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1 Profiling Process and Post-Process

That writing process continues to function as a metaphor for the disciplinary identity of rhetoric and composition is nowhere more apparent than in the coinage of post-process, a contemporary movement that arguably functions not to revise process so much as to insist that any hope ever attached to it was and is as futile as charging at windmills. The problem with making such a statement, however, is that it assumes that both process and post-process discourses are monolithic. Neither is, after all, nearly so tidy. But with its naming alone, post-process clearly does mean to substantively challenge process. The question is how, to what extent, and for what purpose. At stake in these questions is nothing less than where we teach, how we teach, what we teach, and even whether we teach, along with what answers to these questions might portend for rhetoric and composition’s disciplinary identity.

All of us undoubtedly believe ourselves well versed in process theory and practice. With only a little exaggeration, it might be said that process constitutes the conceptual fabric of our disciplinary hegemony.3 The very naming of post-process, then, brings this hegemony into relief, an event we ought to consider healthy and productive. But if we uncritically discard one organizing principle for the field only to uncritically adopt another, we risk not only capitulating to similar errors in our disciplinary history but also foregoing a dialogue that might allow us to (re)see process so that we can understand the challenge of post-process within the context of some shared value. Without such a context, the risk is that adherents of both positions will cling to their positions in a posture of recalcitrant self-defense. Certainly, disillusionment with process is not sufficient reason to discard it, but neither is allegiance to process sufficient reason to dismiss post-process. Indeed, disillusionment and allegiance are tricky warrants, offering little exigence for a context in which a genuinely engaged dialogue might occur. More is needed, then, to build a context that can produce dialogue. Minimally, this involves understanding the nature of the two positions and how they differ. It also involves identifying what value the two might share and at what point that value destabilizes. Therefore, a context for genuine dialogue requires at the very least that we determine the point of stasis at which productive disagreement might begin.

My purpose in this chapter is to identify this point of stasis. To accomplish this, I first construct post-process and process profiles to determine how they differ, and what they mutually value. I devote more space to post-process, simply because it is the less well understood perspective, and I ask a variety of questions. What characterizes the post-process position? What does post-process reject of the process position? Why? What is the nature of the disciplinary identity post-process rejects and would supersede? What characterizes process? What shared value might serve as an effective starting point for a productive dialogue? To answer these questions, I begin with post-process and examine process in light of what post-process critiques in process. Then, I consider the two positions against stasis theory to identify the point at which productive dialogue might ensue.

Post-Process

Although some are calling the present time in our history “post-process,” it, “like its counterpart, postmodern,” Lynn Bloom writes, “seems vague in comparison with its referent” (35). Many, undoubtedly, would agree, and while this vagueness is attributable in great part to an unclear understanding of the post-process position, it is also influenced by other factors. One is generational.4 Many of those emerging from rhetoric and composition doctoral programs within the last decade or so may associate process with a seemingly remote watershed moment in the history of the field. Thus, they identify themselves as post-process because they perceive an evolutionary, disciplinary sensibility, which they happen to equate with post-process. There are also those disillusioned with what first-year composition accomplishes, with the labor issues that sustain it, and with the way first-year composition shapes rhetoric and composition’s professional and disciplinary identity. Although these attitudes about post-process inform the scholarship of both process and post-process, they are not often translated, themselves, into a publishing focus. Thus, factors involving both the generational and the disaffected may indicate particular sensibilities more than any tangible scholarship, rendering it difficult to assess how the nature of post-process is constituted across these constituencies.

Even within explicit post-process scholarship, however, there is little to mitigate the vagueness of post-process. For example, one factor is the range of scholarship claimed. Some post-process theorists mark its advent with the social and cultural turn of the mid-1980s, effectively enveloping this scholarship within post-process. Others, however, most notably Thomas Kent, a leading theorist of post-process, direct their critique at expressivists, cognitivists, and social constructionists alike, thus situating post-process as following rather than encompassing these schools of thought. Furthermore, there are additional complications within these post-process groups, such as differences over what the adoption of a post-process position would or should lead to. Some, for example, argue for reform of first-year composition; some call for its abolition; some advocate programmatic change; and some hint at disciplinary and institutional changes so profound as to have us re-think the nature of education itself. Post-process is, then, no more homogeneous than process.

Therefore, to gauge post-process—to get some sense of what it is, how it is valued, and what it would portend—I profile post-process according to the following scheme:

1. Entrance of post-process theory into the discourse of rhetoric and composition

2. Entrance of the post-process moniker into the discourse of rhetoric and composition, along with a rejoinder

3. Post-process scholarship that lays claim to the scholarship of the social/cultural turn, which is divided into two strands:

a. Strand One Post-Process, comprised of those who may self-identify as post-process but who do not necessarily partake of Kent’s theory

b. Strand Two Post-Process, comprised of those who explicitly self-identify as post-process but appropriate only specific concepts from Kent’s theory of paralogic hermeneutics, concepts which they then repurpose

1. Critiques of process within Strand Two Post-Process

2. Calls for reform within Strand Two Post-Process

3. Repercussions for a post-process profession within Strand Two Post-Process

4. Post-process scholarship that positions itself beyond that of the social/cultural turn

5. A few rejoinders to Kent’s edited Post-Process collection

Entrance of Post-Process Theory into the Discourse of Rhetoric and Composition

As this post-profile unfolds, it becomes increasingly obvious that what constitutes post-process theory is arguable. For the moment, though, I want to focus on the theoretical grounding that some who both self-identify as post-process and who address post-process in their scholarship reference in their work. This is the theory of Thomas Kent.5

Kent began publishing work that articulated the theory now most closely associated with post-process in 1989, some six years before the term itself would actually be coined.6 Indeed, Kent’s theory, which eventually came to be known as “post-process,” culminated in his book, Paralogic Rhetoric: A Theory of Communicative Interaction, published in 1993. Paralogic hermeneutics, as it is often called, is based on the theory of communicative interaction of analytic philosopher Donald Davidson.7 This theory rests on two premises: the first, that “communicative interaction is a thoroughly hermeneutic act”; and the second, that this act “cannot be converted into a logical framework or system of social conventions that determines the meaning of our utterances” (x). In his formulation of paralogic hermeneutics, Kent argues that conventions of language do not “control” language use; rather, conventions of language are “established through the give and take of communicative interaction” (x). Further, he argues against “the claim that discourse production occurs in specific communities,” along with “the related claim that ethnographers can account for the process of discourse production by disclosing the cultural conventions that define a community” (x). Kent suggests that “an externalist conception of language” such as Davidson’s “can account for many of the inherent problems engendered by the assumption that meaning derives from a framework of normative conventions” (x). Paralogic hermeneutics rests on the assumption that “human subjectivity is all that we can know of the world” (100). No mediation is thus required between the individual and other individuals or between the individual and the world, for to make such a claim would be, according to Kent, paramount to endowing the particular “conceptual scheme” of mediation sole epistemological status (97–101).

Kent takes from Davidson four concepts, which are key to paralogic hermeneutics: triangulation, passing theory, prior theory, and the principle of charity. Briefly, triangulation is the organizing principle, enfolding the other three to arrive at what Jane Perkins calls a “baseline of communication and understanding,” where understanding is, of course, understood to be interpretive (Paralogic 160). Passing theory is enacted when we communicate with another person and is constituted by the “unconscious adjustments” we make regarding our communicant’s beliefs, values, and background knowledge in order to realize a more ideal communicative act. However, passing theory requires a concomitant enactment of prior theory, which is constituted by a person’s background knowledge and which functions to improve the “guesses” of passing theory (160). Last, the principle of charity constitutes an assumption that (a) the ground of communication is a shared, common world in which we each assume others to be relatively rational beings and that (b) we unconsciously extend our best effort to understand others because we do want/need to communicate (161). Kent appropriates these concepts from Davidson’s theory of communicative interaction to fashion his theory of paralogic hermeneutics, which he advocates as a theory for both discourse reception and discourse production.

But to fully understand Kent’s theoretical formulation of paralogic hermeneutics, it is necessary to distinguish how he characterizes paralogy. According to Kent, paralogy is

the feature of language-in-use that accounts for successful communicative interaction. More specifically, paralogy refers to uncodifiable moves we make when we communicate with others, and ontologically, the term describes the unpredictable, elusive, and tenuous decisions or strategies we employ when we actually put language to use, [. . .] paralogy should be distinguished from the rhetorical concept of paralogism, which refers to a sophism, an illogical argument, or an example of false reasoning. Unlike paralogism, paralogy is not a derivative of logic: paralogy is not faulty logic. Rather paralogy seeks to subsume logic. As the etymological origin of the term suggests, paralogy means “beyond logic” in that it accounts for the attribute of language-in-use that defies reduction to a codifiable process or to a system of logical relations. (3)

In Kent’s theory, each instance of language-in-use is a radically unique act. I would add that Kent makes much of the word codify in both his theory and in his criticism of process. His reliance on this word warrants a dictionary explication. The first definition listed in the tenth edition of Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary reads, “to reduce to a code,” where code is then found to be defined as “a systematic statement of a body of law; esp: one given statutory force,” “a system of principles or rules” (“Codify”).

