mentioned is an effort to to keep knowledge from being realized as a system, as categories, as generic, as techne, as political "linking" and more so as "teachable." The game of art is played so that art cannot be known. It is a game of dispersion, diaspora. It is a game of paralinkage. It is a game played proleptically. Lyotard writes that the artist or writer "works without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future post anterior modo" . But finally having discovered the rules for linkage does not mean then that they are to be codified. Instead another game of dislinkage i to be played, another game that "will have been done" This game is not of the polis, but of the pagus--"a border zone where genres of discourse enter into conflict over the mode of linking ( (163).
The chora makes no attempt to systematize ambiguity.
"what we want is a way to proceed without foundations and without criteria and without knowing as a subject and wihtout conventional theory and pedagogy. What we want then is not a discipine or metadiscipline but a nondiscipline, which--heretofore referred to as a postpedagogy--is more accurately labeled a paralogic pedagogy. We need strategies that would ateempt to be discontinuous, random, and filled with fragmented thoughts and digressions; would attempt to call each previous statement into (rhetorical) question. would attempt to use sophistic ruse and ounterruse. It woudl then be a matter of contrary language games. " (165).
"Argument in this modification is not a means of achieving or accounting for consensus. It is, instead, a means of continuous dissensus; it "counterhopes" to achieve an occasional if not permanent place of misology, a place that plato and socrates saw as an anathema but that muts be seen as the beginning of what Deleuze and Guattari would call a "nomadology" (thousand 351) or what Montaign and Lyotard combined woudl see as "just drifting/gaming" It is a place outside the philosophical and rhetorical polis; it is places (exploded and) realized through diaspora/dispersion. It is the pagus" (165).
"For paralogy the goal is not renovation but innovation; not a stochastic series based on rules that allow us to guess effectively and efficiently but a paradoxical series that invites us to break with the formal rules altogether. Thinking paralogically is thinking counterinductively in terms that are counterexamples (that are perverse to the norm). Thinking paralogically, Lyotard says, means 'searching for...the unintelligble, supporting an argument means looking for a 'paradox' and legiitimating it with new rules in the games o reasoning" (166).
Thus discourse on the Chora foremost reveals the chorology to center on the age old issue of whether knowledge can be grounded either on some universal, ontogenetic theory (that is some universal law or physis) or rhetorically on consensus theory (that is on homology, or local nomos). I am taking a cue from Vitanza who cites Gorgias' famous proposition that "Nothing [of essence exists" (145). Thus the Chora is not foundational. However, that does not mean the Chora must be seen along the lines of antifoundationalism.
Lyotard speaks against a universal theory of pragmatics for two primary reasons: "Firrst he says that such a universal theory is currently not possible because of the loss of grand narratives, which oriinally founded knowledge claims/.../Lyotard's second reason for opposing a universal theory is quite simply that it does not emancipate but only enslaves and impoverishes us. Consensus is only a particular state of discussion, not its end. Its end, on the contrary, is paralogy" (146).
"Paralogy can be seen as a means of discovering "what is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics." It is "to bear witness to differends; that is, it is to bear witness to the unintelligible or to disputes or differences of opinion that re systematically disallowed by the dominant language game of homological science and are therefore "silenced;" it is to bear witness "by finding idioms" for these differends. " (146-7)
"Paralogy for Lyotard means legitimation. In this ense, I distinguish paralogy from traditional or modern 'invention' which is smooth, continuous, and controlled and accounted for by a system or paradigm of knowledge which is used to promote a system or paradigm. Paralogy however is "discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical" It returns that is radically tropes--against the system or paradigm of knowledge, "changing the meaning of the word knowledge. I hereas invention is used for traditaional or modern science, paralogy is used by postmodern science." (147)
Deleuze and Guattari "aspire not only to local knowledge (nomoi) but also to radical noncodifiable (nonrational minoritarian) ways of knowing or in other words to great levels of noise.///.Specifically, their antimodel then includes a third (dis)integrating element beyond the binary (of the two general models) an element that I have alled "Third Sophistic possibilisms" and tat can be seen as "the demon, the prosopopoeia of noise" (155).
"The question Who speaks? is a question of origins, groundings, sources, capacities. If we conceive of it in this manner, we end up (or begin again) with some groupings that are not true to waht is commonly thought. (To simpify and to root the distinction, f only temporarily, I will use Berlins labels from "Rhetoric and Ideology" along with others from traditional pragmatics, a Lyotard already does). /.../The first answer to the question Who speaks? then is to be found(ed) in the addressor who shapes the world when he or she speaks. The second answer, however, is found(ed) "relationally" between an adressor and the addressee or an addressor and the code/signal, who speak only by virtue of conventions of discourse, situations, contexts, interpretive communities." (156).
VITANZA: "iT IS A QUESTION OF STUDENTS' RESISTANCE TO AND DISRUPTIONS OF [THESE] SO CALLED RIGHTS AND OTHER SELF (157).
Bartholomae shifts the conceptual starting place for a theory of composition from the self as inventor to the community as inventor.
"Whereas Bartholomae speaks oa position of privilege, of being an insider, Lyotard is against privilege and all that it entails. he is diametrically oppposed to writing from such a position, within academic discourse, because it does, indeed, finally exclude others (that is both people and ideas) from being "expressed" within that discourse. Lyotard attempts to extend the boundaries--if not tear them down--of what stands as academic discourse" (158-9)
"Academia and its discourse, no dobut, foster a private club: it excludes not only nonacademics but also nonacademic academics and their ideas. My position with respect to Barthoolomae's therefore is not that of inventing the university but that of paralogizing (the oppposite of paralyzing) the university so that it might become a (polymoprhous) perversit (159).
De Man is instead an advocate of an unstable--postmodern, third sophistic--paraepisteology and pararhethoric, both founded, but unfounded, on the perversity of a rhetoric of tropes: those specifically that resist unified theories and consequently resist totality and totalitarian knowing-doing-making. Like Lyotard, de Man is against a stable topology--that is, a rhetoric of persuasion--and for an unstable "tropology" he is against the game of knowledge as a means of totality and for the game of avant-garde theory-art as a means of resistance" (160).
"What we want, then, is a pedagogy other(wise), what we want is a pedagogy without criteria, what we desire is a counterpedagogy, which exprsses the "desire to escape the pedagogical imperative: a desire...to do away with pedagogy altogether" (berthof "Teaching" Vitanza 161).
Everything I have mentioned is an effort to to keep knowledge from being realized as a system, as categories, as generic, as techne, as political "linking" and more so as "teachable." The game of art is played so that art cannot be known. It is a game of dispersion, diaspora. It is a game of paralinkage. It is a game played proleptically. Lyotard writes that the artist or writer "works without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future post anterior modo" . But finally having discovered the rules for linkage does not mean then that they are to be codified. Instead another game of dislinkage i to be played, another game that "will have been done" This game is not of the polis, but of the pagus--"a border zone where genres of discourse enter into conflict over the mode of linking ( (163).
The chora makes no attempt to systematize ambiguity.
"what we want is a way to proceed without foundations and without criteria and without knowing as a subject and wihtout conventional theory and pedagogy. What we want then is not a discipine or metadiscipline but a nondiscipline, which--heretofore referred to as a postpedagogy--is more accurately labeled a paralogic pedagogy. We need strategies that would ateempt to be discontinuous, random, and filled with fragmented thoughts and digressions; would attempt to call each previous statement into (rhetorical) question. would attempt to use sophistic ruse and ounterruse. It woudl then be a matter of contrary language games. " (165).
"Argument in this modification is not a means of achieving or accounting for consensus. It is, instead, a means of continuous dissensus; it "counterhopes" to achieve an occasional if not permanent place of misology, a place that plato and socrates saw as an anathema but that muts be seen as the beginning of what Deleuze and Guattari would call a "nomadology" (thousand 351) or what Montaign and Lyotard combined woudl see as "just drifting/gaming" It is a place outside the philosophical and rhetorical polis; it is places (exploded and) realized through diaspora/dispersion. It is the pagus" (165).
"For paralogy the goal is not renovation but innovation; not a stochastic series based on rules that allow us to guess effectively and efficiently but a paradoxical series that invites us to break with the formal rules altogether. Thinking paralogically is thinking counterinductively in terms that are counterexamples (that are perverse to the norm). Thinking paralogically, Lyotard says, means 'searching for...the unintelligble, supporting an argument means looking for a 'paradox' and legiitimating it with new rules in the games o reasoning" (166).
5:30 am breakthrough
THE QUESTION THAT CONCERNS ME THEN IS HOW DO WE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING THAT HAS NO SINGULAR DESIGNATION, NO DEFINITE ATTRIBUTES, NO STATIC FORM TO CALL ITS OWN. aFTER ALL ISN'T THAT THE QUESTION WITH WHICH COMPOSITION IS IS ALWAYS STRUGGLING? HOW DO WE TEACH SOMETHING WITHOUT A SINGULAR FORM OR AIM AND TO STUDENTS FROM DIFFERENT BACKGROUNDS, WITH DIFFERENT NEEDS AND EXPERIENCES? WRITING PEDAGOGY IS IN A SENSE A PEDAGOGY THAT OCCUPIES---NO, NO, THAT MUST OCCUPY-- AN UNPLACE. IT'S AS GEOFFERY SIRC SAYS A 'HAPPENING' CONSTANTLY IN FLUX, A MOMENT OF WRITING IS UNABLE TO BE AUTHENTICALLY REPRODUCED, A MOMENT WHICH MUST CONSTANTLY BEING INVENTED AND REINVENTED IN HOPES OF A KAIROTIC BRINGING FORTH. HOW MIGHT THIS necessarily imprecise practice, THIS REPETITION OF AN ACKNOWLEDGED ALWAYS-IMPERFECT PARADIGM ENCOURAGE INVENTION? HOW MIGHT the very ambiguity surrounding what writing is AND HOW TO EMBODY IT actually help us to INVENT, to invent in THE WAY THAT MUCKELBAUER ARGUES IMITATION INVENTS?
HOW MIGHT THE EXPERIENCE OF ARTICULATING THE CHORA IN A NECESSARILY IMPRECISE AND INADEQUATE WAY LEAD TO INVENTION? HOW HAS DISCOURSE ON THE CHORA ALREADY INVENTED NEW WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT WRITING AND RHETORIC AND IDEAS OF PLACE? MIGHT THE INADEQUACIES OF CHORATIC DISCOURSE ACTUALLY BE THE PURPOSE, AS JUDITH BUTLER SUGGESTS, OF THE CHORA?
