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
