Zinèdine Zidane

Watching a football match will never be the same for me after I saw Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait at the Amsterdam Filmmuseum a few nights ago.

This film follows a single match (Real Madrid v. Villareal) through two alternating camera angles which make the sport of football (and the media upon which it thrives) utterly strange.

One view: the familiar, grandstand, wide-angle view of the pitch with TV commentary, but out of focus so that all the players run around looking fuzzy. Second view: seventeen sideline cameras permanently trained on the crystal-clear figure of Zinèdine Zidane.

And trained not just on the moments when Zidane gets the ball; also on the off-the-ball moments of intense observation, the rhythms of the match registered on that mesmerising face.

Two views, two media. The constant switching between these two perspectives - two different ways of seeing the sport of 'football' - coupled with the absence of the usual distractions of a typical match (the miskicks, the offsides, the waiting for injured players) and the intense background absorption of the crowd, all go to make 'football' feel totally different to what we expect under the ritual formulae of television.

So the effect is of media playing off each other, and competing for meaning. And the media wallpaper of commercial football - the shirts with mobile phone logos, the animated billboards, the crazy flashing scoreboard - get caught in the act, looking suddenly surreal.

Zidane's face is a film in itself. Rugged, focused, poised, tragic, a barometer of the whole match as it happens.

There's hardly any language in the film except for a few subtitled quotes from Zidane. 'When you are immersed in the game...you are never alone'.

Zidane does three remarkable things in the match where his footballing genius unwinds, and then confounds itself. He creates a superb goal with a long run through into the opponent's defence; sets up another goal with a darting run into the penalty area; and then gets involved in a fight and gets a red card.

The saturating intimacy of the cameras allows us to see some of this genius at work, and get insights into the economy of energy that makes it work, as well as the volatility that undermines it. But there are finally more questions than answers as Zidane is shown the red card and the film ends, with his team destined to win without him.

All at once, the prying camera demystifies a great talent, and restores its enigma.

During the interval there is no half-time orange. Instead, fragments of world news from that day in 2005, a reminder of a world outside football, but connected with it. Again a mix of media treatments, drawing images out of their normal domestication in 'news'.

At one point we see the familiar aftermath of a car bomb somewhere in the Middle East. In the foreground, a young boy with the number 5 and the word 'Zidane' on his back.
Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait, dir. Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno.

Writing to Get Into University

I am working at the moment with students from an international school in Amsterdam who are in their last year of high school and are preparing to go to university. My role as a writing consultant is to help them with the written part of their college applications - college essays in the US, personal statements in the UK.

The transition between school and university is a huge challenge as many posts on the excellent Student Room discussion forum confirm.

Students have to focus on their exam subjects in the school context and, at the same time, project themselves ahead into a largely unknown and rather daunting new context, that of the university. And in that precarious state of being between-contexts they have to be confident and competitive.

It's a tall order. It involves constant shifts between academic work in the present, which largely follows the school timetable, and questions about aptitudes, preferences, personality and self-presentation which point towards the future. These questions often fall through the cracks in the school curriculum. They are about identity as much as knowledge - 'who are you?' and 'what do you want to do?' as much as 'what do you know?'

I am interested in how this period of 'transition' makes students rethink constantly and develop new understandings about themselves, about what it means to study, about what it means to be 'academic', and about writing.

Transition from school to college involves a whole range of activities - researching online, networking, bulletin boards and chat, interviews, visits - which project students out of the school environment, even though the school might host them.

Writing is one of these practices. Success in getting into university is not just about writing in exams; it is also about strategically managing a lot of extra writing. Writing traces the transition from one identity to another; but, as far as college essays and personal statements are concerned, it is also transformed by universities into a device for the selection of students.

Listening to the students I am currently working with, transition writing is not just about essays and statements. There's a lot more going on: application forms, portfolios, letters, emails. Getting into university - managing the school-to-college transition - is a major literacy life-event aside from the writing that is formally assessed.

And of course a lot more than writing is involved, as millions of parents know. I was struck by this photograph from China which appeared last year on the BBC News website. It shows parents and students sleeping over in a large sports centre. They are waiting to register for one of Beijing's top universities:

Writing at the Border

I read a few days ago that Australia has become the latest country to introduce tests for immigrants seeking citizenship. The UK introduced similar tests in 2005 (see here) and the Netherlands has operated for some years a mandatory 'inburgering' course for immigrants with a test of national culture (see here).

Borders are about fences, like the recently erected fence between America and Mexico (see photo above). But they are also about language. Through the device of tests, language is being increasingly used to regulate and control movement across borders.

A lot of the work of controlling borders seems to come down to writing. Borders seem to be marked by written texts even at the time when, in other contexts, borders are becoming less certain and visible.

And like the notorious fence pictured above, these textual borders are both solid and porous, keeping people out but at the same time allowing them to get through.

Texts and Borders

I have my own story to tell about texts and borders. When I first started living in the Netherlands I had to carry with me a rather impersonal residence card with the word 'Vreemdeling' ('alien') in large bold capital letters at the top. Every time I used this card - at the post office, for example - I was reminded of my outsider status.

A few years ago the Dutch government, following an EU initiative, introduced smart new identity cards for EU citizens. Gone is any mention of the 'alien'; now my status here is as 'Brits Burger' (British Citizen) within the community of the European Union ('gemeenschapsonderdaan'). My card is adorned with a rather impressive charging bull, a symbol of EU solidarity.

My card is a text at the border. The way it has changed over the years illustrates political and legal changes in the way EU borders are represented, how they are both enforced and effaced, and how migration is seen.

I feel more comfortable with this card. 'Alien' was only a word; but it was a word I had to carry around with me everywhere, a word that kept reminding me of the border.

Testing Transitions

Tests are used to regulate transitions of all kinds: from one phase of schooling to another, from school to university, from one job to another. It is part of the work of writing, or the work writing has been put to.

In these recent developments, tests are designed to manage transition from one country to another, and to mark the difference between 'immigrant' and 'citizen', 'outsider' and 'insider'.

Tests have a double function: they make transitions possible, and block them too.

The citizenship tests I have seen are nearly all multiple choice. Test-makers generate the test papers from a bank of questions. So, in theory, the test-taker could prepare the right answers.

