Hypertextuality's Queer Chorography

- Margaret Morrison, Maryland Institute/College of Art

In The Gay Science Nietzsche writes:
One will hardly find us again on the paths of those Egyptian youths who...want by all means to unveil, uncover, and put into bright light whatever is kept concealed for good reasons. No, this is bad taste, this will to truth, to 'truth at any price,' this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us: for we are too experienced, too serious, too merry, too burned, too profound. We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn; we have lived too much to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and 'know' everything. [...] One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons? Perhaps her name is – to speak Greek – Baubo? Oh those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial – out of profundity. (38)
For a long time our Cartesian-modernist cultural constructions and colluding superegos, which "dictate the premises of [our] judgments" (Ulmer 101), have conspired to repress our multiple personalities, the multiple selves our "Is" generate but force into "transparent" unities or "integrated egos." By supposedly integrating self, we lose some of imagination's mobility and playfulness, its ability to invent chorographically. But in this techno-age, logic-driven, singular selves will not thrive. "I"s interacting with and writing speed-injected hypermedia-hypertexts more and more make use of laterally "associative networks" of concrete linkages, not the logic, linearity, and abstraction of argumentative writing. With video and computers, Gregory Ulmer points out in Heuretics: The Logic of Invention, "it is possible to 'write' in multimedia, combining in one composition all the resources of pictures, words, and sound [....]" Ulmer adds that "For grammatology, hypermedia is the technological aspect of the electronic apparatus," and this apparatus, he says, refers to "an interactive matrix of technology, institutional practices, and ideological subject formation" (17). Like the rest of us who are interested in computers and writing, Ulmer is concerned with the "problem of inventing the practices that may institutionalize electronics in schooling" (17). Working heuretically, he uses a method he is inventing while he is inventing it (hyperrhetoric); he calls his method for inventing in an electronic environment "chorography," which not only makes use of the new hhypermediabut also, through those media, impacts subject formation.
                    What is chorography, Ulmer's new means for thought and action at a time when many are experiencing rhetorical impasse, when hypermedia still lacks a rhetoric? Ulmer never says directly; chorography is something he comes at laterally, associatively. He suggests chorography is a number of things. It's (1) "learning how to write an intuition [...] or is reasoning as intuition" (37). The chorographer is an "active receiver" and writes with "paradigms (sets), not arguments." It's also (2) the "generative potential of specific geography" and encountering "unexpected and different factors and associations" affecting the character of a place – or a "field," "premises" (in its various senses, including real estate and the logical grounds of reason or the propositions from which a conclusion is induced) (40). Chora (3) has to be approached "indirectly, by extended analogies," so is inherently ambiguous; it's neither in the order of the sensible nor of the intelligible "but in the order of making, of generating" (67). To locate the "choral word," (4) "one must be attuned to coincidence. The choral word sets the series going," Ulmer writes, "a movement or passage through language, a spreading memory drawing to itself an associative range of meanings. The choral word produces the paradigm, the combinatorial of possibilities from which the inventor selects" (226-27). As Lyotard notes in The Differend, linking is necessary, but he means a linking that generates this kind of "associative range of meanings" and circulates it speculatively. For linkage imposed by the rules of dialectics to ensure a predetermined result, like the synthesis of two opposite terms, "eliminates the dilemma" and, thus, eliminates the movement through which terms remain unresolved or irreducible (80, 93-94). Ulmer's chorography simply links, without saying how; it "continues the speculative circulation of meaning through equivocal words but introduces a different style of linkage [...] – one that is 'punceptual' rather than conceptual [...]" (228). In other words, it plays on the multiple senses for words and sometimes on humor to generate associations. As all this implies, Ulmer derives his sense of chora in opposition to Plato's in Timeaus and relies on Derrida's theory (including his own notions of chora extrapolated from Plato's).
           What is my interest in chorography? I am interested in using Ulmer's hyperrhetorical method to begin associatively to intuit the linkages among hypermedia-hypertext, queer theory, and changing notions of subject formation in the cyberage, not to argue a case for these linkages, but to speculate, to learn as I'm going where I'm going. "The interface [the name Ulmer gives rhetoric in a computer context] for cyberspace in chorography," Ulmer notes, "is not 'navigate' but 'negotiate'" (239). By "negotiate" he means to succeed in crossing, surmounting, moving through as well as to transfer, confer, bargain. We are "negotiating" this cyberspace field because "the boundary or interface zone mediating the inside/outside dimension of the human subject" is shifting radically now, as it has before in history. "Its terms are being renegotiated" (239).
