Educational Philosophy and Theory,Vol. 43, No. 2, 2011 doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2009.00544.

Who Needs Critical Agency?: Educational research and the rhetorical economy of globalization
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J. A. Rice & Michael Vastola

Department of English, University of Florida

Abstract Current critical pedagogical scholarship has theorized the epistemological and social intersection between globalization and educational technology according to two distinct positions. For some, this intersection offers new liberatory knowledges and opportunities that can subvert social homogenization and economic disparity. For others, this relationship is just another phase of neoimperialism that should be politically and ideologically resisted. In contrast, we argue that the intersection between globalization and educational technologies is rather a manifestation of larger economic and logical forces, and that resistance to such circumstances can neither be purely ideological or social. Instead, we contend that such a theoretical and pedagogical foreclosure dialectically actualizes conditions for real changeparticularly when it complicates educational research technologies and their impact on epistemological multiplicity. Keywords: Globalization, technology, rhetoric, critical pedagogy, computeraided research, iek

The economic and cultural phenomenon called globalization has been the source of a proliferation of communication and research technologies; however, it has also generated a comparably prolic diversity of appraisals about how those technological mediums have informed the way people understand their material, cultural, and epistemological conditions. Mary Kalantzis & Bill Cope (2006), for example, argue that the representative intersection between globalization and technology opens new social and political opportunities for computer-aided research. In their ambitious and incisive analysis, Kalantzis & Cope want: ... to speculatetentatively, suggestively, provocativelythat we might be on the verge of a new phase in our species global presence, the exact shape of which is not yet clear but in which diversity becomes a more fundamental dynamic than it has been within not just our living memories, but even our written, civilisational memory. (p. 403)
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Their support for this central claim is a sweeping consideration of pre-agrarian rst phase globalizationwith its substantive, worldwide explosions of diversity and agencyto the second phase homogenization of identity and suppression of agency, which nds its culmination in Fordism and the Soviet vanguard party. The third and current phase of globalization is then enthusiastically compared with its earliest form, while the technologies of the second phase nally unleash their productive capacities through the form of ubiquitous consumer choices. As such, everything from Tivo to DVD chapter selections suggests a return to agency and diversity. Yet, Kalantzis & Copes (2006) globalized consumer choice fails to offer the liberatory and critical dimensions they so strongly advocate. In fact, the diversity they promote actually sounds like a new homogeneity of difference predicated upon cruel market forces and the over-saturation of locality by global processes. Thus, this failure leads us to speculatewith similar tentativeness, and as a clear provocationthat we already inhabit a moment where notions of identity, agency, and free choice, in their connection with new technologies, consistently fail to describe a substantive diversity at odds with a global, consumption-driven economic imperative.These circumstances are not, however, cause for pessimism; nor do they support a misplaced nostalgia for the Fordist past. Instead, this moment of rhetorical and technological invention allows us to fundamentally question the narrative Kalantzis & Cope describe, where globalization creates new liberatory knowledges that negotiate, narrate, and even subvert the tendency toward social homogenization and economic inequality. In place of their account, we contend that many of the celebratory globalization narratives have been as unhelpful as those that reject globalization as neoimperialist, neocolonialist, or even as completely lacking signicance for critical analysis. Therefore, we hope to show that a foreclosure of rhetorical and pedagogical possibilities can dialectically actualize the conditions for real change specically as this foreclosure complicates educational research technologies, computeraided writing practices, and epistemological multiplicity. If this is the case, it makes sense to demonstrate the nature and depth of this foreclosure. A somewhat contrarian narrative might suggest that emerging communication and writing technologies actually weaken discursive and specically textual practices by emphasizing a totalizing public knowledge that ignores multiplicity in all of its forms. Here, the term public denotes the social and spatial visibility of technological practices and theories; as such, these (visible) theories are epistemologically opposed to the constitutive aspects of their own textual circulation. For example, the ubiquitous practice of social websitesMySpace, Facebook, Blogger, YouTube, etc.relegates writing (loosely dened) to the grammar of pre-established nodes of discourse, images, or meanings, which offer their own discursive restraints. While members of these sites and groups certainly alter their webpages, images, and writings for a diverse and global audience, these methodological applications nonetheless circulate meanings via a stagnant and politicized aesthetic. Searching for, say, video clips of Seth MacFarlanes popular TV show Family Guy on YouTube, can often retrieve irrelevant videos that, in hopes of an increased visibility, merely implemented popular search terms associated with MacFarlanes show. Sites like YouTube, therefore, generally work within a purely associative methodology that prioritizes and politicizes visibilityor perhaps more accurately, fameas the generative and epistemological modality of writing. That sites like
