Rachael Shapiro

learner. teacher. maker.

Search Results Tag: walter ong

Gee, J. P. “The Legacies of Literacy: From Plato to Freire through Harvey Graff.”

by Rachael

Published on: January 20, 2012

Categories: digital literacies, diss, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1989, eric havelock, harvey graff, james paul gee, paulo freire, plato, politics of education, politics of literacy, raymond williams, the platonic dilemma, walter ong, william labov

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Gee, J. P. “The Legacies of Literacy: From Plato to Freire through Harvey Graff.” Journal of Education 171.1 (1989): 147–65. Print.

Summary

In this review essay, Gee builds on Graff’s The Legacies of Literacy to put forth some of his own questions about literacy. Following an excellent recount of what Graff terms “the literacy myth,” Gee returns to Plato who was the first to combat writing in writing (149). Via Socrates, Plato argues that writing is detrimental to memory, supports a false kind of/concept of knowledge that is external to the self, and is mostly incapable of the dialogic method to which he is so committed for its pursuit of pure, beautiful knowledge. Gee points out Plato’s hypocrisy, however, and demonstrates how Plato’s is the first in a long line of theoretical and actual moments of literacy endorsed and controlled by the state. He writes that “Plato’s contradiction is real, and the literacy myth can be seen as a response to it” (154).

That literacy can be liberatory, but can also be an ISA is demonstrated through a look at pervasive literacy in Sweden by the end of the 18th century where poverty was still rampant, but the Church and state had considerable control over the masses. Similarly, Gee/Graff look at Scribner and Coles’ 1981 The Psychology of Literacy, wherein a study of literacy among the Vai in Liberia reveals that literacy and education share myths that are actually undermined by material reality (getting jobs is less about literacy or education and more about how those things are valued). Through these and other examples, Gee explores the side of the Platonic contradiction that shows literacy to have the effect of uncritical acceptance of hegemonic values as natural.

Turning to the liberatory side of the Platonic literacy dilemma, Gee cites Freire’s emphasis on “correct thinking,” and concludes that “Freire has his Republic too. There is no way out of Plato’s dilemma. Literacy always comes with a perspective on interpretation that is ultimately political. One can hide that perspective the better to claim it isn’t there, or one can put it out in the open. Plato, Sweden, and Freire–each has a perspective, and a strong one” (162).

In his concluding section, Gee poses the question: “Can truly emancipatory literacy and literacy education evolve in a society without a prior or concomitant social revolution, the sort of revolution that has rarely in history been seen without violence and major social upheaval?” (164). He goes on to reason out the nature of literacy (or interpretations serving as proof of literacy) as always a matter of social construction, and hence, literacy is a social practice more than an autonomous entity that can be studied in and of itself (164-5). Thus, he concludes in answer to his question that literacy is not the thing that needs to be changed so much as the social institutions that define it: schools.

He ends with a quote from Raymond Williams via Michael Apple:

It is only in a shared belief and insistance that there are practical alternatives that the balance of forces and chances begins to alter. Once the inevitablilties are challenged, we begin gathering our resources for a journey of hope. If there are no easy answers there are still available discoverable hard answers, and it is these that we can now learn to make and share. This had been, from the beginning, the sense and the impulse of the long revolution. (Williams, 1983, pp. 268-9). (165)

Quotes

The most striking continuity in the history of literacy that emerges form Graff’s book is the way literacy has been used, in age after age, to solidify the social hierarchy, empower the eliters, and ensure that people lower on the hierarchy accept the values, norms, and beliefs of the eliters, even when it is not in their self-interest (or “class interest”) to do so. (159)

Nonetheless, the fact that these national norms more closely match the local or community-based behavior of the middle class than they do those below them on the social scale favors the former against the latter. Futhermore, the process whereby lower-class speakers condemn their own comminity-based behaviors as compared to these national norms undergirds the myth that these norms are somehow natireal and God-given, when in fact they represent merely the historical empowering of one set of localized, comminity-based conventional behaviors over other sets. The concept of hegemony argues that this mdel applied to a range of behaviors and attitudes well beyond language. (160)