                    Chorography is like volcanoes erupting and flowing into the sea, a place of genesis. Magma burns and destroys everything in its path in order to stretch the land, create new shore beyond any borders. No one would want to be around the lava's thunderous heat incinerating everything in its path, meandering slowly wherever it wants to go. What are we/am I supposed to do with this? Chorography means I do not know where I'm going until I go there. I can only reach out into the chaos, the void, for wherever these articulations take me; I can only create the field within which a thought already exists (Ulmer 48). I can only compose what Ulmer calls "a 'diegesis' ...an imaginary space & time, as in a setting for a film – that functions as the 'places of invention...,'" for electronic or hypermedia-hypertextual writing, replacing Aristotelian topos with Ulmer's chora, "an area in which genesis takes place" (48). I can only create a field of associations, of premises of my own, coming from my own context, from lava beds and aappurtenancesfrom the shore. I can only create and access a database about erupting volcanoes, flowing magma – pack and unpack a database of details about every kind of volcano – active, dormant, and now-dead. A principle of chorography, Ulmer says, is that one does not "choose between the different meanings of key terms" but one composes "by using all the meanings" (48). What guides my passage through the volcanic field is my "desire to discover this place or chora of my own premises, the diegesis within which I have been thinking, presuming, the setting that has gone without saying but that has provided the logic of all my work" (49), so that the grounding presuppositions of my own queer subjectivities might gradually emerge.
                    This particular idea – exploring volcanic eruptions and lava beds and aappurtenancesthat become more island shoreline – occurred to me as I was thinking about my family's plan to scatter my father's ashes on the sea near Kuau, Maui, where I used to swim when I was a kid. This also brought me to polymorphous perversity, to queerness, to hypertextuality and the spitting strands of selves that have always emerged from me and lodged only momentarily elsewhere. This also brought me back to Walt Whitman, one of my favorite poets when I was growing up, perhaps because I instinctively knew that not only was he a good, queer poet but, like me, he was polymorphously perverse – a DSM codified "disorder" shrinks applied to me when I was young that discursively transformed "me" into a virtual entity (Allucquere Roseanne Stone 399), i.e., a queer (or pervert) who apparently had polymorphed. I remembered Whitman's poem about the isolated spider on the promontory ("A Noiseless Patient Spider") who makes webs, networks, linkages, "launch[ing] forth" its silky strands from that place above the sea "to explore the vacant vast surrounding [...] Till the bridge you need be formed, [...] Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere..." (Whitman 314). I also remembered Whitman's other poem about "sparkles from a wheel" that also spit forth fire, "showers of gold," like volcanoes erupting and selves polymorphing (Whitman 275). Volcanoes always remind me, too, about the generative power of volcanoes, and about Pele, the Hawaiian fire goddess, and about fire and madness, about the destructive fires of depression. And, finally, volcanoes remind me of the sugar cane fires running from above our house in Upper Paia to the sea far below and of the day a man in a jeep ran over our dog on the cane field road adjacent to the field and did not stop but kept speeding makai down the hill, like a destructive wave of lava. Everything there on Maui was the in-between. How far from his growing up in the Midwest my father was, how far from her childhood in San Francisco my mother was, but how closely involved my "I"s were to the in-between-ness of Pele's destruction and creation.
                    Ancient Hawaiians journeyed blindly in rudimentary boats from the South Pacific northward to the Hawaiian islands, not knowing where the tides would carry them. Islands, isolato, Ishamel, "ealand" or water land. The rebellious demi-god Maui scattered his mother's laundry on the sea like islands. The islands are like a scattering of isolated ashes upon the sea, like a volcanic eruption that scatters ashes on the sea. Isolato, isolation. I was very small when my mother took me to the Paia library, where I loved to read, to look at the books and wonder what was in them, my curiosity to search: a generative force. This diegesis comes "with the temporality of a puzzle, riddle, or enigma." But I do not seek to unveil truth with these scatterings along a surface. "The atmosphere of chora is naked," Ulmer writes; "there is no love, no story; it's desert [...] it's a zero [...]" What does desert suggest: (1) heat – crawling through years and years of fiery desert heat – on my naked belly and feeling the most searingly hot pain; (2) a place of mirages, deceptive images, optical illusions: "culture as a mirage and as the perpetuity of the simulacrum" Jean Baudrillard wrote (63), whose best analogy is cinema (Ulmer 230). Outside the movie theater, "the whole country is cinematic," Ulmer says, and [the movie stars] "are immanent in the unfolding of life as a series of images....They embody one single passion only: the passion for images, and the immanence of desire in the image" (Baudrillard 56). Out of the blue, my mother recently told me an odd thing – that many people have said she looks like Barbara Stanwyck. Barbara Stanwyck was one of my movie heroes as a kid – the dream – because she was beautiful, strong, and gender ambiguous, and I've always desired that kind of ambiguity, that kind of perverse shading. "Scattered around the desert of the symbolic Other" are the leftovers of desire, Lacan said, too, "[...] erogenous zones, fragments still penetrated with enjoyment" (Slovoj Zizek 123).
