Prueba de Hipótesis

Our earlier discussion proposed a historical change from reliance on inte- gration through a particular text, to integration through a text type, genre, style or discourse type, to integration through a strategy of connecting texts of very different types. This also seems to be a move from long texts fre- quently revisited, to shorter texts rarely revisited (but with text types being frequently revisited), to texts of variable length and type that are not revis- ited in the same sequence (though perhaps revisited in new sequences), where what is frequently revisited now is the connection strategy, or system of intertextual tying, as applied to different sequences among different texts of heterogeneous types. This last case also argues for shorter constituent texts if only because the variety of meaning that can be built by sequences using the same strategy depends on sequence length (for a given heteroge- neous text resource base). Because the timescale for the total activity is roughly constant, each unit needs to become shorter.

The paradigm case of this last strategy is hypertext (Landow, 1994, 1997; Lemke, 1998b), in which relatively short text-units (Landow’s lexias) are concatenated in branching systems of multisequential linkages. The user (reader-writer, meaning-maker) makes a traversal through the hypertext (that is, through the whole relational textual database, the resource system which enables all the possible traversals) and constructs meaning along the way. This traversal then passes through elements which, in the case of the Web, may be of many different genres, functioning in many different modernist institu- tions, and of many different media (for example, Lemke, forthcoming (a)).

Social control here corresponds not only to the control of content, which is the same as in prior modes of textual mediation, and to the well-formedness criteria of genre elements, but to the kinds of reasoning and action (cf. Kolb, 1995), including the literacies needed to write valued hypertext (Lemke, 1998c), which new members of the community must obtain as part of their ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu, 1984, 1990).

Imagining these as three ‘regimes’ of textual mediation of social organi- zation and control, then in the first regime, new texts are very difficult to produce and circulate, and innovation is simply a change in the content of the text. In the second regime, new texts are easy to produce and circulate

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provided they are of recognized types, but the creation of new types is diffi- cult; innovation is in the form and the content becomes less critical. Higher levels of organization are now buffered against changes in content, but not against changes in form. In the third regime, new text types are relatively eas- ier to produce, and indeed conditions favouring this regime also favour con- stant innovation in text-types, with relatively little emphasis on content except as a feature of the type (that is, appropriate linguistic register). What is difficult is the production of new intertextual strategies, but not the con- struction of new sequences that make use of existing intertextual strategies. The higher levels of the system are now buffered against changes in text-type and text content (and more generally in institutional types and activities), but not against changes in intertextual strategy (or transinstitutional cul- ture). Fundamental changes in the system now take place at longer timescales. The types of change at shorter timescales which were formerly significant matter much less at higher scales of organization, if at all.

From the perspective of the cultural capital which is effective and valued in the society, and so the social control which results from inculcation of a habi- tus (dispositions to action and evaluation) in individuals, we may say that:

● in regime 1, the dominant habitus is one whose cultural capital is tied to

the exegesis of a particular text

● in regime 2, the dominant habitus affords cultural capital that is tied to

proficiency with the creation of texts of particular discourse formations or types

● in regime 3, the dominant mode of cultural capital enables surfing across

many genres, text- and media-types and discourse formations; what is valued is the ability to connect texts and activities, and therefore institu- tions, in standard ways (cf. intertextual strategies), while what is innova- tive, and therefore highly controlled, is the production and circulation of new kinds of connection strategy.

In the regime of this newest ‘traversals’ mode of textual mediation and social integration, it is not the new connections themselves that represent fundamental change (and so threat to stability) in the system at higher lev- els of organization, but only new strategies for making meaningful connec- tions. It remains to be seen what forms this social control, and resistance to it, will take in the future, but it must certainly be on the agenda of CDA to be prepared to expose the relationships of social power, interest and advan- tage, and textual mediation of social control in this newly emergent regime.

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8

Identities in Flux: Arabs and Jews