Thursday, April 28, 2016

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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Lyon, T. (1994). Jorge Luis Borges and the interview as literary genre. Latin American Literary Review, 22(44), 74-89.
McNely, B. (2013). “That lightbulb feeling”: An Interview with Clay Spinuzzi. Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society 3(1). Retrieved from
http://www.presenttensejournal.org/volume-3/that-light-bulb-feeling-an-interview-with-clay-spinuzzi/
Miller, C. R. (1984.)  Genre as social action.  Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70(2), 151-167.  Retrieved from http://www4.ncsu.edu/~crmiller/Publications/MillerQJS84.pdf
Miller, C.R. (1994). Rhetorical community: The cultural basis of genre. In A. Freedman, & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (67-78). London: Taylor & Francis.
Miller, D. N. (1984). Isaac Bashevis Singer: The interview as fictional genre. Contemporary Literature, 25(2), 187-204.
Nowacek, R. S. (2011). Agents of integration: Understanding transfer as a rhetorical act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Prior, P., & Shipka, J. (2003). Chronotopic lamination: Tracing the contours of literate activity.  In C. Bazerman & D. Russell (Eds.), Writing selves, writing societies: Research from activity perspectives (pp.180-238). Fort Collins: The WAC Clearinghouse and Mind, Culture, and Activity. Retrieved from http://wac.colostate.edu/books/selves_societies/prior/
Rantanen, T. (2005). An interview with Manuel Castells. Global Media and Communication, 1(2), 135-147.  Retrieved from:  http://www.giovanninavarria.com/pdf_docs/castells/castells-gmc-Interview.pdf
Rickert, T. J. (2013). Ambient rhetoric: The attunements of rhetorical being. Pittsburgh, PA : University of Pittsburgh Press
Russell, D.R. (1995).  Activity theory and its implications for writing instruction.  In J. Petraglia (Ed.), Reconceiving writing, rethinking writing instruction, (51-78). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing genres through organizations: A sociocultural approach to information design. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Syverson, M. A. (1999). The wealth of reality: An ecology of composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Tachino, T. (2012). Theorizing uptake and knowledge mobilization: a case for intermediary genre. Written Communication, 29(4), 455-476.
Tresch, J. (2013). Another turn after ANT: An interview with Bruno Latour. Social Studies of Science, 43(2), 302-313.
Vygotsky, L. S., & Cole, M. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Yamagata-Lynch, L. C. (2010). Activity Systems Analysis Methods: Understanding Complex Learning Environments. Berlin: Springer US.



Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Mind Map Revisited

Gleaning some themes

I redid my mind map completely to capture themes.


I categorized the readings in terms of theoretical frameworks and made these nodes.  Sometimes this meant a separate node for a theorist, like Foucault or Latour.  At other times, I brought together multiple theorists in a single node, like Spellman,Syverson and others writing about ecology.  (In fact, this is roughly the list that my group started with for developing our theory tree.)  I distributed these theorist nodes as radiating from a central list of thematic nodes, such as "Motion in the network," "Complex and self-organizing systems,""The importance of material objects" and so on. This actually proved quite interesting because I saw connections that I hadn't before, like the fact that Foucault and the genre theorists are both working with discourse in a linguistic sense while many others we looked at in the semester are not really focused on rhetoric as language at all.  In fact the reason that I used this system of restructuring to begin with was to capture connections that I was already seeing, like how many theorists were fascinated by the importance and agency of material objects--like Rickert, Bateson, and Latour, for instance.  But once I developed my list of themes, I was surprised at how it pulled things together differently than I had thought about before.

I really like this mind map.  It is a nice summary of the semester for me.

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

894 Case study #3: Adding genre theory

Why these theories


 The academic interview genre is similar to published interviews familiar in magazine journalism, but with some additional features generated by its situatedness within academia and the situated identities of its participants within a discipline or disciplines.  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.  For the purpose of the current analysis, I use as a foundation a previous analysis of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) as adapted by Spinuzzi (2003).  That analysis compared CHAT with activity theory (AT), a precursor theory to CHAT that is also productively used in writing studies (see, for example, Russell, 1997).  Because my previous analysis concluded that Spinuzzi’s version of CHAT captured most of what was best about AT—though perhaps with a few modifications—I will be referring almost exclusively to Spinuzzi’s version of CHAT here.  The most important purpose of the present analysis, however, is use ideas from the genre theory of Carolyn Miller (1984, 1994) and Charles Bazerman (1994, 2004) to generate a more fine-grained analysis of the place of genre within an activity system.