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MySpace and Facebook serve as many students primary introduction to semi-social software and writing in the 21st century speaks not only to material access but, more importantly, to the increasingly public nature of an information economy that primarily circulates restricted identities. In a similar vein, recent research and educational technologies seem to follow the public visibility required by a pure circulation of information. Signicantly, recent arguments by some college writing and communication scholars focus greatly on the connectivity and visibility of existing and emerging technologies, which often come at the expense of a methodological investigation or rhetorical/critical ethic.1 As a consequence, the economy of meaning in this global public knowledge marketplace would be inseparable from the economy of material production, circulation, and consumption; in turn, our freedom to choose this or that product, practice, ethic, value, etc. would actually suggest a forced choice between homogeneous forms of (visible) knowledge, much like the social sites we outlined above. Multiplicity of thought and practice is sacriced for an economic rationality derived from a globalizing imperative. Ryan Moellers (2004), Wi- Rhetoric: Driving mobile technologies offers a representative example of this forced choice. Moeller critiques the purportedly liberatory dimensions of wireless networking (wi-) technologies on the grounds that, in contradistinction to the industry rhetoric, the values associated with consumer choices are represented by a universal product image that obfuscates difference, contradiction, and conict in order to distribute products efciently to a mass audience (Moeller, 2004). For Moeller, the so-called choices between brand names, retailers, product features, and so on, are what bind the consumer to the larger system of mass consumerism that the wi- industry represents. However, one does not have to generalize Moellers observations beyond wireless networking to recognize that the signier globalization indicates a system of restraints and so-called freedoms that must be understood alongside the dominant economic paradigm that produces and is reproduced by its global reach and socio-spatial logic. If we understand this globalizing economic paradigm as an epistemological system that sells freedoms to the public as the opportunity for new communicative choices, these new freedoms must be situated within a specic epistemological and technological economy with their own simultaneously material and discursive opportunities/ limitations. This emphasis on an epistemological economy has signicant consequences for education theorists. It forces us to wonder whether there is any so-called global village, local context, or critical rhetoric from which to draw our research; or if there is only a false multiplicity of consumable textual moments that shed the important lessons of their particularity in order to join the frictionless constellation of digestible products. Neoliberalization as the Impetus of Globalization? Given our claim that the signier globalization indicates an epistemological system of restraints and so-called freedoms that cannot be completely separated from the dominant capitalist economic paradigm, denitions of globalization that fail to articulate the material and economic basis are insufcient, or, worse, potentially complicit in the
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ideological reproduction of this particular, hegemonic socio-economic theorywhat we call neoliberalismthat has made itself appear inevitable and desirable. Neoliberalism, according to the geographer and economic theorist David Harvey (2005): ... is in the rst instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. (p. 2) The advocacy of those practices is often accomplished under the aegis of an inevitable series of processes called globalization.2 Along these lines, Arjun Appadurai (1996) provides nuanced conceptions of how, under global cultural ows, local knowledges primarily work to produce and reproduce locality itself (pp. 180181). Similarly, Manuel Castells (2000) locates these neoliberal processes in his conception of a network society, where the decentered, subtle character of networks of social change ... makes it so difcult to perceive, and identify, new identity projects coming into being (p. 428, italics his). These popular, sophisticated articulations are useful in their descriptions of how global processes affect identities and social practices, and often advocate cultural exchanges, modernization, substantive forms of democratization, and other practices that many nd desirable. In our own discipline, rhetoric and writing studies, some recent disciplinary trendsedited collections on public/private rhetoric, spatially based pedagogies/theories, and even certain themes