Arising out of the work of Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, Jacques Derrida and Gregory Ulmer, among others, it is widely thought there are three stages in the history of human communication: the oral, the literate and the electronic. Nonetheless, debate is ongoing over the integration, ordering and the substantive separation of these stages. An upshot of these debates is that each stage is loosely allied to a particular socio/political structure: hunter/gatherer or tribal societies, nation states, and globalisation respectively. In the current alloying of ‘electronic communication’ and ‘globalisation’ though there is a rising interest in what is termed ‘new regionalism’, or regionalisation, even regionality. Accordingly, Chora-Logic: Electracy as Regional Epistemology examines the possibility of an emerging conceptual alliance (and through reference to two Australian regions a sometimes embodied and situated one) between the embryonic communicational infrastructure of electracy and the age-old spatial scale of the region, a relationship that might just come to represent a means of rethinking the civic and the psychic, the commercial and governmental frameworks of an electro-energised global skein. It may also be a way of reinvigorating a study in the relation of the body (in its capacity as a citizen-subject) to the nation state, especially as all these entities are increasingly though ambiguously constituted in and through globalisation. The method of synthesising and antagonising these relations between electracy and regionalism is through the philosophy of chora, Plato’s conception of embodied place as found in the middle section of the Timaeus, coaxed along by a range of interpretations of this important genesis myth in Western philosophy. In particular, chora is taken up in the work of Gregory Ulmer as a key method in the ongoing conceptualisation of an electrate epistemology. Arising out of these concerns Chora-Logic is an experimental re-configuration of the sovereign, abstracted and disembodied citizen-subject of the Cartesian mould (a significant psycho-political mooring of the literate national character) to one situated both in the virtual density and multidimensional actuality of a particular place (organically conceived of herein as an idiosyncratic mix of psychic, domestic, workplace, local and regional proximities), but whose both [dis][embodied] self-knowledge and world-knowledge are now increasingly realised by access to an electronically arbitrated global/regional polis. In sound-bite terms, the bumper sticker could just as easily proclaim the following inversion: ‘Think and feel chora-logically, act globally’. Finally, the nucleus of Chora-Logic: Electracy as Regional Epistemology is a risky praxis whose experimental eddy (in both formal and content terms) spins within the current ambivalence, uncertainty and fast-paced change in electronic communicative arrangements (electracy), as these are themselves wrapped in the psychic and socio-political variabilities of spatial affiliation, all of which are symbiotically entwined regardless of the historical period and/or the geographical context.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Murdoch University, 2004. / Thesis submitted to the Division of Arts. Bibliography: leaves 411-424.

This thesis explores the relation between two interpretations of chôra, drawn from a reading of Plato’s Timaeus. The first I label the elemental chôra. The second, I call the social chôra. The first chapter addresses the elements in Ionian philosophy, with an eye toward the political and social backdrop of the important cosmological notion of isonomia, law of equals. Here social and elemental are continuous. Chapter two looks at the next phase of Presocratic thought, Elea, specifically Parmenides and his influence on later thought, then turns to Heidegger’s reading of Parmenides’ through the key word of alêtheia. Finally, I offer a reading of Parmenides through a different key word— trust. The third chapter examines Plato’s cosmology in the Timaeus, focusing on the way the beginning of this dialogue inflects the dialogue in a political/social direction, putting the social chôra in tension with the elemental chôra that the body of the Timaeus’ discusses. In the fourth chapter, which examines the Phaedrus, this tension is inverted, since this dialogue on writing and justice set in what proves to be the mesmerizing and erotic elemental milieu of the world outside the walls of the polis. The second half of the dissertation turns to some modern thinkers within the phenomenological tradition or its wake who write about elementals. Chapter five examines Gaston Bachelard’s reveries on imagination which dream the natural world of fire, air, water, and earth from the standpoint of what he calls material and dynamic imagination, concepts that imply a strong sense of embodiment. Chapter six treats Levinas’ description of the elemental and fixes it in a stark relation to the human. I will suggest some possible points of contact between the elemental and the social in Levinas. Chapter seven turns to John Sallis’ analysis of the imagination as the means of access proper to the elemental in ways that differ from Bachelard. He position the earth as a fundamental other. I will suggest that in the end his position inherits Heidegger’s lack of emphasis on embodied and needy humanity. Alphonso Lingis offers his own unique reading of the elemental in a more Levinasian and Merleau-Pontian vein, speaking of the directives the world, both human and natural, puts to us, and returning to a philosophy of substance that puts the body in the picture. Chapter eight uses his thought to focus the issue of the dissertation.

