Genre and Power
GENRE has an interesting relationship with POWER in the sense that GENRES exist as patterns prior to individual acts of communication, constraining the way in which individuals communicate through language. That is not to say that GENRES cannot be adapted, resisted, subverted, hybridised, parodied, ignored, or replaced. But to do any of these things is to position oneself in relation to an existing framework of expectations – or, to put it another way, in relation to an external authority. The nature of this authority varies a lot from GENRE to GENRE and between times and places.
Some GENRES are the concern of the educational system and are drilled into children along with a kind of ideological account of them. This, it is made clear, is the proper way to write. (Speech has been less of a concern in the British system.) Thinking about how GENRE is embedded in education, it strikes me that the situation is very complex. Earlier generations would have received training in the conventions for writing different kinds of letters and there are textbooks that include samples of many different types of correspondence. I have just used Google books to take a look at one: A Treatise on Commercial Correspondence by Benjamin Bayly of Spitalfields, published in London in 1862 and intended ‘for the use of Schools, Seminaries, and for the Instruction of Youth’. It includes patterns for ‘an order’, ‘a bill of parcels’, ‘an invoice’, ‘a cheque’, ‘a bill of exchange’, ‘a promissory note’, ‘a letter of advice’, ‘a bill of lading’, and so forth. There is no doubt, I think, that this kind of knowledge was important for individuals seeking work in the commercial world and would have been of practical use to those working as clerks in business or industry. But the educational system has traditionally trained children in other, less ‘useful’ genres – the essay, for example, which has never had any place in commercial life and has strongly literary antecedents. (Montaigne and Bacon wrote essays, as did the eighteenth-century philosophes.) Training in writing essays was, in a sense, an induction into higher levels of education, a requirement for entry into the university.
Both these examples have a historical quality – the writing of letters and essays is no longer prioritised in education as it once was and I would like to hear Kate’s thoughts on this. Has educational policy and practice moved away from a focus on these very formally defined generic conventions? Have new genres moved to centre stage? Or are the conventions of writing communicated differently?
At any rate, although the school is one site in which GENRE becomes connected with POWER, it is not the only one. I mentioned earlier that the inscriptions on tomb stones might be seen in terms of GENRE. (And, actually, there is a cluster of GENRES surrounding the event of a person’s death – the eulogy, the obituary, the epitaph – some spoken, some written, and some quite literary in character.) The fact that the owners and administrators of cemeteries, whether religious groups, civil government, or private companies, can regulate what is written on tombstones again results in the private individual encountering external authority in the very moment that he or she begins to write. And the dispute between Dignity and the parents of the children buried in East Herringthorpe cemetery demonstrates the kind of conflict that can arise from this encounter.
Returning to the account of POWER that is emerging in our work, it strikes me that the complex discourse of FREEDOM is relevant here. Children must learn to write well because it will give them more opportunity to take control of their own lives, more opportunity (freedom to do). Parents must be discouraged from putting plastic ornaments on graves because this adversely affects the experience of others (freedom from).
Incidentally, in both the case of education and the authorities that regulate the inscriptions on tomb stones, that authority is often exercised with reference to an AESTHETIC discourse: ‘it looks better laid out like that’, ‘it is clearer like this’, ‘it is more tasteful’, ‘it is more “in keeping”’. People internalise these ideas to a greater or lesser degree.
I would like to end by thinking about whether GENRE can function OPPOSITIONALLY. Resistant and subversive communication may distance itself from modes of writing associated with education and authority, although this distancing is not always total. (The comedy writer John O’Farrell wrote a book with the title Things Can Only Get Better about the experience of being a Labour activist in the long years of Conservative government leading up to 1997. He describes himself as a middle-class student writing political graffiti on the walls of his university town and being mocked next day for introducing a comma into the slogan, ‘coal, not dole’.)
It would be interesting to look more closely at the practice of graffiti here. This seems to me governed by quite an elaborate code of conventions and one has to know about these and abide them in order to be taken seriously as a graffiti artist.
In fact, it occurs to me that some of what I have described as GENRES of graffiti might equally well be described in terms of MEMES: conventionalised texts, images, or combinations of media which are varied a little every time they are used. A present-day example is the online phenomenon of lolcats and a historical one would be the war-time cartoon of ‘Chad’ looking over a wall with the slogan ‘wot no ____?’ under it, originally a comment on rationing and recently revived on a T-shirt:
(http://www.force18.co.uk/chad-wot-no-banksy-p-644.html)
Perhaps GENRES are associated with authority, whereas MEMES are more oppositional?
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