Inhuman Literacies

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Queer-Inhumanisms: Unsettling the Legacies of "Man" Across the Curriculum

Abstract

Objectives

This paper returns literacy to its affective beginning and end over the course of one’s life (Grumet, 1988). In infancy, literacy marks the child’s attempt to symbolically communicate feeling. As she is given words to name these feelings the child, learns to engage in man-made symbols that form, reform, and deform her unique sense of self (Panelist, 2015). To engage inhuman literacies, literacies that queerly express our selves in relation and excess to normative molds of language, this paper presents and analyzes two accounts of inhuman expression: one of an infant entering into a life of language and the other of a man departing language as his life ends.

Theoretical framework

In education, literacy is conceived as a cognitive process fostering the intellectual ability to decode discrete alphabetical symbols. The literacy industry, based in the colonizing imperatives of English education and supported by cognitive psychology, touches every part of a child’s K-12 education; every part of a person’s mental, emotional, intellectual, social and physical development is subject to the man-made practice of literacy. In his essay, The Inhuman, Jean Francois Lyotard suggests that technologies of Man, such as literacy, are dehumanizing as they fail to attend to the whole and relational felt existence of the infant, not yet human, born radically dependent on others, immobile and without words. Indeed, the word infans, from the Greek, marking our primary human state and status, means ‘one who does not speak,’ signifying an existence that is wholly immersed in feeling for the (m)other. My paper refinds literacy in this pre-colonial, animal, in-human, relational state of not speaking or speaking without symbols to ground literacy in its radically affective state that cares for, carries, and survives a life.

Methods

The paper will engage two accounts of inhuman literacies to present literacy as fundamentally a felt, interpretive, intra and inter subjective experience of language. The construction of both cases relies on “observations in a set situation” of pre or non-verbal participants over sustained periods of time (Winnicott, 1941). My analysis of radically-dependent participants attends to somatic, affective and/or non-verbal expressions arising in their efforts to communicate a sense of their need, feeling, existence to others.

Significance

The analysis of these cases will highlight the educational need to reconceive literacy as beginning with the felt life of the infant, and the emotional life of the person. It will also surface the ways in which inhuman literacies ground and reside queerly inside normative forms of language. When literacy is viewed as a technology that overwrites the first inhuman nature through the instrumental, functional, intellectualizing, rote or routine delivering of words that approximate feeling without attesting for it, it voids language of the possible meanings words, symbols, communication can hold for us all. To ground literacy to its inhuman condition is to relocate symbolic development in its inhuman, in becoming human, in excess of human being, queerly felt wellspring of all thinking, acting, and existing with each other.

Author

• Aparna Rita Mishra Tarc, York University