894 Synthesis

The Scholarly Interview through Two Lenses:Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and Genre Theory

Interviews in academic journals share similarities to the interviews familiar from journalism but are shaped by their situatedness within the academy and, in many cases, a specific discipline. For this reason, an ecological or network approach works well for theorizing the genre.  Likewise, using such a heavily situated genre as an object of study sheds light on the situatedness of genre in general and adds insights on how theories that bring in ideas from networking, complex systems or ecology can be productive as rhetorical theory.  Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), as adapted by Spinuzzi (2003) in conjunction with ideas from genre theory, offers a starting point by pushing beyond Bitzer’s (1968) model of rhetorical situation, itself an important early attempt to theorize context.  Since cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) and its predecessor, activity theory (AT), focus on the activity system in which the rhetorical events take place, it urges more attention to contextual factors than the fleeting glimpse of relations and constraints in Bitzer’s model.  Arguably, actor-network theory (Latour, 2005) or Syverson’s (1999) model also grapple with the interaction of a complex and shifting ecology.  However, by restricting attention to a manageable list of factors and narrowing the frame of reference to a single activity system, Spinuzzi’s model provides focused attention at roughly the level of scope where genre is most conspicuous.  

Before examining the theoretical framework, it may be helpful to take a closer look at the object of study. What I am calling an academic interview can be found in a number of places.  The most obvious is in academic journals.  Interviews may also be published in books.  One such example is Conversations with Anthony Giddens, a collection seven thematic interviews with the prominent sociologist (Giddens & Pierson, 1998).  It is also possible to find academic interviews published online, such as McNely’s (2013) interview of Spinuzzi published in Present Time, an online rhetoric journal. It is also possible to find videotaped interviews on YouTube or transcriptions of recorded interviews, such as, for example, the 18 visiting speaker interviews included in Florida State’s Rhetoric and Composition department site. 

In spite of the fact that, as we can see, the interview is a robust form that is published in different media and is distributed in several ways, very little research has targeted this genre. One of the few is Arnold’s (2012) look at how Michel Foucault’s interviews function within his larger body of work.  Although Arnold doesn’t examine the academic interview as a genre, she does examine the ways that Foucault used the interview as a space to make theoretical statements that transcended his specific published works.  Another look at a specific scholar’s interviews is Chakraborty’s (2010) discussion of how Gayatri Spivak’s interviews brought together “the scholarship with the persona” (p. 623). Chakraborty also examines the way that such interviews allow public intellectuals to “use the interview as a modus vivendi to produce intimate interlocution with their chosen constituency” (p. 627). In both Arnold’s and Chakraborty’s discussions, however, the focus is primarily on the scholars rather than the genre.  Neither Arnold’s nor Chakraborty’s articles analyzed genre per se. 

However, at least two literary scholars have theorized interviews of literary figures as examples of a literary genre. For example, David Neal Miller (1984) describes how Isaac Bashevis Singer played with the generic expectations of the interview, bringing it closer to a fictional genre.  Singer controlled the trajectory of the interview, offered playful and not always consistent answers, and as much as possible, reviewed the manuscript before publication. In fact, Singer gave many interviews and seemed to use the opportunity to construct a persona and a literary text.  Miller notes that “the geniality and formal accessibility of Singer's interviews belie the radical reorientation of generic expectations that [his interviews] undertake to produce” (p. 198).  Another literary scholar, Ted Lyon (1994) came to a similar conclusion about the way that Jorge Luis Borges approached interviews.  Lyon’s article describes techniques that Borges used to make the interview artistic, arguing that “Borges turned the interview into a literary genre, a game, a personal art form that he often controlled more directly than the interviewer” (p. 75).  In his article, Lyon also reviews several other scholars who have looked at the interview as a literary genre, before moving on to theorize the interview as a literary genre.  Features include drawing on both written and spoken style, employing a loosely-organized, serendipitous structure, and ultimately offering a blurring of generic form.  Both Singer and Borges were known as storytellers and prolific interviewees.  Perhaps it is not surprising that they used the interview as a creative literary genre. Academic interviews may be more predictable and less prone to experimentation.  Nevertheless, it is probable that academics, like other authors and other figures in the public eye, reflexively use interviews as a promotional vehicle and performative event at least partially designed to accomplish their own goals.  One outcome of an academic interview is likely to be increased uptake of a scholar’s published works.   Here, Tachino’s (2012) study of intermediary genres might add value. Though Tachino is looking at a completely different activity system, namely the judicial system, the concept of “a genre that facilitates the ‘uptake’ of a genre by another genre” (p. 455), almost certainly applies in the case of the academic interview. 

