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.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
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.
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