HOW MIGHT THE EXPERIENCE OF ARTICULATING THE CHORA IN A NECESSARILY IMPRECISE AND INADEQUATE WAY LEAD TO INVENTION? HOW HAS DISCOURSE ON THE CHORA ALREADY INVENTED NEW WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT WRITING AND RHETORIC AND IDEAS OF PLACE? MIGHT THE INADEQUACIES OF CHORATIC DISCOURSE ACTUALLY BE THE PURPOSE, AS JUDITH BUTLER SUGGESTS, OF THE CHORA?
Thursday, December 2, 2010
A few more things from Judy B.
"a disruptive movement" between poles. --Butler
Butler refers to the Chora and Irigaray's reading of it as not just a space, but an "inscriptional space"
Plato first refers to the Chora as "a mother, and the source or spring to a father, and the intermediate nature of a child" (50d) and later calls it "a nurse" (40b) and then as "the universal nature which receives all bodies" (55a).
--> These multiple names all under the same name, Chora, seem to echo the rhetorical issues in post-modern discourse. Situation, Ecology, etc are all terms that aim to get at the same thing. These definitions of the Chora however all stand on equal plane and instead of fighting for dominance, there's a way in which they might all suffice, offering something productive. Similarly, Rhetorical discourses many "discourses" too offer new angles of examining rhetorical action and in such a way the Chora offers a paradigm for how different, even diametric terms, might work together. Chora is about connections (RICKERT)The Chora opens things up, rather than working through exclusion and abjection, as the abject itself, it works through inclusion.
-->As Butler rights "In effect, the receiving principle potentially includes all bodies and so applies universally" (40).
Butler brings up perhaps the most important point about the Chora. Plato, who says that the Chora is undesignatable, names that which he claims cannot be named. Butler offers one crucial interpretation: "Is it that the receptacle, designated as the undesignatable, cannot be designated, or is it rather that the "cannot" functions as an "out not to be? /.../Out we not to conclude that Plato means to prohibit the very proliferation of nominative possibilities that the undesignatable might produce? Perhaps this is a representation within discourse that functions to prohibit from discourse any further representation, one which represents After all, Plato posits that which he claims cannot be posited. And he further contradicts himself when he claim that that which cannot be posited out to be posited in only one way. In this sense, this authoritative naming of the receptacle as the unnameable constitutes ta primary or founding inscription that secures this place as an inscriptional space. This naming of what cannot be named is itself a penetration into this receptacle which is at once a violent erasure, one that establishes it as an impossible yet necessary site for all further inscriptions" (44) In other words, Butler seems to be suggesting that Plato's argument is performative. that the Chora and the discourse and designations around it, are meant to show that singular designations can be dangerous. Thus the very telling of the story about the Chora, of the site of genesis, enacts and becomes an allegory of its own procedure. In other words, had Plato assigned ONE designation to the Chora, he would have given it deifnite form and thus made it stagnate, confined to those designations.
Butler refers to the Chora and Irigaray's reading of it as not just a space, but an "inscriptional space"
Plato first refers to the Chora as "a mother, and the source or spring to a father, and the intermediate nature of a child" (50d) and later calls it "a nurse" (40b) and then as "the universal nature which receives all bodies" (55a).
--> These multiple names all under the same name, Chora, seem to echo the rhetorical issues in post-modern discourse. Situation, Ecology, etc are all terms that aim to get at the same thing. These definitions of the Chora however all stand on equal plane and instead of fighting for dominance, there's a way in which they might all suffice, offering something productive. Similarly, Rhetorical discourses many "discourses" too offer new angles of examining rhetorical action and in such a way the Chora offers a paradigm for how different, even diametric terms, might work together. Chora is about connections (RICKERT)The Chora opens things up, rather than working through exclusion and abjection, as the abject itself, it works through inclusion.
-->As Butler rights "In effect, the receiving principle potentially includes all bodies and so applies universally" (40).
Butler brings up perhaps the most important point about the Chora. Plato, who says that the Chora is undesignatable, names that which he claims cannot be named. Butler offers one crucial interpretation: "Is it that the receptacle, designated as the undesignatable, cannot be designated, or is it rather that the "cannot" functions as an "out not to be? /.../Out we not to conclude that Plato means to prohibit the very proliferation of nominative possibilities that the undesignatable might produce? Perhaps this is a representation within discourse that functions to prohibit from discourse any further representation, one which represents After all, Plato posits that which he claims cannot be posited. And he further contradicts himself when he claim that that which cannot be posited out to be posited in only one way. In this sense, this authoritative naming of the receptacle as the unnameable constitutes ta primary or founding inscription that secures this place as an inscriptional space. This naming of what cannot be named is itself a penetration into this receptacle which is at once a violent erasure, one that establishes it as an impossible yet necessary site for all further inscriptions" (44) In other words, Butler seems to be suggesting that Plato's argument is performative. that the Chora and the discourse and designations around it, are meant to show that singular designations can be dangerous. Thus the very telling of the story about the Chora, of the site of genesis, enacts and becomes an allegory of its own procedure. In other words, had Plato assigned ONE designation to the Chora, he would have given it deifnite form and thus made it stagnate, confined to those designations.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Judith Butler
"...the necessity of 'reopening'the figures of philosophical discourse...One way is to interrogate the conditions under which systematicity itself is possible: what the coherence of the discursive utterance conceals of the conditions under which it is produced, whatever it may say about these conditions in discourse. For example the 'matter' from which the speaking subjecct draws nourishment in order to produce itself, to reporduce itself; the scenography that makes representation feasible, representation as defined in philosphy, that is, the architectonics of its theater, its framing in space-time, its geometric organizations, its props, its actors, their repsetive positions, their dialogues, indeed their tragic relations, without overlooking the mirror, most often hidden, that allows the logos, the subject, to reduplicate itself, to reflect itself by itself. All these are interventions on the scene; they ensure its coherene so long as they remain uninterpreted. Thus they have to be reenacted in each figure of discourse away from its mooring in the value of 'presence' For each philsopher, beginning with those whose names define some age in the history of philosophy, we have to point out how the break with matterial contiguity is made, how the system is put together. --Luce Irigaray "The Power of Discourse"
Surely it must be possible both to use the term, Chora, to use it tactically even as one is, as it were, used and positioned by it, and also to subject the term to a critique which interrogates the rhetorical operations and differential power-relations.
Here it is necessary to state that the options for theory are not exhausted by either agreeing with discourse on the Chora thus far or by negating it. It is my purpose to do neither of these things. To call a presupposition into question is not the same as doing away with it; rather, it is to free it from its metaphysical lodgings in order to understand what interests were secured in and by that metaphysical placing and thereby to permit the term to occupy and to serve very different aims.[MUCKELBAUER] To problematize the Chora may entail an initial loss of epistemological certainty, but a loss of certainty is not the same as nihilism. On the contrary, such a loss may well indicate a significant and promising shift in thinking, in rhetorical theory and composition pedagogy. This unsettling Chora can be understood as initiating new possibilities, new ways of thinking about the space in which rhetoric operates.
[Can language simply refer to the Chora or is language also the very condition under which the Chora may be said to appear?]
Judith Butler, in Bodies that Matter, writes that "to speak of bodies that matter is not an idle pun, for to be material means to materialize, where the principle of that materialization is precisely what "matters" about that body, its very intelligibility. In this sense to know the significance of something is to know how and why it matters, where "to matter" means at once "to materialize" and "to mean" (32).
[FACEBOOK] Butler, in her reading of Irigaray, asks "How can one read a text for what does NOT appear within its own terms, but which nevertheless constitutes the illegible conditions of its own legibility? Indeed how can one read a text for the movement of that disappearing by which the textual "inside" and "outside" are constituted?" (37)
"For Irigaray only in catachresis, that is in those figures that function improperly, as an improper transfer of sense, the use of a proper name to describe that which does not properly belong to it, and that return to haunt and coopt the very language which the feminine is excluded explains the radical citational practice of Irigaray" (37)
"For Derrida and Irigaray, what is excluded from the dialectical is also produced by it in the mode of exclusion and has no separable or fully independent existence as an absolute outside. A constitutive or relative outside is, of course, composed of a set of exclusions that are nevertheless internal to that system of its own nothematizable necessity. It emerges within the system as incoherence, disruption, a threat to its own systematicity" (39)
"As a topos of the mataphysical tradition, this inscriptional space makes its appearance in Plato's Timaeus as the receptacle which is also described as the chora. Although extensive readings of the chora have been offered by Derrida and Irigaray, I want to refer here to only one passage which is about the very problem of passage: namely, that passage by which a form can be said to generate its own sensible representation. We know that for Plato any material object comes into being only through participating in a Form which is its necessary precondtion. As a result, materia objects are copies o FOrms and exist only to the extent taht they instantiate Forms. And yet, where does this instantiation take place? Is there a place ,a site, where this reproduction occurs, a medium through which the transformation from form to sensible object occurs? "
Butler offers a way of talking about Chora as embodiment instead of practicality.
Surely it must be possible both to use the term, Chora, to use it tactically even as one is, as it were, used and positioned by it, and also to subject the term to a critique which interrogates the rhetorical operations and differential power-relations.
Here it is necessary to state that the options for theory are not exhausted by either agreeing with discourse on the Chora thus far or by negating it. It is my purpose to do neither of these things. To call a presupposition into question is not the same as doing away with it; rather, it is to free it from its metaphysical lodgings in order to understand what interests were secured in and by that metaphysical placing and thereby to permit the term to occupy and to serve very different aims.[MUCKELBAUER] To problematize the Chora may entail an initial loss of epistemological certainty, but a loss of certainty is not the same as nihilism. On the contrary, such a loss may well indicate a significant and promising shift in thinking, in rhetorical theory and composition pedagogy. This unsettling Chora can be understood as initiating new possibilities, new ways of thinking about the space in which rhetoric operates.
[Can language simply refer to the Chora or is language also the very condition under which the Chora may be said to appear?]
Judith Butler, in Bodies that Matter, writes that "to speak of bodies that matter is not an idle pun, for to be material means to materialize, where the principle of that materialization is precisely what "matters" about that body, its very intelligibility. In this sense to know the significance of something is to know how and why it matters, where "to matter" means at once "to materialize" and "to mean" (32).
