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.
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
