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Beyond postprocess / edited by Sidney I. Dobrin, J.A. Rice, Michael Vastola. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87421-831-2 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-0-87421-832-9 (e-book)1. English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching (Higher) 2. English Philology--Study and teach-ing. I. Dobrin, Sidney I., 1967- II. Rice, J. A. III. Vastola, Michael. PE1404.B48 2011 808--dc22 2011009571

This one’s for N!"# and L$%&$—S.I.D.

To T$'($.—J.A.R.

To my parents, A')*+'( and J$'!, V$,)+-$—M.V.

Preface: Righting Writing xiThomas Kent,

Introduction: A New Postprocess Manifesto: A Plea for Writing 1Sidney I. Dobrin, J. A. Rice, and Michael Vastola

Barbara Couture

Debra Journet

Joe Marshall Hardin

Byron Hawk

John Trimbur and Karen Press

Jeff Rice

Kyle Jensen

Cynthia Haynes

Collin Brooke and Thomas Rickert

Raúl Sánchez

Geoffery Sirc

Rebecca Moore Howard

During a family dinner, my young granddaughter began to eat before all of us at the table were served. She caught my eye, and I raised my eyebrows. In turn, she rolled her eyes, smiled broadly, and put down her fork. I knew that she knew the social conventions that constitute the dining-out script, and my raised eyebrows simply reminded her of one of those conventions: one waits until everyone is served before dig-ging in. Obviously, I might have communicated with her in a variety of ways; I did not need to employ upraised eyebrows. To communicate my intention, I might have spoken to her, nudged her, shaken my head, or written her a note. However, the eyebrow lifting worked to convey my intention, and I believe I understood her response as well. She rolled her eyes and smiled, I believe, to tell me something akin to “okay, okay, I understand,” or maybe “get off my back,” or perhaps even “thanks for reminding me.”

This sign language was efficacious for at least three reasons. First, my granddaughter understood that my physical gesture represented an attempt to communicate, and with this seemingly self-evident and unremarkable understanding, my granddaughter also granted to my gesture what philosophers call the principle of charity. This principle means in general that an interpreter, in order to maximize an inter-pretation, must ascribe to a speaker or other language user a kind of rational credit; that is, the interpreter presupposes that the speaker is rational and, more importantly, that the speaker speaks the truth or is not attempting to mislead. Stated a bit differently, the principle means that an interpreter, in order to arrive at a reasonable interpretation, will maximize agreement with a speaker by attributing to a speaker a com-mon and shared rationality. In Donald Davidson’s formulation of this concept, the principle is extended further to mean that when we com-municate we do not only maximize agreement; we also must be mostly correct about one another’s beliefs, for if we were not correct about one

another’s beliefs, we wouldn’t even be able to recognize an utterance as an utterance.1

So, my granddaughter maximized her interpretation of my gesture by charitably crediting me with rationality and by granting to me the verac-ity of my gesture, in this case the fact that I intended to convey a mean-ingful message. Now, my granddaughter certainly might have inter-preted my raised eyebrows as something irrational, as an attempt to be funny on my part by making a face or simply as some sort of autonomic muscle response, but before she could arrive at this kind of interpreta-tion, she first would need to rule out the possibility that I intended to communicate with her. In other words, the principle of charity helped her decide how to interpret my gesture; it did not help her decide the meaning of the gesture. Nonetheless, my granddaughter could have arrived at no meaningful interpretation at all without first attributing to me her belief that I intended to communicate a rational thought. Although we employ the term principle to explain this interpretive activ-ity, this principle does not really qualify as a principle in that it can be reduced to a formula or process, where by process I mean something like a procedure or methodology that can be codified and then applied to circumstances in order to predict some sort of outcome. The Principle of charity constitutes a principle only in the sense that this interpretive activity comprises part of our ability to communicate, an ability probably hardwired in the brain, as I will discuss later.

A second reason my gesture proved efficacious relates to what I will call hermeneutic triangulation. After my granddaughter attributed to me the rationality and commonality of belief described by the principle of charity, she simultaneously understood that she could interpret my gesture as something meaningful and, by extension, that my gesture could be interpreted by other language users within a world shared by these language users. More specifically, my granddaughter could inter-pret my gesture because she recognized in a rational manner that my upraised eyebrows related to our world—at least the world of middle-sized dry goods (restaurants, eating utensils, grumpy grandfathers, and so forth)—and to other signs that could be deciphered as part of a lan-guage, in this case a sign that related to other signs and conventions in the dining-out script. In order to interpret my gesture in the way I intended, then, my granddaughter, in a sense, maneuvered within a

1. For more on this, see Davidson, “Radical Interpretation” (1973).

triangular communicative relation among herself (as a language user), a world of objects and events, and me (as another language user). Of course, when people communicate, these three elements never appear as discrete entities; each element comes into being only because the other two exist. Nonetheless, this triangular relation enables us to gen-erate and to interpret utterances, although the meaning of any particu-lar utterance, as I indicated previously, may be different for different language users. Consequently, the principle of charity and hermeneutic triangulation cannot guarantee effective communication. Although my granddaughter, for example, rightly understood my gesture to be a form of rational communication—she triangulated well enough to know my gesture had something to do with her and the world we occupied—she nonetheless might have misinterpreted my gesture to mean something different than “wait to eat until others are served,” a possibility that relates to a third reason regarding the efficacy of my gesture.

A third reason my granddaughter understood my gesture relates to what I have called hermeneutic guessing (1993, 42–43). When two people communicate, they guess, generally in a highly effective manner, about the meaning of one another’s discourse. This guess may be best under-stood as an ongoing attempt to align or to triangulate another person’s discourse with language employed by other language users and with the world. These guesses generally are highly accurate because over time we become better and better guessers so that everyday communication seems practically effortless. In most of our communicative interactions, our utterances align unproblematically with the utterances of others and the world we share with others, although clearly at times even the most mundane message may be misinterpreted. In my granddaughter’s case, she obviously possessed a wide range of possible interpretations in her interpretive repertoire to explain my gesture; as I have indicated, she might have interpreted my gesture as an attempt on my part to be funny or simply as some sort of twitch, for example. However, the interpretive strategy she employed—what Donald Davidson calls a “passing theory”—allowed her to make an accurate hermeneutic guess that corresponded with my intention. 2 In fact, one might argue that the meaning of my gesture could be understood only as an action and not as a sign within a semiotic system of some sort; that is, her action of replacing her fork actu-ally constituted the meaning of my gesture. However, I do not have the

2. For more on this, see Davidson, “A Nice Derangement” (1986).

space here to develop this sticky point, but we can say with some certainty that she understood the meaning of my gesture within a field of possible meanings. She was able to discern this meaning because she was able within this particular and unrepeatable moment to formulate a fleeting hermeneutic strategy that corresponded with my intention. I say this strat-egy is “fleeting” because the interpretive strategy employed in this one unique situation may not work in another. However, I need to emphasize the obvious point here that hermeneutic guessing is ubiquitous; all of us in each of our particular communicative interactions employ these fleet-ing hermeneutic moves when we communicate with one another.