No surprise that a number of test preparation guides have come on the market with titles like 'Entering the UK: What you Need to Know'. These tend to break down the necessary information into info-bites (number of MPs in the House of Commons, dates of the English Civil War, number of people on a cricket team) which can be stored, memorised and repeated with as little leeway for interpretation as possible, presumably so that they can be machine-scored.

This is testing as the packaging of national identity, a literacy event designed to broker - and control - the movement of identity across borders. As so often before, literacy is charged with the job of policing, but wearing the disguise of empowerment.

Tests are genres, and like all genres have a politics. Those who have taken the UK test probably pick up very quickly that it is not so much about culture and history as much as the English language. The signs of written English are used in the test as vehicles of content, of 'information'; but isn't it those signs that are really under scrutiny, with literacy as the measuring rod?

Testing

The phenomenon of the written test is always caught up in the social ambiguities and give-and-take of language, but nevertheless bears the aura of a transparent event, the risky wager of language as pure content/pure representation. Behind testing lies the assumption that the mark I make in a test has a direct, representational link to what I am thinking. It functions as evidence - of what I know, what I believe, and what I can do. It isolates me, and is outside 'communication'. Miraculously, social context evaporates in the test, before which everyone is apparently equal.

Isn't that the power of tests - to create a sense of neutrality where 'context' disappears? A context without context.

In order for this test to work, words have to be emptied of their power as well as their ambiguity. They must become pure content so that pure form can be assessed. It's 'mastery' of 'the language' (as a system, as an object, as a skill) that is really being tested, and used to regulate both migration and identity.

In this article from The Indepedent newspaper, Pakistan-born novelist Moshe Hamid describes his experience of finishing the UK citizenship test early and seeing other candidates struggle with the wording of the questions, 'barely able even to begin':

It is only then that I realise what surely must be the real purpose of the test: to exclude the illiterate and those with a poor mastery of the English language. That is why it does not ask us the practical questions that might actually be of use to life in the UK - the number to dial for emergency services, for example, or how to register to vote - and instead focuses on arcane trivia unknown even to most native Britons.

On 'Copying'

The word 'plagiarism' seems to come up a lot nowadays in discussions about writing, and student writing in particular. I wonder: why now?

I have been reading a book about the legal history of plagiarism (The Little Book of Plagiarism by Richard Posner). This engaging book does not immediately assume criminal motives behind plagiarism - as so many university guides for students do - but recognises the complex cultural and moral issues behind the term and its shifting definitions. Also, how sensitivities around plagiarism are heightened by digital technology which makes the re-use of texts easy and widespread.

Plagiarism is one of those fuzzy concepts that is nevertheless used to make serious charges, usually akin to theft, fraud or deception. Posner's book recognises the need to be careful with terms in this area, to separate 'plagiarism' from 'copying', and both terms from 'infringement of copyright'. Often they are all lumped together.

Also, the need to distinguish between paraphrase as textual influence (or as the 'response' of one text to another) and paraphrase as deliberate plagiarism.

And, further, the need to recognise what he calls 'creative imitation' - how a text might rework, allude to, or borrow from a precursor or model. He gives some great examples here - Shakespeare's transformation of North's Plutarch in the Cleopatra barge description, Manet's allusion to Titian in his Olympia. We might add: rap artists' sampling, film directors' visual quoting, modern painters' collage.

Before slapping the word 'plagiarism' on a text, one would have to work through a number of other possibilities for what might be called 'copying'.

Simple, clear-cut accusations of plagiarism become more difficult if we accept that all texts are related to other texts and not just to their authors and/or readers. In many ways the digital world brings this inter-textual tracery more clearly into view; but it also muddies the waters of what we traditionally mean by 'authorship'.

Authors and Authorship

Most current debates about plagiarism still draw on a notion of the author - propositional, independent, originary - which much critical theory has challenged. I think at least some of the anxieties about plagiarism have something to do with this deconstruction, and its resistance.

Moreover, the digital world threatens the splendid isolation of the author as producer and 'owner' of texts. Writing nowadays is perhaps less a solitary than a collaborative act. It is, for example, a major commodity in online industries, like those where texts are packaged using templates, bought and sold (and re-sold) as models, ghost-written by stand-ins, or 'coached' online for a fee.

Writing, perhaps more than ever before, is a market, but the ruling notion of authorship is still based on originality. As Posner observes:

Ours is a time and place in which market forces favour originality and in which a robust concept of plagiarism backs up the market valuation.

However, looked at from another point of view, writing, rather than being the work of single authors, is increasingly absorbed in what the French social theorist Michel de Certeau called 'scriptural economies'. It was always so, but the digital world makes us more aware of it.

The current concern about plagiarism might be an attempt to shore up the idea of the sole author against the waves of those economies - and the profusion of available texts - which threaten it. And shoring up not just the sole author. Also the notion of 'grading', and the assumption upon which schooled writing depends - that a piece of writing can be incontrovertibly traced to an individual mind.

For me, the limitation of Posner's book is his uncritical acceptance of 'the market' as a determiner of writing's values:

...in a commercial society anything that fills an empty niche, however tiny, in market space has value, and that value is diminished by plagiarism.

Posner here adopts a market-oriented view of plagiarism and originality in which 'the book' is the main thing; he does not consider the possibility of textual practices bearing multiple values, and operating in different kinds of 'market spaces', even in the same society.

Interestingly, he does not discuss blogs and blogging, where 'originality' and 're-use' of texts play out differently to the book publishing world. He gestures to the new digital world; but his perspective stays locked in a juridical view of the individual and a capitalist view of the market.

'the copied text'

Linkage between 'copying' and 'criminality' is never far away when accusastions of plagiarism are made. Even Posner uses words like 'sin', 'culprit' and 'punishment' without much qualification, though it's striking how rare actual legal convictions for plagiarism are. It seems to be as much about social disgrace as punishment.

Against this background, it's quite hard to get other perspectives across. Plagiarism is seen usually as a moral/legal issue of theft of property and rarely as a psycholinguistic issue of development, for example, or a semiotic issue of composition (such perspectives would entail a change of terminology but would treat the same phenomenon). And the roots of this linkage lie in a Western tradition.

