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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 environments 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 informational 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 Platos concept of the chra and rhetorical invention. Much
rhetorical theory still works out of the separatist mind/body/environment paradigm 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 reflective 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 environment 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, 45). 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 efficiency), as providing a discursive place where
thoughts begin and grow.
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 40, No. 3, 2007.
Copyright 2007 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
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more fully developed by Aristotle when he subsumed chra under topos and
theorized it as material space, although he did grant that Plato was the first to say
anything of significance about space.1 Nevertheless, Aristotles assimilation of
chra to space and matter, while widely regarded as an advance, is disputed by
some because the chra lends itself to other interpretations.2 Kristeva, Derrida,
and Ulmer are among those interested in what the chra can offer us distinct
from what Aristotle accomplished. In the chra they find a theoretical resource
able to generate new light on the emplaced (and displaced), distributed, and
bodily character of rhetorical activity. However, the chra is not only a matter
of theoretical inquiryit 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 nonhuman actors such as language, networks, environments, and databases. They
demonstrate that the chra 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 complexifies traditional divisions among discourses, minds,
bodies, and circumambient environs.
Contemporary work on the chra suggests that there is no clear demarcation 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 chra 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 chra has no body of
scholarship in rhetorical theory. This situation necessitates some basic groundwork in developing a sense of what the chra 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 chra, at which times the main argument takes a backseat. Nevertheless,
even at these points, I should emphasize that since the chra presents an expansive notion of invention attendant to environments and limits, chras 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.
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THOMAS RICKERT
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 floor (1993, 6263). For McEwen, Daedalus personifies the growing realization that place and making are conjoined.
Not only did Daedalus make the Knossos dancing floor (choros), but he built the
moving automata and the Labyrinth at Crete. Perhaps more significantly, Diodorus Siculus relates that after fleeing Crete, Daedalus built a nearly impregnable
city, the strongest in all of Sicily (McEwen 1993, 76). The connection between
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the polis and creation will be central to Plato in the Timaeus. While chra 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 (chra)
(155n4; cf. Sallis 1999, 116). Looking at the archaeological work of Franois
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 citys territory (chra) 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 movements 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 floor.
Of particular relevance is the affinity that shows up here between architectural and discursive construction. In both cases, we can understand such
making as processual. If in its more archaic sense the chra was a territory
made to appear through what McEwen characterizes as a continual remaking
or reweaving of its encompassing surface (82), an instability becomes apparent 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 weaving of the city because they are necessary for the polis to thrive. In this regard,
McEwen remarks that what is striking about Platos 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 Republics
static ideals to seeing such ideals made and put into action. Furthermore, for
Plato, the chra 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.
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Aristotles far clearer assimilation of chra to hul (matter) and topos (generally, though not exclusively, place) has been dominant in the centuries since.
However, Aristotles repurposing of chra through other terms has had the
effect of confining it to work on material space, even if there has been a legacy
of controversy surrounding this move. Aristotles writings on space do not
seem congruent with what Plato wrote, suggesting that the chra cannot be
solely understood as phenomenal space.4 Further, as Jacques Derridas and John
Salliss commentaries on the Timaeus argue, the concept of chra is complexly
interwoven into the dramatic action and discussion of the dialogue itself.5 An
understanding of the chra cannot be extracted solely by examining what seem
the most relevant passages, usually considered approximately 48e53d, 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 befitting the receptaclelike chra, such that we might see the dialogue itself as providing a place for
the concepts emergence. It is important to note that while the chra thereby
designates a kind of beginning, it has no real qualities itself; its odd passivity
marks it as fundamentally indeterminate (Timaeus, 51ab). 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 first 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 days discussion about
an ideal city. The first 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 chra 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 chra is granted a strangely displaced place, one
that mirrors an ambiguity concerning ideas of beginning and creation, genesis
and invention. This uncertainty is reflected in the dialogues three different
beginnings. From the dialogues first line the issue of a missing fourth arises,
paralleling the sense that something is yet missing from the ideal city described
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in the Republic. And, in order to beginin order to go forwardthe conversation must first go back, which raises the issue of memory. Socrates, then, first
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 first 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 Timaeuss task is to address a crucial problem concerning the Republic. While it evokes powerful feelings and approval, the ideal city remains an
ideal. It misses actuality, and the discussants hope this condition is rectifiable,
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, corporeity itself in its singularity, takes on greater significance 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 techn or poiesis, with respect to eros (26). We can
also say that this is very much a problem of invention, in the sense of finding
ways to actualize or enact what are initially only ideas, feelings, or intuitions.
