LITERACY, PHILOSOPHY AND POSTMODERNISM: AN INTERVIEW WITH COLIN LANKSHEAR

M I C H A E L P E T E R S

University of Auckland New Zealand

Introduction Colin Lankshear is Associate Professor and Director of Research in the School of Language and Literacy Education, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He is author/editor of several books and numerous articles on the politics of education and literacy. His books include Literacy, Schooling and Revolution (1987), which contains a sympathetic account of the 1980 literacy campaign in Nicaragua. He has been involved over the past decade with numerous development and education projects in Nicaragua, including work which focuses on the relationship between women's literacy and children's health. He is also, most recently, co-editor with Peter McLaren, of two related collections on politics and literacymCritical Literacy: Politics, Praxis and the Postmodern (1993), and Politics of Liberation: Paths from Freire (1994).

This interview, conducted through the medium of email, concentrates on his recent interests in thinking about literacy within the postmodern condition: literacy is to be understood in the plural; it is not 'an essential technology, a specific skill, or a universal phenomenon such as print or script' (Lankshear & McLaren 1993, p. xvii). Rather, literacies are considered to be socially constructed forms of reading and writing which are practiced within particular socio-cultural and political contexts. The use of the word 'critical' in relation to literacy denotes, for Lankshear, both an understanding of literacy as deeply imbricated in the politics of culture, and a means by which ordinary people may engage the political as an aspect of their daily lives 'in the quest for a more truly democratic social order' (Lankshear & McLaren p. xviii).

Lankshear trained as an analytical philosopher of education. In this interview he reflects upon his 'academic apprenticeship' in relation to his emerging interests in the politics of literacy in a way that casts light on the continuing relevance of a

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field of study in education--philosophy--that some might argue has become marginalised, or less dominant, when compared to its heyday in the 1970s under the 'liberal rationalists' of the 'London School'. Philosophy, albeit in a more dialectical and critical mode, is important, Lankshear argues, not merely because it embodies the concern for standards of rigour and reasonableness--a kind of 'toolkit' for advancing arguments and clarifying conceptsmbut also because it provides epistemological, ontological and ethical dimensions for understanding the postmodern, and 'translate[s] ... across to politically motivated projects'.

Finally, a brief introductory word about the form of the interview is in order. The interview is not only a form of sociological or ethnographic inquirym structured or open, according to standard research protocolsmbut also and perhaps, more importantly a journalistic genre, with its own rules based on the power of the question. It is a quintessential 'flexible' postmodern form of 'interrogation' which is pervasive within everyday communication, both print- based and electronically mediated. Its modern form, exemplified in the televised, face-to-face, politically staged adversarial format, has its origins both in more ancient forms of dialogue and in the child's relentless questions. (One is struck by how the Greek form of eristics, with its strict rules of question and answer, resembles various children's word-games.) Its postmodern forms permitted through email, user-groups and teleconferencing now allow an academic re- appropriation to emphasise knowledge-flexibility in terms of mediation and exchange.

In particular, the email interview permits a delayed, deferred, set of reflections uncommon in more spontaneousmthough scripted--face-to-face situations. As a text-based form, the email interview enables on-line rewriting and editing which does not necessarily sacrifice the reconfiguration of knowledge-exchange for the sake of the efficiency of information--for simply sending and receiving messages. The email interview as one form of electronically mediated communication has the potential to recuperate the possibility of dialogue, and calls attention to the need for new theorisations and greater formal experimentation.

This interview is one of a series conducted through email as part of an on- going book project designed to explore educational themes concerning the new communications technologies.

Can I begin by asking for a brief autobiographical sketch of how and why you became interested in questions of critical literacy, leading up to your recent attempts to reconfigure literacies in 'new times'. Why 'literacy', and what influences would you say have been most important on your thinking ?

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My travels in literacy have been very much in the manner of an accidental tourist, in that entering a research and publishing career in the area was more a manner of 'falling into' literacy than consciously following an academic path in that direction.

Initially, several unrelated factors coalesced and conspired to yield an unforeseen interest in literacy. First, while doing postgraduate work in analytical philosophy of education on the themes of rights and freedom, I came across the work of Paulo Freire (1972, 1973, 1974), albeit without engaging it closely. I filed it away, so to speak. Next, I ended upmin my first academic jobmin a university Education department largely dominated by cognitive and behavioural psychology approaches to research in reading. What I read of this work I found less than compelling, and certainly a lot less than intellectually stimulating and satisfying.