of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, such as representing identity, and building communities suggest that questions related to cultural exchange under globalization permeates the discipline and serves as a commonplace foundation for new discursive and rhetorical sites of investigation.While these popular, interdisciplinary themes should be judged case by case, we should also accept that what are sometimes signied by the cultural aspects of globalization cannot be cleanly differentiated from the economic circumstances of their production. This difculty in differentiation becomes problematic because, as a possible mode of critical discourse, neoliberal ideology tends to limit discursive possibilities to only preconceived economic concerns and priorities. As educational theorist Henry Giroux (2004) puts it: Neoliberalism empties the public treasury, privatizes formerly public services, limits the vocabulary and imaginary available to recognize anti-democratic forms of power, and reinforces narrow models of individual agency (pp. 67-68). Questioning the impact interdisciplinary cultural themes have on rhetoric and composition scholarship is not enough; rather, such viewpoints often (and perhaps unwittingly) resign themselves to mere thematic circulation. In contrast, without potent, alternative rhetorics and logics that address the metonymic relationships between culture and economy, rhetoric and writing studies scholarship cannot adequately address either the identityeconomic or otherwiseof these global, rhetorical situations or the rhetorical knowledge produced. Rhetoric and writing studies scholarship should therefore look with some skepticism on any treatment of globalization that ignores the economic
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processes signied by the term neoliberalismabove all those that tend to conate a particular, contingent economic logic with a hegemonic rhetoric of global inevitability. This hegemonic, cultural rhetoric of neoliberalism, as Harvey (2005) suggests, has ... pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world (p. 3). As such, this hegemony appears insidious when one recognizes the extent to which it has failed to adequately address the very global social and economic stratications that marked previous modes of economic discourse, such as poverty, race, genocide, and the like. For instance, Mike Daviss (2004) review article of a report by the United Nations Human Settlement Program entitled The Challenge of Slumswhich Davis calls the rst truly global audit of urban poverty (p. 11)contends that Whereas the classic slum was a decaying inner city, the new slums are more typically located on the edge of urban spatial explosions ... [This] slum sprawl is as much a problem in the developing world as suburban sprawl in the rich countries (p. 14). The population of these slums, already estimated to be a staggering percentage of current urban dwellers, may reach close to two billion between 2030 and 2040 if current development trends continue (Davis, 2004, p. 17). As the UN report indicates, the forms of these social and economic stratications have changed, as have their geographical and cultural content, which in some instances may validate the hopeful appraisals of familiar cultural studies topics like emerging identities, agencies, communities, and public spheres. In addition to those familiar topics, Kalantzis & Cope (2006) certainly feel that the transition from a homogenizing second phase globalizationwith its political economy of subjectivity based on the agency of the few dominating the agency of the manyis a positive development for pedagogical theory (p. 406). But accounts such as Kalantzis & Copes, while limiting thought and argumentation to a particular global logic and neoliberal ideology, also primarily restrict popular political and disciplinary imagination to a misappropriation of the immediate, material, and local consequences of globalization.This logic has detrimental material effects.The growing trend in the US to standardize classroom practices and textbook content, the limitations on academic freedom and diminution of tenure-track hires, all perfectly t the socio-economic logic of neoliberal theory and mimic the dictates of its market-driven rhetoric. Moreover, neoliberalisms rhetoric of teacher and school accountability ordinarily proceeds from a philosophy of efciency and quantiable results. As Mark C. Taylor (2003) bluntly explains: In the competitive world of higher education, institutions and corporations will nd it increasingly difcult to survive when a signicant portion of their workforce is comprised of permanent [read tenured] employees who resist change (p. 266). Though many of the primary characteristics of such theory can be found under previous economic paradigms and in older theories, in our historical moment they do the work of furthering a neoliberal hegemony that has subsumed numerous anti-Welfare State ideals and used them to consolidate the status of an elite, multinational corporate hierarchy. By deploying what Harvey calls The theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument, (2005, p. 19) this hegemonic rhetoric has done a phenomenal job of maintaining and in some instances restoring the power of economic elites. By primarily work[ing] as a system of justication and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this