In the end, we might say that, contrary to the literacy myth, nothing follows from literacy or schooling. Much follows, however, from what comes with literacy and schooling, what literacy and schooling come wrapped up in; namely, the attitudes, values, norms, and beliefs (at once social, cultural, and political) that always accompany literacy and schooling. These consequences may be work habits that facilitate industrialization, abilities in “expository talk in contrived situations,” a religiously or politically quiescent population, radical opposition to colonial oppressors, and any number of other things. A text, whether written on paper, on the soul (Plato), or on the world (Freire), is a loaded weapon. The person, the educator, who hands over the gun, hands over the bullets (the perspective), and must own up to the consequences. There is no way out of having an opinion, an ideology, and a strong one–as did Plato, as does Freire. Literacy education is not for the timid. (162-3)

Ohmann, Richard. “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital.”

by Rachael

Published on: January 19, 2012

Categories: digital literacies, diss, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1985, bernard de mandeville, jonathan kozol, monopoly capital, political economy, politics of literacy, richard ohmann, walter ong

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Ohmann, Richard. “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital.” College English (1985): 675–689. Print.

Summary

In this prescient essay, Ohmann takes on the task of reminding us that though computer literacies might be new and exciting, they need to be thought with regard to the same political and economic contexts that have historically complicated literacy in general. He reminds us that literacies and their technologies are often developed, touted, and distributed from above, systemically and cyclically affecting citizens along the same axes of race, class, gender, etc. that allow maintenance of the status quo. He concludes that computer literacy, like any literacy, is not inherently liberatory and will only serve democratic purposes if we actively intervene to help it do so.

Quotes

I claim that exhortations about the need for “computer literacy” have much in common with longer-standing debates about literacy itself; that both kinds of discussion usually rest on a serious misconception of technology and its roles in history; and that we can best understand the issues that trouble us by situating them within the evolution of our present economic and social system-a very recent historical process, going back little more than a hundred years. The whole discussion presumes that questions of literacy and technology are inextricable from political questions of domination and equality. (675)

Once the lower orders came to be seen as masses and classes, the term “literacy” offered a handy way to conceptualize an attribute of theirs, which might be manipulated in one direction or the other for the stability of the social order and the prosperity and security of the people who counted. (677)

All of this-the analytic division of people into measurable quantities, the attempt to modify these quantities, the debate among professionals and political leaders over what’s good for the poor-all this legacy still inheres in the discourse of literacy, even now, when almost everyone takes it for granted that literacy is a Good Thing, and when it would be hard to find a Mandeville to argue that the poor should be kept illiterate in order to keep them content. (677)

The technology developed over a century and more, in ways far from accidental. Those with the vision, the needs, the money, and the power gradually made it what they wanted-a mass medium. (I exaggerate only a bit.) Technology, one might say, is it-self a social process, saturated with the power relations around it, continually re-shaped according to some people’s intentions. (681)

Perhaps I can make the point another way by entering a friendly objection to some characteristic formulations of Walter Ong, one of our most stimulating and learned writers on these matters. In Interfaces of the Word, for instance, he writes of “technological devices . . . which enable men to … shape, store, retrieve, and communicate knowledge in new ways” (44). Again, “writing and print and the computer enable the mind to constitute within itself… new ways of thinking. . . .” (46). And, “the alphabet or print or the computer enters the mind, producing new states of awareness there. … the computer actually releases more energy for new kinds of exploratory operations by the human mind itself .. .” (47). My objections are, first, to phrases like “the computer,” as if it were one, stable device; second, to these phrases used as grammatical agents (“the computer enables the mind .. .”), implying that the technology somehow came before someone’s intention to enable some minds to do some things; and third, to phrases like “man,” “the mind,” and “the human mind,” in these contexts, suggesting that technologies interact with people or with “culture” in global, undifferentiated ways, rather than serving as an arena of interaction among classes, races, and other groups of unequal power. (681)

I am suggesting that, seen from the side of production and work, the computer and its software are an intended and developing technology, carrying forward the deskilling and control of labor that goes back to F. W. Taylor and beyond, and that has been a main project of monopoly capital. (683)

Graduates of MIT will get the challenging jobs; community college grads will be technicians; those who do no more than acquire basic skills and computer literacy in high school will probably find their way to electronic workstations at McDonald’s. I see every reason to expect that the computer revolution, like other revolutions from the top down, will indeed expand the minds and the freedom of an elite, meanwhile facilitating the degradation of labor and the stratification of the workforce that have been hallmarks of monopoly capitalism from its onset. (683)

Seen from this side of the market, computers are a commodity, for which a mass market is being created in quite conventional ways. And their other main use in the home, besides recreation, most likely will be to facilitate the market-ing of still more commodities, as computerized shopping becomes a reality. Thus our “age of technology” looks to me very much like the age of monopoly capital, with new channels of power through which the few try to control both the labor and the leisure of the many. (684)

