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Chapter 1. Toward the Chora: Kristeva, Derrida, and Ulmer on Emplaced Invention
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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41 c h A P T e R 1 Toward the Chōra kristeva, Derrida, and ulmer on emplaced invention The great problem of creativity is “creativity” itself. —Richard McKeon, “Creativity and the Commonplace” And a third kind is ever-existing Place [chōras], which admits not of destruction, and provides room for all things that have birth, itself being apprehensible by a kind of bastard reasoning by the aid of non-sensation, barely an object of belief. —Plato, Timaeus One could say: from the outset what would be said of this word [chōra] is posed at the margin of what can be fabricated, marking the limit of controlled production. —John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s “Timaeus” our understanding of what it means to inhabit and interact in spatial environments is changing. Holding on to a conception of ourselves as subjects who know, do, and make against a neutral, objective background is growing increasingly difficult. Fields as diverse as computing, biology, information design, cognitive science, and philosophy have in their own ways been pushing for a more dynamic sense of what it means for bodies to do things in physical and informational spaces, and these spaces are seen not just as the setting for activity but as a participant. Accordingly, the mind in particular is seen as something implicated in and dispersed throughout complex social and technological systems. “Mind” is a nebulous concept regardless, but on a number of fronts it is now conceived as extending beyond the body proper. Andy Clark argues that mind designates a mobile series of mergers and coalitions in which the tools we 42 chapter one use start “dovetailing back” and blur the distinction between “mind” and “tool” (Natural 7). However, given that minds are embodied and that the body itself is no longer best conceived as bound by the epidermis, we might simply say that the notion of the body is itself newly plastic. Thus Clark goes further, reworking the traditional mind-body problem as a “mindbody -scaffolding problem,” with the mind enmeshed within a matrix of nonhuman elements enabling everyday practices (Natural 7, 11). To inhabit a place, then, means something different if the human body is less stably bounded than we are accustomed to thinking it to be. Rhetorical theory is only beginning to consider how these transformations of human being in its relation to place affect rhetoric.1 More work on place is needed, work that furthers ontological insights into the dissolution of the subject/object dichotomy and the vital role of the material environment in rhetorical practices. The advent of ubiquitous computing, “smart” rooms and buildings, and other forms of ambient intelligence will further the offloading of mental and physical activity (including decision making) into other arenas in ways we cannot yet fully fathom, even as we understand that such advances are now at only a nascent stage. As Clark and others suggest, bodies and brains are being conceived as more plastic and extended than they formerly had been, and we should do the same with our environments; they inhabit us just as we inhabit them. Most of this technological work is greeted as a great advance, saving us time and energy and enabling us to do more. But both opportunities and dangers beckon (Aarts and Marzano, Greenfield). Further, such technological advance will spur rhetorical theory to catch up, just as the emergence of the Internet and the explosion of multimedia are continuing to challenge it. Fresh forays into thinking what place is, how it might be changing, and how we inhabit it are not secondary but primary for understanding how rhetoric is to be conceived. My wager is that ambience allows us a new perspective, especially as these forays can be thought from Plato’s theory of matter and place conceived as the chōra. In this chapter, then, I examine how issues concerning place, mind, boundary, and invention emerge for rhetorical theory across the chōra. Plato’s chōra is an ancient attempt to think the relation between matter and activity, work and space, background and meaning, and thus it already starts to broach issues concerning relations among bodies, minds, and world. The chōra deserves contemporary attention in its conception as a “third” term that, in a manner most uncanny, bridges these realms, so often held to be distinct. Yet Plato also suggests that something like the chōra [100.26.1.130] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:08 GMT) toward the...