Agency in Berlin's Rhetorics, Poetics and Cultures

Agency in Berlin's Rhetorics, Poetics and Cultures

Some quotes: from Postmodernism, the College Curriculum, and English Studies
" Students deserve an education that prepares them to be critical citizens of the nation that now stands as one of the oldest democracies in history. The United States has seldom considered it sufficient to educate students exclusively for work. The insistence that students also be prepared to become active and critical agents in shaping the economic, social, political, and cultural conditions of their historical moment has been a valuable commonplace in this nation’s educational discussions.” (54_55)

“education exists to provide intelligent, articulate, and responsible citizens who understand their obligation and their right to insist that economic, social, and political power be exerted in the best interests of the community… the work of education in a democratic society is to provide “critical literacy”.” (55)


“the new economic democracy would require consumers whose buying habits are intelligent responses to the needs of the community, not simply an extension of personal interest.” (56)

Chapter 4
Postmodernism in the Academy

Postmodern Theory
“Language is no longer a set of transparent signifiers that records an externally present thing-in-itself, a simple signaling device that stands for and corresponds to the separate realities that lend it meaning. Language is instead a pluralistic and complex system of signification that constructs realities rather than simply presenting or reflecting them. Our conceptions of material and social phenomena, then, are fabrications of signification, the products of culturally coded signs”. (61)

“We are thus all spoken by language as much as language is spoken by us” (64)

Berlin writes,
“ The structuralist and poststructuralist conceptions of signification have dramatic consequences for our understanding of the self and its formation. The unified, coherent, autonomous, self-present subject of the Enlightenment has been the centerpiece of liberal humanism. From this perspective, the subject is a transcendent consciousness that functions unencumbered by the social and material conditions of experience, acting as free and rational agent that adjudicates competing claims for action” (65)

“The speaking, acting subject is no longer considered unified, rational, autonomous, or self-present. Instead, each person is regarded as the construction of the various signifying practices, the uses of language and cultural codes, of a given historical moment. In other words, the subject is not the source and origin of these practices but is finally their product. This means that each of us is formed by the various discourses and sign systems that surround us. These include not only everyday uses of language (discursive formations) in home, school, the media, and other institutions, but the material conditions (nondiscursive formations) that are arranged in the manner of languages- that is, semiotically- including such things as the clothes we wear, the way we carry our bodies, and the way our school and home environments are arranged. These signifying practices are languages that tell us who we are and how we should behave in terms of such categories as gender, race, class, age, ethnicity, and the like. The result is that each of us is the heterogeneously made up of various competing discourses, conflicted and contradictory scripts, that make our consciousness anything but unified, coherent, and autonomous….In short, we are constituted by subject formations and subject positions that do not always square with each other. To state the case in its most extreme form, each of us is finally conflicted, incoherent, amorphous, protean, and irrational in our very constitution” (66)


“Foucault depicts individuals as the instruments of impersonal institutions, structures designed to serve their own interests, not the interest of those who pass through them. Human subjects are thus products of power-knowledge formations” (67).

“the loss of the unified subject, stable signifiers, and reliable truths is celebrated as a triumph of contemporary civilations” (71)

“ since each agent enjoys a unique set of interacting formations, each of us has a “specific history”. In other words, we are indeed different from each other, although never completely unique” (74).

“Our specific history is thus situated within a larger social history-the economic, political, and cultural conditions of the time. This concept of the subject as a dialectical process of subject positions within a specific social history as well as within broader shared social history accounts for the possibilities of agents actively changing the conditions of historical experience.” (74) .

But “acting is always circumscribed by material and discursive constraints, but acting against these conditions is feasible. The important implication of this scheme is that the diverse and varied the subject positions of any agent and the more free and open the political environment, the greater the possibilities for action” (74) .

“Both the subject who experiences and the material and social conditions experienced are products of discursively constituted and historically specific negotiations with genuine material constraints” (76).