Networked Process. Helen Foster

present is the third area, the place where “knowledge of the past thus bears in on us to define the here and now, where all ages meet” (326). Due to the overload of knowledge and a demand for relevance, the past has been diminished as the present assumes greater distinction, a “stampede,” Ong writes, that “may prove self-annihilating if it crowds out first hand knowledge of the past by neglecting the linguistic and other tools that make such knowledge possible” (327). From this, Berlin justifies his approach to historiography and its particular relevance to the field as an aid in legitimizing its claims in the academy and in the culture.

      The fourth area, the anthropologizing of knowledge, however, might have been particularly significant to Berlin. Referencing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s work, Ong says that de Chardin’s purpose was to anthropologize actuality through an interpretation of the world through the interpretive lens of the phenomenon of man [sic]. It is the business of the writer, Ong concludes, “to take hold of the maximum in the tradition and transform it as completely as possible” (332). This transformation “entails anthropologizing because it centers history not in the movement of material and the redefining of political boundaries, but in the human consciousness and in the patterned shifts in personality structures which in great part determine the externals of cultures and of history and at the same time are determined by these externals” (334).

      This is the crux, then, of what Berlin wanted to accomplish with the use of noetic field: the relationship between rhetoric, reality, human consciousness, and culture or that which, as Ong says, has “held together man’s [sic] life world” (318), a relationship that renders rhetoric far more fundamental than Berlin has thus far ever claimed. While he insists that noetic fields should be viewed relative to their position in larger social structures, it is likely that Berlin stopped using the term after this publication because it is too imbricated in humanism and its concomitant focus on individuality, autonomy, and transcendence to serve his ideological purpose.

Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985

      Although Berlin’s purposes in writing this monograph are multiple and broadly conceived, I contain my discussion to his cognitive mapping of rhetorics and writing processes. This work represents a significant departure for Berlin, as his cognitive map is now drawn in a distinctly different manner. He has abandoned the use of noetic field and resumed the use of epistemology. Significantly, he has also now explicitly included ideology and added literacy as factors in his interpretive matrix. Apparently at a point of transition in his conceptualization, Berlin becomes more difficult to interpret, in part because there is a dissonance between his composite conceptualization and his need to produce a system of classification.

      Part of Berlin’s purpose in this monograph is to counter monolithic notions of rhetorical theory that continue to prevail in English departments, which have been indifferent to innovation. To this end, he states: “In considering the rhetorical theories of the period, I have chosen epistemology rather than ideology as the basis for my taxonomy, doing so because it allows for a closer focus on the rhetorical properties—as distinct from the economic, social, or political properties—of the systems considered” (6). Electing to use ideology as the primary coding would have required using a strategy of deduction, which would not, therefore, have produced the taxonomy that Berlin wished to accomplish. Interestingly, Berlin comments more than usual on his taxonomy, noting that the three categories—objective, subjective, and transactional—are not monolithic, as “each offers a diversity of rhetorical theories” (6). Further, he provides the caveat that “this taxonomy is not meant to be exhaustive of the entire field of rhetoric, but is simply an attempt to make manageable the discussion of the major rhetorics I have encountered in examining this period” (6). Perhaps Berlin is experiencing some ambivalence about a taxonomy in light of his more complex cognitive map.

      Nevertheless, while the rhetorical properties continue to consist of “the nature of the real, the interlocutor, the audience, and the function of language” (7), Berlin now variously interprets rhetoric as “the production of spoken and written texts,” as part of “the indispensable foundation of schooling” (1), and as “a diverse discipline that historically has included a variety of incompatible systems” (3). Rhetoric’s goal, literacy, is defined as “a particular variety of rhetoric—a way of speaking and writing within the confines of specific social sanctions” (3–4), while it functions as an intermediary “between the writing course and larger social developments” (5).