The People's Front Of Systemics

  Martin & Rose (2007: 332):

We are now all confronted with the urgency of tackling head-on the ‘growthist’ ideology of global capitalism that is fuelling the greenhouse effect. We can’t be sure how interventions of this order will focus functional linguistics — but as the comrades of our youth once took Bob Dylan’s words to heart, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. As culpable weather-makers, it is time to re-imagine the possibilities of our craft, and to realise them as social action.

Blogger Comments:

This calls for immediate discourse.

Perception Management

 Martin & Rose (2007: 332):

Our experience is that the most influential factor shaping the direction of research is what we are developing our linguistics for. For us, as participants in the Sydney School, the development of discourse semantics out of cohesion, the emergence of genre theory and appraisal analysis, and the current interest in intermodality, have all been very much tied up with our concern with redistributing the literacy resources of western culture to the peoples who have historically been subjugated by them. Our aim has never been to promote a particular ideology, but simply to offer what we know about these language resources, so that people could redeploy them as they choose. This remains a central concern of our work and a major application in educational contexts, that continues to grow internationally, as we illustrated with David’s South African lesson in Chapter 7. But as far as we can see these peoples, be they working class, indigenous minorities, or third world nations, will have increasingly limited opportunities for such redeployment given current projections for global warming. This creates a new and pressing agenda for socially responsible linguistics.

To this point in time we have been primarily concerned, like the authors we have studied in this book, with subverting what Halliday (1993) has called the 'lordism' of the Eurasian culture bloc.

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Martin & Rose have not taken the work of others, misunderstood it, and rebranded it as their own for personal gain, but for the noble cause of social justice. This means that any challenge to the theoretical validity of their work must be made by those opposed to social justice.

[2] To be clear, contrary to their stated aims, Martin & Rose do promote a particular ideology — or range of ideologies — despite being unable to define, let alone model, ideology, as previous posts on that subject have demonstrated. However, what can be said is that Martin's focus on heroism, and on "building (his own) community", as well as his contempt for scientists, and his coercing of students to use his misunderstandings of Halliday's theory, in preference to Halliday's theory, all suggest an ideology that is quite at odds with that presented in this and other publications. As Bertrand Russell, in his History Of Western Philosophy (pp 21-2), observed:

Throughout this long development, from 600 BC to the present day, philosophers have been divided into those who wished to tighten social bonds and those who wished to relax them.  With this difference, others have been associated.  The disciplinarians have advocated some system of dogma, either old or new, and have therefore been compelled to be, in greater or lesser degree, hostile to science, since their dogmas could not be proved empirically.  They have almost invariably taught that happiness is not the good, but that ‘nobility’ or ‘heroism’ is to be preferred.  They have had a sympathy with irrational parts of human nature, since they have felt reason to be inimical to social cohesion.  The libertarians, on the other hand, with the exception of the extreme anarchists, have tended to be scientific, utilitarian, rationalistic, hostile to violent passion, and enemies of all the more profound forms of religion.  This conflict existed in Greece before the rise of what we recognise as philosophy, and is already quite explicit in the earliest Greek thought.  In changing forms, it has persisted down to the present day, and no doubt will persist for many ages to come.

[3] To be clear, here Martin & Rose explicitly identify themselves with Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Previously (p62), they have only explicitly identified Martin with Mandela:

His communion with Mandela, at such a distance in so many respects …

By repeatedly bathing in the reflected glory of genuine activists for social justice, through the inclusion of their texts in his publications, Martin has successfully misrepresented himself as a fellow activist. For a reality check, see Jim Martin "Honouring" The Late Ruqaiya Hasan.

[4] This is misleading, because it is untrue. Halliday (1993) makes no mention of "the lordism of the Eurasian culture bloc". Rather, his term 'lordism' refers to the notion of the uniqueness of the human species as the lords of creation, as an evolved destructive feature of our daily language. Halliday (2003 [1993]: 225-6):

So what are the lessons here for us as applied (or "applying") linguists? I tried to suggest in the paper I gave at the World Congress two years ago that the concept of doing applied linguistics means, among other things, that one is involved in the semiotic history of the culture. The point I was making there was that our dominant grammars lock us in to a framework of beliefs that may at one time, when they first evolved in language, have been functional, and beneficial to survival, but that have now become inimical to survival and harshly dysfunctional: the motifs of bigger and better (all 'growth' is positively loaded), of the uniqueness of the human species as lords of creation, the passivity of inanimate nature, the unboundedness of natural resources like water and air, and so on. These are not features of technical languages; they are aspects of our most unconscious, deeply installed, everyday common-sense grammar; and they are now very destructive, at a time when we have to learn to break the rhythm of endless growth, to identify ourselves with other species as part of a living whole, and to recognise that our planet is not a repository of infinite wealth and abundance. And I see this as an applied linguistic concern: to draw attention to these features of our daily language, its growthism and its lordism; and perhaps even to explore the possibility of design, though this will be forbiddingly hard to make succeed.