At about this time, in the late 70s and early 80s, analytical philosophy of education came under heavy attack by a group of Marxist educational philosophers, mainly based in Sydney. People like Kevin Harris (eg. Harris 1979) convinced me that there was important personal academic growth to be had by investigating (classical and neo-) marxist scholarship. In the course of reading in this area I became more aware of what it was I found lacking and otherwise problematic in the psychology of reading, and began looking at themes like the contribution of technicist notions of the (importance of the) ability to encode and decode print to the role of schooling within larger processes of ideological formation and domination.

Also around the same time, I became aware of the Nicaraguan Literacy Crusade (1980) and the earlier Cuban Literacy Crusade, and began studying Freire closelympartly because Marxist philosophy of education dealt with his work, and partly because I was by then pondering the potential of 'literacy' as a conceptual antidote to 'reading': 'literacy' being a more overtly social or sociological concept, whereas 'reading' was patently a psycho-technicist concept. A colleague passed me Ken Levine's (1982) article on 'Functional Literacy', which argued that the then prevailing model of 'functional literacy' had obvious domesticating potential and, indeed, domesticating tendencies. I tried to conceptualise an alternative approach to functional literacy, drawing on Freire's work. A couple of articles that resulted came to the attention of a Series Editor who invited me to write a book: 'Literacy, Schooling and Revolution' (Lankshear with Lawler 1987).

In the course of writing that book I had to familiarise myself much more closely with quality thinking in the area of literacy theory than I had hitherto managed. During the brief several months I had in which to write the book, I

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zeroed in especially on what I thought were the most significant contemporary works inliteracy studies relevant to my purpose: namely, Brian Street's (1984) Literacy in Theory and Practice, and Harvey Graff's (1979) The Literacy Myth. In terms of my subsequent activity, these remain two of the most important and most enjoyably stimulating books I have ever read.

By such 'accidental' routes I assumed the role of a writer about literacy.

What led you, more specifically, to focus on critical literacy, and to reconsider literacy in relation to postmodernism?

This stems from 1990, when Peter McLaren and I were contracted to edit a collection that subsequently emerged as Critical Literacy: Politics, Praxis and the Postmodern. By that time I had lived through the demise of the Nicaraguan Revolution at close quarters during the period (late 1988--February 1990) 1 spent living with a peasant community in Nicaragua. And like others, I was observing the rapid crumbling of the Soviet 'empire'. Shortly afterwards I resigned my university job and worked briefly for the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, investigating new trends in post-compulsory education. My time in Nicaragua convinced me that the world had changed in ways that required a wider theoretical span than I had available for understanding them. Working for the Qualifications Authority provided a context in which to explore global social and economic changes, and ideologies associated with them. Finally, coming to work in an Australian universitymin the School of Language and Literacy Education at Queensland University of Technologymhas required me to consider additional approaches to critical literacy besides those that derive more or less directly from Freire. Thus, professionally, I have had to familiarise myself with the work of people like Norman Fairclough and Gunther Kress, as well as look more closely at the literacy research of folk like Shirley Brice Heath and Judith Green, and literacy pedagogy interventions like those of Catherine Wallace, Pam Gilbert and Rob McCormack. At present I am drawing particularly on the work of Jim Gee. The point I had reached before turning quite explicitly to Gee's (eg., 1990) work is best reflected in the short publication ('Critical Literacy') which I completed recently for the Australian Curriculum Studies Association.

In your earlier book, Literacy, Schooling and Revolution, you give an answer to the question of what is meant by the politics of literacy in terms of two elements: a methodological approach or a specific type of investigation; and an understanding of what constitutes literacy. Perhaps you will elaborate on your way of approaching this question. Do you still hold to this general approach ?

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When Falmer contracted the book, I had said it would be a book on the politics of literacy, building on an epistemology which carves knowledge up into more or less identifiable areas or fields of inquiry. Here my academic apprenticeship in analytical philosophy of education was showing through.

Since the 'area' to be covered in the book was the politics of literacy, and this constituted a kind of inquirymnamely, 'the politics of ... 'mit seemed necessary to mark out the terrain of literacy and clarify what I meant by addressing its politics. I saw literacy as comprising an aspect of human practice which needed to be identified and elucidated, and the politics of literacy as focusing on certain characteristics or facets of literacy. To locate these seemingly required clarifying what counts as the 'politics' of this or that. What aspects have to be addressed in looking at the politics of literacy as distinct from, say, the philosophy or sociology of literacy?

