Genesis is a tough question. AT is of course a developemental
(cultural-historical) theory, so much of what it does is try to explain
change. Writing and reading in ways that are new to some subject
(individual or collective) can perhaps be explained in terms of
appropriation of tools, "picking up" for one's' own use some other people's
way of doing things with certain tools--inevitably an interpersonal
process, even if it goes on at a distance using inscriptions, writing
("immutable mobiles," in Latour's phrase for such tools). In the process of
appropriation, the tool and the use change (as well as the person[s] doing
the appropriating and therefore the network of social and technical
interactions of which s/he/they are involved with, the register [perhaps
I'm missappropriating the linguist's term]).
The ideational meaning might be thought of as arising out of the
interpersonal, and forming what are sometimes called "secondary tools," (a
distinction I think Ilyenkov makes--help me out, someone). As a collective
acts with material tools in typified ways, some are given names and places
and called ideas, abstracted. (After reading your WRITING SCIENCE, I think
nominalization is an important part of this for many activity networks,
especially academic disciplines and bureaucracies).
Latour describes something like this when he says (in a turn on
Heidigger) that all intellectual work is hand work (I'd add
tongue-work)--manipulating material things,including inscriptions--notes,
data, diagrams, other experts' texts. (There's a lot of speculating drawing
on Goody and Ong mold about the history of literacy out of particular
social/technical configurations).
That kind of change called learning can thus be seen as moving from the
abstract to the concrete, the reverse of the empiricist's view. That is,
moving from the present formulation in its abstract, blackboxed,
commodified present (as with textbook statements of "ideas" or "facts" to
unpacking the historically developed but ordinarily hidden hand work of
manipulating tools (including material texts) that went into the making of
the "ideas". One goes from textbooks to labs, from "knowing the content"
(there's that container metaphor) to doing the work of the discipline in
all its concrete and human messiness. But I better stop here because I have
yet to read the tradition of Davydov in any detail, where these things are
laid out in (for me) daunting complexity. (I would be grateful if some
CHATter would recommend where I should start with Davydov on
abstract-to-concrete).
As for the knotty problem of time you raise--I'd like to hear more about
how register is connected to future events. As I am using AT, the future
exists as a kind of hermeneutic guessing, where people can make what they
believe are better and worse guesses based on their history of
interpersonal interactions using tools. A genre is in one sense, perhaps, a
way of making better guesses about what tools-in-use will work in a present
set of conditions that seem enough like those experienced before (I'm
thinking here of Carolyn Miller's (1984) discussion of typification).
Are you thinking of the future as unrealized possibilities of language?
David
>Thanks for your very helpful comments. I agree that what you call the
>Martin/Rothery SFL perspective tries to generalise genres across
>institutions with respect to their linguistic realisations - leaving the
>field, tenor and mode account of context to deal with differences and
>specificities. I was curious if you could say a little more about
>differences with respect to change. I've been interested in developing a
>model in which genre explains the way in which a culture goes about
>phasing field (ideational meaning) with tenor (interpersonal meaning)
>through various modes (textures) into linguistic activities. In this kind
>of model, genre represents the past - the combinations and phasing that
>have taken place and are thus immanent; whereas register (field, tenor and
>mode) represent the future, since a culture changes by combining and
>phasing these variables in new ways. What does activity theory have to
>say about genesis?
>
>Jim Martin
David R. Russell
English Department
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011
USA (515) 294-4724,fax 294-6814
drrussel who-is-at iastate.edu