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goal (Harvey, 2005, p. 19), the core of neoliberal rhetoric has consisted of wonderfulsounding words like freedom, liberty, choice, and rights, (p. 19) which have often successfully hidden the grim realities of the restoration or reconstitution of naked class power, locally as well as transnationally, but most particularly in the main nancial [centers] of global capitalism (p. 119). One way in which this discourse can be contested is by refusing the rhetorical conation of globalization with neoliberalization.The former can encompass rhetorical processes and practices that may be inevitable and in many instances desirable to liberatory educational theories. The latter, however, is essentially irredeemable. Unfortunately, the unmasking of this conation means recognizing that the two cannot be separated cleanly. As Fredric Jameson (1991) famously described in his methodology for reading cultural texts under the postmodern banner, every position on postmodernism in culturewhether apologia or stigmatizationis also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capital today (p. 3, italics his). This dialectical understanding of his approach bears more than a family resemblance to our own treatment of the relationship between neoliberalism and research and writing technologies found throughout composition classrooms. In addition, we can also locate neoliberalisms downfall within its very logic. Various critical intellectuals, such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000; 2004), already famously locate the democratizing powers and spaces of counter-Empire within the processes of their concept of Empire.3 In critical pedagogical theory, Giroux (2006) interprets neoliberalisms counterforce as new critical, public pedagogical sites. In the movement from private, economic concerns to a new public or civic identity, these sites: ... generate forms of knowledge mediated through specic social relations and mobilize select ideologies, histories, and memories in response to particular problems ... Crucial here are questions regarding what strategies are necessary to interpret, critically engage, and transform such sites as part of a broader struggle over the control of the [neoliberal] new media and their use as a form of public pedagogy. (Giroux, 2006, p. 74) By addressing the latent rhetorical possibilities of neoliberalisms ideological constitution, public pedagogies seek to rupture the circulation of economic identities and examine not only what forms of knowledge and agency it tries to put into place but also what is screened out and how the latter resonates with subordinate forms of critical knowledge and engagement (Giroux, 2006, p. 74). At the same time, however, we should be careful not to uncritically celebrate social forms and formations that emerge from global capital because they may be reliant upon, or even sustain neoliberal logic. Against the too-quick celebration of the radical democratic productive potential of Hardt & Negris (2004) Multitude and Girouxs public pedagogy, philosopher Slavoj iek (2006) asks, is not the capitalist form ... the necessary form, formal frame/condition, of the self-propelling productive movement? (p. 263, italics his). In other words, does not Empire, or, in our case, neoliberal ideology, have to exist in order to maintain the Multitude or many of the ostensibly positive aspects of globalization? Though answering such a question would take us well beyond the parameters of this analysis, we should nonetheless try to understand its implications in the context of
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globalizations often purportedly democratizing and diversifying effects. And while it would be too easy and unproductive to dismiss these forms of access as First World phenomena of little value to the vast majority of humankind, we should also recognize that the economic paradigm responsible for the forms that globalization takes still has much of its theoretical and geographical foundations in parts of the world where this epistemology and its necessary material circumstances are common. 4 Emerging Research Epistemologies and their Discontents While certainly constructing and emphasizing the connective and circulatory social patterns of a globalized thinking, the epistemological research coordinates of a neoliberal economy and ideology produces the sites and syntax of its own rhetorical possibilities and freedoms. At the same time, however, the rhetorical freedoms offered by such a system also mask the way it limits any liberatory alternative or pedagogy. It is in this general description that Moellers (2004) analysis of consumer choices in wireless networking technologies is exemplary of the freedoms of information access under neoliberalism, while the affect of global economic processes on local practices and identities detailed by Castells (2000) and Appadurai (1996) appear central to global commonsense. Part of the difculty with this neoliberal epistemology is precisely how it articulates its freedoms and choices. For example, it often links the rhetoric of choice to the reality of economic insecurity and the disruption of societal identity. Consistent with Taylors (2003) blunt observation about workforce exibility in uid economic systems, iek (2001) says of the neoliberal risk society: the ruling ideology endeavors to sell us the insecurity caused by the dismantling of the Welfare State as the opportunity for new freedoms (p. 116). Consequently, if this rhetorical freedom is tantamount to a forced choicehere, as a globalizing choice with no substantive alternativethen Kalantzis & Cope (2006) simply miss the point with their hopeful