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Content THE CODES OF LITERACY
by
Richard Fliegel
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
December 1986
Copyright 1986 Richard Fliegel
UMI Number: DP23111
All rights reserved
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This dissertation, written by
Richard Fliegel
under the direction of hT.f. Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirements for the degree of
D O C TO R OF PH ILOSOPH Y
Dean of Graduate Studies
Date
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
F h - D ,
E
16
fat
For Lois and Razi
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
When I first arrived at USC, in the summer of 1980,
Ross Winterowd was the Director of a program in Rhetoric,
Linguistics, and Literature offered through the English
Department, and Michael Holzman was Chairman of Freshman
Writing, an independent program conceived by Winterowd
which was running at the time about a hundred composition
sections each semester. There was a young, rapidly growing
Linguistics Department which had been started ten years
before by Ed Finegan, and a Professional Writing Program
offering courses in popular genres by professional people
such as Shelly Lowenkopf. Over the next few years I was
fortunate enough to work with each of these gentlemen,
studying writing from their various points of view. I was
struck by the different ways in which they spoke about the
same phenomena and tried to trace the lines along which the
boundaries between their departments had been drawn by the
University. The misconceptions which follow are of course
my own interpolations, but it should be clear, I hope, to
what extent my thesis depends upon their patience, and the
opportunities they afforded me to juxtapose perspectives on
writing.
i i i
Elinor Ochs has been more than generous in her
comments and suggestions, for which I am grateful. I thank
also Ruth Simmons, Rosanne. Dutton, and Marlene Wagner,
whose encouragement and real support were essential;
Carolyn Dewald, Rick Lacy, Mark Olson, Jim Williams, Tim
Gustafson, Karen Segal, Eugene.Gerlitz, David Fox, Bill
Molinski, and the community of scholars and graduate
students at USC whose enthusiasm for work in literacy must
be unequalled at any other place: Betty Bamberg and Irene
Clark, John Holland, Marilyn Cooper, Louise Phelps, Doug
Biber, Niko Besnier, Elspeth Stuckey, Judith Rodby, Lee
Leeson, Frank Gaik, Mary Kay Tirrell and Karen Hollis.
Finally, I thank Professor Bernstein for his
generosity in commenting on some parts of this study, and
Professor Winterowd, for helping me understand that there
is a discipline here, after all.
IV
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements .......................................... iii
Abstract....................................................... vi
Preface . . . ...............................................viii
Chapter I. Introduction ................................. 1
Chapter II. Elaborating the Codes ..................... 27
Chapter III. Local Literacy
and Popular Literature................. . 91
Chapter IV. Collegiate Literacy
and the Great Cognitive Debate ...........134
Chapter V. Practice and Access ........................ 198
Bibliography ............................................... 261
v
ABSTRACT
The study of literacy from a rhetorical perspective
can best be understood if we think of literacy not as a
single skill but as a range of skills enabling people to
make use of letters, including high-level interpretive and
expressive intellectual abilities. When basic literacy
skills are associated with different orientations, they
result in different literacies.
Extending and adapting the work of the British
sociolinguist Basil Bern
research, we can disti
local literacy, which re
rhetorical scene and is
social group by and for
literacy, which relies
code to determine what a
facilitates the expres
exper ience.
Writers tracing the
distinctions similar to
and oral cultures, but
challenged on the basis
stein in light of current literacy
nguish at least two literacies:
lies upon features of the immediate
used to reaffirm the values of the
whom it is produced; and collegiate
upon the conventions of an acquired
ssumptions can be left implicit and
sion of individual models of
development of literacy have drawn
Bernstein's in contrasting literate
many of these claims have been
of individual instances of literate
and oral usage. It is the premise of this study that the
orientations of literacy and orality both survive in the
form of sociolingustic codes, which are independent of the
medium of any particular instance of contemporary
linguistic usage. The orientation associated with oral
culture now serves as the nucleus of local literacy and can
still be found regulating speech in most social situations
and the expectations readers bring to some genres of
popular literature. The orientation associated with
literate culture serves as the nucleus of collegiate
literacy and regulates the conventions of most expository
prose.
These codes can be used to account for some phenomena
associated with the practice of literacy, including the
popularity of popular literature and some discrepancies
between theory and ethnographic data on the relationship
between literacy and what has been called decontextualized
thought. When understood as components of a system which
allocates societal resources, the distribution of
sociolinguistic codes raises significant questions about
the relationship between pedagogic practice and social
justice.
PREFACE
A spectre is rising over departments of
English— the spectre of Rhetoric. It is a very
old spectre, trapped by its own devices in.Fifth
Century Athens, hacked to pieces by Peter Remus,
sealed in a cave whose entrance was buried in
piles of tracts, dry as dust, while the trumpets
of scientism covered its groans--Rhetoric, the
father, clapped in stony disrepute, whose chair
in the halls of learning, such as they are, bears
the rump of his most courteous and narcissistic
child. But a change is in the academic air;
cracks in the edifice of positivism appear, the
laws of Locke are coming undone, and the palpable
murmur of discourse itself is loosed on the land.
The human voice is heard again as a sweet and
determining force whose cry discovers naked
Truth: the stability of the text at once gives
way, fallacies fall, and the clear pool of
Literature trembles & upheaves, scattering the
semblance of purity, isolation, and irrelevance
on the uncertain ground of motive & contingency,
purpose, situation, discovery. Emerging from its
wat'ry cell, the Word appears in its true
multiformity: not one but three, gunas, the
trinity— ethos, logos, pathos, interdeterminate,
restored to equilibrium. The advocates of
fragments rush about the perimeter, but cannot
escape the vortex of the dance, coherent only now
with all partners restored: beautiful meanings
roll back and forth across the circle of speech,
uttered, inscribed, imagined in the central space
through which thought moves between participants,
articulate in its movement from one to another.
The disenfranchised gather and are admitted to
the circle, instances of the language, usage,
precluded from attention, huddled in departments
of linguistics, psychology, sociology,
anthropology, speaking each its own peculiar
name — for everything expressed in the language is
English.
vi i i
For reasons that are beyond the scope of the present
study, rhetoric was until recently largely ignored by
scholars affiliated with departments of English in American
and British colleges and universities. Over the last two
decades, a number of such scholars, prompted often by an
interest in the study of writing, have taken up the field
again, refashioning it to accomplish new purposes.
Concepts once thought to be intrinsic to the discipline
have been reconsidered or replaced: Kenneth Burke, for
example, has suggested that the concept of "persuasion,"
once the very soul of the art of rhetoric, might give way
to "identification" as the frame of reference within which
human communication is analyzed.1 Rhetoric as it is now
conceived is the study of discourse in all its parameters,
with particular emphasis on those which pertain to the
influence of motive and situation. If rhetoric is at times
perceived as an emerging discipline, it is the oldest
emerging discipline around: rhetoric has emerged again and
again over the last 2500 years, each time differently
understood, differently applied, never quite trusted.
Aristotle defined rhetoric as the art of discovering the
available means of persuasion, but that definition reflects
1 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969) 49-59.
ix
a status to which rhetoric was reduced following a great
defeat at the hands of its most versatile student as
recorded in the accounts of his disciple. In Classical
Greece, the Sophists, teachers of rhetoric, believed and
taught that people create meaning among ourselves,
negotiating what is accepted for truth in language, unable
to discover whatever absolutes the gods have chosen to keep
to themselves. The statement of agnosticism of one
prominent Sophist, Protagoras of Abdera, might stand as a
statement of their view of absolute knowledge in general:
Concerning the gods I cannot say either that
they exist or that they do not, or what they are
like in form; for there are many hindrances to
knowledge: the obscurity of the subject and the
brevity of human life.2
The most widely read accounts of the Sophists today
are those of Plato, an adherent of the opposite camp, so to
speak, whose teacher and principal narrative protagonist
made use of an impressive array of rhetorical strategies to
condemn rhetorical practices. In dialogue after dialogue,
Socrates triumphs over rhetorical opponents whose skills
are sharpest monologically— while his own dialogic
rhetorical skills reframed, refocused, reformed the
discourse between them. Plato believed that there is a
Truth prior and superior to its instantiations, that this
2 Cited in W.K.C. Guthrie, introduction, Protagoras and
Meno (New York: Penguin, 1956) 28.
x
Truth can be approximated dialectically, which is to say,
dialogically, and that ethical behavior is action in accord
with this Truth. The Sophists believed that any such
divine Truth was unattainable, inexpressible in language,
that people determine what will count as truth, and that
ethical considerations must shape the truth we create
between ourselves in language. That "Sophistry" came to
mean "ill-reasoned philosophy" is a measure of Socrates'
triumph in the writings of those who came after; and the
inquiry we call science was built on the conviction that
Truth is apart from our perception of it, "out there"
somewhere to be discovered. A rhetorician would say. that
the discourse of science, the way we talk about scientific
phenomena and methodology, is but one possible discourse
structure, an abstract invention, enormously useful for
some purposes but not for others, drawing our attention to
some aspects of the objects of perception, most useful
where the objects are most passive. Mathematics is a
useful discourse, whose presumption that five is not equal
to one allows us to understand many things, but not the
relationship of fingers to hand.
Faced with competition from such teachers, Aristotle
taught rhetoric to his students, whose success in their
city-states depended on their abilities to convince their
fellow citizens to adopt a public policy they supported.
xi
The engineer triumphed over the soldier when he could
convince his fellow citizens that Athens should strengthen
the harbor rather than attack Sparta. Aristotle's lecture
notes we have:3 a careful dissection of the categories of
persuasion— invention, arrangement, style, memory, and
delivery. Skill in these areas made an orator effective,
and oratory had consequences. In Republican Rome, Cicero
found that an effective voice could expel opponents from
the seat of power, win pardons for friends, and otherwise
influence policy well beyond the station of the speaker;
when the Republic fell, rhetoric moved into the schools,
where Quintilian established the ethical ideal of "a good
man speaking well" which has survived in one form or
another almost to our own time.
The need to study memory diminished with the
availability of paper; delivery, outside of the Church,
grew silent and inscribed. Invention, arrangement, and
style remained the three principal loci of compositional
pedagogy. When, in the 16th Century, the curriculum was
reorganized so that invention, the discovery of ideas, was
relegated to dialectic, rhetoric was reduced to the study
of style, and compilations of tropes and figures of speech
comprised the discipline. The discourse of science grew in
3 Aristotle With an English Translation: The "Art" of
Rhetoric, trans., John Henry Freese, Loeb Classical
Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1947).
x i i
influence, until philosophy was equivalent with logic,
ruled by the "proofs" of induction and deduction.
The rhetorical assumptions which make possible the
discourse of science are not equally appropriate for all
human inquiries. Some things we know cannot be established
by this discourse--the play of human motives cannot be
traced along inductive/deductive lines. In the 1920's,
Kenneth Burke began his investigation into the role of
motives in literary works, an investigation which led him
out of science into the brambles of rhetoric. Burke
characterized human beings as symbol-using animals,
inhabiting a world of our own devising, inventing our
relationships to the ideas by which we live. Burke's
corpus develops a rhetorical epistemology which undertakes
to comprehend the play of human motives dramatistically— by
understanding the relationships between agents and actions,
agencies and purposes, attitudes and scenes. But motives
are not the only object of study for which the discourse of
science is inappropriate: human values, too, cannot be
justified by inductive and deductive linguistic strategies
alone. Chaim Perelman found himself forced to defend the
value of ethics on other rhetorical grounds. The "New
Rhetoric" tacitly acknowledges the inability of science to
account for what is most essentially human: our values,
our motives, the purpose guiding our actions. In a world
xi i i
of symbols, language is action, not approximating some
Truth it cannot fully contain but constructing truths
cooperatively, the purposeful expressions of participants
in history whose situations influence our beliefs.
Rhetoric, then, is the study of discourse from a
particular point of view, one that champions the
significance of motives and values, singular elements of
communicative situations, the influence of context and
purpose. The contemporary study of rhetoric is
multidisciplinary in the best sense of that word, cutting
.across the old scientismic categories of knowledge, drawing
on the resources of linguistics and sociology,
anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, neurobiology,
philosophy and literary criticism in an effort to
understand purposeful human discourse. W. Ross Winterowd
has characterized any act of discourse as "the projection
of a semantic intention through structures to an audience
in a scene." "Semantic intention" usually includes some
propositional content and always includes illocutionary
force, the action a stretch of discourse was intended to
accomplish--a threat, promise, declaration, and so on.
"Linguistic structures" include all utterances recognized
as meaningful from grunts of assent to Moby Dick. These
elements, and the relationships between them, comprise the
domain of rhetorical study. The principal domain of
x i v
English Department rhetoric has become the study of
writing, of all kinds. This is but an extension of the
usual business carried out in such departments, but it is
an extension in an unusual direction: instead of proceeding
downward, from the broader category (literature) to the
narrower subcategories (the novel, the 20th Century novel,
the High Modernist novel, the James Joyce novel, Ulysses,
the first chapter of Ulysses) in search of an object of
inquiry, rhetoricians proceed from the broad literary
category to increasingly broader categories. Just as the
study of any particular literary genre is a possible subset
of the study of literature, the study of literature itself
can be seen as a subset of the study of writing, which can,
in turn, be considered a subset of the study of discourse
in general. From this point of view, it is consistent to
see the study of any particular genre or genres of writing,
including those we think of as literary, as a valuable
subdiscipline of rhetoric; it is more difficult to see how
the study of rhetoric can be subsumed under the study of
literature. This is not, of course, the way we have become
accustomed to thinking about these areas of inquiry, but a
glance at the history of English as an academic subject
suggests that such a view is not unprecedented. The study
of literature has not always been the sole occupation of
scholars inhabiting Departments of English.
xv
The first English departments in universities did not
teach literature at all. The same man, the Reverend Thomas
Dale, was the first Professor of English at both University
College and Kings College in London, the first two schools
to have such a position,4 and his curricula were not
literary: to teach pupils who could not study Latin how to
think, he taught the structure of the English language, and
he used literature in his lectures only for examples of
moral virtue. The study of literature had to win its place
in the English curriculum. In 1848, A.J. Scott and other
advocates argued that the literature of an historical era
gives us some insight into that era, and was valuable for
what it taught us about the era in which it was produced.
Only later was literature recognized as worthy of academic
study in its own right.
In The Mirror and the Lamp, M.H. Abrams categorized
critical perspectives according to the rhetorical element
on which they focus: the writer, reader, text, or the
world to which they refer.5 The Romantic tradition of
critical thought centered on the writer and his or her
(usually his) relationship to the written text: special
attention was paid to the qualities of sincerity and
4 D.J. Palmer, The Rise of Enqlish Studies (London: Oxford
UP, 1965) 18-24.
s M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: 1953; New
York: Oxford UP, 1971).
xv i
originality, and the role of imagination. For many years,
a biographical emphasis characterized study of literature
in departments of English. Most of the current generation
of English professors were trained in the 1940's and
1950's, when the New Criticism dominated critical thinking,
a perspective which minimized the importance of rhetorical
scene in interpreting poetic works. In The Theory of
Literature, Rene Wellek and Austin Warren6 advanced the
position that poems should be read as discrete objects,
independent of extrinsic factors; in "Poetry: A Note In
Ontology,"7 John Crowe Ransom emphasized the autonomy of
the work itself, existing for its own sake; and Archibald
MacLeish explained in verse that "A poem should not mean/
But be."6 Poems were explicated, analyzed as little
machines balancing internal tensions between structures
whose relationships comprised the accomplishment of the
work. The poem was abstracted from the social, political,
and personal contexts in which it is written or read. It
was as a counterstatement to this critical perspective that
Kenneth Burke published his first book in 1931.’ Burke
6 Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, The Theory of Literature
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977).
7 John Crowe Ransom, The World's Body (New York:
Scribner's, 1938).
6 "Ars Poetica."
9 Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement, (1931; Berkeley:
xvi i
challenged New Critical proscriptions that limited the
questions a reader might ask in making sense of a text.
New Critics W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley identified
as "fallacies" interpretive strategies which took into
account the author's purpose in composing the work, or the
reader's response to it.10 Much of recent critical theory
has restored the latter consideration to critical
respectability, but the Derridean concept of the "orphaned"
text continues the New Critical disdain for intentionality
as a legitimate concern of literary criticism. When the
pendulum of critical attention swung away from the text as
a thing-in-itself, interest was focused not on the full
rhetorical frame of writer-reader-text-and-scene, but on
the again partial relationship of reader to text and
interpretation to reader's intellectual environment. A
rhetorical perspective, in contrast, would view the poetic
act as a full transaction, from writer's intention to
reader's apprehension, recognizing the legitimacy of many
sets of critical questions, whose value depends on our
purpose in asking them.
University of California Press, 1968).
10 "The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy,"
both in The Verbal Icon (University of Kentucky Press,
1954).
xvi i i
When the critical perspective on which an academic
discipline is based gives way to other points of view, the
work that can be done in that discipline changes
accordingly. The first casualty of the crash in New
Critical stock was the explication of texts— as the
determinate text became an idea of the past, so did the
practice of articulating the meaning of those determinate
texts. Instead, literary scholars began to explore areas
excluded from New Critical inquiry. For example, the
isolation of the literary text from its social context,
from the concerns of the audience for which it was
intended, has been challenged and explored in much recent
work. But English departments go on teaching literature as
if it were fundamentally different from all other writing
produced in the language. It is time that the Formalist
distinction between literature and all other writing is
questioned as the cornerstone of the English curriculum.
The study of literature, of course, has earned its place in
the university, but it should not displace a more
comprehensive study of the language which is possible under
the aegis of rhetoric.
From the time of the Sophists, rhetoricians have
taught their students to compose effective arguments, and
the contemporary form of that instruction, the teaching of
expository prose or ’ ’composition," is a thriving
x ix
subdiscipline of rhetoric today. The transactional
perspective of theorists such as Louise Rosenblatt has
encouraged compositionists to consider the interpretive end
of rhetorical transactions, and the study of reading has
drawn much interest in the field. The interaction between
writer and reader, like that between speaker and hearer, is
understood rhetorically as a single communicative act;
writing and reading are understood as components of
literacy. The study of literacy is fast becoming one of
the most significant intellectual challenges of our time;
it is a problem ripe for humanists, with human
consequences. The discipline of rhetoric, newly conceived,
allows us a vantage point from which to contribute to this
inquiry, a high ground we should hold: what is necessary
is some view of the whole, the territory accessible to
rhetorical study, and a mapping of the subdisciplines
breaking ground.
In an article published in a 1983 anthology hoping to
"bridge the gap" between composition and the study of
literature, the present president of the Modern Language
Association demonstrates just how wide that gap is. J.
Hillis Miller sets forth in what are clearly intended as
generous terms the literary theorist's view of the
compositionist:
The teaching of writing, it might be said,
has established itself anew as an important
xx
separate discipline, with its independent
institutionalization in the form of professional
societies, meetings, journals, a hierarchy of
distinguished practitioners, and so on. This new
or reborn discipline has a double strength; It
founds itself on the most advanced
twentieth-century scientific or quasi^scientific
discoveries about the nature of language and the
nature of composition, the processes whereby
writing is generated and revised. In addition it
has the most urgent practical necessity and
pragmatic grounding: daily contact with writing
samples from thousands of students. The emphasis
can happily be on praxis as opposed to theoria.
Such theory as there is is immediately testable
in practice. The discipline is required to
appropriate only as much theory as it needs and
as works, while ideas can fairly easily and
quickly be shown not to work and can be hooted
out of court.11
Miller's tone is a blend of paternalistic enthusiasm
and alarm; he observes further that independent programs in
composition are beneficiaries of strong public and
institutional support, "beginning to overshadow the
adjacent departments of English literature in size,
strength, and funding."
Having neatly severed theoria from praxis in the name
of compositionists, Miller is himself "not altogether clear
that theory can so blithely be separated from practice"
(40). Although he concedes that "teachers of composition
no doubt find themselves again and again in the somewhat
11 J. Hillis Miller, "Composition and Decomposition:
Deconstruction and the Teaching of Writing," in
Composition and Literature: Bridging the Gap, ed.
Winifred Bryan Horner (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press,
1983) 38-39.
xxi
embarrassing situation of teaching not just grammar and
rhetoric but also logic, ethics, politics, even something
of theology and the music of the spheres," his
characterization of compositionists as a happy group of
pragmatists, expropriating (presumably from Miller and his
colleagues) only as much theory as is necessary to improve
the grading curve, derives from his inability to identify
practitioners. The compositionists whose texts Miller
examines are Sheridan Baker, James McCrimmon and a few
other textbook writers, (he cites in a footnote the
"valuable corrective" of Nancy Sommers' work on revision).
Miller sets up an opposition by tearing the Rhetoric in
half; compositionists are interested in the "rhetoric as
persuasion" of the earlier chapters, while the stylistic
considerations of Aristotle's third chapter have been of
interest only to "literary theorists" such as himself.
Kenneth Burke he claims for his own team.
Miller cites several handbooks which treat figurative
language as ornamental to writing, and then goes on to
argue against that view. His point is that the teaching of
writing stands to profit by the insights of literary
theorists; students and teachers of rhetoric as composition
must become good readers, "wise in the way of tropes," if
they hope to write or teach writing well. Miller suspects
that the impetus for this new direction in the teaching of
xxi i
writing might be coming from writing teachers themselves
(49), who, along with the authors of handbooks, may be
better read in literary theory than Miller's early
opposition suggested (54). What Miller does not suspect is
that literary theorists have much to learn from
compositionists, and his evident lack of familiarity with
the discipline he is addressing further underscores that
belief. What could compositionists, limited to "rhetoric
as persuasion," contribute to those who have taken up the
unhappy burden of theory in departments of English?
This is a study in rhetoric, which reveals its
disciplinary biases in three principal ways. First, the
object of study, a phenomenon which has been treated as a
"cognitive capacity" by psychologists and as a philosophic
"cast of mind" by classicists, is here presented as a
rhetorical stance or orientation, structuring the
relationship between writer, audience, scene, and attitude
towards the kinds of meaning language can be used to
convey.
Secondly, this study reveals its bias in an underlying
concern for the implications of theoretical insights for
the teaching of writing. This concern is endemic to the
discipline; it may not always be prominent in the terms of
the discussion, but its influence should be noted framing
analyses of literacy practices, redrawing the implications
xxi i i
of anthropological evidence, coloring reference of the
first-person-plural pronoun.
Finally, this study reveals its bias methodologically,
proceeding through a series of rhetorical analyses of
theoretical positions which have been advanced in the
literature of several disciplines. The study of literacy
has profited by the number of disciplines which have
contributed to it, but the difficulty which arises in
integrating interdisciplinary research has not been
sufficiently acknowledged. From a rhetorical point of
view, the theoretical position of each researcher
represents an argument, participating in some context and
undertaken for a motive which may in part be discernible
from the rhetorical strategy of the author. These
arguments can be dismantled and their individual tenets
weighed as separable responses to different motives and
situations. This allows us to identify the most valuable
insights and to determine the extent to which objections
have been directed against those insights rather than
other, more expendable parts of proffered arguments. In
the process, some points of disagreement crucial to the
disciplinary context may prove to be peripheral to the
interdisciplinary, so that apparent conflicts between
positions may be reconciled (or reconciled, at least, with
our thesis) by considering the situations and motives of
the researchers who advance them.
xxi v
This study was in fact prompted by just such a
consideration: the ethos of Dr. Bernstein as presented in
his own articles and those written to challenge him
contrasted starkly enough to stimulate further inquiry. On
the basis of Bernstein's account of his early experiences
at the Bernard Baron Settlement house in Stepney and at the
City Day College in London,12 it seemed that his motives
had been misconstrued. Attempts to correct that
misconstruction have led to the analysis presented here.
In indicating what "prompted” this study, I should
reveal one further element of my own motive in writing.
The distinction Dr. Bernstein drew between class-related
code orientations rang true to me on the basis of anecdotal
information which carries no weight in an inquiry such as
this. My particular interest in the attitudinal shift Dr.
Bernstein identified results from my own experience of
class boundaries. My grandfather was a house-painter; my
father, who began his career carrying bathtubs as an
apprentice plumber to his father-in-law, today serves as
the senior academic administrator of a community school
district in New York City. In the process of that
transition, he and I have engaged in many conversations
12 Basil Bernstein, introduction, Theoretical Studies
towards a Socioloqy of Language, 2nd ed., vol. 1 of
Class Codes and Control, 3 vols. (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 197ll 2-5.
XXV
that might exemplify the sociolinguistic code-switch
Professor Bernstein characterized. The significance of
this "evidence" would be greater on the street than it is
in a formal study; to understand why that might be the
case, we must maintain a rhetorically skeptical eye in
scrutinizing arguments which bear on the theory of codes.
xxvi
Chapter I
INTRODUCTION
Everyone knows what "literacy" is: the ability to
read and write, the opposite of "illiteracy." When asked
what that ability entails, most of us would concede that
the ability to read and write in fact entails a number of
discrete abilities, including but not limited to the
ability to encode and decipher sounds as letters, the
ability to cluster those letters to represent ideas, the
ability to manipulate those clusters of ideas to form more
and more complex representations of human discourse.
Literacy is a composite ability, and the high-order
interpretive and communicative abilities which comprise it
are themselves made possible by the integration of a large
number of acquired skills. A linguist would point out that
literacy involves some degree of skill with nearly all of
the elements of language studied as linguistics: syntax,
the study of word order and sentence elements; semantics,
the study of word meanings; morphology, the study of word
forms as they change to reflect tense, gender, number, and
so on; and pragmatics, the study of how language is used.
A rhetorician would point out that literacy also entails
some degree of skill in handling larger chunks of
discourse, some knowledge as to how coherent sequences of
ideas are discovered and arranged to influence an audience
in some particular context for some particular purpose.
Language, Kenneth Burke tells us, is symbolic action, and
literature equipment for living,13 when the full range of
rhetorical and poetic capabilities made possible by
literacy are available to be used.
This model reduces the value of a binary notion of
literacy, in which a person either has it or she hasn’t, in
favor of a continuum of. increasingly complex communicative
skills. In Teaching the Universe of Discourse James Moffet
identifies a progression of increasingly abstract
relationships between writer and subject matter and writer
and audience through which a student passes in learning to
produce college-level writing.14 Moffet’s writers learn to
describe (1) what is happening, (2) what happened, (3) what
happens, and (4) what might happen, in developmental
sequence, for an audience which grows progressively larger
and more impersonal. The practice of literacy involves
some proficiency in managing these relationships; the
ability to do so counts among the rhetorical constituents
13 Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941;
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973) 8, 293.
14 James Moffet, Teaching the Universe of Discourse
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968).
2
of literacy. There are other scales along which progress
in the use of letters may be charted, and these too should
be encompassed. Framed in this way, the concept of
"literacy" allows us to consider the full spectrum of
expertise in the use of written language for communicative
purposes, running from the simplest inscription to the most
sophisticated poetic and rhetorical strategies. That these
high-order interpretive and communicative skills are not
customarily thought of as integral elements of literacy
undermines our efforts to understand precisely what is
being covered by that loosely used term, beyond its most
evident constituents.
It might be argued that the sense of "literacy" I have
been suggesting is far more ambitious than that used in
some other contexts, and there is certainly no shortage of
other contexts to which one might point to substantiate
that argument. Such an argument depends on the lack of
agreement among investigators in the field as to what
constitutes literacy and a subject who has it. Though the
terms "literacy" and "illiteracy" seem to function as
antonyms, their adjectival equivalents ordinarily do not:
we do not, for example, think of a literate man as one
capable only of reading the local newspaper and writing
simple letters. Yet that is the standard of literacy for
many programs around the world; and other standards have
been employed in research in the field. In one study in
Liberia, for example, a population was considered literate
who could render by rote the letters of the Koran without
understanding the meaning of their own utterances. These
subjects were considered as "literate" as a second
population capable of writing letters within their local
community, and a third population, trained to use written
discourse in an urban, administrative environment.15
A very sparse vocabulary has begun to emerge to
enunciate these different abilities with written discourse.
"Alphabetic literacy" usually describes the ability to
translate sounds into letters and letters into sounds, and
the absence of more sophisticated reading skills.
"Functional literacy" usually describes the ability to put
alphabetic literacy to some specific purpose in a limited
scene, usually just enough to get by on a job. The fact
that as many as one third of all adults in the United
States may lack the skills necessary to make writing a
functional tool in their lives has quite properly attracted
much attention to this first distinction; the two terms are
useful in marking off two stages in the acquisition of
reading and writing, two clusters of skills which are quite
different in what they allow the person who possesses them
Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, The Psychology of
Literacy {Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1981) .
to accomplish. But there is an enormous undifferentiated
range of linguistic and rhetorical skills which begins
where this simpler distinction leaves off. Functional
literates are often unable, for example, to read the label
on an aspirin bottle or the warning on a package of
cigarettes; and even among people for whom literacy is a
portable skill, transferrable from one setting to another,
great discrepancies remain. In Ways With Words: Language,
Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms, Shirley Brice
Heath describes two communities of mill workers in the
Carolina Piedmont: Trackton, whose only books are
children's school and Sunday school texts, the Bible, and
photo albums; and Roadville, whose principal occasion for
sustained written discourse arises in brief letters,
usually between sisters, made up of formulaic and
context-dependent conversational turns.16 The preparation
for and practice of literacy in these communities is vastly
different from those of the mainstream townspeople with
whom Heath compares the residents of Trackton and
Roadville. Yet we have no theoretical model or terministic
screen with which to distinguish Trackton or Roadville
literacy from that of the more affluent Piedmont
communities or the larger world of people who must use
16 Shirley Brice Heath, Ways With Words (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1983) 190, 212-215.
5
writing to earn their livelihoods. This is a larger
population than might appear at first glance. Most
professional and managerial posts and positions in the
growing bureaucracies of both public and private sectors
require skill in interpreting and manipulating written
discourse. The educational system reflects the stress on
literacy: in the lower grades, reading and math scores,
sometimes in conjunction with a written essay, determine a
student's educational opportunities? and the single
requirement of all undergraduates at many universities is a
course in composition. The ability to produce
college-level written discourse represents a watershed in
the acquisition of literacy skills, with dramatic
consequences for the educational and occupational avenues
open to the writer. Yet the differences between
college-level written discourse and that acknowledged and
encouraged from the fourth grade on have never been clearly
expressed, and the underlying principle determining those
differences has never been identified.
To begin to distinguish between types of literacy,
between clusters of abilities in processing discourse, we
need to discover the intrinsic differences that separate
different categories: what are we willing to call
indispensible to literacy, and what will we consider
additional though perhaps related skills? We might say
6
that the ability to produce graphemes, the actual
inscribing, is essential; but a professor of mine used to
point out that we consider Milton to have written Paradise
Lost- , though he dictated the poem to his daughters, who did
the actual inscribing. It could be argued that Milton once
had the ability to inscribe and would have continued to
have that ability had he not gone blind; but even these
arguments concede that he did not lose the ability to write
when he lost his ability to inscribe. Literacy is
fundamentally an intellectual ability, which we may want to
say requires some ability to get one's words written-down.
Or we can speak of functional literacy, which pr-esumes
inscription and deciphering and focuses on the ability to
use those skills.
All of our knowledge, all of our skills, must be
picked up in some way. Few of us can remember how we
developed more than one or two of the skills which make up
our communicative competence, and yet everyone reading this
page has grasped and utilized an incredible network of
social and cognitive principles which allow communication
between individuals. How do we learn these things? One
useful distinction advanced in the relevant literature has
differentiated between the processes of acquiring
communicative skills, picking them up by making use of
comprehensible input, and the processes of learning such
7
abilities, by deliberate repetition and practice in some
"neutral" context.17 It has been argued that some of the
abilities we mean to imply when we speak of literacy are
acquired while others are learned; in general, rules which
we know to obey but not to explain are acquired.
Alphabetic literacy, especially among adults, is usually
learned, as are rules of punctuation and special case
grammatical concepts: rhymes such as "'i' before 'e'
except after 'c'" are necessary because the information
they contain is not usually acquired. The Laubach Literacy
project, a private organization training volunteers to
conduct one-on-one tutorials with people who wish to learn
to read, has an extensive set of materials which help
students learn to recognize and reproduce alphabetic
characters; and even Paulo Freire's consciousness-driven
pedagogy begins by teaching syllables.18
Noam Chomsky has pointed out that most of the rules in
an old-fashioned English grammar book refer to special
cases of usage in which the general rule does not apply;
we are instructed, for example, that the apostrophe is not
inserted before the "s" in the possessive "its" because the
17 Stephen Krashen, Principles and Practice in Second
Language Acquisition (Oxford: Pergamon Press and
Hayward, Ca.: Alemany Press, 1982).
18 Paulo Freire, "The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural
Action For Freedom," Harvard Educational Review 40.2
(May 1970) : 375.
8
general rule, requiring an apostrophe before an added ”s”
to mark a possessive, is defeated for some reason--in this
case, to help distinguish between contracted and possessive
forms of the same three-letter combination. General rules
are stated only when an exception must be pointed out: the
general rule requiring insertion of "by" when an active
sentence is made passive is rarely included in such English
grammars, since the rule has no formal exception. There
are a number of rules Chomsky's followers have argued for
which are not only never (before) spelled out, but in fact
quite difficult to follow when they are spelled out, even
by the native speakers from whose usage they are educed.
Rules governing the movement of WH-elements, such as
"which," "who," and so on, are never violated by native
speakers, though few native speakers could identify them.
Since these rules are followed but not remembered, they
must have been acquired without the acquirer's conscious
knowledge that he or she was acquiring them. Contemporary
linguistic theory holds that most of the rules of any
natural language are of this type; and many of the
higher-order skills and strategies of discourse production
and processing seem to be unconsciously acquired as well.
To recapitulate: literacy seems to be not a single
ability but a composite of interpretive and communicative
abilities, each of which represents the integration of a
9
number of simpler skills; many of these skills and
abilities are acquired rather than learned, so the person
who uses them cannot necessarily identify them; we have as
yet distinguished only alphabetic from functional literacy,
the ability to recognize and produce letters from the
ability to use those letters; we have as yet no vocabulary
or principle according to which the various points on a
continuum of functional literacy may be distinguished; and
yet such distinctions are made in practice to determine
educational and occupational opportunities, without any of
the criteria for those determinations ever being identified
or in fact recognized. In short, we cannot describe what
literacy is, but we seem to recognize it when we see it and
allocate societal resources according to the degree of
literacy a candidate can demonstrate.
Not only do we seem to recognize literacy when we see
it, we also seem to recognize different degrees of
functional literacy when we see the discourse each can
produce. This is after all the principle behind all
college entrance and graduation requirements in written
composition. Writing instructors all over the world
believe they can identify a piece of writing appropriate
for the college level on any topic, regardless of their
individual familiarity with the topic of the discourse.
That is an amazing confidence, considering research such as
10
that reported by Paul Diederich, which suggests that
"distinguished readers" do not agree in their evaluations
of student papers. Diederich, a Senior Research Associate
for the Educational Testing Service, reports a 1961 study
in which 53 graders from six occupations were asked to
score the same 300 papers without any preparation for
inter-rater reliability. Over a third of the papers
received every grade of a nine-grade scale, and 94% of the
papers received seven, eight, or nine different grades.1’
The Educational Testing Service, however, has shown that
evaluators can be taught to agree, when they are trained in
the use of a common rubric for a given set of papers. From
the results of the 1961 study, ETS were able to identify
five factors which seemed to account for a good deal of the
discrepancy in assigned grades. The largest cluster of
graders were emphasizing the importance of the student's
ideas in arriving at a grade. The next largest group
emphasized the correctness of mechanics in grading the
papers. The next groups emphasized respectively
organization, vocabulary, and finally what Diederich calls
"flavor," a personal quality of writing which might be
called "voice." On the basis of these categories another
study was done which produced a rubric with which graders
19 Paul B. Diederich, Measurinq Growth in Enqlish (NCTE,
1974) 5-6.
11
could be trained to rate student papers with a high degree
of inter-rater reliability. For example, the rubric
explains that when "ideas" are being considered, a "high"
score should be given when
The student has given some thought to the
topic and writes what he really thinks. He
discusses each main point long enough to show
clearly what he means. He supports each main
point with arguments, examples, or details; he
gives the reader some reason for believing it.
His points are clearly related to the topic and
to the main idea or impression he is trying to
convey. No necessary points are overlooked and
there is no padding.20
Similar descriptions are given for each rating for
every one of the categories identified as factors in the
1961 study. Graders were asked to give each paper a
single, holistic score, which reflected their opinion of
the paper as a whole. Holistic scoring is now a standard
procedure which often makes use of some variant of the
rubric empirically derived by ETS. For example, the rubric
used by the USC Freshman Writing Program for one grading
session of their final examination included the following
characterization of a high-scoring paper in response to two
provided quotations:
A 6-point essay will:
--clearly summarize both passages;
--effectively argue a point in response to
one or both of the passages;
2 0 Dieder ich 55.
12
--display some originality in argument
and/or presentation;
--make efffective use of supporting details;
--display formal style and tone;
--be logically developed and internally
consistent;
--offer adequate sentence variety and
paragraph development;
— be mature in style;
--be virtually error-free in grammar and
usage.21
Diederich's 1961 study did not test the inter-rater
reliability of writing teachers as a group, but included
lawyers, businessmen, writers, editors, and professors of
social and natural sciences as well as ten professors of
English, whose scores clustered disproportionately around
the factor of mechanical correctness. Douglas Cazort has
elicited results similar in range to the study as a whole
from groups of relatively inexperienced writing instructors
and has adapted the ETS grader-training procedure to help
writing teachers develop some inter-class reliability in
their individual grading.22 But the sense of common
judgment extends far beyond the controlled institutional
setting. The rubric with which ETS graders are presented
approximates an intuitive standard widely used in
composition classrooms, an acquired set of criteria in
21 At USC, a new rubric is drawn up for each examination
question, but this format was used from 1980 through
1984 at least.
22 Douglas Cazort, "Advice From A Recent Has-Been to a TA
Starting Cold," Freshman Enqlish News 10.3 (Winter,
1982): 1-4.
13
terms of which the success or failure of student efforts
are judged: the composition must have a "thesis," whatever
that is (and we shall see that only certain kinds of
opinions count as theses), it must have "transitions" which
reveal its "organization," it must have a degree of
sophisticated sentence structure, appropriate diction,
adequate detail, a sense of audience--determined by some
principle which is never articulated, even among writing
instructors, or by a single instructor to herself. It
seems as if our ability to distinguish types or levels of
literacy is itself acquired, leaving us in the awkward
position of being unable to say precisely what it is that
gives acceptable college-level written discourse its
requirements. That is a problem for researchers, but it is
also a problem for students and teachers of writing, who
must acquire these skills and structure environments in
which such acquisition may take place, without any clear
sense of what must be imparted. High level interpretive
skills are acquired rather than learned, operate nearly
autonomously, and are as a result notoriously difficult to
discover and describe. We all know, for example, that a
sentence beginning "I promise" is often a threat rather
than a promise, but what native speaker (who has not read
John Searle) can explain how we reconstruct the speaker's
illccution? Felicity conditions on speech acts are
14
intricate and difficult to articulate, though they are
recognized in use by all native speakers of a language.
