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PART II KEY CONCEPTS 2 The concept of discourse community 2.1 A need for clarification Discourse community, the first of three terms to be examined in Part II, has so far been principally appropriated by instructors and researchers adopting a 'Social View' (Faigley, 1986) of the writing process. Although I am not aware of the original provenance of the term itself, formative influences can be traced to several of the leading 'relativist' or 'social constructionist' thinkers of our time. Herzberg (1986) instances Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric (1969), Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) and Fish's Is There a Text in this Class? (1980). Porter (1988) discusses the significance of Foucault's analysis of 'discursive formations' in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972); other contributors are Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979) and Geertz (Local Knowledge, 1983), with Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1958) as an earlier antecedent (Bruffee, 1986), particularly perhaps for the commentary therein on 'language games' (3.5). Whatever the genealogy of the term discourse community, the relevant point in the present context is that it has been appropriated by the 'social perspectivists' for their variously applied purposes in writing research. It is this use that I wish to explore and in turn appropriate. Herzberg (1986) sets the scene as follows: Use of the term 'discourse community' testifies to the increasingly common assumption that discourse operates within conventions defined by communities, be they academic disciplines or social groups. The pedagogies associated with writing across the curriculum and academic English now use the notion of 'discourse communities' to signify a cluster of ideas: that language use in a group is a form of social behavior, that discourse is a means of maintaining and extending the group's knowledge and of initiating new members into the group, and that discourse is epistemic or constitutive of the group's knowledge. (Herzberg, 1986:1) the absence of any one (different subject areas, conflicting procedures, no interaction, and multiple discourse conventions) may be enough to prevent discourse community formation - as international politics frequently reminds us. It is possible, of course, that there is no pressing need to clarify the concept of discourse community because, at the end of the account, it will turn out to be nothing more than composition specialists' convenient translation of the long-established concept of speech community common to sociolinguistics and central to the ethnography of communication. This view, for example, would seem to be the position of Freed and Broadhead (1987). After a couple of opening paragraphs on speech community in linguistics and on audience analysis, they observe, 'only recently have compositional studies begun to investigate communities of writers and readers, though the terminology seems to be changing to "discourse communities" in order to signal the focus on the written rather than the spoken' (1987:154). Whether it is appropriate to identify discourse community with a subset of speech community is the topic of the next section. 2.2 Speech communities and discourse communities Speech community has been an evolving concept in sociolinguistics and the consequent variety of definitional criteria has been discussed among others - by Hudson (1980), Saville-Troike (1982) and especially by Braithwaite (1984). At the outset, a speech community was seen as being composed of those who share similar linguistic rules (Bloomfield, 1933 ), and in those terms we could legitimately refer to, say, the speech community of the English-speaking world. Later, Labov will emphasize 'shared norms' rather than shared performance characteristics but still conclude that 'New York City is a single speech community, and not a collection of speakers living side by side, borrowing occasionally from each other's dialects' (Labov, 1966:7). Others, such as Fishman (1971), have taken as criterial patterned regularities in the use of language. In consequence, a speech community is seen as being composed of those who share functional rules that determine the appropriacy of utterances. Finally, there are those such as Hymes who argue for multiple criteria: A speech community is defined, then, tautologically but radically, as a community sharing knowledge of rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech. Such sharing comprises knowledge of at least one form of speech, and knowledge also of its patterns of use. Both conditions are necessary. (Hymes, 1974:51) There are a number of reasons why I believe even a tight definition of speech community (shared linguistic forms, shared regulative rules and shared cultural concepts) will not result in making an alternative definition of discourse community unnecessary. The first is concerned with medium; not so much in the trivial sense that 'speech' just will not do as an exclusive modifier of communities that are often heavily engaged in writing, but rather in terms of what that literary activity implies. Literacy takes away locality and parochiality, for members are more likely to communicate with other members in distant places, and are more likely to react and respond to writings rather than speech from the past. A second reason for separating the two concepts derives from the need to distinguish a sociolinguistic grouping from a sociorhetorical one. In a sociolinguistic speech community, the communicative needs of the group, such as socialization or group solidarity, tend to predominate in the development and maintenance of its discoursal characteristics. The primary determinants of linguistic behavior are social. However, in a sociorhetorical discourse community, the primary determinants of linguistic behavior are functional, since a discourse community consists of a group of people who link up in order to pursue objectives that are prior to those of socialization and solidarity, even if these latter should consequently occur. In a discourse community, the communicative needs of the goals tend to predominate in the development and maintenance of its discoursal characteristics. Thirdly, in terms of the fabric of society, speech communities are centripetal (they tend to absorb people into that general fabric), whereas discourse communities are centrifugal (they tend to separate people into occupational or speciality-interest groups). A speech community typically inherits its membership by birth, accident or adoption; a discourse community recruits its members by persuasion, training or relevant qualification. To borrow a term from the kind of association readers of this book are likely to belong to, an archetypal discourse community tends to be a Specific Interest Group. 