thomas rickert -- "toward the chora"

Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 40, No. 3, 2007. Copyright © 2007 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

251

Toward the Cho–ra: Kristeva, Derrida, and Ulmer on Emplaced Invention

Thomas Rickert

The great problem of creativity is “creativity” itself.—Richard McKeon

Our understanding of what it means to inhabit and interact in spatial environ-ments is changing. Fields as diverse as computing, biology, information design, cognitive science, and philosophy have in their own ways been pushing for a different sense of what it means for bodies to do things in physical and informa-tional spaces. The mind in particular is increasingly seen as something implicated in and dispersed throughout complex social and technological systems. It is leaky, commingling with the body and the ambient environs, and as emotional as it is rational. How these transformations affect rhetoric is less theorized, and this essay attempts to bridge that gap by looking at how these issues emerge in recent work on Plato’s concept of the chōra and rhetorical invention. Much rhetorical theory still works out of the separatist mind/body/environment para-digm being challenged. The demarcation between mind and body, and body and environment, along with a valuation of method, idea, and logic are typical of the older paradigm. One must have a plan, a method for achieving a plan, and a spatial arrangement or layout refl ective of the plan; one then works as a rhetorical agent via ideas to achieve effects in the world “out there.” These assumptions seem prima facie matter of fact and perhaps indisputable, but in fact, this is not the case. In the new spatial paradigm, minds are both embodied, and hence grounded in emotion and sensation, and dispersed into the environ-ment itself, and hence no longer autonomous. As Andy Clark says, “The mind is just less and less in the head,” and it enters “deep and complex relationships with nonbiological constructs, props, and aids” (2003, 4–5). In rhetoric, the innumerable permutations of the topoi, or commonplaces, can be seen as such a nonbiological construct: the mind utilizes an external symbolic resource to generate and organize rhetorical discourse. For instance, topic invention sees various ideas, either abstract (division, cause and effect) or culturally particular (taxes are bad, maximize effi ciency), as providing a discursive place where thoughts begin and grow.

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The challenges to earlier conceptions of space and bodies show up not only in scholarly work such as Clark’s but also in forms of technological change. I am referring especially to the massive infl ux of new media. To the extent that, as Clark puts it, “everyday notions of ‘mind’ and ‘person’ pick out deeply plastic, open-ended systems” (10), we should begin to consider media not simply the medium by which we interact and communicate with others, but in a quite literal sense a place. It is an architectural component of our informational scaffolding, functioning as an exterior co-repository for thoughts and actions—activities we customarily locate as beginning exclusively within our minds. However, the questions that are raised here—about the locus of beginnings, the creation of boundaries between self and world, and the importance of place itself—are not new, even if they have a new fl avor and import. Plato dealt with these issues in the Timaeus, and I consider it no accident that the concept he developed there to explain how things come into being in the physical world, the chōra, is to-day generating not just the usual historical/philological interest—i.e., what did Plato mean by it, how did it relate to his overall system of thought and that of his successors, etc.—but theoretical interest. As deployed in the work of Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and Gregory Ulmer, the chōra transforms our senses of beginning, creation, and invention by placing them concretely within material environments, informational spaces, and affective (or bodily) registers, and in the case of Derrida, also by displacing them. Thus, these writers are interested in how the chōra as an ancient line of thinking can illuminate contemporary concerns. By refocusing on what falls outside discourse proper, like emotion or the chōra itself, or redistributing rhetorical agency across a network of human and nonhuman agents, these writers suggest we can (and should) reapproach the inventional question Plato wrestles with in the Timaeus, which is how to move from static ideas to vital activity, from the speculative theory of the Republic to a dynamic, vibrant Athens. The chōra, brought forward into our age, stands to radically reconfi gure our understanding of rhetorical space.

Still, there are at least two problems: fi rst, rhetoric has little addressed the chōra, so there is scant work to build on. Rhetoric, in whichever of its in-stitutional incarnations, has preferred inventional systems such as the classical topoi or contemporary approaches such as Kenneth Burke’s pentad (see Young, Lauer), and thus has delimited rhetorical space as grounded in discursive, print-based notions of representation and rationality. Second, the chōra as developed in the Timaeus has ever been a murky concept given to mystery and mysticism. Nor does it appear to have been intended to have bearing on rhetoric. Indeed, the chōra is generally seen as a troublesome early effort to explain spatiality

253TOWARDS THE CHŌRA

more fully developed by Aristotle when he subsumed chōra under topos and theorized it as material space, although he did grant that Plato was the fi rst to say anything of signifi cance about space.1 Nevertheless, Aristotle’s assimilation of chōra to space and matter, while widely regarded as an advance, is disputed by some because the chōra lends itself to other interpretations.2 Kristeva, Derrida, and Ulmer are among those interested in what the chōra can offer us distinct from what Aristotle accomplished. In the chōra they fi nd a theoretical resource able to generate new light on the emplaced (and displaced), distributed, and bodily character of rhetorical activity. However, the chōra is not only a matter of theoretical inquiry—it is of practical use. Derrida and Ulmer in particular utilize inventional methods that could be called choric, as opposed, for instance, to topic invention, because of the way they attribute inventional agency to non-human actors such as language, networks, environments, and databases. They demonstrate that the chōra is of rhetorical interest because it transforms our sense of what is available as means for persuasion, or, more precisely, of what is available as means for rhetorical generation, in line with an expanded notion of spatiality that complexifi es traditional divisions among discourses, minds, bodies, and circumambient environs.

Contemporary work on the chōra suggests that there is no clear demar-cation of “in here” and “out there,” and that the notion of system is not one of directly following a method, in some linear fashion, but being immersed in, negotiating, and harnessing complex ecologies of systems and information. In short, the chōra helps us understand that rhetorical concepts like “beginning,” “invention,” and “rhetorical space” are not in fact clear, and that, far from this being only a philosophical-theoretical concern, such inquiry can itself lead to innovative inventional practices. While these last points constitute the main lines of the argument, it yet remains a problem that the chōra has no body of scholarship in rhetorical theory. This situation necessitates some basic ground-work in developing a sense of what the chōra has been, and why a concept that has largely been associated with material space, and only secondarily with beginnings and creation, should be of interest for rhetoric. Accordingly, I will strive to “begin at the beginning” and provide basic historical scholarship on the chōra, at which times the main argument takes a backseat. Nevertheless, even at these points, I should emphasize that since the chōra presents an expan-sive notion of invention attendant to environments and limits, chōra’s original spatial meaning is of considerable importance. Given this, I ask some leeway from my readers, and suggest that one might read such passages as forms of subterranean argument.

