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.
