The first three chapters of Critically Conscious Research constitute my presentation material source for tonite's class. The book is a bit of a departure in our class in that it is in no way instructional so far in its approach. Indeed there is a sense that the authors do not wish to offer any instruction but rather to encourage some critical thinking on Critical Thinking about teaching Criticality. In support of their desire to set the stage for helping the reader to choose their paths regarding Critical Consciousness these first chapters focus upon the roots of such thought in their semi-extricable antiquity, their transition into the post-modernist era and entrance into the American body of thought, and their progress and change as they enter into the Pedagogical Universe.
     My strategy for dealing with the three chapters will be one of excision, explication, and exercise, respectively. Meaning I intend to justify dumping the first chapter after a cursory glance. Then I will draw out the salient dichotomy of ideas that characterize the time and space and state of thought which defines the beginnings of the post-modernist movement in CT. Lastly I will give a reductive overview of what seems to me to be the common theme in all the offerings in chapter three as a precursor to encompassing that theme in a game, an exercise, a moral effort and experiment to see if our tiny microcosm will, in fact, re-enact the greater gestalt faced by all pedagogical adaptations of Critical work.
      So, somebody fetch me a dull ax, let's go behind the shed and liberate chapter one of Critically Conscious Research with extreme prejudice now. There is nothing in particular wrong with it and it fulfills its role within the framework of the book adequately, namely to generally place the origins of Critical Theory in the the creation/recognition of a burgeoning Critical Consciousness in concerned intellectuals and academics in a formative period of history. It does that just fine so what's my beef? My beef is this, there is a limit the futility of abstraction that I can tolerate in the creation of a premise. I mean you pluck out enough history to support an unfinished definition of a term you wish to educate me about and simultaneously speak of how incomplete this definition must be so as not to overly parameter the development of the flowing present in which the subject of your definition must be allowed to romp free to properly embrace its destiny. The actual history is not done justice and the historicity is done violence.
    This is a stepping stone to the present where the material of the book dwells and I got a different book right here(thump) that's twenty times the size and opens with a meek apology for being too small to accomplish this same task. Getting your history straight as a starting place is good stuff but it is better performed elsewhere and is done so in a fairly admittedly perfunctorily way here. Apart from that the chapter somewhat suddenly wholeheartedly throws in with Collins 2000 Matrix of Domination theory as the team it wants to on for kickball. So its on to chapter two unless any one has any aspect of this first chapter they would like to discuss.
      The chapter overview, apart from mislabeling in which chapter they place their emphasis on Gramsci and Fannon(the former is mentioned once in chapter one, the latter not at all), describes chapter two as extending "to a focus on the the contributions of African American scholars and social activists and like minded whites in their quest to address oppression in the United States" but less than half the chapter involves U.S. thinkers and then it seems not so much to show a transition as a runaway rebirth that styled itself in a fairly revolutionary way in its critical focus. Dubois seems the last one attempting to process the values of Marx and then those concepts lose market share or get repackaged.( Marx is so unpopular on these shores that even his most benevolent wisdoms need a fresh nom de' plume every generation.). What the chapter more clearly seems to show is the actual, tangible birth of, lets face it, American Critical Consciousness. Its really different than its predecessors. It was similar to other nascent  ideals coming across the pond and drew heavily upon them to get started but the sheer freedom from history and open intellectual territory waiting to be claimed made it qualitatively different than the various evolutions and reactions following Marx. Praxis never had it so good. Praxis is the living opposite of universality and universal applicability was not a concern to the new critical consciousness. No, relevance and fearlessness are the hallmarks of the new American CT described in Chapter two.  
      Yes, by the time it was blowing up here we had made it uniquely American and inverted the whole process of accessing ones own CC. This inversion and transition can well be made to act as the crucial dividing line between modern and postmodern critical thought. The inversion was the mental act of personalizing oppression and its cures. We are so steeped in this individualistic view now that elucidating what came before it seems odd. Nontheless, an impersonal, generalizable concept of the methods of oppression as simple economic human nature was quite new and sexy in Marx's time. This because it could blend so well with Science and and that meant change was not a matter of goods and evils or even hateful haves and humble have-nots but a forgivable progression into the future. It was the first non-villan based ideology for economic justice and people really liked that. We could hate the game and not the players and in terms of change that was a new technology. This, in terms of Critical thought, is Modernism. The using of science and reason to predict peaceful change.
     Post-modernism in critical thought starts with an examination of how this body of Modernistic thought is incomplete and culminates its birth process by rejecting it outright. The thinkers whose ideas bookend this birth of the PoMo/U.S. flavored CT or CC are Gramsci and Fannon and I went outside this book to obtain extra data to flesh out the underpinnings of my theory as it is presented here. What is at issue for both thinkers here is how they responded intellectually to the inadequacy of Modernism to address the needs of the Peoples each of them loved. Inadequacy or unwillingness. To be clear, in the understanding which frames this speech, Marxism is the essence of Modernism, and PostMarxism is not PostModernism. Postmodernism begins by problematizing out from the individual instead of inward from the larger societal construct. Gramsci and Fannon prepared these lenses to be taken up by the U.S. thinkers.
