Identity, audience and community in writing research

A short message to the reader

Patrick J. Coppock

University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

Reggio Emilia

Italy

Reggio Emilia, November 2000

Dear Reader,

The following chapter is a revised and somewhat expanded version of a manuscript prepared for an introductory talk I gave at the opening of the international writing research conference held in November 1999 at the University of San Marino, The Semiotics of Writing: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on the Technology of Writing. It was this conference which gave rise to the volume which you now (presumably) are holding in your hands.

In what follows, I have chosen to preserve as much of the original ‘oral’, rather personal style of my presentation as possible. I have done this in order to try and make explicit some implicit, and I believe important, issues regarding the role of identity – as expressed and developed through personal experience, and subsequently, private and public writing and discourse practices – in developing an intimate relationship with an audience of others, and on the basis of this intimacy, an extended community of inquiry.

This strategically oriented stylistic choice on my part may perhaps annoy or even offend you as reader to begin with, in seeming to transgress some of the textual and interactional norms traditionally implicit in what we generally refer to as ‘scientific’ or ‘academic’ writing. But I hope you will bear with me a while – at least long enough to gather some overall impression of what I have tried to do in what I write here. If after doing so, you should then decide to abandon any further attempts to follow up, or interpret my message, then of course the fault remains entirely mine.

Thanks for your attention in this matter.

Patrick

Preamble

Well met to you one and all!.

First of all, and before I enter into the main body of my introduction, I would like to say how pleased I am to have you all here with us this afternoon for this, our first ‘open conversation’ on “The Semiotics of Writing”. Together – as invariably seems to be the case here in San Marino, at the interface between the twin discourses of semiotic and cognitive sciences – we represent a very broad and diverse range of personal experience, scientific and disciplinary orientations, research methodologies, perspectives and themes, and I‘m sure we can all look forward to three highly stimulating and interesting days of presentation, discussion and debate, and last but not least, relaxed and pleasant social interaction.

As I mentioned in my letter of invitation sent to our invited speakers in advance, one of our main objectives in organising this conference – quite apart from it opening a new professional program in written communication at the University of San Marino – was to create an intimate and friendly conversational space for mutual inquiry and constructive criticism, bringing together distinguished scholars from all parts of the world working within often quite different theoretical and empirical paradigms, but who all share a keen interest in the general theme of written communication.

The various conversational threads we will be discussing here are all tied in one way or another to the broader question of how the invention, growth and dissemination of the technology of writing, and with it, the emergence of various forms of literacy and educational practices at different times and places in history has influenced, and continues to influence, the ways in which we construe the world we live in, how we interact with this world and the other beings we share it with. In what ways do we make use of the technology of writing in order to represent and communicate our understandings of, and interactions with, this world for one another? Can the rapidly increasing exchange and negotiation of written, and other forms of meaning across a plurality of local-global contexts by means of new networked communication technologies, contribute in the longer term to develop a heightened, positive sense of identity, audience awareness and community for us all?

We are fortunate, not least because of generous funding from the University of San Marino, to have with us here leading scholars of writing research from four quite distant corners of the world: Northern Europe and Scandinavia (Cambridge, UK, Trondheim and Oslo, Norway, and Stockholm, Sweden); from Southern Europe (Naples, Italy); The United States (Wisconsin, Utah, Michigan and North Carolina) and last, but not least, Australia (Sydney and Queensland). I understand too, that the backgrounds of our audience members are at least as varied as those of our presenters, both in terms of personal experience and perspective, research interests, language and culture. But when this has been said, I want to quickly stress that the fact that we have a rather heavy ‘Anglo-Saxon’ weighting among our guest speakers, and none from, say, Africa, South America, the Ex-Soviet Union, the Baltic States, Central and Southeast Asia or the Middle and Far East, in no way implies that no significant writing and literacy research work has been, or is being, carried on in these parts of the world, but rather my own sorry lack of knowledge of such work as may exist. If anyone present here today is able to enlighten me on this score, then I would be very pleased indeed to listen, and learn more.

A not unrelated theme which has also concerned me as conference organiser is ‘gender-weighting’ – something I believe it is still important to be aware of and take account of in organising international venues like this one. Paradoxically enough, our established institutional cultures in the human, social, applied and pure sciences have really been quite slow to follow up in practice the kinds of gender emancipation we are finally beginning to see in different societies and cultures throughout the world. Age (or perhaps seniority is a better word) ‘weighting’ is too, still a delicate, but nonetheless relevant issue which I believe we need to be aware of in this kind of context. In both these respects I have tried as best I could to maintain some kind of reasonable balance and continuity for this gathering, I hope with at least some degree of success.

Finally I believe that it is important for us to bear in mind that there are many other talented researchers and practitioners – of all possible backgrounds, genders, ages, shapes and sizes – engaged in exciting and innovative projects in writing and literacy research in those parts of the world already well represented here, and not least in Italy – whom I would very much have liked to invite to speak to you here. But as I’m sure you will understand, even for a quite small-scale international gathering like this, economy is a limiting factor, as are language preferences, since we have asked for presentations in English, and have limited resources for providing interpretation and translation services.