We have not yet characterized the skills in
manipulating meaning we expect from people we consider to
be literate; until we do, our attempts to teach literacy
must be guided by nothing more rigorous than our individual
experience, our sense of what we do when we write. This is
like trying to teach someone to paint landscapes without
the concept of perspective: scrawling "this tree is too
big" in the margin of the canvas. Teachers know
college-level discourse when they see it; they make
comments which reflect their responses according to some
principle they cannot enunciate; the student must reason
backwards from the responses to the unstated principle,
acquiring the requisite bits of skill until the principle,
similarly unarticulated, takes up residence in his or her
own idea of writing, and guides the practice without
revealing the cause. Though we know that this process
takes place, we are unable to account for it. For teachers
trying to inculcate writing skills, this is sufficient.
For researchers trying to understand the nature of
literacy, it is not.
Of course, I am overstating the case: many writing
teachers can identify specific writing problems and have
learned techniques for intervening and helping their
15
students overcome those problems. But why college-level
writing should have this form or that is something many
teachers are hard-pressed to explain. Students will
occasionally leave out of their papers bits of information
they are certain their teachers possess as a result of a
classroom discussion, only to find that such presumptions
are unacceptable in their written compositions; most
teachers will tell students that the composition must be
written as if the reader had not been present during class
discussion of the topic, but not why that sense of audience
is requisite, and most students have experience enough not
to ask why.
Another example: writing instructors frequently warn
students to steer clear of the first person singular
pronoun in writing "formal, academic discourse," wary of
the shift in tone which often results from a proliferation
of "I"s; yet students are often instructed to read
exemplary essays in which the use of the pronoun adds to
the tone of sincerity and ethical stance. Many instructors
feel they know full well why this is the case, but would
perhaps admit to a vague sense that the explanation would
be difficult, if not to give then certainly to understand.
This sense of knowing more clearly than we can explain is
often a tip-off that our knowledge has been acquired rather
than learned and suggests that the explanation may be a bit
16
further from our fingertips than we might feel.
Translating these acquired, intuitive judgments into
comprehensible explanations requires a taxonomic tool with
which to distinguish between different levels of
literacy— a theory that explains why different types of
discourse differ in the skills they demand from the writer
or reader.
We can think of what I have been calling different
types of literacy in two ways: we can imagine an ideal or
idealized hierarchy of literacy skills with different
subsets of those skills as partial accomplishments of the
full range of literacy; or we can think of different
literacies, suspending the judgment of relative value until
the relevance and appropriateness of each subset can be
understood and evaluated in the context in which it
appears. The school model, in which alphabetic literacy
prepares for basic functional literacy, and reading and
writing instruction in the early grades prepares for
college-level literacy, suggest the idealized, hierarchic
conception. But cross-cultural studies suggest that we
would do better to speak of a variety of different
literacies. Among the Athabaskan Eskimos of Alaska, for
example, the rhetorical stance required for collegiate
literacy places the writer in an untenable social position:
in Athabaskan gatherings, speech is a sign of relative
17
status, and the Athabaskan functioning within his cultural
context does not speak until he has determined the balance
of social status between himself and his audience.23
Collegiate literacy, which often involves writing for an
unknown audience, forces the Athabaskan to choose between
the conventional expectations of his audience and the
cultural values of his society. Or again, how are we to
determine that a Vai farmer writing letters in rural
Liberia would be better served by college literacy than by
his skill in manipulating formulaic constructions and local
references? To do so we must question the purpose of
literacy, the services it renders humankind, and evaluate
the relative importance of those services.
This difficult question has evoked a good deal of
insight and impassioned argument, from writers broaching
the topic from several different points of view. The
purposes of literacy must by definition be some subset of
the purposes of all forms of discourse. Roman Jakobsen has
identified six general purposes which hold for written as
well as spoken communication: we write to express our
feelings, to make contact, to influence other people, to
respond to some object of experience, to explore the
resources of the medium of expression, and to consider
23 Ron Scollon and Suzanne B.K. Scollon, Narrative Literacy
and Face in Interethnic Communication (Norwood, N.J.:
Ablex, 1981) 16, 169-188.
18
language itself.24 Literacy, of course, can help accomplish
all of these purposes. James Kinneavy has similarly
classified the aims of discourse, using a slightly
different version of the communication triangle as his
underlying heuristic.25 Both frameworks take the point of
view of the individual language user; we might call these
the personal functions of discourse, which include
note-taking, record-keeping, and other kinds of information
storage and transfer, as well as more carefully planned and
executed linguistic forms.
But there are also sociological ends to be served by
the popular acquisition of reading and writing skills.
These comprise the societal equivalents of personal uses of
literacy: reference to law and other items of social
significance, inducements to public service, proclamations
and halls of records, expressions of cultural identity, and
the social equivalent of personal development. Literacy,
it has been argued, is a technology which makes possible
most of the other technologies of our time. It is
simultaneously a tool of individual development, which
allows an individual, as Paulo Freire says, to participate
24 Roman Jakobsen, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Style in
Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1960) 350-377.
25 James Kinneavy, A Theory of Discourse: the Aims of
Discourse (New York: Norton, 1980).
19
in history, and it is a catalyst of cognitive growth for a
culture as a whole, stimulating and accommodating new
intellectual possibilities for the society that can use it.
Trying to rank the relative value of these personal
and societal functions of literacy is a difficult
undertaking, and the degree of linguistic sophistication
required for each is often at odds with the benefits it
confers. For example, Freire's education for freedom,
which champions the acquisition of literacy as a
consciousness-raising achievement, must be counted among
the most valuable uses of literacy in terms of its human
consequences, yet Freire's program is carried out at what
amounts to the fifth-grade level in United States schools.
Freire's purpose is to help -the prisoners of the culture of
silence find their own voices; in practice, participants in
his Culture Circles are taught to read the local newspapers
and write simple letters.26 Yet the effect of this type of
literacy on their lives may be far more significant than
the acquisition of college-level literacy skills to a
sophomore who will use those skills to pass a composition
requirement, and then never again. Clearly the sequence in
which different practices of literacy are acquired gives no
indication as to the importance of any particular practice
26 Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness
(London; Sheed and Ward, 1974.)
20
to individual human beings or societies. It seems to be
the case that the purposes of literacy we have outlined
above cut across the different types of literacy we shall
be considering, so that personal expression, reference, and
persuasion take place within all but the most elementary
configurations of literacy skills.
Conceiving of different types of literacy as "levels"
of a developmental sequence necessarily involves some
implied evaluation of their relative significance. Since
it is difficult to measure the degree to which different
types of literacy are useful in accomplishing human
purposes, I will speak of them as different literacies.
What we need to determine are the differences between
literacies and the principles underlying those differences.
How can we determine the requisite skills that
distinguish the discourse acceptable from fourth-grade
writers from that which counts as literate from the college
writer? We recognize these differences when we see them;
we can look at instances of what we recognize as collegiate
literacy, and try to determine how they are different from
the fourth-grade product. Or we can postulate a principle,
drawn from some related discipline, and see how it accounts
for what we know about written discourse.
To do so, of course, is to influence our perception of
the object of inquiry, but that is the nature of all
21
methodology and all theory. In the natural sciences, for
example, physicists have characterized the behavior of
light in two ways, as a wave and as a particle, depending
on the phenomenon they are trying to explain. The theory
representing light as a wave is useful in explaining
polarization; the theory representing light as a particle
is useful in explaining other physical phenomena. In each
case, light is seen from the point of view of its
(necessarily partial) similarity to something else, in an
attempt to say something useful about an essentially
non-verbal phenomenon. Each point of view clarifies some
aspect of the nature of light and obscures another aspect.
The wave theory of light underscores those dimensions of
the behavior of light which most resemble the movement
patterns of sound or water, and the particle theory of
light underscores those similarities in the behavior of
light which most resemble our customary ideas about the
behavior of particles of solid matter. The name of the
rhetorical trope which describes this relationship is
"metaphor," which invites us to see something in terms of
its similarity to something else, drawing attention to the
features common to both: the metaphor "my love is like a
red, red rose" inviting us to see "my love" as beautiful,
fragrant, ephemeral, dangerous to touch, and so on,
obscuring those aspects of the tenor, "my love," which
22
might have been evoked by another vehicle, such as "a
black, black stone," suggesting the volcanic origin of
obsidian, the fiery potential of coal, the mystery of
Stonehedge at sunset or Easter Island at dawn. A theory is
a metaphor, a verbal construct, which allows us to consider
a phenomenon from some particular point of view.
The acceptability of a methodology which prefigures
our perception of the object of inquiry is even stronger in
the social sciences, where the neat lines of causality
claimed by most natural scientists blur when confronted
with messy questions of human motivation. In his
introduction to "The Protestant Ethic" (1910), Max Weber
alerts his readers to the problematic epistemological
status of the claims his paper will try to substatiate:
This point of view (the one of which we
shall speak later) is, further, by no means the
only possible one from which the historical
phenomenon we are investigating can be analysed.
Other standpoints would, for this as for every
historical phenomenon, yield other
characteristics as the essential ones.27
In Writing and Pifference, Derrida makes a similar
point in praising Levi-Strauss's use of a certain myth to
characterize the culture of the Borroro Indians of Brazil,
when Levi-Strauss explains that the myth he has chosen as
"key" is not central for any intrinsic reason, but simply
27 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism, trans., Talcott Parsons [New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1958) 47-48.
23
because he has chosen to represent it in that way.28
Our method, then, will be to start with a theory
attempted first in sociolinguists, weigh its strengths and
weaknesses, draw out its most useful ideas, and consider
them within the context of recent work in literacy, where
they may help reconcile some differences. We will then
reconsider the original context of those ideas, to see if
our conclusions regarding more recent work can clarify some
questions which remain concerning the original controversy.
Over the past three decades, a confederacy of
researchers trained in anthropology, sociology, and
linguistics have observed and tried to explicate the
unwritten rules of language use as they interact with
social phenomena; one idea which has attracted the
attention of several such sociolinguists is the idea of
linguistic codes. There is some confusion over the meaning
of this term, and we shall define it in Chapter 2 in a very
specific way. Sociolinguist codes have been used to
describe a number of instances of observed differences in
usage. John Gumperz has identified a usage prevalent among
young natives of a Norwegian fjord, who use two different
language variants--Bokmal, the legally-sanctioned standard
of the university, and Ranamal, the local dialect of their
28 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans., Alan
Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) 286.
24
home fjord— among themselves when they are home for a visit
from the university; their switching between the native
speech of the fjord and the language of the university
correlates significantly with the social situations in
which they choose which language to use.2’ Other instances
of code-switching involve different variants of a single
language. An instance of code-switching examined by one
sociolinguist, brought to bear on questions about literacy,
provoked the premise of Chapter 2 of this study: different
literacies can be distinguished by the codes they make use
of, defined in a particular way. Chapter 3 identifies a
literature regulated by one of these codes, and Chapter 4
attempts to explain how the codes developed. Chapter 5
considers pedagogical and societal implications of the
theory, reconsidering an early distributional claim in
light of the present analysis.
If we think of a literacy as a set of interpretive and
expressive skills necessary to make use of the ability to
inscribe and decipher graphemes, we need to discover the
differences that exist among different types of discourse
which we recognize as different because we have acquired
the interpretive skills to do so, but lack the learned
29 Jan-Petter Blom and John J. Gomperz, "Social Meaning in
Linguistic Structure: Code-Switching in Norway," in
Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of
Communication, eds. John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes”TNew
York: Holt, 1972) 407-434.
25
criteria by whic( h we make that distinction. These exist;
they can be pointed to. It is the argument of this study
that they comprise different attitudes toward the kind of
meaning that can be expressed in language. They are subtle
distinctions and have rarely been identified, because they
are acquired and not learned. But they can be identified.
26
Chapter II
ELABORATING THE CODES
The
thought,
will be understood to entail implications quite different
from those entailed by the same verbal construct expressed
at another point in time, interpreted within the frame of a
different social scene. Some theorists would insist that
the two expressions are in fact different thoughts,
differently understood and therefore different in the only
sense in which a thought can be said to have been
communicated. More commonly, we speak of an idea "whose
time has come," implying a shift of interpretive frame over
time which allows an idea to be understood and utilized in
some productive way. In attempting to use the
sociolinguistic notion of codes to distinguish between
literacies, we shall need to make use of such an idea,
sharply criticized in an earlier debate, but now, applied
to a new conception of literacy, useful once again because
it is differently understood.
27
Post-Structuralists have taught us to see how a
expressed at one point in time and social space,
If we are to consider how sociolinguistic codes might
help us distinguish between literacies, or types of
literacy, we must ask what sort of code we are looking for.
We have said that alphabetic literacy implies the ability
to recognize and inscribe letters and the words they make
up and that functional literacy implies ability to put that
knowledge to some productive purpose. We have noticed that
higher-order interpretive skills must be included in our
consideration of literacy if we are to take into account
the whole range of literacies. We have noticed that these
higher-order interpretive skills are largely unidentified,
even by people quite skilled in their practice: acquired
rather than learned, we know how to use them, but not to
explain them in any coherent fashion. The resemblance
between our ignorance of these higher-order interpretive
skills and our ignorance of the role of sociolinguistic
codes in characterizing literacy might suggest a thesis:
that the codes of literacy have something to do with
different ways of interpreting discourse, different
attitudes towards the kind of meanings language can be used
to convey. If we look through the sociolinguistic
literature for instances of switching between interpretive
codes, the precedents narrow precipitously, focusing on the
work of a British sociolinguist in the late
nineteen-fifties and early sixties, attacked over the next
28
few years and largely dismissed since then. His name is
Basil Bernstein, and his work on sociolinguistic codes
continued into the eighties. In the light of new ideas
about literacy, and a growing number of ethnographies
documenting sociolinguistic usage, Basil Bernstein's work
might now be reconsidered and applied to an issue other
than the one in which Bernstein found himself trapped.
In brief, Bernstein made two claims: he described a
linguistic phenomenon and argued that the phenomenon was
distributed by social class. The description sets forth a
theoretical model, and its distribution constitutes an
empirical claim. We shall examine the implications of
Bernstein's distributional argument at a later point in
this study; for the moment, it is worth noticing that
(while most of the criticism provoked by Bernstein's work
took issue with the distributional claim) it is the
theoretical model which is relevant to our discussion of
literacy.
The Theory of Codes
Bernstein's chief contribution to our understanding of
the interaction between language and social structure may
be the meaning he gradually came to give the idea of a
sociolinguistic code. When Bernstein first began writing,
he spoke of "two forms of language use," a public language
29
and a formal language.30 Two years later, he wrote of the
mode of expression as a discriminating feature between the
scores of working-class and middle-class boys on verbal and
nonverbal intelligence tests.31 The term "code" appears as
a chapter heading ("The Code of Oral Legislation") in a
book he reviewed for Donald MacRae, and by 1962 had been
incorporated into Bernstein's own theory of language and
social class.32 Bernstein first described his codes in
terms of the probability of predicting which of a range of
syntactic features available to a speaker would be used to
organize meaning. That is, rather than saying what a code
is, he began by saying what it does. Bernstein formally
defined the term "code" as a set of principles regulating
the orientation, association, and organization of meaning
during verbal planning— in other words, a code is a
principle in terms of which the meaning of utterances is
identified, recognized, and integrated. Social factors
were understood to constrain the choices an individual
speaker might make in selecting linguistic forms. At that
time, Bernstein thought of linguistic forms as individual
30 "Some Sociological Determinants of Perception," British
Journal of Socioloqy IX (1958): 159-174.
31 "Language and Social Class," British Journal of
Sociology IX (1960): 271-276.
32 "Linguistic Codes, Hesitation Phenomena and
Intelligence," Language and Speech 5 (1962): 31-46.
30
syntactic and lexical items. In an experiment, he
tape-recorded conversations among separate groups of
working-class and middle-class boys and counted their
lexical and syntactic constructions.33 He found some
statistically significant differences, and it was in this
form that his theory was most widely understood and
criticized. But Bernstein's own understanding of the
nature of a code would change dramatically, and it is with
the later conceptions that we shall be most concerned.
Bernstein came to see that lexical and syntactic variations
were but reflections of what was more essential to a
code--an attitude, a distinct orientation towards the kind
of meaning language could be used to express. Certain
lexical and syntactic constructions might facilitate the
expression of one orientation or another, but the
occurrence of any set of syntactic forms would be neither
necessary nor sufficient to identify the code regulating a
stretch of discourse. Orientation was the critical
element.
Bernstein described two interpretive codes which, he
said, determine the kind of meanings a speaker can express
and how those meanings can be conveyed in language. One
code produces discourse which relies upon the immediate
33 "Social Class, Linguistic Codes, and Grammatical
Elements," Language and Speech 5 (1962): 221-240.
31
social scene of the speaker and listener to supply semantic
elements necessary to render a coherent interpretation; the
other code relies upon a more abstract frame of reference
shared by speaker and listener. Bernstein argued that
these codes are distinct in what they set out to do: the
first conveys social ("particularistic") meanings,
underscoring and strengthening the social bond between
participants in discourse; the second conveys abstracted
{"universalistic") meanings, emphasizing individual
differences in point of view and individual models of
experience.
Bernstein's orientations bear a resemblance to what
Endel Tulving has characterized as episodic and semantic
(or verbal) memory.34 In the former, sense impressions are
remembered as responses to the incidents in which they were
acquired; in the later, a proposition is remembered as a
transferrable concept, with little significance accorded
the scene in which it was learned. W. Ross Winterowd has
pointed out that the apparent opposition between these
terms is a relative one: most remembered episodes have a
"point" that makes them memorable, and all propositions
must be learned in some social scene. The difference
between them seems to be one of emphasis, the degree to
34 Endel Tulving, Elements of Episodic Memory (New York:
Oxford UP, 1983) .
32
which the point has been abstracted from the scene in which
it was discovered. We might think of Bernstein's
elaborated code as a tendency to undertake this process of
abstraction, to privilege the transferrable point over the
social dimensions of the episode in which both are
encountered.
In a postscript to the second edition of Class, Codes,
and Control, Bernstein argues that, in evaluating research,
the single most important consideration is where it leads,
rather than where it starts. American linguists as a rule
have shown their flexibility in this respect, looking to
the implications of revisions and extensions of the
Standard Theory as it evolves at M.I.T., rather than to its
history. Bernstein's own work, however, has never been
accorded this patience, but has been cited and criticized
most often in its earliest formulations, despite the fact
that it has changed from observation and analysis of
class-related differences in linguistic usage to a theory
of the role of language in cultural transmission. Through
the 1960’s and 1970's Bernstein was criticized for the
implications of his theory, as others spelled them out, and
for the naivete, or malevolence, of the intention behind
the theory, as interpreted again by other people.
Bernstein was condemned as a racist whose value-laden terms
implied the ineducability of working-class people,
33
understood in the United States to refer to Blacks and
other minorities. In this chapter, we shall examine his
work more carefully than most of his critics have done, to
determine which complaints were justified and which we
might call into question.
Professor Bernstein is now head of the Sociological
Research Unit of the University of London Institute of
Education; in 1954, he began his career as an instructor at
the City Day College in London, teaching English, civics,
and arithmetic to messenger boys released from their duties
at the Post Office one day a week to attend his classes.
Their inability to follow and participate in class
discussions forced Bernstein to re-evaluate his pedagogical
approach and the system in which he functioned. He wrote:
"The level of formal attainment of the students was one of
the best indictments of the educational system. There was
no good reason for them to be interested. School had given
up on them many years earlier." And yet, he noticed, they
were interested at times. "The same boys who appeared to
have a short attention ispan in the classroom listened
avidly to fifty-minute lectures (about auto mechanics) and
took notes to write up later."35 He organized his academic
curriculum around his students' interest in auto mechanics,
and in 1958 published a paper in which he tried to show a
Basil Bernstein, Theoretical Studies 4-5.
34
difference between potential and expressed intellectual
ability among these students. Bernstein tested 300 boys,
fifteen to eighteen years old, from all parts of London, on
two measures of intelligence: the Mill Hill vocabulary
test and the non-verbal Progressive Matrices test. He
found great discrepancies between potential intelligence,
as indicated by the Matrices, and verbally expressed
intelligence, as indicated by the Mill Hill test, a pattern
with significant consequences for his students: 20.7% of
the total group demonstrated potential ability for grammar
school on the non-verbal Matrices, but would fail the
entrance requirements as a result of "limited educational
attainment" (i.e., poor academic records) and low verbal
scores. In the English system, grammar school is a
necessary precursor to university study; Bernstein found
that of those students whose non-verbal scores were high
enough for entrance, 90% would not be eligible for grammar
school because of their vocabulary scores. Of eighty
students whose Matrices scores showed them to be potential
candidates, only eight went to grammar school. Bernstein
found an even more disheartening pattern: the higher the
score an individual student received on the non-verbal
intelligence test, the greater the discrepancy between
verbal and non-verbal measures.
35
That Bernstein began his study of language use by
considering intelligence test scores would later count
against him; the association of linguistic capability with
I.Q., especially as that relationship was characterized by
educational psychologists such as Arthur Jensen, proved
academically and politically suspect, damaging Bernstein’s
credibility. It is important, therefore, to understand the
difference between Bernstein’s purpose in considering test
scores and those of other writers with whose theories his
have been confused. Whereas Jensen and his colleagues
sought to account for differences in school-related
linguistic performance by pointing to I.Q. scores,
Bernstein attempted to account for differences in test
scores by investigating linguistic practices. The
implications of the two endeavors are markedly different:
where Jensen's approach led to speculations as to the
"educability" of minority students, Bernstein's suggested
that the selection procedures of the school system prevent
working-class students from realizing their potential. The
innate intelligence of working-class boys, revealed by the
Matrices, was not being expressed on the Mill Hill
vocabulary tests, and Bernstein suspected linguistic
practices were to blame.
What could explain the discrepancy between non-verbal
potential and verbal facility? Bernstein attributed the
36
difference in test scores to attitudes learned in the homes
of his working-class students and ended his paper with a
warning that would reverberate through much of his early
writings: "It is equally important to consider that as a
result of the close relationship between education and
occupation a situation may soon be reached when the
educational institutions legitimize social inequality by
individualizing failure."34 This warning marked the
beginning of Bernstein's concern with the role of language
in maintaining the status quo.
That same year Bernstein found, in a 1939 volume of
the journal Psychiatry, A. R. Luria's translation of an
article by the Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, who
believed that inner speech, the silent voice of our
thoughts, develops as an internalized variant of our social
talk.37 Bernstein had been reading the American linguists
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose "linguistic
determinism" held that the forms of language "predetermine
for us certain modes of observation and interpretation."38
34 Basil Bernstein, "Some' Sociological Determinants of
Perception," reprinted in Theoretical Studies 38.
37 See, for example, Thought and Language (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1962); and Mind in Society: The
Development of Higher Psychological Processes eds.,
Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia Scribner, and
Ellen Souberman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1978).
33 Basil Bernstein, "Some Sociological Determinants of
Linguistic determinism holds that the values, practices,
and habitual modes of perception of a culture are reflected
in its language, which in turn provides the terms in which
language-learners will speak about their society.
Vygotsky's theory seemed to give Bernstein a psychological
rationale for linguistic determinism. If Vygotsky is
correct, and the inner voice of our thoughts is a silent,
internalized variant of our public speech, then the form of
language influences the way we think about the world as
well.
This element in his theory ignited the passion
Bernstein encountered wherever his work was discussed. To
claim to have discovered a linguistic phenomenon, its
distribution by class, and the influence of that phenomenon
on human perception, Bernstein learned, is to have made a
political statement, for one side or another. Bernstein
was accused of providing the rationale for blaming the poor
for their own victimization. It might be argued instead
that his theory provides an analysis of the mechanics of
oppression, exposing the role of language in maintaining
the status quo. In determining which way the implications
Perception" 26, citing "Sapir, E. (1956), 'Linguistics
as a science,'in Culture, Language and Personality, ed.
Mandelbaum, G., Univ. of California Press," most likely
a reprint of the 1949 paperback edition of David G.
Mandelbaum's Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in
Language, Culture, and Personality, cited below.
38
point, the most sensitive area is this, concerning the link
between language and thought. It is worth our time to look
a little more closely at the theory of linguistic
determinism.
In a paper delivered before the American
Anthropological Association in 1911,3 9 Edward Sapir argued
that the vocabulary of a language reflected the interests
of the people who spoke it. Sapir was arguing against the
idea that the forms of culture were determined by the
physical environment, the local geography of a people.
Stressing instead the cultural environment, Sapir tried to
show how the phonetics and morphology of language were
unrelated to physical environment, and that in fact it was
the realm of social phenomena, human interests, to which
vocabulary pointed. Language was seen at first as
reflecting, rather than determining, other cultural forms:
In the first place, a language is not a
disconnected complex apart from culture, but, on
the contrary, is an important part of the culture
of a particular people living at a definite time
and place. As such it reflects in its subject
matter, i.e., chiefly vocabulary, many of the
non-linguistic elements of that culture.40
39 "Language and Environment," American Anthropologist, 14
(1512): 226-242.
40 "Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture: A
Study in Method," Canada, Department of Mines,
Geological Survey, Memoir 90 Anthropological Series No.
13 (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1916); reprinted
in Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language,
Culture, and Personality, ed. David G. Mandelbaum (1949;
39
Furthermore, every language is formally "complete" in
that its forms are capable of expressing any idea:
To put this matter of the formal
completeness of speech in somewhat different
words, we may say that a language is so
constructed that no matter what any speaker of it
may desire to communicate, no matter how original
or bizarre his idea, the language is prepared to
do his work... it is not absurd to say that
there is nothing in the formal peculiarities of
Hottentot or of Eskimo which would obscure the
clarity or hide the depths of Kant’s
thought--indeed, it may be suspected that the
highly synthetic and periodic structure of Eskimo
would more easily bear the weight of Kant's
terminology than his native German.41
Different languages, however, have different
"form-feelings" associated with them, each with its
corresponding psychological orientation:
To pass from one language to another is
psychologically parallel to passing from one
geometrical system of reference to another. The
environing world which is referred to is the same
for either language; the world of points is the
same in either frame of reference. But the
formal method of approach to the expressed item
of experience, as to the given point of space, is
so different that the resulting feeling of
orientation can be the same neither in the two
languages nor in the two frames of reference.
Entirely distinct, or at least measurably
distinct, formal adjustments have to be made and
these differences have their psychological
correlates.42
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958) 432.
41 Edward Sapir, "The Grammarian and His Language,"
American Mercury 1 (1924); reprinted, Mandelbaum
153-154.
42 Sapir, "Grammarian" 153.
40
It is the Eskimos and Hottentots, in Sapir's view, who
do not use their language to produce a Critique of Pure
Reason. The form of the language itself allows it. The
vocabulary, if not present, is available. But the
language, reflecting the culture in general, suggests a
psychological orientation which makes certain observations
more likely than others.
In the Eskimo language, there are 49 different terms
for snow and ice, about a dozen of which refer to snow
alone in one condition or another.43 The language is
sensitive to differences which are of enormous significance
in their geographical situation but of little consequence
to most speakers of English. When, however, a situation
arises which makes such distinctions useful,
English-speakers are capable of perceiving the differences
relevant, for example, to a skier, despite the lack of
alternative vocabulary in the language. Measurement and
metaphor ("two-inch powder"), terms borrowed from other
languages ("slalom"), and similar linguistic inventiveness
makes up the discrepancy. The lack of semantic
alternatives does not prohibit us from perceiving
differences which are of use to us, but the semantic field
in English does not encourage us to attend to those
43 Michael Fortescue, West Greenlandic, Croom Helm
Descriptive Grammars (London: Croom Helm, 1984) 336-7.
41
differences until we need them. As a result, we cannot be
certain that the distinctions we have not yet drawn will
not be useful as well. A skier would do well to attend to
the 49 subtle discriminations the Eskimo language
underscores, some of which may have been discovered by the
English-speaking skier on her own. They would have to be,
for her language does not identify them.
Or consider the following: there is a word in
Yiddish, "mensch," which means a "man," but a term of
respect which includes the connotation of ethical behavior,
reliability, and compassion, a man who understands his
responsibility to others as a human being. In contrast,
American slang has adopted the Mexican "macho" for manly,
connoting physical strength, self-reliance, but no
particular ethical judgment. These terms of course reflect
the values of the cultures that use them; to what extent do
they prefigure the forms in which language-learners
conceptualize masculinity?
Sapir's student, Benjamin Lee Whorf, emphasized the
role of language in shaping thought over that of reflecting
the culture in general. Whorf emphasized differences
between languages, in semantic as well as grammatical
categories, and found, for example, in substantives and
verbs the basic contrast of Indo-European grammar,
42
fashioned by the Greeks into a law of reason.44 Whorf saw
the world view of modern science arising from this source,
as every point of view is shaped by unconscious patterns of
perception:
These patterns are the unperceived intricate
systemizations of his own language...And every
language is a vast pattern-system, different from
others, in which are culturally ordained the
forms and categories by which the personality not
only communicates, but also analyzes nature,
notices or neglects types of relationships and
phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the
house of his consciousness.45
Where Sapir had emphasized that language is embedded
in culture, reflecting and emphasizing other cultural
forms, Whorf's strongest statements stress the influence of
language on thought as a determining force of which talkers
are very dimly aware:
From this fact proceeds what I have called
the "linguistic relativity principle," which
means, in informal terms, that users of markedly
different grammars are pointed by their grammars
toward different types of observations and
different evaluations of externally similar acts
of observation, and hence are not equivalent as
observers but must arrive at somewhat different
views of the world.44
44 Benjamin Lee Whorf, "Language and Logic," Technological
Review 43; reprinted in Language, Thought, and Reality,
ed. John B. Carroll (Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T.
Press, 1956) 241.
45 "Language, Mind, and Reality," Theosophist (January and
April 1942); reprinted Carroll 252.
44 "Linguistics As An Exact Science," Technological Review
43 (December 1940); reprinted Carroll 221.
43
Whorf's book was first published in 1956; Bernstein
discovered Luria’s article two years later. Bernstein's
early citation is to Sapir, not to Whorf, but it must have
been in Whorfian terms that Bernstein was at first-
understood. Bernstein's own emphasis was closer to
Sapir's, who saw language as facilitating rather than
determining perception, reflecting as well as shaping modes
of thought. In interpreting his data, for example,
Bernstein saw a diminished capacity to manipulate symbols
of time and causality in the relative lack of causal and
temporal connectives in the speech of his working-class
students. This view was expressed the following year in
another paper published in the British Journal of
Soc ioloqy;
Language is considered one of the most
important means of initiating, synthesizing, and
reinforeinq ways of thinking, feeling, and
behavior which are functionally related to the
social group. It does not, of itself, prevent
the expression of specific ideas or confine the
individual to a given level of conceptualization,
but certain ideas and generalizations are
facilitated rather than others.47 (His italics.)
The same article elaborates what had been restricted
to a footnote in the first paper, the characteristics of
the "public language" of working-class speakers, and the
"formal language" which middle-class speakers, Bernstein
47 "A Public Language: Some Sociological Implications of a
Linguistic Form," Bri t i sh Journal of Soc ioloqy X (1959):
312; reprinted in Theoretical Studies 43.
44
thought, generally learn to produce as well.
It is easy to see how the two claims, the theoretical
distinction between "public" and "formal" languages, and
the empirical claim that these language variants were
distributed significantly across class lines, were
conflated. For our purposes, we should ask, are there two
such variants? How are they distinguished? Once we have
the answers to those questions, we might be in a better
position to question their social distribution.
Believing that two variants existed, Bernstein first
attempted to use syntactic features to distinquish one from
the other— such as the frequency of use of short commands,
commas, and a small group of coordinating conjunctions;
limited use of adjectives and adverbs; and grammatically
simple, short, often incomplete sentences with verbal forms
stressing the active mood, as indicative of the "public"
language. But he also identified a non-syntactic,
attitudinal feature which distinguished the two variants,
an attitude towards discourse in which the individual
qualification of the meaning conveyed is understood as
implicit in the sentence structure rather than explicitly
encoded--and believed that this feature determined the form
of the "public" variant.
Consider these social terms in one type of
public language for a situation where the
indiviual deliberately avoids an alloted task or
duty: 'skive', 'scrounge', 'dodge the column',
45
’swing the lead', etc. These terms by their very
nature are social counters which the individual
can attach to a particular class of act. They do
not characterize precisely the nature of the act
nor the individual's specific relation to it, so
that an impersonal sanction is given to the
behavior which the terms designate.4®
In contrast, the demand of the "formal" variant for
explicit lexicalization of individually qualified meanings,
Bernstein thought, prods a speaker to verbalize relatively
precisely the experience of separateness and difference.
Bernstein saw that the formal variant requires a
speaker to put into words meanings which remained implicit
in discourse shaped by the public variant. In what was the
implicit meanings of the public variant understood to
reside? In this early article, Bernstein points to the
sentence structure, seeking to identify, as linguists are
trained to do, the discrete elements of a language variant
and their properties. The task of the sociolinguist is to
correlate discrete linguistic elements with the social
situations in which they arise, and Bernstein attempted to
identify the syntactic structures with which he could mark
off his newly discovered variants. He identified the
attitudinal component as controlling the syntactic, but
looked to the syntax, and to "point-at-able" linguistic
features, to validate his theoretical claim. At the same
time, his empirical claim, that these two variants were
4® Bernstein, "Public Language" 49.
46
differently distributed across class lines, ignited by his
interest in Vygotsky's work as a rationale for linguistic
determinism, provoked the antipathy of readers whose
patience he would need as he refined his theoretical model
of the public and formal language variants.
All of his formulations evolved over the next few
years. In 1960, Bernstein entered the Department of
Phonetics at the University College London, to read for a
higher degree in linguistics. There he met Freida
Goldman-Eisler, who was investigating the relationship
between hesitation phenomena ("uh," "er," and so on) and
verbal planning. Bernstein decided to try-to use
hesitations to demonstrate the differences between public
and formal language variants, by tape-recording interviews
with 61 of his students at the day college and comparing
the duration and frequency of pauses with those recorded in
similar interviews with 45 students from one of the six
major public schools, whose speech was taken to be
middle-class. The interviews consisted of informal group
discussions on a topic suggested by the researcher--the
abolition of capital punishment— with occasional verbal
prodding by the researcher when the conversation lagged.
Bernstein found as he predicted that the working-class
group (the post office messengers at the day college)
paused less often and for shorter periods of time than did
47
the middle-class group (from the public school), when the
two groups were matched for intelligence on the Raven
Progressive Matrices non-verbal text. Bernstein
interpreted the frequency of hesitations as a measure of
self-monitoring of the speaker's discourse and the duration
of hesitations as a measure of the speaker’s difficulty in
selecting the next sequence. This was consistent with
Goldman-Eisler’s finding that summarizing, for example,
requires more time in pausing than describing does. In
another paper, Bernstein compared grammatical elements used
by his two groups of interviewees, and found significantly
more use of subordination and uncommon adjectives, adverbs,
and conjunctions in the usage of the public school
students.4’ He also found a strong complementary
distribution of "I think" clauses and tag questions such as
"ain’t it?" and "you know?" across the two groups. The
public school boys used the former and the day college boys
used the latter construction with impressive consistency.
49 This study has been nearly replicated. Lee Leeson
recorded discussions of student papers at a middle-class
university and similar discussions of written papers
among employees of the California Conservation Corps, a
program which employs inner-city young adults. She
compared linguistic items such as verb choice and use of
modals, as well as contextual behaviors such as
turn-taking, affect, and the physical framing of the
discourse setting. the discussion. She found
differences similar to those Bernstein had predicted.
Lee Leeson, "Talk, Cross-Talk, and Adult Literacy," in
Workplace Literacy, forthcoming.
48
Bernstein interpreted these as expressions reflecting doubt
individually ("I think") or with an element of what he
called "sympathetic circularity" (in the tag questions),
which, he felt, exemplified the formal variant’s emphasis
on individual, and the public variant’s emphasis on
communal modes of discourse.
In these and following papers, Bernstein developed his
distinction between public and formal languages into a
theory of sociolinguistic codes, interpretive principles
regulating a listener's orientation, associations, and
organization of meaning in discourse, defined at first in
terms of the probability of predicting a speaker's
selection of structural elements, and later (when it became
clear that these codes worked on a more abstract,
interpretive plane rather than a surface-structural
linguistic plane) as verbal planning activities at the
psychological level; shaped by the forms of social
relations in a society, they in turn regulate the meanings
its members can convey. The restricted code, as Bernstein
unfortunately named it, aims at particularistic meanings,
which are relatively tied to a given social context; it
assumes that speaker and listener (reader and writer) share
a common context of beliefs and values and so leaves
implicit the assumptions and connectives that context can
supply. The elaborated code, in contrast, orients the
49
listener (reader) to universalistic meanings, which are
less tied to a local social context; since speaker and
listener are not assumed to share beliefs and values,
assumptions and connectives must be made verbally explicit.
This code, Bernstein tells us,
will facilitate the verbal transmission and
elaboration of the individual’s unique
experience. The condition of the listener,
unlike that in the case of a restricted code,
will not be taken for granted, as the speaker is
likely, to modify his speech in the light of the
special considerations and attributes of the
listener...If a restricted code facilitates the
construction and exchange of communalized
symbols, then an elaborated code facilitates the
verbal construction and exchange of
individualized or personal symbols.50
The restricted code stresses the re-affirmation of
shared beliefs, while the elaborated code stresses the
difference between one's point of view and that of the
group. This implies a rhetorical stance toward one's
audience and an attitude toward the kinds of meaning
discourse can convey: local or universal, communal or
individual, context-dependent or -independent.
Context-dependency has been shown to account for
significant complementarity among specific linguistic
structures. Using multivariate statistical techniques and
large-scale text corpora, Douglas Biber has identified
so "A Sociolinguistic Approach to Social Learning," Penguin
Survey of the Social Sciences, ed. J. Gould (Penguin,
1965); reprinted in Theoretical Studies 128.
"Abstract versus Situated Content" as one of three
underlying factors accounting for co-occurrence of
linguistic variables among 545 samples of British English
comprising over a million words in sixteen spoken and
written genres.51 The other two factors are "Interactive
versus Edited Text” (we might say planned versus unplanned)
and "Reported versus Immediate Style" (fiction versus
nonfiction). The number and variety of features and genres
Biber examines allow him to generalize his conclusions
beyond the scope of any particular type of text or
utterance.
