A giant northern termite sits at the intersection of its own bodily fluids (saliva and dung) and environmental resources (soil particles and rotting vegetation), bringing both together to shape a subterranean home space and protected mud tunnels to food sources. In the process, M. darwiniensis serves as a visual trope for porous materiality where the affordances of its body and the resources of its environment yield textur-alities, forms of rhetorical expression that embrace traditional and nontraditional texts, genres, media. Oddkin Yancey performs those alternative textur-alities, dancing on the edges of spaces, bodies, and technologies of production. In so doing, she expands what constitutes "fitting rhetoric."
Mud Tube
“Termites are intriguing social insects with multiple uses in the physical and spiritual world.”
--Arnold van Huis (10/12)
Bitzer and Bound Materialities
Nested within the triangle of composer-subject-audience, an oddkin of “text, genre, media” situates itself at the center of the dynamic constituting rhetorical situation. That heart of the CCC poster page mediates the (composite) creation of composer, subject, and audience, underscoring the crucial property of a Yancey inspired sympoietic rhetorical situation: porous materialities.
If agentive co-constitution in Yancey’s hands expands the boundaries of the Bitzerian rhetorical situation to include alternative communal and multiple subjectivities, then those boundaries are also destabilizing through the force of porous materialities, central to sympoiesis.
Making-with is a permeable action.
A verb masquerading as a noun, porous materiality underscores the degree to which all matter—biological and nonbiological, human and nonhuman—exists as oddkin across entities, scales, and contexts. As Donna J. Haraway muses in 2000, “My instincts are . . . to insist on the join between materiality and semiosis” (How 86), a join Yancey’s poster page evokes.
At the convergence point where “the fleshy body and the human histories are always and everywhere enmeshed in the tissue of interrelationship where all relators aren’t human” (Haraway, How 106)—such as the feedback loops among text, genre, and media—a fluid orientation integral to the oddkin emerges. Porous materialities put “the natural and social, the nonhuman and the human, realms back together,” Alex Reid notes (qtd. in Yancey and McElroy 9), resonating with what Haraway terms natureculture (Companion).
While the visual image of a giant northern termite crafting mud tubes and subterranean mounds from a combination of soil particles, feces, and salvia underscores the porosity of materialities in nature, the termite making-kin with humans expands and reinforces that interweave of sympoiesis.
Arnold van Huis highlights the dense diffusion of semiotics and materiality in Africa, the country with the highest diversity of termite populations in the world.
Examples of physical permeability between termite-mounds-humans abound. For instance, populations across African destabilize the specious separation between the classes of Insecta and Mammalia by merging bodies. Communities derive sustenance from termites as a critical food source, creating “termite clubs” for children to forage for the calcium rich insects (4/12). Equally significant, termites serve as medicines, helping to “break a child’s fever” or “to assures safe delivery of a child” (5/12). Also, pregnant women in many African cohorts eat the soil of the termite mound, gaining an estimated 14 percent of the daily iron recommended for gestating women (6/12).
Repeatedly, termites and humans, body to body, interpenetrate, undermining the comfortable notion of discrete separation. But that interpenetration also operates linguistically and rhetorically.
The permeability of semiosis and language is also readily evident in this African natureculture, from lexicon to rites. Vernacular names for termites derive from “the shape of the [termite] mound, the time of swarming. . . or to termites’ behavior” (3/12) infiltrating a people’s vocabulary. More extensively, the destabilization of word and matter occurs in a rhetorical rituals, such as the informal ceremony to resolve strife between wives. Two crushed termites and mound soil are combined with water and then “given to both wives [to consume] while saying ‘there should be understanding between these two, as there is good understanding between 2 termites” (8/12).
From food to family amity, from health of the body to health of the spirit, from naming to living, from ritual to rhetoric, termitehuman sympoiesis provides living examples of the porosity of res and verbum, of natureculture.
In contrast, Bitzer’s rhetorical situation maintains a stark separation among rhetorical actants, isolating word and thing.
