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49 This chapter was cowritten by Cortney Kimoto (Smethurst), a graduate of the English rhetoric and composition M.A. program at California State University, Long Beach, and a certified technical and professional writer. 3. The Question of Definition: Choric Invention and Participatory Composition What is X? . . . is a question that excludes and purges. What do I want, wanting to know? . . . What is it to know (to no)? This contrary question allows me to interrogate the What is X? question . . . By saying No, we would purchase our identity. Know ourselves. By purifying the world, we would exclude that which, in our different opinions, threatens our identity. —Victor Vitanza, Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric Chora is the spacing which is the condition for everything to take place, for everything to be inscribed. . . . Everything inscribed in it erases itself immediately, while remaining in it. —Jacques Derrida, qtd. in Gregory Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention Vitanza’s first counterthesis raises the question of definition, or What is x?, and this chapter examines this first of three theoretical constructs that create a framework for electrate and participatory practices. These three constructs are based on the countertheses and include: the question of definition (What is x?), the question of authorship (Who speaks when something is spoken?), and the question of pedagogy (How is knowledge communicated?). Examining the first counterthesis, we will link the question of definition to the classical practice of stasis theory that serves as the counterpart to choragraphy: Ulmer’s method of invention that comes out of the ancient conception of space, or chora. Choragraphy is another way to describe “choric” invention. On the way from stasis to chora, however, we will revisit the forces animating our recasting of chora as an inventional practice, namely Barthes’s punctum of recognition, Ulmer’s reappropriation T H E Q U E S T I O N O F D E F I N I T I O N 50 of the punctum, and Collin Brooke’s concept of proairesis, in order to offer a complex and rich picture of invention for the electrate apparatus. Thus, this chapter has three ambitious goals. First, beginning with the question of definition, we will revisit the doctrine of stasis theory, a commonplace inventional strategy that is pedagogically familiar. Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee suggest that the questions of conjecture, definition, quality, and procedure posed by stasis theory generate copia, an abundance of language wherein one might generate arguments or figures for any situation . Second, after exploring Barthes’s and Ulmer’s work on the punctum of recognition, we will extend their concepts into the participatory realm and then transition into a discussion of Brooke’s recasting of invention as proairesis, a postcritical approach to invention that he aligns with Ulmer’s “process of conduction” (Heuretics 85). Our discussion of Brooke’s notion of proairesis acts as a relay toward our investigation of chora that we juxtapose with Deleuze and Guattari’s dualisms for both spatiality and temporality. Displacing binaries through the generative logic of the and complicates traditional efforts to arrest movement to achieve stasis and propels us into a discussion of online video and participatory cultures through which we can see the aforementioned theoretical concepts in action. Finally, we turn to YouTube as our exemplar for choric invention and conclude by explaining how a particular meme, with its folds of remix and reappropriation, illustrates how spreadable (and undefinable) media can influence participation as well as global collaboration, interaction, and communication. Online video sharing sites and the cultural phenomena arising throughout them serve as striking exemplars of the theoretical concepts discussed in this chapter, especially since, as reported in chapter 1, more than 91 percent of the web’s global consumer traffic will be video by 2014, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast, 2009-2014. These numbers indicate that video sharing and the participatory practices that are a necessary part of video culture will continue to rise. The purpose of this chapter will be to look forward by looking back: back to the age-old question of definition as it pertains to the electrate and participatory context in which we find ourselves . Combining these elements together, we hope, will create a dynamic picture of invention. The Question of Definition: From Stasis to Chora The central tenets of the first counterthesis are extremely important for rhetoric and composition wherein what constitutes the discipline’s object of study is continuously under contention.1 That said, however...

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