Alphabetic Literacy

I believe the most efficient way to understand ourselves and the world around us involves looking at situations in the simplest way possible. By this I mean ridding ourselves of superfluous traditions, conventions and confusions and plainly assessing the situation at hand. Anybody is capable of doing this. One does not have to be conventionally educated for such a task.

In the literate Western world, alphabetic literacy provides a pervasive basis and criterion for all our other modes of communication. Instructions on how to use a computer, telephone or television, for example, will all be communicated through alphabetic literacy. All our academic and reflective work is expressed through this medium. Much of our day to day communication, such as emailing, texting and letter writing, is done through this medium. Alphabetic literacy structures our lives. It structures how we think and relate to the world around us. By psychologically internalising this medium, we have gained impressive abilities, but have also lost certain other abilities.

The markings of Chinese character writing are different from alphabetic units, or phonemes. Chinese characters resemble objects in the physical world. Phonemes visually represent sounds. Alphabetic writing captures the complex dynamics of speech and reduces it to a visual and particularly abstract medium.

To clarify, the effects I am about to describe can be applied to literacy in general, but are heightened, taken to a more intense level, with alphabetic literacy, particularly the Greek-developed vocalic alphabet, which Walter Ong describes as "the most radical of all writing systems" (37).

The intense abstraction of experience and reality that occurs with the application of alphabetic writing significantly leads to an intense separation of thought from action, of psychic meanings from physical experiences. This allows us to consciously reflect on reality. Alphabetic literacy sets up a world of complex abstract meanings and concepts that appear to be divorced from direct physical experiences and actions. This apparent divorce or separation has led to civilisation as we know it.

"One of the most generalizable effects of writing is separation" (Ong, 36). In the process of separating thought from action, psychic meaning from physical experience, alphabetic literacy encourages the impression that we are detached from the world around us. Alphabetic literacy leads to Descartes’ cogito, a purely conceptual isolated subject, an autonomous neutral entity experiencing objects and forces that are external to it. Our very identity tends to be solely equated with this abstract entity, this "ego", that has no physical validity or meaning. Unfortunately, this notion that we are separate from each other and the world around us can lead to very negative consequences. For example, I believe it is this notion that allows us to blindly destroy our natural world, as opposed to work in harmony with it. If we realised that we are an extension of everything around us and that the health of nature is equivalent to our own health, then we would instinctively treat nature with more respect. In order to solve many of our great societal problems, we need to understand the psychological effects of our technologies.

By fixing acoustic information at a certain point in space, in a particularly abstract form, alphabetic writing enables a divisive and linear way of processing of information, as opposed to the simultaneous and immersive processing of information that occurs with speech. Alphabetic literacy consequently encourages the conception that time itself is linear, and that moments in time, like phonemes or individual words, are separate and autonomous. In reality this is not the case. "The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion" (Albert Einstein). Similarly, Quantum Physics has shown us that space is not divisible and that even our notion of locality is an illusion. Thus, by looking deeper into physical reality, modern physics has led to the same conclusion as mystics who looked deeper into their own minds. This conclusion: We are all one.

The fact that it is so pervasive and ubiquitous means, perhaps unexpectedly, that alphabetic writing very often eludes analysis and recognition. It is a powerful technology that has led to conceptual thought, concentrated conscious awareness and, as a result, modern civilisation.

Post 10

In order to meaningfully grow one must attain relative independence from cultural pressures and demands. At a certain point in one's life one must leave behind or overcome the limitations of traditions and doctrines, of established knowledge. One must reach a point where they do not simply parrot and embody the immediate and prevalent teachings of their surrounding environments.

Throughout our lives we are told by almost every teaching institution how the world is and how we should approach and view the world. Such teachings are most often charged with insipid domination-oriented ideologies that want the majority of people to be submissive, to submit to the demands of the dominant cultural paradigm. This has been the case, primarily, in every culture and every teaching institution in history.

The word independence is here used to designate the state whereby one has loosened the constraints placed upon us by all traditions and doctrines, where one's thoughts and actions blossom and flourish creatively and spontaneously, where innovative ideas and ways of perceiving the world come forth and develop positively and meaningfully.

Post 9

All conscious awareness and knowledge is the result of projecting or translating psychical processes into physical objects and events.

Post 8

To interpret an event literally, to judge an idea superficially, to take only content, surface meaning, into account - this is to misunderstand things enormously. Such an approach to experience, whereby events and ideas are evaluated solely in light of their direct and immediate appearances, is to my mind majorly flawed, in that it does not account for the inherently complex, ambiguous and paradoxical nature of experience.

