Page 98 - Literacy in the New Media Age

A SOCIAL THEORY OF TEXT 87

pure genre categories, only flux. Mixed genres are seen as evidence of the
absence of genres. At one level this is of course odd; one cannot mix what does
not exist in the first place. Nor can one blend things which are not initially
distinct or discrete. It is not necessary to throw the baby of a useful category out
with the bathwater of a theory of doubtful validity.
The mixing of genre has to be a reality, simply as an effect of our ordinary
normal social lives and our ordinary normal use of language; constant change
has to be seen as entirely normal as an effect of a social theory of language. In
learning language as much as in our everyday lives, we encounter language in its
social use, that is, as text-in-the-making and as text. Both as text-in-the-making
and as text, language is always socially/generically formed. Therefore we always
encounter language as genre; it cannot be otherwise. That means that every bit,
every strand of language-as-text which we encounter is generically shaped.
When we use language in our new making of texts, in social situations which are
always at the same time recognisably like others and always new, we use
generically shaped strands to make our new generically shaped texts.
These new texts-as-genres cannot therefore be other than generically mixed,
even though we are using the generically shaped strands to make texts which
realise both the new and old social givens of the situation in which we are
making the text. Similarly with the question of fluidity and change. Even in
periods of the strictest policing of generic norms, makers of texts have to make
texts which fit the changing social situations in which the texts are made. And even
though there may be periods in which there are stringent attempts through the
exercise of power to keep the social immobile, that is always something aimed
for but never achieved. Human semiotic action just like human social action is
ceaselessly changing. Views to the contrary are the dreams of ideologues.
Nevertheless, there are periods of greater and periods of lesser change, for
whatever reason. The last two hundred years of ‘Western’ history, despite being
marked by cataclysmic events, has in some profound respects been a period of
great social stability. The political systems of 1945 were not that different to the
political systems of 1918, nor for that matter to those of 1871. To speak
personally for a moment, the life lived by my grandmother, who was born in
1884, was and remained recognisable to me as the life I knew as a child, even
into my adolescence in the early 1950s, despite some significant – yet I would
say, superficial – differences. And indeed, the values which I attempt, now, to
pass on to our children – entirely unsuccessfully – are recognisably those which I
know stem from the life of my grandmother. The major force for stability was of
course that of the economy of industrial mass-production, and the social and
cultural forms which it produced. These lasted well into the 1950s, in Germany as
much as in the UK or in Australia, or indeed in the USA. It is no wonder that
social/cultural forms such as genres should come to be seen as stable.