Biber's method is especially persuasive because he
does not start with context-dependency as a factor but
arrives at it as a result of his analysis. He begins by
asking a computer to identify which of 41 independent
linguistic features co-occur across the 545 samples and in
what genres that co-occurrence takes place; he then
describes the underlying factor the cluster of features has
exposed. His results indicate that nominalization,
agentless passives, "by"-passives, prepositions, specifics
conjuncts (such as "in conclusion," "hence," and so on),
"it"-clefts, split auxiliaries, and extended word lengths
tend to cluster around a dimension he calls "Abstract
1 Douglas Biber, "Spoken and Written Textual Dimensions in
English: Resolving the Contradictory Findings,"
forthcoming in Language.
51
versus Situated Content." Discourse on the "Abstract" end
of this factor is statistically high in the occurrence of
these lingusitic features: discourse on the "Situated" end
is not. So context-dependency can be shown to have
statistically significant linguistic correlates,
"point-at-able" linguistic features.
It has been argued, however, that the elaborated code
is not in fact independent of interpretive context but
presumes instead a different shared frame of
reference— that of the schoolroom. This is in one sense
true, but it obscures significant differences between the
two codes. Orientations are rhetorical stances regulating
expectations about the relationship between speaker and
listener, writer and reader, as they interact with the
scene of discourse and the purposes participants bring to
that scene. Each orientation emphasizes different elements
of the rhetorical field— such as the logical relations
between propositions or the social significance of scenic
details. The elaborated code does not require reference to
any particular schoolroom. Discourse which relies on the
elaborated orientation is not, of course, universally
accessible— it is accessible only to a reader or listener
who has learned the code. But the local scene (where it is
spoken or inscribed, and where it is heard or read) is not
relevant to its meaning. This is not the case with the
restricted code.
52
Consider the following situation:
An American Professor lecturing in Europe on
immigration reports, "The blight of 1845 forced
hundreds of thousands of Irish to seek jobs and
potatoes in the New World." One student in the
back raises his hand and says, "I like potatoes."
The professor stares at him a moment and
continues the lecture. A few minutes later, a
woman sitting at the next desk leans towards the
student and whispers, "I've got a big pot of
potato soup for supper tonight." His eyes light
up— he reminds her, "I like potatoes." She
shakes her head sadly and replies, "My mother’s
in town tonight."
The same words are uttered twice, in nearly the same
social context, yet they are taken as meaningless the first
time and meaningful the next. Grice's Maxim of Relation52
and Searle’s analysis of speech acts53 together explain how
the woman interprets the utterance as a request for an
-invitation: she looks for its relevance to her own comment
(Grice) and notices an indirect reference to the felicity
conditions for an invitation (Searle). What is more
interesting is the professor's refusal to make sense of the
student's utterance in a similar way, to apply precisely
the same logic to the same words uttered by the same person
in the same setting, and hear the student's comment as a
request for an invitation to visit the United States. A
52 H.P. Grice, "Logic and Conversation," in Syntax and
Semant ic s _3: Speech Acts, eds. P. Cole and J. Morgan
(London: Academic Press, 1975) 41-58.
53 J. Searle, Speech Acts, (Cambridge University Press,
1969).
53
different code controls each of the two conversations and
the strategies available for making meaning. Their social
roles led the professor to expect from the student an
utterance aiming at universalistic meaning, the truth value
of which is understood as constant regardless of speaker or
hearer, and related to the topic of immigration rather than
the local social context. The professor was unwilling to
draw the following chain of reasoning: I am an American;
he is a Brit; I have just said that hundreds of thousands
of people left Ireland for jobs and potatoes; he considers
his liking for potatoes somehow relevant to what I have
said; therefore, he would like to leave here for America;
indicating this desire refers indirectly to one of the
felicity conditions for an invitation, which requires that
the hearer would like to go to the place the speaker is in
a position to make accessible; therefore, he would like me
to invite him to visit me in America.
The woman's reply, on the other hand, indicates an
interpretation that assumes implicit, shared meanings:
among other things, that her mother's presence in town
requires the two women to eat together, and without her
fellow student. That this may be a face-saving device,
that her mother might not actually be in town, does not
matter a jot--whatever its motive, the woman's
understanding of her fellow student's speech act and her
54
own reply are rooted in the details of their immediate
social situation.
Perhaps we can distinguish indirect speech acts and
implicatures which rely on the details of the immediate
social situation from those which can be understood on the
basis of the context provided by the discourse itself. If
so, it seems clear that the elaborated code allows the
latter but not the former.
Bernstein came to see social role as the critical link
between class and codes. In 1960 Donald MacRae, his
undergraduate tutor at the London School of Economics, sent
Bernstein a book by Iona and Peter Opie to review for the
British Journal of Socioloqy. MacRae sent the review to
Dell Hymes at Berkeley, who introduced Bernstein to John
Gumperz. From Hymes and Gumperz, Bernstein must have
learned the importance of social context in constraining
the form of speech, an element which begins to appear in
his work in 1965, with his use of social roles (induced,
expressing, and regulated by codes) to explain the part of
codes in cultural transmission. A role is for Bernstein "a
constellation of shared, learned meanings, through which an
individual is able to enter into persistent, consistent,
and recognized forms of interaction with others." Roles
are defined in speech, which is constrained by code. "As a
person learns to subordinate his behavior to a linguistic
55
code, which is the expression of the role, different orders
of relation are made available to him."54 The elaborated
code is learned in connection with certain social roles,
but access to those roles is limited. Social role was
identified as the mediating element controlling the
distribution of opportunities to learn the elaborated code.
M. A. K. Halliday was on the faculty of the University
of London when Bernstein received an appointment as Senior
Lecturer in the Sociology of Education, in 1963; a few
years later, Ruqaiya Hasan joined the Sociological Research
Unit. From Halliday's work on functionalist grammar,
Bernstein drew an analysis of the primary contexts in which
socialization occurs and the use of language each of them
demands. Bernstein reduced Halliday's seven to four
categories of language function: the regulative,
instructional, interpersonal, and imaginative. Bernstein
believed that in each context in which a child is taught to
use language the code or codes available to the speakers
with whom he or she interacts will determine the forms of
speech the child is exposed to; these forms imply attitudes
towards meaning, available to the speakers as a result of
the social roles to which they have access.
Or her. Bernstein, "A Sociolinguistic Approach to
Social Learning" 125.
56
In Ways With Words, Shirley Brice Heath provides a
detailed ethnography of linguistic acquisition and
practices of two working class neighborhoods in the
Carolina Piedmont, Roadville and Trackton. Both are
populated by mill-workers whose families have worked in
similar textile mills for generations, though people in
both communities have relatives who have moved on to other,
more urban occupations; in both communities people make use
of limited though clearly functional literacies in their
daily lives. Roadville is white, and Trackton is black.
Heath concentrates most of her attention on the interior
lives of these off-road neighborhoods and compares the way
language is learned and used in each of them. She also
tells us something about the mainstream community of blacks
and whites from whom Roadville and Trackton residents keep
a deliberate distance but with whom they must on occasion
interact. There are some differences between the practices
of literacy in Roadville and Trackton, but the significant
contrast which concerns our present discussion centers on
the differences which emerge when the practices of both
Roadville and Traction are compared to the mainstream
population. In Trackton, Heath writes,
Children remember and reassociate the
contexts of print. When they see a brand name,
particular sets of numbers, or a particular logo,
they often recall when and with whom they first
saw it, or they call attention to how the
occasion for this new appearance is not like the
57
previous one...They seem to remember the scene
and staging of print, so that upon recalling
print they visualize the physical context in
which it occurred and the reasons for reading it:
that is, what it was • they wanted to learn from
reading a certain item or group of items...The
dependence on a strong sense of visual memory
often prevented efficient transfer of skills
learned in one context to another.ss
This is, of course, precisely the sort of recall
Tulving has termed "episodic." Literacy in Roadville is
different in some respects, but similar in its dependence
on implicit context:
Roadville residents use writing only when
they have to, and view it as an occasional
necessary tool— to aid their memory, to help them
buy and sell things, and sometimes to help keep
them in touch with family and friends. Few write
letters; those who do, see them as conversations
between parties who know each other well and need
no background information.5i
The preparation for literacy is quite different,
however, among the mainstream townspeople of the larger
communi ty:
Both children and adults are producers and
consumers of literacy in a consistent, highly
redundant, and repetitive pattern of using oral
language, and especially dialogue, as a way of
learning both from and about written materials.
The modes of speaking, reading, and writing are
tightly interrelated as children learn to
recognize, link, talk about, and "read" the cow
jumping over the moon on the bedroom wall
decoration and in the nursery rhyme book, and to
separate this knowledge from the real-world
knowledge they might have which suggests cows do
55 Heath, Ways With Words 192.
56 Heath, Ways with Words 231.
58
not jump over moons...Written materials have a
context of their own which disengages them from
literal linkages to objects, people, and events
of the real world. As the children of the
townspeople learn the distinctions between
contextualized first-hand experience and
decontextualized representations of experience,
they come to act like literates before they can
read.5 7
Heath provides a detailed account which describes
precisely how mainstream mothers prepare their children to
acquire skills which will be necessary for the elaborated
code.
Training in one's attitude towards meaning in language
begins at a very early age. Heath argues that the
diffferences in this early orientation towards language use
account for the difficulty the children of Roadville and
Trackton face when they enter school; unlike their
mainstream competitors, they have not been trained from
birth in the linguistic abilities privileged in the
classroom. These abilities of course prepare students to
acquire and manipulate the elaborated code; when they learn
to inscribe, their familiarity with this interpretive
gestalt allows them to write what counts as acceptable
academic prose, while their fellow students from Roadville
and Trackton must first struggle to acquire the necessary
code.
57 Heath, Ways With Words 256.
59
It is important to see that Bernstein's codes need not
imply, as they have been used to imply, some innate
deficiency on the part of people who have not acquired both
of them. Instead, they can be used to identify what may
not be imparted as a matter of course in the processes of
cultural transmission in some sociolinguistic subcultures
of our society--if that proves empirically to be the case.
Bernstein's contention was that the elaborated code is
acquired as a function of social roles to which a speaker
has access and that access to the social roles which allow
the acquisition of the elaborated code is not evenly, or
randomly, distributed. Access to these roles is controlled
by middle-class status, which in turn is established by
facility with the elaborated code. In this way, codes
maintain with some fluidity the membership of the various
social classes: working-class children have limited access
to the roles in connection with which the elaborated code
is learned. For a child to acquire the elaborated code,
someone in his or her linguistic environment must have
access to social roles which have been monopolized by
middle-class speakers. The code controls access to the
roles which allow one to acquire the code. Bernstein
believed the closure of this system explained the role of
language in perpetuating the class structure. William
Labov, in a study conducted in New York department
60
stores,58 showed that certain phonological features
correlated with social class and that speakers aspiring
socially upward adopted the pronunciation of the class to
which they aspired; but pronunciation is a relatively
superficial element of linguistic usage, easily noticed and
imitated, with a wide distribution within any one social
class. The deep-seated interpretive differences Bernstein
was looking for pass largely unnoticed, except for their
consequences. And their consequences are significant.
It was not until this period, when Bernstein was at
the University of London with Halliday and Hasan, that he
identified context-dependency as the chief characteristic
of the form of the restricted orientation: where a local
context is presumed, exophoric reference, which points to
the features of the context, should increase over
endophoric reference, which points to the discourse itself.
This is so because.codes, unlike social dialects, control
the framing of meaning. In an article written in support
of Bernstein, Hasan emphasizes the attitudinal orientation
(which she thinks of as high-order semantic structure) over
the features of the discourse resulting from a code: "it
is not so much the formal patterns but rather the semantic
structure of a message that is under focus when the latter
58 William Labov, The Soc ial Strat i f ication of Engli sh in
New York City (Washington, D.C.: Center For Applied
Linguistics, 1966).
61
is examined in relation to codes."5’
Bernstein's latest definition of a code contains the
adjustments to his initial formulations which proved
necessary as he better understood the nature of the
phenomenon he had discovered: a code is a regulative
principle, tacitly acquired, which selects and integrates
relevant meanings, the forms of their realization, and the
contexts that evoke them.60 A speaker must be able to
recognize the social situations in which certain
orientations towards meaning are called for and be able to
produce the structures which reflect them, relatively
context-dependent or -independent speech variants.
We might prefer to think of them as scene-dependent or
-independent rhetorical stances, since, as we shall see,
the context for discourse can be rather abstract, relying
on the conventions of an intellectual tradition rather than
social norms for the shared ground on which communication
takes place. Derrida suggests that the "context" of a
piece of writing is always finally indeterminate,51 but
S9 Ruqaiya Hasan, "Code, Register, and Social Dialect," in
Applied Studies Toward a Sociology of Language, vol. 2
of Class, Codes and Control, ed. 3asil Bernstein
(London; Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973) 265-6.
50 "Codes, Modalities, and the Process of Cultural
Reproduction: A Model," Language in Society, 10 (1981).
51 Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context," Glvph 1
(1977): 174-181.
62
that observation informs the rhetorical orientation of only
a small number of professional readers, reading with a
specialist's code. All texts may be (read as) orphaned
from author and referent, but it is not a strategy of all
codes to read them in that way. Our treatment of context
is similar: texts are read— and expected by writers to be
read--against some frame of reference. Most readers
familiar with the elaborated orientation expect to be able
to supply an appropriate interpretive context, independent
of the local scene. It is those rhetorical expectations
that the theory of codes describes.
Critical Response
Bernstein was not without his critics. In a 1969
monograph, the American phonologist William Labov
complained about the discrepancy between the "subtle and
sophisticated mode of planning utterances" Bernstein had
described as the elaborated code and the "proliferation of
'I think', of the passive, of models and auxiliaries, of
the first person pronoun, of uncommon words" that make up
3ernstein's data in his 1962 paper, which compared
linguistic structures in the tape-recorded group interviews
in an attempt to distinguish the two speech variants.
Labov's point is that the speech of the public school
students, presented as representative middle-class speech,
63
did not live up to Bernstein's description of the
elaborated code. Bernstein had argued that middle-class
speakers could make use of either code, and the sample
interviews of the public schooboys had been proffered as
instances of the elaborated variant. Labov, of course, was
considering Bernstein's claims from this side of the
Atlantic, where the lines between social classes are less
indelibly drawn and more frequently denied: any writing
teacher has seen enough examples of children from
well-to-do homes whose linguistic usage contradicts
Bernstein's correlation between social class and code
proficiency. The strength of class divisions in this
country can be sensed, however, when we consider how rarely
the correlation is broken in the other direction--how few
students whose facility with the elaborated variant was not
acquired with the help of some middle-class speaker.
Bernstein had already begun moving away from
correlations between usage and class, recognizing the
influence of the mother's occupation before marriage, for
example, on her child's proficiency with the elaborated
variant, but Labov's observation pointed to another shift
Bernstein would have to make: from thinking of codes as
speech variants with discrete syntactic features to
thinking of codes as attitudes controlling the
interpretation of meaning. We have seen how, by 1965,
64
Bernstein had recognized the significance of this
distinction.
This was not Labov's only criticism. Labov argued
that Bernstein did not know enough about working-class
linguistic usage in general, and the richness and
complexity of Black linguistic usage in particular. There
are two aspects of this criticism. The first is empirical:
Labov could be arguing that the distribution of restricted
and elaborated codes Bernstein claimed to have found among
his London subjects did not reflect the distribution of
code proficiency among the people Labov had studied. That
argument, of course, could be true--it can only be
substantiated or denied by empirical research. The second
aspect is of a different character: Labov could be arguing
that working-class linguistic usage is full of richness and
complexity which Bernstein's binary distinction does not
describe. Labov's monograph spends some time detailing
some of the linguistic practices Black speakers acquire
which, he argues, are as sophisticated as any of the skills
Bernstein has identified as necessary for proficiency with
the elaborated speech variant. Bernstein readily concedes
this point; he believed that working-class speakers do
acquire proficiency with linguistic skills which
middle-class speakers are not encouraged to practice but
that those skills, that proficiency, will not expedite a
65
student's progress through the school curriculum and into
the social roles available to those who can manipulate the
elaborated variant. Bernstein repeatedly concedes the
point in his papers, finding no inconsistency between that
observation and his own. Labov’s point is addressed not at
Bernstein directly, but at some of the claims which have
been made in his name. The line in Labov’s monograph most
damaging to Bernstein's reputation, particularly in
America, was the attribution of the idea
first drawn from Basil Bernstein's writings
that 'much of lower class language consists of a
kind of incidental ''emotional" accompaniment to
action here and now.'*2
The citation Labov provides is not to any paper by
Bernstein but to an article by Arthur Jensen,*3 who, with
other American educational psychologists, saw in
Bernstein's early papers support for their view that
working-class Black children in America were
"linguistically deprived," a position Bernstein explicitly
denies.*4 The cited page in Jensen clarifies the situation:
*2 William Labov, The Logic of Nonstandard English,
Georgetown Monographs on Language and Linguistics 22,
1969. Reprinted in Language and Social Context, ed.
Pier Paolo Giglioli (New York: Penguin Books, 1972) 202,
183.
*3 "Social Class and Verbal Learning," in Social Class,
Race, and Psychological Development, eds. Martin
Deutsch, Irwin Katz, and Arthur R. Jensen (Holt,
Rinehart, Winston, 1968) 118.
** "A Critique of the Concept of Compensatory Education,"
66-
The functions of language also seem to
differ between the lower- and middle-class
family. Most of the research on social-class
differences in verbal behavior has been carried
out in England by sociologist Basil Bernstein
(1960), but many of his findings are probably
valid among the lower and middle classes in
America as well. Spoken language among the lower
class is less like written language
syntactically, grammatically, and in over-all
sequential organization and logical progression,
than is the case among the middle class.
Consequently there should be relatively less
positive transfer from lower-class verbal
experience to formal language of books,
newspapers, magazines, and so on. For the
lower-class person, reading and writing are very
different from speech. Also, language in the
lower class is not as flexible a means of
communication as in the middle class. It is not
as readily adapted to the subtleties of the
particular situation, but consists more of a
relatively small repertoire of stereotyped
phrases and expressions which are used rather
loosely without much effort to achieve a subtle
correspondence between perception and verbal
expression. Much of lower-class language
consists of a kind of incidental "emotional"
accompaniment to action here and now.
There is much we might contest in this paragraph, but
our focus for the moment is the distinction between
Jensen's and Bernstein's views. Jensen begins a paragraph
with a reference*s to Bernstein's comparison of
intelligence scores on the Mill Hill and Progressive
Matrices tests; he then goes on to speculate about the
implications of that data in a manner far less rigorous
reprinted in Theoretical Studies 190-201.
*s Jensen's reference is to Bernstein's "Language and
Social Class," British Journal of Socioloqy, XI (1960);
271-276.
67_J
than Bernstein had done. However one interprets
Bernstein's data, everything following the "Also” in
Jensen's paragraph, including the "emotional cry"
conclusion, is Jensen's own, nowhere present in the paper
he has cited. Labov does explain that "Bernstein's views
are filtered through a strong bias against all forms of
working class behavior," but does not make clear that the
filter is Jensen's bias rather than Bernstein's own.
Another critique of Bernstein popularly cited is that
of Richard Ohmann. Ohmann is a Marxist whose principal
concern derives from the interaction of linguistic
determinism with Bernstein's description of sociolinguistic
codes. If working-class people are unable to handle
abstract thinking because they lack facility with the
elaborated code, then the job of the Marxist intellectual
who seeks to communicate to workers a socialist perspective
and critique of capitalism becomes "truly herculean."
Ohmann takes issue with Bernstein's lack of definition of
class, then supplies a Marxist definition which has the
effect of lumping both groups of language users into a
single class; he then redistinguishes the two groups by
calling them "mental workers" and "physical workers," and
discovers that
Once the discussion is so grounded, and for
all the immense complexities that remain,
Bernstein's results make a good deal of initial
sense...A class builds its life on its role in
68
production. The social relations it experiences
there may be embedded in its linguistic codes,
and carried over into the kind of training it
gives its children at home.64
There is a footnote in Ohmann's article conceding that
Bernstein does mention such an explanation in a memorable
paragraph, but does not develop it further. And Ohmann
does not like the hypothesis as he has developed it
himself; he argues that class is not a static concept, but
that human beings create their classes as they interact.
Ohmann believes that the influence of early
socialization on the form of adult speech is overstated:
When I talk, I mark myself, for others, as
some kind of intellectual worker. Learning to
talk that way was of course one prerequisite to
securing myself a place in intellectual work. I
might add that although my father did similar
work, I don't believe I learned my code at home
so much as in various acculturating institutions
along the way to professordom.67
Ohmann does not here consider how his father's
influence in the home may have helped him gain access to
those institutions. Heath's ethnography clearly shows to
what extent Ohmann is obscuring the significance of
childhood linguistic environment. His reason becomes
clear: the strategy of looking for the "cause" of the form
of adult speech in the processes of socialization, Ohmann
46 Richard Ohmann, "Reflections on Class and Language,"
College English 44.1 (1982): 10, 11.
6 7 Ohmann 11.
69
feels, has a political motive:
Aside from the theoretical arbitrariness of
such a strategy, its political implications are
political and rather nasty--e.g., the poor may be
blamed for their own poverty; black parents may
be held accountable for their children's failure
in school; or, only a little more benignly, the
liberals may set out to correct, in school, the
cultural damage done at home.**
For his part, Bernstein wrote repeatedly to disagree
with those who found in his work evidence with which to
argue against the educability of working-class children or
in favor of programs for compensatory education: At a Work
Conference of the Teacher's College at Columbia University,
Bernstein delivered a paper in which he said, "The
introduction of the child to universalistic meanings of-
public forms of thought is not compensatory education- it
is education." His 1965 article cited above concludes
It is important to realize a restricted code
carries its own aesthetic...To say this is not to
argue for the preservation of a pseudo-folk
culture but to argue for certain changes in the
social structure of educational institutions; it
is also to argue for increased sensitivity on the
part of teachers toward both the cultural and
cognitive requirements of the formal educational
relationship.4 9
Ohmann believes that Bernstein's description of
sociolinguistic codes simplifies a much more complicated
picture: that all sorts of cultural phenomena shape the
48 Ohmann 9 fn.
49 Bernstein, "A Sociolinguistic Approach to Social'
Learning" 136-7.
70
form of any given instance of speech, and that, in
particular, the power relations in force determine who says
how much and in what form. There are really two aspects of
this complaint. The first is that Bernstein ignores the
power relations and political implications of his theory of
codes? but Bernstein, in an article published a year before
Ohmann's, comments on the political dimension of code
distribution from a point of view clearly influenced by
some Marxist thinking:
Elaborated orientations (where there is an
indirect relation to a specific material base)
are, however, always subject to strong regulation
and surveillance; for these orientations have the
potential for creating alternative realities,
possibilities, and practices. Elaborated
orientations are potentially dangerous, and those
acquiring them have to be made safe.70
The second aspect of Ohmann's objection emphasizes the
complexity of all social utterance. No one consideration
can account for the form of any human discourse. This is,
of course, true, but it argues only against a linear
view--that class "causes" the form of speech--rather than
an interactive, cyclic model of the relationship between
class and the form of social speech, such as we have seen
Bernstein advance. Ohmann offers a similar model to
represent the relationship between power relations and
speech in a society. His objection seems to be that speech
70 "Codes, Modalities, and the. Process of Cultural
Reproduction" 355.
71
can also be used to challenge those power relations, as
well as reproduce them. I think Bernstein’s work can be
used to understand the nature of the social bias that is
built into our use of language, which must be considered if
language is to be used to alter the social structures it
reflects.
Ohmann's suggestion, that Bernstein define class in
relation to the means of production rather than some other
sociological considerations, strengthens the theory, as
Bernstein himself must have seen in writing his most recent
article. As Ohmann observes, such sociological definitions
of class can shift as new considerations are
introduced--multiplying the number of differentiated groups
until the existence of discrete classes is itself called
into question. In a brilliant chapter of her forthcoming
dissertation, Elspeth Stuckey delineates a tendency in
American sociology to deny the existence of a class system
by complicating the picture.71 If empirical research bears
out Bernstein's prediction, and expertise in the elaborated
code correlates with what he calls an indirect relation to
the material base (a privileged relation to the means of
production), Bernstein's codes can be used to give the lie
to the portrait of a classless America.
71 Elspeth Stuckey, "Literacy and Social Class," diss
USC, 1.986, Chapter 1.
72
Another critic of Bernstein who has written at length
about his work is his colleague, Harold Rosen, at the
University of London. In addition to the usual complaint
that Bernstein does not know working-class linguistic usage
well enough to characterize it, Rosen examined the data on
the basis of which Bernstein had claimed that codes were
distributed along social class lines, and found the data
insufficient to warrant that conclusion.72 Rosen's point is
well taken, but--in the context of the present
discussion— suggests rather that more thorough empirical
research .is needed to substantiate Bernstein's
distributional claim, the main appeal of which has always
been theoretical: the mechanism (in which facility with
the elaborated code confers middle-class status, which in
turn allows access to social roles as a function of which
codes are learned) is such a coherent account of the role
of language in maintaining the class system that it should
not be dismissed until significant counter-data is found.
If the distribution of restricted and elaborated codes
(especially on this side of the Atlantic) does not in fact
correspond to Bernstein's theoretical prediction, the
discrepancies between prediction and data will prove
productive ground for further research.
Harold Rosen, Language and Class: A Critique of
Bernstein (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1972).
73
The Codes of Literacy
Bernstein's theoretical discovery--the existence of
(at least) two discrete variants of native English usage,
discernible along (what we have called) rhetorical
lines--is confirmed in the daily experience of a large
number of readers scanning this page. I am thinking of the
writing teachers whose interest in literacy springs from
their interest in teaching writing more effectively. Those
who teach composition at the college level will have
anticipated my observation that Bernstein’s contrast
between restricted and elaborated language variants
suggests the difference between those papers our students
turn in at the beginning of the term and those they must be
able to produce in order to continue their college careers.
His analysis implies that problems with audience,
specificity and originality of thesis may not be the result
of intellectual laziness or lack of interest, but of our
students' difficulty in making the switch from an
orientation of shared values, implicit meanings, and a
preference for communal agreement, to one of carefully
differentiated positions, explicitly expressed, with a
preference for individual models of experience. It is
significant that their ability to make this switch and
produce the required discourse stands in many universities
74
as the single ability all undergraduates must demonstrate.
In a later paper, Bernstein writes that the clusters of
meaning of the elaborated code are the categories of
knowledge recognized as disciplines by the schools. For
many people, school is the place in their lives where they
are asked to produce this discourse— to disagree, and to
document their disagreement in carefully coordinated
detail--and they are asked to do this at school only in
writing.
Most of our students come to us with competent
inscription skills and the ability to speak grammatically.
How is writing different from inscribing speech? The bulk
of contemporary research shows that teaching punctuation
and spelling does not produce competent writers. Research
on revision has indicated, in fact, that weak writers spend
too much of their time worrying about surface errors,
compared to more competent writers.73 Editing skills do
have to be learned, but they are far more easily acquired
when the student has discovered a need to communicate some
ideas in writing. A dash, colon, or semi-colon can be used
to coordinate two independent clauses: the difference in
73 Lester Faigley and Stephen Witte, "Analyzing Revision,"
College Composition and Communication, 32 (December
1981): 400-414. See also Nancy Sommers, "Revision
Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult
Writers," College Composition and Communication 31
(December 1980) : 378-388.
their usage depends upon the relationship between ideas to
be communicated. There is no intended relationship when
there are no real ideas. Nor is it that our students have
no ideas; rather, that they have trouble distinguishing
which ideas will count as ideas. Students preparing to
answer an essay question will try to discover what the real
answer is. They are seeking--wholly justified in terms of
the restricted code--the shared group opinion with which to
express agreement. They have to be taught to understand
that we are not interested in the large area of agreement
between their views and those expressed in a reading
selection designed to prompt writing, but the often narrow
space of disagreement— and the attitude towards meaning
which determines the form in which they articulate that
disagreement. It is true that on occasion a thesis can be
formed in agreement with what a proffered writer has said,
but it is significant that the argument in support of such
a thesis must be different from the arguments advanced by
the writer of the discussion piece. A student writer who
agrees with the writer of an assigned bit of reading, and
agrees for the reasons offered by that writer, will be told
to find a thesis.
What our students need to be taught, Bernstein's work
tells us, is a new attitude towards discourse and the kind
of meaning it can convey, along with the structures that
76
allow a writer to make explicit what goes unstated in
contextualized talk. This different attitude undertakes to
produce a discourse the truth value of which is independent
of the immediate social situation of the writer writing and
the reader reading it. We have been taught to see that
interpretation is always a function of the historical
moment, the intellectual environment, in which discourse is
apprehended. There is nevertheless a difference between
discourse which depends upon a particular locality to
supply gaps in the text, or the social relations between
writer and reader, and discourse which relies for its
interpretive frame on an abstract set of conventions which
are understood to be largely the same whether they are
learned in a private school in Connecticut or a mission
school in Liberia. They are often learned in schools; but
they are learned not only in schools, and they are not
dependent upon any one particular schoolroom or the social
station of the learners. In this sense, the meanings which
are encouraged by the elaborated code can be said to be
independent of context (though dependent on an interpretive
community), when compared to meanings which depend for
interpretation on details of a particular locality, or the
social status between participants--meanings dependent upon
the context in which they are uttered or inscribed.
77
If we determine that the ability to produce written
discourse consonant with one or another of Bernstein's
interpretive codes comprises different literacies, we can
distinguish at least two such literacies. We might speak
of "local literacy" (a more appropriate term than that
unfortunate word "restricted") when referring to the
abilities to read and write when they are associated with
an interpretive code which relies upon details of the
immediate social context and shared social values in order
to communicate meaning. And we might speak of "collegiate
literacy" when referring to the abililties to read and
write when they are associated with Bernstein’s elaborated
code, since success at the college level requires a student
to produce and comprehend discourse regulated by it.
To identify collegiate literacy with the elaborated
code is not to make the terms synonymous: collegiate
literacy requires the interpretive gestalt of the
elaborated orientation and also the vocabulary, syntactic
fluency, and organizational skills necessary to use that
orientation in writing. Other skills help: for instance,
some facility in balancing abstraction with supporting
detail and in supplying transitions and other textual cues
which help the reader construct a coherent interpretation.
The rhetorical skills associated with the restricted
orientation of local literacy-rhythm and voice, tropes and
78
figures of speech, an eye and ear for telling detail— can
of course also be tapped for collegiate texts, contributing
immediacy, presence, identification. Aristotle's
discussion of the rhetorical appeal of ethos and pathos
suggests that most instances of collegiate discourse will
be "localized" to some extent to personalize the writing
and make it more persuasive, but the presence of local
elements in the writing of collegiate literates does not
diminish the usefulness of Bernstein's theoretical
distinction. If Bernstein is correct, teachers of
composition are often in the position of trying to impart
tacitly what we cannot explicitly define. Orientations
towards meaning are abstract concepts, slippery to hold
onto, difficult to see at all when in use. We might make
it easier on ourselves and on our students if we could
explicate our own orientations.
In Construetinq Texts, George Dillon discusses the
tradition of the English essay, in a chapter which begins
with a reference to Bernstein.74 Dillon lists seven
oppositions between what he sees as the conventions of
Utterance and Text: Utterance treats discourse as
face-to-face conversation, while Text treats discourse as
face-to-page reading and writing of essays; speakers are to
George L. Dillon, Constructing Texts (Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1981) 21.
79
reproduce accepted wisdom, in order to enact solidarity
with their social group, whereas writers are to produce
novel facts and viewpoints in order to enact membership in
an imagined community of inquiring minds; Utterance is
spontaneous, whereas Text is planned; in Utterance, word
senses are based on conversational exchanges and shared
experience, whereas in Text, word senses are based on
formal written usage as defined in dictionaries; in
Utterance, bridging premises are based on common
assumptions and may be largely implicit; in Text, bridging
premises are to be made explicit; speakers are expected to
speak understandably, while writers are expected to write
according to handbooks of usage; Utterance aims at the
sharing of experience, Text at proving the correctness of
its model of the world. Dillon crams an eighth point in
with his seventh: hearers interpret speech in relation to
the speaker, while readers interpret Text in terms of what
is on the page. Dillon rightly observes that
In the course of sketching in these seven
oppositions, we have touched on many of the real
problems of student writing: faulty assumptions
about the audience, lack of originality,
stridency, uncritical use of sterotypes, cliches,
punctuation errors, obscure, vague, and faulty
diction, leaps in logic, weak paragraph
structure, wavering word sense, usage violations,
inconsistencies of tone, and boring, 'objective'
writing. Though incomplete, the list is
daunting, and the ineptitude it catalogues
threatens to appall. But at least we can see
these problems not as crudities or diseases but
as manifestations of an incomplete substitution
80
of the conventions of Text for those of
Utterance.7 5
Dillon's emphasis on convention explains why the last
two items on his list of oppositions are lumped together as
a single entry: the speaker or writer's purpose in
producing the discourse, and the reliance of the discourse
on social relations, are not conventional elements at all,
but point to the underlying sociolinguistic code which
shapes the formal conventions of collegiate literacy.
This is why Dillon discusses Text in terms of the
tradition of the English essay, from which the
configurations of conventions descend, instead of an
earlier moment in history, when the orientation, the
attitude towards meaning these conventions help express,
emerged. It has been suggested that a new way of thinking
began to appear in the histories of Herodotus and
Thucydides, made possible by the literacy of their time. I
shall take up this issue in detail in Chapter 4; for the
moment, it is important to understand that literacies can
be distinguished by code--orientation— and that the
conventions of various literacies evolve as people express
their thoughts within the interpretive frames of those
underlying attitudes towards meaning.
D i l l o n 49.
81
Local literacy, then, comprises the local orientation
and the linguistic elements which facilitate its
expression. These include genre knowledge (usually lists,
letters, newspapers, and some fictional forms, but other
socially significant genres may be required); knowledge of
the local cultural context, parlance and usage; and the
syntactic, semantic and morphological conventions
catalogued by Dillon as endemic to Utterance. An example
of a text which makes use of local literacy might be:
This letter belongs to my brother, M.S., at
Sinje. My greetings to you.
I told you some time ago that I was going to
send your money very shortly, but it happens that
I became sick, so I beg you to be patient.
Secondly, I am still thinking about what I told
you; I will come to discuss it with you on
Friday. Please try to think of it too and tell
me which one is better.
Tell your wife, A., that I have bought her
dresses and will bring them along. Extend my
greetings to her.
I am A.B.
The opening line is a formula of the letter genre
among the Liberian Vai, as is the closing; the
"transactional" character is also typical78 of Vai usage.
Another example of a text composed by a writer conversant
with local literacy is described by Shirley Brice Heath in
summarizing letters exchanged by women in the Roadville
community of the Carolina Piedmont:
18 Scribner and Cole 73.
82
These letters are brief, devoid of
unpredictable topics, marked with a proper and
formal air about them, and always in accord with
a general outline. They open with a salutation
of "Dear--," and the first paragraph invariably
contains the greeting "How are you?" What
follows is only somewhat less invariable: "Fine,
I hope. We are all fine." or "We are fine, and
hope you are too." If there has been a serious
recent illness or accident in the family, the
addressee of the letter is never informed about
it through a personal letter, but by telephone.
Thus, any comments on an individual's state of
health merely up-date the knowledge the addressee
has previously received by phone: "Mama is doing
better and eating better. She walked out on the
porch this week."
The next topic is almost always the weather?
severe heat or drought, heavy rains, a snowstorm,
big hail or a destructive thunderstorm are the
major topics of early paragraphs of those
Roadville letters written in the few weeks
following their occurrence. If the intent of the
letter is to make a request or to inquire about
an impending visit, the topic follows next.
Often no specific or immediate purposes motivate
the letters written between the women of
Roadville and their out-of-town female relatives.
Thus, after the greeting and paragraph on the
weather, the writer moves on to "news," which may
include her latest sewing projects, progress of
the children in extracurricular or church
activities, and perhaps a tidbit of gossip ("I
hear Jed Todd is doing real good at the garage,
and he told one of the Turner girls he wasn't
coming back to school. Poor Sue."). The closing
of letters is always apologetic. "Well, I got to
get to that ironing. I have to close for now.
Write soon and let me know how you are."
Following the final note of "Love," there is
almost always a P.S., which often seems to exceed
in importance all else in the letter: "P.S. If
you come for Thanksgiving, we need to plan. Will
you?"
Roadville letters are conversations written
down.7 7
77 Heath, Ways With Words 212-213.
Heath's own account and analysis exemplify collegiate
literacy— the final line cited above is the thesis of the
paragraph which follows, arguing for Heath's
interpretation. Collegiate literacy comprises the
elaborated orientation together with the cultural and
linguistic information which facilitate its expression.
This includes knowledge of genres not required for local
literacy (most expository genres, "short stories" and other
fictional forms), an expanded "dictionary" vocabulary, and
the syntactic, semantic, and morphological conventions
Dillon associates with Text. It also includes cultural
knowledge collegiate literates expect one another to share,
for as E. D. Hirsch, Jr. observes,
The repeatable surface elements of language
cannot be successfully separated from vast
domains of underlying cultural information, and
an essential aspect of that information is
knowledge about the world contained in knowledge
of words...Just for a moment let us suppose that
such a body of cultural information exists. And
let us call its possession "cultural literacy."
My argument is that you cannot have linguistic
literacy without cultural literacy, that
competence in reading or writing cannot go
further than the cultural information that
reading and writing presuppose.7 8
This shared cultural information, we have seen, may be
local information, pertaining to the immediate rhetorical
scene and the shared social values of participants; or it
78 E. D. Hirsch, Jr., "Reading, Writing, and Cultural
Literacy," in Horner 145.
84
may be more abstract cultural information, including world
knowledge and a rhetorical stance which do not rely upon
details of the immediate scene. The latter provides a
ground for the collegiate code. Hirsch's structural
definition of cultural literacy describes also the
requisite information collegiate literates demonstrate in
addressing an unknown audience:
that knowledge that enables a reader or
writer to know what other writers and readers
know within the literate culture. Thus it is not
only a knowledge of conventions and vocabularies
but it is also a knowledge that this information
is widely shared by others.79
Texts that exemplify collegiate literacy can be found
in any college composition reader--essays which have been
severed from the contexts in which they appeared. The
elements of the essays which remain intelligible despite
that severing highlight collegiate conventions. Collegiate
literacy is the ability to use the collegiate code; the
code comprises the elaborated orientation, certain genre
and other linguistic information, and some degree of
requisite world knowledge. When we speak of local or
collegiate literacy, we refer to a code orientation and the
linguistic and real-world knowledge required to express
that orientation within a given cultural context. It is
important to notice, however, that the underlying
7 5 H ir s c h 146.