Activity system & the concept of mediation

Tachino’s idea that one genre might mediate the uptake of another genre is interesting, but in fact, genres may be defined as a type of cultural and cognitive tool that mediate human activity.  Indeed, a key concept in activity theory and most models of CHAT is the idea of mediating tools that connect the social with the cognitive.  This insight owes a significant debt to Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who theorized that higher cognitive functions emerge through practical activity in a social environment.  The manipulation of physical tools in a guided activity leads to the association of signs with meanings, and thus allows the learner to internalize symbols as cognitive tools.  Tools and signs both offer ways of engaging the world, of mediating between the world and oneself (Vygotsky & Cole, 1978).  “Vygotsky and his colleagues saw the essence of human psychological functioning in the mediation of action by means of cultural tools and signs” (Engeström, 2010, p. 77).  Since Vygotsky was especially concerned with the development of cognitive capacities, his theories have had significant uptake from educators.  Within rhetoric and compositions, scholars have used activity theory, the precursor to CHAT, to look at genre within writing pedagogy (Russell, 1995; Nowacek, 2011.  Russell and Nowacek use a “mediated action triangle” diagram that Yamagata-Lynch (2010) identifies with first generation activity theory.  The first generation model of activity theory placed mediational tools as the core of the analysis, between the subject, the people who work within the system, and the object or objective that they are working towards.  It is the mediational tool that streamlines or enables the completion of the task.  Using this approach we keep the genre prominently in view and examine how it works to complete the social action.  As we have seen, such mediational tools also work to mediate cognitive development for an individual learner.  In other words, mediational tools are both social and cognitive, an idea that we will return to later.

The “mediated action triangle” highlights the intermediary role of the mediational means in helping subjects achieve the object.  However, this model glosses over the larger ecology at work.  Missing is a sense of the community within which the genre operates, the knowledge required to do the job, and the rules and conventions that operate in the activity system.  Spinuzzi (2003) adapted Engeström’s (1992) model of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) to bring in these elements while maintaining the idea of mediating artifacts. 

Before mapping the activity system surrounding the academic genre, we will look at the way that Spinuzzi (2003) defines the nodes within the system.  Spinuzzi adopts most of the nodes used by Engeström (1992), with two exceptions.  As noted earlier, instruments (mediating artifacts) are the focus of the activity system, and are thus, placed at the top of the activity system diagram.  Spinuzzi points out that genres have a history of being viewed as “tools-in-use” (p. 40), but they involve more than simple artifacts; rather, genres “convey a worldview” and as “cultural and literary traditions, genres convey and ‘remember’ the past” (p. 42).  For that reason, Spinuzzi sees “genre instances” as filling the instruments slot, while “genre knowledge” appears within domain knowledge (p. 44).  Probably because of Spinuzzi’s focus on the workplace environment, he also finds it useful to rename the subject slot with the term collaborators.  The other nodes within the activity system are community, division of labor, and the two terms already familiar from the activity theory model, namely object and outcomes.

At this point, we can begin to map the activity system for the academic interview.  The interview as genre is placed in the instrument slot. The interviewer and interviewee together constitute the collaborators since these are the agents who work together to accomplish a goal of illuminating a scholar’s ideas, motivations, influences, personal idiosyncrasies and other interview content.   The object may be the promotion of the scholar’s ideas within the disciplinary community.  Of course, there may be additional outcomes, such as reinforcing the values of a discipline, educating interested parties outside the discipline, mentoring disciplinary novices, and so forth.  The domain knowledge, as previously mentioned, includes knowledge of the conventions of the interview as a genre, but certainly must also include the values of academia, and of the discipline within which the interview takes place, often, but not always, the discipline of the scholar being interviewed.  The content knowledge and research objects of the discipline would be included here as well as, arguably, the discursive formulations of the discipline in a Foucauldian sense, that is, what can be talked about and how.  The community clearly would be the disciplinary practitioners and other scholars working within the discipline.  The division of labor can capture the point that one “collaborator,” to use Spinuzzi’s term, is the scholar being interviewed and the other is the interviewer, usually another, less established scholar in the discipline, who, although named, is nevertheless overshadowed by the scholar being interviewed.  Perhaps, too, we can extend the division of labor to include other actors in the publication process, such as journal editors, archivists and webmasters and so on.  If this is the structure of the network, we can see that agency has now been dispersed since collaborators and community both involve human agency.  Of course not all human actors have the same level of agency; the community arguably has less impact on the activity system than the collaborators per se.

