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, Platos 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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/201561 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Maybury, Terrence Shaun, t.maybury@uq.edu.au |
| Publisher | Central Queensland University. |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.library.cqu.edu.au/cqulibrary/disclaimer.htm), Copyright Terrence Shaun Maybury |
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