More Bawarshi: "A Meditation on Beginnings"

I'm still liking this book (which I began thinking through in this post) a lot as I slowly become more entangled in it.  Bawarshi continues his introduction by musing on "beginnings" in writing—on invention, which he sees as "a site at which writers obtain, negotiate, and enact specific social commitments, orientations, and relations within what Bazerman has recently called 'genred' discursive spaces" (13):

I examine invention as the site in which writers act within and are acted upon by the social and rhetorical conditions that we call genres—the site in which writers acquire, negotiate, and articulate the desires to write.... If beginnings take place in the textured midst of things...then genres are part of this midst of things, rhetorically sustaining and enabling the ways communicants recognize and act in various situations. (7)

Some main ideas from the introductory chapter:

• We often consider the agency for invention to lie within the writer: "Invention heuristics such as freewriting, brainstorming, clustering, and mapping locate the writer as the primary site and agent of invention" (4).  

Beginnings, Bawarshi says, are mired in ideologies and mythologies of blank spaces waiting to be marked, and this has shaped our conception of invention.  Composition largely situates agency for beginnings inwardly, with the writer: for example, Bawarshi says, most comp textbooks (even those not identifying as expressly expressionist) treat invention as "prewriting," something that happens within the writer.

This, Bawarshi says, "helps contribute to the perception that invention is pre-social,"or something that "somehow remains immune from the social, collaborate, and discursive conditions that later affect the text's production, circulation, and reception" (4).  This topic will get taken up in greater detail in Chapter 3, where Bawarshi relates invention to the history of writing instruction and theories, and looks at how several movements (particularly the process movement) have shaped invention as "an individual and introspective act" (13).

• Writers are never alone: because we recognize that writing practices as socially situated, we know that we are always writing alongside other texts and ideas.  There is "more at work on the text than the writer's seemingly autonomous cognition" (5); the invention of texts is shaped by both the writer's own cognition and social forces (usually identified as discourse communities).

Some (Young, Becker, and Pike) even identify invention as "a process of orientation rather than origination" (6).  

• Why, in the end, study genre?  And what are they?  Recent scholarship says "that genres are dynamic discursive formations in which ideology is naturalized and realized in specific social actions, relations, and subjectivities" (8). 
• Genres as "rhetorical ecosystems" (8): social and rhetorical conditions; genres maintain social and rhetorical habits; genres are entwined with invention because they allow us to "locate a writer's motives to act within typified social and rhetorical conditions" (11).
• Genres both shape and transform social and rhetorical practices. 

So, it would seem that Bawarshi is posing social questions, and looking beyond texts themselves to the actual act of writing.  He says,

We cannot, I argue, fully understand or answer the question "what do writers do when they write?" without understanding and answering the question "what happens to writers when they write?" In genre theory, I see a way to bring these questions together, to acccount not only for how writers articulate motives or desires, but also for how writers obtain motives or desires to write—how, that is, writers both invent and are invented by the genres that they write. (12) 

In all, tough chapter to summarize, as Bawarshi basically goes through a micro-version of the argument he'll explicate over the course of the entire book.