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4 r e A s s e M B l i n g P o s t P r o c e s s Toward a Posthuman Theory of Public Rhetoric Byron Hawk i nt ro d Uct i o n—t hree P ri nci P les In Thomas Kent’s introduction to Post-Process Theory, he argues that the three main assumptions behind the emerging postprocess movement are writing is public, writing is interpretive, and writing is situated. By public he means dialectical exchange among writers and audiences through language; by interpretive he means that since humans can never fully understand the other, they must make hermeneutic guesses about the other and align their utterances with others’ beliefs about the world; by situated he means these interpretations are enacted and tested in particular situations and with particular audiences. All these positions are in fact distinct from universal and individual notions of the writing process, but they are still grounded in a humanist tradition—they are still couched in terms of social construction and traditional hermeneutics . If rhetoric and composition truly wants to break out of traditional notions of the subject and process, as postprocess theorists seem to desire, these three grounding principles have to be reconfigured from a different paradigm. A Deleuzian ontology of assemblage could ground the notion that writing is situated; a Heideggerian model of interpretation would move beyond hermeneutic guessing to material embodiment ; and a Latourian concept of a public can move rhetoric beyond the human scale. Using these three theorists respectively, this essay builds a new constellation of concepts that can reground postprocess in a posthuman model of networks to ultimately argue that the subject of writing is the network that inscribes the subject as the subject scribes the network. Such a paradigm is less an argument against Kent than a rearticulation of his humanist position within the kinds of posthuman worlds 76 BeyON D P OST P ROCeSS rhetors inhabit today. Kent organizes his process from public to interpretive to situated. His notion of the public is based on human-tohuman communication. For Kent writing “automatically includes other language users” and “must be accessible to others” (1999, 1): it happens in relation to other humans who can understand what is written. These publics have knowledge of conventions, genres, and words from specific languages that facilitate this communication, but their specific historical articulations forego foreknowledge of the outcomes of communication . Since writers or theorists cannot predetermine these public encounters, writing requires ongoing interpretation and guesswork. To “enter into a relation of understanding with other language users,” writers must interpret readers’ situations, motives, and genres with “uncodifiable moves” in an “attempt to align our utterances with others” (2–3). Kent calls these moves “hermeneutic guesswork” (3). Since this process can’t be predicted, writers can only map out the process they used in retrospect. The more writers make such retrospective maps the better they get at guessing future outcomes. But when employing these maps writers can make wrong guesses, misunderstand the other, so interpretation is a continuous process. Finally, writers must test their hermeneutic guesses in particular situations. Kent argues, “When we write, we elaborate passing theories during our acts of writing that represent our best guesses about how other people will understand what we are trying to convey, and this best guess, in turn, will be met by our reader’s passing theories that may or may not coincide with ours” (4–5). Since no two people can really share the exact same discourse community, writers have to see how others will respond to their utterances. In short, Kent’s notion of postprocess theory relies on the dialectical give and take of hermeneutic guesses among humans in particular situations involving human communication. Kent’s world is one of dialogic give and take among humans who are locked into their individual worlds and must overcome that distance through testing guesses about the other in particular situations. Writers are caught in a kind of hermeneutic circle and struggle to understand and interpret their world: they never seem to be fully connected to it, and there isn’t a sense of how such a connection would produce the grounds for rhetorical enaction beyond hermeneutic guessing and testing.1 As Stephen Yarbrough argues, Kent’s notion of hermeneutic 1. Kent’s articles “Beyond System: The Rhetoric of Paralogy” (1989a) and “Paralogic Hermeneutics and the Possibilities of Rhetoric” (1989b) inform his book Paralogic [18.226.96.61] Project MUSE...

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