conditions of possibility

To all, Betsy shared the following (part of the "Salt of the Earth" discussion):

I watched SALT OF THE EARTH and looked at the web page on Reverend Billy's Church of Stop Shopping and noticed some commonalities in the two social movements depicted. First, people who take a stand are ridiculed and belittled. Second, those in power or speaking for the powerful try to intimidate and undermine the leaders of the movement, questioning their education and/or literacy. Third, the most outspoken ones in the movements have some sort of legal or police action brought against them like being arrested and taken to jail. (Esperanza was jailed along with other female leaders and children for maintaining the picket line after the miners were order by the courts to stop and Rev. Billy was arrested, handcuffed, and taken away in a police car for leading a demonstration against Starbuck's.) The mining union's persistence met with success after much hardship and persecution due to the workers' and their families' organization and solidarity. It is yet to be seen if a state of organization and solidarity can be formed around bringing the public into an awareness of uncontrolled capitalism as an inhuman and evil entity which must be stopped before all of us perish.

In response, I shared the following, and I hope Betsy will share her response to this:

It reminds me of something about which I was reflecting on the plane back from Philly. I have not yet worked it through carefully, but the general outline was around a few notions: conditions of meaningfulness, conditions of value, conditions of urgency and conditions of possibility. These are, of course, not always aligned. I am thinking here about critical literacy operating in the real world as it is. In my own view, critical literacy always has high levels of meaningfulness and value, and as time passes the urgency increases (especially without the implementation of critical literacy theories and practices inside and outside formal education), but others could argue that sometimes it has lower levels of meaningfulness (that could be related to how well developed one's concept is of critical literacy, or how well one is able to communicate its meaning). I think it would be very difficult to argue that it has low value or low urgency, but recognizing that would require a fairly well-developed notion of the meaningfulness of critical literacy.

Conditions of possibility for implementing critical literacy is another matter, and this is the key dilemma we face when we are conscious of the meaningfulness, value and urgency of critical literacy. Conditions of possibility for the implementation of critical literacy can be high (rarely) or low (the norm), even while conditions of urgency are constantly increasing thus making the value of critical literacy all the more meaningful and necessary. In some sense, critical literacy is always operating in a cage, and the forces of power (sometimes local and sometimes beyond the local) are working to make the cage smaller and more repressive and the forces of CL are working to expand the bars of the cage. Why the disconnect between urgency and possibility?

In general, the problem is again one of power relationships and indoctrination, as well as a general absence of civic literacy accompanied by fairly widespread levels of "illiteracy" across a wide array of crucial social spheres (more on this later).

Then there is the question of struggling to keep alive the possibility of critical literacy when the conditions might be so contaminated that it is extremely difficult to appropriate critical literacy in the immediate. It is not unusual for institutions to create conditions that not only discourage practitioners but marginalize the ideas.

So, one of the tasks of critical literacy is to create modes of communication that express the meaningfulness, value and urgency in ways that increase the conditions of possibility for implementation, and do so in ways that do not land us in jail like Billy and some of the folks in "Salt of the Earth;" or, without a job.

Side note: The woman who played Esperanza in the film was kicked out of the US before filming was completed (part of the Blacklist repression in the US in the 1950s -- though we should know that HUAC really started in the late 1930s under Senator Dies). The producers had to send a film crew to Mexico (under the guise of making a documentary) in order to film some of the scenes. Goon squads were hired to harass the film crews when they were filming in Silver City, NM. Violence erupted on several occasions to try to prevent the film from being made. There is some good material online about the struggles to make the film.