A key alteration in Bitzer’s theory of rhetorical situation presaged by Yancey’s CCC’s poster page concerns the emphasis on and re-identification of Bitzer’s “presumed” rhetor. As Bitzer explains, the rhetor, excluded from the three properties comprising rhetorical situation (exigence, audience, constraints), is less important than the situation itself. Rather, the rhetor’s primary responsibility consists of discovering and effectively employing situational constraints to move an audience to the necessary action (“Functional” 24).

The poster page makes the rhetor explicit, spotlighting it as one of the anchoring powers in the rhetorical situation.

Even more innovative the poster page expands the scope of “rhetor,” re-casting it as “composer,” thereby bringing into the rhetorical situation associations absent from a traditional concept of rhetoric as alphabetic discourse (oral and written).

But Yancey’s collaborative work reveals an even more transformative shift—a sympoietic shift—in rhetor/composer identities, reconfiguring them as mutualistic and multiple, thereby authorizing alternative subject positions occluded by Bitzer’s theory.

Oddkin Yancey effects that transformation through the embrace of agentive co-constitution, a sympoietic shift in logic that reshapes the infrastructure of rhetorical situation and opens space for alternative subjectivities.

Although Bitzer himself may have subordinated the power of the rhetor to the power of situational exigence (2), he consistently depicted the rhetor as what Trinh T. Minh-ha calls the “originary I” (22): the singular, self-contained agent responsible for managing the constraints of the rhetorical situation in ways that fruitfully (fittingly) align exigence and audience (another isolate entity) (“Rhetorical” 11).

Similarly, even as Richard J. Vatz dethrones the exigence/situation to enthrone the rhetor as the creative force in rhetorical situations, the subjectivity of that rhetor—the dominant individual actor—remains foundational: he is the one who chooses, interprets, and translates (“Myth” 158).

Scott Consigny, too, regardless of his effort to ameliorate the “antimony” posed by Bitzer’s and Vatz’s contrasting functions for the rhetor, still maintains the same nature construction of the rhetorical agent: a self-contained, self-created subjectivity unchanged by his rhetorical efforts, like Lincoln, Churchill, and Kennedy (Bitzer, “Rhetorical” 2).

Thus, while the function of the rhetor—what the rhetor does and does not do—remains a contentious subject in the scholarship on Bitzer’s rhetorical situation, the nature of the rhetor, with few exceptions, remains surprisingly constant: it is a discrete individual, typically a euro-centric white heteronormative male (Edbauer; Ervin; Garret and Xiao).

Writing as one facet of Myka Vielstimmig, Yancey insightfully notes this sustained dominance of the singular rhetor, ascribing it to “our cultural reverence . . . for the individual” (“Petals” 95). Such reverence yields what Haraway refers to as “prick tales”: culturally ascendent euro-centric narratives emphasizing “only one real actor, one real world-maker, the hero,” where “all others in the prick tale are props, ground, plot, space, or prey” (39; 118).

Yancey’s collaborative scholarship across numerous articles and books chapters enacts and celebrates a different rhetor and a different dynamic. It embodies a spectrum of “compos(t)ing” identities formed in conjunction with “others” various defined and ensuing from the making-with—the mutualism—of sympoiesis through its formative logic: agentive co-constitution.

A game-changer for rhetorical situation, sympoiesis invites a radical reconceptualization of the logic by which relationships forming Bitzer’s rhetorical situation are forged. Sympoiesis transforms the Bitzerian construct from one predicated on an interactive logic to one cohering through a co-constitutive logic, a shift that implicates the range of rhetorical subjectivities available for a “fitting” rhetoric.

A consistent feature of Bitzer’s model across its scholarly conversation has been its interactive orientation.

Reflecting a mechanical—even deterministic—relationship between the self-contained elements of exigence, audience, constraints (Miller; Patton), the rhetorical situation in Bitzer hands resonates with a Newtonian logic that Louise Rosenblatt^[1] refers to as interaction.

By her account, while a semi-participatory process, interaction resembles a cause-effective dynamic, one in which objects-entities affect each other like “billiard balls colliding” (16). In response to this mechanistic logic, billiard balls alter in their velocity—direction and speed—but without any impact on their identities as phenolic resin or acrylic spheres (16-17).