85
orientation or rhetorical stance gives significance to the
conventional elements associated with each code.
There are four logical possibilities when considering
the interaction of context-dependency and the purposes of
discourse. We can think of 1) a context-dependent language
variant, aiming at particularistic meanings and the
stability of the social group; "Open that before we
suffocate, will you?" might be an utterance in such a
discourse. Or we can think of 2) a context-independent
language variant, aiming at universalistic meanings and the
value of an individual point of view; an advice column
using this orientation might include the utterance, "A
limited amount of fresh air is salubrious after dinner and
helps with digestion." We can think of 3) a
context-independent language variant, aiming at
particularistic meanings; an example might be, "A limited
amount of fresh air is salubrious after dinner and helps
with digestion," when uttered after dining in a stuffy
room, as a request for an open window— the difference in
context involves a different code, since codes relate
interpretation to rhetorical scene. Finally, we can think
of 4) a context-dependent language variant, aiming at
universalistic meaning; for example, "The closed window
obscured his musing on the white breast of the dim sea" is
fully comprehensible only when one recognizes the reference
8 -6.
to Stephen Daedalus in the first chapter of Ulysses and the
reference to Yeats' "Who Goes With Fergus?" behind that.
The first of these four possibilities comprises the
code of local literacy; the second, collegiate literacy.
The third comprises an odd way of talking we accept from
college professors and other tolerated pedants who cite the
general case rather than its local application. The fourth
comprises a distinct orientation--the high literate
code— which is outside the scope of this study. We should
not be surprised, however, to learn that other codes exist,
determining what will count as an acceptable contribution
to a given discourse by regulating the expectations brought
to bear by speaker and listener (or writer and reader)
concerning the interpretive frame of reference which can be
presumed in communicating meaning. Nor should we be
surprised to discover that this last code serves to
identify a socio-cultural subgroup, the practitioners of a
profession or discipline, in a manner similar to that
proposed by Bernstein in his analysis of class-related
linguistic usage.
We have earlier discussed the importance of culture in
determining the form of literacy in a given society--the
Athabaskans, for example, face a particularly difficult
conflict which arises as a result of the status relation
which is presumed to hold between speaker and listener in
___________________________________________________________________________ 87.
Athabaskan culture. Writers such as Robert Pattison,
confronting the influence of culture on the practices of
literacy, have rejected entirely the attempt to identify
universal attributes, preferring instead to identify as
"literate" any cultural use of language which implies a
critical stance towards language: Homer's Achilles and
Diomedes are literate but Agamemnon is not.80 Where
Pattison's impulse to separate the crucial element of
literacy from inscription and deciphering skills is well
motivated, the cultural relativity of "critical attitudes
towards language"- does not tell us what we need to know.
To identify a component of literacy with which all cultures
must contend (even when that component is value-laden in
our own practices) is not to insist that the literacy of
some cultures is inferior to others. All cultures which
use writing must deal with the problem of inscription--what
to write on, what to write with, what will count as a
significant mark. Similarly, all cultures must deal with
the problem of codes: what frame of reference can be
presumed as common to writer and reader, what sorts of
meanings both expect to be communicated. Clearly, codes
interact with cultural variables, reflecting and
reinforcing values, each code attributed prestige as a
80 Robert Pattison, On Literacy (New York: Oxford UP, 1982)
16-17.
88
function of its role in the culture in which it is used.
We would not wish to imply that one code or another is
"better” than another intrinsically or morally in some
imagined acultural context or in the eyes of God. We do
want to. investigate the sorts of meanings each code
facilitates and explore the interaction of the codes we can
discriminate with other phenomena in our society.
We have said that (at least) two discernible codes can
be identified as components of the practice of literacy in
our own linguistic culture. The first facilitates the
expression of locally shared meanings, and the second
facilitates the expression of "decontextualized" meanings,
the truth values of which are understood to be relatively
independent of the social scene in which they are written
or read. A skeptic might challenge, "There is ample
evidence of the latter orientation in writing, but where do
we find real-world instances of the former?"
We have explained that the former orientation
emphasizes the social dimension of language, reaffirming
shared values, and is evident in spoken form in most
informal conversation, and in written form in letters which
accomplish the same purpose as that social talk. Shirley
Brice Heath has supplied sample letters between Roadville
sisters which seem to demonstrate such a code.
8.9
The skeptic might press further. "We are not now
concerned with conversation— we are talking about writing.
Where else can we find the restricted orientation in
written form? Is there a literature we can point to?"
I believe there is; but to recognize it, we must
understand a little more clearly the essential differences
which hold between the codes of literacy.
90
Chapter III
LOCAL LITERACY AND POPULAR LITERATURE
In Illiterate America, Jonathan Kozol takes issue with
the 1980 Census claim of universal literacy in the United
States. Kozol points out that the census information is
obtained by the use of written forms which are mailed to
households, and that the Bureau’s expectations that these
forms will be read to illiterate adults by their literate
children or neighbors ignores everything we know about the
sociology of illiteracy.®1 Kozol estimates that there are
more likely 25 million people in the United States lacking
alphabetic literacy, and another 35 million who cannot read
and write well enough to use writing in the world. Kozol
writes that 60 million illiterate or marginally literate
Americans are a cause for national shame, and I agree with
him. But those are not the people whose literacy skills we
shall be considering in this chapter.
Or perhaps some of them are. It is difficult to tell
from Kozol's calculations how he has counted the residents
of Trackton and Roadville, whose literacy skills are not
81 I Hiterate America (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1985)
31-40.
......................................................................................................................................... 9.1,
good enough to allow them to get white-collar jobs
requiring collegiate literacy but are good enough for
note-taking and record-keeping, writing local letters and
reading the local newspaper. They seem to be counted among
Kozol's "marginal" literates. If so, he has misrepresented
their situation. What they lack, Bernstein suggests, is
not more coaching but access to the social roles in which
the elaborated code is acquired.
Bernstein drew upon his theory the hostile scrutiny of
a generation when he implied that the orientation of the
restricted code was somehow inferior to that of the
elaborated code, and then claimed to have found those
orientations distributed along class lines. There are
obvious advantages to a local orientation--communication
can be very rich when subtle networks of shared meanings
can be invoked by association--but economically, from the
standpoint of the material resources available to a
code-user, people who can switch between codes certainly
have an advantage over those who cannot.
Anyone who might read this page has acquired both
local and collegiate literacies and may find it difficult
to distinguish between the two in his or her own reading
and writing habits. One way to mark the difference would
be to consider the goals of programs designed to teach
people to read and write. The Adult Basic Education
___________________________________________________________________________ 2.2L
program of the United States government identifies
fifth-grade reading level as its target literacy; however,
we should remember that all fifth graders do not read at
what has been identified as fifth-grade level. Paulo
Freire, the Brazilian educator and literacy theorist,
reports that his programs have taught Culture Circles of
twenty adults in two months to read the local newspapers
and write simple letters--just the skills we have seen in
Shirley Brice Heath's description of Roadville and Trackton
literacy. Scribner and Cole describe the practices of
Liberians literate in an indigenous Vai script who are
capable of writing local (again, formulaic) letters,
record-keeping, and reading the local newspapers. We can
speculate why the literacy of three communities on separate
continents seems to concentrate on similar forms: people
who have acquired alphabetic literacy, whose orientations
favor reliance on shared social meanings, excluded from
social roles which require other sorts of discourse, find
letter-writing the genre which best addresses their needs.
It is important to remember when we speak of local
literates that we are also speaking of people who have
acquired collegiate literacy as well; the latter does not
supplant the former but supplements it. The restricted
orientation is the dominant code in most homes. One study
has reported a shift from restricted to elaborated
___________________________________________________________________________ 93_
orientation over the Thanksgiving dinner table,32 but such
reports are noteworthy because they are exceptional. When
we speak of a restricted orientation, we are speaking of an
interpretive gestalt used by all of us at one time or
another? when we speak of the literature of local literacy,
we are speaking of books that can be (and often are) read
by collegiate as well as local literates.
The Codes of Fiction
We have said that a sociolinguistic code regulates the
form of discourse to facilitate the expression of an
orientation, an attitude towards the kind of meaning
language can be used to convey. As such, codes mediate
between language and meaning, emphasizing at times the
social dimension of an utterance, at times its abstract
propositional content. In the case of fiction, however,
the emphasis is experiential: writers and their readers
explore human values by postulating scenes, actions, and
their consequences. The codes of literacy continue to
function, mediating still between language and meaning,
which is to say, between language and values. The codes
regulate the possible relationships which may hold between
the text and the reader's (or writer’s) values.
Deborah Tannen, "The Myth of Orality and Literacy," in
Linguistics and Literacy, ed. William Frawley (New York
Plenum, 198377"
94
In The Act of Reading, Wolfgang Iser describes the
social function of literature:
If the literary work arises out of the
reader's own social or philosophical background,
it will serve to detach prevailing norms from
their functional context, thus enabling the
reader to observe how such social regulators
function, and what effect they have on the people
subject to them. The reader is thus placed in a
position from which he can take a fresh look at
the forces which guide and orient him, and which
he may hitherto have accepted without question.83
Iser seems to believe that such a presentation of the
norms by which one lives is likely to lead to a critical
evaluation, as the orientation of the elaborated code
encourages; but, given the bias of the restricted
orientation, we may suspect that novels which depend on
local literacy for interpretation might lead to a different
evalution of those norms. Literary works may present a
picture of the social context within which readers
function, but different codes will favor different
responses to that picture. A few pages later, Iser
expresses the same idea in a manner we might call more
code-neutral:
And so we may say that the reassessment of
norms is what constitutes the innovative
character of the repertoire, but this
reassessment may lead to different consequences:
the participant will see what he would not have
seen in the course of his everyday life; the
observer will grasp something which has hitherto
Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Readinq (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 19781 74.
95_
never been real for him. In other words, the
literary text enables its readers to transcend
the limitations of their own real-life situation;
it is not a reflection of any given reality, but
it is an extension of or broadening of their own
reality.*4
This reassessment, we have said, may lead to different
responses: the elaborated orientation of the code of
collegiate literacy supports a critical response,
differentiating one's individual view from that revealed as
the norm; and the restricted orientation of local literacy
encourages a favorable response, affirming the shared
values of the community of which the reader is a member.
If we think of local literacy as characterized by a
restricted orientation toward meaning, dependent on the
local social context, emphasizing shared social values, we
can predict some features of its literature: stories in
which the protagonist is freed from the limits of the
reader's local social context, but discovers, through trial
and tribulation, the correctness of the reader's values,
reaffirming the consensus of the reader's social group.
Literature, Iser tells us, compensates for the deficiencies
in its reader's social situation. If that situation is one
of close identification with a narrow local context, we
might expect a literature that compensates by carrying
people away— transporting them, in the literal sense.
• 4 I s e r 7 8-79.
96
Editors of mass-market paperbacks have a term for this
effect: "transportation," which implies the ability to
bring the reader from his or her (usually her) local
situation to some other, preferably distant and glamorous
location. This transportation is often geographical, to
Araby, Aruba, anywhere away. One publisher of romance
novels has put out a line of titles each of which consists
of a different state name— Nevada, Ohio--alone on the cover
with a picture. Or the transportation can be to a
different sociological location--the "world" of modeling,
oil, or any big business, publishing, automobiles, and so
on. Of course, Hollywood and show business in general have
been good reading at least since Sister Carrie.
Transportation is often up the economic ladder. But less
glamorous businesses will also serve— a freight pilot in
Alaska--as long as they are sufficiently someplace-else.
And the values of the reader's social group must be
affirmed, regardless of the cultural context in which the
heroine finds herself.
There is, of course, a limitation on the number of
copies a publisher might hope to sell of a book whose
enjoyment depends upon its affirmation of local social
mores. We would expect a different literature for each
social group, except in those areas common to many, where a
single set of social mores can be said to run constant
____________________________________________________ 9_7_
across a great many local communities, participating in a
larger cultural norm. Ubiquitous cultural institutions,
such as courtship and marriage, are among the few which can
be counted on for widespread consensus, at least among some
large segments of the population. We should not,
therefore, be surprised to find wide popular support for a
literature which centers on courtship and marriage,
reaffirming the values of the reader's social group even as
it frees her from the limits of her local situation. If
those stories are written so they can be put down and
picked up when the baby cries and returns to sleep, . they
should sell in the millions. And they do.
According to Publisher's Weekly the magazine of people
in the business of selling books, romance novels account
for some 30% of the sales of mass-market books, tens of
millions of books a year. In 1980, there were an estimated
12 million readers of romance novels; by 1983, 20 million.
There are, for comparison, 44,000 professors of English, of
all ranks, in the United States,85 that is, hardly more
than 44,000 voluntary readers of James and Conrad and Ford.
If we speak of the literature of our culture and limit
our understanding to include only Ashbery, Beckett and
Coover, we have failed to understand the literacy practices
85 Or 44,000 people who so identify themselves, according
to the Current Population Survey of the Census Bureau,
U.S. Department of Commerce.
___________________________________________________________________________ 98_
of the society in which we live. We can refuse to consider
as literature the books our fellow-citizens read, and
refuse to include them in the study of "English," but by
doing so we have merely adopted a pose and left to those
more disinterested researchers who come after us to
characterize the literacy of our time. At best, we can
identify the books we believe should survive us. But that
is not finally our decision to make. The significance and
beauty of any text depends upon the social context in which
it is read, and the interpretive frames available to the
reader. If we have argued for the last few decades that
Ezra Pound is more "interesting" than Edna St. Vincent
Millay, a reasonable question would be, "To whom?" The
answer, of course is to us, and to some community of
readers in the future whose tastes and concerns resemble
our own. We are not thinking of the larger community of
readers in our own society and perhaps in those that follow
for whom Millay is clearly more interesting because her
poems are comprehensible. Aesthetics, too, depend on
interpretive code.
I am not suggesting that all books are of equal merit,
equally worthy of study. I am suggesting that for
different sorts of books, different sorts of inquiries are
possible. Little is to be gained by explicating the
structure of tensions in Arizona, but we can learn
99
something about literacy in general and the literate
practices of our own society in particular if we consider
the interpretive framework within which such books are seen
as better investments of limited reading time and limited
money than than the candidates for the "canon" of English
departments— whose judgments, unlike those of the Church to
which the metaphor refers, is guided not by divine
inspiration but by human purpose.
The discrepancy between the large numbers of books
that are popularly read and the limited circulation of
books critics consider "literature" has not gone unnoticed.
In 1939, Q.D. Leavis published a study which traced the
growth in size and disintegration in taste of the English
reading public from the sixteenth century to the twentieth,
pointing to economic conditions affecting book publishing,
libraries, newspapers and magazines in accounting for a
slide from sensibility to sentiment. Leavis divides her
contemporary readers into three groups by the publications
whose book reviewers they were likely to consult:
"highbrow" readers consulted the Criterion, "middlebrow"
readers the Times Literary Supplement, and "lowbrow"
readers "a whole handful of cheap weeklies."86 Leavis
considered her method "anthropological," though her values
88 Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1939) 20.
100
are clear throughout: the contrast she is most interested
in is that between middle- and highbrow, and she makes her
case for Conrad, Forster and Lawrence. To investigate
popular expectations, Leavis sent a questionnaire to sixty
novelists and received replies from twenty-five, one of
whom she considered highbrow; on the basis of their
answers, she drew up four reasons readers turn to novels:
1. To pass time not unpleasantly.
2. To. obtain vicarious satisfaction or
compensation for life.
3. To obtain assistance in the business of
living.
4. To enrich the quality of living by
extending, deepening, refining, co-ordinating
experience.* 7
The last is of course the highbrow's purpose; the
second we have called transportation. Leavis explores
several aspects of the decline in popular reading matter
over the last few centuries--the diminished capacity of the
average reader, the paucity of the general intellectual
climate, changes in the intentions of the most rewarding
authors— but this difference in the ends people expect a
novel to fulfill marks a boundary we shall want to consider
in light of the theory of codes.
Leavis explains that the popular reader wants to be
reassured in his reading "that life is fun, he is living it
at its fullest and there are no standards in life or art
L e a v is 48.
101
other than his own." (p. 79-80). This is not, we
understand, what readers ought to be looking for in a
novel; low- and middlebrow readers are reading for the
wrong reasons. "These people clearly mistake the relief of
meeting the expected, and being given the desired picture
of life, for the exhiliarating shock that a novel coming
from a first-class fully-aware mind gives." (p. 74). The
mistake those people were making was widespread in 1939 and
continues with surprising consistency today. In describing
what her contemporary public wanted, Leavis cites a chapter
in Short Story Writing For Prof it, by Michael Joseph,
entitled "What Editors Want," contributed by editors:
Here, repeated with scarcely any variation,
is a demand for 'dramatic and light-hearted
stories with a strong love interest and a
pleasant atmosphere'; Love? Yes. And romance. But
nothing sordid'; 'Stories must have a strong
feminine appeal and a happy ending is
essential.* 8
Publishers speak of "genre" or "category" novels when
referring to romances, juveniles, westerns, mysteries,
phastasy or science fiction books that are relatively
formulaic or predictable in structure. One feature of
romance novels which is unusual even among category novels
is the perception that their authors are not professional
writers of other genres who have tried their hands at
romances, but readers of romances, housewives, who have sat
8 8 L e a v is 27.
102]
down at the typewriter one day and banged out their own
composit ions:
It was while we were on the road that I
finally found time to catch up on my reading. I
began buying Harlequin Romances because they gave
me a positive feeling when I was done with them.
I felt a complete identification with the books
and knew there was a natural link. Then I kept
coming up with ideas for plots until I was
convinced I could write them...I began to talk
nonstop until my husband Bill, who has no
patience with words that aren't backed by action,
finally said, 'Okay, then get off your duff and
do it.'
I stayed at the typewriter for six months and
when the first story, No Quarter Asked, was
finished, I showed it to Bill and asked him what
to do next. His advice: 'Send it to Harlequin.
If you're going to get turned down by somebody,
it ought to be by the best and the biggest.8’
The implication is that any reader could do the same,
had she time free of her responsibilities. Romances are
considered by the people who read them a true reader's
genre, with some readers giving expression to some
consensus shared by all readers of the genre. One such
reader-turned-writer is Janet Dailey, one of the most
prolific writers of romances and consequently among the
most widely read writers in the language.
Janet Dailey's first romance novel appeared in 1976;
since that year she has published 69 category romances,
which have sold over 100 million copies to date. This is
* * Kathryn Falk, "Janet Dailey," Love's Leading Ladies (New
York: Pinnacle Books, 1982) 77, 78. This is a book
which supplies a brief portrait of sixty-six women who
write romances, and a recipe from each of them.
____________________________________103_
some eight times the number of copies of Huek Finn which
have sold since Twain first published the book in 1884.90
Simon and Schuster publishes a Janet Dailey Newsletter, to
keep her readers informed about her activities and latest
books. Janet Dailey may be the best known living writer in
America--except in academia, where she is nearly unknown.
The combined holdings of the libraries of the largest
public and private universities in Los Angeles number over
seven million titles, but include only one book by Janet
Dailey: Silver Wing, Santiaqo Blue, for Poseidon Press,
Dailey's attempt to escape the romance genre. Her category
romance novels, which are read by literally millions of
citizens, simply do not count as literature.
Local Code Fiction
What does Janet Dailey do? Dailey was one of the
first Harlequin writers to use American settings and story
lines for her romances. Early in Dailey's career, her
husband Bill suggested she set a book in each of the fifty
states, a strategy she has employed with imagination and
commitment. The publicity about Dailey tells us that she
and her husband lived in a trailer, travelling around the
country, Bill responsible for researching local color,
’0 Projected on the basis of a 1971 estimate. Robert B.
Downs, Famous American Books (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1971) 163-171.
104
Janet doing the writing. Her first seven books, all
published in 1976, are set in Texas, Nebraska, Texas again,
California, New Mexico, Iowa, and Colorado. Her eighth,
published in hardcover in 1976 and paperback the following
January, is set in Alabama.51 In that book, Dangerous
Masquerade, we meet Laurie Evans, 21, orphaned at seven,
raised by the parents of her cousin LaRaine who is
everything Laurie is not: Laurie thinks of her from moment
to moment as "stunningly sensuous," "demanding,"
"captivating”--and "calculating." LaRaine has black hair
and brown eyes, and is notoriously inept with an iron.
Laurie has black hair and blue eyes, and has invested her
father's legacy in a secretarial skills course. LaRaine
manages to secure an engagement to -Rian Montgomery, a sexy
millionaire with black hair, black eyes and expertly
tailored clothes. To seal the engagement, LaRaine must
visit his Aunt Vera in Alabama; at the same time, she is
offered a part in a movie. Unable to put off either one,
LaRaine talks Laurie into taking her place in Mobile, where
Laurie quickly grows close to Aunt Vera. Rian's surprise
appearance changes things dramatically— he breaks off with
LaRaine and wants to continue the pretended engagement to
Laurie. She is drawn to him sexually and soon discovers
Janet Dailey, Danqerous Masquerade (Toronto: Harlequin,
1977).
____________________.105
she loves him; but his "denunciation of love" makes their
union intolerable. She runs away; he finds her, confesses
his love, and she reciprocates.
"Transportation" is provided by details of
Mobile--which, we learn, is the original American home of
the Mardi Gras. Laurie is taken to the carnival, to a
Mardi Gras Ball, and for a tour of the old French Fort on
Dauphin Island, where the King of France delivered a
boatload of women to be married to his stationed troops,
anticipating the central conflict of the book. The syntax
is not simple but unsophisticated, with adverbs and
adjectives doing most of the work. Certain information is
repeatedly given: many synonyms for "blue" are supplied,
though "sapphire" and "cerulean" dominate the descriptions
of Laurie’s eyes. Much attention is devoted to clothing,
and LaRaine's scarlet luggage seems to mark Laurie to
herself whenever she notices it.
Romance depends, of course, on character, and the
characterization begins immediately. The book opens with
Laurie in a taxicab, intimidated by the driver into
increasing the tip, anxious not to be late for her cousin
LaRaine. Most of the characterization is done by contrast:
Laurie is neat whereas LaRaine is sloppy, Laurie is timid
and accommodating whereas LaRaine is dramatic and
demanding, Laurie will only marry for love whereas LaRaine
will marry for other considerations.
106
The principal conflict is from the outset a matter of
values: LaRaine chooses to marry a man she does not love,
calculates how to win him, and accepts expensive presents,
directly from his hand or left for her with her cousin; but
Laurie is unwilling accept the gift left for LaRaine:
Laurie knew she would have wanted to receive
the gift directly from the giver, especially
something as expensive as that bracelet, which
considering the cost, she would probably have
refused.5 2
LaRaine dreams up the plot to deceive Rian's Aunt
Vera, but Laurie is full of guilt and on several occasions
is close to confessing the masquerade. We have Rian's word
that LaRaine is an "experienced" woman, but Laurie
considers herself "something of a prude when it came to the
so-called 'free love'" (116). Though very restrained
compared to the explicitness of similar books over the next
few years, Danqerous Masquerade is full of sexual
encounters. Laurie discovers, scene by scene, that the
ideal husband need not be "tender and gentle"— he can be
"arrogant," "demanding," "mocking," even "cruel," if he is
sexually exciting and willing to admit that he loves her.
The second half of the book is almost wholly concerned with
this discovery. The underlying value expressed by the book
is this: whereas LaRaine and Rian were to marry for
convenience, or money and prestige on her side, and a
92 Dailey, Masquerade 14.
_______________________ 107
presentable spouse on his, Laurie will marry Rian only if
he loves her, despite the fact that she knows she certainly
loves him. Even sex, finally, is not enough. When this
value is affirmed by Rian as well as Laurie, we have
arrived at the happy ending, and there is no reason for
Dailey to stick around for the wedding.
Two years and 25 books later, Dailey introduces us to
Lacey Andrews, heroine of Tidewater Lover, a secretary in a
construction company with short, silky, brown hair and
brown eyes. Like Laurie, Lacey is at first characterized
by contrasting her with her cousin Margo, portrayed as
chattier, less professional than Lacey, whose competence
and loyalty to her company are emphasized. The scene is
Virginia Beach: a misunderstanding results in an agreement
between Laurie and a man name Cole Whitfield to share a
house for ten days. Cole is unlike Rian Montgomery in that
Cole has blue eyes ("indigo") where Rian's were black, but
in most other respects they resemble one another: each is
depicted as arrogant, frequently "mocking," a man
accustomed to having his way, whose very presence exerts a
powerful sexual influence over the heroine of his
attention. In the earlier book, Rian is set off, to so
speak, by another man, a blond "god" who is kind and
patient with the heroine but lacks head-spinning sexual
appeal; in the later book, this role is played by two men,
1 08
blond god and kind soul having been separated. Both
heroines choose demanding, black-haired men with sex appeal
rather than kind souls. And both must struggle with their
lovers for the kind of acceptance they value.
A struggle similar to that between Laurie and Rian
takes up most of Tidewater Lover: Cole wants to make love
to Lacey, and, despite her strong desire to acquiesce, she
refuses him. The sexual revolution has influenced the
genre to the point that Lacey acknowledges "Spending a
night with a man in today’s society doesn't put a scarlet
stain on a girl anymore," when she is mistaken for Cole's
lover’3 but not to the point that Lacey is willing to
become his lover, or as she calls it, his "playmate."
Dailey does not frame the conflict as a question of sex
before marriage, but as a question of sex without love:
when, towards the end of the book, Lacey threatens to move
out, Cole replies,
"I thought I’d made it plain that was what I'd
wanted all along."
Lacey paled slightly. "I had the impression
you’d changed your mind," she retorted.
There was an unfriendly gleam of mockery in
his gaze. "Because I had a desire to make love
to you?" he replied. "For God's sake, Lacey,
you're an attractive woman, intelligent and easy
to be with, as well as having a passionate
nature. Any man in my situation would want to
make love to you, given the- opportunity."
"I see,” Lacey murmured stiffly.
’3 Janet Dailey, Tidewater Lover (Toronto: Harlequin, 1979)
59.
109
If she had asked him outright whether or not
he felt any serious affection towards her, she
couldn't have received a more explicit answer.
The passes he had made at her had been strictly
that— just passes.’4
It is this discovery that sends Lacey running from the
house at Virginia Beach. When Cole finds and confronts
her, she tells him, "I'm not interested in taking on a
lover at the present time." The implication is that she
might consider "taking on" a lover at another time; but
what we know of Lacey causes us to doubt it. In some
senses she expresses values she herself considers modern:
she lets Cole do the dishes (once), plans to keep her job
after she marries, and tells Cole, "I'm not a prude" (78);
but also discovers that "I'm a bit more old-fashioned and
traditional than I thought" (76).
In Danqerous Masquerade, Rian wants to marry Laurie
"for convenience," that is, without love, and Laurie
struggles to make him admit he loves her; In Tidewater
Lover, Cole wants to sleep with Lacey (again for
convenience--she's in the house), and Lacey struggles to
make him admit he loves her as well. Both women resolve
their conflicts by running away from their lovers and
hiding. When the men find them, each admits he cannot live
without the heroine of his novel. This revelation affirms
the heroine's decision to stand by her principles; and, in
94 Janet Dailey, Tidewater 154.
110
Tidewater Lover, there is an old woman on the beach who
explicitly endorses the values implied by the lovers'
reunion.
We can find in this novel more clearly than the
earlier one the theme of seduction, which Leslie Fiedler
has traced to the origin of the novel, Richardson's Pamela
and Clarissa, and has associated with class struggle in
eighteenth-century England.’5 But twenty million
contemporary readers are not buying hundreds of millions of
romance novels to find a parable of class struggle two
hundred years old; Fiedler suggests that the Seduction
theme represents a prototypical- construct of the American
imagination. Fiedler sees Pamela as the comedy of
seduction, and Clarissa as the tragedy of seduction,
because the seducer fails in the former novel and succeeds
in the latter. Category romance novels, however, see
little comedy in the seducer's failure. Instead, the
seducer's redemption, the heroine's ability to win him over
to what Fiedler calls "the love religion," comprises the
principal struggle of these books. If the theme of
seduction is indeed an archetype of the American
imagination, it is so because it instantiates in narrative
form a value which is evidently very much alive in the
’5 Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel,
Revised Edition (New York; Stein and Day” 1966) 39-73.
111
belief systems of a large number of contemporary readers.
The code of local literacy facilitates the affirmation of
such shared values. If we assume that romance novels
require their readers to have acquired only the code of
local literacy, we can, understand why the theme of
seduction is so consistently used to focus on values.
Category romances unequivocally affirm the values of their
heroines and their readers, and in so doing, attract an
enormous readership.
Janet Dailey's success represents a publishing
phenomenon, but it should not be seen as anomalous. Dailey
is not, for example, the most prolific writer of romance
novels: Barbara Cartland published over 50 titles in 1981
and 1982 alone; she has been writing steadily since the
late 1950’s. And one publisher suggests that Rosemary
Rogers, whose Sweet Savage Love heralded a generation of
sexually explicit historical romances, may soon be closing
in on Dailey's sales revenues.
As the values of the readers for whom she writes have
changed, so have the situations and morals of her
characters. In a recent issue of Publisher's Weekly Ms.
Dailey describes what has and has not changed:
My first Harlequin, No Quarter Asked, which
hit the stands in January 1976, had a spirited
virginal heroine, a handsome, arrogant hero, some
conflict, a few kisses and a happy
ending— nothing even vaguely controversial. In
my last category romance, Leftover Love,
112
published in February 1984, the sexually
experienced heroine was searching for her natural
mother, fell in love with an ugly, vulnerable
hero, became pregnant, was initially rejected by
her natural mother, but— yes, there was a happy
ending...A writer today is pretty well free to do
what she— or he— wants to do in a story as long
as it is a positive tale with the requisite happy
ending.* *
The requisite happy ending is the tip-off to the
interpretive code culturing her readers' expectations. The
happy ending vindicates the heroine' point of view, and the
values that have shaped it. Romance heroines do not
question their values--they stand by them, and their
steadfastness is rewarded. Romance novels no longer deal
in what Fiedler calls the tragedy of seduction--as social
mores have shifted, premarital sex per se no longer leads
inevitably to the street. Romances, however, continue to
affirm the values their readers share. There are different
kinds of romance novels, distinguished by the publisher as
different "lines," with variations on the set of social
mores each affirms.
Category romance novels in their present form first
appeared in London in 1907, under the imprint of the Mills
& Boon publishing company. In 1957 a Canadian publisher,
Harlequin, began reprinting and distributing Mills & Boon
stories, until, in 1972, they bought the British firm. The
’* "The View From Janet Daily," Publisher’s Weekly, 226
(August 1984): 54, columns 1-2.
113
original Harlequin Romance and Harlequin Presents lines
featured "trembling 18-year-old virgins," according to one
editor, and were sold in the United States by Simon and
Schuster, who, when Harlequin decided to handle their own
distribution, introduced a new line, Silhouette, with books
written by Harlequin's two American authors, Janet Dailey
and Sondra Stanford. The competition between Harlequin and
Silhouette opened the field to other American publishers,
who made their presence known by raising the temperature of
their heroines: the Dell publishing company created a line
called Candlelight Ecstasy, offering "sensual content,
modern American heroines, and more realistic stories";
Silhouette countered with Special Edition, promising
"explicit sexuality and good taste." The Second Chance at
Love line advertised "a contemporary love story with
spice"; Silhouette answered with its Desire line, according
to one executive "just as far sexually as a brand name
romance product can go." Harlequin responded with a line
called Harlequin American Romances, Bantam followed with
Loveswept, Silhouette with Intimate Moments, and many other
companies followed suit. But sex was not sufficient to
make a line popular. Avon offered a series in 1983 called
Finding Mr. Right:
Finding Mr. Right would address the
situation of a woman with more than one choice of
lovers. The brand survived for less than a year.
Traditional American values, first tapped by
______________________________ 11.4_
Harlequin, would prevail, no matter how steamy
the sex. ’7
This, of course, is precisely what our theory would
lead us to predict: the code of local literacy prepares
readers for a literature which affirms their social values.
We can see how those values shifted in America during the
1970's by the behavior of acceptable heroines, whose
acceptability to their readers can be gauged by a glance at
their sales. Since the time of Mills & Boon, the
predictability of the category romances allowed a marketing
strategy based on company name; after the split between
Harlequin and Simon and Schuster in 1978, and the emergence
of Silhouette and other competitors, author’s name became
the principal drawing card. We can judge the acceptability
of the values affirmed by the popularity of an author and
her line.
The study of literature was first justified in the
university as a means of gaining insight into the thought
prevalent at different moments in English history.’8 Our
usual window on an era, the books which have been admitted
to the canon of English studies, tend to question the
values of the time in an effort to clarify them, or point
57 Vivien Lee Jennings, "The Romance Wars," Publisher’s
Weekly, 226 (August 1984): 52.
’8 D.J. Palmer, The Rise of Enqlish Studies (London: Oxford
UP, 1965) 26.
115
to discrepancies between proclaimed mores and observed
behavior. But the dependence of popular literature on the
code of local literacy ensures that the values represented
in such works are those a great many people recognized as
their own.
Some work has been done in English departments along
these lines, under the aegis of American Studies, reading
the popular literature of earlier historical epochs in an
effort to understand the values such literature affirmed.
In Prodigals and PiIqrims, Jay Fliegelman of Stanford
University shows how the popular ("sentimental") novels of
the Revolutionary period focused attention on the proper
relationship between parent and child, extolling the
virtues of independence in children and, by extension,
nations. Fliegelman discusses two novels of that period,
both critical of parental tyranny, which
implicitly call for a new kind of familial
relationship that would accommodate the new
valuation of personal liberty rather than be
sacrificed to it. Those volumes that most
effectively answered that call, some famous and
some now forgotten, became in almost every
instance the bestsellers of their age and gave
dramatic and rhetorical form to an ideology whose
political implications were soon to become
clear.9’
** Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilqrims (Cambridqe:
Cambridge UP, 1982) 38.
116
The bestsellers of 1775 included Robinson Crusoe, but
also included John Gregory's A Father's Legacy to His
Daughters, a work Fliegelman considers "completely without
literary merit" (p. 44), whose attraction was its "theme"
(advising young girls to restrain the tyranny of their
charm), or in the usage of our present analysis, the values
it promulgated.
Gregory's works had no less than eight
American editions between the years 1775 and
1782. Few other titles, if any, achieved
equivalent wartime success. The tender
solicitude of a dying parent for the future
welfare of his children and his commitment to
preparing them for the world rather than keeping
them from it, undoubtedly moved those American
readers who were, at that moment, anxiously
embracing their independence without the benefit
of such a legacy as Gregory's.100
Fliegelman discusses The Vicar of Wakefield, Fielding,
and Sterne, but also Marmontel's Contes Moraux (Moral
Tales), translations of which were reprinted in British
periodicals with "unprecedented frequency" between 1765 and
1800, and quotes Robert Mayo’s judgment that the popularity
of Marmontel at the time represents "the single most
extraordinary phenomenon in the realm of magazine fiction
in translation, although the Contes Moraux have received
only slight attention from modern historians of the
novel."101
100 Fliegelman 50-51.
101 Fliegelman's citation is to Robert Mayo, The English
117
Analyses such as Fliegelman's usually focus on texts
which have been admitted to the English canon, as if the
significance of such studies depended on the illumination
they afford readers of the texts, rather than students of
the society in which those texts were written.
Fliegelman's use of popular literature is selective and
well documented, integrated into the rest of his book, and
his evident scholarship validates his use of such texts.
In general, English departments look askance at this sort
of work, uncertain how to categorize it but clearly marking
off the books such work considers from those studied as
literature. The theory of codes suggests why this might be
the case: to count as literature in the academy, a text
must be relatively inaccessible to someone who has acquired
only local literacy. Relatively accessible texts are
treated by people who have acquired collegiate literacy as
well as if they were relatively inaccessible texts.
The one true advocate of the modern popular novel is
of course Leslie Fiedler, whose What Was Literature?
effaces the indelible line between books required in
English classes and those such as Charlotte Temple, Uncle
Tom's Cabin, and Gone With the Wind, enjoyed by a large,
nonprofessional audience. Fiedler points out that required
Novel in the Magazines, 1740-1815 (Evanston: Northwest
UP, 1962) 376.
118
writers such as Poe and Melville sought commercial success
only to have it elude them; that literature and lucre, in
America at least, have always been intertwined.10* Fiedler
distinguishes mythos from logos, the power of a story to
move an audience from the form of its expression in
language, and holds the two separable, so that stories
capable of moving mass audiences need not be finely wrought
works of literature. As a "vestigial Freudian," Fiedler
focuses on the power of popular books to express, as all
myths and communal dreams do, the repressed, anti-social
urges of their readers. This power, Fiedler believes,
deserves our attention, and our respect. His argument
justifies critical interest in popular literature on the
basis of its similarity to the more prestigious kind: his
defense of superhero comic .books, for example, as valuable
because cathartic, represents an attempt to extend the
known virtues of canonical literature to a less acceptable
kind. This similarity points both ways:
Yet an examination of works which we
consider lowbrow or vulgar in our own time can
reveal to us something of which we may remain
otherwise unaware in what we have come to treat
as "classics." Such honored works as Sophocles'
Oedipus Rex, Euripides' Medea, Shakespeare's
Henry IV and Macbeth, we thus realize, have
persisted not merely because they instruct us
morally or delight us with their formal
felicities, but because they allow us, in waking
101 What Was Literature? Class, Culture, and Mass Society
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982) 23-34.
__________________________________________________________________________11.9...
reverie, to murder our fathers and marry our
mothers with Oedipus; to kill a king with the
Macbeths, or our own children with Medea; to lie,
steal, cheat, deceive and run away from a
justified and necessary war with Falstaff— and to
glory in it.10 3
Popular literature is like the acceptable kind, and
highbrow literature depends on the same vicarious pleasures
as the lowbrow variety--this is the crux of Fiedler's
apology. In justifying the study (and praise) of popular
literature, Fiedler de-emphasizes the differences between
them: that popular books allow expression of anti-social
pleasures which are normally repressed by social mores,
only to affirm those mores ultimately; while literature
that demands other codes of literacy allows a similar
expression but also allows those mores, or their
observation, to fall into a problematic light, to be
questioned, and often undermined. Fiedler believes popular
books should be appreciated because they do something like
books required in school; our application of
sociolinguistic codes to literacy suggests they should be
studied because they do something different, which in
itself can tell us something about the practice of literacy
in our society.
