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I googled critical consciousness and found this summary of Freire in large friendly letters. I'm writing a bit more about what I meant here, but please will you all treat it somewhat gently? I am choosing the option of writing and publishing this in a raw state, because the other option would be to leave it without a reply and I don't want to do that. But I am somewhat grief-ridden and not at my best this week.
The emergence from post-modernism is very relevant, and I like the essay alas links to in eirdandfracar's HeadShop thread. A quote from that article: "My inability to come up with a true account was not the product of being situated nowhere; it was the product of certitude that existed somewhere else, namely, in contemporary literary theory. Hence, the level at which my indecision came into play was a function of particular beliefs I held. I was never in a position of epistemological indeterminacy, I was never en abyme. The idea that all accounts are perspectival seemed to me a superior standpoint from which to view all the versions of "what happened," and to regard with sympathetic condescension any person so old-fashioned and benighted as to believe that there really was some way of arriving at the truth. But this skeptical standpoint was just as firm as any other. The fact that it was also seriously disabling--it prevented me from coming to any conclusion about what I had read--did not render it any less definite."
As I understand it critical consciousness is the emergence (from postmodernism? Or perhaps from modernism? But then Latour says that in a sense 'we have never been modern') into a sense of how to engage with the rest of the world: a conscious political stance and methods aiming at creating a more just, peaceful and sustainable world. Critical thinking is powerful: I see it as the valuable "empirical testing" part of the intuitive and wholistic creative processes we engage in as writing humans. Creative emergence through writing, through art, through critical thinking, works towards setting up human beings who are conscious of their situation in the world. My impression is that the better people understand and communicate their own situation, the more able they are to hear about the perspectives of others. Through understanding our own situations we are able to hear better the similarities and differences between us. I think it makes us able to create more robust collective accounts, because we can incorporate more of the richness of diverse human understandings from our differences rather than obscuring them. I beleive that the current crisis in the world needs everyone's creativity. I understand critical thinking as part of the holy because it (like the divine) brings the mighty low and raises up those who have been downtrodden.
I guess I could list some ways I find to discriminate between possible approaches is by their motivation and by how overt the political stance within them. I can ask, is this intended towards healing the world into an outbreak of peace and justice? Is it consciously moving toward sustainable human life? Does it declare its motivation and stance clearly or does it attempt to hide it? Does it seem to be accountable to a community, grounded and situated in a way that makes it robust?
One impression I have of the 'postmodern' is that it's a bullshit power game by privileged white men to undermine the authority of experience of people who are being held down by racist and sexist oppression. Whilst the white men play at being oh so flexible and unsituated, they perpetuate white/male domination of valuable cultural spaces and obscure the voices of those who have been trained to not to take their access to voice and the right to shape the future for granted. But then another account of the postmodern as I understand it is about seizing the power to define: I don't think that worked, does it have more use as a definition in another sense?
Yes, in one sense everything produced by humans is produced inside the global capitalist media culture / white supremacy, but not everything produced reproduces that domination culture. Some works seem to me to provide larger toolkits for constructing identities: some encourage more self-reflection, some make people better able to speak their understandings and shape the world in ways which dismantle oppression. I value highly cultural tools which help people become more conscious, responsible, connected, creative, active in shaping the future. I think whatever is created inside alternate modes begins to perpetuate the alternative mode: like Kuhn's paradigm shifts or the hundreth monkey thing. |
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