Consideration of these more culturally and politically oriented aspects of the problem of how to promote variation and complexity within the organisation of this conference has led me to reflect, too, on the not immaterial, and highly pragmatic question of how to go about finding relevant and interesting work in writing research elsewhere in the world, other than that of which I was already aware. This turned out to be an quite difficult thing to do in relation to the relatively ‘young’ and still growing field of inquiry that writing research represents, since there is still little institutionalised ‘positioning’ of the field within the realm of the international science community. I personally believe that this apparent lack of positioning has a good deal to do with the fact that many of us here today began our current research trajectories, as I myself did, coming to the field from the boundary zones of more ‘mainstream’ theoretical fields of the human sciences such as linguistics, psychology, philosophy or literature studies, involving teaching, or other forms of mainly language-based practices. For many of us, it was our day-to-day experiences as writers, translators, language, composition, or subject matter teachers in public schools and other public institutions that gradually made us aware of the pressing need to chisel out a more specialised ecological ‘niche’ for research into the specific, and often highly idosyncratic, problems and questions that tend to arise in course of such work. We have discovered the need for a niche where we can develop not only our own personal research interests, but also promote a more general metatheoretical discourse regarding research into writing. Choosing a tortuous journey of this kind, involving a migration from the ‘periphery’ towards some sort of as yet vague and undefined ‘centre’ does not immediately give access to prestigious institutional positions such as those already competed for and won many years ago in more ‘mainstream’ fields of the human sciences.

However, this rather special kind of ‘peripheral’ – we might even say ‘local’ – starting point for the more ‘global’ research initiative which writing research in general today represents, is certainly not something to be embarrassed about. Rather, as I see it, this is one of the main traits making writing research such an exciting and dynamic environment to work in. Not only do we find a profound understanding of the need for developing new strains and genres of theories grounded in the pragmatic, everyday realities of rich and varied discourses and textual practices involved in teaching language and literacy awareness and skills in a wide range of institutional, social and cultural contexts, and thus, too, in language and literacy policy-making and implementation on a wider scale; we also find a deep commitment to the adoption of a problem-solving approach to research methodology and theory development. Such an understanding of the field carries along with it, too, a requirement of a research community which is heavily future-oriented, flexible in the face of change, dynamic and above all, inherently transdisciplinary in character. It is my hope that this conference will be able to contribute in a small but constructive way to promoting the further growth of such a specialist community.

Positioning writing research

So, to return to the main thread of my argument again: what do the above reflections on the field imply in practice for a conference organiser like myself? Well for the first, it means that finding out where innovative and qualitatively excellent work in writing research is being carried on around the world is definitely not the kind of thing we simply can do by keying the words ‘writing AND research’, or ‘writing AND literacy development’ into the URL slot of our Web browser, pushing the enter-key and waiting to see what happens. Not only does writing research lack positioning as a domain of mainstream science at the present time – it most probably never will achieve such a positioning! Due to the highly ‘ephemeral’ nature of this field, it quite simply does not manage to worm its way into the top-level keyword categories of well-known search-engines like Yahoo and Excite, thus remaining well hidden from view in the emergent virtual marketplace of the Internet. Since writing research is inevitably obliged to relate to and accommodate within its frame of reference constantly shifting configurations of social and cultural traditions, practices and norm systems as they change over time, as well as the combined effects of these changes on how we all experience, interact with, and understand one another through written and other forms of communication, it seems ‘by nature’ to be peripheral, emergent and ephemeral at one and the same time. I suspect too, that for its own health and future growth, it must constantly strive to remain as it is in this particular respect, difficult as that often may be to manage in practice!

So while in some sense or other ‘parasitic’ on linguistic and communication oriented domains of the human and social sciences like linguistics, psychology, literature studies, science studies, sociology, anthropology and pedagogy, as well as some technologically oriented domains like computer science, systems theory and artificial intelligence, to mention just a few, writing research cannot, and indeed must not – as Michael Halliday, Lars Evensen and others have already clearly pointed out in their case-studies of the ‘applied’ versus ‘pure’ linguistics’ continuum – simply be a locus where we ‘consume’, ‘test’, or ‘implement’ grand theories or methodological approaches ‘manufactured’ in these other fields, but rather construe them as usefully related, strategically overlapping areas of inquiry, which may represent interesting loci for fetching heuristic models and even empirical materials for further study. Here I am thinking specifically of some recent work on writing and reading science by colleagues of Michael Halliday, such as Charles Bazerman, Brian Paltridge, Jim Martin, Jay Lemke and others[1]. These studies have so far tended to focus attention on discourses and texts developed specifically for teaching science and technology subject-matter in elementary and further education classrooms, or in other, similar institutional settings. But we might equally well consider examining in a similar way materials designed, selected or collated for use in the human and social sciences in higher education settings.

Rightly enough, within the broader framework of general semiotics we find a more specialised domain of textual semiotics which has long focused on developing semiotic analyses of literary narrative texts; many of which (and sometimes both the texts and their analyses) have become almost canonical for traditional literature and literary science studies. Semiotic text analyses of this type, however, have tended – at least so far – to restrict themselves to analysing on the one hand the semiotic encoding of meaning as realised in textual, and perhaps especially narrative structure, and on the other hand, the phenomenologies of the reception and interpretation of such textually encoded meanings. As a result, they have largely neglected to consider what may be the shorter or longer term socio-cultural effects of such texts and their readings, i.e. how the various ways in which texts are USED while they are being construed as meaningful utterances by and for different individuals and groups, come to affect the further development of the specific institutional, social and cultural contexts or settings where such usage occurs.