       Central to each of these people are the mid-sized social constructs to whom they feel allegiance and whose fate they cannot bear to view in a statistical or generalized fashion. And whose being left behind or marginalized constitutes a kind of proof that the Modern ideologies are failing. If I see my people being left out of the better things in a larger society, that pretty well proves that the methods for detecting and correcting unfairness are not working. In Gramsci's story he hewed to the founding ideals and identity of several dominant political groups and strove to adapt them to better serve people more like the ones he loved. His disinterest in Socialism was simply that it did not help Sardinians that much. In his hunger to do right by his class he walked and worked a path much like our Ben Franklin in becoming a Publisher/Journalist and getting as close to the flow of information as possible. In noticing and framing the culture war, he may have been its first true 4-Star General.
     Marxism, in its nearly non-moral account of distributive inequity utterly failed to account for how such systems resist change and redirection. What allows an inequity to persist in an at least partially ethical and moral society must be some means of slapping a glamour on those inequities. They must be made palatable to persist in a situation which characterizes itself as having moral and ethical rules. Two main additions to the economic patterns elucidated by Marx were needed. The creation or codification of the concept of a Cultural Hegemony, which serves a normative function over conditions of inequity and recasts them as helpful, inevitable, or under construction. It accomplishes this via the creation of consent which is a form of coercion in that it creates a manufactured and false consensus as a frame or context to fix its principles upon.
     The other is the complexification of our understanding of the locus of ruling power into a stratified oligarchy of economic players who intermingle with the distributors and producers of culture. In this way the actual power can regulate how it is perceived by the populace by carrying its messages across the dual sides of power regulation. Political Society is the embodiment of force and Civil society is the embodiment of consent. He borrowed the term "blocs" for these collaborative units too monstrous and varied to be isolated but still obvious enough to be studied and examined.
     Gramsci sought and fought for reforms that would give distributive and productive control to the working class by tuning Marxism to address the Nations view of itself. The workers councils would stand and speak for themselves in an organized manner. This was the clearest and truest path to equity in his eyes and when it was completely defeated by political and propagandistic forces in 1920 Gramsci did two things. One was to be done with Socialism and help found Italian Communism and the other was to conceive of a new class of intellectual to balance forces of consent and transform Academia from within to support a more egalitarian National view. If you look around you you will see examples of the bourgeois/prole scholars envisioned by Gramsci. We are well and truly his children in that sense. Transforming the institutions which resist transformation by enhancing the balance of thought within them is the praxis of critical consciousness and one end of the spectrum in the Postmodernist view. Gramsci's progression from Idealism to pragmatism shows his increasing dissatisfaction with systems of thought too incomplete to address the needs of the people he cared about.
     The other end of that spectrum starts with Fannon. Frantz Fannon is a recognizable influence on the tremendous internal power of American Critical Thought. He gave the necessarily individualistic voice to Racial Injustice studies that lent the urgency that was missing from CT at the time. He poetically and articulately stood for his own significance. Basing his critical view on the realities that impacted upon him and stressing how his view of his world was superior to that of any person of any stripe. I will not repeat any of his words here because each of us should be free to feel them privately and taste how much we crave them as our own. This emphasis is understandable in light of Fannon's life path.
       While his education is tolerably parallel to Gramsci's and his predicament extremely similar in that his adoptive Algerian people were being continuously denied progress and economic justice, his lived story is one of battle and healing. He made his living as a psychiatrist and through his work there honed his understanding of the role of coercive consent in oppressed peoples. All Fannon's work was with individuals and the day to day good he strove to produce was done one person at a time. It is easy to see how he came to see the individual as the fundamental unit of change in a society. We take this for granted now but it was crazy talk until Fannon hit out of the park a concept that had been tee'd up by Gramsci's acknowledgment of the wider forces of culture. Fannon criticized society's failures and taught us to criticize our culture from our place within it, regardless of how we, or others, see that place.
  As with all things quintessentially American, the U.S. PoMo thread of CT was a radical reinterpretation of something that was just happening a little too slow for our tastes and once these thinkers crack the door we barged right in.
     This concludes my analysis of chapter two and to introduce my plans for chapter three I will state the lens that occurred to me as I read it and then we will proceed to the exercise. What I got from the chapter dedicated to the transition of CC and CT into the pedagogical world was that no body of thought could resist the pull toward universality. You can't teach that one of us is more deserving of focus than another even if that makes a super profound story or essay, even if its the new American way, it just ain't the academic way and all self based philosophies seem to drift toward a more egalitarian view as they are prepared to be taught.
Lets take a breath and see if there is time for a group exercise to study this idea.