In this one relatively straightforward communicative interaction between my granddaughter and me, a fairly complex hermeneutic activ-ity occurs that cannot be explained very well by a process-oriented com-munication model. Perhaps the most famous process-oriented commu-nication model is Roman Jakobson’s schematic (1960) that describes the elements inherent in any communicative interchange and how these elements function. When Jakobson emphasizes the function of commu-nicative elements, he carries forward a quite long formalist and structur-alist tradition that, in many ways, still serves us well. By function, Jakobson understands communicative interaction as a process that includes an addresser and addressee along with a message and a contact. These four elements, related across diachronic and synchronic axes, represent necessary components that work together to enable communication to occur. They function together, in other words, to make communication possible. However, this process-oriented model cannot explain (and to be fair to Jakobson, the model does not attempt to explain) how we come to understand one another. I believe that no process-oriented model or, in fact, no process at all can describe adequately the necessary and sufficient conditions that allow one person to interpret successfully the utterances of another. Certainly, in retrospect we always can conjure an explanation to describe how we interpreted a specific utterance, but this explanation may or may not help us at all to interpret a subsequent utterance. So, in a sense, our ability to understand one another cannot be reduced to a process, again if we mean by process something akin to a procedure or methodology that can be codified, or schematized in the case of Jakobson’s model, and then applied to circumstances in order to predict an outcome. Our hermeneutic guesses cannot be reduced to a process. Our attempts to understand how these guesses operate lie beyond process models.

Brain wiring constitutes another way to think about the inability of process-oriented models to explain adequately the integral role that interpretation plays during our communicative interactions. We now know that humans do not require sinuses, tongues, lips, or larynxes in order to communicate through speech. In several research projects around the country, electrodes have been placed in the cortexes of stroke victims who are “locked in” and unable to communicate through ordinary means. When a stroke victim thinks about a word, complicated nerve activity occurs in the cortex that under normal circumstances would signal specific muscles to move in order to produce speech, but because these impulses are short-circuited in the brain of a stroke victim, the muscles never move. However, through the implanted electrodes, a computer can read the impulses that signal the muscles to move and, in turn, identify the muscle movements associated with the sounds that produced the impulses. These signals for muscle movement then may be converted into speech through a voice synthesizer. This ability to speak through brain activity alone clearly demonstrates that our brains are wired for communication, but this research also demonstrates just as clearly that from person to person this wiring cannot control or predict the message being communicated. Unlike our ability to control and to predict nerve impulses and muscle movement, controlling or predicting how and what someone may communicate or desire to communicate may prove impossible, for what we communicate and how we communi-cate is related hermeneutically to the utterances of other language users and to the world we share with these language users.

This by now tedious example of my granddaughter’s ability to inter-pret accurately the meaning of my raised eyebrows demonstrates, I believe, the interpretive complexity embedded in even simple day-to-day communicative interactions. When we consider the act of writing as a kind of communicative interaction, this interpretive complexity increases significantly. When we write, we obviously create cultural artifacts, and these artifacts, as we know, are doubly hermeneutic. Unlike objects in the natural world that represent, in a sense, things-in-themselves, written artifacts, let’s call them texts, represent someone’s interpretation of the world, so that when we confront a text, no matter the simplicity of the text, we must interpret someone else’s interpretation. In fact, we recog-nize an artifact as a text precisely because of a text’s doubly hermeneutic nature; a text is a text because it constitutes an interpretation or repre-sentation of the world that must be itself interpreted by another language

user. As an aside, I probably do not need to point out that as composition teachers we confront continually this doubly hermeneutic condition of texts in that we insist that the production of texts always includes a cal-culation of the reader’s ability to interpret or to make sense of a text. As teachers, we want students to understand that texts communicate our intentions only when our interpretations or textual representations of the world can be interpreted accurately by others.

Because texts occupy this doubly hermeneutic space—texts constitute interpretations of the world and, at the same time, must be interpreted themselves—writing or the production of texts, or at least the produc-tion of comprehensible texts, must take into account other language users, the interpretative strategies employed by other language users, and the situation occupied by the writer and the reader. Stated a bit differently, writing must be public; it must be interpretable by others, and it must be situated in time and space. I have previously discussed this tripartite relation in some detail,3 and I will not rehearse here the points I made there. Here, I want to emphasize that writing always takes the form of a historically determined text or artifact, and this artifact always already constitutes an interpretation of the world, unlike other automatized objects in the world such as trees and breadboxes. No mat-ter if the artifact takes the form of a clay tablet that records a Babylonian business transaction or the form of electronic impulses in a computer that records all of Shakespeare’s plays, a text represents simultaneously an object in the world and an interpretation of the world. Consequently, writing differs from speech, as Derrida and others repeatedly have pointed out, because of writing’s artifactual and historical character. What has come to be called postprocess theory takes as a given these doubly hermeneutic and historical properties of texts.

Of course, postprocess theory, from my perspective anyway, does not amount to a disciplinary or even an intellectual movement replete with a dogma or rules of thought; rather, postprocess theory, theory with a very small t embodies a kind of general mindset about writing, a mindset that understands writing as more than the conventional use of language or as a process that, once learned, leads to effective commu-nication. Broadly speaking, process-oriented conceptions of writing fre-quently turn the act of writing upside down. When we understand writ-ing as something we learn to do—a series of cognitive steps, or a socially

3. For more on this, see introduction to Post-Process Theory (1999).

constructed set of internalized conventions, or even a relatively simple pragmatic recursive process of drafting, editing, and redrafting—we imagine that writing may be reduced to a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, and once these conditions are met, satisfactory communica-tion is more or less assured. This inoculation conception of writing—the notion held by many university administrators and faculty—holds that we can become effective writers if only we receive a pedagogical injec-tion of efficacious rules for writing, rules that embody the necessary and sufficient conditions required for successful written communication. So, in many universities for example, curricula are developed to deliver this inoculation against bad writing, and administrators, especially in pro-fessional schools, imagine that once students receive this innoculation, students will be able to write those effective business letters, lab reports, and design documents that accrediting agencies demand. So, a process-oriented conception of writing imagines that something exists out there that makes writing effective, and this something may be learned.

On the other hand, postprocess theory—understood as a kind of mindset rather than as a dogma—holds that nothing exists out there to ensure successful communication. In a sense, postprocess theory attempts to right writing by turning on its head the still-prevalent notion of writing as something we learn to do. Instead of emphasizing writing as a process of one kind or another, postprocess theorists, again in general, emphasize the artifactual, historical, and hermeneutic dimensions of writing. Instead of conceptualizing writing as something we learn, post-process theorists tend to see writing as something we produce; writers produce texts or historically determined artifacts, and the production of texts constitutes the writer’s raison d’être. This postprocess mindset, then, rights writing by placing textual production—which is always inter-pretive, public, and situated—as the rightful object of our attention.

