A Discipline Built on the Individual

For a long time, composition pedagogy operated within paradigms which emphasized the individual. 

In classical rhetoric, there was the canon of speech: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.

During the enlightenment, common sense rhetoricians focused on style and delivery as the most important canons of composition and rhetoric.

The neo-classicists resurrected the canon of invention, and expressivist scholars such as Peter Elbow, Janet Emig, and Donald Murray emphasized introspection as a vital part of the composition process.

Cognitive process theorists came along and incorporated process theory with scientific documentation of how people compose.

 

 

 

A Social Turn in Rhetoric and Composition

In the early eighties, scholars of rhetoric and composition began to notice how these individually-based paradigms left out the social and contextual elements of the composition process. 

They started to study the ways socially constructed identities, communities, and cultures effected the process of composition.

This new focus lent itself to the use of various lenses as a way of interrogating the composition process: marxist, dramatist, post-colonial, feminist, psycho-analytic, post-human, etc.

All of these lenses are embedded with inherently political projects; they work against hegemony/the man/status quo.

Post-process theories of composition share the assumption that “no codifiable or generalizable writing process exists or could exist” (Kent, 1999, p. 1). Post-process theorists build on this exigence in various ways, producing ever-expansive conceptions of what writing is, epistemologically and ontologically.[1]

 

 

 

Ecology and Writing

The concept of rhetorical ecology is a manifestation of this disciplinary post-process shift.

 

Marilyn Cooper's 1986 article entitled "The Ecology of Writing" began the conversation about ecology as it relates to composition. Cognitive process models are grounded on social intelligence as an indicator of better writers, and this is problematic for Cooper. She critiques "conversations" between audience and writer as advocated by Linda Flower because they are hypothetical and essentially a conversation with the self. Cooper emphasizes that ecology is *not* the new way to say context; social ecologies of writers are solid, traceable networks. 

 

This conception of ecology is extremely social; it does not take into account non-human subjects and environmental influence on the writing process. 

 

 

 

Margaret Syverson's 1999 book, The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition marked another big jump in the theorizing of an ecological conception of writing. Syverson seeks to understand why, despite the "composition boom," and all the resources being funneled into composition programs, there is no evidence that students are reading, writing, or thinking better than the past (2). Additionally, she wonders where knowledge comes from during collaborative projects, saying it is not "contained in any individual mind (8)." To address these questions, Syverson pushes for cooperation among disciplines, a sort of a metaphor for the ecological lens itself. Disciplines should not be discretely-functioning; instead we should be recognizing the ways in which they are connected into larger systems. Syverson defines ecology as the study of numerous interrelated and interdependent complex systems which rely on independent agents (3), and identifies four pertinent qualities of ecosystems which should be applied to composition studies: 

• DISTRIBUTION- "processes--including cognitive processes--are... both divided and shared among agents and structures in the environment (7)"

• EMERGENCE - the process of becoming; creation; invention; "counter-effect to entropy (10-11)"

• EMBODIMENT - our conceptual schemas are grounded in physical experiences (12)

• ENACTION - "knowledge is the result of an ongoing interpretation that emerges through activities and experiences situated in specific environments (13)"

Syverson applies these principles to the study of writing to discover the ways in which we are shaped as we shape our texts (17). 

 

 

 

In 2002, Sidney I. Dobrin & Christian R. Weisser published Natural Discourse: Towards Ecocomposition. The authors define ecocomposition as "a study of writing and ecology and the ecology of writing (62)."  Dobrin and Weisser see the study of writing as developing alongside the study of ecology, and "for the very same reasons" (64-5). In order to prove this, Dobrin and Weisser de-value orality and point to writing as an indicator of a sophisticated society, which is an antiquated way of looking at orality/literacy. 

 

Dobrin & Weisser's notion of ecology relies on a decidedly Western notion of "nature," which intrinsically implies that nature and society are somehow separate. This conception of ecology is limited; it does not recognize that the principles of ecology are bigger than all of us, were not created by us, and preexists our study of it. Our modern study of ecology is an attempt to understand little pieces of the networks. 

 

 

 

In 2005, Jenny Rice published “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies” in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and in so doing brought ecology into the world of public rhetorical studies. Rice argues that "rhetorical situations operate within a network of lived practical consciousness or structures of feeling (5)." Her notion of rhetorical ecologies sees the traditionally-defined elements of the rhetorical situation as over-simplified. She seeks the grey area to break binaries of exigence, audience, text, but also sees the connections and networks within the grey area. Rice uses "affect" and "ecology" interchangeably, and her work is informed by cultural ecologies, but it still lacks a focus on environmental factors beyond humans as being key players in the composition process.

 

 

 

The concept of rhetorical ecology has been criticized as being very theoretical. My work is to attempt to nudge these theories towardsd pragmatism within this techne. In order to do so, I need to first extend ecology a step further.

This practical approach to facilitating writing starts from the general premise that everything is connected (based on the work being done through quantum physicists to prove universal consciousness).

 

[1] See Thomas Kent / Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing-Process Paradigm / 1999 for thirteen theoretical spinoffs of post-process theory by scholars in rhetoric and composition.

 

See Parallel Paths for other theories which work towards de-centering the human as the normative subject.