Kent is critical of traditional “logico-systemic approaches” that continue, he says, to “dominate” the field (Paralogic 24). These include expressive, empirical, and social constructionist approaches. According to Kent, expressive approaches, as represented in the work of Peter Elbow and Ken Macrorie, assume that all writers “share certain innate mental categories,” which they access through “systemic processes,” for example, freewriting and heuristics (24). Empirical approaches such as those of Linda Flower and John Hayes, H. H. Clark and Susan Haviland, and Barry Kroll assume that writing competence can be measured by the likes of protocol analysis or brain hemisphere research and the results systematized to accurately describe the “constitutive elements of effective writing” (24). Moreover, the social constructionist work of Kenneth Bruffee and M. K. Halliday assumes that writing is a “transactive social activity,” that is, that writers and readers contribute equally to the construction of meaning. Moreover, the social constructionist work of Bruffee and Halliday assumes an equal contribution of writers and readers to the construction of meaning. This equal contribution represents both discourse production and reception as “conventional social processes” (25). All share, Kent says, a foundationalist assumption that discourse production and reception “can be reduced to systemic processes and then taught in classrooms in some sort of codified manner” (25). If, then, discourse production and analysis cannot be reduced to a logico-systemic process, Kent says we must concede that both our rhetorical tradition and our current notions of writing and reading need serious reconsideration. Paralogic hermeneutics is, of course, his recommendation.

As for the potential repercussions of paralogic hermeneutics, Kent says the theory would require us to re-think the student/teacher relationship and to “reimagine the curricular mission of composition and literature courses within the university” (Paralogic 158). We would give up our dependence on Plato and Aristotle; we would understand that while codifiable material—for example, grammar rules, syntax, paragraphing, modes of discourse, etc.—can be usefully taught through the dialectic method, dialectic is moot since knowledge is located in the subjective knower; we would also understand that writing and reading “cannot be taught, for nothing exists to teach” (161). Traditional writing and literature courses would thus cease to exist and we would work, instead, as mentors who co-construct meaning with students. Admittedly, he says, more teachers would be required, which would not only “be very costly” but also “create complex problems for the discipline of English” (169).

Again, not all or even most who may self-identify as post-process necessarily subscribe to Kent’s theory. Indeed, when the term post-process entered the field, Kent’s theory, which he had already begun to discuss in various articles, was not even addressed.

Post-Process Moniker and the Discourse of Rhetoric and Composition

John Trimbur is said to have been the first to coin the term post-process, in a review written in 1994 of Patricia Bizzell’s Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness, C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon’s Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy, and Kurt Spellmeyer’s Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition.8 All three books address literacy as a problem for democratic participation in terms of how difference is negotiated, how literacy is defined, and how civic discourse has been impoverished. Each is notable, according to Trimbur, for couching literacy arguments in a framework of politics rather than the usual framework of students’ processes of reading and writing. Thus, Trimbur writes that

taken together, the three books can be read as statements that both reflect and [. . .] enact what has come to be called the “social turn” of the 1980s, a post-process, post-cognitivist theory and pedagogy that represent literacy as an ideological arena and composing as a cultural activity by which writers position and reposition themselves in relation to their own and others’ subjectivities, discourses, practices, and institutions. (emphasis added, “Taking” 109)

Trimbur then uses this clear and succinct concept of post-process to analyze how each of the three books distinguishes the result of “a crisis within the process paradigm and a growing disillusion with its limits and pressures” (109). This is not to say, however, that Trimbur dismisses the significance of process or the contributions that researchers of writing have made to our understanding of writing. He does take process to task, though, as he recounts its early, heady days, when teachers responded to the repressive “formalism” of current-traditional rhetoric and sought to empower students by giving them ownership of their learning and their writing. Effectively, this move to empower and to confer ownership to students not only simplified a very complex act, he says, but it also led teachers to assume that they could inhabit some culturally pristine space from which to bestow an authentic language upon their students. Equally destructive was an abdication of teacher authority, as teachers attempted to occupy the role of facilitator or co-learner. This led, Trimbur says, to genuine problems. Students recognized only too well the bottom line that their writing products would be exchanged for a grade. The more astute students also recognized the genuine currency of symbolic exchange to be “sincerity” and “authenticity.” Ironically, then, even as teachers abdicated authority in the interest of freeing students’ powers of authenticity, students were “learning a genre their teachers had failed to name” and for which they would be handsomely rewarded for (re)producing (110).

Trimbur’s interest in the three books revolves around problems inherent in process, particularly with the issue of teacher authority and the utopian desire each work advocates as negotiation to the cultural politics of literacy and thus to a fuller notion of democracy. Knoblauch and Brannon, he says, realized that their attack on the classical tradition in a previous book and their subsequent subscription to process merely replaced one master narrative with another, the latter distinguished by its liberalism and focus on individuality. Now, paralyzed by a postmodern fear of master narratives, Knoblauch and Brannon, in Trimbur’s estimation, succumb to the process fetish of relinquished teacher authority and eschew the engagement of rhetorical argument that would promote their own beliefs in radical social change. Trimbur suggests that Spellmeyer also capitulates to a preoccupation of process with the student-writer. Spellmeyer attempts to resolve the contradiction between educating students for mastery and educating them for citizenship by nominating the essay as his genre-of-choice and presuming that the essay resides in some privileged and unmarked social and political space that students can unproblematically appropriate for their own ends. Finally, Trimbur endorses Bizzell’s self-understanding, which she achieves through a critical review of her own work, that no method and no meta-discourse can successfully bring students to critical consciousness. Trimbur agrees with Bizzell that we must recognize the limitations of the prison-house of language and unapologetically assume the attendant responsibility to promote what we ethically view as the common good.

Countering Trimbur and the many who adopted Trimbur’s position, Debra Jacobs argues that regardless of its limitations, “losing sight of writing as a process can lead to impoverishing the process of critical inquiry” (673). She admits, however, her discomfort “with the risk I take in advancing an allegiance to what [process] has been so thoroughly critiqued that its limitations can readily be rehearsed by anyone who is even modestly acquainted with recent composition scholarship” (663–64). Nevertheless, Jacobs does take issue with Trimbur and his review, not for the critique and resolution he offers, but with his recommendation of the notion post-process, which is bought with what she views as an essentialist characterization of process theory and classroom practice. Furthermore, she admonishes those advocates of post-process who conflate process theory with expressivism and call upon dated process theory from the 1970s and early 1980s to construct a straw man merely for the sake of dismissing it.

In her 2001 essay published in JAC, Jacobs responds to three articles—Candace Spigelman’s “What Role Virtue?,” Thomas Rickert’s “‘Hands Up, You’re Free’: Composition in a Post-Oedipal World,” and Anthony Petruzzi’s “Kairotic Rhetoric in Freire’s Liberatory Pedagogy.” She concedes that she takes liberties in applying the ideas in these three articles, particularly those of Rickert, to pedagogy in general and to process theory in particular since the three do not share the same views. Nevertheless, she defends doing so on the grounds that unless we conceive the classroom only as a space for “happenings,” we are forced to theorize classroom practice (666). The purpose of her response is to “reexamine process theory and pedagogy in light of some common characteristics of the liberatory pedagogy” all three writers, she says, “point toward” (663). In the estimation of Jacobs, the characteristics the writers identify in their formulations of a critical or liberatory pedagogy not only “resonate” with but also “enrich” her understanding of writing as process (663).

Both Spigelman and Rickert address the rub between emancipatory pedagogies and the disciplinary and institutional authority that undermines them. For Spigelman, problems occur as teachers attempt to intervene in students’ critical and ethical development, but her position is that teachers still have a responsibility to exercise such interventions. Rickert advocates a post-pedagogy that promotes and values “transformative acts of transgression” (Jacobs 663). But Jacobs believes Rickert’s post-pedagogy is actually a “non-pedagogy,” since his post-pedagogy of the act would “refuse accommodation entirely in favor of a radical abandonment” (qtd. in Jacobs 666). Petruzzi, in his attempt to theorize a Freirean version of “critical consciousness as a rhetorical concept,” understands passivity and accommodation from a phenomenological perspective, as comprising an individual’s doxa (commonsensical, passive, and unexamined knowledge) to which new knowledge is added and subsequently assimilated. In his view, then, both quotidian (stream of consciousness) and critical consciousness are situated in the “same hermeneutic circle” and are thus “co-implicated with critical consciousness in processual acts of cognition” (663).

Jacobs believes all three writers strive for an emancipatory moment achieved through transvaluation. To achieve this, however, an intervention must occur. Jacobs says that process theory offers us the possibility for such disruptive interventions. If process theory has been reduced to disciplinary doxa, she says, then it is our responsibility to disrupt it through interventions such as asking “new and better questions” (617). Jacobs thus chooses to enlarge process to accommodate the goal of critical inquiry she shares with Trimbur and other social/cultural scholars.