Although the model does not explicitly represent it, CHAT can also evoke the ecological framework that branches out of the activity system.  After all, when we analyze the interview genre within the activity system, we should recognize that the system entails more than just scholars talking to other scholars.  Each of these involves its own activity system. In a way, the entire institution of the university is activated with all its moving parts, from financial aid to student support services to plant services.  In a sense, each node of CHAT, alludes to a larger ecology—not just the discipline but the greater community of the university, the division of labor within that ecology, the values and rules of other activity systems that impinge upon the disciplines inside the university and those that the university draws on and feeds into.

An important consideration of the activity system model is its situatedness in a specific moment in time, a moment that draws from a longer history with a trajectory pointing forward into the future.  Let us start with the last of these points.  The forward momentum of the activity system has to do with its orientation toward an object and yet-unrealized outcomes.  Engeström (2010) points out that “the object is both resistant raw material and the future-oriented purpose of an activity” (p. 76).  Foot (2001) explains that activity systems are constantly evolving but stay in operation as long as an object is in focus. “Activities are always specific, each one answering a definite need of the subject, directed toward an object of this need, extinguished as a result of its satisfaction, and produced again, perhaps in other, altogether changed conditions…The object of an activity gives it a determined direction, a horizon toward which it orients… but being a horizon, the object is never fully reached or conquered” (p. 9).  The activity system, therefore, draws the participants together to engage in future-oriented activities. 

Researchers, on the other hand, usually study the activity system in the present, through time, or from the perspective of how the past has enabled the present.  In methodological terms, a researcher must follow an activity system through time, as Spinuzzi does in his 2003 study, or use artifacts such as texts to freeze a moment in time.  Each academic interview, for example, represents a speech event that takes place at a specific point in time—usually identified—and occurs at a specific location, usually one where the interviewer and interviewee are co-present.  This situatedness is often identified in the introduction to the published interview.  Eldred & Bazerman (1995) note that their interview of Charles Bazerman took place in October 1993 on the campus of Virginia Military Institute where Bazerman made a presentation.  In the case of McNely’s (2013) interview of Spinuzzi, to give another example, both participants were at the 2012 ACM Special Interest Group on Design of Communication conference.  Tresch (2013) notes that his interview of Latour is an edited transcript of “a conversation held in Paris on 16 March 2012” (p. 303). 

But the activity system draws on history to create its present.  The model is, after called, cultural-historical activity system.  Cole & Engeström (1993) allude to the role of history in three of eight core summarizing principles for CHAT as a model of human development.  First, they note that “the cultural environment into which children are born contains the accumulated knowledge of prior generations.  In mediating their behavior through these objects, human beings benefit not only from their own experience, but from their forebears.”  Second, the human environment represents the accumulation of practices and values inherited from the past.  In other words, “culture is, in this sense, history in the present.”  Furthermore, activity systems represent “historically conditioned systems of relations” bringing individuals into interaction with each other and their environments (p. 9).  The activity system draws on historical practices, but as Spinuzzi (2003) notes, artifacts and mediating instruments within the activity system—such as genres—are also shot through with history since they have arisen through historical processes and serve as “a sort of social memory” (p. 43).  Prior & Shipka (2003) theorize this point using the term “laminated chronotope,” a term that in turn draws on Bakhtin’s (1981) discussion of “chronotope,” or time-space, as a unit of literary analysis.   Prior & Shipka describe how Bakhtin “came to view all chronotopes as embodied-representational—with concrete time-place-events deeply furrowed with, and constructed through, representations and with representations always deeply rooted in chains of concrete historical events” (p. 186).  In other words, each text is embodied in that it is composed by an author or authors working in a specific time frame, shaped by their physical surroundings, and affected by how the act of writing is woven into or ripped out of daily routine.  At the same time, each text also represents the cultural frame of reference, textual conventions and intertextual choices.  Thus, authorial experience and cultural and textual expectations become laminated together in the texts emerging in time-space. 

