Networked Process. Helen Foster

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СКАЧАТЬ productive. But if we uncritically discard one organizing principle for the field only to uncritically adopt another, we risk not only capitulating to similar errors in our disciplinary history but also foregoing a dialogue that might allow us to (re)see process so that we can understand the challenge of post-process within the context of some shared value. Without such a context, the risk is that adherents of both positions will cling to their positions in a posture of recalcitrant self-defense. Certainly, disillusionment with process is not sufficient reason to discard it, but neither is allegiance to process sufficient reason to dismiss post-process. Indeed, disillusionment and allegiance are tricky warrants, offering little exigence for a context in which a genuinely engaged dialogue might occur. More is needed, then, to build a context that can produce dialogue. Minimally, this involves understanding the nature of the two positions and how they differ. It also involves identifying what value the two might share and at what point that value destabilizes. Therefore, a context for genuine dialogue requires at the very least that we determine the point of stasis at which productive disagreement might begin.

      My purpose in this chapter is to identify this point of stasis. To accomplish this, I first construct post-process and process profiles to determine how they differ, and what they mutually value. I devote more space to post-process, simply because it is the less well understood perspective, and I ask a variety of questions. What characterizes the post-process position? What does post-process reject of the process position? Why? What is the nature of the disciplinary identity post-process rejects and would supersede? What characterizes process? What shared value might serve as an effective starting point for a productive dialogue? To answer these questions, I begin with post-process and examine process in light of what post-process critiques in process. Then, I consider the two positions against stasis theory to identify the point at which productive dialogue might ensue.

Post-Process

      Although some are calling the present time in our history “post-process,” it, “like its counterpart, postmodern,” Lynn Bloom writes, “seems vague in comparison with its referent” (35). Many, undoubtedly, would agree, and while this vagueness is attributable in great part to an unclear understanding of the post-process position, it is also influenced by other factors. One is generational.4 Many of those emerging from rhetoric and composition doctoral programs within the last decade or so may associate process with a seemingly remote watershed moment in the history of the field. Thus, they identify themselves as post-process because they perceive an evolutionary, disciplinary sensibility, which they happen to equate with post-process. There are also those disillusioned with what first-year composition accomplishes, with the labor issues that sustain it, and with the way first-year composition shapes rhetoric and composition’s professional and disciplinary identity. Although these attitudes about post-process inform the scholarship of both process and post-process, they are not often translated, themselves, into a publishing focus. Thus, factors involving both the generational and the disaffected may indicate particular sensibilities more than any tangible scholarship, rendering it difficult to assess how the nature of post-process is constituted across these constituencies.

      Even within explicit post-process scholarship, however, there is little to mitigate the vagueness of post-process. For example, one factor is the range of scholarship claimed. Some post-process theorists mark its advent with the social and cultural turn of the mid-1980s, effectively enveloping this scholarship within post-process. Others, however, most notably Thomas Kent, a leading theorist of post-process, direct their critique at expressivists, cognitivists, and social constructionists alike, thus situating post-process as following rather than encompassing these schools of thought. Furthermore, there are additional complications within these post-process groups, such as differences over what the adoption of a post-process position would or should lead to. Some, for example, argue for reform of first-year composition; some call for its abolition; some advocate programmatic change; and some hint at disciplinary and institutional changes so profound as to have us re-think the nature of education itself. Post-process is, then, no more homogeneous than process.

      Therefore, to gauge post-process—to get some sense of what it is, how it is valued, and what it would portend—I profile post-process according to the following scheme:

      1. Entrance of post-process theory into the discourse of rhetoric and composition

      2. Entrance of the post-process moniker into the discourse of rhetoric and composition, along with a rejoinder

      3. Post-process scholarship that lays claim to the scholarship of the social/cultural turn, which is divided into two strands:

      a. Strand One Post-Process, comprised of those who may self-identify as post-process but who do not necessarily partake of Kent’s theory

      b. Strand Two Post-Process, comprised of those who explicitly self-identify as post-process but appropriate only specific concepts from Kent’s theory of paralogic hermeneutics, concepts which they then repurpose

      1. Critiques of process within Strand Two Post-Process

      2. Calls for reform within Strand Two Post-Process

      3. Repercussions for a post-process profession within Strand Two Post-Process

      4. Post-process scholarship that positions itself beyond that of the social/cultural turn

      5. A few rejoinders to Kent’s edited Post-Process collection

Entrance of Post-Process Theory into the Discourse of Rhetoric and Composition

      As this post-profile unfolds, it becomes increasingly obvious that what constitutes post-process theory is arguable. For the moment, though, I want to focus on the theoretical grounding that some who both self-identify as post-process and who address post-process in their scholarship reference in their work. This is the theory of Thomas Kent.5

      Kent began publishing work that articulated the theory now most closely associated with post-process in 1989, some six years before the term itself would actually be coined.6 Indeed, Kent’s theory, which eventually came to be known as “post-process,” culminated in his book, Paralogic Rhetoric: A Theory of Communicative Interaction, published in 1993. Paralogic hermeneutics, as it is often called, is based on the theory of communicative interaction of analytic philosopher Donald Davidson.7 This theory rests on two premises: the first, that “communicative interaction is a thoroughly hermeneutic act”; and the second, that this act “cannot be converted into a logical framework or system of social conventions that determines the meaning of our utterances” (x). In his formulation of paralogic hermeneutics, Kent argues that conventions of language do not “control” language use; rather, conventions of language are “established through the give and take of communicative interaction” (x). Further, he argues against “the claim that discourse production occurs in specific communities,” along with “the related claim that ethnographers can account for the process of discourse production by disclosing the cultural conventions that define a community” (x). Kent suggests that “an externalist conception of language” such as Davidson’s “can account for many of the inherent problems engendered by the assumption that meaning derives from a framework of normative conventions” (x). Paralogic hermeneutics rests on the assumption that “human subjectivity is all that we can know of the world” (100). No mediation is thus required between the individual and other individuals or between the individual and the world, for to make such a claim would be, according to Kent, paramount to endowing the particular “conceptual scheme” of mediation sole epistemological status (97–101).

      Kent takes from Davidson four concepts, which are key to paralogic hermeneutics: triangulation, passing theory, prior theory, and the principle of charity. Briefly, triangulation is the organizing principle, enfolding the other three to arrive at what Jane Perkins calls a “baseline of communication and understanding,” where understanding is, of course, understood to be interpretive (Paralogic 160). Passing theory is enacted when we communicate СКАЧАТЬ