Before commenting on Freadman's presentation, I
want to re-situate the problem she focused on in
CHAT terms. As Chuck pointed out, genres were generally
perceived at the symposium as forms of activity,
genred utterances as embedded in activity systems.
But precisely the relation between genre, as the
primarily tacit know-how we have for doing x activity,
and the activity itself in the AT sense,
was not explicated.
More important, what does genre theory give us that
AT doesn't? (I think they are usefully different, easily
interrelated theories)
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?]
While activity theory presupposes linguistic tools in
the unit of analysis, if what is said in an activity is
problematic in relation to what is otherwise known or done,
the problematic is dealt with in terms of the developing system,
not on its "own" terms. The distinction between language and
the body is therefore moot.
Here's Russ's version of the central question in Freadman's
presentation:
How, [Freadman] asked us, while using as examples
the utterances clustered around the last hanging
ever to occur in Australia, how is it that a sentence
becomes an execution? Execution, she pointed out,
_is_ an uptake of a sentence....
----------
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.
Judith
Judith Diamondstone (732) 932-7496 Ext. 352
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1183