Page 114 - Literacy in the New Media Age

A SOCIAL THEORY OF TEXT 103

of the card address me as someone who is interested in something beautiful, as
someone who has taste. There is of course the logo (is it Renaissance Italy, or is
it Australian art deco?). The language too strikes me as carefully ‘crafted’;
it uses adjectives such as ‘fine’. The punctuation is sparse to the point of severity;
I assume so as not to make the text look fussy. In its overall generic shape it is
perhaps nearest to the report genre – leaning on the factual, the reporting of
matters presented as fact.
Now the appearance of a report-genre (if that is what it is) in this shape, in this
context, is for me quite unusual. I expect genres to occur in a certain place, and
when they appear out of their place I wonder what is going on. This
recontextualisation of a genre (to borrow a term from the theoretical work of Basil
Bernstein) makes it quite different. ‘Lifting’ a genre from one context and
putting it in another (lifting it out of its ‘proper’ social context and inserting it in
another) is an innovative act, an act of creativity. It changes not just the genre,
not just my relation to the text, but it changes also the new context in which it
occurs. ‘Why’, I ask myself, ‘am I being told these things?’ I am happy just to
have the purse, why the report?
The answers to that question are many. The work done by the card is semiotic
work, it is the work which transforms the purse from something made from
Italian leather (the text says ‘in Italian leather’), and made in China, into
something which is 100 per cent Australian. That is why I am being given the
report. In an economy and a society of consumer capitalism, in which
consumption is the means for establishing ‘who I am’ through my lifestyle, the
purse is no longer just a purse, it is something through which I can (re)connect to
Australianness. Of course, in order to see how the card really does that, we need
to focus on more than the features I have mentioned. In the text we need to focus
on the discourses of nationalism, of (weakly articulated) racism, of taste, and of
contemporary economies (‘quality inspection’). Beyond the written text in that
narrow sense, we need to focus on quite physical material features of the card.
Generically, as card, it relates to business cards, and to the social relations of that
type of card, the relations to visiting cards, credit cards and so on. In its colour it
invokes both a certain idea of Italy, and the colour of the Australian bush.
Australianness could have been signalled, of course, with the use of the
Aboriginal flag, and its red, gold and black colours. But that would have jarred with
the discourses present here, and with the generic construction of the rest of the
card.
Are all of these features – whether generic or discursive – there by accident?
Of course not: they are absolutely precise indicators of the assessment of the
widest social, political and economic environments by the maker(s) of this object
or text. That is the condition of all textual objects. The deep changes in that
complex environment have given rise here to the production of a text which, in
its generic, discursive features (realised in language but also in quite other
semiotic modes: colour, paper, shape, image, layout) represents these features.
This is, to me at least, an entirely novel text, and its novelty arises out of the