Interview as literary genre


            Research on the academic interview as a genre has not been too extensive, as I noted in my previous case study.  Ironically, most of the discussion has been done in the field of literature rather than rhetoric or discourse analysis.  For example, as I noted in my previous case study, Chakraborty (2010) discusses how Gayatri Spivak’s interviews brought together “the scholarship with the persona” (p. 623) and how public intellectuals can “use the interview as a modus vivendi to produce intimate interlocution with their chosen constituency” (p. 627).  Chakraborty draws conclusions for the genre as a whole but she is more interested in what Spivak’s interviews say about Spivak. Two other literary scholars, however, do look at interviews as genre. One, David Neal Miller (1984) describes how Isaac Bashevis Singer has played with the generic expectations of the interview, bringing it closer to a fictional genre.  Some of Singer’s techniques include controlling the trajectory of the interview, offering playful and not always consistent answers, and reviewing the manuscripts before publication. Miller notes that “the geniality and formal accessibility of Singer's interviews belie the radical reorientation of generic expectations that they undertake to produce” (p. 198).  A third literary scholar, Ted Lyon (1994) came to a similar conclusion about the way that Borges approached interviews, illustrating techniques that Borges uses to make the interview artistic, and 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 consider the extent to which interviews work as a literary genre that draws on both written and spoken style, has a rambling, serendipitous quality to it, and hence, represents a blurring of generic form.  To what extent, does an interview of a famous author in a literary publication share generic features with the interview of a scholar in an academic journal?  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. Still, it is useful to consider the extent to which any public figure reflexively uses an interview as a promotional vehicle and performative event.  


The academic interview and its activity system


On the other hand, the typical academic interview appears to have a tighter set of generic expectations attached to it than the Singer and Borges interviews do.  To see that this is the case, we will revisit the academic interview within its activity system while adding genre theory to the CHAT analysis.  Next, we will consider instances of academic interviews as artifacts of the genre, looking for ways that traces of the network show up as rhetorical moves within the genre.  Finally, we will look at what genre theory accomplishes—or neglects—in terms of building productive theory.
Perhaps the best source for grasping the network nature of genre theory is Miller’s (1994) article on the cultural basis of genre, building on her seminal (1984) article on genre as social action.  The most clear-cut identification of the nodes comes from her identification of the “rules and resources of a genre,” namely, “reproducible speaker” and “addressee” as roles, “social typifications of recurrent social needs or exigences,” “topical structures” and “ways of indexing an event to material conditions.”  All of these are embedded within each instantiation of a genre as it is situated “in space-time” (p. 71).  It does not seem to stretch the case too much to correlate most, if not all, of these with nodes that we have already identified within the CHAT model offered by Spinuzzi.  The “collaborators” node (in other models of activity theory “subject”) correlates with the “reproducible speaker” and the “addressee” might be associated with the “object,” though we might also see object as “social action,” or in the terms of Miller (1994), “social typifications of recurrent social needs or exigences.”  The “topical structures” correlate with Spinuzzi’s “domain knowledge” (also known as “rules” in some versions of CHAT) and “ways of indexing an event to material conditions” could be analogous to the “instruments” in Spinuzzi’s model, which are also material objects, or the human and cultural context that he calls “community” and “division of labor.”  However, it may be problematic to associate “ways of indexing” with so many nodes in Spinuzzi’s model.  However, the concept does seem a little undertheorized in Miller’s (1994) article.   The “addressee role” as a node also seems to map slightly differently between genre theory and Spinuzzian CHAT.  Even though it is not a perfect fit, our attempt to correlate genre theory to the activity system does offer us two insights, however.  First, it shows us that there are important points of overlap between CHAT and genre theory.  This is not surprising considering the fact that activity systems are frequently discussed in tandem with genre (Russell, 1997; Bazerman, 2004; Spinuzzi, 2003).  Although these theorists don’t use the same version of the activity system, all argue that genre is best seen at work within an activity system.  The second point to note here is simply that genre theory also can be mapped in network terms.  By employing some of the familiar terms from the already mapped CHAT network, we can see that this is the case.


