Thanks Mike,
But mine was a question, not a commentary. I'm by no means fluent in
activity theory and certainly don't claim to be. So I was trying to ask
whether Gordon was seeing genre and language as processes, social practices
in this case, or as "things". Even in SFL, I think genre is sometimes
construed as a reified "thing".
And, I think once we see activities as things, they are already "dead" for
us. That is problematic for me, regardless of which perspective we take.
Regards,
Phil
>
>Your commentary on Gordon's note was helpful to me, Phil. Your wrote in
>part:
>
>Without descending to a narrow economism, can we say the difference is that
>when we look at these processes as artefacts, we are looking at *what* is
>produced within a given field; that when we look through the lens of social
>practice, we are looking at the *processes* of production, at *how* these
>are produced; and when we look at the forms in which the genre becomes
>manifest, we are looking at the processes of _re_production, the
>structuring structures of production and reproduction, which includes the
>"rules" of exchange (which are usually nothing other than tradition and
>reactions thereto)?........
>
>I recognize the usefulness of such parsing, but it makes me nervous.
>In particular, I see a really incestuoys hybridity involving artifacts
>and practices, so some way of talking about this nexus that treats
>the different "moments" as "perspectives" or "figure/ground" establishing
>analytic tools might be useful. I think both you and gordon were pointing
>in the same direction, but here is a case where our discourse, i am
>afraid, runs the risk of "murdering in order to dissect."
>
>mike
>
>
>
--------------------------------------------
Phil Graham
Faculty of Business, Economics, and Law
University of Queensland
phil.graham@mailbox.uq.edu.au
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