I argued for a view of politics linked to the structuring of power, and for a view of literacy that was about much more than the mechanics of encoding and decoding text. I sought to borrow from liberal rationalist analytical philosophy an approach within which I could develop and employ concepts and theories that are very different from those of liberal rationalistsmlike Paul Hirst and Richard Petersmand that ultimately make possible a much more dynamic and dialectical approach to investigating the world of literacy than the standard approaches of analytical philosophers.

Do you still hold to this general approach ?

To some extent, yes, especially if I am writing for undergraduate Education audiences. I believe that whatever else a commitment to 'critical' values implies, it has to do with people being able to inquire in rational and disciplined-- systematic and rigorous--ways. This is compatible with the operation of a variety of quite different Discourses of rational and disciplined inquiry. I would never want to foreclose here, despite how strongly I might try to argue for particular substantive positions on given occasions. In the end, being critical implies corrigibility. At the same time, I have been personally devastated to witness the legacy of much of our academic teaching during the 70s and 80s, when too many of us went soft on methods of inquiry and standards of rigour, because we did not want to impose authoritatively on others. Having recognised the importance of serving some apprenticeship to caring for criteria and standards of rigour and reasonableness, I look for ways to model this--whilst nonetheless trying to make it clear that my own investments do not hold the mortgage on possibilities. I am particularly impressed by the work of Jim Gee- -a linguist by

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trainingm, who does superbly well what I would like to be able to do: namely, to marry the best of postmodern understandings of epistemology and ontology with one's own apprenticeship to critical inquiry as rigorous, methodical, responsible and accountable.

Developing new academic and scholarly Discourses is necessarily about taking risks and being prepared to departmwhere appropriatemfrom 'the old'. We must continue to do this. Even so, in doing something new, and something new that is worth doing, we need to know a lot about what we are doing differently, and why we are doing it differentlymwhat makes it better to do it this way. I am not convinced that we have yet worked sufficiently through the dialectic between foundationalism and anti-foundationalism to be able to play fast and loose with procedures of inquiry!

You seem to be able to marry successfully elements of an analytical approach with a deep-seated political commitment, and yet many would say that analytical philosophy, while rigorous, still smacks of a universalism and ahistoricism in terms of method (in a postmodern age suspicious of these 'metanarratives'), which robs us of the opportunity to take up substantive political positions. This does not seem to have been a problem, say, for Kevin Harris and his attack on analytical philosophy of education, or for yourself Your political commitment, somehow, seems grounded in a 'reality' of struggle, and also seems entirely compatible with elements of an analytical approach to the issues.

For me, analytical philosophy has always been useful as a tool kit for advancing arguments, detecting logical slips in others' arguments, for clarifying my use of concepts, and so on. The technical or methodological aspect of analytical philosophy never foreclosed for me on the scope of what I could read and think about. You mention Kevin Harris' work. Kevin showed how Marxist philosophy of education could draw on elements employed in analytical philosophy of education to make stronger and better reasoned cases than the 'London School' educational philosophers ever managed. He, along with others, showed something of the range of alternative literatures and ideological positions available from which to develop politically and ethically informed educational positions.

Doing philosophy is very much about striving to exemplify certain values like being methodical, caring for rigour, being committed to providing evidence, accepting always the possibility of being wrong--at least in the sense that better positions can be pursued. These are standard academic values. They are discursive values. Such values are never, and never can be, disembodied. There are no values outside of Discourse.

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In my own case, values like caring about rigour, doing the best job one can, aspiring to elegant design, and the like, had been modelled discursively by my parents, who are both tradesfolk. My mother was a dressmaker and tailor and my father a carpenter. Both of these are pretty precise crafts. My father's joinery had to be (for him) neat and meticulous, as did the seams my mother would sew. To them, excellence in production was 'the bottom line'. I simply found, initially in analytical philosophy of education, my own discursive terrain on which to pursue these same carings and commitments.

I would like to make two points here in response to your question. First, it is true that in the case of analytical philosophy of education in the London School mould the values I have mentioned came dressed up in thoroughly universalist and ahistoricist discursive garb. Unless one achieves what Gee calls a meta-level understanding of this Discourse (or any other) one is unlikely to recognise that the generic values I have mentioned, and the useful 'techniques/tools' for argument and evaluation, are only contingently linked to the wider assumptions and ideological trappings of this particular mould of analytical philosophy of education. With a meta-level understanding of a given Discourse, plus a meta- level knowledge of Discourse(s) generally and some experiential access to other/competing Discourses, it becomes possible to employ Discourse critique: engaging other Discourses and/or seeking to transform the Discourse one is in, by drawing on one's meta-level knowledge of alternative possibilities and one's experience of and access to alternative Discourses.

