Page 14 - Literacy in the New Media Age

THE FUTURES OF LITERACY 3

whichever I choose, and normally it is an actional verb, I cannot get around the
fact that I have to name the relation, and refer to either a state or an action, even
if I do not want to do so at all. ‘I have a holiday coming up’ is not really about
ownership stated by have; nor is ‘I think that’s fine’ really about what I think – it
is saying that I feel fine in relation to whatever ‘that’ is. Yet both speech and
writing absolutely insist that I choose a name/word for an action, even though I
do not wish to do so.
To take another example, if I am in a science lesson and I am talking about
cells, and the structure of cells, I might want to say ‘every cell has a nucleus’. As
in my example above, I have to use a word to name a relation between two
entities – cell and nucleus – which invokes a relation of possession, have. I
actually do not think of it as being about possession, but it is a commitment
which language forces me to make. If I ask the class to draw a cell, there is no
such commitment. Now, however, every student who draws the cell, has to place
the nucleus somewhere in the cell, in a particular spot. There is no way around
that, whether the nucleus actually has this or that specific place in the cell or not.
There is a demand for an epistemological commitment, but it is a totally
different one in the case of the two modes: commitment to naming of a relation
in one case – ‘the cell owns a nucleus’, and commitment to a location in space in
another – ‘this is where it goes’.
Let me make another comparison of affordances, to draw out the impact of the
shift. In writing, I can use ‘every cell has a nucleus’ without having any idea
what a nucleus actually is, does, looks like and so on. The same applies to cell;
nor do I know what have actually means in that structure – other than a kind of
‘there is’. The reason for that is that words are, relatively speaking, empty of
meaning, or perhaps better, the word as sound-shape or as letter-shape gives no
indication of its meaning, it is there to be filled with meaning. It is that ‘filling
with meaning’ which constitutes the work of imagination that we do with
language. In what may seem a paradox given common-sense views about
language, I want to say that words are empty of meaning, relatively. If someone
says to me ‘I have a new car’, I know very little indeed about that person’s
vehicle. It is this characteristic of words which leads to the well-known
experience of having read a novel and really enjoyed it – filling it with our
meaning – only to be utterly disappointed or worse when we see it as a film, where
some others have filled the words with their very different meanings.
At the same time, these relatively empty things occur in a strict ordering,
which forces me to follow, in reading, precisely the order in which they appear.
There is a ‘reading path’ set by the order of the words which I must follow. In a
written text there is a path which I cannot go against if I wish to make sense of
the meaning of that text. The order of words in a clause compels me to follow,
and it is meaningful. ‘Bill and Mary married’ has a point of view coded in the
reading path which makes it different from ‘Mary and Bill married’. If I
have two clauses – ‘The sun rose, the mists dissolved’ – then the order in which I
have put them structures the path that my reader must follow. ‘The mists