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09/05/2005 Archived Entry: "Invention"

Invention
The terms of invention need re-inventing themselves.
The Web has redefined how we understand invention.

Inherent in the notion of invention is the concept of a process that engages a rhetor (speaker or writer) in examining alternatives: different ways to begin writing and to explore writing situations; diverse ideas, arguments, appeals, and subject matters for reaching new understandings and/or for developing and supporting judgments, theses and insights; and different ways of framing and verifying these judgments - Lauer

The Web does not motivate support for persuassion as much as it allows for connections, interlinking, relationships.
Surfing today, I find

Pics from the Astrodome
An online HTML editor
A collection of old Apple movies and commercials
A blog still not updated
Ample fodder for mockery
Detroit Donuts
Images from a Medeski, Martin, and Wood show.

I've often found the invention process to be in the pattern that emerges (the avant-garde practice, later made digital within Ulmer's mystory). But the invention process is also in the merging of points, the connections made by surfing, by visiting, by tagging, by considering relationships where they do not yet exist. The invention process realized by the Web is not predicated by a claim nor by the need to demonstrate support (though, of course, such moves can occur). Instead, it is realized within connections, a rhetorical situation (as Jenny says) that is more ecology than situation. We see this invention made possible in online commerce (Netflix, Amazon). The time has come for a pedagogy of this kind of invention. It's not that we have the option of choosing "different ways to begin writing" as Lauer paraphrases Aristotle. It's that we are always choosing.

Posted by gvcarter @ 09/10/2005 11:05 PM EST

The Aristotelian notion of rhetoric and the Aristotelian definition of invention may be the dominant one, especially today, but its never been the only one.

I'm wondering if what the Web is showing us is not that we need to develop a new practice and understanding of invention, but that new media is making it increasingly apparent that our privileged (and limited) notion of invention, and of rhetoric for that matter, is not *the* rhetorical tradition but the tradition which we've privileged. (I'm thinking here, of course, along the lines of Ong, McLuhan, and Havelock arguing that electronic culture foregrounded our privileging of print culture.)

My reading of classical and medieval memoria, as Mary Carruthers and others have defined it, was very much about connections, interlinking, and relationships. Memory practices and memory systems existed as the tools of invention. Consider, for instance, Carruthers' definition of memory as a machina memorialis: "Conceive of memory not only as 'rote,' the ability to reproduce something (whether a text, a formula, a list of items, an incident) but as the matrix of a reminiscing cogitation, shuffling and collating 'things' stored in a random-access memory scheme, or set of schemes - a memory architecture and a library built up during one's lifetime with the express intention that it be used inventively."

As I suggested in my GRN presentation at C&W (abstract), artificial memory systems are databases, and the art of memory is not about the storage but the retrieval and use of what is stored. The techniques of juxtaposition, mixing and remixing, and the cut-up are, I think, returns to these older practices.

Posted by John @ 09/10/2005 08:59 PM EST

yup

Posted by gvcarter @ 09/08/2005 11:06 PM EST

right on. it so much matters how writing is defined, understood, appreciated. too often around these parts invention is invention as it is in rhet/comp, which is a sterile notion of what invention is about for so many outside--making stuff.

Posted by robert @ 09/06/2005 10:29 PM EST