RELATED TERMS: Place, Space, Placiality, Spatiality
In philosophy, the term khôra or chora is associated with four main authors: Plato, Heidegger, Derrida and Kristeva. In the context of developing an understanding of design as practice, discipline and material public discourse, that is, as professional, academic and socio-cultural practice at once, khôra or chora is taken to be the place of human creation and participation, of invention, as the in-coming of the other, and of imagination, as the articulation of hodological, Euclidean, Cartesian and topological spacings. Together, these spacings form interiors and exteriors as well as exteriorised interiors and interiorised exteriors with barriers between them which, when breached, through ‘foreign exchange’ bring ‘disease’ and ‘destruction’, terms which are relative to the currents and currency of the system in question.
Wilken (2007), citing Derrida notes that in Greek, khôra or chora means ‘place’ in several different senses. It has been used to refer to place in general, the residence, the habitation, the place where we live, the country. It also has to do with interval; it is what you open to ‘give’ place to things, or when you open something for things to take place.
According to Niall Lucy, for Derrida, taking his lead from Plato, khôra is that third genus between the intelligible and the sensible that makes it possible to think anything like the difference between pure being and pure nothingness, between my autonomous selfhood and your autonomous otherness. It is what makes it possible to think the difference between ‘I’ and ‘you’. Derrida brings to attention the distinction between to situate and to give place, to yield, perhaps
For Plato, khôra is a formless interval. However, rather than being akin to a non-being, khôra is understood here as a being-with, with the dimension of ‘withness’ taken as variable and conditional, not universal.
Alberto Perez-Gomez (1994) takes Plato to be describing the space of human creation and participation, postulating a coincidence between topos (natural place) and chora, yet naming the latter as a distinct reality to be apprehended in the crossing, in the chiasma, of being and becoming. This disclosure is a prerogative of human artefacts. In the particular context of Plato’s tradition, this was the province of poetry and art. In the post-industrial, post-consumerist, Anthropocene age in which we live, this is the province of design and the role of imagination in realising design in practice.
References
Burchill, L. (2011) In-between “spacing” and the “chôra” in Derrida: a pre-originary medium?, in Oosterling, H. and Ziarek, E. P. (eds) lntermedialities: philosophy, arts, politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. 27–35.
Derrida, J. (1995) Khora, in Dutoit, T. (ed.), McLeod, I. (trans.) On the name. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 89–127.
Lucy, N. (2004) Khora, in A Derrida Dictionary. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 68-69.
Perez-Gomez, A. (1994) Chora: The Space of architectural representation, in Perez-Gomez, A. and Parcell, S. (eds) Chora: intervals in the philosophy of architecture. Volume 1. Montreal, CA: McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp. 1–34.
Wilken, R. (2007) Diagrammatology, in Toffs, D. and Guy, L. (eds) Illogic of sense: the Gregory L. Ulmer remix. Alt-X Press, pp. 48–60. Available at: https://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/file/bb2dcd7d-2a96-4e56-8839-dadf52a727b5/1/PDF %28Published version%29.pdf (Accessed: 21 July 2023).
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