The reading I have been doing in new materialism has really messed me up. Nearly everything I read related to composition or second language writing seems too limited in the scope of what is working within a pedagogical situation, too human-centric, or too tied to dualistic thought. While I’m fairly non-committal in my theoretical underpinnings, I see beauty in what is produced under the label of new materialism, as I think it has a potential to productively open up thought, providing opportunities for renewed classroom practices.

So far, however, I’ve been enjoying reading Linda Addler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle’s Naming What We Know, as I think the threshold concepts they present contain enough space for thinking along the lines of new materialism. One example of this is Kevin Roozen’s explanation of the threshold concept “Texts get their meaning from other texts” (p. 44). Roozen explains that texts are “profoundly intertextual in that they draw meaning from a network of other texts,” not only written texts, but also visual images. Roozen also points to a history and futurity of texts as being a part of the network of text production (the Declaration of Independence was entangled with the texts encountered by the writers and was intended to serve a future function.)

Roozen does not go so far as to include objects or senses in the network, but I don’t think that he would intentionally resist the idea that they are a necessary part of the entanglement (a term that Karen Barad, a feminist/queer studies thinker who uses principles of quantum physics to show how meaning is produced through the intra-action of agents). He mentions, for example, that a philosophy’s students notes could contain talk from classroom discussions that would find its way into the text that is produced. A new materialist might also look at the material conditions that made the note-taking possible, availability of pen, ink in the pen, space in the notebook, arrangement of the room that enabled hearing, etc. Even in the process of “putting words to paper” using all of the entangled actants that produced the phenomenon of the written text, we can see the material as having agency. As I type this in a coffee shop, the bass guitar garage rock playing in the background is causing a vibration in the window or some other conduit for vibration that is influencing my ability to concentrate while also creating a rhythm that may be altering my writing tempo and most likely influencing the text that is produced.

As I continue to think about new materialist classroom practice, I am curious about ways in which the material conditions in which writing occurs influence the thought/ideas/agency/being of the writer, and how these entangled texts both in their historicity and futurity make texts meaningful. Do you have any examples or insights into the materiality of intertextuality?