I had another post in mind, but I’d be remiss now to abandon the furrows I’ve made in a far and forgotten field just because our class is sent traipsing single-file through the hot sociopolitical cañon. I’m talking about “love.”
I’ve written previously about my feelings, and the intimacies of literacy, ways that one might (learn to) engage with art and criticism. By this logic, to be literate is to be intimate with things, having things right in front of your face and being unable to ever completely peel yourself away. It is not different for personal relationships—among or between people—being in love. But that’s one way of literacy that we might lose.
You can say for certain that literacy has “practical” political applications, because you can feel them. You’re dragging political objects with you everywhere you go: in class, around town, and at voting booths, for some, but also in bed, in the shower, and at dinner. I’m nodding vaguely in Raymond Williams’s direction—it’s all political, everyone has an agenda—but do please keep your seats. I also know firsthand how exhausting that can be. I’m suggesting that sometimes you can leave the political objects virtually alone, because they’ll still be there when you get “back.” Thinking about them brings them front and center, but you don’t have to do that when it’s not useful, because they’re already thinking about themselves. And, if I can appeal to you this way: political objects aren’t politicking about you in return; neatly, they politick about politics. You can have sex and pray politically (KABOOM!) or you can choose not to. (If you won’t believe me, this dailykos community is forever documenting explosive reactions between the political and the personal.)
And just like that media (reading and writing, or film, dance, etc.) have become very important to this discussion. How do interactions happen? I’ll postulate three ideas about media for multivariate objectivity (see OOO).
1) Media are objects just like you, me, coffee, and art itself, all caught in an intricate mesh. When I’m reading a poem or studying a drawing, I might be studying the art, the artist, or myself. (“Well great, John; you’ve gone through all of this just to resurrect the author-text-reader debate.”) WELL NO, but since you’ve mentioned it: I’m studying the artist, the text, and the reader (that’s me, probably, or you, even), or I’m studying just one or two of three. So who says this? When it’s just you, me and the art, we’re all saying it. (Sorry, Welch.) (“How unproductive. Ughhhhh!”) No! It’s important because it doesn’t really matter that much—that is, until you think about politics (property rights, money, employment). It might matter, then; it might be quite useful. But that’s when I say, “UGHHHHH!”
2) Media are the not-object mesh between you and every other object—like arts and people. Literacy is literally what connects us with other people. It’s what lets us whisper to each other during movies as much as it’s what gives us a marriage certificate. Are relationships political? Sure. Who’s going to vacuum? Who pays for dinner? What will we name our kids? Now I’m looking at Gilbert and Gubar. The personal is political, and the sexual is textual, yes, but only remotely, many times.
3) Media are instantaneous tugs at the mesh—happening reconfigurations—that manipulate objects in finely dexterous ways. Gravity is pulling on you right now. Can you feel it? You know it’s there, and as you start to think about it, you become very conscious of your feet, how heavy they seem, and how you can’t escape gravity’s pull. Of course, you’re exerting a force in return, but it’s just so damn negligible. If only you could get out into space, outside of Earth’s orbit, but even then gravity from Earth is pulling on you, just more slightly. The moon is pulling on you right now where you sit; so are distant suns. An induced force on the mesh, media can make the political affect less weighty or more so, depending on how things are arranged and how you make them be.
In any case, Tim Morton is right: to study art is to study causality.
Of course, we can do social studies too, but we don’t exclusively have to. This is something that we should remember at all times. Let’s not lose the trees for the forest—when we’re discussing sociopolitical uses of literacy, especially. If the prosecutor doesn’t want you on his jury, are you as good as illiterate? If you’re in low-track high-school English, isn’t the subject just as critical for you as it is for your high-track peers? (Or shouldn’t it be? We all seemed to think so two weeks ago. Let’s not forget that. Let’s ask why.) If you’re not a United States citizen, and you won’t be able to vote here, should we bother teaching you to read? Yes. Not just because you might one day naturalize, not just because we want to inculcate you with our worldview (or, alternatively, because our worldview wants to inculcate you), but mostly because you are here, in the mesh, in our face. You do things.
I think we’re at risk of losing an important way of literacy.
I’m leaving this open: what thoughts do you have?
This is a really interesting post. Do you think then that if one is not literate in the English language they cannot be in love with English media? I really like this idea. To some extent though, I feel like even being literate does not ensure one’s love of media. And what is media? You defined it as reading, writing, dancing, film, and yes, though I feel like these are more forms of entertainment. What about social media? Twitter, Facebook, Youtube interviews, or Perez Hilton.com, etc. I am literate and I am not in love with this media. How do these “lesser” forms of connection factor in to one’s literacy level/assimilation process? I like the idea that media pulls on you, I certainly feel that social media has a push/pull effect on me like the tides, and I can absolutely see where these media outlets could affect my political perception of current events or even of myself. I also feel like these forms of media are more politically relevant than movies or novels, simply because those take more time to craft than a 140-character word blurb. I can see where you are coming from about the loss of love literacy, but I feel like maybe it isn’t so much of a loss as a shift to make room for other types of political media, or maybe I’m totally off-base on my whole interpretation of your argument.
Right away before I go on a tangent, I need to clarify what I mean by media: I mean the plural of “medium”—for instance: oral or written language, images on screen, oil on canvas, bricks and mortar, bodily movement—things that you could say “mediate” literacy. I’m NOT expressly talking about “The Media” as a metonym for the hulking sociocultural apparatus (journalists, corporations) that wield these “media” (lowercase m). Having noted that, I’m now interested to take this further in order to “(re)negotiate” some productive accord between the two ways of literacy that I’ve mentioned here: sociopolitical, and personal.
This confusion is my fault. I was misleading; I mention and link to a (Media) website and then abruptly claim that “media become very important to my argument.” This happened by some brew of coincidence and poor construction. I removed an underdeveloped section from right between the paragraph ending with the dailykos and the one beginning with media. I might add that for some time I considered removing the entire discussion of media, which, in its present form, is a dizzying fit of others’ ideas and my own; I’m still thinking about which of those postulates, if even any, is most useful. The push/pull effect is key, I think, and I’m glad you agree. This made Tim Morton’s “mesh” indispensable to my discussion. I have got to explain each of those three postulates much better, I know. But ultimately, I’ll need to think harder about how “pushes” and “pulls” are induced on the mesh. Is language an object (an agent, you might say) like me, you, art coffee, cat, Earth, global warming, or evolution? (That’s the “simplest way”—the least destructive to the “flat” object-priority system.) But might media somehow be the mesh? But how? Because that would make the mesh dark and numinous—almost an object. Or might media be just the tugs? This would give media no agency whatsoever (imagine: “the text is dead!” Pound and Eliot would turn in their graves.), so I’d want to have some idea of 1) what gives “it” (the “dead” text) its object-like appearance and 2) what its essence is. This is not only dark and numinous, but downright sinister. The epistemic structure vanishes in a poof—not a magic trick but a real one. The coyote chases the road runner off a cliff, and he can keep running ahead without falling right until he looks down to see that he has tricked himself.
Another thing about how this is organized: the three postulates become “necessary,” I thought, because you need to know what media actually “are” in terms of the mesh before you can talk more about literacy (of love)—how it works, first, and how to show its endangeredness, and how its “vitality” is restored.