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...

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.

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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.