In his fascinating Gesture and Speech (1964, 1993) André Leroi-Gourhan traces the development of alphabetic writing considering it a distant consequence of the upright posture that allowed the hand to be free to draw the focus of communication from the face to the techniques of the hand.  The face and graphics are more strongly associated with mythology while the eventual development of alphabetic characters arranged in a linear stream precipitated the emergence of rational thought and philosophy.

There is much of interest in this way of understanding writing and its emergence because it centers the importance of alphabetic writing in the body, particularly the hand, and it identifies alphabetic writing as gesture or technique.  My reading of Leroi-Gourhan indicates something like a simultaneous development of writing gesture and the privilege of reason and thus philosophy suggesting, importantly, that body, that technique, that gesture, is linked at least as much with agency as with expression.  In the long history of human development we think as (not just what) we write and vice versa.  While I think Leroi-Gourhan understands that alphabetic writing and reasoned thought co-developed, my reading of him suggests that he understands writing in more of a utilitarian fashion, as a tool of memory, rather than as a tool of creative and explorative thought.  Clearly the evidence of what the earliest writing was about supports this understanding.  However, this leaves untold the story of when and how writing came to be a creative active powerful heuristic imaginative process, surpassing and complementing the functional characteristics of recording and documenting.

As I am in the process of critiquing academic writing conventions, these observations of Leroi-Gourhan are important.  It is clearly notable that a culture’s or community’s techniques of writing correlate with the way that community or culture thinks and engages the world.  Writing conventions that prohibit first person pronoun, that proceed along a reasoned and factually supported argument from thesis to conclusion, inculcate and reflect a reasoned and linear and factual mind and a world that is similarly ordered and related to.  These conventions correspond with a world that is orderly, firmly based on fact, and that can be understood and fully comprehended by the proper use of reason and objective observation and description.  These conventions correspond with a world where reason reigns and emotion, intuition, experience, subjectivity are excluded as distracting.  Yet, Leroi-Gourhan shows that alphabetic writing is inseparable from the bodily posture of walking upright, inseparable from the hand gaining some role in communication otherwise centered in the face.   Writing is, as Leroi-Gourhan shows us, gesture, a technique of culture and history.  The conventions of specific forms of writing amount to unconsciously used gestures that instill value without ever articulating the value.  The agency of the conventions is in the repetitious unquestioned practices of the body, the hand stringing alphabetic symbols across a blank page under specified constraints.

Leroi-Gourhan, writing in the 1960s discussed the impact of audiovisual innovations as suggesting a shift in gestural practices that he believed might well spell the end of writing.  He explicitly discussed film and audio recordings.  He focused largely on mechanical production and reproduction with hints of electronic media.  Little could he have imagined the developments that have occurred in the last half century.  What might Leroi-Gourhan have thought of the uncontrollable expansion of the Internet, the availability of 6 million songs on iTunes along with 10,000 music videos, 20,000 audio books, 65,000 podcasts, and 500 movies.  What would he have made of YouTube with its 120 million videos (up from only 6 million 3 years ago, only I say!), or Facebook with 500 million active members?  These too are founded in gestures that demand greater analysis than we have yet given them as techniques of culture, especially the bodily implications of these media forms.  Surely, these new media mark ever more strongly than did Leroi-Gourhan the end of writing or at least the necessity of its radical shift.  The interactive and relational character of the Internet engages gestures that defy the values insinuated by academic writing conventions that have changed little in a couple thousand years.  And the extensive research that convincingly grounds mind, value, and meaning in gesture, body, sensorimotor patterns, and bodily movement offer equally powerful challenges to these same conventions.

The future of writing surely lies in that aspect of writing that is a technique of creativity and imagination and exploration.  Until now we have relegated this technique to the sideline where we place art and entertainment; the challenge is how to embrace this technique while retaining some semblance of what we understand as academic.