description of how under the third phase of globalization, a greater capacity to decide and act is devolved to civil society [and] a higher level of participation and reexivity is required of citizens. This is fertile ground for a new globalization of cultural divergence (p. 407). If we consider the rhetorical limitations of certain concepts in this neoliberal epistemology, the forced choice is actually the purportedly (and often legitimately) democratizing force of globalization itself. As French philosopher Alain Badiou (2005) explains, ... the word democracy concerns what I shall call authoritarian opinion. It is forbidden, as it were, not to be a democrat. More precisely, it stands to reason that humanity aspires to democracy, and any subjectivity suspected of not being democratic is regarded as pathological. At best it refers to a patient re-education, at worst to the right of military intervention by democratic paratroopers. (p. 78, italics his) In other words, even though what it means to be democratic is contested terrain, what we are not free to contest is its necessity.5 The logical outcome of that epistemological framework isto say the very leastnot at all inconsistent with the uses to which the term democracy has been put in recent and current military interventions by the United
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States. And it is only a very modest transition to an epistemology of information accessto the research opportunities contained in new technologies and their freedoms of choice. With a research initiative in place in almost all institutions of higher education, the access to electronic databases, search engines, online classes, etc. signify a push towards a particular mode of inquiry and investigation that follow the same circulatory and epistemological patterns of the forced choice. But this accumulation of various research options and bits of information into the university setting and resources is not the main hindrance; rather, the very fact that these databases, etc. are modeled on and produced by larger private companies methods and research epistemologies (read priorities) is.6 By procuring the only means through which students and teachers alike can research in general, this hegemony of global companies epistemological interests produce the same or universal text or agent. That is, by categorizing research concepts or texts according to a global economic logic, research possibilities are always already limited to an adaptive or translated conceptual imperative. This type of corporate logic should sound familiar. Much like media and congressional arguments concerning the privatization of healthcare, education, and even the recent allocation of military contracts to private security organizations (such as Blackwater Worldwide), the universal logic and conceptual apparatus used in these global educational organizations is a derivative of the private sectors economic interests. To be sure, students entering the university are not strangers to electronic texts and the epistemologies that come with them: from text messaging to personalizing web pages to expressing their creative identity on Xanga, students are very aware of how to utilize or consume these electronic sources. Yet, consumption is precisely the link we want to emphasize here: textually and conceptually speaking, there is relatively little difference between the epistemological possibilities of the university electronic resource and the overtly consumer electronic product. Take, for example, the research similarities between consumer productssuch as iPods or Zunesand university research sources, like LexisNexis. With iPods and Zunes, the technology works to primarily assemble distinct, but not disparate, songs, images, text messages, Podcasts, etc. into a coherent and contingent categorization for the user. Like these consumer technologies, LexisNexis also works to assemble distinct search terms into a collective and working (in the loose denition of the term) category of knowledge. But perhaps more importantly, both the consumer units and LexisNexis methodologically perform within the same dynamic. When producing results for searches, both iPods and LexisNexis disregard context and instead focus on the particular signier, whether it be a word in a song or a word in a newspaper article. By undertaking research in this waycollecting and displaying results for the userthese searches select results and data according to a marketplace of signiers that, at the extreme, is constructed as a global production that further circulates the same, tired methodologies. Accordingly, the knowledge (or playlist) a student creates through an iPod or LexisNexis is primarily produced for ready-made, pragmatic purposes. Bradley Dilger (2000) echoes this methodological worry when he considers the ideological and organizational power of ease. Stating that the dialectical interaction between accessibility and rhetorical situations rely on a sacriced exchange between research technology and knowledge, he claims:
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J. A. Rice & Michael Vastola Software (or any products, for that matter) that allows nearly instantaneous use are much more likely to be considered easy than those which require perusal of instructions. The popularity of step-by-step tutorials or wizards, as opposed to reference manuals, can also be attributed to the power of ease: again, these computing practices can restrict creativity and affect content ... Ease is never free: its gain is matched by a loss in choice, security, privacy, health, or a combination thereof. (Dilger, 2000)

