III. Background

C. Digital Tools and Invention

My analysis highlights how composing tools act on pieces according to their own material affordances and constraints, in ways that the human composer did not perhaps intend. In this sense, composing tools insert their own “ideas” into the process of invention and the resulting inscape’s implicit argument. This pursuit is informed by Rhodes and Alexander (2014), who contend that the discipline of composition “eschew multimedia if it cannot teach it [and, I extend, compose with it] in ways that are fully cognizant of the rhetorical capabilities of those media” (p. 20). I follow them, too, in their (2015) work to “encounter technologies as orienting our stories while also feeling our way through productive disorientation. How are we thought through our things? But also, how can we think ourselves, and our things, differently?” (Orientation 1). Claire Lauer’s Inventio narrative provides an extended illustration of what it looks like as a composer to be “thought through our things.” Using the narrative frame of an epic journey at the mercy of the “technology gods,” she describes her experiences of being oriented by technologies through disorienting encounters (both productive and otherwise). Her sense of lacking control over her project’s developing design emphasizes tools’ key roles in the distributed nature of webtext invention.

In this chapter, I foreground tools as co-composers and orienting rhetorical agents, asking how digital interfaces influence webtext invention. If the composer has an idea for the project, how do composing tools “think” about the design differently? How do tools shape pieces in ways the composer did not anticipate or might not be aware of? To paraphrase Rhodes and Alexander (2015), how are our webtexts “thought through” our tools? In investigating these questions, I am interested especially in shifts that occur at the moment of breakdowns, that highlight tools’ rhetorical agency to produce new ideas and participate in the process of inscape development. This rhetorical agency is also exercised in moments of compatibility between composer and tool. However, it is especially made visible, as Heidegger notes, in breakdowns, where it seems as if the tools suddenly have a mind of their own about how the project should proceed.

I use “agency” to highlight the role tools play in shaping webtexts’ arguments, both through possibilities and new ideas they open up and through channels of action that they limit or cut off.³ This is not to say that tools themselves possess consciousness or willpower on the same level as humans; I recognize ways in which this attribution of agency to objects has been deemed problematic, particularly in light of the many human beings whose full rhetorical agency has not been recognized. My approach to this project is strongly situated in the narrative perspectives and experiences of human composers, and makes no attempts to fathom the inner lives of things apart from their human context. At the same time, to completely ignore the way nonhuman objects have a capacity to act on and shape reality (often thwarting human intentions and purposes in the process) is likewise a partial view that doesn’t fully do justice to the material nuances of a rhetorical situation. While stopping short of full parity between human and nonhuman considerations (Latour), I do want to shed light on the role tools and technologies play in the invention process, particularly insofar as they shape the high-stakes course of scholarly knowledge creation.

Furthermore, in my discussion of tools as possessing rhetorical agency (that is, the capacity to act on and influence rhetorical situations due to their material affordances and constraints), I want to evoke in some ways the experiences of a human composer negotiating with nonhuman objects, particularly when they cause breakdowns or roadblocks (or otherwise thwart composerly intentions). Intellectually, I know that my computer or a software program does not have intentional design goals or the capacity to bear any ill will toward me in a human sense. However, experientially, when I can’t figure out how to make a desired design effect work, it certainly feels as if my tools have a mind of their own and are simply refusing to cooperate. As noted above, C. Lauer describes a similar experience in her Inventio narrative; she opens her story with a note that she felt as if she were undertaking a journey “at the whim of the technology gods” and uses negotiations with major shifts in tools as a way to structure her narrative. Less fancifully, Delagrange notes how she decided to set up her interface for her Wunderkammer piece based on what pixel dimensions fit best for a certain screen and program. In both cases, the composer’s design ideas and decisions—and thus, the implicit argument that their webtext’s inscape performed—were shaped significantly by the tools they used.

In this chapter, I want to investigate these negotiations with tools as moments of developing a webtext’s design more closely as key instances of invention. All three of the case studies changed significantly from the prototype to the final version, and one reason for these shifts were my negotiations as composer with the tools of composing selected along the way. I suggest that negotiations with tools both facilitate and challenge ideas in designing a webtext, in both the ideas that they thwart and in the new ideas that they raise. As with investigating the influences of people in the previous chapter, I want to make visible the (otherwise invisible) moments that tools intervene to shape a webtext’s inscape in ways that the composer alone could not have anticipated.