            Not all nodes have equal agency within the network, either in CHAT or in genre theory.  In genre theory, a human agent, the speaker, employs the genre to accomplish something.  This gives this node the strongest agency.  The genre itself facilitates reproducibility, highlighting features of the situation, thematically and textually, and making them more salient, more likely to be reproduced in future situations.  In this sense genre itself has agency, and thus, too, the nodes of structures, social typifications, and situational anchors, though to a more minor degree compared with the speaker.  Each of these nodes shares agency in that together they shape the message that employs the genre as a vehicle. A node that offers little agency, interestingly, is the role of addressee.  The genre theory model does not theorize interaction with an audience as impacting back on the network, though this might be implicit since genre theory is working within the framework of rhetoric, and many contemporary models of rhetoric see collaboration or interaction between speaker and audience.
            Within Spinuzzi’s model of CHAT there is a strong sense of directionality within the network.  Reading activity system diagram from left to right, as Americans are programmed to do, we find the subject in the most salient, or initiating, location.  This holds true for genre theory.  Since the speaker has strong agency, he or she is the initiator within the network.  What is moving within the network in genre theory is a packaged message, or perhaps more accurately, intention.  Bazerman (1994) corroborates this point.  Genres “identify a repertoire of actions that may be taken in a set of circumstances” and to that extent, “identify the possible intentions one may have” (1994, p. 82). CHAT captures this point even more clearly in the way that the activity system is diagrammed.  An arrow leads from the diagram to the right, labeled “outcomes.”  We also know that the collaborators with a division of labor within a larger community structured by rules are using mediating instruments to accomplish some goal or “object,” the intention flows through the network towards the outcomes. 
            Neither the genre theory model nor the CHAT model makes a strong distinction between communication as rhetorical work and any type of productive task that a group intends to accomplish.  For example, or where a speech is made or a paper is written, the rhetorical work emerges more clearly than when the collaborators in the activity system are engaged in building a bonfire or repairing a car, tasks that presumably are not done in silence but where the communication event is a less conspicuous part of the process.  In a case where information is recorded in a database, as in the accident logging system that Spinuzzi (2003) examines, the genre is seen as the instrument.  In an explicitly rhetorical event, like a political speech, this also makes sense.  But in all of these tasks, whether those with more stereotypically rhetorical goals or more physical ones, other tools or objects may come into play.  Thus, when genre appears in the instruments or tools position in the network, we lose sight of these other material objects.  For that reason, I place genre in a central, mediating position for my purposes.  This move also owes a debt to several other theories, such as actor-network theory, a move that I will justify more fully in the synthesis paper to come.


Academic genre as cultural artifact


            At this point, we shift our discussion to a fuller theorizing of the academic interview genre from a genre theory perspective.    When we bring Spinuzzian CHAT together with genre theory, we begin to see network mapped on two levels.  First, we have the activity system itself as a network—or if we want to go beyond the activity system at the focus of an analysis, as for example Spinuzzi’s (2003) activity system clustered around the accident logging system—we can see that activity systems impinge upon each other, opening up into a complex network of shifting and evolving activity systems.  To take a quick example, engineers do not only reengineer intersections using accident statistics but also accomplish other goals with other sets of collaborators, employing other rules, using different instruments.  In other words, they participate in other activity systems.  For our purposes, we will be arguing that a single activity system or an ecology of activity systems represents one level of mapping.  The other level of mapping occurs within the genre as an artifact.  Each text within a genre leaves traces of the activity system that produced it.  Spinuzzi (2003) makes this point in his discussion of genre, calling genre “a sort of social memory that its practitioners accept without their explicit recognition that they are doing so” (p. 43).  Miller (1994) quotes Anthony Giddens’ characterization of social structure as existing in “memory traces” that guide agent’s actions (p. 70), and later in her article, notes that “as bearers of culture, these artifacts literally incorporate knowledge—knowledge of the aesthetics, economics, politics, religious beliefs and all the various dimensions of what we know as human culture” (p. 69, emphasis in the original). In other words, genres carry within themselves the traces of the activity system that employs them, and thus, also map within themselves the network nodes and connections that we have discussed.  This is precisely what we add by shifting our focus away from genre within the activity system to genre as an artifact, and what we can better see by going back to genre theorists such as Miller (1984, 1994) and Bazerman (1994, 2004). 


