Judy Diamondstone and Jim Martin asked about differences between activity
theory and systemic functional linguistics (SFL) on genre and social
theory. Here are some always-tentative (but long-winded) thoughts I have
had lately while wrestling with these problems and reading the very useful
thread on CHAT.
First, differences in genre theory. The differing views of genre espoused
by various versions of SFL, in cluding those of Martin/Rothery and Gunther
Kress, share with certain US researchers, who use the term genre, a
rejection of the tradtional literay notion of genre as a set of definable
formal properties of a group of texts. Both look to the relation between
texts and social processes to explain genre. To separate one genre from
another, both look at people's PURPOSES.
But the differences are important. Let me contrast the version of
Hallidayan theory that Cope and Kalantzis (POWERS OF LITERACY Falmer, 1993)
call the Martin/Rothery version and the US theorists inspired by Carolyn
Miller's (1984) genre theory and Vygotskan activity theory (including
myself, Chuck Bazerman, Carol Berkenkotter). I'll leave Gunter Kress's
SFL-inspired theory aside for this message--along with Norman Fairclough's
(They're somewhere in the middle, as I view it--see Cope & Kalantzis's
intro and the essays by Kress and Callahan et al, as well as those by
Martin and Rothery).
As I understand the Martin/Rothery version, these purposes (and genres that
realize them) are conceived in broad terms, which cut across, transcend,
various social contexts (registers, social practices, activity networks,
discourse communities--pick your version of genre theory and hence your
term!). Two genres Martin/Rothery identify, for example, are Report
(classifying things) and Recount (relating an unproblematic series of
events). People within many different social practices within a culture
might have to classify things, for example, so they would use (if they know
how) the Report genre to fulfill that purpose (and choose certain
grammatical structures typical of that genre as a consequence). (I am
grossly oversimplifying here; I rely on Jim and others to straighten and
flesh this out).
In the versions of genre theory that use activity theory (and also in
Gunther Kress's [Critical Discourse Analysis] theory), genres are not
viewed in such broad terms, but rather as social processes developed under
specific communicative needs that have come to be met in certain typified
ways. For example, US patent applications (Bazerman), or case notes from
pschiatrists paid by US HMOs (Berkenkotter).
In the activity theory versions, genres (routinzed/operationalized/typified
ways of using words to get things done) arise WITHIN and BETWEEN individual
social practices [registers, activity networks--sorry for the lumping] in
response to specfic (though ongoing) needs of some speicfic collective,
that share some social purpose/motive/direction growing out of the division
of labor (a government agency, indistry, discipline, profession, union,
political movement, hobby club, etc.). A genre arises as a social process
that meets some particular (though typified, ongoing) social need.
To me, the Martin/Rothery version is useful for seeing the similarities in
the ways grammar and other resources of languge appear ACROSS
registers/contexts/social practices (sorry again).
To me, the AT-inspired versions of genre theory are useful for analyzing
differences, in texts and in the ways people use them, within and between
registers/contexts/social practices (sorry again). Some people have found
it useful for looking at diversity because it gets at how genres mediate
the activities of groups of people as they interact and collide and merge
within and among various (cross)purposes that different groups and
indiviudals bring to the varied kinds of work people do with reading and
writing (and drawing and . . .). For example, how people in an
institution deal with internal contradictions (people at cross-purposes) or
external pressures, how students move into workplaces and pick up (and
sometimes change) the organization's ways of doing things.
Some critics of the Martin/Rothery version say it leads to formalism
because it tries to describe regularities across registers/contexts/social
practices, but I think that's unfair, because it certainly talks about how
genres adpat/are adapted to different conditions, how texts can contain
multiple genres, etc. (Both theories are historical, evolutionary, with
Darwin as the great grandfather). However, because the effort is toward
classifying uses of language, the emphasis is on defining types.
Some people have said to me that the activity theory version of genre does
violence to the term because it makes genre so specific and, well,
ungeneric. How does one account for (and what word will we use for) the
similarities in texts across wiely different registers/contexts/social
practices if the term genre is given a local habitation? Activity theory
would suggest that appropriation across registers/contexts/social practices
can account for the similarities that need accounting for. But that's
another question.
Pedagogically, the activity theory version has proved more userful to me
than the Martin/Rothery version in understanding the kinds of things
students in secondary and higher education write/speak/draw/make (where I
am working), because there the purposes are so highly speicalized and the
texts as well, incorporating/negotiating/reconstructing many genres (as the
Martin/Rothery theory uses the term).
Now for the differences in social theory: SFL describes social contexts
(registers) in terms of field (the ideational), tenor (the interpersonal),
and mode (the textual). Their analysis of social functioning usually
emphasizes the relation between the textual and the ideational. Moreover,
the ideational is seen in generally textual terms, as ideas are constructed
through linguistic choices.
Activity theory analysis describes not social contexts (container and
contained metaphor) but social networks (or systems metaphor), where THE
INTERPERSONAL IS PRIMARY. The ideational arises out of the need for people
to work (and play and struggle) together and to use material tools. Thus,
it cannot be analyzed apart from the interpersonal.
Moreover, texts (written or spoken or signed or drawn) are but one kind of
material tool, there being all kinds of others--from ordinary
garden(variety) tools to the stars in all their splendor (when used for
navigation). Because texts are used with these other material tools-in-use
(and are not prior to or determinate of them), one cannot anlalyze, say,
the scientist's use of the grammatical metaphor nominalization (one very
important tool--see Halliday and Martin's WRITING SCIENCE) without also
looking at her use of petri dishes and checks from granting agencies and
historical rivalries and alliances among groups of scientists and exchanges
of various other material resouces and tools.
Here I think back to what Phil Agre asked a few posts ago in pointing to
the difficulty of theorizing the role of material relationships with
Bakhtin and other theories that privilidge language and see society in
primarily linguistic terms: "How, if at all, [do] the relationships among
the voices reflect the material relationships among the social groups whose
voices they are (or were)?"
David
David R. Russell
English Department
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011
USA (515) 294-4724,fax 294-6814
drrussel who-is-at iastate.edu