Confusing Ideational Context (Field) With Ideational Content (Language) [1]

Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 294):

Field focuses our attention on the institutional context of a text – including domestic, work and leisure activities. A field can be defined as a set of activity sequences defining participation in a specific walk of life – for example doing the rounds, writing stories, attending staff meetings, reading newspapers, viewing current affairs programs on TV etc. as a print media journalist. Each step in each of these activity sequences consists of configurations of participants, processes and circumstances. And each participating entity, human or non-human, abstract or concrete, is organised within each field into distinctive taxonomies – of both subclassification ('is a kind of ') and composition ('is a part of').

Blogger Comments:

[1] This metaphor is potentially misleading. Field does not "focus our attention". Field is the ideational dimension of culture that is both realised and intellectually constructed (construed) by language and parallel semiotic systems.

[2] To be clear, for Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 320), 'field' means 

the field of activity and subject matter with which the text is concerned ('what's going on, and what is it about?' … The field is thus the culturally recognised repertoires of social practices and concerns …

expressed by Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 33) as:

what’s going on in the situation: (i) the nature of the social and semiotic activity; and (ii) the domain of experience this activity relates to (the ‘subject matter’ or ‘topic’)

[3] As previously mentioned, Martin has variously located 'activity sequences' at the level of context in field (Martin 1992) and at the level of discourse semantics in his experiential system of IDEATION (Martin & Rose 2007). This reflects Martin's inability to distinguish cultural context from language and its varieties (register, text type), which follows from his inability to understand stratification as levels of symbolic abstraction, rather than as interacting modules (Martin 1992: 390, 488). 

The chief source of his confusion seems to be between field in the sense of what the text is about, in terms of social concerns, and the ideational content of the text itself. As Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 407) diplomatically put it:

[Martin's] "field" corresponds to what has been discussed here in terms of ideational semantic networks in the ideation base.

[4] To be clear, this nicely demonstrates Martin's confusion between field (e.g. the social practice that the newspaper columnist Peter FitzSimons is engaged in) and the ideational content of a text (participants, processes and circumstances in the newspaper article).