Bildende SelbstpraktikenThe Genealogy of Internal Dialog in Educational Material & Practice

Norm Friesen

Introduction: Writing as a Technology of the Self

Foucault’s general notion of “technologies of the self” provides both an invaluable starting point and an indispensable set of conceptual tools for this investigation. Foucault defi nes these technologies as “refl ected and voluntary practices by which men not only fi x rules of conduct for themselves but seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their particular being, and to make their life an oeuvre” (2005, p. 61; see also Foucault 1985, p. 10) Th ese are practices or techniques, in other words, that may be initiated by the self and are directed toward it. In Fou-cault’s words, they “transform the self,” make of it a subject, or a kind of work or image. In his lectures on the “hermeneutics of the subject,” Foucault notes the resonance of these characterizations with the German notion of Bildung (or [self-]formation) which has as its root in the German word for Bild or image.1 Foucault describes the self as being formed to particular directions or ends – for example,

1 In his lecture from the 13th of January, 1982, Foucault makes it clear that the notion of technologies of the self is closely related to paideia as a kind of formation of and by the self: “Socrates says: You are ignorant; but you are young and so you have time, not to learn, but to take care of yourself. It is here, I think, in the gap between ‘learning,’ which would be the usual result expected from this kind of reasoning, and the necessity to ‘take care of the self,’ between pedagogy understood as apprenticeship and this other form of culture, of paideia (we will return at length to this later), which revolves around what could be called the culture of the self, the formation of the self, the Selbstbildung as the Germans would say, it is in this gap, this interplay, this proximity that a num-ber of problems rush in which concern, it seems to me, the whole interplay between philosophy and spirituality in the ancient world” (2005, p. 46).Similarly, in a text called “Dies ist keine Pfeife,” Klaus Mollenhauer observes: “So erscheint mir Foucault eigentlich als ‘Bildungstheoretiker’; denn was ist der Bildungs-prozeß jedes Gesellschaft smitgliedes anderes, als eine Formierung von Kognitionen

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to be remade as knowledgeable, pure, immortal, or as having particular access to the truth (see: 2005, p. 46; 1988, p. 18). Examples considered by Foucault include religious conversion, the religious retreat or withdrawal, and of particular interest here, specific ways of reading and writing for and about the self (see 1988, pp. 27-33). In his account of these textual practices, Foucault describes an early version of a kind of mediated dialogue of the self, one which serves as a point of comparison for internalized and other forms of dialogue considered in this chapter. Significantly, Foucault’s description of this practice of the self also offers one of the few extend-ed considerations of what are conventionally thought of as “media technologies” to be found in his work. Indeed, Foucault can be said to identify the spread and development of textual media as a precondition for new technologies of the self in Greek and Roman culture. As writing moved from a form of poetic and dialogical expression to epistolary and other more “prosaic” forms, a new experience of the self became possible:

“In Plato’s writings, dialogue gave way to the literary pseudodialog. But by the Hel-lenistic age, writing prevailed, and real dialectic passed to correspondence. Taking care of oneself became linked to constant writing activity. The self is something to write about, a theme or object (subject) of writing activity. That is not a modern trait born of the Reformation or of romanticism; it is one of the most ancient Western traditions. It was well established and deeply rooted when Augustine started his Confessions. The new concern with self involved a new experience of self. The new form of the experience of the self is to be seen in the first and second century when introspection becomes more and more detailed. … Attention was paid to nuances of life, mood, and reading, and the experience of oneself was intensified and widened by virtue of this act of writing. A whole field of experience opened which earlier was absent.” (1988, pp. 27-28)

Writing becomes a technology of the self first in the sense that it is writing about the self, about an individual’s life, moods and deeds; second, it is writing for the self of the present and of the future, in that such writing provides a focus for the present and an artifact for later reflection. Taking the example of a letter written by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE), Foucault notes an important change in this self-practice, one which he identifies with developments occurring over the subsequent millennium, through the Middle Ages:

“[Aurelius’] letter is the transcription of [an] examination of conscience. It stresses what you did, not what you thought. That is the difference between practice in the

und Antrieben nach den Regeln gesellschaftlichen Wissens, in denen der ‘objektive Sinn’ subjektiver Existenzen und Handlungsräume definiert ist.”