2.3 A conceptualization of discourse community I would now like to propose six defining characteristics that will be necessary and sufficient for identifying a group of individuals as a discourse community. 1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals. These public goals may be formally inscribed in documents (as is often the case with associations and clubs), or they may be more tacit. The goals are public, because spies may join speech and discourse communities for hidden purposes of subversion, while more ordinary people may join organizations with private hopes of commercial or romantic advancement. In some instances, but not in many, the goals may be high level or abstract. In a Senate or Parliament there may well exist overtly adversarial groups of members, but these adversaries may broadly share some common objective as striving for improved government. In the much more typical non-adversarial discourse communities, reduction in the broad level of agreement may fall to a point where communication breaks down and the discourse community splits. It is commonality of goal, not shared object of study that is criterial, even if the former often subsumes the latter. But not always. The fact that the shared object of study is, say, the Vatican, does not imply that students of the Vatican in history departments, the Kremlin, dioceses, birth control agencies and liberation theology seminaries form a discourse community. 3 The concept of genre Genre is a term which, as Preston says, one approaches with some trepidation (Preston, 1986). The word is highly attractive - even to the Parisian timbre of its normal pronunciation - but extremely slippery. As a first step in the arduous process of pinning it down, I shall discount all uses of the term to refer to non-verbal objects. These include the original meaning of the term (in English) to refer to a type of small picture representing a scene from everyday domestic life and its growing employment as a fancy way of referring to classes of real world entities. The latter is illustrated in Webster's Third New International Dictionary by 'large floppy rag dolls, a genre favored by two-year olds'. The use of genre relevant to this study is glossed by Webster's Third as 'a distinctive type or category of literary composition'; however, the dictionary's citation - from The New Yorker - usefully expands the context of literary to include 'such unpromising genres as Indian Treaties, colonial promotional tracts and theological works'. Indeed today, genre is quite easily used to refer to a distinctive category of discourse of any type, spoken or written, with or without literary aspirations. So when we now hear or read of 'the genre of the Presidential Press Conference', 'the new genre of the music video' or 'the survival of game-show genres', we do so, I believe, without feeling that a term proper to rhetorical or literary studies has been maladroitly usurped. Even so, genre remains a fuzzy concept, a somewhat loose term of art. Worse, especially in the US, genre has in recent years become associated with a disreputably formulaic way of constructing (or aiding the construction of) particular texts - a kind of writing or speaking by numbers. This association characterizes genre as mere mechanism, and hence is inimical to the enlightened and enlightening concept that language is ultimately a matter of choice. The issue then is whether genre as a structuring device for language teaching is doomed to encourage the unthinking application of formulas, or whether such an outcome is rather an oversimplification brought about by pedagogical convenience. An initial way of tackling the issue is to examine what scholars have actually said about genres in a number of fields. For this purpose, the following four sections briefly consider uses of the term in folklore, literary Irrespective of the merits of this 'cluster of ideas', the cluster is, I suggest, consequential of the assumption that there are indeed entities identifiable as discourse communities, not criterial for establishing or identifying them. They point us towards asking how a particular discourse community uses its discoursal conventions to initiate new members or how the discourse of another reifies particular values or beliefs. While such questions are well worth asking, they do not directly assist with the logically prior ones of how we recognize such communities in the first place. Herzberg in fact concedes that there may be a definitional problem: 'The idea of "discourse community" is not well defined as yet, but like many imperfectly defined terms, it is suggestive, the center of a set of ideas rather than the sign of a settled notion' (1986:1). However, if discourse community is to be 'the center of a set of ideas' - as it is in this book - then it becomes reasonable to expect it to be, if not a settled notion, at least one that is sufficiently explicit for others to be able to accept, modify or reject on the basis of the criteria proposed. Several other proponents of the 'social view', while believing that discourse community is a powerful and useful concept, recognize it currently raises as many questions as it answers. Porter (1988:2), for instance, puts one set of problems with exemplary conciseness: 'Should discourse communities be determined by shared objects of study, by common research methodology, by opportunity and frequency of communication, or by genre and stylistic conventions?' Fennell et al. (1987) note that current definitions have considerable vagueness and in consequence offer little guidance in identifying discourse communities. They further point out that definitions which emphasize the reciprocity of 'discourse' and 'community' (community involves discourse and discourse involves community) suffer the uncomfortable fate of ending up circular. We need then to clarify, for procedural purposes, what is to be understood by discourse community and, perhaps in the present circumstances, it is better to offer a set of criteria sufficiently narrow that it will eliminate many of the marginal, blurred and controversial contenders. A 'strong' list of criteria will also avoid the circularity problem, because in consequence it will certainly follow that not all communities as defined on other criteria - will be discourse communities, just as it will follow that not all discourse activity is relevant to discourse community consolidation. An exclusionary list will also presumably show that the kind of disjunctive question raised by Porter is misplaced. It is likely to show that neither shared object of study nor common procedure nor interaction nor agreed discoursal convention will themselves individually be necessary and sufficient conditions for the emergence of a discourse community, although a combination of some or all might. Conversely