Although Bitzer does not use the term interaction in his 1968 publication, he implicitly insists on an interactional logic for his theory. The three properties of exigence, audience, and constraints exist in a separate and fixed dynamic. As Bitzer describes, the “situation which calls discourse into existence” (2) generates the exigence, the “imperative stimulus” that collides with an audience (4).

Furthermore, in his 1981 return to rhetorical situation, Bitzer explicitly features both interactive as a term and a process, doubling down on an linear causal logic governing human contact with physical and mental environments (“Functional” 22, 23).

Barbara Biesecker protests the damage done to rhetorical situation by an interactionalist logic. As she argues, if a rhetorical situation is conceived interactively—as occurring only via an exchange between “distinct and already constituted subjects [speaker and audience]”—then how can these “fixed” identities be “affected by discourse?” (111).

According to Biesecker’s interpretation of Bitzer’s model, rhetoric can “realign their [subjects’] allegiances” but it cannot “form new identities” (111), and thus it cannot effect any meaningful change in attitudes or behavior. In essence, interactionism constrains available rhetorical identities, limits invention, and threatens the nature of rhetoric itself.

Sympoiesis and its co-constitutive logic redresses this deficit. Rosenblatt, again, helps clarify the co-constitutive logic by which sympoiesis co-relates.

In juxtaposition to interaction—wherein the movement of self-contained components superficially affect one another in opposite but equal ways—Rosenblatt offers transaction, her term for co-constitutive logic.

As she explains, a transactional logic is at play in literacy where entities—such as text and readers (her primary focus)—mutually make each other through reciprocal actions. Each only exists as potentialities until they jointly “evoke” each other, such as when (or if) scribbles on a surface (a page, a screen, the night sky) become words/images/constellations and thus transform perceiver into reader and scribbles into text. That moment of mutual co-evocation—of co-evolution—serves as a necessary prelude to response, or the process by which some words (versus others) command meaningful attention of some readers (but not others).

Like the M. paradoxa and the giant northern termite, reader and text, compos(t)er and audience, become together by making-with together, even as they, like protozoan and termite, remain distinct agents. The pairs—microbe/insect scribbles/perception, compos(t)er/audience, and response/meaning—entangle and thereby shape each other via that entanglement.

As Haraway characterizes it, the process is a “non-arrogant collaboration with all those in the muddle” (Staying 56).

A significant contribution to rhetorical situation scholarship, Yancey’s collaborative work resists Bitzer’s interactive logic and embodies an agentive co-constitutive logic.

Marked by communal vocality and the generativity of “the intuitive leap?/The juxtaposition./ The unarticulated predication,” Yancey as compos(t)er in the muddle reconfigures the infrastructure of the Bitzerian rhetorical situation, transforming it into a co-constitutive flow that authorizes alternative subjectivities and agentive multiples (“Petals” 90; “Not” one).

“Vignette: Honor and Ichabod” begins with the term paper. Or, rather, it begins with the end of a term paper . . . pending completion of a final requirement: signing an honor statement attesting that Kathleen A. Blake, undergraduate at Viriginia Tech University, has “neither given nor received help on this paper” (Yancey and Spooner, “A Single Good Mind” 45).

As described by the literature professor, “help” included, among the conventional prohibitions, talking even in a casual way about the subject (David Copperfield) to or with other students, friends, acquaintances. The 1998 Kathi Yancey reminisces: the fear that Professor Johnson would “think I cheated” had her hands sweating, and, of course, such a physiological reaction would “announce” her “criminal intent” even in the absence of such an intent.

With the deadline looming, she signs (46).

The pressure to write without “help,” without “talk,” without oddkin reflects the cultural and theoretical dominance of the solitary, discrete writer-rhetor in and out of the classroom. An identity tied to Bitzer’s rhetorical situation, the writer-alone, as enshrined in Kathi Blake’s honor statement, undermines the salience and value of alternative rhetorical subjectivities and impoverishes rhetoric as a result.

Trinh T. Minh-Ha illuminates both the value of such alternatives and the damage resulting from their marginalization.

In “The Story Began Long Ago. . . .,” a parable-like tale, members of a remote village decide to gather in the marketplace for a discussion of “matters of capital importance to the community” (Trinh 1).

However, that discussion “does not break in on daily village life but slips into it” as a mother bathes a child, two men play a game, a woman braid’s another’s hair, a man sings softly while playing a lute, everyone “listening or intervening when necessary” (Trinh 1). Nor do the issues ever emerge directly; instead, they seep into the conversation-activities elliptically and only when ready (1).