“Resisting the Vortex” examines the tenuous role of the abject in Melville’s early writings. While much psychoanalytic criticism on Melville and his works is driven by Freudian and Lacanian analyses, my study explores the role(s) of women, particularly that of the mother, through the lens of Kristeva’s theory of abjection. I suggest that Melville’s depiction of the abject evolves and becomes more apparent as his writing career progresses. I include Typee, Mardi, Moby-Dick and Pierre in my analysis since these texts demonstrate the evolution of Melville’s relationship to the abject mother. I argue that throughout each of these works, the female (and some of the male native characters as well) are depicted in terms that are similar to Kristeva’s concept of the idealized chora and the abject mother. While the male protagonists of Melville’s early works are drawn to women who seem to embody the chora (the energies and drives that are regulated by the mother’s body), they recoil from women who are abject and seem to threaten their sense of identity. Although man must reject/abject the mother in order to maintain a sense of autonomous identity, he still longs to recreate the symbiotic relationship he once had with the mother as an infant. He seeks the language of the mother’s body – that of the semiotic, which issues from the chora, – in an effort to return to the safe haven of the womb. This tension between maintaining a sense of identity that is separate from the mother while simultaneously longing to return to the mother, is evident in each of Melville’s aforementioned works to varying degrees. However, it is in Pierre, a work that chronicles a young man’s attempt to escape the suffocating influence of his mother, that the threat of the abject becomes the central theme of one of Melville’s novels. Ultimately, man should strive to balance his need for an autonomous identity with the realization that he may never fully “escape” the mother’s presence in his life. Unfortunately, Melville’s leading men fail to recognize this paradox and the consequences are dire.

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In this essay I refer Eilis Ni Dhuibhne’s narrative construction of the main characters and the theme of the novel The Dancers Dancing, in the context of the anthropologist Victor Turner’s concept of liminality. Thus the summer in the Gaeltacht that five teenage girls experience, can be understood as a depiction of the liminal phase in a rite of passage. Ni Dhuibhne’s differently constructed characters enlighten different aspects of liminality and through the céilí dance their experiences are exposed. Furthermore this essay suggests that Julia Kristeva’s notion of the chora, which can be associated to dance, is also relevant when describing the unbounded and unlimited process that radically can reform social structures. I conclude that the liminal space offers an area of many possibilities. It functions as a free zone where the main characters can freely explore their personal issues that trouble them, or the difficulties of their own society.

This thesis offers new models for participatory and performative interventions in sites of heritage tourism through a theorized practical engagement. Drawing on both Tourism Studies and Performance Studies, the primary aim of these interventions is to reveal and provoke ways of seeing and using these sites as places of multiple meanings rather than as ones constricted and bounded by normative heritage narratives in their production and management. The experimental phase of the project discussed in the thesis includes three contrasting case studies: GeoQuest, Sardine Street, and Water Walk. These are each analysed and evaluated through my development of a ‘mythogeographic’ framework that includes the performative techniques of layering, rhizomatic interweaving, the making of 'anywheres' and the self-mythologising of the activist. The thesis charts a trajectory through praxis, from developing models for ambulatory, signage-based and ‘mis-guided’ interventions to be undertaken by performance ‘specialists’, towards a dispersal of their tactics for use by heritage tourists in general. It thus describes a related change in the balance of the research methodology from ethnographic participant observation towards practice-as-research (PaR), the latter of which both generated and enacted knowledge and understanding. This PaR took the form of various visits and forays to and across heritage sites and landscape, and also the production of a ‘toolkit’ of handbook, pocketbook, website and online short films for the dispersal of tactics and a strategy that is eventually called ‘counter-tourism’. The thesis thus includes the publications A Sardine Street box of tricks, Counter-tourism: the handbook, Counter-tourism: a pocketbook and the DVD, Tactics for counter-tourism, as well as their fully theorized critical contextualisation. These represent a PaR enquiry that attempts to creatively express my research findings from productions made in the field through a popular form of writing and presentation that is capable of inspiring general, ‘non-specialist’ tourists to make their own performance interventions in heritage sites.

Contemporary architectural discourse commonly invokes the term framing. ??Derivative phrases contrived in education and practise are seemingly inexhaustible: framing the view, framing space, framing an idea, frame of reference, framework, window frame, body frame, space frame. ??The polymorphic nature of the term is perplexing, and despite its frequent and casual mention, the rich potential of framing in the architectural design process is often overlooked.?? ?? Framing is a primal phenomenon. It shapes an essential spatial experience with the power to divide, connect, fuse, reveal and conceal entities literally or notionally.??In the simple but profound act of recognizing, entering and exiting the boundary between, for example, an interior and an exterior, framing emerges in all its architectural and emotional significance. The experience of the frame is both intimate and metaphysical, hinting at shared but intangible dimensions of architecture. Through essays, drawings, installations, lists, poems, collages, and other architectural media, this thesis presents a body of twelve investigations that seek to elicit the broader notion behind the complex and transformative nature of framing in today???s parlance of architecture. To clarify, organize and interconnect the experiences of framing, the thesis constructs a theoretical framework on which to base further reflection, study, design and construction.

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