Page 102 - Literacy in the New Media Age

A SOCIAL THEORY OF TEXT 91

effects of power are such that not to have access to the generic forms through which
power is coded is to suffer exclusion from participation in public life, to be
denied criterial elements of social, economic and cultural goods. Hence access to
the genres of power was seen as crucial for full, active participation – and hence
for a literacy curriculum that would do its part to ensure equitable social
outcomes.
There were two major foci of critique of this position. First, it was suggested,
a literacy pedagogy based on this version of genre theory would ask young
writers to fit their writing to pre-existing schemata, and turn their writing into the
mechanical performance of an acquired rigidly adhered-to competence. This
would produce the antithesis of ‘lively’, ‘authentic’, ‘dynamic’ writing, and
would encourage stability to the point of stasis. Second, the emphasis on access
to the genres of power would lead to a spurious kind of equity, in which there
was no challenge to the existing status quo of social arrangements: inequitable
social arrangements were not threatened or subverted, but were confirmed and, if
anything, strengthened by the teaching of these forms. The proponents of genre
theory by and large countered that the first critique could no longer be valid in a
society in which the major requirement made of education systems was to
provide equity of access to all. While it might be fine for those who already had
linguistic (as well as social, cultural, economic) access to complain about the
requirement to adapt to rigid schemata, for those who had no access – which
included many non-middle-class white children as well – the provision of
explicit knowledge was an absolutely essential step towards equitable conditions
and outcomes in school. Among other things, even secure access to the
curriculum of the school itself was in doubt without such knowledge. As for the
argument that teaching the genres of power would leave skewed power
arrangements firmly in place, the answer given tended to be that once access was
available to many, then that would of itself alter the distribution of power
fundamentally.
These debates, it has to be remembered, took place in the mid-to-late 1980s. In
my view they reflect, without the participants on either side being particularly
aware of this, conceptions taken for granted in an earlier era, in which stabilities
of social and linguistic kinds had shaped the thinking of everyone, myself of
course included. With the benefit of hindsight it can now be seen that the real
conditions of political and social life, and of linguistic and other forms of
representation, had already moved somewhere else: away, decisively, from the
stabilities which made the proponents of the project utterly certain and its
opponents deeply furious in equal measure.

What, then, is genre? What does it look like?

So far I have presented the picture as though there is, broadly, agreement about
what genre is. Now I have to declare my own position and say that within a large
frame of broad agreement within the ‘Australian genre school’ there were at