Nathaniel A. Rivers

All of the Things: Engaging Complex Assemblages in Communication Design

In this paper, we compare sociocultural theories of communication and user experience design to scholarship from associative and new materialist approaches. We argue for a more expansive and symmetrical perspective on communication design---one that broadens the scope of potential actors that affect user experiences, and that more strongly considers their effects on communicative activities. We posit three ways in which this perspective may be operationalized: (a) accounting for the missing masses, (b) designing for flat ontologies and radical symmetry, and (c) designing for interagentivity. Finally, we offer an initial heuristic for deploying such approaches and discuss scenarios in which they may prove fruitful.

Deep Ambivalence and Wild Objects: Toward a Strange Environmental Rhetoric

Carl Herndl and Stuart Brown argue that the complexity of environmental rhetoric is such that its concerns are embedded in both our lived experiences and across many intellectual endeavors. To think through environmentalism, they suggest, is to think through rhetoric, and both entail crossing boundaries. Environmentalism and its concomitant rhetorics, however, frequently draw a bold line between humans and nonhuman nature, and so long as rhetoric remains wedded to the human and the human alone, environmental rhetoric will continue to miss the mark. A strange environmental rhetoric, which blurs the line between humans and nonhumans, calls for more relations and not less—not a removal of humans from the environment, but another way of comporting ourselves with environments.

Future Convergences: Technical Communication Research as Cognitive Science

Cognitive scientist Andy Clark (2008) has argued, “the study of mind might … need to embrace a variety of different explanatory paradigms whose point of convergence lies in the production of intelligent behavior” (p. 95). This article offers technical communication research as such a paradigm and describes technical communication research past and present to argue that our disciplinary knowledge of tools, work environments, and performance assessment is a necessary complement to a more robust science of the mind.

A Version of Access

abstract This article explores accessibility ontologically, proposing nonequal design as a way to include and encourage difference. Part One situates the possibility for a multiple version approach to accessibility; Part Two finds affinities in science and technology studies where several figures have explored the politics of multiple versions of ontologies; Part Three introduces three design principles—syncopation, medium specificity, and versioning—for enacting how an nonequal approach opens up generative possibilities for accessibility.

Ecologies of Deception in Psychology and Rhetoric

This article explores deception through the lenses of rhetorical theory and experimental social psychology, thus performing an important interdisciplinary gesture. It argues that deception is emergent in experimental conditions as it likewise is in rhetorical encounters. In so doing, it builds toward an understanding of human agency outside the bounds of the subject/object split. Examining work on rhetorical ecologies and ambience on the one hand, and experimental social psychology on the other, the article argues that deception is not something that one person does to another, but rather is an emergent phenomenon within moments of encounter, whether they be rhetorical interactions or psychological experiments.

Forum: Bruno Latour on Rhetoric

It used to be that only rhetoricians of science and technology read Bruno Latour. However, Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers’s 2015 collection Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition demonstrates how widely the appeal of his work has spread in recent years. I read this influence not as a fad for one scholar’s work but rather as an indication that we have all sensed a change in the temperature of late-modern argumentation and persuasion. Arguing in the anthropocene is qualitatively and quantitatively different than arguing in the Classical agora. Now, no matter which direction we turn, we find the forum crowded not only with human speakers of all stripes but also with an awesome flotsam of nonhumans: computer models, polar bears, FitBits, genes, Tweets, YouTube videos, viruses, cookbooks, nebulae, and iPhones. Whatever our area of research, things whine, clamor, and jostle us. And weary of squinting around them to try to make out the dim, dotted outline of the public sphere, we have finally started to look right at them. There is no doubt that Latour constitutes a major pivot in the materialist, postcritical, and post-humanist turns—for reasons amply explained in the Lynch and Rivers volume. My purpose in this introduction is not to rehearse that genealogy but rather to explain to readers who do not consider themselves invested in the material turn why they, too, may wish to attend to Latour’s most recent work and his thoughts on rhetoric. My argument lies in a symmetry half-revealed by the influence of Latour on new rhetorics: because even as rhetoricians are coming around to post-critical theory, those theorists (Latour among them) are coming around toward rhetoric. This rapprochement presents rhetoricians with an unprecedented opportunity to enter and shape the intellectual conversation about how best to live together in the anthropocene. To best demonstrate this meeting of minds, we should begin at the end, with Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME; modesofexistence.org), in part because Latour himself presents AIME as the culmination of his scholarly endeavors. In AIME he subsumes anthropology, sociology, and even philosophy under a new, prospective discipline he calls “diplomacy.” He does so, he says, because of the exigence of facing Gaia—his name, borrowed from James Lovelock, for our threatening and threatened anthropocene. Gaia, our hybrid terrestrial cyborg, “the Möbius strip of which we form both the inside and the outside” (AIME 9), has both exceeded the paradigm of cause and effect—the founding myth of academic

Dappled Discipline at Thirty: An Interview with Janice M. Lauer

2014 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Janice M. Lauer’s “Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline,” in which Lauer looks back to the field’s “pioneering efforts” at cobbling together a disciplinary identity—as she articulated, the field of rhetoric and composition’s most important questions “would have remained isolated and unexplored as they had been for decades if it were not for … a shared trait of these early theorists—their willingness to take risks, to go beyond the boundaries of their traditional training into foreign domains in search of starting points, theoretical launching pads from which to begin investigating these questions” (21). This interview reengages Lauer’s suggestion that the field’s early boundary-crossing transformed rhetoric and composition into a multifaceted and dappled discipline composed of a manifold of theoretical and onto-epistemological perspectives.