No one has the “floor” (Trinh 2), no one directs, “no need for a linear progression” (1). Instead, answers and subjectivities arise and change organically, a story of a rhetoric—and rhetor—that “appears headless and bottomless because it is built on differences” (2).^[1]

In contrast to an interactive infrastructure shaping the quasi-cause-effect coherence of Bitzer’s rhetorical situation, Trinh’s story of “headless and bottomless” rhetoric-rhetor embraces the agentive co-constitutive logic of sympoiesis. It embraces participants, who “Neither One nor Other,” live as “who we all are” (Haraway, Staying 98, emphasis added).

But “who we all are” operates outside the parameters of conventional interpretations of rhetorical situation as describe by Bitzer, which assumes and presumes a single rhetorical figure, a Lincoln, a Kennedy, a Churchill.

It is this limited vision of rhetorical subjectivity and rhetoric that Yancey critiques and transforms almost 30 years after signing Professor Johnson’s honor pledge. She both argues for and performs alternative rhetorical subjectivities arising from the co-constitutive logic of sympoiesis.

Perhaps the most explicit critique Yancey offers of the discrete rhetor arises in “A Single Good Mind” co-authored with Michael Spooner, especially in the duo’s differentiation between cooperation (making-by) and collaboration (making-with).

As they detail, when cooperating, co-authors unknowingly enact hero-rhetor status by maintaining clear demarcations of responsibility and identity: “You write that section; I’ll write this one. Stay on your own side of the page, and don’t forget the dean is watching” (Yancey and Spooner, “Single” 50). Cooperation, then, co-relates only tangentially.

Such an approach reflects “a refusal to let the needs of the text and the audience shape what we do, a refusal to let the ‘we’ become a collective singular” (Yancey and Spooner, “Single” 51). It reflects the actions of two discrete hero-rhetors who liaise to work toward a joint end but where each individual voice—and credit for each individual contribution—is clearly recognized and assigned.

Whereas cooperation manifests “clear structure, division of roles, division of knowledge, efficiency” (52), collaboration, in contrast, “heightens the sense of connection among collaborators,” emphasizing the relationality, the “teamwork” the kookaburra cheers in an Aboriginal Dreamtime^[2] story.

In the narrative, animals join a conclave organized by humans to discuss the state of the land. The animals “each come from their difference areas of the country and with their different knowledge” and initially only cooperate in Yancey and Spooner’s term. They focus solely on their special interests: the frog on declining river levels, the kangaroo on rising scarcity of grasses, the emu on soil erosion, and so forth (8370).

Cocooned in their individual bubbles, like the ones Professor Johnson imagines for young Kathi and her classmates, they cling to and know only a sliver of the land and its problems.

But a tipping point occurs when they “sat down” together to share perspectives and to listen deeply to each other. As they discuss their land’s decline, they simultaneously draw in the sand, integrating individual pictures into one large sand painting. They collaborate.

In the process, they discover water—its mismanagement—constituted the collective heart of each individual problem. So the kookaburra proposes that everyone perform their unique part of the rain story together.

When they danced as one, the rain started to fall gently, succoring the dry land as individuals become collective (8371), achieving “a critical level of congruence in understanding, in purpose, and in other intellectual dimensions of a project” (Yancey and Spooner, “Single” 52).

Yancey in her collaborative guise as Myka Vielstimmig observes a similar dynamic of symbiosis in writing: “the individual disintegrates as the writing group integrates, and you begin to see, in small, the large constructivist vision of interconnection” (“Petals” 95).

“You begin to see,” as well, the large constructivist vision of alternative rhetorical subjectivities.

Donna J. Haraway, writing with long-time friend Michael Hadfield, describes a similar phenomenon of communal subjectivity. “[S]ending probes into his text” provides “nourishment for mine” by “giving back some trace nutrients.” As a result “our manifesto becomes something that neither of us could do alone” (S228).

Rather than a solitary hero-rhetor, oddkin Yancey enacts and celebrates, as does Haraway, the possibilities of alternative subjectivities, especially across various collaboratively authored articles embodying the “new essay genre.”

In so doing, she fulfills the longing of her 1969 self to make kin with her peers and David Copperfield.