It seems to me that the western concept of plagiarism in academic writing owes a lot to the opposition of 'originality' and 'repetition'. To repeat is not to be original or to do anything new, apparently. If I cite the words of another then they must be counterpointed somehow to my 'own', authorial words. Authorship is here the frame that separates 'my own' from 'other' words, divides what is 'cited' from what is 'original'. If I cite, I must be an author.

But what about if I 'cite' without having words of my own to frame them? Am I then plagiarising? Am I then an author?

Aside from Derrida's acute and prolonged reservations about this problem of origin and citation (he argues for a profound 'citationality' in all language, in its dissemination), I am reminded of Walter Benjamin, who dreamed of writing an essay made up entirely of quotations from other authors.

Reading Benjamin again brings some much-needed fresh air into debates about plagiarism which are always tinged with anxiety and moral panic, and quasi-legalistic concerns that underestimate the slippery nature of words in use. This is not the least because of his awareness of textual practices in non-European cultures.

I love the sensuous movement of this passage, for example, from 'One-Way Street', which I copy here, word for word:

The power of a country road when one is walking along it is different from the power it has when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at a front.

Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits to its command. The Chinese practice of copying books was thus an incomparable guarantee of literary culture, and the transcript a key to China's enigmas.

Walter Benjamin, 'Chinese Curios' in 'One Way Street' (1926)

About Twitter

I found an interesting article about current communications technology at Read/Write Web which suggests that 'email is becoming an endangered species'.

Just when I was getting used to it!

The author, Alex Iskold, produces a four-way grid which sets 'one-to-one' against 'broadcast' communication, and 'slow/lengthy' against 'quick/compact' delivery.

Iskold suggests that social networking sites like Twitter are a possible way forward and occupy the fourth square on his grid - broadcast communication that is also quick and compact, with facility for immediate feedback.

I joined Twitter and it looks fun, but I don't know anyone else who uses it so I am broadcasting fast to no-one at the moment!

I can see the advantages of sites like Twitter which exploit the speed and real-time interaction of broadband, and add the archiving resources of a web site; but they also depend on the concept of a 'social network', a curiously closed - or maybe, ajar? - social phenomenon. I can't get away from the feeling of cliques. The designers have chosen the trope 'What are you doing at the moment?' as a message prompt, which rather enhances the idea of social chat, keeping in touch, being busy etc.

I don't have anyone on Twitter (a weird form of loneliness, or social isolation!) but I do have a large network through email. Could the latter possibly migrate to the former or something like it? Maybe. But the live-update process of Twitter seems to suit an informal, chunk-size register, whereas email seems more flexible and capable of accommodating multiple registers and message-types, and does not depend on a social network of 'friends' or 'followers'. Of course it also has 'broadcast' facilities, although, at the moment at least, it would be good to do without the spam!

Twitter - as its name suggests - is more of a chat medium/message board, and although it is potentially a 'broadcast' medium like YouTube or a blog, at the moment it resembles a glorified form of instant messaging, with perhaps a bit more outreach. It is suspended uneasily - and perhaps creatively so - between public broadcast, social group building, and private intimacy.

For the moment at least, email can do all this, and more, so I can only see sites like Twitter co-existing with email services, and eventually blending with them. One thing you can say about email is that it's really easy to get started - you only need to know one person - whereas getting into Twitter seems much more of a social challenge if you don't already have off-line contacts using it.

It's interesting, though, how those who design and market sites like Twitter do so explicitly with 'social networking' in mind. This term has migrated massively, and is as closely associated with the web now as the word 'information' was ten years ago.

Forever Falling Standards (or: How John Humphreys Nearly Killed Me)

It's approaching Autumn, so things must be falling, especially standards of literacy.....

If you judge by the media, and especially about late August time, standards of literacy have been falling for so long that it is surely amazing that anyone can still read anything (including the articles about 'the decline of literacy').

I can't remember a time in my adult life when someone wasn't complaining about 'falling standards' - 'students don't know x' or 'students have never have been taught y' (x and y here usually denoting 'spelling' or 'grammar').

It's a ready-made discourse of decline, following similar phrases every year. It's nearly always connected to writing, that vast shifting field of signs where so many ideologies meet and clash and where language is called on to wear every kind of disguise. But usually it's examined or tested writing that triggers the complaint mood, rather than the writing people might do for enjoyment or in their social lives.

Nobody ever talks about 'falling standards of blogging', for example, or 'falling standards in web design', although both involve lots of writing. Maybe they have not risen high enough yet to be able to 'fall'.

No-one ever sits down to actually define it, but it seems there was a golden age when everyone could read and write - and be taught to do so - perfectly, and since that time we have 'fallen'. But where?

Somewhere. To the present. To a place where 'writing', in a million guises, takes place all the time, ceaselessly, and with unprecedented success and diversity. Where the rise of mass global literacy has been one of the great success stories of the last hundred years.

But still people need to believe that literacy's past was better than its present - and its future is barely imaginable.

It's funny, though, that the language of complaint about literacy - a language with its own ritual terrain and taboos, automatically triggered every year by A-level results in the UK (so in August) - rarely acknowledges 'literacy' as itself a changing phenomenon, susceptible to new technologies, new social movements, new styles of communication, to a plural rather than a singular destiny, and not a thing.

Of course 'writing' does not always get such a bad press. On another day, and in another mood, the media will report on new technologies - also new literacies - with unbridled enthusiasm and interest. Then 'writing' enters a brave new world of participation and empowerment, all eyes to the future, not a word of complaint.

It's writing at school, examined writing, student writing, that inspires the dull sense of falling somewhere bad from somewhere better, and the media responds to this powerful strand in the public imagination with an obedient discourse, one that can be easily recycled.

Why is this discourse so durable? In order to keep believing that 'standards have fallen', the complainer must keep believing in 'literacy' as a fixed institution, a thing outside history, immutable, sacred. It must be something schooled and examinable, thus repeatable. And, above all, something measurable. Also, perhaps, a guarantor of the nation, of national identity.

Hence, there will be a nostalgia for the past - or a longing for another country - when it seems like things have 'fallen' out of control in the present, when things are no longer repeated as before, or can't be measured with certainty (how can something as subjective and intangible as a 'standard' be measured?), when 'schooling' seems to have failed to reproduce the past. In a word, when there is change.

But in my view, if literacy is about anything, it is about change.

