issues from his particular formulation of paralogy. If you were to subscribe to a notion of social-epistemic rhetoric, you might surmise the previously described instance of triangulation to have occurred multiple times across a group of people who, let’s say, share the same peach orchard. In this situation, there might eventually be some malleable but fairly stable, generally agreed-upon “knowledge” regarding people’s interactions with peaches. Kent would criticize this assumption, however, on the basis that each instance of triangulation is not just different but is so radically unique and different as to defy the possibility of a gist of repeatability (intertextuality) and its transference across a range of socially shared responses. To so think would, according to Kent, suggest that some codified procedure, system, or process (logico-systemic process) functioned foundationally as mediation between communicants. Kent’s appropriation of triangulation, according to his own theory of paralogy overdetermines the reality factor of Davidson’s notion of intersubjectivity. It conceives of intersubjectivity so radically as to at least insinuate the privileging of the individual, radical indivisibility of each instance of triangulation. This privileging is proportionate to an overdetermined notion of triangulation and therefore to an overdetermined notion of individuality.
Some strands of early process and radical post-process ironically share a privileging of the individual, even though the manner in which they do so differs. Significantly, however, it is the grappling with writing’s possibility, the person who writes, that is indicated across the entire range of the process/post-process continuum seen in Figure 1. Thus, whether tacit or explicit, all theories of writing and the theories of rhetoric that inform them make certain assumptions regarding writing’s condition of possibility: the person who would write. This holds true for expressivist, cognitivist, social constructionist, social-epistemic, feminist, Marxist, cultural studies, postmodern, post-process, and/or radical post-process informed theories of rhetoric/writing.
The point of stasis indicated in the middle of the continuum by the acknowledgement of some strands of process and of post-process for the value of social/cultural scholarship is telling, since this scholarship effectively moved us off overdetermined notions of the individual and toward theorizing (1) the complex networks with(in) which writers are imbricated by merely being and (2) the complex networks that influence and pressure the act(or) of writing. The point of stasis between process and post-process—with their mutual suspicion of the overdetermined, individual and their mutual appreciation of the complex social/political/cultural networks that pressure writers/writing differently—marks the place of stasis and creates a new space for productive dialogue between the two positions. As the point of stasis for process and post-process, this material and conceptual space of writer/writing/network needs a name that exceeds the limitations of process and post-process. Networked process is such a name.
The space of networked process, then, would require not only that we conceptualize theories of rhetoric/writing according to some notion of a material writing subject who exists within complex social, political, and cultural networks, it would also require that we articulate this notion. Networked process would also enable us to re-envision the field’s identity and, more importantly, its possibility.
The person who writes has long been too thinly treated in disciplinary theories of rhetoric/writing.12 Such thinness has alternately led, for example, to a number of conflicting positions: privileged notions of individual autonomy; universal assumptions of the individual; formulations of the social nature of subjects; articulation of differences that pressure subjects differently; a sometimes myopic focus on various elements with which the subject is a tacitly assumed presence; and avoidance of an agentless subject altogether. For much of our history, this thinness is explainable through our limited knowledge and scholarly preoccupations. But, structuralism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism, have foregrounded the subject thoroughly. That we have failed to adequately respond may be due to our fear of accusations of capitulating to grand narratives. But, given the pragmatic aspect of our disciplinary mission—the effective teaching of and student engagement with writing—we can ill afford such timidity, for it serves only to undermine our potential to intervene in the everyday practices of the various lives and contexts we would affect. Networked process addresses this deficiency by articulating a theory of the subject who writes (and is written) within and among complex social, political, and cultural networks.
2 Exploring Networked Process in James Berlin’s Cognitive Maps
A critique of any theoretical system is not [merely] an examination of its flaws or imperfections. It is not a set of criticisms designed to make the system better. It is an analysis that focuses on the grounds of that system’s possibility. The critique reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal, in order to show that these things have their history, their reasons for being the way they are, their effects on what follows from them, and that the starting point is not a (natural) given but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself. [. . .] Every theory starts somewhere; every critique exposes what that starting point conceals. [. . .] The critique does not ask “what does this statement mean?” but “where is it being made from? What does it presuppose?
—Barbara Johnson1
In the 1980s, James Berlin was, luckily for us, pre-occupied with the connection between rhetoric(s) and writing process(es). I say “luckily” not because he necessarily got it right and certainly not because everyone agrees that he got it right, but because his classifications provide us such a rich vein of scholarship to mine. In other words, Berlin’s classifications had and continue to have “effects on what follows from them.”
The grounds of Berlin’s work in the 1980s are various theoretical formulations of rhetoric and writing. Hindsight indicates a trajectory in these theories that brought about both the advent of post-process in the 1990s and the notion of networked process. In each of these theoretical formulations, Berlin provides different “cognitive maps.” The maps are offered in keeping with Fredric Jameson’s conclusion that the political component of theory ought to provide cognitive maps so that we may “begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and [thus] regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion” (Postmodernism 54).13 A reading of Berlin’s maps, as well as a reading across these maps, can help to chart the landscape that gave rise to networked process. Moreover, to critique his maps is to begin to (re)draw the landscape yet again.14
Because the map does necessarily precede the inquiry, the map will in large part determine the nature of the inquiry and its findings. It cannot be otherwise.15 The map of this critique, then, pre-occupied as it is with Berlin’s cartography and yielded landscapes, seeks to illuminate the nature, function, and relationship of the following networked process sites: the subject who writes (students and teachers), rhetoric(s), writing processes (curriculum and pedagogy), composition classrooms, the disciplinarity of rhetoric and composition, and the broader culture. The developing map of networked process, which this critique constitutes, can be reasonably expected to “find” knowledge regarding the subject who writes and the webbed relations within which it is implicated.
Berlin’s Cognitive Maps
The following works, which were published across an eight-year span during the 1980s, are particularly salient for a fuller conceptualization of a networked process map. They attest to Berlin’s attempts to understand the relationship among writing processes, rhetorics, teachers, students, disciplinarity, and culture:
1. “Current-Traditional Rhetoric: Paradigm and Practice” (co-authored with Robert P. Inkster), 1980 (referred to as “Current-Traditional” throughout this chapter);
2. “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories,” 1982 (referred to as “Major Theories” throughout this chapter);
3. Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges, 1984 (referred to as Writing Instruction throughout this chapter);