In this respect, what postmodern-poststructuralist theory has brought home to us is the historical contingency of all Discourse(s), in ways that help us make more explicit the ways in which the tyranny of specific acad6mic-scholarly narratives and grand narratives alike can be resisted and transcended. Much of the problem laid at the feet, so to speak, of totalising metanarratives, or master narratives, has to do with our legacy of pedagogies that fail to identify and make explicit the fundamental bases of a critical spirit: knowing what it is to be in Discourse, and knowing there are other Discourses that may be preferable under certain descriptions. Harris' work, incidentally, made this abundantly clear to me--although without recourse to the particular language of 'post-Discourses'. I have no qualms about 'raiding' various features of diverse Discourses to come up with intellectual and practical positions I can live with. I want the same for others, and critical literacy has a lot to do with making this possible.

My second point is that so far as analytical philosophy is concerned, what became important for me in what you call my 'political work'mwhether as writing or as development project work in the (so-called) Third Worldmwere matters of attitude, technique and organisation, rather than content. Doing analytical philosophy well is about being organised and methodical; about

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analysing and synthesising; about exploring angles and engaging logics; about looking for reasons and developing cases and lines of argument, and so on. At a very practical level, these translate very nicely across to politically motivated projects. If it's a matter of producing handpumps for wells in order to make it easier to get water, so as in turn to enable peasant families to use more water in hygiene and sanitation, there is a lot of analysis and conceptual clarity to be achieved here. What kinds of funding organisations should we tap into for funding support? What kind of case will they respond favourably to? What kind of structures and personnel do we need to organise in order to complete the task most effectively? Where should we look for the most relevant information to make our case? All of this can be seen as so much applied analytical philosophy.

I suspect the notion that analytical philosophy and other such 'narratives' smack of universalism and ahistoricism only bothers academics who don't admix their theory with enough practice, who depend on texts confined to specific disciplinary fields for their ideas, who take academic theory altogether too seriously, and who don't have faith in others to be able to critique Discourses (possibly because they themselves tacitly or unconsciously desire a larger place for and/or a privileging of their own discursive commitments). Certainly, peasants who seek water supplies, health centres, and access to vaccines can't wait for issues of ahistoricism to be addressed, and don't spend much time worrying about them. Likewise, academics who work with them, and/or in other material political struggles, tend not to become unduly bogged down in such matters either. They get on with practising 'border pedagogies' and fomenting counternarratives of liberation in praxis. If more academics did more of this, 'fast capitalism' might currently have a fight on its hands, along with patriarchy, racism, and the rest.

Personally, I find that academic life becomes utter drudgery when I lack a direct practical, ethically-grounded concomitant of the theory I am working with at the time. Dragging in consultancy dollars is eminently less satisfying to me as a practice of adding value to theory than is being a part of projects that construct water supplies and housing around ethically and politically steeped Discourses of social justice and liberation.

Can you state briefly for our audience what you consider the main commitments o f critical literacy to be ?

Different people, of course, construct quite different discursive practices of critical literacy. None of these practices has a mortgage on 'ultimacy'. There is no 'Platonic form' or 'transcendent essence' of critical literacy--just a variety of discursive constructions for which people variously appropriate the signifier

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'critical literacy'. Discourses of critical practicemwhether of critical literacy, critical thinking, or whatever--are a dime a dozen.

The best way into sketching my own view is by using Gee's distinction between Discourse (with a big D) and discourse (with a little d). Big D Discourses are material social practices in and through which we live our lives and constitute ourselves/are constituted as the particular 'identitied' human beings we are. Small d discourses are the 'language bits' in Discourses. There is no language outside of these larger social practices that comprise the contexts for meaning making. There is, then, no discoursemhence, no literacy--outside of Discourses. Equally, there can be no Discourse without discourse.