Resisting a Culture of Complaint

Actually, this discourse of complaint would not bother me so much if it had not once nearly ended my life. I was in my mid twenties, teaching English at a comprehensive school in Huntingdon. I was driving home along the A604 after watching a class of fifteen-year-olds give presentations based on their essays on Hamlet. I had been impressed by their work, and moved by it, and inspired by it, and I remember thinking 'I love my job'.

The voice of John Humphreys on the Today programme managed to change my mood. In an item about 'education', I listened to the usual weary mantra of complaint unfold. 'Standards of literacy in schools have reached an all-time low' ('all-time?' Are you nuts??') boomed that confident, knowing voice. With the image of my Hamlet students and their work - insightful, passionate, careful, literate, contemporary - fresh in my mind, I seethed with anger and despair. I was livid. 'An all-time low? You mean, in the whole of human history? How can you allow your voice to say these inane things?'

I imagined filling the Today programme studio with the students from my class and making John Humphreys actually listen to them, to another source of power, to another voice, one that has no consciousness of being fallen.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the mantra of falling standards nearly killed me that day. My concentration thrown, rage almost led me to drive into the back of a lorry. I pulled off the road, switched off the radio, and calmed down, lucky to be alive. It was the monologue of 'falling standards', in defiance of what I was actually seeing and experiencing, that had driven me mad.

I then decided I would dedicate my life to resisting this hopeless mood, to putting alternative ways of thinking into play, to fostering other kinds of social imagination about language and literacy, even if only for myself (the only person one can ever really change). And to believing that discourse lives always in the future, which is unwritten.

Resisting the voice of John Humphreys, the Today programme, the culture of complaint. Not to 'fall', not to be 'fallen'.

It's a small thing, and what happened that day was entirely 'my fault'. Every August it comes back to me, and I shudder to think.

Except, I realised then that 'discourse' is never just about words and opinions. It has effects too. It can hit you in the stomach. It can be a weapon of power regardless of what is actually being 'said'. Insidious and deadly and complaisant, it can steal pathways into the body as well as the mind.

Every August it comes back to me: the need to struggle for your own voice, not as an inner searching but as a response, and in doing so turning the languages of power against themselves.

Viva La Kalle!

On my recent trip to New York I found myself not only hearing but also using Spanish within a few hours of arriving. Once again proof to me that Spanish is emerging not just as the 'second language' of America but increasingly, in some areas and in some contexts, as a 'co-language', a partner - and maybe rival - to the dominant.

The Puerto Rican driver of the shuttle bus to my hotel was listening to 'La Kalle', a new radio station aimed at the 16-25 demographic of Hispanic Americans living in the New York region.

Interspersed with reggaetón music, the talk on the station is in both Spanish and English, with no clear line of demarcation between the languages. The announcers move in and out of the two idiomas, weaving them into one radio language, a hybrid production entirely accessible to millions of today's Americans, reflecting their everyday experience living in - and between - two languages.

Listening to 'La Kalle', the whole idea of a language as a single system with a grammar and a set of rules seems to crumble. The shifts between Spanish and English may be at the end of a sentence, in the middle of one, or just on the turn of a single word or phrase.

Having listened to the station a bit more on the Internet since my visit, I have given up trying to analyse or predict when a 'shift' or 'switch' will be made. After some time I actually stop noticing, the combining of languages becomes so embedded and natural. And a great help for me in improving my Spanish! (And thinking differently about English....).

Hablamos Los Dos

As I listen to 'La Kalle', I am thinking of the question: 'Why do people switch languages?'. We might look to situational and functional explanations, or personal choices, or political affinities. But I wonder if some 'switching' is more a kind of creativity; an interlacing or meshing, a way of bringing supposedly separate things together into one form of production through the medium of the spoken voice, and making relationships of style.

In some of the talk on 'La Kalle', every utterance is like a bridge thrown between one language and another. There may not be a 'reason' to change language except to keep the discourse in touch with its partner, its parallel-idioma.

A few years ago I read Ann Celia Zentella's book Growing Up Bilingual, a study of New York-Puerto Rican children's bilingual styles of speech. She suggested in her study that almost half of all switches were to do with identity and not with function or situation. For the children in her study, mixing - or meshing -English and Spanish was about having 'a foot in both worlds':

Because they had a foot in both worlds, they never spoke in one for very long without acknowledging and incorporating the other, especially in informal speech. (Zentella, 120)

My inquisitiveness on the shuttle bus listening to the female announcer on 'La Kalle' eventually got the better of me.

'Cuando ella cambia la idioma?' ['When does she change language?']

'Porqué pregunta usted?' ['Why do you ask?']

'Yo soy estudiante de lenguas. Me interesa, cómo cambian tanto....' ['I am a student of languages. It interests me, how much they change..']

'Pero, eso es normal. Hablamos los dos. 'La Kalle', lo han hecho para nosotros'. ['But, this is normal. We speak both. They have done it - La Kalle - for us.']

La Kalle, Nueva Yorka

My Garden at the Moment....

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.

Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky 99c

During a visit to MoMa in New York last week I was once again captivated by the photographs of Andreas Gursky. This is not the first time I have had a 'Gursky experience'. His photos are also in the Tate Modern in London, another place like MoMa which usually sends me away a slightly different person.

Let me try to say what it is about Gursky that I like, with my limited knowledge of photography.

Gursky's photos are no doubt compositions as studied as they are high res. But they seem spontaneous. The iconic 99c (above) is a good example. It is, perhaps, a contrived scene made by methodical placement of items in rows, as some amateur photographers on Flickr have recently implied. For example, There are hardly any items hanging down in the picture, as you usually find in these peculiarly American bargain stores where everything costs less than a dollar. In Gursky's picture it all looks serenely neat and tidy.

(I went in one of these stores last week just off Sixth Avenue and was struck how un-Gursky it looked, more like a rag-bag jumble sale than serried ranks of commodified objects).

Even so, the photograph looks so natural and unforced. It's like a panoramic glimpse, a sudden revelation of the unnoticed, the mundane come to life in an instant, the everyday wrapped in the stillness of routine. It's like a scene we have all seen, but not witnessed. It's so American, and so real. And no wonder people spend ages in front of this photograph.

