The Problem of Agency

Warner, in a very interesting book Public and Counterpublic, problematizes the idea of "authentic texts and conversations," by showing how the circulation of texts of various sorts already presupposes a public.  The question then, if we follow Warner, when we read student work is "what public is this writer imagining? or "what reader is this text inviting me to be?"  These questions have been following me throughout my day today, ranting about Common Core, creating a digital story, thinking about how to create an image of our Invitational Summer Institute, exploring the teaching of grammar, and then in constructing discourses in mathematics.  In all of these activities we were discovering the discourses and  language practices that are in our heads and how those discourses and practices offer us images of possibility or restrict what we think is possible.  Those discourses already presume a public--that is, they come to us from the social world, the worlds we inhabit as we construct our lives.  Those publics are abstractions--they don't exist a part from human interaction--just like numbers are abstractions that stand in for the life world--just like stories are abstractions that we construct out of the stream of experiences that construct our lives.  We participate in and are interperlated by various publics--we are "insiders" and "outsiders,"  bystanders (witnesses) and agents (participatory publics), and we document these publics through our digital cameras, the stories we make of our lives, the things we remember.  When we think about "fairness" and evoke "objectivity" we participate in the culture of "sameness" where everyone must do the same thing in the same about of time in or to be "fair" and "objective."  When we think about "fairness" and evoke the complexity of everyday life, we wonder about "difference" and why uniformity seems to matter at all.