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Introduction

Rhetoric and composition emerged some forty years ago in response to a variety of institutional and cultural pressures occasioned by perceived crises in student writing and the inadequacy of prevalent writing curricula to successfully address them. As the teaching and learning of writing became the focus of study, the term writing process came to represent not only a material, curricular approach to the teaching of writing, but also a significant, symbolic representation of the field itself.

Dedicated faculty lines, thriving graduate programs, and field-specific scholarly journals and books have since created a dynamic knowledge base of writing studies that continues to benefit from and to be challenged by poststructuralist, feminist, critical, and postmodern theories. In the wake of these productive challenges, writing process has become increasingly suspect as a curricular approach and, particularly, as a symbolic representation of the field whose disciplinary interests now far exceed the boundaries of the traditional first-year composition course.

This turn has come to be labeled post-process, and, although not well defined as a position or school of thought, its general sentiment is gaining currency with those discontented with process. Many, however, do not comfortably identify with either position. Process today is not the process of the 1970s and early 1980s on which our disciplinary identity was based and post-process remains for many a nebulous concept that equally misses the mark. Thus, a tension ensues that either can polarize or productively challenge us to rethink our disciplinary identity and mission.

A prerequisite to meeting this challenge, however, is an engagement of dialogue among the process and post-process positions, as well as with the many who do not comfortably identify with the extremes of either position. A potential mutual point of departure for a dialogue between the two discourses can be identified using the classical theory of stasis. As a heuristic, stasis would pose questions regarding existence, quality, and procedure/policy as a method by which to assess the point of departure at which an ensuing conversation between process and post-process could commence.1 Effectively, these questions would address the issues of “what is,” “what is good,” and “what is possible.” It is obvious that stasis would be located at the level of existence or the issue of “what is.” However, given that post-process posits itself in definitional opposition to process, it is considerably less clear what value the two positions share at this level that could serve as the actual point of stasis, that is, the point at which productive dialogue could commence. It is not hyperbolic, I believe, to say that in the absence of productive dialogue between the two, each might increasingly exhibit its own will to power, which would then hold potentially negative repercussions for students, for us, for the spaces of teaching writing, for the larger culture, and for the very nature of our disciplinary identity.

Thus, the goal of this book is to explore process and post-process for the point of stasis from which we might begin, anew, a conversation that would honor our past, recognize the exigencies of our present, and anticipate the future to which the conversation could lead us. An equally important goal is a conceptualization of some of the various institutional sites with which writing overlaps. Such a conceptualization could maintain the conversations that ebb and flow within and among these sites as a complex network in which the past, the present, and the future co-exist in a web of genuine organic simultaneity.

Because post-process is so ill-understood, Chapter 1 profiles post-process in an attempt to answer the first question of stasis theory: What is? This profile illuminates the heterogeneous nature of the post-process position and gauges the nature of its criticism aimed at process. I then compile a process profile that demonstrates the heterogeneous nature of writing process, along with its material and metaphoric roles in forming our early disciplinary identity. Ultimately, I map the process and post-process profiles along a continuum to assess how they differ and how they resonate. The point of resonance is identified as the point of stasis, the place at which both share some degree of common value, the place at which productive dialogue might create material and conceptual spaces that exceed the limitations of both positions.

I name this material and conceptual space networked process. As a metaphor for rhetoric and composition’s contemporary disciplinary identity, networked process evokes both the growing number of sites and the relational loops that characterize the discipline, a discipline of ever-increasing complexity.2 Materially and conceptually, networked process encompasses a variety of sites, including multiple notions of writing processes, spaces/places, epistemologies, literacies, disciplinary artifacts, and subjectivities. But a proverbial and fundamental conundrum common to both process and post-process, and thus to the sites with which they are networked, is subjectivity, or the individual who writes.

In Chapter 2, I explore historical scholarship that points toward the possibility of stasis between process and post-process, as well as the scholarly journey that eventually arrived at said stasis. James Berlin’s scholarship, specifically his cognitive mappings of various classifications of writing, is the focus. Analysis of these cognitive maps illuminates how his work speaks to a theory of networked process: they provide (1) a panoramic view of the first half of the process/post-process continuum mapped in Chapter 1, (2) a complex representation of relations that culminated in the theory that would come to be characterized as post-process, and (3) a platform for further elaboration of networked process.

In Chapter 3, I take up the conundrum of subjectivity. First, I articulate a theory of networked subjectivity that describes the materiality of the individual who writes. Then, I posit the conceptual potential of networked subjectivity to function as a heuristic for curricular, pedagogical, and programmatic decision-making. Networked subjectivity describes the nature of the subject and its relation to the world, suggesting that while not a teleology, the subject is nevertheless the necessary analytical ground for entry into the complexity of networked process.

In Chapter 4, I situate networked subjectivity relative to specific discursive formations or webbed relations with which writing and the teaching of writing inevitably co-exist. These discursive formations include power relations, discourse communities, epistemologies, subjectivities, literacies, and classrooms, all of which can be productively considered as sites that exponentially increase the dynamic complexity of networked process. My description of these discursive formations does not exhaustively explore networked subjectivity. These formations represent the minimum networked sites we ought to consider in the pursuit of our educational enterprise.

In Chapter 5, I use networked subjectivity as a heuristic to assess various sites of a network. First, I consider the artifactual site of a well-known first-year composition textbook, and then I turn to the material and conceptual site of a published composition program reform effort. These analyses illustrate that a notion of subjectivity, whether tacit or explicit, influences a conception of what writing is and thus sets in motion a set of assumptions and practices regarding how it ought to be taught. These analyses also indicate the capacity of curricula, pedagogies, writing programs, local institutions, and state governments to convene in the complex site of a particular student subject position, a site that can easily undermine and frustrate the most well-intentioned educational goals and objectives.

I conclude in Chapter 6 with a discussion of the disciplinary ramifications of networked process, as I attempt to (re)imagine the possibilities for the space of networked process and what it could portend for our disciplinary identity. This space, along with others not yet imagined, might become an additional site in the complex educational and cultural network in which both we and student-writer-subjects are enmeshed. Networked process can function as a nuanced and complex thermometer by which to measure the state of our disciplinary identity and health, as well as a dream-catcher for imagining what might be.