Now, none of these developments is foreordained. The technology is malle-able; it does have liberatory potential. Especially in education, we have some-thing to say about whether that potential is realized. But its fate is not a technological question: it is a political one. (685)

Literacy is an activity of social groups, and a necessary feature of some kinds of social organization. Like every other human activity or product, it embeds social relations within it. And these relations always include conflict as well as cooperation. Like language itself, literacy is an exchange be-tween classes, races, the sexes, and so on. Simply recall the struggle over black English, or think on the continuing conflict over the CCCC statement, “Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” or the battle over generic male pronouns, for times when the political issues have spilled out into the open. But explicit or not, they are always there, in every classroom and in every conversation-just as broadcasting technology is an exchange which has up to now been resolved through control by the dominant classes, and participation by the subordinate classes in the form of Neilson ratings and call-in shows. That means that we can usefully distinguish between literacy-from-above and literacy-from-below. (685-6)

Technique is less important than context and purpose in the teaching of literacy; and the effects of literacy cannot be isolated from the social relations and processes within which people become literate. Enough. The age of computer technology will bring us some new tools and methods for teaching literacy. I hope we (or rather, those of us teachers who are on my side!) will manage to shape that technology to democratic forms. (686)

But this age of technology, this age of computers, will change very little in the social relations-the class relations-of which literacy is an inextricable part. Monopoly capital will continue to saturate most classrooms, textbooks, student essays, and texts of all sorts. It will continue to require a high degree of literacy among elites, especially the professional-managerial class. It will continue to re-quire a meager literacy or none from subordinate classes. And yet its spokesmen-the Simons and Newmans and Safires and blue ribbon commissions on education-will continue to kvetch at teachers and students, and to demand that all kids act out the morality play of literacy instruction, from which the mor-al drawn by most will be that in this meritocracy they do not merit much. But then monopoly capital will also continue to generate resistance and rebellion, more at some times than at others. I hope many of us will find ways to take part in that resistance, even in our daily work. Apparently we must learn to fight mindless computer literacy programs, as we have sometimes fought mind-less drills in grammar and usage. We should remember that most programmed instruction, in addition to being mindless, builds in imperatives other than ours and other than those of our students. (687-8)

We should be critically analyzing the politics of all these tendencies, trying to comprehend them historically, and engaging our students in a discussion of literacy and tech-nology that is both historical and political. It’s worth trying to reconstitute liter-acy as a process of liberation-but also to remember that work for literacy is not in itself intrinsically liberating. The only way to have a democracy is to make one. (688)

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.

by Rachael

Published on: December 12, 2011

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1994, death of literacy, digital literacy, eric havelock, historical continuity, literacy and culture, ludditism, marshall mcluhan, sven birkerts, walter ong

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Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. New York: Faber and Faber, 2006. Print.

Summary

Throughout this collection of essays, Birkerts juxtaposes (in often reductive binaries) the impact of print culture’s shift to electronic media, essaying his way through what he sees or foresees as the consequences of that shift. His primary concern has to do with the ways in which a decrease in reading and attention span will effect our collective ability to share a sense of values that follow historical continuity. Paradoxically, he is also concerned that people will be less able to form themselves as individuals (27-9). Ultimately, what Birkets seems to lament is his shifting place in history, given the displacement of many (privileged) traditional values with the proliferation of web technologies, an expanding canon, and shifting linguistic norms and practices.

His primary concern is that the material practice of reading print books has been an integral part of shaping the world and our culture, and ourselves, as we have known them, and that the ripple effect of media and how it reshapes each of those things are dangerous and should be held suspect.

Quotes

What this meant was not, narrowly, that a large sector of our population would not be able to enjoy certain works of literature, but that a much more serious situation was developing. For, in fact, our entire collective subjective history–the soul of our societal body–is encoded in print. Is encoded, and has for countless generations been passed along by way of the word, mainly through books. I’m not talking about facts and information here, but about the somewhat more elusive soft data, the expressions that tell us who we are and who we have been, that are, in effect, the cumulative speculations of the species. If a person turns from print–finding it too slow, too hard, irrelevant to the excitements of the present–then what happens to that person’s sense of cultural continuity? (20)

We can think of the matter in terms of gains and losses. The gins of electronic postmodernity could be said to include, for individuals, (a) an increased awareness of the “big picture,” a global perspective that admits the extraordinary complexity of interrelations; (b) an expanded neural capacity, an ability to accommodate a broad range of stimuli simultaneously; (c) a relativistic comprehension of situations that promotes the erosion of old biases and often expresses itself as tolerance; and (d) a matter-of-fact and unencumbered sort of readiness, a willingness to try new situations and arrangements.

