Re: genres in activity

Judy Diamondstone (diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu)
Wed, 24 Jul 1996 15:26:29 -0400

Paul,
I am still struggling with ways of conceptualizing "genre." Let me do
that on-line, in response to your postings on this topic.

I agree with everything you said genre knowledge is but not with what
you said it is not. I agree that genre knowledge is
an abstraction "generated on-line" but I also think that it works
to run the show, even as it is being generated, in its formulative,
emergent, changeable sketch-of-a-script state. It does for me,
anyway. It - genre knowledge - is not in-the-head but embodied knowledge,
I agree with that. It is certainly not "fully present in the mind."
But it, whatever it is - the enminded body that knows this situation as
an instance of a type - is nevertheless deployed (whatever that means -
made use of) as a resource for action by the agentive subject. When I
get the feel of being a presenter, I am deploying (by way of the
feelings/knowings) my knowledge of a presentation genre.

You say that genre is "situated, negotiated, perspectival, & a matter
of family resemblance." Well, it is more or less negotiable, depending
on the activity. I, as someone who has "found myself" or "got myself" in
unfamiliar situations - not superficially unfamiliar but profoundly so -
am keenly aware of the non-negotiable status of the generic aspects (?)
of such activities. Perspectives are at play, but they are at play
in highly constrained ways. If that is emphasized, I completely agree that
"phenomena of genre are fundamentally matters of texts in
multiperspectival functional systems of mediated activity."

You mention Bakhtin's choice of the novel as an example of a genre
configured by multiple voices. Right. And then there are other genres,
those of modern institutions that still trade on enlightenment values,
like constitutional law and schooling. The multivoicedness of classrooms,
courtrooms, prisons, etc. is stratified in ways that can't be undone by
individual protagonists. How do we describe the constraints on
multivoicedness, negotiation, reciprocity?

In reference to your second posting, I also agree that for Bakhtin,
utterances carry "often considerable centripetal force" -- which I
see as the vertical vector in his dialogical theory (in productive tension
with the horizontal vector of dialogism, which trades more on the ideal of
reciprocity). You suggest that the issue is where we look for the
centripetal forces ("sociohistorical relations"), which you say are still
inscribed in your theory of genre. If you see those sociohistorical
relations lending authority to certain inflections over others, depending
of course on context, then I am with you here. - Look for them, we must.

I completely agree that we need to look for sociohistorical relations
in embodied forms of life/ways of being, rather than in abstract
systems of knowledge. I also, like you, favor a theory that favors
"multiple laminated origins that arise from the complexities of
dispersed, heterogeneous historical activity." But I also want that
theory to describe, to help me understand, how certain
ways of being count more than others in certain situations.

I agree that Bakhtin offers a notion of language "as what we get from
other people's mouths." However, you object to notions of speech communities
or discourse communities because they "reinscribe structuralism" --
"mini-langues with increased scope for rules." I think of speech communities
as SOUNDED in ways _that implicate structural forces/ sociohistorical
relations_. I see no problem with the notion of "embodied" individual
voices as "sounding" the voice of a sociocultural group that we abstract
from multiple instances of hearing the voices of its members. I think of
voices I have heard as particular realizations of more generalized
_ways of sounding_ - NOT realizations of abstract sign systems,
but realizations nevertheless.

And I don't agree that "we should not expect classifications of
linguistic-rhetorical form to describe and determine the phenomena of
genre." It's certainly a mistake to treat a description as determinative,
but why shouldn't linguistic/rhetorical formations, traces of
situated performances, show evidence of family resemblance in a way
that can be classified?

Behind some of this I realize is an uneasy sense that one branch of genre
theory does not draw on a resource I find useful (Systemic Functional Ling's).
I hope to keep the discourses about genre permeable enough to allow
cross referencing, which would facilitate my own developing pedagogy.

And as I said at the outset, I am still struggling with ways of
conceptualizing, talking about, and making available to students,
notions of genre. So I am greatly indebted to those on this list who
precede me in this effort. I look forward to more....

Judy

At 09:05 PM 7/23/96 -0500, you wrote:
>Judy,
>
>I hope you do say more about the tensions you see following from the idea
>of genre generation as opposed to genre instantiation and from voices as
>embodied/virtual rather than as abstract systems of discourse.
>
>My initial reaction is that I don't see sociohistorical relations getting
>written out. There are still widespread centripetal forces (whether the
>medieval church, bodies of oral literature, MTV, or the nuclear family)
>that are in play and shape the historical becoming of persons in activity.
>For example, as mediational means with histories (and hence perspectives)
>embedded in them, Bakhtin's utterances and genres of utterance always carry
>at least some and often considerable centripetal force (though what is
>centripetal at one level or in one context may be centrifugal elsewhere).
>
>So I wasn't trying to raise the question of whether we look for
>sociohistorical relations, but where we look for them. I was suggesting
>that we should look for those relations in embodied forms of life/ways of
>being in the world rather than in abstract systems of knowledge. In terms
>of determinism, I see this perspective as one that rejects unified origins
>for human activity (whether they be in abstract macrosocial structures or
>in isolated individual cognitive structures) in favor of multiple laminated
>origins that arise from the complexities of dispersed, heterogeneous,
>historical activity.
>
>In any case, I'd be interested in hearing more about your concerns and what
>triggered them.
>
>
>>
>>I like Chuck Bazerman's and Paul Prior's discussion of genre as
>>script-like in the generative sense and discussion of voice as
>>the echo, so to speak, of actual voices. Ana also emphasizes
>>the dialogism of Bakhtin' notion of utterance.
>>What I am a bit concerned about, however, is that the constraining
>>sociohistorical relations are getting written out of the theory; the
>>sociolinguistic "facts"/probabilities of occurrence and
>>dominance of certain types of voice, etc. I can appreciate a move
>>away from determinism, but I sense a tension developing here between
>>productive foci of genre theory. That's good - A productive
>>tension and not a dichotomizing one. I'll say more later....
>>
>>Judy
>
>Paul Prior
>p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
>University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
>
>
>
>

....................
Judy Diamondstone diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
Graduate School of Education Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place New Brunswick, NJ 08903

Eternity is in love with the productions of time. - W. Blake