            To better see this, we now move to an informal analysis of a small corpus of academic interviews.  I looked at two interviews of Bazerman (Crawford & Smout, 1995; Florida State, n.d.), one of Latour (Tresch, 2013), and one of Deleuze (Deleuze & McMuhan, 1998).  In addition, I revisited an interview of Spinuzzi that I referred to in a previous case study (McNely, 2013).  Although this is a small sample, I made an attempt to represent both intra-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary interviews, printed and online journals, and in the Florida State case, an unpublished interview that was nevertheless distributed online.  For each case, I noted the types of information included in the interview in an attempt to determine what types of information are typically included in an academic interview.  All five mentioned scholars who influenced their ideas, such as mentors or individuals whose works they had read.  This appears to be almost obligatory for the academic interview.  Four out of five, for example, 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 was known for.  All four also included personal asides as part of this narrative, like, for example, the fact that Latour’s daughter was born in Africa while he was doing fieldwork there (Tresch, 2013, p. 305).   Four out of five also made comments about their disciplinary identity and disciplinary or cross-disciplinary elements within their scholarship.  Bazerman and Spinuzzi both made arguments about what is, or should be, included in the discipline of rhetoric.  Latour and Deleuze did not do so, for several possible reasons.  They were being interviewed in a cross-disciplinary context.  They are not easy to pin to a single discipline.  The disciplines that they have worked in are less reflexive and perhaps more secure about their disciplinary status than rhetoric and writing studies is.  Some other topics that two or more interviews touched on include comments on current projects, comments on best-known work or works, explanation of core ideas within their scholarship, and future prospects, either for the field or related to their research program.  Three discussed methodology, but because of the centrality of this discussion in several interviews and its importance for accounting for the uptake of innovative scholarship, I would expect it to emerge as important in a larger sample.  I did not track the order that the ideas occurred because my goal was not to find a conventional order—if such even exists for interviews.  Rather I wanted to determine the extent to which elements of the activity system show up as points of reference within the interview.
            In fact, we can see that they do.  Again, using Spinuzzi’s model of CHAT, we can see elements of community, if community is taken as discipline or research program.  Most scholars situate themselves within or across disciplines within the interview.  A number tell the story of how they entered the discipline.  Reference to influences also connect to community.  In other words, a key goal of the interview seems to be to situate the scholar and his or her scholarship within the field and to promote his or her ideas.  Moving back to genre theory, there is also the addressed, namely, other members of the disciplinary community or the larger academic community.  The discussion of methodology brings us traces of the “instrument” node, and in some cases, “domain knowledge.”  Discussion of a scholar’s projects, whether previous work or current work, one could argue also connects to the “tools” or “instruments” node, in the sense that it is a tool for actively promoting the scholar’s ideas. 
The collaborators themselves—that is to say, the interviewer and interviewee, we might point out, are explicitly present in the interviewee, and in the typical Q & A format, remain highly conspicuous.  The personal asides highlight the human side of the scholar, and we might argue, fulfill another role of the academic interview, the desire of followers and fans to feel closer to an admired figure.  This is no doubt the primary goal of interviews in popular magazines, but it is not absent from the academic interview. 
The academic interview 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, and often identified in the introduction to the published interview.  In the case of the Spinuzzi interview, for example, both participants were at a conference whereas both Bazerman interviews took place on college campuses where Bazerman made a presentation.  Tresch (2013) merely notes that his interview of Latour is an edited transcript ofa conversation held in Paris on 16 March 2012” (p. 303).  It is interesting that the academic interview so clearly anchors the event in space and time.  The time of the interview, particularly, 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 wherever they appear they help to situate the scholar by filling in details of the past.  Discussion of current projects, methodological preferences and core concepts are foregrounded in the present.  Finally, 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. 
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.  The same scholar interviewed twice does not tell the exact same story.  In fact, the interview itself can subtly change the scholarly landscape and lead to a different story.  This means that as content or meaning travel through the network, the network changes.  As Miller (1994) points out, genres are “cultural constructs that reflexively help construct their culture” (p. 69).  The network is constantly evolving, and each time the genre is employed, it emerges from an evolving activity system, which in turn may be affected by the message as well as all the traces of the culture encoded in the genre. 
As we can see, genre theory reinforces much of what is present in CHAT, as defined in Spinuzzi (2003) and presented both in this analysis and the previous case study.  On the other hand, since it is rhetorically-based, genre theory offers a stronger emphasis on the audience than CHAT does.  Genre theory also leads to a finer-grained analysis of genre as an artifact that that mirrors both the activity system and the cultural values encoded within the activity system.  On the other hand, neither model has much to say about the larger culture of which the activity system is a part.  They do not account for the complex interaction with other activity systems.  Both need add-ons to highlight power relations or provide a critical lens.  The activity system framework can, however, serve as a heuristic to call attention to a number of the elements operating within an organization or discourse community that play a role in a speech event, and genre theory further focuses our attention on some of these elements. 