In the loss column, meanwhile, are (a) a fragmented sense of time and a loss of the so-called duration experience, that depth phenomenon we associate with reverie; (b) a reduced attention span and a general impatience with sustained inquiry; (c) a shattered faith in institutions and in the explanatory narratives that formerly gave shape to subjective experience; (d) a divorce from the past, from a vital sense of history as a cumulative or organic process; (e) an estrangement from geographic place and community; and (f) an absence of any strong vision of a personal or collective future. (27)

As we now find ourselves at a cultural watershed–as the fundamental process of transmitting information is shifting from mechanical to circuit-driven, from page to screen–it may be time to ask how modifications in our way of reading may impinge upon our mental life. For how we receive information bears vitally on the ways we experience and interpret reality. (71-2)

We are experiencing in our times a loss of depth–a loss, that is, of the very paradigm of depth. A sense of the deep and natural connectedness of things is a function of vertical consciousness. Its apotheosis is what was once called wisdom. Wisdom: the knowing not of facts but of truths about human nature and the processes of life. But swamped by data, and in thrall to the technologies that manipulate it, we no longer think in these larger and necessarily more imprecise terms. In our lateral age, living in the bureaucracies of information, we don’t venture a claim to that kind of understanding. Indeed, we tend to act embarrassed around those once-frightened terms–truth, meaning, soul, destiny… We suspect the people who use such words of being soft and nostalgic. We prefer the deflating one-liner that reassures us that nothing need be taken that seriously; we inhale the atmospheres of irony. (74)

The order of print is linear, and bound to logic by the imperatives of syntax. It requires the active engagement of the reader, for reading is fundamentally an act of translation: ciphers are turned into their verbal referents and these are in turn interpreted. The print engagement is, further, private. While it does represent an act of communication, the contents pass from the privacy of the sender to the privacy of the receiver–writer to reader. Print also posits a time-axis; the turning of pages, not to mention the vertical progress through the page, is a forward-moving succession, with earlier contents at every point serving as a ground for what follows. Moreover, the printed material is static–it is the reader, not the book, the moves forward. The physical arrangements of print can be seen to accord with our traditional sense of history. Materials are layered; they lend themselves to rereading and to sustained inquiry. The pace of reading is variable, with progress determined by attentiveness and comprehension.

The electronic order is in most ways the opposite. Information and contents do not simply move from one private space to another, but they travel along a network. Engagement is intrinsically public, taking place within a circuit of larger connectedness. It can be passive, as with television watching, or interactive, as with computers. Contents, unless they are printed out (and thus part of the static order of print) are evanescent. With visual media, impression and image take precedence over logic and concept. The pace is quick, and the movement is laterally associative rather then vertically cumulative. The presentation prestructures the reception–the viewer absorbs a steady wash of packaged messages.

Further, the technology–visual and non-visual–in every way encourages in the user a heightened and ever-changing awareness of the present. The now. It works against historical perception, which must depend upon the inimical notions of logic and sequential succession. If the print medium exalts the world, fixing it into permanence, the electronic counterpart reduces it to a signal, a means to an end.

Transitions such as the one from print to electronic media do not take place without rippling–more likely, reweaving–the whole of the social and cultural web. And we don’t need to look far for evidence that this is what is happening. We can begin with the headlines, and the millennial lamentations sounded in the op-ed pages and on talk shows. That our educational systems are in decline; that our students are less and less able to read and comprehend their required texts, and that their aptitude scores are falling like the index of consumer confidence. That tag-line communication, called “bite-speak” by some, has destroyed the last remnants of discourse in our public political life and made spin-doctors and media consultants our new shamans. That as communications empires fight for global hegemony, publishing itself has fallen to the tyranny of the bottom line, and that the era of the “blockbuster” is upon us. That funding for the arts is being cut on every front, while the arts themselves appear to be suffering a deep crisis of irrelevance. And so on.

Every one of these developments is, of course, overdetermined, but there can be no doubt that they are profoundly connected to the transition that is underway. (122-3)

Havelock, Eric. The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present.

by Rachael

Published on: December 8, 2011

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1986, alexander luria, eric havelock, greek alphabet, jack goody, orality and literacy, primary orality, the classics, visuality, walter ong

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Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven : Yale University Press, 1986. Print.