To see behind the surface of what has been communicated and expressed, to understand the complex language of paradoxes, metaphors and allusions, to intuit the inherent ambiguity of life, is to apprehend that which one experiences clearly and accurately.

Post 7

Each moment and event may be described as a particularised convergence of all moments and events.

Post 6

My current thoughts and meditations are intended to be seeds. They are intended to be brief beginnings and openings from which more developed, refined and complex thoughts may grow.

Post 5

Everything external, every perceptible empirical experience, is in some way a manifestation of something internal. All external forms require, for their very existence, internal energies. It may be better put that all external forms are internal energies.

Although we cannot adequately talk about or recognize that which is internal, that which is within life and motivates it, it is perhaps our strongest intuition that there are psychic, spiritual or energetic forces within us and the rest of the world.

As far as I'm concerned it is inconceivable to have a form, anything that exists in the phenomenal world, that was not motivated by something, that was not animated by something. All forms are manifestations of an energy, a will.

Post 4

Time cannot in reality be divided into separate autonomous units, like the division between past, present or future. Or minutes, days, years. In my view all events, all moments in time, flow into and affect each other.

What are equated with our only experiences are those which we have consciously and directly experienced. One does not usually feel that they have experienced that which all other beings have, even though it could be argued that one’s experience of reality derives from all other experiences and events.

You and your present experience is to my mind a particularized crystallization, emergence, of everything, of all times and places.

All individual events exist in an inseparable unity with all other events. This could be said in numerous ways, with numerous metaphors, but our experience of events, of events that can be differentiated from each other and thus talked of plurally, is in my view a projection of our ways of understanding and relating to reality.

The Medium is the Message

A medium is an environment, a context in and through which energies are expressed. The specific nature and form these energies take is shaped by the nature of the medium.

Ferdinand de Saussure points out the simple yet useful notion that ideas do not exist prior to language. An idea may be described as a phenomenon that is motivated by energy/thought and arises in and through the context of language. An idea is a simultaneous and inseparable combination of thought and language. And the nature of the idea will invariably be shaped by the nature of the language through which it is expressed. Better still, the idea is the language through which it is expressed.

The medium and the message cannot be separated. They both rely on each other for their existence and meaning. These two phenomena arise simultaneously, are inseparable and are involved in a reciprocal symbiotic  relationship. McLuhan once said that the medium and the message are the same. This is a statement that indicates most clearly what he meant by his famous aphorism.

Marshall McLuhan as Metaphysician: Reproducing McLuhan's Implicit Cosmological Picture

Before Marshall McLuhan no one had explicitly, thoroughly or systematically analysed the mediums by which we think and act. Coded languages confer upon individuals the capacity for consciousness, for thought as we know it, which is why Wittgenstein said that the thought is the language. It may be said that conscious reflection is only made possible by transferring the energies of existence into explicit and discernible forms and patterns. 

Coded languages, as well as giving us the capacity for abstract human thought, may also be seen as defining the limits by which we can think. This is at least partially what McLuhan meant by saying that the medium is the message. The medium creates an environment that makes certain things possible and certain other things impossible. For example, Paul Levinson has argued that the idea of an abstract supreme being like God could only be adequately expressed through the abstract nature of alphabetic literacy.

For me at least, in order to adequately understand things, assessing that which makes understanding possible is the most efficient thing one can do.

McLuhan makes a basic distinction between tribal people and literate or civilized people. This distinction lies at the heart of his thought.

The spatial orientation of the tribal person was primarily acoustic. 

The tribal person lived in a world where things were experienced simultaneously, not sequentially. There was no split between past, present and future. There was no split between conscious and unconscious. 

For tribal people, what we would call the unconscious was always apparent, never suppressed, but was not apparent in an explicit, visual or even conscious way. 

Communication for tribal people was carried out primarily through speech. The complexity and spontaneity of the spoken word was a unique fleeting event that could not be analysed or reflected upon.

Writing froze the multi-dimensional dynamics of speech and experience, divided the simultaneous totality of experience into separate parts and made possible the highly concentrated explicit analyses of things and events. “The fracturing of the integrity of the word split consciousness and culture into many fragments. It transferred the rich organic compound of immemorial speech into a thin abstract cross-section which could be examined at leisure and analysed” (McLuhan, 1995: 229). Writing may thus be seen as allowing conscious reflection to come into being.