Misleading Through Misrepresentations, Misunderstandings And A Logical Fallacy

Martin & Rose (2007: 331-2):

From our own vantage point, there have been some interesting shifts of focus in discourse analysis over the four decades of Jim’s involvement and two decades of David’s. In the 1970s, cohesion was the favoured episteme, as grammarians cast their gaze outwards beyond the clause. In the 1980s it was genre that came to the fore, fostered in important respects by work on literacy development in the Sydney School, English for Academic Purposes and New Rhetoric traditions (Hyon 1996). The 1990s saw the emergence of evaluation as a major theme, as analysts developed models of attitude in functional and corpus linguistics (Hunston and Thompson 2000, Martin and Macken-Horarik 2003). Currently we are in the midst of a surge of interest in multimodal discourse analysis, inspired by the ground-breaking work of Kress and van Leeuwen (1996/2006, 2001) on images. Looking ahead, we can probably expect an emerging rapprochement between qualitative and quantitative approaches to text analysis, depending on the kinds of technology that can be brought to bear in large-scale studies of many and longer texts. Just how this will tend to focus discourse analysis epistemes is harder to predict. Our own approach, in this book and beyond, contrasts strikingly with current trends, which for operational reasons (or worse) tend to elide discourse semantics in favour of word counts, collocations and colligations — as if texts where random sequences of words, phases or clauses. As analysis technologies develop, we need to ensure these trends do not become entrenched in the field in the long term.

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in SFL Theory, discourse analysis is the use of linguistic theory (potential) to analyse texts (instances of language).

[2] This is misleading. Four decades before the first edition of this book Jim Martin turned 13 years old. David Rose, on the other hand, completed his PhD — describing an Australian language — only 5 years before the first edition of this book.

[3] On the one hand this is misleading, and on the other hand, this misunderstands the term 'episteme'. Firstly, it is misleading because it falsely claims that discourse analysis was restricted to cohesive analysis, which is merely the non-structural component of the textual metafunction. Discourse analysis potentially involves all of theory, but crucially, it deploys the grammar. As Halliday (1985: xvii) made clear:

A discourse analysis that is not based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a running commentary on a text… the exercise remains a private one in which one explanation is as good or as bad as another.

Secondly, the use of 'episteme' is inconsistent with its use in philosophy, whether by Plato or Foucault, the latter being the more likely source for Martin & Rose. For Foucault, 'épistémè' means the epistemological assumptions on which meaning-making is based, as exemplified by the SFL Theory assumption that meaning is immanent of semiotic systems, not transcendent of them.

More generally, 'episteme' means a principled system of understanding, such as a science, and it contrasts with 'techne', an applied practice. In talking of the practice of discourse analysis, Martin & Rose are concerned with techne, not episteme. However, Plato distinguishes 'episteme' from 'doxa', common belief or opinion. In tracing a history of "favoured epistemes", Martin & Rose are actually concerned with doxa (with regard to techne).

[4] This is misleading. Here Martin & Rose are presenting Martin's personal trajectory of interests as if they were the prevailing trends in the worldwide SFL community as a whole.

[5] This is misleading, because here Martin & Rose fallaciously argue for the value of their own approach, discourse semantics, by contrasting it with a straw man: non-existent Systemic Functional linguists who analyse texts as if they "random sequences of words, phases or clauses."

Firstly, as this blog and the review of Martin (1992) have demonstrated, Martin's model of discourse semantics is his misunderstandings of Halliday's speech function (interpersonal semantics) and Halliday & Hasan's cohesion (non-structural textual lexicogrammar), rebranded as his own systems, and as such, as Martin's theoretical insights.

Secondly, in SFL Theory, the quantitative approach is used to distinguish texts according to register. Texts differ by the frequencies of feature selection, across all systems of the content plane, and these frequencies instantiate the probabilities of feature selection by which registers of language differ. This is, of course, all lost on those who cannot distinguish registers of language from the cultural context of language, such as Martin & Rose.