254 THOMAS RICKERT

Dances with the Chōra before Plato

The word chōra was a common word for space before Plato wrote about it, but it was not the only word in use. Topos and kenon were also everyday spatial terms, and in fact topos shows up in the Timaeus alongside chōra (52b6). Kenon most typically refers to space as void, and, as it is a complex term in its own right and less pertinent to this investigation of the chōra, I will not be addressing it here. Chōra and topos were often used synonymously to refer to space and place. Chōra is the older term, however, and in the extant written record topos is not encountered until Aeschylus (Liddell, Scott, and Jones 1940, 1,806). There are some fi ner shades of distinction as well. So, while chōra does connote place, it is also closely associated with land, city, region, or ground. Keimpre Algra goes on to suggest for chōra the more abstract meaning “an extension that can be occupied” (1995, 33), a meaning that can include one’s place, as in social rank, or one’s proper positioning, as for example a soldier’s post (Liddell, Scott, and Jones 1940, 2,015). As we will see when we get to Plato, however, the original connotations of city and land remain very much a part of the discussion of chōra in the Timaeus.3

In his study of the origins of architecture, Indra McEwen argues that chōra also shares affi nity with choron and choros, words fi rst appearing in the written record in the Iliad, where they refer to both a dance and a dancing-fl oor. It may be recalled that Daedalus was held to be the fi rst architect, and he built the dancing fl oor at Knossos. In Book XVIII of the Iliad, Homer tells us,

Therein furthermore the famed god of the two strong arms cunningly wrought a dancing-fl oor [choros] like unto that which in wide Knossos Daedalus fashioned of old for fair-tressed Ariadne. There were youths dancing and maidens of the price of many cattle, holding their hands upon the wrists one of the other. . . . And a great company stood around the lovely dance [choros], taking joy therein; and two tumblers whirled up and down through the midst of them as leaders in the dance. (18.590–605)

McEwen looks at this and other passages in Homer and Hesiod to argue that we see here an emerging recognition that a precondition for activity is a place for it to occur, as dancing requires a dancing fl oor (1993, 62–63). For McEwen, Dae-dalus personifi es the growing realization that place and making are conjoined. Not only did Daedalus make the Knossos dancing fl oor (choros), but he built the moving automata and the Labyrinth at Crete. Perhaps more signifi cantly, Dio-dorus Siculus relates that after fl eeing Crete, Daedalus built a nearly impregnable city, the strongest in all of Sicily (McEwen 1993, 76). The connection between


the polis and creation will be central to Plato in the Timaeus. While chōra can mean land or city, when used in the context of polis, it more properly means the surrounding territory; a polis consists of a town (asty) and territory (chōra) (155n4; cf. Sallis 1999, 116). Looking at the archaeological work of François de Polignac, McEwen describes the placement of sanctuaries in early Greek cities as falling into three areas: those within the inhabited urban area, those a short distance from urban area (suburban), and those extra-urban sanctuaries placed at the limit of the city’s territory (chōra) some six to twelve kilometers away. McEwen argues that here we see “the notion of a polis allowed to appear as a surface woven by the activity of its inhabitants” in “ritual processions from center to urban limit to territorial limit and back again” (1993, 81). The move-ments from city center to outlands and back constitute the weaving of the city, whereby what is constructed emerges directly from the situated activity of the inhabitants, much like the dance “weaves” the dancing fl oor.

Of particular relevance is the affi nity that shows up here between ar-chitectural and discursive construction. In both cases, we can understand such making as processual. If in its more archaic sense the chōra was a territory made to appear through what McEwen characterizes as a “continual remaking or reweaving of its encompassing surface” (82), an instability becomes appar-ent in the notion of the polis, suggesting that it is always bumping up against a limit or boundary that it must exceed, while retaining a dependency it wants to overcome. The movements beyond the city boundary proper mark the weav-ing of the city because they are necessary for the polis to thrive. In this regard, McEwen remarks that what is striking about Plato’s Republic and Laws is that political order can be thought without this sense of making or weaving integral to the polis (98). However, as the Timaeus makes clear, similar misgivings must also have engaged Plato insofar as he attempts to move from the Republic’s static ideals to seeing such ideals made and put into action. Furthermore, for Plato, the chōra is not just the outlying territory on which the city depends; rather, it takes on far greater cosmological import as the Receptacle, the matrix or mother of all becoming.

Plato: Chōra Chōra Chōra

Even with the above preamble, it is less than clear what the Platonic chōra is. As Timaeus says, the chōra participates in the intelligible in a manner most perplexing and baffl ing (Timaeus, 51a–b). This ambiguity helps explain why

256 THOMAS RICKERT

Aristotle’s far clearer assimilation of chōra to hulē (matter) and topos (gener-ally, though not exclusively, place) has been dominant in the centuries since. However, Aristotle’s repurposing of chōra through other terms has had the effect of confi ning it to work on material space, even if there has been a legacy of controversy surrounding this move. Aristotle’s writings on space do not seem congruent with what Plato wrote, suggesting that the chōra cannot be solely understood as phenomenal space.4 Further, as Jacques Derrida’s and John Sallis’s commentaries on the Timaeus argue, the concept of chōra is complexly interwoven into the dramatic action and discussion of the dialogue itself.5 An understanding of the chōra cannot be extracted solely by examining what seem the most relevant passages, usually considered approximately 48e–53d, but rather must be worked through by attending to all aspects of the dialogue, including its dialogic character.6 As will be seen, this is entirely befi tting the receptacle-like chōra, such that we might see the dialogue itself as providing a place for the concept’s emergence. It is important to note that while the chōra thereby designates a kind of beginning, it has no real qualities itself; its odd passivity marks it as fundamentally indeterminate (Timaeus, 51a–b). The implication is that while a beginning requires a place, the generative or choric aspects of that place remain indeterminate, or, as we shall see, give nothing to what emerges.

