DEFINITIONS OF LITERACY
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Literacy shaped by Technology/Medium
Functional Literacy
Literacy as Personal Growth/Self Development/Reflective Understanding
Literacy as Power/Empowerment
Literac(ies) as Cultural “Practice(s)”
Civic Literacy <-> Rhetorical Literacy (overlapping but distinct approaches)
Rhetorical Literacy/Argument Literacy/Academic Literacy (overlapping)
Critical Literacy
Cultural Literacy
Media Literacy
Digital Literacy – what elements of the above should be part of new media
literacies?
Lists, Tags, Categories
& Social Construction
Lists, Language & Rhetoric
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Small changes in material organization of language are important
– for language is the stuff we live, interact and think in (it is the
“House of Being”). Just as the seemingly trivial shift to word
spacing had important results (Saenger), so does the emergence
of the list. They influence literacy practices – how we read, write,
and relate to texts.
Think of this in terms of “affordances,” paths of resistance and
“tipping points.” (Think Gladwell and 401ks, social science
experiments, organ transplants as “opt-out” vs. “opt in,” etc.)
If you take a rhetorical view of things, the importance of shifts in
the material organization of language seems to follow…
Lists and genealogies = key to the
emergence of classification
Goody & Lists
a) “retrospective lists” – an inventory of things
and persons
b) “shopping lists” – future oriented
c) “lexicial lists” – lists of words for education
and play (proto-encylopedias, schoolbooks
etc.)
Q: Why are lists important?
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Lists are impt to emergence of alphabet, record
keeping, categorization, the development of history,
administration, teaching, the abstraction of words
into essences or genera.
Lists are an impt genre and stepping off point for
various forms of “information architecture”
They allow the arrangement of words and things into
complex hierarchies, trees, and other spatial forms.
They are important to the development of ways of
sorting, ranking, categorizing, and comparing
information – and through a dialectical process, to
construction of fine-grained distinctions.
Lists & Literacy
a)
b)
c)
Lists are important to the emergence of the Greek alphabet,
which develops out of lexical lists (Goody, 36 and 44).
Inventories of pictographic words suggested reductions
based on sound (since reductions based on form are
difficult).
Lists are an important milestone in the development of
historical thinking
Lists encourage the decontextualization of language, and
abstraction. They make possible the spatial ordering of
language which then becomes subject to rearrangement
(47) “Narrative is the enemy of classification.” (Hobart &
Schiffman, 69). Narrative recounts a temporal sequence
of actions, while classification describes atemporal,
synchronic relations between entities.
Narrative as “enemy” & crutch
What’s in a writing system?
a)
Lists sharpen the outline of categories (one
has to decide whether dew is of heaven or
earth). They help reflection on conceptual
matrixes. Lists “encourage the hierarchization
of the classificatory system” (Goody, 47). They
represent the beginning of the conceptual “tree
structure” described by Shirky and Weinberger
as so important to Western thought.
Categorizing Birds – turn list on
its side and you get a tree
Haeckel's Tree of Life
Lists & Literacy
f)
g)
h)
i)
Lists represent a break between writing and speech, and
writing and memory. Many other types of writing are used to
reproduce speech, or to augment memory in order to
reproduce language as speech.
Lists enable the sorting of information in new ways (the
alphabet & lists change “the type of data an individual is
dealing with, and it changes the repertoire of programmes he
has available for treating this data.” (Goody)
The list makes chunking and hierarchical ordering of
information easier – early “document design” (Book title,
chapter, section, subsection, etc.)
Lists begin the process of “punctuating” information, of
sorting, arranging, systematizing and setting in motion
data that will culminate in records, databases, filing
systems and modern bureaucracy.
f)
g)
Hesiod is a transitional figure – he uses
geneaologies to create lists that are
classificatory – almost encyclopedia-like.
Plato takes this further (he is transitional –
why? How? See p. 73 H & S) and the
process culminates in Aristotle with his
“science of classification.”
Aristotle’s philosophy stands as the
culmination of “the first information age.”
Lists & Literacy
Plato’s forms are like tree hierarchies that indicate true
Being – the essence of things.
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Hoskin writes that in Plato we can identify “a whole
alphabetic way of seeing” (39). This captures the
centrality of both writing and vision to Plato’s philosophy.
For Plato, true knowledge is modeled on an act of vision
– that of ascending to a realm in which the essence of
things can be clearly seen. The essence of things in their
ideal form are represented as a form of inscription –
writing.
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As Derrida argues in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” writing is the primary metaphor for
that which is “well ordered” and “ever unchangeable” in Western philosophy.
