Reading :: Genre Networks and Empire

Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China

By Xiaoye You

As the back of the book says, “Genre Networks and Empire integrates a decolonial and transnational approach to construct a rhetorical history of early imperial China.” You applies the concept of genre and genre networks to activity systems developing in early imperial China, providing an analysis of how several rhetorical genres developed, thrived, and interacted across this history. It’s inherently interesting, especially for someone who is interested in how administrative work happens in different cultures. 

I’ll offer a very gentle critique at the start. This book could have been written without the concepts of rhetoric, genre, activity systems, and perhaps without the concept of decolonialism as well. Many books and articles that examine similar networks of text types have been, mainly in anthropology and sociology. Like those books, this one could offer a compelling analysis that doesn’t use those concepts and still reveals the complex dialogic workings of early imperial China. 

Nevertheless, it does use those concepts. In the Introduction, You lays down some stakes. In terms of decolonialism, You argues that “in efforts to decenter Western epistemology … there exists a tendency to use non-Western concepts and practices into rhetorical studies without fully attending to the oppressive social structures from which these concepts and practices emerge. This book argues that in studies of a non-Western rhetoric, the decolonial option must include an exposition of the imperial, colonial, ethnic, racial, and sometimes feudal matrix of power residing in that tradition” (p.2). This idea — treating non-Westerners as just as complex and conflicted as Westerners — is characterized as a “decolonial move” (p.2), and ultimately seems respectful to the culture under examination. You also argues that early imperial China is “a period rendered invisible by Western biases” (p.2). “To explore rhetoric and autocracy, this book argues that Chinese networked theories of genre are essential, as a distributed use of genres was instrumental for imperial government” (p.3). You asks: “How did genres function as a tool for generating and reproducing the imperial matrix of power? What opportunities did genre networks create for political participation? How did they mediate in policy discussions that impacted the far reaches of the empire? How did court historians portray and theorize genre networks as a political institution?” (p.4).

You takes aim at the Western idea that rhetoric only takes root in democracies, “where cacophonous voices are heard and negotiated” (p.7), and blames the Western lack of interest in imperial China on this bias, since it was not democratic. I do think that Western rhetoricians might be stuck on the idea that public rhetoric emerged in Athenian democracy — but then again, many Westerners have shown interest in bureaucratic rhetorical discourse, which is hardly appealing to public deliberation in a democratic setting. That is, I see what You is driving at, but I think he might be overgeneralizing the claim, and he might find some useful work on genre in professional communication studies. 

In any case, he doesn’t need to appeal to Western scholarship, since antecedents exist in Chinese scholarship. You argues that rhetoric really did take place in imperial China in identifiable genres working within networks, and studying these genre networks allows him to get to materiality and rhetoric (p.10). To that aim, he provides a genealogy of genre studies in China (p.10), including a Chinese network theory of genre that theorizes hierarchies among genres as well as aesthetic order (p.12). Although he connects this work to Western concepts such as activity systems (p.15) and genre as social action (p.16), he keeps the focus on this Chinese scholarship. He concludes by outlining the hierarchies explored in this book: a metaphysical order, a gender hierarchy, a politico-military organization, an ethnic hierarchy, an aesthetic hierarchy, and a linguistic hierarchy (pp.18-19). Under these concerns, he examines “representative genre networks,” where “a genre network is defined as an array of connections and meanings that unfold as a discourse, or a seriesof discourses, is produced and circulated in response to a sociopolitical exigency” (p.19). He examines each genre network to understand how it “generated meanings and political power” (p.19). 

Throughout the rest of the book, You delivers on these promises, providing lucid descriptions of the genre networks at play in different points of imperial Chinese history. Particularly interesting to me is Chapter 5, in which he explores the clash between the Vertical-Horizontal school and the Spring and Autumn Annals — two distinct genre styles grounded in different theories of suasion. 

In the conclusion, You argues that genre networks sustained and enacted a Confucian form of government; encouraged self-cultivation; regulated elite families; and enabled the ruler and officials to actuate the imperial myth (p.167). He also (once again) returns to decoloniality: “While seeking non-Western epistemologies does aid decoloniality by allowing us to think, feel, understand, and live otherwise, we must keep in mind the histories of their appropriation by the colonial and imperial powers” (p.171). 