Circulating throughout enfolding layers, alternative rhetorical subjectivities and the new essay make kin in Yancey’s collaborative hands. Co-shaped by the rising dominance of digital technologies and a digital zeitgeist, the new essay comprises “a place where multiple ways of knowing are combined, collage-like,” Vielstimmig explains (“Petals” 90).

It is also the place where multiple subjectivities are combined, collage-like. The innovative genre features the intricate, chaotic, and confusing process of co-constitute oddkin rhetors in myriad combinations.

That dance of alternative subjectivities, a dance with no empirical beginning or end, becomes apparent when the kin-making merges two or more identifiable voices. A third voice materializes, obligated to its sources but more than the sum of all the voices involved.

Like the rain dance of the Dreamtime animals, alternative subjectivities require individuation—the emu, the frog, the kangaroo—for kin-making, like securing beneficial rain, depends not on individuals but on the combined actions of individuals acting, in this instance, together as one, as part of and apart from. It is the “more” that woos the rain for the dry land.

That dynamic plays out in Yancey’s sympoiesis with the new essay genre.

With the debut of “Posting on a Genre of Email” in 1996 and the final act in “The Play on Texts” in 2001, the compos(t)ing collaboration of Yancey and Michael Spooner, as well as their gestalt Myka Vielstimmig co-constituted texts that “embodied collective intelligence,” illuminated “some of the ways, at least that such intelligence is created” (“Petals” 99), and reflected on the risks of each.

Perhaps the most innovative move—as wells as the most transgressive—consists of deliberately merging of voices and obfuscating of the “person” who “owns” the voice. The co-authorial configuration—the alternative rhetorical subjectivities—permeates the texts.

For example, Vielstimmig in “Petals on a Wet, Dark Bough” reflects on the creation of the 1996 “Posting.” They recount their early refusal to use typographical strategies to identify which portions of the text stem from which author.

That refusal stemmed from an epiphany: the realization that “the piece isn’t written by two individuals, but by this third persona—this author—created by the process of collaboration” (Vielstimmig, “Petals” 97). a “collaborated Author, an our/self, who projected from itself two characters in a manner not unlike the projection of characters in a fiction” (99).

Synergy becomes the key dynamic as the collaborated Author notes: “Some of the text we would have assigned to one of us was written by the other, and vice versa,” underscoring for oddkin there is neither one nor other (Vielstimmig, “Petals” 96).

Equally telling, the sense of individual ownership of the text erodes: “Actually, I thought you suggested this [collaborative writing “brings with it a unique aesthetic”]. Do you suppose there is any way to trace this back to the singular, definitive source?” (Yancey and Spooner, “Single” 47). The answer is no because a single, definitive source ceases to exist at that moment.

In the collaborated Author’s deft hands, co-constitutive making-with decenters and destabilizes the discrete I/ego pre-formed prior to the rhetorical act and unchanged—or only superficially changed—by the act.

By so doing, Yancey, as integral to and distinct from that collaborated Author, validates Trinh’s “headless and bottomless” rhetor and rhetoric, expanding the boundaries of the rhetorical situation by expanding the boundaries of rhetorical subjectivities.

However, oddkin Yancey does not stop with compos(t)ing the collaborated Author. Her making kin with Spooner extends to compos(t)ing readers (listeners, viewers, immersives), a move that might be traced back three decades to a teen-aged Kathi Blake sweating over an honor statement.

While young Kathi’s resistance to signing the college-mandated form centered on the impossibility of a solitary writer-rhetor, another implied conflict lurked within the vignette: the configuration of Professor Johnson as the solitary reader—the teacher-reader/teacher-assessor—of Kathi’s essay on Dickens’s David Copperfield.

Years later, Yancey mourns the iron grip of the solitary reader-professor: “Our model of teaching composition. . . (still) embodies the narrow and the singular in its emphasis on a primary and single human relationship: the writing in relation to the teacher” (“Made Not Only in Words” 309).

Kathi then and Yancey now both reject the dominance of the reader-hero, expanding the boundaries circumscribing audience and bridging the chasm between rhetor and audience characteristic of a Bitzerian dynamic.

More specifically, she, as one-half of Myka Vielstimmig-gestalt, underscores the co-constitutive logic of rhetor-text-audience shaping identities together through the hot process of making “kin in lines of inventive connection” (Haraway, Staying 1).