I remember seeing 99c for the first time and getting pleasantly lost in it. I get this roaming feeling - as if looking is not constrained by the frame but almost forgets it in the plethora of detail - with many of Gursky's photos: the Chicago trading floor, the Montparnesse flats, the May Day crowd. It's as if there is no centre to these pictures, except the one (or ones) that you make for yourself. The composition is in the details, and the manner in which the details both hang together in a single scene and, at the same time, pull away from that scene, assert their own minute individuality.

From a distance, Gursky's compositions look like 'the same thing'; but then they burst into an abundance of detail which is seemingly endless. There is a tension which does not resolve between the 'context' and these stubborn, quirky little details. They conform, but also resist.

What he captures - but this is not the right verb at all, since his work is not about pinning something down but releasing something, letting it go - is the profusion of uniqueness in repetition. Each Montparnesse flat window looks 'the same'. But each window is uniquely different despite that sameness. You get lost in the closer look that dis-proves the first impression.

In Roland Barthe's terms, Gursky is all 'stubborn detail', what he called punctum. This is the detail in a photograph which appears incidental to the main topic or function - the studium - but which you can't take your eyes from, you keep coming back to. It's the detail which compels an emotional attention, the small thing that sticks in the memory. In each Gursky photo there are dozens of puncta - stubbornly interesting details which create mini-narratives of their own, sometimes at odds with the big picture, always pulling centres away into profusion, losing the viewer.

Here the 'frame' becomes important. What is the purpose of the frame in Gursky's photographs? The frame reminds us that we are dealing with an artifact, a construction, a positioned view of the world. But the frame does not tell us necessarily how to read the photograph. The frame is so benign it could be moved and the profusion of detail would persist. It's a framing that wishes to give itself up as much as it also invites us into the image, and allows us to get lost in compelling detail.
For more on Andreas Gursky, see this MoMa page

Photograph 'London, art' courtesy of 'hinke' on Flickr, see here.

Writing in Space and Time

I have been reading an article by Peter Elbow with the title 'The Music of Form: Rethinking Organization in Writing'.

Elbow's main point is that there are two main principles or 'forces' of organisation in play when we write: a force of energy which is time-oriented, and a force of arrangement which is space-oriented. He argues that the teaching of writing has favoured the spatial principle. Teaching has been 'hostage to a spatial metaphor', he says. Our understanding of the temporal principle has lagged behind, dwarfed by 'a monopoly of vision and space in our concept of organisation'.

I think that Elbow's distinction is very useful. That writing is an event in time as much as an arrangement of words in space is powerfully apparent every time we write. We can't escape fully into space and write 'outside' time; but nor can we escape the other way, from space into pure time. Writing - as Kress would say - is 'multi-modal', taking place in both space and time. But, for some reason, space has dominated.

It is maybe an example of what Derrida called' the exorbitant privilege of the eye'.

Energy and Composition

Space and time: the two forces are in play - and at play - whenever we write. Elbow uses the word 'energy' only in relation to the temporal force. I would rather see energy at work in both space and time.

At this point I am thinking of Hiroshige's great painting usually called 'The Wave' (above). The wave that never breaks, but is forever breaking. The painting seems to capture a moment when both spatial and temporal energies are at work and are unresolved by composition, though harnessed by it. The ferocious energy of the wave about to break is both contained by arrangement and precariously threatening to break out of it, to capsize and overwhelm it. Mount Fuji in the background provides a kind of central focus of stability and calm, oddly mirrored by the peaking wave in the foreground. There is the spatial force. But the tumultuous rising and breaking waves on either side seem to introduce a force of time into the painting, as if no frame could hold back its potential power and anarchy.

Composition - when it is alert and convincing and powerful - uses energy of both space and time. Maybe that is why meticulously arranged and structured writing can sometimes seem lifeless and dull. It's got the space, but it has no time.

Too Much Space in the Teaching of Writing?

It seems to me that a heightened awareness of time (a deadline, the rhythm of a sentence, the sequence of ideas in an argument) hits us at certain points when we write; whereas an awareness of space (layout, design, structure) hits us more strongly at other points. But both awarenesses clearly interact. When I say that a piece of writing 'unfolds', it seems to me that I am drawing simultaneously on metaphors of both space and time.

I think that Elbow is right in saying that the teaching of writing has relied so heavily on spatial arrangement. I can hear it in my own teaching. I can hear myself stressing the need for 'outline' and 'structure' when I talk about 'organisation', rather than qualities of rhythm, for example, or voice, or perplexity. Or the myriad ways in which the flow of language can show the movement of thought.

I stress the need for writer's to 'envision' a text, to 'see it' in advance. I can hear myself recommending 'signposts' and 'mapping', urging the need to 'orientate the reader' and 'give the reader direction', showing examples of 'planning' and 'overviews', underlining the importance of 'focus' and 'clarity'.

All these words privilege the idea that writing takes place primarily in space as an arrangement, and suppress the idea that writing takes place in time as an event. They favour the eye over the ear, the voice, and the rest of the body too. They favour the idea that writing reflects thought rather than moves through it.

Peter Elbow's essay shows me a limitation in my teaching, but also points to an area of growth. For some time I have been uneasy about a spatial bias in my teaching, and his essay makes me aware of it; but it also releases into theoretical light the alternative, countervailing energies of time which are always present in writing and which complement - and complicate - space.

A few months back I was leading a workshop on drafting. I became aware of the fixation on space in my approach to writing and started to think about the rest of the body in the act of writing. Writing, I realised, is a listening, a speaking, a tactile experience, a physical movement, even at times an olfactory moment, and not just a visual projection. Writing listens, talks, moves, feels, even smells. It breathes, screams, whispers, shouts for joy. And we use these words all the time to describe written communication. And yet my teaching seemed to neglect them.

In trying to put across the traditional idea of 'structure' in my teaching I want to release at the same time notions of time. So when I talk about 'signposts' I also want to release talk about 'transition'. When I talk about 'mapping' I also want to talk about 'journeys'. So metaphors of space and time can be made to move in and out of each other. Or to release one another.

Elbow's essay does what a great essay should do: it illuminates what I have already experienced, and beckons me to what I have not yet known.