The entrance of the post-process moniker into rhetoric and composition (1994) clearly did not reference the paralogic hermeneutic theory or paralogic rhetoric of Kent (1989–1993). Additionally, post-process, as originally coined, clearly assumed a provenance of scholarship synonymous with that of the social/cultural turn. This assumption did not go uncontested, as evidenced in Jacobs’s contention that critical inquiry cannot be effectively practiced without a viable theory of process.

Post-Process Scholarship and the Social/Cultural Turn

This third space of post-process is where most who self-identify as post-process reside, making it the most heterogeneous of all post-process spaces. However, an examination of post-process scholarship that lays claim to the social/cultural turn of the mid-1980s forward reveals two major post-process strands. One includes those who may self-identify as post-process but who do not necessarily ground that identity in Kent’s theory of paralogic hermeneutics. The other strand self-identifies as post-process but appropriates from Kent’s theory only specific concepts, which are then mediated in degree from his strong version. In the following section, I consider these two strands in turn in order to clarify and contrast them.

Strand One Post-Process, Comprised of Those Who May Self-Identify as Post-Process but Who Do Not Necessarily Partake of Kent’s Theory

This strand of post-process includes some of those who likely self-identify as post-process but whose scholarship does not foreground the term. They might be said, therefore, to harbor a post-process sensibility of the type described earlier: generational and/or disaffected. This sensibility is informed at the very least by a tacit critique of process, as well as by the assumption that the advent of post-process coincides with the mid-1980s scholarship of the social/cultural turn.

Designating scholarship into this category is problematic if only because some whose scholarship I include might well take issue with their inclusion. To mitigate this difficulty, I restrict coverage to one edited collection, with the assumption that the contributors share, to some degree, the sensibility if not the position of the collection’s editor, Joseph Petraglia. The edited collection to which I allude is Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction, published in 1995. It is in his introduction that Petraglia illustrates his particular post-process sensibility and position.

Petraglia writes that the focus of the collection is the acronym GWSI (general writing skills instruction), which he defines as “the general ability to develop and organize ideas, use techniques for inventing topics worthy of investigation, adapt one’s purpose to an audience, and anticipate reader response” (xi). According to Petraglia, GWSI characterizes almost all contemporary writing curricula in most composition courses, with the exception of those such as basic writing, technical writing, writing-intensive content courses, and creative writing, all of which have their own “specialized content and limited rhetorical scope” (xii). These latter, content-rich, and rhetorically situated courses contrast sharply with the intention of the GWSI course, which, he says, is to give students skills that, ostensibly, teach them “‘to write,’” with the assumption that these skills transcend any context or content (xii). Moreover, Petraglia says that GWSI is not any straw man since it is the curriculum taught by the majority of teachers, the curriculum that almost all composition textbooks endorse, and the curriculum for which English departments garner considerable resources. Because GWSI is synonymous with writing instruction itself for many in the discipline, Petraglia concedes that questioning the legitimacy of GWSI is tantamount to questioning the discipline itself.

As I have indicated, the degree to which contributors to the collection share Petraglia’s view varies, but all offer some critique of GWSI. Broadly, these critiques revolve around a variety of queries regarding GWSI: whether it is “intellectually defensible,” given what we now know about what it means to be a rhetor and a writer; whether it helps students perform effectively beyond the specific course in which it is taught; whether it can continue to secure a space for rhetoric and composition in the academy and, if not, whether we ought not begin to attempt to create spaces more congenial to current theory and research (xii).

Addressing the issue of the intellectual defensibility of GWSI, some suggest that there is a paradox in how the GWSI course is constructed and conducted in its disciplinary and institutional space and what we now commonly acknowledge as part of our disciplinary knowledge about writing. This disciplinary knowledge is abstracted by Lil Brannon:

The act of writing is a complex sociocognitive interaction with the world that entails, beyond mechanical control, such subtle practices as establishing and maintaining social positions, adapting to variable discursive conventions, and constructing ideas and relationships for oneself and others. It is not separate from one’s life or from one’s culture. Our [. . .] responsibility then [is] to ensure not that students receive some essentially alien technology, some “correct” set of language practices, in order to proceed through the university, but rather that they learn to use, with greater subtlety and control, the language they bring with them, adjusting the register, the cadences, the vocabulary, the social codes, the nuances, and the intellectual moves, as they confront the demands of writing. (240–41)

In light of what this passage represents about our disciplinary understanding of writing, contributors find the GWSI classroom, as constructed in this edited collection, to be deficient.

For example, Dan Royer maintains that the rhetorical situation of the GWSI course cannot accommodate the range of student experience needed for a genuine practice of invention. He also believes, however, that the course can be improved with a new theory of invention as guided phenomenology, which he articulates. David Kaufer and Patricia Dunmire address the lack of content in the GWSI course and offer a course they developed and based on Sylvia Scribner’s notion of knowledge design for teaching analysis and analytic writing. To address his criticism of the theoretical thinness of the GWSI course, David Jolliffe recommends we reconsider the multivocal and interreferential nature of discourse. With his critique that the GWSI course is not so much bad pedagogy as pedagogy effective at producing “the wrong results,” Fred Kemp recommends a postmodern-informed pedagogy based on electronic texts, which he believes would offer us a way to literally rethink what it means to write (181).

Others, however, are not so optimistic regarding the potential of reform. David Russell studies the course as a paradoxical activity system that attempts to teach writing as part of activity systems of which neither teachers nor students are actually part. For writing to have genuine meaning and purpose, it must occur within the complexity and richness that can only be offered, he says, by a specific activity system (“Activity Theory and Its Implications”). Aviva Freedman’s research on genre echoes this idea. Her findings indicate that students acquire the discipline-specific features of genres routinely taught in GWSI classrooms in their content courses without resort to either models or to explicit teaching. Furthermore, not only does the explicit teaching of the underlying rules of genre in the GWSI classroom fail to facilitate learning, Freedman says, it often impedes it. Petraglia concurs, writing that formal instruction of genre conventions and principles may well be “counterproductive.” Such instruction may suggest to students that rhetorical situations are governed by rules and conventions. This impression diminishes the complexity and richness of rhetorical situations students will be expected to navigate in their futures. Petraglia maintains that evaluating students on their performance in the impoverished contexts of GWSI is not just “unrealistic” but is also “unethical” (90–91).

Criticism of GWSI also considers contexts that would better facilitate students’ writing. “The combined evidence from many studies” Freedman reports, “pointed compellingly to the powerful facilitative effect of establishing a richly textured and finely managed discursive context” for students (141). This, she continues, “is what we saw typically in the disciplinary classes observed, where students did indeed learn to write, and learn to write extraordinarily well” (141). Her suggestion for an alternative to GWSI is “a specialized model of WAC” that might function in a variety of ways, for example, with writing centers, “sheltered courses,” and/or writing-intensive courses (140). Suggesting that writing cannot be taught but that we can nevertheless locate environments for students in which writing “naturally occurs,” Petraglia, too, suggests guidelines analogous to WAC (94). Lil Brannon, who reports on The University at Albany, SUNY’s move away from compulsory first-year composition to a WAC model, along with their rationalization for doing so, says that first-year composition continued to function so long as they conceived of literacy and writing in strictly functional terms, as “something basic, a skill to be mastered, a technology to be applied” (239). Having critiqued that assumption, an assumption that constructs students in terms of lack and deficiency, they were able to “move away from ghettoized general writing skills instruction” and toward a model of literacy that views students as developing writers (240). This move was accomplished, she says, by a group of faculty across the curriculum understanding that the first-year composition requirement was based on a “‘skills’ concept of writing that was losing professional currency” that contradicted what those responsible for SUNY’s composition program believed about writing and what “major researchers in the field found credible” (240). This vein of criticism of GWSI suggests programmatic changes that will provide students with more rhetorically sound environments. Such changes, of course, also have implications for disciplinarity.

Many in this collection advocate for reform in first-year composition; others call for its abolition. Many are sympathetic to Freedman’s position that “in the end, I am arguing against stand-alone GWSI classes” (140). While they argue for reform rather than abolition, even Kaufer and Dunmire, write that “the question of a college writing program’s goals and cultural legitimation has to be answered better than we have so far answered it” (218). In terms of activity theory, the writing done in GWSI courses must meet the objectives of each of the activity systems served by the course; the activity system of the GWSI course, on the other hand, simply does not exist beyond the confines of the course. Petraglia says, too, that the real question is not whether the GWSI course “could be doing something better but whether it is attempting to do something that needs to be done at all” (89). “Baldly stated,” he writes, “general writing skills instruction—perhaps the very notion of the composition classroom—is an idea whose time has gone” (97).

This strand of post-process also distances itself from early process theory, as it tacitly envelops process theory and practice into its critique of the ubiquitous GWSI approach. It also presumes to envelop the scholarship of the social and cultural turn of the mid-1980s on as part of its domain. These scholars appropriate this scholarship as theoretical ground upon which they offer additional theoretical formulations to render the composition course more consonant and amenable to the social/cultural turn. Still, some within this post-process strand believe the course to be hopelessly compromised by its disciplinary and institutional context, and they call for its abolition (“The New”).