Fiedler, What Was Literature? 50.
120
Fiedler has cut the generic deck differently--the
popular novels of interest to him are best sellers such as
Gone With the Wind which have been excluded from the canon
of English department study. In contrast, category
romances, like other books which rely primarily on local
literacy, only occasionally find their way to the
best-seller list individually, though we have seen how wide
a collective readership they share. The books Fiedler
d scusses rely on more than one code for interpretation,
mixing elements of both; but, even so, he traces in the
rise of the novel one of the elements we have identified
with local literacy. Fiedler's observation carries forward
his claim in Love and Death in the American Novel, that the
novel, an art form of the emerging bourgeoisie, competed
with poetry, an art form of the declining aristocracy, when
the novel first appeared on the scene; and that the novel
scrambled pre-existing critical distinctions relevant to
poetry, including the divide between literacy and
illiteracy:
Like (comic books, cinema, TV) the novel is
an art form which tends to make the classic
distinction between literacy and illiteracy
meaningless--or at least challenges it in ways
disconcerting to traditional humanists; for it is
a product both of the Industrial Revolution and
of the political shifts in power which have
replaced class-structured societies by one
version or another of the mass society.
He points out that in such societies,
121
(which have destroyed the myth of class,
however strongly analogous distinctions persist
in fact) it seems possible and desirable to
mass-produce forms of narrative not only for
proper literates, but for quasi literates as
well, i.e., for those who have acquired the
mechanical skills of reading without being
inducted into the elite culture which was their
original context.104
Fiedler is here thinking of classical culture, which
provided the genres of epic, lyric, verse tragedy and
comedy, as the original context of literacy. The novel is
the form of literature accessible to those who have not
enjoyed a classical education. The emerging bourgeois
class hired experts in etiquette to tell them which fork to
use, and in criticism to distinguish the good books from
the bad. This advice is not always taken. Expert critics
require special training: to Fiedler, this is a question
of information, of experience with literature, rather than
orientation; but we can see how neatly his speculation
anticipates our thesis. The present study has not tried to
correlate local literacy with the wide range of popular
fiction; we have been speaking of romance novels, and
category romances at that. But we are clearly with Fiedler
when we find in some novels an opportunity for readers who
have acquired only local literacy to enjoy what literature
can offer.
104 Fiedler, What Was Literature? 53.
122
Today, Harlequin owns the Silhouette line, and both
are owned by Torstar, publisher of the Toronto Star♦
According to Harlequin publicity, their romances are read
in 90 countries, by 200 million readers, speaking 15
languages; of romance readers in general, 40% are
university-educated, 40% are employed full-time, and 40%
read one romance book every other day. "If all the
Harlequin books sold in a single day were stacked one on
top of another, the pile would be 16 times as high as New
York's World Trade Center. If placed end to end, Harlequin
books sold last year could run along both banks of the
Nile, both banks of the Amazon, and one bank of the Rio
Grande.10 5
All of these books are purchased and read by women.
The closest equivalent to the romance novel for male
readers is probably the Western, providing transportation
to a simpler time, when traditional male values of
self-determination and personal heroism are enacted,
unencumbered by the qualifying complexity of contemporary
life. I shall not examine the genre further than to point
out once again the popularity of such books, especially
when compared with the readership of books which require
collegiate literacy: Louis Lamour alone has sold over 145
10s Press kit available from Katherine Orr, Public
Relations Director for Harlequin, thanks to her
assistant, Laurie McGregor.
123
million copies of his 88 western novels.104 Writers of
westerns are no less prolific than their colleagues writing
category romances. Frederick Schiller Faust, better known
as Max Brand, has published a western every six months
since the 1930's, and will continue to do so through the
end of the century— and Mr. Faust has been dead since 1945.
I have dwelt on these sales figures at such length
because to my mind they indicate with undeniable
significance the character of literacy in our own culture.
It is sometimes said that Americans do not read books? from
these figures it is clear that a great many books are being
read, a great deal of reading is going on--but the books
which are read often do not count as literature, and the
reading does not count as "reading." While it seems to be
the case that most Americans do not read what professors of
English would have them read, they are certainly reading
something else. To dismiss these books as "trash" is to
say nothing useful; we must ask what makes this kind of
writing count as trash. To imply that millions of readers
choose these books because they are ignorant is to say
nothing at all, unless we can answer the question such a
comment immediately prompts: what are they ignorant of? We
can discover bits and pieces of information one needs to
read works of literature: vocabulary, genre conventions,
106 People Weekly 22 (July 23, 1984): 55.
124
world knowledge, perhaps some metatheory, but all of these
pieces are useful only after one has acquired an
orientation towards a text that facilitates the exploration
of individual models of experience. This orientation
Bernstein has labeled a "code," and all of these other bits
of knowledge--like the list of conventions George Dillon
has identified for expository prose--are acquired in an
effort to express that orientation. I have used the term
"collegiate literacy" to include both the elaborated
orientation and the learned conventions and linguistic
structures necessary to use it in writing. It is the
contention of this study that category novels appeal to
people who have not acquired the elaborated orientation
necessary for collegiate literacy— and at times to people
who have. What is significant is that these books require
only the code of local literacy to render a coherent
interpretation.
Collegiate Fiction
We can best understand local literacy, in terms of
which romances and Westerns are expected to be read, in
contrast with the next most widely acquired interpretive
code. What do books which rely on collegiate literacy do?
Collegiate literacy, we recall, emphasizes models of
experience, differences between the individual point of
______________ 125
view and that of the larger social group. Collegiate
literates are of course reading and writing within some
social context, and it could be argued that by delineating
points of disagreement with the larger social group,
collegiate literates affirm the values of their subgroup.
That is precisely the point--collegiate literacy, and the
elaborated code on which it depends, focuses on individual
differences of opinion but maintains the coherence of the
interpretive community created by the code itself. The
literature of collegiate literacy should consist of books
which provide self-contained models of experience, critical
of the values of the larger society. Since the code
presents each instance of discourse as rhetorically
independent of interpretive context, collegiate literature
should rely for interpretation on genre conventions with
relatively little intertextual dependency.
If we look at the syllabi of courses in Twentieth
Century literature designed for college undergraduates,107
we find books by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Conrad, Faulkner,
and Joyce (Portrait of the Artist or DubIiners.) Sometimes
Virginia Woolf or D.H. Lawrence are added, and some
contemporary favorites of the instructor. Hemingway and
Fitzgerald, of course, are ideal--always popular with
107 As I have done, in the General Education Office files
at USC.
126
undergraduates, and comprehensible without help. It may be
that those two attributes are related. Of Hemingway, the
stories, A Farewell to Arms, and The Sun Also Rises appear
on syllabus after syllabus, year after year. Hemingway's
tight-lipped ethos and familiar references to European
locales comprise the archetypical collegiate text,
advancing a point of view of resolute individuality in a
world devoid of meaningful social consensus. Of
Fitzgerald, it is always The Great Gatsby: a valley of
ashes presided over by a spectacled billboard, Gatsby's
shirts, Daisy's laugh like money, the green light at the
end of the pier--put them together and you have a neat
little structure, a model of experience, properly critical
of the social order but from a position inside.
Of course, Hemingway writes loves stories, and those
stories are also concerned with values. But we do not need
to look beyond the unhappy endings of A Farewell to Arms or
The Suns Also Rises to discover how problematically those
values are treated. In the latter book, we are presented
early on with the contrast between Jake's tight-lipped
acceptance of his own cruel fate, loved by the most
desirable woman in Paris but unable' to have her, and Robert
Cohn's self-important ethos--sometimes self-pitying,
sometimes self-aggrandizing, but apparently unaware that
"One generation passeth away and another
generation cometh; but the earth abideth
___________________ 127
forever...the sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth
down, and hasteth to the place where he
arose.. ."10 8
Despite the generally low esteem in which Cohn's
sentimentality is held, there is an ambivalence in Jake's
attitude towards him that surfaces from time to time. When
Cohn discovers that Brett has gone with Pedro Romero, he
accuses Jake of pimping, punches him in the jaw, beats up
Romero, and breaks down in tears— none of which Jake can
stomach. But Jake can identify with the desire that lies
behind Cohn's extravagance, and the pain when that desire
is frustrated. In an earlier scene, Jake watches Brett
drive off from his flat in Count Mippipopolous's limousine:
This was Brett, that I had felt like crying
about. Then I thought of her walking up the
street and stepping into the car, as I had last
seen her, and of course in a little while I felt
like hell again. It is awfully easy to be
hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but
at night it is another thing.10’
The values of Jake's crowd in Pamplona are contrasted
with those associated with the bullfight, Pedro Romero, and
the hotelkeeper Montoya. As soon as Brett manages to
seduce Romero, Jake’s friends are thrown out of the Bar
Milano. When they check out of their hotel, Montoya will
not come near them. It is Brett's ability to give up
108 Epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, attributed to
Ecclesiastes.
105 The Sun Also Ri ses, (New York: Scribner's, 1970) 34.
128,
Romero that salvages for her what grace she can get:
"You know it makes one feel rather good
deciding not to be a bitch.”
"Yes."
"It's sort of what we have instead of God."110
Even this rather modest ethos is questioned when Jake
and Brett find themselves once again in each other's arms,
in a taxi in San Sebastian, still unable to love one
another. The last time we have seen them in a taxi they
were in Paris, trading protestations of love. The action
of the book has led Jake to see those protestations as
perhaps necessary illusions:
"Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had
such a damned good time together."
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki
directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car
slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.
"Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think
so?"111
This is the best we can hope for, Hemingway seems to
say: an individual acceptance of the limitations each of us
carry with us. Jake no longer thinks about his impotence,
or the teleological status of the universe in which he was
injured. Shouldering one's individual burden without
complaining or otherwise imposing that weight on
others--that is the ethos advanced by the book, a model of
experience which emphasizes the isolation of the individual
110 Hemingway 245.
111 Hemingway 247.
from the social group among whom he or she lives. It is
not so much the content as the form of the model which
identifies it as a product of the interpretive code of
collegiate literacy--an individual reconciliation of desire
and experience, an ethos which is not presumed to be shared
by writer and reader, but developed and established in the
text itself, growing out of the protagonist's ambivalence
about the values with which he is confronted. We are led
to understand that each person arrives at such a
reconciliation in the privacy of his or her own
consciousness; received norms of the society have very
little to contribute. The book builds up this individual
model in increments of brief scenes, a few lines at a time,
the sensibility of the whole emerging as a product of the
elements of which it is composed.
We can, of course, read these books from another point
of view— more sophisticated than that of collegiate
literacy, cognizant of the dependence of a text on the work
it follows. We can read The Sun Also Rises against The
Wasteland, recognizing Eliot's Smyrna merchant Mr.
Eugenides in Hemingway's Count Mippipopolous, and spotting
the Eliotic Fisher King on the bank of the Irati River at
Burguete, where Jake and Bill Gorton fish, lunch on chicken
and wine, and fall asleep, dreaming of the Church; Jake's
disability is the infirmity of The Wasteland, and his
130
cleansing swim at San Sebastian clearly intended to evoke
the nexus of death-and-rebirth-by-water agricultural ritual
described in Jesse Weston’s book. But we don't have to:
the reader need not know The Wasteland to make sense of The
Sun Also Rises. The greater the number of literacies a
reader can bring to bear on a text, the more she will get
out of it; our present discussion concerns the minimum
literacy a reader must have acquired to render a coherent
interpretation of a text. Romance novels, as a rule,
require only local literacy; Hemingway and Fitzgerald
require collegiate literacy; many texts require more.
One difference we have seen between the literature of
local literacy and the literature of collegiate literacy
concerns the writer's relationship to the values of the
larger social group, the society in which writer and reader
are presumed to live. Local literacy texts seem to affirm
the values of that society, and collegiate literacy texts
seem to participate in those values but are in some way
problematic, calling into question the mores by which
people live. Social values are notoriously difficult to
identify: are we speaking of values professed or practiced?
It could be argued that writers of collegiate texts take
issue not with societal values but with the lack of
observance of those values, in order to affirm the values
themselves. This is clearly often the case, but it is not
____________ 131
an objection to our analysis: unlike writers of texts that
depend for interpretation upon the code of local literacy,
writers of collegiate texts must differentiate their own
points of view from the beliefs, expressed or implicit in
behavior, of the larger social group.
This is in fact presumed in the study of literature,
but why that should be the case is rarely considered. We
can see the usefulness of questioning in literature
assumptions which go too often unexamined, but there is
clearly an audience who find pleasure in the affirmation of
shared social consensus. These are sometimes the same
people, reading one sort of book for one sort of pleasure,
and another sort for a different pleasure. The values of
one of these literatures--structural complexity, point of
view, the critique of society--have been recognized and
studied by literary scholars for decades. It has
occasionally been conceded that another literature exists,
written by "female scribblers" as Hawthorne called them.
What goes unacknowledged is the proximity of the two and
the shift of orientation in switching from one code of
literacy to another.
Yet it is not enough to demonstrate that two codes
exist, each with its recognizable orientation. To do so
would seem to imply that they have sprung into existence
directly from our foreheads, and without our noticing their
132
birth. We must also be able to account for their
development as intellectual tools. Where did the
orientations which differentiate the codes of literacy come
from? When did they originate? How have they escaped the
scrutiny of disciplines whose concerns would seem to be
relevant?
The answer is that they have not escaped such
scrutiny, but to identify the line of their development, we
must again pick up the trail at another point.
133
Chapter IV
COLLEGIATE LITERACY AND THE GREAT COGNITIVE
DEBATE
In a book organized as a concert and dedicated to
music, the French anthropologist Claude L^vi-Strauss begins
his Introduction to the Science of Mythology with an
Overture that sets forth his purpose:
The aim of this book is to show how
empirical categories— such as the categories -of
the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the
decayed, the moistened and the burned, etc.,
which can only be accurately defined by
ethnographic observation and, in each instance,
by adopting the standpoint of a particular
culture--can nonetheless be used as conceptual
tools with which to elaborate abstract ideas and
combine them in the form of propositions...I
intend to carry out an experiment which, should
it prove successful, will be of universal
significance, since I expect to prove that there
is a kind of logic in tangible qualities, and to
demonstrate the operation of that logic and
reveal its laws.212
The experiment has not proved of universal
significance, but it is an interesting book, tracing a
particular myth of the Bororo Indians of Brazil through
many variations, attempting to identify the structural
112 The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen
Weightman ("New York: Harper & Row, 1969) 1. First
published as Le Cru et le Cuit, (Paris: Libraire Plon,
1964).
. 1 .3 .4 J
elements which comprise it. These structural elements are
relations between signs, systems of contrasts, which mark
off recognized clans, customs, and in fact any culturally
acknowledged continuities and distinctions. For example,
Levi-Strauss reduces a series of origin myths with common
themes to a syllogism in which excessive family relations
(such as rape and incest) disturb the link between earth
and heaven, life and death, which is re-established thanks
to the mediation of the agent whose origin the myth
explains (62-63). Levi-Strauss identifies the mediating
agent of his "key" myth (because of its position in a cycle
of myths) as the cooking of food, the "good fire" which
keeps sky and earth in proper relation, and develops a
distinction between the categories of the "raw" ana the
"cooked," "or between nature and culture, the two contrasts
being readily confused in linguistic usage" (335).
Levi-Strauss' analysis of some 180 examples leads him to
look upon a myth as a matrix of meanings which refer to
other myths, other matrices. The limitation of such an
analysis is that it seems finally to point only to itself.
In order to justify the Structuralist enterprise in
anthropology, to give some significance to the charting of
signifiers and their transformations, some referent outside
the system must be included--discovered, debunked, somehow
illuminated. Levi-Strauss argues that from the system of
______________________________________________________ 135
meanings he has delineated, a picture of the primitive mind
emerges:
And if it is now asked to what final meaning
these mutually significant meanings are
referring--since in the last resort and in their
totality they must refer to something--the only
reply to emerge from this study is that myths
signify the mind that evolves them by making use
of the world of which it itself a part.113
Levi-Strauss gives us a better picture of that mind in
another volume, La Pensee Sauvage (The Savage Mind),
published two years before Le^ Cru et l_e Cuit. In the
earlier book, Levi-Strauss argues that the accomplishments
of the Neolithic epoch--pottery, weaving, agriculture, and
the domestication of animals--required systematic inquiry,
which he finds is also present among a great variety of
primitive people living today. Neolithic man inherited a
long tradition of empirical research and discoveries.
However, had he, as well as all his
predecessors, been inspired by exactly the same
spirit as that of our own time, it would be
impossible to understand how he could have come
to a halt and how several thousand years of
stagnation have intervened between the neolithic
revolution and modern science like a level plain
between ascents. There is only one solution to
the paradox, namely, that there are two distinct
modes of scientific thought.114
113 Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked 340-341.
1 1
4 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago:
University^of Chicago Press, 1966) 15. First published
as La Pensee Sauvage (Paris: Libraire Plon, 1962).
136
L^vi-Strauss characterizes those two modes of
scientific thought as that of the engineer, or contemporary
scientist, and bricoleur, or primitive scientist, both of
whom begin with a desire for order, categories, and causal
links; both are limited by the previously determined set of
theoretical and practical knowledge available in their
cultures. The difference is that "the engineer is always
trying to make his way out of and go beyond the constraints
imposed by a a particular state of civilization, while the
'bricoleur' by inclination or necessity always remains
within them."115 Their relationship to the immediate social
context is not the only distinction between these modes of
inquiry. The bricoleur engages in "mythical thinking," a
different logic, which picks up bits and pieces of cultural
events and constructs new patterns with them. The elements
of mythical thinking have been used, and are used again,
carrying forward some signification from previous
implementations each time they are invoked. "They are
therefore condensed expressions of necessary relations
which impose constraints with various repercussions at each
stage of their employment" (36). This "concrete logic"
establishes different classificatory systems, which, though
different from typical western taxonomies, allow subtle
distinctions among a large number of genera and species, as
115 Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind 19.
137
well as the organization of all natural phenomena. This
concrete logic, which operates with a finite set of
possible classes transformable into each other, has its
advantages, Levi-Strauss suggests, over our own. And he is
careful to make clear that, unlike other writers who
consider magic poor science, he does not view mythical
thinking or bricolage as an earlier form of our abstract
logic:
Magical thought is not to be regarded as a
beginning, a rudiment, a sketch, a part of a
whole which has not yet materialized. It forms a
well-articulated system, and is in this sense
independent of that other system which
constitutes science, except for the purely formal
analogy which brings them together and makes the
former a sort of metaphorical expression of the
latter. It is therefore better, instead of
contrasting magic and science, to compare them as
two parallel modes of acquiring knowledge...These
are certainly not a function of different stages
of development of the human mind but rather of
two strategic levels at which nature is
accessible to scientific enquiry: one roughly
adapted to that of perception and the
imagination: the other at a remove from it.116
Levi-Strauss was led.to focus on the contrast between
primitive and modern thought, and to represent that
contrast as a polar opposition, not only by his
Structuralist orientation, but also by earlier French
anthropology. Forty years before, the French
anthropologist Levy-Bruhl had described how natives think,
by drawing similar binary oppositions:
114 Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind 13, 15.
138
It would be idle to institute any comparison
between the discursive processes of prelogical
mentality and those of our thought, or to look
for any correspondences between the two, for we
should have no grounds on which to base a
hypothesis. We have no a priori reason for
admitting that the same process is used by both.
The discursive operations of our rational
thought— the analysis of which has been made
familiar to us through psychology and
logic--require the existence and the employment
of much that is intricate, in the form of
categories, concepts, and abstract terms. They
also assume an intellectual functioning, properly
so called, that is already well differentiated.
In short, they imply an ensemble of conditions
which we do not find existing anywhere in social
aggregates of a primitive type...The conditions
under which prelogical mentality operates are
altogether different. There is no doubt that it,
too, is transmitted socially by means of language
and concepts without which it could not be
exercised. It also implies work which has been
previously accomplished, an inheritance handed
down from one generation to another. But these
concepts differ from ours, and consequently the
mental operations are also different.117
The American anthropological tradition opposed this
view. In the Preface to the 1938 edition of The Mind of
Primitive Man, Franz Boas stated flatly, "There is no
fundamental difference in the ways of thinking of primitive
and civilized man."118 In the text, written 27 years
earlier, Boas argues against the position that race is
related to mental capacity, and cites L^vy-Bruhl among
117 Lucien L^vy-Bruhl, How Natives Think (New York: Arno
Press, 1979) 105, 107-8. First published as Les
Fonctions Mentales dans les Soc i€t£s Inferieures
(London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1926.1
118 Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York:
Macmillan, 1938) v.
139
others whose writings do not mention racial differences:
"The similarity of fundamental customs and beliefs the
world over, without regard to race and environment, is so
general that race appeared to them as irrelevant."
However, in pressing his argument against racism, Boas
moves away from Levy-Bruhl and suggests an evolutionary,
which is to say, gradual and non-oppositional, view of the
relationship between primitive and modern thought:
The customs of the South African Negro or of
the Australian are analogous and comparable to
those of the American Indian, and the customs of
our European predecessors find their parallels
among the most diverse peoples. The whole
problem of the development of culture is
therefore reduced to the' study of psychological
and social conditions which are common to mankind
as a whole, and to the effects of historical
happenings and of natural and cultural
envi ronment.11 *
Jack Goody uses precisely this point of view to
undermine the binary oppositions of Levi-Strauss' contrast
between primitive and modern thought. In The Domestication
of the Savage Mind, Goody devotes a few pages early on to a
critique of La Pensee Sauvage, praising Levi-Strauss for
recognizing that primitive minds might be of the calibre of
a Plato or an Einstein, and blaming him for dichotomizing
the hot and the cold, modern and neolithic, history and
atemporality, scientific thought and mythical thought,
scientific knowledge and magical knowledge, engineering and
11 * Boas 33.
140
bricolage, abstract thought and intuition, imagination,
perception.120 Goody's view is evolutionary, a McLuhanesgue
account of the influence of technology on cutural modes of
perception, and he criticizes Levi-Strauss for the bimodal
pattern of differences between wild and domesticated minds
delineated in La Pensie Sauvage. Goody concentrates
instead on developments in the means of communication, "the
technology of the intellect," chief among which (after
language itself) he counts writing.
Literacy versus Orality
Goody's book builds on a paper he co-authored with Ian
Watt in 1963 (the year between publication dates of La
Sauvage Pensee and Le Cru et Le Cuit) titled, "The
Consequences of Literacy," which set forth a list of
conceptual skills fostered by the development of mass
literacy in classical Greece.121 The authors presented
their picture of "the homeostatic organization of the
cultural tradition" of non-literate societies:
The language is developed in intimate
association with the experience of the community
and it is learned by the individual in
face-to-face contact with the other members.
What continues to be social relevance is stored
120 Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind,
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977) 7.
121 Goody, J. and Watt, I.P., "The Consequences of
Literacy," Comparative Studies in History and Society 5
(1963): 304-345.
141
in the memory while the rest is usually
forgotten12 2
Their evidence is supplied by ethnographic studies:
the Tiv of Nigeria alter their genealogies to accommodate
present circumstances, as do the Gonja of Northern Ghana,
remembering only the latest, most useful form; and they
cite Boas' comment that "for the Eskimo, the world has
always been as it is now." This attribution of
ahistoricity is consistent with L^vi-Strauss' description
of savage thought; but Goody and Watt identify literacy as
the crucial technology which allows the development of an
alternative cultural perspective:
The pastness of the past, then, depends upon
a historical sensibility which can hardly begin
to operate without permanent written records; and
writing introduces similar changes in the
transmission of other items of the cultural
repertoi re.12 2
The consequences of literacy in any given social
context will depend on the nature of the writing system;
not until phonetic systems developed, with a single letter
representing a single sound rather than a word or idea, was
the cognitive revolution of classical Athens possible.
Goody and Watt argue for the existence of a popular
literacy in classical Greece, on the basis of written laws
(the practice of ostracism in the Fifth Century required
122 Goody and Watt 315.
123 Goody and Watt 319-320.
142
6,000 signatures to banish a citizen), the Protagoras, and
The Frogs, which allows them to treat the rise of Greek
civilization as "the prime historical example of the
transition to a really literate society" (330). In
comparing Greek thought to its antecedents, Goody and Watt
recognize the similarity of their contrast to the
dichotomized view they are writing to oppose:
Nevertheless, although we must reject any
dichotomy based upon the assumption of radical
differences between the mental attributes of
literate and non-literate peoples, and accept the
view that previous formulations of the
distinction were based on faulty premises and
inadequate evidence, there may still exist
general differences between literate and
non-literate societies somewhat along the lines
suggested by Levy-Bruhl. One reason for their
existence, for instance, may be what has been
described above: the fact that writing
establishes a different kind of relationship
between the word and its referent, a relationship
that is more general and more abstract, and less
closely connected with the particularities of
person, place, or time, than obtains in oral
communication.12 *
Writing, they argue, allows one to look at what has
been held and to decide whether or not to believe it; the
critical and sceptical function Goody and Watt identify as
a consequence of literacy, which brought down the old
myths, and--together with new attitudes towards time and
space similarly attributed to literacy— made possible
historical inquiry. Goody and Watt understand that the
Goody and Watt, p. 331.
143
strong causal argument is difficult to establish, given the
evidence, and instead limit their claim to a temporal
correlation,
suggesting that some crucial features of
Western culture came into being in Greece soon
after the existence, for the first time, of a
rich urban society in which a substantial portion
of the population was able to read and write; and
that, consequently, the overwhelming debt of the
whole of contemporary civilization to classical
Greece must be regarded as in some measure the
result, not so much of the Greek genius, as of
the intrinsic differences between non-literate
(or proto-literate) and literate societies125
Goody and Watt count among the consequences of
literacy democracy (made possible when a large number of
citizens can read the laws), alienation (because no
individual can participate in the totality of his or her
culture, given the as recorded in the vast quantities of
written texts), and logic (the syllogism requiring that
ideas be distinct and separable). In addition, and most
significantly for this study, they include social
stratification as a consequence of literacy, since cultural
transmission in literate societies is carried out by oral
means as well, and access to the literate tradition is not
universally available. Goody and Watt note a tension
between literate and oral subcultures in western societies,
between the schoolroom and the street corner, which they
attribute to the tendency of some people to avoid the
125 Goody and Watt 337-338.
144
literate subculture because of the greater persuasive power
of oral communication and a disjunction they perceive
between the orientation of literate discourse and immediate
personal experience:
The abstractness of the syllogism, for
example, of its very nature disregards the
individual’s social experience and immediate
personal context; and the compartmentalization of
knowledge similarly restricts the kinds of
connections which the individual can establish
and ratify with the natural and social world.126
We recognize these features as elements of a code
distinction from earlier chapters of this study; but the
ability to handle logical syllogisms has played a role in
contemporary ideas about literacy and cognition which needs
to be considered.
The inability of non-literate people to handle logical
syllogisms outside of a practical social context was first
recorded by A .R . Luria, the Soviet psychologist whose
translation of Vygotsky had so impressed Basil Bernstein in
1958. Luria's paper, "Cultural Differences In
Thinking,"127 begins by recounting the debate in the 1920's
over the question of culture and intellectual ability,
which he traces back to Durkheim’s contention that "mind
originates in society." The only evidence available was
126 Goody and Watt 343.
127 A.R. Luria, The Makinq of Mind, eds. Michael Cole and
Sheila Cole (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1979).
145
anecdotes brought back by missionaries and explorers who
had come in contact with exotic cultures in their travels.
Luria and Vygotsky felt the need for hard psychological
data. They chose the hamlets and nomad camps of Uzbekistan
and Khirgizia in the Central Asian territory of the Soviet
Union, which was undergoing rapid change in the 1930's as a
result of collectivization and the mechanization of
agriculture. Five experimental groups were identified,
whose members represented a range of literacy skills.
Group one comprised illiterate women living in remote
villages who were not involved in any modern social
activities; group five comprised students admitted to
teachers' school after two or three years of study. The
other three groups fell in between, representing a range of
exposure to new forms of social relations and the new life
principles accompanying those forms, with a significant
divide between groups three and four. After winning the
confidence of the people who would serve as subjects, Luria
conducted a series of psycholgical tests, in tea houses and
camps in the fields, often in groups where the subject was
included among other commentators.
Subjects from group one, the nonliterate women from
remote villages, identified geometric shapes as objects of
daily experience, rather than as representatives of
geometric categories. They distinguished between similarly
146
colored skeins of yarn by referring to colors they
experienced locally: "the color of grass in spring," "the
color of mulberry leaves in summer," "the color of young
peas." Objects were grouped on the basis of situational
relevance, real-world functional relations, rather than
membership in an abstract or linguistic class:
"Look," we said, "here you have three wheels
and a pair of pliers. Surely, the pliers and the
wheels aren't alike in any way, are they?"
"No, they all fit together. I know the pliers
don’t look like the wheels, but you'll need them
if you have to tighten something in the wheels."
"But you can use one word for the wheels that
you can't for the pliers--isn't that so?"
"Yes, I know that, but you've got to have the
pliers. You can lift iron with them and it's
heavy, you know.''12®
The subjects from the first two groups consistently
interpreted the intellectual tasks set for them in terms of
the realities of their immediate locality. Luria
summarizes his results this way: This tendency to rely on
operations used in practical life was the controlling
factor among uneducated and illiterate subjects. Subjects
whose activities were still dominated by practical labor,
but who had taken some school courses or had attended
training programs for a short time, were inclined to mix
practical and theoretical modes of generalization. The
somewhat more educated group of subjects employed
categorial classification as their method of grouping
128 L u r i a 70.
147
objects even though they had only a year or two of
schooling (71). Other tests produced comparable results.
Luria found on word definition tests that his uneducated
subjects used words not to codify objects into conceptual
schemes, but to establish the practical interrelations
among things--a log was considered a "tool" because "If we
have no wood to use with an ax, we can't plow and we can’t
build a carriage," When subjects had acquired some
education and participated in discussion of social issues,
they readily made the transition to abstract thinking.
Tests which suggested logical syllogisms met with similar
results: "nonliterate subjects often failed to perceive
the logical relation among the parts of the syllogism. For
them, each of the three separate phrases constituted an
isolated judgment." Such subjects were often unable to
repeat the three lines of a syllogism and maintain the
logical implication. Two types of syllogisms were used:
some which used material drawn from the local experience of
the participants, and some which referred to other
localities, requiring purely theoretical conclusions. The
first type drew responses on the basis of personal
experience; many participants refused to answer the second
type at all. Presented with the syllogism, "In the far
north, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya
Zemlya is in the far north. What colors are the bears
148
there?", subjects would answer, "I've never been in the
north and never seen bears," or "If you want an answer to
that question, you should ask people who have been there
and have seen them," or "There are different kinds of
bears. If one is born red, he'll stay that way" (77-78).
In all cases, personal experience, local information,
and immediate context comprised the interpretive frame for
the uneducated subjects, in contrast to the more educated
participants. Luria concludes:
The results from many interviews of this
kind seem particularly clear: the process of
reasoning and deduction associated with immediate
practical experience dominates the responses of
our nonliterate subjects...Although our
nonliterate peasant groups could use logical
relations objectively if they could rely on their
own experience, we can conclude that they had not
acquired the syllogism as a device for making
logical inferences.
As in all of our other research, the picture
changed sharply when we turned our attention to
the educated subjects, who responded to these
logical syllogisms much as we would. They
immediately drew the correct, and to us obvious,
conclusion from each of the syllogisms presented,
regardless of the factual correctness of the
premises or their application to a subject's
immediate experience.129
Luria attributes the difference in ability to handle
decontextualized logical riddles to schooling, rather than
literacy per se but his research has provided essential
data to theorists attempting to show that the transition
from concrete to abstract logical thought is associated
129 L u r ia 7 9 -8 0 .
149
with the acquisition of literacy.
The thesis that writing restructures consciousness was
developed in further detail by Walter Ong, from a
perspective informed by literary study and "the vast,
meticulously worked-out art of rhetoric, the most
comprehensive academic subject in all western culture for
two thousand years."130 Ong distinguished between the
"primary orality" of a culture which has not been
influenced by writing and the "secondary orality" of
cultures such as our own, where telephones, television, and
so on have led to a type of orality which depends upon
literacy in general and "grapholects" in particular,
necessarily literate language variants, such as Standard
English. The contrast between primary orality and literacy
is his chief focus, the effects of "technologizing the
word," including the transition from auditory to visual
perceptual biases, changes in the size of vocabularies, the
role of memory, and the form of story lines and characters
in narratives. Ong shows how different schools of
contemporary criticism reflect the oral-literate shift, and
observes some contrasts which are by now familiar to us:
that orally based thought and expression is additive rather
than subordinative, aggregate rather than analytic,
130 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technology of
the Word (London and New York: Methuen, 1982) §"1
150
participatory rather than distanced, situational rather
than abstract. Ong points to the "pre-emptive" nature of
literacy, ' which compromises our attempts to understand the
orientation of orality: the study of "oral literature" he
compares to trying to understand a horse as a wheel-less
automobile, and he criticizes Levi-Strauss for a
literacy-based analysis of oral thinking: "Bricolaqe is
the literate's term for what he himself would be guilty of
if he produced an oral-styled poem" (165). Ong summarizes
the influence of literacy on consciousness not only as
alienating, the isolation of the individual from the
totality of shared community, but also as
consciousness-raising, helping the individual realize an
articulate knowledge of self:
The highly interiorized stages of
consciousness in which the individual is not so
immersed unconsciously in communal structures are
stages which, it appears, consciousness would
never reach without writing. The interaction
between the orality that all human beings are
born into and the technology of writing, which no
one is born into, touches the depths of the
psyche. Ontogenetically and phylogenetically, it
is the oral word that first illuminates
consciousness with articulate language, that
first divides subject and predicate and then
relates them to one another in society. Writing
introduces division and alienation, but a higher
unity as well. It intensifies the sense of self
and fosters more conscious interaction between
persons.131
Ong 179
151
We might prefer to say "different" rather than
"higher" unity, if we recast Ong's contrast in the terms of
our analysis and compared writers and readers linked by a
shared knowledge of collegiate literacy's elaborated
orientation, with a community enmeshed in the shared values
and details of an immediate social context on which oral
communication and local literacy depend.
Ong draws on the work of Milman Parry, whose The
Makinq of Homeric Verse demonstrated that the distinctive
features of Homeric verse result from the necessary economy
of oral verse performance, formulaic expressions stitched
together for metrical purposes by a poet extemporizing on
commonly-accepted themes,132 and Eric Havelock, whose
Preface to Plato traced the shift in Greek thought from a
predominantly oral cast of mind, which valued formulaic
expressions for their mnemonic value, to a predominantly
literate orientation, which did not need to remember what
it could record, once the Greek alphabet had been
interiorized some 300 years after it had been developed.133
Havelock argues that Plato's antagonism to poets, expressed
in the last book of the Republic, represents a rejection by
the new mode of Greek thinking— abstract, decontextualized,
132 Milman Parry, The Ma k i n q of Homer ic Verse, ed. Adam
Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19717"!
133 Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (1963; Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1982).
152
syllogistic--of an earlier formulaic and participatory mode
embodied in the "psychic poison" of the poet's work.134 The
poets were at the center of the Greek educational system;
Havelock sees the Republic as a critique of (or attack on)
that system to justify the curriculum of the Academy; the
essential fault of the system is that it promotes an
earlier cast of mind which Plato wishes to replace with a
new orientation. Havelock believes that the new mode of
thought championed by Plato is made possible by the
interiorization of the alphabet, an orientation fostered by
literacy, and that Plato's distrust of writing disguises
but does -not diminish the literate cast of Plato's own
mind. Plato distinguishes in the third book of the
Republic between two modes of poetic expression, one of
which is dramatic and mimetic, the other, narrative and
descriptive. The dramatic-mimetic voice, Havelock tells
us, is "polymorphous, and, we might say, exhibits the
characteristics of a rich and unpredictable flux of
experience. The descriptive mode cuts this tendency down
to a minimum" (22-23). Plato rejects the mimetic mode in
favor of the descriptive. We have read enough about
literacy and orality to recognize this mimetic mode as
characteristic of the immersion and identification of oral
culture, and the detached observation of the descriptive
134 Havelock, Preface to Plato 5.
153
mode as characteristic of literate culture. By the tenth
book, the distinction between kinds of poetic expression is
less significant than the participatory nature of poetry as
an activity wedded to the old oral orientation, and Plato
ejects the poets absolutely from his- Republic and the
curriculum of his Academy.
Havelock associates the role of poetry^ in preserving
cultural information, the psychology of poetic performance,
and the content and quality of poetic statement with an
oral attitude towards meaning in discourse. He then
compares this oral orientation with that advanced by Plato,
which separates the knower from the known and views the
known as an object of experience, culminating finally in
the Theory of Forms— removed from participatory experience,
from the immediate social context of daily life, Ideas can
be approximated only through abstracted dialectic, rational
and detached. Greek culture
had been one of oral communication. This
fact created a set of conditions for the
preservation and transmission of the Greek ethos
which were only starting to change radically in
the generation just preceding Plato's...The
function of the poet was primarily to repeat and
in part to enlarge the tradition. The Greek
educational system, if this term may be used, was
placed wholly at the service of this task of oral
preservation.
This conflicted with Plato’s educational program, as
it formed the curriculum of the Academy, and with the mode
154
of thinking Plato hoped to inculcate in his students. The
Republic, Havelock explains,
is systematically organized behind two
doctrinal goals which constitute the core of
early Platonism: the affirmation of a "subject,'
that is, of the autonomous thinking personality,
and the affirmation of an 'object,' that is, of
an area of knowledge which shall be wholly
abstract. We have also argued that these twin
goals of Platonism are both directly conditioned
by his perception of the need to break with the
poetic experience. That experience had been
central; it had constituted an over-all state of
mind; let us call it Homeric. And he proposed to
substitute a different state of mind, the
Platon ic. 13 s
It is tempting to view Plato's accomplishment
Platonically, as a philosophic insight--the discovery of an
idea. It might also be viewed rhetorically, as an
Aristotelian technique— the invention of a way of speaking.
(Aristotle defined rhetoric as "the art of discovering the
available means of persuasion," but named invention rather
than discovery among the five subdisciplines of that art.)
When Socrates demands that Meno define "shape" without
reference to particular shapes, "color" without reference
to colors, and "virtue" without reference to socially
sanctioned behaviors, he is requiring the young Thessalian
to speak in a new way. Meno is quite ready to concede that
insofar as bees are bees, they are all the same, and, with
some prodding, that in its character as strength, all
13S Havelock, Preface to Plato 234-235.
