Raewyn ConnellPART ONE: ABOUT WRITING
1 : THE NATURE OF WRITING
The importance of writing
In everyday life we encounter writing in a great many forms, from street signage to
product codes to books. A while ago I read Shirley Brice Heath’s wonderful
ethnographic study Ways With Words , which looked at language and reading in two
communities of the southern United States, especially their schools. She got the
children to note what they read, and found an astonishing number of messages -15,
- read by one school class in the course of one ordinary day, from when they got up in
the morning to when they went to bed. That’s an average of 600 messages read by
each child.
The philosophers tell us about the structural importance of writing in culture. Jacques
Derrida’s monumental Of Grammatology , if I have understood it correctly (no
guarantees!), argues that writing can’t be understood as subsidiary to speech, but is a
form in its own right, deeply connected with our capacity for conceptual thought. Paulin
Hountondji, in his brilliant African Philosophy , argues that writing is essential to allow
authors to take responsibility for their statements, and for the correction of knowledge
through critique.
In the light of these contributions, Raewyn Connell (who hasn’t written any philosophy)
argues that writing is a form of social communication central to the development of
organized knowledge. Therefore, an understanding of writing is needed for the
democratisation of knowledge. More of that, as we go along.
Writing as a practice
If you walk in through the red-brick entrance of the British Library, in Euston Road
London, you find on the left a little museum of writing. Just now it is occupied by an
exhibition about Magna Carta, the barons’ delight. In ordinary times it displays a
selection of books and manuscripts from the BL’s fabulous collection, including English-
language literature from Beowulf to the computer age.
The first time I went in, I hoped – since I have Irish ancestry – that they had something
from Mr James Joyce. Really I needn’t boast about my thin connection. Joyce is
interesting simply because he is the greatest writer in English since Shakespeare.
(How’s that for a value judgment?) And there it was, in a glass cabinet in a dimly-lit
room: a yellowing page of the original manuscript of Ulysses , the most influential text of
modern literature in the world.