The letters of the Greek alphabet are particularly abstract. This is because phonemes do not have any resemblance to that which they communicate. “The phonetic alphabet is the only one in which the letters are semantically neutral, lacking verbal structure or force. Since the visual image presented in these letters is acoustically and semantically neutral, they have had the extraordinary effect of supporting the visual faculty independently” (McLuhan, 1995: 285). Alphabetic writing thus encourages a highly visual spatial orientation.

Due to the nature of literacy, particularly alphabetic literacy, a separation of meaning from experience occurred, which had the significant effect of separating thought from action. This is arguably the prime source of dualistic thinking in Western culture and is well encapsulated in Descartes’ famous phrase I think therefore I am which, as Capra points out (1975: 22), “led Western man to equate his identity with his mind, instead of with his whole organism”. Such an equation of identity with mind would have been unthinkable to a tribal person.

It would be useful here to make a distinction between visual and acoustic space. “A basic feature of acoustic space is its inclusiveness. Visual space is exclusive” (McLuhan, 1995: 300). It could also be pointed out that visual experience is of a more explicit nature than acoustic experience, that is to say, sights are more identifiable and fixed whereas sound is “fleeting transparent and diaphanous, it escapes our desire to capture, fixate or freeze it” (Elseasser, 2010: 137).

Due to writing, people were able to reflect upon and critically analyse experience. The results of this ability were vast. “The analysis of visually abstracted speech brought into existence very quickly the now traditional arts and sciences and their divisions” (McLuhan, 1995: 299). Further, “writing permitted the visual analysis of the dynamic logos that produced philology, logic, rhetoric, geometry, etc.” (McLuhan, 1995: 300).
 

With the introduction of moveable typography into 15^th century Europe, the effects of alphabetic literacy were greatly extended, initiating the modern civilized world as we know it today.

Print technology mechanized writing, standardizing all texts.

With moveable typography came the portable book. The portable book encouraged the formation of the private individual with a fixed point of view, as individuals could now read in isolation and form personal opinions, which, in the wider context of culture, also led to a wider variety of opinions. Reading in private also sets up the interior monologue, thus leading to psychic withdrawal (McLuhan, 1995: 61). In this sense moveable type may be seen as leading to individualism and conditioning the basic principles on which capitalism rests.

One of the habits of a literate Western person is to think in sequences. This is due to the process of mechanisation which “is achieved by fragmentation of any process and by putting the fragmented parts in a series” (McLuhan, 1964: 12).  This means that experiences are split and divided into seemingly unrelated yet linearly connected segments. This is in contrast to a holistic or mosaic approach to experience.

The introduction of electric/electronic technology in the early-mid 19^th century reconfigured the sequentiality of mechanisation and allowed, once more, for the simultaneous apprehension of experience. 

In the electric age tribal/acoustic spatial orientations have returned in many ways. 

Simultaneity of experience is typified, for example, in much 20th century science. "For us who are convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent" (Einstein: 203). Time is, according to modern physics, a simultaneous phenomena which cannot in reality be divided into independent parts or sequences. The same can be said for human beings and existence itself.

It was McLuhan’s view that literacy brought us out of the acoustic tribal world and into the visual civilised world. This transition resulted in an increase in explicit analytical conscious awareness but also resulted in a rigid split between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, as well as many other rigid splits, and a decrease in awareness of the multi-dimensional dynamics of acoustic space and experience. This limited awareness of the complexity of multi-dimensional experience held so long as we lived in an alphabet/print oriented culture, because, as established in the introduction, mediums define the limits by which thought can operate.

In the electric or information age the unconscious is once more apparent and inescapable as a result of retrieved forms of acoustic simultaneous awareness, and yet we have retained, precisely through the continuing power and presence of literacy, a unique conscious awareness of complex experiences which tribal people simply did not have. We now have the potential to be aware of the multi-dimensional acoustic world that envelops us,  as has been well demonstrated through much modern art, science and thought in general. 

Post 1

An individually delineated thing can only find meaning in relation to other individually delineated things. On a simple level, one can only grasp the meaning of the word good in relation to the word bad. One might observe that within the word good there implicitly resides the presence and influence of the word bad and vice versa.

The relatedness and inseparability of seemingly opposed and isolated things was stressed by Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil "It could even be possible that the value of those good and honored things consists precisely in the fact that in an insidious way they are related to those bad, seemingly opposite things, linked, knit together, even identical perhaps".