Who Cares if Johnny Writes with a Pencil? Or, a Hauntological Historiography of Materiality in Composition-Rhetoric

ABSTRACT

Composition-rhetoric is experiencing a surge in research examining how the material is rhetorically consequential, sometimes termed new materialism. However, much of this research is future-oriented, leaving intact traditional disciplinary values. This article offers a hauntological re-reading of our disciplinary history from a materialist perspective wherein we are always-already material. By examining three canonical articles where the original research is haunted by the rhetoricity of matter, the field’s traditional history and, concomitantly, current-future identities are left radically open and unsettled. New adjacent possibilities are available for realization only if/when we render our past-present-future selves unfamiliar.

Notes

1. My humble thanks to RR reviewers, Drs. Chris Mays and Kellie Sharp-Hoskins, whose encouraging feedback kindled this manuscript, giving it hope and shape.

2. In Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy, Robert Connors defines composition-rhetoric as “that form of rhetorical theory and practice devoted to written discourse” (6). This definition highlights the consequential contact zone between rhetoric and composition, which are sometimes viewed as distinct disciplines. My use of composition-rhetoric is intended to follow Connor’s suggestion that written rhetoric has existed as a field of study since at least the 1800s in a variety of forms. Concomitantly, composition-rhetoric has a history that is open to and capable of revisionary critiques.

3. “Past” and “future” are bracketed here because, as I demonstrate later, the mattering of composition-rhetoric necessarily displaces the notions of continuity, linearity, and fixedness of time as well as identity. “Mattering,” Karen Barad claims, “is about the (contingent and temporary) becoming-determinate (and becoming-indeterminate) of matter and meaning, without fixity, without closure” (Quantum 254). In other words, the “past” is never really past, but rather in an enfolded and iterative state of not/becoming. A look “back,” then is less about revisiting a previously determinate narrative but more about a radical (and contingent) performance of past-present-future disciplinary identity.

4. My use of the term “broadening” here carries dual weight. On one hand, it refers literally to the disciplinary expansion of composition-rhetoric to include theories of materialism. Simultaneously, it invokes the oft-repeated mantra within materialist theories that materiality was never meant to replace the intending human agent with matter in a rhetorical exchange. Rather material rhetorics are intent on “flattening out” the relationship traditional rhetorical approaches value between the human and nonhuman, not erasing it altogether (Muckelbauer). The net effects this displacement of disciplinary values are a broadening of both what was/is considered to be rhetorical as well as future possibilities.

5. The “adjacent possible” is a concept developed by theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman. The adjacent possible are those realities which are “not . . . actual, but are one reaction step away from the actual” (142). In other words, the adjacent possible is that which has the potential to become reality given the an ever-expanding conditions of what is currently real. Important to note about the adjacent possible is that it is “infinitely expandable” (142). This concept, I argue, is as applicable to composition-rhetoric as it is to evolutionary biology.

6. The articles chosen for inclusion in this study have traditionally been read as assigning rhetorical agency and affect to human subjects. I have intentionally excluded articles that explicitly demonstrate the rhetorical effect of non-human agents. I want instead to uncover material agency where it is clearly present but not the focus of the study. I want to draw our disciplinary gaze to the specters of the material within composition-rhetoric, those moments of material haunting that have always-already made up an important, if unrecognized, part of our disciplinary history and identity.

7. In “Historiography as Hauntology,” Ballif marries form and function, using footnotes to mirror the very argument she is making. She remarks: “What has been buried, for example, in a footnote? How does this burial haunt—irrepressibly—the text?” (140). I attempt here to follow Ballif’s example by purposefully using the footnotes to develop, to haunt, the body of this text.

8. One of the ways we have “traditionally understood” ourselves is through the poststructural critique of social power structures. This has been and continues to be a vitally important part of our discipline. By unsettling traditional disciplinary values I do not wish to obscure the importance of these power structures. I endeavor instead to show that composition-rhetoric is capacious enough to assemble from both the material and social.

9. The concept of intra-action stands in contrast to interactions. Intra-action highlights the ways in which rhetorical import is derived from an interior and interdependent assemblage, or collective rather than an interaction of separate and independent entities (Latour, Pandora’s).

10. Importantly, Walter’s work also demonstrates how material rhetorics are attuned to embodiment, how our bodies are differently marked in culturally, politically, economically, and racially constructed ways. While not (necessarily) a focus of this research, embodiment and dis/ability studies point to an/other important line of materialist rhetorics that warrants attention.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Manuel Piña

Manuel Piña is a writing instructor and researcher. He is currently the Associate Director of the General Education Writing Program at St. Edward’s University; his research interests include material and posthuman rhetorics, digital writing spaces, critical theory and pedagogy, and transfer theory. He is available to be contacted at [email protected].