References

Bazerman, C. (1994). Systems of genres and the enactment of social intention. In A. Freedman, & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (79-101). London: Taylor & Francis.
Bazerman, C. (2004). Speech acts, genres, and activity systems: How texts organize activity and people. In C. Bazerman, & P. Prior (Eds.), What writing does and how it does it (309-339). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Chakraborty, M. N. (2010). Everybody’s Afraid of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Reading interviews with the public intellectual and postcolonial critic. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 35(3), 621-645.
Crawford, T. H., & Smout, K. D. (1995). An Interview with Charles Bazerman. Composition Studies/freshman English News, 23(1), 21-36.
Deleuze, G., & McMuhan, M. (1998). The brain is the screen: Interview with Gilles Deleuze on "The Time-Image". Discourse, 20(3), 47-55.
Florida State University. (n.d.). Interview with Charles Bazerman. Retrieved from http://www.english.fsu.edu/rhetcomp/transcripts/bazerman.pdf
Lyon, T. (1994). Jorge Luis Borges and the interview as literary genre. Latin American Literary Review, 22(44), 74-89.
Miller, C. R. (1984.)  Genre as social action.  Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70(2), 151-167.  Retrieved from http://www4.ncsu.edu/~crmiller/Publications/MillerQJS84.pdf
Miller, C.R. (1994). Rhetorical community: The cultural basis of genre. In A. Freedman, & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (67-78). London: Taylor & Francis.
Miller, D. N. (1984). Isaac Bashevis Singer: The interview as fictional genre. Contemporary Literature, 25(2), 187-204.
McNely, B. (2013). “That lightbulb feeling”: An Interview with Clay Spinuzzi .Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society 3(1). Retrieved from
http://www.presenttensejournal.org/volume-3/that-light-bulb-feeling-an-interview-with-clay-spinuzzi/
Russell, David. (1997). Rethinking genre in school and society: An Activity Theory analysis. Written Communication 14(4):504-554. http://www.public.iastate.edu/~drrussel/at&genre/at&genre.html
Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing genres through organizations: A sociocultural approach to information design. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Tresch, J. (2013). Another turn after ANT: An interview with Bruno Latour. Social Studies of Science, 43(2), 302-313.

894 Scaffolding for synthesis

Looking at the academic interview genre is important to English studies in several ways.
  • First, genre research has been productive within rhetoric, composition, and writing studies as a middle term.  Bazerman (1994) and Miller (1994) both argue its importance here.
  • It has also been productive in applied linguistics, another subfield of English studies, as argued by Swales (1990, 2004).
  • The academic interview genre also offers insights into the discipline and serve as an intermediary genre for understanding disciplinary argumentation, and hence, indirectly offering insights related to Writing across the Curriculum.
  • However, only by using a richer, network-oriented framework for theorizing genre can we move beyond a simple genre analysis and understand what this genre tells us about the values of higher education and gain insights on the ecology of higher education.

Which 2 – 4 theories are you choosing and why? How are they similar enough that you can justify getting them to work together? How do they fill each other’s gaps?
  • My primary analysis will continue to be based on Spinuzzi’s version of CHAT, as in case study #3.
  • I will add to this genre theory, as in case study #3.
  • Finally, I will justify the decision to move genre to the middle of the network, separating it from a “tools” or “instruments” node.  This is because I found the idea of objects as having agency to be quite persuasive.  This idea comes from ANT, but it is also alluded to in Bateson and Gibson, and in a slightly different way perhaps, an essential feature of Rickert.  I still need to determine whether I need to bring in more of one (or two) of these theories, or whether I can simply grab the one insight.

How do these theories align with how you position yourself as a scholar?
  • All of these theories look at how writing does work in the world.  That is how I define my research interest.  I am interested in the texts, the human players, the discourse community, the work that is being done, and the cultural framework.  This framework captures all of that.
  • In fact, I am also interested in bringing cognitive into conversation with the social for a true sociocognitive approach.  I think Bateson’s theory opens the door to paying more attention to the cognitive. Genre theory also does so, to a degree, as CHAT’s debt to Vygotsky.  However, I do not intend to develop the cognitive here, though I would like to open that door.

How do these theories align with your own biases and background (the reason you came to this project in the first place)?
  • I have been interested in genre for a long time, and I developed an interest in the ecological framework and CHAT last summer.  I find CHAT offers some ecological elements but is easier to operationalize.
  • I prefer productive theory to critical theory.  I like the productivity of these theories.  That being said, my PhD program has made me much more aware of the fact that theory is never neutral and I do think it is possible to bring in critical insights in the employment of genre theory, at least.  I am not sure how much CHAT has been used that way.  Still, if we assume that any network, any structure, exists in a certain way that it could exist in a different way.  We also have to consider the possibility that some things are being left out, and what is being left out may be something (or someone) valuable.