Overall, I got a lot from this book. Granted, the discussion of decolonialism felt a bit tacked on to me — as someone who has read anthropological, archaeological, and sociological work set in non-Western societies, the stance that You articulates seems pretty common-sense to me. I wondered whether this decolonialist discussion was really organic to the book, or whether it was an attempt to connect the book to reviewer concerns. But getting past that, the book offers a fascinating account of genre networks in imperial China on their own terms, entering into these periods to understand their governing theories and assumptions, bureaucratic practices, and balance of powers. This is where I think the book really shines, and I definitely plan to return to it as I think through materiality and genre further. If you’re interested in genre theory, genre networks, bureaucratic discourse, or imperial China, definitely check it out. 

 

Reading :: Agency and Transformation

Agency and Transformation: Motives, Mediation, and Motion

Edited by Nick Hopwood and Annalisa Sannino

This 2024 collection from Cambridge focuses on agency from a cultural-historical perspective, and largely with the purpose of political activism. 

As the editors argue in Chapter 1, “The world we live in urgently calls for a better understanding of agency, and for using new understandings to promote positive change” (p.1). They critique “what dominant psychological and sociological conceptualisations of agency typically offer: categorising different types of agency but remaining silent or unclear on the processes of its emergence and development” (p.1). They note that agency is often seen as a slippery concept (p.3), but argue that this slipperiness is more due to how we too often think about agency. Their alternative is a dialectic understanding of agency, grounded in cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) (p.7). In discussing this understanding, they characterize Vygotsky’s project as “rebellious” and “activist” (p.9), and they explore three “motifs”: motivation, mediation, and motion. They then turn to developing a developmental account of agency (p.19), one that does not just respond but that also builds toward a vision of the future. 

In Chapter 2, Sannino offers a conceptualization of transformative agency based on her transformative agency by double stimulation (TADS) framework (p.35). As she explains, “TADS highlights the unfolding of transformative agency as a process (motion). These dynamics are triggered by the ways in which historical contradictions are experienced when we pursue what matters in our activities (motives). They are sustained by the use of cultural means and artifacts (mediation)” (p.36). She puts this perspective into dialogue with “Eric Olin Wright’s sociology of real utopias” (p.36), which “despite the strong dialectical and progressive stance it adopts… is still predominantly one based on the formulation of accounts and critiques on how power is played out” (p.36). Along the way, Sannino overviews her recent studies on eradicating homelessness, examining two studies in which housing unit managers and employees, NGOs, city and national representatives participated. (Residents of the housing units did not.) Examining these “hybrid coalitions,” Sannino concludes: “the agency processes presented earlier make it possible to put forward the following three claims on which a power-sensitive concept of transformative agency could build: (1) power can be put in motion by means of TADS; (2) conflicting motives, besides being paralyzing experiences of disorientation and powerlessness, can also be resources for generating and exerting power; and (3) power is a willful process that can be triggered and sustained by deliberately mobilizing material and symbolic artifacts as mediators” (p.51).

In Chapter 3, Anna Stetsenko argues that we should “understand humans as active co-creators of the world and their own development who agentively contribute to co-realizing the-world-in-the-making and, moreover, who come to be agentive – that is, capable to matter – precisely through such contributions” (p.57). She characterizes this view as decolonialist, invoking Frantz Fanon (p.57), and characterizes it within her transformative activist stance (p.60), which understands Marxism and Vygotsky’s approach as aligning “with the radical scholarship of resistance” (p.60). Along these lines, she challenges views of Vygotsky as eurocentric: indeed, Marx and Vygotsky yielded a “new – I would argue, de facto non-eurocentric – approach” because “their philosophy of ‘world-changing’ went against the very core postulates and the most central pillars of European canons” (pp.61-62). (I think this argument is a tough one to make, and requires us to either ignore or explain away Vygotsky’s consistent focus on achieving the New Soviet Human through teaching Soviet cultural tools and competencies. See my review of Proctor’s Psychologies in Revolution for starters.) Stetsenko concludes that “this chapter reveals how the scholarship of resistance, inclusive of the Marxist/Vygotskian framework and its extension in TAS, offers ways to understand human agency without placing humans either above nature/reality or apart from it. Instead, all of human development is understood as the process of a synergistic co-realizing of, and hence a togetherness with, the world. This highlights that people and the world belong together – and moreover, not as entities but as currents in one and the same stream of a joint/entangled/entwined co-becoming” (p.76). 