Summary

In this 1986 work, Havelock (closely aligned with Ong), describes the transformational impact of literacy on the previously primarily oral Greek culture through an examination of Hesiod and Homer. As the title suggests, Havelock traces the overlapping time within which literacy was used as preservation of the oral, until the time that the alphabetic system became codified enough (materially and socially) for its real effects to be felt. Whereas its first function as artificial memory supported the goals of primary orality in preservation of cultural tradition (71), the evolution of literacy revealed the affordances of logic, propositional statements, abstract thinking (101), and a move from action-oriented statements to being-oriented ones. This transition (which he argues was advocated and propelled by Plato) allowed for the development of objectivity and theory, and hence, science, philosophy, and modern consciousness. This rests upon, in part, the uniqueness of the Greek alphabet in its use of vowels that allowed a more advanced, closer to speech, means of capturing acoustic expression and translating it to visual form. Visuality of literacy also helped give rise to the concept of selfhood (113-4).

Whereas primary orality relied upon commonplaces, such as rhythm and pattern, to ensure memorization, and hence, preservation of cultural knowledge, the revolution of print opened vast horizons for those who no longer were forced to adhere to such prescriptions due to the fixity of print compared to the ephemerality of speech (74!, 109). Though there were long generations of collision and clash between orality and literacy, it is difficult, Havelock argues, for the literate mind to think primary orality, due to the ways in which we are already shaped by a literate context. This is the essence of what the title means to capture; the Muse (the mother of primary orality) learns to write and is forever changed.

Quotes

…the epics as we now know them are the result of some interlock between the oral and the literate; or, to vary the metaphor, the acoustic flow of language contrived by echo to hold the attention of the ear has been reshuffled into visual patterns created by the thoughtful attention of the eye. (13)

Logically, if the message is a song or verse sung aloud, you don’t see it. If on the other hand it is a written document, it can’t sing to you. But the logic of either/or does not belong in these words. They open a window on a cultural process of transition, in which collision and contradiction are of the essence. The Muse of orality, a singer, reciter, memorizer, is learning to read and write–but at the same time that she continues to sing. (22)

Platonism, being a written text, was able to formulate a new conceptual type of language and thinking as a replacement for oral narrative and oral thinking. Narrative along with rhythm had been the necessary means of supporting the oral memory and was now no longer needed. Finally, the suggestion (but only a suggestion) was offered that clues to the Greek achievement of literacy and the literate state of mind could be discerned in a superior phonetic efficiency of the Greek writing system. (29)

May not all logical thinking as commonly understood be a product of Greek alphabetic literacy? (39)

If any adequate visual representation of the way primary orality worked is possible it is to be found in the script [the Greeks] invented. Here in Greek are texts that truly “speak.” What they first speak is likely to be a language shaped acoustically for storage, a language of preserved communication, a body of “useful” oral information. Equally, through this same alphabetic instrument, there was discovered a new means of storage infinitely more efficient than the oral kind which it had put into the record. The use of vision directed to the recall of what had been spoken (Homer) was replaces by its use to invent a textual discourse (Thucydides, Plato) which seemed to make orality obsolete. Here was a paradox indeed of dialectical process, of transformational change. The singing Muse translates herself into a writer: she who had required men to listen now invited them to read. There is justice in assigning her both roles. Was not the alphabet invented under her aegis, when her song was still supreme? Are we to deny hr the credit for its invention and for the ability to use it herself? (63)

This language, what it says and the way it says it, itself shapes the tradition that guides social behavior; in fact it becomes itself the tradition (74).

A special theory of Greek literacy involves the proposition that the way we use our senses and the way we think are connected, and that in the transition from Greek orality to Greek literacy the terms of this connection were altered, with the result that thought patterns were altered also, and have remained altered, as compared with the mentality of oralism, ever since. (98)

The special theory of Greek orality presumes that a condition of total nonliteracy need not connote the kind of primitiveness which is often read back into the early history of societies, as for example in the anthropology of :evy-Bruhl (1910, 1923). It may represent a positive condition of an oralism possessing its own quality of life, simpler no doubt than ours but civilized, with a special capacity for creating an “oral literature” (if the paradox can be tolerated) of its own. In contrast, the illiterates who continue to exist in societies where literacy is practiced, either by a few as in the Middle Ages or by a majority as in modern America, are by definition outside the field of the accepted culture and have to be brought into it ip possible by education. This social condition of illiteracy is confused with the condition of primary orality, which by analogy is also “put down” in estimation. Greek culture before 650 or 700 BC is relegated to the status of a Dark Age, or else unhistorically upgraded to meet the literate standard. The prejudice at work here rests on a failure to distinguish between nonliteracy and illiteracy. The former, though a negative, describes a positive social condition, in which communication is managed acoustically but successfully. The latter refers to a failure to communicate under altered conditions. Yet to judge one by the light of the other is commonplace. (119)

