Beyond Postprocess

11. The Salon of 2010

11 t h e s A l o n o f 2 0 1 0 Geoffrey Sirc After a debauch, one feels oneself always to be more solitary, more abandoned. Baudelaire to t he co M Po si t i o ni st s I think of the history of composition as a series of abandoned rooms. Again and again, a terrific, heightened, pointed scene coalesces through mutual enthusiasm out of the otherwise shapeless social. Glasses are filled, appetizers sampled, and the conversational chatter goes from zero to sixty in a matter of seconds. All sorts of brilliant, witty things get said (and a lot of overindulgent foolishness, of course). New paths are discovered, resolutions sworn, lives might even be changed. The persuasiveness of the presiding vibe at that scene is such that the whole future makes sudden, brilliant sense. A new book or article appears; soon it’s on everyone’s lips; it’s the most brilliant thing ever written, explains everything; then, the guests congregate again a month or so later, and no one’s talking about it anymore. Before you know it, the whole party scene’s moved on. You show up to the usual spot, and they’ve all gone. All that’s left is the mess to clean up. Most of the crowd, it turns out, has gone off disgusted at all their foolish talk, home to stew in anger and recrimination (never again!) over their refusal to control their penchant for excess. A series of abandoned rooms, landscapes, party scenes. As a child, I loved going through deserted scenes. The rooms—a couple in the attic, one in the basement—in my grandparents’ house that had remnants in them of a life lived richly for a time but long gone; they’d become de facto history museums. Or towns we’d visit, former tourist meccas like Haileybury or the Soo, which were once the place and now were just ghost filled. Or open houses, when someone’s selling—I walk through, 196 BeyON D P OST P ROCeSS taking in the books on shelves, the field- hockey trophies in the daughter ’s bedroom, the kitchen remodel that must have been done back in the 70s, the bar in the basement used now only to store boxes; all these talismanic traces of a vibrant life lived in this microcosm of the social. And now it’s the room, the scene, that huge, brilliant, longest-running cocktail party ever in composition called process. Is it over? Really? I confess, I never really got that season or two where everyone was talking about postprocess. I mean, what more is there, if you’re a writer, than the doing and the reflecting on the doing? I like the gestalt of writing and its teaching; I like writing myself, seeing students do it, talking about it with students, trying to help them do it better. Even at its stage-model silliest, I remembered process as the liveliest time ever in our field, a time that was all about the stuff of language, the shaping of it, being excited by it, wanting to do new, different, interesting kinds of it. The classroom became a place to reflect that interest in messing about with writing, indulging creativity, defying participants to do cooler stuff; the classroom as workshop —how many academic spaces can claim that term? Plus, another reason I never “got” postprocess: I couldn’t imagine anything duller than what replaced it—a notion that the writing classroom (workshop no more) should put aside all the kicky stuff in order to “study the processes of mature writers composing within knowledgeproducing disciplines, such as those of the sciences” (Journet 1999, 96). Hell, I thought, it’s bad enough that scientists in the academy have to read that crap, and now I’m supposed to? Or “studying the ways upperlevel students negotiate the boundaries between the genres (and writing processes) of upper-level professional schooling and the genres (and writing processes) of entry-level professional positions” (Russell 1991, 91). Is there anything really compelling going on in the genres (and writing processes) of entry-level professionals? I mean, more interesting, say, than pop music? Or a journal assignment like “Destroy an enemy” (Buell 1969, 43)? It’s like, we only have so much time, you know? Plus, I wasn’t a dutifully-work-my-way-through-the-latest-theory type—neither were my first-year students. I was more of a pop-music...