One More Post?

So I've been trying to come to terms with the concept of posthumanism this morning, another post that might finish off our week-long discussion of post-everything. I arrive at this concept in uncertainty, without a full realization of what the term denotes,or what it might mean for composition and rhetoric. What I want to do here is offer something of a process narrative of my growing understanding of the term while asking specific questions about that process which might challenge a human or subject-specific orientation toward research or knowledge-gain. That is, when I engage in research, when I attempt to learn about something, how much agency do I have as a writer/reader/learner over the knowledge that I gain? Do I decide what I learn, what knowledge I gain and texts I appropriate? I think a posthuman perspective on learning might also challenge us to ask: How much do the texts and media one engages in act upon the human subject? What kinds of decisions do the texts make about my education?

“Polymorphous perversity” indicates transgression, but actually signals innocence: The innocence for the body to experience pleasure at every sensory surface. A frankly Freudian concept, but useful. 

What happens when we experience texts as the spaces we're within? The spaces that are moving within us? 

Infection? Reproduction? Mutation? ("Polymorphous Perversity and Texts")

Here is an unconventional act in academic writing: appropriating a text without introducing it. I tell my students about signal phrases and appropriate introductions to sources. Remember to provide the author's full name when you introduce them the first time. Give us some information about who they are and what the work you're quoting from is about. What happens when we writers fail to do these things? Johnson-Eilola, the "author" of the above passage, might say that this kind of raw appropriation demonstrates how texts move through us and through our writing. To introduce them, to appropriate them in academically conventional ways, is an attempt to mask the ability and agency of texts and to construct an author who is in control of the texts (rather than the other way around). He (Johnson-Eilola) uses the Freudian concept of "Polymorphous Perversity" - "the ability to find erotic pleasure out of any part of the human body" both as a means to talk about the way:

• we derive pleasure from splitting and fracturing texts, from appropriating texts for our own devices, 
• and the way that texts act upon our bodies and come to inhabit us.

Have you ever heard the term earworm? An earworm is "a piece of music that sticks in one's mind so that one seems to hear it, even when it is not being played" (Wikipedia, what else?).

This song by Gotye gets stuck in my head a lot. There's something about the bells, and the repetition. And I once heard my little brother doing a piano adaption and singing it. I think the idea of the earworm is a good way to think about the role of texts in a posthuman conception of writing. We don't invite earworms, do we? We're invaded by them. The songs (texts) seem to come to us of their own accord. They might "infect" us or move from another body to our own. They inhabit us, at times against our will. The gain and enact agency both with and without our (human) consent.

The earworm can also help us see  posthumanism as a critique of social-epistemic theories of rhetoric/writing. In "Reassembling Postprocess: Toward a Posthuman Theory of Public Rhetoric," (from Beyond Postprocess) Byron Hawk complicates Thomas Kent's conception of postprocess theory by challenging its "reli[ance] on the dialectical give and take of hermeneutic guesses among humans in particular situations involving human communication" (76).  Here's how Hawk responds to Kent:

Humans don't just test their theories on other humans: they connect these theories to complex situations to express worlds. Such an approach isn't based on conscious debate about effective guesses, but on embodied enactions with a complex evolving world that include innumerable objects at various levels of scale. This is a posthuman image of the world that includes humans but decenters them in relational models of assemblage and expression. (77)

But what does the earworm have to do with Hawk's revision of Kent as a questioning of the human-centric approach to rhetoric and the subsequent omission of other factors within the writing ecology? When we give the earworm agency, we also limit our own human agency. The individual human becomes an actor in a complex ecology of actors and agents: the song itself, the technology which allows the song, radio or laptop, the various human interactions associated with the song, etc.

Seeing myself as an actor that both appropriates and is appropriated by texts allows me to reposition my views on research and writing. As I promised in the introduction, I want to use this essay (as a kind of process narrative) to challenge our  notions of what it means to research, and to come to a certain knowledge, specifically of posthumanism.  Remember The Moment of Complexity?: "I, Mark C. Taylor, am not writing this book. Yet the book is being written." (196).

 I, Matt Vetter, am not writing this post; rather it's being written through me via a complex ecology of texts, objects, individuals, sensory data, and stimuli, etc, ad (almost) infinitum. The few texts I appropriate in the essay are consequences of my material access at this particular time. Hawk, Taylor, Johnson-Eilola, but I know I'm leaving out certain people too. I know that Bruno Latour is important in this discussion because I keep seeing his name in various texts. So I appropriate him in secondary ways but don't have access (both physical and perhaps mental because I may not be ready to understand the ways he is writing) (at this particular time) to his ideas in their primary form. Of course, texts are always intertextual and I could never fully document all of my appropriations. Just as I could never full document the complex set of objects that come to bear on my composition process here and now:  The coffee I drink spawns a chemical reaction in my brain which makes me write in certain ways, allows and disallows certain responses. I'm sitting at the kitchen table and I've got a book open but I've also got a blank notebook and pens, copies of articles we've read in this class. My browser at any moment in the composing process has 10+ tabs open between multiple texts. My kids get in arguments or are hungry and that experience requires that I stop what i'm doing and attend to them. My wife calls and and wants to know whether she should rent Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked or Happy Feet 2. Shes asks, "Are you there?" Because I'm  not really. I'm having trouble moving the text I'm writing out of my body (enough) to make room for this mundane decision. I'm wondering how how much power I have over the text and how much power it has over me.

Works Cited

• Hawk, Byron. "Reassembling Postprocess: Toward a Posthuman Theory of Public Rhetoric." Beyond Postprocess. Eds. Sidney I Dobrin, J.A. Rice and Michael Vastola. Logan: Utah State U P, 2011. 75-93. Print.
• Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. "Polymorphous Perversity and Texts." Kairos 16.3 (2012). Web. 25 May 2012.
• Taylor, Mark C. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Print.