To elaborate, while Bitzer arrays materialities—in the guise of situational exigence—as the key driver in rhetorical situation— “situation controls the rhetorical response” (6)—he also depicts those materialities as a binary between a clearly demarcated physical realm (biologics-non-biologics) and humanity. Thus, while humans interact “functionally with their [physical and mental] environments” (“Functional” 21), participating through sense acts “with what we take to be real” (22), they also “give existence to much of this total environment” through their actions without that environment shaping their identities in turn (23).
As a result, “genuine rhetorical situations,” Bitzer claims, are those that are “real,” are “present in the historical environment,” and are “available for scrutiny by people prepared to see them” (23). Although situations may not be “fixed and unchanging,” Bitzer concedes, they are “easily scrutinized” by perceptive humans and thus empirically verifiable because they exist separate from humans who shape but are not shaped (24).
A key problem arises from this separation: if materialities and agents do not compost, then the rhetorics that rely on sympoietic epistemologies—ways of knowing and discoursing centered in compos(t)ing—are dismissed as not rhetorically fruitful, as not generative of “genuine rhetorical situations.”
Protesting such a narrow—impermeable—vision of rhetoric, Yancey and Michael Spooner point to Indigenous epistemologies predicated on porous materialities. “Consider the case of the Native Americans,” the collaborative voice urges, “in whose culture all selves are speaking selves by virtue of their connection to, their expression of, and their contribution to the universe” (“Concluding” 303), a way of knowing at odds with Bitzer’s interactive model.
Kimberly G. Wiesser elaborates on the exclusion of American Indian rhetorics—their designation as outside, separate from, a “genuine rhetorical situation”—because of divergent epistemologies and rhetorical performances.[1]
[1] Nor is this exclusion limited to rhetorics of American Indians. Obdurate materialities delegitimate Black Women’s Rhetoric(s) growing out of an epistemology validating “Black women’s daily realities” (see Browdy). Similarly, feminist Latine rhetorics, especially as set forth by Gloria Anzaldúa, who positions the borderlands in the very porosity Bitzer’s model dismisses, are similar excluded. Finally, Elizabeth Ervin specifically questions the salience of Bitzerian discrete materialities for radical feminist activism “grounded in direct experience and inherently pluralistic, dialogic, and transformative” (317).
Speaking from a lineage tied to the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek with oddkin familial co-relations among the Cheyenne, Comanche, and Blackfoot (xi), Weisser illuminates the porous materialities of American Indians thinking, being, and discoursing. Inhabiting an “Intertribal orientation”—the term preferred in her “grassroots Indian country” for community “interactions as relationships between kin groups” (xi)—Wiesser explains the epistemology historically guiding American Indians in their daily lives and rhetorics.
To begin, Intertribal members privilege the interpenetration of “the physical and metaphysical” where “stories, signs, and symbols cannot be separated from the rest of reality” (xi). Such Indigenous beliefs operate in ways that are “antithetical” to the dominant western mode of “linear, logical reasoning that argues for a ‘right answer’” (7), the exact mode guiding Bitzer’s model.
Focusing on the circulation and uptake of rhetorical texts across contexts, Jenny Edbauer resists the epistemological and textual restriction in rhetorical situation, interrogating “the effects of building a model [of rhetorical situation] around a ‘conglomeration’ of distinct elements in relationship to one another” (8).
Regardless of scholarly containment efforts, regardless of reliance on interactional human-nonhuman dynamics that dismiss porous materialities, the rhetorical situation “bleeds,” Edbauer continues. “Situation bleeds into the concatenation of public interaction. Public interactions bleed into wider social processes. The elements of the rhetorical simply bleed” (9), an assertion underscoring the salience of American Indian epistemology and other rhetorical performances devalorized by a Bitzerian rhetorical situation.
Such making-with between word and thing also characterizes oddkin Yancey’s work, especially as evinced in textur-ality, or the complex, sensuous materialities of multi-modal, multi-vocal communication.
Mud Tube
“Termites “are the premier decomposer insects—along with microorganisms they unlock the energy and nutrients contained in dead plant material, which can then be circulated throughout the ecosystem.”
