Misrepresenting One Text In Order To Misinterpret Another

Martin & Rose (2007: 41):

Perhaps a better reading of the drift of feeling in the Act would be one that follows Tutu’s comments on the meaning of ubuntu:

the spirit of ubuntu, the healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships

Here order subsumes disorder; peace breaks out. These are the values the Act wants people to align with in the new rainbow republic. Accordingly it might be wise to group judgement and appreciation together here, under the headings of order and disorder, by way of displaying the attitude to reconciliation the Act is designed to enact:

order
democracy, peaceful co-existence, national unity, peace, reconciliation, reconstruction of society, understanding, reparation, ubuntu, reconciliation, reconstruction;
recognition of human rights, truth, well-being, amnesty, amnesty 

disorder
deeply divided society, strife, conflict, conflicts;
injustice, violations of human rights, vengeance, retaliation, victimisation, omissions, offences

Blogger Comments:

[1] Here Martin and Rose propose to analyse the appraisal enacted in one text, an Explanatory memorandum of a Parliamentary Bill, by looking at the appraisal enacted in a section of a completely different text — of a significantly different register/text type (genre) — Tutu's book No Future Without Forgiveness.  This is the authors' response to being unable to apply appraisal consistently to the original text under discussion; see previous post.

[2]  This commentary is a misrepresentation of Tutu's text:

Further, retributive justice - in which an impersonal state hands down punishment with little consideration for victims and hardly any for the perpetrator - is not the only form of justice. I contend that there is another kind of justice, restorative justice, which is characteristic of traditional African jurisprudence. Here the central concern is not retribution or punishment but, in the spirit of ubuntu, the healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships. This kind of justice seeks to rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator, who should be given the opportunity to be reintegrated into the community he or she has injured by his or her offence. This is a far more personal approach, which sees the offence as something that has happened to people and whose consequence is a rupture in relationships.  Thus we would claim that justice, restorative justice, is being served when efforts are being made to work for healing, for forgiveness and for reconciliation. (Tutu 1999: 48-52)

The purpose of this misrepresentation is to justify the 'order vs disorder' analysis that follows.

[3] Trivially, this misunderstands the meaning of 'subsume'.  Here Martin and Rose claim that a proposed hyponymic relation between two antonyms, order and disorder, accompanies peace.

[4] Returning to an Explanatory memorandum of a Parliamentary Bill, Martin and Rose relabel their previous distinction between (positive) appreciation and (negative) judgement as a distinction between order and disorder, respectively, on the basis of their misrepresentation of another text, Tutu's No Future Without Forgiveness.  See the previous post for some of the reasons why the original analysis (appreciation vs judgement) is a misunderstanding and misapplication of Appraisal theory.

Moreover, in terms of metafunction, the distinction between 'order' and 'disorder' is an ideational one, not an interpersonal one; it is a distinction in the construing of experience as meaning, not a distinction in the enactment of intersubjective relations as meaning.  It is the values that are attributed to 'order' and 'disorder' that can function interpersonally in a text.

Furthermore, as classes, the terms 'order' and 'disorder' are largely inconsistent with the members attributed to each of them.  For example, conflict, injustice, violations of human rights, vengeance, retaliation, victimisation, omissions and offences can all be carried out in an orderly fashion in an orderly regime.