Given these ideas, I see two main elements to critical literacy. First, I agree with Catherine Wallace (1992) that part of what makes for a critical literacyN what she calls critical language awareness--is an understanding of literacy/reading/language 'itself': that is, having a critical appreciation of what language 'is', as a consequence of having made it the object of scrutiny. This involves understanding discourse(s) in relation to Discourse(s)--examining the ontological character of language/literacies in their dynamic relationship to Discourse(s). At this level, then, to promote critical literacy involves a commitment to making literacy the object of scrutiny. For teachers, it involves enabling learners to understand how and where literacy fits into the order of things: to grasp text ontologically in relation to contextmwhere contexts are the larger social practices or Discourses within which language functions in processes of giving and sharing and taking meanings, making life, creating identities, developing and maintaining institutions, producing and allocating power and status and other social goods (like wealth), creating and reproducing social relations and hierarchies, and so on.

Therefore, if for their school-based language learning we get students to gather textsNfor instance, by tape-recording conversations and bringing them to school, along with examples of written or visual texts from new homes and communitiesmwe must ensure that we get them to explore also the larger contexts within which these texts derive their 'shape' and 'do their work', and have/make/mediate meaning, and have them make connections and comparisons within and across Discourse-discourse associations. Only in such ways do we get to grips with the nature and operation of literacies in and as social practices.

Second, Discourses function in part to produce and distribute power within the larger process of setting parameters to what we become and how we can be: our Discourse fields shape and circumscribe what our Being will be--our limits and our possibilities--and they do this in conjunction with producing and allocating access to power. Discourses have both internal and external politics. Externally, some Discourses are dominant and others subordinate, within the

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overall order of Discourses. Internally, these same Discourses, regardless of their location in the hierarchical order of Discourses, themselves establish hierarchies of dominance and subordination, authority and subjugation, higher and lower status, unequal distributions of power and rewards, orders of privilege and advantage, etc., among their participants. For example, in the production Discourse of the shop floor, the supervisormwho is subordinate to the general manager in the management Discoursemis dominant over the routine production worker.

At this level of concern, critical literacy has two main commitments. One is to examine the ways in which language functions within Discourse to make what is really historical and contingent appear necessary and inevitable. The other is to enable students to examine ways in which language performs other ideological work in reproducing, masking, and facilitating unequal productions and allocations of power, wealth, status, opportunity, and the rest.

Furthermore, in working as they do, Discourses set limits to what anyone can do or be under their regimes~although some can nonetheless be 'more' than others, and in ways that really matter. Hence, the practice of critical engagement with text is not simply to reveal the role of language within larger discursive processes of constituting, and shaping, and controlling, and establishing difference and hierarchy. It is also to enable us to recognise the existence of larger and different possibilities from those which exist within our currently available Discursive fields.

Critical literacy is a means to envisaging transformative possibilitiesmto extend the option of engaging in Discourse critique and transformation. To build on what I've already said, this requires ensuring that students have access to multiple Discourses and discourses, to (meta) knowledge of what Discourses are, and to some appreciation of the variety of Discourses that exist and notions of Discourses that potentially could exist (by being created). These latter include, especially, Discourses that are more egalitarian, just and democratic.

Personally, I retain a special concern for the discursive construction of social class hierarchies. This is not to say that I am sanguine about oppressions of ethnicity, gender and the like. It is just to choose to work on ground I am reasonably familiar with, in solidarity with others working on other ground.

Do you see critical literacy as a part of the broader commitment of critical pedagogy? To what extent is critical literacy anchored in and tied to Paulo Freire's work ?

For me Freire remains a very important 'guide'. But as I have intimated, that is in no way a necessary condition for effecting coherent discursive constructions of

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critical literacy. The commitments I adhere to are those of discursive transformation in pursuit of a more just distribution of social goodsmbroadly construedmand progressively more equal and expansive conditions for all persons to participate in creating the social and cultural 'shape' of the world, and shaping how we ourselves will be as 'identitied' individual and collective co- creators and co-habitants of that world. These commitments seem to me central to what my friends and other colleagues engaged in critical pedagogy are on about, and what Paulo Freire has devoted his life's work to. The evolving social practice of critical literacy I subscribe to is closely informed by and related to the work of these people.

Do you agree with Robert Mackie's comment, made in a recent review of one of your edited collections with Peter McLaren, that Freire is the arch modernist ?