But I digress: in the rather complex situation sketched out above, in order to find, and potentially bring together, people around the world interested in developing the broader domain of writing research – a domain I have chosen here to refer to, doubtless too loosely, as ‘The Semiotics of Writing’ – we are quite simply fallibly and humanly dependent on starting out from the relative ‘intimacies’ of our own local identities, audiences and communities – our individual and very personal sets of professional interests and contacts, and trying to expand things ‘outwards’ from there. We might perhaps say it with Heidegger: “Here we stand, we can do no other!” – so let’s just get on with it! And indeed, this is precisely what has had to happen in this particular case too.

So since the rather knotty problem of trying to account meaningfully for, and accommodate, a plurality of disciplinary, gender, linguistic and cultural identities in the organisation of an international encounter of this kind first has ‘slopped over’ into the public discourse arena, I feel obliged to return to and confront briefly the undoubtedly heavy Northern European – especially Norwegian – weighting of our speaker list. The story of how this particular ‘filtration’ (for which I as organiser of course am fully responsible) actually turned out as it did, involves many different actors, scenarios and events, some of quite personal nature, and others not, but all related in one way or another to the much longer story of how I first came to move to Italy from Norway in the first place, and as a result of this relocation process, to become scientific organiser of this conference.

Now, you will doubtless be very pleased to know that this longer story is something I do not intend to go into in all the lurid details of here and now. We are, after all, not watching “The Truman Show”, or “Big Brother” on TV. But when that has been pointed out, and in the interests of openness and accountability in science - which I passionately believe in promoting – I would like to briefly mention a couple of key episodes, and links back and forth to these episodes, from the above-mentioned story.

I also believe there IS an important point to be made by my doing so at this juncture – so I beg those of you who have followed with me so far to bear with me for at least a little while longer....

OK, so the first, and probably most important scenario in this larger chain of events, is that it was in Norway, more specifically Trondheim – the ex-capital of Norway, and a charming old pilgrim city a few hundred kilometres south of the Arctic Circle – where, in 1988 or so, I first happened into contact with a tiny pioneering outpost of a then relatively new-born international writing research community. The basic groundwork leading to the birth of this international community had been laid down in the United States several years before – in the late sixties and early seventies – yet another story which Martin Nystrand will fill you in on later this evening, and for which reason I shall simply hop over for now. So anyway, the isolated and tiny frontier outpost of the empirical writing research community I stumbled upon in central Norway in the late eighties was – and indeed still is – known as the DEVEL Group. The proto-word “DEVEL” here stands for “Developing written language competence”, an innovative and far-reaching Scandinavian literacy project first conceived of, and is still directed by, my good friend and colleague Lars Sigfred Evensen, one of our speakers here today[2].

Today, in spite of it being at least ten years since my first encounter with the DEVEL Group (and four or five more than that again with Lars himself) in the northerly cold and dark of Norway, and in spite of having been living here in the southerly warmth and light of Mediterranean Italy during the last few years, I still consider, and feel myself, very much a member of the DEVEL community – a vital and alive community of inquiry which Lars over the years lovingly, and not without considerable labours and pain on his own behalf, nurtured and pummelled – from really quite small beginnings – into the still small, but nonetheless strong and innovative voice it now represents within the international research community.

Without my first auspicious meeting with Lars and, through him. the rest of the DEVEL community – which I suppose today consists of around twenty people from a broad range of experiential and disciplinary backgrounds, with several of whom, like myself, no longer living in Trondheim – I would most certainly not be opening this international writing research conference here in San Marino today. Nor indeed would I even be working in the field of writing research. Worse still, had I not first been pulled into the field by Lars, and through this, become interested in textual semiotics, I would never have chanced to meet the wonderful woman who is now the mainstay of my life, my wife Patrizia, who just happens (not coincidentally, of course) to be director of this Centre.

Of course, THIS last-mentioned fateful meeting with its further felicitous consequences for us both and our lives is yet another story, and one in which two other DEVEL Group friends and colleagues whom I have also invited to be here with us today, Kjell Lars Berge and Finn Bostad, both played their own special roles. Kjell-Lars by enticing me into the weird and wonderful world of textual semiotics in the first place, and Finn, through his long-term friendship, and gentle and fatherly interest in Patrizia and my nascent e-mail courtship, which began after she courageously agreed – at very short notice indeed – to come to Trondheim in the Fall of 1994 to give a series of lessons at the first Summer School in Semiotics in Norway (in October!), organised, not surprisingly, by Kjell-Lars and myself.

I also have Patrizia to thank for putting me in contact with one of the most ‘pluralistic’ people I have ever met, our only ‘programmed’ Italian speaker – Maurizio Gnerre. And then it was Maurizio who first brought to my attention Jack Goody’s pioneering work in writing research. Through Patrizia too, I have recently come into contact with the as yet, still ‘young’ writing research community here in Italy. I have met people who have been interested in the general themes of written communication and literacy development for quite some time, such as anthropologist Matilde Callari Galli and linguist Raffaele Simone, as well as some fresher faces in the field such as Graziella Tonfoni, Gabriele Palotti and Maria Pia Pozzato, whose recently published work I am well aware of, since I have copies of most of their books at home, but due to my continuing linguistic incapacities in Italian – something I am working hard to reduce – I have not yet been able to read in any great depth. Now I know I am sticking my neck out a bit by mentioning individual names at all in a, for me, completely ‘foreign’ context such as Italy, about which I as yet know far, far too little, but it is at least a beginning. I sincerely hope to be able to remedy these sad deficiencies on my side as time goes on.

