In “Modeling and Emulating: Rethinking Agency in the Writing Process,” Barbara Couture attempts to articulate moving from the “dualistic device paradigm of writing as process to what she calls writing as “design” (31). Concerning her desire to recover a personal agency in writing not based on mindlessly model[ing] (31, 30), Couture is perhaps the most forcefully eloquent when she writes “we pay a price…by reducing those acts that make us uniquely human—speaking and writing—to a device or technology to be mastered, ignoring their more central role in shaping the way we are and live” (39). Others, while still calling for release from prescribed ways of writing, as in the case of Olson’s ire with the constricting demands of adopting a “rhetoric of assertion” (9), or DeJoy’s “critical” position, “identification of” and analysis of the “dominant approaches to process” (172, 170), seem to erode the very robustness of any subjectivity vested with the capacity to write without any coerciveness of experience, inasmuch the social turn and “post-process” attends to the “larger forces that affect the writer and of which the writer is a part” (132, emphasis hers). To what degree is any vestige of agency determinable within such a mutually constitutive framework and, by extension, what does this say of the impetus behind projects that attempt to extricate and fashion the self out of the social in order to interrogate context(s) of composing?
Ewald, writing on postmodern commitments to the “interrogations of agency, perspective, and values” on the part of those who would tout post-process theory, foregrounds the fractiousness of this enterprise amongst “critical and feminist approaches” inclusive of “accusations of cultural bias and uncritical cultural reproduction” (119-120). She does so amidst thoughts that would seem very much to align with Couture on the resuscitation of agency, inasmuch as she accepts the “inherent value” of post-process theories seeking to establish “subject/subject” relations” in which “student contributions” have value” (129). Yet these are “relations” fraught with peril for those students striving to initiate community while the ideology of some scholars binds them to the rack of “privilege,” as Foster, in conjuring up the frustration and distress of identity politics gone awry in his discussion of a pedagogy of “contingency” (154-157), demonstrates in explicitly referencing two of such bent:
Patricia Bizzell has argued that well-meaning efforts to develop community in classrooms made up of…middle-class majorities that do not recognize their own privilege, inevitably silence disempowered others…Similarly, Susan Miller is uncompromising in her insistence that “no amount of mutuality, sympathy or collaborative, ‘dialogic’ and dialectic interaction [can reduce] this difference” that makes me “always an ‘object’ to you, even in ‘public’ spaces where we write collaboratively. (qtd. in 161)
What might generously be said of such positions within a more expansive unfolding of context comprising the social turn in composition studies, given what seems to be an incessant desire to impose a paradoxically extensive and localizable culpability to individuals within social relations that clings to notions of a concretized hierarchy of difference?
Ewald, writing on postmodern commitments to the “interrogations of agency, perspective, and values” on the part of those who would tout post-process theory, foregrounds the fractiousness of this enterprise amongst “critical and feminist approaches” inclusive of “accusations of cultural bias and uncritical cultural reproduction” (119-120). She does so amidst thoughts that would seem very much to align with Couture on the resuscitation of agency, inasmuch as she accepts the “inherent value” of post-process theories seeking to establish “subject/subject” relations” in which “student contributions” have value” (129). Yet these are “relations” fraught with peril for those students striving to initiate community while the ideology of some scholars binds them to the rack of “privilege,” as Foster, in conjuring up the frustration and distress of identity politics gone awry in his discussion of a pedagogy of “contingency” (154-157), demonstrates in explicitly referencing two of such bent:
Patricia Bizzell has argued that well-meaning efforts to develop community in classrooms made up of…middle-class majorities that do not recognize their own privilege, inevitably silence disempowered others…Similarly, Susan Miller is uncompromising in her insistence that “no amount of mutuality, sympathy or collaborative, ‘dialogic’ and dialectic interaction [can reduce] this difference” that makes me “always an ‘object’ to you, even in ‘public’ spaces where we write collaboratively. (qtd. in 161)
What might generously be said of such positions within a more expansive unfolding of context comprising the social turn in composition studies, given what seems to be an incessant desire to impose a paradoxically extensive and localizable culpability to individuals within social relations that clings to notions of a concretized hierarchy of difference?