Peter Elbow, The Music of Form: Rethinking Organization' in College Composition and Communication, Volume 57: 4, June 2006

Copy/Paste

Copy/paste has a poor press. It is usually seen as reductive, mindless, lazy - the textual equivalent of 'dumbing down'. It implies 'this is not your own work'. People talk about 'the copy/paste culture' to decry lack of originality - in writing, in music, in film.

Except that, of course, everybody does it. And it has rapidly become part of the grammar of composition in our time. Copy/paste takes place all the time now in 'writing', but also has its equivalents in music and film, increasingly accessible to everyone with a computer or a mobile phone.

I am rethinking copy/paste. I see copy/paste as a citational activity. It's a form of quotation buried in the everyday.

Copy/paste appears to be a two-part process. I copy, I paste. But is it?

In Derrida's terms there are three, not two, parts to any citational move or 'borrowing': highlight, graft, extend.

Maybe Microsoft could make something out of that. I copy, I paste, I redirect?

Can anything be 100% copied? Don't we intervene all the time in what we 'copy'? If I 'copy' from one context and move the piece of text - however slight and humdrum it may be - to another context where I then 'paste' it - have I not also changed the original piece of text? It's now out of context, as all citation must be.

/Slash/

I copy/paste a lot but I no longer see it as a two-part function. The slash separating those two business-like verbs is where all the action is. It is a diverse middle-ground, potentially as subtle and context-sensitive as language itself.

As I use it, I am aware of copy/paste as a choice, with its own resources and limitations. It is not just about using another person's words and presenting them or re-using them as my 'own'. It is also a platform for response and commentary. It is a site for making new texts out of old ones, for borrowing and transformation. It is perhaps an example of what the French linguist Frederick Francois calls reprise-modification.

And it's also about efficiency, accuracy of re-presentation, saving time and energy.

Rather than teach a grammar of formulation, perhaps we should take a closer and more detailed look at copy/paste as a grammar of event and not structure, a grammar of intertextuality. It is one of those everyday sites that a focus on grammar as a logic of system, rather than a logic of event, will not allow us to see.

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Last week I did a workshop in a primary school on research skills. I was struck by how net-savvy the ten-year-old students were, how quickly they all recognised and used words related to the net and could talk easily about search engines, web sites and blogging. It's their world and they are entirely at home in it. And that includes copy/paste. Not as a passive or reductive operation but as a resource in a wider repertoire of movement between texts, of intertextuality.

However, the familiar problems which I noticed in observing children's online research three years ago - the overload of 'information', not knowing how to evaluate the usefulness of web sites, copying or highlighting chunks of text without knowing how to modify them or use them in a new way - these are clearly still problems in learning research skills in the world of the web. Teaching needs to address them in the context of the web search engine as much as the information book.

It was a fun workshop. Research can be a lot of fun. We made some progress by focusing on the need to have good research questions and on how to read, evaluate and exploit sources proactively, for specific purposes rather than passively storing masses of material.

But I left the workshop feeling, not for the first time, rather uneasy and swept out to sea. Once again that feeling that 'writing' and 'reading' are undergoing such revolutionary changes that cherished, schooled notions like 'write in your own words' are no longer useful.

We need to think of authorship in new ways, outside the rituals of education which insist on writing as a 'skill' that you can possess rather than a set of practices in which you can participate.

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Where does academic writing begin?

I think these early engagements with 'information' in the primary school are the places where 'academic writing' begins.

Academic writing does not begin with being able to write per se. It begins with reading and writing together. Or, better, the practices which transfer language-as-read into language-as-written, and back again. I call these intertextual practices. I think they lurk in the undergrowth of all ecologies of literacy. They are often so ubiquitous that they seem invisible.

Quotation, paraphrase and referencing are mainfestly intertextual; but these are just the most explicitly marked and visible examples of a phenomenon dispersed through language and life. In them I would now include the much-maligned but nevertheless widely-used copy/paste.

Learning to write in academic and disciplinary ways is not just about essay-writing, formulation of sentences or 'argument'. It is about inhabiting and using other people's words, and knowing how to transform the weight of the already-written into new writing, borrowed words into 'my own words'. It is about acting intertextually. Style arises in the intertextual, not purely in the expressive.

As research activity moves more and more to the web and away from print sources - and for the ten-year-olds in my workshop most research will be predominantly web-based - the operations of reading and writing become so closely connected that at some moments they almost seem like one.

In fact, watching people use the web in public places like libraries, it is amazing how much writing is going on as part of reading, how much text is being created as it is consumed, how deftly keyboards and scroll bars and menus are being used to manipulate text and not just 'read' it.

The textul environments of the web invite multiple reading pathways; but they also invite writing - as response, annotation, feedback, creation. Using web text is rarely just about reading as we traditionally conceive it - decoding, absorbing, receiving meaning - but something increasingly more dynamic and interactive. We read, but we also get involved physically in what we read. We copy, translate, edit, annotate, respond.

Walter Benjamin's prediction about the rise of the mass media:

At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer

has come vividly true with the web.

In order to teach web research we need to see reading and writing not only as connected skills, but also as acts of design. As I read a text, I also re-make it. I don't just record 'information'. I transform it.

Copy/paste is part of the design vocabulary of text-making. It is widespread and diverse, though still curiously frowned on.

Rather than see it as a reduction of text, I would like to see it as a sign of diversity and change.

Why I Love Reading Bakhtin

I realised the other day that of all the authors I read at university the one who has stayed with me the most is one who was not on any syllabus. That author is now a star everywhere in academic circles; but I discovered Mikhail Bakhtin by chance, aside from the academic world. And it changed my life.

I first discovered the work of Bakhtin through 'The Dialogic Imagination' when I was at university in the mid 1980s. Bakhtin's work was at that time not widely available in English. I can't remember him being mentioned once in lectures in the Cambridge English Faculty, then a maimed dragon chasing its tail about questions like 'What is Literature?', lumbering its way to the great wide ocean of words like 'discourse'.

Reading Bakhtin, off the syllabus, provided me with my best education.

The Cambridge University Library had one copy of the book I loved. I must have borrowed it a dozen times, layering it with notes and annotations and questions. A fellow reader was doing the same thing. We would comment on the same passages. After a while I found myself reading and responding not just to the Bakhtinian text, but to this other, unknown interlocutor and the improvisatory text that we were together weaving amidst Bakhtin's own. I always hoped I would meet this person, this co-reader.

