Reclaiming Experience: The Aesthetic and Multimodal Composition

• An important direction for composition and new media studies is inquiry into the aesthetic as a mode of sensory experience—an act of perception, based on the ancient Greek aisthetikos.
• The aesthetic here is in essence a how and not a what; it is not located in an object of perception, but in how the aesthetic is perceived by the audience.
• The role of sensory-based experience and the role of meaning making in communicating messages to audiences can and should be part of the domain of the study of multimodal composition.

Recent scholarship points to the rhetorical role of the aesthetic in multimodal composition and new media contexts. In this article, I examine the aesthetic as a rhetorical concept in writing studies and imagine the ways in which this concept can be useful to teachers of multimodal composition. My treatment of the concept begins with a return to the ancient Greek aisthetikos (relating to perception by the senses) in order to discuss the aesthetic as a meaningful mode of experience. I then review European conceptions of the aesthetic and finally draw from John Dewey and Bruno Latour to help shape this concept into a pragmatic and useful approach that can complement multimodal teaching and learning. The empirical approach I construct adds to an understanding of aesthetic experience with media in order to render more transparent the ways in which an audience creates knowledge—or takes and makes meaning—via the senses. Significantly, this approach to meaning making supports learning in digital environments where students are increasingly asked to both produce and consume media convergent texts that combine multiple modalities including sound, image, and user interaction.