Finally and not least, it is thanks to my belonging to the DEVEL-community – and here I have finally got around to my second reason for having brought so many as three of our ‘core’ members, Lars, Kjell-Lars and Finn to San Marino as speakers – that I through the years, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, have been gently nudged and bumped into contact with other central figures in the international writing research community who are here today. This has sometimes happened through face-to-face encounters at seminars or workshops organised by Lars or other DEVEL-community members, other times ‘virtually’, through meeting their writings in journals or books discussed together in the DEVEL Group, and via their personal and institutional web pages or shared e-mail conversations in on-line forums. So now I am very pleased to finally have them all here with us in their ‘real-life’ identities of Martin Nystrand, Gunther Kress, David Barton, Carol Berkenkotter, Carolyn Miller, Jim Martin, Thomas Huckin, Anne Freadman and the youngest member of our community yet, Anne Malin Karlsson, whose talk in Japan this summer at the AILA conference apparently created a very favourable impression. We will probably be hearing parts of her talk, or something along those lines, on Saturday afternoon, so we can doubtless all look forward to that.

At this point I do not intend to embarrass either Patrizia, Lars, Kjell-Lars, Finn, Anne-Malin or anyone else more than I already have done by going into further details of my life-story and the various encounters, interpersonal connections and links associated with it. But what I do hope at this point, is that my communicational act in revealing for you all these really quite tiny fragments of my personal experience – which in situations such as this is something which normally tends to be relegated to specialised discourse or genre categories like ‘non-academic social chit-chat, or ‘personal background knowledge’ – may serve to foreground the vital role played by the interpersonal component of our experience in the growth and development of community in science.

My aim has been to bring into clearer focus the often serendipitous ways in which complex networks of interpersonal relationships and interconnections are born, grow and weave their way out from often chance events and meetings, bringing together people from very different kinds of cultural and social backgrounds in the science community. I want too, to emphasise the fact that unless the right kinds of interpersonal, socio-cultural and technological default preconditions exist for the growth and maintenance of a plurality of such strong interpersonal relationships and interconnections as a ground, even at very local levels like the original DEVEL community, then the whole socio-cultural domain of science as we know it would not be able to function. In fact it would not exist at all. There would quite simply be no way for each of us to develop our personal and professional identities as scientists and scholars, and without a sense of personal identity of this kind, there would be no sense of audience to give our scientific writing and communication meaning, and thus, there would be no community of science either.

The above insights, perhaps rather tortuously exemplified and foregrounded as I have done above, are of course a form of tacit knowledge which anyone engaged in doing science as part of their everyday lives intuitively shares and understands to exist. But on the other hand, this is also a type of knowledge all too seldom talked about, made explicit and shared, and indeed, it is often sadly ignored as a topic of inquiry outside of certain areas of the humanities and social sciences, even though it is absolutely essential for the growth of long-term, committed and ethically sound forms of co-operation and communication in science. In trying to make this tacit knowledge explicit, by using my developing sense of professional identity, audience and community – all of which have directly or indirectly played a role in bringing me to my present role of organiser of this conference – as an example, I hope to have built a small piece of ‘common ground’ we can all stand on during our next few days together, and to help you understand just a little bit better why I am so very pleased to be able to welcome, and to share with you all from the rest of the world, my friends and colleagues from the Norwegian DEVEL Community.

As I mentioned in my letter to the reader at the beginning of this chapter, it may well be that I have laboured things too much in emphasising all the tenuous, serendipitous, personal-professional, local-thematic-global links which have woven themselves into me, my life and all the other people in the international writing research community in the course of my the years in the field. But my hope is that you have stayed with me this far, and that this account has served usefully to foreground the main theme of my argument – the importance fo recognising the central role played by personal identity, in developing a relationship of the other as audience, and on the basis of this, the open forms of give and take necessary for developing a communicational community of science. This is something which perhaps is especially vital to have in mind when working in young and developing fields of science like writing research.

So now I shall – if I’ve left myself time and space (and an audience) to do so, after all this heavy personification of the issues in hand– try to say something meaningful about it!

Identity, audience and community: global metafunctions in writing research?

I have titled my contribution to this encounter ‘Identity, audience and community in writing research’, first and foremost because I want to try and frame our interactions here in San Marino, and any further exchanges that may grow out of this encounter in the future, in a general and positive manner, while at the same time throwing out a few ideas I thought may be relevant for our discussions – not only regarding possible future directions which writing and literacy research might take, but also with regard to developing new frames of reference for international communication and co-operation within the writing research community.

My approach is both triadic and pluralistic in orientation, in the sense that I shall attempt to position the three general themes of identity, audience and community as inseparable, essential, while at the same time clearly identifiable, global metafunctions framing, and at the same time framed by, a pluralistic understanding of the semiotic domain of writing. This approach involves, amongst other things, attempting to take account of not only the wide variety of individual, social and cultural contexts where practices of writing are carried on; but also the various institutionalised research environments, and other kinds of contexts, where scientific forms of inquiry into writing practices are carried on,.

These three global metafunctions are, I claim, closely related to the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions in Michael Halliday’s[3] sense of the term. I shall not begin to discuss this specific relationship here, especially since we have with us here one of Michael Halliday’s close colleagues, Jim Martin, who doubtless would manage this much better than I ever could, should the need arise. But in any case, as I see it, these global metafunctions of identity, audience and community are operative in the complex semiotic system of multimodally mediated meanings, constrained and facilitated in their realisation by the expanding range of local, thematic and global contexts of situation and culture which are opening up, and engaging more and more with one another, due to the rapid development and diffusion of new digital networked media and communication technologies.

