Language in the world: properties and powers
Linguistic autonomy
Written language and the practice of literacy
Reconsidering 'the great divide' theory of literacy
It is several decades since writers such as Goody and Ong developed claims about the impact and effects of written forms of language on social and cultural practices. One strand of this argument was that the advent of writing transformed the possibilities of social and human development. Critics such as Street have claimed that this view of literacy mistakenly saw it as 'autonomous', detached from ideological and political interests and practices. Furthermore, the critics pointed to the normative assumptions implicit in what they regarded as the exaggeration of the advantages of literacy compared to orality. This identification of the shortcomings of the 'Great Divide' theory of literacy, and the recognition that literacy practices are heterogeneous and context-dependent (Street 1984, 1995), changed the terms of the debate. However, as Gill (2002) points out, the 'autonomous/ideological dichotomy' has in its turn tended to polarize protagonists in 'the literacy debate'. We revisit it here not so much to rehearse the arguments as to explore instead what can be gained by a focus on the distinctive properties and powers of people and language, and on the ways in which the relations between them are modified by the emergence of writing.
Both sides in this debate have made important contributions to our understanding of literacy, and our own perspective seeks to identify what these are without committing us to an outright rejection of either position. It is unfortunate that the whole debate seems inevitably to become entangled with normative and evaluative judgements. Rather as any claim that the human linguistic faculty is distinctive is easily seen as a claim for human superiority, so any position which identifies writing as having properties distinct from those of speech can be criticized for being 'scriptist': valorizing writing and stigmatizing speech (Harris 1980). There is no doubt that these two kinds of idea, distinctiveness, on the one hand, and superiority, on the other, are often found together, but there is no logical reason why they should be. As Bickerton (1996) points out with reference to the human capacity for language, some people object to the claim that this makes humans profoundly different from other species because it seems to chime in with a claim for a God-given right to dominance over those other species. No such inference follows from the first claim, however:
language and thought, and the consequences of these, may turn out to be disastrous for the planet and all the species on it, but this does not amount to a refutation of the difference language makes. Another of the problems with making claims about orality, as Harris has also noted, is that we do so from the perspective of literacy: to be schooled in literate practices, and to engage in debate by writing books, is to 'speak' from a literate perspective: arguments about orality have to be advanced with caution (see also Linell 2001). It should also be noted, as Street, Barton and others have pointed out, that orality and literacy are typically mixed modes: both are found in most social settings (Barton 1994; Street 1984). Nevertheless, we shall outline the criticisms we have of both positions in the literacy debate, and these involve the components of reality which each appears to eliminate in its description of the phenomenon at issue - literacy. In our terms, the 'autonomists' neglect social practice, while the 'ideologists' fail to give adequate recognition to the distinctiveness of literacy.
Thus the autonomous model is clearly open to the charge of reifying literacy, of treating it as an undifferentiated entity and of failing to connect it as a practice with other sorts of social practices, particularly the pursuit of social and political interests. Street, for example, describes how an autonomous concept of literacy has persisted in the discourse which is used 'to draw public attention to literacy and to encourage both financial and organizational resources into the field', as in campaigns in 1990 for International Literacy Year, whose rhetoric, he claims:
reproduced many of the stereotypes of the autonomous model: in particular, that 'illiterates' were lacking in cognitive skills, living in 'darkness' and 'backward' and that the acquisition of literacy would (in itself, 'autonomously') lead to major 'impacts' in terms of social and cognitive skills and 'Development'. (Street 1995: 13)
The strength of Street's objections to the 'autonomous' model is that he recognizes that it is people, rather than literacy, that have the power to cause things to happen in the social world. It does not follow from this, though, that written language has no distinctive properties. Moreover, these properties, since they are emergent, shape the contexts within which people exert the powers they do have. Indeed, this is why it is impossible for us, working as academics in the twenty-first century, to empathize fully with those philosophers who have lived in an exclusively oral society and why Street and the other critics of the 'autonomous' model of literacy have felt obliged to put their ideas into print rather than formulating them exclusively in speech. The 'ideological' model of literacy, we would argue, does not acknowledge sufficiently the emergent properties of written language, thus running the risk of reducing literacy to what people do with it.
