Networked Process. Helen Foster

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.

Writing Process/Post-Process Unbound: Networked Process

      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 rhetoric, it differs in Kent’s appropriation in its radical extreme, which 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.