Networked Process. Helen Foster

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);

      4. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges 1900–1985, 1987 (referred to as Rhetoric and Reality throughout this chapter); and

      5. “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” 1988 (referred to as “Rhetoric and Ideology” throughout this chapter).

      Throughout these works, Berlin insists that teachers become more reflexive about the ramification of their classroom practice for themselves, their students, their institutions, and the larger culture. The following challenge, one among many, is perhaps most representative of the “felt” dissonance that compelled him to this scholarship.16

      The numerous recommendations of the “process”-centered approaches to writing instruction as superior to the “product”-centered approaches are not very useful. Everyone teaches the process of writing, but everyone does not teach the same process. The test of one’s competence as a composition instructor, it seems to me, resides in being able to recognize and justify the version of the process being taught, complete with all of its significance for the student. (“Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories” 247)

      Throughout these works, Berlin calls teachers to raise the stakes. His article, co-authored with Robert Inkster in 1980 (“Current-Traditional Rhetoric: Paradigm and Practice”), addresses the issue that would capture his intellectual and emotional energies for years to come: “we need to scrutinize carefully the epistemology implied by our practice in the teaching of composition” (14). More urgent, as illustrated in the above quoted passage from “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories,” Berlin ties the need to scrutinize the epistemology of practice directly to teachers’ competence, while in Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century in American Colleges, his appeal expands to invoke a professional, teacher ethos and to foreground teaching as an ethical obligation. “One of the purposes of this study,” he writes, “has been to convince writing teachers of their importance. [. . .] Most students [. . .] learn what we teach them. For this reason, it is important to be aware of what we are teaching, in all its implications. [. . .] We owe it to our students and ourselves to make certain that we are providing the best advice that we can offer” (91–92). By 1987’s Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985, however, Berlin asks teachers to consider the implications of teaching beyond students’ personal welfare: “Our decision, then, about the kind of rhetoric we are to call upon in teaching writing,” he says, “has important implications for the behavior of our students—behavior that includes the personal, social, and political” (7). In “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” Berlin’s agenda is even more emphatically articulated as he writes: “It should now be apparent that a way of teaching is never innocent. [. . .] A rhetoric cannot escape the ideological question, and to ignore this is to fail our responsibilities as teachers and as citizens” (492–93). An abiding issue for Berlin, then, involves the responsibilities and obligations that teachers of writing can fulfill only by appreciating distinctions among rhetorics and their attendant writing processes.17

      Berlin makes the connection between rhetoric and writing process explicit in yet another call for teachers of writing to understand the implications of their practices, as explained in his 1984 monograph, Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges. Rhetorics are, he writes, multiple, varied, and changeable, characterized as “the codification of the unspeakable as well as the speakable. No rhetoric [. . .] is permanent, is embraced by all people, or even by some one person or group, at all times. A rhetoric changes” (1). The connection between rhetorics and writing processes, he says, has to do with the underlying assumptions of a specific rhetoric, for these determine

      how the composing process is conceived and taught in the classroom. What goes into the process—the way in which invention, arrangement, and style are undertaken, or not undertaken, as is sometimes the case—is determined by the assumptions made, and often unexamined, about reality, writer/speaker, audience, and language. Each rhetoric, therefore, indicates the behavior appropriate to the composing situation. Beyond that, it directs the behavior of teacher and student in the classroom, making certain kinds of activity inevitable and other kinds impossible. (2)

      There exists, then, at all times multiple rhetorics. In teaching writing, any sort of writing, we must inevitably use some process to teach the student, although notions of what constitute this process vary and emanate from both formal theory (institutionally legitimized) and informal theory (lore). Rhetorics have historically been concerned with notions of rhetorical situation/reality, speaker/writer, listener/reader, and language/discourse, while theories of writing process have variously addressed how the elements that constitute a writing process correlate with the elements of a particular theory of rhetoric. It is the relationship between rhetorics and processes that prescribes, or, according to Berlin, ought to prescribe, teaching and learning. Writing processes, then, represent material instantiations of theory and practice.

“Current-Traditional