The one general, non-historical comment I would make, is that
genres, scripts, and all forms of typified behavior exist both in and out
of the head--or rather at the juncture of the person in the world, and
having correlations with things on ether side of the juncture.
I understand typifications as psycho-social recognition categories.
People treat things a certain way because they recognize them as a certain
kind of thing. Each person's recognitions may be quite distinct, but
insofar as their recognitions orient to similar artefacts and result in
the production of other similar artifacts, which may then be socially
recognized by nbaming, there is a strong dynamic of pattern recognition
and pattern making that priovides an interpretable and somewhat reliable
social world for individuals to navigate their way through by the
invocation of further socially recognized types. The more social artefacts
that can be reasonably understood as patterned, and even make their
principles of patterned construction salient, the more liokely we are to
mutually orient to relatively congruent perceptions of the social world.
So there is a dialectic between the pattern attribution cognitive
practices and the texts lying around on our desks along with our socially
visible behaviors.
I also would like to suggest that the typifications occur in many
dimensions and not just linguistic form (that is, we might say, the
typifications occur within the meanings attributed to the
text--affexctive, ideological, social structural, social relational, etc)
so that further blurs the line between artifact and in the head as to
where the genre lies. Even the linguistic form, of course, is only
meaningful, insofar as individuals can attribute meaning--but meanings
that are part of aligning to a social interaction.
I take one of the virtues of activity and vygotskian approaches to
be that they do not force us to treat the skin as an impermeable boundary
with thought on one side and social interaction and
self-contained/self--evident artifacts on the other.
Yours, in obscurity,
Chuck Bazerman