Networked Process. Helen Foster
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