Misrepresenting Barthes And Confusing Material & Semiotic Orders Of Experience

Martin(1992: 538-9):

Focussing on narrative theory, Barthes does not take the step of theorising paradigmatic relations among activity sequences, for which the notion of field is developed here.  A field such as linguistics for example involves a large number of sequences: lecturing, evaluation, supervising, writing, editing, meetings, committees, seminars, conferences, research activities, referee's reports, community work, administration and so on.  More than one of these may well succeed another as a series of micro-sequences, but there is more to their interrelationships than this constituency analysis suggests.  All are related to participation in the field of linguistics, sharing a large number of taxonomies of both the superordinate and compositional variety.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This misrepresents Barthes' sequences, which are language structures, as Martin's activity sequences, which are misconstrued by Martin as context, which in turn is misconstrued by Martin as register.  The confusion is thus simultaneously along the two theoretical dimensions of stratification and instantiation.

[2] This confuses what people do (lecturing etc.) with what people say (sequences). The confusion is thus between material and semiotic orders of experience.