Two Questions
The following presentation is concerned with two simple questions: what do we mean when we speak of literacy, and what do we mean when we speak of a public? Admittedly, at the end of the presentation, we may no longer decide to consider such questions as merely simple. Pushing forward regardless, a particularly important aspect of opening up these two concepts and exploring their salience and valences, especially for our purposes, as they relate to pedagogical practices and common places, is to pay close attention to how the relationships with their inverse concepts – counter-publics and illiteracy – change during the course of our inquiry. If in fact these relationships do change, and I will argue that they do, then there are important pedagogical, ethical, and rhetorical implications to ponder when trying to answer the questions: so, what, and, where do we go from here? What do we do differently? To be sure, I don’t and will not pretend to have any answers or ultimatums in response to these concerns. Instead, this presentation is crafted as such in order to open up a space for us here, and for all future readers and listeners, to orient and attune ourselves, again and with care, to the responsibilities we all share in regard to the Other, each other, and the more-than-human-world.
A Question Concerning Literacy
Literacy is, perhaps surprisingly, a concept that is malleable and multiple, changing in definition, context, size and shape through time and across academic disciplines. What is recognized as literacy for scholar A could lack the scope and texture of literacy for scholar B. In The Norton Book of Composition Studies alone, for example, literacy is, to name but a few adjectives, described as: decontextualized, universal, cultural, ideological, embedded, social, autonomous, and abstract. It is referenced as a situated and concrete social practice, a trans-contextual force, a set of constant and predictable skills (e.g. the ability to read and write), and as a revolutionary praxis that leads to critical consciousness. Literacy has undergone psychological turns, social turns, and ecological turns. Indeed, as Beth Daniell (1999) writes in her work, “Narratives of Literacy: Connecting Composition to Culture,” literacy is, fundamentally, “encoding and decoding meaning” (p. 374), and meaning moves up and down registers, in and through and around (even before) established axes of knowledge production; in other words, literacy is much more of a process than a possession. This is all to say that scholars should not, and, as I’ll argue, cannot, attempt to capture literacy within its multiplicity or amidst its mutability. One can only trace genealogies of meaning and literacy, all while creating meaning in the wake of the tracing.
Of course, as we’re all aware, the variable nature of literacy doesn’t stop the attempts at and the creation of static definitions that work well in colloquial and academic discourse. The 2016 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Media and Communication (Chandler, and Munday, 2016), for example, describes literacy as both “the ability to read and write, contrasted with illiteracy,” and as “more metaphorically… technical competence [literally or broadly] (e.g. computer literacy, media literacy, news literacy, cultural literacy, etc.)” (p. 57). In other words, literacy, broadly speaking, is considered a kind of epistemological skill-set, an ability to appropriately read, write, work, and/or move within one’s socio-historical milieu, all dependent upon the mind of the reader/writer/worker/mover to understand what they are doing. On the proverbial dark side of the equation, then, if we stick with such a definition of literacy, we find illiteracy, seemingly thought of and defined as a lack, an absence, or a “not-literacy,” a sequestering that creates a lacuna of meaning when any attempt to define illiteracy as something more than just the negative side of a bifurcation is made.