In addition to the way that activity systems live in and represent time, we need to mention a couple of additional tenets of CHAT as a theory.  First, the activity system is “multi-voiced” (Engeström, 2010, p. 78), meaning that individuals interacting within the system bring differing voices into dialogue.  This idea, which can also be linked back to Bakhtin, is not merely metaphorical since different speech styles and textual styles literally interact within the activity system.  For instance, we can see that the style of an academic interview evokes both ordinary conversation and academic prose.  If we compare the transcript of Bazerman’s Florida State interview with one of his published interviews, such as that of Eldred & Bazerman (1995), we can see that through the editing process, voice is negotiated as some elements of conversational style are retained while others are smoothed over.  In fact, the activity system involves many dynamic processes.  Not just multiple voices but multiple forces vie within a system, and it is through these that change occurs within an activity system over time.  As Engestrom (2010) explains, “Contradictions are the driving force of transformation” (p. 77).  Because Spinuzzi (2003) follows an activity system over time, he demonstrates in detail how contradictions acquire critical mass and eventually drive change.  The system never reaches stasis, however, because changes in any node of the system—division of labor, instruments, community, etc.—create new contradictions, as smoothing one set of wrinkles in a piece of cloth usually creates new ones elsewhere.   

As we can see, CHAT offers a contextual and ecological framework for seeing what genre does.  So far, however, we have failed to account for the concept of genre as a separate category or class of artifact.  We have taken genre for granted in the analysis without adequately theorizing the concept.  What genre theory addresses is the way that language use becomes regularized, whether or oral or written, informal or formal—a fast food order spoken through a drive-through speaker or a printed apartment lease—to pick two genres at random.  In his 2003 study, Spinuzzi reached back to genre theorists such as Carolyn Miller to define genre and describe how it functions.  In fact, I want to argue that both an ecological framework, such as CHAT, and the rhetorical and discourse approach offered by rhetorical genre theory are necessary to illuminate genre as a mediating artifact without losing sight of its specifically rhetorical benefits.

Genre as social action

Perhaps the best starting point for understanding genre theory is Miller’s (1994) article on the cultural basis of genre, building on her seminal (1984) article on genre as social action. As Miller describes it, her original article aimed to demonstrate that “a genre is a ‘cultural artifact’ that is interpretable as a recurrent, significant action” (1994, p. 67). Miller is arguing that genre serves as a crucial focal point for rhetorical analysis.  Genre serves as a middle term between “the micro-level and macro-level of analysis,” that is to say, between language as enacted from moment to moment, text to text, and the larger frame of human culture in both the universal and regional senses of the term culture.  In other words, genre is not just a mediating instrument, a node within an activity system, but is also a central and complex node that connects individual instances of language use (i.e. a smaller unit than the activity system) with the cultural framework that organizes both language and behavior (i.e. larger than an activity system).  It is important to recognize that Miller’s theory of genre does not draw on the concept of activity system at all, although Spinuzzi (2003) uses genre as his object of study and situates it within an activity system, both of which change over the time period that he focuses on in his study.  Miller is focusing on genre as intrinsically rhetorical whereas Spinuzzi is looking at it as instrumental and mediating.   Indeed, in a recent retrospective interview, Miller notes that she has been frustrated by the uptake of genre into activity theory.  She explains that this is “partly because I think that activity theory is not at all rhetorical—it treats genre as a tool or an instrument, as a means rather than an action that’s its own end” (Dryer, 2015).  I believe that CHAT offers a starting point for beginning to theorize a way into the larger ecologies of culture and action.  Genre theory alone does not accomplish this goal as thoroughly. Yet I believe that Miller’s concern is not unfounded.  To see genre as only an instrument in the same way as any other symbol or tool does not allow us to see all that genre can offer.   Even if genre acts a tool, it also accomplishes rhetorical action and, more than most nodes of the activity system, it bears the traces of the culture and history in itself.  Miller argues that as cultural artifacts, genres “literally incorporate knowledge—knowledge of the aesthetics, economics, politics, religious beliefs and all the various dimensions of what we know as human culture” (1994, p. 69, emphasis in the original).  To put it another way, genres co-evolve with an activity system, capturing its values, goals, rules and knowledge domain, and so on. Thus, in a genre analysis, we can often find allusions to the activity system that employs the genre.  However, according to Miller (Dryer, 2015), to employ a genre is to perform a speech act, not simply to employ a simple tool to accomplish a task.  Since speech acts and organizational (or political or academic) goals often do overlap, it is all too easy to confound the two.  