My approach is thus not only triadic and pluralist, it is also contextualist, in that it accepts that the plurality of ways in which these global metafunctions are construed and realised semiotically over time will come to vary, in often irregular and unpredictable ways, from context to context depending on, amongst other things, which directions the new communication technologies mentioned above, and the various day-to-day practices associated with using them to represent and communicate meaning, tweak and nudge our individual life-worlds, societies and communities in the future. It will not, as I see it, be viable to focus exclusively on any one of these three metafunctions in an isolated way, without at the same time attempting to take into account the intrinsically dynamic ‘intimacies’ of the relationship between it and the other two. It will not be meaningful, I claim, to talk of a communicative metafunction tied to identity development, without at the same time conceiving of a metafunction tied to the development of audience awareness, and it will not be meaningful either, to talk of a metafunction tied to the development of audience awareness, without at the same time conceiving of a metafunction tied to the notion of envelopment in a meaning-making community.

More on the notion of envelopment a bit later on.

Within the basic framework of such an approach, too, the increasing pluralism of our own practices of scientific inquiry will involve us – not only as writing researchers, but also as Men (and Women) of Science, to paraphrase Emerson – in a wide range of interpersonal, social, cultural, and increasingly, TRANS-cultural communities, where various forms of scientific, literary, educational and other types of writing are practised, talked about and encouraged to develop. Writing too, is becoming increasingly multimodal in nature. Editing video, sound and animation sequences is becoming everyday practice for many authors, for instance, and publication in the digital media of the Internet more and more a realistic alternative – or at least supplement to – traditional forms of publication on the medium of paper. As this happens, we are continually developing our personal and professional identities, which are construed and realised, in part at least, through the specialised forms of scientific languages, terminologies and writing practices we develop and use as tools for studying and discussing these communities of writers and their practices. How we as researchers choose to relate to the various people involved, interact with them, and go on to describe what we discover through our encounters and interactions with them, will often have profound consequences in the longer term for the development of both their, and our own, construals of identity, audience and community. As time goes on, we will find our own personal and professional identities as writing researchers becoming more and more intimately enfolded into the plurality and dynamism of the day to day lives of our ‘objects’ of study.

So, to sum up: my focus here will be on reconstruction of some salient aspects of the, as I see it, inherent pluralism of the global socio-semiotic realm of writing research.

This will allow us to envision a general systemics of the writing process, operative in the local-global social semiotic of the international writing research community as our main object of study. In this context, the global metafunctions of identity, audience and community are seen as realised within a process of increasing pluralism – through, amongst other things, the diversification and individualisation of communicational, educational and research practices, as these change over time in response to changing understandings of the communicative and developmental potential inherent in new forms of writing techniques and technologies as they become available and are taken into use and dropped over time.

What is pluralism?

But before I go on, I think perhaps I ought to try and say a bit about what I mean with the notion of ‘pluralism’. So far I have been bandying this term about with fairly wild abandon, but with precious little specificity about what I take it to mean. To this end I have torn a leaf from a fascinating piece of prose by the American pragmatist philosopher and psychologist William James, who poses, in the concluding chapter of his ‘A Pluralistic Universe’ (James, 1909), the following question[4]:

“What at bottom is meant by calling the universe many or by calling it one?”,

He then proceeds to give HIS answer as follows[5]:

“Pragmatically interpreted, pluralism or the doctrine that it is many means only that the sundry parts of reality may be externally related. Everything you can think of, however vast or inclusive, has on the pluralistic view a genuinely ‘external’ environment of some sort or amount. Things are ‘with’ one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes. ‘Ever not quite’ has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in the universe at attaining all-inclusiveness. The pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom. However much may be collected, however much may report itself as present at any effective centre of consciousness or action, something else is self-governed and absent and unreduced to unity.”

Hegel, writes James immediately before this passage, had claimed that whatever is ‘real’ is only that which is rational. He (James) continues[6]:

“I myself said a while ago that whatever lets loose any action which we are fond of exerting seems rational. It would be better to give up the word ‘rational’ altogether than to get into a merely verbal fight about who has the best right to keep it. Perhaps the words ‘foreignness’ and ‘intimacy’, which I put forward in my first lecture, express the contrast I insist on better than the words ‘rationality’ and ‘irrationality’ – let us stick with them, then. I say now that the notion of the ‘one’ breeds foreignness and that of the ‘many’ intimacy.”

All that is real is then, for James, ‘with’ everything else which is real. This being ‘with’ takes place within a particular kind of intimate continuity of ‘manyness’ or ‘multitude’, where, as he puts it, ‘nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything’. Something will always, he maintains, escape subsumption into some sort of Hegelian Absolute. This is why for him, any attempt made by us or anyone else to attain some form of ‘all-inclusiveness’, be it in philosophy, ontology, epistemology, or science in general, will be fated to remain ‘ever not quite’.

In a pluralistic universe there can be no universal truths, no absolutes, no universal laws. But on the other hand, everything real in such a universe may still be seen as being connected to everything else real in some way or other, in a special kind of ‘intimate’ relationship, while at the same time retaining its fundamental individuality of identity, as well as a certain degree of indeterminacy. Things will remain so, in spite of any desperate attempts we fallible human beings might make to pin down reality, or to completely include it – for instance by means of our rationally based forms of logic or categorisation – in some form or other of proposed absolute unity. I do not have space here to go into the details of this part of James’ lively discussion for now, but I think he actually manages to express quite well in what I have cited so far, that which I intend to mean when I use the term ‘pluralism’ or refer to a ‘pluralistic’ approach.

