Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacy

Gee, James Paul. Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. 3rd Edition. Taylor and Fancis: New York, 2007.

Quick sum: The first edition was one of the contributing foundations to “New Literacy Studies,” which “studies literacy in its full range of contexts: cognitive, social, cultural, historical and institutional” (“Social Linguistics and Literacies”). In his Intro, Gee talks about how New Literacy Studies puts the relationship between language-in-society as the center point of analysis, which also helps us to see more clearly the “other stuff” that comes attached to language. Gee’ mission was twofold:

1. to articulate a new field called New Literacy Studies
2. develop perspective in this field, particularly toward educational issues (1)
3. This new field is a paradigmatic shift counter to the “traditional view” of literacy in which “cognitive” or “psychological” literacy skills

Thus, his larger argument is that, “to appreciate language in its social context, we need to focus not on language alone, but rather on what I will call ‘Discourses,’ with a capital ‘D’…It’s not just what you say or even just how you say it, it’s also who you are and what you’re doing while you say it…Discourses are ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing, that are accepted as instantiations of particular identities (or ‘types of people’) by specific groups…They are ‘ways of being in the world’; they are ‘forms of life’; they are socially situated identities. They are, thus, always and everywhere social and products of social histories” (3).

Discourses are multiple and varied, just like the people who use them: “Each of us is a member of many Discourses, and each Discourse represents one of our ever multiple identities” (4). And because Discourse is diverse, it is part and parcel of conflict, as well as creates tacit “theories” about who is “normal” and the “rights” ways for that person to think, feel and behave (4). It is because of these connections that Gee claims that, “language is inextricably bound up with ideology and cannot be analyzed or understood apart from it” (4). It is also because of these connections that he takes great pains to talk about the power that language holds, and the ethical responsibility that we hold to that power and to make our tacit theories explicit (5).

Gee claims to do the following things in this edition:

1. to give readers an overview of sociocultural approaches to language and literacy, approaches which coalesced into the New Literacy Studies
2. to introduce readers to a particular style of analyzing language-in-use-in-society
3. to develop a specific perspective on language and literacy centered around the notion of ‘Discourses’ (with a capital ‘D’) (2)

Gee points to the traditional notion of literacy to lay the background for the rise of New Literacy Studies. This view posits that:

• literate people are more intelligent, more modern, more moral
• countries with high literacy rates are better developed, more modern, better behaved
• literacy freed some of humanity from a ‘primitive’ state, from an earlier stage of human development
• if language makes us human, then literacy makes us ‘civilized’ (50)

And this, as echoed in Graff, is a myth, one which Gee calls a “master myth” because it is at the very heart of our notion of our reality but it does not actually reflect reality so much as rationalize inhumane and unjust world views and behaviors. The myth has lasted since about the time that the alphabet was created, and in analyzing Plato’s discussion of writing, makes some poignant conclusions regarding the social and political place of literacy: on a micro level, Plato chides writing for not being able to defend itself by any other means than strict repetition; on a macro level, his argument is against “any form of language or thought that cannot stand up to the question ‘What do you mean?’ That question is an attempt to unmask attempts to persuade, whether by poets, rhetoricians, or politicians, based on self-interested claims to authority or traditionalism, and not on a genuine disinterested search for truth” (53). This is why Plato favors dialogic thinking, speaking and writing. Gee points to Bakhtin here, who believed that, “genuine dialogue always presupposes that something, but not everything, can be known” (qtd 54). Thus, Gee sees Plato’s exposition on writing as a contradictory: literacy as liberator and literacy as weapon (55), though it seems more a paradox than a contradiction to me. Scribner & Cole’s study verifies this myth: “literacy in and of itself led to no grandiose cognitive abilities, and formal schooling ultimately led to rather specific abilities that are rather useless without institutions which reward ‘expository talk in contrived situations’ (such as schools, courts, bureaucracies)” (59).

Religion plays a very large role in the “success” of literacy, as seen in the example of Sweden, a country able to develop widespread literacy among men and women in a general state of poverty. The trick? Literacy was a tool to promote a Christian faith and lifestyle. While Gee only points to Levi-Strauss here, there has been a lot of work done on this connection, like rhetoricians such as to Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, as well as scholars like Warner, Letters of the Republic, Enoch Refiguring Rhetorical Education, Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space, Gere Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in US Women’s Clubs 1880-1920, Gere: “Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms”, Moss, A Community Text Arises, Swearingen, Rhetoric and Irony, Freitas, Sex and the Soul, and Warner, “Tongues Untied” to name a few.

And economics is also a huge factor, as almost every literacy account takes into account on some level. Thus, literacy is a matter caught in a great debate: “One the one side are elites (whether social, religious, economic, or hereditary) arguing that the lower classes should not be given literacy, because it will make them unhappy with their lot, politically critical and restive, and unwilling to do the menial jobs of society. On the other side are elites who argue that literacy will not have this effect. Rather, they argue, if literacy is delivered in the right moral and civil framework, one that upholds the values of the elites, it will make the lower classes accept those values and seek to behave in a manner more like the middle classes (i.e. they will become more ‘moral’ and ‘better citizens’) (61-62).

