A Genre Field Analysis of Water Right Transfers in Utah

Genre assemblages play a key role in technical communication.  In this paper, I will do a genre field analysis of the specific genre assemblage pertaining to water right transfers in the state of Utah.  Genre field analysis is the theory developed by Ryan M. Moeller and David M. Christensen in “System Mapping: A Genre Field Analysis of the National Science Foundation’s Grant Proposal and Funding Process.”  On page 71 of their article, Moeller and Christian discuss and define the elements of communication situations that genre field analyses identify.  These 4 elements are as follows:

1. Genre-agents
2. Player-agents
3. Transformative Locales
4. Play Scenarios

I will identify and analyze these elements in relationship to the transfer of ownership, or title, for a water right in the state of Utah.  This analysis will include an examination of the website, forms and review process created by the Utah State Division of Water Rights (genre-agent) from the perspective of a title abstractor employed by a property owner (player-agents) to facilitate the change in ownership.  By applying genre field analysis to this process, I hope to gain a better understanding of water transfers and inform other player-agents of the complexities of the genre assemblage.  I believe this paper will help make the process more accessible for property owners, attorneys, surveyors and other title agents.  I also hope it will identify important transformative locales and play scenarios that may influence future legislation relating to water right transfers in Utah.

Moeller, R., & Christensen, D. (2010). System mapping: A genre field analysis of the National Science Foundation's grant proposal and funding process. Technical Communication Quarterly, 19(1), 69-89. doi:10.1080/10572250903373098

The Social Language of Technical Communication

In his book Network, Clay Spinuzzi discusses the role “social languages” play inside of a network (p. 23-28) by introducing the reader to a Telecorp worker called Jeannie and her initial experience with social language.

            “And how bitter that discovery is: workers have worked hard to learn their own social language, and now they have to learn another.  “We are taken right off the streets with zero experience in this field,” Jeannie told me, “an it was like walking into a language course of Greek and it was taught all in Greek and you didn’t have a clue what they were saying. . . .They would plop you down with a book this big and say ‘read it’ but you can’t even understand the lingo and can’t even understand what you’re reading.” Jeannie eventually learned this Greek,” (p. 26)

Spinuzzi's discussion of social languages and Jeannie's experience in trying to learn how to speak one resulted in some serious thought about the social language of technical communication.  I have felt just like Jeannie this semester.  I am a student trying my hardest to learn a language (that of technical communication) but the class is taught in Greek and the book is written in Greek and I only speak English! This seemingly impossible task has been frustrating and left me feeling like I will never understand the material let alone be able to articulate it and then along comes Clay Spinuzzi and Network.

While I was reading this book, I began to make connections with the ideas and theories Dr. Moeller presented earlier in the semester.  Suddenly and strangely, concepts from A Thousand Plateaus’s began to make sense inside another text.  When Spinuzzi started discussing how networks are spliced, I actually thought of Delueze and Guittari and it made perfect sense to me that he referenced rhizome. I applauded his use of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu in discussing strategies for dealing with the ruptures inside of the Telecorp network.  I even found myself physically nodding my head while reading because Spinuzzi's application of these ideologies made sense.  The semester came together for me in this one book.

As this phenomenon recurred during my reading, it became clear that technical communication has its own social language.  Learning and understanding how to speak this language is what will make me a successful scholar.  There is little doubt that next week I will find myself still reading Greek but hopefully I will be able to recognize a word here and there.  Just like the acquisition of any other language, fluency will take time but for me the key to understanding is recognizing that there is another language being spoken. While my fellow students probably understood this from the start, by finally being able to see it I am hopeful that I'm not too old or too tired to learn something new.

Gaming: from Hard Core to Sentimental 

On page 82 of Games of Empire, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter discuss the beginnings of Xbox as a system set up for hard core gamer.  My first purchase of an Xbox gaming system was made in 2003 as a Christmas present for my then husband who was an intense on-line gamer and wanted the system because of its online gaming capabilities.  For a person who still owns the original Nintendo gaming system complete with Duck Hunt and the original Tetris, I found myself nodding in agreement with the authors discussions of the complexity of the controller. However, on Christmas day 2003, my 6 year old son had no such qualms and was soon bonding with his dad playing Halo: Combat Evolved.

Fast forward to present day and a discussions over dinner about what my now 17 year old son Chase and his 13 year old brother Cole want for Christmas.  Chase would prefer the new Play Station 4 (PS4) and Cole wants the new Xbox One (XB1).  As a single Mom, I can't afford both, so holding with our family tradition, I asked each son to argue why their choice of system is superior, after which we would make a joint decision.