Because postprocess theory may be best understood as a mindset or attitude about writing, postprocess theorists (and I employ this term advisedly and in the most fragile sense) do not share a common dis-ciplinary program or specific research agenda.4 Instead, postprocess theorists address a wide range of research concerns related directly or sometimes tangentially to writing, concerns that include research areas such as genre theory, activity theory, cultural studies, gender studies, and cyborg writing, to cite only a few examples. Of course, postprocess

4. For more on this, see Olson (2002).

theory also participates in a significant intellectual turn beginning roughly in the middle of the previous century, a turn toward antifoun-dationalism and externalism in philosophy, narratology in history, eth-nography in anthropology, and neopragmatism in literary theory. At the center of this turn resides the notion of fallabillism, that pillar of empiricism that reminds us we might be wrong about our judgments. Joining our scientist friends whose very enterprise—something usually called the scientific method—could not exist without the acceptance of fallabillism, the postprocess mindset understands that our attempts to interpret the utterances of others may be just as fallible as scientists’ attempts to interpret nature. The postprocess mindset accepts that no matter how much we know about writing conventions or the writing process or the elements of style, we nonetheless may miscommunicate. Because writing is by definition a kind of communicative interaction, this postprocess mindset also holds that interpretation doesn’t bottom out; in fact, our interpretations of the world and our interpretative interactions with others in the world constitute the very engine that makes communication possible. Through our ability to triangulate with the world and with others, we formulate interpretations that are con-tinually tested through continued triangulation with the world and with others, and during this interaction, we must grant the possibility that our interpretations indeed may be fallible. So, given that our utterances may be fallible, we nonetheless may concede that at least one necessary condition exists for communication and consequently for writing; in order to communicate and therefore to produce comprehensible texts, we need to triangulate with the world and with other language users who inhabit that world, although I need to emphasize once again that this necessary condition clearly may not be sufficient for effective com-munication. For example, by looking at my granddaughter and raising my eyebrows, I might be triangulating effectively and communicating with her, but her interpretation of my gesture might not be the message I intend. So, triangulation is necessary for communication, although it may not be sufficient for effective communication.

In addition to righting writing by understanding that texts are dou-bly hermeneutic and that effective writing is always interpretive, pub-lic, and situated, the postprocess mindset also rights writing in another important way. Instead of understanding writing as primarily a thing-in-itself—such as a cognitive process or synchronic linguistic system or set of generic conventions—the postprocess mindset understands writing

to be part and parcel of a larger uncodifiable semiotic activity that con-stitutes only one kind of human communicative interaction, albeit an incredibly important one. Understood from this perspective, writing, which always appears in the form of a text, must take its place among the heteroglossia of other signifying elements that give meaning to cul-tural life and that, in a sense, enable us to triangulate and make sense of the world and the people who inhabit it. This heteroglossia of signifying elements cannot be pulled apart into discrete processes, systems, or sets of conventions, for every single communicative act—whether a speech act or text or raised eyebrow—partakes of other signifying relations. For example, my raised eyebrow obviously could not have been understood apart from the restaurant script—the set of social conventions that guide what we do when we dine out—that was understood by both me and my granddaughter. And, of course, restaurant scripts differ from culture to culture and from time to time and could be learned through oral com-munication, texts, or simple observation. The postprocess mindset takes as foundational the antifoundationalist claim that writing cannot be produced or understood in isolation from the heteroglossia formed by other signifying elements, or, stated another way, the postprocess mind-set understands that writing never constitutes a thing-in-itself such as a discrete process, system, or conventional act. To produce a text or to read a text means that we must have already an incredibly wide range of com-municative competencies, and when we write effectively, we always pro-duce texts that call upon these unique competence and that cannot be reproduced through the application of a process, system, or pedagogy. To understand that writing is more a means than an end, more an activ-ity than an object, more a place than a thing, helps us to right writing by comprehending texts as artifacts that cannot be reduced to a more elementary form, system, or process.

Although writing shares features common to all other forms of com-municative interaction—features such as triangulation and interpreta-tion—writing also differs significantly from other forms of communi-cative interaction. Because writing is doubly hermeneutic, writing—understood as the production of texts—constitutes at least some of the mortar that binds together human culture. Texts are artifacts, and arti-facts endure and preserve a history, no matter how that history is rep-resented. This ability to write, to produce texts we know to be doubly hermeneutic, sets us apart perhaps from other animals who communi-cate effectively with one another and often with us. Granting that some

animals—our chimpanzee cousins, for example—can manipulate signs and even compose sentence-like utterances, the chimpanzee has not yet evolved far enough to understand that signs may be strung together to form texts that, in turn, form artifacts that serve both as interpretations of the world and as objects in the world, artifacts that may be interpreted by future generations of chimpanzees to help form a history of chimpan-zee existence. So, from this admittedly anthropomorphic perspective, writing binds together human culture by enabling us to generate texts that, in turn, allow us to explain ourselves to ourselves. Because of writ-ing’s unique position relative to other forms of communication—writ-ing’s unique role in producing texts that are historically determined and that, at the same time, relate history itself—writing obviously constitutes a privileged place among the different forms of communication, for writing provides both artifacts that we study and interpretations of those artifacts, interpretations that take myriad generic forms, such as histo-ries, novels, letters, reports, scholarship, and so forth.

Consequently, I am suggesting here that postprocess theory or, per-haps better phrased, the postprocess mindset, given of course this mind-set’s many different permutations, encourages us to understand writ-ing as one kind of communicative interaction that operates within the open-ended exchange of human utterances, an exchange that animates our ability to understand our world and to navigate through it. Because communicative interaction, whether in the form of a raised eyebrow or a Tolstoy novel, remains always unfinished and open to reinterpretation, postprocess theory helps to right writing by reminding us that writing, as one kind of communicative interaction, remains always the unfinished and irreducible task of interpreting our world and the utterances of oth-ers who inhabit our world.

In the chapters to follow in this volume, the issues and challenges presented by the different permutations of postprocess theory are exam-ined from a variety of perspectives that broadly address both the ramifi-cations of postprocess theory and the new directions postprocess theory might take us. For example, Sidney I. Dobrin, J. A. Rice, and Michael Vastola trace the influence of post-post process theory over the previous ten years or so, especially the theory’s impact on composition pedagogy. Joe Marshall Hardin argues that “two specters are haunting the disci-pline of writing studies . . . the unified subject and the hegemony of communitarian thinking,” and he suggests that the postprocess mindset might help us imagine writing studies from a more productive “textual

cosmopolitan” point of view. In “Reassembling Postprocess: Toward a Posthuman Theory of Public Rhetoric,” Byron Hawk extends the reach of postprocess theory and argues persuasively that “public rhetorics require the reassembly of new configurations in new spaces.”

In her phenomenological approach to postprocess theory, Barbara Couture relates the “relational character of writing in the writing class-room,” especially emphasizing educational accountability. In a series of “riffs,” Cynthia Haynes addresses the impact of technology on the lan-guage games we play, and she asserts that one of the central questions confronting postprocess approaches to writing is “how to write as audi-tors rather than orators.” Continuing to examine the relation of post-process theory to technology, Kyle Jensen addresses textual studies and the nature of writing in a digital age. In “Postpedagogical Reflections on Plagiarism and Capital,” Rebecca Moore Howard addresses the con-nections between plagiarism and our economic structure, and she sug-gests that we need to develop a better “understanding of the competing systems of capital that underlie many incidents of transgressive student writing.” Deborah Journet, in her contribution “What Constitutes a Good Story? Narrative Knowledge in Process, Postprocess, and Post-Postprocess Composition Research,” argues that stories of composing and of research “are related . . . in their theoretical, epistemological, methodological, and rhetorical commitments.” Employing the concept of a “folksonomic rhetoric,” Jeff Rice extends certain elements of post-process theory to demonstrate the complexities of space in which we both live and write.