Plato weaves the themes of beginning and creation into the dramatic action of the dialogue from the very fi rst line. The day that the Timaeus takes place is the next day after the conversation known as the Republic occurred, which makes the Timaeus into a continuation of the previous day’s discussion about an ideal city. The fi rst concern is to ensure that everyone who was there before is present again. So, the dialogue starts with a count: “One, two, three,—but where, my dear Timaeus, is the fourth of our guests of yesterday, our hosts of to-day?” (17a). Sallis remarks that the appropriateness of this beginning was noted even in antiquity, as, for instance, by Proclus (1999, 7). Certainly, the importance of numbers resonates throughout the dialogue, not to mention with the Pythagorean themes that are woven into Timaeus’ discussion. More pertinent here is that the counting to three is a recurring leitmotif as well as a structural feature. The dialogue is held to have three movements or (re)beginnings.7 More important, the chōra is itself called a “third kind” (triton genos) by Timaeus (48e), meaning that it is not a thing as customarily understood, being neither matter nor ideal form. The chōra is granted a strangely displaced place, one that mirrors an ambiguity concerning ideas of beginning and creation, genesis and invention. This uncertainty is refl ected in the dialogue’s three different beginnings. From the dialogue’s fi rst line the issue of a missing fourth arises, paralleling the sense that something is yet missing from the ideal city described


in the Republic. And, in order to begin—in order to go forward—the conversa-tion must fi rst go back, which raises the issue of memory. Socrates, then, fi rst complies with the discussants’ request to review the highlights from the previous day about the Republic. The implication is that a beginning is not an autonomous, decontextualized setting forth; rather, a beginning already entails a past and the ability to recall it, which further implies that a beginning cannot be an isolated, founding moment. In this, we may well see here the fi rst glimmerings of the Necessity (anagke) Timaeus later discusses (47e). A beginning is interwoven with memory, and rather than having a precise point for launching forth, it becomes a rhetorical effect. A “beginning” as a singular, locatable moment is missing; what emerges instead is a distribution (or matrix) of beginnings. The insinuation is that a beginning is but an idea (l) materialized in rhetorical space and character, an idea Derrida also takes up.

The Timaeus’s task is to address a crucial problem concerning the Repub-lic. While it evokes powerful feelings and approval, the ideal city remains an ideal. It misses actuality, and the discussants hope this condition is rectifi able, that this city can be brought to life and seen vigorously exercising as States do (Timaeus, 18b). As is, the ideal city is a dead city. Sallis remarks that, strictly speaking, it is a “technical city,” a city of the head (1999, 20). Not only is it a fabrication, but it lacks eros, which is to say, it lacks becoming in a generative sense. The fact that the Republic focuses strongly on controlling eros and all that goes with it, such as “procreation, mating, birth, sexual difference, corpo-reity itself in its singularity,” takes on greater signifi cance in this context (26). There is thus a tension between control, as something intellectual, and life, as something that exceeds the intellectual. For this reason, among others, Sallis tells us that what the Timaeus comments on, from its very beginning, are the limits of fabrication, whether as technē or poiesis, with respect to eros (26). We can also say that this is very much a problem of invention, in the sense of fi nding ways to actualize or enact what are initially only ideas, feelings, or intuitions. Stated otherwise, we can see the Platonic chōra as addressing the question of the available means of creation, and how we give life to and make a place for (static) ideas.

Friedrich Solmsen argues that we can understand Plato to be wrestling with a problem that reaches far back into debates carried on by the Pre-Socratics. How is one to understand genesis, or becoming? Parmenides is held to have dismissed any outright genesis; Empedocles refi ned Parmenides, suggesting instead that something akin to mixture could replace genesis. The Timaeus itself addresses this issue, but it does so as a reopening of the question of becoming. Throughout the dialogue, the uncertainty of knowing anything about genesis is remarked, and

258 THOMAS RICKERT

even the accounts given are characterized as only probable or likely (Timaeus, 28b, 44d, 48c–d, 55d, 59c, 66d). In this regard, the chōra can be taken as Plato’s attempt to reintroduce the notion of becoming, even if he steps back from the more assertive positions of his predecessors (Solmsen 1960, 40). At the risk of oversimplifying, we might say that Plato posited this refi ned notion of genesis as an aid in thinking through how, as Algra puts it, the sensible world participates in the intelligible world (1995, 3). Ann Ashbaugh makes a similar point when she claims that the Timaeus was the single most important Platonic dialogue in antiquity because it addressed a fundamental question—a question we have yet to answer defi nitively—not “of what an objective cosmos is, but how it comes to be known by the soul” (1988, 1). We can see apropos of Sallis’ comment on the limits of fabrication that the Republic already carries in germinal form this very question: how does one move from ideas, or, more specifi cally in terms of Plato, the realm of the Forms, to the sensible, active world?

It is this question of passage that leads to perhaps the most troublesome aspect of the chōra. There is no direct equivalency between ideal and chōra, or chōra and world, which is also a way of saying that there is no proper place for these concepts. Indeed, that is problem of the Timaeus: that the ideal city is atopos, that it has no place. And, as a “third kind” (triton genos) approachable as in a dream through a bastard discourse, neither does the chōra. Indeed, chōra’s nonplace frames the gap sundering the Forms from the physical world as well as providing passage between them. The Timaeus thereby stages for us a new kind of beginning, one that moves from the realm of the idea to the world of generation, or from being to becoming. This is what Socrates wishes to hear from his fellow discussants, and it is the purpose of the Timaeus to bring the ideal polis to life as an actual city, one that has a place. Eventually, this place will come to correspond with Athens. In making this comparison, the Timaeus implicitly argues that beginning is tied to place and memory, and that both beginnings and place are woven through the polis. Further, the choric city will be one that not only has a place, but one where eros is present. The limits to fabrication can be exceeded through productive eros, an idea that adds to the implicit importance of place a bodily dimension (as well as a reinscription of a maternal feminine, a point underscored by Kristeva). Put differently, we could say that the choric city is where invention comes to life. The chōra thereby provides Plato with a means to explain the movement from Idea to Becoming as a form of vital, robust actuality. There is a parallel here with the connection McEwen sees between dancing and having a place to dance: to give something a place means to see it in action, and vice versa. This helps explain the import of the legend about ancient Athens facing off against the Atlanteans. While the


Athens of Plato’s day appears less noble in comparison, nevertheless, the point remains that Athens of old comes to embody not just the ideal polis discussed in the Republic, but those ideals further ennobled in agonistic activity.

Despite these insights and explanations, there remains something elusive about the chōra, something about it that resists determination (see Sallis 1999, 3–6). This problem is already noted in the Timaeus. Timaeus tells us that it is “most diffi cult to catch” and only apprehendable by means of a “bastard rea-soning” (Timaeus, 51a–b, 52b). The chōra is of a third kind that is not really a “kind”; it is a Receptacle (hupodoxe), which Edward Casey describes as some-thing “at once locatory and yet not itself located, permanent and yet invisible, underlying and yet insubstantial” (1997, 37). The chōra is the maternal matrix of all becoming, yet it declines to be determined, and in this sense, it is not strictly speaking an eidos. So, as Casey argues, while chōra is not a thing, “it is a locatory matrix for things” (34). It is what is necessary for the genesis of things, the in which (en hō) and out of which (ex hou) they show up and pass away; but the chōra also recedes, declining to leave its imprint on things just as it declines to take on the qualities of the things it receives (Timaeus, 50c). There is a dichotomy between what occurs in the passage to actuality by which things show up, and their actual showing up. A beginning, even as something unstable or retroactively posited, is never equivalent to what has emerged. Placing occurs through displacing, a point Derrida makes by showing how the chōra disrupts representation itself (and hence rhetoric) even while it remains fundamental for the passage to representation.

