Power and Agency in Online Reading

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Power and Agency in Online Reading

• Annamaria Carusi

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• "Collaboration" in recent years has taken on the
  force of a mantra in education, government, and
  business
• and in part this is because of the scope,
  complexity, and interdisciplinarity of the
  problems being pursued.
• (Burbules)

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• Networked society
• Transdisciplinary and transient nature of
  projects in the workplace
• consensus pragmatic or performative conceptions
  of knowledge
• Constructivist-collaborativist pedagogical model
  stresses the activity of learners in organizing
  and interpreting experience and actively creating
  meaning

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• The best of both worlds?
• Benefits of sharing and participating in a group
• While maintaining a space for the personal and
  the individual.

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Online collaborations

• Consensus driven collaborations communicative
  rationality and the sincerity condition
  (Habermas)
• Criticisms of these (Benhabib, Young)
• Absence of shared life world
• Different kinds of communicative contributions
  argument aesthetic, expressive, metaphor
• Power and resistance

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• dialogue characterizes an epistemological
  relationship. Thus, in this sense, dialogue is a
  way of knowing and should never be viewed as a
  mere tactic to involve students in a particular
  task. We have to make this point very clear. I
  engage in dialogue not necessarily because I like
  the other person. I engage in dialogue because I
  recognize the social and not merely the
  individualistic character of the process of
  knowing. In this sense, dialogue presents itself
  as an indispensable component of the process of
  both learning and knowing. (Freire and Macedo,
  379)

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• Finally, true dialogue cannot exist unless the
  dialoguers engage in critical thinking thinking
  which discerns an individualsitic solidarity
  between the world and the people and admits of no
  dichotomy between them, thinking which perceives
  reality as process, as transformation, rather
  than as a static entity thinking which does not
  separate itself from action, but constantly
  immerses itself in temporality without fear of
  the risks involved. Critical thinking contrasts
  with naïve thinking, which sees historical time
  as a weight, a stratification of the acquisitions
  and experiences of the past, from which the
  present should emerge normalized and
  well-behaved. For the naïve thinker, the
  important thing is accommodation to this
  normalized today. For the critic, the important
  thing is the continuing transformation of
  reality, in behalf of the continuing humanization
  of men.
• Only dialogue, which requires critical thinking,
  is also capable of generating critical thinking.
  (Freire, 93 emphasis mine)

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• MACEDO I could not agree with you more. I am
  reminded of how educators who embrace your notion
  of dialogue mechanistically reduce the
  epistemological relationship of dialogue to a
  vacuous, feel-good comfort zone. For instance, in
  a graduate class I taught last semester in which
  we discussed extensively an anti-racist pedagogy,
  many White teachers felt uncomfortable when the
  non-White students made connections between the
  assigned theoretical readings and their own lived
  experience with racism. In discussing her
  feelings of discomfort, a White teacher remarked
  that "we should spend at least three weeks
  getting to know each other so as to become
  friends before taking on sensitive issues such as
  racism." In other words, this White teacher
  failed to recognize her privileged position that
  enabled her to assume she can negotiate the terms
  under which classmates from oppressed groups can
  state their grievances. It is as if in order to
  be able to speak the truth about racism or to
  denounce racist structures, non-Whites must first
  befriend their White classmates. The inability of
  this White teacher to acknowledge her privileged
  position in demanding to negotiate her comfort
  zone before grievances against racism are made
  makes her unable to realize that, in most
  instances, certain groups such as African
  Americans are born and live always without any
  comfort zone, much less the privilege to assume
  they can negotiate the appropriate comfort zone
  within a graduate course

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• MACEDO If in this sense the object of knowledge
  is the fundamental goal, the dialogue as
  conversation about individuals' lived experiences
  does not truly constitute dialogue. In other
  words, the appropriation of the notion of
  dialogical teaching as a process of sharing
  experiences creates a situation in which teaching
  is reduced to a form of group therapy that
  focuses on the psychology of the individual.
  Although some educators may claim that this
  process creates a pedagogical comfort zone, in my
  view it does little beyond making the oppressed
  feel good about their own sense of victimization.
  Simply put, I do not think that the sharing of
  experiences should be understood in psychological
  terms only. It invariably requires a political
  and ideological analysis as well. That is, the
  sharing of experiences must always be understood
  within a social praxis that entails both
  reflection and political action. In short,
  dialogue as a process of learning and knowing
  must always involve a political project with the
  objective of dismantling oppressive structures
  and mechanisms prevalent both in education and
  society.

