Inventing Invention

I had a meta moment while I was reading The Languages of Edison's Light, and it stemmed from buying my book used on Amazon. I read it through the lens of this class: invention. That dictated what I found important as I read--the idea that inventing light was not just about inventing light; the invention of a persona surrounding Edison, of his credibility, of the utility of the product, of this masculine world becoming feminine; invention of a material object facilitated by text... in short, I invented the salient topics as I read. I invented a lens that I then applied to the book, and it was an "invention" lens. 

"If people have ideas

If people have bodies

If Bodies exist at specific intersections of time, place, and space

Then ideas must be positioned accordingly

Theorizing Non-Western Invention

Somewhere along the line, Emory struck up a partnership with the Dalai Lama's exiled Tibetan Buddhist community in Dharamsala. We now have monks-in-residence in an Atlanta monastery, and because the Dalai Lama thinks that Buddhist monks should be educated in the natural sciences, they take science courses on campus. Seeing and speaking to the red-robed monks was a part of our daily life on campus. We were also lucky enough to benefit from the cultural exchange.

One of the things that the monks brought to our campus was the practice of making sand mandalas. According to the Buffalo Museum of Science, “a ‘mandala’ is an artistic representation of the sacred mansion of a Tibetan Buddhist deity.” These mandalas are formed from colored sand, with delicate designs that make them look more like intricate paintings. They can be large, made of millions of grains of colored sand.

Linked in this post is an article about one of the monks’ mandalas on Emory’s campus in 2010. My senior year (2012), I remember buzz on campus in the spring because you could go to the Carlos Art Museum on the quad and watch the monks work on a mandala in real time: http://news.emory.edu/stories/2012/02/er_take_note_buddhist_monks_mandala/campus.html\

Making mandalas is not a task that just anyone can engage in; after its purported origins with the Buddha in the 6th century BCE, “the ritual creation of sand mandalas is an art still handed down from master to disciple in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries” (“Tibetan Sand Mandalas”). “Learning how to create the mandala teaches patience and meditation, while learning to understand the meaning of the mandala helps to initiate the monk into the spiritual complexities of Buddhist religion” (“Tibetan Sand Mandalas”).

Creating sand mandalas is invention within an Eastern religious context. And here’s where this artistic form deviates from invention as we frequently conceive of it in Western contexts: many mandalas, like the one in the 2010 piece that took six days to create, are destroyed upon completion. “This is normal practice,” the assistant program director at the Atlanta monastery, and a language instructor at Emory, asserted in the CNN article above. “It is done to symbolize the impermanence of life.”

So much of the invention scholarship that we have encountered this semester has been talking about invention as related to writing--invention from the topos (Leff, Miller, McKeon, Wallace); tagmemics and other heuristics; the Progymnasmata. Writing, in turn, is conceived of as permanent. Wallace does allow for the “overlap” of “creative activity” and “inventive activity,” in writing contexts (391, 393)... but I think that the idea of the sand mandala goes far beyond even meshing creativity, broadly defined, and invention. What happens when you invent in a mindset geared towards impermanence? When, in a Western frame of mind, would we dedicate such time and care, such purposeful action, toward something just for the sake of breaking it down again?

1. Invention of the self

2. Invention out of negativity, pain 

3. Spatial creation: crossing bridges, generative nature of liminal space 

Creating and using space that is generative of further invention. Harnessing the potential of liminal space. Western fear of this space; fear of unknown in the in-betweens. 

4. Conocimiento= knowledge. Self-consciousness.

5. World as generative… four directions as spaces of inspiration

The thing that comes to mind first is not an active use of technology that helps me invent; rather, it is a technology that captures an already-existing process. I have always been the type of writer who sits down at a time I have specifically ordained for writing. And writes. And then gets up and stops writing. I have also known for many years that some of my best ideas come to me elsewhere, but as an undergraduate, I was not in the habit of recording them for later use. Instead, I waited for the "time to write" and tried to recall them. 

This didn't work. (Surprise, I know.) Often, as I was allowing a topic to incubate, I would have a moment where a particular phrase or sentence, an articulation of an idea, would come to me. It never came back during the Time to Write. 

When we read Lingua Fracta in Dr. Roozen's class last semester, I understood, cognitively, that we were discussing modern applications (and changes to) Aristotle's canons. But I didn't really understand the importance of the idea. This week's readings--particularly Delagrange's multimodal Wunderkammer piece--juxtaposed with Atwill's reading from last week led me from ancient to modern. In particular, I was able to work with the word "techne"... I noted Atwill's attempts at a definition of the term in chapter one of Rhetoric Reclaimed in my commonplace book last week, and Delagrange helped me to understand why techne is a "heuristic."

As I was navigating ("reading," but not in the traditional sense) through Delagrange's piece, I was struck by her noted focus on "the canon of arrangement refigured as techné, as a productive art of arranging (bodies of) evidence to discover ethical bases for action" (Introduction, part 2). Then, on the next slide, she goes on to specifically define techne. She discusses four "implications" of "rhetoric as techne." The first is as follows: "it is heuristic, a process of making, and thinking, and re-making, through which meaning and knowledge are made." 

Atwill also devotes time to defining techne, detailing its meaning in the 7th-4th centuries BCE. Here is her third (of three) "defining characteristic" of techne during that period: “In contrast to philosophical knowledge, techne is defined by its relation to situation and time. A techne is knowledge as production, not product; intervention and articulation, rather than representation" (Atwill 7, emphasis mine). 

Arrangement as techne, as invention, is exciting because it shows the blurring of boundaries between canons. Here is Delagrange's definition of "critical wonder": "a process through which digital media designers can thoughtfully and imaginatively arrange evidence and articulate links in a critical practice of embodied discovery." Then, "these 'small pieces loosely joined' (Weinberger) become associative knowledge-building spaces." Delagrange, Introduction

The title of this section is "Invention is Embodied." This was something I brought up at the very beginning of our class--and I think it can work in two ways. Invention is embodied, meaning that the body is a tool in the act of invention. But we also rhetorically invent our bodies. Invention is embodied, and the body is invented. This invented body then serves as the place--the commonplace--from which we view the rest of our world.

What does invention look like in a multimedia age? How can we utilize new technologies to aid students in the invention process? Is invention inherently different today, given students' exposure to the kinds of multimodal learning environments that constitute the web?