Mud Tubes
“[S]taying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present. . . as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, and meaning.”
-Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (1)
Termites and their oddkin have served as guides throughout this webtext, providing both a foil for and a visual metaphor of the three properties characterizing a sympoietic rhetorical situation: agentive co-constitution, porous materialities, and rhetorical accountability.
But here, at only a titular end, Yancey becomes the guide, offering promise and hope.
On February 1, 2025, she writes at the end of Note 1317: “But January is a wrap, Florida's weather is closer to normal, and I'm able to take some solace in nature. This photo's caption: Promise.”
A Facebook post, Note 1317 is part of Yancey’s long series of sharings. Begun during the COVID-19 pandemic, the varied posts feature brief Montaignian-like musings, reflections, ironies, exasperations, and insights.
Meandering across troublesome politics, misbehaving appliances, industrious critters who feast on available automative wires, and a Florida spring waiting for its cue, Note 1317 includes (and concludes) with an image: a camellia on the cusp of blooming.
Captioned “Promise,” Yancey’s photograph features a close-up of two tightly furled pink-ish buds, the petals sheltered against February surprises but ready to unfold into glory.
However, as the caption indicates, for Yancey, the camellia carries curled within its protective sepals not just solace; it also carries a covenant that is both material (spring with its regeneration) and metaphysical (humanity with its capacity for compassion, justice, and compassionate justice).
In a deeply disturbing moment of political, social, and environmental fracturing where inequality and inequity flourish, the camellia’s—and the post’s—promise of renewal and the resilience of compassion reaffirms commitment and resolve.
Yet the paired buds go beyond promise, powerful as that is. Yancey alludes to this in the first entry in her comment section where she offers a second “naming” possibility: “Or perhaps the caption should be Hope”
Or perhaps it should be both Promise and Hope
Shepherded by Yancey, this unconclusion makes oddkin with promise and hope. The soaring exhilaration of “Hope”—more wish than vow—makes kin with “Promise,” giving wings to the weight of oaths pledged and worlds changed.
This powerful oddkin—this promisehope— circulates through scholarship and especially a sympoietic rhetorical situation.
Rooted in and emerging from oddkin’s co-relatings, Yancey’s poster page and collaborative writing, holds the promise—potential and commitment—of a new rhetorical situation and its possibilities for re-worlding.
Yancey’s body of work—both in form and content—implicitly challenges conventional scholarship on rhetorical situation that aims “to conserve rather than reject [. . .]” the Bitzerian model (Garret and Xiao 30); instead, it embodies—and theorizes on the slant—rhetorical situation as sympoietic, as a becoming-with.
First, through her multi-vocal performances, oddkin Yancey promises a rhetoric beyond that of the Leonardo de Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the “classical ideal of ‘Man,’” a figure that infuses Bitzer’s rhetorical situation.
A construct of the Italian Renaissance, Vitruvian Man “doubles as a set of mental, discursive and spiritual values”: human-centric, rational, self-referential, and dichotomizing. This array of qualities then operates as a “civilizational ideal” (Bradotti 13, 15), shaping subjectivities, discourses, politics, and cultural capital according to a single template.
A sympoietic rhetorical situation, as Yancey demonstrates, expands the parameters of who can speak beyond the rhetor as Vitruvian Man, offering alternative rhetoric subjectivities composed of agentive multiplies.
By privileging a co-constitutive logic in contrast to Bitzer’s interactive infrastructure, oddkin Yancey also privileges a rhetorical situation that emerges from “collaborations among differently situated people—and peoples” as well as collaborations “between humans and animals” (Haraway, Staying 16) and humans and technologies where we shape even as we are shaped (Haraway 117; Spooner and Yancey 275).
Second, Yancey promises significant transformations in the what and how, as well as the who, of rhetorical situation through her commitment to and enactment of porous materialities. Oddkin Yancey challenges the discrete, separatist materiality that marks Bitzer’s project for permeable boundaries, honoring the constant movement between natureculture, word and thing, cognition and affect, rhetoric and poetry.
Through that promise, Yancey opens up rhetoric to alternative textur-alities, unconventional sites, and quotidian occasions for performing rhetoric. She authorizes rhetoric as more than words disseminated in a traditional public sphere.
Finally, Yancey promises rhetorical accountability, integrating an ethical commitment into any sympoietic rhetorical act. As her collaborative scholarship reveals, a sympoietic rhetorical situation entangles, and entanglement always excludes even as it moves to enmesh (Giraud 2). Thus, it is necessary to pay attention to the “entities, practices, and ways of being” foreclosed when “other entangled realities are materialized” (2).
With its triadic dynamic of respectful-caring, calculating consequences, and vigilance, Yancey’s rhetorical accountability endows a sympoietic rhetorical situation with an ethical gravitas elided in Bitzer’s model.
From alternative subjectivities and enriched textur-alities to an overarching rhetorical accountability, Yancey promises a new—sympoietic—rhetorical situation.