Now, when I have my 'own' Bakhtin and have no need to go to the library, I still feel that sense of improvisation when I read Bakhtin's words, working on a borrowed text that is shared space, living in a world of other's words, a world resounding with many voices, including my own from the past.

Discovering Bakhtin like this was a dialogic experience, one that placed my reading in a world decidedly outside that of the 'English Literature' course I was following. I don't think I ever put Bakhtin in an essay as that world of ideas I discovered seemed already remote from academic work, or maybe resistant to it.

It's a world I have not stopped exploring since. A world both rooted and wandering, both companionable and homeless. But above all a passionate world, where it's possible to love ideas and be an artist of them.

'The Dialogic Imagination', 'Speech Genres' and other books have accompanied me in my travels and migrations. I measure and evaluate a bit of my life through readings of Bakhtin - on beaches, in gardens, in hotel rooms, in Amsterdam cafes, in Parisian parks, on the London underground. Once I nearly left Bakhtin's book on Dostoyevsky in a taxi. More than once I spilt red wine on 'Rabelais and His World'. And when flying, I always take my copy of Bakhtin in hand luggage for fear that it may end up in a lost suitcase. Now my daughters even recognise the books when we travel. It's that Russian guy again!

A few years ago I started my second copy of 'Speech Genres' after the first one became so interleaved with my notes that I could no longer read the 'original' words.

What is the love of reading Bakhtin? For me it is not a comforting thing, nor is it about escape. It is a challenge, it is a juggling of many perspectives, and it is a stretching of the mind outside the bounds of its normal assumptions. It is about friendship, but also about estrangement. It is a familiar place, but always renewed. It is sometimes an exasperation; but it is never boring.

I feel a kind of resistance when I read anything by Bakhtin. That just reading him is about resisting, swimming against the current of habitual thought, the current of words we habitually use to discuss 'language', 'writing', 'texts'. I mean words like 'expression' and 'skill' and even 'communication'.

Reading Bakhtin resists, but also blows fresh air through the institution of these words. The more I read Bakhtin the more wary I become of these words. We rely on them too much, I think. They seem to languish in what he called 'the dungeon of a single context'.

More than once, reading Bakhtin, I have had that awesome feeling that Montaigne had about books and had inscribed above his library: Que sais je? In Bakhtinian thought lies something that shakes the foundations of my everyday thinking, something mysterious that has me listening at the edge of myself.

So Bakhtin's a great read. But not so good when you are trying to sleep.

What is it about Bakhtin?

Let me revisit once again one of those Bakhtinian moments that has kept me awake and alert:

Our speech, that is, all our utterances (including creative works), is filled with others' words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of 'our-own-ness', varying degrees of awareness and detachment. These words of others carry with them their own expression, their own evaluative tone, which we assimilate, rework, and re-accentuate.

These words, it always seems to me, go right to the heart of Bakhtin's dialogic theory of language. They enact a theoretical position mid-way between social and individual concerns, but without resorting to a binary opposition between 'the social' and 'the individual'. They neither hold out the promise of a unifying system, nor point up an endless antagonism between self and society.

Bakhtin's work suggests to me: my utterance is never fully 'my own'. It is always, to some extent, 'double-voiced'. It is expressive, but never in isolation from social forces, from otherness, from what Bakhtin elsewhere calls addressivity. Those 'forces', however, do not necessarily come at me in batallions. They do not always appear like hard-edged edifices I must climb, or as secret codes I must master, and never as anything as clear-cut as 'structures'.

Those 'forces' of the social approach me not as whole structures, but in fragments - in the words and phrases of other people. They may enter me, circulate around me, become part of me, as words and phrases. I may struggle with them, accepting some - but always re-accentuating them too - and resisting others. And my words in turn will have traces, echoes, provenances.

I look for words. But it is also true that words look for me.

Bakhtin's vision does not set 'the social' against 'the individual' like a permanent stand-off or a dialectical step to a higher unity. The one is always involved dialogically - not dialectically - in the other. Consequently, I choose words; but words also settle in me, dispose me and position me in certain ways.

So this quality of 'double-voice' does not mean a loss of self. It is not an accommodation of personal meanings to social conventions, a smothering of intention in code. It means that my voice, my authorship, my words, emerge and become possible through the social affordances of discourse.

Such conditions - the conditions of discourse which I inhabit - do not determine me. I also act. I assimilate, rework, re-accentuate. My words are always, in some measure, a response.

I live in a world of others' words.

This perspective is threatening only to those who adhere to a raw, unmediated subject, or those who think that a text can be made permanently to stand alone in the world.

Nobody owns language or the conditions in which language is produced. At the same time, every utterance is unique in its space and time and its personal accentuations, its relational work as an utterance.

This is not to say that just anyone can be free with language at any time. If only this were true!My freedom should mean a freedom to re-accentuate, to transform and remake inherited discourses, including those which hold power over me, initially taking over other people's words by repeating them, and then introducing my own notes, my own accents. It is a freedom to answer as much as a freedom to speak.

The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions; it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own.

Education, in my view, must be based primarily on 'moments of appropriation'. Dialogue must be its key process.

My own work is dedicated to understanding the textual processes of appropriation-as-dialogue. I am interested in how writers, when picking up new genres in new conditions, learn to take the word in its already signifying contexts, and make it their own in new contexts. I study how we convert the otherness of discourse from something forbidding or mysterious into something we can answer and work with, transforming it from a monolithic imposition into a dialogic resource. This means looking at how social resources such as genres contain invitational features in their living histories. And how the word - once taken, once renewed - continues to be double-voiced, continues to bear the constitutive traces of 'otherness' alongside 'my own-ness', and in turn becomes a resource for new appropriations.

Of course, such a process is never as smooth as hopeful educational metaphors ('growth', 'skills', 'targets') might make it sound.

Words do not always come easily:

And not all words for just anyone submit equally easily to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property; many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated - overpopulated - with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.

Nobody owns language. Instead, we rent it out for a long period of time. Some people seem to get off rent-free when it comes to the languages of power and influence. Words pass in and out of them easily. Fluency comes - it seems - naturally. Others (and I include myself in this group) pay a rent. Words come, but only after long struggle. It would seem that many pay, but get very little back. Words continue to escape, or they stay with us but 'sound foreign in the mouth', or are forever overshadowed by the contexts of authority from which they were taken.

