In her seminal 1992 essay, Nancy Sommers suggests that “[w]hat happens between drafts seems to be one of the greatest secrets of our profession” (28). We, too, believe that this is true, as traces of production are often overlooked in our scholarship and pedagogical practice. As John Trimbur argues, writing instruction has tended to ignore the cycle of “production, distribution, exchange, and consumption.” Instead of attending to the messiness, ambiguity and uncertainty associated with communicative practice, we too often occupy what Sommers’ calls “safe positions,” that is “either/or ways of seeing” and valuing texts, of placing them into neat boxes based on type, such as academic or personal, alphabetic or new media—categories that tend not to do enough to foreground the distributed aspects of composing. We would argue that the work of Bruno Latour provides us with a way to complicate these either/or ways of seeing, to recognize instead the noisy and populated places that inform literate practices where countless, as Latour says, “absent makers who are remote in time and space” are “simultaneously active and present.”

In Pandora’s Hope, Latour describes how breakdowns in technology provide an opportunity to see the roles objects play in the course of action. In an example that resonated strongly with us, Latour talks about a projector breaking down, say in the middle of a conference presentation. With that breakdown, Latour maintains the projector grows from being composed of zero parts or one to many. In other words, when the projector was functioning, we were not particularly aware of its existence. It was doing its job; it was behaving (183). When the breakdown occurs, we become more aware of the projector’s many parts (some of which are obviously no longer functioning) and of the importance of seeking out the tools and/or expertise of those who might get the projector and us up and running again. In drawing our attention to the way humans and nonhumans interact, Latour underscores the importance of not limiting agency solely to what ‘intentional’ ‘meaningful’ humans do. Instead, we need also attend to the way that “things might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid and so on.” (71-72). Latour suggests a number of ways that researchers can go about tracing how objects participate in the course of action. Chief among these is to study innovations in the artist’s workshop, the engineer’s design department, the scientist’s laboratory, the user’s home. . .” as well as the classroom. In these sites—what Latour has referred to as “construction sites,” or sites of construction, objects live a multiple and complex life through meetings, plans, sketches, regulations, and trials.  Here, “they appear fully mixed with other more traditional social agencies. It is only once in place that they disappear from view” (80). 

We believe Latour’s efforts to recognize the roles objects play in the course of action, to redistribute the local and localize the global offer new potentials for researching, theorizing, and re-presenting accounts of communicative practice. To illustrate some of these potentials, we provide audiences with two cases studies that offer views of literacy in action by attending to how material processes, cultural narratives, histories, spaces, and technological artifacts shape interactions with, and attitudes toward the production, reception, circulation, and valuation of texts.