While there is much to hold onto within the typical formation of
critical pedagogy -- viewing education as means for social change, encouraging
teachers to become public intellectuals, creating curriculums driven by
students' interests and experiences, and supporting diversity and multiplicity
-- the dialectical approach driven by a counterhegemonic sociopolitical vision
against capitalism has become problematic. Criticisms emerged and grew as critical pedagogy moved from
theory into practice. Educators struggled to manipulate a model based on the
informal education of Brazilian adults to fit the institutionalized classroom
setting where work is required for credit and graded. In 1988 Elizabeth
Ellsworth claimed in "Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering? Working Through
the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy" that critical pedagogy does not
go far enough in problematizing the role of the instructor and the limitations
of dialogue. No matter what the sociopolitical vision of the instructor may be,
classroom equality is an illusion as critical pedagogy practices leave the
"authoritarian nature of the teacher/student relationship intact"
(306). In addition, the instructor's personal stake and relation to their
sociopolitical vision is often left unexamined. Ellsworth suggests shedding the
goal of "utopian moments of
'democracy,' 'equality,' 'justice,' or 'emancipated' teachers -- moments that
are unattainable (and ultimately undesirable, because they are always
predicated on the interests of those who are in the position to define utopian
projects)" (308).
One of the
most common utopian moment critical pedagogues aspire to is a moment where
capitalism is rejected. A central claim in much critical pedagogy scholarship is that
schools are a reproduction of capitalistic corporate society (Giroux, Shor,
Mclaren, Apple). During the 1980s, the parallels between the factory line and
the classroom were easy to make -- they were both housed in centralized
institutions, employed standardized forms of labor, etc. However, today such
comparisons are much more difficult to make as scholars from various fields
have begun researching the increasingly dominant status of
"post-fordist" or "post-factory" categories of labor:
affective labor (Hardt and Negri), immaterial labor (Lazzarrato), knowledge
labor (Drucker), virtuous labor (Virno), linguistic labor (Marrazi), symbolitic
analytic labor (Reich), ludolabor (Dibbell), info-labor (Berardi), spectacular
labor (Bellar), cognitive labor (Yann Moulier Boutang), etc. What all of these
formulations have in common is a recognition that the classic Marxian “labor
theory of value” that drove critical pedagogue’s conceptions of labor and
capitalism (as well as much work in critical and cultural studies work of the
70s and 80s) no longer makes much sense (even as many turn to another
conception of Marx’s—his references to “General Intellect”—for contemporary
inspiration).
Lazzarato
divides immaterial labor into two parts: "informational content" and
"cultural content." The informational content is comprised of
communication within computerized and cybernetic systems, whereas the cultural
content involves consumer and lifestyle choices that can be tracked and
monitored. Taken together, the two result in what Mario Tronti calls a
"social factory" in which labor in increasingly less defined by time
and location (as in the traditional factory), creative and “intellectual” work
takes precedence over physical labor, and products tend to be created for
smaller groups of consumers and more flexibly attuned to shifting consumer
demand (Thoburn).
The large
encompassment of immaterial labor supports Antonio Hardt and Michael Negri's
claim in Empire that there is no
longer an outside when it comes to capitalism: "There is nothing, no 'naked
life,' no external standpoint, that can be posed outside this field
permeated by money; nothing escapes money [...] The great industrial and financial powers thus produce not
only commodities but also
subjectivities. They produce agentic subjectivities
within the biopolitical context: they
produce needs, social relations, bodies, and minds-which is to say, they produce
producers" (22).
