julio’s invention of “invention”
The time in which we live is often called the Machine age, and you can easily understand why. Most of our work is now done with machines. We have machines in our homes and schools, on our farms, and in our forests, mines and factories. We use machines in communication, transportation, and construction. We even have machines to make more machines! So we cannot get along without a great many kinds of machines in modern life.
– Science Problems 3, For Junior High School1
Julio didn’t make up the word invention, but he did invent it [2, 63].
I imagine that when most of us, in our daily lives, think of the word “invention,” we think of some machine designed to make something easier. Inventions, in this sense of the term, arrived on the scene at a dizzying pace in the half-century prior to Julio’s birth in 1914. Consider the following: the typewriter (1870), the telephone (1876), the phonograph (1877), the electric light bulb (ca. 1880), the steam turbine generator (1884), the motor car (1885), the safety bicycle (1885), the gramophone (1888), the diesel engine (1892), the radio (1894), the compact electric motor (1899), the meccano (1901), disk brakes (1902), the safety razor (1903), the electro-cardiograph (1903), the Wright flyer (1903), car seat belts (1903), the teddy bear (1903), the termionic valve (1906), the washing machine (1907), the nuclear model of the atom (1911), the domestic electric refrigerator (1913), stainless steel (1913), the assembly line (1913), electric traffic lights (1914), and the zipper (1914). For residents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, these objects still carried an aura of the miraculous, and the men and women who invented them, the aura of deities. The process by which inventors conjured these miracles was mysterious and worth talking about.
We residents of the twentieth century have had our share of inventions as well, our share of what seem to be miracles. What struck me, however, as I jotted down that list of inventions was how commonplace they seem today, how natural. It is almost as hard to imagine a world without a zipper or stainless steel as it is to imagine a world without rainfall. We are unique, I believe, in the degree to and pace with which we have experienced the naturalization of inventions. The computer provides the obvious example. As a child in the early 1970s, it was still wondrous to me to go to my father’s laboratory and see there the large mainframe cranking away with punch cards. My dad would make the machine do totally useless things like tell me what day of the week my birthday had fallen on in the year 1316. The power of the machine to do things so beyond me left me feeling awe. The machine was mystery and I felt before it as I feel before the ocean or the stars. Today, just 30 years later, I don’t even blink when I see an old PC, whose powers would make my dad’s mainframe look like a slide-rule, sitting on somebody’s curb with the rest of the trash. Mass production, mass marketing, and mass consumption together have conspired to make such experiences possible and, even, commonplace in the industrialized world.
As a sign of this unprecedented experience has come also a gradual shift in the dominant connotation of the word “invention”: from a process of creating something new to a thing designed to make our work easier. We’ve tilted the word “invention” from action to thing. I think of it this way. There are inventions and then there is invention. There are wheels and printing presses and computers, bicycles and automobiles, and airplanes. There are these things, everything from the propeller to the zipper; these things that make our lives more comfortable if we own them; these things for comfort, for commodity. And then there is that process whereby these things are given material form for the very first time (perhaps in a garage, or – like Henry Ford’s internal combustion engine – a kitchen, usually accompanied by a distinctly unmarketable racket and layer of grime, not to mention intensities of frustration, despair, and joy).
That process, to be sure, leads to a thing. But that thing is still part of the process. It stands at the edge of process and there can be a moment when the thing can still be experienced, still unique and singular, as a merely momentary concentration of intellect, matter, and labor. This process of invention experiments with existing things and with the existing and, especially, possible relations between them. This process turns away from the comfort of familiar uses and recognizable patterns of relations in order to generate, indeed to proliferate the new. If inventions tend toward the commodity of the familiar, invention, the process, tends toward the discomfort of the never-before-seen. Something like what I’m saying was perhaps said, in different terms and with different emphases by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin back in the 1930s in an essay called “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”2 We in the twentieth-century have witnessed – even carried out – a shift in attention from the process to the thing [11, 62, 74, 95].
Now, one might well argue that something like a television set, in and of itself, is neither good nor bad. That there are healthy as well as unhealthy uses of a television set. Fair enough. It’s just a box full of parts configured to receive radio signals and convert them as images and sounds. It is much harder to make that argument about an automatic machine gun or a bomber or nuclear missile, all of which have been configured to kill or, at the very least, to threaten with loss of life. Moreover, among the things that we have invented are machines and processes that consign unprecedented numbers of human beings – all just trying to make a living – to misery, drudgery, or even death.
Sure, we’ve also invented ways to entertain and heal them. But that sort of counter-argument reminds me of how much of our ingenuity gets applied to the task of undoing the effects of some poorly thought through – or unethically implemented — prior invention. It’s like the Tule Tree near Oaxaca. Huge tree, 2000 years old. It’s dying now, slowly, because of the development, geared toward tourists’ convenience, in the area surrounding it. So the local authorities have devised ingenious means of getting water to the massive root system of this tree, the root system that is now buried under tons of poured concrete. It might have been easier not to pour the concrete in the first place. “I can have no confidence,” wrote Thomas Merton, “in places where the air is first fouled and then cleansed, where the water is first made deadly and then made safe with other poisons.”3
I don’t feel as fully the absence of confidence expressed by Merton. But I find his words a helpful reminder of how often less can be more, and of how much the material world I live in expresses just the opposite. As for the Tule tree, it reminds me that we’ve invented, with all our machines and processes, the possibility of our own annihilation, whether in a single nuclear stroke or by strangling off the capacity of our planet to support us. These, whatever we might think or wish, are the material significations of “invention” in the twentieth-century world. This is “invention” as Julio might have experienced it in his daily life: in his kitchen, on the street, in airports, in the newspapers. It was what was, in a sense, “lying around” or “at hand.”