That the socially connective and organizational capacities of a user-created playlist never fundamentally alter the way music, computing practices, or knowledge are categorized, performed, sold, or understood suggests, if nothing else, the function and dynamic of such technologies are epistemologically limited. Much like Badious (2005) authoritarian opinion, electronic research methodology in a neoliberal epistemology promotes thinking as a global or universal enterprise. Consequently, Kalantzis & Cope (2006) cannot be taken at their word when they assert that The more we take agency for real, the more multifarious its manifestations become (p. 408). Here their fundamental mistake is to see erratic consumption patterns as emerging forms of substantive diversity, and to conate consumption within a restricted economy of choices as real agency. Ultimately, what they identify as moments of agentic exchange between the local identity and the global commodity universe contains less dialogue, negotiation, and (above all) choice than they want to believe. To put this provocation in slightly different terms: instead of creating spaces that are egalitarian at the level of exchange, the global spaces of dialogue are egalitarian to the extent that there is exchange. Under these circumstances, all dialogue can be considered commodiable and all localism ironic. The local is only dened as local through the very global epistemology to which it stands in contradistinction. In spite of this view, these are hopeful circumstances, and a grim assessment of their uses and drawbacks should not make us misunderstand them as lacking potential, or see their potential as always already recuperated. First, we should understand these rhetorical, textual, and research conditions as conditions in which any substantive freedom of choice is impossiblewhere the commodity universe has already won. The immediate protest will insist that these globally determined circumstances are not apparent and, in fact, there is much of the social constitution of this planet that is not yet affected by these global processes. Such a protest is accurate to the extent that there are numerous knowledge communities on this planet that do not seem to participate in exchange to the extent that we and many of the authors we have quoted seem to suggest. But we have only ever described a crucial tendency, and a simple thought experiment that tries to imagine the results of even a small nation instituting broad protectionist measures should make the economic characteristics of this tendency apparent. Once we accept that these neoliberal power relations do exist on a global scale though by no means uniformlyit is the necessary dialectical gesture to understand these conditions of impossibility as the very conditions in which new possible textual choices arise. The truly dialectical position of enunciation, the position that effectively estranges us from the epistemology of neoliberalism, must recognize the truth of unfreedom in order to make real choices possible. Before we elaborate on that point, it should
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be made clear that this gesture will necessarily contain a notion of totality that exceeds the global and is wildly insensitive to the local as local. Choice, Totality, and New Liberatory Pedagogical Theories This idea of totality as an entry point to new textual, rhetorical, and pedagogical choices is best exemplied by Robert Samuelss (2005) article Integrating Hypertextual Subjects: Combining modern academic essay writing with postmodern web zines. When describing the familiar theme of a digital divide, he makes the important observation that the risk of teaching our students how to use and develop hypertexts is that these highly functional and efcient systems of information processing tend to undermine the ability of people to stand back and analyze the various social, cultural, and subjective effects that these new technologies perform (Samuels, 2005). Though it is unlikely people ever had the epistemological freedom to stand back and analyze the effects in question, the important point here is how Samuels describes the concept of totality as precisely the structure that exceeds its own textual effects. In similar fashion, the social, cultural and subjective effects (Samuels, 2005) that we might locate in the research performed by, say, a Google search, belong to a far larger framework of intelligibility that make them cogent and coherent. If we add the economic, or recognize the economic as implicated in all of Samuelss categories, we begin to understand what is at stake in the concept of totality: the imperative to readand articulatethe larger systematic. Needless to say, hypertext and Google can both contribute to the tendency to ignore the broader epistemology in which they operate. But the new research and epistemological imperative we have been describing is of particular interest in this context. This is because it actively presents itself as engaged in the imperative to describe a totality of meaning and epistemological possibilities. As a working premise, then, the globalization of research and access describe the means through which the total eld of meaning, including those subjects and ideas that were previously unthinkable, is recognized as such.Yet, according to this logic, we can only understand the totality of globalization to be a closed totality, as one might nd in some dated