At present, the meanings and criteria associated with 'modernity' and 'postmodernity' are so various, and are so constantly being refined and augmented that I think it extremely risky to refer to anyone as 'the arch modernist'. Depending on which features of modernity are accented, people as different as Frederick Taylor and Jurgen Habermas might be seen as quintessential modernists. If we pick up Mark Poster's (1992) ideas in 'Postmodernity and The Politics of Multiculturalism', for example, we could see Taylor as subscribing par excel lence to system rationality, instrumental reason, and functionalist operationalitymall of which can be seen as hallmarks of modernity. By contrast, Habermas' commitment to emancipatory reason grounded in a consensus achieved within a public sphere of communication can also be seen as resonating with modernity.

The dangers of such talk aside, clearly there are some features associated with modernism/modernity that Freire manifests: for example, commitment to a democratising political agenda, an elaborated humanism, clear norms to guide practice, a perspective on social development linked to a vision of an ideal future (to invoke Poster, again). Freire has participated deeply in a Discourse of critical social theory that seeks 'to provide a coherent sense of the social world, distinguish salient historical trends, specify groups suffering structural domination and therefore having potentials to mobilize for change, and [to] depict utopian possibilities' (Poster, p. 573). These are Poster's words in connection with Habermas, but they apply equally to Freire. Insofar as we might identify Habermas as one kind of arch/quintessential modernist, then we might similarly view Freire.

On the other hand, Freire has always been complex, and in the very moment we recognise such 'modernist steepings' we must also recall that he has had a

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conception of subjectivities as multiple and contradictory, as well as something very close to a post-colonial politics of difference, working for him from the very outset. In any event, we have a lot more work to do sorting out what is happening materially in postmodern times before we can make sweeping pronouncements on the epochs themselves and their 'arch signifiers'.

Is critical literacy capable of transforming its own critical tradition to take account of what you call 'post-types'of analysis ? What core commitments are not, perhaps, open to change ?

The idea of critical literacy having a (single) critical tradition is a fiction for me, in the sense that I do not see critical literacy as unitary, but rather, as so many discursive practices manifesting multiple critical traditions. Coherent discourses of critical literacy have, in my view, just two necessary generic commitments. One is a commitment to evaluation. For any practice to be critical, it must advance evaluative judgments (although these are not necessarily negative). The second is a commitment to knowing closely, and 'for what it is', that which is being evaluated/judged. The object of evaluation may be language or literacy itself, or some larger phenomena or practices that are mediated by language or can be known and assessed and (partially) addressed through literacy practices. Any critical literacy must meet these generic commitments. Beyond that, it's open to discursive variety and contest.

My own view is that critical literacy is an aspect of normative social praxis grounded in a concern to promote the most equal access possible to the means of production, distribution, and exchange of social and cultural goods, including those that meet the most basic needs of human existence (food, shelter, etc.), as well as intangibles we believe to be associated with living well. At present, I see no way out of continuing to frame visions of ideals of human life, around which to pursue justice and progress. The postmodern turn requires us to re-assess our old ways of doing this, and to ascribe at most a provisional status to the ideals we envision. I do not believe, however, that the postmodern turn has done away with the task itself, or indeed that it can do away with it.

Where do you see the postmodern challenge to modernist conceptions of reading and writing being most promising ?

Social theory always performs at least two functions. One is to describe and make sensible/intelligible the things that go on in society. The other function is more normative in nature. We use the theory to try and make things in the social world better than they are.

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I think we are currently witnessing attempts to produce concepts and constructs intended to help us handle new and emergent phenomena. So far this has been going on most effectively at the descriptive level--thanks to good early work by people like Alain Touraine. In my estimation, the normative dimension has, inevitably and necessarily, been lagging somewhat. Without some conception(s) of 'a good life'--however provisional these may have to bemit is very hard to know what to say normatively about, and how to respond praxically, to virtual realities, electronically mediated subjectivities, and the like. In the process of developing postmodern categories, concepts, theories and explanations, we have to balance our descriptive theoretical investments with normatively based conceptions of projects for building 'safe', viable, and 'human' words.

The two generic commitments you mention come through strongly, I think, in the book on critical literacy you edited with Peter McLaren. In the last chapter, for instance, you mention the decentring of the subject and the text as 'obstacles' to the political project of critical literacy. Why do you consider these to be obstacles?

They are, perhaps, more matters of challenge than they are obstaclesmappearing as obstacles at this point in time because we are not yet sure how to deal with matters of historical agency and related issues in terms that seem to be called for by the postmodern attacks on the humanist subject and on fixed loci of meaning (and meaning-making).

