Networked Process. Helen Foster

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 the engagement of rhetorical argument that would promote their own beliefs in radical social change. Trimbur suggests that Spellmeyer also capitulates to a preoccupation of process with the student-writer. Spellmeyer attempts to resolve the contradiction between educating students for mastery and educating them for citizenship by nominating the essay as his genre-of-choice and presuming that the essay resides in some privileged and unmarked social and political space that students can unproblematically appropriate for their own ends. Finally, Trimbur endorses Bizzell’s self-understanding, which she achieves through a critical review of her own work, that no method and no meta-discourse can successfully bring students to critical consciousness. Trimbur agrees with Bizzell that we must recognize the limitations of the prison-house of language and unapologetically assume the attendant responsibility to promote what we ethically view as the common good.

      Countering Trimbur and the many who adopted Trimbur’s position, Debra Jacobs argues that regardless of its limitations, “losing sight of writing as a process can lead to impoverishing the process of critical inquiry” (673). She admits, however, her discomfort “with the risk I take in advancing an allegiance to what [process] has been so thoroughly critiqued that its limitations can readily be rehearsed by anyone who is even modestly acquainted with recent composition scholarship” (663–64). Nevertheless, Jacobs does take issue with Trimbur and his review, not for the critique and resolution he offers, but with his recommendation of the notion post-process, which is bought with what she views as an essentialist characterization of process theory and classroom practice. Furthermore, she admonishes those advocates of post-process who conflate process theory with expressivism and call upon dated process theory from the 1970s and early 1980s to construct a straw man merely for the sake of dismissing it.

      In her 2001 essay published in JAC, Jacobs responds to three articles—Candace Spigelman’s “What Role Virtue?,” Thomas Rickert’s “‘Hands Up, You’re Free’: Composition in a Post-Oedipal World,” and Anthony Petruzzi’s “Kairotic Rhetoric in Freire’s Liberatory Pedagogy.” She concedes that she takes liberties in applying the ideas in these three articles, particularly those of Rickert, to pedagogy in general and to process theory in particular since the three do not share the same views. Nevertheless, she defends doing so on the grounds that unless we conceive the classroom only as a space for “happenings,” we are forced to theorize classroom practice (666). The purpose of her response is to “reexamine process theory and pedagogy in light of some common characteristics of the liberatory pedagogy” all three writers, she says, “point toward” (663). In the estimation of Jacobs, the characteristics the writers identify in their formulations of a critical or liberatory pedagogy not only “resonate” with but also “enrich” her understanding of writing as process (663).

      Both Spigelman and Rickert address the rub between emancipatory pedagogies and the disciplinary and institutional authority that undermines them. For Spigelman, problems occur as teachers attempt to intervene in students’ critical and ethical development, but her position is that teachers still have a responsibility to exercise such interventions. Rickert advocates a post-pedagogy that promotes and values “transformative acts of