Derrida (1981) writes that Plato’s metaphors “are exclusively and irreducibly
scriptural,” and that his entire system of thought is “grammatologically”
structured. The underlying principle of coherence governing speech,
knowledge and the cosmos is represented as a purified form of inscription in
Plato’s writings. In Platonic philosophy the soul is repeatedly described as
coming to know the fundamental elements of the real in terms of the visual
apprehension of written form. Plato uses the word stoikheia to refer to the
ultimate constituents of both reality and alphabetic writing. In the Sophist
(253 ff) the reducibility of reality into its constituent elements is modeled on
the way written language can be broken down without surplus into a finite
number of constituent elements. The question of how unity, order and
infinity can coexist is resolved through the example of the combination of
letters, which permit only certain groupings, but which allow an unlimited
number of combinations.
Lists & Literacy
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“The list relies on discontinuity rather than continuity; it depends on
physical placement, on location…Most importantly, it encourages the
ordering of the items, by number, initial sound, by category, etc. And
the existence of boundaries brings greater visibility to categories, at the
same time making them more abstract.” (34)
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Goody talks of the “dialectical” effect of writing upon classification. On
the one hand “it sharpens the outlines of the categories,” as you have to
decide if rain or dew is of heaven or earth. It also “encourages the
hierarchization of the classificatory system.” This in turn “leads to
questions about the nature of the classes through the very fact of
placing them together. (47)
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Lastly, the fact that no system is adequate or complete leads to the
formation of more complex systems. Consider the following:
Bacon tries to sort all human knowledge
Curse You Ramus!!!
Diderot & Human Knowledge
Dewey Decimal system
Dewey categorize ‘em and how
CIA categorization of world
Silly example
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"...our knowledge of the world has assumed
the shape of a tree because that knowledge
has been shackled to the physical. Now that
the digitizing of information is allowing us to
go beyond the physical in ways Aristotle
could not have dreamed the shape of
knowledge is changing.” Weinberg,
Everything is Miscellaneous
Literacy & Classification
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In the Phaedrus Plato defines true knowledge and true rhetoric in terms
of a pure inner writing. Plato rejects traditional writing as dead,
external, transitory and promiscuous (“when it has been written down,
every discourse rolls about everywhere…it does not know to whom it
should speak and to whom it should not.” 275e) True knowledge is
described as inner writing inscribed in the soul of the listener, and as
seeds planted in a fixed, orderly manner. (276a, 277a) It is contrasted
with false knowledge that is mutable, transitory, and which can be
likened to seeds that are carelessly disseminated. False knowledge and
false rhetoric “turns,” “rolls about everywhere,” does not respect proper
boundaries, is tropological. Poetry, song and figurative language, all
representatives of traditional oral culture, beguile the senses and
corrupt the soul. They are perturbations in language that falsely make
one thing seem like another, and threaten the proper representation of
reality.
Plato fears that his trees – ordered hierarchical knowledge, a “one-tomany” system - may descend into something more like a grid or
network, a “many-to-many” system. Forms/categories might have
multiple, branching homes. His dialectic is a way or dividing and
organizing knowledge into hierarchical classification systems.
Literacy & Classification
Where Plato tries to subsume rhetoric to dialectic, Aristotle divides between
realms. For example, Rhetoric is the “counterpart” of Logic. Each functions in
different domains. In the realm of logic and formal systems, the tree is the
model of meaning and identity.
Aristotle: “the potency of place must be a marvelous thing, and take
Precedence of all other things.” For “That without which nothing else can exist,
while it can exist without the others, must needs be first. (Aristotle, 1941, p
270.) In Aristotelian philosophy space is a basic metaphysical property, the
essence of form, an entity that grounds identity and is unchangeable with
respect to the changing things that are its occupants. Aristotle writes that
“Things that are are somewhere, because what is not is nowhere.” Spatial
location grounds the movement of signification, providing a foundation for the
relational play and deferral of meaning.
For both Plato and Aristotle identity is defined by “place” – a fixed location in a
classificatory hierarchy made possible by writing. Rhetoric tends to deal in
more dynamic, emergent concepts of place and identity – place as “practiced,”
as “organic,” as emerging out of the activities and lived experiences of
people (compare memory places – spaces drawn from everyday life, from
experience, that are infused with narrative, imagery, etc., with the architecture
of logic and formal systems.)
Today, rhetoricians study informal logic, or argumentation, in order to
understand how people think, reason, deliberate and persuade. Rhetoricians
often approach categories as social constructs. That is, while philosophers
such as Plato and Aristotle assume the world comes in a clear hierarchical
order – language follows thought and thought follows the order of things rhetoricians tend to assume that language plays a key role in constructing
order, and that this order is in process. (Shirky: “does the world make sense, or
do we make sense of it?”)