[FACEBOOK] Butler, in her reading of Irigaray, asks "How can one read a text for what does NOT appear within its own terms, but which nevertheless constitutes the illegible conditions of its own legibility? Indeed how can one read a text for the movement of that disappearing by which the textual "inside" and "outside" are constituted?" (37)
"For Irigaray only in catachresis, that is in those figures that function improperly, as an improper transfer of sense, the use of a proper name to describe that which does not properly belong to it, and that return to haunt and coopt the very language which the feminine is excluded explains the radical citational practice of Irigaray" (37)
"For Derrida and Irigaray, what is excluded from the dialectical is also produced by it in the mode of exclusion and has no separable or fully independent existence as an absolute outside. A constitutive or relative outside is, of course, composed of a set of exclusions that are nevertheless internal to that system of its own nothematizable necessity. It emerges within the system as incoherence, disruption, a threat to its own systematicity" (39)
"As a topos of the mataphysical tradition, this inscriptional space makes its appearance in Plato's Timaeus as the receptacle which is also described as the chora. Although extensive readings of the chora have been offered by Derrida and Irigaray, I want to refer here to only one passage which is about the very problem of passage: namely, that passage by which a form can be said to generate its own sensible representation. We know that for Plato any material object comes into being only through participating in a Form which is its necessary precondtion. As a result, materia objects are copies o FOrms and exist only to the extent taht they instantiate Forms. And yet, where does this instantiation take place? Is there a place ,a site, where this reproduction occurs, a medium through which the transformation from form to sensible object occurs? "
Butler offers a way of talking about Chora as embodiment instead of practicality.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Notes after meeting with Rivers
The body is outside, and embodiment is what happens inside, and chora is the weaving between the two, flux, traces,
My interest, in comparison to Rickert, is in how can we help studetns invent? I want to use the word Chora to inform how we can do this.
Look into term interface, that's what rivers is interested in
Hawk uses complexity theory which is basically what clark argues. We can't know beforehand what students bring we can only set up the playing field. Paradigm.
Intuition for Hawk has method attached to it.
My interest, in comparison to Rickert, is in how can we help studetns invent? I want to use the word Chora to inform how we can do this.
Look into term interface, that's what rivers is interested in
Hawk uses complexity theory which is basically what clark argues. We can't know beforehand what students bring we can only set up the playing field. Paradigm.
Intuition for Hawk has method attached to it.
Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New KeyAuthor(s): Kathleen Blake Yancey
Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.
Literacy today is in the midst of a tectonic change. Even inside of school, never before have writing and composing generated such diver- sity in definition. What do our references to writing mean? Do they mean print only? That's definitely what writing is if we look at national as- sessments, assuming that the assessment includes writing at all and is not strictly a test of grammar and usage. According to these assessments-an alphabet soup of assessments, the SAT, the NEAP, the ACT-writing IS "words on paper," com- posed on the page with a pen or pencil by students who write words on paper, yes- but who also compose words and images and create audio files on Web logs (blogs), in word processors, with video editors and Web editors and in e-mail and on presentation software and in instant messaging and on listservs and on bulletin boards-and no doubt in whatever genre will emerge in the next ten minutes.
So we need a new vocabulary, one that opens instead of constrains, that describes this network, this expansion.
At the same time, when re- viewed, our own practices suggest that we have already committed to a theory of communication that is both/and: print and digital. Given the way weproduce print--sooner or later inside a word processor-we are digital already, at least in process. Given the course management systems like Blackboard and WebCT, we have committed to the screen for administrative purposes at least. Given the oral communication context of peer review, our teaching requires that students participate in mixed communicative modes. Given the digi- tal portfolios coming into their own, even the move by CCCC to provide LCD's and Internet connects to panel- ists upon request and for free, we teach- ers and students seem to have moved already-to communication modes assuming digital literacy. And thinking about our own presentations here: when we consider how these presenta- tions will morph into other talks, into articles for print and online journals, into books, indeed into our classrooms,it becomes pretty clear that we already inhabit a model of communica- tion practices incorporating multiple genres related to each other, those multiple genres remediated across contexts of time and space, linked one to the next, circulating across and around rhetorical situations both inside and outside school. This is composition.
To begin thinking about a revised curriculum for composition, we might note the most significant change that has occurred in composi- tion over the last thirty years: the process movement. Although not ev- eryone agrees that the process movement radically altered the teaching of composition (see Crowley; Matsuda), most do think that process-as we defined it in the research of scholars like Janet Emig and Linda Flower and as brought into the classroom by teachers like us-did revolution- ize the teaching of writing. We had a new vocabulary, some of it-like invention--ancient, some of it-writing process and rewriting and freewriting-new. We developed pedagogy anew: peer review, redraft- ing, portfolio assessment. But nothing stays still, and process approaches have given way to other emphases. Recently, we have seen several ap- proaches seeking to update that work, some on the left in the form of cultural studies and post-process; some more interested in psychologi- cal approaches like those located in felt sense; others more interested in the connections composition can forge with like-minded educational initiatives such as service learning and first-year experience programs.
Richard Lanham, of course, has argued that with the addition of the digital to the set of media in which we compose, delivery takes on a critical role, and I think that's so. But much more specifically, what a shift in the means of delivery does is bring invention and arrangement into a new relationship with each other. The writer of the page has fundamentally different opportuni- ties than the creator of a hypertext. Anne Wysocki is right about the interface of the page-that is, it has one, and it's worth paying attention to-but even so, as we read the pages of an article, we typically do so line by line, left to right, as you do now: page one before page two. This is the fixed default arrangement. The writer invented through such a text is a func- tion of that arrangement. In other words, you can only invent inside what an arrangement permits-and different media permit different ar- rangements. By contrast, the creator of a hypertext can create a text that, like the page, moves forward. In addition, however, hypertext com- posers can create other arrangements, almost as in three rather than two dimensions. You can move horizontally, right branching; you can then left branch. The writer invented in a medium permitting these ar- rangements is quite different-a difference of kind, not degree.
My third and final expression is the deicity of technology. Deixis, linguistically, refers to words like now and then, words whose "meanings change quickly depending on the time or space in which they are uttered" (Leu et al.) or read. The word Now when I wrote this text is one time.
And let me provide another example. For the last several years, I have worked with graduate students in architecture, and one of their prac- tices is meeting monthly to talk about how their projects and theses are developing. Now, given that it's architecture, they do more than talk: they show-in pin up's on the walls, in a one-page handout, and in a set of PowerPoint slides. Something that grabbed my attention almost im- mediately was how those slides were being used: not for presentation of a finished idea, as the design of them would have it-and as the name, presentation software, suggests-but, rather, for a different purpose: for exploration, in fact as a new space for drafting ideas. Since then, in several different classes, I've used PowerPoint in just this way, as a site for a rough draft, shared with a real audience.
Electronic writing is by nature adaptable, malleable, nonlinear. While Walter Ong argues that the word is dead once it enters the page, electronic writing is an active process.
Cyborg theory bridges theories of receiver and receving.
The Cyborg is the fusion of contradictions, differences, dependencies and as such subverts our stereotypes and predijuces of what it means to be human.
In this view, texts will tend toward the nonhierarchical, nonlinear, anti-linear, malleable, manipulable, multivocalic, de-centerable, re-centerable, multi-centerable, dynamic, democra- tized, anarchic, fragmentary, reticulate, malleable, and multivocal. In addition, the written text - printed out on paper or ftp-ed around the Net - is not simply an artifact affected by technology: it is simultaneously the realization of a set of wider, constantly shifting social relations, including those imbued with class, race, gen- der, ethnicity, political and cultural concerns (Giroux, 1992, 1990, p. 121).
One effect of electronic literacy and the electronic classroom-without-walls is the end of the distinction between personal and private realms.
This perspective suggests that the unstable, shifting, state of postmodern literacy is not something to be avoided. The destabilized text is not something to fear; rather, it is desirable.
Space is not passive or empty.
Literacy today is in the midst of a tectonic change. Even inside of school, never before have writing and composing generated such diver- sity in definition. What do our references to writing mean? Do they mean print only? That's definitely what writing is if we look at national as- sessments, assuming that the assessment includes writing at all and is not strictly a test of grammar and usage. According to these assessments-an alphabet soup of assessments, the SAT, the NEAP, the ACT-writing IS "words on paper," com- posed on the page with a pen or pencil by students who write words on paper, yes- but who also compose words and images and create audio files on Web logs (blogs), in word processors, with video editors and Web editors and in e-mail and on presentation software and in instant messaging and on listservs and on bulletin boards-and no doubt in whatever genre will emerge in the next ten minutes.
So we need a new vocabulary, one that opens instead of constrains, that describes this network, this expansion.
At the same time, when re- viewed, our own practices suggest that we have already committed to a theory of communication that is both/and: print and digital. Given the way weproduce print--sooner or later inside a word processor-we are digital already, at least in process. Given the course management systems like Blackboard and WebCT, we have committed to the screen for administrative purposes at least. Given the oral communication context of peer review, our teaching requires that students participate in mixed communicative modes. Given the digi- tal portfolios coming into their own, even the move by CCCC to provide LCD's and Internet connects to panel- ists upon request and for free, we teach- ers and students seem to have moved already-to communication modes assuming digital literacy. And thinking about our own presentations here: when we consider how these presenta- tions will morph into other talks, into articles for print and online journals, into books, indeed into our classrooms,it becomes pretty clear that we already inhabit a model of communica- tion practices incorporating multiple genres related to each other, those multiple genres remediated across contexts of time and space, linked one to the next, circulating across and around rhetorical situations both inside and outside school. This is composition.
To begin thinking about a revised curriculum for composition, we might note the most significant change that has occurred in composi- tion over the last thirty years: the process movement. Although not ev- eryone agrees that the process movement radically altered the teaching of composition (see Crowley; Matsuda), most do think that process-as we defined it in the research of scholars like Janet Emig and Linda Flower and as brought into the classroom by teachers like us-did revolution- ize the teaching of writing. We had a new vocabulary, some of it-like invention--ancient, some of it-writing process and rewriting and freewriting-new. We developed pedagogy anew: peer review, redraft- ing, portfolio assessment. But nothing stays still, and process approaches have given way to other emphases. Recently, we have seen several ap- proaches seeking to update that work, some on the left in the form of cultural studies and post-process; some more interested in psychologi- cal approaches like those located in felt sense; others more interested in the connections composition can forge with like-minded educational initiatives such as service learning and first-year experience programs.
