Carrol Cox wrote: [clip]
I know this valorization of speaking over writing has a long and celebrated history in Western thought, but I don't follow the reasoning here. Speaking and listening can be a tool of freedom or oppression, just as written communication can. --A simple example: if someone is being tortured for opposing political authority, it matters not one wit whether the torture order was given verbally or in writing. And as we demonstrate in this forum, writing at its best can provoke thoughtful consideration of different perspectives; at its worst, the words are blunt tools to inflict ridicule. However, those same possibilities of language use occur in oral communication! We've all been party to verbal interactions that are inspiring and others that are literally oppressive ("you're fired!").
So--why consider oral literacy central or primary?
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It depends on context. My context is political, with a focus on the great difficulty that so many have in expressing their thoughts in writing. There has been some serious research in this, some of it summarized and analyzed in Patricia A Dunn, _Learning Re-Abled_. Everyone (I hope) is familiar with that difficulty called "dyslexia." That has been discussed at length, and it is more or less common knowledge now that some persons of great achievement 'suffer' from this 'disability.' Very little effort has ever been made to answer the obvious question: Are there other such 'disabilities,' undiagnosed, that bar a person from full participation in the intellectual life of the nation, though in fact they are, in other senses of "literacy," _highly_ literate. I encountered one such person many years ago in my classes. He did NOT suffer from dyslexia -- in fact I discovered that he was a quite brilliant reader, but he simply could not write. I discovered his ability to read intelligently by sheer accident; in a conference in my office he began to comment on a novel we were reading -- and, moreover, doing so in flexible, correct, sentences: sentences which would have earned him a grade of B to A by anyone's standards had he been able to put them on to paper. He took three courses from me: he never gave me a literate sentence of paragraph! It was not only that he wrote "incorrect" English: he could not organize his thoughts on paper; he could not think coherently on paper. But he could read, he could understand what he was reading (even in the case of some difficult texts), and he could _talk_ about what he had read; he had useful thoughts to offer on the content of his reading. There was, in his case, some glitch between brain and hand, a glitch that had barred him all his life from participation in the full intellectual culture of the nation. And deprived that 'culture' of what he (and others like him) might contribute.
My core objection then is not to print culture as such -- in my initial post I went out of my way to drag in references to print culture (Milton, Pope, Swift, Pound). Access to such culture ought to be more widespread than it is. My objection is the imposition of the standards of standard literacy upon the whole population of students in the schools both inflicts pointless pain and, in fact, seriously distorts the lives, the thinking, of those who cannot more or less spontaneously, develop the skills demanded. I would suggest that those who write well at the age of 21 for the most part are those who wrote well at the age of 8.
Re-read the FHP paper: if that were to dominate a political movement, the vast majority of the population would be excluded from participation in left political discussion. And that is precisely what Jodi Dean clearly wants: that political decisions be made by experts ( the super-literate), while the masses simply fall into line behind them.
Carrol
P.S. As to wider questions your post raises -- even the best writers _do_ want their texts to be discussed, not simply responded to in formal criticism. You and I are circumscribed in our consideration of issues here in a way we would not be facing each other across a dinner table.
(My own experience as my partial blindness has continued to approach total blindness is of some relevance here, I think. I simply cannot maintain coherence in a composition beyond a certain length: the process of rereading my own work is too clumsy: I lose my way. It seems probable that there are many other reading difficulties than dyslexia, not grounded in "illiteracy," that exist for many, just as there may exist many neurological difficulties that make writing a painful task for the person. I at least have not met many people incapable of speaking fairly fluently.)