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.

by Rachael

Published on: December 8, 2011

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1982, eric havelock, literacy and consciousness, politics of discourse, primary orality, secondary orality, walter ong

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Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routledge, 2004. Print.

Summary

In this seminal work, Ong expresses the difficulty for a literate culture to think of primary orality, or, those cultures “untouched” by literacy. Drawing on anthropologists, classicists, and more, Ong describes the characteristics of primary orality and its bearing for what’s possible in the consciousness of such people. He does this in order to demonstrate the ways in which literacy fundamentally changes human consciousness for those who have writing. Much of the shift comes down to the capacity of memory and how it shapes language use and social interaction. For primary oral cultures, language must be repetitive, conform to pattern, and relate to human action for the purpose of encoding information (individually and culturally). Language in oral cultures, like knowing, is inherently social. He describes orality as having the following features (which are often binaries with those he sees in written culture):

1. Expression is additive rather than subordinative.
2. It is aggregative rather than analytic.
3. It tends to be redundant or “copious.”
4. There is a tendency for it to be conservative.
5. Out of necessity, thought is conceptualized and then expressed with relatively close reference to the human lifeworld.
6. Expression is agonistically toned.
7. It is empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced.
8. It is Homeostatic.
9. It is situational rather than abstract.

In chapter 4, Ong begins with an interesting comparison between Plato’s objections to the consequences of writing, and those threats to literacy ascribed to computer use. Included here are a threat to memory, weakening of one’s intellectual powers, and diversion from the real world (78). He characterized writing as artificial, removed from nature, but essential to human civilization (81). Writing is isolating and isolated (99). It is distanced and more analytic (101). With the help of dictionaries, writing is an elaborated code (105).

Chapter 5 looks at the ways in which the materiality of writing has reshaped consciousness in literate peoples. The relationship between reader, writer, and text is different in print, which is consumer-oriented (120). Print’s visuality and the interiorization of literacy elicited people’s tendency to understand words as things, located physically, and thoughts as material in space as well (123). Modern science is in part a result of the visuality of written language and print, as it blended description and reality (124-5). It also led to awareness of consciousness as a thing (129).

Electronics have brought about a period of secondary orality (132). In some ways, computers reinforce print, but add to it as well through the oral. Secondary orality is much like primary, in part through its effect of our being more social (though with larger audiences possible that those of PO cultures) (133). It promotes spontaneity (134), though not antagonism.

Quotes

This is to say, a literate person cannot fully recover a sense of what the word is to purely oral people. (12)

Oral cultures indeed produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche. Nevertheless, without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations. In this sense, orality needs to produce and is destined to produce writing. Literacy, as will be seen, is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed for the explanation of language (including oral speech) itself There is hardly an oral culture or a predominantly oral culture left in the world today that is not somehow aware of the vast complex of powers forever inaccessible without literacy. This awareness is agony for persons rooted in primary orality, who want literacy passionately but who also know very well that moving into the exciting world of literacy means leaving behind much that is exciting and deeply loved in the earlier oral world. We have to die to continue living. (14)

I had earlier suggested (1967b, p. 189) that many of the contrasts often made between ‘western’ and other views seem reducible to contrasts between deeply interiorized literacy and more or less residually oral states of consciousness. (29)

How could you ever call back to mind what you had so laboriously worked out? The only answer is: Think memorable thoughts. In a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence. Your thought must come into being in heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or antitheses, in alliterations and assonances, in epithetic and other formulary expressions, in standard thematic settings (the assembly, the meal, the duel, the hero’s ‘helper’, and so on), in proverbs which are constantly heard by everyone so that they come to mind readily and which themselves are patterned for retention and ready recall, or in other mnemonic form. Serious thought is intertwined with memory systems. Mnemonic needs determine even syntax (Havelock 1963, pp. 87–96, 131–2, 294–6). (34)

