“I’d delayed her liberal education until the bitter end. Alone,
I could postpone no longer. The means of surrender were trivial.
The digitization of the human spoor made the completion
of Helen’s education as easy as asking.”
—Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995), p. 313

On August 22, 2005, Inside Higher Ed reported a $2 million grant awarded to Baruch College to teach business students how business leaders “dress, interact with colleagues, eat, socialize, and talk.” Donna Haggerty, Executive Director for Strategic Partnerships at Baruch, cautioned that this was not about making college professors “Henry Higgins types” but was "about helping students take the talents they already have to the surface.” The notion that one’s eating habits, dress, and talk could be conceived as “hidden talents” is suggestive of ways in which socialization and mediation become naturalized and invisible through repetition.

Although Shaw sharply critiqued class divisions in a capitalist society, he nevertheless placed great faith in high culture and scientific progress. In the epilogue to Pygmalion, he writes

Finally, and for the encouragement of people troubled with accents that cut them off from all high employment, I may add that the change wrought by Professor Higgins in the flower-girl is neither impossible nor uncommon. But the thing has to be done scientifically, or the last state may be worse than the first. An honest and natural slum dialect is more tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically untaught person to imitate the dialect of the golf club. (p. 195)

In identifying the phonetician as savior for those who speak other Englishes, Shaw calls on language experts to remedy the divisions caused by various factors including economics. When we first meet Eliza, she is the crude flower girl. Her Cockney dialect is tied to her ragged image. Nearby, Higgins is taking down people’s words. In a move that would make Bourdieu proud, Higgins amazes the crowd by identifying their habitus. “Then what did you take down my words for? How do I know whether you took me down right?" Eliza asks, thinking Higgins is a police officer (p. 201). Not quite; he is just the phonetician who will become her teacher.

Such faith placed in literacy is what Harvey Graff (1991) calls the literacy myth, the overzealous belief in the power of literacy. Anne Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola (1999) have described literacy as “a cloud of sometimes contradictory nexus points among different positions” (p. 367). Varying definitions of literacy have proven all too true regardless of modality. One reason for this is that narratives of literacy are related to issues of socialization and cannot be separated from them. Identifing Shaw’s play as a literacy narrative, Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen (1992) note how it raises perennial questions about literacy and language acquisition:

Pygmalion raises many of the same questions that we see in composition research narratives today and that we also find in late-nineteenth-century discussions of the subject: questions about the nature of literacy education, about whether literacy can be acquired without institutional training, about the relationship between literacy and socialization, employment, and mobility, about the continuities and tensions between speech and writing, about the influence of popular and literary genres on literacy formation, and about the role of gender in the acquisition of schooled language. (p. 513)

Indeed, the play raises many of the same questions today—questions that also are embedded in digital literacies. In Literate Lives in the Information Age, Cynthia L. Selfe and Gail E. Hawisher (2004) offer compelling portraits of individuals making sense of technology and literacy. They note how values about literate practice “can transcend the boundaries between print and electronic literacies” (p. 229)—in both directions. Because of this, our rhetorical canons also need to transcend boundaries, to examine broader networks of activity. "Neither life nor rhetoric," as we note in the core text, "is composed of an archipelago of focal events, so researchers should be alert to extended semiotic campaigns, to interdiscursive connections across time, place, and social milieu."

I conclude this section with Rebecca’s Bilbro’s meditation on Richard Powers' (1995) Galatea 2.2, below right. When Helen, the computer, discovers the context of her life, when she discovers the context of her literacy, she no longers wants to play. In the next section of this node, I turn to issues of hybridity: the bringing together of humans and non-humans.

Remediations (counterclockwise): 1. Remediated photograph of Mrs. Patrick Campbell; Berry reads Shaw's letter to Campbell; 2. Continuously playing footage: remediated scene from 1938 film; 3. Kim Parker reads from Pygmalion; remediated scene from 1938 film; 4. Continuously playing footage: “Literacy as Monopoly” with scene from My Fair Lady (1964); 5. Rebecca Bilbro, doctoral student in Writing Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discusses Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2.