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Hellenistic and imperial periods and later monastic practice. In Seneca too there are only deeds, not thoughts. But it does prefigure Christian confession …” (p. 30)

The “Christian confession” that Foucault sees as anticipated in the increasing internalization of self-reflection traces its own trajectory as a technology of the self. Foucault understands the confessional as a manifestation of specifically Christian forms of renunciation that take place primarily through self-disclosure and verbalization: “from the beginning of Christianity to the seventeenth century,” Foucault observes, “there is a correlation between disclosure of the self, dramatic or verbalized, and renunciation of the self.” Foucault highlights in particular the “inauguration of penance in the thirteenth century [as] … an important step in its rise” (of dramatic or verbalized self-disclosure). It is this rise, and the pivotal period at the end of the medieval and beginning of the early modern period that this chapter now considers.

The Confessional as a “Learning Technology”

Christian confession is relevant not only in that it offers a link between early and later technologies of the self, but also in that it entails a type of technology, a kind of “medium” for the expansion and popularization of certain practices of the self. In his 1974 “Social History of the Confession,” John Bossy describes how, over a number of centuries, confessional practice moves broadly from “the field of objective social relations [to one] of interiorized discipline for the individual” (Bossey 1975, p. 21). As it occurred in rural communities in the Middle Ages, confession was generally a social and pragmatic affair, a matter of reconciling the penitent or layperson with the parish priest, with his or her neighbors, and finally also with the Church (e. g., Figure 1). As Bossey puts it, this type of confession generally took the form of

“a face-to-face encounter between two people [the priest and the penitent] who would probably have known each other pretty well in the not-so-remote presence of a large number of neighbors, and more or less at the time … for the reconciliation to the community of public penitents[, circumstances in which] the average person was much more likely to tell the priest about the sins of his neighbors than about his own.” (p. 24)

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Fig. 1A late Medieval confession (Cornell University Press; used with permission).

The emphasis on external deeds noted by Foucault in the ancient, “elite” examina-tion of conscience of Seneca or Aurelius is still very much present in this popular, rural confession. And the medieval confession occurs, notably, without a clear or explicit focus on privacy and reflexivity. However, features of privacy, reflexivity and interiority are gradually introduced, almost one-by-one, starting with the spread of what Bossey characterizes as a broad tendency to “psychologize the sacrament,” (p. 30). This took place specifically through the work of Catholic Church leader (St.) Carlo Borromeo (1538-1584), the former archbishop of Milan, and a believer in the importance of confession specifically as “a reconciliation to God and not to the community” (p. 22; emphasis added). One of Borromeo’s concerns was the introduction of “the new technology of the [two- or three-chamber] confessional,” a technology that, as Bossey says, has “educational values … close to its center” (Figure 2; p. 38).

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Fig. 2An early modern confes-sional “technology of the self:” (Cornell University Press; used with permis-sion). The shelf and bench beneath the confessional grille appear to meet Bor-romeo’s precise specifica-tions.

Borromeo specified the design of the confessional in great detail in his Instructiones Fabricae et Supellectilis Ecclesiasticae, requiring for example

“A small slightly inclined board [to] …be set on the upper end. On this the penitent can lean with joined hands while kneeling during confession. This board will be twelve ounces wide and one cubit and a half long [sic]. There will be a step on which the penitent can kneel at the bottom part of this bench.” (1981, p. 83)

This precisely specified technology is also one that gradually spread through ear-ly-modern Europe – beginning in the 16th century Catholic counter-reformation in the Latin south, and moving through the Germanic north over the course of some two centuries. As Bossey explains, Borromeo

