Writing and Rhetoric and/as Posthuman Practice

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This article elaborates on Kristine Johnson’s rhetorical response to the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, and proposes that the field’s emerging interest in writing as a “way of being in the world” offers an occasion to reframe rhetorical practice. So, this project looks to “productively read” the Framework to reframe rhetoric’s current habit of humanist, reflective practice towards posthuman practice. Posthuman practice unfolds not through the traditional conception of rhetoric as critical reflection about an object but as ongoing, serial encounters with and through mediation. The article supports this proposition thusly: First, it sketches how reflective practice has become synonymous with rhetoric and writing studies, giving rise to  “Current-Critical Rhetoric.” Second, in response to a thoroughly humanist orientation to media, the project (re)introduces posthumanism as a frame for considering rhetorical training in an age of constant connections to digital media and networks. Third, it proposes serial practice as a reinvention of rhetoric’s habit of reflective, critical awareness that unfolds through repeated perceptions of material ecologies.  The article then concludes by reconsidering metacognition and its implications for how reframing rhetoric as a posthuman practice could affect writing pedagogy and ethics.