Page 96 - Literacy in the New Media Age
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A SOCIAL THEORY OF TEXT 85
there is no issue about teaching stable types: we would already have shown that
the stability or instability of textual form derives from somewhere else. It comes
from the social arrangements in which actions take place and, to some extent –
but always present – the interest of the text-maker in closely or not so closely
adhering to what they understand the reasons for the conventions to be. This
approach also answers the questions about non-powerful genres: we would
always need to focus on the question of power; it would be in focus. And
because the curriculum would show that generic configuration derives from
social/cultural configuration, the question would be, do we want to learn from
and about the cultural configurations of all groups in the society, do we want to
benefit from the experiences of all cultures as they are coded in genre, or do we
wish to neglect that knowledge? The question would then be a profoundly
political one, to which the literacy curriculum would provide both access and
key.
One other question remains at this point. This is a book about alphabetic
writing, but a book about that topic in the age of the new media. So in a real
sense the question of the coexistence, the cofunctioning of modes of
representation is central: not just alphabetic writing, but alphabetic writing in the
environment of other, co-occurring modes, importantly, in the environment of
the new media. Here the question of genre takes on two forms. One is about the
origins of our theory, and whether it is adequate to an account of writing in a
multimodal and multimedial world. We might suspect that, in this case
particularly, all the debates have been shaped by linguistic theorisings, so that the
categories that we have may be the wrong ones for what we wish to do. The
other is the suspicion that maybe genre is a category which belongs only to
linguistic modes – speech and writing – or perhaps to temporally organised
modes, which would bring in gesture, dance, image-in-motion and so on. Maybe
genre is neither appropriate as a category for spatially organised modes, nor
appropriate therefore in a theory of multimodality. However important the social
world which is realised in genre is, it may be that it has no possibility of
realisation in spatial modes, no existence there. That would give language a
privileged place indeed, the place it has held for the last few centuries. I will deal
with that question in the next chapter. It might be useful to say two things now:
clearly if we do extend the category of genre to modes other than linguistic ones,
it will need to be defined in non-mode-specific ways. If genre-in-language does
realise significant social relations then we would need to show how and why it is
irrelevant to realise that such social relations are, in texts, constituted in other
modes, how it could be that these social facts were not present and realised in
such texts. I leave that at this point as a question to bear in mind.
The introduction of the concept of genre into theories of literacy entails that
we see text – not letter, not word, not clause or sentence – as the central category
in literacy. Text is the result of social action, and so the centrality of text means
that literacy is always seen as a matter of social action and social forces, and all
aspects of literacy are seen as deriving from these actions and forces. The shift to