Vielstimmig theoretically signals that entanglement with the recognition of a “different notion of reading, one that is multiple processes at once,” rather than the mechanistic stimulus-response model of billiard ball interacting (“Not” two). These multiple processes revolve around a “reader [who] understands him or herself as participating with authors/writers, and watching them too” (two).

Audience, like rhetors, then, are always collectivities, always oddkin. Even as “[a]ll writers hear voices . . . that inform us (or contradict us),” so, too, do all readers hear voices that inform, contradict, and shape them (Spooner and Yancey 253). Reader, text, collaborated Rhetor inextricably intertwine, shaping and shaped together.

Young Kathi’s vignette, Trinh’s parable, and the Elder’s Dreamtime tale, each honors a commitment to co-relating, to co-constituting rhetorical subjectivities that are alternative to the rhetor-hero.

But, even as the boundaries circumscribing rhetorical subjectivities in Bitzer’s theory are redrawn, those boundaries retain room for a range of an array of subjectivities. “Agentive Multiples” explores that paradoxical aspect of a sympoietic rhetorical situation.

As the organizational logic animating sympoiesis, co-constitution secures alternative rhetorical subjectivities, including rather than excluding collaboratively-compos(t)ed rhetorical identities.

Providing the guiding force by which cross-species, cross-cohort stakeholders—biological and nonbiological—can make common cause without erasing or appropriating differences, co-constitution involves the complex choreography of agentive multiples.

Those multiples include young Kathi Blake, who was “dutifully silent” except for securing two Dickens’s factoids from Jeanne (Yancey and Spooner, “Single” 45); the kookaburra’s delight in teamwork (Kutay and Walsh); Trinh’s emergent communal subjectivities; Yancey and Spooner’s commitment to the “collaborated Author”; and Haraway’s acknowledgment of a rhetor-hero’s “prick” tales.

In each case, agency/ies—the ability to choose, to act on that choice, and to be counted for both choosing and choices—were integral to co-constituting multiples, underscoring the necessity and the paradox of agencies in alternative rhetorical subjectivities.

Agency/ies within multiples also underscore the need for constant negotiations to ensure equitable flow of this diversity, without which synergy dissolves and a union of multiples collapses.

Finally, agency/ies underscores a sympoietic continuum of co-constituted alternative rhetorical subjectivities, from the tight weave of obligate symbiosis——intrinsic to the giant northern termite and M. paradoxa to the fleeting elective connection between young Kathi and Jeanne over Dickens. That continuum of alternative subjectivities includes the living web of reciprocal agencies in Trinh’s communal rhetors to the unacknowledged but no less important play of intricate agency/ies possible in a sympoietic rhetor-hero.

Each configuration of oddkins and their ageny/cies finds space and opportunity within a capacious sympoietic rhetorical situation. Oddkins also find an array of risks that accompany creating and maintaining agentive multiples.

The making-with of N. walkeri, or the tree termite, and the kookaburra, a member of the kingfisher family, provides an apt guide for benefits and hazards of agentive multiples, all of which ensue from the one odd couple sharing the same abode.

Unique to the tree termite is its creation of arboreal nests. Constructed of carton—a combination of feces and wood fragments (Hindwood 1)—the fragile termite architecture attracts kookaburras, who chip an opening in the termitarium to make their own nest and hatch their eggs, frequently revisiting the same termitarium year after year.

Each benefits from the co-habitation in a “remarkable parasite-host relationship” (Moreau qtd. in Hindwood 2). The kookaburra feasts on ants, the tree termites’ key predator, and the tree termites protect the shared home, continuously repairing the termitarium’s carton, without which the entire structure would disintegrate (1).

Both support the other’s wellbeing, adjusting to, without infringing on, each other’s agencies. They craft a mutualistic, but not an obligate, symbiosis, an agentive multiple that sometimes extends for years.

But their oddkin co-relating also carries dangers. On occasion, kookaburras, one of the larger members of the kingfisher family, stumble inadvertently into the termite queen’s chamber, resulting in her death and, consequently, the death of the entire nest. Similarly, tree termites have walled off kookaburras from their own eggs in an excess spirit of home repair.

If there are any truths to take away from this oddkin dynamic, it is that co-constituting agentive multiples with their complicated flow of agency/ies requires work on the part of all participants and that it comes with risk, two truths central to alternative rhetorical subjectivities.