If at times the Timaeus waxes large with its cosmological import, we might recall that the older sense of chōra as city or land is still always present. The dialogue’s attempt to wrestle with the limitations of fabrication (or technē) following the discussion of the ideal city invites us to consider the relation of the chōra to the polis, and the polis to its exterior or what lies outside its boundar-ies. The region surrounding and sustaining a polis is also called chōra. Thus, as we saw above with McEwen, the chōra has a specifi cally political dimension, being both the boundary of the city and what lies beyond the boundary. What must be underscored here is the necessity for the polis to go beyond its bound-aries to thrive (a reinforcement of Timaeus’s anagke in 47e). These patterns of boundary and disruption weave throughout the Timaeus. For example, the fact that approaching the chōra requires a bastard discourse means that the chōra is disruptive of the other discourses in the dialogue (Sallis 1999, 132). Going still further, we might note that Plato reputedly took the bulk of the Timaeus, including the notion of the chōra, from the Pythagoreans. And, as discussed above, the impetus behind the Timaeus in the fi rst place is the limit of fabrica-

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tion, the desire to see the lifeless boundaries of the idea transcended in favor of an emplaced polis living in accord with eros.

So far I have discussed several themes that emerge when the chōra is taken to be a concept useful for rhetorical invention. As we have seen, fi rst there is the problem of the establishment of a beginning point (note also the irony in the tension between “fi rst” and “beginning point”). While such a point is necessarily threaded through the polis and its outlying areas, and also linked to memory, these seem insuffi cient for a founding. Rather, memory and polis become boundaries that must be gotten beyond, not to abandon them, but to establish them as what will have been the beginning points. There is something retroactive and motivated about a beginning. There is also a destablizing move-ment that speaks to a beginning’s ultimate indeterminacy. Such assertions may seem abstract, but there is a functional role to them that returns us to rhetoric’s orbit. For instance, Derrida points out that Socrates himself plays a choric role in the Timaeus (more on this point below), being the in which and out of which the dialogue emerges (1995, 109; 1997, 166). Socrates resembles the chōra both by helping to generate what Timaeus relates, and—in a manner remarkable considering Socrates’ dominant role in most dialogues—also by withdrawing from the conversation, leaving nothing of his imprint on it. Indeed, this is so to such an extent that some critics have asserted that Plato and by inference Socrates would likely have believed none of what Timaeus as a well known Pythagorean relates (e.g. Taylor 1928, 19). Derrida adds that the relation between the three sections is less thematic or logical than mutually generative, each sec-tion nestling the other, receptacle-like, perhaps akin to the way Russian dolls are packed one inside the other (1995, 117). In the end, the chōra, ostensibly a cosmological likely story for genesis, becomes also a writerly principle, and thus, even for Plato, rhetorical.

Kristeva: Invention Inventing Itself

In Revolution in Poetic Language, Julia Kristeva, French feminist, linguist, and semiotician, reaches back to Plato’s chōra in order to theorize a preverbal realm prior to and distinct from the symbolic realm, one that is subversive of the symbolic’s masculine, overly rational character. The originary chōra remains in dialectical relation to the symbolic, and it is in fact accessed through the symbolic after we acquire language (Kristeva 1984, 26). The semiotic chōra includes emotions, sensations, and other marks and traces of psychical and


material experience. With the acquisition of language, these choric experiences come under and are transformed by the Idea and become signs. The logos as the rational (or Johannine) Word takes prominence, and is retroactively pos-ited as originary: In the beginning is the Word, and the Word is masculine. As Kristeva indicates with her epigraph from Hegel (11), this has the effect of gathering what is originally choric under the Hegelian Idea and divorcing it from its role in the sciences and humanities—even though the chōra is still in play (13). In this sense, the Kristevan chōra is an “archaic origin” counter to the phallologocentrism of both John and Hegel, one that reincludes repressed aspects of environmental, bodily, and relational experience (83). This amounts to a defetishization of the rational, masculine logos as the ultimate horizon of human understanding and a re-embedding of the subject in material history, bodily affect, and social networks. Particularly illustrative of such embedding is the mother-child relationship, vital for a child to thrive, and yet only the smallest amount of what occurs in this relation can be considered symbolic—the rest, argues Kristeva, is choric.

While the acquisition of language transforms our relation to the more originary chōra, the symbolic cannot efface it. Kristeva sees in magic, shaman-ism, esoterism, the carnival, and poetry examples of what the symbolic renders opaque, or even represses, especially in the guises of law or what counts as “socially useful.” Kristeva argues that we must acknowledge the limits of the symbolic and demonstrate the necessity for investigating what “[exceeds] the subject and his communicative processes” (16). As Kristeva tells us in her opening paragraph, to deny the chōra leaves us playing with the remains of the processes that give life to human activity and simultaneously forecloses on regaining access to them. Kristeva’s focus on beginnings, Maria Margaroni remarks, has at stake our understanding of the passage “from nature to culture, from the biological organism to the social, speaking subject” and how that pas-sage is implicated in “the order within which we live” (2005, 81). One might well add invention to Kristeva’s list of choric phenomena, not because inven-tion is necessarily arcane or esoteric, but because it exceeds the subject, and our communicative processes do not exhaust or wholly explain all forms and aspects of invention. Invention, like avant garde literature and the other examples she gives, demonstrates the incursion of the semiotic chōra into the symbolic. Without the semiotic chōra, Kristeva argues, the sciences and the humanities are “archivistic, archaelogical, and necrophiliac” (1984, 13). These terms underscore for Kristeva the necessity for the chōra’s vital, extra-linguistic processes, just as they aid us in gaining insight into the order within which we live.

262 THOMAS RICKERT

The chōra, then, raises anew questions about beginnings, about what lies at an origin, and about the relationship of that originary moment to what follows. As we have seen, not only did these questions interest Plato, but they have bearing on rhetoric. For instance, in the rhetorical tradition, the topoi, general or special, are seen as a means to initiate a discourse. The general top-ics (commonplaces) would be cultural familiarities ready at hand for a rhetor; the special topics would be cognitive abstractions showing particular ways for thought to follow. In both cases, ideas are assumed as starting points. Kristeva’s chōra challenges this assumption. While it does not deny the use of ideas for invention, which would be impossible in any event, it does claim that ideas are only a part of what occurs in an inventional procedure, the other parts being of the semiotic chōra. Culture’s high premium on rational thought typically elevates ideas to the role of cause, thereby obfuscating what is choric. Kristeva demonstrates that the chōra disputes the purity of desire for the rational idea, which in turn suggests that invention is also choric.