Literacy & Classification
Categories, meaning & Identity – emergent,
socially constructed, “prototypical” (probabilistic),
contextual - or fixed, universal, transcendent,
timeless?
Rhetoric tends toward the former world view.
Rhetoric & Social Construction
This brings us to the following questions: what is rhetoric, and
what is social construction?
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Plato: “RHETORIC is the art of ruling the minds of men.”
Rhetorica ad Herennium (ca. 80 BCE) The task of the public speaker is to discuss
capably those matters which law and custom have fixed for the uses of citizenship,
and to secure as far as possible the agreement of his hearers.
Aristotle (ca. 350 BCE) Let rhetoric be [defined as] an ability, in each [particular]
case, to see the available means of persuasion.
Nietzsche What is called “rhetorical,” as a means of conscious art, had been active
as a means of unconscious art in language and its development, indeed, that the
rhetorical is a further development, guided by the clear light of the understanding, of
the artistic means which are already found in language…a power which Aristotle calls
rhetoric, is, at the same time, the essence of language. Rhetoric and Language, p 21.
Werry “Rhetoric refers to the study of spoken, written and visual language
understood as socially situated action. Rhetoric investigates how language is used to
organize and maintain social groups, construct meanings and identities, coordinate
behavior, mediate power, produce change, and create knowledge. Rhetoric assumes
that language is constitutive (we shape and are shaped by language), dialogic (it
exists in the shared territory between self and other), closely connected to thought
(mental activity as “inner speech”) and integrated with the social, cultural and
economic dimensions of life. Rhetorical study and written literacy are understood to
be essential to civic, professional and academic life.”
Rhetoric & Social Construction
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Rhetoric provides a conceptual map for the study of reasoning
(argument) and communication that approaches categories as social
constructs, as “site and stake in struggle” over meaning.
It is often interested in the “commonplaces” of thought (memory loci
become commonplace books, where people stored culturally
significant materials. Commonplaces are also the taken for granted
ideologies, values etc inscribed in language).
It tends to see categories as prototypical, context-dependent,
culturally and historically situated, emergent and processual
Consider “formal” and “informal” approaches to argument/reasoning
(closed systems vs. open, logical operators vs. broad categories,
absolute truth values vs. degrees of plausibility, propositions vs,
situated utterances.
Consider a “rhetorical,” reflexive approach to grammar vs. a formal,
“structural” approach. (Is “good” an adjective or adverb?)
Rhetoric & Social Construction
Style as persuasion, tropes and definitions as “terministic screens,”
categories as constructions.
Consider how the following everyday categories construct the world
in particular ways:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Far East, Middle East, Near East
Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms.
Negro, Black, African American
The Maori Wars, The New Zealand Wars, The Land Wars
Or: “the war on drugs”; “male pattern baldness,” “social phobia” (the
medicalization of ailments, personal problems, age, etc.)
“teenager,” “baby boomer,” “tweener,” “war on terror,” pronouns
of address; political discourse in totalitarian and democratic
societies.
Rhetoric & Social Construction
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What is Essentialism? Essentialism is an
orientation toward reality, knowledge, truth, and the
identity of things in the world that posits that the
'reality' of these things is to be found in their
'essence', or in their innermost nature. To know the
truth about a given concept or category, we
concentrate on uncovering its essence or inner
being. Its essence is an internal property that
defines its Being. This essence is: timeless, fixed,
immutable, universal, trans-historical and transcultural.
Rhetoric & Social Construction
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What is Social Construction? Social Construction is a “muddy,”
deeply contested term. However, some salient characteristics are
the following. Social construction is an orientation toward reality,
knowledge, truth, and identity that posits that these things are
dependent on social, political, discursive, economic (and
sometimes cognitive) processes, and on shifting ways of viewing
and representing the world. It is sometimes relativist in character,
and tends to stress the extent to which forms of knowledge,
language and social interaction are intertwined. Social
construction emphasizes the cultural and historical specificity of
knowledge, truth, identity, and our representations and
categorizations of the world. Knowledge, conceptual frameworks
and systems of representation are seen as caught up in forms of
life and language, and therefore always in process.
Rhetoric & Social Construction
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Categories: is race a social construction?
Gender?
Heterosexuality/homosexuality?
Memory & New Media
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If we are going to think about new media and how it might be
built in ways that reflect a more sophisticated understanding of
literacy – its history, theorization, relation to memory, etc. – then
we may find it useful to read authors such as Yates.
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What resources do new media provide us with for managing
memory – both collectively (think wikipedia, blogs, social
software etc.) and individually (think personal memory
management systems, PIMS, tiddlywikis, scrapbooks, etc.? How
can we establish modern “memory places” that let us annotate
texts, track where we have been, and create personally
meaningful connections between texts?