Page 112 - Literacy in the New Media Age

A SOCIAL THEORY OF TEXT 101

In the three texts there are many other linguistic and textual features
which have social import; in fact, all of them do. For instance, the heavily formal
language of the ‘Swimming Club Rules’ speaks of the (borrowed) weight of
bureaucratic language and the institutions in which it is produced. Look, as just
one instance, at the subject noun-phrase ‘being absent far more than three
consecutive sessions without explanation to the membership secretary’ or take
the impersonality of the address to members. This text was written by a group of
young mothers of very young children, all well-educated women, who knew each
other socially and frequently met in each other’s houses; a fact which shows the
social significance of genre even more: to step into, to assume the forms of a
genre, is to step into a specific social world with its vastly ramified values,
practices and obligations.
The genre of rules and regulations is not all that easily accommodated in the
broad classificatory schema of the generic types of the Australian genre school,
though the genre of procedure may be relatively close to what is going on here.
If you look at the ‘beach house holiday units’ text you get closer to a sense of that
genre. Nevertheless my three examples present their rules in a relatively
unordered fashion or, to put this more honestly, I cannot readily make out the
principles of the ordering. I suspect that in all three cases there are principles of
order: the rule about turning off heaters comes aptly at the end, as you leave the
flat, so to speak. And maybe in the ‘Swimming Club Rules’ the writers did not want
to start with the merely officious rule about carrying membership cards (this was
1974 after all), and felt that parental responsibilities should be the first concern.
Procedural genres, like all genres, project a world with a larger order, a
coherence: whether, as in the recipe for duck à l’orange, the necessary sequence
of steps to achieve the perfect dish, or in the procedure through which a scientific
experiment, an industrial process, or a social event is set out.
The important point is to be aware of the fundamental tension around genre,
uneasily hovering between regularity and repeatability on the one hand – the
effect of social stabilities and of regulations erected around text to keep them
close to ‘convention’ – and the dynamic for constant flux and change on the
other hand. These are the effect both of inevitable social change (even in the
most conservatively stable societies) and of the constantly transformative action
of people acting in ever-changing circumstances (even where the changes are of
the subtlest kind). The current interest in genre may, paradoxically, be an effect
of social, economic, political changes of the most far-reaching kind, which are
precisely unmaking the conditions of stability, repeatabilty, recognisability. So
just when the concept was introduced into education, in Australia in the
mid-1980s – with a clear emphasis on stability – it had ceased to have the tight
connection to social conditions which had given it (the appearance of) stability.
In other words, in some senses the concept’s potency was discovered in theory
(and introduced into educational practice) just at the very moment when the
social conditions had become such as to make the concept problematic.