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
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