“clearly wanted to seclude both priest and penitent. … if the confessional was to become an instrument for intimate self-examination, for instruction of the ignorant in the rudiments of Christian doctrine, and for encouraging the denunciation of neighbors to the Inquisition for heresy and similar matters, privacy of a kind was evidently called for.” (p. 30)

In this case, we have an environment deliberately designed for “private” and “intimate self-examination;” for the reconciliation of the self to God, mediated metaphysically through priestly intercession, and physically through verbalization, the medium of the spoken word. Also as indicated in the quotes above, instruction and education

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were seen as integral to this technology. The spread of the confessional coincided, as Bossey explains, with “a novel concern for the confession of children, [and] the association of confession with catechism” (p. 38).

Print as a Technology of the Self

The 16th century not only marked the introduction of the confessional in the Catholic Church; it also marked the rebirth of the catechism, as both pedagogical performance and published text. In 1529, Martin Luther published both his “greater” catechism for priests and his “lesser” catechism for lay teachers. Not to be outdone, Borromeo advocated the composition of a Roman Catholic catechism, which was published in 1566, largely as doctrinal instruction for priests. In the latter, the medium of the spoken word as well as the mediating function of the priest are central, as this introductory passage from the Catechismus Romanus indicates:

“But, as ‘faith cometh by hearing,’ the necessity of the assiduous labor and faithful ministry of a legitimate teacher, at all times, towards the attainment of eternal salva-tion is manifest, for it is written, ‘how shall they hear without a preacher?’ And how shall they ‘preach unless they be sent?’”2 (Pius V 1829, p. 2)

The people hear the words of the priest – the “ministry of a legitimate teacher” – who has been sent out to the people, presumably after having received training at a center of learning and instruction. Such a preacher, a verbal communicator of the truth, is clearly the mediator between what is written and the attainment of eternal salvation by those who hear his voice and words.

Media, mediation and contact with textual authority are configured rather differently in Luther’s lesser catechism, which he introduces as follows:

For young and simple people must be taught by uniform, settled texts and forms, otherwise they easily become confused when the teacher to-day teaches them thus, and in a year some other way, as if he wished to make improvements, and thus all effort and labor is lost. But with the young people stick to one fixed, permanent form and manner, and teach them, first of all, these parts, namely, the Ten Commandments,

2 Da man den Glauben vom Hören erlangt [Röm. 10,17], so erhellt deutlich, wie nothwendig zur Erlangung der ewigen Seligkeit das Wirken und der Dienst eines rechtgläubigen Lehrers immer gewesen ist; wie geschrieben steht: Wie können sie hören, ohne dass ihnen Jemand predigt? Wie können sie aber predigen, ohne gesandt zu seyn? [Röm. 10,14]

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the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, etc., according to the text, word for word, so that they, too, can repeat it in the same manner after you and commit it to memory.3

For Luther, the relationship between the text and its readers or audience is to be as direct and immediate as possible. Both the teacher and student are to be taught in “the same manner,” with no acts of intercession. All of its parts are to be “repeat[ed] in the same manner after you and [thus] commit[ed] to memory.” The language here is more one of didactic and pedagogical pragmatics than of clerical ministry and legitimacy. At the same time, though, the catechisms for both churches illustrate a correlation between the verbalized disclosure of the self, dramatic or verbalized, and the renunciation of the self. Foucault explains:

“This theme of self-renunciation is very important. Throughout Christianity there is a correlation between disclosure of the self, dramatic or verbalized, and the renunciation of self. My hypothesis from looking at these two techniques is that it’s the second one, verbalization, which becomes the more important.” (1988, p. 47)

