Composition Forum 43, Spring 2020
http://compositionforum.com/issue/43/

Review of Marilyn M. Cooper’s The Animal Who WRites: A Posthumanist Composition

Jason Crider

Cooper, Marilyn M. The Animal Who Writes: A Posthumanist Composition. U of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. 296pp.

In the face of ever-mounting digital and environmental crises, and challenges brought about by globalization, technology, and late capitalism, the fields of rhetoric and composition are becoming increasingly concerned with the concepts of network, ecology, and the nonhuman Other (Brooke 2009, Davis 2010, Rickert 2013, Gries 2015, Lynch and Rivers 2015). Marilyn M. Cooper’s The Animal Who Writes: A Posthumanist Composition serves as a productive synthesis of emerging conversations in posthuman and new materialist thought that is equal parts measured and profound, offering rhetoric and composition scholars a theory of writing that not only accounts for our complex interconnectedness with the material and phenomenological world, but looks to these very complexities as its generative engine.

Cooper situates her project within the field’s increasing focus on the decentering of the human writer, and the humanities’ more general nonhuman turn from epistemology to ontology, where writing is distributed across a network of agents, or as Cooper puts it, “Writing and the agents of writing are intra-active phenomena” (13). More specifically, The Animal Who Writes develops a holistic theory of writing that draws from complexity theory, process theory, new materialism, and posthumanism, with specific focus on the work of Bruno Latour, Karen Barad, and Alfred North Whitehead. Cooper builds from these theorists’ culminating view of humans as “entangled participants in the becoming of an ever-changing world” (6), and sees writing therefore as fundamentally creative, a driving force within the entangled intra-action by which the universe constantly creates itself, and a call to develop more active dispositions towards our entanglements. Cooper concludes her introduction with a polite proposition: “what if all our intra-actions with other creatures served to invite them to adopt the ethical habits of writing well?” (18).

The “animal” of The Animal Who Writes, then, describes the human animal, agents “not so very different from other living beings in how we feel and think and act” (6). Cooper writes, “I call humans the animal who writes to emphasize that writing is a behavior very like other animal behaviors, not only simple behaviors like the tick’s but more recognizably in extended systems of cognitive ecologies, which involve tools and language” (11). Cooper’s “animal” is not the transcendental, autonomous subject of modernism, or the socially constructed subject of postmodernism (126), but something closer to an agent or Latourian actant, what Cooper defines as “intra-acting individualizing entities” (156). Herein lies one of the book’s most vital undertakings, a redefining of agents and agency. Chapter 5, “The Agency of Writing,” opens with an epigraph of Casey Boyle calling agency “the most boring concept in rhetorical theory” (127), signalling Cooper’s move away from agency attached to volition. Instead, agency arises out of entangled phenomena, and agents are “essential participants in the world’s becoming” (130). Agents are human and nonhuman animals, living and nonliving beings, objects and technologies; agency is not a characteristic or asset, but a kind of creative relationship of agents—a kind of concrescence, in Whitehead’s terms (139-140). For Cooper, such enmeshment entails an ethical imperative, an urgent invitation to respond in a way that acknowledges our becoming and entanglements.

Cooper’s core project in The Animal Who Writes, and the one with the most far-reaching implications for rhetoric and composition, is a forwarding of enchantment ontology. It is worth quoting at length:

Enchantment ontology inspires a focus on how all writing begins in intra-action and is realized through accountability for what comes to be in the process. It is an ontology that requires a major shift in how we understand reality and ourselves. Instead of a world made up of bounded individual entities, enchantment ontology envisions individuals as entangled in intra-active phenomena from which they co-emerge contingently in an ongoing process of becoming. Change is not the result of intentions and planning, but emerges continually as parts of the universe affect one another. Everything is made new in every moment (9).