Extending our conception of postprocess theory and confronting the “beyond” in beyond postprocess theories of writing, Ra.l Sánchez argues that “the idea of moving ‘beyond postprocess’ seems tolerable, but only if it is part of a broader ‘move’ with larger implications for the study of writing than the mere extension or redefinition of old terms.” In his critique of postprocess theory, Geoffrey Sirc argues that “postpro-cess made a fatal gesture trying to distance itself from the techniques, the processes, the durée of writing” and that “some of the foundational work of modernism, namely the critical writing of Charles Baudelaire, [suggests] a richer, more pointed discussion of compositional ideas—the use of materials to shape and craft meaning—in discourse surround-ing the actual making of verbal and visual art.” And in their chapter titled “The Page as a Unit of Discourse: Notes toward a Counterhistory for Writing Studies,” John Trimbur and Karen Press seek “to make the

page visible, to recover it from the dominant narratives of inscription, in a counterhistory for writing studies.”

In this cursory overview of the chapters in this book, I have not been able to relate of course the complexity and subtlety of arguments that mark these essays, but I believe the breadth and the scope of the topics covered by these essays is readily apparent. Taken together, these essays constitute a book that establishes new boundaries for postprocess writ-ing theory and that helps us understand better the always fascinating power of writing. Stated a bit differently, these essays help us to right writing by insisting that writing cannot be reduced to a process or con-ventional practice, and taken as a whole, these essays display as well an intellectual excitement rarely displayed in the discipline of contempo-rary writing studies.

Davidson, Donald. 1986. A nice derangement of epitaphs. In Truth and interpretation: Perspectives on the philosophy of Donald Davidson, edited by Ernest Le Pore. New York: Blackwell.

———. 1984b [1973]. Radical interpretation. In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (pp. 125-40). New York: Clarendon Press. Original publication (1973): Dialectica, 27 314-28.

Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics. In Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

Kent, Thomas. 1993. Paralogic rhetoric: A theory of communicative interaction. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.

———. 1999. Introduction to Post-process theory: Beyond the writing process paradigm, edited by Thomas Kent, 1–6. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

———, ed. 1999. Postprocess theory: Beyond the writing process paradigm. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Olson, Gary A. 1999. Toward a post-process composition: Abandoning the rhetoric of assertion. In Kent, 7–15.

These essays help us to reimagine the act of writing and, in so doing, they help us rethink our past and create a new future for composition studies.

Thomas Kent, Post-Process Theory

When first published over a decade ago, Thomas Kent’s Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing-Process Paradigm participated in a transitional moment in composition scholarship. Before Kent’s collection (and his previously published articles on the subject) began to galvanize the post-process movement, it was difficult to describe writing practices and theo-ries that departed from the process movement in strictly positive terms. Rather, the long dominion of the process paradigm required the identi-fication and critique of its untenable assumptions. This identification was the chief preoccupation of that first collection, and it has enabled other projects—including this one—to point toward new forms of invention/intervention not defined in opposition to a particular paradigm. As we envision it, Beyond Postprocess attempts to understand the consequences of the theoretical opening brought about by the postprocess movement and describe ways in which postprocess can be productively negotiated.

To accomplish this, Beyond Postprocess brings together thirteen origi-nal essays by some of the most prominent and promising authors study-ing writing today. The essays are organized into four parts, giving struc-ture to the overall mission of the collection. Just as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari once described concept creation in philosophy, post-process theory is to be understood as a project and not a gift. Along those lines, this introduction and Kent’s opening essay consider the foundational principles of postprocess theory in light of contemporary

methodological and disciplinary appropriations. Rather than attribute this writing theory as a unified and singular theoretical intervention in rhetoric and composition studies, these chapters rethink postprocess in terms of potentialities for philosophical revisions and the institutional failures thereof. To state this slightly differently: such revisions suggest there is no easily defined moment or codifiable method that could be called postprocess. Rather, this signifier acts as a placeholder for the opening it introduced into composition theory, and what the first collec-tion inaugurates and continues to provide is the very linguistic and con-ceptual constellation that makes something beyond postprocess intellec-tually valuable. Each contribution to this collection provides a unique and important example of what that something could be.

Since postprocess first challenged one of composition studies’ most ingrained (and immaculate) models, the study of writing has moved in a number of promising theoretical directions. The broad questioning of institutional, pedagogical, and inscribed doxa have often proceeded alongside the insistence that the study of writing disengage itself from the once sacrosanct gravitational pull of the writing subject. Thus, the next step will mean extending the important critique of how process was naturalized and made unassailable in composition scholarship to how such ideological work is ubiquitous in textual production. In that vein, the second section of this collection uses a variety of approaches to address the ways postprocess can, to quote Thomas Kent, “help us to reimagine the act of writing” (1999, 6) by contextualizing and making “textual” certain common themes and concerns in composition schol-arship. These essays accomplish this by conceiving postprocess theory as an ethical and practical response to the ideological push for educa-tional accountability, by looking at the page as a unit of discourse—the very materiality of its design—as a site of ideological and epistemologi-cal contestation, by outlining the limiting effects of traditional ideology critique on composition’s engagement with multimodal and digital writ-ing, by critiquing social-epistemic rhetoric in favor of posthuman, eco-logical alternatives, and by reconsidering the writer as agent in process narratives in order to illuminate rhetorical and epistemological commit-ments central to genres of representations in post-post process theory.

If ideology’s relationship to the study of writing must be reconsidered in light of the aforementioned essays, it would undoubtedly draw upon questions related to the social construction of subject positions and the contingent nature of identity in postmodern writing environments.

These developments have fundamentally challenged the ways theorists of writing think about the scriptural economy of their trade. It is to their great credit that we can now begin to speak coherently about what it could mean to theorize writing without a subject. In defiance of the commonsensical recognition, we may finally ask: Who or what is the sub-ject of writing? What would it mean to understand the subject of writing as strictly textual? How is identity constructed and circulated in writing environments and postmodern writing practices?

Yet these questions of writing’s subject positions and identities are not strictly relegated to the material and conceptual practices of writ-ing. Since Post-Process Theory’s publication in 1999, the study of com-puters and writing—most notably new media studies and digital and visual rhetorics—has increasingly complicated and engendered writing practices that extend well beyond the linear model. Networked writing, wikis, blogging, microblogging, hyperlinking, ideographic composing, to name a few, create spaces for writing practices that radically anticipate ideological notions of space, (hyper)rational thinking, intellectual prop-erty and politics, and new epistemologies. To address these changes, the essays in the third section ask searching questions about the relation-ships between the study of new media and the role narratives play in generating theories or classifications of writing, the value of theorizing as a trope, the changing character of research methodologies, and the conflict-driven locations of postprocess discourses. Their answers are innovative, original contributions to current debates about the role of knowledge, disciplinarity, and rhetorical interpretation in studies of new media and digital and image writing.

But perhaps the most controversial aspect of postprocess’s introduc-tion was its unapologetic resistance to simple pedagogical application. While the process-oriented movements tended to promote a writing practice that delineated a normative, progressive model of student sub-jectivity and written production, postprocess insisted writing is indistin-guishable from various theoretical, ideological, or contextual consider-ations. Writing, therefore, could never be taught as the version or mode of a writer’s subjectivity; rather, writing accounts only for the multiplici-ties active in each writing situation.

