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
Arnold, W. (2012). The
secret subject: Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, and the
interview as genre. Criticism, 54(4), 567-581.
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