Questions from the dying

I'm not there, and yet I am...

I don't have a great deal to say about the Vielstimmig article except to ask:

Does their embodiment of their ideas support or undermine their argument? What can I make of the fact that I found the article annoying, too self-satisfied with its own conceit (and I do want to imply both meanings of that word)?

Do we need to start defining more clearly what we mean by collaboration? Is collaboration a good in itself?

With the Kress article, I had some moments of disjunction in the beginning when it seemed to me that he was setting up a false controversy around the use and meaning of genre. Being pretty steeped in genre theory from Anis Bawarshi and others, I found the idea that scholars still maintain a more limited sense of genre as formal types of linguistic texts hard to believe. In the end, I agreed with his conclusions, mostly, but didn't understand the exigence for making the argument. Anyway, I'm prompted to ask:

Where do genres come from? Are writers empowered as much as Kress seems to imply to be creative in how they mix genres?

One of my key points of resistance to genre theory (at least those branches of it that posit genre as the sole key component of writing—if that reading isn't just my hyperbolic interpretation) is that I cannot see how genre itself provides for its own dynamism. Kress doesn't seem to be articulating an understanding of Genre in this vein, which is evident when he says he explains an understanding of design as "an understanding of what the social and cultural environment is into which my text is to fit" which seems to posit genre choice or mixtures as being within some larger understanding of the writing/cultural environment. So my question:

Is genre, as Bawarshi and others view it both habit and habitat, or is genre operating within a larger ecology? If genre is more codetermining and cosubstantiating with performance (the Bawarshi view) how does that affect a writer's level of "Choice" of genres? If genre is less determining, what are the larger structures that mitigate genre choice?

Hope you have a good discussion.

John W.