Citation of “Writing and rhetoric and/as posthuman practice”

Annotation by Emma Moghabghab

Boyle, C. (2016). Writing and rhetoric and/as posthuman practice. College English, 78(6), 532-554. Retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/ CE/0786/CE 0786Writing.pdf

Article Summary

In this article, Boyle reframes rhetorical practice as posthuman practice constituted of a series of mediated encounters. He first characterizes reflective practice as current-critical rhetoric and then explores how posthumanism functions as a framework for studying and reexamining rhetorical training given the humanist interest in media, connectivity, and networks. Within this framework, he argues that serial practice in the form of material perceptions that are repeated reconstructs the notion of rhetoric as a “habit of reflective, critical awareness.” Finally, Boyle reevaluates the concept and implications of metacognition on this reframing and its consequent effects on the ethics and pedagogy of writing.

Article Assessment

Boyle’s article provides an excellent illustration of his argument in practice. In fact, his text enacts the continuity between theory and practice that he articulates in his argument. His incorporation of sources and subsequent articulation of argument move away from reflective practice toward an ecology of practice that is serial and affective. It adopts a style of engagement that is central for the development of an ethical theory-practice of composition constantly recreating mutually affective capacities. Boyle’s extension of his argument to writing pedagogy and ethics in the expanded media ecologies that make up our lives and our classrooms thus invites further exploration of application and questioning. His article is particularly useful in setting up the theoretical framework within which composition can be explored as a shared endeavor constantly recreated across the in-between of distributed cognition as an exercise in “inventional media” or “writing bodies.”

Key Quotations

On the Reframing of Rhetoric as Posthuman Practice

   •         “What I have proposed here is that rhetoric, by attending more closely to practice and its nonconscious and nonreflective activity, reframes itself by considering its operations as exercises within a more expansive body of relations than can be reduced to any individual human. The central ethic for a rhetoric framed as posthuman practice  is to exercise the humble, open-ended claim that we do not yet know what a (writing) body can do ; after which, we attempt to find out, repeatedly.” (p. 552) 

On Writing Pedagogy as an Ethic for Composing Habits

•          "If we are to reconsider practices as informing “habits of mind” and, further, the more expansive ecology of which we are part, then the rhetorical training and writing pedagogy we seek would be an ethic for composing habits, dispositions, and orientations at least as much as the ability to consciously reflect on and account for causes and effects."