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)
