From a disciplinary perspective, Petraglia critiques the close association of process with the behaviorist model in psychology. Process theorists argued against a notion of writing as a single behavior and for a notion constituted by procedures and strategies that eventually coalesced into the complex system of process. This understanding then established a professional agenda that both resonated with the notion of rhetoric as practical art (techne) and propelled research and teaching. It rendered other methodologies viable, especially those including a scientific analytic component, which contributed, Petraglia argues, (1) to serve composition well as a field “dedicated to the production of rhetorical skills”; and (2) to “[discipline] writing in every sense of the word,” imposing a coherence on lore (North) and providing “a catechistic structure through which writing could attain a distinct academic identity” (“Is There” 51). Cognitive models of process greatly contributed to the development of “a genuinely academic profile” that ultimately became the movement’s “Manifest Destiny” (51). However, the empirical method objectified writing process and continued he says, a two-millennia tradition of “dissecting and redissecting the whole of rhetoric into manageable parts” (53). Thus, Petraglia argues that the current professional profile of the field remains entrenched in the impoverished pedagogy of GWSI.
Others also take process to task for its privileging of individuality. David Russell credits process with enacting an important shift from text to the individual writer, thus effectively rendering the student an object of study. The problem, he argues, is that process “remained with the individual” and attempted to generalize psychological processes across a broad range of students and settings (“Activity Theory and Process” 80). Along with this, process altered teacher/student relationships, but then exerted a normative influence on them. Teachers were taught, Russell says, to intervene strategically in students’ process, using a normative process vocabulary to guide not only their verbal interaction with students but also their written responses and final evaluations. This pedagogy assumed that the stages of student writing constituted “legitimate stages of work in progress rather than failed attempts to produce a correct product”; teachers then responded with “transactional in-progress comments [. . .] rather than evaluative ‘final’ judgments” (150). Russell concludes, however, that the shifts made by process contributed to disciplinary legitimacy. These shifts provided English departments leverage to successfully bid for additional institutional resources, and they allowed some writing programs to successfully argue for separation from English departments, based on a body of knowledge created through strong research agendas and newly minted graduate programs.
Interestingly, this collection includes a voice that contradicts the lament over the focus of process on the individual writer. Barbara Couture critiques process precisely for having failed to translate process scholarship—which, she says, assumed that writing ought to develop and express the “subjective agent”—into effective classroom application. Composition relied on modeling technique rather than on the emulation of expression. Where the former relies on experts’ writing, the latter relies on students’ striving “to emulate others, to be like them, worthy of them, perhaps, even better than them.” This attitude, she says, is partly to blame for the failure of process to translate process scholarship into practice (30–31). According to Couture, post-process can thus more effectively address the issue of students’ self-development and self-expression.
Others critique process for the universality they believe process harbors. Gary Olson expresses this complaint in terms of a master narrative that results from the attempt to formulate a model that would apply in all writing situations and ignore the local (8). This attempt to systematize something that cannot be systematized, he says, is the gist of the complaint Thomas Kent and other post-process theorists offer. George Pullman agrees: speaking of the goal of process to reduce writing to “some step-by-step procedure with universal application” (27), Pullman argues that, had the process movement accomplished this goal, all writers in all situations would use the same process. That process has not thus proven adequate to this task indicates a need for change. Nancy DeJoy offers personal experience in her description of the “complexes” she experienced as a gendered student subjected to both expressivist and cognitivist writing process approaches. She says she was “accused more than once of being confused and/or hysterical, of not understanding, for example, the ‘universal’ quality of any or all of dominant process models’ conceptualizations of audience, invention, and so forth” (164).
Pullman also objects to the universality of the classroom site. He contends there was no paradigm shift, that both writing process and current-traditional rhetoric share a limiting and disabling metaphor that defines both, namely, the classroom, whose nature is distinguished by the exigency of illiteracy mediated by abstracted, universalized conventions (27). Pullman concludes, however, that rhetoric is too complex to ever be codified; its teaching, therefore, “must serve only an introductory purpose and must never be mistaken for (or reconstructed as) real rhetoric as it is lived and practiced” (28-29). Russell, on the other hand, does not share Pullman’s presumption regarding the goal of universality. He believes that process was commodified. Still, he contends that most process research focuses on the classroom, rather than on what is of more interest: the relation between the writing processes of school and those beyond school. Russell uses activity systems theory to argue that we look beyond how “the writing process” is taught within our own school activity systems to “the plural sociologics of various networks of people and purposes and tools, including that most protean tool, writing, in the relation between school and society” (95). If our desire is to make substantive changes in writing, composition must broaden its “study of the microlevel circulation of discursive tools (and power)” between school and society and insinuate our own tools into those activity systems. “In doing so,” Russell says, “the commodification of writing processes is not an irony to be lamented but a sign of composition’s influence to be understood and used, one hopes, for good” (95).
The universality of process beyond the composition classroom is also a target of critique. Nancy Blyer reports that knowledge of writing in one situation does not ensure successful writing in another, nor can any pedagogy ensure such success (68). Russell critiques process in public schools with an anecdote regarding his and others’ attempts to have NCTE make changes regarding the description of process in their curriculum standards document. Russell has passionately argued, to no avail, to change the phrase “‘the writing process’” to the plural “‘writing processes.’” “Early on,” he writes, “researchers such as Applebee (“Problems”) pointed to problems with notions of the writing process, as a unitary psychological process that would be somehow more ‘real’—less school-bound—than previous ways of learning and teaching writing” (80). That a notion of “the writing process” has, indeed, become reified in public education is evidenced in Russell’s narrative about entering his third-grade daughter’s classroom to see four, large, commercially produced posters, each containing a one-word text: “PREWRITE. WRITE. REVISE. EDIT.” (80). Both Blyer and Russell attest to the problems of individuality and universality in process as it is applied in institutional contexts other than first-year composition.
Strand two post-process critiques differ from those in strand one, where scholars maintain that neither GWSI nor process is theoretically or pedagogically defensible, that GWSI is actually detrimental to students’ writing, and that it compromises our disciplinary security. In contrast, strand two advocates must explicitly critique process in order to self-identify as post-process. Their critiques, therefore, focus on aspects that process valued in its turn away from current-traditional rhetoric: (1) a focus on the student, which this group of scholars translates to the privileging of individuality over the social; (2) a focus on the cognitive models of process, which is maintained to have continued a two thousand year-old tradition of essentializing rhetoric as techne; (3) a focus on a universality that process is said to have valued but was unable to achieve; (4) and a critique of the value process placed on the teacher-student relationship, which is argued to have constituted a system of mediation inherently flawed by its overdetermined, always-already commodified epistemological assumptions. But it must also be said that