Toward the Chōra: Kristeva, Derrida, and Ulmer on Emplaced Invention

Abstract

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. 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 ch?ra and rhetorical invention. Much rhetorical theory still works of the separatist mind/body/environment para digm being challenged. 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 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 efficiency), as providing a discursive place where thoughts begin and grow.

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