[literacy in transliteracy]

"maintaining heterogenous contradiction is essential"


(Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 189).

While catching up on some reading and sifting through my google reader, my thoughts keep turning to Monday's transliteracy workshop. Again the notion of literacy appeared (initially) to cause some discomfort or at least problematisation. What *exactly* is literacy? Did we mean it in a linguistic book-sense? Should we be employing another term? Although it seemed there was general agreement that literacy points to modes of comprehension that extend beyond letters to mean *codes* in a broader sense, I frequently am asked why we don't just say visual literacy or multi-media literacy etc... For me, transliteracy is very much about a plurality - it isn't *just* visual or oral or linguistic and it isn't just about being media savvy. I think a large part of being transliterate is the ability to carry multiple literacies between media. For me, aspects of the web seem to exemplify this. I'm thinking of Twitter and sending updates via a mobile (txt literacy perhaps) to the web (web literacy) and then someone being notified of those updates on their mobiles, via rss aggregators, IM or just be following along on the web. Amidst these kinds of information exchanges there are also literacies required to navigate across literacy borders, to *read* images and sounds. I'm also thinking of web fictions (Dene Grigar's Fallow Field, Donna Leishman's Red Riding Hood, Marjorie Luesebrink's Fibonacci's Daughter etc...) which require readers to be literate in sounds, images, text and interaction and often this literacy requires readers to amalgamate these literacies into the same instant of reading/understanding/interacting/performing. Maybe using the word literacy in transliteracy might also be thought of (in my view) as a Kristevian move; (like Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray too suggest); one can challenge traditions (literary and otherwise) from within. So, using the term literacy can suggest a critique of (monomodal?) foundations. A sort of productive mimesis, repetition with a difference?

Iterability is "the logic that ties repetition to alterity"

(Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context," 180).