Getting past process

Reading Lynn Bloom’s “The Great Paradigm Shift” and Patricia Bizzell’s “Cultural Criticism: A Social Approach to Studying Writing,” I am reminded of how far the fledgling discipline of rhetoric and composition has come in the past thirty years, in large part because, as a discipline, we have “come back” to one another. Those of us who study rhetoric and composition tend to see our field as split down the proverbial middle: At some point, graduate students are prompted to choose between the “rhetoric” or the “composition” half of our discipline. But, as Jane Tompkins so elegantly puts it in Reader Response Criticism, language is power, and these two readings have reminded me that what we teach is language.

Speaking to the College Conference on Composition Research Network Forum in 1989, Patricia Bizzell made an impassioned plea for an ethical movement in rhetoric and composition, a movement away from the individually-centered, expressivist-oriented process movement toward what she calls “cultural criticism,” what Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed calls “critical literacy.” “Cultural criticism,” Bizzell, one of rhet/comp’s earliest social constructionists, explains, takes as its text “ideologies that may be not only taken for granted but also actively suppressed from the consciousness of the people acting on them…I think it is important for academics to become cultural critics…because I hope that the activity of cultural criticism will foster social justice by making people aware of politically motivated ideological concealments” (225).

To put it simply, Bizzell wants the discipline of rhet/comp to take a hard, critical look at the work of rhetoric and composition; she wants writing teachers to foster in students a willingness to look at texts and at culture as constructed, to identify the sources of their deeply ingrained beliefs so they can redress injustices and prejudices in their own minds, to critically analyze others’ texts for “concealed” injustices and prejudices, and to actively (and collectively) advocate for cultural awareness and social revolution that redresses these injustices.

Lofty goals for a discipline that is oft described, by itself and by others, as a “service” discipline. I can’t quite imagine how my English 101 students would react if I announced that our project in the course was to recognize and redress social injustice; I suspect that 24 out of 25 minds would be wondering when we were going to have time for developing thesis statements, learning MLA citation, and correcting comma splices. Yet since 1989, more and more rhetoric and composition scholarship has taken up Bizzell’s call. College English, CCC, Journal of College Writing, Pre/Text – many of our major journals and national conferences feature all sorts of research on feminist rhetoric, the rhetoric of race, the rhetoric of class. And many of the essays that are now anthologized for composition deal directly with issues of social justice. After all, who can teach Malcolm X’s “Homemade Education” without confronting head-on the paradox of a violent criminal espousing the merits of education, or Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” without raising the specter of on-going racism in our own day and age?

What Bizzell promotes as the focus of rhet/comp has, perhaps surprisingly, grown naturally out of our discipline’s process roots, however far afield her work may at first seem from Flower and Hayes’ neat and tidy Cognitive Process Theory. Flower herself is a rhetorician, and as co-founder of Carnegie Mellon’s Community Literacy Center, an outreach program for inner-city youth, she has certainly brought the “power of language” to the forefront. Bloom reminds us that in the 1970s the process movement saw itself as “inherently democratic” for “it was calculated…to produce a nation of good writers committed to their own process and invested in their own writing…By decentering the classroom…, the process paradigm was compatible with Paolo Freire’s liberatory pedagogy, and a fitting response to the turbulent 1960s” (34). In other words, for all of the accusations that have been labeled against it, the process movement in its inception was never intended to be “self-indulgent writing in contrast to real-world demands for meaningful, goal-directed communication” (35).

Like all theories, though, the process movement was not perfect, and it has been usefully updated and expanded by what has come after, particularly (in my mind) the social constructionist movement which insists upon the endemically social nature of writing, thinking, speaking and knowledge. Social constructionism helped shift rhet/comp back toward its rhetorical roots; rhetoricians, especially the Sophists like Isocrates, preached tirelessly about the importance of audience, the role of kairos, not because they were interested in manipulating audiences but because they recognized that speaking and writing are necessarily transactive. That is, language has the power to move people, to persuade them to action, to convince them to hold some beliefs while rejecting others. Bizzell and other social constructionists did not deny the importance of process in helping student writers become cultural critics. Bizzell herself contends that “we can look at student and professional academic writers and readers as participants in a complex literary genre…To practice cultural criticism, then, us to study discourse” (229). Bizzell sees cultural criticism as a teachable process, one that is not at odds with the expressivism of the process movement but which does, in usefully and theoretically sound (from the perspective of rhetoricians) ways, move us beyond the stereotypical process concerns of invention, organization, revision, voice, and so on.

So I am not concerned with where we have been or where we have arrived, mostly because I agree with Bloom that the process movement never died; instead, I think it has been resurrected in wonderfully useful ways by feminist rhetoric, social constructionism, social cognitivism, and cultural studies. I am concerned, however, by where the next vaunted movement in composition, the so-called “post-process” movement, might take us. I have read Thomas Kent’s Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing Process Paradigm in its entirety, and I found it to be the worst kind of postmodernist nihilism. I don’t take issue with any of Kent’s theoretical tenets: that writing is public, interpretive, and situated seems to me the ideological bedrock upon which process theory was founded in the first place. I do take issue with post-process’s desire to “make a composition class an oxymoron – as well as an unteachable algorithm” (39). And I don’t find Bloom’s question about whether “students actually write better…in a process curriculum than under other competing models” (41) a satisfactory place from which to begin critiquing post-process theory. The fact is, I do believe that writing can be taught. I am committed to the original process pedagogy that wanted to create a nation of writers, a nation of empowered, educated individuals who would see writing as a tool for discovery as well as for expression; I am equally committed to the social constructionist position that wants students to recognize the power structures inherent in language and to learn how to critique both texts and culture. I believe that students need language, and teaching students to use and to study language is not an impossibility, anymore than finding a center in a text is an impossibility. Postmodern disciples forget that Derrida did not say the center didn’t exist. Derrida said the center was a function created by each individual based on her/his own experiences, and furthermore, he insisted that the center’s function was absolutely vital to meaning-making.

So, too, is the belief that we can teach writing indispensable for the field of rhetoric and composition. We shouldn’t be tempted to theorize ourselves into oblivion. We shouldn’t apologize for taking students from “no words to words,” as Elbow puts it (11). We should be willing to critically revisit process pedagogy, to let ourselves get “past process” (Bloom 28) into whatever other useful theories exist for the teaching of writing, but I don’t think we will ever find that we are post-language.