In her work on multimodality, Jody Shipka comments on Latour’s powerful recognition of how “‘nonhumans’ do play a role in shaping and determining action because they ‘might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid and so on’ certain actions and outcomes over others” (119). Shipka’s use of Latour is noteworthy in that she advocates for a pedagogical engagement that asks students composing multimodally to “consider the ways in which they are always already collaborating with things (such as language systems, rules, genres, materials, belief systems), and so [are] always working with or against the agency of things” (119). We couldn’t agree more, particularly about the importance of enacting such pedagogies.

But we may deviate here from a more straightforward Latourian engagement with such actor-network-inspired pedagogies in two ways. First, we desire to become better attuned to the orientations enacted through our technologized networks—orientations that lurk behind, below, or beyond how we might already be more self-consciously “working with or against the agency of things.” Our work isn’t necessarily in conflict with Latour on this point, and our phenomenological turn attempts to bring to consciousness the interplay of orientations that condition much agency and awareness. Second, that phenomenological turn also underscores our commitment to using such awareness—to the value of human awareness as potential for personal and political action. Our stuff might have agency. But some of that agency is surely a product, enacted in and through products themselves, of various values, consciously intended or not. For instance, in a neoliberalized environment of constant work, do our smartphones (and our ceaseless connection through them to our means of making a living) support that environment or are they a manifestation of it? Smartphones call to us. But must we always answer? Tracing our engagements phenomenologically offers the possibility of individual and collective reorientation, if not outright resistance.

Paul Lynch’s reading of Latour on composition emphasizes how, for Latour, “composition does not proceed in a straight line to a clear message” (469). That avoidance of the “straight” line becomes for us a queering, a deviation from expected paths, a willingness and even need to turn away from expected orientations. If it is queer, it is also for us connected to our lived sense of the intimate embodiment in social networks always seeking to straighten us out.