Ich bin ein Berliner

I'm sorry to invoke that moment in history (when JFK announced to Germany, and the world, "I am a jelly donut" in German), but it seems to speak to how language composes the self. That little misstep in translation might be seen as an instance of the cultural codes colliding badly as they intersected in the person of the president, or, more likely, that, when he made that speech, he existed to the world as language, as we all exist to each other. Also, it's lunch time, and a jelly donut sounds pretty spectacular right about now.

Berlin has really helped me to understand how social epistemic rhetoric grows from structuralist and post-structuralist thought, and, reading his thoughts on critical literacy, I wanted to reflect on all of the above. The structuralists and post-structuralists show how signifying systems are fundamentally disconnected from the real world, and how the self is constructed from them, and is fundamentally amorphous and conflicted because of the conflicting systems of signs, or codes, that constitute us. Social epistemic rhetoric becomes a way of making students aware of their socially constructed natures, and empowering them, through critical literacy, to become shapers of the codes, to participate in a democratic process where they're either agents of change or victims of semiotic storms. Really cool ideas (that's my critical take on it). Ich bin ein Berliner.

I've been trying to relate critical literacy, and the ideas that Berlin leads up to it, with our previous class readings. LeFevre's ideas seem wedded to Berlin's, since he's proceeding on the idea that rhetoric is not only social, but that it needs to acknowledge its social nature in order to really promote democracy, and not just keep students subservient to the social hierarchy. Gee and Trimbur seem likely to agree with Berlin, in my (possibly botched) interpretation of all of them, since they're showing how the social turn, and, in Trimbur's case, process pedagogy, revolutionize the classroom, but only insofar as they help students to join existing conversations. Gaonkar's discussion of rhetoric, that subscribes to the Platonic view, if I'm remembering correctly, would certainly go against Berlin's conception of it. The one whose work seems most likely to problematize Berlin's discussion, and the poststructuralist conception of language, is LaTour. I've been reading Berlin's description of Foucault, and how Foucault sees language as something we're conduits for, and I wonder how LaTour would see this. Since privileging the social over we who create it is a no-no, how would this concept of language sit with him? The idea of critical literacy is that we're not just conduits for an impersonal force of discourse, but we can shape it as we're shaped by it. LaTour might like that a little better. It seems like the poststructuralists give language an animism that lets them conceive of its effects on us with the power that it deserves. But there is no discourse without we who enact it, and LaTour might point us consistently back to that fact, as Berlin would.

If anyone has anything to add to that discussion, I'd be grateful. Hope you guys are having a great week, and staying warm.