I would like to argue that a helpful way of capturing the internal constituents of genre is to look at what Miller calls the “rules and resources” of a genre, namely, “reproducible speaker and addressee roles, social typifications of recurrent social needs or exigences, topical structures (or ‘moves’ and ‘steps’), and ways of indexing an event to material conditions” (1994, p. 71).  To map these elements as an internal, metaphorical network shows us how genre functions as social memory.

Genre as social memory

To be fair, genre is not the only cultural artifact that bears the traces of social memory.  Miller (1994) quotes Anthony Giddens’ characterization of social structure in general as existing in “memory traces” that guide agents’ actions (p. 70).  However, it is precisely those social structures that meet recurrent goals and capture everyday routines that encode and guide behavior in the way that Giddens is arguing to be the case.  In her article, Miller demonstrates that such is the case for genre.  Social structures, such as genre, have “only a virtual existence, out of space-time… yet must be instantiated in space-time, in the actual flow of material existence” (1994, p. 71).  To bring it directly to the current case, it is because of reading academic interviews and participating in academic institutions that interviewees and interviewers carry a mental model of what an effective interview will tend to be like, how it will flow and what it will do.  To verify that this is the case, I will perform a quick genre analysis of a small corpus of academic interviews.

    

I examined two interviews of Latour (Katti, 2006; Tresch, 2013), and one each of Bazerman (Crawford & Smout, 1995), Castells (Rantanen, 2005), Deleuze (Deleuze & McMuhan, 1998), Miller (Dryer, 2015), and Spinuzzi (McNely, 2013).  Although this is a small sample, I made an attempt to represent several disciplines, spread over time, and looked at both printed and online journals.  I first looked at how the interview is structured.  Each interview includes an introductory section, though this varies considerably in length.  The shortest is the two-sentence abstract printed at the top of Dryer’s interview of Miller (2015).  Most introductions, as we can see by looking at the chart, include a summary of the scholar’s activities, connect to a scholar’s current work, or do both.   This one does neither.  However, both Miller’s scholarship and the journal, Composition Forum, are associated with the discipline of rhetoric.  Furthermore, the interview appears in a special issue dedicated to rhetorical genre studies.  Since it is likely that few of the journal’s readers are unfamiliar with Miller’s work, the editors move directly to their purpose: “In this interview, Carolyn Miller describes the origins and struggle to bring to publication her now-landmark article ‘Genre as Social Action’ (1984) and its subsequent uptake as a powerful explanatory construct across many disciplines” (Dryer, 2015).  In contrast, the introduction for Castells lasts five paragraphs and includes a lengthy summary of his achievements, leavened with a few personal details (Rantanen, 2005).  Castells has published widely and travels globally but recently moved from sociology to communication studies, so some readers in this communication journal could be unfamiliar with his work.  Following the introduction, the body of the interview is the question and answer format associated with most published interviews.  Certainly the dialogic nature and semi-conversational style sets the academic interview apart from research articles and other academic genres.

A conversation is assumed to be meandering and serendipitous, but if we examine the body of the typical academic interview, we see some common themes emerge.  Going back to the chart, we can see that it is nearly obligatory, for example, that a scholar discuss his or her intellectual influences. This may be part of a biographical narrative near the beginning or interwoven through the interview.  All the interviews here also compared or contrasted the scholar’s work with the work of others doing similar work.  The majority included a strong narrative element in terms of how the scholar got into the field or got involved with the area of research that he or she was known for.  Obviously, interviewers will also ask scholars to elaborate on or explain their theoretical contributions.  It is also common for scholars to make comments about discipline, even if, in the case Castells, they are arguing for more interdisciplinary scholarship.  Related to this, interviews also frequently include discussion of methodology.  Finally, it is common for discussion to address the larger relevance of the scholarship, and, before the end of the interview, to look ahead to future prospects for society, for the discipline, or for the individual scholar. 

The common structure and themes that we can see in the sample demonstrate that the academic interview is indeed a genre in the sense argued by Miller and other genre theorists.  We can see that there are very clear-cut “speaker and addressee roles” within the interview.  There are “topical structures (or ‘moves’ and ‘steps’” that we can see in the introduction plus body structure and in the topics included.  We can also see “ways of indexing an event to material conditions” (Miller, 1994, p. 71) in that most interviews locate the place and time of the interview in fairly specific terms.  Interestingly, the time of the interview also serves as an anchor for the treatment of time within the interview.  The narrative part of the interview represents the past, bringing the reader up to the present moment of the interview.  Mention of mentors and other important influences also often appear within this narrative, though even if they appear at other points in the interview, they situate the scholar further by filling in details of the past.  Discussion of current projects, methodological preferences and core concepts are foregrounded in the present.  Finally, as previously mentioned, interviews not uncommonly end with a reference to ongoing or future projects or trends for the future, either within a field or research program, or society at large. 

