I am writing as someone who is still very much a recent student of both SFL
and activity theory - my questions are guided more by intuition than
analysis, and I suppose they are relevant to any theoretical tradition
concerned with change.
It is easy enough for me to see that the undreamed of present/future, though
sociohistorically constrained, are never fully determined. But I am still
cautious about the desire to overgeneralize the present and future. I say
this while acknowledging both the following comments:
>This view deeply assumes an active subject and the need for constant
>negotiation within heterogeneous "layers" of constraints. I take
>genres to refer to identifiable-ish units of socio-culturally embodied
>constraints.
>As I am using AT, the future
>exists as a kind of hermeneutic guessing, where people can make what they
>believe are better and worse guesses based on their history of
>interpersonal interactions using tools. A genre is in one sense, perhaps, a
>way of making better guesses about what tools-in-use will work in a present
>set of conditions that seem enough like those experienced before (I'm
>thinking here of Carolyn Miller's (1984) discussion of typification).
Maybe I am harping, but the tendency to overgeneralize possibilities
seems unwise if we are committed to social change.
I keep thinking that, though change happens despite anyone's intention on an
ongoing basis (is this what you mean, David, by shit happens?), for people
to effect change, they need to be very good at reading how (in my bumper
sticker terms) Practice Happens, Man! - they need to keep foregrounded the
constraints of practice, of discourse, of the past. Probabilities are
encoded in semiotic terms, and dreamers who want to change the writing on
the wall should know what that writing says. I don't know if meaning
potential is finite or not. But it seems obvious that flexibility in meaning
making is more available to some than to others. Constraints are more
visible to others than to some. In my experience, those graduate students
who are politically active within the institution have much to say about how
power operates in that portion of the university where their interests are
at stake. Lower SES parents know how power operates in a school district of
mostly higher SES families (who are more likely to note the fairness of
parent-teacher committees, school board/ district policies). Certain
combinations of tools, certain meanings, don't get taken up not because they
are not useful to some users but because they aren't useful to the more
powerful users.
I _think_ everyone participating in this conversation about genre & genesis
etc. would agree that meaning can't be read off written texts alone. I also
assume, though maybe not everyone would agree (?), that SOME meaning is
available from intra-textual relations and more with intertexts identified,
though ultimately it's made with respect to the analyst's frame of reference
which is not in the text. That there's much to be gained from tracing the
genesis of a text through identifiable activity networks.
But I wouldn't want the emphasis on all the messiness of interactions with
tools to distract me from noticing that, despite the indeterminateness of
the future, more poor women are dying of AIDS than are any other group and
they have the most inadequate medical care. How can issues like that not be
made salient in a theory of social change? And these are issues that can be
made salient in written and spoken texts, as medical anthropologists have shown.
I see the focus on written & spoken texts to be necessary but insufficient
for a rich analysis of cultural innovations. In this respect I see SFL &
activity theory as complementary. I also see SFL as a potentially terrific
intervention in language arts instruction and the preparation of language
arts teachers, though as I move sluggishly through Halliday, I do have
questions -- but those for another time, another place.
Specific to David's last response to Jim's comment:
>So that common sense everyday language (without grammatical metaphor in
>>technical terms) is a good theory of activity.
I understood Jim to be suggesting that the way everyday language operates
can serve as a model of activity - not that the way everyday language
_represents_ activity can serve as a model. Can Jim please respond and/or
elaborate?
Judy
....................
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