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)