--Alan Neil Andersen and Peter Jacklyn (4)
Porous Materialities and Alternative Textur-alities
Oddkin Yancey’s emphasis on porous materialities offers a palliative to Bitzer’s impermeable rhetorical situation, as the last chapter of Voices on Voice illustrates. In dialogue with Michael Spooner, Yancey begins implicitly pushing against Bitzer’s brute materialities.
Writing on the edge of their own porosity, the co-authors state that their purpose in their “unconcluding” is “to preclude closure” by “defying dichotomies and certainty” and by “arguing for possibilities beyond its own boundaries” because, by implication, those boundaries cannot be closed (“Concluding” 298).[1]
[1] Vielstimmig describes Yancey and Spooner’s approach in “Concluding Words”: “we put it in format that more or less represented the dialogue we had experienced,” the “more or less” crucial here (“Petals” 114, emphasis added).
That openness is exactly what characterizes porous materialities, thus validating epistemologies and rhetorics emerging from the symbiosis of word and flesh. The co-authors articulate this point even more baldly when they stress the human organism’s embeddedness in “the external conditions of the physical world,” likening it to the “symbiosis of the mite and leaf, the plankton and the world” (299).
That mutualism leads them toward “non-Western views of solidarity—a communitarian self integrating the individual, the group, and nature” (300), attune to that of American Indian epistemologies and Haraway’s sympoiesis. Nor is that epistemological stance limited to the biological world; it extends as well to the non-biological, specifically, writing technologies, subverting the policed separation between human, tool, product, and response in co-shaping.
As Spooner and Yancey recount, “working on email—constructing the messages within a pre-genre that is still being shaped itself—is constructing us, too” (275). Myka Vielstimmig concurs, reinforcing that technology-human convergence by heralding “really live intertexts” (“Play” 127) and contending that “e-communication is what got us into this mess (oops), I mean exigence” (132).
In each case, the osmotic flow of the quadradic humans-technologies-texts-experience defies any absolute separation; instead, the quadrat revels in the permeability of interfaces.
By valuing porous materialities, oddkin Yancey confirms the value of non-eurowestern epistemologies and discourses; in so doing, she simultaneously confirms the need for alterative textur-alities: rhetorical forms designated as not “fitting rhetoric,” such as those practiced by American Indians as well as by many other stakeholders denied a seat at the euro-western rhetorical table.
Introduced as a term in the Kairos webtext “Not a Cosmic Convergence,” textur-ality as the “subtext of reality” (“Handout”; seven) emphasizes the material permeability of biological and nonbiological spheres, of cognition and affect, of body and mind, of text and experience.
Derived from the Latin verb texere meaning “to weave/woven,” textur-ality delights in its roots in “human, animal, cyborg coshapings” by which they “bec[o]me-with each other” and therein “render[…] each other capable” (Haraway, Staying 22).
As a noun, texture refers to the tactile quality of a physical surface (a texture), and as a verb it refers to the act of endowing a surface with a particular tactile character (to texture). As a result, texere already bestows on textur-ality a blend of sensory modalities—sight and touch, at a minimum—even as it blends a physical object with its physical making and experiencing.
Likewise, as oddkin Yancey and her various collaborators weigh textur-ality with an osmotic diffusiveness across res and verbum, they also extend that diffusion to poetics and rhetoric, rationality and intuition.
Foreshadowing Yancey and Stephen McElroy’s 2015 exploration and application of assemblage—comprised of product, process of embodied production, and process of embodied response—textur-ality in 1998 thus highlights the action of porous materialities, exposing a blind spot in Bitzer’s rhetorical situation.
The discrete materiality promoted by Bitzer erases alternative textur-alities as it excludes alternative epistemologies, rendering invisible rhetorical performances that rely on multiple modes, media, and text(ure)s in making-with. In so doing, Bitzer’s model flattens—de-textur-alizes—rhetorical options for action.
Kimberly G. Wiesser again elaborates on the cost of this segregation for American Indians and their rhetoric of “indirect discourse” (39), a rhetoric tightly tied to their materially porous epistemology.