The purity accorded the rational idea is particularly seen in the emphasis on systematic method as the key to rhetorical invention. Kristeva’s point is not that method is useless or unproductive, but that it is inadequate as an explana-tion for inventional activity, and disadvantageous to the extent that it colors our general understanding of invention, leading us once again to privilege word and idea. Mood, feeling, situation, sensation, accident, environment, memory, and sociopolitical negotiation, to create but a short list of possible phenomena, would then need to be factored into any accounting of beginning. Note that while such phenomena fall out of a systematized inventional method, nevertheless, they are still integral to rhetorical production.8 It is just that the use of method allows for the retroactive assignment of the productive cause to method, as if a rhetorical process can pull itself up by its own bootstraps. Thus, the symbolic, while it is the medium by means of which understanding and discourse show up (the in which, en hō), is not a replacement for the chōra and its effects (the out of which, ex hou).

Of course, this opens a problem that does need further addressing: if Kristeva’s chōra resists codifi cation, and presumably any easy or customary form of teaching, then in what sense can we legitimately align it with rhetori-cal invention? A fair question, of course, but also a misleading one. It assumes that we have fi rm knowledge already of what invention is, which thereby shuts out for further inquiry the question of invention itself. We might then answer that one thing choric invention provides us with is a way to put invention itself back into question, not as a metaphysical problem (à la “What is invention?” with “invention” being defi ned as a category with X number of characteristics),


but as an inventional problem. Kristeva, in other words, invites us to see choric invention as a particular form of beginning, one I would like to describe as “in-vention inventing itself.” Such invention takes place in material and affective situations that in turn create us. This is not a mystifi cation; rather, it attempts to return us to the complexities and concreteness of what occurs in rhetorical discourse. For example, we can envision an inventional scenario where a rhetor utilizing the topoi happens upon the topic of defi nition to advance a cause. This is fi ne as far as it goes, and it has the virtue of being teachable. Considered from a choric perspective, however, things are messier. One would want to bring into the purview of this inventive act less determinable factors: the affective state and confl icts of the rhetor, larger factors pertaining to the ambient environs and the social network she or he is in, and the informational network she or he brings to the issue as well as those that brought forth the issue to the rhetor, and so forth. Such factors can be addressed by inquiry, but they cannot be absolutely deter-mined; in this sense, every inventional act is also a (re)learning how to invent. I am reminded of a novelist who once responded to the question of whether or not writing novels made it easier to write future novels. The answer was no; the reasons were that every novel required new approaches and solutions to fresh problems that past writing experience could not cover. So, while there are aspects to invention that cannot be codifi ed, we can address them through inquiry and the challenge of invention itself; in so doing we resituate ourselves in a far richer conception of rhetorical activity.

Derrida: Oh, Khora!

Derrida’s writings on the chōra take two general tracks: theoretical investiga-tions about the chōra’s place in thought and discourse and its instability as a generative, spatial principle, and practical deployments of the chōra as an inventive principle. It is the latter usage that is directly inspirational to Ulmer, who takes Derrida’s techniques and extends and refi nes them. Derrida has di-rectly addressed the chōra in a number of works, but two in particular stand out: “Khōra,” which is bundled with two other essays in On the Name, and a book co-authored with Peter Eisenman documenting an architectural project, Chora L Works. Derrida’s systematic use of choric invention is so prolifi c as to preclude listing. Nor typically is the use of choric invention addressed specifi cally as an issue in these works. Already this suggests real differences between Kristeva’s chōra and Derrida’s (and Ulmer’s). Nevertheless, we will fi nd that there is some

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overlap, and while it will not do to confl ate these different senses of chōra, it will be productive to develop a sense of how they can be brought together to advance our understanding of rhetorical invention. One thing that they have in common is the struggle against reducing invention to ideas, or, perhaps more accurately, to understanding production and invention exclusively within the principle of representation.

Derrida’s essay “Khōra” was originally included in a festschrift for Jean-Pierre Vernant, the French classicist.9 Vernant did much work on the opposition between myth and reason, including how they often reversed poles, whereby mythos becomes logos and vice versa. In On the Name, Derrida in turn looks to khōra as a third term that lies outside the “regularity of the logos” yet does not belong to mythos, and asks, is there a place for what lies outside this opposition (1995, 90). This question of place is tied to the issue of naming, which is one of the reasons he refers not to “the chōra” but to “khōra,” as if he were speaking to a woman by that name. So, while we can give something a proper name, we are also reopening the classic poststructuralist question of the relation of the name to what is named (signifi er and signifi ed). In this case, “khōra” functions as a name for a referent the status of which is a matter of uneasy oppositions, aporia, and conjecture. Further, the question is complicated by its self-refl exiv-ity, which gives it a form like that of a snake eating its own tail. In asking about the possibility of giving place to something that seems to have no place, he is asking about the place of khōra, a word that itself refers to place (i.e., “what is the place of place?”). This thematization of a paradoxical third term/place/name (recall that Timaeus spoke of it as a third kind, triton genos) may strike us as a typically Derridean move, but we should be careful in this assessment. If we consider it less as the pursuit of a typical theme or topic of Derrida’s, but rather as a kind of inventio, we see that such a move is already telegraphed by Plato. Khōra is there a paradox calling for a “bastard reasoning” (logismō nothō) be-cause of the aporetic (aporōtata) manner in which it takes part in the intelligible (Timaeus, 52b, 51b). Derrida looks to Plato’s Timaeus as a means to create a new discourse resonant with the aporia of the khōra and by which he addresses themes of beginning, naming, placing, and inventing.

The aporia described by Derrida is consequential not only for thinking but for rhetoric. In reading Plato’s text, commentators have latched onto the metaphorical resources offered there. Khōra is matrix, mother, receptacle, nurse, or bearer of imprints. However, Derrida argues, commentators who depend on these rhetorical resources never wonder about them, when khōra as stated ex-plicitly by Plato questions the distinction between the sensible and intelligible upon which rhetoric is built (1995, 92). We thereby come to the crux of the


problem for Derrida. When we give something a name, we inevitably come to it via rhetoric—image, metaphor, simile, tropology (92, 94). And yet, how are we to think about and give place to the aporia that emerges when we attend to the disjunctions between rhetorical discourse and what in the dialogue falls out of that discourse, ranges beyond it, or calls that very discourse into question?