However, these are truths that Yancey honors repeatedly, both with her insistence on agency and her commitment to protecting agency/ies in any form of collaboration. Her attention to two especially fraught sites—multi-vocality and multi-authorial combinations—highlights agency/ies in action and offers strategies for reducing risk without jeopardizing the dynamic by which agentive multiples mutually cohere, evolve, and sustain themselves as alternative rhetorical subjectivities.

For Yancey, agency is “at the heart of rhetoric and likewise at the heart of the teaching enterprise,” stretching its salience across pedagogical and public spheres (“From the Editor: Writing” 416). Thus, for Yancey, teachers are agents of change especially through their connecting inside and outside the classroom (“Still Hopeful” 84). Students are also agents, especially of their own learning, as evident in their work with portfolios (“Portfolios” 726; “Trust the Process” 99). Finally, rhetor-activists, such as the Parkland survivors, are co-agents of and within the collective public movements they generate and nurture (“‘Seizing’”).

Within pedagogical and public spaces, Yancey embraces agentive multiples—both in terms of agency/ies and multiples and in terms of variations in a collective’s size, organization, and density. She also recognizes that each agentive multiple comes with its own array of pressures that endanger agency/ies and truncate making-with. Her scholarly performances offer nuanced insights into benefits of and risks to the co-constitution of agentive multiples in alternative rhetorical subjectivities.

One space particularly vital for academics and the students they teach is multi-vocality.

Multi-vocality, for oddkin Yancey, is a capacious term, one with room for the multiple voices chattering in a “dynamic exchange between individual knowledge and shared knowledge” and for the multiple voices whispering in the back brain of a rhetor-hero. It includes as well the multi-vocal flow that yields a particular instantiation of the collaborated Author (Vielstimmig 99). Those multi-vocal configurations both benefit and threaten agentive multiples, a key issue for forming and sustaining alternative rhetorical subjectivities.

Spooner and Yancey acknowledge the dependence on multi-vocality in a field long committed to the idea that all writing, all rhetoric, is social: “Voices always populate,” the collaborated Author rightly claims (“Postings” 253). “Not just our own two voices here, either. Others interrupt us with commentary, obiter dicta, humor. All writers hear voices” (253).

Echoing through, around, and between the words of any compos(t)er, these voices comprise agentive multiplicity in obligate symbiosis with the academic enterprise. That is, academic work—writing itself—cannot take shape without these voices because these voices are the work.

But what happens to agency/ies when a portion of these populating voices are not formally cited? What happens to agentive multiples when multi-vocality finds itself unseen and unheard, a voice without an ear?

Yancey explores this question.

For instance, in guise of the collaborated Author, she and Spooner muse on the ease of creating a “blender-voice” for co-authored pieces, to create an authorial ethos that reduces difference and agency/ies to a singularity (Spooner and Yancey 253). It would be equally easy, if not more so, to blender-voice the multi-voices sharing knowledge, commentary, and quips, multi-voices echoing in the spaces between the words. Such voices act as oddkin in the text’s compos(t)ing but may never receive any formal—or informal—acknowledgment.

Herein lies the threat of multi-vocality: its invisibility. Again, the collaborated Author points to the pervasiveness of such erasure.

“We could have written a seamless monologue honoring the role of discontinuities in collaborative work,” Yancey and Spooner share. “We could have delivered a respectable monologic essay celebrating the virtues of multiplicity. It’s done all the time, right?” (Yancey and Spooner, “Single” 61).

But they didn’t, and here lies strategies to honor agency/ies, to honor differences, in alternative rhetorical subjectivities. The collaborated Author identified and resisted multi-vocal silencing, enriching their symbiosis accordingly.

First, Spooner and Yancey do so (in)formally. In their acknowledgments for “Posting on a Genre of Email,” the compos(t)ers point to “several people,” who, while “not explicitly noted in this conversation,” were “crucial to its development,” calling by name those “without whom nothing” (275). Then they continue making-with the voices that populate, thanking the reviewers, again, by name for their valuable input.

Next, the collaborated Author further dispels the invisibility of agentive multiples by bringing into view “several hundred writers who contribute to genres of chaos,” specifying particular listservs where these multi-vocals create oddkin. Spooner and Yancey promise in their final comments—“Interface wit’ ya later”—to rejoin these multi-vocal matrices that serve as proto-alternative rhetorical subjectivities (275).