If we stop for a moment and consider the fact that, on the one hand, there are multiple different understandings of literacy that traffic in specialized discourse, and that, on the other hand, there seems to be a dominant definitional strain of literacy-as-epistemological-skill-set that has spread and embedded itself in most colloquial rhetoric concerning thoughts and feeling about literacy, then we begin to realize the kind of pickle we may be in. What definition for literacy is best? Is the answer to that question contextual? Are literacy and illiteracy, in fact, epistemologically separate? What definition of literacy should one have in mind when constructing a pedagogical methodology for, say, first year English? Are there, in actuality, multiple kinds of literacy? If so, could one then speculate that this would mean that there really is no such thing as being epistemologically illiterate in toto; that, instead, a person, or any kind of organism, is always and already literate in relationship to a practice (literate in whale speech, for example, or web-spinning literate, or perhaps pheromonally literate, like ants, as Vicki Kirby explains in Quantum Anthropologies)? Amidst all of these questions, we may consider, for ballast, what scholar Henry Giroux (1992) has to say when he writes that:
Literacy is about more than negotiating and translating the terrain of cultural and semiotic differences. It is also a rapturing practice that engages questions regarding who writes for what audience, in what institutional setting, and with what purpose in mind… it… serves to focus attention on the importance of acknowledging that meaning is not fixed [and that any meaning is dependent upon] multiple languages, discourses, [actions], and texts of [O]thers who speak [and come from] different histories, locations, and experiences. (p. 2)
Of particular interest to me then, are the implications (and particularly the moral and pedagogical implications) that arise when we consider literacy as a practice and in the multiple, as literacies, that all organisms have, the effects of which are thrown into sharp relief during and because of engagements with Others, and especially with non-human Others who create meaning in their engagements, with us and with the more-than-human-world. If we glance back at Beth Daniell’s description of literacy, as “encoding and decoding meaning,” and we pair that with Giroux’s definition of literacy as a practice that highlights the importance of acknowledging meaning as a byproduct of matter’s movement, unveiling the entangled relations all matter moves through, we begin to see how literacy, as a concept, begins to slip out of its popular epistemological register, and into an ontological register – indeed, going so far as to blur the distinction between the two registers, suggesting that literacy is, in fact, an onto-epistemological practice that allows for meaning, and, as I’ll argue, matter itself, to come into being.
Matter and Literacy Mattering
To follow James Gee (2009), an important scholar within literacy studies, as he muses about the social turn in literacy studies, “if they [the social turns] had not from the outset, sooner or later all the social turn movements came to argue that meaning and context are mutually constitutive of each other. A word or deed takes its meaning from a context which it, in turn, helps to create” (p. 1301). In other words, meaning and context arise together, recursively contributing to each other’s movements amidst flows of power and as change occurs through space-time. To me, this observation seems to corroborate and bring into literacy studies’ orbit Karen Barad’s work with agential realism, a metaphysics couched within quantum physics that states that all of reality is made up of mutually entangled phenomena that only ever separate to create complex assemblages by way of communicative-apparatuses that intra-act with the entangled phenomena, effectively creating meaning from within matter itself separating.
Specifically, Barad argues that at the quantum level there is only ever phenomena: ontologically inseparable material that is entangled together (think here of sub-atomic particles moving, intra-acting with each other, connecting, and creating the elements of life, hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, effectively establishing the foundations upon which life as we know it depends). This means that, in order for there to be any entities in the world that are separated from other phenomena enough to form their own individuality, there must be what Barad calls an agential cut, a separating out of the phenomena in their “inherent ontological indeterminacy” to establish a “local resolution.” And these cuts, for Barad, are catalyzed by intra-actions, ‘specific material-discursive enactment.’ As she writes, the primary ontological units of reality are things-in-phenomena, “dynamic topological reconfigurings/entanglements [and] (re)articulations. And the primary semantic units are not words but material-discursive practices through which boundaries are constituted” (Barad, 1998, p. 18). Matter, put simply, means something (i.e. creates meaning as we think of it), in Barad’s onto-epistemology. Putting Giroux into play here alongside Barad, literacy – understood as a practice that underlines the importance of acknowledging that meaning is not fixed – would seem to have some purchase within Barad’s metaphysics, especially in relation to intra-actions, themselves practices through which boundaries are constituted. One could argue then, and I do, that literacy is of a piece with Barad’s intra-actions, meaning that a kind of literacy is always working at, and part and parcel with, all levels of reality (every kind of phenomena) in order to construct, and keep constructing, reality (i.e. time-space) itself.
Publics and Counter-Publics?