Interestingly, Robert Connors opens this edited collection with a historical account of calls for both the reform and abolition of composition, so that we can, he says, better understand how the current abolitionist movement compares with those of the past. Historically, he says, calls for abolition have come from those outside the field, whereas the current one is being proffered by insiders. Because insiders do have knowledge of the local circumstances of our disciplinary situation, Connors suggests the current abolitionist movement warrants greater scrutiny and consideration on our part.

Strand Two Post-Process, Comprised of Those Who Explicitly Self-Identify as Post-Process but Appropriate from Kent’s Theory of Paralogic Hermeneutics Only Specific Concepts, Which They Mediate

This strand of post-process theory includes those who explicitly self-identify as post-process but appropriate specific concepts from Kent’s theory, which they then mediate. While Kent’s position might be said to constitute a strong version of a particular concept, most in this group do not fully share Kent’s conviction. Kent acknowledges this in the introduction to his edited collection, Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing-Process Paradigm, published in 1999.

In the introduction, Kent writes that “different incarnations” of post-process theory exists (1), and that while not all of the book’s contributors agree about “the nature of ‘post’ in ‘post-process’ theory, all agree that change is in the air,” regarding how we talk about writing and what writers do (5). It is with such a caveat, then, that we can reasonably expect this collection to reflect a broad range of consonance with Kent’s theory as formulated and described in Paralogic Rhetoric. Kent distills three principle assumptions that he believes unite the scholarship of the book’s contributors,: that writing is (1) public, (2) interpretive, and (3) situated.

The claim that writing is public implies two assumptions: (1) that writing is constituted by communicative interaction between individuals who share specific relations with others and the world at specific historical moments, and (2) that since these moments and relations are unique in each instance of communicative interaction, “no process can capture what writers do” in these ever-changing moments and relations (1–2). While it is advantageous for individuals to have a command of conventions, genres, and language use, or what Kent calls “codifiable shortcuts,” these do not equate to a “Big Theory,” as they cannot function as a repeatable process that would lead to success in every writing situation. The point, Kent says, is that a writer “cannot start from nowhere” (2). There is always a public dimension to writing.

The claim that writing is interpretive refers to an act that engages in “a relation of understanding” with others (2). Interpretation is thus equally involved in reception and production. Because it engages in perpetual hermeneutic acts, interpretation constitutes nothing less than our attempt to make sense of the world. Although hermeneutic acts are based on guesswork, Kent does concede that practice can render us “better guessers” (2–3) but insists that effective guessing resists codification to any process that might guarantee success. Because any degree of knowing is the result of interpretation, most post-process theorists maintain that interpretation “goes all the way down.” Writing cannot occur, therefore, in a “vacuum,” since the ground of interpretation is a relationship with others and the world (2–3).

That writing is situated simply indicates that “writers are never nowhere,” a notion Kent concedes is as equally commonplace among process as post-process theorists. However, the latter put more emphasis on situatedness, he says, given their understanding of a communicative act as a fluid and indeterminate “hermeneutic dance” comprised of two simultaneous acts, prior theory and passing theory. From this perspective, situatedness assumes that we are always “somewhere” in relation to other language users, a positioning that influences not only the nature of our prior theory but also how we use a prior theory to formulate a passing theory. Importantly, these communicative instances “can never be reduced to a predictable process” (4).

Critiques of Process within Strand Two Post-Process

Again, the degree to which Post-Process contributors share these three basic concepts of writing varies, but all are united in their critique of process. From a historical perspective, George Pullman critiques the history of the process movement as a rhetorical narrative of “triumph of compassion and empiricism” over the current-traditional rhetoric of “tradition and prejudice” (16). This was accomplished with two moves: one from a focus on the teacher to the student and the other from a notion of writing as skill to writing as ontological, or as a way of being (23–25). This “triumph” constituted, he says, nothing less than a return to the “self-reflective, contemplative life,” which Plato offered to Phaedrus as “an alternative to the life of political power that the young man thought he wanted” (25). Pullman thus employs these binaries to argue that many of the dichotomies constructed by process have cast long, pervasive, and detrimental shadows.

From a disciplinary perspective, Petraglia critiques the close association of process with the behaviorist model in psychology. Process theorists argued against a notion of writing as a single behavior and for a notion constituted by procedures and strategies that eventually coalesced into the complex system of process. This understanding then established a professional agenda that both resonated with the notion of rhetoric as practical art (techne) and propelled research and teaching. It rendered other methodologies viable, especially those including a scientific analytic component, which contributed, Petraglia argues, (1) to serve composition well as a field “dedicated to the production of rhetorical skills”; and (2) to “[discipline] writing in every sense of the word,” imposing a coherence on lore (North) and providing “a catechistic structure through which writing could attain a distinct academic identity” (“Is There” 51). Cognitive models of process greatly contributed to the development of “a genuinely academic profile” that ultimately became the movement’s “Manifest Destiny” (51). However, the empirical method objectified writing process and continued he says, a two-millennia tradition of “dissecting and redissecting the whole of rhetoric into manageable parts” (53). Thus, Petraglia argues that the current professional profile of the field remains entrenched in the impoverished pedagogy of GWSI.

Others also take process to task for its privileging of individuality. David Russell credits process with enacting an important shift from text to the individual writer, thus effectively rendering the student an object of study. The problem, he argues, is that process “remained with the individual” and attempted to generalize psychological processes across a broad range of students and settings (“Activity Theory and Process” 80). Along with this, process altered teacher/student relationships, but then exerted a normative influence on them. Teachers were taught, Russell says, to intervene strategically in students’ process, using a normative process vocabulary to guide not only their verbal interaction with students but also their written responses and final evaluations. This pedagogy assumed that the stages of student writing constituted “legitimate stages of work in progress rather than failed attempts to produce a correct product”; teachers then responded with “transactional in-progress comments [. . .] rather than evaluative ‘final’ judgments” (150). Russell concludes, however, that the shifts made by process contributed to disciplinary legitimacy. These shifts provided English departments leverage to successfully bid for additional institutional resources, and they allowed some writing programs to successfully argue for separation from English departments, based on a body of knowledge created through strong research agendas and newly minted graduate programs.

Interestingly, this collection includes a voice that contradicts the lament over the focus of process on the individual writer. Barbara Couture critiques process precisely for having failed to translate process scholarship—which, she says, assumed that writing ought to develop and express the “subjective agent”—into effective classroom application. Composition relied on modeling technique rather than on the emulation of expression. Where the former relies on experts’ writing, the latter relies on students’ striving “to emulate others, to be like them, worthy of them, perhaps, even better than them.” This attitude, she says, is partly to blame for the failure of process to translate process scholarship into practice (30–31). According to Couture, post-process can thus more effectively address the issue of students’ self-development and self-expression.

Others critique process for the universality they believe process harbors. Gary Olson expresses this complaint in terms of a master narrative that results from the attempt to formulate a model that would apply in all writing situations and ignore the local (8). This attempt to systematize something that cannot be systematized, he says, is the gist of the complaint Thomas Kent and other post-process theorists offer. George Pullman agrees: speaking of the goal of process to reduce writing to “some step-by-step procedure with universal application” (27), Pullman argues that, had the process movement accomplished this goal, all writers in all situations would use the same process. That process has not thus proven adequate to this task indicates a need for change. Nancy DeJoy offers personal experience in her description of the “complexes” she experienced as a gendered student subjected to both expressivist and cognitivist writing process approaches. She says she was “accused more than once of being confused and/or hysterical, of not understanding, for example, the ‘universal’ quality of any or all of dominant process models’ conceptualizations of audience, invention, and so forth” (164).

Pullman also objects to the universality of the classroom site. He contends there was no paradigm shift, that both writing process and current-traditional rhetoric share a limiting and disabling metaphor that defines both, namely, the classroom, whose nature is distinguished by the exigency of illiteracy mediated by abstracted, universalized conventions (27). Pullman concludes, however, that rhetoric is too complex to ever be codified; its teaching, therefore, “must serve only an introductory purpose and must never be mistaken for (or reconstructed as) real rhetoric as it is lived and practiced” (28-29). Russell, on the other hand, does not share Pullman’s presumption regarding the goal of universality. He believes that process was commodified. Still, he contends that most process research focuses on the classroom, rather than on what is of more interest: the relation between the writing processes of school and those beyond school. Russell uses activity systems theory to argue that we look beyond how “the writing process” is taught within our own school activity systems to “the plural sociologics of various networks of people and purposes and tools, including that most protean tool, writing, in the relation between school and society” (95). If our desire is to make substantive changes in writing, composition must broaden its “study of the microlevel circulation of discursive tools (and power)” between school and society and insinuate our own tools into those activity systems. “In doing so,” Russell says, “the commodification of writing processes is not an irony to be lamented but a sign of composition’s influence to be understood and used, one hopes, for good” (95).

