Reading :: Postprocess Postmortem

Postprocess Postmortem

By Kristopher M. Lotier

This book, based on Lotier’s dissertation, really took me back. Lotier examines “postprocess,” the “movement/theory/attitude” (p.3) that took hold of composition studies in the 1990s, then seemingly disappeared. Lotier argues that it — or at least some form of it — has stuck around in contemporary composition theory, but under different names, often under the heading of new materialism.

The book is grounded in two strands of thought that have often been considered together and more or less combined. One is grounded in the pioneering works of Thomas Kent, who characterized this strand of theory as “paralogic rhetoric” or “externalism”; Lotier characterizes this strand as “postprocess” without a hyphen (p.26). Paralogic rhetoric characterizes discourse production and reception as uncodifiable dialogic activities, and thus centers on hermeneutic guessing (pp.27-28). In contrast, he uses “post-process” with a hyphen to characterize a second strand, one that relies on critiques of subjectivity and focuses on discursive conditions (p.22); this strand is based in Trimbur and others.

I mentioned that this review takes me back, and that’s because Kent was at Iowa State University, and he and others on the faculty discussed paralogic rhetoric quite a bit in my PhD classes in 1994-1999. So Lotier’s discussion of those years at Iowa State (in Ch.5), which covered contributions by Kent, Blyler, Ewald, and my dissertation director David R. Russell, brought me back to those days. As Lotier points out, ISU’s program in professional communication adopted postprocess ideas early and brought them into PC scholarship. In contrast, post-process (with the hyphen) was, he says, grounded in Saint Thomas University in New Brunswick (Chapter 4) in the works of Anthony Pare and colleagues Hunt, Reither, and Vipond. (I certainly read a lot of Pare in grad school!) 

So what happened to postprocess/post-process? Lotier argues that many of its key tenets have been taken up by new materialist scholarship. Here, he demonstrates that many postprocess ideas have become mainstream: writing is grounded in specific moments, no generalized theory can completely capture what happens in these moments, readers and writers coconstruct meaning, materal conditions affect what is written (p.191). 

Overall, I thought this was an interesting and enjoyable read — although I suspect a lot of the enjoyment comes from rethinking the articles that I saw my professors writing in the 1990s from a new perspective. I really appreciated the methodical recontextualization that Lotier offers here, as well as his exploration of how these ideas have been taken up in different strands of thought. If you’re interested in comp theory, or if you remember comp in the 1990s, or if you want to see how historiography can explore the evolving thought in a specific field, definitely pick it up.