Processing Post Process

The process of reading through Paul Kei Matsuda's paper on Process was painful at best. It was exceedingly difficult just to wade through all of his Squirrel! citations just to get to the gist of his paper. Academic writing style notwithstanding, it was a beast to read. And after all that slogging through it, Matsuda's summation was "How is post-process defined and for what purpose? What conception of process does it invoke? These are some of the questions that need to be considered as we continue to explore the implications of the term post-process (78)." What? I thought that was supposed to be the point of the article in the first place - and we still have to go exploring? Do we have to take all those other guys with us? There's a barge full of them.

Seriously, however, my impression of post-process is close to the one he defines as Atkinson's and Susser (1994), which states that rather than a clean-break approach to a new theory, post-process is "best defined not as a complete theory or a pedagogical approach but as a set of pedagogical practices that can be adapted to any pedagogical approaches (78)." Matsuda goes on to explain further (miraculously managing to avoid the term pedagogical), defining post-process as "the rejection of the dominance of process at the expense of other aspects of writing and writing instruction (78-79)." 

The history of writing instruction held some interesting points for me, particularly in light of my research into prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar instruction, which it parallels. The rejection of the current-traditional rhetoric approach, first tentatively attempted early in the 20th century in an effort to "make composition a humane and intimate discipline (68)", and then full tilt revolution in the later part of the century toward the process product we know and sort of love today. Except that, as with all things humanly created, it did not abruptly change from one style to another universally, it took its time evolving, and I am sure there is a decrepit old English teacher somewhere in Texas who is still fiercely clinging to the old ways. The analogy of those old ways being perceived as caricature rather than reality was an apt one, and as the new ways of post-process eclipse process, the half-truths and misconceptions emerge once more.

I ended the article still rather mystified about what post-process was, so I goggled up another opinion and found one I really liked in Gary Olsen's "Toward a Post-Process Composition: Abandoning the Rhetoric of Assertion." (here's the link) Olsen agrees with what I think Matsuda said, and eschews writing Theory with a capital "T" for theories, and takes all of the primary discourse parameters out of the writing process. He calls the "rhetoric of assertion" - the thesis/truth at the core of most writing processes - "masculinist, phallogocentric, foundationalist, often essentialist, and, at the very least, limiting (236)." He quotes Jean-Francois Lyotard whose "conception of writing is in contradistinction to the traditional notion of writing as an activity whose objective is to 'master' a subject, to possess it, to pin it down through a discourse of assertion (238)." Olsen cites  a variety of theorists who have "speculate[d] productively about how writing is deeply implicated in structures of power and domination, how writing can never be disconnected from ideology, how writing as traditionally conceived is driven by a discourse of mastery and a rhetoric of assertion (240)."

Those terms and that approach make sense to me in the evolving theories (NOT with a capitol "t") about how to teach writing in an evolving world of letters, but I'm not sure I agree with them entirely. There are aspects of the process writing approach that I think make a lot of sense, as is also true of "current-traditional rhetoric" as defined by Richard Young (Matsuda 70).  In a broad, unscientific way, I would frame post-process as inclusive in terms of all the theories, and open to interpretation and adaptation to suit a narrative purpose. So in the end it seems to be more defined by what it isn't than what it is.