The universality of process beyond the composition classroom is also a target of critique. Nancy Blyer reports that knowledge of writing in one situation does not ensure successful writing in another, nor can any pedagogy ensure such success (68). Russell critiques process in public schools with an anecdote regarding his and others’ attempts to have NCTE make changes regarding the description of process in their curriculum standards document. Russell has passionately argued, to no avail, to change the phrase “‘the writing process’” to the plural “‘writing processes.’” “Early on,” he writes, “researchers such as Applebee (“Problems”) pointed to problems with notions of the writing process, as a unitary psychological process that would be somehow more ‘real’—less school-bound—than previous ways of learning and teaching writing” (80). That a notion of “the writing process” has, indeed, become reified in public education is evidenced in Russell’s narrative about entering his third-grade daughter’s classroom to see four, large, commercially produced posters, each containing a one-word text: “PREWRITE. WRITE. REVISE. EDIT.” (80). Both Blyer and Russell attest to the problems of individuality and universality in process as it is applied in institutional contexts other than first-year composition.

Strand two post-process critiques differ from those in strand one, where scholars maintain that neither GWSI nor process is theoretically or pedagogically defensible, that GWSI is actually detrimental to students’ writing, and that it compromises our disciplinary security. In contrast, strand two advocates must explicitly critique process in order to self-identify as post-process. Their critiques, therefore, focus on aspects that process valued in its turn away from current-traditional rhetoric: (1) a focus on the student, which this group of scholars translates to the privileging of individuality over the social; (2) a focus on the cognitive models of process, which is maintained to have continued a two thousand year-old tradition of essentializing rhetoric as techne; (3) a focus on a universality that process is said to have valued but was unable to achieve; (4) and a critique of the value process placed on the teacher-student relationship, which is argued to have constituted a system of mediation inherently flawed by its overdetermined, always-already commodified epistemological assumptions. But it must also be said that while these critiques are, indeed, more specific and directed than those in strand one post-process, they nevertheless seem very familiar.9

Calls for Reform within Strand Two Post-Process

As anticipated, contributors to this edited collection use broad strokes to paint a post-process landscape. Many of these also resonate with great familiarity, while others call for more radical disciplinary (re)imaginings. All agree, however, that change is needed. Most familiar are calls for particular sorts of reform. These might be said to subscribe to a mild version of Kent’s paralogic hermeneutic theory. For example, Couture writes that by treating writing as design, we can “fulfill the [process] movement’s original promise” (31). This would be realized through the use of textual theory, with its deconstruction of foundationalism, along with critical genre theory. These complementary theories, she believes, are sufficient to help students understand writing as personal agency and as a way to become better people. Debra Journet also endorses genre theory as enabling us to rethink the relation of the social and cognitive in composing, the relationship between composing processes and composed products, and the extent to which composing is communal or individual. Focusing on disciplinary and interdisciplinary genre relationships, she argues, has implications for how we understand the intellectual factors involved in all composing practices.

John Schilb, who critiques the role of the essay, particularly the centrality of personal and exploratory essays in many composition courses recommends reform based on a reconceptualization of the essay. He contends that we and students ought to critique the signifying practices essay writers use to “simulate” experience in their writing. He is also concerned with the role of the social in the essayist’s experiences, whether the experiences depicted in the essay itself or those that surround the writing of the essay. The circulation and reception of essays also merit critical attention. The point, Schilb says, is that we ought not view essays as virtual re-enactments of experience but as constructed representations. Such an understanding can lead students not only to better appreciate the craft of essay writing, he believes, but also to imaginings of how their own texts might influence different situations (“Reprocessing”).

A stronger affiliation with Kent’s concepts of writing as public, interpretive, and situated, is evident in Helen Rothschild Ewald’s “A Tangled Web of Discourses: On Post-Process Pedagogy and Communicative Interaction.” She articulates how post-process pedagogies steeped in the notion of communicative interaction might influence discourse away from a transmission model and toward the transactional, a move that might suggest ways for students and teachers to interact as subjects. The organizing principle she nominates for this pedagogy is discourse moves, that is, rhetorical strategies enhanced by students’ prior knowledge and social differences. Because post-process places a high “exchange value” on teacher contributions to their student communicants, a writing class would explore writing studies’ disciplinary content (e.g., “writing skills and pedagogical methodologies”), along with “the contingent nature of instructional advice” (129). This pedagogy would function, she says, to demystify both the explicit and tacit content students confront in the classroom, enabling more successful communicative interaction with the classroom, the teacher, and their fellow students. Ewald concludes, however, that the potential to realize this post-process classroom depends “in large part on our ability to research and re-envision the educational paradigms and speech genres that currently shadow our efforts” (130).

Sidney Dobrin most explicitly sympathizes with Kent’s theory, even as he admits that paralogic hermeneutic theories fail to account for power and ethics. Therefore, his goal is to make these theories, if not consonant with, at least resonant with liberatory and radical pedagogies (“Paralogic”). Other contributors likewise recognize this need. Blyer, for example, advocates a critical research approach that rejects the process research mode and focuses on interpretation and meaning. In addition, her approach insists that a focus on domination and power is prerequisite to critique and social change. She says that while critical research may not be on the post-process agenda, such research is consonant both with post-process scholars’ view of communicative interaction as hermeneutic and paralogic and their goal of communicants engaging in a “‘hermeneutical journey of self-discovery’” (79). Just such a journey of self-discovery is illustrated in John Clifford and Elizabeth Ervin’s account of their own moves to post-process. Though Clifford and Ervin do not share generation, gender, or geography, they do share the common experience of having embraced process, only later to become disaffected with it in favor of a post-process model that engages both teacher and student in public, civic work.

David Foster sees the pedagogical challenge of the post-process classroom in the diversity of ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic status. He is not particularly optimistic about the possibility of meeting this challenge. Chronicling Kent’s externalist posture, which views writing as radically contingent from situation to situation, Foster concedes that such “a thorough-going skepticism of this sort” dampens the “best-intentioned efforts” to formulate an acceptable writing pedagogy, threatens the very existence of traditional writing programs, and challenges our notions of appropriate research methods (153). In place of traditional writing programs, Foster therefore recommends WAC programs, which he views as enacting pedagogy more compatible with Kent’s paralogy. In place of process research methods, he recommends more self-reflexive methods informed by concepts such as Sandra Harding’s notion of strong objectivity. Although Foster does not articulate a specific pedagogy, he does interrogate and critique a variety of collaborative pedagogical models for their potential to avoid the collision that leads, he says, to genuine conflict when pedagogy explicitly values difference.

Vulnerable to charges of being “masculinist, phallogocentric, foundationalist, often essentialist, and, at the very least, limiting” (9), the ubiquitous rhetoric of assertion (asserting an argument of truth) in composition classes is, according to Olson, ripe for critique. To wage this postmodern critique, he suggests we look to Sandra Harding’s notion of strong objectivity, Donna Haraway’s notion of cyborg writing, and Jean-Francois Lyotard’s notion of master narratives, all of which he believes would challenge us to reinvent writing and to reflect on how we translate our understanding of discourse into the post-process classroom. Writing in this view, Olson says, is “radically contingent” and “radically situational” (9).

Critical discourse and the strategies of feminist discourse merit a firm position in the post-process classroom, according to DeJoy, who articulates a notion of counterprocess that embodies these discourses and strategies. Counterprocess is distinguished, she says, by three moves: (1) from “mastery to analysis”; (2) from “identification” with the dominant to “alternative routes to subjectivity”; and (3) from “persuasion to participation” (164). To this end, she recommends heuristics that positively change the subject positions available to writers.

Again, what is most obvious in these calls for reform is the degree of affinity individual contributors exhibit with Kent’s theory. Kent’s theory, taken to its logical conclusion, raises the question of whether there is any reason to think that these calls for reform are any less susceptible than process to the charge of epistemological commodification. Can these reforms—writing as design, genre theory, critique of signifying practices, discourse moves, difference, liberatory and radical pedagogies, postmodernism, and/or critical/feminist discourse—avoid the “Big Theory” trap? This would not be an issue, of course, but for the fact that the people who are suggesting these reforms not only explicitly self-identify as post-process but also, by virtue of their inclusion in Kent’s collection, share some affinity with his theory of paralogic hermeneutics. More troubling among these recommended reforms, however, are the calls for liberatory and radical pedagogies and the valuing of difference in the classroom, made without even a cursory nod toward a body of scholarship in the field regarding these issues. Finally, a certain degree of ambivalence toward process is exhibited in this collection: some appear to call for an enlargement or expansion of process, while others appear to so thoroughly disregard process that they advocate reinventing the wheel.

Repercussions for a Post-Process Profession within Strand Two Post-Process

Taking a historical approach to paint the broadest strokes for a post-process landscape yet, Petraglia speculates on a post-process profession. Indirectly dating post-process from about 1980 on, he says that the production of scholarship since this time has contributed to making post-process increasingly “hybridized and complex” (53). His own view of the “post” in post-process rejects what he views as a highly formulaic approach to writing. The observation that writers use a process to produce a text continues to inform our disciplinary reality even though we now consider “the mantra ‘writing is a process’ as the right answer to a really boring question” (“Is There” 53). Process has been critiqued and found wanting. In response, we have moved beyond it with the work of social construction and social-epistemic, whose tenets that writing is socially and culturally mediated are, according to Petraglia, as readily accepted today as the fact that a text is the outcome of writing (54).

