Commentary as genre as social action

I started this blog with the best of intentions, but lo and behold, it's well over half a year since I last posted. Blame it on the day job. But I'll try to get things back on track now. Throughout those seven months, I've been meaning to blog one particular work of reader study: Kathryn Grafton's PhD thesis, Paying attention to public readers of Canadian literature: popular genre systems, publics, and canons, which was successfully defended last year. So here we are.

Grafton's thesis belongs to what I like to think of (although to paraphrase the 'immortal' Mandy Rice-Davies: I would, wouldn't I?) as the new school of reader research. If this is a form of reception study, then it is reception study that refuses to reify reception, seeing the traditional materials of reception study (statements about texts by people who claim to have read them) as an aspect of cultural production. The primary inspiration for this turn is surely Pierre Bourdieu, who counted among cultural producers all those who contribute to the production of the value of literary or artistic works, and not merely those identified as the 'creators' of such works (Bourdieu 1993). If this is accepted, then 'receiving' the work is producing the work - and there is no such thing as 'reception'. Perhaps the sort of research I'm talking about should be called 'reception studies post-reception' or even 'post-receptionism'. Perhaps that's what I should have called this blog. But I digress.

Grafton's starting point is more or less the same as the one from which I started my own PhD research, ie. that what a person says or writes about a text must be analysed as a piece of speech or writing that he or she has produced, rather than as evidence of a mental event that previously occurred during an individual act of private reading. Her and my research draws on quite different traditions in order to theorise such words on words, however: while my PhD work was founded in a mish-mash of discursive psychology, literary theory, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics, Grafton's arises from a sustained engagement with genre theory, which also led to her 2009 chapter 'Situating the public social actions of blog posts' and her 2008 article with Elizabeth Maurer, 'Engaging with and arranging for publics in blog genres'.

Grafton's main theoretical contribution is to argue that 'contemporary canons are discursive spaces comprised of publicly circulating and re-circulating literary texts and talk about these texts.' (Grafton 2010, p. 7) To some extent, that's the point I tried to make in my 2006 reception study of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. In the aforementioned article, I first adopt Michel Foucault's conception of canonical literary texts as speech acts taken up and re-spoken through speech acts of commentary, and then use Michael Billig's theory of arguing as thinking in order to make sense of the relations between specific commentaries. The closer I look at that article, the more I commonality I can see between literary critics (as I theorised them) and the various old and new media commentators that Grafton studies; moreover, the ongoing production of canonicity is at the heart of my analysis, which even recognises the link between this and the publishing industry. It all makes me wonder whether I slipped off track between 2006 and the submission of my PhD thesis - a work limited by (and constantly chaffing against) a certain idealism. I could have studied the material basis for the production of academic literary criticism, and investigated the work of criticism as a contributor to the production of institutional status both for the critic and for the object of criticism. Then my thesis might, I think, have become the equivalent of Grafton's brilliant exploration of the interactions between the blogosphere, the library system, civic authority, and the broadcasting and publishing industries in contemporary Canada - and of the circulation of texts and of symbolic capital across those interlinked systems. That exploration is Grafton's main empirical contribution - and as you can see, I'm impressed.

I suspect that this says something about the theoretical and methodological foundations of my PhD research, which diverted my energies from the research itself to the extent that their construction became my research. I hope I'm not too immodest in supposing that my own PhD thesis makes empirical contributions of its own. But what empirical claims it does make come close to getting lost in all the theoretical and methodological hand-wringing, added to which I was never quite sure whether to do the interesting thing (generalising through comparison with other studies) or what is often taken for the rigorous thing (insisting that everything one finds is specific to the particular text or spoken interaction that one happens to be analysing). This makes me wonder about the following as tests for social theory:

• to what extent does your theory enable you to get on with your job of investigating how the social world works? (Or conversely: to what extent does it tie you up in questions of ontology and epistemology?)
• to what extent does your theory enable you to draw meaningful links between case studies? (Or conversely: to what extent does it limit you to a fragmentary series of expositions of local contexts?)

On the evidence of Grafton's thesis, Carolyn Miller's (1984) theory of genre as social action definitely passes muster. At least partly because it enables Grafton to spend so much of her time not talking about the theory of genre as social action.

Just a thought.