Were Derrida to remain only at the level of this questioning of the capac-ity or possibility of rhetoric, even though the question is of interest to rhetoric, still the matter would remain a philosophical concern. But as already indicated, Derrida implicitly argues that the question of how to give place to something is an issue of invention. The conundrum is that it is an issue that puts rhetoric’s relation to invention in a precarious place. While rhetoric includes invention, insofar as invention initiates a rhetorical discourse, this stops short of actually addressing or thinking invention. For Derrida, an inventio is khōra-ic, choric: like Plato’s receptacle, it gives rise to a discourse and withdraws from that discourse. There is a dichotomy between the functioning of invention and the attempt to grapple with actual inventional activity, an aporia that is itself choric. In short: Derrida raises the possibility that while rhetoric works through or even depends on invention, invention may inhabit a paradoxical or impossible place within rhetoric, precisely because of its always-ongoing withdrawal. Looking back at Kristeva, we can see here another take on invention “inventing” itself. We only have so much access to what occurs during inventional activity, and at some point, inventional activity comes up against its own limit, which leads to a reopening of the question of how to invent.

Derrida demonstrates his choric inventio throughout his oeuvre, but I would like to examine an example from “Khōra” of particular signifi cance because it involves a rhetor, Socrates. Derrida calls attention to how Socrates plays a choric role in the Timaeus, which in turn resononates with Derrida’s characterization of his relationship with Eisenman on the garden project as “Socrato-choral” (1997, 166–67). This choric role shows up, for instance, when Socrates at 19d describes his own inability to magnify suffi ciently or bring to life the ideal polis discussed in the Republic—or, to reinforce the thematic point, to give place to it. Socrates admits of a similarity to the poets and the sophists, which means he shares with them something of the imitative. How-ever, as Derrida points out, it is also that the poets and especially the sophists, who are given to wander, have no proper place (107). Socrates appears to place himself in a similar nonplace, but this gambit also has the effect of putting his interlocutors into the proper subjective place for the dialogue to ensue—the place of the philosopher/politician (107–8). Additionally, that Socrates aligns himself with the genos of the poets and the sophists is itself precarious. Being

266 THOMAS RICKERT

both like and unlike them, he falls into a third category, a triton genos like the khōra, but at the same time, this neutral, unmarked place is the genesis for the entire dialogue on place and polis (109). This makes of Socrates’ silence for the bulk of the dialogue something remarkable if we consider it as corresponding to the khōra. His withdrawal allows for the emergence of Timaeus’ cosmology and ultimately the khōra itself.

Chora L Works is an unusual collection of texts documenting discussion and plans for a collaborative project between Derrida and the architect Peter Eisenman. The project, a “garden” for the Parc de la Villette in Paris, is an at-tempt to bring architecture and deconstruction not just into discussion with each other, but into actual co-production. As Eisenman asks early in the collaboration, “How does one turn Jacques Derrida into a synthesizer? How does one make him make?” (8). But as we fi nd at the end of the project, one does not get him to make architecture. The book—two hundred pages of notes, drawings, essays, and transcripts, collected in an artful design itself inviting commentary—documents four years of travails that ultimately produces . . . nothing but the book itself. No garden is constructed. One conclusion we can reach about this is that Derrida as a philosopher is certainly interested in beginnings, creation, and invention, but that he confronts a limit with productive arts such as rhetoric and architecture. In part, this is because he is interested in inventing the impossible. The chōra for Derrida is precisely such an impossibility, and the confl icts that emerge with Eisenman stem from Derrida’s attempt to realize this impossibility leavened with an intuition that it cannot be realized—that it remains impossible (see Dayan 2003, 72–73). Derrida’s chōra inhabits an impossible place, one that governs, in a manner nearly meta-metaphysical (in the sense that the chōra comments on the limits of metaphysics), the entire proceedings, to the extent the project remains unfulfi lled. Given this, one can see why Ulmer aligns Derrida with surrealism (Ulmer 1994, 5). In Chora L Works, however, even if Derrida aligns himself with “anti-architecture,” he also admits, “Yet I have always had the feeling of being an architect, in a way, when I am writing” (1997, 8). Derrida recognizes how his treatment of the impossible supplies just another form of discursive construc-tion. This inventio, as Ulmer characterizes it, is at work throughout Derrida’s corpus. One example directly relevant to the issue of place is Derrida’s essay “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils,” originally a talk given at Cornell on the dangers besetting the contemporary university. Derrida quite literally utilizes Cornell’s surrounding landscape to invent his argument (see also Ulmer 1994, 40–41). Cornell’s topology gives insight into the topolitics of universities, the governing role of reason, and the problem of the abyss: like the Cornell campus, built near a chasm, reason fi nds itself “above


an abyss, suspended over a gorge,” and the university too is threatened with losing its formerly secure socio-political place (Derrida 1983, 10–11). In short, by weaving his discussion through a text of Heidegger, Cornell’s founding and campus topography, the question of the “place” of the university, the precarious ground of reason, and his own status as an au large professor speaking to an audience, Derrida ably performs his choric invention.

Ulmer: A Choric Inventio

In turning to the work of Ulmer, we see a more complete fl owering of the chōra as a rhetorical concept, and certainly a more practical approach, but it is also work that builds rather directly on Plato, Derrida, and Kristeva. By “directly,” I do not mean in terms of direct appropriation of their thought. Rather, Ulmer himself works via the chōra, and his sense of chōra is somewhat loose. He is not attempting a rigorous recapturing of what Plato—or Derrida or Kristeva—might have meant or intended. Instead, he is applying to them the very principles of choric invention he develops out of their work. This indicates a high degree of self-refl exivity that is fully in keeping with Ulmer’s writerly and inventional aesthetics. Such self-refl exivity is further appropriate for the electronic age, where near-total mediation, feedback loops, co-adaptive systems, and ecological systems theory are culturally and epistemologically ascendant, if not dominant. In such a world, Ulmer argues, choric invention has great potential, and may even be said to supplant older inventional approaches such as the topics.

One of the key ideas developed in Ulmer’s book Heuretics is that the contemporary age of electronic media asks us to move away from the inventional techniques codifi ed in the topoi toward techniques that build out of the chōra. Ulmer states that “the writer using chorography as a rhetoric of invention will store and retrieve information from premises or places formulated not as abstract containers, as in the tradition of topos” (1994, 73). Instead, a choric rhetorician will attend to memory, networks, technologies, intuitions, and environments (places). What might this mean? For Ulmer, among other things, it will mean inventive rhetorical forms, such as the Mystory, the Popcycle, and the CATTt, that are alternatives to the rationalistic methods developed for print culture.10 These are inventive forms appropriate for an “information environment” (38). As does Plato in the Timaeus, Ulmer wrestles with the genesis of rhetorical production from out of our circumambient environs, i.e., the passage from choric world to expression. He uses a hybrid combination of method, pastiche, accident,

268 THOMAS RICKERT

and associative thinking, as well as rational discourse and logic, to construct variable-media discourses that he refers to as hypermedia. Hypermedia digitally combine image, text, and sound in various permutations; further, in terms of their composition, they are likely to borrow techniques from one media form and apply it to the other, e.g., appropriating a network organizational pattern for an argument.

