Page 94 - Literacy in the New Media Age

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A SOCIAL THEORY OF TEXT
Genre

Genre in theorising about literacy: some introductory
remarks
In Chapter 4 I discussed some theoretical concepts we need in order to provide a
full account of literacy. I said that text as the product of social action was the
starting point. However, we need categories that will help us understand what
text is, how it is constituted and, above all, what text does. Again, the starting
point is social action. Who acts, with what purposes and around what issues?
Clearly, in social action there are issues; they may be exceedingly trivial, or they
may be significant. Issues are one reason for action. Where there are no issues,
there is no action. In earlier formulations (1984/1989) I used the notion of
difference to explain the coming into being of text; difference not in the sense
that Derrida has used it but in the sense in which we explain lightning: a
potential for a current to flow due to a difference in electrical charge. The current
is made possible by that difference, with a flow from negative charge to positive
charge. In semiosis that difference can be about anything: about who is to act,
about purposes, about knowledge, about issues of any kind. Difference as such is
itself an issue. In this book I want to use issue to refer to content, to what
something is about. In the social semiotic theory that I use, this is dealt with by
the category of discourse. It deals with the social provenance, production and
organisation of content, following from the work of Michel Foucault.
Genre, by contrast, deals not with what is talked about, what is represented in
the sense of what issues, but with who acts (and) in relation to whom, with the
question of purposes. This is directly in the domain of social interaction: the
questions that arise are questions such as ‘who are the participants involved in
the social action as it takes place?’ and ‘what are their social relations with each
other?’ Such interactions have structure and shape, which is reflected in or
realised in the representational practices that are part of such actions, or which
constitute such actions. When that social action is looked at from the point of
view of representation, we invoke the category of text. Text is the result of the
social semiotic action of representation. We say that a text was produced.