The Transhuman Contexts of Literacy Practices

One line of thought I am trying to follow relates Bruno LaTour's notion of nonhuman actors with literacy studies. How and to what extent does the nonhuman and the transhuman shape literacies? A recent article, "Limits of the Local," by Deborah Brandt and Katie Clinton begins a conversation in this direction. However, I would argue that they miss a great opportunity to fold the insights offered by affect studies into their discussion of the transhuman. Below I briefly summarize Brandt and Clinton's argument. I am hoping to use this position as a spring board; perhaps future posts may emerge from this as observations of potential examples for a paper in this class.

Brandt and Clinton argue that the socio-cultural turn in literacy studies, which emerged as a critique of the determinisitic autonomous model of literacy, may have taken too far of a reactionary swing, for the situated approach to literacy studies "under-theorizes certain aspects of literacy," including the global dimensions of literacies. Consequently, Brandt and Clinton urge literacy scholars to more fully consider "the material dimensions of literacy" and to thus "theorize the transcontextualized and transcontexualizing potentials of literacy -- particularly its ability to travel, integrate, and endure" (377). Some of the limits to the current paradigm of literacy research include the "assume[d] separations between the local and the global, agency and social structure, and literacy and its technology" (338). But at the heart of their critique is the argument that literacy has "certain 'autonomous' aspects" (339), which we must rehabilitate, for Literacy is neither a deterministic force nor a creation of local agents," which is what the situated approach seems to presume. "Rather it [literacy] participates in social practices in the form of objects and technologies, whose meanings are not usually created nor exhausted by the locales in which they are taken up" (338).

• Literacy has certain autonomous aspects

• Literacy participates in social practices through nonhuman agents (objects and technologies)

• Nonhuman agents extend beyond the global

To rehabilitate the "autonomy" of affects literacy, Brandt and Clinton turn to LaTour's notion of nonhuman actors. The socio-cultural approach to literacy research, according to Brandt and Clinton's critique, has presented "overwhelming evidence that human agents, individually and collectively, mediate literacy practices whenever they take them up – imbuing them with local intentions, resisting their often hegemonic currents, recrafting them to fulfill needs at hand." However, and here is where LaTour helps to extend the dominant paradigm, "objects are doing the same or possibly other things. They also are active mediators – imbuing, resisting, recrafting" (346).

So Brandt and Clinton's argument is that "We need perspectives that show the various hybrids, alliances, and multiple agents and agencies that simultaneously occupy acts of reading and writing. Agency is indeed alive and well in reading and writing but it is not a solo performance" (347). What we need, then, is a new analytical framework. These new frameworks must operate on the principle that literacy is 'autonomous,' though not in a deterministic sense, but in that "it is a something in practice, not merely an accomplishment of practice" (348).

This is the heart of their argument: Literacy is not just an accomplishment of practice, but is a something in practice. Conceptualizing a thingness in literacies aids in the further theoretical work of explaining how literacy mediates experiences, identities, power, and so on. So, here are the new (and gently reused) analytical frames proposed by Brandt and Clinton:

• Literacy-in-action: this concept would replace the notion of 'literacy event' (developed by Heath) by not favoring human actors over nonhuman actors as the former construct urges us to do. Rather, literacy-in-action points to not only the role of human actors in mediating the world through literate practices, but the role played by nonhuman actors as well. For example, we might not only consider the roles played by humans in the negotiation of a bank loan, but how "the various forms, instruments, and machines in the setting" frame the social interaction and carry a certain "social load" (349).

• Sponsors of literacy: this term comes from Brandt's earlier work; it urges us to account for the "underwriters" of literacies by "recogniz[ing] the historical fact that access to literacy has always required assistance, permission, sanction, or coercion by more powerful others or, at least, contact with existing 'grooves' of communication" (349). This framework connects human and nonhuman agents by drawing attention to how powerful agents act through objects, like literacy materials in a given setting. Access to the literacy/Discourse is channeled or gets acted out through the mediating role played by these objects.

I am particularly drawn to the literacy-in-action framework. One way I have been thinking about this idea is the question (which seems kind of panopticon-ish): how does the generalized architecture as well as the various objects located in a typical classroom come to shape and reinforce certain literacy practices? A further question might be how does the organization of a setting premediate the literacy practices that structure a social interaction? By this, how are nonhuman actors situated in social spaces inorder to shape literacies or Discourses as they emerge or become actualized?

How do the nonhuman agents in these scenes shape our language practices in social interaction? What discourses do these nonhuman agents call for?

Following this line of thought will require some thought along the lines of media studies. That will have to wait for a future post.