SALUD DE LAS RELACIONES PARA EL BUEN VIVIR

These exercises in rearrangement support an interventional, material approach to composition, which theorizes writing as a practice of building and rebuilding like the physical work of setting type that Boyd invoked above. Bits of language constitute parts or building blocks, materials amenable to movement, manipulation, and transposition. I recognize, as Robert Macfarlane has, that invention involves recombination and that texts, like things or devices, are reconfigurable, consisting of parts that composers can combine and arrange in numerous ways to yield distinct

outcomes. As I conceive it, then, composition should share the ethos of technical and artisanal activities, with their emphasis on making, crafting, building, and assembling. I argue that an inventor of texts works in a way much like an inventor of things (devices, tools, and structures), and I recast textual invention through the lens of technical invention.

Modeling composition in this way provides guidelines for determining whether a given combination and arrangement of parts is in fact productive. As technical approaches acknowledge, not all combinations and arrangements will be useful or even attainable. I was able to show that Parker’s exercise in rearrangement produced new meaning because changes to syntax produced recognizable changes in emphasis and effect. Beyond the sentence, however, there is no rule-governed system like grammar that signals whether a given combination or arrangement makes sense. In moving from grammatical manipulation to rhetorical manipulation, we lose the syntactical principles that guide grammatical rearrangement toward effective results. A technical-material model of composition facilitates thinking at a macro level about how reuse and rearrangement can yield new functions, values, and meanings. It can offer guidelines like those of syntax that we can use to judge larger manipulations of text.

This material approach has a history beyond the nineteenth-century textbooks that I have focused on thus far.6 _{Macfarlane and Marjorie Swann have each described literary composition} at different historical moments through artisanal analogies. In taking up the Victorian era and championing an interventional approach to invention, Macfarlane describes the inventor’s mind, as “a lumber-room in which are stored innumerable odds and ends” (4). The inventor gathers bits and pieces of text (spare parts) and later assembles and shapes them into a new compilation.

6 _{Carl Fehrman distinguishes two visions encompassing all of creative production, one relying on natural, organic}

Swann uses similar language to describe commonplacing, or “the notebook method,” in early modern England, a method whereby inventors mine texts for fragments to incorporate later in their own writings (as writers have continued to do up until the present). The poet Ben Jonson was one commonplacing enthusiast, who likened the practice to gathering timber and envisioned the poet as a laborer whose artisanal object is the poem (157-159).7

Such analogies reframe the composer as a craftsman, someone occupying a humbler and more accessible position than the mythical genius poet who writes via unconscious inspiration. I reject the image of mythic genius as many scholars before me have. But at the same time, I want to avoid resuscitating a simplistic notion of the craftsman-author, one that Martha Woodmansee has located in the Renaissance and the long eighteenth century. This version of the craftsman- author relied upon formulaic “predefined strategies” in composing (427). In contrast, I want to retain the sense of experimentation inherent to technical invention, even while offering, below, what may seem more mechanical guidelines for composition. Technical invention calls for openness, play, and exploration. An interventional, recombinative approach to invention encourages moving and manipulating textual blocks toward different ends and in the process, generating new meanings and new functions. Moving and manipulating texts can alone yield productive results, as in Parker’s rearrangement exercise, but it can also prompt a composer to rethink, rewrite, and add to component parts. Even while breaking text into discrete blocks like words and sentences, a technical model can nonetheless accommodate the recursivity of the writing process that Connors worries the pedagogy of levels typically cannot (Composition-

7 _{Scholars of modern and postmodern poetry have also made a connection between language and materiality in}

recognizing how poets exploit the sounds, images, and textures of words rather than just their meanings, particularly in projects of concrete and conceptual poetics. (See, for example, Jerome McGann’s The Point Is to Change It; Ross

Rhetoric 242, 250). Arrangement is a general writing practice that can contribute to the development of further ideas and plans. It has inventive potential.

In forwarding a material perspective on language, I argue that invention need not begin with intentions and goals. Nor must it begin wholly in language. Instead, thoughts, intentions, and language inter-animate each other in an experimental process of invention. Language does not represent fully intentional thoughts that a composer has already experienced and now wishes to report; language is material that feeds back into thoughts and intentions, influencing them through a textual agency. Paul J. Kameen encapsulates this perspective via Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his elaboration of an exploratory theory of writing. He asserts,

To build a text is not then to master language but to yield to it, to let it guide meanings toward fruition. Language is not cloth for intentions abstractly conceived. Language conceives intentions and nurtures them into texts. Language is in this sense itself a “forethoughtful query” which invites certain responses, responses that do not waft in fully fleshed on the breath of inspiration, but issue forth from the dwelling of the query. And that dwelling is language. (82)

Kameen suggests that it is through dwelling in language—the open and experimental process of moving and manipulating textual parts—that one practices productive writing. Note that his metaphors link language and writing to material practices of building and dwelling (in Heidegger’s words). Kameen disputes a wholly formalist approach to writing, one privileging thought over actual interaction with text by positing that intention must precede language and can be transparently translated into textual structures (74-75). He likewise disputes a wholly expressivist approach to writing, one that locks the writer in a mental space without relationship to the outside, material world (76-77). These divergent approaches both subordinate language to

thought, rather than cast language as material to play with and explore through manipulation and appropriation, writing as “work and play with words” (82). The model that I imagine here figures writing as the kind of exploratory give-and-take process that Kameen develops in opposition to these two approaches. The difference, however, is my focus on interaction with blocks of reused text—concrete raw materials, rather than language in abstract, as Kameen has it. I believe that the visual, almost tangible nature of reused chunks demystifies writing a bit more than does the idea of playing with language more generally, as expansive as it is.