As I have suggested, since the political project of critical literacy has to do with more than deconstructing and otherwise critiquing texts, we need some kind of substantive positive agenda for social transformation. This requires being able to mobilise people around interests that are to some extent shared, and grounded in a sense of identity that is also somewhat shared and abiding; and around notions for action that presuppose individuals assuming historical agencyma we/us who will act because we are who we are and we share an agenda. Likewise, if we decentre texts beyond a certain point it becomes difficult to identify and 'own' targets for historical action. We would indeed arrive at the end of history, giving everything away to the 'centreless ubiquity' of latemor, perhaps, 'post'---capitalism.

This is not a plea for a return to the excesses of the 'metaphysics of presence' that characterises so much modernist thought, which lent us non-contradictory autonomous subjects who were either with us or against us, and made it all too easy to reduce power to 'that which came down the barrel of a gun'. At the same time, we have to heed the lament of people like Nancy Hartsock that just at a

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time when many groups were engaged in 'nationalisms' which involved redefining themselves as marginalised others, so many academics begin to legitimise (so-called) critical theories of the subject which cast doubt on its agency and on the possibilities of general theories that can describe the world and underwrite an 'agenda-ed' quest for historical progress. Above all, we must not become so overwhelmed by the impossibility of the quest for total control of our subjectivities that we abdicate responsibility for pursuing the most coherent and ethically/politically informed control we can responsibly aspire to.

Similarly, with decentred texts, we risk putting our energies into endless cutesy bourgeois deconstruction: a politics of the salon. An overblown view of texts, meaning, and meaning-making as 'decentred' makes it all too easy to diffuse away our own privileges as academics and to dissolve away responsibility for text-mediated cultural actions that, at the extremes, produce bloated profits for some and starvation for others.

What I think is important about your book with Peter McLaren is the way it attempts to absorb insights from postmodernism/poststructuralism without sacrificing the critical ethos or the commitment to overcoming oppression. This seems to me a brave and risky enterprise in that you may be criticised by both camps. What criticisms have the two of you faced in attempting to promote such an accommodation ?

The only published comment I have seen so far that touches on this is made in a review by Peter Roberts (1994, pp. 99-100), where he notes that McLaren and Lankshear 'want to hold on to the dream of a better society, yet feel bound (given the postmodern accent on the local and particular) to temper their call for a vision of an ideal social whole by noting that it should be 'perhaps evanescent or even ephemeral' ... There is a pull in two directions, with [the editors] straddled between the utopian, modernist Freirean tradition in critical pedagogy, and more recent post-structuralist and postmodern positions'. Roberts does not, however, see that as a weakness, but as an aspect of the condition of the present, to be negotiated by people committed to the sorts of ethical and political ideals enunciated throughout the book.

If Roberts is anything like typical of our readers, perhaps the 'obstacles' I referred to previously are similarly experienced by others, such that we generally sense a need to explore the implications of accepting both an ethically based commitment to tackling oppression, whilst at the same time heeding the well placed critiques of modernist excess. Alternatively, it is possible that the book is sufficiently eclectic to prevent any easy conflation of its content to a single coherent theoretical stancemthereby precluding its being made into a unitary

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object of critique. In a way, it gives people a chance to have their cake and eat it too. Our wish for approaches to the question 'What is to be done?' will be satisfied in some chapters, and any unease we may sense over the unequivocal nature of the agendas and strategies spelled out in those chapters, can be appeased by noting that the things that trouble us in these 'hardline' moments are taken up and worried away at elsewhere. My own view is that at present we have to come through a period when it is supremely important to ensure that an ethics with more substance to it than a business ethos alone survives and prospers. We need to keep alive an ethical tradition equal to the challenges presented by the postmodern human condition. In the past we often sought that in something 'founded' and 'transcendent', if not certain. That innocence has gone. But, as Jim Gee's chapter in our collection shows so convincingly, that leaves us in a better, not a worse position, than before. So long as the will to live ethically remains intact, people of goodwill can rebuild a powerful ethical tradition. That calls for feeling the force of postmodern/poststructuralist insights, while at the same time being prepared to own and stand by some positive substantive conception of the good life, and to work for it in the sites one inhabits daily. That, to my mind, is the central theme of the book, and perhaps the lack of criticism thus far reflects the fact that our assessors would find it churlish to criticise i tmalthough I wouldn't bet on that!

Your accommodation or marriage between critical theory and poststructuralism- -what you call 'critical poststructuralist literacy' at one point--provides something of an agenda for future research and scholarship. Can you outline, first, what you see as the main elements of this new constellation and, second, what you see as the most important or exciting directions for future research?