Before picking up on this hypothesis, it is important to note that specifically as Luther describes it, the catechism depends on a mediatic precondition that may be as important as “non-dialogical” writing was for the experience of the Hellenic self. For it is only printed texts can be described, as Luther says, as being “uniform” and “settled.” And only through the mass-production of printing can many such identical words be prescribed to be memorized “according to the text, word for word.” Before the printing press, invented only about 80 years before Luther’s in-junctions, variation and error in hand-copied manuscripts made any one document distinct from any other. This simple fact rendered any literal, “word-for-word” learning moot – as well as commonplace notions of publication dates, successive editions, corrections, etc. While some attributed the flawlessness and precision of print – which reproduced even accidental markings and misspellings – to the

3 Wer es nicht besser vermag, der nehme dieses Hauptstück und Form vor sich und halte sie dem Volk vor, Wort für Wort … Der Prediger hüte sich vor allen Dingen vor verschiedenen und unterschiedlich gestalteten Texten und Formen der Zehn Gebote, des Glaubensbekenntnisses, des Vaterunsers, der Sakramente usw.; er meide sie und nehme statt dessen eine Form, bei der er bleibe und dieselbe immer treibe, ein Jahr wie das andere. Denn das junge und einfache Volk muss man mit einem bestimmten Text und einer Form lehren. Sonst werden sie zu leicht irre, wenn man heute so und ein Jahr später anders lehrt, als wollte man’s verbessern, und wird dabei alle Mühe und Arbeit vergeblich.

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devil,4 Luther saw in the printing press nothing less than “God’s highest act of grace” (Eisenstein 1979, p. 374).

Luther’s injunctions in the lesser catechism might suggest a kind of internal “dialogue” of a student committing an authorized text to memory by working word-for-word. However, this was more likely to be the exception rather than the rule. Catechism typically took the form of questions asked by a teacher and ver-balized answers provided by a group of students. The self in this process is clearly subsumed or in Foucault’s terms, “renounced” in the face of “uniform, settled texts and forms” such as the Ten Commandments, or prayers for forgiveness of sin like the Pater Noster. The text reflects not an earlier experience of the self, nor is it a self-examination of deeds or thoughts. Instead, it is an exact iteration of previously stated religious truths. And the catechetical performance, to use Foucault’s terms, represents a kind of “subjectivization of truth” (1988, p. 34) – of truth authorized and through the printed word.

The subsequent history of the catechism, particularly as an pragmatic instruc-tional or pedagogical form, can be explained in terms of Foucault’s aforementioned “hypothesis:” that the increasing significance of vocalization and the decreasing importance of self-disclosure and -renunciation are the hallmarks of certain tech-nologies of the self in post-reformation Europe. Foucault goes further:

“From the eighteenth century to the present, the techniques of verbalization have been reinserted in a different context by the so called human sciences in order to use them without renunciation of the self but to constitute, positively, a new self. To use these techniques without renouncing oneself constitutes a decisive break.” (1988, p. 49)

Looking at the catechism form in the 18th century, this break or moment of dis-continuity can be seen in the gradual subsumption of the catechetical form to secular curricula and to the pragmatics of the simplest of classroom instruction. The execution of the pedagogy of the catechism calls for an absolute minimum of equipment. Besides the text to be vocalized in the teacher’s hand, students could be taught without books, paper or any other equipment. Considering examples of

4 Daniel Defoe writes in the eighteenth century of the “famous doctors at the faculty in Paris” responding as follows to the careful inspection of a set of printed texts:

“they observed the exact agreement of every book, one with another, that every line stood in the same place, every page a like number of lines, every line a like number of words; if a word was mis-spelt in one, it was mis-spelt also in all, nay, that if there was a blot in one, it was alike in all; they began again to muse, how this should be; in a word, the learned divines not being able to comprehend the thing, (and that was always sufficient,) concluded it must be the Devil, that it was done by magic and witchcraft …” (1728, p. 325)

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catechetical textbooks from the 18th century onwards, Wakefield explains in his “Brief History of Textbooks:”

“If the goal were memorization, the catechetical style eliminated the need for either pedagogical knowledge or subject knowledge on the part of the teacher. The voice of the teacher and the textbook author were not only in agreement, they were the same.” (Wakefield 1998, p. 5)