Robert J. Weber’s guide to technical invention, Forks, Phonographs, and Hot Air Balloons: A Field Guide to Inventive Thinking, provides for me a promising foundation for theorizing productive arrangement. Weber shows how prior tools and devices can be “joined” into meaningful composite inventions. In a join, parts come together so that their separate functions mostly remain while a new function or affordance emerges too (113). Consider the Swiss army knife, a convenient composite derived from joining several smaller inventions—a knife, scissors, tweezers—into a common handle. All textual reuse involves putting parts together, at least some of which are preexisting parts and others of which may be new; Weber’s concept thus seems an appropriate one to try out in the textual domain. An obvious textual analogy for a join might be an anthology or a miscellany, which compiles or joins reading materials for a class, a family, or some other context into a common volume. A technical model of invention like Weber’s is fitting too because it is clearly interventional. Weber’s guidelines encourage aspiring inventors to intervene in—to get between—existing inventions in order to join them into functional composites.

Intervention involves mixed agency yet remains an active process that allows composers to exert agency. Even as I disavow theories of invention that necessarily begin with plans and

intentions, I acknowledge that the composer must nonetheless act. Invention remains an active process while it accommodates mixed agency, some give-and-take among composer, text, and context. Here I depart from theories of invention that deemphasize authorial control to the point of recasting the composer as a passive receptacle for language rather than one who contributes through actions like dwelling and playing. Jason Wirtz and Paul Magee have recently put forth such theories. Writing as theorists of creative writing, they have each fiercely refuted conscious, intentional authorial control over artistic productions. Wirtz argues that years of developing one’s craft can cultivate an intuitive, unconscious mode of production characterized by what he calls the “receptive stance.” The composer becomes a channel or conduit for language rather than a conscious, active constructor of it (16). Wirtz intriguingly reconciles something like spontaneous inspiration with learned knowledge, suggesting that one can learn how to facilitate unplanned creative moments. Yet he and Magee both move so far from conscious intention that the writer loses agency. According to Wirtz, invention involves “surrendering to the material” (17) and acknowledging that “the writing is smarter than the writer” (18; emphasis in original). I want to affirm the power of textual agency and to deemphasize writerly intentions and desires, as Wirtz and Magee have, but not while ignoring the writer’s actions. A technical-material approach to invention requires interaction among agents, especially movement and manipulation of textual components. It is an active approach, even while it is open-ended, with often unpredictable results coming from the other agents in play.

Weber describes four heuristics for choosing promising components and then joining and arranging them effectively. One, join inverse parts, those that undo the actions of each other, such as a pencil and an eraser. Two, join complementary parts, those that are often used together and thus promise convenience or increased functionality when joined, such as shampoo and

conditioner. Three, join parts with shared properties to eliminate redundancies and condense space and costs, as the Swiss Army knife does by combining tools that all require handles. And four, join parts that when combined produce an emergent function, a capability that no single part can accomplish on its own (115-118). Weber uses hand tools as simple examples of parts that can be combined. In adapting Weber’s heuristics, I create an analogy between tools and textual parts, one that correlates with a functional perspective on language. This perspective serves my larger vision of language as material, one congruent with the “truly dialectical relationship between self and world” that Kameen affirms (77). Language for Kameen “is both the instrument and expression” of this inventional dialectic (78); it both facilitates the necessary give-and-take between internal and external spheres during invention and constitutes the composition that results. Language as a tool is both a means of invention and an outcome of invention; the metaphor works because it accommodates invention as both process and outcome.

Though Weber’s guidelines pertain to tools much weightier and less abstract than texts, they nonetheless accord with Kameen’s elaboration of an inventional dialectic and his refutation of formalist and expressivist thought. Weber’s and Kameen’s disparate models of invention are surprisingly compatible, for the technical-material model that I develop via Weber is not just combinatory (mentally combining ideas) but material and combinatory (combining things). A simply combinatory approach leaves open the possibility that invention is entirely mental or unconscious, a mythologized account often associated with expressivism and the blank page, that is difficult to prompt and perhaps impossible to teach. Like Kameen, Weber deliberately aims to distinguish his approach from a purely mental or unconscious one like Arthur Koestler’s concept of bisociation, which defines creative synthesis or joining as “an unconscious connection between ideas” (Weber 112). Weber finds fault with Koestler’s concept, writing that “[I]f we

explain inventive thinking as the coming together of unconscious ideas, what should we do when the muse does not strike? Certainly, I do not wish to deny the role of unconscious processes, but if our sole way of generating inventive ideas depends on the unconscious, we must admit to little influence on the creative process and little possibility of teaching or learning about it” (112). Without guidelines like Weber’s, an inventor might wait for the muse to strike or attempt joining parts together at random, an option that he says leads to “combinatorial explosion” and useless composites like a dictionary and a fishbowl (113).

Weber’s approach is provocative and amenable to my project because it is material and methodical yet still allows for spontaneity. This approach helps demythologize invention without oversimplifying it. Weber promotes orderly, accessible heuristics while not limiting their outcomes to predicted results. In adapting Weber’s guidelines to textual invention, I am making an inherently pedagogical move. Even as I turn now to analysis of previously composed texts, this project maintains an orientation toward practice—toward the production of additional composite texts. In what follows, I explicate each of Weber’s four heuristics with reference to various cases of reuse from the eighteenth century to today, looking for additional signs that reuse and rearrangement are productive writing practices. So far I have shown that these practices can be productive in introducing new meaning into a group of already existing textual components. Thinking through Weber’s guidelines helps to identify additional features that can mark a composite text as inventive.