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DEFINITIONS OF LITERACY. 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)”
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DEFINITIONS OF LITERACY • 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, Language & Rhetoric • 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 & Listsa) “retrospective lists” – an inventory of things and personsb) “shopping lists” – future orientedc) “lexicial lists” – lists of words for education and play (proto-encylopedias, schoolbooks etc.)
Q: Why are lists important? • 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 • 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.
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
Lists & Literacy • 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.
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. • 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.
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 • “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) • 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) • Lastly, the fact that no system is adequate or complete leads to the formation of more complex systems. Consider the following:
"...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 • 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-to-many” 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? • 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 • 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. Far East, Middle East, Near East2. Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms.3. Negro, Black, African American4. 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 • 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 trans-cultural.
Rhetoric & Social Construction • 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 • Categories: is race a social construction? • Gender? • Heterosexuality/homosexuality?
Memory & New Media • 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. • 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?