Now, all of this might seem to render “invention” rather uninspiring for an artist whose affinities put him at odds with many of the consequences of the historical transformations registered by the shift from invention as process to invention as thing. Fortunately, there were, and are, other “inventions” lying around. I mean that there were other meanings of the term available to someone who didn’t, or who doesn’t want simply to abandon the field of meaning of invention to an accumulation of inert objects. Among those meanings that were lying around were two of particular relevance here: first, the classical Greek notion of heuresis (Latin: inventio), meaning “discovery” or “coming upon” as in, within the classical arts of rhetoric, finding something, among all that has already been said, to say to the present occasion [63]; and second, the Romantic notion of invention as the genius of being able to forget the past and thrust something new up out of one’s self.
From the first sense of “invention” Julio took the acknowledgment that saying or writing something entails finding something to say among the things that have already been said. The emphasis points to the fact that there is no burden of originality in this sense of invention, no belief that one must be the origin of what one says or writes [34, 84]. In addition to this meaning, Julio also adopted something of the stance of the classical rhetoricians and their kin, the sophists. Specifically, he adopted the stance that invention is as invention does. That is, that with invention, with the things you say or write, the effect on an audience matters much more than correspondence to some supposed, state of affairs, some conventionally agreed upon idea of reality. This belief got sophists in trouble in their own time with others, like Plato, who believed that language ought faithfully to reflect reality [34, 67]. From the Romantic sense of invention, on the other hand and perhaps as a balancing corrective, Julio took a strong sense of the role of the individual — not as origin of invention, but as a sensitive medium through which invention is transmitted. Julio adopted as well something of the stance of the Romantics in their own time. Specifically, in this case, he assumed the Romantic commitment to the value of non-conformity and experimentation for facilitating invention.
Now, I want to clarify two potential misunderstandings that could arise from this way of putting things. First, when I write that “Julio took” this or that or “Julio combined” this or that, I am not claiming that Julio Cortázar consciously sought raw materials for his understanding of the term “invention” among the ruins of earlier usage. It may be safe to assume that Julio – who wrote a six-hundred page book on the British Romantic poet John Keats; who was an avid reader; and who taught college literature classes for years – was familiar with these usages. But I don’t need to know or even to assume that Julio understood these usages as I do, or that he liked them if he did understand them as I do. It suffices that the term “invention,” in his writing, works as if imbued with both these meanings. Second, I want to emphasize that the sense of invention that Julio developed need not, in of itself, be set against what, for example, Henry Ford, or some scientist might think that he or she is doing in the workshop or the laboratory. Henry Ford, after all, did nothing more than put together in a new way some things that were already lying around when he invented the automobile. Invention in Julio’s sense can in no way be considered the exclusive or essential property of the artist or humanist. Far from it [73].
Yet it is important to admit that in the twentieth-century marriage of capitalist enterprise and scientific knowledge something happened to the sense of invention. Capitalist investment may well have stimulated the process of invention. But ultimately it valued that process only to the degree that it reliably yielded products – whether toenail clippers or John Grisham novels or nuclear missiles – that could profitably be sold. This dynamic effectively stunted our capacity to think invention as a process of creation available to any of us, replacing it with invention as a thing – conceived and made by someone else – the pursuit of which leaves us another day older and deeper in debt. Perhaps most seriously, this dynamic permitted, if it did not directly lead to, the production of inventions whose only conceivable purpose was the more rapid and efficient destruction of human life.
It was to combat the dangers of this freezing of invention-process into invention-thing – a freezing that may occur in a corporate boardroom, an academic’s study, or an engineer’s workshop – that Julio cobbled together his own sense of invention. His sense emphasized immanence, selflessness, ceaseless experimentation and efficacy in creation and he insisted upon it throughout his life and writing. This is the sense in which Julio did not make up the word “invention”, but did invent it. For he did take the nine letters, the set of meanings, and the attitudes and activities to which they point and recombine them so as to make the word do something new [26].
1 Wilbur L. Beauchamp, John C. Mayfield, Joe Young West, Science Problems 3, for Junior High School(Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1957), p. 6.
2 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, Ed. by Hannah Arendt, Trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1985), pp. 217-251. Benjamin was concerned more specifically with the effects of mechanical reproduction on what he called the “aura” of the work of art – our sense of its singularity as an object in a concrete material context of production and reception – and he linked it to the emergence of both mass production and consumption and mass social movements. Compare this to the American philosopher John Dewey’s thoughts on the matter, written roughly around the same time, but from a very different philosophical and somewhat different social context in Art as Experience (New York: Perigee, 1980), pp. 107-8.
3 Thomas Merton, “Rain and the Rhinoceros,” Raids on the Unspeakable (New York: New Directions, 1964), pp. 10-11.ese sillón – dijo Isadora,”La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (México: Siglo Veintiuno, 1967), p. 49.