Listening (Again) to a Blind Reader’s Literacy

I received a request recently from David Shields asking to clear copyright to quote from one of my early essays on literacy and disability. He plans to quote one sentence about list-making and the advent of literacy in his forthcoming book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.  The sentence is actually a summary statement of ideas in Jack Goody’s 1977 book, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, so Shields may need Goody’s permission, not mine. I think it’s a fair use that requires no one’s explicit permission, but I appreciate the contact because it led me back to Listening to the Literacy Events of a Blind Reader (1994), which I have moved to the Fair Use Lab to re-open it for discussion.

The essay begins with a hypothetical problem posed by Jack Goody which was hardly hypothetical for me:

Goody (1977) poses a problem that both intrigues me and stirs a lingering doubt about the nature of my own literacy. In a discussion of Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970), Goody asks this of his readers: “Imagine (though it is a fanciful task) Kuhn’s book as an oral discourse” (p. 49). Listening to such an oral discourse, Goody explains, would preclude a process essential to reading written texts visually. This process involves the recursive scrutiny of text to detect, compare, and resolve inconsistent meanings. It is a literacy skill that Goody and others regard as the cornerstone of critical thinking.

Close critical reading (and notation) of the book’s first edition led scholars to identify multiple, inconsistent usages of Kuhn’s seminal concept — the paradigm. Kuhn acknowledged and amended the inconsistencies in the book’s second edition. Goody maintains that, for the listener, such discrepancies in the text and the critical thought it represents would be “swallowed up in the flow of speech… the spate of words, the flood of argument, from which it is virtually impossible for even the most acute mind to make his mental card-index of different usages and then compare them one with another” (p. 49-50).

Goody’s fanciful problem haunts me sometimes because it is not fanciful for me. Listening to a recorded version of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is precisely how I read the book.

And the essay concludes:

When I first learned that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was available as a recorded book, I was thrilled. A book that I had heard about for years, a book which continues to enlarge the philosophy of knowledge in and beyond the sciences, was accessible to me. Access to information (in other words, decoding the text) is the first challenge to the literacy of blind people, and lack of access is the greatest barrier limiting that literacy. Access is not enough, however. Functional capability and social efficiency are not enough. A literacy acquired, maintained, and advanced through the oral-aural mode is capable of truly protean shapes; understanding their contexts and processes is the key to achieving a literacy without limits.

For the sake of my own literacy as well as the literacies of many other blind readers, I am pleased to report that the literate technologies available to us are far greater now than I could have imagined in 1994. Thank you, David, for bringing me back to this text.

[see the Reality Hunger website]