As Wiesser describes Intertribal rhetorics are deeply textur-alized utilizing as they do “actions and material culture as mediums” (xii). Those performances embrace and go beyond the alphabetical to include “the material, in forms such as wampum belts and quipu, and to the kinesthetic or embodied forms such as Plains Sign Language or smoking a pipe” (7).
However, a Bitzerian rhetorical situation predicated on dichotomous brute materialities and a discrete rhetor discredits Intertribal indirect discourses, reliant as they are on the porosity of word, flesh, object, and world. It renders such discourse as un-rhetorical, as not “genuine rhetoric.”
A sympoietic rhetorical situation, as inspired by oddkin Yancey’s scholarly performances, rectifies that bracketing by enacting and authorizing just such textur-alities.
A materially porous rhetorical situation, marked by sympoiesis and kin-making, erupts from the exuberant textur-ality of Myka Vielstimmig’s “Not a Cosmic Convergence,” a 1998 webtext performance and critique of the “New Essay/NetEssay/Digital Essay/Experimental/Alternate” (one). Like the termite, the Myka Players compos(t)e and circulate porous materialities throughout the natureculture ecosystems.
Mud Tube
“Mutualisms cannot be understood in isolation from their ecological contexts.”
--Judith L. Bronstein (16)
Yancey: A Making-with Drama in Two Acts
The Scene: “Not a Cosmic Convergence”
As inspired by oddkin Yancey’s scholarly performances—and as adumbrated in the CCC’s poster page—a sympoietic rhetorical situation rectifies Bitzer’s elision of porous materialities. Rather than discounting such porosity as rhetorically insignificant, Yancey depends on and leverages it.
The Myka Vielstimmig 1998 hypertext demonstrates the textur-ality ensuing from an embrace of porosity.
Initially performed before a live audience at the 1998 Computers and Writing Conference by members of the self-named Myka Players,[1] “Not a Cosmic Convergence” was subsequently remediated as a hypertext (“Intro”). The hypertext’s multimodal performance embodies a promiscuous intermixing of materialities, resulting in a multi-sensual digital fabric woven of images, words, spatiality, and audio evocations.[2]
[1] As the “Bio”—About, the, um, Author—shares, the Myka Players include John Barber, Dene Gregar, Tina Perdue, and Michael Williamson with Yancey and Spooner providing the script.
[2] The Computers & Writing presentation itself, and, especially, the remediation between presentation and hypertext, offer intriguing insights into the textur-ality of porous materialities. For example, the shift between conference and online performance reveals the sympoietic play of materialities across the seven elements of the CCC’s poster page: context, composer, subject, audience, text, genre, media. One quick example suggests the action of making-with materialities. To illustrate, for the conference presentation, the players positioned themselves around the room with Yancey and Spooner at the front (backed by visuals), creating a heterophonic audio experience for the audience while creating a mutable visual focus (Fleckenstein). In contrast the experience of heterophony-with-visuality was reconfigured imaginatively in the hypertext, from the invention of the Stage Manager’s sonic and visual cuing (“To the Kairos Readers”) to the gustatory and audio sensuality of the Cast Party (“Cast Party”).
Consisting of 12 webpages, the hypertext breaks with tradition in numerous ways. To begin, it upends the conventional linear organization of print-centric academic writing, which privileges argument-specific material predominant, subordinating support information such as works cited, bios, and so forth last. The navigation bar itself underscores that the hypertext is “not your mother’s text anymore” (“Petals” 89).
The design-aesthetic reinforces that subtext.
Characterized by a two-part columnar page, that occasionally morphs to three columns or reduced to a single one, and dialogic in style, the conversation(s) occurs within and across the separate columns via different fonts and colors. The columns, in brief, are porous. In addition, the conversations unfold both discursively and visually, with the images—especially the Impressionist and post-Impressionist art—operating as active contributors to the verbal dialogue. Thus, the making-with spirit of the multimodal “messages” infuses the hypertext, creating layers of meaning.
With its welter of sensory stimuli and puzzle-like fragments, the hypertext embodies what Vielstimmig describes as a “‘new essay’”: “a place where multiple ways of knowing are combined, collage-like: a site where alternatives are at least as valuable as single-voiced, hierarchically-argued, master narratives” (“Petals” 90).
