Networked Process. Helen Foster
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