Richard Lanham, of course, has argued that with the addition of the digital to the set of media in which we compose, delivery takes on a critical role, and I think that's so. But much more specifically, what a shift in the means of delivery does is bring invention and arrangement into a new relationship with each other. The writer of the page has fundamentally different opportuni- ties than the creator of a hypertext. Anne Wysocki is right about the interface of the page-that is, it has one, and it's worth paying attention to-but even so, as we read the pages of an article, we typically do so line by line, left to right, as you do now: page one before page two. This is the fixed default arrangement. The writer invented through such a text is a func- tion of that arrangement. In other words, you can only invent inside what an arrangement permits-and different media permit different ar- rangements. By contrast, the creator of a hypertext can create a text that, like the page, moves forward. In addition, however, hypertext com- posers can create other arrangements, almost as in three rather than two dimensions. You can move horizontally, right branching; you can then left branch. The writer invented in a medium permitting these ar- rangements is quite different-a difference of kind, not degree.
My third and final expression is the deicity of technology. Deixis, linguistically, refers to words like now and then, words whose "meanings change quickly depending on the time or space in which they are uttered" (Leu et al.) or read. The word Now when I wrote this text is one time.
And let me provide another example. For the last several years, I have worked with graduate students in architecture, and one of their prac- tices is meeting monthly to talk about how their projects and theses are developing. Now, given that it's architecture, they do more than talk: they show-in pin up's on the walls, in a one-page handout, and in a set of PowerPoint slides. Something that grabbed my attention almost im- mediately was how those slides were being used: not for presentation of a finished idea, as the design of them would have it-and as the name, presentation software, suggests-but, rather, for a different purpose: for exploration, in fact as a new space for drafting ideas. Since then, in several different classes, I've used PowerPoint in just this way, as a site for a rough draft, shared with a real audience.
Electronic writing is by nature adaptable, malleable, nonlinear. While Walter Ong argues that the word is dead once it enters the page, electronic writing is an active process.
Cyborg theory bridges theories of receiver and receving.
The Cyborg is the fusion of contradictions, differences, dependencies and as such subverts our stereotypes and predijuces of what it means to be human.
In this view, texts will tend toward the nonhierarchical, nonlinear, anti-linear, malleable, manipulable, multivocalic, de-centerable, re-centerable, multi-centerable, dynamic, democra- tized, anarchic, fragmentary, reticulate, malleable, and multivocal. In addition, the written text - printed out on paper or ftp-ed around the Net - is not simply an artifact affected by technology: it is simultaneously the realization of a set of wider, constantly shifting social relations, including those imbued with class, race, gen- der, ethnicity, political and cultural concerns (Giroux, 1992, 1990, p. 121).
One effect of electronic literacy and the electronic classroom-without-walls is the end of the distinction between personal and private realms.
This perspective suggests that the unstable, shifting, state of postmodern literacy is not something to be avoided. The destabilized text is not something to fear; rather, it is desirable.
Space is not passive or empty.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Ulmer
Part of working heuretically is to use the method that I am inventing while I am inventing it, hence to practice hyperrhetoric myself. (17)
"What each one calls for at the same time, in different ways, is invention. It is time to craft some new means for thought and action" (20)
[CYBORG] I would argue that technology, the cyborg, "literalizes" or represents the material embodiment of the Chora.
Ulmer's Heuretics considers the technology of hypermedia, what he defines as the digitalized convergence of one "text" of words, images, and sounds" alongside Hayden White's reinvention of historiography which proposes to use the arts and sciences as models for historical invention.
Heuretics appropriates the history of the avent-garde as a liberal arts mode of research and experimentation. In other words, whereas avant-garde has thus far served as an object of study, Ulmer proposes that it can be used as a method of study. Combining the owrds critique and hermeneutics, heuretics is a generative practice.
Ulmer asks, crucially, how are these alternatives invented? He proposes that new discourses must be "tried out" and "considered as experiments in representation" in the same way a composition course presents models of the essay to teach the poetics of academic writing. The goal of heuretics, then, is not only to reproduce historical inventions (to learn about alternative rhetorics) but also to invent new ones. In other words, Ulmer shows that it is possible to write a theory of poetics in teh same way that one learns to write interpretations or critiques. (xii)
In the heuretic classroom, students become producers as well consumers of theory.
Opening the opportunity for a choratic pedagogy.
Ulmer calls his work a "generative experiment" "A generative approach to writing theory" He uses Andre Breton's invention of surrealism to suggest the ways in which Invention spreads by emulation (5).
According to Ulmer, who uses Roland Barthes, an "inventive culture requirse the broadest possible criterion of what is relevant" The chora makes this possible, it opens up the space of the classroom.
[DREAMS] "Everyday adult existence, organized by the demands of practicality, has suppressed all other modes of thought. The plan of the piece as a whole is anticipated in the general appeal to dreams as a resource for recovering a place for imagination in a world dominated by narrowly defined logic" (6)
Ulmer's work follows the tradition of discourse on method. He creates a mnemonic for the common set of elements in method CATTt.
[CONTRAST]"The theorist begins by pushing away from an undesirable example or prototype, whose features provide an inventory of qualities for an alternative method" Ex. Plato defines his position in opposition to that of the Sophists--I will not be trying to define the chora while other attempts have.
[ANALOGY] "Method becomes invention when it relies on analogy and chance. If methods tend to be practiced as algorithms, their invention is heuristics. To help invent the dialectic, Plato uses the analogy between the city and the country, while Derrida uses God, and Kristeva Freud, and Rickert the matrix.
[THEORY] "The theorist generates a new theory baed on the authority of another theory whose argument is accepted as a literal rather than a figurative analogy."
[TARGET] "The theorist has in mind an area of application that the new method is designed to address" PEDAGOGY;
[TALE] The theorist's invention, the new method, must itself be represented in some form or genre. It must be dramatized." WAY OF ENACTING IT/EMBODYING IT.
(pg 9)
[MEMORY] "Writing as technology is a meory machine"
[CYBORG] "Part of the contribution of hypermedia as Target for my method is the models of memory developed for it, in as much as individuals and societies tend to internalize as forms of reasoning the operations of their tools." (17)
"What each one calls for at the same time, in different ways, is invention. It is time to craft some new means for thought and action" (20)
[CYBORG] I would argue that technology, the cyborg, "literalizes" or represents the material embodiment of the Chora.
Ulmer's Heuretics considers the technology of hypermedia, what he defines as the digitalized convergence of one "text" of words, images, and sounds" alongside Hayden White's reinvention of historiography which proposes to use the arts and sciences as models for historical invention.
Heuretics appropriates the history of the avent-garde as a liberal arts mode of research and experimentation. In other words, whereas avant-garde has thus far served as an object of study, Ulmer proposes that it can be used as a method of study. Combining the owrds critique and hermeneutics, heuretics is a generative practice.
Ulmer asks, crucially, how are these alternatives invented? He proposes that new discourses must be "tried out" and "considered as experiments in representation" in the same way a composition course presents models of the essay to teach the poetics of academic writing. The goal of heuretics, then, is not only to reproduce historical inventions (to learn about alternative rhetorics) but also to invent new ones. In other words, Ulmer shows that it is possible to write a theory of poetics in teh same way that one learns to write interpretations or critiques. (xii)
In the heuretic classroom, students become producers as well consumers of theory.
Opening the opportunity for a choratic pedagogy.
Ulmer calls his work a "generative experiment" "A generative approach to writing theory" He uses Andre Breton's invention of surrealism to suggest the ways in which Invention spreads by emulation (5).
According to Ulmer, who uses Roland Barthes, an "inventive culture requirse the broadest possible criterion of what is relevant" The chora makes this possible, it opens up the space of the classroom.
[DREAMS] "Everyday adult existence, organized by the demands of practicality, has suppressed all other modes of thought. The plan of the piece as a whole is anticipated in the general appeal to dreams as a resource for recovering a place for imagination in a world dominated by narrowly defined logic" (6)
Ulmer's work follows the tradition of discourse on method. He creates a mnemonic for the common set of elements in method CATTt.
[CONTRAST]"The theorist begins by pushing away from an undesirable example or prototype, whose features provide an inventory of qualities for an alternative method" Ex. Plato defines his position in opposition to that of the Sophists--I will not be trying to define the chora while other attempts have.
[ANALOGY] "Method becomes invention when it relies on analogy and chance. If methods tend to be practiced as algorithms, their invention is heuristics. To help invent the dialectic, Plato uses the analogy between the city and the country, while Derrida uses God, and Kristeva Freud, and Rickert the matrix.
[THEORY] "The theorist generates a new theory baed on the authority of another theory whose argument is accepted as a literal rather than a figurative analogy."
[TARGET] "The theorist has in mind an area of application that the new method is designed to address" PEDAGOGY;
[TALE] The theorist's invention, the new method, must itself be represented in some form or genre. It must be dramatized." WAY OF ENACTING IT/EMBODYING IT.
(pg 9)
[MEMORY] "Writing as technology is a meory machine"
[CYBORG] "Part of the contribution of hypermedia as Target for my method is the models of memory developed for it, in as much as individuals and societies tend to internalize as forms of reasoning the operations of their tools." (17)
Sunday, November 28, 2010
A day's work on Chorology by John Sallis
_Chorology_
Socrates asks about the discourse of yesterday. It i a question of memory. (12)
Timaeus proposes that Socrates go back over it briefly from the beginning in order to fill out their partial remembrance of what Socrates said on the previous day. Or rather, Timaeus asks that Socrates go back over it "if it is not somewhat troublesome for you" (17b)-->As Sallis notes, this word "troublesome" will appear throughout the dialogue. (12)
The first venture of the dialogue will be, then, an exercise in remembrance. "It would not be entirely out of the question to regard the entire dailogue as a complex of remembrances. But what is remembrance? What is it to remember? To remember is to bring something back to mind, to bring back before one's inner vision something remote, something past, something removed from the present, from prescence./.../it is to bring back to a certain presence something that nonetheless, in its pastness, is--and remains--absent" (13).
Repeating discourse is a way of remembering...so remembrance is aided through repetition....(yesterday's discourse repeated today).
[THE GREEKS ARE CAPABLE OF REMEMBERING ONLY WHAT IS RECENT, ONLY WHAT STILL HAS A LIVING CONNECTION TO THE PRESENT SO THAT IT CAN BE BROUGHT BACK TO MIND....Where such connections are lacking, remembrance requires writing. Remembrance requires the markings of time by writing; without writing, differences would be effeaced, different times would be conflated. Because of their repeated loss of writing, the Greeks are incapable of memory of truly ancient things, whereas the Egyptians because their writing is preseved have such memory and indeed can pass it on. The greek forgetfullness of the beginning..." (43)]
Timaeus is told by Critias to speak first about the beginning of the cosmos adn ending with the nature of mankind (27a). He is told that he should speak first because he has made it his business to know about the nature of the universe.