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• There is a différend between two parties when
  there is no rule which is applicable to both
  cases which would solve the dispute between them
  equitably. If the dispute is treated as though it
  is a simple disagreement, a wrong is inflicted on
  one or both of the parties. A wrong (un tort)
  results from the fact that the rules of the
  discourse according to which one judges are not
  those of the discourse judged. (Lyotard, Le
  différend, 12 paraphrase)

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Online collaborations - problems, issues and
challenges

• What kind of educational recommendations and
  interventions to make with respect to the design
  of technologies, learning, activities, etc.
• What is it for a collaboration to work?
• How to understand the nature of online
  collaborations?
• How to analyse them?
• Which theories to use?

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Further problems for text-based collaborations

• What are these texts?
• How do they come to have meaning?
• Do they have a meaning? If so, whose meaning is
  it?
• And what are group meanings, negotiated meanings
  and constructed meanings anyway?

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Actions are words?

• the commands you type into a computer are a
  kind of speech that doesnt so much communicate
  as make things happen, directly and ineluctably,
  the same way pulling a trigger does. They are
  incantations in other words the conflation of
  speech and act.
• (Dibbell, 567)

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Power

• Discourse and politics of exclusion/inclusion.
• Relation between spaces and structures of
  discourse and the construction / experience of
  subjectivity.
• Control over representations
• World-representations
• Self-representations
• Other-representations

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• Power cont .
• Terms of discourse for example, governing
  turn-taking
• Mode or system of representation
• textuality
• intersubjective relations around representation
• institutional relations
• Hence
• power and agency

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• Eg education
• Discipline
• Educational paradigms
• Educational structures
• Quality controls
• State structures
• Funding bodies
• Publishing / journals / books
• Means, media, control

• Eg literary
• The art-world
• Relation with other media visual art, tv, film,
  etc.
• Language
• Relation with communicative uses of language
  letter, sms, email
• Relation with other uses of language
• Publishing and reviewing structures
• Publishing outlets and bodies
• Means, media, control

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Technological power

• Technology like all other media makes it
  possible to exert power on and by subjects in
  different ways
• What, if any, are the ways specific to online
  technologies, with respect to text and to
  intersubjective relations around text?

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• Technology is socially constructed. Technological
  designs express what we want and they shape who
  we are. People in all walks of life are involved
  in demanding, making marketing, using,
  maintaining, regulating, and disposing of
  technology. Design is the focal point of
  technology. It is where societal needs meet
  technological resources in a problem-solving
  context. As we design technology, so we design
  our lives, realize our needs, create
  opportunities, and establish constraints, often
  severe, for future generations. (Devon)

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and online reading

• Where does power reside in our relationship with
  (online) text? Possibilities
• In the language, the rhetoric and the discourse
• In the thick embedding of text le monde vécu
• history
• society
• gender
• body
• In the roles available to us
• In our experience of agency with respect to texts

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A matter of meaning it

• Roles / agency for example, power expressed as
  control over meaning
• Is the meaning of a text a matter of power?
• What is a text?
• What are the relevant kinds of text?

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Who or what determines the meaning/s of a text?

• what
• Deep structures
• Base structure
• Discursive formation
• Intertextual relations
• Différance / play of signifiers
• The unconscious
• Ideology

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• Who
• Who questions often associated with questions
  of authority who has authority over the text?
• In literary contexts, anti-authoritarianism is
  conflated with anti-intentionalism.
• Or, strictly speaking, anti-actual
  intentionalism or anti-authorial intentionalism.
  
• Anti-intentionalism is conflated with
  anti-individualism
• Questions of interpretation conflated with
  questions of power eg reading against the
  grain, or the hermeneutics of suspicion,
  post-colonial and feminist critiques of meaning
  systems.

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Authors
Authors
authority
(Anti)
authoritarianism
(Anti)
authoritative
(Anti)
individualistic
(Anti)
Collaborative
W/
readers
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• Who continued
• Meaning / interpretation as power effects
• If authority goes together with power as control
  over representations (world, other self) then
• Resistance
• as aspects of reading
• Ethics of interpretation
• The right to self-represent as aspect of
  writing

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Individualism

• Atomistic
• External or accidental relations between
  individuals
• Judgements of significance and of value are
  private, not public a matter of individual
  perceptions, not intersubjective.
• Tends to go together with (Hobbesian) social
  contract, capitalism, ownership, competition

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Collaborativism

• Holistic
• Internal relations between individuals or selves
• Judgements of significance and value are public
  and intersubjective
• Tends to go together with communitarian social
  arrangements

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But individualism and a theory of meaning?