Chase started by stating that the Play Station 4 ends up being more affordable because it serves as a blue-ray player and will play all the games Play Station has made so we don't have to re-purchase our gaming library which, if sold, would fund a small revolution in a 3rd world country or pay for his 4 year college degree.  Cole, my youngest, familiar with our system of decision making came prepared.  Typed on a piece of paper, he read the specs for each system and then pointed out that the Xbox will now play blue-ray and the PS4 will now only play PS4 generation games.  In addition, the PS4 with Call of Duty: Ghost retails at $519.97 while the XB1 standard is a mere $499.99, a substantial financial saving in the mind of a 13 year old.

Chase's rebuttal was eloquent but in the end we agreed it was a draw so the decision needed to be made between the boys.  Chase pointed out that "Mom would like the PS4 better because she loves movies but Cole ultimately won with his final statement "Well, Mom won't have to learn a new controller or Call of Duty so she can still play Halo with us and do you remember the first time we played Halo together?  Its my favorite memory and playing Halo with you takes me back to the happy time."  Chase smiled then conceded to Cole, so it looks like Xbox One for a Christmas and a second job for Mom.

The point of this story is that after I read Games of Empire I gained a whole new appreciation for the capitalistic empire that gaming has created, acknowledged that I am a paying member and related my entrance into this world to a hard core gamer that fell in love with Xbox.  I also marveled at the fact that sentimentality between brothers makes me a consumer that doesn't plan on stopping any time soon.

¿qué demonios?

In Chapter 11 of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) discuss the territorializaton and deterritorialization of assemblages and how their oppositional  relationship creates the consistency and fluidity of assemblage.

“Just as milieus swing between a stratum state and a movement of destratification, assemblages swing between a territorial closure that tends to restratify them and a deterritorialzing movement that on the contrary connects them with the Cosmos. Thus it is not surprising that the distinction we were seeking was not between assemblages and something else but between the two limits of any possible assemblage, in other words, between the system or strata and the plane of consistency.” (p. 392)

My initial reaction to this passage, as with most of D&G, was ¿qué demonios? So I turned to Manuel De Landa’s book The New Philosophy of Society, Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity for clarification. De Landa uses assemblage theory to explain social ontology in a very clear and meaningful way.  His summary of assemblage theory gave me the sense of illumination or at least partial illumination coveted by people everywhere reading D&G.

“First of all, unlike wholes in which parts are linked by relations of interiority (that is, relations which constitute the very identity of the parts) assemblages are made up of parts which are self-subsistent and articulated by relations of exteriority, so that a part may be detached and made a component of another assemblage…….A second dimension characterizes processes in which these components are involved: processes which stabilize or destabilize the identity of the assemblage (territorialization and deterritorialization.) (p.18)

 The deterritorialization of assemblage allows a component of the whole to be released and start new assemblages.  This cyclic process allows for infinite combinations of assemblages and strata.  I was able to connect this to the idea of collage in my last post by imagining another artist taking a picture from my board, placing it on their own and creating a new collage around it.  Ultimately, both collages or assemblages would have different meanings to the artist and audience but contain the same autonomous component.

In this same way, academics can and do create intellectual collages by taking an idea from another academics work and creating their own assemblage around it.  De Landa's work is an excellent example of this because he basis a new school of thought in sociology off of assemblage theory.  In this way, he makes D&G understandable and relevant.  Any author that can claim that is pretty cool. 

Assemblage and Collage

Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) introduce their readers to assemblage in chapter one Introduction: Rhizome to lay a framework for their book A Thousand Plateaus.

“There is no longer a tripartite division between the field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes the connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book establishes has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject.” (p. 23)

Assemblage also defined as a whole made up of heterogeneous parts provided me with a theoretical “middle” for contemplating this work.  D&G's usage of assemblage throughout their book as entity brought to mind the collages I created as art projects in elementary school.  The art teacher explained a collages as images and text taken from magazines and newspapers glued to poster board to convey a larger idea to your audience. The concept is a simple one but the end result was a complex and at times seemingly dissimilar montage.

The idea of assemblage as a type of intellectual collage became cohesive for me in chapter five 587 BC-AD 70: On Several Regimes of Signs.  

"We call any specific formalization of expression a regime of sign, at least when the expression is linguistic.  A regime of signs constitutes a semiotic system.  But it appears difficult to analyze semiotic systems in themselves: there is always a form of content that is simultaneously inseparable from and independent of the form of expression, and the two forms pertain to assemblages that are not principally linguistic." (p. 131)

 D&G discuss regimes of signs as an assemblage of symbols that is infinitely connected and circular. The circular aspect of symbols isn't as important as the link it forms in the symbol chain.  It is easy to picture a chain or the Olympic rings as a visual interpretation of this assemblage.  This concept is easily likened to dependent images in a collage.  They stand on their own but the end result or whole is dependent on the connections the images make for the artist and the audience.

