Reinventing Invention, Again

## Citation

Simonson, Peter. "Reinventing Invention, Again." *Rhetoric Society Quarterly*, vol. 44, no. 4, 2014, pp. 299-322.

## Abstract

"Since the 1960s, invention theory has reinvented itself. This essay aims to map and advance that process. It provides a window into the recent intellectual history of rhetorical studies, and advocates continued development of sociologically informed rhetorical theories open to culture, materiality, and post-humanist understandings. I argue that invention theory has productively organized itself around two sets of dialectical tensions but remains constrained by two longstanding prejudices. The productive tensions revolve around (a) breaking with and affirming inherited rhetorical traditions and (b) conceiving invention as emplaced or dispersed. The prejudices consist of a continued *logophilia* and normative privileging of creativity and newness. I map the dialectics and prejudices across modern, premodern, and postmodern orientations. I then provide a revised definition and heuristic framework revolving around a concept, inventional media, which aims to capture invention's simultaneous emplacement and dispersal across processes of discovery, creativity, and rhetorical reproduction."

## Notes

"I propose that we define invention simply as *the generation of rhetorical materials*." (313)

* To bring into being
* To give rise to
* To form
* To produce from other substances
* To reproduce

"*Rhetorical materials* are then the symbolic and physical elements that enter into or are gathered for the purpose of communicative address. [...] Rhetorical materials include invention's traditional words, ideas, and arguments but also stories, styles, gestures, rituals, bodily deportments, emotions, images, objects, and the dynamic matter that gathers itself into 'things' that contribute to the dynamic flow of rhetorical production." (313)

For example: "When a mass shooting prompts discussion of tougher gun registration laws and ideologically interpolated subjects are charged with affect that energizes thoughts, words, and actions like purchasing more guns, rhetorical invention has occurred at every step of the way." (313)

Medium as habitat or dwelling place; as artistic material; and as modes of communicative expression.

Major categories of inventional media:

1. Bodies
2. Minds
3. Language
4. Experience
5. Physical spaces and geographical places
6. Time
7. The social (relations, roles, identities, etc.)
8. The cultural (cultures and subcultures, as well as meanings, values, ideologies, *doxa*, practices, theories)
9. Technologies
10. Economies of labor and money
11. Regimes and relations of power

NOTE: The categories are analytically distinct but interrelated in practice. Invention happens across and intersecting with most if not all categories (to greater or lesser extents).

ALSO: "The concept of medium indicates a *way of looking* at the phenomena found in the different categories. It asks us to raise questions about how they provide habitats, materials, and communicative modes for rhetorcial invention. Each of the three senses of *medium* provides its own investigative pathway."

* Medium as habitat - looking at it ethnographically
* Medium as source of materials - looking for how it offers loci of [...] rhetorical energy and signification
* Medium as communicative mode - looking at how medium provides forms through which invention expresses itself in process leading to rhetorical production (315)

Example #1: Whitman's notebooks, "media through which both *Leaves of Grass* and Whitman himself were invented. They also provided material indices of the social, cultural, psychological, geographical, and economic habitats and relations of power within which his invention emerged."

Example #2: "Think of the best discussion course you have been a part of. Think of an excellent meeting of it late in the semester - the setting, the mood, the conversation, the participants. Through what salient media did the collective performance emerge? The social dimensions were surely key: the interactions and established relationships that function as generative habitats for the words, ideas, countervailing arguments, emotions, and bodily expressions produced; the roles of teacher and students, structured by different power relations, establishing expectations and repertoires of appropriate behavior out of which curiosity and engagement expressed themselves. A meshwork of individually embodied experiences outside and within the classroom furnished topics, sensibilities, insights, and turns of phrase. Some of the most salient experiences were mediated by technologies - reading an assigned book or pdf of an essay, watching a YouTube clip, contributing to a course blog.

"The course was embedded within a political economy that structured entry into the classroom, favoring groups with social, cultural, and economic capital while excluding Others whose presence would have shaped invention differently. Over the semester, it developed its own micro-culture, patterned forms of activity and meaning-making that drew selectively from cultures, ideologies, and discourses circulating outside the classroom. The gendered, raced, and classed identities manifesting themselves within that micro-culture were in turn enabled and constrained by regimes of power structuring talk and social interaction. Time mediated the invention in multiple ways, from the sense of the *kairotic* that emerged from the flow of conversation to the 50-minute hour, the moment of the semester, and its placement within the broader unfolding of history. And physical place did its work, too, with bodies gathered together in a particular room whose architectural design allowed for interaction and furnished invention with its visual field, sonic resonance, tactile feel, and perhaps a characteristic smell. Finally, we shoul recognize that the rhetorical products that emerged through this meshwork of media wwere multiform. Among them were notes inscribed on paper or laptop, shared conversation, individual understanding, the re-constitution of the class and its roles and relationships, and freshly catalyzed performing selves that dispersed afterward into their own vectors of quotidian invention elsewhere." (317)