the introduction, Kent writes that “different incarnations” of post-process theory exists (1), and that while not all of the book’s contributors agree about “the nature of ‘post’ in ‘post-process’ theory, all agree that change is in the air,” regarding how we talk about writing and what writers do (5). It is with such a caveat, then, that we can reasonably expect this collection to reflect a broad range of consonance with Kent’s theory as formulated and described in Paralogic Rhetoric. Kent distills three principle assumptions that he believes unite the scholarship of the book’s contributors,: that writing is (1) public, (2) interpretive, and (3) situated.
The claim that writing is public implies two assumptions: (1) that writing is constituted by communicative interaction between individuals who share specific relations with others and the world at specific historical moments, and (2) that since these moments and relations are unique in each instance of communicative interaction, “no process can capture what writers do” in these ever-changing moments and relations (1–2). While it is advantageous for individuals to have a command of conventions, genres, and language use, or what Kent calls “codifiable shortcuts,” these do not equate to a “Big Theory,” as they cannot function as a repeatable process that would lead to success in every writing situation. The point, Kent says, is that a writer “cannot start from nowhere” (2). There is always a public dimension to writing.
The claim that writing is interpretive refers to an act that engages in “a relation of understanding” with others (2). Interpretation is thus equally involved in reception and production. Because it engages in perpetual hermeneutic acts, interpretation constitutes nothing less than our attempt to make sense of the world. Although hermeneutic acts are based on guesswork, Kent does concede that practice can render us “better guessers” (2–3) but insists that effective guessing resists codification to any process that might guarantee success. Because any degree of knowing is the result of interpretation, most post-process theorists maintain that interpretation “goes all the way down.” Writing cannot occur, therefore, in a “vacuum,” since the ground of interpretation is a relationship with others and the world (2–3).
That writing is situated simply indicates that “writers are never nowhere,” a notion Kent concedes is as equally commonplace among process as post-process theorists. However, the latter put more emphasis on situatedness, he says, given their understanding of a communicative act as a fluid and indeterminate “hermeneutic dance” comprised of two simultaneous acts, prior theory and passing theory. From this perspective, situatedness assumes that we are always “somewhere” in relation to other language users, a positioning that influences not only the nature of our prior theory but also how we use a prior theory to formulate a passing theory. Importantly, these communicative instances “can never be reduced to a predictable process” (4).
Critiques of Process within Strand Two Post-Process
Again, the degree to which Post-Process contributors share these three basic concepts of writing varies, but all are united in their critique of process. From a historical perspective, George Pullman critiques the history of the process movement as a rhetorical narrative of “triumph of compassion and empiricism” over the current-traditional rhetoric of “tradition and prejudice” (16). This was accomplished with two moves: one from a focus on the teacher to the student and the other from a notion of writing as skill to writing as ontological, or as a way of being (23–25). This “triumph” constituted, he says, nothing less than a return to the “self-reflective, contemplative life,” which Plato offered to Phaedrus as “an alternative to the life of political power that the young man thought he wanted” (25). Pullman thus employs these binaries to argue that many of the dichotomies constructed by process have cast long, pervasive, and detrimental shadows.
From a disciplinary perspective, Petraglia critiques the close association of process with the behaviorist model in psychology. Process theorists argued against a notion of writing as a single behavior and for a notion constituted by procedures and strategies that eventually coalesced into the complex system of process. This understanding then established a professional agenda that both resonated with the notion of rhetoric as practical art (techne) and propelled research and teaching. It rendered other methodologies viable, especially those including a scientific analytic component, which contributed, Petraglia argues, (1) to serve composition well as a field “dedicated to the production of rhetorical skills”; and (2) to “[discipline] writing in every sense of the word,” imposing a coherence on lore (North) and providing “a catechistic structure through which writing could attain a distinct academic identity” (“Is There” 51). Cognitive models of process greatly contributed to the development of “a genuinely academic profile” that ultimately became the movement’s “Manifest Destiny” (51). However, the empirical method objectified writing process and continued he says, a two-millennia tradition of “dissecting and redissecting the whole of rhetoric into manageable parts” (53). Thus, Petraglia argues that the current professional profile of the field remains entrenched in the impoverished pedagogy of GWSI.
Others also take process to task for its privileging of individuality. David Russell credits process with enacting an important shift from text to the individual writer, thus effectively rendering the student an object of study. The problem, he argues, is that process “remained with the individual” and attempted to generalize psychological processes across a broad range of students and settings (“Activity Theory and Process” 80). Along with this, process altered teacher/student relationships, but then exerted a normative influence on them. Teachers were taught, Russell says, to intervene strategically in students’ process, using a normative process vocabulary to guide not only their verbal interaction with students but also their written responses and final evaluations. This pedagogy assumed that the stages of student writing constituted “legitimate stages of work in progress rather than failed attempts to produce a correct product”; teachers then responded with “transactional in-progress comments [. . .] rather than evaluative ‘final’ judgments” (150). Russell concludes, however, that the shifts made by process contributed to disciplinary legitimacy. These shifts provided English departments leverage to successfully bid for additional institutional resources, and they allowed some writing programs to successfully argue for separation from English departments, based on a body of knowledge created through strong research agendas and newly minted graduate programs.
Interestingly, this collection includes a voice that contradicts the lament over the focus of process on the individual writer. Barbara Couture critiques process precisely for having failed to translate process scholarship—which, she says, assumed that writing ought to develop and express the “subjective agent”—into effective classroom application. Composition relied on modeling technique rather than on the emulation of expression. Where the former relies on experts’ writing, the latter relies on students’ striving “to emulate others, to be like them, worthy of them, perhaps, even better than them.” This attitude, she says, is partly to blame for the failure of process to translate process scholarship into practice (30–31). According to Couture, post-process can thus more effectively address the issue of students’ self-development and self-expression.
Others critique process for the universality they believe process harbors. Gary Olson expresses this complaint in terms of a master narrative that results from the attempt to formulate a model that would apply in all writing situations and ignore the local (8). This attempt to systematize something that cannot be systematized, he says, is the gist of the complaint Thomas Kent and other post-process theorists offer. George Pullman agrees: speaking of the goal of process to reduce writing to “some step-by-step procedure with universal application” (27), Pullman argues that, had the process movement accomplished this goal, all writers in all situations would use the same process. That process has not thus proven adequate to this task indicates a need for change. Nancy DeJoy offers personal experience in her description of the “complexes” she experienced as a gendered student subjected to both expressivist and cognitivist writing process approaches. She says she was “accused more than once of being confused and/or hysterical, of not understanding, for example, the ‘universal’ quality of any or all of dominant process models’
