personals, practice, genre, feeling, blocking

Bill Barowy (wbarowy who-is-at mail.lesley.edu)
Fri, 17 Sep 1999 08:12:56 -0400

Victoria wrote:
>
>In articulating this, I am suggesting that perhaps, my identity as a
>observer (passive/inactive etc) participant in XMCA in the past (up till
>now) has only been that of a somewhat disengaged member, watching the
>"actions/interactions". This has been the case, in my short experience in
>XMCA, when reading most mails that were "comprehensible, ... complete".
>
>But, in noticing mails that borders on the affect, I'm almost ready to jump
>in response, although sometimes there are really very personal mails, which
>I have no business to be involved in. The same response is conjured too in
>reading mails which raised more questions rather than those with complete
>logically discussions.

That reminded me of something Judy wrote:

In the presentation reported below, a data-rich study of
the last hanging in Australia, Anne Freadman used the notion of
genre to address the problematic relation between language
and the body. How would AT describe the same series of events?
[Or is it even useful to think about using AT to look
backwards at a historical record?]
[...]

By asking "how can a sentence kill," Anne made the crucial
point that "genre" (e.g., the narrative that underpins the death
penalty) can't be applied to a single text - it's more usefully
described as a relation obtaining between texts - the "uptake."
Uptakes have long, intertextual, intergeneric memories -- and
memory is essential for words to have consequences.
Genres entail JURIS DICTIONS.
To determine what counts as a genre, we might look for the
seam, the boundary between one genre and another. The boundary
between trial and execution is mediated by the sentence. The
sentence carries material from one side to another, from court
to executioner. The sentence is a kind of "boundary genre" I guess.

It is by way of the notion of translation that we can understand
how the supposed border between language and the body is transgressed.
"Translation does not obliterate a boundary, but crosses it,
calls attention to it" (D's notes). Uptake involves translation.
Speech act theory only addresses uptake WITHIN a genre. It does
not explain what happens "when things go wrong" -- when genres
collide, when semiosis (in one genre)/history/memory is blocked
by the collision.

Despite thousands of precedent texts for commuting the
sentence of hanging in the historical case AF presented,
one lawyer managed to effect the hanging anyway,
by "blocking" [by way of a rhetorical ploy/ trickery]
the possibilities for the story of commutation to be told.
Ironically, at the time of the hanging, stories ABOUT the
incident began, stories which eventuated in the end
of the death penalty in Australia.

Here's my own somewhat incoherent reflection on the above:

For Freadman, the sentencing was a kind of "boundary genre"
[my term, not AF's], a boundary between genres, the
place where one kind of semiosis [a narrative of commuted sentences?]
was blocked by another [a narrative of hanging following the guilty
verdict] - the sentencing was also a site where another kind of
translation could happen, the translation of language into
non-language, or of languaging as "immediate" action, as speech
event (I sentence you to be hung) into languaging as reflective
activity (a hanging happened, here's my view of it) -- the fate of
the body/ change in materiality intervening between event and reflection.

Was Freadman claiming that such crossings [language to non-lang]
do not happen intra-generically???

If AT is a tool for analyzing what goes wrong/ what may
lead development, may we think of "boundary genres" like the
sentencing - a site where semiosis goes through translation
or gets blocked; a site where a practice gets constructed
as a certain kind of practice - as a useful focus for the
reflective activity of a collective?

This took me a long time to think through, without much
leverage in the end. With apologies to anyone
anticipating more, I will end my compilation here. It would
be nice if people who presented would send brief summaries of
their own work, relating it to CHAT. I plan to say something
about the project I attempted - "integrating" systemic
functional linguistics and activity theory - but not tonight.

Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
Lesley College, 31 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
_______________________
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]