The primary turn here is to complexity, which Byron Hawk describes in his Counter-History of Composition as “the moment of transition from order to chaos and back to order” (155). Embracing such complexity for writing requires that we reimagine writers less as independent agents and become more attentive to the many movements of writings in a “posthuman model of networks”; as such, “the subject of writing is the network that inscribes the subject as the subject scribes the network” (75). More than a rehashing of classic social constructivism, however, posthuman models offer “a non-dualistic understanding of nature-culture interaction” and stress “the self-organizing (or auto-poietic) force of living matter” (Braidotti, Posthuman 3). As Rosi Braidotti writes in The Posthuman, the “boundaries between the categories of the natural and the cultural have been displaced and to a large extent blurred by the effects of scientific and technological advances” (3).

This continuum (rather than dyad) of nature<—>culture, given<—>constructed resonates with Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, which asks that we question (and leave behind) our long-standing Western predilection of understanding nature and culture as separate or separable, and instead work toward conceiving assemblages that bring together a range of animate and inanimate “actors” to understand and compose our world. Indeed, in his “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,’” Latour uses the word composition to refer to such assemblages, which are less revelatory of a “reality” and more strategic in their accounting of both humans as actors and the many ways in which our worlds act on us. We are always already part of larger systems. Latour argues that such a reconception of what it means to be human, while daunting, even unsettling and “terrifying,” might be “the best path to finally taking seriously the political task of establishing the continuity of all entities that make up the common world” (485).

Braidotti is similarly concerned with using such theories to rethink our relations with the worlds we inhabit (but do not center). She writes of a critical posthumanism that includes “a radical aspiration to freedom through the understanding of the specific conditions and relations of power that are imminent to our historical locations” (Posthuman 11-12). That is, she argues that the task of critical theory in our posthuman age should be “to provide adequate representations of our situated historical location” (4). We would torque her “humble cartographic aim” to include the idea of a critical techne—not just the representation, but the enactment of theory through the very act of creating the representation. Indeed, in “Queerness, Multimodality, and the Possibilities of Re/Orientation,” we wrote about the possibilities for re/orientation, arguing that multimodality "offers us some powerful (though not exclusive) strategies to invite people to experience an orientation (and perhaps even a bit of productive disorientation) vis-à-vis the sexual. Such work, necessarily personal and emerging from 'the private,' draws on our own sense of queerness" (203).