"a beginning retracted by being referred back to a prior beginning." "This palintropic operation will determine the movemeber by which teh timaeus will carry out its vigilant interrogation of beginnings, a movement of return to beginnings." (13)
So, what I am doing in my oral examination is first beginning with the discourses of Yesterday--of Kristeva, Derrida, Ulmer, and Rickert, and of course Plato--in order to "re-begin" ...again. It is less starting from scratch and negating past discourse on the Chora than affirmatively engaging with it in order to create something both new and old.
"In the Timaeus Hermocrates presents no proper speech. He ties together the threads of other idscourses; he is not a mere stage prop," (35). Silence will thus prove to be a decisive moment in the Timaeus. Even Socrates, who was notorious for his incessant interruptions and interrogations remains silent throughout most of the Timaeus. This moment of silence is embodied in Hermocrates.; he is a meidator between the discourses of others; a messenger" (35).
Rickert says that Socrates is the Chora--he is an active receptacle both present and receding. How might an instructor in a composition classroom embody this idea? What would it look like? Socrates reiterates that his three hosts ha agreed that in exchange for his speech of yesterday--his recapitulation--they are to offer him a "feast" He says "Here I am, all prepared. Here I am all dressed up and most eager to receive" (35).
[EXPLORE SILENCE AS PEDAGOGY]
"The discourses on making, on production, will recoil upon themselves as produced, as made." (47).
"whatever is generated is also subject to perishing. As perpetually being generated and perishing/.../the generated is always becoming different from itself. THe generated is not simply the sensibly manifest" 48b [CYBORG]
[MUCKELBAUER-->REPETITION AS INVENTION] Timaeus' description of making/production/fabrication brings to light its mimetic structure. In fabricating something, the maker looks to the model or paradigm in order to form the product, to fashion its look and its capability in such a way that it looks like the paradigm and has the capability for whatever functions belong to something with such a look. Looking in advance to the pardaigm, the maker gives the work the same look: he fabricates it in imitation of the paradim, as an image of the paradigm. (51).
Timaeus begins not by articulating a beginning but rather by receving it. He doesn't put something forth but rather acceptes something, receving it. "Good he was" (29e) HEnce the first word of the beginning, that is, the beginning of the beginning tthat Timaeus accepts as his way of beginning, is: "good" If one puts in play Socrates declaration in the Republic, that the good is the beginning itself, the beginning of teh whole, the beginning of eerything (rep 511b) then one can trace at this point in the TImaeus a fourfould compouding of beginning: the beginning of the beginning recieved as Timaeus' way of beginning is the good, which is the beginning itself. (56).
[PROCESS] He tells how the god took over all that is visible, or as may equally well be said, received the visible. The double sense is appropriate: the visible was there to be taken up by the god and thus was both taken and received. when the god, receiving it, came to take it up, it was not at rest but in discordannt and disorderly motion" (57). This is the state of comp theory. As theorists we take what is there and we re-create [VITANZA].
[CHORA IS INTERUPTION/RUPTURE] \
[COLERDIGE; WANDERING] This necessity is also called the errant form of cause; the verb means to lead astray, mislead. In the passive form it means to wander, roam about, to stray. The double sense of wandering could involve indeterminiacy, as outside, or at least resistant to, the supervisory governance by a paradigm, and of erring in thesense of making errior in the usual sense possible by being deceived abou something . (92)
As Sallis says, there are constant beginnings in the Timaeus. Timaeus begins several times, always differently. Timaeus declares that each new beginning marks the other beginnings: "Thus we begin the discourse anew" (48e). So it is a matter of compounding--or undoing (or both)--that distinction, which even the first discourse, as it began, left suspended in question. This is what each new "key term" does--it works, choratically, making progress and then receding. Kristeva undoes Derrida who undoes Kristeva's designation of the Chora.
By clling the Chora a third kind of being --as Derrida discusses in depth--then we can consider it to be alternative. [VITANZA]
So, the Chora is described through images--nurse, receptacle, et cetera--and as such, it begs us to "imagine." I would argue that that imagining causes tension because its images are often times paradoxical
Receptacle, as Sallis notes, is also the word for Reception (thus it is a place of receiving) The word also means support, aid, succor, and hence it is a type of surrogate mother who holds, aids, succors, the newly born child. (Nurse). [SCAFFOLD] 88D
[FLUX]
me: I have traced these connections, not in order tos upport one or the other, but in order to make explicit the doubleness (multiplicity) of the discourse and the complexity thereby introduced into it. Irrespective of the interpretation, the chora is always becoming something else, it lacks tablilty, selfsameness, and consequently it retreats from discourse. Thus, we can only circle around the Chora.
"Yet one must desire eagerly to speak of this again more clearly" (50a)
[transformation] The otherwise unceasing cycle of remakings--
[formless] Since it is all receiving, not only a mother but seemingly promiscuous--it can have no form itself, no determinations, whatsoever. It can itself receive, be stamped by all things. RHETOR DETERMINES IT KAIROTICALLY. The ramifications of this utter nondetermination are profound. [TRACES]
[MATRIX] It i s portrayed also in the image of the matrix; yet, over agaisnt this image, limits its truth too, the thrid kind is said to partake of the intelligible. to be like precisely that which would imprint its stamp on the matrix. IT is then especially the technical images that prove manifestly limited.
[NEOPIC/TRACE] How can chora be at all accessible? Its peculiar appearing by way of, for instance, traces. Even if this appearing one could, it seems, catch only a glimpse, perhaps by spying a trace of chora in the interval in which , undergroing transformation, breaks down in a way that could release its momentary flash. (114)
The chora as space is complicated. FOr surely it is not the isotropic space of post-Cartesian physics. Nor is it even an empty space, the void discussed in Greek Atomism. We risk, constantly, assimilating Plato's chorology to the topology of aristotle's phsycics. These are not translations...they are interpreations. The meaning of the chora is interrupted, inherently, thus no translation is possible. In as much as chora has no meaning it is instrincically untranslatable.
Keep in mind that all the discourses in the Timaeus are political.
[RUINS] The chora is said to be everlasting, perpetual, always, not admiting destruction, that is ruin, corruption, passing away. (119_
[TRACES]
"saying the chora is not enitirely unlike saying the flux" (118)
Socrates asks about the discourse of yesterday. It i a question of memory. (12)
Timaeus proposes that Socrates go back over it briefly from the beginning in order to fill out their partial remembrance of what Socrates said on the previous day. Or rather, Timaeus asks that Socrates go back over it "if it is not somewhat troublesome for you" (17b)-->As Sallis notes, this word "troublesome" will appear throughout the dialogue. (12)
The first venture of the dialogue will be, then, an exercise in remembrance. "It would not be entirely out of the question to regard the entire dailogue as a complex of remembrances. But what is remembrance? What is it to remember? To remember is to bring something back to mind, to bring back before one's inner vision something remote, something past, something removed from the present, from prescence./.../it is to bring back to a certain presence something that nonetheless, in its pastness, is--and remains--absent" (13).
Repeating discourse is a way of remembering...so remembrance is aided through repetition....(yesterday's discourse repeated today).
[THE GREEKS ARE CAPABLE OF REMEMBERING ONLY WHAT IS RECENT, ONLY WHAT STILL HAS A LIVING CONNECTION TO THE PRESENT SO THAT IT CAN BE BROUGHT BACK TO MIND....Where such connections are lacking, remembrance requires writing. Remembrance requires the markings of time by writing; without writing, differences would be effeaced, different times would be conflated. Because of their repeated loss of writing, the Greeks are incapable of memory of truly ancient things, whereas the Egyptians because their writing is preseved have such memory and indeed can pass it on. The greek forgetfullness of the beginning..." (43)]
Timaeus is told by Critias to speak first about the beginning of the cosmos adn ending with the nature of mankind (27a). He is told that he should speak first because he has made it his business to know about the nature of the universe.
"a beginning retracted by being referred back to a prior beginning." "This palintropic operation will determine the movemeber by which teh timaeus will carry out its vigilant interrogation of beginnings, a movement of return to beginnings." (13)
So, what I am doing in my oral examination is first beginning with the discourses of Yesterday--of Kristeva, Derrida, Ulmer, and Rickert, and of course Plato--in order to "re-begin" ...again. It is less starting from scratch and negating past discourse on the Chora than affirmatively engaging with it in order to create something both new and old.
"In the Timaeus Hermocrates presents no proper speech. He ties together the threads of other idscourses; he is not a mere stage prop," (35). Silence will thus prove to be a decisive moment in the Timaeus. Even Socrates, who was notorious for his incessant interruptions and interrogations remains silent throughout most of the Timaeus. This moment of silence is embodied in Hermocrates.; he is a meidator between the discourses of others; a messenger" (35).
Rickert says that Socrates is the Chora--he is an active receptacle both present and receding. How might an instructor in a composition classroom embody this idea? What would it look like? Socrates reiterates that his three hosts ha agreed that in exchange for his speech of yesterday--his recapitulation--they are to offer him a "feast" He says "Here I am, all prepared. Here I am all dressed up and most eager to receive" (35).
[EXPLORE SILENCE AS PEDAGOGY]
"The discourses on making, on production, will recoil upon themselves as produced, as made." (47).
"whatever is generated is also subject to perishing. As perpetually being generated and perishing/.../the generated is always becoming different from itself. THe generated is not simply the sensibly manifest" 48b [CYBORG]
[MUCKELBAUER-->REPETITION AS INVENTION] Timaeus' description of making/production/fabrication brings to light its mimetic structure. In fabricating something, the maker looks to the model or paradigm in order to form the product, to fashion its look and its capability in such a way that it looks like the paradigm and has the capability for whatever functions belong to something with such a look. Looking in advance to the pardaigm, the maker gives the work the same look: he fabricates it in imitation of the paradim, as an image of the paradigm. (51).
Timaeus begins not by articulating a beginning but rather by receving it. He doesn't put something forth but rather acceptes something, receving it. "Good he was" (29e) HEnce the first word of the beginning, that is, the beginning of the beginning tthat Timaeus accepts as his way of beginning, is: "good" If one puts in play Socrates declaration in the Republic, that the good is the beginning itself, the beginning of teh whole, the beginning of eerything (rep 511b) then one can trace at this point in the TImaeus a fourfould compouding of beginning: the beginning of the beginning recieved as Timaeus' way of beginning is the good, which is the beginning itself. (56).
