Press the Pause

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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)

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).

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?

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.

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.