Page 43 - Literacy in the New Media Age

32 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

English, even though in the Norfolk dialect of English, for instance, that is not a
rule. But across language as a whole, variability, dynamism, change, flux are the
order, rather than the rigidity of unchangeable rules.
For me it is now a real question whether we can talk about some phenomenon
called ‘language’ in any serious sense at all, and if we do so, what it is that we
are actually talking about. I wonder whether the concept of ‘language’ is a fiction
that gets in the way of thinking clearly. Maybe it is essential to talk of speech and
its regularities as one mode, and writing and its regularities as another. And yet
there are points where, in alphabetically transcribed languages, speech and
writing are closely enough connected that the term ‘language’ does have its uses.
These may seem remote arguments, though they do have real effects in everyday
lives, such as in school curricula for instance, or in attitudes to correctness, to
social order and to the role of authority whether in language or much more
widely in social lives.
Staying with abstract notions of language may have its uses, though
understanding the potentials of the resources of speech or of writing in making
meaning is not one of them. For that we need to focus on the very materiality of
these resources to understand their potentials in their actual use. How does the
fact that speech necessarily happens in time affect the meanings that we make
with it? How does the fact that – in cultures with a longer history of writing – it
has freed itself from temporality in some ways, but has been subject, in its
graphic display, to some of the effects of space, affect the meanings that we can
make in that mode? Further, we need to understand the histories of the shaping
of both in their social use. We need a quite new way of thinking about resources,
their use and the users; we need a new theory of meaning and meaning-making, a
new theory of semiosis. For that, both speech and writing need to be discussed in
terms of their materiality as much as in terms of their cultural shaping, in very
concrete, quite non-abstract ways. To understand the potentials of the resource of
writing we need to understand the potentials of the resource of speech – as of other
resources – in their differences and in their similarities. Only at that stage might
it again be useful and possible to reintroduce the notion of ‘language’.
Much of the book will be concerned with showing that we need to attend to
the materiality of the resources, the material stuff that we use for making
meaning. The sculptor who does not understand the potentials of the material
with which he or she works is at an entire disadvantage in their work. Of course
he or she will also need to know the traditions of sculpture, in their own or in
other cultures – not only what can be done with fibreglass but also what has been
done with that material. After all, what they make now derives part of its
meaning from its contrast with what has been made before.
At the level of stuff, speech and writing are obviously different. One exists as
the materiality of sound in time, and the other as the materiality of graphic marks
in two-dimensional space. A question that is pressing is, is it possible to make
the same meanings with sounds in time (and all the cultural elaborations of that)
as with light in space (and the elaborations of that)? This becomes urgent now