The Autonoumous Model of Literacy

Brian Street articulates what he sees as two models of literacy study: an autonomous model and an ideological model. These are not two monolithic conceptions of literacy, but general groupings of scholarship based on shared approaches to literacy.

Street criticizes scholars who he claims subscribe to an autonomous model of literacy for their failure to acknowledge and interrogate the social and political contexts of their views of literacy. Because of this blindspot in autonomous models of literacy, Street calls into question the construction of literacy presumed by those writing from such an understanding (e.g., Ong, Goody, Olson), pointing out that "the model assumes a single direction in which literacy development can be traced, and associates it with ‘progress’, ‘civilization’, individual liberty and social mobility. It attempts to distinguish literacy from schooling^?. It isolates literacy as an independent variable and then claims to be able to study its consequences" (2). Street points out that autonomous models of literacy tend to favor and naturalize Western literate traditions^? by assuming that “what is taken...to be qualities inherent to literacy artifacts are in fact conventions of literate practices in particular societies” (4).

Walter Ong, for instance, claims that literacy enables “features we have taken for granted in thought and expression in literature, philosophy and science, and even an oral discourse among literates." These features are not natural to human cognition “but have come into being because of the resources which the technology of writing makes available to human consciousness” (1). According to Ong, then, literacy as a technology is the agent (to invoke Burke's pentad) acting upon human consciousness. Of course, attendant upon Ong's rhetoric in his construction of literacy as a technology is the subtext of literacy as cultural commodity^? and technology as progress^?. Both these subtexts interact to reify the notion that the Western European literate tradition forms the apex of human development -- a progression which begins with the Greeks -- and that those without literacy are stalled in the early stages of intellectual development. Ong claims that "without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials...orality needs to produce and is destined to produce writing...There is hardly an oral culture or a predominantly oral culture left in the world today that is not somehow aware of the vast complex of powers forever inaccessible without literacy. This awareness is agony for persons rooted in primary orality, who want literacy passionately but who also know very well that moving into the existing will literacy means leaving behind much that is exciting and deeply loved in the earlier oral world" (14-15). Echoed in these words are the elements of what Harvey Graff identifies as the "literacy myth^?,"* the idea that literacy, indepedent of all other social and political variables, can propel individuals and societies forward into an ideal of success and achievement, however this ideal is articulated (e.g., cultural success in "moving on up" to the middle class or economic success).

-- BrianHoule - 03 May 2006

Goody makes claims about the "formal, cognitive, and linguistic operations" (34) which the advent of the list opened up for people in ancient Mesopotamia. Like Ong, Goody is concerned with an instrumentalist understanding of literacy; in this case, the technology of the list. The trouble with Goody's conclusion, though, as Street would suggest, is one of causation: Goody makes claims about the social and cognitive effects of a writing technology with little evidence of the actual literacy practices surrounding the technology. Goody, like Ong, while not ignoring the social context in which a literacy technology is used, still emphasizes the literacy artifact as the agent of change.

Reflected here is the received yet unacknowledged idea that, in the Western/Christian literate tradition, "books themselves came before reading...just as the dwelling comes before the dweller, or the earth before the peasant" (Debray 139). Debray reminds us "that there is a close and necessary relation between the beginnings of the use of the codex and the expansion in popularity of the first Christian writings" (141). Goody, of course, writes about lists in ancient Mesopotamia, not codices, but the point is that his focus on lists as agents of change in Mesopotamia has more to do with the cultural tradition from which he writes than the literacy practices of the Mesopotamians. That is to say there is a rich history in Western culture of reverence for literacy artifacts, a tradition which stems from Judeo-Christian religious beliefs: "The dogma of the Incarnation and the belief in the resurrection of bodies predisposes one to consider sacred the body of the Book, Spirit made object, Word become papyrus or parchment. An author's soul made flesh" (Debray 142). If the Christian tradition holds that God is in the book, a literacy artifact, then it is easy to see how this can inform an autonomous view of literacy, given the tradition of spiritual and moral training bound up with literacy schooling in North America and Europe (see Graff, Vincent, Soltow & Stevens). What's more, this technical understanding of the function of literacy reflects what Heiddeger calls a " technological understanding of the world" (Selfe 140) which "blinds us to a full understanding of the natural world as well as a full understanding of our relationship to this world and to the technology we have created" (141). This has ramifications for the very material ways in which people and institutions address literacy and literacy education, because “this way of ‘enframing’ the world becomes dangerous when it limits our repertoire of response to a ‘single way’ and when our other ways of understanding the world atrophy and disappear” (141).

The ideological blindness of the autonomous model of literacy thus has ethical and methodological ramifications. Elspeth Stuckey articulates these ramifications as violence: "literacy provides a unique bottleneck. Unlike a gun, whose least precedent is literacy, literacy legitimates itself. To be literate is to be legitimate; not to be literate is to beg the question. The question is whether or not literacy possesses powers unlike other technologies. The only way to address the question is to be literate. What more effective form of abuse than to offer clandestine services” (18). Stuckey also notes that many researchers “seem unable or unwilling to view the frustration of their work as ideologically intolerable; thus, they shape their work to fit the ideology” (23).

-- BrianHoule - 04 May 2006