• Since Wittgensteins private language argument,
  it is commonly accepted that there can be no
  individual meanings, where individual
  non-shareable meanings.
• Language and meaning are inherently social.
• Where does that leave intentions?
• Individual intentions
• Group / social intentions

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• Individual or group meanings as fundamental
  object of analysis and interpretation?
• Individual meaning is not a matter of mental
  ideas, or of hidden psychological processes.
• Speakers intentions and lived experience.

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• Meaning / interpretation and intentions
• Meaning is an intentional domain
• Message/ document / contribution / paper /
  article etc. are in the intentional domain cf
  text?
• Is there a mind behind the text and is the point
  of interpretation to get at that mind?
• The mind individual / social / one in the other
• Merleau-Ponty and other phenomenologists (and
  ubuntu)

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• There is no collective life which delivers us
  from the responsibility for ourselves, which
  releases us from the obligation to have an
  opinion and there is no interior life which is
  not like a first draft (or sketch) of our
  relations with others. (Merleau-Ponty, Causeries,
  p.30)

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Interpreting for intentions

• In a critical practice must go via the
  intentions of the speaker / writer even if this
  is only to establish the basis on which criticism
  can be made
• In a reconstitutive practice respect for
  intentions in self-representation
• Critical and reconstitutive must be dealt with
  consistently and are normally intertwined anyway
  (particularly in a collaboration)
• Reading for otherness (I-Thou), particularity,
  creativity.

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How to interpret for intentions

• Where a range of terms could have been chosen,
  pay attention to which terms were chosen.
• Idiolects and sociolects.
• Make interpretive hypotheses and check them.

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Collaborativism

• Is based on a more tenable theory of meaning and
  of agency as intersubjectively constituted
• Allows for multiple perspectives so allowing for
  richer, more layered and subtle interpretations
  of the instances of text in the interpretive
  exercise
• Provides opportunity for development of self for
  the same reason with different perspectives
  comes the need to find ones own perspective and
  narrative of self.
• Is based on trust.

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Collaborativism and power

• Freire
• The task of the dialogical teacher in an
  interdisciplinary team working on the thematic
  universe revealed by their investigation is to
  re-present that universe to the people from
  whom she or he first received it and
  re-present it not as a lecture, but as a
  problem (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p.109)
• Footnoted quotation from Mao Tse Tung we must
  teach the masses clearly what we have received
  from them confusedly

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• Burbules
• Or, to put this a different way, those modes of
  dialogue that put the greatest emphasis on
  criticality and inclusivity may also be the most
  subtly co-opting and normalizing. Such a
  recognition unsettles critical pedagogies of all
  sorts, whether feminist or Freirean, rationalist
  or deconstructionist (The Limits of Dialogue)

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• Poster
• On the Internet, individuals read and interpret
  communications to themselves and to others and
  also respond by shaping sentences and
  transmitting them. Novels and TV ads are
  interpreted by individuals who are interpellated
  by them but these readers and viewers are not
  addressed directly, only as a generalized
  audience and, of course, they respond in fully
  articulated linguistic acts On the Internet
  individuals construct their identities, doing so
  in relation to ongoing dialogues not as acts of
  pure consciousness. the acts of discourse are
  not limited to one-way address and not
  constrained by the gender and ethnic traces
  inscribed in face-to-face communications
  (CyberDemocracy Internet and the Public Sphere )

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Online text

• Depends on the type of text / textual
  communication
• Will there be continuity between, for example,
  literary text, scholarly texts, either of these
  in hypertext form and the texts that make up an
  online collaboration?
• What is the relation between subject and texts in
  collaborations?
• What range of commitments?

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Problems and issues

• Pedagogical design issues
• How to design the kind of online spaces and
  activities which respect individualism/intentional
  ism within collaboration? (And should we?)
• A deeper, research issue
• How do we study the relation between self and
  group, subjective and intersubjective in online
  collaborations?
• A range of answers already available
• More answers that refer to intentions, different
  kinds of intentions, and to the sense and
  experience of self within a lived world.