In these instances, multi-vocality was documented as an integral and required agent in compos(t)ing. A second strategy reinforces the first.

Spooner and Yancey also balance agency/ies among multiples by calling visual attention to multi-vocality. They do this by disrupting the traditional visual page design of the print academic journal. Via integrating frequent textboxes and unconventional font changes for a chorus of voices, the collaborated Author highlighted the agency and value of multi-vocality within the visual content of their article. They “amplify those voices that inform us (or contradict us)” in word and image (253).

There is no “transcending, integrated consciousness” in agentive multiples to ease the compos(t)ers way by monologizing agency/ies and differences. Instead, “there’s a working shared knowledge” and “a dynamic process of contribution, adjustment and synthesis among members—and between members and the group,” a dynamic process essential for the emergence and survival of alternative rhetorical subjectivities (Yancey and Spooner, “Single” 52).

Such strategies benefit all collaborators, for “the more opportunity for agency, the more opportunity for learning to be social and for all of us to see anew” (Yancey, “Portfolio” 724).

A second array of agentive multiples is equally important to Yancey’s advocacy of agency: the configuration of the collaborated Author, multiple in both its combination of voices and multiple in its various forms. Each multiplicity requires attention to balance agency/ies and to sustain the agentive multiples integral for a viable alternative rhetorical subjectivity.

Like multi-vocality, a problem posed by collaboration concerns dissensus and disagreement among the participants as they exercise their agency/ies. How does collaboration form a collaborated Author—a third voice—without eliding those differences in perspectives, life experiences, cultures, and opinions?

Yancey responds to these very real concerns by spotlighting the differences—the seams—in the collaborated Author as a means to keep the differences alive. Spooner and Yancey advocate this explicitly.

To illustrate, the two compos(t)ers consistently assert the impossibility of separating who said what because—ostensibly—they are in harmonious agreement. At the same time, however, they also consistently assert that they disagree, claiming that “disagreement is part of the content. It’s important to show that, while we do work toward each other, we finish feeling that there is still room for two separate soapboxes at the end. At least two” (Spooner and Yancey 253).

Scripting as Myka Vielstimmig, the two (or six) go even further in the hypertext “Not a Cosmic Convergence.” The Myka Players include two characters who keep differences alive and two who keep digressions alive.

As Vielstimmig warns in the “Intro,” while the Players (designated by the colors teal and purple) “carry what we might be tempted to call the primary dialogue,” their positions cannot be trusted because sometimes they “agree with each other; as often, not.” Such a performance emphasizes the differences inevitable in any agentive multiple. In addition, the hypertextual performance includes two additional characters who conduct between them a conversation seemingly tangential to that of the other Players, a reminder that collaboration always destabilizes even as it stabilizes.

For oddkin Yancey, the transaction of sympoietic making-with does not—cannot and should not—yield a mystical merging of subjectivities—with all their hiccups, contradictions, tangents, and experiences—into an undifferentiated whole, for such undifferentiation destroys rather than enriches.

Without differences, disagreements, and disjuncture—without the capacity to disagree and choose among those mismatches—no kind of collaboration can exist for either writer or reader: “[W]hat is written,” Vielstimmig shares, “grows out of the collective intelligence [of co-relaters],” including differences (“Petals” 99).

Instead, Yancey as collaborated Author implicitly advocates “prickly” collaboration where kin-making unfolds as a continuous wooing of partial connections, a courtship that delays completion by “expos[ing] and explor[ing] the disconnects as they develop,” by tracing and exposing the seams—the evidence—of agency/ies in co-constitution (“Petals” 90).

Beyond urging continual exposure of the seam-fullness characterizing any agentive multiple, Yancey also addresses the differing configurations of the collaborated Author because not all collaborated Authors are alike.

Vielstimmig states this explicitly. “All authorship isn’t alike,” the collaborated Author points out: “If we thought it were, we wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of theorizing kinds of authorship” (“Petals” 94). In fact, they continue, “the collaborated author is artifice, but in the same way—within the same parameters—as the single Author is artifice. . .. There must be a spectrum” (“Petals” 98).