Ultimately, the chōra allows Ulmer to reconceive the relations among a writer and his or her “specifi c position in the time and space of a culture” (33). This is not solely a matter of the hermeneutics of cultural identity, except insofar as that is extended to a broader project of the generation of texts ap-propriate for the electronic age, and the question of how an inventio suited to such generation can be formulated. Ulmer’s chōra moves us from a thinking that is “linear indexical to network associational” (36) and concerned less with logic than with memory (experience, both personal and externalized/stored) and intuition (37), less with verifi cation than with learning (xii). The radical expan-sion and externalization of memory in cultural discourse, electronic networks, and databases creates an ocean of information, which in turn requires navigation (30). One must be careful on this point, however. As suggested above by both Kristeva and Derrida, the chōra is precariously placed in regard to reasoning and discourse. Ulmer points out that computers, by providing new equipment of memory, also transform people and institutions (36). Choric navigation, then, moves us toward a reconceptualization of place, and hence equally a re-confi guration of what it means to navigate. For Ulmer, this will mean, among other things, that a hypermedia composer constructs not arguments per se but an “information environment” through which a user will choose a path. Such a notion of place, and the kinds of activities that emerge from it, are properly understood as dispersed or distributed.

But, given the centrality of place in these discussions, I want to emphasize that these rhetorical forms rely on processes of externalization and dispersion. The movement in electronic media of digitalizing word and image is an exter-nalization, to be sure, and Ulmer takes time to develop these ideas in detail. But it can be added that such processes both join and help accentuate an ongoing attunement to the materialities of body, place, and environment that have been picked up in numerous disciplines at this time, including the sciences. Such attention to materiality has helped produce a sense of dispersion for the human subject that extends the insights of French poststructuralist thought. Katherine Hayles, for example, has written about this dispersion in the ongoing work of systems theorists in her book How We Became Posthuman. One of her remarks is that it is less that humans are getting smarter than that they are building


smarter environments (1999, 289). Such a statement marks a key difference between topical and choric invention because it underscores how material and informational scaffolding become part of the “in which” (en hō) and “out of which” (ex hou) rhetorical and cognitive activity occur.

While we might well characterize our environments as “smarter,” in the sense that we have built information and ability into our circumambient scaffolding, it should also be remarked that when such transitions occur, they inevitably transform who we are in relation to that environment. Thus, in the age of mechanized physics, we had mechanical models and theories for understand-ing human bodies and brains. Today, in the age of the computer, computational models for the brain abound. Likewise, ecological understandings of what it means to be human transform our ambient environs, as we are seeing a prolifera-tion of studies that attribute to it a kind of “intelligence.” Ulmer may have been prescient on this point; in his 1985 book Applied Grammatology he argued that in Derrida’s rhetoric we see an inventio that “functions on the assumption that language itself is ‘intelligent’” (1985, 46). Studies like those of Edwin Hutchins disperse that intelligence still further, demonstrating that a common occurence such as steering a large ship into harbor depends on an interactive complex of knowledges, vocabularies, technologies, and skills. This constitutes a dispersion of agency into the informatic-material environs that can include but extends signifi cantly beyond the ideas-driven system of topical invention, which is to say, it is a move that radically reconfi gures rhetorical space and what can show up there as appropriate and available for theory and practice.

While Ulmer makes of the chōra an inventional methodology, and Clark, Hutchins, Hayles and others invoke the choric as the locus of everyday activ-ity, there are theoretical parallels with the work of Kristeva and Derrida that bear mentioning because of how they situate us with regard to invention itself. Like Derrida especially, Ulmer is attuned to the displaced place of the chōra in a discourse of method and invention, if not discourse in general. As Ulmer notes in Heuretics, “My problem, in inventing an electronic rhetoric by replac-ing topos with chōra in the practice of invention, is to devise a ‘discourse on method’ for that which, similarly, is the other of method” (1994, 66). Chōra is an other to method as traditionally conceived for at least two reasons. First, as Plato, Kristeva, and Derrida have all suggested, the chōra is only approachable through bastard discourses, or as if in a dream; like a black hole, we perceive it only through its effects. The chōra is the receptacle, but it simultaneously withdraws, and because of this it cannot, stricto sensu, be represented (66).

What are we to think of a writing and invention, both of which seem to be activities entirely caught up with representation, that traverse in what are

270 THOMAS RICKERT

claimed to be realms of nonrepresentation? Simply this: to take this fundamental insight and begin to think it through and invent out of it, in all the myriad ways available, about what is of interest and concern, but most particularly about what happens when we think and we invent. Ulmer broaches this idea himself when he states that “part of working heuretically is to use the method that I am inventing while I am inventing it” (17). Ulmer likens this to the dream logic of surrealism, which he also associates with Derrida (5), but a further connection is to the Timaeus itself when Timaeus indicates that one approaches the chōra as through a dream (oneiropoloumen) (Timaeus, 52b). In all these instances, we run up against the limits of representation, as well as the limits of a dis-course on invention. What is suggested is that invention considered from the perspective of the chōra, or as given a place in choric genesis, is itself akin to the receptacle. Something of what occurs in the inventional process withdraws even as a discourse or hypermedia emerges. Ulmer acknowledges how this traces the impossibility of the chōra. But we should exercise some care here. The impossibility has nothing to do with what we can do with choric invention except the one, self-refl exive exception: what is impossible is that a discourse of representation can capture invention. Certainly representation can describe methods, or paths, by which invention can occur. But the impossible emerges when we try to equate this with invention itself. It is for this reason that, if we think along with Ulmer, Kristeva, and Derrida, we see that, like the Platonic polis, there is a movement to invention, a going beyond boundaries and returning, that precludes its being fi xed in place, even though it simultaneously emerges in and through place. It turns back around on itself, ensuring that what remains at the heart of invention is invention itself. What the chōra allows Ulmer to do is theorize and practice how this seeming inconsistency or paradox is actually productive. It is part of what enables or gives rise to rhetoric (as the receptacle), but it also withdraws, which in turn necessitates nothing more than another beginning, or another inventio.