James wrote “A Pluralistic Universe” in passionate defence of what he often referred to as “Radical Empiricism”, and the notion of pluralism is for him inescapably associated with this particular variant of empiricism. As he notes elsewhere[7]:

“Radical empiricism and pluralism stand out for the legitimacy of the notion of some; each part of the world is in some ways connected, in some other ways not connected with its other parts, and the ways can be discriminated, for many of them are obvious, and their differences are obvious to view”

Diversity and truly distinguishable forms of difference are then for James, inherent in the very nature of our being, and on this basis too, the notion of individual identity is vital. So before we go on to look more closely at how the notion of identity relates to the field of writing research, let us end up this brief philosophical excursion with some of James’ further thoughts on identity in a pluralistic universe. He wrote in this connection[8]:

“For pluralism, all that we are required to admit as the constitution of reality is what we ourselves find empirically realised in every minimum of finite life. Briefly it is this, that nothing real is absolutely simple, that every smallest bit of experience is a multum in parvo[9] plurally related, that each relation is one aspect, character, or function, way of its being taken, or way of its taking something else; and that a bit of reality when actively engaged in one of these relations is not by that very fact engaged in all the other relations simultaneously. The relations are not all what the French call solidaires with one another. Without losing its identity a thing can either take up or drop another thing, like the log I spoke of, which by taking up new carriers and dropping old ones can travel anywhere with a light escort”

As it was too, for fellow pragmatist and innovative social psychologist George Herbert Mead, individuality for James is something constantly and inevitably fostered through our human engagement with a pluralistic universe of intimate differences, or ‘bits of reality’, each and every one of which, in spite of their moving between the intimacies of different contexts and their consequential taking up from and giving back to (‘dropping’) of various bits and pieces of themselves here and there along the way, are nonetheless able to retain some of the basic indeterminacy and intimacy of their own (‘personal’ or individual) relationship with the whole. This means also having a continuity of relation with their own past, their own personal history, their own life narrative or trajectory, if we will – and also with this trajectory as it might possibly come to be projected into the future. A pluralist form of continuity is ‘recoverable’ – it is not lost for ever if certain aspects of our reality become subject to ‘breaks’ or ‘fission’, losing contact with one another and the basic continuity of things over the course of time. A potential for ‘reconnection’ is always present. A monist point of view rejects this idea, as James goes on to point out[10]:

“With monism, on the contrary, everything, whether we realise it or not, drags the whole universe along with itself and drops nothing. The log starts and arrives with all its carriers supporting it. If a thing were once disconnected, it could never be connected again, according to monism. The pragmatic difference between the two systems is thus a definite one. It is just thus, that if a is once out of sight of b or out of touch with it, or, more briefly, ‘out’ of it at all, then according to monism, it must always remain so, they can never get together; whereas pluralism admits that on another occasion they may work together, or in some way be connected again. Monism allows for no such things as ‘other occasions’ in reality – in real or absolute reality, that is.”

The reality of identity in writing research

In choosing to raise this whole issue of identity as the first of the three global metafunctions I consider foundational for any attempt to understand the wider field (or domain) of writing and literacy research as a pluralistic one, this has largely been inspired by the extremely fruitful period of contact mentioned before I had in the early nineties with the pioneering work in writing research being carried out by Lars Sigfred Evensen and another DEVEL Group colleague, Rutt Trøite Lorentzen, at the University of Trondheim, Norway[11].

Lars and Rutt’s approach to literacy development was broadly framed and informed by a number of detailed empirical studies within a Norwegian socio-cultural and educational context, and focused at that time on the development of social identity in young children’s early writing. Rutt, who pioneered the humanistic approach to the study of early writing in Norway, playing a role in the Northern European writing research context parallel to that of Glenda Bissex[12] in the United States, began to speak in this connection of children using writing in ‘identity work’, in order to establish and develop interpersonal and social relationships, to negotiate power relations, and to gain control over themselves and their surroundings.

Taking his point of departure in this way of seeing children’s writing, Lars, in a (mega-)longitudinal study of his daughter Siri’s own process of ‘envelopment’, which he began at around the same time when Siri was about three and a half years old, reported how her first piece of personal writing – at home on daddy’s portable computer – focused on positioning herself symbolically within her most intimate and frequent social context – her immediate family of mother, father and grandparents. This global interaction frame was established through her initially writing a horizontal concatenation of three ‘names’ with her own name ‘SIRI’ in first place, with the proto-words ‘MAMA’ and ‘PAPA firmly attached, as follows:

SIRIMAMAPAPA

Over the next few days and weeks this message was developed into the even more complex form of:

SIRIMAMAPAPAMORMORMORFAR

[English translation:: SIRIMAMAPAPAGRANMAGRANPA]

This signified an interactional, and for Siri, highly meaningful frame, functioning, according to Lars’ compact, but nonetheless eminently readable, analysis (Evensen 1993), both as genre marker and global frame for textual content. Siri then went eagerly to work on ‘filling out’ this multifunctional global framing with steadily more complex types and tokens of substantial linguistic (and graphic – since she also sent letters with her own pictures drawn on them to her addressees) ‘content’ as time went on, and she began writing more and more.

