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Date: 10/6/96 1:17 PM
To: Geoffrey Williams
From: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
Re Judy Diamondstone's query on technical discourses, I think she
may have assumed that in remarking their power I was also
endorsing them tout court. Not so. She also, understandably,
identifies technical discourse in the sense I contrasted with
'liberal arts' discourses suitable for 'Agre-appropriation' (TD-
1) with the technical discourses of modern natural sciences as
described by Martin and Halliday (TD-2). But this relationship is
complex and interesting, certainly not a simple match.
TD-1 is useful mainly to specialists and tends to serve as a tool
that codifies techniques which, so long as we do not unpack and
critique them, are useful but not interesting in their own right.
Using TD-1 is the hallmark of a specialist, and indexes
membership in a specialist community, from whence came these
tools and whose institutional arrangements allow use of the tool
to be magnified into more substantial power than the tool-in-
itself confers. This is, I think, how these matters work. I'm not
saying this is a good thing, or that TD-1 are good in any respect
except that in which we judge the primary uses to which they are
put.
I'm not sure if every TD-1 is also a TD-2, probably not, for
there are many non- 'scientific' TD-1 (e.g. knowing a rare
historical dialect) that do not share the common features of TD-
2. Certainly many TD-1 in the natural sciences are also TD-2, but
many scientific TD-2 are not TD-1. Indeed the basic conceptual
theoretical discourses of the sciences, which are surely TD-2,
are hopefully not TD-1 (and are of interest in themselves, and to
more than just specialists). All TD-2 do, however, fill the bill
as discourses which are magnified in power by institutional
arrangements (but then so are, as Judy says, many non-science
discourses as well, both TD-1 and non TD-1). What Martin and
Halliday claim, and I endorse, is that the power of TD-2 come not
_just_ from institutional amplifications, but also from
'inherent' qualities in the semantics of the discourse itself (at
least when used as part of the normal practices of science, and
for its ends).
This last claim is quite parallel to the debate between, say
Bourdieu on one side vs Hasan and Basil Bernstein (or me, Jim,
and Halliday, and many others), where PB. (maybe just to make a
point) emphasizes the power of discourses or languages as
'external' in origin (i.e. from the value assigned them as
capital in the market, or by powerful groups) vs. the other
side's efforts to show that there are also, sometimes, 'internal'
features of a discourse which make it genuinely better for some
purpose than other discourses. Thus Bourdieu's view works quite
well if we are talking about a difference of 'accent' between
otherwise extremely similar dialects, so that the status of one
compared to the other is 'arbitrary' linguistically and
politically motivated. But there is another factor to consider if
we are talking about specialized registers or 'sociolects' (the
great 'codes' debate of Bernstein vs. Labov) which appear to be
in fact functionally adapted in their semantic properties to
certain tasks or styles of life.
I hope this helps. JAY.
-----------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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Date: Sun, 09 Jun 96 22:13:11 EDT
From: Jay Lemke <JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
Subject: getting technical
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