This technology of the self configures the media of both text and voice in ways that are quite different from their functional interrelationship among Foucault’s ancient elite or in the popular Catholic confessional. The voice of the teacher, the textbook author and the student are seen as being in agreement or indistinguishable, as Wakefield suggests. Although this arrangement would certainly have met with Luther’s approval, it is important to note that the impulse behind this catechetical practice is different. The context is no longer explicitly one of renouncing the self in front of the authority of the text, but as Foucault suggests, the reinsertion of techniques of verbalization into a different context – one in which pupils are seen as being equipped with skills for use in a secular world, rather than their being prepared for a religious hereafter. In keeping with the Bildungsidealen starting to develop at the end of the 18th century, the verbalization associated with the secular catechism can be seen as helping “to constitute, positively, a new self” to use Fou-cault’s words. Such a vision of a new self can be found in the popular, encyclopedic pansophism of Comenius, or in the autonomous “Mündigkeit” of the enlightened individual described by Kant. Using as an example of the real-world task of gram-matical instruction, Wakefield further observes that as a secular pedagogical form, the catechism lasted

“well into the nineteenth century. Noah Webster (1758-1843) was perhaps America’s most successful author of the last half of the eighteenth century. Part II of Webster’s (1783) Grammatical institute of the English language couched all of its definitions in question and answer format:What is Grammar? Grammar is the art of communicating thoughts by words with propriety and dispatch.That is the use of English Grammar?To teach the true principles and idioms of the English language.” (1998, pp. 2-3)

However, as early as the beginning of the 19th century, this catechetical pedagogy was subjected to significant critique, even among educators of an explicitly reli-gious orientation.

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Hermeneutic Technologies of the Self

Johann Gottfried Herder, a protestant theologian, linguist and philosopher in Weimar, targeted catechists in one of his “School Addresses from 1800:”

“But remember, you catechists: The eternal turning to and drawing from subject to predicate, from predicate to subject: ‘Who created you? Who (else) did he create?’ Is not really catechizing, but actually a kind of bodily “yawning” of the word, in that one moves the mouth up and down, from side to side, resulting in little more than the ‘giddyap’ of a driver of horses. One must catechize in one’s own words; one must draw one’s own words out from that which is catechized. One’s own words: these and these alone signify one’s own thoughts. These (words) must one follow, in order to connect one’s thoughts with them. In this way, one learns in a teacherly manner, and one teaches in a way akin to learning.” (Herder 1953, p. 732; emphasis in original)5

The true source of knowledge or belief, for Herder, is neither the medium of the catechetic text nor of the catechizing voice or body. For an exercise of question and answer to have any value, it has to occur “in one’s own words” directly “signify[ing] one’s own thoughts.” The verbalization of the author, teacher and the student could no longer be in agreement or indistinguishable. In the final analysis, Herder is pointing to a return of the medium of writing as technology to serve the contem-porary self in a way similar to its function in ancient Rome. Written words, in both cases, offer an occasion for the enunciation of a response, a response which can be external and aloud, or internal and silent. Of course, there remains an important difference: Instead of the self directly recording its experiences and actions sui generis, Herder sees it as responsive to catechetical or other textual media it has before it: “one must draw one’s own words out from that which is catechized.” In this case, Foucault’s hermeneutics of the self become, in a sense, a hermeneutics of the text: What students learned needed to be recognized as having its origin in themselves, in their own “thoughts,” rather than in a uniform, settled text.

