Different things shooting off in my brain...

I read an article today titled "Rethinking Genre in School and Society: An Activity Theory Analysis" by David R. Russell (Written Communication 14.4 (1997): 504-554). It was full of things that made me think about how I should treat genre in my diss.

He defines genres as "ways of recognizing and predicting how certain tools (including vocalizations and inscriptions), in certain typified--typical, reoccurring--conditions, may be used to help participants act together purposefully" (513).

He notes that it is important (especially for scholars of writing) to remember that genre doesn't have to refer to only language. Genre "may apply to the typified use of material tools of many types by an activity system, often in conjunction with one another" (513). This, and something he writes later about power and discourse, reminded me of something I had read in Sun Kang-i's book 走出白色恐怖 (Farewell to the White Terror).

Russell writes that from the point of view that he is developing,

power (social control, domination, hegemony, exclusion, etc.) is not some force that is mysteriously transported or conspiratorially hidden in discourse. Power is analyzable in terms of dialectical contradictions in activity systems, manifest in specific tools-in-use (including within genres) that people marshal when they are at cross-purposes. Nor are genres, in this view, Foucauldian capillaries, micro-level conduits carrying power (Foucault, 1981). Rather, genres come historically to fully mediate human interactions in such a way that some people (and some tools) have greater and lesser influence than others because of their dynamic position(s) in tool-mediated systems or networks. ... To understand power in modern social practices, one must follow the genres, written and otherwise. Power appears in specific, locatable occasions of mediated action and is created in the network of many localized instances. It is not an inchoate climate of force or terror, although such atmospheres and responses are (re-)created by the operationalizing of specific actions in mediated activity systems. (523-4)

In 走出白色恐怖, Sun Kang-i writes about how after her father was released from prison, police started coming to their house in the middle of the night, every 2 or 3 days, supposedly to check their household registration. The police would purposely make a lot of noise in order to let neighbors know that they were there, and the neighbors became more and more reluctant to have any dealings with Sun's family (72-3). This "checking of household registration" (查戶口), including the loud knocking on the door and the loud voices of the police, could be described as a genre of terror, including typified, localized actions by specific people with the purposes of disturbing Sun's family and affecting their neighbors' attitudes toward and interactions with her family.

There's also a sense, though, in which depicting this "terror genre" at such a local level makes it easy to ignore the activity systems of the KMT police state to which those local actors were connected. So one thing that Sun says that I am not sure I accept is that officials who are higher up are usually more compassionate and humane, but the lower officials are more uncooperative and even use their power to bully others (狐假虎威). She also felt that a lot of the other harassment that her family suffered was probably more due to the lower-level officials than the higher-ups--the latter probably didn't even know what was going on. I'm of the opinion that higher-up officials created the conditions for lower-level abuses.

So I think that while I'll mostly agree with Russell's depiction of how power and genre are related--in the sense that power is not "present" in genre-as-text, but rather is (re)produced through specific typified activities which are mediated by tools (including texts)--I also think it's important to map as completely as possible the various interlocking networks that are connected to those specific localized instantiations of power.

[dissertating] [genre] [power] [White Terror]