Cinnabar and Alabaster

meta
316. what threadgold is doing: "reviewing" the book, but also "what Anne Freadman...calls an 'uptake,' a dialogic and intertextual response" and also "what she calls a 'not-statement,' that is, the kind of strategic and rhetorical action which testifies to the reality of generic constraints at precisely the moment when it proves that so-called generic constraints are no strait-jacket"; this acknowledging move allows readers "to locate [her] text among the circulating system of contrasts and differences that constitute recognisable and socially ratified textual processes in the specific contexts in and for which [she writes and we] read: [she is] however both constrained by that necessity and free, once [she accepts] the challenge of the other text, to move in a number of only probabalistically predictable directions." thus, "the construction of this is [her] 'mixed genre,' which...can in no way be isolated from those ideological and emotional investments in certain intellectual positions and frameworks which are always a part of the inevitable coming together of the discourses of 'structure' and 'agency' in any form of social action that leads to the production of a text"
318. devil's advocacy to the book's main theories, for the sake of: an argument in poetics (1987) says "'genres' are constituted by cognitive phenomena: they are not feature sets abstracted from media products....what we naturalise as genres (textual patternings) are in effect only the effects of cognitive 'media schemata' which become 'mental' only by means of verbal processes...and are developed through interactive behaviors which construe realities by means of communication. such media schemata are socially consensual modes of referring to reality...which also construct and stablize reality"; the "object" of "theorizing about genres" should thus not be genres but should be "the genre concepts shared by agents in a media system in a given society" <--in such a theory, media (genre) is both text and matter of conveyance.
320-1. point #1: Q if there's so much research & attention on the social semiotic, "why are systemic linguists and 'hallidayans' and critics of other more general semiotic persuasions...still so hung up on the formal properties of genres as text-types?" & A b/c "consciousness is formed through social processes" & "it is by mastering semiotically mediated processes and categories in social interaction that human consciousness is formed in the individual"; "there is a systematic, probabilistic...relationship between generic situation types in a culture and the co-patterning of features in the text that social agents produce in those situation types"
322-3. "there is no question here of 'the genre school' constructing boundaries. the boundaries are already very clearly drawn, and they are drawn throughout the social and cultural order"; "in a poststructuralist enthusiasm with openness and the deconstruction of totalizing systems, with a happily euphoric conviction that the play of difference will ensure slippage, shifts of meaning, we need...to ask ourselves why then things change so slowly, why so many patterns of meaning...remain apparently impervious to change"
328-9. ultimately, "the text is full of talk of stability and flexibility"; "there are differences [between the positions framed as 'in debate'], but they are not in any sense incompatible with 'hallidayan' positions writ large. in fact, halliday himself has always argued that langauge is only one semiotic system among many and that in order to understand how we make meanings with it we have to understand how we make meanings with all the other semiotics with which language interacts."