Nathan R. Johnson

As back­ground read­ing for a book project, I have been work­ing through Lin­gua Fracta by Collin Gif­ford Brooke. I like this book alot because of its genre: it’s the type of the­o­ret­i­cal work I’ve been writ­ing recently.

One part in par­tic­u­lar has stood out as par­tic­u­larly use­ful so far: Brooke’s dis­cus­sion of rhetor­i­cal ecolo­gies. Brooke describes a rhetor­i­cal ecol­ogy by way of the clas­si­cal rhetor­i­cal canons: inven­tion, arrange­ment, style, mem­ory, deliv­ery. An inven­tion ecol­ogy, for exam­ple, is “a per­sonal sen­si­tiv­ity to the con­di­tions under which inven­tion takes place in my own writ­ing” (44).

It’s his exam­ple of an inven­tional ecol­ogy that drew my attention:

I attend a cou­ple of con­fer­ences per year and each time, start­ing about halfway through the con­fer­ence and extend­ing to as long as a week fol­low­ing my return trip home, I am a par­tic­u­larly pro­duc­tive writer. I sus­pect that many peo­ple share this expe­ri­ence .… When I began blog­ging, I noticed a shift in my per­cep­tions of the world around me.… Over time, the sub­tle oblig­a­tion of the weblog has some­times encour­aged me to write when oth­er­wise I would not” (44).

Although Brooke is writ­ing largely about social con­ven­tions affect­ing the writ­ing process, I couldn’t help but think of a Howard Becker book (Art Worlds) in which he explores the infra­struc­ture of musi­cal con­certs. The typ­i­cal con­cert lasts about three hours and sys­tem­atic depen­den­cies like con­cert labor, park­ing space, and occu­pant spaces become hope­lessly entwined into that 3 hour time period. The odds of being able to run an eight-hour con­cert must work against a slew of pre­con­fig­ured and embed­ded con­ven­tions of prac­tice. The time of the con­cert, once estab­lished, lit­er­ally becomes infra­struc­tured into the social prac­tice of the con­cert. When these con­ven­tions become embed­ded within tech­ni­cal sys­tems, this infra­struc­tur­ing process becomes sig­nif­i­cantly more complex.

Mate­r­ial objects are built because of social con­ven­tion but then push back and solid­ify con­ven­tion (ANT the­o­rists will be yawn­ing at how rudi­men­tary that seems). Get­ting back to Brooke and his book, the thing I find inter­est­ing about rhetor­i­cal ecolo­gies is the infra­struc­ture involved in each. Yes, to some extent rhetor­i­cal ecolo­gies are dynamic, but they also con­sist of infra­struc­tured, mate­r­ial tech­nolo­gies. Just to begin think­ing about blog­ging, it seems that one part of the struc­tured ecol­ogy the HTML form field that is used in many con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems as a way to shut­tle text to the server. The inter­face pro­vides an easy way to write a ton of text, but it resists com­pos­ing with some­thing more like a mind map­ping piece of soft­ware. This is to say that it’s hard to doo­dle with bub­bles in a blog. I need to think a lit­tle bit more about this, but stan­dard­ized com­po­nents pro­vide resis­tance to writ­ing and rhetoric.

This is all just a long way of say­ing that I’m find­ing a lot I like about Brooke’s book. It’s smart, and I see some great places to add infra­struc­tural the­ory to his con­cep­tion of rhetoric.