Skipping ahead, in Chapter 8, Aydin Bal and Aaron Bird Bear “present a formative intervention study, Indigenous Learning Lab, implemented at Northwood High School through a coalition of an Anishinaabe Nation in the Great Lakes, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the Wisconsin Indian Education Association, and a university-based research team” (p.183). At the high school, “Indigenous students who made up 21 percent of the student population received over 60 percent of the suspensions and 100 percent of the expulsions in the 2014–15 academic year” (p.184). In response, “Indigenous Learning Lab aimed at facilitating transformative agency among American Indian students, families, educators, and community members and non-Indigenous educators at Northwood High School to design the future of their school’s behavioral support system” (p.184). Applying Sannino’s TADS and following a decolonialist approach, the authors conclude that 

Disproportionate representation of American Indian students in school discipline is an adaptive historically accumulated systemic crisis. The individualization of systemic problems – seemingly color-neutral discourses, policies, and practices – cannot solely address complex, adaptive systemic injustices such as disproportionality. People cannot survive and thrive in an oppressive institutional culture that persists and reinforces racism, White supremacy, and racialized experiences. Addressing racial disproportionality requires developing systemic, adaptive, and persistent solutions with historically marginalized communities and practitioners and building justice-oriented, strategic coalitions among multiple communities and activity systems that envision systemic transformation. To this end, there is a need for creating an inclusive problem-solving space in which local stakeholders collaboratively engage in future-making with critical dialogue on racism and settler colonialism to dismantle the existing punishing, disabling, and marginalizing education systems and simultaneously reimagine schools as sites of collaboration, inclusive future-making, and joy. (p.205)

The collection also includes chapters describing research into a post-Apartheid land restitution case in South Africa (Chapter 10), birth plans in Brazil (Chapter 11), an ecological agroforestry association also in Brazil (Chapter 12), frontline homelessness work in Finland (Chapter 13 — reporting on the Housing First project led by Sannino), and children’s agency during the COVID-19 epidemic in China (Chapter 14), along with several classroom studies that I skimmed (I’m just not that interested in classroom studies). 

The collection concludes with Nick Hopwood’s chapter on agency in CHAT. Hopwood argues that “Linking actions with activities is key to [overcoming the tendency to locate agency in an individual/structure binary]. Concern for the direction and reach of actions implies consideration of the activities in which they are embedded” (p.357). He concludes: 

Agency cannot be directionless. It is a matter of intended movement towards a desired future, however unviable it may seem and however unknowable the means to realise it may be. As such, agency is inherently and intimately connected with motives, with responsibility to oneself and others. (p.376)

In sum, the collection uses contemporary CHAT to discuss the difficult question of agency. Although I’m not especially interested in agency per se — like other broad terms such as “concept” and “solidarity,” this term has been used so many ways that it’s sometimes hard to tell what is being invoked — in this collection, authors have worked hard to develop a developmental, cultural-historical understanding of agency. For me, it is not entirely convincing — I’d really like to see more critical pushback against Vygotsky, Leontiev, and others in the CHAT lineage, who (I would argue) clearly understand agency differently than some of the contributors here. I’ve already mentioned Vygotsky’s focus on empowerment through culturally assimilating someone else’s tools, and I second Blunden’s critique of Leontiev as providing a managerial view of activity, i.e., a view from the top of the hierarchy. 

Still, reading these chapters has given me a better sense of an approach to agency, one that attempts to retain a developmental understanding while making the concept useful through a decolonialist lens. That’s an important contribution. If you’re interested in agency and CHAT, definitely pick up this book.

Reading :: Concept Formation in the Wild

 Concept Formation in the Wild

By Yrjo Engestrom

Sometime last year, I became interested in what is meant by “concept” — a term that is used broadly, in both colloquial senses and a multitude of academic senses. Like terms such as “solidarity” and “phenomenon,” it can mean very specific things to someone who is steeped in a specific scholarly tradition, yet different things to those in another tradition or in no tradition. After reading several sources, including this one, I have a better understanding of some of these senses (and a diminished enthusiasm for the term itself).