[PROCESS] He tells how the god took over all that is visible, or as may equally well be said, received the visible. The double sense is appropriate: the visible was there to be taken up by the god and thus was both taken and received. when the god, receiving it, came to take it up, it was not at rest but in discordannt and disorderly motion" (57). This is the state of comp theory. As theorists we take what is there and we re-create [VITANZA].
[CHORA IS INTERUPTION/RUPTURE] \
[COLERDIGE; WANDERING] This necessity is also called the errant form of cause; the verb means to lead astray, mislead. In the passive form it means to wander, roam about, to stray. The double sense of wandering could involve indeterminiacy, as outside, or at least resistant to, the supervisory governance by a paradigm, and of erring in thesense of making errior in the usual sense possible by being deceived abou something . (92)
As Sallis says, there are constant beginnings in the Timaeus. Timaeus begins several times, always differently. Timaeus declares that each new beginning marks the other beginnings: "Thus we begin the discourse anew" (48e). So it is a matter of compounding--or undoing (or both)--that distinction, which even the first discourse, as it began, left suspended in question. This is what each new "key term" does--it works, choratically, making progress and then receding. Kristeva undoes Derrida who undoes Kristeva's designation of the Chora.
By clling the Chora a third kind of being --as Derrida discusses in depth--then we can consider it to be alternative. [VITANZA]
So, the Chora is described through images--nurse, receptacle, et cetera--and as such, it begs us to "imagine." I would argue that that imagining causes tension because its images are often times paradoxical
Receptacle, as Sallis notes, is also the word for Reception (thus it is a place of receiving) The word also means support, aid, succor, and hence it is a type of surrogate mother who holds, aids, succors, the newly born child. (Nurse). [SCAFFOLD] 88D
[FLUX]
me: I have traced these connections, not in order tos upport one or the other, but in order to make explicit the doubleness (multiplicity) of the discourse and the complexity thereby introduced into it. Irrespective of the interpretation, the chora is always becoming something else, it lacks tablilty, selfsameness, and consequently it retreats from discourse. Thus, we can only circle around the Chora.
"Yet one must desire eagerly to speak of this again more clearly" (50a)
[transformation] The otherwise unceasing cycle of remakings--
[formless] Since it is all receiving, not only a mother but seemingly promiscuous--it can have no form itself, no determinations, whatsoever. It can itself receive, be stamped by all things. RHETOR DETERMINES IT KAIROTICALLY. The ramifications of this utter nondetermination are profound. [TRACES]
[MATRIX] It i s portrayed also in the image of the matrix; yet, over agaisnt this image, limits its truth too, the thrid kind is said to partake of the intelligible. to be like precisely that which would imprint its stamp on the matrix. IT is then especially the technical images that prove manifestly limited.
[NEOPIC/TRACE] How can chora be at all accessible? Its peculiar appearing by way of, for instance, traces. Even if this appearing one could, it seems, catch only a glimpse, perhaps by spying a trace of chora in the interval in which , undergroing transformation, breaks down in a way that could release its momentary flash. (114)
The chora as space is complicated. FOr surely it is not the isotropic space of post-Cartesian physics. Nor is it even an empty space, the void discussed in Greek Atomism. We risk, constantly, assimilating Plato's chorology to the topology of aristotle's phsycics. These are not translations...they are interpreations. The meaning of the chora is interrupted, inherently, thus no translation is possible. In as much as chora has no meaning it is instrincically untranslatable.
Keep in mind that all the discourses in the Timaeus are political.
[RUINS] The chora is said to be everlasting, perpetual, always, not admiting destruction, that is ruin, corruption, passing away. (119_
[TRACES]
"saying the chora is not enitirely unlike saying the flux" (118)
Saturday, November 27, 2010
intro to presentation (...)
John Sallis, in _Chorology_ begins his discussion of the Chora by focusing on the opening of Timaeus. It begins, he says, with counting. EXCERPT. Similarly, my primary task in preparing for this oral examination has been to figure out what to "count" and what not to count. After reading through Derrida, Ulmer, Kristeva, and Rickert's conceptions of the Chora, I have drawn out common language in their discourses and in doing so I have tried to create a network of key terms. These key terms will be, for the purposes of my argument, analogous to those guests whom Socrates counts as present in the dialogue--and as such, they will serve as fillers for the absent guest--the Chora. In other words, I will use the work of Derrida, Ulmer, Rickert and Plato as proximal referents to the Chora. Ultimately I hope that these key terms will offer a way in, that they will offer suggestions for how the absent Chora might be made present in the composition classroom.
Friday, November 26, 2010
A few thoughts on learning and education
We need to think back to a time when the arts and the sciences were combined, before these things became separated, fragmented, and trivialized. We need to retrace our steps, to find the “wisdom we have lost in knowledge,” the “knowledge we have lost in information” (T.S. Eliot)
Increasingly, in a society shaped by technology that is continually changing, we need to learn a new skill: how to keep learning. We must be flexible and adaptable enough to survive in any circumstances.
We must remain active learners // active receptacles // chora.
Increasingly, in a society shaped by technology that is continually changing, we need to learn a new skill: how to keep learning. We must be flexible and adaptable enough to survive in any circumstances.
We must remain active learners // active receptacles // chora.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
kristeva and derrida
Derrida’s thinking of the “chora” appears 16-22 years after Kristeva’s publication of “Revolution in Poetic Language,” in 1974 (to which I will turn briefly in a moment). Already, in “Semiotics” (1968), and already in conscious relation to Derrida, Kristeva was articulating a certain reading of Freud and Saussure (among others). However, she was also beginning, in a sense, to accuse Derrida...
This passage works to complicate the categories of linguistics, semiotics and psychoanalysis. It will no doubt have Scott Eric Kaufman rolling his eyes in all sorts of directions (just allow me to repeat Michael Bérubé's remark the other day: that even Kristeva had (and has) long since given up the kind of nonesensical jargon Lacanese for which she and others were so widely ridiculed by Alan Sokal et al.):
"Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body -- always already involved in a semiotic process -- by family and social structures. In this way the drives, which are ‘energy’ charges as well as ‘psychical’ marks, articulate what we call a chora: a non-expressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated.
We borrow the term chora from Plato’s Timaeus to denote an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases. We differentiate this uncertain and indeterminate articulation from a disposition that already depends on representation, lends itself to phenomenological, spatial intuition and gives rise to geometry. Although our theoretical description of the chora is itself part of the discourse of representation that offers it as evidence, the chora, as rupture and articulations (rhythm), precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality and temporality. Our discourse -- all discourse -- moves with and against the chora in the sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it. Although the chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be definitely posited: as a result, one can situate the chora, but one can never give it axiomatic form....Neither model nor copy, the chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm.
(Kristeva, "Revolution in Poetic Language," in Moi, 93-94).
To borrow Zizek's mantra: Is there not a metaphysical urge lurking in this movement of simultaneous “dependence” and “refusal”?
Kristeva’s distinction...placed the semiotic within the prelinguistic space of drives and energy charges that precedes but also participates in the construction of the speaking subject. Associated with the term “chora,” meaning “receptacle” or “womb,”...the structure of the semiotic was essentially instinctual and dual for Kristeva. As a period of indistinction between itself and its mother’s body, the infant was without a sense of “otherness,” without object (for the object is seen as identical to the self), and without the intervention of a paternal third party who separates and differentiates. Despite her claim that the semiotic is a heterogeneous space before the constitution of identity and, therefore, without an ontologically feminine specificity, it has been, as her critics point out, consistently linked throughout her work to the maternal as opposed to the paternal. The symbolic, on the other hand, has always been equated with the paternal realm of identity and of communicative language. It places the subject within a normalizing triadic relationship in which the paternal third party becomes an agent of separation and difference constituting an object for the subject and vice versa.”
(Brandt, 266).
What would seem to be at stake is Kristeva’s often slippery appropriation of Plato's term, in describing the chora as a “mother” or “wet nurse” -- a space yet “preceding evidence, language, subjectivity and sexual difference...
The theory of the subject proposed by the theory of the unconscious [read: Lacan, but also Melanie Klein] will allow us to read in this rhythmic space, which has no thesis and no position, the process by which significance is constituted. Plato himself leads us to such a process when he calls this receptacle or chora nourishing and maternal, not yet unified in an ordered whole because deity is absent from it (Kristeva, "Revolution in Poetic Language," in Moi, 94)..
Kristeva’s reading of Plato thus poses a conceptual dilemma, one which may position her quite near Derrida in some ways, but which she seeks to “resolve” in a manner that is undoubtedly at odds with, or at the very least rather inhospital toward Derrida’s insistence on ‘im-possibility.'
The desire to give voice to sexual difference, and particularly to the position of the woman-subject within meaning and signification, leads to a veritable insurrection against the homogenizing signifier. However, it is all too easy to pass from the search for difference to the denegation of the symbolic. The latter is the same as to remove the ‘feminine’ from the order of language (understood as dominated exclusively by the secondary process) and to inscribe is within the primary process alone, whether in the drive that calls out or simply the drive tout court. In this case, does not the struggle against the ‘phallic sign’ and against the whole mono-logic, monotheistic culture which supports itself on it, sink into an essentialist cult of Woman, into a hysterical obsession with the neutralizing cave, a fantasy arising precisely as the negative imprint of the maternal phallus?...In other words, if the feminine exists, it only exists in the order of significance or signifying process, and it is only in relation to meaning in signification, positioned as their excessive or transgressive other that it exists, speaks, thinks (itself) and writes (itself) for both sexes (Kristeva, “Il n’y a pas de maître à langage”, 134-135, as quoted by Moi, 11).
As Moi astutely notes, the above passage is perhaps most revealing onto the question of Kristeva’s “finely balanced” or slightly problematic “position on...feminity: as different or other in relation to language to meaning, but nevertheless only thinkable within the symbolic, and therefore also necessarily subject to the Law” (Moi, 11). I might venture (rather violently, perhaps) to suggest that one aspect of this act of balancing would appear to be a subtle prioritizing of the symbolic over the semiotic (such as here) or vice versa (such as in the passage on the ‘chora’ quoted earlier), depending precisely on which of these two spaces or destinations is being more immediately linked with the feminine.
