Functional Illiteracy

Why people read a book and then think they understand everything all of a sudden.

Functional illiteracy is a habitual kind of illiteracy that is worse than normal illiteracy because it comes with the pretense of being literate. 

At least a person who is illiterate knows they are illiterate, but if you can read the Bible or The New York Times, you probably think you’re literate.

Functional illiterates are most Americans. 

We have “learned how to read,” but we rarely actually read books. Instead, we just read advertisements and propaganda. 

Having read some books in high school doesn’t count. Some popular throw-away novel on the weekend that you won’t talk to anyone about or ever think of again? Nope, that won’t cut it. 

Likewise, and perhaps counterintuitively to many, reading political, religious, or business propaganda books from within only one specific tradition doesn’t count either. 

Here’s why.

When you sit down and try to read something on your own, without having a basis in a wide diversity of texts that represent or critique different interests and perspectives, the text appears transparent; its very textuality disappears into the background. 

Whatever it is you’re reading is not an object or thing-in-itself, like a table or rock. Yet it gets taken as such. To us illiterates, the book tends to function as either an object of novel curiosity, a social signifier (what does this book say about me? To who? What am I supposed to say about it?), or, most likely, as a guru. 

The guru text strikes you as profound and articulates thoughts you’ve broached but never connected to others or worked through. It leaves you feeling as though you’ve found what you needed. 

It is usually easier to see this in others instead of oneself. Some examples: 

1. Someone goes from never reading anything but tweets, posts, comment sections, billboards, ads, and maybe sometimes fiction or some articles, then they get “into” a religious, political, or business camp, ideology, or scheme. Suddenly they are reading that stuff voraciously. Though there might be disagreements at times, it generally presumes a lot of the same unspoken assumptions that the reader doesn’t even catch because the only stuff they’re reading is now based in this specific position. 

1. “Literalists” are an extreme form of functional illiterate. They’ve learned “to read” but not to read. Literalists think the book that profoundly impacts them is the best book ever written, where truth becomes concrete and obvious. Every time they read it, the narcissism of understanding congratulates them, and insofar as it ties them to a community, belonging is found, felt, and relished. Literalists have tasted the uncertainty of a world of superficiality and relativism, and now live in revolt against it. 

2. Idealogues go hand in hand with literalists, and if they form a venn diagram, there is a lot of overlap. However, one could be a very well-read ideologue who even reads "the enemy" or philosophy more broadly—the difference here is that, regardless of how much diversity in perspective the idealogue explores, it is always done from the outset to prove something already assumed to be true, or to negate what is presumed true. That’s like going to “get to know” someone and then constantly interrupting them to put words in their mouth or score cheap gotchas, except it’s being done to authors.

Emmanuel Levinas’ important distinction between theory and critique is relevant here. 

“[Critique’s] critical intention then leads it beyond theory and ontology: critique does not reduce the other to the same as does ontology, but calls into question the exercise of the same.” (Totality and Infinity, pg. 43)

Theory strives to understand and grasp, whereas critique turns back on the one who aims to understand and grasp. Without some level of critique, there can be no self-awareness. 

Of course, sometimes “critique” goes too far and is seemingly too self-aware, almost narcissistically fixated on signaling “look, see how self-aware I am!” (Even acknowledging this is self-serving for me, as I am positioning myself as the one whose self-criticism is not over-doing it… and now I’m doing it even worse. See, this is what I mean with how this kind of “reflexivity” can get obnoxious.) 

So all critique might not be a real solution to anything, but critique is an important part of any process that aims to refine one’s understanding. Opening oneself to critique, calling oneself into question, in its extreme form this looks like Levinas and Derrida. Critique, in Levinas’ sense, tries to compensate for theorists like Hegel and Marx who called the world into question and tried to bring it all into their conceptual grasp. The vice of theory is totalization and hubris, whereas with critique it is narcissistic self-righteousness. One can go off the deep end either direction, the pragmatic thing I think we all aim to do today is to do both theory and critique. 