Lars went on to build on and around these observations and other empirical materials from Rutt’s and other colleagues’ work, managing to integrate the fundamental processes of cumulative elaboration in an meaningful context which is inherent in his notion of ‘envelopment’ mentioned above – a specialist term standing for the particular form of inner development represented by the taking-up and giving back of experience of language-in-use gained through the gradual process of filling out a global framing of the kind just mentioned – into a more general developmental model for writing skills, whereby young writer-learners oscillate in a wave-form like way between steadily more complex and integrated sets of global and local concerns, or foci, in their writing over time. The following model sums up this notion in graphical form.

Figure 1: Wave model of foci and envelopment in genre development (after Evensen 1993)

I do not have the time here and now to go into a discussion of this model in depth, but I am sure that Lars[13] would be very pleased to do so if anyone would like to know some more about it, and discover how it has subsequently been developed[14].

The reality of audience in writing research

The importance of audience in the development of early writing ability was another aspect of social reality which was also strongly foregrounded in Lars’ and Rutt’s work in this early period. Rutt (Trøite Lorentzen 1992)[15] noted for instance that what early writers often lack – especially in educational settings – is not audience awareness, which is often a key assumption made by of teachers of writing, but any kind of real audience at all. Since small children like Siri take their own writing (and drawing) practices, as I presume we all do too, very seriously indeed, they develop their abilities in these practices best in contexts that also take them seriously, as they go about their day-to-day identity work. That is to say, in similar intimate social contexts to the emotionally nurturing, language and literacy rich (family) environment where Lars study of Siri’s writing development began.

In positively relationally charged and caring contexts of this kind, children quickly develop the global, socio-cultural functions of genre, since they are constantly gaining meaningful experience of just how their own writing, and thus, too, their self-expression as individuals, actually ‘works’ in relation to a caring, but non-invasive or overly critical audience of significant others.

What seems to have been important too, at least in the initial phases of Siri’s writing developmental process, was not so much the actual responses she received from the members of her audience, to whom she sometimes did not even show her writing, but the very fact that she knew that they were there, that they mattered to her, and she to them, as potential addressees and response-givers, that they sometimes were genuinely astonished and pleased by what she was doing, and that they were not afraid to show it when they were.

Lars concluded on the basis of this preliminary study that a fundamental emphasis on the fostering of the development of global functions in the context of educational writing would be the most favourable for the development of early writing ability, and I think that it is also emerging too, that a start of this kind too, will have clear developmental consequences for more complex literacy skills later on in life, in other life-world contexts such as college, university and the professional world of work, in fact, wherever academic, scientific, or other technologies of writing are used to create, communicate and negotiate meaning. However, as both Lars and Rutt noted at this point, providing children with this kind of start to their embryonic writing careers in educational settings is often quite problematic, since many teachers have a heavily ingrained tendency to focus on writing as something which needs to be practised, rather than employed in forms of meaningful communication which carry along with them inherent forms of individual and interpersonal meaning for the child.

The reality of community in writing research

So with this, we have more or less arrived back at something I started off by trying hard to exemplify at the beginning of my talk through a serious of copious references to myself and my personal life story, revealing in doing so, just a few of the tortuous web of linkages and interrelationships with other people that have grown up around, and woven themselves through me, all the way along the yellow brick road from my inauspicious beginnings in Norway as a curious novice entering the field of Applied Linguistics at the end of the 1980’s. The story of this personal trajectory towards my present quite privileged relationship with, and position (such as it is) in the international community of writing researchers you all represent, came about mainly thanks to my extreme good fortune in finding that tiny community of inquiry in Trondheim to serve as my own ‘intimate’ – and above all, ‘just right’ – point of departure for my further development as a writer, teacher and researcher.

This story reflects quite well, I believe, the crucial importance we all must attach to paying sufficient attention to creating the right kinds of conditions to ensure that the global metafunctions of identity, audience and community can become enveloped in the semiotics of writing, and indeed the whole field of writing and literacy research.

Howard Callaway (2000): in an article entitled “Values and Conflicts of Values in the Pragmatist Tradition”, written some time ago but published for the first time this year (2000) on the Peirce Telecommunity Website: “Arisbe”[16], notes that in a recent book, Jürgen Habermas (1993, p. 114) makes use of a quotation from William James, inscribed on the wall of William James Hall at Harvard, which he claims expresses “the essential intuition of pragmatism”. The quote is as follows:

“The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual, the impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.”

As Howard subsequently points out, If we take as an example the tragic, but highly productive life and work of the American pragmatist philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce, with whom William James had a close personal and working relationship for most of his professional life, it is quite clear that James was not completely right with regard to the second part of his maxim. Peirce’s highly innovative, forward-looking philosophy is enjoying a quiet renaissance today, almost one hundred years after his death in 1914 in abject poverty and more or less without the sympathy of the lofty academic and scientific community he was born into. Peirce the man may have died away, but the impulse he offered lives on through his thought and writings. But my personal experience, at least, with the DEVEL-community has certainly borne out for me the truth of first part of James’ thesis, that the development of (a sense of) community DOES depend on the individual impulse, not only of exceptional people like Lars, whose vision was what got the DEVEL project off the ground and moving in the first place, but also the whole network of exptional individuals who subsequently joined this community, each bringing along with them the potential of THEIR own impulses and their intimate, local and global networks of relationships.

Working consistently and painstakingly together over time, with a deep commitment to the methods, means and discourses of science, with which to try and understand the world, and through these understandings, contribute in positive ways to changing it, is something each and every one of us is engaged in doing in OUR own ways. It is our commitment and belief in the positive power of radical empirical research to move the world forward, that creates the strong sense of interpersonal and professional community I find to exist in international writing and literacy research environment today.

