Full Panel
Panelists
Alexander Reid (Panel Organizer), University at Buffalo; Derek Mueller, Eastern Michigan University and Matt King, St. Bonaventure University
Biographies
Alexander Reid is an associate professor of rhetoric at the University at Buffalo, where he teaches digital rhetoric and theory and serves as director of composition.
Derek Mueller is an assistant professor of written communication at Eastern Michigan University. His teaching and research concerns the interplay among writing, rhetorics, and technologies.
Matt King is an assistant professor of rhetoric, writing, and literature at St. Bonaventure University. His teaching and research interests focus on rhetorical theories of identification; procedural, digital, and nonrational rhetorics; writing and composition studies; 20th century American and postmodern literature; and video games.
Panel Description
In “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,’” Bruno Latour takes up and modifies Benjamin’s familiar trope contrary to Benjamin’s interpretation, the Modern who, like the angel, is flying backward is actually not seeing the destruction He is generating it in his flight since it occurs behind His back! It is only recently, by a sudden conversion, a metanoia of sorts, that He has suddenly realized how much catastrophe His development has left behind him. The ecological crisis is nothing but the sudden turning around of someone who had actually never before looked into the future, so busy was He extricating Himself from a horrible past. (485-6)
Latour is clearly focused on ecological matters in this essay. However, his broader critique of modernity and its articulation of the future and progress (Benjamin’s concern) is significant as we approach our own future vision (or “prospects” as Latour prefers). Our panel, consisting of three digital rhetoricians, will consider how Latour’s compositionist manifesto, situated in his broader work, might inform the ways we study digital technologies and literacies.
Speaker One: Alex Reid will discuss how incorporating an understanding of nonhumans as symmetrical participants in rhetorical networks shifts our fundamental understanding of how rhetoric works and opens new possibilities for investigating digital literacy.
Speaker Two: Derek Mueller will introduce dissoi ecologoi, contextualize the concept specifically in terms of scripts and description—key ideas from Latour’s earlier work on interactions among humans and nonhumans (“Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together”), and showcase the concept in two specific digital composition projects designed to bring differential ecosystems out of hiding.
Speaker Three: Matt King will put Latour’s understanding of compositionism into conversation with Ian Bogost’s understanding of procedurality as both a method for writing computational arguments and a means for describing the ontology of objects.