However, if we take these premises to their logical conclusion, does this mean postprocess has ushered in an era of postpedagogy? By postped-agogy, we do not mean writing beyond teaching, but rather a point within composition studies where new ways of thinking about writing

fundamentally refuse any codifiable notion of the relationship between the writing subject and the texts it produces, as well as the “practical” scholarship expected to proceed from that relationship. The final sec-tion examines this scenario from four distinct and even disparate per-spectives, illustrating the early battle lines of what promises to be an intense debate within composition research. Among the problems and considerations raised by this section is the pedagogical status of a radi-cally textualized writing subject and the epistemological contingency introduced by ever more technology-driven writing environments that take us beyond traditional questions about the (student) identities and subjects that inhabit those spaces. Those concerns then move rapidly beyond the role of the subject in writing and even beyond pedagogical connections between subject and writing to a larger inquiry regarding the very position of writing subjects within educational institutions.

Given the provocative character of the essays in this collection, Beyond Postprocess aims to provide a critical site for nothing less than the broad reevaluation of what it means to study writing today. Through its polyvocal considerations and conclusions, this site is invested with a unique potential to describe not what that field of study should be, but what it has the capacity to create. Consequently, the central pur-pose of Beyond Postprocess is to unleash this creative potential, which now rests uneasily in areas and modes of inquiry as yet unexplored by mainstream scholarship.

For those inquiries, the scene of writing is not reducible to a scrip-tural mode of language. Language is not independent from its inscrip-tive capacities and is arguably incomprehensible without acknowledging their epistemological interdependency. This is a longstanding argument and there is no need to rehash it here. We can say, however, that one of the major goals of this collection is to be able to pull something unique from a variety of approaches that operate under that assumption, and thus feel the full weight of something they call writing—something which will not be reduced to a transparent technology for the transmis-sion of sovereign ideas. Such approaches can be located within, without being identical to, a rhetorical tradition that frequently associates the production of something unique with invention. For Jacques Derrida, “An invention always presupposes some illegality, the breaking of an implicit contract; it inserts disorder into the peaceful ordering of things, it disregards the proprieties” (Psyche 1989, 25). Is that the same inven-tion Cicero relates to disposition, to the arrangement and organization

of an argument? In that classical register and under the aegis of inven-tion we may inquire about what the study of writing can reveal that is intellectually new.

But we have probably already diverged from a classical inheritance. A new propriety emerges. Derrida’s hypothesis from “Psyche: Inventions of the Other” becomes useful for “placing” our invention. He claims that

within an area of discourse that has been fairly well stabilized since the end of the seventeenth century in Europe, there are only two major types of authorized examples for invention. On the one hand, people invent stories (fictional or fabulous), and on the other hand they invent machines, techni-cal devices or mechanisms, in the broadest sense of the word. (32; italics in the original)

One may ask the (perhaps naïve) question, “Is this true?” Derrida never tries to prove it. Instead, he shows what such a history—if we wish to call it that—makes accessible to our understanding of the past. If it is history that is at stake here, then it is in the form of a division in the word truth, in a historical truth that may affirm the hypothesis. Crucially, this is the “place of decision, where the full weight of the ambivalence is gathered” (48). Or we may say that invention here requires the decision not to permit history to calculate, program, or decide as a datum what counts for invention. Yet it is not completely dissociable from that sequence. Nor can it be said to purely exceed institution, its institutionalization as invention. Its movement must be im-possible—not accountable to an existing discourse of the possible—and a form of repetition that is some-how more than the invention of the same. It is this movement between institutional necessity and incalculable chance that gives us cause to call an invention unique.

The goal of this introduction—its intervention—is to locate a basis for the possibility of inventive productions within the study of a symbolic system of inscriptive meaning making we call writing. Consequently, we are most interested in various theoretical discourses from rhetoric and composition, while attempting to avoid the sort of pitfalls Stephen M. North (1987) once identified in Richard Young’s advocacy of “inven-tion,” which can be acquired through a multimethodological elimina-tion of ineffective pedagogical strategies for writing instruction. North’s critique is crucial. As he explains, Young’s use of the classical rhetorical category of invention “serves as little more than a general rubric under which contributions from a variety of methodological perspectives can be

loosely gathered; and which, for one reason or another, a particular com-mentator thinks are relevant to the generation of things to write about” (339). When taken along with North’s claim that composition’s philoso-phers are inclined to dabble with difficult ideas rather than engage with them in a sustained and systematic fashion, it should come as no sur-prise that North asserts that philosophical inquiry in composition studies “demands allegiance only to a mode, not a subject matter: what matters is how one investigates, not what” (99; italics in the original).

Both implicit and explicit responses to North’s observation can be found in the collection Rhetoric and Composition as Intellectual Work (Olson 2002), where authors like Susan Miller and John Trimbur point toward forms of theoretical engagement that do not superimpose theo-ries from other disciplines onto loosely related concerns in composi-tion research. Trimbur’s “Delivering the Message: Typography and the Materiality of Writing” locates traditional Marxist topics—like material-ism, labor, production, circulation, and consumption—in typographic networks, as well as asking interesting questions about the ideological dimensions of the page as a unit of discourse. Similarly, Miller’s “Writing Studies as a Mode of Inquiry” advocates a new disciplinary attention to “the production of texts over their interpretation,” and defines “cul-ture as a conjunction of specific acts of composition and their resulting texts” (2002, 41, 42; italics in the original). Miller explains that, at least at the time of her writing , what she describes as “writing studies most often addresses historical writing practices” (48). Her rigorous archi-val research in Assuming the Positions: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Commonplace Writing reflects that premise.

Yet our intervention is not intended to settle on a particular identity, or even range of identities, that are authentic exemplars of a self-autho-rized discipline called writing studies. Nor is each of this collection’s con-tributors a likely candidate for being defined and compartmentalized in that way. Instead, this introduction uses postprocess theory as the intel-lectual basis for framing three series of questions we believe are central to any study that seeks to understand the contemporary contexts of writ-ing. The first series of questions gathers around new-media writing tech-nologies and their concomitant epistemologies. The second is institu-tional—in line with the disciplinary concerns expressed above. And the third, which is also a deepening or focusing of the second, seizes on the question of pedagogy and its consequences for intellectual work. Each of these concerns is driven by something like a fundamental refusal to

see writing as a self-evident, easily explicable object. Along those lines, our intervention not only circumscribes the field of debate, but takes an unambiguous side on those points where middle ground can only rep-resent capitulation to a deadening logic.

Yet, to maintain writing’s im-possible inventions, perhaps we should pro-ceed by way of postprocess’s initial theoretical and political gesture—that is, the disruption of writing acts and a systematized knowledge of them—instead of how it continues to modify composition studies’ disci-plinary interests. To be sure, disciplinary appropriation remains a cen-tral concern, if not danger, for postprocess theory since such an appro-priation refutes postprocess’s supposedly fundamental departure from process theories. With that concern in mind, postprocess theory must continue to be insensitive to composition’s most cherished disciplinary concerns. Among other things, this means that composition studies’ tra-ditional issues of ethical accountability, agency, and pedagogy, to name a few, cannot be the sole guarantors of a new postprocess theory of writ-ing. Our endeavor requires an entirely new logic (or perhaps paralogic) to deny the danger of disciplinary affirmation.