Although the possibility of a responsible comparison is perhaps becoming less and less likely (if ever it was possible) -- and not wishing Kristeva to appear to dominate the space of this discussion, -- let us hold up a passage from Derrida. Here he is suggesting (in my reading), that the “concept” itself is at once the phallus and the possibility of castration (in the deeper sense of the phallus’s disappearance or “culpable ending”), beyond any formalization of the “fetish:”
One will always be able to take the tallith for a fetish, on condition of an upheaval in the axioms of the theorem of restricted fetishism and a formalisation -- I attempted in Glas and elsewhere -- of generalised fetishism. At the moment of the verdict, this theory would no longer be merely a theory, it would take into account, at the end of the day, with the whole history engaged in it (from Exodus to Saint Paul to Freud to everything that is implied and placed en abyme in A Silkworm of One’s Own), this thought of the event without truth unveiled or revealed, without phallogocentrism of the greco-judeo-paulino-islamo-freudo-heideggeriano-lacanian veil, without phallophoria, i.e., without procession or theory of the phallus, without veiling-unveiling of the phallus, or even of the mere place, strictly hemmed in, of the phallus, living or dead. Thus culpable ending of the phallus, the edges of this cut which support the veil and hold it out like a tent or an awning, a roof, a canvas, this theoretical toilet of the phallus is none other that the concept, yes, the concept in itself. The phallus is the concept, you can’t oppose it, any more than you can oppose a “sexual theory”. Unless you do something different, you can only oppose to it another concept or another theory, a knowledge like another. Very little. It is not enough to have concepts at one’s disposal, you have to know how to set them, like one sets sails, often to save oneself of course, but on condition of knowing how to catch the wind in one’s sails: a question of force, concepts and veils are there only in view of this question of force (Derrida, “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” in Anidjar, 350-351).
This passage works to complicate the categories of linguistics, semiotics and psychoanalysis. It will no doubt have Scott Eric Kaufman rolling his eyes in all sorts of directions (just allow me to repeat Michael Bérubé's remark the other day: that even Kristeva had (and has) long since given up the kind of nonesensical jargon Lacanese for which she and others were so widely ridiculed by Alan Sokal et al.):
"Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body -- always already involved in a semiotic process -- by family and social structures. In this way the drives, which are ‘energy’ charges as well as ‘psychical’ marks, articulate what we call a chora: a non-expressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated.
We borrow the term chora from Plato’s Timaeus to denote an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases. We differentiate this uncertain and indeterminate articulation from a disposition that already depends on representation, lends itself to phenomenological, spatial intuition and gives rise to geometry. Although our theoretical description of the chora is itself part of the discourse of representation that offers it as evidence, the chora, as rupture and articulations (rhythm), precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality and temporality. Our discourse -- all discourse -- moves with and against the chora in the sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it. Although the chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be definitely posited: as a result, one can situate the chora, but one can never give it axiomatic form....Neither model nor copy, the chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm.
(Kristeva, "Revolution in Poetic Language," in Moi, 93-94).
To borrow Zizek's mantra: Is there not a metaphysical urge lurking in this movement of simultaneous “dependence” and “refusal”?
Kristeva’s distinction...placed the semiotic within the prelinguistic space of drives and energy charges that precedes but also participates in the construction of the speaking subject. Associated with the term “chora,” meaning “receptacle” or “womb,”...the structure of the semiotic was essentially instinctual and dual for Kristeva. As a period of indistinction between itself and its mother’s body, the infant was without a sense of “otherness,” without object (for the object is seen as identical to the self), and without the intervention of a paternal third party who separates and differentiates. Despite her claim that the semiotic is a heterogeneous space before the constitution of identity and, therefore, without an ontologically feminine specificity, it has been, as her critics point out, consistently linked throughout her work to the maternal as opposed to the paternal. The symbolic, on the other hand, has always been equated with the paternal realm of identity and of communicative language. It places the subject within a normalizing triadic relationship in which the paternal third party becomes an agent of separation and difference constituting an object for the subject and vice versa.”
(Brandt, 266).
What would seem to be at stake is Kristeva’s often slippery appropriation of Plato's term, in describing the chora as a “mother” or “wet nurse” -- a space yet “preceding evidence, language, subjectivity and sexual difference...
The theory of the subject proposed by the theory of the unconscious [read: Lacan, but also Melanie Klein] will allow us to read in this rhythmic space, which has no thesis and no position, the process by which significance is constituted. Plato himself leads us to such a process when he calls this receptacle or chora nourishing and maternal, not yet unified in an ordered whole because deity is absent from it (Kristeva, "Revolution in Poetic Language," in Moi, 94)..
Kristeva’s reading of Plato thus poses a conceptual dilemma, one which may position her quite near Derrida in some ways, but which she seeks to “resolve” in a manner that is undoubtedly at odds with, or at the very least rather inhospital toward Derrida’s insistence on ‘im-possibility.'
The desire to give voice to sexual difference, and particularly to the position of the woman-subject within meaning and signification, leads to a veritable insurrection against the homogenizing signifier. However, it is all too easy to pass from the search for difference to the denegation of the symbolic. The latter is the same as to remove the ‘feminine’ from the order of language (understood as dominated exclusively by the secondary process) and to inscribe is within the primary process alone, whether in the drive that calls out or simply the drive tout court. In this case, does not the struggle against the ‘phallic sign’ and against the whole mono-logic, monotheistic culture which supports itself on it, sink into an essentialist cult of Woman, into a hysterical obsession with the neutralizing cave, a fantasy arising precisely as the negative imprint of the maternal phallus?...In other words, if the feminine exists, it only exists in the order of significance or signifying process, and it is only in relation to meaning in signification, positioned as their excessive or transgressive other that it exists, speaks, thinks (itself) and writes (itself) for both sexes (Kristeva, “Il n’y a pas de maître à langage”, 134-135, as quoted by Moi, 11).
As Moi astutely notes, the above passage is perhaps most revealing onto the question of Kristeva’s “finely balanced” or slightly problematic “position on...feminity: as different or other in relation to language to meaning, but nevertheless only thinkable within the symbolic, and therefore also necessarily subject to the Law” (Moi, 11). I might venture (rather violently, perhaps) to suggest that one aspect of this act of balancing would appear to be a subtle prioritizing of the symbolic over the semiotic (such as here) or vice versa (such as in the passage on the ‘chora’ quoted earlier), depending precisely on which of these two spaces or destinations is being more immediately linked with the feminine.
Although the possibility of a responsible comparison is perhaps becoming less and less likely (if ever it was possible) -- and not wishing Kristeva to appear to dominate the space of this discussion, -- let us hold up a passage from Derrida. Here he is suggesting (in my reading), that the “concept” itself is at once the phallus and the possibility of castration (in the deeper sense of the phallus’s disappearance or “culpable ending”), beyond any formalization of the “fetish:”
One will always be able to take the tallith for a fetish, on condition of an upheaval in the axioms of the theorem of restricted fetishism and a formalisation -- I attempted in Glas and elsewhere -- of generalised fetishism. At the moment of the verdict, this theory would no longer be merely a theory, it would take into account, at the end of the day, with the whole history engaged in it (from Exodus to Saint Paul to Freud to everything that is implied and placed en abyme in A Silkworm of One’s Own), this thought of the event without truth unveiled or revealed, without phallogocentrism of the greco-judeo-paulino-islamo-freudo-heideggeriano-lacanian veil, without phallophoria, i.e., without procession or theory of the phallus, without veiling-unveiling of the phallus, or even of the mere place, strictly hemmed in, of the phallus, living or dead. Thus culpable ending of the phallus, the edges of this cut which support the veil and hold it out like a tent or an awning, a roof, a canvas, this theoretical toilet of the phallus is none other that the concept, yes, the concept in itself. The phallus is the concept, you can’t oppose it, any more than you can oppose a “sexual theory”. Unless you do something different, you can only oppose to it another concept or another theory, a knowledge like another. Very little. It is not enough to have concepts at one’s disposal, you have to know how to set them, like one sets sails, often to save oneself of course, but on condition of knowing how to catch the wind in one’s sails: a question of force, concepts and veils are there only in view of this question of force (Derrida, “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” in Anidjar, 350-351).
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Sirc
What I find so incredibly striking about Geoffrey Sirc's "English Composition as a Happening" is the way in which the terms and images that Sirc evokes so effectively conjure up images related to the chora. Sir begins by asking us to re-locate "the idea of the writing classroom as blank canvas, ready to be inscribed as a singular compositoin space" a place that he theorizes would allow its inhabitants "a sense of the sublime, making it a space no one wants to leave, a happening space" (1).
"Happenings were all about blurring tthe boundaries between art and life. They underscored what cage maintained, which was that "what we are doing is living and that we are not moving toward a goal, but are, so to speak, at the goal constantly and changing with it, and that art, if it is going to be anything useful, should open our eyes to this fact" (kirby and schechner, 60) (9).
"To de-determine form and content means that the writing can just be;/.../The happening artists' basic rule was indeterminacy: nothing is previously determined, neither form nor material content; everything is under erasure. The only given, a kind of non-axiom, is the one stated by RAucschenberg, who cared not at all about control or intention, only change: 'What's existing is that we don't know. There is no anticpated rule, but we will be changed'" (10).
Sirc calls his approach both "disruptive/restorative" (12)--choratic no?
I think Sirc's argument works on several levels. For one, he is talking about the rhetoric of the physical space--"Physically the space insists on order and authoritarianism; the enemies of creativity. the teacher as ultimate authority/.../and the students as passive receptacles at his feet" ( 5-6). And of course on the less material level, he is talking about the rhetoric of the theoretical space that pedagogical practice participates and engages.
"Happenings were all about blurring tthe boundaries between art and life. They underscored what cage maintained, which was that "what we are doing is living and that we are not moving toward a goal, but are, so to speak, at the goal constantly and changing with it, and that art, if it is going to be anything useful, should open our eyes to this fact" (kirby and schechner, 60) (9).
"To de-determine form and content means that the writing can just be;/.../The happening artists' basic rule was indeterminacy: nothing is previously determined, neither form nor material content; everything is under erasure. The only given, a kind of non-axiom, is the one stated by RAucschenberg, who cared not at all about control or intention, only change: 'What's existing is that we don't know. There is no anticpated rule, but we will be changed'" (10).
Sirc calls his approach both "disruptive/restorative" (12)--choratic no?
I think Sirc's argument works on several levels. For one, he is talking about the rhetoric of the physical space--"Physically the space insists on order and authoritarianism; the enemies of creativity. the teacher as ultimate authority/.../and the students as passive receptacles at his feet" ( 5-6). And of course on the less material level, he is talking about the rhetoric of the theoretical space that pedagogical practice participates and engages.
Friday, October 29, 2010
and thesis ramblings continue...