So what, then, is the payoff for making such an abstract observation: that literacy can in fact be paired with Barad’s conception of intra-actions, and that perhaps all things have a kind of onto-epistemological literacy that allows reality to continue its concrescence? If we think back to the beginning of this presentation, I mentioned the importance of tracing how the relationships of literacy and publics to their ostensible antonyms, illiteracy and counter-publics, change during the course of our inquiry. The goal has been to destabilize the hierarchy between literacy and illiteracy, and, as I will do in a moment, publics and counter-publics, much like Derrida does with writing and speaking, absence and presence, in Of Grammatology. If we follow Derrida in arguing that the trace, an arche-writing, differance itself, is the condition for writing and speaking in the first place (writing and speaking as we know it), then my argument, alongside Derrida’s, is that differance, too, is the condition for literacy as we know it and practice it. In other words, there is no fundamental, hierarchical difference between literacy and illiteracy: just various instantiations of literate practice (established by how one is written by arche-writing), wholly dependent upon biological factors, forces, power, and events. To be illiterate (in the case of being unable to read and write) would only ever be a kind of literacy, as it would also be a kind of arche-writing in Derridian terms: a way of affecting (arche-writing) and being-affected. And in fact, to think of what might be deemed illiterate practices as just a different practice of literacy – thus widening the scope of what we think and teach literacy to be – could help lower the boundaries that erect moralizing judgements and ultimatums (e.g. illiteracy is wrong. You’re stupid if you’re illiterate, etc.)
These are fundamentally ethical implications. To return, once more, to Giroux (1992), we’ll remember that he explains how “literacy is a rapturing practice that engages questions regarding who writes for what audience, in what institutional setting, and with what purpose in mind…” (p. 2). These are the questions we always must take up, then: to what audience are we oriented toward, with what purpose, within what institutional setting?
To be sure, these questions resonate with what it means to be, ontologically, epistemologically and ethically, within a public and/or multiple publics. As Michael Warner (2005) explains in his work, Publics and Counterpublics, “to address a public or to think of oneself as belonging to a public is to be a certain kind of person, to inhabit a certain kind of social world, to have at one’s disposal certain media and genres, to be motivated by a certain normative horizon, and to speak within a certain language ideology” (p. 10). This, inherently, refers back to Giroux’s understanding of literacy, in that literacy (both the kind we know it to be, able to read and write, AND the kind I’ve argued for, an onto-epistemological feature of Being) would help this certain kind of person to understand the social world they find themselves in, and would be constitutive of this person’s movement and motivation by, as Warner explains, normative horizons: entering into and out of various publics depending upon the person’s desire.
Paradox and Verb-ing of (Counter)-Publics
The paradox of the public, however, is that “although the idea of a public can only work if it is rooted in the self-understanding of the participants, participants could not possibly understand themselves in the terms… stated” (Warner, 2005, p. 12), i.e. it is not possible for people to at all times be aware of the complex, multiplicity of forces that go into “creating a public:” e.g. the languages, the ideologies, the media and the tools ready-to-hand that construct, at least ostensibly, what would pass as the public they identify as being a part of. In other words, Warner (2005) writes, “when people address publics, they engage in struggles – at varying levels of salience to consciousness, from calculated tactic to mute cognitive noise – over the conditions that bring them together as a public” (p. 12). Such a conceptualization of the public is resonant with Hannah Arendt’s (1998) claim that “our feeling for reality depends utterly upon appearance and therefore upon the existence of a public realm in which things can appear out of the darkness of sheltered existence” (p. 51). And to be sure, such appearances, such struggles, of a public depend upon the “in-between” of human affairs and interaction: words and deeds, rhetorical actions and orientations. This is to say that, putting Erik Doxtader’s (2001) work into conversation with Warner’s, that to address a public, is to be speaking from and acting within a counter-public, here understanding counter-public as a verb, “a series or process of speech-actions that (aim to) replace (public) violence with speech and action” (p. 68) in order to create a public in the first place.
Doxtader’s (2001) criticism of counter-publics as a noun, which (when counter-publics are considered as a noun) appears to “tame discursive contestation and obscure inquiry in the ways in which opposition actually engages and remakes norms of public deliberation,” and his pivot to describe counter-publics as “reflect[ing] engag[ing] and represent[ing] the procedural and material terms of public deliberation” (p. 63) highlights, as was stated, the verb-ing of counter-publics as that which is already and always caught up within whatever it is that we call a public; this may, I hope, remind you of my argument for how illiteracy is also and always already caught up within literacy, allowing literacy’s popular definition to stretch and open itself up to affirming difference in a productive, harmonious, rhetorical way. Put simply, the idea of publics, according to Doxtader, depends upon the differance that counter-publics evoke, just as literacy depends upon the differance that illiteracy evokes.