First, our conception of a critical literacy remains wedded to the practice of demystifying the world, understanding our circumstances and those of others as accurately as we can, and seeking the most informed basis possible for enacting negative control (resistance) as well as positive control (transformative action) within these circumstances, in accordance with optimal provisional views of what a total transformation of society in accordance with ideals of emancipation and justice might involve.

Second, this involves recognising that 'the space between the actual and the real, between consciousness and identity, between the word and the world, is the space of experience'rathe space in which we give voice to the world. A critical literacy makes that space explicit, by exposing the social-cultural, historical and contingent nature both of language and 'reality' and of their particular relatedness at any point in time. Critical literacy is the practice of foregrounding the ways in

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which for us, as individual subjects and as bearers of subjectivities that are to a greater or lesser degree shared, this space of experience is 'always already occupied', and that the coloniser holds a share in this occupation (McLaren and Lankshear 1993). Exploring this, and addressing what we find in respect of the mediating texts of our constitution, is the stuff of critical literacy. In part this involves coming to a critical understanding of language/literacy p e r se; how language operates, how language is made and remade. Beyond this, critical literacy builds on such an understanding of language to critique specific instances of language in operation. This is a call not simply for literacy research but, importantly and relatedly, also for developing adequate pedagogies. Here there are presently some wonderful possibilities to explore--as colleagues from linguistics, socio-linguistics, discourse analysis, the 'new' literacy studies, anthropology, cultural studies, information sciences and elsewhere increasingly bring their insights to bear on the pursuit of critical literacy. Challenging teachers to put together exciting forms of textual investigation by drawing on the work of people like Norman Fairclough, Gunther Kress, Catherine Wallace, Brian Street, Judith Green, James Gee, Shirley Heath and many others, should provide all of us with more than enough work in the years ahead.

We need to address literacy in relation to new and emerging forms of linguistic experience and the structures of domination they entrain. Poster poses some important questions for critical literacy researchers when he asks: what happens in society when the boundaries of linguistic experience are drastically transformed? How are social relations altered when language is no longer limited to face-to-face speech or to writing? What assumptions about the nature of society need to be revised when the already complex and ambiguous aspects of language are supplemented by electronic mediation? I see this as a crucial and exciting direction for future research.

In the end, we are concerned to ask how it is that essentially arbitrary organised codes, which are products of historical struggle among regimes of signs as well as regimes of material production, come to represent the 'real', the 'natural', and the 'necessary'. Here we must remain focused on the primacy of the discursive, as opposed to a search for transcendants and epistemological foundations. We need to focus on the association between Discourses (as contingent historical social practices) and discourses (as the language bits of Discourse). We need to explore what happens when different and possibly incompatible Discourses come into alignment, and terms/concepts/language from one are taken up in others, and reframed in ways that can have unwanted consequences if the 'crossings over' are not problematised. The work I am currently becoming involved in with Jim Gee, exploring alignments among socio-cultural approaches to literacy, fast capitalism, and cognitive science, and

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what happens to and with the language of 'empowerment', 'collaboration', 'learning', 'value', 'self-directedness', 'motivation', and the like in the process, seems to me both important and exciting. Certainly, this is the area I am hoping to work mostly in, myself, in the immediate future.

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London. Gee, James (1990) Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses,

Falmer Press, London. Graff, Harvey (1979) The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the

Nineteenth Century City, Academic Press, New York. Harris, Kevin (1979) Education and Knowledge, Routledge, London. Lankshear, Colin with Lawler, Moira (1987) Literacy, Schooling and Revolution,

Falmer Press, New York, Philadelphia and London. Lankshear, Colin (1994) Critical Literacy, Australian Curriculum Studies

Association, Occasional Paper no. 3. Lankshear, Colin and Peter McLaren eds. (1993) Critical Literacy: Politics,

Praxis and the Postmodern, State University of New York, New York. Levine, Ken (1982) Functional literacy: Fond illusions and false economies,

Harvard Educational Review, vol .52, no. 3. McLaren, Peter and Colin Lankshear eds. (1994) Politics of Liberation: Paths

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Fiction Studies, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 567-580. Roberts, Peter (1994) Ethics, education and literacy in the postmodern age,

Critical Forum, vol .3, no. 1, pp. 95-104. Street, Brian (1984) Literacy in Theory and Practice, Cambridge University

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