Developing and maintaining such a sense of community, which builds, I believe, upon a profound understanding of the centrality of the three metafunctions of identity, audience and community, seems to me a fundamental precondition, not only for the healthy birth, and growth of innovative ways of diagnosing, approaching and resolving critical and more everyday empirical problems, but also for the nurturing of the experiences gained through doing so, into socio-culturally and politically relevant, efficacious models for further forms of diagnosis and action, and last, but not least, the ‘doing’ of excellent and ecologically sustainable ‘science’ – in the widest possible sense of the word.

It is these kinds of broader, and absolutely vital, sociocultural and political objectives of writing research which I believe we have all, each and every one, expressed a deep commitment to promoting by engaging to come and spend the coming days together here in San Marino. So with that I would like to once more wish all of you heartily welcome to what promise to be three very intense and extremely exciting days of scientific inquiry and learning. A time for watching, listening and talking to one another, and hopefully too, a time for some quiet reflection around what I believe is one of the most important themes of our time – not only for each of us as ‘Men and Women of science’, parents, children, teachers, thinkers and doers of all kinds, but also for our respective local communities –not to mention the nascent European and global communities we can glimpse from time to time, riding like the bobbing log of William James’ allegory, borne along by a multitude of hands all engaging in one way or another with the technology of writing. It is through all our fallible, but vitally important, attempts to try and understand better the enormous potential of writing for communication and meaning-making, that we are beginning to see, too, its innumerable consequences for, as Jack Goody has constantly urged us to remember[17], how we as human beings have come to construe and interact with our pluralistic universe, and how we together, strangely enough, still continue to build, maintain and develop our small, intimate, local communities as a source of new impulses for further growth and understanding in the midst of all this plurality.

List of references

BAZERMAN, CHARLES

1988 Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the experimental article in science. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.

BISSEX, GLENDA L.

1980 Gnys at wrk. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press

FABB, NIGEL, ATTRIDGE, DEREK, DURANT, ALAN & MacGABE COLIN

1987 The linguistics of writing: Arguments between language and literature, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

CALLAWAY, HOWARD G.

2000 Values and Conflicts of Values in the Pragmatist Tradition, Discussion Article published online at the Peirce Telecommunity Arisbe Website: http://www.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/callaway/conflict.htm

COPPOCK, PATRICK JOHN

1996 TextNorm CoDiVE: Changing textual and interactional norms through cooperation in distributed virtual environments. A field-study of the development of qualifying text- and communication norm-systems in distributed multi-user text worlds. First Field Report. Unpublished draft of Section 1, PhD Thesis. Trondheim: The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Applied Linguistics.

1997a “The semiotics of a phenomenological research paradigm for investigating the evolution and ontogenesis of cultural norm-systems in distributed virtual environments”. Semiotica 115-3/4 (1997), T. Sebeok, (ed.) pp. 235-262

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1997c TextNorm CoDiVE: Changing textual and interactional norms through cooperation in distributed virtual environments. A field-study of the development of qualifying text- and communication norm-systems in distributed multi-user text worlds. Second Field Report. Unpublished draft of Section 2, PhD Thesis.. Trondheim: The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Applied Linguistics

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1991 ”Alternative worlds: actual student writers”. In Smidt, J & L. S. Evensen, Roller i relieff: Skrivestrategier - tekster – lesestrategier [Roles in relief: Writer strategies – texts – reader strategies]. DEVEL Report No. 6. Trondheim: ALLFORSK.

1992a “Emerging peaks, turbulent surfaces: Advanced development in student argumentative writing”. In A.-M. L. Olsen & A. M. Simensen (eds.), Essays in honour of Eva Sivertsen, Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 111-130.

1992b “A sense of relief: Backgrounding in student argumentative writing”. In Lindeberg, A. -C., N. E. Enkvist & K. Wikberg (eds.) Nordic research on text and discourse, Åbo: Åbo Academy Press, 211-222.

1993 The envelopment of social identity in early writing: Coming of age (3;4 to 6;10) (1). Paper presented at the 1993 AERA Conference, SIG Writing, Atlanta Georgia.

GOODY, JACK

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1987 The Interface between the Written and the Oral, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

1997 Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence Towards Images, Theatre, Fiction Relics and Sexuality, Oxford, Malden: Blackwell

HABERMAS, JÜRGEN

1993 Justification and Application, Remarks on Discourse Ethics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

HALLIDAY, MICHAEL A, K.

1994 An Introduction to Functional Grammar (Second Edition), London, New York, Sydney, Auckland: Edward Arnold.

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1999 Construing Experience through Meaning: a language-based approach to cognition. London & New York: Cassell.

JAMES, WILLIAM

1909 (1996) A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy, Bison Books Edition (1996) Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

LEMKE, JAY

1993 Talking Science: Language, learning and values, Norwood N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corporation.

MARTIN, James R.

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MEAD, GEORGE H.

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PALTRIDGE, BRIAN

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TRØITE LORENTZEN, RUTT

1991 Tekstskaping med seksåringer (Creating text with six year olds). In L.S. Evensen, M.E. Halse, T.L. Hoel, R.T. Lorentzen, I. Moslet & J. Smidt, Utvilking av skriftspråklig kompetense (Developing written language competence), Report No. 1 from the DEVEL Project. Trondheim: ALLFORSK, 121-138

1992 Barns første tekstskaping – skriving på alvor (Children’s creation of their first texts – serious writing). Paper presented at the DEVEL conference “The foundations of innovation in teaching writing”. Trondheim, December 1992