The use of two textur-alizing strategies—a kinetic form and permeable bodies—enacts its pervious epistemology and showcases its alternative—and highly textur-alized—rhetoric, underscoring the action of and necessity for a sympoietic rhetorical situation.
Mud Tube
“Walking on a termite mound is not even recommended as one may become ill.”
--Arnold van Huis (8/12)
Alternative Textur-alities: Kinetic Spaces
Writing as the materially porous Myka Vielstimmig, oddkin Yancey in “Not a Cosmic Convergence” illustrates exactly that, especially through its textur-alizing via kinetic spaces.
By privileging a textur-alized discourse in the Kairos hypertext/performance, fluid spatiality makes an indirect argument for a way of knowing and doing the “subtext of reality” distinct from that undergirding the Bitzerian rhetorical situation. The kineticism of form privileges a “tolerance for nonlinear associations” resonating with “Navajo thought,” which, “honors a ‘cluster logic’” (two), in this case, a spatial cluster logic.
As a Myka Player’s avatar shares, “We live in a world of motion” where knowledge is “provisional, perpetually self-refining” (two), a sentiment aligning with Haraway’s contention that, via sympoiesis, “embodied form is always kinetic, perceptual, ongoing, never finished” (“Nothing” xxxviii).
In other words, form is always in the making as it flows across—merges into, converges with, and diverges from—various materialities, from walking on a termite mound (or stories about walking on a termite mound) to crafting a digital new essay.
That spatial playfulness calls into question the specious certainty of a claim-driven, linear academic essay—of an obdurate and stable physical reality—by transforming it into a generative uncertainty that moves from “understanding” to “multiple understandings” (two), from materiality to multiple materialities.
Kinetic space textur-alizes it.
Haraway applauds the resultant uncertainty of moveable spaces: “Breakdown provokes a space of possibility precisely because things don’t work smoothly anymore” (How 115).
Perhaps the most evident example of kinetic form as an alternative way of knowing and textur-alizing ensues from the design of the hypertext's different “pages.”
As a Myka Player-character contributes, the spatial form characterizing “Not a Cosmic Convergence” pairs with Cubism: “dynamic while static; it moves. It evokes vibrancy, a sense of dimension. It’s tactile almost” (four).
To illustrate, the collective screens of the scripted performance itself—barring two exceptions—mimic each other in their two-column aesthetic with the left-hand column, background in white, the repository for images of art, and the right-hand column, background in pale yellow, allotted for “spoken” dialogue.
However, that spatial aesthetic constitutes a specious division as the eye constantly moves between the two columns. In fact, this kineticism is reinforced on the first page of the scripted text (one).
Here, a line from the opening of a Tom Waits-Bette Midler duet, “I Never Talk to Strangers”— “Now tell me did you really think I’d fall for that old line? I was not born just yesterday.”—starts on the left-side of the page and extends, with white space, into the right side of the page. It diffuses, opening a new communicative dynamic through that diffusion.
That dynamic is further underscored by the intersection of Waits' song lyric with Ezra Pound’s 1913 14-word poem “In a Station of the Metro,” where faces in the crowd are “apparition[s]” (one), an association underscored by the accompanying visual image.
The figure, the only one without attribution in the hypertext, combines the style of pointillism with that of a random dot stereogram, which both hides and reveals a 3D image, reinforcing the “ghostly” nature of “the apparition of these//faces in the crowd” (one).
What results from this design is kinetic motion in permable layers: metaphoric—putting the “moves” on a stranger; allusive/poetic—trains moving, crowds moving, individuals in the crowd moving; and real—eyes moving across the page). The swirl of motion undermines any illusion of the inseparability of the content on one side—and the sensory modes of sound, sight, sensation—and rhetoric and poetic on the other. Instead, contents make-kin—textural-izing—porous materialities in an explosion of constantly changing (un)certainties.
Kinetic motion renders strangers and apparitions—biologics and nonbiologics—oddkin.
In addition, kinetic motion manifests on the different “types” of pages: paratext and text.[1] For instance, paratextual pages differ from “text” pages in their spatiality as the “Intro” illustrates.
