Paralogic Rhetoric: A Theory of Communicative Interaction, Thomas Kent (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1993, 212 pages). 182 JAC

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1 182 JAC thinking, and social empowerment. Moreover, "Building on Halliday's systemic functional approach, a socially useful grammar needs to be functional rather than formal, with a semantic rather than a syntactic focus, and oriented to discourse rather than sentences and their particles." Unfortunately, the promise held out in the introductory chapters is not wholly fulfilled in subsequent applications of the genre approach, which seems to consist mainly of a pedagogy for elementary education based on developing taxonomies of diverse sociolinguistic situations, speech acts, and modes of discourse, albeit in a developmentally staged progression oflinguistic and grammatical complexity. Not being an authority on elementary education theory, I cannot judge the efficacy of these applications. I am bothered, however, by the absence of a focus on critical thinking, especially as applied to the rhetoric of politics and public discourse, of the kind that can be found in elementary curricular materials published by the Center for Critical Thinking and Moral Critique at Sonoma State University. In this absence, I must conclude that the most practical pieces for college teaching in these two collections remain those by Dillon, Bleich, and Trimbur in Into the Field. Works Cited Kytle, Ray. Clear Thinking/or Composition. New York: Random House, Lazere, Donald. "Teaching the Political Conflicts: A Rhetorical Schema." College Composition and Communication 43 (1992): Paul, Richard, AJA Blinker, and Maria Charbonneau. Critical Thinking Handbook: A Guide for Remodeling Lesson Plans in Language Arts, Social Studies, and Science. Rohnert Park, CA: Sonoma State Center for Critical Thinking, (separate volumes for K-3, 6-9, and high school) Trimbur, John. "Counterstatement." College Composition and Communication 44 (1993): Paralogic Rhetoric: A Theory of Communicative Interaction, Thomas Kent (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1993, 212 pages). Reviewed by Irene Ward, Kansas State University Thomas Kent moves composition theory closer to a postmodern and fundamentally dialogic perspective in his investigation of the work of several prominent poststructuralist philosophers whose work deals with epistemology, language, and communication. Although his work draws from time to

2 Reviews 183 time on Jacques Derrida, Jean Franc;ois Lyotard, and others, he deals primarily with the theories of American analytic philosopher Donald Davidson. Kent believes that Davidson's theory of communicative interaction has significant implications for composition studies. Kent represents the general direction in which composition studies appears to be moving. Increasingly, compositionists are investigating theories of communication that elaborate the dialogic nature of spoken and written discourse to explain how discourse is produced and analyzed. Kent claims that writing and reading involve a hermeneutic activity, that is, "the interpretation of another's language code." Readers and writers engage in what Kent calls "hermeneutic guessing." In producing discourse, Kent argues, invention is not the primary and most fundamental activity. Prior to invention, a writer makes a "hermeneutic guess" about the reader's code. Writers make these guesses because, although we may be guided by the conventionality of discourse communities, no exact match between the writer's hermeneutic strategy and the reader's is ever possible. These guessing strategies defy codification in any systematic way because the situation in which communication takes place is always different and because we may use a limited number of signs in many different contexts, allowing an unlimited range of meanings. These meanings can't be predicted with certainty in advance of any given situation. Therefore, Kent asks, if reading and writing cannot be reduced to a codifiable system that predicts discourse activities with any certainty, how can these activities be described and how can they be taught? Kent sees his major project as moving composition theory beyond the process paradigm. He views social constructionism as part of the process paradigm, and a large part of his critique deals with its problems. He sees two major problems with social constructionist theory: its reliance on the concepts of convention and discourse community. Kent points out that the major theories of composition involve some fundamental notion of "convention." Social conventions then are understood as the means by which discourse is comprehended. Although language is thought to be conventional by most contemporary language philosophers, Davidson and Derrida seriously question the assumption that language is convention-bound. Kent argues that the critiques provided by Davidson and Derrida question not only our understanding ofthe nature oflanguage but also the very foundation of contemporary rhetoric; such critiques suggest, therefore, that perhaps our notion of rhetoric needs to be reformulated. Kent is not denying that language conventions exist and to a point aid in speakers' and writers' attempts to communicate, but instead, argues that convention is not the foundation upon which the communication of meaning rests. Whatever it is that allows us to understand each other is not recognizable as a stable, unified system or as "conventional" in any axiomatic way. Kent draws on Derrida to elaborate further his claims and corroborate

3 184 JAC those of Davidson. While Davidson confines his discussions to spoken linguistic conventions, Derrida also addresses the nature of convention in written discourse and language as a whole. Derrida defines writing as the attempt to communicate with a reader who is absent. This process of communicating with those who are not present means that written signs must be "iterable" or repeatable. That is, signs must remain readable beyond the immediate contexts in which they were produced and be repeatable in new contexts and for new addressees. (Speech need not necessarily be iterable, because one can imagine a speech situation in which one invents a sign that serves a single instance for a single addressee and is never used again; whereas writing, because the addressee is not present, must rely on a repeatable code, if, Derrida argues, it is to be identified as writing.) Derrida, like Davidson, looks for and finds no conventional feature oflanguage that accounts for its repeatability and concludes that there is an unbridgeable separation between words and their meanings. Therefore, according to both Davidson and Derrida, we must not look to convention to understand how meaning is communicated. Accordingly, communication always involves an interpretive act that is not systematizable because no two communication situations are exactly the same and no two communicants will have exactly the same language knowledge. Kent argues that these interpretive acts are paralogic in nature-that is, beyond codification or systematization-because each time the writer encounters a new situation, he or she must invent a hermeneutic strategy in an effort to predict what will work. Convention only makes the guessing more accurate but never ensures that any particular guess will be the correct one. Kent questions not only the necessity of a foundational notion of the conventionality of language but also the usefulness of the concept of "discourse community" -a notion central to social constructionist theory. Kent believes that the social constructionist concept of discourse community tells us very little about how meaning is communicated by discourse. Kent claims that rhetoricians can abandon the notion of discourse community because it does not tell us very much about the nature of discourse production other than that it is produced in social settings. He proposes a way around the notion of discourse communities by demonstrating the advantages of abandoning the Cartesian epistemological dualism that posits an "inside" and "outside": a separation between inside the subjective mind ofthe writer and outside in the objective world. Once composition theorists abandon the dualism of inside and outside-or, as Kent says, once they become "externalists" rather than "internalists" -they do not need the network of social conventions to connect the minds of writers with the world out there. Without the internal/external dualism, communication can be understood to take place between individuals unmediated by a discourse community or any other conceptual scheme. According to Kent, Davidson has derived a communication theory that does not need to posit a conceptual scheme in