Nevertheless, since, our current professional profile remains entrenched in the impoverished pedagogy of general writing skills instruction, Petraglia seeks to explore what being post-process would portend for empirical research and for the writing profession. Ultimately, he advocates for the “new social scientism,” which situates writing “in physical and metaphysical spaces of time, place, culture, and identity” (56) and is more “epistemologically aware” and more self-reflexive than its predecessor (59). Such a rethinking would lead us away from techne and toward the development of rhetorical sensibilities. We need to deploy our efforts “to inculcate receptive skills” (62). Petraglia endorses David Russell’s recommendation that, in addition to WAC classes, we offer introductory and interdisciplinary courses that would raise awareness about writing among students, other faculty, and the public. However, all of this depends upon the “ability and willingness of writing professionals to evolve not only post-process but post-composition” (63). In Petraglia’s view, post-process research is likely “to suggest the ways in which the enterprise of composition is misguided and why the explicit teaching of writing—as rhetorical production—is a losing proposition” (60).

As for the future of a post-process profession, Petraglia suggests several scenarios. One is that we “will hunker down into the general writing-skills trenches” and continue to maintain a service role in the university (60). Another is that we will shun the very method of empirical research that could lend us greater disciplinary integrity (60–61). The last is that we will realize the need to study how writers write outside the composition classroom, an initiative currently addressed by writing-across-the disciplines (WAC) and writing-in-the-disciplines (WID) programs. WAC and WID do not, however, promote disciplinary security or prominence and, he argues, we can achieve such security and prominence only by rethinking the entire enterprise of teaching writing (61).

The degree to which Kent’s contributors share the strong version of his theory depends on the extent to which they agree about the radical nature of writing as public, interpretive, and situated, along with what they believe this portends for teaching writing, much as the degree to which Petraglia’s contributors share his strong version of GWSI depends on their view of the disciplinary and professional repercussions. These two edited collections share common values between the editors and a group of contributors whose sympathies mirror in kind, rather than degree, those values.

Post-Process Scholarship that Positions Itself Beyond That of the Social/Cultural Turn

Two scholars occupy this space, but only one rests comfortably here, and that is Thomas Kent, originator of this position. The other conceptual inhabitant is Sidney Dobrin. I have discussed Kent’s theory earlier, so I will not belabor it again. Suffice to say that Kent maintains that expressive, empirical, and social constructionist approaches all share the same foundationalist assumption “that discourse production and analysis can be reduced to systemic processes and then taught in classrooms in some codified manner” (Paralogic 25). If, however, we concede that neither the production nor the reception of discourse can be reduced to a “logico-systemic” process, we must re-think all of our assumptions regarding writing and reading, along with the rhetorical tradition from which they are derived. We must also abandon writing instruction in any form that we know it today. This would inevitably entail forfeiting disciplinarity, since no body of knowledge regarding the acts of writing or reading could be assembled. No less problematic from an institutional standpoint would be the only alternative for student learning: the one-to-one mentoring relationship that would constitute an authentic communicative interaction.

While Dobrin shares an affinity with Kent’s notion of paralogic hermeneutic theory, he critiques it to suggest that what is now needed are “post-post-process theories of paralogic hermeneutics” (emphasis added, “Paralogic” 133). Dobrin criticizes current attempts to derive post-process pedagogies from Kent’s theory, and he nominates a different vision. Few attempts, he argues have been made to formulate a pedagogy derived from paralogic hermeneutics. Of the ones attempted thus far, however, Dobrin is critical, writing that they “tend to fall short of [paralogic hermeneutics’] agendas” (133). He also parses the field differently, based on his definition of post-process as “the shift in scholarly attention from the process by which the individual writer produces text to the larger forces that affect the writer and of which that writer is part” (132). Dobrin agrees with many of his fellow post-process scholars, but he disputes Kent’s notion that the advent of post-process coincides with the social/cultural turn in the field.

Dobrin differs with all, however, in his advocacy of a yet more extreme remove from process, that is, post-post-process theories of paralogic hermeneutics. This post-post theory is required because regular theories of paralogic hermeneutics have failed to account for power and ethics: “triangulation, as it has been defined, denies that culture, race, class, or gender affect at all one’s prior theories which determine one’s passing theories, which affect the moment of triangulation and communication” (142). In order to correct this problem, he seeks effective resistance in the discursive moments of triangulation that are the heart of paralogic hermeneutic theories. Dobrin does not, however, actually offer a pedagogy of paralogic hermeneutics, as he believes the current educational environment would seriously compromise it and because he remains deeply ambivalent about even the possibility of formulating such a pedagogy. The challenge, he writes, “becomes not creating the uncreatable paralogic pedagogies but redefining how we envision the very nature of pedagogy with these theories in mind” (135).

The space of this post-process version is the most extreme of all post-process positions. Indeed, its most positive note for a discipline as we currently know it is a strong ambivalence about this possibility: were the field to accept these theories, it might well cease to exist.

A Few Rejoinders to Thomas Kent’s Edited Post-Process Collection

Responses to Kent’s edited collection reflect a certain degree of dismay as to how process has been constructed, what the differences between the two really are, and what the adoption of a post-process model would mean for the field. Richard Fulkerson maintains that post-process advocates have offered a “straw person” argument similar to the one process constructed for current-traditional rhetoric; however, the price of this new fallacy is the disparagement of three decades of thoughtful work in composition as “scientific, cognitivist, and universalistic” (“Of Pre-” 111). “[E]ven among those that use the [post-process] term with confidence,” there appear to be few shared “assumptions, concepts, values and practices,” except for their agreement with Kent’s “industrial strength definition” that the process of writing cannot be systematically codified (Bloom 35–36). Fulkerson is also critical of how the term post-process shifts so radically among the collection’s contributors and argues that this should remind us that a no more cohesive post-process “movement” exists now than ever did for process. Speaking to the differences between process and post-process, Kevin Porter describes a position to which many, I suspect, are sympathetic. He speculates “that if you blunt the extreme rigidity of the charges leveled against process theory (as well as some of the more extreme claims made by early advocates of it)” and argue, rather, that process theory represents attempts to better understand writing and to translate those understandings into effective pedagogies, “then these charges [made by post-process advocates] lose most of their excitement” (712).

Last, Susan Miller clearly does not “celebrate the post-process movement now said to theorize composition anew” (“Why” 55). To Gary Olson’s critique that the attempt of process to achieve a generalizable explanation of writing has been “misguided” because such explanations elide the local, she offers this rebuttal: “Certainly, many generalized explanations may be misguided, as I think this one is. That is, without a stake in a general theory of how composing and texts work, there is no justification—as some already suspect—for hiring composition specialists who claim more interest in generalized explanations of reading than in general theories of writing” (“Why” 55–56). What a post-process model would portend for the field, according to Miller, is bleak. “Its administration will be in the hands of those with no general idea about writing and no disciplinary mandate to develop them”; “we will also be without all power but that to read, not write, our own, ended, history” (56). Miller responds to what the logical conclusion of post-process would indicate for rhetoric and composition as a discipline.

Process: A Rebuttal

It seems only fair at this moment that process should have an opportunity to address critiques that it engenders a myopic focus on the individual student, that its goal was/is universality, and that it constitutes, or tried to constitute, writing as a codified system. Of these three, overdetermined individuality receives the greatest emphasis in critiques made by post-process, a charge, I would note, undoubtedly more easily made if process is deemed to have no part in the social/cultural turn.

Process scholarship, plentiful and vast, offers the only genuine rebuttal to the critiques of post-process. The following, then, constitutes a brief profile of process scholarship through the early social/cultural turn that contributed to the substantiation of writing process as a domain of knowledge, or a unity of discourse, in our field. Such statements have traditionally focused on (1) the intersection of process with the disciplinarity of rhetoric and composition; (2) the nature of what writing is; (3) the nature of the process that we teach as well as how we teach it; and (4) the actual process students engage to produce writing.

Because post-process has been especially critical of the focus on individuality in process theories, I attempt in this brief process profile to bring some attention to notions of the student-subject, even when these notions are only tacit. We should again be reminded that process theories constituted a response to current-traditional theory that had virtually elided any consideration of the individual. Nevertheless, my primary purpose is to (re)acclimate our sensibility to the historical richness of writing process discourse and to bring into relief those aspects of process against which post-process situates itself.

Process Profile

Among the first to research and advocate the importance of writing in the educational curriculum was Janet Emig. In “Inquiry Paradigms and Writing,” Emig recommends an agenda to which the research of writing should adhere: “inquiries into writing, into composition, probably need to be informed by at least four kinds of theories: 1) a theory of meaning; 2) and if this is different, a theory of language; 3) a theory of learning; and 4) a theory of research,” all of which, she added, “should be consonant or congenial” (165). Certainly, the tacit presence of the student-subject inheres in this excerpt, for it is in relation to the student-subject that meaning, language, and learning matter. It was and is the student-subject, quite as much as the contribution to the constitution of a scholarly field, that renders these questions worthy of inquiry.

