Nevertheless, since, our current professional profile remains entrenched in the impoverished pedagogy of general writing skills instruction, Petraglia seeks to explore what being post-process would portend for empirical research and for the writing profession. Ultimately, he advocates for the “new social scientism,” which situates writing “in physical and metaphysical spaces of time, place, culture, and identity” (56) and is more “epistemologically aware” and more self-reflexive than its predecessor (59). Such a rethinking would lead us away from techne and toward the development of rhetorical sensibilities. We need to deploy our efforts “to inculcate receptive skills” (62). Petraglia endorses David Russell’s recommendation that, in addition to WAC classes, we offer introductory and interdisciplinary courses that would raise awareness about writing among students, other faculty, and the public. However, all of this depends upon the “ability and willingness of writing professionals to evolve not only post-process but post-composition” (63). In Petraglia’s view, post-process research is likely “to suggest the ways in which the enterprise of composition is misguided and why the explicit teaching of writing—as rhetorical production—is a losing proposition” (60).
As for the future of a post-process profession, Petraglia suggests several scenarios. One is that we “will hunker down into the general writing-skills trenches” and continue to maintain a service role in the university (60). Another is that we will shun the very method of empirical research that could lend us greater disciplinary integrity (60–61). The last is that we will realize the need to study how writers write outside the composition classroom, an initiative currently addressed by writing-across-the disciplines (WAC) and writing-in-the-disciplines (WID) programs. WAC and WID do not, however, promote disciplinary security or prominence and, he argues, we can achieve such security and prominence only by rethinking the entire enterprise of teaching writing (61).
The degree to which Kent’s contributors share the strong version of his theory depends on the extent to which they agree about the radical nature of writing as public, interpretive, and situated, along with what they believe this portends for teaching writing, much as the degree to which Petraglia’s contributors share his strong version of GWSI depends on their view of the disciplinary and professional repercussions. These two edited collections share common values between the editors and a group of contributors whose sympathies mirror in kind, rather than degree, those values.
Post-Process Scholarship that Positions Itself Beyond That of the Social/Cultural Turn
Two scholars occupy this space, but only one rests comfortably here, and that is Thomas Kent, originator of this position. The other conceptual inhabitant is Sidney Dobrin. I have discussed Kent’s theory earlier, so I will not belabor it again. Suffice to say that Kent maintains that expressive, empirical, and social constructionist approaches all share the same foundationalist assumption “that discourse production and analysis can be reduced to systemic processes and then taught in classrooms in some codified manner” (Paralogic 25). If, however, we concede that neither the production nor the reception of discourse can be reduced to a “logico-systemic” process, we must re-think all of our assumptions regarding writing and reading, along with the rhetorical tradition from which they are derived. We must also abandon writing instruction in any form that we know it today. This would inevitably entail forfeiting disciplinarity, since no body of knowledge regarding the acts of writing or reading could be assembled. No less problematic from an institutional standpoint would be the only alternative for student learning: the one-to-one mentoring relationship that would constitute an authentic communicative interaction.
While Dobrin shares an affinity with Kent’s notion of paralogic hermeneutic theory, he critiques it to suggest that what is now needed are “post-post-process theories of paralogic hermeneutics” (emphasis added, “Paralogic” 133). Dobrin criticizes current attempts to derive post-process pedagogies from Kent’s theory, and he nominates a different vision. Few attempts, he argues have been made to formulate a pedagogy derived from paralogic hermeneutics. Of the ones attempted thus far, however, Dobrin is critical, writing that they “tend to fall short of [paralogic hermeneutics’] agendas” (133). He also parses the field differently, based on his definition of post-process as “the shift in scholarly attention from the process by which the individual writer produces text to the larger forces that affect the writer and of which that writer is part” (132). Dobrin agrees with many of his fellow post-process scholars, but he disputes Kent’s notion that the advent of post-process coincides with the social/cultural turn in the field.
Dobrin differs with all, however, in his advocacy of a yet more extreme remove from process, that is, post-post-process theories of paralogic hermeneutics. This post-post theory is required because regular theories of paralogic hermeneutics have failed to account for power and ethics: “triangulation, as it has been defined, denies that culture, race, class, or gender affect at all one’s prior theories which determine one’s passing theories, which affect the moment of triangulation and communication” (142). In order to correct this problem, he seeks effective resistance in the discursive moments of triangulation that are the heart of paralogic hermeneutic theories. Dobrin does not, however, actually offer a pedagogy of paralogic hermeneutics, as he believes the current educational environment would seriously compromise it and because he remains deeply ambivalent about even the possibility of formulating such a pedagogy. The challenge, he writes, “becomes not creating the uncreatable paralogic pedagogies but redefining how we envision the very nature of pedagogy with these theories in mind” (135).
The space of this post-process version is the most extreme of all post-process positions. Indeed, its most positive note for a discipline as we currently know it is a strong ambivalence about this possibility: were the field to accept these theories, it might well cease to exist.
A Few Rejoinders to Thomas Kent’s Edited Post-Process Collection
Responses to Kent’s edited collection reflect a certain degree of dismay as to how process has been constructed, what the differences between the two really are, and what the adoption of a post-process model would mean for the field. Richard Fulkerson maintains that post-process advocates have offered a “straw person” argument similar to the one process constructed for current-traditional rhetoric; however, the price of this new fallacy is the disparagement of three decades of thoughtful work in composition as “scientific, cognitivist, and universalistic” (“Of Pre-” 111). “[E]ven among those that use the [post-process] term with confidence,” there appear to be few shared “assumptions, concepts, values and practices,” except for their agreement with Kent’s “industrial strength definition” that the process of writing cannot be systematically codified (Bloom 35–36). Fulkerson is also critical of how the term post-process shifts so radically among the collection’s contributors and argues that this should remind us that a no more cohesive post-process “movement” exists now than ever did for process. Speaking to the differences between process and post-process, Kevin Porter describes a position to which many, I suspect, are sympathetic. He speculates “that if you blunt the extreme rigidity of the charges leveled against process theory (as well as some of the more extreme claims made by early advocates of it)” and argue, rather, that process theory represents attempts to better understand writing and to translate those understandings into effective pedagogies, “then these charges [made by post-process advocates] lose most of their excitement” (712).
Last, Susan Miller clearly does not “celebrate the post-process movement now said to theorize composition anew” (“Why” 55). To Gary Olson’s critique that the attempt of process to achieve a generalizable explanation of writing has been “misguided” because such explanations elide the local, she offers this rebuttal: “Certainly, many generalized explanations may be misguided, as I think this one is. That is, without a stake in a general theory of how composing