This new logic might instead be best articulated through the spec-ulative gesture of scene. The new scene(s) of writing, at first glance, are analogous to the grammatical rhetorics Kenneth Burke outlined in A Grammar of Motives (1969). For Burke, scene designates both the plasticity of the space in which writing happens and the material-ity of writing itself. In his description of scene, Burke notes that the scenic grammar of Hobbes’s Leviathan necessitates “the reduction of reason itself to motion,” where the full significance of such a reduc-tion understands machines “not as the product of a rational man but as a complete model of reason itself” (134; italics in original). Here, rationality is not as much an effect of its contextual premises and con-sequences as it is the pervasive condition of those very premises and consequences. What Burke might call writing, then, acts as a primar-ily speculative application, or more simply, as a logic of inscriptional conjecture. Consequently, we could say that the logic of scene invents new theoretical beginnings in each inscriptive moment—effectively “rethinking” each writing situation through its very claim of contin-gency. For example, as philosopher Alain Badiou (2008) points out, the genius and politic of The Communist Manifesto derive not from its

specific message, but from the advent of its material inscription. As an act of writing, The Communist Manifesto taps into the hegemonic logics of the time (German idealism, British materialism, and French social-ism), and posits a counterhypothesis that aims at the very immutabil-ity of these concepts’ shared historical logic. As Badiou succinctly puts it, “The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organiza-tion is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labor [emphasis added]” (Badiou 98). Since The Communist Manifesto could envision the logical relationships between these various informational contexts through the outwardly disparate logic of political economy, it seizes and literally rewrites the possibili-ties of politics and sociality through its very inscriptive moment, that is, the manifesto form. In similar fashion, the scene of writing changes the possibility of thought because its relationship to thought has fun-damentally changed. For postprocess theory’s purposes, such a con-ception means that scene is never about writing, but is the ubiquitous, permeable condition that exceeds, describes, and reflexively affects the relationship between invention and logic: it is a contingent, inscriptive affair where time and knowledge are indubitably entwined.

In composition studies’ contemporary landscape, these new inven-tive, speculative logics are perhaps best exemplified by new-media technologies’ scenes of writing. To be sure, for the past twenty-five years the study of computers and writing have theorized how digital writing technologies have changed the writing situation from a linear, print-based model to a dynamic, interactive, and public enterprise. Like their predecessors, new media technologies certainly change how writing happens and how we might theorize those happenings. From RSS feeds and aggregate search engines to desktop publishing and social-networking sites, new-media technologies create spaces for writing practices that, in their very inscriptive moment, interrogate and equalize the ideas of space, politics, knowledge, and language, to name a few. Thus, in many ways, new-media technologies writing scenes reconceive composition studies’ traditional images, rhetorics, pedago-gies, philosophies, and so on as economically equivalent. Consider, for instance, how new-media technologies exemplify the social, col-laborative connectivity often found in more consumerist technologies. These technologies articulate a different informational environment, where knowledge production is not limited to an aggregate collabo-ration between scribal agents. New-media sites that are designed for

and encourage interaction from multiple and anonymous users—like YouTube, blogs, social-networking sites, wikis, and so on—do not rel-egate knowledge and writing practices to a particular method, group formation, or environment. Rather, these sites reorganize, remix, and mash up information as a temporary instance in an indetermin-able context. YouTube, for instance, allows users to create and upload videos and then revise and reject, produce a channel (genre), cre-ate video “responses” to other users’ videos, and so on. In the case of Michael Wesch’s YouTube video “Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us,” users disseminate and (re)direct information to and from other social networking sites, while simultaneously creating temporary and flexible directories that reorganize the video’s (rhetorical) strengths and weaknesses. As a result of this networked logic, Wesch addressed other users’ suggestions and revised his video accordingly. However, his video series also prompted other users to create supplementary, alternative new-media arguments that are linked to and exist alongside “Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us.” In such a rhetorical dynamic, new-media writing scenes foreground the fluidity of writing’s contin-gent, interchangeable contexts more than anything else.

Similarly, Microsoft’s Photosynth software, which manages vast amounts of image data, allows us to rethink the very concepts of image and writing as similar forms, repositioning writing as a navigable image. Photosynth creates three-dimensional images by analyzing individual images of a given location or object and remapping those images into a comprehen-sive model. Photosynth approaches written text as image, able to manip-ulate entire volumes of writing as individual images and then reposition that “writing” within a more expansive image. Photosynth can search through and analyze unlimited numbers of images, like those made pub-lic on photo-sharing applications like Flickr, and recompose them in uni-fied and spatially representative amalgams. This new approach to “writ-ing” images embodies postprocess notions of what writing can be, incor-porating digital networks and digital literacies as sites of invention where writing must be imagined as something altogether different as the media and methods for communication and circulation emerge in new forms.1

Given these circumstances, postprocess theory’s new inventive scenes cannot be restricted to composition studies’ disciplinary ideas of writ-ing because writing exceeds these considerations. In new-media/digital

1. For an overview of Photsynth see http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html.

contexts, for example, we can say that agency is writing, not intention. It is the affective/productive links, connections, indeterminate contexts, and economies that reflexively constitute each writing act. But to blindly assert that a discrepancy between composition studies’ disciplinary con-cerns and new-media writing scenes exists is not enough. (To be sure, such an assertion does nothing more than repeat Plato’s criticisms of how writing’s technicity will always exceed a particular rhetorical function, like memory.) If, for instance, writing is agency, then we must cease using the concepts of information and logic in their real technical, functionary sta-tus, and instead think of these concepts differently. Accordingly, instead of asking how disciplinary knowledge about writing can account for the changes writing creates, the more important question would be this one: If writing exceeds and affects disciplinary knowledge, how do we think this knowledge so that it interacts with writing differently?

Such a dynamic puts the relationship between writing and composi-tion studies’ disciplinary knowledge in a precarious situation. Unlike previous institutional accounts, new- media scenes envision the relation-ship between knowledge and writing as an uncompromising, repeating individuality not unlike the very writing scene Derrida outlines in “Freud and the Scene of Writing” (1978). Freud’s insight, Derrida maintains, was how each dream was “written” idiosyncratically within the horizon of a commonality. Freud pointed out that in each dream’s logic there is a “purely idiomatic residue [that] is irreducible and is made to bear that burden of interpretation in the communication. . . . The dreamer invents his own grammar. No meaningful material of prerequisite text exists which he might simply use, even if he never deprives himself of them” (209; italics in the original). Though the commonality between dreamers is precisely that they dream, the written logic of each dream is entirely original and different. A dream’s logic, its “writteness,” is there-fore a repetitious originality that articulates itself regardless of autho-rization. More importantly, Derrida argues, this interpretive, inventive refusal is a continued reinstatement of each writing scene’s material particularity: “The materiality of a word cannot be translated or carried over into another language. Materiality is precisely that which transla-tion relinquishes. To relinquish materiality: such is the driving force of translation” (210). As the residue of every writing scene, materiality is the singular commonality that is always inconvenient: it provides the pos-sibility for both writing and scene, but defies conventions of knowledge through its utter uselessness. Take, for example, the social- bookmarking

site Delicious. Users use signifier-like bookmarks and tags to create nonhierarchical temporary clusters (or folksonomies) that establish multiple, simultaneous contextual relationships—that is, networks of writing—that cannot be adequately accounted for by any contextual translation. The tag created for, say, composition might yield a variety of results and further tags, but no one cluster sheds a comprehensive or intelligible light on another. Each instance of writing is both common and specific. Like the dream’s internal logic or “writteness,” new-media scenes of writing invent their own grammar through their very material possibility. The relationship between knowledge and writing, therefore, is primarily an occurrence between written inscription and instance.