4 Reviews 185 order to account for the communication of meaning. According to Davidson, "communicative interaction" is necessary if meaning is to be communicated. This interaction takes place in a process he calls "triangulation." Meaning is communicated directly by a process in which at least two individuals with some social connection engage in a dialogue that reveals to each what is commonly known about the nature of the world. These three positions occupy three apices of a triangle and are conceived of as a unity-if one has knowledge of one of the elements one necessarily has knowledge of the other two. In order for meaning to be communicated, two people must engage in dialogue about objects in the world. In that process, knowledge about all three is revealed: the first speaker comes to know his or her own knowledge, something about the knowledge of the second person, and something about the object in question; the same is true reciprocally for the second person. According to Davidson, it is in the process of communicative interaction that concepts, beliefs, and knowledge come into existence. We know what we know, in other words, through dialogue. According to Davidson and Kent, although triangulation is a necessary condition for communicative interaction, it is not a wholly sufficient condition. When we triangulate we also must be able to interpret, on the run, the utterances of others. In order to do this, we are always engaged in what Kent calls hermeneutic guessing and what Davidson calls forming passing theories. Passing theories or hermeneutic guesses do not substitute for any sort of a priori foundation that reliably predicts how an utterance will be received. Passing theories are generated "on the spot" and are specific to individual communicative occasions. Clearly, notions of communicative interaction and triangulation would move composition theorists' focus away from internal mental constructs and cognitive processes and toward a focus on interpretation and a public and dialogic concept of discourse production. The process of dialogue-one that involves participants in constant interpretive guesses causing "on the spot" adjustments in the give-and-take of the dialogue-fundamentally describes speaking, writing, and reading. And this dialogic process is never ending: one dialogue ends in only a provisional settlement that in tum initiates another dialogue, and so on. Thus, reading and writing are, in Kent's theory, activities or processes; however, they are not codifiable processes that can be reduced to linear steps, or even recursive steps like inventing, arranging, drafting, revising, and editing. Although those activities may occur, they do not account for how written and spoken discourse communicate meaning. It is only through our repeated attempts to communicate meaning to others and with others that we learn how to engage in dialogic interpretation or hermeneutic guessing. This theoretical framework leads back to the question Kent raises: If reading and writing cannot be reduced to a codifiable system that predicts discourse activities with any certainty, how can these activities be described and how can they be taught? Even Kent admits that formal elements of

5 186 lac discourse can be taught. However, compositionists are in no way guaranteeing that a student can produce effective discourse when they teach the conventions of discourse or prescribed forms. In doing so, instructors are not ensuring that students can engage effectively in communicative interaction. Effective communication emerges from the activity of interactive dialogue. Kent has only sketched in broadest terms what a pedagogy based on his theory would entail. First, as I said earlier, part of Kent's program is to move composition beyond the process paradigm. When compositionists adopt an externalist view and refrain from talking about totalizing concepts of writing and, instead, understand writing as a species of dialogue, classroom focus on the process of writing can no longer be the primary focus of composition courses. The classroom would be structured so that students can engage directly in communicative interaction. Consequently, Kent claims, the instructor becomes just one more voice in the dialogue, an advisor who offers possibilities to writers about possible hermeneutic guesses and what results they might have in the world. Also, Kent maintains that composition instructors must realize the difference between monologic and dialogic writing. Much of the writing assigned in school is mono logic; it tests memory or analytic skill or provides a basis for assigning grades. Monologic writing (dis)ables interaction between writer and reader; the student writes to an evaluator who never authentically responds to it. Dialogic writing would be understood as a response-already part of a communicative interaction, in which the student is attempting to communicate meaning to an other via the process of triangulation discussed above. Kent's classroom would be a place where students engage in communicative interaction, where they perform or actually engage in "on the spot" dialogic interpretation in orderto communicate meaning to an other who in turn responds, keeping the dialogue and the process of inquiry and knowledge-making moving along. In short, the classroom scene would be a performance of dialogic interaction. Students would write public discourse intended to get things done in the world rather than discourse thought of as practice. The discourse must be produced with the goal of eventually having an effect in the world. In this public, dialogic interaction, writers would learn about themselves, others, and concrete reality. Although one wishes that Kent would have given us some evidence of a more critical engagement with Davidson's ideas, his applications of postmodern language theories of communication and language offer an intelligible and useful employment of postmodern thought to composition theory. Although much of Kent's theory reacts against the theoretical assumptions of social constructionist composition theory, in many ways he further refines composition studies' attempt to understand writing as a social activity. Kent offers an alternative and more useful understanding of what is entailed when one uses written discourse in an effort to affect the world.