Critical Pedagogy and Overdetermination

• In Event: Critical Pedagogy: New Philosophical Interventions

Abstract

This paper argues that critical pedagogy should employ a Marxian theory of overdetermination to build out from culturalist approaches to literacy (e.g., New Literacy Studies). The culturalist approach pushes hard against the supposed technological determinism of writers including Goody. By playing up culture and by playing down technology, however, the culturalist approach construes literacy as a process driven in the last instance by the folkways of face-to-face communities (see: Author, 2013).

Critical pedagogy can draw upon its Marxian lineage to mobilize a theory of overdetermination/ interaction that construes literacy as a process that conditions and is conditioned by other processes in a social formation (see: Althusser, 1968; Resnick & Wolff, 1987). Social processes, as Harvey (2010) suggests, may be grouped into seven activity spheres: technologies and organizational forms (e.g., literacies); social relations; institutional and administrative arrangements; production and labor processes; relations to nature; and mental conceptions of the world. These processes co-condition each other insofar as any given process relies on many other processes for its realization. Thus, to classify literacy as a technology is not to construe it as a merely technical process of encoding and decoding—it is to note how literate forms depend upon and internalize processes from many other activity spheres. For example, writing a quiz question (a kind of technology) entails: activating social relations (e.g., teacher-student relations); citing institutional arrangements (e.g., procedures for grading); engaging in labor processes (e.g., assessing students); relating to nature (e.g., using ink and paper); and mobilizing mental conceptions of the world (e.g., the belief that quizzes are valid measurements of knowledge). While the culturalist model privileges cultural processes (e.g., mental conceptions of the world), the new interaction model maintains no one type of process always determines the fate of other processes—they recreate the world through their interaction. Improvement upon the culturalist model is the most significant contribution of the interaction model.

Using this new approach, critical pedagogues might help students analyze how actors rework literate forms to draw together different social processes to build the world in different ways. For instance, a class might examine a number of letters to the editor of a local newspaper and ask how different letters mobilize different processes in different manners. They might note that some letters front political relations (i.e., readers are figured as citizens), while other letters front economic relations (i.e., readers are figured as consumers). Furthermore, they might ask how certain changes to a process generate contradictory relations with other processes. For example, figuring the reader-editor relationship as a consumer-provider relationship might open up a contradiction with the paper’s democratic mission statement (a mental conception of the world). Moreover, classes might consider how the banner ads on the paper’s website (a technology) clash with the paper’s commitment to keeping corporate power in check. By investigating how social processes overdetermine each other and by asking how changes to processes change the world, critical pedagogues and their students can develop more nuanced understandings of literacy than those made available through culturalist approaches.

Author

• Ross Emmerson Collin, Virginia Commonwealth University