Sam Gill – August 26, 2010

The future of education must carefully and critically question the current broadly held understanding that education is information.  Late in the twentieth century research began to demonstrate conclusively that meaning and value are based in and founded on bodily experience.  The western Cartesian perspective separates mind and body (and experience, subjectivity, and emotion).  In many ways information is disembodying and body-denying.  Even though we may know lots of facts and bits about something, this information does not a rich experience make.  Information is information about and about signals object and distance.  Even while advertisers and information providers identify very closely our personal individual information interests (most usually without our even knowing it is being done)—suggesting a subjective and experiential development—the information still stands apart from experience, from body.

This trajectory towards education as information  marks, in my view, the greatest threat to education and thus to human value and the quality of human life.  The difficulty in an electronic information age is how to link learning with experience, particularly bodily experience.  While there are endless possibilities, a couple are worth a mention.  The colony model suggested by Thomas Frey puts students, faculty, and professionals together as workers, developers, producers, investigators, creators, contributing to society as they experience learning while actively pursuing practical goals:  a film, a product, a service, new knowledge.  Another possibility is the by-product of the scale of efficiency of e-learning.  If most of the traditional time in classrooms and on campuses were spent e-learning, the time needed to learning would potentially be less than that required for the more traditional learning methods.  Time would be saved since the learning would be individually paced; once a student has learned a bit of knowledge she may move on.  Time would be saved in the efficiency of having the active learning tools available to students at any time and place, rather than being restrained to scheduled classrooms and class times.  Thus, with less hours spent learning the same materials, with facilities freed from the exclusive inefficient use of classes, this time and these spaces could be devoted to a wide range of bodily-based activities:  intramural sports, yoga, dancing, fitness, and so forth.  I’ll need to write before long on the types of brain/body activities that create the greatest potential for brain/body acuity.  These need to be present in any learning environment.

A further option would be a transformation in the practice of writing.  Currently university writing practices are consistent with the out-dated objectivist linear understanding of learning.  Current university writing conventions generally abhor any significant presence of the author, of subjectivity, of experience, of emotion.  Given that it has become well established that experience, emotion, movement, sensorimotor patterning, gesture, etc are fundamental to all meaning, future university writing conventions need to change.  The challenge will be to create conventions and expectations in which academics—faculty and students—are writing the body, writing the moving body, writing experience, etc while continuing to be academic in the sense of creating and establishing generally applicable knowledge, principles, ideas, concepts, etc rather than simply personal trivia or even art.  To rise to this challenge is an exciting prospect.

Sam Gill, August 26, 2010

The Future of the University:  Writing Conventions                                          August 24, 2010

It is somewhat confounding to me that while one of the most important images and charges of the university is that it represents the freedom to experiment and think, privileged and enabled by a separation from society, it appears in some respects to be among the most conservative and protective of societal institutions.  Much of the scientific research has already given over to being contracted by business and government.  The humanities however seem to be in a plodding phase where research is conducted on models established decades, if not centuries, ago.  And teaching methods have changed little.

As Marshall McLuhan and others have shown, there is a strong interplay between medium and message.  As futurists and educators evaluate the powerful shift toward electronic media, there is an accompanying discussion of the future of education.  My readings of this discussion indicate that when electronic media are considered, everything in education turns to information.  The assumption is that what e-media deliver is information.  I suppose this is conditioned by the Google and Wikipedia and Facebook mentality that allows us to find out something about most anything we run across.  I totally love this aspect of the Information Age.  However, having information does not an education make.  The university, in my experience, has over the last twenty years steadily drifted towards the understanding that education is information processing.  This is not a healthy direction for it supplants an information portal for a school.  Back to that in a later writing.

At the moment I want to think about the standard writing conventions that are expected in most universities.  While I think there is a shift to simply using writing to “report” on information gathered, there remains that standard linear narrative: thesis, argument, conclusion.  The disembodied posture (enough said) places this narrative as some object in the world that can and should stand alone.  This academic writing convention is, in some sense, the hallmark of the university as it has been for a very long time.  The accompanying qualities of these writing conventions—disinterested, disembodied, objective, unemotional—have far-reaching implications for us.  While the university seems uninterested in even budging on its writing conventions, its own research findings have proven the error of the human qualities so strongly engrained in the university’s most cherished  gesture, its writing convention.

