Notes on Genre Theory #1

These notes on genre theory are a response to a panel discussion at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in New York, March 2007. Over 90 presentations at the conference included the word 'genre' in the title.

For an example of my previous work on genre see here. For my bibliography on genre studies see here.

Imagining Genres
I used to think that genres were shared social phenomena upon which communities and conventions could be built. Institutions are shaped and structured by effective practices called - for want of a better term - 'genres'. They, I thought, are sites for interlocution, for the co-construction of meaning, and for social action.

Now I am not so sure. I am not sure of the nature of this shared-ness and the nature of this community. I wonder if genres have been made to carry a burden of stability which in fact they do not possess, or which reduces and over-simplifies them. I wonder if genre has been used as a metaphor for harmony and symmetry in social order under the guise of 'communication' and 'getting things done'.

The messy and unpredictable spaces where social activity is far from harmonious, where (for example) radically different cultures meet and collide or where novices make their first faltering steps into professional practice, have been overlooked in theory which is fixed on building systems.

I see genres now as typifications of practice which are vulnerable to different forms of social imagination. The tension between type and instance is played out in ways which invoke different 'images of genre' rather than a single, archetypal super-image embedded in recurring social situations and apparently 'shared' by everyone in a 'community'.

A genre, therefore, can be said to exist, but only as a phenomenon of constantly shifting and conflicting perspectives and experiences, not as a fixed entity 'out there', an objective site, and definitely not as a 'structure'.

What at one moment appears to be unified, consensual and efficient, at other moments (and sometimes very quickly, in the blink of an eye) can become diverse, conflictual and disrupted. The 'image of a genre' can come across as hard-edged, rule-bound, self-contained - especially under the supervision of 'meta-genres' such as manuals and guidelines and the forceful gaze of formal education - but at other times it can appear fuzzy, loose, porous, able to blend easily with other genres or be changed by a surprising stylistic move.

Sometimes the forces of unification seem irresistible, pressing writing into pre-set generic frameworks, normalising texts by force of coercion or propriety, sedimenting transactive bonds which seem unbreakable; at other times those forces seem strangely absent or fragmented, freeing writers and designers to try new things, to dispense with frameworks and run risks.

So where is 'genre' in these shifts of perspective and experience? Or is genre not this very diversity itself?

Genres and Instability
I wonder if genres are experienced in the same way by everyone in the same context?

Do students, for example, see written genres the same way as their teachers see them? When students experience the genre of the school essay, how is this related to their teachers' experience of the essay as readers and evaluators (assuming that teachers rarely write essays alongside their students)? Or examiners' experience of the same essays? Is the 'same' genre involved each time?

Does each moment not invoke different imaginings of what 'the genre' is for, what it should look like, what it should respond to, and involve different practices as time and space shift? It may share a name (but not even that is guaranteed, even for 'the essay') but not roles, values and purposes.

Are we not dealing with what Judith Butler calls 'disjunct lingusitic locations'?

I see the concept of genre as useful only if this perspectival instability is taken into account as a defining feature, not as an afterthought. It's not as if there is an obligatory centre (the 'basics' of a genre) and then an optional surround (called 'creativity' or 'style').

Genres can be seen as the constructors of 'likewise' features - norms, standards, conventions, recurrences, homologies, patterns. These features beckon us towards a sense of system, what Bakhtin called 'centripetal forces'.

But at the same time genres are constructors of 'unlike' features - differences, contestations, uniquenesses, changes, diversities. These are Bakhtin's 'centrifugal forces'. Genres individuate whilst they also normalise. And the 'same' text can be treated in radically different ways. So reading genres for system features alone means missing out a lot of activity.

I think that genre theory - still haunted by older formalisms, still in the residue of structuralism, still shaped by linguistic ways of thinking which insist on a 'centre' and a 'periphery' - has favoured the 'likewise' features of system because they allow recurrence (in words, phrases, textual features, moves) to be identified, labelled and mapped. Genres can then be modelled as normative structures, 'stablised for now' in the words of Cathy Schryer.

But genre theory has not developed a vocabulary for discussing the tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces which in every utterance both asserts and pulls away from the centre. I mean the forces which produce contradiction, ambiguity, diversity and change, the forces that touch on this dual quality of stability and instability, the chameleon-like change-ability of genres at the hands of different kinds of social imagination.

It has something to do with participation rather than usage. Is it always true to say that writers 'use' or 'select' genres? This way of putting things sets the speaker against a system, even though in a benign way, using a treasured resource. It instrumentalises genres and puts them at the service of the speaker's intentions. It restores a Cartesian image of the word.

But is it not also true to say that I 'am used' and 'am selected' by genres? Isn't there a force of positioning as well as intentionality - I see these as two modes of social imagining - going on when genres are functioning? Thus: I speak; but I am also spoken. And my experience is dual, I shift in awareness between being an intentional centre of my text, and a participant in broader textual practices out of my control.

The self/society boundary is not one I can possess like a skill. Though it is one I can partially control and monitor, I am also at the mercy of it. Do genres not operate on that boundary, both resources for my participation in the social and frames for my subjection to it?

I wrest from the genres of my life a measure of control (I may call it 'style'); but I also concede to them, become shaped by them, and even controlled by them. But as practices they are not available as a single imagining. They appear one moment reified, the next moment fluctuating, as I experience them and inhabit them differently and in changing conditions.

The Haunting of Genre Studies
Janet Giltrow said during this panel discussion: 'form comes back to haunt genre'. Genre theory needs to face its ghosts and find ways to attend to form and context, not to split the two or submerge one in the other, and to see genre as a dual phenomenon of semiotic life.

One way forward - working with this constantly returning ghost and not fearing it - might be to develop ways to read texts doubly, as both examples of genre and participations in generic change. We would need to be ready to see every utterance as both 'belonging' to genre, fitting in to established patterns and codes and exhibiting features of recurrence, but also stepping beyond those regularities and transforming them.

The aim of genre studies, then, would not be to read through instance towards type, or to describe structures amidst diversity. It would instead be to read the movements between types and instances as a two-way process, one that is not resolved by a hierarchy of instance belonging to type or instance folded into type.

An instance is not the product of a type or an illustration of a type, but a response, a dialogic instantiation of the resources of type in traffic with other instances which themselves draw on resources of type, but not necessarily in the same way. This would assume that images of types are constantly changing and revised; but also that such images are not the same for everyone. They will be experienced, calibrated and acted on slightly differently.

Following this lead, we might rethink form along the lines of practice and activity rather than code and structure. I do not 'use' form in the way I might 'use' a tool or a technique. Instead, I activate form, I practise it, I create it. I give form to my utterances, drawing on formal resources borrowed from others and the past, but also innovating in the new contexts in which I find myself.

Genres, as I now see them, are not structures but forms of activity - for borrowing, response and innovation.