3. "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community"

Porter's article addresses a view of writing as a constructive process.  In his paradigm, it isn't an individual text being written that is the focus of this construction, but rather the collective knowledge of some broader community.  He describes all texts as being pieces of a discourse community in the like which govern the qualifications for good writing.  Every work within these communities must appeal to previous works in order to have merit.  These communities of course include academic subjects of writing what with their available collection of directly citeable works, but also included are the more creative contexts of writing such as poetry and fiction.  This is because these forms of writing would simply not exist if not for the linguistic constructs that they appeal to.  The language itself and all of it's applicable rules must be used when someone spews any unit of literature.  This paradigm isn't limited to literature though.  Porter gives an example of someone borrowing from the discourse community of fictional film in an advertisement which presented alien life forms in a way which greatly borrowed from a Spielberg film.  Basically all art forms, visual, musical, or as we've already discussed conceptual, appeal to the cannons of their genre's history.

With this in mind, you can't help but ask, where do these cannons come from and why should we see them as a normative force when it comes to our own writing?  After all, to assert that all ideas in writing are just borrowed from those already there seems rather question begging because those ideas must have had some sort of origin.  Furthermore if all ideas are combinations of old ideas then how do we look at situations where one idea will challenge those ideas accepted by the discourse community in question?  Where do new ideas come from?  Porter answers these questions along the lines of 'you can't break the rules until you understand them'.  He argues that the people who make great breakthroughs in the discourse communities are the very same people who have spent some time being a part of that community.  They've gone through the process of closely examining the old technical cannons, arguments, and conclusions, and then finding problems with them before they actually present any differing solutions.  Porter claims that many young writers see the presenting of their individual conclusions as coming more important than understanding the old ones and this ends up with a lot of writing that cycles through previously addressed issues and makes a lot of basic logical mistakes.  He concludes that we should all strive to become productive members of some discourse community if we ever want to become one of the great game changers.