The Point
At the beginning of her short essay, “The Multiple, the Letter, and the Theorist,” Claire Colebrook (2012) writes that “there is a crisis, today, in literacy… [which] concerns not only the capabilities of marginal and disenfranchised groups, but the human species as a whole.” She continues:
widespread lament and preliminary mourning is being articulated with regard to a loss of the reading and critical brain in the face not only of an increasingly visual culture, but of a society of such intense and multiple stimuli that individuals are losing their very distinction… ours is a culture of shallow, distracted, increasingly over-taxed and threateningly myopic attention. (p. vii)
Alongside this fear of the human race seeming to be losing the ability to read, we are living, as Bruno Latour reminds us, in the age of the Anthropocene, and “our current intellectual resources are inadequate to the challenge of ‘composing a common world” (Walsh, 2017, p. 404) that could face (and maybe even save) Gaia, that infinitely complex, more-than-human organism that we experience as our world.
While perhaps a small suggestion in the face of these portentous times and trajectories, I submit that a reconceptualization of literacy and illiteracy as fundamentally the same thing – i.e. as a rapturing practice that engages ethical questions of audience, topos, and intention, and that underscores the importance of acknowledging, in every moment, the imbrication of all matter and meaning – could play a radical, revolutionary role in helping all scholars, all students, and all people better grasp the potential for unity, since unity, as Doxtader (2001) explains, “appear[s] only as it remains energized by the expression of difference.” It is, “difference [that] is the substance of shared meaning” (p. 79). It is only through a kind of ethos of oppositional argumentation, an orientation, a commitment to the idea – the faith – in social justice as a relational good only built through interactions – intra-actions – with the other, perhaps with animosity, a form of illiteracy, and complete, fundamental difference as the only commonalities, where the impulse for a public, and perhaps for a new pedagogy, springs forth. Were we to teach writing and reading as derivative of this much larger concept of literacy, one that supports, and is indeed supported by, difference/differance, it would, as Colebrook (2012) writes, “enable the possibility of reading and writing not as modes of replication (tracing a pattern) but as modes of mapping – [of] marking out new spaces, new dimensions, new lines of filiation” (p. xi). Perhaps it would also be a step towards “be[ing] intensive and hospitable; be[ing] without why,” in the writing classroom, as Cynthia Haynes argues for in her work, The Homesick Phonebook. Such an acknowledgment of the relationship between pedagogy (and in particular literacy pedagogy), and publics, how both presuppose and depend upon difference and differance (illiteracy and counter-publics), could catalyze a widespread, public recognition of the response-ability (in every sense of the term, including especially how Diane Davis considers it – as the condition of possibility to respond) that we all have, each of us, to the Other, and to Gaia. The stakes at this point in time, both in and outside of the classroom, could not be higher.
References
Arendt, H. (1998). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Barad, K. (1998). Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10, 87-128.
Chandler, D., Munday, R. (2016). A Dictionary of Media and Communication. New York: Oxford University Press.
Colebrook, C. (2012). Forward. In Diana Masny and David R. Cole, Mapping Multiple Literacies: An Introduction to Deleuzian Literacy Studies (pp. vii-xii). New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Daniell, B. (1999). Narratives of Literacy: Connecting Composition to Culture. College Composition and Communication, 50, 393-410.
Doxtader, E. (2001). The faith and works of counterpublicity.” In R. Asen and D.C. Brouwer (Eds.), Counterpublics and the State (pp. 59-86). New York: State University of New York Press.
Gee, J. P. (2009) The new literacy studies and the ‘social turn.’ In S. Miller (Ed.), The Norton Book of Composition Studies (1293-1310). New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Giroux, H. (1992). Literacy, pedagogy, and the politics of difference. College Literature, 19, 1-11.
Haynes, C. 2016. The Homesick Phone Book. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Lynda W., Rivers N. A., Rice J., Gries L. E., Bay J. L., Rickert T., and Miller, C. (2017) Forum: Bruno Latour on rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 47, 403-462.
Warner, M. (2005) Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.