Cooper outlines three clear assumptions made by enchantment ontology. First, reality is entangled. In Chapter 2, Writing as Entangled, Cooper establishes writing as a material and embodied practice through which we engage in reciprocal cycles of creation within the cognitive ecologies of the world. Second, reality is in a constant process of becoming. In Chapter 4, Dynamics of Becoming, Cooper delineates a kind of structural dynamics of flow for writing, one that considers the implications that dethroning static being in favor of fluid becoming has for how we consider agency and subjectivity. Much of this builds from a prolonged meditation on Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of concrescence, what he defines as “the production of novel togetherness” (22), a process of creation by which entities “infect” a system and are fundamentally altered by said system in the process. And third, creativity follows from these first two assumptions and is inherent to reality’s constant emergence, the “pulse of the cosmos” (158). In Chapter 6, The Creativity of Writing, Cooper defines creativity as “the pulse of the cosmos that beats in every moment of life as entangled beings intra-act” (157), “the process of reciprocal self and world creation” (159). Writing is an essentially creative process by which writers create meaning out of entanglement.

In Chapter 1, Enchanted Writing, Cooper offers enchantment ontology’s implications for rhetoric and composition, creating a powerful synthesis of complexity and process theory that is especially useful for the large subset of the field aligned with Barad and Latour’s readings of quantum physics. In this networked, fluid paradigm, writing matters more than ever, as it is a fundamental process of creation, of making material, phenomenological entities amidst the constantly emerging world. In terms of writing and rhetoric, enchantment ontology connects in many ways to Thomas Rickert’s notion of ambient rhetoric, but Cooper makes a clear distinction that while ambient rhetoric’s key operant is attunement, enchanted writing instead functions via asking others to participate in creating new entities and potentials. And when we focus on invitation and creation in these ways, there is a clear imperative to develop and maintain ethical habits of writing, to which she again turns to Whitehead, as well as Casey Boyle’s work in Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice. Cooper returns to, and compounds, the importance of ethical habits throughout the book, particularly Chapter 3, Writing as Making, and Chapter 7, Ethical Persuasion. Chapter 3 revisits traditional rhetorical concepts in terms of a kind of enchanted notion of embodiment, particularly hexis, techne, and metis, and demonstrates how these reconfigured concepts coproduce a correspondence with the becomings of the universe. Chapter 7 centers on the “ethics of persuasive intra-actions among creaturely interlocutors of all kinds” (189), and features a series of encounters, ranging from human to animal to thing, that demonstrate a key outcome of enchantment ontology for Cooper. Put simply: “ethical persuasion invents new possibilities that lead to change” (192).

The Animal Who Writes has profound implications for new materialist philosophies of writing while also providing a thoughtful, adaptable theory of writing with potential for all subdisciplines of rhetoric and composition. Cooper demonstrates how enchantment ontology operates at various levels of complexity, a theory that is equally suited to understanding writing in terms of quantum entanglement, or in terms of an experience she details of a brief moment with a dragonfly. And while Cooper saves her brief words on writing instruction for a short section tucked in the conclusion, they nonetheless provide the blueprints for a profound enchanted writing pedagogy. Cooper’s overall project is not offered up as a posthuman corrective, but rather an ethical call, an invitation to cultivate more active dispositions to the world that not only account for our enmeshment, but dynamically embody such enmeshment as our source of invention. Ultimately, if we take Cooper’s proposition seriously—and I believe that we should—writing creates an opportunity to approach our intra-connected becoming with a new compassionate intensity, a way to be better accountable to the world with which we participate in becoming.

Works Cited

Boyle, Casey. Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice. Ohio State UP, 2018.

Brooke, Collin Gifford. Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media. Hampton Press, 2009.

Davis, D.Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations. U of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.

Gries, Laurie E. Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics. Utah State UP, 2015.

Lynch, Paul, and Nathaniel Rivers, editors. Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition. Southern Illinois UP, 2015.

Rickert, Thomas J. Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. U of Pittsburgh Press, 2013.