A Comment on Casey Boyle's "Writing and Rhetoric And/as Posthuman Practice"/casey Boyle Responds
A Comment on Casey Boyle's "Writing and Rhetoric and/as Posthuman Practice" (article available free at https:/goo.gl/HH3Oir) Matthew OverstreetLike fashion or financial markets, it seems that trends in rhetoric and composition are subject to periodic correction. If mid 90s cultural studies, embodied by, say, James Berlin, is the most concerned our field has ever been with consciousness raising critique, Casey Boyle's "Writing and Rhetoric and/as Posthuman Practice" (July 2016) represents the opposite pole. Twenty years on, critique is most definitely out: practice is in. Professor Boyle's essay is to be praised, I think, for capturing the nature of this swing and thoroughly articulating the investments and ideas behind it. Like a driver on an icy road though, I worry that Boyle, and the field as a whole, may be engaged in something of an overcorrection.As Boyle sees it, rhetoric as posthuman practice "unfolds as an ongoing series of mediated encounters" (534) It foregrounds the codependence of texts, bodies and things, acknowledges the "betweenness" of the human and nonhuman (540) Ultimately though, such practice is less concerned with cultivating awareness of our embeddedness "and more concerned with inventing techniques with which we exercise that embeddedness" (538) These techniques the moves that define the successful writer largely operate on an unconscious level. This means that doing and doing and doing again is favored over analysis, practice over critique.In a provocative move, Boyle positions rhetoric as posthuman practice against rhetoric as reflective practice. Viewed from a posthuman perspective, he argues, metacognition and reflection, privileged terms in rhetoric and composition, "have the potential to become bad habits," because they encourage the "writer to separate herself from all those things with which she is codependent" (533).Boyle also accuses "current critical rhetoric" (E.G. Berlin's consciousness raising kind) of focusing on reflection purely as a means of increasing human agency. Again, this suggests distance and difference, which is problematic.Admittedly, there is a lot to like about Boyle's vision of posthuman practice. Sitting at my desk, simultaneously embedded in Microsoft Word, new materialism, a Beatles track, and a "heat dome," it's impossible not to feel the codependence he privileges. Likewise, raised on post process, I recognize that many, if not most, of the moves a successful writer makes are unconscious, lying beyond the reach of either language or reflective thought. That said, should writing teachers really classify reflection as a bad habit?I think not.To buy Boyle's dismissal of reflection, we must deploy a very limited notion of what reflective practice entails. In short, we have to understand reflective practice as nothing more than the discovery and exploitation of causal relationships. I admit that viewed in this way, reflection takes on a regressive, positivist tint. Reflection means (should mean/has meant) more than this though. In its strong sense, reflection thinking about thinking implicates self and world in equal measure. As such, it becomes, over and above a source of agency, a way to limn the boundaries of one's agency. It draws our attention, for example, to the extent to which our interests and experience shape things "as they are." In this regard, thinking about thinking reflection, critique, analysis helps foster the humility and sense of connection that is so important to posthuman practice.To illustrate my point, I'd like to turn to one of the high points of modern humanism, William Perry's Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years. Published in 1970 and drawn from a survey of Harvard undergrads, this book seeks to chart just what exactly liberal education, in its mid century, classically liberal form, does to students. As expected, Perry puts a strong emphasis on reflection.