Primary orality fosters personality structures that in certain ways are more communal and externalized, and less introspective than those common among literates. Oral communication unites people in groups. Writing and reading are solitary activities that throw the psyche back on itself. A teacher speaking to a class which he feels and which feels itself as a close-knit group, finds that if the class is asked to pick up its textbooks and read a given passage, the unity of the group vanishes as each person enters into his or her private lifeworld. (67)

A deeper understanding of pristine or primary orality enables us better to understand the new world of writing, what it truly is, and what functionally literate human beings really are: beings whose thought processes do not grow out of simply natural powers but out of these powers as structured, directly or indirectly, by the technology of writing. Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness. (77)

Writing and print and the computer are all ways of technologizing the word. Once the word is technologized, there is no effective way to criticize what technology has done with it without the aid of the highest technology available. Moreover, the new technology is not merely used to convey the critique: in fact, it brought the critique into existence. Plato’s philosophically analytic thought, as has been seen (Havelock 1963), including his critique of writing, was possible only because of the effects that writing was beginning to have on mental processes. (79)

Such considerations alert us to the paradoxes that beset the relationships between the original spoken word and all its technological transformations. The reason for the tantalizing involutions here is obviously that intelligence is relentlessly reflexive, so that even the external tools that it uses to implement its workings become ‘internalized’, that is, part of its own reflexive process. (79-80)

To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word. Such transformations can be uplifting. Writing heightens consciousness. Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as nothing else does. Technologies are artificial, but—paradox again—artificiality is natural to human beings. Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it. (81)

One consequence of the new exactly repeatable visual statement was modern science. Exact observation does not begin with modern science. For ages, it has always been essential for survival among, for example, hunters and craftsmen of many sorts. What is distinctive of modern science is the conjuncture of exact observation and exact verbalization: exactly worded descriptions of carefully observed complex objects and processes. (124)

By removing words from the world of sound where they had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral. Print encouraged the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space. (129)

Secondary orality is both remarkably like and remarkably unlike primary orality. Like primary orality, secondary orality has generated a strong group sense, for listening to spoken words forms hearers into a group, a true audience, just as reading written or printed texts turns individuals in on themselves. (133)

The highly interiorized stages of consciousness in which the individual is not so immersed unconsciously in communal structures are stages which, it appears, consciousness would never reach without writing. The interaction between the orality that all human beings are born into and the technology of writing, which no one is born into, touches the depths of the psyche. Ontogenetically and phylogenetically, it is the oral word that first illuminates consciousness with articulate language, that first divides subject and predicate and then relates them to one another, and that ties human beings to one another in society. Writing introduces division and alienation, but a higher unity as well. It intensifies the sense of self and fosters more conscious interaction between persons. Writing is consciousness-raising. (174)

Orality-literacy dynamics enter integrally into the modern evolution of consciousness toward both greater interiorization and greater openness. (175)

Greenberg, Karen, Patrick Hartwell, Margaret Himley and R. E. Stratton. “Responses to Thomas Farrell, ‘IQ and Standard English.”

by Rachael

Published on: September 24, 2011

Categories: basic writing, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1984, karen greenberg, literacy, margaret himley, orality, patrick hartwell, politics of discourse, politics of education, r. e. stratton, racism, thomas farrell, walter ong, william lubov

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Greenberg, Karen, Patrick Hartwell, Margaret Himley and R. E. Stratton. “Responses to Thomas Farrell, ‘IQ and Standard English.” College Composition and Communication 35.4 (1984): 455-469. Print.

Summary

In this collection of responses to Thomas Farrell’s unfortunate articles, the four contributors dispute Farrell’s reasoning, intention, and effect in his claim that African American children come from an oral culture whose lack of the copulative verb deprives them of the abstract thinking latent in those from a literate (white) culture.

Quotes

Greenberg:

Logic and rhetorical ability are aracial. Regardless of their di- alects, all remedial writers use both hypotactic and paratactic constructions in their writing and all of them need practice and instruction in elaborating their ideas with specific and appropriate details. (458)

Farrell repeatedly asserts that he does not believe the hypothesis of genetic differences in intelligence between black and white children; however, his own hypothesis is just as wrongheaded and just as harmful. And just as racist. My Webster’s II defines “racism” as “program or practice of racial discrimination based on racial differences.” Advocating a separate pedagogy for students be- cause of differences in their genes or in their language is racist. (460)

Hartwell:

