Introduction to Binary Invention

This blog takes its name from the 2012 UND Arts &Culture Conference. Folks in the Department of Art & Design and I developed the theme “Binary Inventions” as an umbrella for thinking about the ways digital technologies alter the relationship between the fine arts and public life. But beyond that relationship, I’m increasingly interested in locating my own rhetorical research and teaching in the language of the binary invention. 

 Part of that interest is based on word-play. Rhetoric has long resisted binaries; they enforce a theory/praxis distinction that rhetoric resists in its very performance and binaries constrain the contingencies that make rhetoric a vital force in public life. But “binary” as a placeholder for digital culture encourages us to recognize that the either/or logic of binary code maintains infinite possibilities. Not only that, but “binary invention” encourages us to consider how these shifts in the production and dissemination of rhetoric might require revisiting the canon to consider how rhetorical theory and practice shift. 

In many ways, that consideration looks a lot like Tom Farrell’s work in Norms of Rhetorical Culture, where he argues that the “formal technai of rhetoric,” the proscriptive rules of invention found in Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, can “generate new dimensions of practical consciousness.” But the binary part of binary inventions reminds us that contemporary rhetoric is more than adapting formally codified arrangements to contemporary contingencies. Binary Inventions are those rhetorical acts that reflexively consider--in line with Anne Wysocki's definition of new media--how the digital interfaces of public discourse impact the inventional process. That’s the kind of binary invention I want to tinker with in this space.