additional critical theory

Some additional theory would make this discussion fuller and richer. A direct engagement with Marxist discussions of technology and economy or Gramscian theories of cultural production and hegemony would provide easy segues into discussions of agency that are connected to access as a mode of cultural and economic production. If we consider the way in which our current emerging technologies and media blend and dialectically (re)produce each other, the ways in which they embody agency (as Banks’s discussions of X, King, Southern quilt-makers, and BlackPlanet members suggest), then we might find that discussions of technological access are also ones about the (re)production of culture and subjectivity, which means that to be “critical” (as in Banks’s “critical access”) must also mean that rhetors, students, teachers, and citizens need to think consciously about what “critiquing” and “resisting” mean specifically. Any old resistance won’t do, just as any old critique won’t transform. Banks doesn’t say this, but it seems clearly an important cultural and political aspect of technological access.

Consider just a few current technological examples that (re)produce culture through access, all of which use various representations of White, African American, Asian Pacific American, Latino/a, and Native American subjectivities. These examples are the kinds of sites of cultural production that U.S. citizens encounter every day. Their access affects our students’ subjectivities, and their consumption is both rhetorical (as Banks discusses in his examples) and ideological (in the Althusserian sense, or as part of “interpellation”). Understanding, critiquing, and transforming this kind of access, something Banks doesn’t do, seems crucial in today’s postmodern economies of desire and consumerism. Surely this is a different project than the one Banks set out to do, but his seems clearly to lead in this direction, and I wanted him to at least acknowledge this kind of critical and transformative project toward “higher ground,” but he does not. Again, perhaps this is unfair and less of a criticism of Banks’s discussion, and more of a call that I hear his book making, one that provokes important questions concerning agency and subjectivity, capitalism and cultural (re)production, hegemony and desire. Regardless, it proves the book is well worth reading.

-- -- --

• It tended to construct “race” in binary terms.
• Its discussions begged for a fuller treatment of various communities of color.
• Additional critical theory would have strengthened the book's arguments.