Page 101 - Literacy in the New Media Age

90 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

So two, perhaps the two, central supports of previous approaches to writing
(authenticity of meaning in writing, and writing as individual expression in a
culturally homogeneous society) were simultaneously challenged in the severest
fashion by genre theory in its new form. In that new form, genres were seen as
forms which had come into being as the result of social action and which, in and
through all aspects of their form, represent the central characteristics of the
social occasion in which they are produced. Let me go back to the simple
example of the interview. It is a text in a generic form; it comes into being in a
particular social situation. In that situation people come together, usually in the
context of some institutional framework (work, entertainment), with specific
purposes and intentions, with quite well-understood expectations, rights and
duties. These are all reflected in different ways in the structure of the interview:
who can ask questions, when, of what kind; who cannot ask questions; how long
questions and answers may be; how direct or indirect (‘polite’ or ‘impolite’).
These forms and structures – from rules about turn-taking to finely articulated
conventions of politeness – are coded with absolute precision in the language/text
of the interview: whether as ‘would you mind repeating that question, please?’ or
as ‘look, we really need you to answer this point!’
But this move makes language-use, whether in writing or, as in this case,
talking, no longer an individual expressive act, but a social act performed by an
individual, any individual, within conventions which are clearly enough there.
The action is conventional, even though I argue in this book that conventional
actions are nevertheless still new and innovative. But the ability of the individual
to express himself or herself as he or she wishes, as it had been seen in English
pedagogy, has evaporated. We can go a step further, and say something more
about convention, for it can now be seen that writing (or talking) always happens
in a situation where power is the defining characteristic for potentials for action,
and not desire as in the earlier pedagogic approach. Convention has two aspects:
on the one hand it is that which names the results of actions undertaken in
structures marked by persistence of power, so that members of a group acquiesce
in or simply accept certain forms of action. These are structures that we regard as
‘conventional’. On the other hand, to act within convention is to accept to a
certain degree (it always is ‘to a certain degree’) the structures which exist, and
use them as the basis for new action. The individual who acts ‘conventionally’ is
seen as fitting into the pre-given structures of power and power-difference
through their realisation, whether in forms of action or in forms of text. In that
approach, the impulse for writing has shifted from desire to power, from the
individual to the social, from expression to communication, from creativity to
conventionality, from authenticity (a question of fit with personal truth) to
appropriateness (a question of fit with social truth). No wonder there was a
debate, and a fierce debate at that. Genre theory threatened to unmake everything
that the subject English thought it had stood for over the preceding twenty years.
The case made by the Australian proponents of genre theory went one step
further: it said that in any one society there are social situations in which the