                    Like the workings of hypermedia-hypertexts on readers/writers, my "I"s' stories plunge "me" into a labyrinth of middles, a choral space, so that "I" am never certain how much of the story has been read/written, how often splinterings have formed how many new figurations. "I" am very decidedly "queer," as queer as queer can be. This is not the Cartesian I. The pronoun "I" here reinforces Lacan's view that the integrated "I" (or core-ego) is an illusion generated during the "Mirror Stage," when the child sees itself in the mirror as a unified and vertical entity (an "I"). Many, current tech or cyber theorists, including Sherry Turkle in Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet and Katherine Hayles in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, have generally endorsed this Lacanian view of the illusory nature of the integrated "I" and have argued that, whether online or offline, we never have stable, unified egos but are multiple personalities, multiple "Is." A public (legal, social, political) identity is simply imposed on us when our parents give us a gender/sex/name – identifiers – at birth.
                    This notion that we have multiple "Is" or that we are able to perform multiple "Is" also coincides with the queer theories of Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler. In Tendencies, for example, Sedgwick writes her essays in a number of modes – from the atrocity story and performance piece to the polemic and autobiographical piece – and she uses the "I," she says, as a heuristic (iv). She is writing chorographically, in a field, journeying blindly – at least at first – perhaps a little like the early Polynesians. And, as for "queer" in that book, Sedgwick views it, not as a gender/sexual topos, a stable category, or as a conjunction or integration of things that can be neatly lined up; "queer" is not something that can be denoted or connoted. Rather, it is an experimental speech act that "dramatizes locutionary position itself" and makes of that position something slippery and multiple. Thus, "queer," she says, can refer to:
the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically. The experimental linguistic, epistemological, representational, political adventures attaching to the very many of us who may at times [...] describe ourselves as [...] pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, leatherfolk, ladies in tuxedoes, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldaggers, divas, Snap! queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes, lesbian-identified men or lesbians who sleep with men, or [...] people who relish, learn from, or identify with such. (8-9)
But, Sedgwick adds (and perhaps more importantly to this paper), some of the most exciting thinking about "'queer' spins the term outward along dimensions that can't be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all." The term, she might have said, also "negotiates" the ways that "race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity fracturing discourses [...]" (9). To her list of ways "queer" can be spun through dimensions – generative geographies, fields, premises – other than gender/sex, I would add its applications to performative, cyborgian mutations as we are beginning to see them in ourselves and others interfacing with cyberspace, adopting their prostheses, and performing acts of experimental self-polymorphing. Many, if not most, of my "Hypertext" art students describe themselves as having multiple personalities – though not, they insist, of the neurotic/psychotic type. Interestingly, however, though these same students seem to be cognizing a shift in boundaries of human subjectivities, they are also simultaneously still disclaiming a fragmented postmodernist identity, clinging to the idea that their multiple personalities are integrated in an ego that still controls all of those personalities. They rarely mention the power that the unconscious and cultural shiftings must be playing on their own polymorphing. Needing to retain at least the illusion of conscious control also seems to be one reason some of these students have trouble writing hypermedia- Hypertexts Hypertrexts demand more explicitly than linear texts that the writer give up control to readers who will make their own texts of the ones the writer has written across his/her own generative geography. With hypertexts, less and less can one claim to possess what one has written; possession of one's writing proves to have been an illusion all along – and possession of any selves invested in that writing, too. One writes and gives both the writing and the written selves up to those who will perhaps have already moved them into dimensions the writer could never have imagined.
                    Would that we could be as free in real life (RL) as we sometimes are in virtual reality (VR) to experiment and to explore our selves chorographically – to launch forth from the shore in rudimentary boats and follow the tides where they take us. Instead, so rarely do we glimpse the selves we try to regulate and control. We limit especially those of our selves that powerful socio-political forces aim to constrain and marginalize as not befitting the kind of world order those forces seek to engender. So-called transgressive selves are necessary to normal, conventional, condoned selves, which define themselves against what is transgressive in the normal/transgressive binary. So it's not just conventional/transgressive selves that would be mediating the choral spaces of my geography, but a multitude of drifting and changing, mirchameleon and cameleon selves, a multitude of queer selves, and, if there's a holding together, it would be of scattered things, like ashes or islands on the sea that may have their own name (Hawaii) but do not fit.