Of course, many of Farrell’s observations are sound. Black American culture does place a high value on oral performance; basic writers do turn naturally to narrative modes; becoming literate does involve massive changes in one’s in- ternal grammar and in one’s awareness of language as language. And Farrell is
particularly right to stress that the basic writing course needs to concentrate on developing abstract thought through written language. There are a number of suggestions about how to develop such thought, however, and few place much emphasis on “full standard deployment of the verb ‘to be.”‘ (463-4)

Himley:

Farrell raises complex issues about language, learning, and thought, but re- duces them to a series of global, dichotomous, and mutually-exclusive propo- sitions or variables. (466)

The point is that Farrell’s premises simplify highly complex and interrelated issues of language, learn- ing, and thought. (467)

Language, learning, and thought may be far more complex than Professor Farrell’s disjunctive premises and argument suggest. He grapples with these issues in a simplistic way, struggling to fit a squirming octopus into a tight pair of pants. (468)

Stratton:

The article is offensive in that it fails to examine the moral issues involved in the proliferation of standard English, and it is offensive to whites as well as to blacks: a passive nation so programmed might be a great deal easier to con- trol politically than one less dominated by so vicious a stance of cultural supe- riority. (469)

Elbow, Peter. “Inviting the Mother Tongue: Beyond ‘Mistakes,’ ‘Bad English,’ and ‘Wrong English.’”

by Rachael

Published on: September 23, 2011

Categories: basic writing, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:contrastive rhetoric, geneva smitherman, john ogbu, lisa delpit, mother tongue, peter elbow, politics of discourse, standard academic english, victor villanueva, walter ong

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Elbow, Peter. “Inviting the Mother Tongue: Beyond ‘Mistakes,’ ‘Bad English,’ and ‘Wrong English.’” JAC: Journal of Advanced Composition 19.3 (1999): 359-388. Print.

Summary

In this lovely essay (lovely thanks to it’s mix of comp-iness, empathy, optimism, and attention to critical race issues), Peter Elbow addresses the question of how writing teachers can preserve the confidence and cultural sanctity of those whose dialects of English have been labeled “wrong” or “bad,” while also facilitating their competence and development in the codes of power in the academy, or, SWE. In response he offers his solution, in which he invites students (though doesn’t require them) to write in their “mother tongue” until they are prepared for submitting final drafts, which he requires to be copy-edited in the conventions of SWE. To accomplish this, he encourages students to seek out peers, writing tutors, family members, or even paid services.

Combatting some likely objections, he relies on linguists and scholars like Delpit, Ogbu, Ohmann, Ong, Smitherman, and more. He argues that “Standard Written English is no one’s mother tongue,” (362). Borrowing from Ong, he defends against critiques that diverse languages make different meanings distinctly possible (and therefore cannot be translated), with citations like Villanueva. He argues that rather than a pure assimilation, writing in one’s mother tongue is a radical move toward preservation, since few people are literate therein. The writing, and hence further social practice, of a mother tongue in effect ends up further preserving its life span. Copy-editing and conforming to SWE, rather, does not colonize the mother tongue–since those are primarily oral in use–but rather encourages development in additional forms of rhetoric and thinking.

Quotes

…we shouldn’t be too quick to assume speakers of stigmatized dialects must abandon all the rhetorical and linguistic habits of their culture. (377)

Linguists tell us that dialects tend to drift toward the dominant language and to die out. I don’t think minority dialects can survive and flourish unless they come to be legitimate for writing. Given the growing recognition of English as a world language rather than merely the language of the UK and the US, however, it’s not unrealistic to imagine a future where multiple and very distinct dialects of English are legitimate and widely used for writing. (37*)

Still, I suspect that dialects can only survive and prosper if they are widely used–in writing and for various purposes. This will probably result in some change, but I’m worried about the survival of dialects if people try too hard to preserve them in their “pure” or unmixed form. [...] When students can write early drafts in home dialect and home rhetoric, I think that both their language and their thinking will be stronger and be more their own–even if not remaining pure. (380)

It may be difficult for speakers of nonmainstream dialects to copy-edit final drafts, but not as difficult as trying to write all their drafts in SWE. The same goes for “giving in”: it may be galling to give in on final drafts to a culture that seems bent on destroying your culture–but not as galling as giving in on all drafts, all writing. (382)

Perhaps this is the most important benefit for speakers of stigmatized dialects. We can show them that writing provides a safer site for language use than speaking–easier access to linguistic power. That is, when they speak to mainstream listeners they must use correct mainstream English–even down to intonation–or risk stigmatization; but when they write to mainstream readers, they can do most of their work in their mother tongue and still end up with a text in SWE. (388)

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