“Concept,” of course, has intrigued Engestrom for a while. As someone who has studied and learned from Vygotsky, Leontiev, Davydov, and others in the tradition of Soviet-era Russian psychology, Engestrom understands concept as sociocultural:

The primary focus of this book is … collective creation of culturally new concepts in the wild. The starting point is the realization that culturally novel concepts are created not only by scientists but also by people struggling with persistent problems and challenges in all walks of life. (p.5)

To study it, he draws on studies he conducted throughout his decades as a scholar, examining not laboratory studies but rather field studies and interventionist studies. 

In Chapter 2, Engestrom draws on the work of a variety of (loosely speaking) sociocultural researchers to explore the notion of concept formation. These include familiar names such as Cussins and Hutchins. Re the latter, Engestrom notes that “Hutchins argues that conceptual models are commonly stabilized with the help of ‘material anchors’” — which “are more than just words or signs” (p.12). Indeed, although Engestrom does not point this out, Hutchins does not show any interest in distinguishing between signs and tools — like Engestrom and Leontiev, unlike Vygotsky.

In Chapter 3, Engestrom draws on Vygotsky’s work on concept formation in Thinking and Speech. Discussing the methodological principle of double stimulation as laid out by Vygotsky and explicated by Sannino, Engestrom then moves to discussing the four generations of activity theory. (Longtime readers of this blog will recognize that Engestrom has long described activity theory in terms of these generations, and that they are not universally accepted by other AT scholars. See my upcoming book for the gory details.) When he inevitably presents the activity system triangle (p.19), he locates Concepts under “Instruments: Tools and signs.” And he argues that “From a dialectical perspective, a concept is a stepwise process of moving from the initial germ cell abstraction to its concrete manifestation” (p.21, his emphasis). He adds that “the origin of concepts is to be found in productive labor, in the practical molding of materials into artifacts” (p.22). This is a very Leontievan understanding of concepts, and it contrasts sharply with (for instance) Andy Blunden’s understanding (as we’ll see when I eventually review his book on concepts). 

In Chapter 4, Engestrom examines functional concepts in organized productive activities. He begins by discussing “prototype concepts,” which we can examine as material rather than mental representations (p.37). Following Brooks, he provides the example of the Chartres Cathedral, which was built by many contractors in many campaigns over decades, a “mess” that nevertheless defined the concept of the Gothic cathedral (pp.37-38). “It may have been later used by others as a model to emulate, but it was not created to be emulated. It is primarily a prototype of itself and for itself” (p.38). Turning to an example of observing how Indian fishing boats are built, he argues, “A prototype concept answers the question ‘What?’, not by listing attributes or explaining but basically by pointing and inviting the observer to touch and test” (p.41). “Prototype concepts are oriented to the here and now,” and “The formation of the prototype concept in our study took place as extended dwelling and moving in a bounded space around the material object” (p.42). 

Other types of functional concepts exist. In fact, Engestrom provides a table (p.77) laying out five types:

• Prototype
• Classification: Category
• Process: Script, story, or plan
• System
• Germ cell 

Each is illustrated by a case study, and each has a different purpose. He adds:

Each type of functional concept has its own specific strengths and affordances. In other words, one type is not “better” or “more advanced” than the other. However, many complex activities would benefit from making use of the complementarity of different types of functional concepts. (p.77)

In Chapter 5, Engestrom considers an embodied germ cell at work, drawing on the studies he conducted with Nummijoki and Sannino on physical mobility in elderly home care. He argues that “A theoretical concept may be understood as dialectical movement from the abstract to the concrete. In other words, the concept is a way of moving within a domain, not a static definition” (p.80). Here, he focuses on the germ cell he and Nummijoki identified for elderly home care: “Getting up from the chair, or sit-to-stand, [which] is extensively used as a rehabilitation and intervention technique and central item in tests of physical mobility and functional capacity” (p.83). After all,

It is foundational for any other kind of physical movement. In other words, it can be seen as the smallest and simplest initial unit of a complex totality; as something ubiquitous, so commonplace that it is often taken for granted and goes unnoticed; and as opening up a perspective for multiple applications, extensions, and future development. (p.84)

Intriguingly, through this elaborated illustration Engestrom argues that “Concept formation in the wild is foundationally a societal and collective process that takes shape in a distributed fashion not reducible to individual learning, cognition, and behavior” (p.106) — that is, if we think about concept formation as a socially distributed process, we must think beyond the sign or individual understanding. 