[1] Borrowing from Gérard Genette, Vicki Tolar Collins defines paratext as “title page, epigraph, introduction, and added texts not written by the author” (551).
With its three columns ostensibly separating content into discrete “chunks,” the design of the “Intro” suggests the stable knowledge of academic writing, of grids, and logic squares.
But that separation—and stability—is repeatedly dislocated by the back-and-forth motion across the middle and third columns as one voice breaks the “fourth wall” by directly addressing the reader.
This voice elaborates on the contents of the note itself—“we don’t want you to worry about the names—who (i.e., which RL person) is saying what”—before another voice interjects and sidetracks the first by breaking the “third wall” by commenting on the hypertext itself as it implicates real life: “One thing, though: who gets to put this on their vita?” (“Intro”).
The columnar arrangement sets up the expectation of tidy order—even if an odd one—with everyone staying in their lane—a Bitzerian dynamic—only to disturb that spatial logic in diverse ways throughout the entirety of the hypertext.
As one Myka Player-character contends, the rationale for such kinetic spatiality is to “dramatize[...] (or perform[...]) juxtaposition and disruption” (four), challenging the logico-rational epistemology and genre conventions associated with the “classic print” academic essay, argumentation, and their underlying epistemology.
It textur-alizes it and the rhetorical situation.
As a performance of porous materialities characteristic of a sympoietic rhetorical situation, kinetic space in Vielstimmig’s “Not a Cosmic Convergence” exemplifies what Haraway calls a “becoming-with” tale, one where the compos(t)er “passionately understands the need to change the story” to search “for compositionist practices capable of building effective new collectives” (Staying 40).
That search for new “compositionist practices” and “new collectives” continues with the hypertext’s second textur-alizing strategy: the porous materialization of bodies, including those of the hypertextual content, those of the participants (players and audience), and those of the mediating technologies.
[1] Borrowing from Gérard Genette, Vicki Tolar Collins defines paratext as “title page, epigraph, introduction, and added texts not written by the author” (551).
Mud Tube
“Several informants from Madagascar mentioned that you should not urinate on a termite mound as something may happen to your testicles or penis.”
--Arnold van Huis (8/12)
Alternative Textur-alities: Materializing Bodies
Illuminating porous materiality in a sympoietic rhetorical situation, “Not a Cosmic Convergence” ratifies alternative—and marginalized—epistemologies and rhetorical forms of textur-ality. It emphasizes the ways by which the seven elements of the CCC’s poster page implicitly textur-alize rhetoric—and the rhetorical situation—by making kin across contexts, compos(t)ers, subjects, audiences, texts, genres, and media.
By relaying on multiple modes and materials of composing, a sympoietic rhetorical situation thus embraces epistemologies and rhetorical forms dismissed as not “fitting” rhetoric.
Nowhere in “Not a Cosmic Convergence” is the force of porous materialities more dramatically evident than in the permeability of bodies, the ultimate signifier of discrete—always separate—identities and realities, a solitary body characteristic of Bitzer’s interactionist rhetorical situation.
As Kenneth Burke insists, the distinct corporeality of the body constitutes the driving motive behind rhetoric. As beings who are inevitably divided from each other by their own skins, humans seek to transcend their fleshy shells through identification, the heart of persuasion. Thus, he asserts, humans are, at once, both a part of and apart from, “both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another” (Rhetoric of Motives 21).
Through its use of different semiotic systems, “Not a Cosmic Convergence” textur-alizes the substance/consubstantial osmotic field across which context-compos(t)er-reader-subject-text-genre-media diffuse. The hypertext embodies the “side-winding, snaky shape of becoming with” that is “relentlessly contingent” (Haraway, Staying 40).
The first instance of body textur-alizing involves the multimodal blending of audio and alpha-visual semiotic systems. That process begins with an invitation from the Myka Players.
In the absence of live “actors,” the Players urge screen readers to animate the script themselves by reading aloud “the parts belonging to all the players” (“Intro”). The invitation offers an opportunity to engage in a kind of table read in which actor-readers immerse themselves in their “characters,” encouraging them to experiment with shifts in tone, cadence, vocal range, and pacing.
