"Not being able to read or write myself, and my husband also having been without the advantages of an education--upon whom would devolve the writing of the book at my dictation--caused me to doubt whether I would be able to present a work that would give perfect satisfaction." --Abby Fisher
Fields traditionally encompassed by the academic category English--rhetoric and composition and literature--risk tacitly endorsing efforts to delineate the boundaries of civilization, justifying the marginalization and exploitation of underprivileged populations. The assumption that students must become literate, culturally useful individuals bears a too-close resemblance to social Darwinism, persuading individual and collective actors to exclude and extinguish the illiterate masses from the civilized core. Written communication, taught as the necessary pathway towards cultural literacy, is pushed on every entering freshman as if to underscore the fact that the university does indeed have an intellectual gateway that separates it from the actual universe outside the ivory tower. Written communication defines the boundaries of the university, separating it from the Powerpoint presentations of the business world as much as from the confessionals offered by the clergy. It not only keeps out the uncivilized businessman and businesswoman, who supposedly hunger for money devoid of an ethical consciousness, but writing also keeps those in the university...well, "in" the university. Teach a slave to talk about whether she want to be free, and she'll never be free. Teach a student to write and he'll always seek advice from the professor, the writer par excellence.
Visual literacy, on the other hand, challenges teleological notions of writing as the penultimate medium of civilization. Writing, after all, developed in many societies as a crude record keeping device; more important cultural memories were transmitted orally. Visual studies opens the university, and more specifically English, to the broader cultural oscillations between written and visual literacies. Neither writing nor images form the end product of modern civilizations; Western civilization has not "progressed" into written literacy, nor has it de-evolved into a primitive visual culture (as might be inferred from Marshall McLuhan's descriptions of a single human tribe reduced to a global village through new visual technologies). Lived experience, as well as human development, begins at a general sensory level, often using sight to coordinate motor skills and learn cultural signifiers, like facial expressions. While verbal language becomes an important cultural tool, visual literacy emerges with writing serving as the skeletal framework that makes reading a book from left to right, or top to bottom, possible.
Visual studies helps separate writing from literacy, allowing us to see that even the illiterate--those who cannot personally write and read--can still write through surrogacy. Abby Fisher, an ex-slave who could not read or write, wrote a cookbook in 1881 through dictating to an amanuensis. She signifies her capacity as a mother not through written style, but through an image: in her final recipe, a remedy for infants, she boasts that she raised eleven healthy children into adulthood, a remarkable feat for any woman living in nineteenth century America. The figure of the image, here, is not a spectacle or simulation as popularized in postmodern theories. Rather, the image displays a heightened sense of cultural literacy, a familiarity with more than one culture. Black and white women will appreciate the image of her eleven children. Her cookbook may be written in words, but it signifies through images.
Fisher's interdependency with her amanuenses is overlooked in a culture that stresses the autonomy of the author: writing as an individual, not collective, act. On the other hand, interdependency is fundamental to many visual productions that populate our cultural environment. Packages on a grocery store shelf and commercials on the television involve hundreds of hours of collaboration time, ranging from research and development to the aesthetic representation itself. The effort at universities to push group learning occurs less at the written level and more at the visual and oral levels as students pick up social cues from their peers. And yet, at the end of the course, they are still judged individually by a single professor. Myths of individualism die hard. Images continue to live whether we acknowledge the collaboration behind them or not.