155
strength is the same. When Socrates applies the same
reasoning to virtue, however, Meno replies, "I somehow feel
that this is not on the same level as the other cases."136
Nonetheless, having accepted the form of the argument,
Socrates' decontextualized technique, he is forced to
concede the point.
In a later book, Havelock compares the Greek alphabet
to the syllabaries which preceded it, stressing the
sound-letter conjunction (which involved a shift from
empirical to theoretical linguistics, since isolated
consonants are not pronounced in natural speech) and the
resultant ease with which the reduced number of symbols
could be memorized as the key technological advance that
gave literacy its social and psychological consequences:
The introduction of Greek letters into
inscription somewhere about 700 B.C. was to alter
the character of human culture, placing a gulf
between all alphabetic societies and their
precursors. The Greeks did not just invent an
alphabet; they invented literacy and the literate
basis of modern thought.137
Havelock takes pains to trace the process between the
development of the Greek alphabet and its dissemination,
and claims that popular literacy freed psychic energy,
136 Meno, 73a. Protagoras and Meno, trans. W.K.C. Guthrie
(New York: Penguin, 1956) 118.
137 Eric Havelock, Origins of Western Literacy, The Ontario
Institute for Studies in Education No. 14 (Ontario,
1976).
156
brain-power, from the task of memorizing what could now be
recorded and forgotten. Much of his emphasis on
widespread, popular literacy, however, seems to be
motivated by a desire to explain why the technology of
alphabetic literacy did not provoke decontextualized
thought in the 300 years between its adoption by the Greeks
and Socrates' arrival on the scene. We will postpone for
the moment a closer analysis of the necessary relationship
between literacy and the Platonic mode of language use, but
should notice that conceiving of the latter as an invention
rather than a discovery helps diminish the need for such an
explanation. If Socrates and his contemporaries invented a
way of speaking which requires different assumptions about
the relationship between meaning and the immediate
dialectical scene, we do not need to explain why no one
before them gave expression to the new mode of thought.
The emphasis on a phonetic alphabet is similarly less
crucial if we conceive of the Socratic as a rhetorical
invention rather than a philosophic discovery: Havelock’s
correlation is intended to explain why the decontextualized
orientation emerged in Athens but not before in the
classicist's classical tradition. However, having
distinguished the Socratic rhetorical stance from the
subsequent philosophy furthered by Plato, we are in a
better position to address questions about the consequences
157
of literacy per se. The strongest form of Havelock's
thesis would hold that a widespread phonetic alphabet is
both necessary and sufficient for the development of the
decontextualized orientation--but the evidence of Chinese
and Talmudic thought suggests that similarly nonlocal
rhetorical stances have been developed by peoples without
strictly phonetic (in Havelock's usage) alphabets.
Havelock raises two objections to the claim that Hebrew and
Chinese are "phonetic" scripts: he attributes an
"ambiguity" to the Hebrew script, since vowels are not
normally marked,138 and the Chinese is further burdened by
its lack of "economy," due to the large number of signs, so
that "the average Chinese, as opposed to the specialist is
limited in the number and variety of statements he can read
easily, because his ability to accommodate the shapes of a
variety of symbols in his memory is also limited."13’
Havelock's comments on Hebrew are usually reserved for
Biblical Hebrew, which he views as inscriptions of
formulaic oral statements; the tradition of commentary he
does not consider. His treatment of Chinese is even more
oblique: the dominance of Mandarin, he believes, "which
138 Eric Havelock, "The Pre-Greek Syllabaries," The
Literate Revolution In Greece and Its Cultural
Consequence¥ (Princeton: Princeton UP, 19821 71.
139 Havelock, "Spoken Sound and Inscribed Sound," The
Literate Revolution 52.
158
makes unified communication available by non-acoustic
means, may have inhibited any tendency to draw the spoken
dialects closer to each other,” (p. 52) and so contributed
to the rural isolation of China. But this is to minimize
the significance of other, extra-linguistic societal
influences. The Chinese and Talmudic traditions did not
result in Platonic philosophy because of other cultural
values which were brought to bear; but Chinese
philosophical writing and Hebrew commentaries on the Book
are as independent of the local rhetorical scenes in their
own cultural contexts as the Platonic was in Athens.
Havelock's treatment of Chinese and Hebrew seems to be
motivated by his desire to separate them from the Greek
phonetic script. His project is, in an odd way, the
mirror-image of Derrida's; both associate phonetic writing
with western metaphysics, but Derrida concentrates on what
that conjunction excludes while Havelock celebrates what it
allows.
If a popular, phonetic alphabet is not necessary for
the development of a decontextualized stance, it is also
difficult to prove that such an alphabet is sufficient to
provoke its invention— the strong causal link has yet to be
demonstrated. But Havelock's discovery that the Republic
records the struggle between an earlier orientation of oral
Greek culture and a new rhetorical stance championed by
159
Plato adds an important historical dimension to our
understanding of codes; and his arguments do suggest that
the development of the Greek alphabet helped facilitate (as
in our earlier discussion of linguistic determinism) the
invention of Socrates's peculiar new mode of speech.
It is important to remember that the rhetorical
innovation of Socratic dialectic was significantly a way of
speaking. The new orientation seems to have emerged in
Greece somewhat earlier in writing. Havelock originally
placed Herodotus (484?-425? B.C.) and Thucydides (460-400
B.C.) on opposite sides of the literate watershed.140 But
other scholars, skeptical of the "great divide" of
Havelock's representation, have pointed to earlier written
evidence. In her forthcoming book, The Voice of the
Histor, Carolyn Dewald finds in Herodotus a critique of the
oral logoi and traces the emergence of a new attitude
toward lists and genealogies which is responsive to values
of the oral mode as well as those Goody and Watt associate
with literate cultures. Charles Kahn would push the
timetable back further: arguing that Heraclitus produced
in the middle of the sixth century a book intended to be
read and reread by an individual (rather than read aloud
140 Eric A. Havelock, "Communication in Greek Historical
Thought," Communication Arts in the Ancient World, eds.
Eric A. Havelock and Jackson P. Hershbell (New York:
Hastings House, 1978) 138.
160
once for a group),141 Kahn challenges Havelock’s
characterization of Heraclitus as an author of "sayings" to
be heard. Havelock has in any case attenuated his
position, portraying the Presocratics as "poised between
literacy and nonliteracy," dissatisfied with the language
of their contemporaries and in search of a new vocabulary
which might describe abstract qualities. This process,
culminating in Plato, runs parallel to developments in
Greek poetry which similarly reflect the influence of
expanding Greek literacy:
I would offer the general conclusion that
what we call Greek literature from Hesiod down
through the classical period is composed in a
condition of increasing tension between the
demands of the ear and the new possibilities
afforded by the eye, that its composers managed
language on the one hand so as to appeal to and
evoke response from the nonliterate; and on the
other were exploring fresh modes and rules of
composition which would prove acceptable and
pleasurable to the literate.142
This more recent analysis, while narrowing the
Socratic leap from oral to literate modes, maintains
Havelock's claim that Greek literacy helped promulgate the
Platonic cast of mind. It also echoes Derrida's case for
141 Charles H. Kahn, "Philosophy and the Written Word: Some
Thoughts on Heraclitus and the Early Greek Uses of
Prose," in Language and Thought in Early Greek
Philosophy, ed. Kevin Robb, The Monist Library of
Philosophy (La Salle: Hegeler Institute, 1983) 110-124.
142 Eric A. Havelock, "The Linguistic Task of the
Presocratics," Robb 9.
161
the conceptual primacy of writing over speech— a new
orientation, prompted by the dissemination of (colloquial)
writing, exploiting to some degree the decontextuality of
(arche-)writing, is opposed to an earlier oral mode and its
origin in writing denied.143
Shifting emphasis from the philosophic "cast of mind"
to the rhetorical "way of speaking" is a move Havelock's
recent thinking may also support. In a paper delivered at
the Conference on College Composition and Communication in
New Orleans this year, Havelock described the new Platonic
mode as "conceptualist speech," "a prose of ideas" not
available to the poets of Homer's time, permitting a "new
syntax of speech," a "syntax of definition," characterized
by what Havelock called "the 'is' statement," a "thematic
statement which is always true." Referring to his latest
book, in press at Yale, Havelock commented that the
partnership between pre- and post-Socratic modes is "not an
either/or story"; in response to a question by the present
author, he agreed that while each mode may have emerged in
the context of an oral or literate culture, either may be
employed in any given instance of oral or literate
discourse.
143 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatoloqy, trans. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak~Tl967; Baltimore and London: John
Hopkins UP, 1976) 7+.
162
In The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural
Consequences (which was published the same year as Ong's
book), Havelock collected some chapters from earlier books
and articles he had published in journals. In one,
Havelock compares the mechanisms of socialization in oral
and literate cultures in a passage which suggests the
contrast we have drawn between restricted and elaborated
orientations in our discussion of sociolinguistic codes:
All societies support and strengthen their
identity by conserving their mores. A social
consciousness, formed as a consensus, is as it
were continually placed in storage for re-use.
Literate societies do this by documentation;
pre-literate ones achieve the same result by the
composition of poetic narratives which serve as
encyclopedias of conduct. These exist and are
transmitted through memorization, and as
continually recited constitute a report--a
reaffirmation--of the communal ethos and also a
recommendation to abide by it.144
We have seen that the restricted orientation continues
to use language to affirm the consensus of the social
group, though the function of record-keeping, among people
who have acquired local literacy at least, has been
transferred to writing. In Ways With Words, Shirley Brice
Heath documents this record-keeping function among the male
members of the Roadville community, who do not otherwise
engage in even the limited letter-writing activities
carried out by their women. This record-keeping function
144 Havelock, "The Alphabetization of Homer," The Literate
Revolut ion 167.
163
of literacy clearly does not of itself lead to the
intellectual development attributed by Havelock to similar
uses of the alphabet among the ancient Greeks--an apparent
problem for the thesis as it has been advanced so far, but
one which our analysis of codes shall help us explain.
It should be clear by this point that the advocates of
literacy as a technology inducing cognitive change do not
so much oppose the position espoused by Levi-Strauss as
attenuate it: contemporary thought is different from
primitive thought in some respects about which there is
general agreement, with the further stipulation on the part
of Goody, Ong, and Havelock that progress from one state to
another was effected as a consequence of mass literacy.
Levi-Strauss' insistence that concrete logic and
syllogistic logic are not developmentally related reflects
his attempt to refute the popular view of magic as "a timid
and stuttering form of science."145 The significance of his
Structuralist analyses depends upon the complexity and
comprehensiveness of mythical thinking. We can, however,
concede the internal coherence and capacity for extension
of mythical thinking and still trace a development from
concrete logic to our own, provoked or made possible by the
advent of literacy. Once this point of disagreement has
been set aside, the apparent opposition between
14S Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind 13.
164
Levi-Strauss on one hand and Goody, Ong, and Havelock on
the other disappears. In The Domestication of the Savage
Mind, Goody writes:
I have tried to take certain of the
characteristics that L^vi-Strauss and others have
regarded as marking the distinction between
primitive and advanced, between wild and
domesticated thinking, and to suggest that many
of the valid aspects of these somewhat vague
dichotomies can be related to changes in the mode
of communication, especially the introduction of
various forms of writing. The advantage of this
approach lies in the fact that it does not simply
describe the differences but relates them to a
third set of facts, and thus provides some kind
of explanation, some kind of mechanism, for the
changes that are assumed to occur.146
This is fair enough, and reconciles the binary
opposition drawn by Levi-Strauss with the developmental
view of literacy as technology of the intellect, advanced
by Goody and Ong. But this reconciled view has been
challenged by a younger group of sociolinguists and
psychologists, who question the accuracy of the theoretical
division between literacy and orality.
Critique of the Grand Dichotomy
In a 1979 paper, Elinor Ochs considers orality and
literacy from the developmental perspective of the child's
individual acquisition of two ways of using language. Ochs
refers to the literature on child language acquisition to
demonstrate that some of the contrasts we have seen
146 Jack Goody, Domestication 16.
165
identified with orality versus literacy can also be matched
to stages in the acquisition of language skills:
It is not only in the course of becoming
competent that developmentally earlier
communicative strategies are retained. We also
rely on a number of these same strategies as
adult communicators, as well under certain
contextual conditions.
A major condition affecting adult reliance on
early communicative patterns is the extent to
which the communication has been PLANNED prior to
its delivery. We find that adult speech behavior
takes on many of the characteristics of child
language, where the communication is spontaneous
and relatively unpredictable. For example,
spontaneous dialogues and multi-party
conversations among adults evidence greater
reliance on developmentally early communicative
strategies. Similarly, stream-of-consciousness
writing, casual letter writing, and so on display
thi s reliance.14 7
Ochs shows that discourses produced in planned
situations have many linguistic features in common, and
that discourses produced in unplanned situations have many
other linguistic features in common, regardless of the oral
or written nature of the situation. Her data base consists
of a large variety of spoken and written material drawn
from her own and her colleagues’ empirical studies. In
dividing the material between planned and unplanned rather
than oral and written discourse, Ochs challenges the claims
about literacy and orality we have seen. We should not be
surprised to find that in unplanned discourse, speakers
Elinor Ochs, "Planned and Unplanned Discourse," Syntax
and Semantics Volume 12: Discourse and Syntax (Academic
Press, 1979) 52-53.
156
rely on the immediate context to express propositions, and
on morphosyntactic structures acquired in the early stages
of language development, including grammatical structures
such as coordinating rather than subordinating
conjunctions. We have identified these features with the
restricted orientation of local literacy; Goody, Ong, and
Havelock have identified them with oral cultures. Och's
analysis demonstrates that these features no longer
correlate with oral rather than literate contexts in
contemporary individual situations.
Deborah Tannen takes on Goody, Ong, and Havelock, in
an article entitled, "The Myth of Orality and Literacy."14®
Tannen showed a film with sound but without dialogue to
groups of American women and Greek women, who were asked to
tell one another what they had seen. The American women
approached the telling as a memory task, and the Greek
women approached it as a storytelling task. Tannen
considers these as literate and oral strategies
respectively, and distinguishes some features between
them--in particular, "the cohesion hypothesis: that spoken
discourse establishes cohesion through paralinguistic
features whereas written discourse does so through
lexicalization" (41). Tannen notices at a Thanksgiving
141 Deborah Tannen, "The Myth of Orality and Literacy," in
Linguistics and Literacy ed. William Frawley (New York,
Plenum, 1983T7
167
dinner that highly literate people adopt oral strategies,
which we have seen in a more rigorous form in Och's study.
Tannen believes her observation undermine the dichotomy
between literacy and orality:
However, there is something very tantalizing
about dichotomies, and something catchy about the
notion of orality versus literacy. People
continued to walk away from my talks and my
articles with the oral/literate split more
prominent in their minds than what I intended as
my main idea: that is it not orality vs. literacy
per se that is the key distinction, but relative
focus on involvement vs. content.149
In another paper, Tannen compares spoken and written
versions of the same narratives— her students recorded oral
performances and then asked the story-tellers to write the
same stories down.
Comparative analysis of spoken and written
versions of a narrative demonstrates (1) that
features which have been identified as
characterizing oral discourse are also found in
written discourse, and (2) that the written short
story combines syntactic complexity expected in
writing with features that create involvement
expected in speaking.150
Again, specific instances of written discourse exhibit
features which have been associated with oral culture. We
can explain this in terms of the theory of codes: writers
are also speakers, and can bring to bear the skills of the
restricted orientation at least. Writing which
149 Tannen, "Myth” 37.
1SC Deborah Tannen, "Oral and Literate Strategies in Spoken
and Written Narratives," Language 58, No. 1 (1982): 1.
168
demonstrates features common to oral communication is
precisely what we would expect from the code of local
literacy; and writers who have acquired collegiate literacy
as well are of course still able to tap their knowledge of
oral strategies. Like Ochs', Tannen's research does not so
much question the characterization of oral cultures as
argue against a one-to-one correspondence between the
interpretive and expressive strategies of that cultural
orientation and specific written or oral tasks in our own
culture.
This point was demonstrated again by Ruth Finnegan, at
a conference on universals of human thought, held by the
African Studies Centre of the University of Cambridge in
1975. Finnegan asks if the charaterization of oral
literature as formulaic, first advanced by Milman Parry,
was indeed a linguistic universal. Finnegan cites Lord’s
study in Yugoslavia,151 as well as studies in Africa by
Junod,152 Smith,153 Anyumba,154 Opland,155 and her own
151 A .B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (1960; New York:
Atheneum, 1968).
152 H.A. Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe, 2
volumes (Neuchatel, 1912-19137^
153 M.G. Smith, "The Social Functions and Meanings of Hausa
Praise-Singing," Africa 27 (1957).
154 H.O. Anyumba, "The Nyati Lament Songs," East Af r ica
Past and Present (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1964).
155 J. Opland, "'Scop' and 'Imbongi': Anglo-Saxon and Bantu
169
earlier research156 in support of Parry's hypothesis, and
then reconsiders the universality of Parry's claims that
oral literature is always formulaic, and that literacy
displaces the ability to compose in that oral fashion.
Finnegan points to overlapping practices of oral and
written verse composition in the Swahili, Fulani, and Hausa
languages in Africa, and to "mixed" forms, written then
orally delivered, in Tibet, medieval China, and the South
Pacific. Finnegan asserts that there are sufficient
instances of oral performances which have some written
preparatory stage, or unwritten but prior word-for-word
composition, to doubt the universality of Parry's
bifurcation of oral and literate composing strategies. But
Finnegan is troubled by her critique of Parry and Lord, and
wonders why their thesis has proven so attractive to
students of oral culture, including herself.
Perhaps too they have added to our
understanding of a cluster of phenomena that had
not been so clearly delineated for us before,
phenomena which have occurred not only in
Yugoslavia in the 1930s but in many other
settings too. The complex of processes may not
have the complete universality claimed by some
adherents of the oral-formulaic school but it is
nevertheless widespread and always worth looking
for as one of a series of recurrent possibilities
in human action.157
Oral Poets," English Studies in Africa 14 (1971).
156 R. Finnegan, Limba Stories and Story-telling (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1967).
170
Finnegan rejects as tautological claims about the
"oral mind" or a "mental template," which, she claims, are
tempting but untestable, but is unable to shake the
impression that Parry and Lord have indeed identified
something which has its consistency:
In one sense I cannot help feeling that
there ijs something universal in what Parry and
Lord pointed out, and in the formulations in The
Singer of Tales, but that, as I have taken pains
to reiterate, this does not mean that it always
occurs! Rather it is universal in the sense that
is is one commonly recurring set of possibilities
in human action, complemented by other
possibilities which are realized in other
contexts.15 a
Finnegan does not try to characterize this "set of
possibilities," or to consider its relationship to the
contexts in which it is utilized. Her analysis, instead,
leads her to question the relationship between theory and
data--Parry's intuitively satisfying contrast between oral
and literate composition, and the empirical evidence which
seems at times to confirm, at times to contradict it.
David Olson has tried to make sense of this divergence
by thinking of "utterance" and "text" not as instances of
discourse but as relations between meaning and language--a
view wholly consistent with our theory of codes. Olson
157 Ruth Finnegan, "Literacy and Literature," in Universals
of Human Thought: Some African Evidence eds. Barbara
Lloyd and John Gay (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981) 251.
158 Finnegan, Universals 252.
171
distinguishes between cultural and individual development,
and sees his contrast cutting across both. There are three
principal differences between utterance and text.
Utterance relies on a background of shared experience and
"common sense"; text relies on rules of logic. Utterance
views truth as received wisdom; text views truth as
correspondence with observed phenomena. In utterance, the
assumption is that the meaning resides in the shared
intention and apprehension of speaker and listener, while
in text, meaning is conventionalized in a sentence itself,
that 'the meaning is in the text.’
My ar-gument will be that there is a
transition from utterance to text both culturally
and developmentally and that this transition can
be described as one of increasing explicitness
with language increasingly able to stand as an
unambiguous or autonomous representation of
meaning.15 9
Olson's central claim is "that the evolution both
culturally and developmentally is from utterance to
text."140 In his rather extensive listing of references,
Olson does not mention Bernstein, and instead of codes he
discusses "linguistic assumptions" about meaning: he
argues that a shift--from a belief that meaning is
extrinsic to the utterance, to a belief that meaning is
159 David R. Olson, "From Utterance to Text: The Bias of
Language In Speech and Writing," Harvard Educational
Review 47.3 (August 1977): 258.
140 O lso n 262.
172
intrinsic to the text--marks the transition from orality to
literacy. Olson's descriptions of "utterance" and "text"
are very close in this essay to the restricted and
elaborated orientations--but, lacking a third variable,
code, to mediate between language and thought, his theory
cannot account for the contemporary critical scene, in
which most literary theorists are using "text" to deny the
determinate meaning of a text. The theory of codes allows
us to explain that reader-response critics such as Stanley
Fish are using an orientation towards meaning in discourse
(which presumes that the truth value of their predications
are independent of the scene in which they are read) and
the conventions associated with that orientation in order
to question the presumptions upon which that orientation
rests. Without the mediation of a code, Olson is caught
between the attitude Fish expresses in his text1*1 and the
attitude he must necessarily hold if he hopes to
communicate his ideas in a widely circulated book. Olson's
"utterance" and "text" are sets of assumptions about
meaning, orientations, and to the extent that they move
away from specific instances of spoken or written
discourse, they have moved the debate in the right
direction. But the names he has given to each of his
141 Stanley Fish, l_s There A Text 1 n This Class?: The
Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge,
Mass. : Harvard UP, 1980).
173
orientations reveal their proximity to the categories of
Havelock, Goody and Ong.
Schooling and Orientation
The most comprehensive and rigorous challenge to the
claim that literacy inculcates decontextualized thought
comes from a four year study in Liberia, under the
direction of psychologists Sylvia Scribner and Michael
Cole. Cole is an editor of Luria's book, and, as we might
expect, improved upon Luria's experimental design in
planning the Liberian study. Luria, we recall, felt that
schooling rather than literacy per se would correlate with
ability to handle syllogistic problems; but Luria's data
did not distinguish between schooled and unschooled
literates. Among the Vai people of Liberia, Scribner and
Cole found a natural laboratory where they could do just
that.
The Vai people of Liberia practice three variants of
literacy: some Vai are literate in Arabic to the extent
that they can recite by rote the words of the Koran in
Islamic school; some Vai are literate in a local syllabic
script with which they write local letters, keep records,
and so on; some Vai have been taught to read and write
English in order to participate in the mainstream life of
nearby Monrovia. There is significant overlap between the
174
first two groups, but the results of the study relevant to
our inquiry demonstrate a sharp difference between the
third group and all other groups: Vai literates, Arabic
literates, and nonliterate members of the community.
Scribner and Cole identified each population by asking
people to identify themselves, and then corroborating those
personal judgments with a reading test. When the three
populations were identified, Scribner and Cole administered
a series of psychological tests designed to gauge their
abilities with abstract thought and some other linguistic
and psychological variables. A large number of different
methods of gathering information were used over the four
years of the study, including surveys, interviews, and many
different tests, designed to identify skills in
classifying, logical thinking, metalinguistic knowledge,
and a whole series of very specific abilities which seemed
to Scribner and Cole to be associated with the practice of
literacy among the Vai. They made every effort to win the
confidence of their subjects, using local assistants to run
the tests, and tried to couch the test questions so as to
maximize their respondents' local knowledge. Like Luria,
they asked some questions with local referents, and some
without. Their results were as Luria might have predicted.
The only subjects who could answer the syllogistic
problems "correctly" were those who were educated in
175
missionary schools. Those who had read aloud without
comprehension from the Koran could not; and, most
significantly, those who could read and write the local Vai
script also produced responses similar (in their insistence
on the social reality) to those in Luria's account. All
were presented with the syllogism:
All women who live in Monrovia are married.
Kemu is not married.
Does Kemu live in Monrovia?
The Vai subjects who had not been to missionary school
would answer, "I don't know Kemu," or "Kemu could live with
her mother in Monrovia." Scribner and Cole asked their
subjects to answer the questions and then explain their
answers.
Of all the survey tasks, logic problems
proved the most predictable and demonstrated the
strongest effect of schooling. Not only did
amount of school increase the number of correct
answers, but it contributed to the choice of
theoretical explanations, over and above correct
answers. Schooling was the only background
characteristic to improve performance; neither
Vai script nor Arabic literacy had an effect on
either measure.162
Since literacy in the Vai script, and in the Arabic
script to the extent demanded at the Koran school, do not
promote the kind of decontextualized thinking necessary to
complete syllogisms, Scribner and Cole conclude that
162 Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, The Psychology of
Literacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1981) 127.
176
schooling (that is, western schooling--significantly not
Arabic schooling) rather than literacy correlates with the
particular cognitive patterns Goody, Ong, and Havelock have
identified with literacy:
Despite the unresolved questions and
ambiguous findings this experimental assay may
leave behind, there are several conclusions about
which we believe there can be little argument.
In our opinion, they help to lay to rest some
misconceptions about the psychology of literacy
that went unchallenged in the past for lack of
empirical data. First, it is clear from the
evidence we reviewed that nonschooled literacy,
as we found and tested it among the Vai, does not
produce general cognitive effects as we have
defined them...Implicit in the foregoing
discussion, but worth stating explicitly, is the
fact that there is no evidence in these data to
support the construct of a general 'literacy'
phenomenon.16 3
When Vai literates are tested for skills, such as the
ability to give directions, which are directly involved in
their own practice of literacy, their abilities are
significantly greater than those of their nonliterate
neighbors? when tested on nonspecific indices of abstract
thinking, such as the syllogisms, Vai literates show no
statistical cognitive advantage over their nonliterate
neighbors.
These results, and their interpretation by Scribner
and Cole, deserve our careful scrutiny. At face value,
they threaten any one-to-one correspondence between
143 Scribner and Cole 132.
177
literacy and what has been called cognitive development, or
decontextualized thinking. If schooling, rather than
literacy, explains the development of this mode of thought,
what aspect of schooling is responsible? What did those
Vai people learn in that missionary school?
Before attempting to answer that question, we should
take a closer look at the assumptions about literacy which
underlie the study in Liberia. What do Scribner and Cole
understand "literacy" to entail? We have said that
Scribner and Cole used self-selection and a reading test to
identify Vai literates in each of the three languages.
What can we say about their literacies?
Fortunately, our analysis of the codes of literacy
provides us an appropriate analytic tool. We can
distinguish at once between three different literacies: we
recognize that the students of the Koran school who have
learned to translate Arabic inscriptions into sounds
without understanding the meaning of those sounds have
acquired what we have called alphabetic literacy; that the
Vai farmers who have learned to keep records and write
simple letters in the local Vai script have acquired what
we have called local literacy; and that the students in the
missionary school who have learned to read and write
English in preparation for joining the mainstream community
at Monrovia have acquired some training in what we have
178
called collegiate literacy. Scribner and Cole have
demonstrated that only schooled literacy correlates with
the ability to handle decontextualized syllogisms--so we
can ask, what did the Vai students learn in school? We
cannot determine precisely what the urbanized Vai studied
in the missionary school, but in order to have answered the
syllogisms logically, privileging abstract relations over
referential claims, the schooled literates must have had
some exposure at least to the rudiments of the orientation
we have identified with the elaborated code. In working
out a syllogism, the internal consistency of its premises
must take precedence over the consistency, or lack of
consistency, between details of the syllogism and the local
situation as it is communally understood by those who
participate in it.
What we do know for certain is that the psychological
tests reveal two disparate attitudes towards the
relationship between language and the meaning of an
utterance as it is recognized by a language-user. That it
is orientation, and not cognitive capacity, determining the
responses of the Vai who were tested can be demonstrated by
their ability to handle syllogisms the details of which did
not conflict with shared understandings of the local
community: when presented with syllogisms about rocks on
the moon, about which there was as yet no village
179
consensus, Vai literates were perfectly capable of
completing the cognitive tasks. When the syllogism about
Kemu and the married women of Monrovia was transplanted to
a lunar locale
All men living on the moon have three heads.
This one man does not have three heads.
Does he live on the moon?
the results were quite different:
For this set of materials, correct answers
and theoretical explanations occurred with high
frequency in both the metalinguistic study and
its replication. All groups achieved a level of
performance attained only by schooled groups in
the major survey. The theoretical mode was not
confined to the moon problems: a constant high
level of performance was maintained for both the
mundane and the fantastic syllogisms.144
It is only when the details of the syllogisms
conflicted with the details of the world as they knew it
that Vai literates refused to answer the test questions as
a westerner might. The cognitive capacity to do so was not
lacking— but the orientation was different. Rather than
favor the abstract over the immediate, shared
understanding, the Vai literates chose to interpret the
test questions within the frame of the restricted
orientation. Nothing in their practice of literacy
suggested they do otherwise, because the practice of local
literacy does not require the prior acquisition of the
elaborated code.
144 Scribner and Cole 155-156.
180
The difficulty raised by the Liberian study for any
one-to-one correlation between literacy and
decontextualized thought disappears once a third element is
introduced into the equation: the development of
interpretive codes. The exact nature of the causal
relationship is difficult to determine. If we say that the
theoretical character of the Greek phonetic alphabet helped
facilitate in Athens the development of a new way of
speaking, an orientation or rhetorical stance with which to
express knowledge the truth value of which would be
independent of speaker or hearer, we have not argued that
all uses of writing will require that code--we can then
distinguish between a literacy which does require that code
and one which does not. We should not expect people who
have acquired only the literacy which does not require the
elaborated code to demonstrate facility with the
orientation that code entails. The local Vai literates are
capable of doing syllogisms when doing so does not conflict
with their habitual mode of language use, but they are not
oriented towards doing so. Their test results were
evaluated in terms of an orientation which always gives
precedence to the abstract relations in force between
internal elements o.f a discourse. Since we have both
orientations available to us, we can step back and see that
there is no reason, outside of orientation, why the
181
abstract must take precedence over the observed details of
life, particularly when those details are sanctioned by the
consensus of a sustaining community, and the abstract
values are not.
At the outset of this study we realized that literacy
is not a unitary phenomenon— there are different
literacies. The Liberian study supplies at least
tangential evidence for our contention that one literacy,
which we have called collegiate literacy, will correlate
with an orientation toward abstract meanings, while another
literacy, which we have called local literacy, will not.
We have seen that the theory of codes can be used to
triangulate the relationship between literacy and the
development of decontextualized thought--when literacy
provokes or allows the emergence of an elaborated
orientation, it leads to decontextualized thought. We
might ask why it has not done so in the case of the local
Vai literates in Liberia. Havelock would certainly point
out that the Vai script is a syllabary, with units based on
phonetic syllables rather than abstract consonants which do
not appear isolated in natural speech. In explaining why
the Greeks and not the Phoenicians before them developed
from literacy to abstract thought, Havelock makes much of
the shift from phonetic syllabary to alphabet: the
attendent reduction in the number of symbols, he believes,
182
makes possible a far more widespread literacy than was the
case among literate cultures prior to the Greeks.165 Among
the Vai, however, use of the syllabary is not limited to a
class of literate experts— the typical Vai literate is a
farmer living a traditional lifestyle. Why has his
literacy, or the collective literacy of his social group,
not stimulated the orientation necessary to effect changes
in cognitive style? One element might be time: Havelock
demonstrates that, although the Greek alphabet was
developed between 720 and 700 B.C., it was not until the
Fifth Century that the new mode of thought came into
prominence.166 It may be that, without interference, a
widespread Vai script might have led to the emergence of an
elaborated orientation; it is almost certainly the case
that the availability of such a code in English, accessible
even in rural Liberia, will affect the process.
We should not, on the other hand, expect the local
orientation to disappear. Levi-Strauss has described for
us a world-view endemic to savage, that is, aboriginal
thinking, with an orientation towards meaning in discourse
consistent with that world-view. Havelock, Goody, and Ong
identify that orientation as representative of oral rather
165 Havelock, "Transcription of the Code of A Non-Literate
Culture," The Literate Revolution 89-101.
166 Havelock, "The Character and Content of the Code," The
Literate Revolution 144-147.
183
than literate culture. The development of the alphabet
made possible in Greece a different orientation, which we
have identified with Bernstein's elaborated code, which
allows the expression of meanings without reference to the
immediate social context of speaker or listener, writer or
reader. We have seen that the same orientation persists in
our own time, although the correspondence between it and
particular written or oral activities has somewhat changed.
We should not be surprised at its tenacity. In discussing
the "logic" of the shift from oral to literate composing,
Havelock comments:
The historian, looking back from an
experience of over 2,000 years of literacy, has
the advantage of retrospect. He can afford to be
logical and clear-sighted. Is it likely, in the
known ways of things, the human ways, that men of
the centuries that immediately followed the
alphabetic invention would be equally logical?
Is it not more likely that habits of oral
conservation which had proved viable from time
immemorial would seem to retain their viability
with some persistence, that the possibilities of
the new technique would meet with some resistence
from the users of the old?1*7
We might say that the resistence continues, or that
the old orientation persists, still viable for some
purposes. If, as Parry suggests, the original purpose of
the code was to preserve cultural information and to affirm
the solidarity of the social group, then writing has
replaced speaking for the first of those functions, but the
147 Havelock, "Character and Content" 145.
184
code survives in everyday discourse still accomplishing the
second; and we have seen literary genres which depend on
that code performing that function in print as well. What
was (before the advent of popular literacy and the
emergence of the elaborated orientation) the only available
interpretive gestalt, remains with us, performing one
aspect of its former function— no longer encompassing the
totality of communal experience, no longer serving as a
record of cultural information, but affirming still the
cohesiveness of the social group. These meanings are now
afforded less intellectual prestige, especially by that
subculture whose members earn their livelihoods elaborating
textual meanings. The instances in which they are given
expression no longer correlate with the oral/literate shift
which saw their displacement as the favored code of
linguistic usage. But the code of orality, in a modified
form, is still with us when we speak, as Bernstein's
messenger boys, and all the rest of us, at times, do; and
when we write, as an orientation towards meaning, the
interpretive gestalt required for the code of local
literacy. A new mode of speaking, invented in Fifth
Century Greece, entailed a new attitude towards meaning in
discourse; this new attitude came to dominate prose writing
by 400 B.C., and is still our privileged orientation,
expected in oral discourse when we deliver a planned
185
address and in written discourse, as the interpretive
matrix of the code of collegiate literacy.
The code of collegiate literacy is a technology, an
invention. It is not inherent in the structure of the mind
or implicit in the use of inscription. Nor is it merely a
set of stylistic conventions. At the heart of the code
lies an orientation regulating the nexus of expectations
concerning meaning and language, language and values, the
purpose of the writer and the requirements of the reader.
In the development of western civilization, this
orientation, together with a set of linguistic conventions
which facilitate its expression, emerged as a function of
growing popular literacy in ancient Greece. But it is used
today in some oral, some written forms, as is the prior
communicative code it supplemented and in some contexts
replaced. This prior code can still be found regulating
the form and content of speech in most social situations
and the expectations readers bring to some genres of
popular literature.
It may be noticed that the orientation I have
attributed to collegiate literacy does not characterize all
discourse at the college level and above; some discourse
clearly depends on a framework of shared knowledge which is
never made explicit in the discourse itself. This
knowledge expected of the reader is not, however, drawn
186
from the immediate rhetorical scene or a set of shared
social values. It is based instead upon a presumption that
writer and reader have read the same books, establishing a
textual frame of reference similar to that provided by
social information in Bernstein’s restricted code.
Derrida's De la Grammatologie, for example, demands some
familiarity with the texts of Rousseau and Levi-Strauss,
Saussure and Jakobsen, Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel and Freud,
as well as the disciplines in which those and similar works
predominate— in principle, the history of western
metaphysics and poetics, social science and linguistics.
There is clearly another code boundary here,
regulating what will count as an acceptable contribution to
academic and other professional discourse, reflecting a new
configuration of the variables with which we have
differentiated our first two codes: whereas the restricted
code relies upon local information to affirm the values and
identity of a social group, and the elaborated code relies
upon schoolroom conventions to facilitate the expression of
individual perspective, this third configuration, which we
have earlier referred to as the "high literate code,"
affirms, on the basis of a textual frame of reference, an
intellectual community among whom subtle distinctions in
individual perspective are required. An argument
constructed in Paris is expected to stand in Los Angeles as
187
a credible contribution to a debate whose participants
acknowledge the high literate code as a constitutive frame
of discourse. Consequently, advancing such an argument
counts as a bid for membership in the community constituted
by the code.
Walter Ong identifies one such community in describing
a Forum on the Reader of Literature offered at the Modern
Language Association convention in New York City in
December 1976. Ong tells us that the audience of about
1000 listeners included non-professionals attracted by the
title of the presentation.
Most persons at the forum, however, were
there not for wish-fulfillment but for more
informed and sophisticated reasons.
Collectively, they had been reading or hearing of
works published in the past decade or so by
members of the Tel quel circle in France such as
Roland Barthes, Phillipe Sollers, Tzvetan
Todorov, and Jacques Derrida. They knew
something of the Heideggerian and Husserlian
thought that lay back of these works, something
of the related phenomenology of discourse
developed by Paul Ricoeur and by the late Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, probably less about the earlier
phenomenologist Louis Lavelle and the much
earlier and precocious Maine de Biran, a great
deal about Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics
and Claude L^vi-Strauss's linguistic and
anthropological structuralism, as well as about
the Russian and Prague formalism decanted and
matured in the work of Roman Jakobsen, and
something about the French psychoanalytic
cultural critics Michel Foucault and Jacques
Lacan. The forum attendants were also often
deeply into Henry James’s and E.M. Forster’s
reflections of fiction writing and into the work
of American critics and literary theorists
emerging from of diverging from the old New
Criticism, such as Wayne Booth, Robert Scholes,
188
and Robert Kellogg, who discuss the nature of
narrative as such— what can be done to develop a
story line out of the welter of lived
existence— and they had become acquainted with
the views of cisatlantic critics in dialogue with
the French such as Harold Bloom, Geoffrey
Hartman, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and E.D.
Hirsch, Jr., and with some of the work of
hermeneuticists and theorists from the German
milieu, such as the Polish-born Roman Ingarden or
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Erich Kahler, and Wolfgang
Iser. Most of the audience had read works by
members of the forum panel themselves: David
Bleich, Stanley Fish, Norman Holland, Walter Ong,
and Michael Riffaterre.1 * *
The discussion which took place at this panel was of
course spoken and not inscribed, but it relied upon a
presumed frame of reference available most often only to
writers who can draw upon a specialist's code? and it is
this shared frame of reference, more than their titles or
even their academic departments, which identified
participants as in the field.