So the hypertext’s solicitation deliberately seeks an embodied act of audio textur-alizing on the part of the readers, an act that consciously lodges readers as bodies in the hypertext. In the process, the readers’ lodge themselves in the Players' bodies. Their “voice-overs” begin to dissolve the “apart from” divide by textur-alizing readers’ and Players’ corporeal involvement: it entices readers to “perform it [the hypertext/script] themselves” (“Intro”) and thereby make-kin with the Players as players themselves.
What results is a textur-al cascade, a sensual osmosis promoting an experience of “ideas, voices, genres as displaced, displacing planes” (four). They are, paradoxically, a consubstantial substance.
Such textur-alizing evokes Michael McGee’s materialist conception of rhetoric rather than Bitzer’s dematerialist stance: “rhetoric is ‘material’ by measure of human experiencing of it,” McGee argues (29); it is a bridge “among people, the social equivalent of a verb in a sentence,” one that fosters “interactivity among people” (27).
Here, then, at the very beginning of the hypertext, porous bodies arise from the complex textur-ality of a lived rhetorical experience, an insight that underscores a fundamental goal of the performance: “to understand that the writer can’t control how any text will be read or narrativized—will be experienced. Or: how others may join in the plot” (one).
Simultaneously “a part of and apart from,” the Players then amplify and complicate corporeal permeability by textur-alizing the (in)visible designation of individual “character” identities. It fractures substance into substances by diffusing presence—associated with audio voicing, with speaking—into fragments constantly rearranging in new combinations of oddkin.
Throughout the hypertext, (in)visibility complements and contradicts readers’ experience of audio-embodiment. The predominant strategy for this is the splintering semiotics of color.
Rather than identifying which specific member of the Myka Players declaims which lines—or providing images or avatars of the actors, as in a playbill or program—the hypertext presents speaking roles as colors: teal, purple, brown, black, orange, green, red, and blue.
While the “Bio” includes the names of the Myka Players—the “in real life” (IRL) performers—the hypertext never identifies which IRL body performs which color. So making-kin via a table-read embodiment of a Myka Player goes awry, becomes uncertain, with the (in)visibility of a specific Myka Player.
Further, in a layered act of textur-alizing, the alignment between colors and a single IRL body completely explodes.
Rather than assigning a single Player to a single color—a single body to a single role—the performance continually disrupts discrete boundaries between IRL bodies of the four Players because those Players necessarily split themselves among eight colors. Who performs which color when is unknowable because the colors—like bodies—diffuse, circulate.
In brief, (in)visible claims associated with a single static body (color) are full of holes: they are porous. Instead, the physical-semiotic body—readers’ and Players’—materializes as a textur-alized body.
Thus, despite the audio presence of a spoken line—and the implicit “truth” of a body producing that audio—the (in)visibility and subsequent fragmentation of the color-coding underscore textur-alized bodies as parts that are apart from each other even as they are a part of each other.
When “Not a Cosmic Convergence” invites “the reader to play a role in the text with the writer,” and also apart from the writer, it seeks not only to consubstantiate but also to do so through a “collage-like invention processes” (one), one in which unitary substance fragments and constantly reorganizes those into new, contingent consubstantial patterns.
Marked by porosity of spatial motion, bodies, and realms (poetry, visual art, rhetoric, composition), Vielstimmig’s hypertext showcases the rhetorical power of a textur-ality radically different from the discrete “genuine rhetoric situation” Bitzer advocates.
After all, as Yancey points out, “Rhetorical situations are, however, also not discrete,” (“‘Seizing Kairos’” 6/52).
“Not a Cosmic Convergence” offers an oddkin vision of what rhetorical situation can be when sympoietic porous materialities constitute a key force of its existence. It celebrates and validates alternative textur-alities for all rhetorics, including those of American Indians and other communities for whom porosity is a central truth of their epistemologies and their discourses.
Making-kin with agentive co-constitution and porous materialities, the final component of a sympoietic rhetorical situation—rhetorical accountability—provides an oddkin ethic to guide a sympoietic rhetorical situation.
