Her notion of 'uptake' reminds me particularly of Bakhtin's dialogical
views about language (on all scales, from utterance to text). Just as there
is a sense in which every speech act is embedded in a presumptive (if not
actual) dialogue -- in the sense that it presupposes some prior action (not
necessarily verbal) and expects some possible uptakes (ditto) or at least
contextualizes-in-advance how any uptakes are likely to get taken up in
their turn -- so the same is true of even lengthy monological texts.
Writing is action, and their are larger activities of the production,
circulation, and use of texts which are themselves linked with if not
wholly embedded in professional, career, political, legal, etc., etc.
activities of broader sorts.
My very first ideas about genre basically said that we ought to think of
genre texts as the products of generic activities in order to avoid
reifying the notion of genre, decontextualizing the texts, and isolating
one genre from another. This was considered pretty radical in discourse
linguistics in the early 80s. The notion fit quite closely with ideas that
activities themselves form a semiotic system (also a bit wild-eyed at the
time), and that intertextuality is based not just on text similarities but
on relations between texts of different genre types that figure in the same
activity. (The notion of activity-based systems of related genres is one
that Chuck Bazerman independently articulated in his own work and has
developed much more than I ever did.)
But I have always continued to be fascinated with the problem of how to
link genres more usefully to what we can say about their material basis,
i.e. the material-cum-semiotic activities that produce generically similar
texts. I wrote one piece about this a few years ago, focussing on how the
process of textproduction could be both step-by-step contingent and overall
emergent, and yet so often wind up producing rather predictable texts. Anne
Freadman evidently is using the connection to our bodily involvement with
texts (sometimes extreme) in activity contexts, to explore these issues.
In terms of the relations of genre theory (and yes there certainly is such
a thing, indeed several such) to other major paradigms, it also seemed to
me that the characterizations of Freadman's view of genre-genre and
genre-body boundary issues is rather akin to Latour's (actually here
Star's) ANT notion of 'boundary object'. At a recent conference in Tucson
(xmca comment readers will recall it) I suggested that the body is very
precisely a boundary object in the terms of that theory: it forms a
material link between different activities (including ones that generate
genre texts), and it is transformed in its modes of agency (its actantial
roles) from one activity context to another.
A final reaction to another comment on genre. What genre I think most often
does for us, and its main raison d'etre, is that it activates familiar sets
of expectations in terms of which to make sense of an unfolding text (or to
make such a text, period). I think we are so enamored of our sense of free
agency and our unique creativeness as writers and speakers (Americans
especially, even Chomsky) that we underestimate the importance of
'cliches'. A lot of what is said and written is not in fact generated or
composed from the word level up, but activates ready-made boilerplate
verbiage (listen to casual speech, observe burocratic writing).
Ready-to-wear text is not made simply of predictable phrases and idioms,
but also often of predictable sequential organization structures and
rhetorical 'commonplaces'. This does not necessarily make us robots (a slur
on our silicon brothers/sisters): it simply means that the level of
discursive organization at which we make conscious choices is 'bumped up'
to a larger/higher scale, and from that point on down to the level of
vocalizations or motor-writings, things are pretty much automated. Human
bodies seem to be built to take advantage of such automatizations whenever
they are useful, which does not make us automatons. The Prague School of
linguistic-literary analysts often said that 'fancy' writing was a matter
of the de-automatization of language use.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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