In terms of scene, the relationship between writing and knowledge, if such a thing can exist, actually conditions composition studies’ disci-plinary concerns. This is a subtle, yet distinct, point that differs greatly from postprocess theory’s initial conception of the relationship between writing and knowledge. In contrast to postprocess theory’s purely nega-tive critique—that “no codifiable or generalizable writing process exists or could exist” (Kent 1999, 1; italics in the original)—these new-media scenes articulate the relationship between writing and knowledge as a contingent possibility; that is, the relationship between writing and knowledge can be, and every instance of writing is precisely a repetition of this very possibility. What we name as the relationship between writ-ing and knowledge, then, is closer to what Joseph Petraglia outlines as “a sense of writing”: a temporary and generalized disposition about the writing act that both prepares and defies disciplinary systemization as “new” ideas of writing emerge (1999, 79–84).

But perhaps more importantly, new-media scenes allow us to rethink postprocess theory’s notions of interpretation. Though new-media scenes envision writing as a material, contingent formation, this does not mean they are devoid of interpretive interventions. Writing’s new scenes are not a mechanistic materialism. On the contrary, as Post-Process Theory outlined more than ten years ago, every communicative act must tarry with its own limitation, its own finitude. Thomas Kent points out that in every writing instance “we can always distinguish some sort of process that we employed [in previous communicative acts]. However, if we try to employ this process again, we can never be sure that it will work the way we want it to work” (1999, 3). Since each particular instance of writing conceptually breaks with previous instances of writing, forming some sort of relationship between different writing acts becomes more

of an open gamble than a guaranteed practice. For Kent, this gamble is best described through the violence of interpretation: “Writing requires interpretation, and interpretation cannot be reduced to a process” (3). Any writing act performs an interpretive violence that, in its very ges-ture, forsakes its commonality with other writing acts. At the same time, however, each writing act is linked to other, past writing acts through their shared material inscription. Interpretation, then, is a functional vio-lence that logically anticipates—and in some senses, relieves—the rela-tionship between each writing act and its particular purpose.

Accordingly, in these new writing scenes where writing (re)inter-prets itself in each inscriptive instance, we can finally affirm and sup-plement postprocess theory’s claim that writing is a noncodifiable, disruptive, contingent, and necessary materiality: it is indeed all these things, and it can now be additionally thought about without the logic of the writer.

The relationship between writing and interpretation (or perhaps more clearly, writing and knowledge), can be thought about without the writer because new-media scenes signal a new interpretive situation. What we conventionally call the writer—the individualized, transcendent agent—cannot actively interpret a writing scene as much as merely participate in the fluid, temporary occurrences between various writing instances. Instead, the contingency of any writing instance enables interpretation to be an ethical and epistemological requirement of logos, not writer. Here, Derrida’s analysis of Freud’s breakthrough is again helpful. “Writing,” claims Derrida, “is a system of relations between strata: the Mystic Pad, the psyche, society, the world. Within that scene, on that stage, the punctual simplicity of the classical subject is not to be found” (1978, 227). The classical subject is certainly not a factor in a system of writing, but only because it cannot be a logical concern of any writing system. The logic of writer, as Derrida notes, is of an entirely different sociality: “Writing as drama requires an entirely different discipline” (227). Since new-media scenes emphasize the relationship between written inscription and instance, the logical need for an external, interpreting agent does not exist. Writing, that is, “is not a container for [an agent’s] thought because it may be written for no other purpose than to have been written” (Miller 1992, 79). In such contingency, this phenomenological limitation is really as far as the writer, as nothing more than an act of “hermeneutic guessing” (Kent 1999, 3), can go. In new-media writing scenes, the writer can only be a literal supplement to a logic of contingent inscription.

Ultimately, however, new-media writing scenes present postprocess theorists with a still more difficult, fertile challenge: to (re)envision post-process theory as a movement from institutional critique to a theory of the new.

In his contribution to Kent’s original postprocess collection, Joseph Petraglia argues (in part) that composition studies’ idea of “process” “made the social scientification of the field almost inevitable” (1999, 59). He goes on to prophetically identify that “as we move into the post-process phase of our discipline’s evolution, research cannot be counted upon to serve as techne’s handmaiden in the same way it did in pro-cess’s halcyon days. What this means for social scientism in writing,” he explains, “depends upon the ability and willingness of writing pro-fessionals to evolve not only post-process, but post composition” (63). Petraglia’s notion of disciplinary evolution seems to naturalize a form of intellectual process itself. The equating of a move postprocess as possi-bly signifying a move postcomposition assumes a particular disciplinary understanding of what composition is to which a position post might be established.2 In other words, Petraglia’s evolution postcomposition appears to be the next phase of an evolutionary process of the disci-pline. Though the field has long-windedly debated its disciplinary func-tion and identity to no definitive consensus, we can safely say that one of the primary disciplinary inquiries has surrounded the relationship between the independent subject and the texts that subject produces. This inquiry has been manifest in the discipline’s abundant attention to pedagogy, to the very idea that a subject can be given access to codifiable processes that lend to the production of written text. That is, as a disci-pline, composition studies’ identity is seemingly bound to pedagogy, or more accurately, pedagogy is almost always implicated in composition studies’ identity. In this way, we might read Petraglia’s claim as indica-tive of postprocess’s signifying a disciplinary shift that requires a com-plete reconceptualization of what composition studies might entail. A shift like this includes a dramatic modification in how writing specialists engage those inquiries which have been sacrosanct to the field, inquiries so often tied to pedagogy and questions of student writing subjects. In this way, we contend that any move beyond postprocess be understood

2. See Dobrin, Postcomposition (2011).

as inherently postpedagogy—not opposed to composition studies’ ped-agogical imperative, but more interested in questions and theories of writing not trapped by disciplinary expectations of the pedagogical. We envision, too, postpedagogy as a disciplinarily disruptive maneuver, one rendering composition’s pedagogical neurosis an all but insignificant element of writing studies, leaving the field to rethink its disciplinary ontologies. Embedded, then, in writing theory beyond postprocess is a disciplinary and institutional critique, one that requires a degree of dis-ciplinary violence.

