Miami Virtue

Proposal:  Miami Virtue and the Ulmer Tapes

Small Cities Imprint, the online publication wing of the Community-University Research Alliance

The Florida Research Ensemble (FRE) is an interdisciplinary collaborative arts and research group working on the development of choragraphy, a method of inquiry which applies modernist arts practices and poststructural theory to the design and testing of image as category. We contend that image categories functions for networked digital media the way Aristotle's word categories functioned for literacy.

In the 1990s the group conducted a field experiment on the Miami River to test this methodology using the site as a prototype of a chora.  We would like to submit some fruits of this work for your consideration as an e-publication.  The submission includes:

1) "Miami Virtue,” (please see the attached Miami_Virtue.docx file) a book-length manuscript by Gregory Ulmer, placing the Miami River experiment in a theoretical and methodological frame.

2) The “Ulmer Tapes” archive, a series of video interviews recorded in June, 2001 by John Craig Freeman of Gregory Ulmer discussing the FRE choragraphy of the Miami River. The Archive can be previewed online at http://johncraigfreeman.wordpress.com/ulmer-tapes/.

3) A portfolio of photographs by Barbara Jo' Revelle created on location at the Miami River.

The purpose of this proposal is to indicate the relevance of choragraphy in general and Miami Virtue and the Ulmer Tapes in particular for Small Cities CURA.  A primary site of relevance is the Small Cities concern with how a community achieves definition, character, place, identity, not only cartographically but also experientially. Choragraphy is an experience-based theory of place and space, addressing “borders” in conditions of sprawl affecting geography, information, and mentality.

FRE’s aliance with CURA dates back to November 2005, when Freeman was invited to participate in the "Artist Statement: Artistic Inquiry and the Role of the Artist in Academe" workshop/symposium co-organized by Will Garrett-Petts and Rachel Nash of Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops BC, Canada. The program focused on how the "artists-as-researchers" model extends and complicates the practice of interdisciplinary research and collaborative practices. This event resulted in an ongoing creative and research relationship.

Chora

 “Chora” (meaning “region” or “space” in Greek) was appropriated as a term in philosophy by Plato in the dialog Timaeus.  Plato’s two-world metaphysics proposed that an ideal realm of pure Ideas (Being) was the source of reality, of which the material world (Becoming) was but an image.  He added a third register of interface, dubbed “Chora,” as the support wherein Being and Becoming interacted.  Chora is neither perceptible nor intelligible, but its action may be inferred from the manner in which order emerges from primordial chaos.  Plato resorted to mythology to discuss “region,” describing it as a machine that generated categories, sorting the world into elements the way threshing sorted wheat from chaff (a practice referenced also in the symbolism of the Eleusinian Mysteries that were celebrated in Plato’s day).   Aristotle, rejecting the idealist account in favor of a metaphysics of immanence, translated Chora into the principle of “potentiality” (Dunamis), paired with “actuality” (Energeia).  He added temporality, and declared that Being constituted the essence of an entity, that causes it to become what it is:  things develop in the manner of seeds into trees.  His neologism for this teleological process is “entelechy,” that organized comprehension by a final cause (that-for-the-sake-of-which).

 Chorography (with an “o”) was a term introduced in Ancient times for a particular approach to regional mapping:  it combined mimetic or pictorial representation with cartographic geometry.  Chorography was a hybrid between town portraiture and abstract cartography.   One of its important practical uses was to help ship pilots recognize and distinguish one seaport from another.  The vogue for panoramas in the nineteenth century updated the mode, and it survived in maps designed for tourists until Google Maps gave it renewed functionality today.

Choragraphy

 “Chora” was retrieved for contemporary philosophy by Jacques Derrida, in the context of his deconstruction of Western metaphysics.  Grounded in grammatology (the history and theory of writing), Derrida’s critique of Being and Becoming as primary concepts of reality is that the category or classification system invented within literacy is not adequate for the apparatus of electracy that has developed since the industrial revolution.  Literacy modeled an appropriate invention process, which correlated the science of material space-time with language technology structures and the skill set of people who use the technology to manage life in material reality:  chronotopes join physics, language, and mind.  Thus Aristotle used his notion of topos (place) to model an information space of topic, and a logical practice by which literate people could store and retrieve information as an internalized or psychologized physics. 

 Derrida contributes to apparatus shift (the invention of electracy) by putting in question “border” “boundary” and all notions of “category,” at every level of the chronotope.  “Aporia” is his name for the experience of movement/arrest across thresholds.  His work makes accessible to thought the understanding of time-space of our world, taking into account chaos theory (catastrophe, complexity, strange attractors, and the like), dromosphere (dimension collapse described by the urbanist Paul Virilio), technics (Stiegler’s observation of technology as opening a third dimension of evolution, autonomous from the entelechy of nature and humanity), and capitalist globalization.  Chora in Derrida’s grammatology is a point of departure for inventing a new category procedure adequate to our digital, global apparatus.

