Part 1: Face to Face Democratic Culture -- Another Take on Why We Need Local Institutions to Develop Face to Face Democratic Culture

I’m going to go on a a thought-riff here and thought I would share – don’t know if you will be able to make it through, though.

I just now finished a delicious read about the transition from oral cultures to writing- and print-based cultures. (It’s my second book on the subject – this one is “ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind” by Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders. I have a third in line: “Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,” by Benedict Anderson. The first was “Orality and Literacy,” by Walter Ong.)

I love this stuff because it is deeply related to how I understand my own vision and work, and touches on why I deem it of such central importance to our world that we create institutions for the development and cultivation of face-to-face local democratic culture.

In part ABC is about how the establishment of State power required the invention of print and how, with the standardization of writing that print was able to enforce and which (in the form of “grammatical correctness”) won the culture over as a shared “value,” the “nation” itself first becomes possible as a political entity. (Benedict Anderson will call the “nation” an “imagined community” because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion [through the nation]. ... In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact are (and perhaps even these) are imagined.”

My sense is that all of this is profoundly connected to Heidegger’s characterization of the modern age as the era in which truth becomes identified with “the certainty of representation.” Illich and Sanders say something similar when they characterize the modern era as an age of “literacy,” an age that lives as though represented words on the page (e.g. of newspapers and laws and standardized texts, etc.) were primary and not secondary. Bush says there is a terrorist threat, and “ta da” there is — fear rises up everywhere in self-fulfilling response and the country and world are reorganized.

Such an age is one in which adequation to norms, standards and models (i.e. conformity to published standards of success, conduct, beauty, status, etc.) is strongly enforced, putting psychic pressure on the self — we are all judged by the centralized eye that has arisen thanks largely to trans-communal print culture.

This is particularly a disaster for many where the norms of conformance and privilege include biological features such as skin color — i.e. there is an inherent racism (which goes beyond skin color to the deepest unseen parts of every self) in the measuring of authentic reality according to artificial standards of value (which are presumed to be essential truths but are in fact socially constructed). What our culture lacks therefore are organized institutions for the celebration and surfacing of the ab- pre- or sub-normal, which is the ground out of which all norms arise and which is also the unspoken, living, fiery ground that keeps us aware of the artificial nature of all our norms and rules and languagings, which awareness is our opening into constant love and creation together.

All this is of a piece: economics and society got reorganized in conformity with the factory form and technological reproduction, both made possible on the basis of standardized models realized mechanically in productive machinery. Standardized reproducibility became the standard of scientific truth (reproducible experiments, reproducibly represented) and of technological progress — these notions of power and truth became the consensus around which thought and culture begin to reorganize themselves, leading however to something like what Nietzsche called nihilism: i.e., to a crisis of authenticity. The crisis of authenticity was fated, of course, due to the self measuring itself relative to promulgated models while having no forums for the individual to manifest or risk touching the extra-normal, for fear of being scapegoated. The uniqueness of the individual self’s experience has been put out of bounds, such that the authentic self has no opportunity to exercise influence and therefore no means of gaining unique identity through public action — the authentic self relying on upwelling, unwilled, “risky” experience in the presence of others. The channels must be reopened that allow and encourage the touch between the deep authentic unique self and the wider public and its thinking.

A few excerpts from Illich and Saunders, who talk about how there was no such thing as “correct” spelling until quite recently in history, i.e. after the promulgation of cheap printed materials and then of dictionaries, etc. -- a phenomenon that Sanders and Illich associate with the “bureaucratization of language.”

Mark Twain in Huck Finn, the authors suggest, intentionally reproduces Huck’s words with oral-dialect-like “misspellings,” e.g. “sivilization,” to thematize the coincidence of established power, privilege and “progress” with the enforcement of rules of correct writing and grammar. What do advertisements today do but ceaselessly promulgate norms, standards, aspirations to privilege and consumption?

A few excerpts from one passage of _ABC_:

“the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson ... Both set out to civilize Huck by teaching him the rules. ... In this emerging world of literacy, correct spelling offers the key to the correct look of literacy, the visual check on a person’s education, in much the same way that skin color is a key in this book to freedom or slavery.”

“Anyone who is able to read Huck Finn is obviously literate, literate enough to harbor the impulse to correct Huck’s mistakes, for the mistakes loom as boulders impeding the smooth and steady flow of the reader’s fluency. ... [Thus] this book forces us to read in an aristocratic way .... The inner self that sits in judgment, silently corrects Huck’s speech.”

“There is a whole world in Huck Finn that is closed to those without literacy. They can’t, for ironic example, read this marvelous work .... And yet we must recognize a world rich with superstition and folklore, with adventure and beauty, that remains closed to those who are too tightly chained to letters. ... By the end of the 19th century, very little territory remained. Only small pockets of orality still survive in the country—mostly rural, mostly poor, mostly black. The rest is literate in the most sweeping way.”