In the keynote address given at the Conference on College Composition and Communication Convention in San Francisco in March 1982, Emig offers a blueprint of what she imagines writing pedagogy should accomplish (and tacitly of what it ought to prepare students to be). Arguing that notions of literacy need to change to include writing, her blueprint provides criteria for what any literacy “worth teaching” ought to accomplish. It should provide access, sponsor learning, unleash literal power, and “activate the greatest power of all—the imagination” (“Literacy” 177–78). Emig’s ideal pedagogy would direct what student-subjects might experience. Emig’s 1964 article, “The Uses of the Unconscious in Composing,” which argues that writing is not often accomplished by a rational, conscious, coherent method, also foregrounds the student-subject. Because it involves the unconscious, writing, Emig insists, is messy, and she further advocates that teachers change their curriculum not just to allow this messiness but to encourage it. Situated at the site of the student-subject, then, the unconscious that Emig recommends for consideration constitutes a fuller conception of the student-subject.

In her discussion of qualifying paper for the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1963, Emig reveals an even more explicit consideration of the student-subject. She reports that she chose to focus on the inconsistencies in 19th century authors’ texts regarding the acts that led to writing because she believes that “the teaching of writing was [as] deformed in the past as it is in the present by concentrating on what the teacher does, not on what the student writer is experiencing” (“The Relation” 1). Her starting point for a consideration of what leads to writing is the student, not pedagogy. In “The Origins of Rhetoric: A Developmental View,” Emig adds that she wanted to look at “the origins of rhetoric in the life of an individual rather than in the life of a culture” (55). While we would now contend that the life of an individual is inseparable from the life of a culture, Emig’s stated goal attests to an intention to examine the individual student-subject who learns to write. Of course, there are Emig’s seminal works, The Composing Process of Twelfth-Graders, which focuses on the writing processes of real subjects, real students, and “Writing as a Mode of Learning,” which advocates writing not just as one of many modes of learning but as a unique mode of learning. Significantly, writing as learning is described as “active, engaged, personal—more specifically, self-rhythmed—in nature” (124). This statement also attests to her belief in the primacy the student-subject ought to occupy in any notion of learning and in any notion of writing.

Other scholars call for a synthesis of approaches to writing and for broader conceptions of writing. Janice Lauer speaks to pedagogical issues, James Kinneavy to the nature of writing process, and Sondra Perl to the nature of writing itself. In “Instructional Practices: Toward an Integration,” Lauer argues that the two major pedagogical directions of composition teaching—art and as nurturing natural process—should be integrated, along with the pedagogies of imitation and practice. This integrated approach, she writes, “offers a more stimulating and supportive context in which students can learn to write and write to learn” (3). Lauer argues for a both/and perspective rather than an either/or, a syntheses of approaches that expand the pedagogical horizon. In “The Process of Writing: A Philosophical Base in Hermeneutics,” Kinneavy voices a concern that writing process was often too narrowly conceived, and he calls for a more comprehensive notion of process. He provides theoretical and pedagogical depth by applying Martin Heidegger’s notion of hermeneutics to the notion of writing process. Such a perspective, he suggests, provides a more flexible, recursive, exploratory, and, especially, pluralistic perspective than the “almost monolithic notion floating in the journals that there is a single process underlying all invention, prewriting, writing, and editing stages” (8). Speaking to the complexity of writing and the need for deeper understandings of its process, Perl discusses teachers’ insights into their own composing processes and products, noting one teacher’s conclusion “that at any given moment the process is more complex than anything we are aware of” (“Understanding” 369). Perl maintains that these sorts of insights “show us the fallacy of reducing the composing process to a simple linear scheme and they leave us with the potential for creating even more powerful ways of understanding composing” (369). This call for an examination of actual writers’ insights into their own writing situates the starting point of inquiry with the student-subject, the writer.

Lester Faigley contends that a disciplinarily shared definition of process is needed if a discipline of writing is to ever achieve legitimacy. If writing process were to continue influencing the teaching of writing, he argues, “it must take a broader conception of writing, one that understands writing processes are historically dynamic—not psychic states, cognitive routines, or neutral social relationships” (“Competing” 537). From the expressive perspective, he says, we should study the possibilities that technological changes engender for personal expression. From the cognitive focus on problems, we should study the imbrication of writing process and power; and from the social perspective, we should study how texts serve power as well as the power relations that shut down certain discourses. Faigley’s broad characterization of what writing process ought to be implies a complex notion of the student-subject.

Richard Gebhardt and Charles Kostelnick also discuss the need for broader perspectives, suggesting that early theories to date did not yet approximate the complexity of writing process. Gebhardt notes that “the processes of writing are sufficiently complex, and sufficiently variable from writer to writer, that they cannot be reduced to a pat formula but demand models of great breadth and flexibility” (294). Kostelnick, on the other hand, says that writing process parallels design process. He further argues that a comparison of the two underscores the importance of building models that would account for the full spectrum of the writing taught and researched. Both scholars, however, attest to the complexity of writing process and articulate a broader spectrum of possibility that suggests student heterogeneity.

Both D. Gordon Rohman and Erika Lindemann also implicitly reject a homogeneous notion of the subject. They speak to the need for writing process theory to include notions of situatedness as well as flexibility. Rohman, for example, says that writing is usefully conceptualized as a process, “something which shows continuous change in time like growth in organic nature” (106). The analogy of writing process to organic nature suggests that the student-subject is the logical antecedent to process. Just as notions of writing should not be static, he argues, neither should notions of the student-subject for which those notions are formulated. Lindemann is even more specific in her support for a heterogeneously conceived notion of writing process: “writing involves not just one process but several. [. . .] Also, the processes change depending on our age, our experiences as writers, and the kind of writing we do. Indeed, they seem as complex and varied as the people who use them” (21). Lindemann therefore describes a highly rhetorical conception of writing process, as heterogeneous as those who use it.

Still other scholars offer new conceptualizations of writing process, or they discuss those they believe to have been overemphasized or neglected in the past. Lee Odell, for example, recommends that we could best help students by identifying the intellectual processes reflected in their writing. Linda Flower and John Hayes provide the ground for further research on the thinking processes involved in writing. Barry Kroll recommends a “cognitive-developmental” theoretical approach to composing, which draws upon the psychology of Jean Piaget and the educational psychology of John Dewey. He argues for an emphasis on writing as process because, he says, it could provide students with strategies to manage their writing that would not oversimplify their process.

Although George Jensen and John DiTiberio argue that C. G. Jung’s system of identifying different personality types would benefit both composition instruction and composition research, they also acknowledge that different people use different processes. This observation suggests that what was most needed was a better understanding of how people differ and how these differences affect writing process. Personality, then, was the element they believe had been neglected. C. H. Knoblauch takes issue with a perceived overemphasis on the textual aspects of writing choices, and he insists that behavioral aspects are worthy of teaching scholarship. We should, he argues, ask questions about the correlation of writing choices to both the kind of task attempted and to the competence of a specific writer. When these questions are answered we better understand how to develop advantageous behaviors in the classroom.

Jack Selzer, however, believes composing habits do differ among writers, but he does not believe these differences inhered within a writer. Carol Berkenkotter maintains that changes in aim, an element she contends is overlooked, also changes the composing habits of experienced writers. Sondra Perl, however, argues that parts of the writing process cause changes not only from writer to writer but also from topic to topic (“Composing Processes”). It is an overemphasis on the rationalization of composing that Richard Young maintains was the “great danger of a technical theory of art—of art as grammar” (201). Patricia Conners argues that our research ought to focus on intuition and intuition ought then to inform our teaching practice. “A persistence in viewing intuition and the whole problem-solving process of writing as inexplicable and mysterious,” she says, “is a little like insisting the world is flat—no true wonder is lost in a more accurate understanding” (77). Alice Brand identifies affective elements as the overlooked element in what she contended was a concentration of scholarship on the cognitive aspects of writing. “Understanding the collaboration of emotion and cognition in writing,” she maintains, “is both fundamental and far-reaching. It is in cognition that ideas make sense. But it is in emotion that this sense finds value” (442). Finally, Susan McLeod justified the need for scholarship of the affective: “we can help with strategic self-management in the affective as well as in the cognitive domain” (433).