Yet, despite postprocess theory’s potential for disruption and disci-plinary critique—or perhaps, specifically because of it (notably what the contributors to Kent’s collection exposed)—composition studies’ acknowledgment of postprocess theories has mostly attempted to pla-cate postprocess and inculcate it into the disciplinary narrative, thus rendering its disruptive potential impotent, its theoretical difference quiescent, and its post-ness not as a position removed from composi-tion studies, but as a position always already implicated as composition studies. That is to say, because postprocess is a derivation of composi-tion’s process narrative, it is always already inseparable from composi-tion studies and its symptoms, such as the pedagogical. However, what we hope to suggest by invoking the idea that there is the potential of theoretical space beyond postprocess (an idea with which Sánchez takes issue in his contribution) is that a tear in the fabric of composition can disrupt the discipline enough to remove writing theory from the limits imposed by disciplinary conservatism and the defense of the pedagogi-cal as sanctified.

A prototypical example of this deep-seeded conservatism can be found in Helen Foster’s Networked Process: Dissolving Boundaries of Process and Post-Process (2007), a book that represents a conciliatory attempt to normalize postprocess within the very composition studies rubric against which it reacts. Unfortunately, this means that Foster’s book presents a disciplinarily conservative project that works to preserve the authorized narrative of the field. Foster’s project sets out to find common ground for process and postprocess composition theories, wanting to locate a point of “stasis” in order to allow both to operate harmoniously within the disciplinary boundaries of composition studies. To come to such har-mony—or at least an absence of conflict—Networked Process attempts to consolidate a manageable definition of postprocess that might be easily disciplinarily corralled, and thereby made useful.

For Foster, the central location of the process/postprocess stasis lies within the theorization of the writing subject and the social/cultural influence on the subject. Networked Process thereby rebuts postprocess via a multiplicity of process approaches, ultimately claiming that stasis between process and postprocess is attained in “networked process,” a deeply problematic concept devoid of virtually any recognition of the very network theories that have come to inform postprocess theories, new media theories, and postsubjectivity theories. For instance, when attempting to flesh out a theory of “networked subjectivity,” Networked Process employs an unusual methodological combination of Bakhtinian dialogics, surveys, and a tour of well-worn composition scholarship to define a working conceptual nexus. The central problem with this vision of network subjectivity is that it terminates right where it began: in the lap of composition studies, seeking protection from any endeavor that suggests disciplinary constants might not be constant.

Networked Process may be further criticized for limiting what might be considered viable avenues of research within and counter to the field, particularly for the manner in which Foster’s ground of stasis predetermines boundaries for where theorists might roam. At its core, Foster’s project attempts to stave off any disruption to the comfort and safety of disciplinary familiarity and works to ensure that process peda-gogies retain their disciplinary position by mollifying postprocess. The project cautiously masks a disciplinary fear of postprocess through its largely counterproductive attempt to neutralize postprocess as a com-position theory.

Likewise, Theresa Enos and Keith D. Miller’s 2002 collection Beyond Postprocess and Postmodernism does little to forward a writing theory beyond the comfort zone of composition’s established disciplinary inter-ests. As the editors assert, the collection is designed to “illuminate and complicate many of the tensions in the field and thereby contribute to postprocess pedagogy and post-postmodernist rhetoric” (vii), and hopes to achieve these tasks by rethinking rhetoric’s ability to engender social justice, writing’s relationship to concepts of space, and textuality’s inven-tive propensity. Yet, at the same time, this ambitious agenda is nested in the safety of composition’s pedagogical imperative, risking little of that disciplinary comfort. For example, postprocess remains an ambigu-ous, untheorized term that works concomitantly with those approaches that engage race, class, gender, and other social-epistemic paradigms as another phase of understanding how students write. Symptomatic

of this tendency, the collection, though specifically identified as “not meant to be in the genre of Festschriften,” is a tribute to Jim Corder’s work because “the issues he wrestled with are just as relevant today” (vii). The underlying message is clear: to theorize (or inhabit) the postpro-cess position, the field need not look beyond the disciplinary tools of its past. The book’s entrenchment in classical rhetorics seems indicative of the desire to couch any concept of process deeply within the familiarity of composition studies.

We should note, though, that projects like these, despite their limited engagements with postprocess, function as legitimate tools of composi-tion studies, performing precisely the task the discipline requires them to perform. They do what disciplines do: disciplines assimilate. This is the self-preservation impetus of disciplinary conservatism, seeking not change to core functions, but working to validate through absorption. That which can be brought within disciplinary embrace is of value to the discipline; that which resists the embrace must either be familiar-ized or exiled. In order for postprocess to be of disciplinary value it must be able to be assimilated into composition studies. However, post-process is not just a critique of process (or as Sánchez notes, a disciplin-ary part of process), but a move postpedagogy, postcomposition and postdiscipline, just as writing—or the study of writing or the teaching of writing—is more than what is commonly called composition. Thus, to say that postprocess is postpedagogy is to acknowledge that any critique of composition studies’ pedagogical imperative is inherently a critique of composition studies’ institutional space and identity. This collection is intended to coalesce that critique, calling into question the disciplinary convictions of composition studies.

Postpedagogy invokes Gregory Ulmer’s post(e)pedagogy, a turn beyond traditional pedagogies in order to institute pedagogies more suited for digital media3 Ulmer’s post(e)pedagogy is itself a reenvisioning of the pedagogical; it seeks to transcend the space that separates what a stu-dent interprets (like literature) and what a student makes (like writing). Ulmer’s post(e)pedagogy itself occupies a space between the tradition of composition’s pedagogical focus on student production and its push beyond and, perhaps, away from traditional pedagogies and toward peda-gogies designed for the digital age. It is also noticeably ambiguous as to the role of the autonomous subject in new-media pedagogies. Yet it is not

3. For more on this, see Ulmer’sApplied Grammatology (1984).

postpedagogy because it theorizes writing as an unteachable moment but because it envisions writing as the network itself, as operating beyond the pedagogical. The potential of postprocess theories lies not in their recon-figuration of how disciplines like composition studies might rethink the teaching of writing—as postprocess composition projects like Matthew Heard’s “What Should We Do with Postprocess Theory?” (2008) sug-gest—but the very role of disciplines within a process-based education system. To move postpedagogy is to rethink writing as a teachable object, to encourage projects that theorize writing outside the classroom or other pedagogic scenes—even nonclassroom-based projects like service learning or community-based writing—in favor of inquires that are not limited by processes of pedagogy. And it is to insist upon scholarship not tempered by disciplinary pedagogical dictate. Part of this shift requires a reconfiguration of writing theory away from subjectivity, away from the idea that autonomous agents produce and circulate writing. Instead, pedagogy—systems that assume ideas, knowledge, information can be transmitted from one agent to another—must be set aside in order to see writing as not bound by the canons, grammars, and rhetorics of peda-gogy that have been naturalized as the methods through which writing is learned and performed. Because writing is nomadic and paralogic, the ability to teach or learn it dissolves along with the impetus for disciplines that specialize in the teaching of writing, demanding instead a greater focus on theorizing writing qua writing sans subject.

In the pages that follow, contributors begin such work, tearing at the very seams that have not only given form to the discipline of composi-tion studies, but that have become the outline for its sobriety, its con-servatism. Yet the immediate form of this violent rejection is primarily affirmative. As Nietzsche’s Zarathustra notes, it is, after all, the good and the just—the sober-minded conciliators of all ages—who fail to recog-nize the creative impulse that seeks to shatter their tables of values. In such instances, destruction really is “the trail of the creator” (Deleuze 2006, 177).

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