From my perspective the reluctance to experiment with, reinvent, play with, try out alternative writing conventions is, along with the limitations of the furniture and architecture, the most oppressive and limiting features in the contemporary university humanities programs.  Thomas
Frey introduced an interesting situation that I’d like to extend beyond his use as an analogy for how our writing conventions limit our research and world.  He noted that the ancient Romans were highly limited by their number system—Roman Numerals.  While this system works satisfactorily for tracking some things—I suppose keeping track of years is the main example, since we actually continue to do so—it clearly doesn’t work well for keeping one’s bank statement or for the calculations necessary for rocket science.  While the Romans understood their number system as wholly adequate, they had no idea of the limitation this system imposed on their world.  It is rather, as Frey suggests, like asking a fish to understand the limitations of the water in which they swim.  I think also here of that fascinating book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, the 1884 satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott , in which we, by analogy understand the possible limitations of a three dimensional world.

The analogy I’d make is that our current writing conventions, especially when their limitations and determinations are not even acknowledged, function similar to the way the Roman numeral number system did for the Romans; it limited their universe and experience in ways they couldn’t even detect.  Academic writing conventions simply limit the world we are able to see and experience and investigate and they do so in ways that we cannot even see or know.  It follows then that what we need is a revolution in academic writing conventions.  In the midst of this far-reaching electronic media revolution, this effort may well be the only way that university humanities programs will survive, that the idea that education is anything more than information processing may survive, that the very idea of the liberal arts educated human being is important might survive.

How can this revolution in writing conventions be achieved?  How can a fish even “know” about “air” much less appreciate its importance (the parallel to evolutionary history might well be of interest here)?  I suppose there are a number of strategies (and I’ll want to write more before long on creativity, play, hypothetic inference) but there are a couple obvious directions.  First, we might simply ignore the conventions while continuing to write and see what emerges.  Second, we might take a Janus perspective and look back that we might see forward.  Here, we’d need to ask what is writing.  Why do we write?  What does it matter whether we write or not?  When did we start writing?  How does writing relate to identity? To agency?  Third, we may already have some hints, indeed some very strong indicators, about who we are as human beings and what actually matters to us:  passions, feelings, emotions, movement.  We may already understand that these qualities and values function even hidden behind the standard academic writing conventions.  We may recognize that these qualities are inseparable from being embodied human beings and that being bodied is an essential aspect of our identity and agency.

“New writing,” if writing at all, must be shaped by who we understand ourselves to be as human beings, as academic beings, as valued human beings and also by who we want to become, by how we want to impact the world in which we live, by how we want the world in which we live to look.  “New writing” must be seen as agency and action as creation as personal as powerful, not simply as some passive mechanism by which to connect information sources with information demands.

“New writing” is not, in the rapidly emerging e-world, some nice little experiment in cleverness initiated by idle academics bored being removed from the real productive world.  “New writing” is, as I see it, an essential task to save the humanity in a world that is hell bent on transforming everything into information and every being into an information processor.  Not only do we lose something important of our humanity in this process (like our humanity), we also truncate our human potential.  We even lose the point of information: Why information?  Through “new writing” we may realize ourselves; we may recreate ourselves to be powerful and creative in the new world that is arising around us.

As a teacher of writing I am at the point of admitting that I am a fish in water, but that, through analogy and imagination, I have begun to imagine that the water in which I swim may be depriving me of a type of oxygen, a vitality, whereas I thought it was the source of life.  I can imagine breaking through surfaces and finding new, now unimagined, vitality and richness, yet, I am confined in some ways (how can I even know?) by the gestures and postures that comprise me.  While I’ll do my best to realize “new writing” as fully as I can, I think of my students more as the tadpoles with legs who are about to rise to the surface and walk out on new lands into new atmospheres.  My students are the ones that have the greater potential to explore and create new heretofore unimagined worlds through their creation of new writing systems.  I’ll nip their heels to force them forward.