The discipline still carries a deeply embedded notion that rhetoric is about the conscious and intentional strategies of humans attempting to persuade other humans. This is not the only reason that rhetoricians will be skeptical of OOR. For instance, others who fully accept the premise that persuasion happens outside the realm of the human will resist OOR and OOP because they want to guard disciplinary boundaries. Nonetheless, the big point is this: there’s a lot of work to be done to get rhetoricians to grant that this approach is a) worthwhile and b) within the scope of what rhetoricians do. But that’s on us. The people interested in this line of questioning will have to prove that it matters and that it does something valuable. This is a difficult and necessary step.

I do not suggest that this is approach is groundbreaking or earth shattering. However, I think that some in OOP do come off sounding this way. Harman’s Prince of Networks (a book I thoroughly enjoyed) can come off sounding like a manifesto. It celebrates Latour and the approach of OOP in a way that probably turns many off. That tone is not always rhetorically effective, and I will make every attempt to avoid it. I don’t think OOR is going to radically reconfigure rhetorical studies, but I do think it can lead us to questions that are not central to our contemporary disciplinary conversations.

Although I’m not widely read on OOR, I’m on board. I guess I still wonder about the ongoing goal. In an email, you suggested that “the ongoing goal is to develop new methods. Those methods should not be about pointing
out what we missed. They should recognize the missing masses, assume
that we need to account for them, and then build methods that examine
the world in a new way.” I wanted to follow up on this point.

I don’t know if you’ve had an opportunity to read it yet, but some of my thinking here goes back to my post on “Counting.” There seem to me to be two basic “attitudes” toward complexity: one that suggests that it always exceeds our abilities to apprehend and appropriate it, and one that puts faith in “counting” it, in pursuing methods that break up the flow into discrete units.

It seems to me that OOR is interested in “counting” the non-human, in taking things beyond the human as objects of study. In terms of a broader rhetorical conversation, this seems like an important step. As you suggest in the last line of your post, one of our goals should be striving to provide the richest possible account of rhetorical situation. I am fully on board with this – it seems worthwhile to study everything we can take into account and to recognize that our situations are informed by much more than we normally account for and perhaps could account for.

And yet I still wonder how different these methods are. Maybe we simply need to do the work and see where it takes us. And yet, for some reason (and maybe this is just my problem and not rhetoric’s), I keep getting stuck here. Are we coming up with new ways of counting, or are we simply counting more things? Again, I don’t mean to suggest that counting more things isn’t important, but I wonder if it’s also possible to say that it isn’t really a game changer in the broader scheme of things.

I’m thinking here of the quote from Jenny Edbauer in Scot Barnett’s review essay that you link to: “writing is distributed across a range of processes and encounters.” I’m wondering about the difference between exploring those processes and encounters in greater detail vs. simply recognizing this insight. I wonder if this can be framed as a difference between knowledge and attitude. Clearly we can create more knowledge of the ways in which objects inflect our rhetorical situations (and how they participate in extra-human rhetorical situations themselves), but I wonder if our fundamental attitude changes. The attitude I have in mind would be one of humility, and it would be characterized by what Krista Ratcliffe calls rhetorical listening. It would be based on the recognition that our situations are complex and that any gesture toward “understanding” this complexity would necessarily be incomplete.

To return to the question of methods, I see that object-oriented methods could produce new knowledge, but knowledge seems to be somewhat beside the point, perhaps at cross-purposes here. Do these methods bring about new attitudes, new ways of positioning ourselves in relation to the world, new ways of responding to it? Perhaps these questions are entirely unfair at this point. Again, maybe we need to do the work and see where it takes on. Nonetheless, I’d appreciate hearing any thoughts you have on what you think these methods look like and where they take us.