To bring this back to functional illiteracy, we functional illiterates, structurally stultified and out of practice when it comes to the world of textual understanding, take what is given as given without being able to see the unspoken assumptions that get left out. On the one hand we have our own unchecked “cognitive” biases, whereas on the other we can’t see what’s conveniently left out or assumed yet unspoken by the authors we read. Without genuine exercises of critique, we take the text as a thing-in-itself, as an everything-there-all-at-once. 

The presumptions guru texts operationalize are closed, not open. Rigid, not agile. The presumption is never something so simple and profound as "truth exists outside of my fancy" or "beauty and justice are real, but I as well as everyone else are probably ill informed on it." Such axioms, in-part, form a rough basis for any genuine intellectual endeavor, but they are pragmatic assumptions that are open-ended, not closed and limiting. 

The presuppositional matrices of ideology, the operative basis of its spokespersons and fanatics, are less open-ended. In fact, they are the opposite of open-ended, meaning they are unfree to the extreme. Hence the literalist goes to scripture with a predetermined interpretation. On the other side, one reads purely subjective or clearly biased works as scripture. In this mode, philosophy gets read as arguments one’s presupposed group ideology has supposedly already answered, i.e. boot camp for apologetics. While popular and obvious among Christian evangelicals, this can also be seen demonstrated by Lenin or Mao when they “critique” philosophers for not doing “dialectics” the way they think appropriate (“What we do is Real Science, everything else is bullshit metaphysics!”)

Functional illiteracy is not the smooth-brains of normal illiteracy, no—instead, it is the deep ruts of entrenched warfare. And just as in battle, you don't really know why you're fighting, just that the enemy needs to be vanquished. 

To win, you must follow orders. Get your talking points straightened out and accumulate knowledge that will build off your favored position. No need to decenter, dismantle, or gain critical distance from yourself and its context via the exercise of uncertain advances into the not immediately-obvious, the not immediately-useful, the discomforting terrain of whatever your camp would call "enemy." Ideology demands that you approach the textual diversity of the world on a defensive mission to classify as friend or foe, to reduce, downplay, and dismiss anything that provokes discomfort or exposes contradiction within oneself or one's most closely cherished assumptions.

Business, religion, and politics alike all cry out to their various sectarian adherents, "No need to read philosophy in good faith—much less at all!" Capital, Church, and State have made one thing clear to everyone, regardless of ideological position: 

“There is no time to read for the sake of understanding, but especially not as critique. 

You don’t have time to sort through complexity or to try on genuinely new critical perspectives. Just get back to work, you functional illiterate!”

Author bio:

David McKerracher (M.A.) is the organizer for, and founder of, Theory Underground, a teaching, research, and publishing platform by and for dropout workers with earbuds and burnt out post-grads who want to understand The Situation as a means towards figuring out the conditions of possibility for The Good Life. McKerracher’s background is in critical theory, political philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology. All of McKerracher's work revolves around a single question: What is the Good Life? McKerracher's questioning into the conditions of possibility for living The Good Life led him to an M.A. thesis on “Timenergy, the existential basis of labor power.” This work draws heavily from Marx and Heidegger. McKerracher developed this concept further in his first book called Waypoint: Timenergy, Critical Media Theory, and Social Change, and his second book simply titled Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. Because “Timenergy Theory” requires a more robust theory of libidinal economy and ideology, McKerracher has spent the last few years learning Žižekian and Lacanian theory of ideology from his compatriot Michael Downs. Instead of pursuing a doctorate, McKerracher founded Theory Underground, a vehicle for cultivating the kind of research and conversation necessary to take timenergy theory to where it needs to go, the long-term goal of which is to pave a way forward for humanity to maintain the conditions of a robust cultural plurality, harness automation-for-all, and ultimately, explore the universe.

What’s on the other side of the paywall? Just the words thank you.