ontological assumption. If, on the other hand, we understand totality in the sense deployed by Fredric Jameson, the term must describe a methodology that cannot fully describe its object.7 According to Jameson (1991), An older politics sought to coordinate local and global struggles, but in a moment where, for a time, genuine (or totalizing) politics is no longer possible ... what is lost in ... the absence [of] the global dimension ... is very precisely the dimension of economics itself, or of the system, of private enterprise and the prot motive, which cannot be challenged on a local level (p. 330). A pragmatic account of how a conception of an open totality can inform pedagogy in networked classrooms is offered by Tim Mayers and Kevin Swafford (1998) in Reading the Networks of Power: Rethinking critical thinking in computerized classrooms. As their title suggests, Mayers & Swafford are primarily concerned with how to inject critical pedagogical practices into a computerized teaching environment. To accomplish this, they begin by criticizing both the inclination towards fetishizing new writing technologies, as well as those pedagogues who would be dismissive of the opportunities they
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represent. Mayers & Swafford (1998) wisely incorporate the economic implications and suppositions of these technologies into their ideological critique and make the claim that If the liberatory aspects of the technology are to be achieved even remotely, it is our responsibility to rethink the technology along the axes of its larger social, economic, and political implications (p. 153). In other words, critical educators have to provide a space in which to inform their students about the broader framework or totality in which networked forms of written communication are performed. Unfortunately, Mayers & Swafford do not successfully provide anything like a liberatory pedagogy through their reasoned, judicious examination of the subject. Because they rely on the possibility of a choice in how technologies are used, such a choice is posited as what must necessarily be true in order for forms of critical engagement to have an effect. In contradistinction to this free choice, we have argued that such a choice cannot be free. And yet, the reality of the unfree choice has not led us to think that forms of critical textual engagement, as Mayers & Swafford provide, are antiquated or counterproductive. Rather, it shows that these forms of engagement cannot be a politicoepistemological foundation for the pedagogical scene. Since research technologies are always already implicated in the textual, epistemological, and economic processes we have described, the pedagogy that must proceed from those conditions cannot allow ideological critique to become an end in itself. Pedagogies that address a neoliberalized global knowledge must base themselves upon radically different assumptions and recognitions than previous pedagogical theories. Instead of liberating students and disciplinary knowledges, critical pedagogues would advocate a rhetorically invested positiona position that cannot abstain from its own partial and political interests. Unlike an ideological critique of research technologies that calls for greater awareness of how research technology is not neutral, but then insists upon a rational, progressive frame of meaning from which to critique these ideological mediums, a critique of this neoliberal absence of neutrality insists upon a radical, rhetorical and textual choice. But recourse to such a radical choice is precisely what Kalantzis & Copes (2006) globalization narrative has not providedand has not done so in the name of a neutral agency. As such, their claim that the third phase of globalization tells us of a shift back to balance in the political economy of agency, (p. 409) confronts us as an unfortunate conclusion. As we described earlier in our example of democracy under globalization, the deadlocks inherent in global capitalthe forces that prevent its harmonious total transformation of social relationsis the very condition of possibility for the productive forces that Kalantzis & Cope would like to see as democratizing. Put another way: far from being outdated, Karl Marxs famous claim that the ultimate obstacle to capitalism is capitalism itself seems to gain actuality with todays growing deadlocks of globalization in which the inherently antagonistic nature of capitalism belies its world-wide triumph (iek, 2001, p. 18). However, what Marx overlooks and Kalantzis & Cope do not acknowledge, is that if we take away the obstaclecapital, consumerism-driven globalizationthe very potentialdemocracy, diversity, economic productivity dissipates (iek, 2001, p. 19). Yet, we can again turn to Marx (through iek) for the moment of possibility. For Marx, bourgeois freedom under industrial production confronted humankind as