Stated otherwise, we can see the Platonic chra 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 refined 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
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even the accounts given are characterized as only probable or likely (Timaeus,
28b, 44d, 48cd, 55d, 59c, 66d). In this regard, the chra can be taken as Platos
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 refined 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 questiona question we have yet
to answer definitivelynot 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 specifically 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 chra. There is no direct equivalency between ideal and chra,
or chra 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 chra. Indeed, chras
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 chra 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
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Athens of Platos 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 chra, something about it that resists determination (see Sallis 1999,
36). This problem is already noted in the Timaeus. Timaeus tells us that it is
most difficult to catch and only apprehendable by means of a bastard reasoning (Timaeus, 51ab, 52b). The chra is of a third kind that is not really a
kind; it is a Receptacle (hupodoxe), which Edward Casey describes as something at once locatory and yet not itself located, permanent and yet invisible,
underlying and yet insubstantial (1997, 37). The chra 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 chra 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 h) and out of which (ex hou) they show up and pass
away; but the chra 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 chra 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 chra as city or land is still always present.
The dialogues attempt to wrestle with the limitations of fabrication (or techn)
following the discussion of the ideal city invites us to consider the relation of the
chra to the polis, and the polis to its exterior or what lies outside its boundaries. The region surrounding and sustaining a polis is also called chra. Thus, as
we saw above with McEwen, the chra has a specifically 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 boundaries to thrive (a reinforcement of Timaeuss anagke in 47e). These patterns of
boundary and disruption weave throughout the Timaeus. For example, the fact
that approaching the chra requires a bastard discourse means that the chra
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 chra, from the Pythagoreans. And, as discussed
above, the impetus behind the Timaeus in the first 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 chra is
taken to be a concept useful for rhetorical invention. As we have seen, first
there is the problem of the establishment of a beginning point (note also the
irony in the tension between first and beginning point). While such a point
is necessarily threaded through the polis and its outlying areas, and also linked
to memory, these seem insufficient 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 movement that speaks to a beginnings ultimate indeterminacy. Such assertions may
seem abstract, but there is a functional role to them that returns us to rhetorics
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 chra
both by helping to generate what Timaeus relates, andin a manner remarkable
considering Socrates dominant role in most dialoguesalso 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 section nestling the other, receptacle-like, perhaps akin to the way Russian dolls
are packed one inside the other (1995, 117). In the end, the chra, ostensibly
a cosmological likely story for genesis, becomes also a writerly principle, and
thus, even for Plato, rhetorical.
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The chra, 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 topics (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. Kristevas
chra 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 chra. Cultures high premium on rational thought typically
elevates ideas to the role of cause, thereby obfuscating what is choric. Kristeva
demonstrates that the chra 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. Kristevas point is not
that method is useless or unproductive, but that it is inadequate as an explanation 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 h), is not a replacement for the chra and its effects (the
out of which, ex hou).
Of course, this opens a problem that does need further addressing: if
Kristevas chra resists codification, and presumably any easy or customary
form of teaching, then in what sense can we legitimately align it with rhetorical invention? A fair question, of course, but also a misleading one. It assumes
that we have firm 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 ( la What is invention?
with invention being defined as a category with X number of characteristics),
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overlap, and while it will not do to conflate these different senses of chra, 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.
Derridas essay Khra was originally included in a festschrift for JeanPierre 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
khra 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 chra but to khra, 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 (signifier and signified). In this case, khra 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-reflexivity, 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 khra, 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 Derridas, but rather
as a kind of inventio, we see that such a move is already telegraphed by Plato.