 Electracy

 “Electracy” is the term Ulmer introduced to distinguish the apparatus of digital media from the world order of literacy.  An apparatus is not only a language technology, but also institutional formation and pratices (the Classical Greeks invented not only alphabetic writing but also School and the methods of science) and identity behaviors individual and collective (selfhood and democratic state for literacy).    The broad outline of the shift from literacy to electracy at the level of metaphysics (classification of what constitutes reality) is the replacement of essence by relations, of entelechy (teleology) by autopoiesis or self-organizing systems (not essence but emergence, not real and copy but simulation

 The question specific to Small Cities in this context is, how does an identifiable region appear as such within world-information sprawl?  Choragraphy adds functionality to geography.  Some of the examples illustrating the applicability of complexity theory to border mappings are familiar enough.  Forces of attraction-repulsion are at work on the U.S.-Mexican border, and many other regions of the world, in which there is a misalignment between geography and people.  The FRE’s current Imaging Place project is set in Belfast, Northern Ireland, precisely to study this dynamic.  Some modern precedents informing choragraphy as an electrate metaphysics (a digital category system) include  (1) “Vorticism,” Pound’s notion of “vortex,” developed in The Cantos as an attempt to identify places and people in history who functioned as “strange attractors,” having the power to convert  a place into a “center,” such as happened in Renaissance Florence, or colonial America.  (2) Heidegger’s existential phenomenology introduced an alternative to literate categories, derived from poetry and the arts, and called “Stimmung,” or mood.  He used the term “Ort,” that we may take as a translation of “chora,” to name a coherence operating aesthetically, experienced by those who dwell through atmosphere.  (3) The Situationist movement in post-war France, drawing upon existentialism, introduced psychogeography as an alternative mapping technique precisely for identifying living and dead regions in cities.  They called these centers “plaque tournante,” alluding to the same whirling figure that links vortex and chora.  (4) Michel Serres mediated these aesthetic figures with topology and complexity in his allegory of “angels,” expressing again the thought of potentiality.  His various notions of parasite/noise and the third instructed are choral in nature.

 Miami Virtue and the Ulmer Tapes

 The FRE project in Miami proposed to design and test a prototype for a choral category, capable of coordinating real places, cultural collective information, digital technologies, and personal experience.  The design of the methodology was inspired in part by cognitive mapping, with its origins in architectural studies of the way individuals internalize a representation of their locational circumstances.  Another relay was the memory palaces used through the manuscript era to assist memorization for oral performance (orators used scenes of familiar settings as layouts for retrieving textual information).  A third coordinate was Jacques Lacan’s use of topological geometries to figure the intersubjective nature of the psyche.  The challenge to electracy is the condition of industrial memory, that overwhelms the capabilities of individual experience.  A common complaint is that the causal order of the world is no longer accessible to experience or perception, or even to intelligibility.  In the era of electracy wisdom lost all authority and disappeared, that is, collective authority of tradition, expressed in maxims and proverbs, was displaced by techno-science (the subatomic realm is not experienceable), and commerce filled the void with slogans and pitches. 

 The claim and proposal of choragraphy is that the aesthetic invention of modernist arts, directed by poststructural philosophy of affective intelligence and applied as the rhetoric and logic (skill set) for operating within the digital prosthesis, make it possible not just to understand, but to experience (undergo) and ultimately to act upon the real conditions determining contemporary life.  The goal is an augmented deliberation, that allows netizens to participate in public policy decision-making.  Literate science was not invented all at once, and neither will be electrate well-being.  It is important to clarify that electracy does not replace the previous apparati (oral religion, literate science) but supplement them with a new dimension.  Electracy in principle may do for well-being, individual and collective thriving, what orality did for belief, and literacy did for knowledge.  The impasse between belief and knowledge that seems to inform so many contemporary policy disputes may be renegotiated when citizen experience of the stakes of well-being become part of the negotiations. 

 Miami Virtue tested choragraphy as a method for adopting a particular region (the Miami River), including all the primary discourses organizing its lifeworld (booster advertising, entertainment narratives, news, public policy, along with individual stories of the subaltern denizens of the place), and articulating it as a category of thought.  Designed and recorded, the site functions for electracy the way a concept functioned for literacy:  as a container supporting reasoning.  A tour of a virtual Miami River renders into experience the order of measure defining the limits, the coherence, of the world at a moment of time. Chora gives a quantum measure, similar to that offered by divination systems in oral metaphysics:  a reading of an oracle determines for a querent a holistic map of the world at the moment of decision.  A tour of chora gives one to understand how the collective exterior circumstances are relative to one’s singular agency.

 Choragraphy, as a practice of electracy, is generalizable and portable to any region, just as literate categories cover any and all particulars.  In short, chora offers a perspective on the principle and ambition of “small cities,” fostering greater access to the registers of such entities that elude perception and exceed conception.  Chora clarifies the principle that small cities are not only places but also potentialities, events, ecologies.

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M I A M I V I R T U E : Choragraphy of the Virtual City

Abstract