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a lack of freedom. But, far from being useless, this inherent contradiction was a site of potentialthe radical, pedagogical choice par excellence. As iek (2007) insists, With regard to the dialectic of freedom, this means that it is the very alienated, bourgeois freedom which creates the conditions and opens up the space for actual freedom (p. 7). This is perhaps the enduring lesson of the dialectic that still has immediacy today: moments of foreclosure are always pregnant with possibilities that we are not in a position to anticipate. In our moment, it is not helpful to describe new computer and research technologies as liberatory, democratizing, or diversifying. To do so is to settle for far too little in a world that needs much more than neoliberalism has demonstrated the capacity to provide. But if local meanings become everywhere available to global networks of exchange (as many have suggested), this over saturation of the local by the global may foreclose numerous rational, critical descriptions of agency and subjectivity under globalization. Then this impasse/limit can begin to generate a discipline of intransigence and refusal that will settle for nothing less, and celebrate nothing short of, real changes in the global economic and social relations of higher education. Notes
1. Both Collin Brookes (2005) article Weblogs as Deictic Systems: Centripetal, centrifugal, and small-world blogging and Jacqueline Rhodess (2005) Radical Feminism,Writing, and Critical Agency: From manifesto to modem discuss this connective and visible technology imperative. Brookes comparison of expert systems and intelligent agents to blogging technologies deictic nature clearly promotes a technological ethos of circulation and networked visibility. In similar fashion, Rhodess book describes the textually networked identity and community that second wave American feminists created in the 1960s and 70s as an early activist model for contemporary web-based radical feminism. 2. Thomas L. Friedmans (2005) bestseller TheWorld is Flat:A brief history of the twenty-rst century is exemplary of this conation. Though Friedmans analysis is occasionally more nuanced and self-reexive than many of its kind, the populist and egalitarian implications he draws from examples of social dislocation and economic insecurity often appear untenable. The approach to these examples can sometimes, to a troubling extent, be seen as mimicking many sophisticated cultural studies analyses of localized social practices and discourse formations, such as Arjun Appadurais (1996) monumental exercise in nuance, Modernity at Large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. 3. For further elaboration on this complex and problematical concept, see Michael Hardt & Antonio Negris (2000) Empire, or its sequel (2004) Multitude:War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. 4. According to Internet World Stats, only 15.7% or the world, and 2.6% of Africa, utilize Internet technologies: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm. 5. The recent satirical critique of Wikipedia by Stephen Colbert (2006) is signicant here. On the July 31st, 2006 recording of The Colbert Report, Colbert claimed the concept wikiality was where: any user can change any entry [on Wikipedia], and if enough other users agree with them, it becomes true. ... If only the entire body of human knowledge worked this way. And it can, thanks to tonights word: Wikiality. Now, folks, Im no fan of reality, and Im no fan of encyclopedias. Ive said it before. Who is Britannica to tell me that George Washington had slaves? If I want to say he didnt, thats my right. And now, thanks to Wikipedia, its also a fact ... We should apply these principles to all information. All we need to do is convince a majority of people that some factoid is true. ... What were doing is bringing democracy to knowledge. Much like Badious (2005) claim, Colbert asserts the limitation of using Wikipedia
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as a foundation of knowledge: the horizon or legitimacy of knowledge is determined by consensus, regardless of methodological rigor or common knowledge. But perhaps more importantly, the only criterion in Colberts critique is consensusthe limitations of consensus never enter into the epistemological picture. 6. It should come as no surprise that most, if not all, research engines and services available to colleges and universities are owned and operated by external, private companies. For example, LexisNexis is owned and operated by the Reed/Elsevier company, EBSCO by the EBSCO corporation, and Infotrac is supported by the Gale Group (who are also currently writing a program/software that teaches research writing skills and methods: Infowrite). Yet, the difculty here is not with a presupposed ethical or moral problematic within a capitalist system. Rather, the focus should be on the categorizing structure and the political consequences of such an economic and informative union. With private companies organizing the form and access of scholarly and popular knowledge, the academic and democratic consensus or material support are bypassed in the name of economic gain. 7. Jamesons (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism contains his most sustained treatment of this concept.

References
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Rhodes, J. (2005) Radical Feminism,Writing, and Critical Agency: From manifesto to modem (Albany, NY, State University of New York Press). Samuels, R. (2005) Integrating Hypertextual Subjects: Combining modern academic essay writing with postmodern web zines, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 10:2, http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/10.2/binder2.html?coverweb/samuels/index.html Taylor, M. C. (2003) The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press). iek, S. (2001) On Belief (New York, Routledge). iek, S. (2006) The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press). iek, S. (2007) Christ, Hegel, Marx, International Journal of iek Studies, 1:4. pp. 19.

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