LITERACY AND IDENTITY

The adage ‘as one gets older the more one realises how little one knows’ is a truth universally acknowledged. More so by people who return to education late in life. I have been using language most of my life and consider myself to be literate, yet it is only very recently that I have come to understand my lack of knowledge about language and literacy and have discovered the vast numbers of people who seem to have dedicated their professional lives to thoroughly investigating the subject. There are linguists and semioticians galore expounding their theories about how we use, perceive, conceive and appreciate words and how that affects every single aspect of our lives.  From this we have Critical Discourse Analysis or CDA which is defined as an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse that views language as a form of social practice and focuses on the ways social and political domination are reproduced in text and talk. This discipline emerges from the practice of Critical Linguistics which in turn came out of sociolinguistics. What it all means is that the study of ‘language’ expands into every nook and cranny available like a rising tide, and each little pool becomes a site for further scientific exploration- if not scientific most certainly academic - and this little pool of performance writing is where I peer in with my net poised to catch I know not what.

N. Fairclough

I am now surrounded by the likes of Roz Ivanic, Norman Fairclough,  Gunther Kress, James Paul Gee, Theo Van Leeuwen, Ruth Wodak, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Patricia Williams, David Hargreaves, Dorthy Miell, Raymond MacDonald and many many others quite apart form the spirits of the French coven of Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Bourdieu and Barthes. None of them is aware of this association, but there is no reason for them to be aware of this association. In any event I come back to literacy, literacy and identity. The ability to use written language and the ways of using written language are key to my proposal. My take on language is that it includes all forms of sign, anything that can be read, interpreted or translated by anyone. Whether one has the competence to read words or not, we all have the ability to read symbols and images. How the reading is achieved and what understanding is arrived at is a personal matter. How the writing is achieved and what understanding is intended is equally personal. In both cases it is indicative of identity for the reader and the writer.  That identity is part of the set of circumstances surrounding the particular event or situation in which the reader finds the writing, or the writer has displayed the writing. 

Literacy in context (developed by Norman Fairclough
See Language and Power (1989:25)

From a performance-writing point of view it begins with the text. Others may have a different view. My hope is to investigate the various forms of display, how they affect us and the world around us; at least that is the intention. Whether it is worth individual examination or provides anything new is yet to be decided.