Traditionally,
critical pedagogues applied tools of postmodern critical theory—foregrounding
the contingency or ‘constructed’ nature of societal norms, recovering
marginalized identities or subjectivities—to resist the corporatization of
schools. However, based on their analysis of contemporary shifts in the flows
of capitalism, which feed off of the fragmentation of social identities, Hardt
and Negri map contemporary capitalistic power as a system that is “not only
resistant to the old weapons [of resistance] but actually thrives on them, and
thus joins it would-be antagonists in applying them to the fullest. Long Live
Difference! Down with essentialist binaries!” (138). Thomas Frank, to give just
one more example, has echoed this analysis more eloquently, and with more of a
focus on the cultural politics of American Leftism; he writes in his essay,
"Why Johnny Can't Dissent," (an allusion to Rudolf Flesch's famous
1955 essay on literacy, "Why Johnny Can't Read"): “Corporate America is not an oppressor but a
sponsor of fun, provider of lifestyle accoutrements, facilitator of carnival,
our slang-speaking partner in the quest for that ever more-more apocalyptic
organism…Consumerism is no longer about ‘conformity’ but about ‘difference’”
(34). Such a change complicates critical pedagogy's identity as a resistance
pedagogy fueled by counterhegemonic practices. Resistance to norms only creates
new niche markets on which capitalism can feed; simply put, in contemporary
'late' capitalism, resistance becomes surplus labor.
Recognizing
these changes is key to addressing the conservative critique of critical
pedagogy. Jeff Smith
contends in "Students' Goals, Gatekeeping, and Some Questions of
Ethics" that as college instructors we have an ethical obligation to help
students fulfill their goals, even if those goals are to gain social mobility
by joining, rather than critiquing, the dominant class. Similarly, Russel Durst
argues for instructors to acknowledge that students are taking composition to
gain skills for their future careers. However, he does not suggest that
instructors shy away from critical examination of power structures and
ideologies, as long as they acknowledge and accept those students who wish to hold
onto their conservative beliefs and faith in meritocracy. Sullivan and Porter
argue that there is a false dichotomy between students' future professional
lives and their civic lives: "[W]e feel that many people in computers and composition have not
paid sufficient attention
to workplace studies in professional writing, and to some extent have even exhibited
hostility to the workplace, or at least reluctance to see the workplace as a potential site for change.
However, by dismissing workplace
practice, computers and composition fails to engage the key site students will inhabit. The field
ends up separating the workplace agenda from
the social change agenda in the composition classroom, thereby reinforcing an old binary
(classroom v. workplace), that, we contend, is ultimately
harmful to students" (xiii).
What is
lost in this dichotomy is the middle ground and the belief that individuals can
make a difference through their career. Engineers can incorporate more
environmentally friendly approaches. Medical professionals can treat their
diverse patients with better understanding and sensitivity. Scientists and
innovators can question the patent system.
Ellsworth
also asks us to reconsider our expectations of students and the results of
classroom dialogues. If as Ellsworth and others (Elbow, Wright) assert, the
critical class retains the unequal relationship between teacher and student, it
is not a safe zone where students feel free to say anything without
repercussion. As Ellsworth notes in her own class examining race through literature : "Things were not being said for a
number of reasons. These included fear of being
misunderstood and/or disclosing too much and becoming too vulnerable; memories of bad
experiences in other contexts of speaking out; resentment
that other oppressions (sexism, heterosexism, fat oppression, classism, anti-Semitism) were
being marginalized in the name of addressing racism--
and guilt for feeling such resentment; confusion about the levels of trust and commitment surrounding
those who were allies to another group's struggle;
resentment by some students of color for feeling that they were expected to disclose 'more' and once again take the burden of doing the pedagogic work of educating White
students/professor about the consequences
of White middle-class privilege; and resentment by White students for feeling they had to
prove they were not the enemy" (316).
None of these possible road blocks are acknowledged in the abstract
theoretical vision of critical pedagogy. Though Ellsworth doesn't used the
terminology, issues related to affect are also noted in her classroom discussions
of race, which are, to use Jennifer Seibel Trainor's term, "emotioned."
The term "emotioned" is used to describe how "beliefs
become persuasive through mediating and mediated processes of emotional
regulation, individually experienced feelings, and dynamics of persuasion and
rhetoric." Emotioned is not the same as emotional, as it points to the
"related dynamics of lived affective experiences, emotional regulation
taking place through institutional and cultural practices, and language."