This profile of process recognizes a wide array of scholarship: the recommendation to study intellectual processes; the critique of an overemphasis on cognition and rationality; the call for a theory of the affective; the recognition of the role of intuition, the argument that we should study behavior; the nomination of Jungian psychology to ascertain personality types; and the cognitive-developmental theory drawn from Piaget and Dewey. In addition, process theorists have suggested that aim changes the composing habits of experienced writers, that topic changes the composing process of the writer, and that composing habits differ among writers but not within a writer. While this sampling of scholarly opinions is broad, it represents only a scant portion of the total scholarship that speaks in some way to writing process. Nevertheless, it helps to capture a panoramic view of writing process as both discourse and practice

Process, Post-Process: A Point of Stasis

Regarding the nature of academic debates, Ralph Cintron writes that they “are to a significant degree performances. Differences—and they do exist—push themselves forward by creating caricatures of each other. Although it may seem paradoxical, differences are deeply relational: To denounce the other’s position is to announce one’s own” (376). We know that process caricatured current-traditional rhetoric to create a space for itself and we also understand something of the costs of that move. Post-process appears now to harbor a similar impulse. Indeed, Paul Kei Matsuda writes that

while Kent is careful to note the divergence of perspectives among proponents of post-process theory, the term ‘post-process’ seems to be used in his volume as a way of solidifying disparate critiques of so-called expressive and cognitive theories and pedagogies. That is, post-process [. . .] seems to be on its way to constructing its own narrative of transformation with process as the necessary caricature. (74)

As Lad Tobin writes in the 1994 collection Taking Stock: The Writing Process Movement in the ’90s, “recent reports of the death of the writing process movement have been greatly exaggerated” (9). Paradigm hope may thrive, but we know only too well from our own history, and our understanding of what Paul Feyerabend has to say on the utopian yearning for paradigms and paradigm shifts, that no such possibility exists. A shift may, indeed, be occurring, but is it a relational one.10 There is every reason to assume, then, that a point of stasis, representing some shared value, can be articulated and can lead to a productive and mutually enriching dialogue.

The process profile reveals a panoply of perspectives, each of which can be viewed as enlarging the knowledge domain of the discursive formation that writing process was and is. Some statements speak to institutionalization, some to the nature of writing, some to aspects of writing process, some to how writing process should be taught, and some to the process an individual student-subject uses to produce writing. It is important to recall that these discussions were stimulated by frustrations with the current-traditional approach that hardly considered the individual student-subject.11 Thus, the individual student-subject began to receive attention in the context of the questioning of the nature of writing and the best pedagogy for writing. Admittedly, some who rejected the current-traditional approach made the individual student paramount even going so far to evoke the image of a lone genius. This position, along with that of current-traditional, established the ends of a continuum in which the discourse of writing became situated. The composite constitutes the unity of a discursive formation that would lead to its institutionalization. Writing process, or simply “process,” has functioned as a disciplinary metaphor for this discursive formation.

“Process,” as a disciplinary metaphor, became strained, however, with the advent of social/cultural scholarship in the 1980s, when writing process was submitted not only to further (re)formulations but also to the more stringent critiques associated with these reformulations (see Berlin, Bizzell, and Faigley). The social/cultural turn did constitute a significant shift in rhetoric and composition’s disciplinary discursive formation. However, not only was there no break with process during this period, there was also never a serious suggestion that there ought to be. No such suggestion was seriously made until the 1990s, when the scholarly discourse coalesced around the metaphor post-process, a time at which, significantly, many post-process advocates began to claim the 1980s social/cultural scholarship as their own. To date, only a few in the post-process camp have situated themselves in radical opposition to process by disavowing the 1980s social/cultural scholarship altogether. The movement from early process to radical post-process is depicted along the following continuum, plotted thusly as Figure 1:

This continuum suggests a point of stasis between process and post-process at the point where each incorporates the scholarship of the social/cultural into their theories and practices. This is not to say that process and post-process are in alignment at this point; rather, it is to say that this is a point at which both share a common value, the scholarship of the social/cultural turn that theorized the factors that impinge upon the act(or) of writing.

Writing Process/Post-Process Unbound: Networked Process

As indicated, the profile of post-process includes well-rehearsed critiques of the overdetermined individual, though the profile of writing process reveals that this charge is debatable. Less evident, perhaps, is that not even radical post-process is immune to this critique.

For example, Kent’s theory of paralogic hermeneutics centers around Donald Davidson’s notion of triangulation. To examine the individuality inherent in this notion, I will use just one example, which I take from Kent’s published interview with Davidson. This example also illustrates that his appropriation of Davidson’s theory is mediated by his own specific notion of paralogy. Kent asks Davidson to explain triangulation, and Davidson responds that it is part reality, part metaphor. The reality factor of triangulation, as Davidson explains it, revolves around the notion of objectivity, a concept that exists, he argues, only because of interpersonal relations. Alone in the world, we would have no use for the concept of truth, since we would have no cause to question the correspondence of what we think to what is. But precisely because we do not exist alone, our source of objectivity is intersubjectivity, which Davidson conceives as a triangle constituted by two communicants and the world.

The metaphorical equation of triangulation can be illustrated through a thought experiment. Suppose, Davidson says, that you were alone in the world; things would impinge upon you. For example, perhaps the pleasant taste of a peach impinged upon you; to what would you attribute the pleasant taste? You could not say the peach itself since there would be no shared, interpretive ground with another person to determine that it was in fact the peach that pleased “rather than the taste of the peach, or the stimulation of the taste buds, or, for that matter, something that happened a thousand years ago” (10). In this metaphorical situation, you would be, at best, in a state of infinite regress, since there could be no answer without the foundational, intersubjective ground for formulating a mutually agreed-upon objective answer. Indeed, there could be no answer, since, without a fellow interpretive communicant, you could not ask the question anyway. The point of triangulation is that the triangle is completed when I react to the peach and you react to the peach and we then react to each other’s reaction to the peach. Only then can we locate a common stimulus. It cannot be located in my mouth only, in your mouth only, or in some event located thousands of years ago. Rather, “it locates it just at the distance of the shared stimulus which, in turn, causes each of the two creatures to react to each other’s reactions. It’s a way of saying why it is that communication is essential to the concept of an objective world” (11).

If this resonates with a notion of social-epistemic rhetoric, it differs in Kent’s appropriation in its radical extreme, which issues from his particular formulation of paralogy. If you were to subscribe to a notion of social-epistemic rhetoric, you might surmise the previously described instance of triangulation to have occurred multiple times across a group of people who, let’s say, share the same peach orchard. In this situation, there might eventually be some malleable but fairly stable, generally agreed-upon “knowledge” regarding people’s interactions with peaches. Kent would criticize this assumption, however, on the basis that each instance of triangulation is not just different but is so radically unique and different as to defy the possibility of a gist of repeatability (intertextuality) and its transference across a range of socially shared responses. To so think would, according to Kent, suggest that some codified procedure, system, or process (logico-systemic process) functioned foundationally as mediation between communicants. Kent’s appropriation of triangulation, according to his own theory of paralogy overdetermines the reality factor of Davidson’s notion of intersubjectivity. It conceives of intersubjectivity so radically as to at least insinuate the privileging of the individual, radical indivisibility of each instance of triangulation. This privileging is proportionate to an overdetermined notion of triangulation and therefore to an overdetermined notion of individuality.

Some strands of early process and radical post-process ironically share a privileging of the individual, even though the manner in which they do so differs. Significantly, however, it is the grappling with writing’s possibility, the person who writes, that is indicated across the entire range of the process/post-process continuum seen in Figure 1. Thus, whether tacit or explicit, all theories of writing and the theories of rhetoric that inform them make certain assumptions regarding writing’s condition of possibility: the person who would write. This holds true for expressivist, cognitivist, social constructionist, social-epistemic, feminist, Marxist, cultural studies, postmodern, post-process, and/or radical post-process informed theories of rhetoric/writing.

The point of stasis indicated in the middle of the continuum by the acknowledgement of some strands of process and of post-process for the value of social/cultural scholarship is telling, since this scholarship effectively moved us off overdetermined notions of the individual and toward theorizing (1) the complex networks with(in) which writers are imbricated by merely being and (2) the complex networks that influence and pressure the act(or) of writing. The point of stasis between process and post-process—with their mutual suspicion of the overdetermined, individual and their mutual appreciation of the complex social/political/cultural networks that pressure writers/writing differently—marks the place of stasis and creates a new space for productive dialogue between the two positions. As the point of stasis for process and post-process, this material and conceptual space of writer/writing/network needs a name that exceeds the limitations of process and post-process. Networked process is such a name.

The space of networked process, then, would require not only that we conceptualize theories of rhetoric/writing according to some notion of a material writing subject who exists within complex social, political, and cultural networks, it would also require that we articulate this notion. Networked process would also enable us to re-envision the field’s identity and, more importantly, its possibility.

The person who writes has long been too thinly treated in disciplinary theories of rhetoric/writing.12 Such thinness has alternately led, for example, to a number of conflicting positions: privileged notions of individual autonomy; universal assumptions of the individual; formulations of the social nature of subjects; articulation of differences that pressure subjects differently; a sometimes myopic focus on various elements with which the subject is a tacitly assumed presence; and avoidance of an agentless subject altogether. For much of our history, this thinness is explainable through our limited knowledge and scholarly preoccupations. But, structuralism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism, have foregrounded the subject thoroughly. That we have failed to adequately respond may be due to our fear of accusations of capitulating to grand narratives. But, given the pragmatic aspect of our disciplinary mission—the effective teaching of and student engagement with writing—we can ill afford such timidity, for it serves only to undermine our potential to intervene in the everyday practices of the various lives and contexts we would affect. Networked process addresses this deficiency by articulating a theory of the subject who writes (and is written) within and among complex social, political, and cultural networks.