Non/human Ecologies

After reading the work of Bruno Latour and Ian Bogost, I have been thinking of the relationships that nonhuman agents have with particular ecologies. Someone who is not familiar with their work might not really grasp what these concepts mean, or why a graduate student in rhetoric and composition would be interested in such concepts. The truth is that I am still grappling with these concepts myself, so I will attempt to make some sense of them here. In “Composing the Carpenter’s Workshop,” James J. Brown, Jr. and Nathaniel Rivers provide several insights about how these terms are being worked in the field, and even suggest a potential scenario for their impact in future composition courses. They refer to the work of the authors I mentioned above, but also to Collin Brooke’s Lingua Fracta. Brooke’s book was my first exposure to the term ecologies, so I will begin there.

It is my understanding that the concept of ecologies comes from the scientific definition of how things are part of a larger system, and that its components affect each other in a variety of ways. This implies that there needs to be an attention to context. It also implies that it is necessary to consider the things that are doing something. And there should also be a consideration of the connections between such things. Seems simple enough, if we substitute the noun things with humans. But Latour has made me aware that our constant attention to humans have closed off opportunities of exploring other nonhuman agents. That is, everything else that is not human but that has the potential to exert change or that would in one way or another affect other nonhumans, or to go back to our preferred paradigm, how they affect humans, which is why I used the term things. In Lingua Fracta, Brooke is using the concept to create an ecology of new media, by refashioning the five canons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, delivery and memory. It is convenient for him to call it an ecology because of the focus on connections that new media bring up/cause/entail.

Brown and Rivers helped me understand Bogost’s concept of philosophical carpentry, but also to consider it in relation to rhetoric, specifically:

For Bogost, carpentry is both a description of how objects fashion one another and also a practice of doing philosophy. We extend this one step further, suggesting that such making can be undertaken in an effort to do rhetoric...Constructing these strange conversations means that the rhetor must attune herself to complex ecology of human and nonhumans. (2)

They go on to describe the ethical implications of this kind of making, one that is aware of how one situates oneself in relation to a topic, while critically examining this position in regards to human and nonhumans that influence/impact her understanding. If I am to apply the concepts of nonhuman ecologies for some of my friends in the Puerto Rican indie rock scene, I could ask: what kinds of texts (musical genres, songs, music videos, artists) have played a role in the kind of music that they are producing now? How did they engage with these texts? Did they actively seek them out, where they passed on from person to person, did they randomly interact with them in their media consumption practices (listening to the radio, watching television)? How do they think that their location (northwest of PR) has allowed these interactions to occur?

Perhaps these questions might elicit some new understandings of how different humans interact with nonhumans in a particular ecology. The ultimate question to ask after these have all been considered would be: What kinds of rhetorics are being promoted/created in these exchanges?