She couples those promises with hope.
Yancey through her oddkin making-with not only promises: she hopes, an essential element necessary to move from co-relating to re-worlding.
Hope, Mary Zournazi writes, is “a basic human condition that involves belief and trust in the world. It is the stuff of our dreams and desires, our ideas of freedom and justice and how we might conceive life” (12).
However, it is not just “the desire for things to come, or the betterment of life.” Rather, it is also “the drive or energy that embeds us in the world—in the ecology of life, ethics, and politics” (14-15).
Both the stuff of our dreams and the impetus to actualize those dreams, hope motivates us to re-world—to change an inequitable, destructive status quo, something that Yancey repeatedly underscores.
We need stories “of becoming with, of reciprocal induction, of companion species whose job in living and dying is not to end the storying, the worlding” but to begin the re-storying, the re-worlding, Haraway contends (Staying 39).
Yancey agrees. She both understands the need to change the story, and she acts on the hope with becoming-with tales that offer re-worlding for both composition studies and the rhetorical situation.
“Made Not Only in Words” explicitly displays that hope in action.
“So this talk: yes, it’s about change” (320), Yancey announces near the end of her article/address. It is an overt tale of becoming-with that envisions radical change for composition studies, ranging from the discipline as a whole to its research agendas and, especially, its pedagogies. It is a tale of hope for what can be, of a field re-making itself in the face of tectonic shifts in twenty-first century literacies.
So, too, with rhetorical situation. In more covert ways—through her theorizing on the slant—Yancey brings hope for re-worlding to Bitzer. Here she narrates a becoming-with tale through the “spirit of dialogue” and the zest of collaboration in “the joyful engagement possible with others” (Zournazi 13).
As Zournazi argues, “Reflections, conversations and dialogues build new social and individual imaginaries—visions of the world that create possibilities for change,” and Yancey re-worlds Bitzerian rhetorical situation into a sympoietic rhetorical situation by such multi-logic making-with strategies.
In that multi-logic spirit, Yancey invites CCC’s readers to respond to her inaugural CCC’s poster page. As a voice comprising Myka Vielstimmig, Yancey in “Not a Cosmic Convergence” links her email to an invitation: “We're interested to know what you make of all this” (“Intro”). And, finally, in hope, she invites her graduate students to “amplify” Bitzer’s rhetorical situation with new terms, challenging them envision what might change to keep rhetorical situation viable for the twenty-first century rhetorics (Yancey “Interview”).
Each instance is an act of hope, an act of faith in our ability to change the story of the rhetorical situation together. But each is also an exercise and act that includes—not rejects—Bitzer. Bitzer is, as Yancey notes, “a starting point” for re-worlding.
Yancey makes clear repeatedly that change does not require a rejection of the past, including Bitzerian rhetorical situation. “Still, the concept of rhetorical situation prevails—and in so many ways,” even in the flow of re-worlding. We always, she contends, “create the new within the context of the old and based on the model of the old” (Yancey, “Made Not Only in Words” 313), but with a difference: “The new, then, repeats what came before, while at the same time remaking that which it models” (“Made” 314).
So, too, with Bitzer. A sympoietic rhetorical situation in Yancey’s hand is not an effort to “refuse” Bitzer’s ideas or to “demonstrate that they had no place in the constellation of current rhetorical theory” (Young 276). It is not a rejection of the idea of situation or exigence or audience or constraints. Rather, it is Yancey, in hope, performing Bitzer in ways that lead rhetorical situation into a sympoietic future.
Thus, even as the rhetorical situation is re-worlded, it prevails. Exigency, audience, and constraints do not lose salience. They change—they “amplify,” Yancey says (“Interview”) in ways that increase their ability to help us “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, Staying 1).
From the perspective of sympoiesis, a Yaneyan rhetorical situation is contingent, even fragile, reliant on the sympoietic action of “becomers”—like Trinh’s villagers or Kathi Blake’s dorm mates or Kathi Yancey’s collaborators in myriad pieces—muddling together—composting—into partial, fragmented identities and textur-alities, maintaining and sustaining—or co-evolving—through inter- and intra-actions across myriad combinations of making-with.
It is an act of and for hope that enables promise, like the camellia buds, to bloom.
In the Tom Waits’s “I Never Talk to Strangers,” Waits and Bette Midler offer an oddkin promisehope: “We all begin as strangers before we find we aren’t strangers anymore.”
Perhaps that is the promisehope of a Yancey-inspired sympoietic rhetorical situation: the means by which strangers—biologics and nonbiologics—can forge kinship, even contingently, and be strangers no more.
And perhaps it is oddkin Yancey’s most significant accomplishment in a career rich in remarkable achievements.
Yancey’s own performances invite us to act on a “faith ‘without certitudes’” (Zournazi 13). Her promisehope inspires us “[to] take new risks in our encounters with each other” so that we can collaboratively tell a story that secures flourishing across natureculture.
It is a promisehope well worth fulfilling together.