regarding what can and cannot be taught in the composition class. Those who take the position that “stylistic correctness or facility” is the proper classroom content assume the algorithmic position on the continuum, while those who would teach composition as an act of genius occupy the aleatory (13). The paradox, according to Berlin and Inkster, is that both poles of this binary share “epistemologies [that] are wholly consistent with one another” (13). I make a point of this because Berlin alters this interpretation in his 1982 article, “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories.” In claiming that the underlying epistemologies of those who equate composition with stylistic correctness and those who equate it with genius are consistent, Berlin and Inkster’s assessment is based, quite naturally, on the terms by which they define epistemology: the mind, reality, and the relation between the two. From the perspective of “the mind,” then, the two poles are consistent, in that both the algorithmic and the aleatory assume that knowledge is located “outside” of the individual mind. In the algorithmic view, knowledge is constructed to the point of reification, while in the aleatory, knowledge is “found.” What this continuum elides and what Berlin later attempts to correct with a more social orientation, is the emphasis on the individual mind, autonomous and unconstrained by outside forces.
Also related to their claim of algorithmic/aleatory epistemological consistency within the current-traditional paradigm is Berlin and Inkster’s purpose to not only “dissect the paradigm, but to evaluate it, to make some statement about its adequacy for shaping a contemporary rhetoric” (1). The value of freshman composition had been and continued to be contested not only within the English department but also in the academy and beyond. Berlin and Inkster place responsibility for this crisis directly on a faulty rhetorical paradigm and, indirectly, upon those who remain intellectually entrenched within it. There is, then, a concern for reshaping notions of writing process and effecting change in the classroom. This article indicts the current-traditional paradigm as dangerous “to teachers, students, the wider purposes of our educational enterprise, and even our social and human fabric” (14). This goal—remapping notions of writing process and effecting change in the classroom in order to secure the space of the freshman composition course in the academy—permeates Berlin’s work.
“Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories”
In response to recent articles attempting to distinguish various approaches to teaching composition, Berlin in this article contrasts his theoretical approach with that of accepted wisdom that says since the elements of the composing process—writer, reality, reader, language—are uncontested, differences in composing processes must issue from the degree of emphasis given the elements. Berlin says this is a contention with which he “strongly disagree[s],” for “from this point of view, the composing process is always and everywhere the same because writer, reality, reader, and language are always and everywhere the same” (765). It is quite clear to Berlin that since it is common “to speak of the composing process as a recursive activity involving prewriting, writing, and rewriting, it is not difficult to see the writer-reality-audience-language relationship as underlying, at a deeper structural level, each of these three stages” and thus determining the sort of instruction that is or is not prescribed for each activity (765). “Pedagogical theories in writing courses,” he maintains, “are grounded in rhetorical theories, and rhetorical theories do not differ in the simple undue emphasis of writer or audience or reality or language or some combination of these” (765). They differ, he says, in the way writer, reality, audience, and language “are conceived—both as separate units and in the way the units relate to each other” (766). Perhaps I overlook some subtlety, but I do not believe that a change in the emphasis on any specific element precludes a difference in how it is conceived, unless Berlin is claiming that the difference is legitimate only if it is explicit.18 I believe that the elements do, indeed, make a difference, and that, in fact, Berlin’s methodological practice throughout these works depends upon that difference.
While Berlin maintains that composing processes are grounded in rhetorical theories of writer, reality, audience, and language, he contends that the differences between composing processes are explainable by “diverging definitions of the composing process, itself,” specifically in the way each element is characterized (765). The focus should be each composite definition, which presents “a different world with different rules about what can be known, how it can be known, and how it can be communicated” (766). To achieve his goal of explaining how and why teaching approaches differ, Berlin situates the “writer, reality, audience, language relationship” (765) as underlying each element in the activity of composing: prewriting/writing/rewriting. Together, this matrix represents an “epistemic complex” that determines the pedagogy prescribed for each composing process activity: invention/arrangement/style (766). He then organizes and analyzes each of the four dominant pedagogical groups—Neo-Aristotelians/Classicists; Positivists/Current-Traditionalists; Neo-Platonists/Expressionists; New Rhetoricians/Social-Epistemic—according to this “epistemic complex.”
There are subtle but significant differences between Berlin’s descriptions of underlying assumptions in this article and that in “Current-Traditional.” In “Current-Traditional,” Berlin makes epistemology an explicit element in his coding, characterizing it as involving “concepts of the mind, reality, and the relation between the two” (2). This conception of epistemology is thus firmly grounded in the cognitive. Because he describes epistemology in terms of one mind and one reality and their relation, he suggests tacit individuality. In “Major Theories,” however, epistemology enters the coding matrix through his notion of “epistemic complex,” which represents the composite of the “writer-reality-audience-language relationship” (765) underlying and influencing each element of the composing process (prewriting/writing/rewriting). All of these, he writes, present “a different world with different rules about what can be known, how it can be known, and how it can be communicated” (766). Another related difference between the two articles is the way in which reality itself is evaluated. Epistemology in “Current-Traditional” foregrounds the mind; in this article, it appears that Berlin distances himself from a cognitive emphasis and its tacit individuality and folds epistemology into ideology by placing greater emphasis on reality.
In “Current-Traditional,” characterizations of reality were analyzed according to an epistemic continuum said to represent “the processes one may follow in working through any kind of cognitive or creative act” and which range across algorithmic, heuristic, and aleatory positions (3). Berlin equates the assumptions of the binary fields, algorithmic and aleatory, as having consistent, but erroneous, epistemological assumptions, and he recommends the heuristic process as providing the best rhetoric. But what is significant to the present discussion is that Berlin’s continuum foregrounds the writer, so that, again, his entree into the epistemological equation comes by way of the individual. In “Major Theories,” Berlin, although ostensibly continuing to champion a notion of the “heuristic” perspective, displaces this continuum in his view with an analogy to Richard Rorty’s difference between hermeneutic and epistemological philosophy:
For the hermeneuticist truth is never fixed finally on unshakable grounds. Instead it emerges only after false starts and failures, and it can only represent a tentative point of rest in a continuing conversation. Whatever truth is arrived at, moreover, is always the product of individuals calling on the full range of their humanity, with esthetic and moral considerations given at least as much importance as any others. For Current-Traditional Rhetoric truth is empirically based and can only be achieved through subverting a part of the human response to experience. Truth then stands forever, a tribute to its method, triumphant over what most of us consider important in life, successful through subserving writer, audience, and language to the myth of an objective reality. (777)
The “heuristic” position of the continuum has thus previously been depicted as the process of choice for an individual involved in “any kind of cognitive or creative act.” The “hermeneutical” position that Berlin now describes, where truth is located in “the product of individuals calling on the full range of their humanity, with esthetic and moral considerations given at least as much importance as any others,” allows