Khra is there a paradox calling for a bastard reasoning (logism noth) because of the aporetic (aportata) manner in which it takes part in the intelligible
(Timaeus, 52b, 51b). Derrida looks to Platos Timaeus as a means to create a
new discourse resonant with the aporia of the khra 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 Platos text, commentators have latched onto the
metaphorical resources offered there. Khra is matrix, mother, receptacle, nurse,
or bearer of imprints. However, Derrida argues, commentators who depend on
these rhetorical resources never wonder about them, when khra as stated explicitly 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
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both like and unlike them, he falls into a third category, a triton genos like the
khra, 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 khra. His withdrawal allows for the emergence of Timaeus cosmology
and ultimately the khra 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 attempt 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 find at the end of the project, one does not get him to
make architecture. The booktwo hundred pages of notes, drawings, essays, and
transcripts, collected in an artful design itself inviting commentarydocuments
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 chra
for Derrida is precisely such an impossibility, and the conflicts that emerge with
Eisenman stem from Derridas attempt to realize this impossibility leavened with
an intuition that it cannot be realizedthat it remains impossible (see Dayan
2003, 7273). Derridas chra inhabits an impossible place, one that governs, in
a manner nearly meta-metaphysical (in the sense that the chra comments on the
limits of metaphysics), the entire proceedings, to the extent the project remains
unfulfilled. 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 construction. This inventio, as Ulmer characterizes it, is at work throughout Derridas
corpus. One example directly relevant to the issue of place is Derridas 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 Cornells surrounding landscape to invent his
argument (see also Ulmer 1994, 4041). Cornells 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 finds itself above
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an abyss, suspended over a gorge, and the university too is threatened with
losing its formerly secure socio-political place (Derrida 1983, 1011). In short,
by weaving his discussion through a text of Heidegger, Cornells 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.
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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, 12). 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 chra as space, strictly speaking, it is untranslatable. Derrida makes a
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similar argument, and ultimately chooses to treat the chra as khra, i.e., as a proper name that
challenges the relation between a signifier 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 chra with space
and topos with place as if topos were simply a more specifiable location within a generalized area
(1995, 35). Where the two terms do appear together, topos can mean a part of chra, or simply
relative location, ala the topos (position) of the chra (region) (34).
4. Aristotle is simultaneously laudatory and critical of Platos thoughts on space and generation. 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 (209b1516). 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 magnified by the critics, and Claghorn points to a very
old tradition that the spatial theories of Plato and Aristotle are largely congruent (1954, 23). 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 redefines the chra in the terms of topos and hul, place and matter.
For example, Aristotle tells us that in the Timaeus Plato identifies matter and space, because what
is capable of receiving form is the same as space (Physics, 209b1112). Ultimately, Aristotle tends
to understand the chra as the material substratum (hupokeimenon) of each thing (192a).
It is beyond the scope of this essay to analyze the extent to which Aristotles reinscription of
chra is a distortion or an advance; nor are these debates essential to the use of the chra in Derrida, Kristeva, and Ulmer, with one point as exception. For all three of these figures, Aristotle is
aligned with a tradition that sees the assimilation of chra 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 definite, 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 chra is. This essay explores other paths
that can be taken with the chra.
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 Platos is suspect at best. See in particular Hylands
Introduction (2004, 115). 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 chra, 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 Platos
staging of the question of the chra. To what extent Plato understood the chra 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 chra by attending solely to the section 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 chra] 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 chra to the question whether and in what sense it serves as space (75), and then to suggest
that Platos comments are of at best germinal insight and therefore also deserving of Aristotles
criticisms (76). Relatedly, this gives especial significance to the fact that Derrida and Eisenmans
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, Burys introduction to his 1929 Loeb translation of the Timaeus
divides the dialogue into three parts: first, the introduction, including Solons legend of Atlantis
272
THOMAS RICKERT
(19a27c); second, the soul of the world and the discussion of the chra and the triangles (27c69a);
and three, the creation of souls and bodies (69aend) (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 [speakers
or writers] medium ( 1997, ix). Similarly, Richard Young and Alton Becker claim that rhetoric
tends to become a superficial and marginal concern when it is separated from systematic methods
of inquiry (1965, 127). The chra, then, leads us toward a considerably expanded understanding
of rhetorical invention.
9. I will retain Derridas French spelling for khra 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 khra, 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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