Why write the self?

The post-process and post-post-process turns in composition studies, deftly articulated by writers such as Barbara Couture, Sidney Dobrin, Byron Hawk, Jeff Rice, and Raúl Sánchez, challenge rhetoric and composition’s construction of writers as individual agents in control (or developing control) of their use of language. Instead, through greater attention to the spaces, materials, and networks through which writing emerges, these writers seek to reorient our attention to writing as a complex act distributed through and taking shape within numerous overlapping ecologies. In this way, they urge us toward posthumanist considerations of subjectivity. Whether we talk about “distributed cognition” and the “seamless” articulation of human and machine (Hayles, How We Became 3) or the critical rethinking of “the basic unit of reference for the human in the bio-genetic age known as ‘anthopocene'” (Braidotti, Posthuman 5), we face the simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying possibilities of proliferating subjectivities within proliferating discourses and contexts. The question becomes how to write such selves rather than why.

If the process paradigm attempted to articulate a (teachable) set of strategies for the production of texts by humanistic subjects, these newer paradigms push us to consider the messy potentialities of writing by always already contingent posthumans composing strategically (if never definitively) to intervene momentarily in the constant flows of information interpenetrating them and their worlds. And indeed, this move is a welcome one, for it acknowledges the multiple and proliferating discourses that now challenge the image of the Vitruvian Man offered by Leonardo da Vinci, emblematic “of Humanism as a doctrine that combines the biological, discursive, and moral expansion of human capabilities into an idea of teleologically ordained, rational progress” (Braidotti, Posthuman 13). In those challenges to humanism, emerging in concert and in opposition to much poststructural French philosophy, we find not a “liquidation” of subjectivity, but “rather a proliferation of subjects, their responsibilities, and their associated forms of life” (Herbrechter 198).