In applying the concept of assemblage and regime of sign to my professional work and study, I began to understand how complex assemblages can be.  For instance, A Thousand Plateau's is full of scientific, political, religious and linguistic assemblages.  While I understand the gist of rhizome or geological strata, these concepts would be much more relevant to a botanist or geologist because they understand the symbolic and textual nuances of that assemblage.  The assemblages that make up real property law, cartography, state and federal code, litigation, precedence and surveying, are simple for me to interpret and apply because I have been immersed in their study for 25 years. I now have much more empathy for the pre-law and engineering interns I work with.

English 6480

Michel Foucault’s influence on academics and their writing is both wide spread and far reaching.  The citations in this bibliography hardly scratch the surface of Foucault’s impact on the humanities.  In fact, Wikipedia listed Foucault as the most cited scholar in the humanities in 2007.

Annotated Bibliography (Foucault)

Armstrong, P. (1994). The Influence of Michel Foucault on Accounting Research. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 5(1), 25-55.

Peter Armstrong discusses how Foucault’s theories have affected the history and sociology of accounting.  Armstrong addresses the concepts of comprehensive surveillance on the individual and disciplinary regimes in relationship to the controls in accounting. The article addresses how these concepts may have been misleading for the discipline.

Butler, J. (2006). Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.

Judith Butler, a post-structuralist feminist, introduced her performative theory of gender in this book published in 1990.  Butler uses Foucault’s theories from Discipline and Punish as the basis for her argument that gender is the key cultural agent which affects the body and that gender identity is the result of actions or performance.  Butler also views the body as the prison for the soul.

Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.

In his book, Anthony Giddens, a modern sociologist, presents his theory of structuration which revolves around the concept that either individuals or social influences create social reality.  In particular, he sites Foucault’s theory of how time and space influence disciplinary power.  Ultimately, Giddens views them as a duality that can’t be separated.

  

Oksala, J. (2005). Foucault on freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Johanna Oksala book is dedicated to discussing Foucault’s views on freedom which played a large role in Foucault’s lectures and writing.  Oksala divides these views into three separate categories archaeological, genealogical and ethical.  She also addresses Foucault’s theories on phenomenology or the study of how the human consciousness develops.

Saatcioglu, Bige, & L., O. J. (2013). Moral habitus and status negotiation in a marginalized working-class neighborhood. Journal of Consumer Research, Electronic, None Given.

This journal article published in July, 2013 is an ethnographic study about how identity affects consumers in a trailer park. Of particular interest how social hierarchies and power structures influence the purchases of low-income and working class families.  Foucault’s concepts of identity and power can be seen throughout this discourse. 

Frankfurt School Theorists

Post |01 Frankfurt School Theorists

 I found Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” very engaging primarily because I disagreed so fully with his view of photography and film as lesser art forms produced for the uneducated masses. I harbor a deep love for photography and the role it played in my education. As one of eight children growing up on a farm in Southern Idaho, I was immersed in poverty. We had very little money for the necessities of life making access to travel, art museums and plays impossible. The opportunity for me to experience the “aurora” of a painting was non-existent.

Pictures became my only means of discovering anything about the outside world. I cut them out of any National Geographic I could get my hands on and saved my money to buy books about travel and art that contained photographs of places and things I only imagined in my dreams. I still have these collections and as a result of my fascination with photos my Grandfather willed me his photographs from WWII.

While Benjamin views photography as a medium that doesn’t require “free-floating contemplation” (p. 6), I can attest to a lifetime of exactly the opposite. Photography has been at the center of the deepest contemplations of my life. I was shown the following picture at the age of 8:

 

 

 

This photograph taken by my Grandfather at the Dachu Concentration Camp and started my life-long quest for education. At 13, this picture inspired my first essay on freedom which was chosen to be read by me at the Utah State Capitol during the bicentennial celebration of the U.S. Constitution. In turn, I was introduced to Mark Tenhove who offered me a Presidential scholarship to USU. If not for the contemplation invoked by this single photograph I could never have gotten an education.

In addition to its educational value, I also view photography as a medium that allows art to be enjoyed by the masses and provides people with opportunities that were unavailable prior to its invention. I also believe the distribution of art to the masses to be a positive act not a political act lead by fascists. Art isn’t something that should be available only to upper classes and mechanical reproduction has allowed the uneducated poor like me to see the Mona Lisa.