The presumption of shared textual reference allows
each discipline to set different parameters: the legal
community fixes a "determinate" (though subject to change)
meaning to cited phrases in their textual corpus, while the
literary community exploits other strategies the code makes
available. If collegiate literacy privileges what Derrida
might call the phonological linearity of sequential
148 Walter J. Ong, S.J., "Reading, Technology, and Human
Consciousness," in Literacy as a Human Problem, ed.
James C. Raymond (University, Alabama: The University
of Alabama Press, 1982) 172-173.
______________________________________ 189.
exposition, the high literate code permits, in addition to
more prosaic critical strategies, exhibitions of the play
of the trace, simultaneous reference and erasure, and a
self-conscious treatment of one's text as text which admits
problematics and possibilities of arche-writing excluded
from elaborated code discourse.
We have concentrated on the boundary between
Bernstein's restricted and elaborated codes because of its
relevance to the study of literacy and the prominence
Bernstein attributes to it as an instrument for
distributing power in our society. But other codes exist.
We should not be surprised to discover that -other peoples,
with different expectations as to the purposes and
significance of discourse, will construct interpretive
codes which facilitate the expression of the meanings they
find most useful in meeting the exigencies of their
situations.
This is precisely the driving force behind a recent
attack on Jack Goody for overstating the consequences of
literacy. Before tackling Goody, Brian Street takes David
Olson and Angela Hildyard to task for an unpublished
article1*5 in which they argue that schooling can be
justified on the basis of the greater rationality and
169 Hildyard, A. and D. Olson,, "Literacy and the
Specialization of Language," unpublished manuscript,
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1978.
190.
objectivity which writing makes possible. Hildyard and
Olson support their position with references to the
anthropological research of Patricia Greenfield among the
Wolof of Senegal,1,0 who in turn has based her analysis
upon Bernstein: "speakers of an oral language rely more on
context for the communication of their verbal messages" (p.
169). Street follows the usual practice (as Ohmann does
with Mueller and Labov with Jensen) and discusses
Bernstein's ideas as they are used by Greenfield;
Greenfield’s references are to an early (1962) study.
Street criticizes Greenfield's leaps from observed behavior
to overgeneralized conclusion and focuses particularly on
her assumptions about the role of literacy in teaching
logical thinking. Street's purpose is to use Olson,
Hildyard, and Greenfield to critique what he calls the
"autonomous" theory of literacy, which in effect claims
that something known to the researcher as "literacy" has
predictable cognitive consequences for the cultures and
individuals who acquire it. This "autonomous" model
presumes the unitary phenomenon we have been debunking as
"literacy per se" throughout this study; Street contrasts
it with an "ideological model," which has the following
characteristics:
n o "oral and Written Language: The Consequences for
Cognitive Development in Africa, U.S. and England,"
Language and Speech 15 (1972): 169-178.
191
1 It assumes that the meaning of literacy
depends upon the social institutions in which it
is embedded;
2 literacy can only be known to us in forms
which already have political and ideological
significance and it cannot, therefore, be
helpfully separated from that significance and
treated as though it were an 'autonomous' thing;
3 the particular practices of reading and
writing that are taught in any context depend
upon such aspects of social structure as
stratification (such as where certain social
groups may be taught only to read), and the role
of educational institutions (such as in Graff’s
1979 example from nineteenth century Canada where
they function as a form of social control);
4 the processes whereby reading and writing
are learnt are what constructs the meaning of it
for particular practitioners;
5 we would probably more appropriately
refer to 'literacies' than to any single
’literacy';
6 writers who tend towards this model and
away from the 'autonomous' model recognise as
problematic the relationship between the analysis
of any 'autonomous', isolable qualities of
literacy and the analysis of the ideological and
political nature of literacy practice.111
These proscriptions rest upon the assumption that we
are looking for the "meaning" of literacy, which, they
insist, must be the meaning it has for the people in each
locality who use it. The injunctions of points 1, 3, 4 and
5 follow from this perspective: the meaning of literacy in
every culture, they reiterate, is a function of the
cultural totality in which it participates. This served as
our starting assumption in the introduction to this study
and has guided our choice of writers throughout: Street's
111 Brian Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984) 8.
192
advocates of the ideological model include Ruth Finnegan,
Scribner and Cole, and Shirley Brice Heath. It is the
construction of the second and sixth points of Street's
ideological model with which we seem to disagree: whereas
"literacy can only be kown to us in forms which have
political and ideological significance," it does not follow
that "it cannot be helpfully separated from that
significance and treated as though it were an 'autonomous'
thing" unless Street clarifies his intention. In this
usage, "autonomous" seems to mean both "a single
undifferentiated phenomenon" and "unrelated to its role in
the social structure in which it participates." While the
first sense of "autonomous" is inconsistent with the theory
of codes as we have developed it, the second needs to be
examined more carefully. We have differentiated the social
and structural dimensions of two orientations, which have
complicated relationships with reading and writing
practices. We presume that these orientations never in
fact exist in the absence of a cultural context from which
they draw local significance. But is there no purpose to
be served by considering the relationship between these
descriptively isolable elements and the activities diverse
cultures enable and privilege?
The word "helpfully" {in Street's second injunction)
always points to a motive— what do we hope our analysis
_________________ . 113.
will accomplish? In his sixth point, Street explicitly
rules out inquiries which focus on "qualities" associated
with literacy: writers who tend to the ideological model
"recognise as problematic the relationship between any
'autonomous’ isolable qualities of literacy and the
analysis of the ideological and political nature of
literacy practice." Street rejects the premise that any
independent "qualities" of literacy can be usefully
integrated into discussions of the role of reading and
writing practices in specific cultural contexts. Instead,
he considers all versions of the "autnomous" view disguises
for ethnocentrism. We need to understand his position as a
defense, a reaction against the implications of other
arguments, if we are to reconcile the theory of codes with
Street's "ideological" model of literacy.
Street is a Marxian anthropologist who lived for seven
years during the 1970's at Mashad, capital of Khoroson
Province in North East Iran and in Cheshmeh, a village in
the Kuh-i-Binalud Mountains. The basic literacy of
Cheshmeh, which is available to some of the men, is learned
in a "maktab" or religious school. Street objects to
ascribing maktab alumni either to a "pure-type" of oral
tradition or to a pure-type of literacy (p. 133), since the
particularities of their actual practice has features of
both. Yet in his own method Street descscribes the "ideal
194
type" of the autonomous model (p. 3), though granting that
no such actual position may be advanced by a single writer.
In other words, Street resists what he considers the
reduction of cultural complexity in the lives of people he
knows, while acknowledging the usefulness of similar
abstraction on the theoretical level. He is certainly
correct that such reduction is not the best way to
understand the people of Cheshmeh, but there are other
purposes. The fact that Cheshmehis do not conceive of
their situation in what might be called abstract western
terms is a point Street's analysis underscores. It is the
valuation of that difference he is determine to correct.
Street begins his description of Cheshmeh life by
emphasizing the diversity of worship of Islam. In doing
so, he draws a parallel between monolithic views of Islam
and similar views of literacy, both of which he opposes:
"This involves rejecting the notions both of a single,
monolithic, autonomous Islam and of a single, 'autonomous'
and 'restricted' literacy that many have taken to
correspond to it." (p. 135). Street does not insist that
there is no purpose which would be served by an analysis
which considered those qualities which all observances of
Islam share or must accommodate.
Street's opposition to Goody is fueled at least in
part by Goody's reference to Islamic village literacy as
195
"restricted"— he prefers Finnegan's "tentative" model to
Goody's belief in the immutability of texts, for example,
in setting forth the mix of textual authority and oral
interpretation exercised by the mullahs in Koranic maktab
schools. His description of maktab literacy stresses the
function of oral reinterpretation of "themes and formulae"
and stories— features we have associated with the local
orientation of oral cultures. Some mullahs are introduced
in theological school to texts by learned Shiite doctors
which seem to rely upon the elaborated orientation— a
variant in some respects similar to that of the Hebrew
tradition, presuming a shared familiarity with textual
referents. These texts are offered as individual
interpretations of scripture, proclaimed as immutable but
flexible in practical interpretation. Boys in the maktab
schools, however, usually engage in rote repetition of the
Koran in a language they cannot understand. Some (with the
encouragement of some mullahs) have translated this into
reading Arabic or Farsi; a few learn the rudiments of
writing and argumentation.
Street emphasizes the local dimensions of maktab
literacy practice (such as the conventions of layout on the
pages of the Koran) and examines how these skills are
transferred to the "commercial" literacy which allowed
"tajers" (entrepreneurs) in the town to capitalize on the
196
oil boom of the 1970's. This commercial literacy, which
grows out of and was enabled by practices of the maktab
literacy, proved more useful in local commerce than the
western schooled literacy Cheshmehi children brought back
to their village, because the returning students had not
cultivated the necessary social relationships on which
village tajers rely (pp. 177-178). This is, of course,
perfectly intelligible within the distinctions of the
theory of codes— a literacy which depends upon local,
social meanings is likely to be more effective for the sort
of purposes tajers require. Street's argument is directed
against a view of literacy which ignores code distinctions.
He is determined to show that the consequences of literacy
are not uniform. His immediate point is that the
(commercial) value of any literacy to a people depends upon
its relationship to the economic infrastructure; he argues
against the autonomous model of literacy as a single
phenomenon and cites Michael Polanyi172 and Robin Horton173
in an effort to establish that the basic processes of
thought are the same for oral and literate peoples:
Members of supposedly 'primitive' societies
clearly engage in scientific practices, such as
empirical testing of hypotheses, when they plant
173 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1965).
173 Robin Horton, "African Traditional Thought and Western
Science," Africa 37.1-2 (1967): 50-71, 155-187.
197
seeds, the successful growth of which is vital to
their survival. Levi-Strauss has shown, further,
that the classification of the natural world
amongst South American Indian- tribes is as
complex and as interesting as those of the
academic biologist, at an intellectual as well as
a utilitarian level (1966). Conversely, in many
contexts in western 'scientific' society, it is
clear that what some writers have labelled
'non-scientific’ thought is as evident as in
non-western societies.114
The fact that people in oral cultures use
trial-and-error and systems of thought as complex as
literate models is not, of course, inconsistent with a
theory of codes emphasizing orientation rather than
cognitive capacity; nor is the observations that westerners
at times make use of an oral mode. The 1966’citation is to
L^vi-Strauss's The Savage Mind. In that book, Levi-Strauss
posits precisely the divide between "bricoleur" and
"engineer" Street seems to be refuting. The difference
between L^vi-Strauss’s position and the "ideal type" of the
autonomous view Street is attacking seems to be the value
L^vi-Strauss allows the intellectual capability of the
savage mind: a different way of thnking but not inferior.
It is the evaluation of western literate practices as more
objective and generally superior that disturbs Street; he
contends that arguments which claim superior cognitive
development resulting from literacy are updated screens for
older racist arguments concerning cognitive capacity, and
174 S t r e e t 25.
198
discovers in Greenfield’s data as elsewhere contrasts which
reflect differing social conventions rather than
intellectual abilities. Much of Street's argument, in
fact, is directed at precisely those objections we have
raised in positing that orientation rather than cognitive
capacity is the significant variable reflected in test
results. The convention Street finds most determinant in
oral/literate contrasts is "explicitness," the degree to
which details of the local scene are lexicalized, a
"middle-class convention” which, Street implies,
working-class children may be better off without: "The
conventions of working-class speech also have their uses,
and one could provide an argument for some of these being
taught to middle-class children. Perhaps some of the
middle-clas verbosity found by Labov could be eradicated in
this way" (p. 28). However, in denying the significance of
the convention of explicitness, Street touches on a point
which shall become central to our analysis:
One might remark that the working-class
child considered it redundant to constantly refer
to the presence of a picture since he knew that
the researcher was present and could see it for
himself...Learning to frame written material,
particularly in test conditions, is a convention
of our educational system. It can be shown to
have uses and it may well be advantageous for
working-class children to learn it for certain
purposes. Its use for examination purposes is
clearly a rather restricted justification,
although it may account for much of the labelling
of 'failure' which the working-class child
199
experiences.17 5
Street reverses the order of these two observations
because the thrust'of his argument is directed against the
claim that oral peoples and working-class boys are less
logical and objective than their literate, middle-class
counterparts. We have developed the theory of codes, also,
to undermine this contention. But Street would certainly
classify the theory to this point as an "autonomous"
variety in that codes have thus far been defined in terms
of two structural variables (the degree of their reliance
on the immediate social scene and the degree of consensus
or disagreement they seek to establish) rather than as
elements operating within the totality of an ideological
system. These are two dimensions of a single phenomenon;
we have separated them to disentangle Bernstein's
theoretical construct from his distributional claim and the
unwarranted implications which were derived from
it--implications Street quite rightly denies. Dissolving
the theory in a warm bath of cultural relativity is not,
however, the most productive way to discover how codes
function in the context of any social system. Having
theoretically distinguished writing from code we can agree
that the consequences and significance of reading and
writing for any society are a function of the totality of
175 S t r e e t 2 7 -2 8 .
200
its ideology without losing sight of the orientations we
have identified as significant within our own cultural
context. We have discovered three codes at least which
seem in some cultures to facilitate the expression of
certain kinds of meanings. None of the three is inherently
more valuable than others which might be devised;
world-wide patterns of differential code status can be
explained in terms of historical phenomena such as
colonialism. In principle, these are available to any
society which can incorporate and establish a value for
them consonant with its cultural priorities. If this is
not the way it has worked historically, it is because
societies are subject also to political realities which
must be taken into account if we are to move from the
theoretical realm to the world of actual language users.
201
Chapter V
PRACTICE AND ACCESS
In an essay entitled "Real Life," Theresa Elaine
Williams writes of the women she teaches as a member of the
Atlanta Urban League's Education staff participating in the
Rockefeller Foundation's Minority Female Single Parents
Program:
There is a vicious cycle perpetuated by
society and continued by our participants.
Single minority mothers are usually children of
single mothers and some have teenage children who
are also young mothers. I am sure there are ways
to stop this self-destructive cycle among our
women, but unfortunately I am not aware of what
that way is. If you have any ideas about this
problem, please share them.
We spend a lot of time trying to motivate our
women so that they have a positive image of
themselves. But somehow, even after we think we
have accomplished this to some extent, we find
that the cycle continues. Evidently there is
some need being met for these women that causes
them to continue to get pregnant. Even though
these ladies have lived and seen the consequences
of these activities, they continue the same
pattern. The children of these women also see
that their mothers have had tremendous
difficulties because they have many children that
have to be fed or clothed and yet they turn right
around and have baby after baby.17*
174 "Real Life," mfsp newsletter 1.1 (January 1985).
202
The cycle of poverty this teacher points to, and the
underlying structures maintaining boundaries between social
classes, cannot be reduced to questions of literacy and
language use. Efforts to do so have trivialized the
difficulties confronting people who aspire to provide
materially richer lives for themselves and their families.
These aspirations are provoked by physical and
psychological needs reflecting the individual's location
within the social and economic structure of society.
"Motive” Kenneth Burke tells us,177 is shorthand for
"situation"; any analysis which hopes to explain why
working-class people strive to gain entrance to the middle
class would necessarily emphasize economic and
socio-psychological factors rather than literary or
linguistic ones. We can explore the ways in which these
concerns impinge upon questions of literacy if we ask
instead how the boundaries between classes are crossed and
how people who hope to cross them believe they can be
crossed.
Social Class and the Classroom
In The Hidden Injuries of Class, Richard Sennett and
Jonathan Cobb explore the psychological damage induced by a
class system; in the process, they interviewed many
177 Permanence and Change; An Anatomy of Purpose {1935;
Indianapolis; Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).
203
working-class people, asking questions about their lives,
their work, their hopes and expectations. It should come
as little surprise to discover that most working-class
fathers hoped their children would achieve white-collar
status and believed that education— which is to say,
schooling— would accomplish that boundary crossing.
The one bit of information appearing so far
that will be crucial, in fact, for understanding
how the struggle for freedom and dignity has
become destructive in America is the value men
like Frank Rissarro and James put on knowledge.
Knowledge through formal education they see as
giving a man the tools for achieving freedom--by
permitting him to control situations, and by
furnishing him with access to a greater set of
roles in life.17•
School is of course the venue of credentialing, the
locus of preparation for professional certification and in
many occupations the institution doing the actual
certifying. But schooled language-learning has played a
particular role in the iconography of the boundary between
working-class and middle-class life. Young men in the
1920's and '30's hoping to "improve themselves" were
advised by Dale Carnegie to study public speaking.179 as
The much-desired suitor in Tennessee Williams' "Glass
178 Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries
of Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1973) 30.
179 Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People,
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 19377! and Dale
Carnegie, Public Speaking: A Practical Course For
Business Men (New York: American Institute of Banking,
1926).
204
Menagerie" does just that: grilling her son on the merits
of a friend who, like Tom, works at a warehouse, Amanda
comments,
Amanda: At least I hope he’s the type
that's up and coming.
Tom: I think he really goes in for
self-improvement.
Amanda: What reason do you have to think
so?
Tom: He goes to night school.
Amanda: (Beaming) Splendid! What does he
do, I mean study?
Tom: Radio engineering and public speaking!
Amanda: Then he has visions of being
advanced in the world! Any young man who studies
public speaking is aiming to have an executive
job some day!1®0
The character they are discussing represents in some
respects the ideal suitor for Laura, whose mother plots
their return to higher economic ground; the gentleman
caller's night school class in public speaking is a sign
that he has set his sights on a middle-class station in
life.
Several immigrant groups have been able to use the
system of American schools to gain entrance to occupational
posts closed to them under more strictly observed class and
cultural systems: children of house painters and linotype
operators have translated grades and scores on standardized
tests into credentials with which to enter the professional
.Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (New York: New
Directions, 1970) 64-65. First produced on December
26, 1944, the play is set "in the thirties."
205
and "New" classes. (Why certain immigrant groups have been
able to do so more effectively than others is a matter for
ethnographic analysis. One hypothesis would investigate
the relationship between ethnic cultural values and the
orientation required by the schools: for example, the
literate practices of a dispersed people maintaining their
cultural identity despite local exigencies might explain
the relative success of the last few generations of Jewish
immigrants. In that tradition, familiarity with the
elaborated orientation seems to have been distributed by
gender rather than social class. The accomplishments of
contemporary Chinese and Korean students might reflect
different, though equally adaptive, cultural values— or
they might reflect the strengths of the Chinese and Korean
educational system. Bernstein's efforts to relate
schoolroom success with the structure of interpersonal
relationships in the home seem unsatisfactory.)
But if schooling has at times served as an avenue of
opportunity for some social groups, it has clearly served
other purposes as well. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude
Passeron of the Centre de socioloqie europeenne in Paris
point to the role of the schools in reproducing the social
relations extant in the larger culture:
Every institutionalized educational system
owes the specific characteristics of its
structure and functioning to the fact that, by
the means proper to the institution, it has to
206
produce and reproduce the institutional
conditions whose existence and persistence
(self-reproduction of the system) are necessary
both to the exercise of its essential function of
inculcation and to the fulfillment of its
function of reproducing a cultural abitrary which
it does not produce (cultural reproduction), the
reproduction of which contributes to the
reproduction of the relations between the groups
or classes (social reproduction).1*1
In reproducing the social relations which exist among
classes, the school system institutionalizes and reproduces
the inequitable distribution of resources characteristic of
class societies. It is not a matter of the intentions of
individual teachers, for "quite apart from the built-in
inertia of every educational institution, the structure of
power relations prohibits a dominant pedagogic action from
resorting to a type of pedagogic work contrary to the
interests of the dominant classes who delegate its
pedagogic authority to it" (53-54). For a school to be
granted the authority to function as a school, it must
demonstrate that it accepts a definition of sound pedagogic
practice, which it to say, it must adopt pedagogic
strategies which advantage students from the dominant
socio-economic classes: for a school to be a school, it
must participate in the domination of the society's most
oppressed people.
181 Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction
in Education, Society and Culture, trans. Richard Nice
TBeverly Hills: Sage, 19771 54"!
207
While many dedicated teachers and administrators in
the school system are motivated by a desire to help their
students, and in fact often succeed in that attempt, the
schools also serve the function of winnowing students,
determining who will be permitted to pursue what course of
study and, consequently, who will be permitted access to
the social, economic, and professional roles each course of
study allows. Schools are charged with two fundamental
responsibilites at least: to educate (which is to say,
socialize) students in the habits of the culture-at-large
and the particular requirements of the sub-culture in which
the adult student will one day participate; and to evaluate
students, to allocate societal resources so that students
understand the options, if any, which are available to
them.
We can discriminate at least two types of pedagogic
evaluation: judgments of a student's performance expressed
to the student, intended to help improve his or her
performance— which we might call "feedback" or "personal
evaluation"; and judgments of a student's performance
reported in official documents (grade reports, transcripts,
"permanent records"), intended to locate the student along
a continuum of others competing for social status— which we
might call "social evaluation." While personal evaluation
contributes to a student's learning, social evaluation
functions primarily as a component of a selection system
208
permitting differential access to educational and
occupational opportunities.
This distinction becomes clearer when teachers are
asked (by court order, for example) to teach students whose
skills are less than those the selection process would
otherwise require: expectations concerning "errors" on
which the personal evaluation of a struggling student is
based may need to be altered until they become quite
different than those underlying a social evaluation,
especially as the student's performance might be assessed
by people outside the classroom for whom the role of the
school in selecting students is more relevant than its
instructional function.1*2 In the following pages, the term
"evaluation” refers to the social dimension of assessment
and grading involved in selecting students for academic and
occupational roles.
This selection process begins very early. Sarah
Michaels explains how students in the first grade receive
varying degrees of support and evaluation based upon their
abilities to demonstrate proficiency with the teacher's own
discourse strategy (or that which the teacher has chosen to
privilege). Michaels considers "sharing time," also known
Jas "show and tell," as a key situation in the linguistic
182 Mina P. Shaughnessy, Errors and Expectations: A Guide
For the Teacher of Basic Writinq (New York: Oxford UP,
19777:------------------ *
development of children as evaluated by the schools:
This notion of key situation, as developed
in the work of Fred Erickson (1975) and John
Gumperz (1976), holds that life in complex,
stratified societies offer certain "gatekeeping"
encounters that determine access to occupation,
official redress, and educational opportunities.
Within such situations, group specific
differences in discourse strategies or style can
assume great importance because misunderstanding
frequently results in denial of access to some
social opportunity.1*3
We might argue that this "misunderstanding" is the
point at which the teacher's two roles— as instructor and
evaluator— conflate, since the teacher's inability to see
why the student is not producing the required discourse
interferes with the first but not the second. Michaels'
study, however, is ethnographic: she is interested in
recording how the teacher's preferred strategies for
organizing "sharing time" performances disproportionately
assist and assess some students over others. If we
consider the characteristics the teacher valued in these
performances, we may recognize attitudinal preferences
which seem to anticipate acquisition of the elaborated
code:
183 Sarah Michaels, "’Sharing Time': Children's Narrative
Styles and Differential Access to Literacy," Language
in Society 10 (Cambridge UP, 1981): 424-425. Her
references are to Erickson, "Gatekeeping and the
Melting-Pot," Harvard Educational Review 45 (1975):
44-70; and Gumperz, "Language, Communication, and
Public Negotiation," in P. Sanday, ed.,- Anthropology
and the Public Interest (New York: Academic Press.
19761 273-292.
210
Importance was attached, not to content per
se, or to the sequentially ordered structure of a
narrative, but rather, as in simple descriptive
prose, to clarity of topic statement- and
explication. While Mrs. Jones never explicitly
stated these requirements, her questions and
comments indicated that what she was looking for
was a decontextualized account centering on a
single topic, whereby:
1. objects were to be named and described,
even when in plain sight;
2. talk was to be explicitly grounded
temporally and spatially;
3. minimal shared background or contextual
knowledge was to be assumed on the part of the
audience;
4. thematic ties needed to be lexicalized if
topic shifts were to be seen as motivated and
relevant.x *4
Michaels calls this a "topic-centered style," which
some students in the class could use. When dealing with a
topic-centered performance from such a student, Mrs. Jones
was helpful, supportive, and appreciative: "She provides a
clear and elaborate set of guides for how she wants Mindy
to talk about making the candles. 'Tell the kids how you
did it from the very start. Pretend we don't know anything
about candles.’ The last remark is of course an instruction
to assume no shared knowledge and to be as explicit as
possible" (432). She is less helpful, and more critical in
her evaluation, when confronting a student whose
performance is not "topic-centered."
In contrast to a topic centered style, the
black children and particularly the black girls
were far more likely to use a "topic associating"
184 M ic h a e ls 4 2 7 -4 2 8 .
211
style, that is, discourse consisting of a series
of implicitly associated personal anecdotes- The
topic associating style was generally
characterized by an absence of ’lexicalized
connectives other than "and" relating the
anecdotes, and no explicit statement of an
overall theme or point.1*5
This is Michaels' own judgment: she reports no
observations which would suggest a racial bias on the part
of the teacher, and the pedagogical standard Mrs. Jones
seems to be using is entirely consistent with what we might
expect of first-grade practice in producing elaborated
discourse. Michaels does not tell us where this study was
done other than to identify it as an "urban" community, but
we can presume on the basis of what is reported that in
this city color seems to be one variable along which
pre-school preparation for the elaborated code is
distributed.
On the basis of participant observation in a
working-class Boston school, Richard Sennett tells us that
students in the second and third grades have already
identified among their classmates those students the
teacher believes capable of "making something of
themselves," which is to say, crossing over into a
middle-class academic track. Such students are frequently
praised by the teacher and actively encouraged to attempt
more stimulting challenges. They are also resented by the
1 * 5 M ic h a e ls 4 2 8 -4 2 9 .
212
larger group, who are not denigrated by the teacher, but
tolerated, relatively ignored. Sennett found these
"average" students reluctant to waste the teacher's time
with their own education.
In a class on grammar, Stephanie gives a
past participle incorrectly? the teacher asks her
to try again, but while she is thinking, one of
the bright children interrupts with the right
answer. The teacher— the experimental and
"permissive" woman already described— tells the
bright child to shut up and gives Stephanie
another example to work out. Stephanie looks at
her in total surprise, wondering why the teacher
should still care about whether she can learn to
do it, if the right answer has already been
provided. Max, an obnoxious fifth-grade bully,
has somehow formed an interest in writing
doggerel rhymes. During a composition hour he
reads one, but when he finishes, the teacher
makes no reply, merely smiles and calls on the
next pupil. Asked later how he felt. Max looks a
little crestfallen and says with charateristic
grace, -Lookit, shithead, she ain't got time to
waste on me.1 * *
Sennett's data is anecdotal; his view may be partial.
We can argue that his description slights the good work
done by teachers in any number of working-class and
inner-city schools. While many are willing to criticize
the system in which they work, the author has yet to
encounter a teacher who does not believe that real
education is taking place in his or her own class.
Schoolteachers motivate their students to learn and share
knowledge and strategies of inquiry with them. But the
184 S e n n e tt and Cobb 8 6 -8 7 .
213
role of the schools in the social evaluation of students,
circumscribing the options available to them, inheres in
the dual function of the institution within the larger
socio-economic system. The Harlem teenagers in Labov's
study,187 who reject the promises of the educational
system, are responding to the image of themselves as their
strengths and weaknesses are assessed according to the
school's criteria for allocating societal resources.
The selection process beginning in the early grades
continues through the later, closing off access to
higher-paying occupational positions for various groups of
working-class and even more economically disadvantaged
people. Sennett summarizes the decimation of blue-collar
ranks during the college years in this way:
Nationally, about half the children from
white, blue-collar homes get started in the kind
of schooling their parents want— that is, about
half go beyond high school. This is a large
difference between girls and boys in this;
depending on whose figures you use, between ten
and twenty-five .percent of boys from blue-collar
homes receive some further schooling, while
between forty and fifty percent of the girls do.
A much smaller percentage of boys get through
four years of college or technical school (three
to five percent); a slightly higher, though still
small, percentage of girls do.188
187 William Labov, "The Linguistic Consequences of Being a
Lame," Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black
English Vernacular (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1972) 255-292.
188 Sennett and Cobb 26.
214
This is precisely the point of intersection between
Bernstein's characterization of the role of language in
maintaining the status quo and our own analysis of the
codes of literacy. Bernstein speculated that facility with
(we might say preparation for acquisition of) the
elaborated orientation allows access to social roles in
which an individual more fully masters the elaborated code;
applicants for schools and occupational positions who
cannot demonstrate such facility or preparation are denied
access to those opportunities.. There is good reason to
believe that the "social roles" uppermost in Bernstein's
thinking included that of the undergraduate college
student. The subjects of his original studies, we recall,
were boys qualified by potential intelligence but prevented
on the basis of their academic records from continuing
their education at the college level.18*
Bourdieu and Passeron have shown this correlation
between class and university admission in France during the
1961-1962 term.
The chances of entering higher education can
be seen as the product of a selection process
which, throughout the school system, is applied
with unequal severity, dependent on the student's
social origin. In fact, for the most
disadvantaged classes, it is purely and simply a
matter of elimination. A senior executive's son
185 See for example, "Some Sociological Determinants of
Perception," Theoretical Studies 23-41, a reprint of a
1958 article.
215
is eighty times more likely to enter a university
than a farm worker’s son, and forty times more
likely than an industrial worker's son; and he is
twice as likely to enter a university as even a
lower-rank executive’s son.1*0
Not only are the odds of gaining entrance to a
university far less for working-class than they are for
middle- and upper-class students, but the options available
to students who have been admitted share a similar class
bias. Within the disproportionate number of admissions,
students from more advantaged social classes are
disproportionately represented in the more prestigious
French schools, and the types of degrees they pursue are
similarly distributed. Gender is also a factor.
In a more general way, females are more
often consigned to the Arts or Sciences
faculties, which train them for a career in
teaching. Farm workers' daughters who reach
higher education have a 92.2 percent chance of
going into one or another of these faculties,
whereas the likelihood for males from the same
background is only 80.9 percent; the figures are
85.3 percent and 80 percent, respectively, for
the daughters and sons of industrial workers,
74.4 percent and 63.6 percent for the daughters
and sons of clerical workers, 84.1 percent and
68.5 percent for the daughters and sons of
lower-rank executives, and 74.3 percent and 59.3
percent for the daughters and sons of senior
executives.1’1
1.0 Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, The
Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to
Culture, trans. Richard Nice (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1979) 2.
1.1 Bourdieu and Passeron, The Inheritors 6.
216
However, Bourdieu and Passeron consider social origin
a more powerful determinant than gender in establishing the
educational options available to entering students:
Whereas the disadvantage of being female is
mainly expressed in relegation to the Arts
faculties, the disadvantage of low social origin
is ultimately more fraught with consequences,
since it is manifested both in the complete
elimination of children from the underprivileged
strata and also in the restricted choices
available to those who manage to escape
elimination. Thus, these students must accept
the obligatory choice between Arts and Science as
the price of their entry into a university which,
for them, has two doors instead of five: sons
and daughters of senior executives have a 33.5
percent probability of going into Law, Medicine,
or Pharmacy, compared with 23.9 percent for the
sons and daughters of lower rank executives, 17.3
percent for the sons and daughters of industrial
workers, and 15.3 percent for the sons and
daughters of farm workers.1’*
The figures may have changed somewhat over the last 25
years, but there is little reason to believe that the bias
of the social mechanisms they express has done so.
Bourdieu and Passeron note that a student's ability to meet
the challenges of university life are related to his or her
prior prospects, expectations, and preparation for
admission, and argue throughout that, "As much research has
shown, social origin exerts its influence throughout the
whole duration of schooling, particularly at the great
turning points of a school career" (13).
1,2 Bourdieu and Passeron, The Inheritors 7.
217
One of those great turning points is certainly the
first year of undergraduate study, when decisions are made
concerning academic tracks and the careers to which they
lead. This point in the educational process coincides with
the need for what we have called collegiate literacy, the
ability to integrate writing skills with the interpretive
orientation of the elaborated code. We have used the term
to describe that ability because, we have said, students
who cannot produce the necessary discourse simply cannot
carry their educational and professional ambitions
further— they cannot go on.
This is a claim which must be substantiated. If we
are to explore the socio-economic dimension of the theory
of codes, which is to say, the causes and consequences of
their distribution, we must be careful to sidestep the
pitfalls from which Bernstein never emerged. We can do
this by clarifying our method. Rather than beginning by
identifying some group of people as "working-class" and
then attempting to establish whether that group can make
use of some particular set of linguistic skills which
prevents them from gaining access to middle-class social
roles, we might begin by considering the mechanism
controlling access and consider how (and to whom) those
social roles are allocated.
218
When understood as an analysis of the mechanism of
social control rather than as an attack on the intellectual
faculties of any group of people, the theory of codes can
be used to inform the pedagogy of literacy as it occurs in
the classroom, the institution, and the larger social
system.
We have identified the schools as the mechanism of
(particularly linguistic) discrimination. We have seen
that the process of sorting is under way by the first grade
and continues throughout a student's academic career. Of .
particular significance to teachers of composition and to
students hoping to gain entrance to professional or
white-collar managerial positions is the point we have
identified with collegiate literacy, the undergraduate
college years. As undergraduates, students earn places in
graduate and professional programs by overcoming a series
of evaluative hurdles. The first test of literacy skills
confronting incoming college students is the undergraduate
writing requirement.
Most colleges and universities have some such
requirement; at the University of Southern California, it
is the only skill all students, regardless of their College
or Professional School, must demonstrate. A separate
department administers testing and coursework necessary for
meeting that requirement— a large department, employing
over 150 writing instructors for classroom and tutorial
219
work in what may be the largest Writing Center laboratory
in the country. USC's writing program will serve to
illustrate two fundamental social functions of institutions
of higher learning— educating (socializing) and then
evaluating (consigning) students— which are easily visible
in the absence of complicating accommodations to mandatory
enrollment and state-sponsored public education.
The program is exemplary in some respects. It was
designed by Ross Winterowd, who developed also a program in
Rhetoric which drew to the University a sizeable number of
graduate students and assistant professors committed to
research in the teaching of writing. There was (and is) a
well-respected Linguistic Department with faculty members
interested in and contributing to the study of the
acquisition of writing skills. The program was designed to
represent the most current information and thought about
effective instruction in composition; subsequent changes in
that original design, demanded by the students and larger
University community, point up the dual nature of the
responsibility the Freshman Writing Program was expected to
fulfill.
The program was structured so that students would be
allowed the maximum amount of time to develop their writing
in a workshop setting before they were required to produce
the necessary discourse: at the end of the first semester,
220
students making normal progress were awarded an "N" grade,
which was understood by the registration department as a
place-holder, to be filled at the end of the second
semester by whatever letter grade the student earned when
his or her writing skills were tested and appraised. The
result of this arrangement was to allow students a semester
in which individual learning was emphasized and evaluation
minimized; students might pass out of the second semester
by scoring well on that semester's final examination but
were not required to take it. Student motivation was not a
problem for the more effective teachers in the program
since the "N" grade could be assigned for any level of
work: a student could be required to complete any number
of papers acceptably to earn his or her "N". Nor were
students uninformed about their relative standing;
individual papers were most often graded, and when they
were not, students might request a grade on a paper and
would receive one. What was precluded from the system was
the evaluative failure with significant consequences for a
student's access to social roles; during the first semester
of instruction, students who acceptably completed all of
their assignments were not "tracked" in any way as a
function of their ability relative to their classmates,
provided that all fell within the acceptable range.
221
This arrangement proved intolerable to a great many
students, whose complaints fell upon receptive ears when
the advisory committee consisted of faculty members whose
familiarity with contemporary research was limited. There
was a sense that students ought to be evaluated, that the
Freshman Writing Program was in some way cheating the
student and the larger community of its rightful due by
putting off the evaluation of student progress which would
dramatically affect their academic (and consequently
professional) careers.
Bernstein captures the sense of propriety we attach to
this view of knowledge as intellectual capital in
describing how school children are taught to interact with
their classmates:
Children and pupils are early socialized
into this concept of knowledge as private
property. They are encouraged to work as
isolated individuals with their arms around their
work. This phenomenon, until recently, could be
observed in any grammar school. It can be most
clearly observed in examination halls. Pupils
and students, particularly in the arts, appear,
from this point of view, to be a type of
entrepreneur.1 *3
We can talk about the false consciousness of students
who have been oppressed by evaluation for so many years
that they have internalized the need for this oppression,
1,3 Basil Bernstein, "On the Classification and Framing of
Educational Knowledge," Towards a Theory of Educational
Transmissions, vol. 3 of Class, Codes and Control
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975) 97.
222
but it may be more helpful to view their complaints as
perceptively self-serving political acts: more frequent
grading allows well-prepared middle-class students to put
more distance between their own prospects for occupational
status and those of their less-well-prepared
classmate/competitors. When faculty members of the
advisory committee endorse such appeals, they are giving
expression to the underlying regulative principle Bernstein
described as a mechanism for maintaining class
prerogatives. If one needs to identify the human agency
promulgating Bernstein's "self-regulating" cycle, it
appears in the -common-sensical emphasis on the
reasonableness of the notion that students in these writing
classes ought to be graded. Marcuse has pointed out that
such mechanisms and their consequences appear to the
classes they serve as the reasonable extension of rational
laws, timeless and natural.1*4 The complementary human
experience of this regulative principle for allocating
societal resources confronts writing teachers at the end of
each semester in the tears of a horrified student who
recognizes that her "C" grade has closed the door of
medical school.
1,4 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1964) 169.
223
The consequences of student complaints were in any
case real enough: the program administration was
instructed to grade the first semester and to revise the
nature of the second semester so that the workshop approach
would give way to an approach emphasizing some academic
content— to "teach them something while we've got 'em
there." This change, the committee felt, was necessitated
by the first: the program couldn't very well grade students
on two courses sequential in practice but similar in
structure. This problem did not arise when the first
semester was ungraded because the two were then considered
a single course. A grade, it was understood, established
the only socially recognized boundary to the course.
The staff charged with running the program are well
intentioned professionals, familiar with the recent
literature on composition and determined to foster whatever
humanism and humanity the program can accommodate. The
structure of the system as it has been redesigned, however,
reveals the underlying deficiency the renovators of the
program have moved to correct.
The new program provides many more opportunities for a
student to fail and these occur earlier in his or her
college career. Some groups of incoming students,
identified by scores on earlier tests, will be assigned to
a new remedial class, where they will join a community
224
distinguished by its socially acknowledged inability to
write. These students must pass a test to earn a place in
the regular beginning composition class; if they do not
pass that test, they cannot go on. If they cannot go on,
they cannot complete their writing requirement; if they do
not complete that requirement, their college careers are
over. The computer system prevents students who have not
satisfied their writing requirements from registering for
their sixty-fifth units. It is too early to know how many
failed attempts are sufficient to convince a student to
withdraw, but it is clear that the remedial class and its
exit examination represent the first opportunity for a
student to fail to gain access to whatever social roles a
college diploma makes available.
