What literate societies see: the methodical gaze of genres

C. Bazerman



Texts beget texts as representations of the world are repeated, contended, reasoned about, modified, or used within genres and activity systems.  Yet, just as our nervous systems have sense organs that bring us information of the world beyond our skin to modify our internal neural activity and to guide our actions, so do our literate activity systems have portals that bring information from beyond the boundaries of circulating words to modify communal reasoning and actions.  These sense portals are our methods of observing, recording, and reporting. They use our personal senses and all the devices we have developed to extend, refine, and make more reliable our sensory knowledge. Sometimes these methods are spontaneous and unreflective, relying only on our daily practices of life, with all the obscuring vagaries of memory, biases, interest, or momentary rhetorical advantage. But some genres and activity systems hold us to higher levels of accountability for how we touch the world and represent it in texts. In the sciences such reasoning about method is called methodology. Financial markets, governments, courts and other professional forums also have their reflective and regulated ways of gathering facts for their specialized forms of reasoning in their appropriate genres. Even spiritual disciplines have means of sorting out true visions from false to be shared among the faithful. These methods, situated within particular activity systems and their cultures, constrain and direct the contents of genres. They influence how texts in different genres are produced and received. And ultimately they determine the value of genres for solving human problems and improving human life.