Department of EnglishPurdue University

Notes 1. In fact, Aristotle refers to the Timaeus more often than any other Platonic dialogue. This in keeping with the fact that the Timaeus was the most popular Platonic dialogue in antiquity up to the Renaissance (Claghorn 1954, 1–2). The disfavor with which it is currently saddled only began emerging in the nineteenth century. 2. And not only other interpretations, but translations. Indeed, Sallis argues that while it is customary to translate chōra as “space,” strictly speaking, it is untranslatable. Derrida makes a


similar argument, and ultimately chooses to treat the chōra as “khōra,” i.e., as a proper name that challenges the relation between a signifi er and its referent. 3. There is a long tradition for separating space and place, in which space is held to be a more abstract, generalizable term of which place would be a more determinable part. We should be leery of assuming the Greeks maintained this same conceptual distinction, for while they do at times, at others they do not. Algra points out that it would therefore be incorrect to equate chōra with space and topos with place as if topos were simply a more specifi able location within a generalized area (1995, 35). Where the two terms do appear together, topos can mean a part of chōra, or simply relative location, ala the topos (position) of the chōra (region) (34). 4. Aristotle is simultaneously laudatory and critical of Plato’s thoughts on space and genera-tion. In the Physics, Aristotle remarks that “everyone assumes that there is such a thing as place, but Plato is the only one who tried to say what it is” (209b15–16). Furthermore, he seems to be in agreement with Plato on a number of counts. Indeed, scholars such as Claghorn argue that the differences between Plato and Aristotle are magnifi ed by the critics, and Claghorn points to a very old tradition that the spatial theories of Plato and Aristotle are largely congruent (1954, 2–3). More representative, at least in more recent commentary, is the judgment of scholars such as A. E. Taylor, who sees Aristotle as disagreeing frequently with Plato, even to the extent of falling into error (1928, 666), or simply if unconsciously “falsifying the theory of the Timaeus by forcing his own technical terminology into it” (347). Certainly, Aristotle in the Physics as well as in On the Heavens and On Generation and Corruption redefi nes the chōra in the terms of topos and hulē, place and matter. For example, Aristotle tells us that “in the Timaeus Plato identifi es matter and space, because what is capable of receiving form is the same as space” (Physics, 209b11–12). Ultimately, Aristotle tends to understand the chōra as the material substratum (hupokeimenon) of each thing (192a). It is beyond the scope of this essay to analyze the extent to which Aristotle’s reinscription of chōra is a distortion or an advance; nor are these debates essential to the use of the chōra in Der-rida, Kristeva, and Ulmer, with one point as exception. For all three of these fi gures, Aristotle is aligned with a tradition that sees the assimilation of chōra to topos as a move from the boundless to the bounded, the indeterminate to the determinate (see Casey [1997], Sallis [1999], Ashbaugh [1988]). For Aristotle, everything has a defi nite, locatable place, and this place is entirely material: it is the boundedness of bodies and things within circumambient space. Edward Casey remarks that in Aristotle “place is literally marginalized: it becomes the closest static surface coextensive with the edges of a physical thing, that is, what is (at) its very margins” (1997, 333). Thus, we can say that Aristotle took one of the paths made available in the Timaeus, and it is a path mirrored in his choice of term, topos, for material space, and his focus on certain images such as gold and the Receptacle to form his dominant impression of what the chōra is. This essay explores other paths that can be taken with the chōra. 5. See also Drew A. Hyland, who makes the point in his book Questioning Platonism that while we take it as customary that authors write treatises with clearly articulated positions, Plato in fact wrote dialogues that staged issues. This means that the extremely common if not automatic practice of equating Socrates’ arguments with Plato’s is suspect at best. See in particular Hyland’s “Introduction” (2004, 1–15). I will simply note here that in the Timaeus, Socrates speaks very little; the primary voice is Timaeus. When I use phrases like the “Platonic chōra,” then, I will be following a tradition of assigning a position to Plato, but I hope to be understood as doing so sous rature. Considered more rigorously, such conventional phrases will mean something akin to “Plato’s staging of the question of the chōra.” To what extent Plato understood the chōra as his own doctrine is unknowable, even if the intellectual tradition has assigned this doctrine to him. 6. It is worth noting that it is still common to explicate the chōra by attending solely to the sec-tion where it is introduced. For instance, even someone as otherwise careful and rigorous as Algra claims, “I shall take it for granted that this part [on the chōra] can be studied more or less by itself,” and cites E. N. Lee in support (Algra 1995, 74). This also allows Algra to limit his discussion of the chōra to “the question whether and in what sense it serves as space” (75), and then to suggest that Plato’s comments are of at best germinal insight and therefore also deserving of Aristotle’s criticisms (76). Relatedly, this gives especial signifi cance to the fact that Derrida and Eisenman’s Chora L Works is bookended by a reproduction of a page from the Timaeus, a page that begins with 48e. 7. For a well known example, Bury’s introduction to his 1929 Loeb translation of the Timaeus divides the dialogue into three parts: fi rst, the introduction, including Solon’s legend of Atlantis

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(19a–27c); second, the soul of the world and the discussion of the chōra and the triangles (27c–69a); and three, the creation of soul’s and bodies (69a–end) (Bury 1929, 4). Obviously, this is not the only way to section off the dialogue, nor need we stick to a tripartite structure. It is nevertheless quite common. Additionally, the theme of threes is woven throughout the dialogue. Three different cities are discussed (Socrates’ ideal city narrated in the Republic, ancient Athens, and Atlantis), the three parts of the World Soul elaborated, and so on. The Timaeus itself was intended for a projected trilogy, of which it was the beginning, followed by the Critias, of which we have a fragment, and a Hermocrates, which was never written. 8. This assertion is at odds with a narrower conception of rhetorical invention. For example, Thomas Cole argues that rhetoric be limited to being a “self-conscious manipulation of a [speaker’s or writer’s] medium” ( 1997, ix). Similarly, Richard Young and Alton Becker claim that “rhetoric tends to become a superfi cial and marginal concern when it is separated from systematic methods of inquiry” (1965, 127). The chōra, then, leads us toward a considerably expanded understanding of rhetorical invention. 9. I will retain Derrida’s French spelling for “khōra” when working with the essay of that title; otherwise, I will use the customary English rendition. It should also be noted that Chora L Works includes both French and English versions of this essay, but there entitled “Chora.” Derrida declines to use an article with khōra, reinforcing that point that it (she) is less a representational concept with a referent than just a (proper) name, i.e., a name for what falls out of representation. 10. See also Jarrett (1999), Rice (2007), and Saper (1997), who have worked directly or indirectly with the choric logics developed by Ulmer.

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thomas rickert -- "toward the chora"

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