Sirc aruges 'writing is a happening' (vis a vi those greenwich villiage happenings circa 1969). As a happening then, writing is fleeting, kairotic, moment-made. For Sirc, when writing happens it happens, but it leaves no imprint afterward--that spark, that exact process, can't be replicated, repeated, produce the same results twice--it's a happening, writing is always a happening. This seem, to me at least, to echo that same idea of "approaching" which I keep talking about in regards to the Chora --we're always going toward and away from writing, grasping relentlessly, knowing full well that there's nothing solid to hold onto. Plato's dead, along with Truth.
I cant help but wonder, though, how all of this might tie in to Rickert's concept of ambiance...
I cant help but wonder, though, how all of this might tie in to Rickert's concept of ambiance...
Sunday, October 3, 2010
perfect !
Writing, the work and play of writing, does not happen first of all as a cognitive act of problem-solving, as an act of self-expression, or even an act of creation or discovery of knowledge, though at times can be made to take on all these guises. Writing happens first of all as a hermeneutic process, as an event of disclosure. Wirting is a techne, an art, understood in its original sense of "a bringing forth” and it brings forth how, not what, things are and how things might be. More subtly, it brings forth allusions to what is conceivable but unrepresentable: The impossible, the other. (246)-- Lynn Worsham.
Oh, Lynn. Don't you know that what you really mean to say--especially in that last part--is that writing is the chora?
Rice explains that cool can be understand in terms of chora an argumentative strategy in which different meanings are associated and placed in tension in order to produce discourse. Rather than choosing one meaning, the practitioner of chora uses all of them. Rice performs that here, discussing and describing various meanings of "cool," drawing from sources as diverse as McLuhan, Burroughs, and texts on jazz, hip-hop, and anthropology. Cool, therefore, is defined through association across several different and sometimes conflicting meanings. Rice does something similar with the date 1963, which functions as a touchstone across the entire book: 1963 is seen as the year that composition studies "earns its capital C" by extending beyond teaching lore to research and theory (p.12), but it is also the year that John F. Kennedy was assassinated and the March on Washington took place, as well as a seemingly endless list of other events in technology, culture, politics, and the arts. Like "cool," "1963" is defined associationally. On the one hand, this allows Rice to really demonstrate this notion of chora and provides a really interesting approach for laminating an associational argument. On the other hand, it means that the two tentpoles of the argument, "cool" and "1963," are forever indeterminate. I had trouble determining whether this framework actually constituted a rhetoric of cool, or whether "cool" just happened to be a term that is well analyzed through the rhetorical analysis afforded by approach; similarly, especially in the later chapters, it sometimes seemed to me that Rice was reaching when picking out still more events and examples from 1963, events and examples that could have been replaced by those pulled from earlier or later years.
Whatever you call it, Rice's framework has some real potential for analyzing new media texts, particularly highly collaborative and internetworked ones. At the same time, Rice tends to orient again and again to the composition classroom, and this is where I think he gets into some real trouble. For instance, he's very interested in examples such as Sprite's ReMix ad campaign and album covers, and he claims that a rhetoric of cool sheds new light on these practices -- practices that should be, but are not, examined in composition textbooks (p.107).
Rice doesn't clearly articulate the limits of composition, but what he describes sounds like cultural studies rather than composition per se.
I'm also not convinced by Rice's characterization of composition theory. He tends to characterize it through examinations of textbooks -- and textbooks in any field or discipline tend to simplify theory to provide "training wheels" for new students. Just as an introductory physics textbook tends to focus on Newtonian physics rather than quantum physics, introductory comp textbooks tend to focus on rhetorical appeals, fallacies, and Toulmin structure; that doesn't mean that composition studies are forever stuck on these analytical terms. Quite the opposite!
Again, despite these criticisms, I encourage computers and writing folks to read the book. As I said, the framework of chora, appropriation, juxtaposition, commutation, nonlinearity, and imagery makes for a productive and interesting analytical framework for examining new media texts -- and, I think, other texts as well. As for the book's framing and pedagogical application, you've heard my piece; try it out and see what you think.
_______________________________________
Whatever you call it, Rice's framework has some real potential for analyzing new media texts, particularly highly collaborative and internetworked ones. At the same time, Rice tends to orient again and again to the composition classroom, and this is where I think he gets into some real trouble. For instance, he's very interested in examples such as Sprite's ReMix ad campaign and album covers, and he claims that a rhetoric of cool sheds new light on these practices -- practices that should be, but are not, examined in composition textbooks (p.107).
Rice doesn't clearly articulate the limits of composition, but what he describes sounds like cultural studies rather than composition per se.
I'm also not convinced by Rice's characterization of composition theory. He tends to characterize it through examinations of textbooks -- and textbooks in any field or discipline tend to simplify theory to provide "training wheels" for new students. Just as an introductory physics textbook tends to focus on Newtonian physics rather than quantum physics, introductory comp textbooks tend to focus on rhetorical appeals, fallacies, and Toulmin structure; that doesn't mean that composition studies are forever stuck on these analytical terms. Quite the opposite!
Again, despite these criticisms, I encourage computers and writing folks to read the book. As I said, the framework of chora, appropriation, juxtaposition, commutation, nonlinearity, and imagery makes for a productive and interesting analytical framework for examining new media texts -- and, I think, other texts as well. As for the book's framing and pedagogical application, you've heard my piece; try it out and see what you think.
_______________________________________
In Ulmer's follow up to Teletheory, Heuretics, he remakes mysteriography 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 conceptElectronic 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.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
I cannot give an adequate (or an alethetic) relation of Butler's work with
chora and Heidegger's.
Regarding Derrida's Khora in On the Name, I actually was exposed to both
his text and hers at almost the same time. Without going back and reading
again, my memory tells me that Butler's reading (which is a reading of
Irigaray's reading) is less interested in khora in terms of deferal and more
interested in chora as demonstrative of the production of matter.
I am not sure if that clairfies anything, or even if it really
distinguishes the readings. I will try to provide more of a reply soon..
One thing, Butler ends her essay by pointing towards Aristotle's notion of
place in distinction from Platonic chora as a conception of place. She speaks
of relating this to Foucault in terms of the forming of bodies within fields
of power.
Its from this sort of direction that I hear both Butler and Foucault as
engaging bodies (in the plural) such that that which we might call a soul is a
fold in the material fields of force -- something produces rather than
repressed. In this sense, the duality of mind/body is not transcended, but
rather undestood in a radically material fashion.
chora and Heidegger's.
Regarding Derrida's Khora in On the Name, I actually was exposed to both
his text and hers at almost the same time. Without going back and reading
again, my memory tells me that Butler's reading (which is a reading of
Irigaray's reading) is less interested in khora in terms of deferal and more
interested in chora as demonstrative of the production of matter.
I am not sure if that clairfies anything, or even if it really
distinguishes the readings. I will try to provide more of a reply soon..
One thing, Butler ends her essay by pointing towards Aristotle's notion of
place in distinction from Platonic chora as a conception of place. She speaks
of relating this to Foucault in terms of the forming of bodies within fields
of power.
Its from this sort of direction that I hear both Butler and Foucault as
engaging bodies (in the plural) such that that which we might call a soul is a
fold in the material fields of force -- something produces rather than
repressed. In this sense, the duality of mind/body is not transcended, but
rather undestood in a radically material fashion.
Space has changed. "In short," Ulmer says, "the change in thinking from linear indexical to network association--a shift often used to summarize the difference between alphabetic and electronic cognitive styles . . . is happening at the level of the technology itself" (36). As hardware and software change, so institutions and disciplines similarly change. And so does the thinking and writing that gets generated in and by them. If this sounds farfetched, let us not forget that the medium is the message. And if we are not aware, let's understand that there are students in classes today who not only have watched a lot of television (which Ulmer sees as not a problem, but a cure) but also have never written or typed anything on paper but only on a monitor. (Ulmer does not write elegies for Gutenberg.) And more potentially interesting, there are graduate students today who have seldom, if ever, stood in front of human beings in a classroom when they teach, but communicate for the most part to and with their students by way of on-line discussion lists or MOOs. In fact, many of these student teachers do not see themselves as "teachers" but as "facilitators." The medium teaches.
And yet, how is one to write by way of the Chora, when apparently there is no way? Ulmer muses:
An important aspect of chorography is learning how to write an intuition, and this writing is what distinguishes electronic logic (conduction) from the abductive (Baker Street) reasoning of the detective. In conjunction the intuitions are not left in the thinker's body but simulated in a machine, augmented by a prosthesis (whether electronic or paper). This (indispensable) augmentation of ideological categories in a machine is known in chorography as "artificial stupidity," which is the term used to indicate that a database includes a computerized unconscious. (37-38)
thesising. jotting down a few things before i forget
According to Milton, God is eternal. He defines eternality as such: "Everything agrees that nothing can properly be called eternal unless it has no beginning and no end” (143) “It seems from these and various similar texts that the concept of what is, strictly speaking, eternity, is expressed in the Hebrew language by the inference rather than by distinct words” (144)
sounds like another instance of the chora to me!
sounds like another instance of the chora to me!
Sunday, June 13, 2010
I spent 18 years trying to leave this place, five successful years away from it, and now, after only three days, I don't want to leave.
My home, the home I grew apart from and the town that I ran away from, has all of a sudden taken on new meaning for me. Maybe it's nostalgia finally kicking in, but it's felt so good to come home, to drive on Clint Moore Road in my parent's jeep, to picnic at Patch Reef Park, and to walk around Town Center Mall aimlessly.
Even the muggy air's got me all warm and fuzzy inside.
It's nice.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Time is so fleeting
Saturday morning I'll be on a train to Philadelphia, and when I return on Monday to this great city of ours, my second and last year of graduate school will begin, and I will savor each moment as best I know how.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Rainiest of Mays and I'm walking home in the rain, again, and the wind is so strong it pushes my umbrella inside out and my bags are so heavy I have to stop four times to shift their weight and rest my hands, all the while juggling an umbrella that won't right itself. And even though on the outside I look like a mess with my hair wet and matted and my feet soaked, on the inside I'm really calm and together and instead of thinking about how I should have just driven to the grocery store, I am thinking about all the days I get to spend sitting in that one spot at the library of congress where that statue of Shakespeare looks over me as I read and all the evenings that will be spent with friends at happy hours across the city and those sundays I'll be playing kickball and that weekend when Sarah will come to visit and that other weekend that I'll be going home. Because I made a promise to myself that I will keep this Happy happening for as long as I can.
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