An Alternative Scope for Literacy

Earlier in the year I showed part of a film called "class dismissed," which analyzed representations of the working class in the dominant media over the 20th century. We discussed ideas of political, cultural, and economic class, and the power of the media to conflate its image of a working class agenda with its construction of the american dream rooted in the myth of meritocracy, a strong work ethic, and participation in consumer culture. Through a wide range of tactics ranging from commercial investment and script writing to privatization and consolidation, the private sector has managed to not only influence the media, but as Arandhati Roy points out, the private sector is the media. "Class Dismissed" brings to the surface the fundamental contradiction that while the working class- defined here in broad terms so as to include the struggles against white supremacy, patriarchy, and heterosexism- has historicaly formed the leadership of progressive struggles and intillectual projects, they are represented as fully invested in reactionary conservativism and sterotypical baffoonery.


What does this have to do with literacy?


I am interested in expanding our thinking on literacy to engage questions of reading discourses. It is certainly important to develop strategies to enhance comprehensibility, build vocabulary, and so on. I think we take for granted that we know how to read texts for arguments, which I intend to blog on later. However, I think it is critical to engage conversations about how we facilitate learning these skills in the context of gaining strategies for reading discourses as a political project to advance struggle. For example, the social studies folks will be discussing an essay this week on the discourse of "the West and the Rest." In this essay, Stuart Hall argues that the formation of "the West" as an identity and a historical construct, as opposed to simply a geographic location, depended on its construction of "the Rest" as the polarized "Other" through which "the West" is accorded its superior "civilized" status. What would it mean for students to not only build a vocabulary and learn cognitive skills to comprhend the text book as a body of information about the world, but to learn how to read and analyze the text as a discourse that draws on the discourse of "the West and the Rest" as its archive? How would we facilitate a conversation in which we engaged the text in this way?


In "The West and the Rest," Stuart Hall draws on Michel Foucault's theory of discourse as a set of statements that forms a rational body of speech and is implicated in power. He writes, "We should admit that power produces knowledge... That power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute... power relations" (Foucault, 1980, p. 27). Hall clarifies this point stating that "it is power, rather than the facts about reality, which makes things 'true'." Here, Foucault is developing a theory of what he calls a "regime of truth," utilizing the example of "Palestinians fighting to regain land on the West Bank from Isreal" to note that in the competing discourses it is the outcome of the struggle that will determine the "truth" of whether those fighting are "terrorists" or "freedom fighters."


This kind of thinking has enabled us to level thoughtful critiques on notions of "neutrality,""objectivity," "fact," and so on, which form the crux of many of the presuppostions upon which Western epistemologies are constructed. In particular, it is my sense that the field of education/teaching has not considerably taken up questions of "the subject" who teaches and the cultural and political discourses that not only constitue that subject, but set the perameters of what presents itself as "objectivity." For example, teaching about, say "gay marriage," from the perspectives of democrats/liberals and republicans/conservatives (as with teaching "civics" itself from these perspectives) is (re)presented in the dominant imaginary as an unbiased and objective strategy of teaching. Yet, these perspectives are merely two sides of the same coin- elite, Western, and aquiescing to the state as the only significant scene for conducting politics. What is completely erased in this configuration, for example, are queer critiques of gay marriage. I would argue that, in this sense, notions of "objectivity" are central to the formation of what Foucault calls "regimes of truth," and thus work to maintain the dominant social order, contain as opposed to crack open our thinking on a given subject, and ultimately reify "education" as a force that reproduces social relations as opposed to stimulating critical debate. In addition, I think notions of "objectivity" present knowledge as fixed and limit our ability as teachers to engage in intillectual questions that we have with our students, which is really what Foucault was doing in his lectures at the College de France.


What would it mean, then, for the field of education to take seriously questions of the subject (e.g. discourse and subject formation)? How might these questions change our approach to literacy, and invite us to think about subjectivity and the multiple ways it mediates text as a strategy for reading text politically? I would like to engage in a dialogue about the idea of "reading politicaly" in further posts?


Is anyone else interested in thinking through these questions?