Students who are not relegated to the remedial class,
or who manage to pass its exit examination, are not,
however, out of the woods. Students who complete all
assignments can now fail the first semester because of the
quality of their written work— which, we have seen, means
their ability to manipulate the elaborated code. If they
pass the first semester, they may fail the second.
Students who do not fail either semester are by no means
home free: they will still receive eight credits of grade
for their facility with collegiate literacy, and the time
they will have had to prepare for that evaluation has been
radically reduced.
225
The significance of eight credits of grade should not
be underestimated. A student who receives a "D" the first
semester and a "C" the second must ea'rn eight grades of "A"
without a "B" or less to recover a 3.5 grade point average,
the median average required for admission to USC's law
school. Such a string of "A" grades is particularly
difficult for the student whose facility with collegiate
literacy, and the elaborated orientation which underlies
it, is average or less. For many students, two semesters
of "C" is sufficient to close off the possibility of a
professional career, or much hope for a promising
managerial one.
The urgency of the evaluative element, of course,
enters the classroom, affecting the balance of education
and allocation which can now go on. The student's
motivation to earn a high grade is now in place, but that
sharper motivation is by no means the same as a greater
desire to learn. The grade makes it easier to get students
to do what the teacher says; it is not at all clear that
the evaluative element in the classroom makes learning any
easier or more productive.
We might generalize a criterion for weighing the
priorities of any given institution: a school is more
opporessive to the extent that its structure emphasizes the
(social) evaluation of students and allocation of academic
226.
opportunities over the socialization (learning) of its
students. We might say that a writing program is less
oppressive to the extent that its structure is designed to
help students develop facility with the collegiate code
rather than to judge their facility with that code.
Local and Collegiate Pedagogies
We can describe the cycle Bernstein pointed to more
fully if we say that an orientation developed in ancient
Greece has come to dominate the allocation of social roles
and opportunities in our society. Children who have been
prepared to acquire the elaborated code (and eventually
collegiate literacy) gain access to social roles that
require them to engage in practices which impart the
necessary orientation. Children whose parents have not
gained access to those social roles are less well prepared
to acquire the code, and less likely to gain entrance to
schools and jobs that require practices through which that
orientation is imparted.
In another idiom, we can say that the elaborated code
is a mechanism of Sartrean mediation, the residue in the
practico-inert of the Platonic project, now serving to
establish continuity between an individual's relationship
to the material base of production and that of his or her
children; thus the code functions as an instrument of
_________________________________________________ 227
domination. And yet, to understand the sentence above, one
needs to have acquired the code. The dialectical method of
historical materialism requires the ability to look beyond
the immediate social form of a phenomenon in order to
understand its role in the totality of a system.
Thus we must detach the phenomena from the
form in which they are immediately given and
discover the intervening links which connect them
to their core, their essence...This twofold
character, the simultaneous recognition and
transcendence of immediate appearances is
precisely the dialectical nexus.19s
The Socratic shift from the scenic meanings of oral
Greek culture to a new "decontextualized" mode enabled both
the technology of capitalism and Marxist dialectic; Plato’s
advocacy of the new way of speaking represents an
historical antecedent common to both the scientific
tradition behind James Watt, Frederick Taylor, and the
Industrial Revolution and the philosophic tradition behind
Hegel, Marx, and the November Revolution. When Labov's
gang members reject schoolwork preparatory to acquisition
of the elaborated code, they are responding to its use as
an instrument of their oppression; their suspicion of the
"lames" who pursue that preparation is well founded in that
such pursuit represents a real threat to the solidarity of
1,# Georg Lukacs, "What is Orthodox Marxism?" History and
Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectic,
trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1971) 8.
228.
the social group. They are, however, also rejecting an
orientation which facilitates analysis of the etiology of
their situation.
Which is not to say that it prohibits such analysis.
We should remember the differences between Sapir's and
Whorf's renditions of linguistic determinism: Sapir
believed that any language is capable of expressing any
thought, though each inclines the speaker to some forms of
thought rather than others. Similarly, we should say that
codes facilitate the expression of different degrees of
abstraction from the immediate social scene, though a
speaker who has acquired only one code is quite capable of
expressing the full range of ideas.
Furthermore, people are aware of and can express the
injustice of their position in society and the values which
give life meaning in any code at all:
You see a house there, sad, as if it were
abandoned. When you see a house with a child in
it, it seems happier. It gives more joy and
peace to people passing by. The father of the
family arrives home from work exhausted, worried,
bitter, and his little boy comes to meet him with
a big hug, because a little boy is not stiff like
a big person. The father already begins to be
happier just from seeing his children. Then he
really enjoys himself. He is moved by his son's
wanting to please him. The father becomes more
peaceful, and forgets his problems.1,4
1,4 A tape-recorded oral statement cited in Freire, "The
Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action For Freedom"
379.
______________________________________________________ 229
This facility can be tapped as the basis for effective
writing instruction. Beginning with the understanding that
certain student populations are likely to bring to bear the
orientation of local literacy, composition teachers can
work toward two objectives: (1) devising pedagogical
techniques which help develop inscription and deciphering
skills by making use of the local orientation with which
their students are familiar, and (2) devising pedagogical
techniques which help impart facility with the collegiate
orientation.
Techniques for accomplishing the first of these
objectives have already been developed. Paulo's Freire's
method of literacy through consciousness-raising is a case
in point. Freire couches his pedagogy in expressly
political terms: people learn to read and write when they
are allowed to become participants in history, when they
gain some real power over their political and economic
lives. Freire does not argue that literacy is itself
empowering, but that people who have attained some measure
of self-determination appreciate the need for a literate
voice.
In some areas in Chile undergoing agrarian
reform, the peasants participating in the
literacy programs wrote words with their tools on
the dirt roads where they were working. They
composed the words from the syllabic combinations
they were learning. "These men are sowers of the
word," said Maria Edi Ferreira, a sociologist
from the Santiago team working in the Institute
230
of Training and Research in Agrarian Reform.
Indeed, they were not only sowing words, but
discussing ideas, and coming to understand their
role in the world better and better.
We asked one of these "sowers of words,"
finishing the first level of literacy classes,
why he hadn't learned to read and write before
the agrarian reform.
"Before the agrarian reform, my friend," he
said, "I didn't even think. Neither did my
friends."
"Why?" we asked.
"Because it wasn't possible. We lived under
orders. We only had to carry out orders. We had
nothing to say," he replied emphatically."1’7
Nan Elsasser and Vera P. John-Steiner cite several
studies in which this phenomenon was noted.1’8 Elsasser and
John-Steiner have used Friere's approach with Chicano and
Native American college students in New Mexico with
comparable results,1’’ and Linda Shaw Finlay and Valerie
Faith have followed their example, applying Freire's
approach to middle-class college students, whose alienation
from cultural institutions they used to provoke
1,7 Freire, Harvard Educational Review 378.
178 Darcy de Oliveira, R., and M. Darcy de Oliveira,
Guineau-Bissau; Reinventing Education, Document 11/12
(Geneva: Institute of Cultural Action, 1976); Holt, I.,
ed., The Summer That Didn* t End (New York: Morrow,
1965); Greenberg, P., The Devi 1 Has SIippery Shoes
(London: Macmillan, 1969); and Norris, R., A Navajo
Community Develops Its Own High School Curriculum,
unpublished manuscript, University of New Mexico,
Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1970.
179 Nan Elsasser and. Vera P. John-Steiner, "An
Interactionist Approach to Advancing Literacy," Harvard
Educational Review 47.3 (August 1977) 355-369.
_____________ 231
learning.2•0
Freire's method of instruction, however, makes use of
the interpretive code his participants bring to the Culture
Circle. Among Brazilian peasants, Freire begins with
images identified by survey as recognizable from the
immediate social scene, which are joined to words selected
on the basis of the frequency of their root syllables in
Portugese. These pictures and words are then used to
prompt group discussion; the locally significant images and
evolving social consensus which emerges as a result of
group discussions (both strategies of the local code) are
techniques whose effectiveness is grounded in the extensive
experience all participants can draw upon in predicating
meaning.
This is not merely a matter of identifying local
concerns, but of addressing those concerns in terms of the
linguistic strategies Culture Circle participants make use
of. Freire became familiar with those strategies by
joining a community in which they were employed:
Freire recounts one occasion where he talked
with the workers about the psychologist Jean
Piaget: ’I said many beautiful things, but made
no impact. This was because I used my frame of
reference, not theirs.' After his speech finished
one worker said to Freire, 'You talk from a
200 Linda Shaw Finlay and Valerie Faith, "Illiteracy and
Alienation in American Colleges: Is Paulo Freire's
Pedagogy Relevant?" Radical Teacher (December 1979):
28-37.
________________ 232
background of food, comfort and rest. The
reality is that we have one room, no food, and
have to make love in front of the children.’
Freire reports that at this time he could not
understand such reactions. It was only from a
continual and prolonged process of both research
and living with the poor in the slums of Recife
that he finally understood the syntax of the
people.*01
The Rockefeller Foundation programs for minority
female single parents also make use of their students’
facility with the local code in teaching them to read and
write. Among the items in a newsletter produced by
students at the Opportunities Industrialization Center in
Providence, Rhode Island, a community-based organization
serving an extremely disadvantaged community, are recipes
and bits of received information, "words of wisdom" the
writers identify as learned from their mothers— tips about
combing hair, washing floors, mending nylons, and the
following:
If you have a pan with food stuck on it from
cooking eggs, caramel, etc., soak it in water and
food will separate easily from pans.
When I received this newsletter at a conference, a
woman in the next seat read this advice and commented, "Who
didn't know that?" She did not intend the question
unkindly— her sympathies were clearly with the authors of
the newsletter— but her question reflects the assumptions
201 Robert Mackie, Literacy and Revolution: the Pedagogy of
Paulo Freire (London: Pluto Press Ltd., 1980) 3-4.
______________________________________________ 2 3.3
any reader conversant with the code of collegiate literacy
brings to a text: that information which is written down is
offered as new. One cannot help but suspect that the
newsletter contributor also did not consider her tip
especially inventive, but . included it because her
expectations about written information did not include the
injunction that it must include something new. It may be
that her teacher in the Women's Oppotunities Unlimited
program encouraged her to do so. Such a pedagogy is likely
to succeed because it makes use of an orientation all of
the participants have already acquired.
What it is likely to succeed in teaching are the
skills of local literacy, abilities which allow writing to
be used in conjunction with the interpretive gestalt we
have encountered in contemporary oral cultures,
pre-Socratic Greece, and locality-dependent oral and
inscribed discourse. Local literates in Liberia, Brazil,
and the Carolina Piedmont use writing to keep records,
exchange letters, and read the local newspaper. Writing a
local newsletter is in keeping with these activities.
Teachers in community based organizations, while
acknowledging the accomplishment of students who acquire
reading and writing skills as adults, are also aware of the
limitations of that accomplishment. Simone Charlop, a
Rockefeller Foundation participant with the National
234
Council of Neighborhood Women, noted in the April 1985 MFSP
Newsletter that
Women who have above a basic literacy level
may still use the dialect of their community, a
perfectly acceptable social usage, but one which
precludes or limits entry into the business
world.
Her comment concerns dialect, but holds true as well
for orientation; the ability to read and write is not
enough to gain access to a well-paid job. White-collar
employment usually requires some familiarity at least with
the elaborated code.
But our second pedagogical objective, developing
techniques for helping students acquire the elaborated
orientation, is more difficult to accomplish. Collegiate
literacy characterizes the discourse one must be able to
produce at the college level. This is not to claim that a
student learns collegiate literacy at college; Shirley
Brice Heath's Piedmont ethnography demonstrates that
training in elaborated meanings begins for mainstream
children in the crib. Roadville mothers, too, consider
reading to their children important; Heath identifies three
overlapping stages, beginning with bedtime stories,
intended to prepare Roadville children for kindergarten.202
Such preparation allows children to acquire inscription and
deciphering skills more easily and lays the groundwork for
202 Heath, Ways With Words 219-228.
___________________________________________ 235
more sophisticated language learning. Anne Hutchinson, a
teacher for the Center For Employment Training'in San Diego
participating in the Rockefeller Foundation program
contributed the following to the second edition of the MFSP
newsletter:
Pre-school book reading teaches more than
how to read and write. It teaches a set of
master patterns of language use which serves as a
basis for the acquisition of other patterns of
language use and thought. When the set of habits
that accompanies pre-school book reading is
absent, reading takes place at a slower rate.
Children are introduced to the rudiments of the
elaborated orientation early in their school careers and
are expected to have acquired local literacy by the fifth
grade. Writing remains mixed through the higher grades,
gradually de-emphasizing personal experience until the
student reaches college, at which point he or she must be
able to produce discourse regulated by the code of
collegiate literacy.
Efforts to prepare students before they enter school
for acquisition of this code must depend finally on
practices in the home; but parents who have not been
permitted access to social roles which require collegiate
literacy can do little to help their children prepare to
acquire it. Rather than blaming those parents for what
they have not been empowered to do, we should ask how they
might be assisted in preparing their children. To better
236
understand the quandary they confront, we need to consider
more carefully the relationship between social roles and
individual practices of literacy.
Among the strongest conclusions of the Scribner and
Cole study was the recommendation that future research
should concentrate less on abstract concepts of "literacy"
and more on the individual practices of different people
using writing for cultural purposes.
Scribner and Cole spent four years among the Vai in
Liberia. They were as well prepared as they might have
been: they had Luria's research design, which they hoped
to improve upon, and a good deal of respect for the
relativity of cultural variables, which they hoped to meet
by incorporating local people into their project and by
spending sufficient time trying to understand the point of
view of the people who would become their subjects. In the
course of their investigation, however, they discovered
that they had nonetheless been asking the wrong questions,
and concluded their report by suggesting that rather than
study literacy as a monolithic phenomenon, researchers in
the future might do well to investigate particular
practices of literacy among people in various cultures, for
Scribner and Cole believed that specific practices seemed
to correlate more accurately with the cognitive skills
their subjects could demonstrate than any ability intrinsic
to reading and writing:
237
This notion of practice guides the way we
seek to understand literacy. Instead of focusing
exclusively on the technology of a writing system
and its reputed consequences ("alphabetic
literacy fosters abstraction," for example), we
approach literacy as a set of socially organized
practices which make use of a symbol system and a
technology for producing and disseminating it.
Literacy is not simply knowing how to read and
write a particular script but applying this
knowledge for specific purposes in specific
contexts of use. The nature of these practices,
including, of course, their technological
aspects, will determine the kinds of skills
("consequences") associated with literacy.2®3
This approach has been warmly received and has led to
much good work: Heath’s study in Carolina and Labov's in
Harlem are exemplary instances. Its adherents have
suggested that Bernstein's emphasis on social roles was
misplaced, that a more productive inquiry would concentrate
on the relationship between sociolinguistic codes and
specific practices of reading and writing in various social
classes.
It is true, for example, that the practices of
mainstream Carolinans, when compared with Roadville and
Trackton residents, suggest activities which seem to
facilitate acquisition of the elaborated code. But the
focus on practices obscures another dimension even as it
clarifies productive activities; there is a value also in
retaining a line of inquiry which considers the
significance of social roles. We need to consider social
203 Scribner and Cole 236.
_____________:_______238
roles in order to see how access to them is permitted and
denied. Social roles entail bundles of practices and may
in fact control the practices of literacy in which an
individual is likely to engage.
For example, the social role "college student"
requires certain kinds of reading and writing which make
use of the underlying orientation of the elaborated code.
So does "white-collar manager," or the practice of any
profession or academic discipline. The social role
"ditch-digger," on the other hand, does not require such
reading and writing and is consequently unlikely to promote
acquisition of the code.
The bundling of practices in social roles can be
changed, however, Michael Holzman and his colleagues on
several literacy projects for the Rockefeller Foundation
have been recommending to the California Conservation Corps
and similar groups that they require their economically
disadvantaged employees (who may in fact be ditch-diggers)
to write up their daily activities in logs or reports— in
other words, to engage in practices which might help impart
elements of the orientation necessary for more prestigious,
private sector jobs.
Even if the skills these people acquire as a result of
the "rebundling" of literacy practices and social roles are
insufficient to their aspirations, the writing skills they
239
acquire will most likely help them in preparing their
children to deal with the expectations of the educational
system. In a paper prepared for a symposium at the
University of Victoria in 1982, Shirley Brice Heath and
Charlene Thomas report the results of an attempt to
accomplish this secondary objective.204 Heath asked Thomas,
who had registered for and dropped out of a "Basic English"
class in the southern United States, to write reports
detailing the progress of Thomas's son as he learned to
speak. Thomas's teacher, Amanda Branscombe, visited the
house and suggested how Thomas might use bedtime reading as
a focus of her reports. This was an activity Thomas, would
not otherwise have engaged in: at one point, "Thomas
reported that she had not 'started reading' to De, because
she could not get him to sit still long enough. Branscombe
suggested bedtime, and Thomas replied, 'He be sleep before
I go to bed.'"
We can see Heath's experiment as. an attempt to
rebundle practices of literacy so that the social role
"mother" as defined in Thomas's subculture would include
two new practices: bedtime reading to her son and writing
reports of his progress. While the latter may seem an odd
204 See also Shirley Brice Heath and Amanda Branscombe
(with Charlene Thomas), "The Book as Narrative Prompt
in Language Acquisition," The Acquisition of Literacy:
Ethnographic Perspectives, eds. Bambi Schieffelin and
Perry Gilmore (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1985).
__________________ 240
choice, the former has been associated with literacy
practices in the homes of social groups who have been more
successfully prepared for the demands of the school system.
Like the Rockefeller Foundation efforts, it represents an
attempt to make available practices associated with social
roles to which access is limited. This rebundling of
writing practices and social roles must play a crucial role
in any effort to break the cycle of limited literacy and
poverty.
At the college level, we need to appreciate the
importance of code-orientation in what we teach and
evaluate, and to recognize the extent to which our current
pedagogical practices reflect the centrality of
code-switching to collegiate literacy. We have earlier
discussed how the demand for a "thesis" requires a
code-switch with which many of our students have little
facility: rather than reaching for the generally
acknowledged social consensus they must emphasize the
smaller area of disagreement between their own views and
that of some other discourse in which they have
participated. If they are writing in response to a
classroom discussion, they must concentrate on their point
of disagreement with the teacher and rest of the class; if
they wish to agree with an already-expressed opinion, they
must do so for original reasons. In addition, they must
_____ 241
write for an audience imagined as absent from that
classroom discussion; unelaborated references to the local
scene of debate are usually inappropriate. If the student
is writing in response to an assigned piece of reading, she
must concentrate on the differences between her own point
of view and that of the author; if she agrees with the
author’s opinion, she must again do so for reasons other
than those expressed in the assigned book or article. She
must construe her audience as someone who has read the
piece but may have forgotten most of it; the salient points
with which she disagrees must usually be repeated. The
purpose of these sorts of writing tasks is no longer to
affirm the solidarity of the social group, but to establish
the writer's proficiency in expressing an individual model
of experience, a distinct point of view.
This code-switch informs as well the other elements
composition teachers usually emphasize. Instruction in
invention, heuristic or otherwise, designed to produce more
explicitly detailed writing asks the student to break open
socially sanctioned interpretations to get at the original
information on which they are based; this data is necessary
for a discourse which must substantiate its premises with
diminished recourse to social consensus. . Walter Ong has
indicated that in the local code of oral cultures— as in
informal (local) conversation— the received wisdom of
2.42
formulaic "sayings" is often accepted as authoritative.205
The need for details in expository writing reflects
the interpretive bias of the collegiate code, as do the
organizational strategies suggested by many writing
teachers: classification, definition, comparison and
contrast, and the rest of Alexander Bain's "modes" are
patterns of arrangement for presenting ideas outside of a
presumed local context in which they will be considered.
Discourse relying on the local code usually attempts to
present ideas as relevant to considerations of the local
scene; discourse relying on the collegiate code must
organize information internally. Students whose linguistic
usage has relied primarily on the local code may have few
strategies for arranging ideas without reference to the
scene in which they are recorded. Students usually acquire
these patterns rather quickly, though the prose they
produce when they have nothing they really wish to express
via the arrangement is often predictably unimaginative.
The same situation holds true for the teaching of
style, which, at the freshman level, usually means sentence
structure. The value of complex syntax is that it enables
the writer to more accurately express relationships between
ideas. The significance of this subtlety, of course, grows
proportionately as a writer concentrates on points of
205 Ong, Orality and Literacy 35.
___________________________________________________ 243.
disagreement and differences in perspective rather than on
the shared opinions and areas of overlap necessary for
consensus. Students who are concerned that the
relationship between their ideas be properly understood
pick up the punctuation and syntactic structures they need
rather easily, once the forms uncommon in local speech are
made available to them explicitly or in reading. Students
can be taught these forms by drilling, but their value
becomes apparent only when the student begins to rely upon
the orientation of collegiate literacy.
Diction, too, reflects the code-switch, not only in
the register of word choices, but in the attitude towards
the meaning of those words. Derrida tells us that a word
conveys meaning as a function of two variables: its
"difference," which is to say, its relationship to adjacent
terms within the semantic field, its contrast with other
words; and its "deferral," by which he seems to mean the
associations a word has accrued as a result of the contexts
in which it has been used. Collegiate literacy requires a
writer to pay more attention to the first variable, since
the code privileges semantic precision over the
interpersonal charge of an utterance. It is of course true
that collegiate writers who bring sensitivity to the
emotional overtones of words will write more stylishly and
persuasively— good collegiate prose requires the writer to
2.44
bring to bear techniques emphasized by each of the
codes— but the social contexts in which a word has been
used is less significant in collegiate discourse than it is
in local code.
The importance of thesis, of details, of organization,
of style, of diction--each of these is addressed at some
point in most writing classes, but the relationship between
them and the underlying orientation is seldom explicated.
Composition teachers recognize writing informed by
collegiate literacy, and can judge how any given piece of
writing makes use of the techniques which facilitate
expression of the code. We know, for example, when a
transition is necessary, but seldom stop to consider how
the need for that linking device is related to the demand
for textual coherence which arises as a result of a
different set of interpretive expectations than might be
brought to bear by a reader conversant only with the
orientation of local literacy. Our pedagogy may suffer
from this indirection, this intuitive feel for the
expectations of the underlying regulative code. It need
not do so.
We must acknowledge the codes of literacy to better
understand the premises and consequences of our judgments.
When a semester is ending, and our students have acquired
as much of the orientation of collegiate literacy as they
can deduce from our comments on their papers, we read off
the message of the code, evaluating their proficiency with
the necessary code and allocating accordingly places in
graduate and professional schools. Composition teachers in
this way play two social roles at once: we are educators
to the degree we impart the code of collegiate literacy and
allocators to the degree we evaluate proficiency in it. We
occupy a position in Bernstein's social cycle at which the
ability to manipulate meanings through language is
translated into socioeconomic status. Like all authorized
graders, we participate in the selection process,
deciphering the codes, the final judges of our students'
facility with college literacy per se.
We must remember that the judgments we render
participate in a system of resource allocation and are not
reflections of the intrinsic value of the linguistic skills
of the people whose writing we evaluate. The "superiority"
of the collegiate code is that it allows access to a
greater variety of social resources— which is to say, it is
efficacious within the structure of our socio-economic
system. The particular intellectual activities it
facilitates should not be mistaken for nobler or more
profound forms of symbolic action. Its prestige is a
function of the role it has assumed in maintaining the
boundaries of the class structure.
____________________________________________________ 246
The Rhetoric of Resistance
And yet knowledge of the elaborated code lies between
most critical thinkers and the people whose interests they
would serve, as a boundary not easily crossed. This threat
of isolation motivates critiques such as Ohmann's,
reasoning backwards from an unacceptable consequence:
If I may exaggerate', a bit, the implications
of Bernstein's and Mueller's position: the
revolutionary class in advanced capitalist
societies, the class with the experience of
exploitation and powerlessness and with the
motive for socialism, has been excluded from the
concepts and the very linguistic structures that
must be used to express that experience and
develop the institutions that will lead toward
socialism. This would make the job of the
revolutionary intellectual truly herculean. As I
put it a while back, in the form of a questions
to myself and other radicals: "When we try to
communicate to workers a socialist understanding
of things, must we think of our task as, in part,
making up a cognitive and linguistic deficit?"204
Ohmann does not seem to want to entertain the
possibility that the answer to his question might be "yes,"
even if "cognitive and linguistic deficit" were replaced by
some less value-laden reference to limited experience with
the elaborated orientation.
Our analysis of codes, however, is consistent with
analyses of the distribution of nonmaterial resources in
capitalist societies. The collegiate code can be viewed as
a skill the distribution of which mirrors and reinforces
204 Ohmann, College English 44.1: 7-8.
247
the distribution of material goods. Yet the concept of
intellectual domination resulting from an inequitable
distribution of interpretive strategies has met with
particular resistance from educators and theorists alike.
To understand why this might be the case, we need to
understand how the implications of the distribution of
interpretive codes differ from those of other skills.
Some readers suspect the theory of codes establishes
(that is, describes) yet another obstacle to the prospect
of revolutionary change. Marx and many subsequent writers
have analyzed in great detail how the social structures
necessary to industrial capitalism enforce a change in
relations among individuals so that people view the
products of their labor, each other, and finally themselves
as commodities, as objects related only in artificial and
dehumanizing ways. The theory of codes bears upon an issue
crucial to this analysis: the consciousness of
working-class people. Marxists such as Lukacs believe that
the unified process of history has culminated in the
emergence of the proletariat class, which, by becoming
conscious of its own role as the simultaneous subject and
object of history, will effect the transition from a world
of alienation:
Only the consciousness of the proletariat
can point the way that leads out of the impasse
of capitalism. As long as this consciousness is
lacking, the crisis remains permanent, it goes
248
back to its starting point, repeats the cycle
until after infinite sufferings and terrible
detours the school of history completes the
education of the proletariat and confers upon it
the leadership of mankind.207
Though the lesson must finally be learned, the length
of time necessary for the proletariat to become conscious
of its historical role is by no means certain:
History is at its least automatic when it is
the consciousness of the proletariat that is at
issue...The objective economic evolution could do
no more than create the position of the
proletariat in the production process. It was
this position that determined its point of view.
But the objective evolution could only give the
proletariat the opportunity and the necessity to
change society. Any transformation can only come
about as the product of the— free— action of the
proletariat itself.200
Lukacs stresses that the proletariatat must first
become conscious of its historical role, but this
coming-to-consciousness will only take place as a result of
an intellectual victory, since there is in the divided
proletarian consciousness "an antagonism between momentary
interests and ultimate goal. The outward victory of the
207 Lukacs, "Class Consciousness," History and Class
Consciousness 76.
200 Lukacs, "Reification and the Consciousness of the
Proletariat," History and Class Consciousness 208-209.
Marcuse makes the same point: "Thus, according to Marx,
the proletariat is the liberating historical force only
as revolutionary force; the determinat negation of
capitalism occurs i_f and when the proletariat has
become conscious of itself and of the conditions and
processes which make up its society. This
consciousness is preprequisite as well as an element of
the negating process." One-Dimensional Man, 222-223.
2.4.9.
proletariat can only be achieved if this antagonism is
inwardly overcome."20’ To accomplish this, the practical
character of the thought of the proletariat must become
real as the result of a dialectical process.
In this thought self-criticism is more than
the self-criticism of an object, i.e. the
self-criticism of bourgeois society. It is also
a critical awareness of how much of its own
practical nature has really become manifest,
which stage of the genuinely practicable is
objectively possible and how much of what is
objectively possible has been made real.
But this is precisely what the theory of codes
suggests is most difficult for this group to do, since the
working-class people who make up the proletariat have been
denied access to social roles in which the code
facilitating such a dialectical process is acquired; the
orientation of the local code with which most working-class
people are familiar partakes of the "stigma of immediacy"
Lukacs criticizes in contemplative, purely cognitive
stances:
For every purely cognitive stance bears the
stigma of immediacy. That is to say, it never
ceases to be confronted by a whole series of
ready-made objects that cannot be dissolved into
processes...It can survive only if it remains
critically aware of its own tendency to immediacy
inherent in every nonpractical stance and if it
constantly strives to explain critically the
mediations, the relations to the totality as a
process, to the actions of the proletariat as a
class.210
209 Lukacs, "Class Consciousness" 73.
To escape an orientation which views the immediate
form of a phenomenon as most compelling, one needs an
interpretive frame within which to "dissolve" that
pehenomenon in the totality of a larger system. Such an
interpretive frame, however, depends upon a
code-orientation to which most working-class people have
been denied access. Until the bundling of literacy
practices in social roles is changed to allow a wider
dissemination of the elaborated orientation, restricted
access to the collegiate code will slow the process by
which the proletariat becomes conscious of its historical
role.
The implications of the theory of codes are not
inconsistent with the premises of this reading of Marx, but
the delay it suggests has generated some resistance to the
analysis of codes. Lukacs himself is aware of the
limitations of individual proletarians in advanced
industrial societies and, in an effort to . identify the
necessary self-consciousness, distinguishes between the
individual psychological experience of working-class people
and the practical consciousness of the class of its
historical role as it acts to give expression to that role:
class consciousness is identical with
neither the psychological consciousness of
individual members of the proletariat, nor with
210 Lukacs, "Reification" 205.
251 .
the (mass-psychological) consciousness of the
proletariat as a whole; but it is, on the
contrary, the sense, become conscious, of the
historical role of the class,211
This practical consciousness of historical role takes
place in action, such as that described by Sartre in his
analysis of the fused group which stormed the Bastille:
the people of Paris came together as a group as the result
of a series of acts motivated by the threat to each of them
posed by the king's soldiers surrounding the city, each
citizen arming himself to protect his own life. Only in
the act of arming themselves did they recognize themselves
as a group:
It was a collective action: everyone was
forced to arm himself by others' attempts to find
arms, and everyone tried to get there before the
Others because, in the context of this new
scarcity, everyone's attempt to get a rifle
became for the Others the risk of remaining
unarmed. At the same time, this response was
constituted by relations of imitation and
contagion, everyone finding himself in the Other
in the very way he followed in his footsteps...In
so far as everyone wanted to defend himself
against the dragoons— in other words, to the
extent that the government was attempting a
politics of force and that this attempt at
organized practice determined the entire field as
practice— both as what might help this policy and
as what might oppose it— the result, Jjn the field
of praxis, was that the people of Paris armed
themselves against the king.212
211 Lukacs, "Class Consciousness" 73.
212 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason,
trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, ed. Jonathan Ree (London:
NLB, 1976) 354-355.
_________________ 252
In other words, the fused group emerged when the
people of Paris recognized themselves as a united group
which had performed a concerted action, though that action
had itself been undertaken in seriality. This is a
discovery of potential and common purpose which does not
rely upon familiarity with any meta-linguistic interpretive
code. It does, however, seem to meet Lukacs's requirement
for self-consciousness as a revolutionary force. In this
way, Lukacs's formulation solves the problem of limited
access to the elaborated orientation by requiring that
working-class people become conscious only of their
potential (and responsibility) for transforming society.
It leaves Lukacs, however, in the awkward position of
setting forth, in the name of the proletarian perspective,
an analysis unavailable to members of that class. We need
to consider this stance further.
We have said that the elaborated code facilitates the
expression of discourse which is not locality-dependent,
relying upon a rhetorical orientation which presumes that
the truth value of its propositions are independent of the
local scene in which it is inscribed or deciphered. We
recognize this to be finally inaccurate— all discourse is
interpreted as a function of the interpreter's context— but
collegiate literates make use of a rhetorical strategy
which allows a reader or listener to discount local details
253
which contradict a thesis in favor of an internal coherence
among the logical relations between propositions. High
school science teachers frequently invoke such a stance
after failed classroom demonstrations. Local complications
are considered less significant than the more widely
applicable general principle whose manifestation they
obfuscate.
This presumption of alocality, this rhetorical
strategy available to collegiate literates, allows a writer
to adopt a perspective other than that which reflects his
or her own actual position in the class structure. This
strategy permits Lukacs, a governmental minister born to a
bourgeois, to argue that the most accurate perspective from
which to judge a society is that of its most oppressed
class:
For, the Marxist method, the dialectical
materialist knowledge of reality, can arise only
from the point of view of a class, from the point
of view of the struggle of the proletariat. To
abandon this point of view is to move away from
historical materialism, just as to adopt it leads
directly into the thick of the struggle of the
proletariat.
The unstated presumption is that Lukacs is capable of
viewing capitalist society from that perspective. The
perspective he actually adopts, of course, is not that of a
laborer but that of an intellectual, teacher and
administrator who believes working-class interests are
254
allied with his own. Lukacs is aware that proletarians do
not think in the terms of his analysis:
Historical materialism grows out of the
"immediate, natural" life-principle of the
proletariat; it means the acquisition of total
knowledge from this one point of view. But it
does not follow from this that this knowledge or
this methodological attitude is the inherent or
natural possession of the proletariat as a class
(let alone of proletarian individuals). On the
contrary...But it is no less true that
proletarian consciousness of social reality, of
its own class situation, of its own historical
vocation and the materialist view of history are
all products of this self-same process of
evolution which historical materialism
understands adequately and for what it really is
for the first time in history.213
Lukacs expresses some confidence in his ability to
shift his perspective to give expression to the
consciousness inherent in the situation of the proletariat.
At the same time, he acknowledges that the members of the
class whose interests he espouses are not likely to possess
the freedom he demonstrates in shifting perspectives. One
reason for their difficulty in doing so is supplied by
Bernstein’s theory: working-class people have been denied
access to the interpretive code which facilitates the
adoption of a perspective theoretically independent of
their immediate situation. The most powerful determinants
of their local condition may not be those Lukacs has
identified as fundamental, even if his analysis is
213 Lukacs, "What Is Orthodox Marxism?" HCC 21.
________________________________________________2.5.5.
ultimately correct. Pressures to adopt the ideology of
another class may carry for them more immediate urgency.
The degree to which Lukacs is free from those pressures is
the degree to which he is pretending to have adopted the
perspective of the proletariat— that is, the distance
between his own actual location in the socio-economic
system and that of the people whose interests he
theoretically expresses. His ability to adopt the
perspective of the most oppressed class (which members of
that class cannot afford to do) is a measure of the power
of his social position.
The equivalent situation among western intellectuals
suggests an even more problematic relationship. Knowledge
of the elaborated code is a resource both necessary for the
maintenance and capable of facilitating a critique of class
society; as such, we should expect to find its distribution
controlled by self-regulating if not deliberately regulated
mechanisms. Codes serve to maintain the status quo by
limiting access to potentially critical modes of thought by
controlling distribution of interpretive frames which
facilitate nonlocal thinking. If this is the case, people
who have gained such access must somehow have indicated
their intentions vis-a-vis the institutions which make
access available. Bernstein suggests as much in the
quotation cited on page 71 of this study. People who have
_________________________________________ 2.5.6-
access to ways of speaking which facilitate critical
analysis of the existing configuration of power need to be
made safe; or rather, such ways of speaking are only made
available to people who have already demonstrated that they
are safe.
How is this accomplished? In his later writings,
Bernstein argues that information is framed and classified
in the schools to ensure such an arrangement: access to an
understanding of knowledge which allows the most critical
perspective on the existing socio-economic system (such as
that facilitated by the high literate code) is limited to
individuals who have demonstrated their willingness to
function within proscribed boundaries and sharply defined
social roles. Higher education is characterized, in
Bernstein's terms, by collection codes, which involve
strong classificatory boundaries and specific social
identities,
Any collection code involves a hierarchical
organization of knowledge, such that the ultimate
mystery of the subject is revealed very late in
the educational life. By the ultimate mystery of
the subject, I mean its potential for creating
new realities. It is also the case, and this is
important, that the ultimate mystery of the
subject is not coherence, but incoherence: not
order, but disorder, not the known but the
unknown. As this mystery, under collection
codes, is revealed very late in the educational
life— and then only to a select few who have
shown the signs of successful socialization— then
only the few experience in their bones the notion
that knowledge is permeable, that its orderings
are provisional, that the dialectic of knowledge
_257_
is closure and openness. For the many,
socialization into knowledge is socialization
into order, the existing order, into the
experience that the world's educational knowledge
is impermeable.214
This sounds rather like Stanley Aronowitz's
observation that the deliberate humiliations of the
academic credentialing process serve to guarantee that only
those candidates willing to accept domination are
established in berths at research universities and the
granting foundations of large corporations. The people who
have been permitted access to a view of the permeability of
knowledge are of course the same college teachers and
theorists whose role in the allocation of societal
resources we have earlier examined. From this we may glean
some suspicion of a final motive behind the ferocity with
which Bernstein was met. Bernstein noticed that
interpretive strategies are inequitably distributed; some
orientations allow access to power and others do not. When
the hermeneutic haves and have-nots are calculated, the
status of theorists and educators becomes problematical.
The difficult position of the intellectual under
capitalism was addressed in 1929 by Antonio Gramsci, a
prisoner at Turi in the heel of Italy. Gramsci
differentiated between "traditional" and "organic"
intellectuals; the former are distinguished by the social
214 B e r n s t e in , " C l a s s i f i c a t i o n and F ra m in g " 9 7 -9 8 .
258
function they perform in the service of industrialists, as
the clergy did for the feudal aristocracy, though "they put
themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the
dominant social group."215 Organic intellectuals, on the
other hand, are not distinguished by their occupation— they
may have any job characteristic of their class— but by
their function as the thinking and organizing element of
their "fundamental social group." Traditional
intellectuals may be drawn from the working-class but
assume a social position in the system of domination;
organic intellectuals remain working-class in their
relation to the means of production but act to transform
the social order:
The mode of being of the new intellectual
can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an
exterior and momentary mover of passions, but in
active participation in practical life, as
constructor, organizer, "permanent persuader" and
not just a simple orator (but superior at the
same time to the abstract mathematical spirit);
from technique-as-work to technique-as-science
and to the humanistic conception of history,
without which one remains "specialized" and does
not become "directive" (specialized and
political).21 *
215 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks
of Antonio Gramsci, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971)
7.
215 Gramsci 10.
259
Professional intellectuals whose principal dealings
with working-class people take place within the educational
system are understandably sensitive to the implications of
the theory of codes. Whereas material domination,
ideology, and emotional oppression are all topics for
dialectical analysis, the intellectual domination of
working-class people as a function of the interpretive
codes to which they have been denied access reveals the
complicity of the critical-thinking community in the
oppression of working-class people and their children. The
theory of codes may have engendered so much antipathy
because of what it implies about the people most likely to
encounter it: in pursuing our analysis of the codes of
literacy, we finally indict ourselves.
260
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