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Title: post-literacy Author: Seaweed Language: en Topics: literacy, green anarchism, books Source: https://anarchysecessionsubsistence.blogspot.com/2019/11/post-literacy_40.html
I lugged my collection of books from town to town, across a continent,
from place to place, for 40 years. It has always felt like if I didnât
have them, I didnât have the knowledge or insights they contained:
âMedicinal plants of the PNWâ, âAgainst His-story, against Leviathanâ,
âTAZâ, âFoods of the indigenous peoples of British Columbiaâ, âHow to
make wild mead and wineâ, âLiving My Lifeâ, âThe Castleâ, â Les chants
de Maldororâ... But I recently moved to a new place. I brought my
collection of books and when it came time to unload and store them, I
began to refer to them as âboxes of wordsâ. âDamn it, another 50 lbs of
words! I can hardly lift this thing!â Quantifying their content in this
way was a liberating moment. I had finally put them in their place.
Books are not literally knowledge or wisdom or insights â they are paper
and ink and glue, the congealed labor and alienation of workers,
commodities in the marketplace. And they are heavy! I have boxes and
boxes and shelves and shelves of words. And once again I get the sense
that Iâm merely an object of history, a cliche, a passive being who has
internalized enlightenment and civilized values and aspirations. Like
the bourgeois who wants to live in their own castle, Iâm the philosopher
with his own library!
The emergence of literacy and its role in society is a large and complex
topic, one deserving of much debate and conversation. But itâs important
to me that the reader of my essays is aware of my discomfort with, and
ultimately rejection of, literate-centricity. It seems implied by the
writing and publishing of my thinking that I must view literacy as a
neutral, if not necessary or important, tool in the spreading of ideas.
But this is not the case. In fact, I believe that a better world, an
anarchic one, would have difficulty making a place for it. It would have
to be an imposition, a misplaced, ill-fitting carry-over from the old
world into the new.
Literacy presupposes many relationships between humans and between
humans and their environment.
Is orthography more important than say community songs and dances? In an
ecologically sane, imaginative, horizontal world, are there going to be
school buildings in which we are forced to sit quietly as children,
being taught how to write and spell, or will we be at the river learning
how to fish, or in the field learning how to gather medicinal herbs and
edible plants? Will we be laboring at a printing press, with its
machinery and oils and noise, or honing our oratorical skills at
gatherings? Will we be in the machine shop making parts for the press or
reciting poetry from memory to our lover in a meadow?
To my mind, books are like cars or computers or electric guitars. We
make use of them today, within the context of this particular social
order, but I assume that we have no intention of maintaining the
cultural values and social relationships necessary for their survival in
a post capitalist world without centralized political power enforcing a
homogeneous culture on a population. If anarchy is renewal, is a
liberatory explosion of the imagination, a rejection of coercion, of
monolithic lifeways, then I fail to see how literacy would survive in
such a de-commodified, horizontal, de-massified existence.
I admit that I have greatly benefitted from books, from poetry and
radical theory to how-to and fiction books. Iâve been enriched by their
possession. But Iâve also enjoyed my toaster, electric piano, disposable
lighters and automobile and sincerely hope and doubt that any of these
would survive the dismantling of the global grid of authoritarian
institutions and a rediscovery of our kinship with nature.
Historically elite classes kept a great deal of knowledge to themselves,
keeping the peasantry ignorant of important facts, which made literacy
and books sort of levelling tools, a way to even the playing field.
Clearly, in that context, we seem better off with them. But are we
really? Arenât there other ways to impart important knowledge? If all
the municipal buildings and the banks were burned to the ground, if
there was no longer records of ownership or debt as everything was
freely shared, what sort of information would still be necessary to
record and store?
So I am encouraging us to look more closely at literacy, the social
order and relationships that created it and the way it forms our
thinking, reinforces unhealthy habits, and reproduces oppressive and
uniform social orders. I am also speculating that truly free people
deep-rooted in habitats would probably not pursue literacy. Without
elites that have an interest in keeping certain knowledge for
themselves, facts and philosophy would be shared and debated equally
through daily activities, not contained in books.
Books are not just one feature of a beautiful web of learning. They are
more like the hub of a mechanical wheel, with a set of hard spokes
emanating from it. Each spoke represents a static, simple fragment of
what might have been a holistic and complex culture. One spoke points to
the alienation and coercion inherent in schooling as an institution,
another to the ossification of language as the organic is forced to bend
to the inorganic, another to alienated labor making the machinery and
paper and ink and glue, and yet another points to a society of experts
and the division of labor, etc. It seems so obvious that, given the
choice, only some people might choose to maintain literacy and books,
but many others, likely most, would not and it would be difficult to
argue that the literate culture would be superior to the illiterate. In
fact the literate one would plainly need a social order very similar to
the one we are trying to dismantle!
There is a big difference between language/oratorical skills and the
ability to communicate using script. If we were to live in organically
self-organized communities that are entrenched in habitats, would we
have an interest or the time to teach script and copy texts? Wouldnât we
be busy mending fishing nets, making medicines, repairing our
structures, preserving food and other daily necessities of survival?
Isnât it likely that as authentic communities form and separate from the
massified cultures of capitalism, localized dialects would emerge? Does
it make any sense for local dialects and languages spoken by small
numbers of people to have their own script? To what purpose?
Without authoritarian institutions, private property records, large
homogeneous territories controlled from above, there would be an
explosion of new languages blossoming over the planet as centralized
control, colonialism, compulsory education and mass media disappear. We
know that there was once an enormous diversity of languages, and that
they were erased by economics, political imperatives, outsider
interests, subjugation, invasion... If this is the case, ridding
ourselves of these forces would lead to a re-emergence of this
diversity. And in that scenario, why would small villages, isolated
regions, roaming clans of nomads, experimental unions of egoists,
autonomous tribes, etc ever want to take the time to build a script that
reflects their language, perhaps only spoken by a few hundred or
thousand people?
It seems plainly ridiculous to assume that literacy will endure
everywhere or even anywhere where anarchic social relations prevail. I
doubt that the interest, ability and energy will exist to ensure its
universal continuance. A few texts in some places might be copied and
reproduced in some fashion, but we shouldnât project a literate world
into a decentralized, non-industrial, de-massified and ecological
existence. It seems much more likely that the average inhabitant of any
given area will be expected and encouraged to nurture highly developed
memory and oratorical skills rather than literate abilities. Of course
there are social and pro-industrial anarchists committed to maintaining
urban civilization, and, in the beginning at least, they would recognize
literacy as an essential cog in that machine and therefore try to
maintain it, but it would likely be a difficult proposition if coercion
were truly absent, and overtime the effort would fail.
In the meantime I want to encourage face to face conversations and
debates, public speaking, memorization of texts and other forms of
direct, non-literate communication not only among eco-radicals, but
among all who truly want demassified societies, anarchic relationships
and orientations, authentic upheaval, etc. Even reading to each other is
probably better than reading alone. Instead of handing someone a zine or
an essay, why not try to memorize it, make it your own in some way, then
share it with your friends/comrades/neighbours?
Memorization, public speaking talents and the ability to take the
stories and ideas of others and make them our own can be powerful tools
and skills in our struggle to dismantle the psychological and
propagandistic institutions that dominate our lives, to help open our
minds and hearts to what is truly important and re-discover new ways of
learning about and sharing them.