                    When chat rooms or multi-user social environments first began to become popular in the 1980s, especially in corporate settings, many people continued to assumed the garments of their accustomed identifiers. They played the selves they usually played or had become habituated to playing. But, according to Sandy (Allucquere Rosanne) Stone in The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, in 1982, one chatter with the handle "Doctor" on CompuServe, a psychiatrist, named Sanford Lewin, decided to log into a second CompuServe account as a woman named Julie. He had discovered that as "Doctor" some of the women chatters had been mistaking him as a woman and had been talking to him as a woman in ways different from the ways women talked to him as a man. He was intrigued and wanted to interact with these women as a woman. He, therefore, created the Julie character and opened his second account. Julie described herself as having had an accident that had left her severely disabled and depressed. Chatting with her friends online soon helped Julie emerge from her depression, however, and gradually she not only helped advise her online friends but also told them that she was going outside into the community more often than she had before chatting with them. She then also told her chat friends that she had met someone she eventually married. She and her travelednd travelled and sent cards to her chat friends, and when she returned, she began a new career as a lecturer. Lewin seemed to think that everything was going well, but some of the women, especially those who were disabled themselves, were becoming suspicious of Julie, who seemed to blossom and get around better than most disabled people ever could. Soon sensing their suspicions, Lewin then began to have cold feet about his avatar. He tried to kill Julie off by sending her to the hospital with a serious illness, but her friends wanted to know where she was, so he revived her and sent her home. Finally, Lewin had to come clean: he admitted that Julie was an avatar, an alter ego, another self of his (though, perhaps significantly, he could never get back to her once he let her go). A great hue and cry went up from the women who felt Lewin had betrayed them. They called him a fraud and scandalous. (See Stone 69-81.)
                    Now, twenty years later, many of those who chat online probably would be far less offended by the discovery that they had developed an online friendship with an "alter-ego," especially since the notion of ego itself, at least a stable or exclusively "home" ego, has been called into question. Subjectivity is no longer the secure thing it seemed to be. To the person performing that self, a so-called "alter-ego" may seem to be as much a part of that person as any other self; the person may view the "alter-ego" as simply one of many selves s/he performs from day to day, one or more than one of which may seem familiar to those with whom s/he interacts in the course of pursuing a complex of interests, from job responsibilities to social play. The person may claim to have multiple personalities but not be afflicted with MPD or a condition psychiatrists call Multiple Personality Disorder, i.e., a condition that becomes a disorder only when the person experiencing it cannot cope with a splintered and drifting ego. Interestingly for our times and for our now-problematized subjectivity, as Turkle points out, MPD is on the rise. Perhaps those raised to believe in the single, stable, and integrated ego are discovering, in fits of disillusionment, confusion, and anxiety, that they have more than one ego or an ego that's fragmented, changing, and drifting and that negotiating a cyberworld has become a far more complicated project than it ever seemed before when one at least had the illusion of ego integration.
                    Obviously, human subjects are shifting in a very rough, stormy, and transitional sea of events. Nobody can be sure what is going on and nobody ever could. In this particular transitional time, however, when we feel uncertainty, bumpiness, and confusion keenly, even our sense of what constitutes selves is in doubt, is, in fact, molting, chunking off, whirling, catapulting, sailing around the bay and off into the sea. This is what makes it both a dangerous and excitingly generative time. Ulmer's chorographical and hyperrhetorical method of electronic invention is provocative, and hypermedia-hypertext provides the means to search in the frontiers of the slippery premises of our decentered subjectivities and to negotiate them. Like Whitman's spider, we launch forth into the void, never simply to interpolate something in the passage between preset starting and finishing points, but to create and to extrapolate the things, the selves, we will have attained as we have gone our way. Thus, we always will have been more – and then some more.


Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. America. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1988.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. NY: Routledge, 1990.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1999.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1988.

Nietzsche, Frederick. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. NY: Vintage, 1974.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993.

Stone, Allucquere Roseanne. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1995.

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. NY: Touchtone/Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Ulmer, Gregory. Heuretics: The Logic of Invention. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.

Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose. Ed. James E. Miller. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959.

Zizek, Slovoj . Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.