Race is a lived experience, not a property held by individuals.
Affect
theory explains the limitations of rational discourse. Students cannot fully
articulate the reasoning behind their subject positions or beliefs because of
the pre-cognitive elements that shape them. Furthermore, when individuals are
presented with facts that irrefutably challenge their beliefs, their beliefs
become further
entrenched,
a phenomenon psychologists call belief preservance . As reported by Scientific American, "Everyone does it, but we are especially
vulnerable when invalidated beliefs form a key part of how we narrate our
lives. Researchers have found that stereotypes, religious faiths and even our
self-concept are especially vulnerable to belief perseverance." Interesting,
the beliefs they we are most reluctant to scrutinize and change are the ones
most often touched about in a critical classroom. No wonder the pragmatism of
critical pedagogy is being called into question.
To address the pragmatism of critical
pedagogy in the composition classroom,
one must address the key tool which much of the curriculum hinges upon,
literacy. Two key considerations much be made here -- one acknowledging the
role of affect and the other acknowledging that we have moved from a
print-based to multimodal networked world of communication. In
"Experiential Knowledge: How Literacy Practices Seek to Mediate Personal
and Systemic Change," Gwen Gorzelsky argues experiential knowledge is
necessary to address "the disjuncture between students' experiences and
the conceptual and procedural knowledge of social critique" (404). She
defines experiential knowledge as "the combination of procedural memory
and the subjective, emotionally grounded nature of perceptions and cognition"
(401). As an alternative to critique, Gorzelsky proposes a guided meditation,
which allows students to embody a perspective and gain empathy. Essentially, we
need a literacy that allows us to communicate with and elicit response from the
nonrational body.
Experiential knowledge gives us a
new means of understanding subjectivity, beyond ideological construction. As
Brian Massumi explains, "Affect holds a key to rethinking postmodern power
after ideology. For although ideology is still very much with us, often in the
most virulent forms, it is no longer encompassing. It no longer defines the
global mode of functioning of power. It is now one mode of power in a larger
field that is not defined, overall, by ideology. This makes it all the more
pressing to connect ideology to its real conditions of emergence" (104).
This complicates the idea that literacies are ideological, which is the
foundational premise underlying critical literacy. We need to reconsider and
expand our conception of the "relational manner in which meaning is
produced" (Lankshear and McLaren 10)
This expanded notion of literacy
as a political formation that has both affective and ideological dimensions
needs to be applied to the multimodal, networked world of the Internet. Here we
are not bound by institutions but by access, infrastructures, software, and
site design. The strength of one's voice is determined by the ability to
network, draw "hits," and construct texts in various formats
(websites, blogs, videos, etc.). Critical
literacy means understanding how websites work and how the varying elements change
perceptions, privilege certain information, create boundaries, and shape
identities.
Due to the interactive nature of
the web and new media, critical literacy needs to involve not only the control
of information, but the control of experience. The newest form of persuasion
online is video games. Dartmouth and NYU have designed a whole current around
the concept called Values at Play. Instead of reading about oppressed
populations, such as Darfur refugees, you can inhabit their lives through game
play. Through embodying these characters, players gain experiential knowledge
and develop empathy. Empathy, of course, leads to prosocial behavior such as
volunteerism and minimizes negative behaviors such as racial stereotyping.
While many critical pedagogues recognize the
need to revamp approaches of the past to address globalization and advances in
information technology, they don't address the cultural shift that resulted as
we moved from a factory society to a control society. This shakes the
foundation of critical pedagogy, which was designed as a pedagogy of resistance
against the hegemony created by the institutions of the factory society.
Furthermore, critical pedagogues fail to address the limitations of ideological
critique and rationality, leaving the affective dimensions of identity,
politics, and education unexamined. These issues need to be considered when
addressing the common criticisms of critical pedagogy and creating a path with which
to move forward.
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