Violence of the Letter

Coming into this class, I assumed that literacy is a black-and-white concept. Either you got it or you don’t, and being in one category is strongly preferable to the other. Who among us has not listened to a teacher herald literacy as a ticket to a better tomorrow? I thought that we’d be doing readings on how literacy specifically leads to positive social change and progress. Then, right off the bat, we were assigned Collins’ article, and the line of questioning went from, “How does literacy do it?” to “Uh, wait–does it?”

Woof.

The article points out many of our ingrained assumptions concerning literacy and their fallacies. It was dense. I felt dense.

After I got over my melodramatic despair and finished the article, one quick but dirty phrase turned over in my head: “violence of the letter.” Collins drops this quote by French philosopher Jacques Derrida as a criticism of literacy and power. Derrida argued that literacy changes the conditions of truth. “Violence of the letter,” he says, is “…analogous to the colonial violence and expropriation that accompanied the spread of European scripts…” To me, this was a very wordy way of saying that yeah, the pen may in fact be mightier than the sword.

I can’t think of a situation where I’ve been or witnessed someone being told that learning to read and write is bad. Think of Michelle Pfeiffer encouraging her at-risk class to put pen to paper in Dangerous Minds, or Freedom Writers with Hilary Swank that was essentially the same thing but with less overalls and flannel.

Baron, in his own article some decades after Derrida initially made his argument, asserted that technology related to writing needs to be accepted and authenticated as a final integration into society. Nbd.

At this point, writing doesn’t need to be justified or defended. It’s literally been presented as liberating.

No one said to those kids in H. Swank’s class that being adept at writing within certain parameters (as defined by society) would maybe free them from certain restrictions (placed on them by that society), but that becoming literate might also be playing into preserving the class structure (of, yep, that same society).

No T.A. stepped out from the shadow of Hils’ righteous indignation to pipe up that trying to write to their truth under the Western definition of literacy might change the reality of said truth because it’s now being defined by a system that per Goody and Co. is “like, suuuuuuper flexible, bro,” but could instead be limiting or even detrimental to social progress in disadvantaged communities that are trying to play ball in a system that’s already fouled them.

Kid would’ve been fired.