Just as sympoiesis and its co-constitutive logic exist on a spectrum—from obligatory mutualism to by-product mutualism—so, too, does the collaborated Author. Thus, keeping agentive multiples healthy requires welcoming diverse versions of collaboration. . . including the rhetor-hero and the prick tale.

Despite the crucial importance of stories “of becoming with, of reciprocal induction, of companion species,” Haraway argues, equally salient are prick stories “with room for the hunter but which weren’t and aren’t about him, the self-making human, the human-making machine of history” (Staying 39, 40).

Yancey and Spooner agree: “Writers want collaboration and want separate identities, too” (“Single” 51, emphasis added). They want the space to act with, beside, and apart from oddkin, not instead of but in addition to.

Agentive multiples leave room for the rhetor-heroes but only when and if they participate in and as agentive multiples. Rhetor-heroes must be in “generative friction, or generative unfolding” with rather than in opposition to “different aspects of systemic complexity” (Haraway, Staying 61). They must be sympoietic.

Caught within flows of agency/ies and between exercising and ceding control, the rhetor-hero inhabits an uncomfortable position. It is a transgressive and occasionally frightening balancing act, as Yancey recounts.

In “A Study of Making-ness,” Yancey focuses on the creation of an artist’s book as a kind of eulogy for a traumatic personal experience. She resolves to finally craft the book for 2015 Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference with its theme of “Women’s Ways of Making,” taking comfort in and making knowledge from a home invasion with its resultant loss of personally precious items and the theft of the family’s security.

The chapter’s narrative moves between Yancey’s memoir-like snippets of the event, weaving together the voices of son, husband, handyman, neighbor along with an array of scholars and artists murmuring comfort even as they illuminate her overt goal: “collaps[ing] the boundary between scholarship as the preeminent way of making knowledge and artful craft as its poor cousin” (167). By “working together,” she continues, “they might, I thought, be an especially powerful way of making knowledge” (167).

Oddkin in intent, content, and form, the chapter as a whole manifests the sympoietic rhetor-hero in action as Yancey shapes a complex and emotionally evocative tale of loss, grief, and reconciliation that privileges the co-relating of agentive multiples: the reciprocity between arrangement and invention where arrangement invents (171) along with the inextricability of form and content, of (scholarly) knowledge and life where “the material of everyday” exists as a “prime source of knowledge” (175). The very process of compos(t)ing the artist’s book in waves of “making and remaking” highlights a truth of agentive multiples: that meaning “is always contingent, always of a process of coming to terms” (175).

One especially telling moment of the emotional cost required of the sympoietic rhetor-hero occurs when Yancey confronts the reality of sharing her artist’s book in the conference’s exhibit hall. It was, as she describes, an unexpectedly terrifying moment, requiring her to share with “one person at a time” a difficult personal moment (167). The sharing necessitated that she cede control in a way that presenting a paper—where she enacted the traditional concept of the rhetor-hero—did not require. The control she exercised in a presentation would disappear in the one-on-one experience in an exhibition hall (167). This moment, or concatenation of similar moments, would be an instance of kin-making: “My audience, face to face with me, would make of my book, and my experiences, what they would. And more: I would see that making they made,” resulting in a sense of intense vulnerability (167-68).

Haraway warns that “bounded individualism in its many flavors. . . has finally become unavailable to think with, truly no longer thinkable” (Staying 5). But what Yancey offers in artist’s book—and in her chapter—is a sympoietic rhetor-hero dissolving boundaries in a commitment to, intimidating though it might be, to agentive multiples.

Like the kookaburra and tree termite, agentive multiples foster compos(t)ing not with a single voice or a single blend of voices in a single range or site. Rather, agentive multiples entertain varied voices adjusting, changing where, who, what, and how they compos(t)e from moment to moment in a frequently discordant chorus of prickly collaborations, agency/ies, and emotions. It encompasses both the collaborated Author and the unbound rhetor-hero.

Ultimate, agentive multiples yield “a different aesthetic, a different rhetoric, methinks” (Vielstimmig, “Petals” 99), to which can be added a different rhetorical situation, one that provides space for fluid—and (in)harmonious—voices, subjectivities, and differences, all engaged in frequently uncomfortable if not frightening experience of sympoietic becoming.

However, to keep alternative rhetorical subjectivities and agency/ies flourishing, agentive co-constitution makes kin with the second property of a Yanceyan sympoietic rhetorical situation: porous materiality.