This other position stems from Freire’s liberatory pedagogy and emancipatory literacy. And these main points of Freire are similar points made in Gee’s book:

1. a ‘banking model’ of education does not ‘work’
2. ‘reading the world’ and ‘reading the word’ are deeply similar–at some level equivalent–processes
3. dialogue (that is, both face-to-face conversational interaction and conversation-like interaction at a distance through reflection on what one has heard or read) in which diverse viewpoints and perspectives are juxtaposed is, at several levels, essential to ‘read the world’ and to ‘read the word’
4. ‘politics’ (in the sense of assumptions, attitudes, values, and perspectives about the distribution of ‘social goods’ in society, where by ‘social goods’ I mean anything that is considered ‘good,’ ‘appropriate,’ or ‘right’ to have, do, or be in the society) doesn’t stand outside of and is not peripheral to literacy. Rather, politics…and literacy are integrally and inextricably interwoven. (65-66)

This debate and ultimately the dichotomy between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ cultures, based in language and literacy, plays out in many other forms, which Gee attributes to Levi-Strauss’s discussion of the shift cultures make from the science of the concrete to the science of the abstract, Havelock’s claim about the role alphabetic-script literacy (rather than orality) played in revitalizing Greek culture, the exposition Goody gives about thought and expression in primarily oral culture, and even Vygotsky & Luria’s study of literate and nonliterate people, all of which have in common using literacy as a means for dichotomizing (and ultimately casting into hierarchy) orality and literacy, basing cognition on the “ability to read and write” (77).

Not only does Scribner & Cole reinforce that literacy is a mythic civilizing engine, but they also contest this debate in their study of Vai literacy by asking two key questions:

1. Is it literacy or formal training that affect mental functioning?
2. Can one distinguish among the effects of forms of literacy used for different functions in the life of an individual or a society? (77)

Their study found that, “neither syllabic Vai script, nor Arabic alphabetic literacy, was associated with what have been considered higher-order intellectual skills. Neither literacy enhanced the use of taxonomic skills, nor did either contribute to a shift toward syllogistic reasoning” (78). In addition, each literacy was associated with specific skills (79).

This is the background that leads Street to call the traditional literacy the “autonomous model,” which claims that, “literacy (or schooling for that matter) has cognitive effects apart from the context in which it exists and the uses to which it is put in a given culture” (80). In opposition, Street coins the “ideological model” in which “any technology, including writing, is a cultural form, a social product, whose shape and influence depend upon prior political and ideological factors” (80). This leads us back to Graff, who shows that the story of the literacy myth can be applied to places like the US: “In all of these societies literacy served as a socializing tool for the poor, was seen as a possible threat if misused by the poor (for an analysis of their oppression and to make demands for power), and served as a technology for the continued selection of members of one class for the best positions in the society” (81).

Thus, in New Literacy Studies that, “when we speak or write, we very often mix together different social languages,” which Bakhtin called heteroglossia (93). In other words, “the who we are and the what we are doing are really enacted through a three-way simultaneous interaction among (1) our social or cultural group memberships…(2) a particular social language or mixture of them…and (3) a particular context, that is, set of other people, objects, and locations (93).

To recap: “what is important is language plus being the ‘right’ who (sort of person) doing the ‘right’ what (activity)…a socially accepted association among ways of using language and other symbolic expressions, of thinking, feeling, believing, valuing, and acting, as well as using various tools, technologies, or props that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or ‘social network’ to signal (that one is playing) a socially meaningful ‘role’ or to signal that one is filling a social niche in a distinctively recognizable fashion” (154; 161).

Discourses are:

1. inehrently ideological
2. resistant to internal criticism and self-scrutiny, since uttering viewpoints that seriously undermine then defines one as being outside them
3. are formed not just by the Discourse, but counter Discourses
4. concerns itself with certain objects and puts forward certain concepts, viewpoints, and values at the expense of others
5. are intimately related to the distribution of social power and hierarchical structures in society, which is why they are always and everywhere ideological (161-62).

And every person come to a primary Discourse, and then learns a secondary Discourse (which are local or community based).

Why does Discourse matter? Because it is the complicating rhetorical nature that autonomous literacy did not take into account. It is the contrary need to serve the language demands needed to fit into society, as well as the language needs to define ourselves. Ideological analyses of literacy looks not to the literacy “skills” people acquire, but the “language-within-social-practices-within Discourses at work,” which means looking at the rhetorical nuances of language rather than its mere acquisition and then use. And this, in turn, lets us look beyond mere authoritative literacy to other interesting practices, like the peer-based “borderland Discourses,” which are those that circulate outside of “the confines of public sphere and middle-class ‘elite’ Discourses” (189), which Nunley might call hush-harbor discourses.

On a final “pedagogical imperative” note, Gee claims that, “Schools–from the perspective of this book–out to be about people reflecting on and critiquing the ‘Discourse maps’ of their society, and, indeed, the wider world. Schools out to allow students to juxtapose diverse Discourses to each other so that they can understand them at a meta-level through a more encompassing language of reflection. Schools ought to allow all students to acquire, not just learn about, Discourses that lead to effectiveness in their society, should they wish to do so. Schools ought to allow students to transform and vary their Discourses, based on larger cultural and historical understandings, to create new Discourses, and to imagine better and more socially just ways of being in the world” (221).

On a scholar, teacher note, Gee states, “if you, having read the book, agree with me, you have contracted a moral obligation to reflect on, gain meta-knowledge about your Discourses and Discourses in general. Such knowledge is power, because it can protect all of us from harming others and from being harmed, and because it is the very foundation of resistance and growth” (221).

Key terms: literacy, literacy myth, autonomous model of literacy, ideological model of literacy, Discourses, New Literacy Studies, language, primitive, civilized, who, activity, identity kit, borderland Discourses,

Key peeps: Plato, Havelock, Goody, Ong, Levi-Strauss, Vygotsky , Street, Graff, Gee, Freire, Scribner & Cole

Key connections: All of them! This book basically shows the connections between many of the works on my list as well as some not explicitly mentioned (Heath, Duffy, Cintron, etc).