And then there are the millions who sleep, as it were, on the streets, hovering on the edges of the languages of power, but still subject to them.

Reading Bakhtin is a kind of love. Revisiting Bakhtin always brings me, like this, out of myself.

Learning to Read Wikipedia

I am fascinated by Wikipedia. I can happily spend hours there surfing definitions, following links and making citations.

I am also studying myself as a reader.

Surfing, linking, citing: three literacy practices which are changing the nature of reading and how we make meaning with text.

Wikipedias are places where many people are working together to make encyclopedias in many languages. They produce a collaborative and amorphous public text. It can, in theory, be added to or amended by anyone, with editorial control held (again, in theory) by a group of interested people rather than an academic authority.

Wikipedia raises tantalising questions about knowledge construction, learning and the nature of 'expertise'. 'Knowledge' is no longer the statement of an academic authority. It exists in the public commons, rather than the academic common room. Encyclopedic knowledge grows; it is not stated or given.

Wikipedia began, like much else on the Internet, in English. But it has become a multilingual enterprise, with wikis proliferating in many other languages. This is not just a matter of translation. It is also the production - the remediation - of meaning in diverse contexts. So definitions move like citations, through languages as well as social contexts.

In my work studying children researching for school projects, I notice how much Wikipedia has become the information source of choice. It often springs to the top in search engines. But it also accommodates children through the inclusion of a 'simple English' version.

My daughter, aged nine, first introduced me to Wikipedia Simple English. She found it on her own. In searching using key words such as 'pyramids' for school projects she was encountering the biggest problem of the web as an information source - excess and overload. But also the web sites she found were often written in complicated and impenetrable language. She was finding it hard to get a 'way in' as a reader.

She had lots of pictures of pyramids, but found most written text about them hard-going. She also found that web sites often recycle the same piece of text - probably scanned originally from a print encyclopedia - and the piece of text is usually not aimed at a nine-year-old.

When she searched 'pyramids simple English' she found that Wikipedia had anticipated her needs.

So instead of this:

A pyramid is any man-made structure where the upper surfaces are triangular and converge on one point. The base of a pyramid may be either quadrilateral or trilateral, meaning that a pyramid may have either three or four vertical sides, but all pyramids must have trilateral sides. The measurements of these triangles uniformly classify the shape as isosceles and sometimes equilateral.

She read this:

A pyramid is a shape. It typically has a square bottom with four triangular sides that get narrower as they approach the point at the top, called the "apex". A pyramid that has a triangle as its base instead of a square is called a tetrahedron.

Wikipedia, perhaps more than any other source, allows us to see the many voices of knowledge-making at work. Knowledge is always contested through language choices but this fact has been concealed by the monologic authority of the text book and the print encyclopedia.

So what is a pyramid?

The first extract above typifies many aspects of 'academic writing' - in sentence structures and subordinations, in vocabulary, in the mix of modalities - concessions, contrasts, insistences ('may be...but...must...') - that make for careful prose definitions. Maybe this care is a sign of a collaboratively produced text.

But what about the 'simple' version? Is the 'simple English' definition a translation of the academic into the vernacular? Not really. It remediates the whole idea of a pyramid by calling it a 'shape' (this word not used in the first definition) instead of a 'man-made structure'.

Is the 'simple' wiki version simply a matter of easy reading? Or does it signal another way of knowing pyramids? If a pyramid is 'a shape' can it not also exist in nature? Does it have to be 'man-made'?

The Simple English Wikipedia looks like a very useful research tool for information literacy - but also for critical literacy too. Knowledge is visibly contested - or debated, or re-configured - even when a principle of 'translation' is applied. The shift to another verbal context does not mean that we are still talking about the 'same thing'. The simple English wiki involves acts of citation, but also invention.

It is interesting that 'information' in wikipedia is no longer a literal storage and provision of facts, of truth, as in the tradition of encyclopedic knowledge from Diderot. It is more of a dialogue of
versions. Multiple contexts of knowledge-making are built in to the same site. Critical interpretation becomes a necessity in the act of reading.

When I read Wikipedia I am not just taking meaning off the shelf of authority. I am also questioning it. Is this piece of information true? Is it complete? Is it clear? Can the wording be improved? Is there anything I can add? Text becomes susceptible to transformation as part of the practice of reading. As I read, I also 'write'.


Learning to read and write in the information age is about being able to participate in these dialogues.

The Visual Thesaurus

I can't keep away from the Visual Thesaurus, produced by an aptly-named company called Thinkmap.

If you type in a word it displays synonyms in an array around the keyword, each item dangling like a flower on a stem. I love the opening few seconds when the word appears and seems to throw out its synonyms, as if generating them one by one.

If you then click on one of the synonyms the array dances into a new position around that word, producing all manner of shapes and clustered patterns.

It's now a cliche to say that web technology like Java gives us a more spatially dynamic and fluid experience of text. I can imagine essays written like this visual thesaurus. Each stem could be a paragraph or a citation. The reader selects a path and builds a text from a map and not from a writer's linear 'argument' or 'narrative'. Genres explode. Writing is scattered.

Using this thesaurus offers possibilities for exploring language that the old linear Roget's did not. But I can also imagine it being useless for writers looking for a good word for a worn-out one. It carries you away into the forest of words. This new technology is not based on the notion of a list, a catalogue, an archive, as much as a theatre, a spectacle of language.

But something else intrigues me about the Visual Thesaurus. It is the movement of words. I like the idea of text materially moving and re-assembling itself in new relations. I think we do this when we read - we transpose, transplant, dislocate, interconnect, abbreviate and expand the textual elements we are reading, always transforming what we try to understand. We follow writers, but subvert them too.

But here there is a glimpse of something else, of alert and dynamic movement - of agency? - in words themselves.

Except I am taken in by the technology, of course. Somebody has decreed those dancing stems and arranged those word-bouquets. Language moves here; but it is still turned into an institution, a system, and a commodity. There is still the idea of a centre and a periphery, of equals and opposites, of an orderly world of signifiers.

Except there is a moment of anarchy and unexpectedness, when the technology is at work and words are on the move, which you can't get from the linear printed page.

Visual Thesaurus.