To Be Contuumed

Let me just say, by way of preface, that I can't wait to watch this page explode when everyone start's a-hootin' and a-hollerin' about Freire.

That said, I would like to start with a couple of odd little observational questionings.

First, did anyone else grab the Shaughnessy book by mistake? I've been looking and thinking about media, image, and packaging quite a bit lately and find the similar outward looks of the two books intriguing. Maybe there's something about the connotative web that is tapped by stark black lettering (blatant, clear, unignorable) set on a field of red (blood, fire, and outrage).

2nd, from the third page of the preface (I did read the whole thing, he just starts kicking it hard right away), "...so much reactionary 'blah.'...I am certain that Christians and Marxists, though they may disagree with me in part or in whole, will continue reading to the end." To quote that other great observer of the human condition, Jackie Gleason,"Slam, Bang, to the Moon!" Nevermind that Christianity and Marxism are as different in kind as Democracy and Marxism (go ahead, ask), to link the two in preparing us for the ideological kick in the you-guessed-where is a great filter to clear out the whiners and fence sitters. As the athletic slogan puts it--go hard or go home.

I may not ever be able to go home again.


Subjects, objects, dominators (I've always liked the word 'domitor' better, it sound more iron-fisted), dominated...I thought this was about teaching literacy; who let in Gramsci? And who is the oppressor? Bush? The Military-Industrial Complex? Microsoft? Me?

It's me, isn't it? That's what you're oh so eruditely implying, isn't it, Paulo? Because I've got a laptop and a Volkswagen, I must be an acolyte of the great god Market, unable to differentiate between having and being. That hurts, Paulo, it really does. And I think you're wrong, to boot. Sort of. Hence, my title for this entry. Draw a line, put "oppressor/owner" at one end and "oppressed/owned" at the other. Now put "Ray" somewhere in between (I'm not really sure how close to the middle is accurate). Here's my point--We can all claim to care, to have experienced or at least empathize with being oppressed, to a degree. The structure of our late capitalist social ideology, however, makes us automatically complicit in the oppression of others, a priori.

I hate to haul it back out for those who are sick of hearing it from me, but here comes the Althusser reference. Ideology obtains materially within practice. It is not escapable via belief. This is Freire's point about praxis. Thought in action, not thought in isolation. It isn't hopeless, but don't let's hide our collaboration with oppression from our own eyes. I like having things. That, because of how those things are produced, supports oppressive ideological apparatuses. Guess what? I still like those things, and the having. I also like treating people like people, not things. I'm not going to be able to dismantle 'the system' by not having a computer. I'm going to aid in transforming the world by facilitating other's transformation from intensities of object-ness to higher intensities of subject-ness.