In Chapter 6, Engestrom turns to double stimulation and concept formation in everyday work. He focuses on critical encounters, in which participants face a conflict of motives. This conflict could be internal (a participant is oriented toward two different motives) or external (two participants pursue conflicting motives) (p.110). In such a situation, an artifact can be used as a second stimulus, helping to clarify the conflict. Put differently:

A critical encounter is an event in which two or more relevant actors come together to deal with a problem that represents a shared object and at the same time a conflict of motives. In such a critical encounter, there is both complementarity and tension between the actors. To resolve the problem, the actors may use mediating artifacts to take volitional action and to try and conceptualize the situation. In this sense, critical encounters are generic sites of learning, understood as formation of transformative agency and functional concepts. (p.111)

This might lead to “A conceptualization effort [, which] is some type of an articulation of a general idea or characteristic that has integrative potential for establishing a perspective for a solution to the problem or conflict of motives” (p.113).

In Chapter 7, Engestrom considers collective concept formation as creation at work. He argues that “Collective concept formation in the wild may be seen as creation of new worlds, condensed or crystallized in a future-oriented concept” and that it “is typically a long process in which the concept itself undergoes multiple transformations and partial stabilizations. This type of creation transcends the boundary between the mental and the material. The concept typically radiates outward, finds extensions and practical applications that stretch the boundaries of the concept and make it a constantly moving target” (p.139). Let me just note here that I really like Engestrom’s orientation to concept as a social fact, not something that just happens inside the head, but something that happens across people and across their environments. It portrays “concept formation as a process that transcends the divides between mental and material, between mind and body. For these authors, concept formation operates not only with symbols, words, and language, but also it is grounded in embodied action and artifact-mediated enactment in the material world” (p.142). 

Based on this line of thought, Engestrom proposes that

concept formation in the wild may be regarded as movement in a space defined by means of two dimensions, namely the dimension of stabilization … and the dimension of representational modality …  The end points of the stabilization dimension are “emergent” and “well-defined.” The end points of the modality dimension are “enacted, embodied” and “verbal, textual.” (p.142)

After discussing some case studies of work, Engestrom concludes:

If we abandon the individual as privileged unit of analysis and redirect our analytical gaze to real transformations in work and organizations, we gain a very different angle on work-related creativity. Creativity appears as practitioners’ and their clients’ collective efforts and struggles to redefine the idea of their activities – to construct and implement qualitatively new concepts to guide and organize the work practice. This kind of creativity cannot be neatly located in a standard scale from Big C to small c, simply because the individualist unit of analysis of that very scale is inadequate. Collective concept formation at work is creation in the sense of forging the future, building new worlds of work while dwelling in those worlds. (p.155)

In chapter 8, Engestrom considers concept formation “over the long haul,” anchoring the discussion with Sannino’s recent involvement in the Housing First program. As longtime readers of this blog know, I’ve been following this project for a while, and Engestrom’s discussion here gives us new details about how it has unfolded and what it has produced. In particular, he notes a contradiction between security and freedom in managed housing, and he proposes the concept of escorted transfer as a way to integrate services laterally (p.173). 

Chapter 9 wraps up the book, providing advice for interventionist researchers who are interested in helping concepts to form while avoiding imposing their own ideas. 

Overall, I really appreciated this book. Like the other books Engestrom has written since retirement, this one draws case studies from across his long career, using them to explore and sum up themes that he has touched on throughout. In particular, I appreciate the more or less distributed cognition treatment of concept. It helped to make concept a more useful category for me and for the sorts of studies I conduct, and along the way, it helped me to think through relationships among different sorts of material conditions that we too often rush to characterize as tools, signs, words, etc. 

So I will return to this book as I continue to think through these sorts of relationships. If you are similarly interested in them, or if you’re just interested in activity theory more generally, I highly recommend this book.