Thus, we can argue that like journalistic interviews, academic interviews should be, in a broad sense, news-worthy.  In other words, part of the social action, or exigence, here, is to highlight scholarship that is currently important, and at times, newly released.  The interviews of Spinuzzi (McNely, 2013) and Deleuze (Deleuze & McMuhan, 1998), for example, both have as part of their exigence the release of new publications.  Interestingly, Dryer’s (2015) interview of Miller looks at classic scholarship by connecting it to a revival of interest in genre represented by the special issue of which the interview is a part. Phrasing in the abstract also brings Miller’s work up-to-date: “Readers will also find an account of the fall—and subsequent resurrection—of interest in genre in rhetorical and communication studies as well as thoughts on a research agenda for new scholars in genre studies.”

As a genre, the academic interview draws on a recurrent situation—a scholar becomes known for a publication, a scholarly program, a breakthrough, and draws the interest of the academic community.  Each interview, however, represents a single event that occurs at a specific time and place and focuses on a scholar at a specific moment in time.  Indeed, we can see that the academic interview does not simply arise as part of the mundane operation of the activity system, but is driven by an exigence, such as a new publication, a special issue of a publication related to classic scholarship or an encounter such as a campus visit or shared conference participation that calls attention back to a scholar’s work.  By only viewing genre through the lens of the activity system, it is easy to miss these rhetorical realities.

Putting the model back together

Genres can be viewed through more than one theoretical lens.  Using the activity system as a unit of analysis, as CHAT does (Foot, 2001), allows us to focus on the human actors, settings, and interactions surrounding genre.  In other words, mapping the activity system allows us to examine the social context in which genres operate. 

However, the activity system model also poses some risks for seeing genre as social action in the rhetorical sense that Miller intended.  In fact, Miller points out an activity theory analysis may be useful, depending on the focus of the analysis, but it should not be confused with her intention to demonstrate “the idea of social action” as “the illocutionary act itself, that is, the action in the saying” (Dryer, 2015, emphasis in the original). In an activity system, activity focuses on an objective (object) that is typically not a speech act.  To pursue the object, collaborators may perform speech acts and produce texts that are part of the genre set associated with the activity system.  These occur as part of the multi-voicedness of the system.  That does not mean, however, that one genre could not be singled out as the focus of analysis.  In other words, both an activity theory such as CHAT and genre theory per se can analyze a given genre, but the analysis will need to be performed as separate steps and described separately.  However, both can be illuminating.  To offer an analogy, most effective movies involve both long shots and close-ups.  CHAT provides the long-shot and genre theory provides the close-up.

Partly to address the conflicting view of genre—social action versus mediating tool—and partly because of an emerging attention to the role of material objects in rhetorical work (Latour, 2005; Rickert, 2013)—I would like to propose a final adjustment to the CHAT model.  When producing a speech is made or writing a paper is the object of an activity system, the rhetorical work emerges more clearly than when the collaborators in the activity system are engaged in tasks such as building a bonfire or repairing a car, tasks where the communication event is a less conspicuous part of the process.  But even in rhetorical work, tools like keyboard and monitor, or pencil and paper, are essential.  Rickert (2013) also argues that other environmental elements come into play as part of the ambient environment that drives invention, like a beverage, a chair, a lamp, the color of the wall, the song that is playing, and innumerable others.  A problem with Spinuzzi’s (2003) model is that when genre appears in the instruments or tools position in the network, we lose sight of these other material objects.  For that reason, I consider all of these material elements to be mediating objects (tools, instruments. To leave a slot open for these, I move genre to a central, mediating position.  Since genre is my object of study, this arrangement allows it to act rhetorically within the activity system and it highlights its centrality as a middle term. Finally, it allows genre to serve as a mental artifact, a bridge between the social and the cognitive.  Although the current analysis does not pursue the cognitive connection, I anticipate the move as a helpful one for future research.  Ironically, it also brings us back to Vygotsky’s most powerful insight, that as symbols and tools are manipulated in social spaces, they may be encoded as cognitive categories, making mental work possible. 

References

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