knowledge in order to realize a more ideal communicative act. However, passing theory requires a concomitant enactment of prior theory, which is constituted by a person’s background knowledge and which functions to improve the “guesses” of passing theory (160). Last, the principle of charity constitutes an assumption that (a) the ground of communication is a shared, common world in which we each assume others to be relatively rational beings and that (b) we unconsciously extend our best effort to understand others because we do want/need to communicate (161). Kent appropriates these concepts from Davidson’s theory of communicative interaction to fashion his theory of paralogic hermeneutics, which he advocates as a theory for both discourse reception and discourse production.
But to fully understand Kent’s theoretical formulation of paralogic hermeneutics, it is necessary to distinguish how he characterizes paralogy. According to Kent, paralogy is
the feature of language-in-use that accounts for successful communicative interaction. More specifically, paralogy refers to uncodifiable moves we make when we communicate with others, and ontologically, the term describes the unpredictable, elusive, and tenuous decisions or strategies we employ when we actually put language to use, [. . .] paralogy should be distinguished from the rhetorical concept of paralogism, which refers to a sophism, an illogical argument, or an example of false reasoning. Unlike paralogism, paralogy is not a derivative of logic: paralogy is not faulty logic. Rather paralogy seeks to subsume logic. As the etymological origin of the term suggests, paralogy means “beyond logic” in that it accounts for the attribute of language-in-use that defies reduction to a codifiable process or to a system of logical relations. (3)
In Kent’s theory, each instance of language-in-use is a radically unique act. I would add that Kent makes much of the word codify in both his theory and in his criticism of process. His reliance on this word warrants a dictionary explication. The first definition listed in the tenth edition of Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary reads, “to reduce to a code,” where code is then found to be defined as “a systematic statement of a body of law; esp: one given statutory force,” “a system of principles or rules” (“Codify”).
Kent is critical of traditional “logico-systemic approaches” that continue, he says, to “dominate” the field (Paralogic 24). These include expressive, empirical, and social constructionist approaches. According to Kent, expressive approaches, as represented in the work of Peter Elbow and Ken Macrorie, assume that all writers “share certain innate mental categories,” which they access through “systemic processes,” for example, freewriting and heuristics (24). Empirical approaches such as those of Linda Flower and John Hayes, H. H. Clark and Susan Haviland, and Barry Kroll assume that writing competence can be measured by the likes of protocol analysis or brain hemisphere research and the results systematized to accurately describe the “constitutive elements of effective writing” (24). Moreover, the social constructionist work of Kenneth Bruffee and M. K. Halliday assumes that writing is a “transactive social activity,” that is, that writers and readers contribute equally to the construction of meaning. Moreover, the social constructionist work of Bruffee and Halliday assumes an equal contribution of writers and readers to the construction of meaning. This equal contribution represents both discourse production and reception as “conventional social processes” (25). All share, Kent says, a foundationalist assumption that discourse production and reception “can be reduced to systemic processes and then taught in classrooms in some sort of codified manner” (25). If, then, discourse production and analysis cannot be reduced to a logico-systemic process, Kent says we must concede that both our rhetorical tradition and our current notions of writing and reading need serious reconsideration. Paralogic hermeneutics is, of course, his recommendation.
As for the potential repercussions of paralogic hermeneutics, Kent says the theory would require us to re-think the student/teacher relationship and to “reimagine the curricular mission of composition and literature courses within the university” (Paralogic 158). We would give up our dependence on Plato and Aristotle; we would understand that while codifiable material—for example, grammar rules, syntax, paragraphing, modes of discourse, etc.—can be usefully taught through the dialectic method, dialectic is moot since knowledge is located in the subjective knower; we would also understand that writing and reading “cannot be taught, for nothing exists to teach” (161). Traditional writing and literature courses would thus cease to exist and we would work, instead, as mentors who co-construct meaning with students. Admittedly, he says, more teachers would be required, which would not only “be very costly” but also “create complex problems for the discipline of English” (169).
Again, not all or even most who may self-identify as post-process necessarily subscribe to Kent’s theory. Indeed, when the term post-process entered the field, Kent’s theory, which he had already begun to discuss in various articles, was not even addressed.
Post-Process Moniker and the Discourse of Rhetoric and Composition
John Trimbur is said to have been the first to coin the term post-process, in a review written in 1994 of Patricia Bizzell’s Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness, C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon’s Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy, and Kurt Spellmeyer’s Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition.8 All three books address literacy as a problem for democratic participation in terms of how difference is negotiated, how literacy is defined, and how civic discourse has been impoverished. Each is notable, according to Trimbur, for couching literacy arguments in a framework of politics rather than the usual framework of students’ processes of reading and writing. Thus, Trimbur writes that
taken together, the three books can be read as statements that both reflect and [. . .] enact what has come to be called the “social turn” of the 1980s, a post-process, post-cognitivist theory and pedagogy that represent literacy as an ideological arena and composing as a cultural activity by which writers position and reposition themselves in relation to their own and others’ subjectivities, discourses, practices, and institutions. (emphasis added, “Taking” 109)
Trimbur then uses this clear and succinct concept of post-process to analyze how each of the three books distinguishes the result of “a crisis within the process paradigm and a growing disillusion with its limits and pressures” (109). This is not to say, however, that Trimbur dismisses the significance of process or the contributions that researchers of writing have made to our understanding of writing. He does take process to task, though, as he recounts its early, heady days, when teachers responded to the repressive “formalism” of current-traditional rhetoric and sought to empower students by giving them ownership of their learning and their writing. Effectively, this move to empower and to confer ownership to students not only simplified a very complex act, he says, but it also led teachers to assume that they could inhabit some culturally pristine space from which to bestow an authentic language upon their students. Equally destructive was an abdication of teacher authority, as teachers attempted to occupy the role of facilitator or co-learner. This led, Trimbur says, to genuine problems. Students recognized only too well the bottom line that their writing products would be exchanged for a grade. The more astute students also recognized the genuine currency of symbolic exchange to be “sincerity” and “authenticity.” Ironically, then, even as teachers abdicated authority in the interest of freeing students’ powers of authenticity, students were “learning a genre their teachers had failed to name” and for which they would be handsomely rewarded for (re)producing (110).
Trimbur’s interest in the three books revolves around problems inherent in process, particularly with the issue of teacher authority and the utopian desire each work advocates as negotiation to the cultural politics of literacy and thus to a fuller notion of democracy. Knoblauch and Brannon, he says, realized that their attack on the classical tradition in a previous book and their subsequent subscription to process merely replaced one master narrative with another, the latter distinguished by its liberalism and focus on individuality. Now, paralyzed by a postmodern fear of master narratives, Knoblauch and Brannon, in Trimbur’s estimation, succumb to the process fetish of relinquished teacher authority and eschew