5 The last line in this quotation reads in the original: “so lernt man lehrend, und so lehrt man lernend” (literally: “thus one learns teaching-ly and teaches learning-ly”):

“Merkt euch dies, ihr Katecheten! Das ewige Wenden un Drehen vom Subjekt auf ’s Praedikat, vom Praedikat auf ’s Subjekt: “wer hat dich erschaffe? Wen hat er erschaffen?” ist noch kein Katechisieren, sondern ein leibhaftes Wortjaehnen, da mand den Munt zur Rechten und Linken, auf- und abwaerts zieht, und immer doch nichts als den jaehnenden Fuhrmannslaut: ahi! oho! Saget. In einigen Worten muss man chatechesieren; eigene Worte moss man den Katechisirten herauslocken, seine eigensten Worten, diese, diese alien bezeichnen seine eigenen Gedanken. Ihnen muss man folgen, an seine eigenen Gedanken knuepfen; so lernt man lehrend, so lehrt man lernend.”

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Induction as Stimulated Self-Dialog

But how could such an affirmation of individual thought and a degradation of the fixed word be embodied in a text printed for a mass audience? How could such a text actively encourage its many and varied readers to signify their own thoughts in their own way? Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a passionate and highly influential romantic educator showed rather precisely how this might happen. He developed a means by which a printed text might serve as a technology of the self in this sense – how it might prompt and guide students’ own thoughts, through an instruc-tional procedure that is still indispensable today. This did not occur by asking for the statement of abstract facts, but by directing students to concrete realities with which they were already familiar. In a preface to an early “Pestalozzian” text on Grammar, Roswell Smith characterizes this technique as follows:

“Pestalozzi endeavored, in the first place, to ascertain, by questions adapted to the tender age of the pupil, whether any idea existed in his mind upon the subject to which he wished to direct his attention; and from any one clear idea, of which he found the child in possession, he led him on, by a series of questions, to the acquirement of such other ideas as were most intimately connected with that primary conception.” (1830, p. 6; italics in original)

The technology of the text was used to stimulate prior knowledge in the child, and to engage him or her in a type of “dialog.” By asking questions based on “any one clear idea” that the child might already have, and from there, working towards further questions and answers, this method in effect stimulates a dialog between the pupil and text. In the course of this process, the role and contents of the textual medium were significantly adjusted from their catechetical functions. Instead of simply being read as questions and memorized answers, the text was used to elicit questions that could be answered by the student through induction, from things already known, or from those currently being taught. In a report titled “American Textbooks and Educational Change,” Henry Parkinson explains that this Pestalozzian method was initially utilized in America in the 1821 book, First Lessons in Arithmetic:

“[This book] had a tremendous influence on all subsequent arithmetic textbooks. Its main contribution was to construe mathematics as a process of observation rather than as a ‘ciphering’ procedure. (How many thumbs do you have on your right hand? How many on your left? How many on both together?)” (1985, p. xii)

This inductive questioning that begins with a focus on immediate, concrete de-tails (e. g., the fingers on each hand) was soon adapted to all manner of curricula,

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regardless of the presence or absence of any explicit logic in the subject-matter considered. Parkinson references the same grammar text mentioned above in explaining this procedure:

“Roswell Chamberlain Smith, for example, in his Intellectual and Practical Gram-mar in a Series of Inductive Questions (1830) eschewed memorization of the rules of grammar, and instead used questions to develop an understanding of rules and definitions. Geography texts, too, used the ‘inductive method.’ Jessie Olney in his Modern Geography (1830) wrote that it was essential for the learner to thoroughly absorb the simple facts before more complex lessons could be understood. In all subject matter, the old catechetical questions common to earlier textbooks gave way after the 1840’s to inductive questions.” (1985, p. xii)

Through a focus on the concrete experience of the student, this new textual tech-nology of the self can be said to offer the possibility of a new experience of the self. This is one in which the self, one’s own thoughts and mental powers, are confirmed as the source of knowledge, as capable of themselves constructing or “rediscovering” knowledge that is in a sense “new.”

Technologies of the Self, New and Old

Such an understanding of the self, of the mind and its capacity to synthesize and generate knowledge is important if not inescapable today, particularly in construc-tivist and cognitivist accounts of teaching and learning. At the same time, given the development of many new media technologies over the 20th century, from radio through television to the “hypermedia” of the Internet, specifically textual technologies of the self have typically not been seen as introducing any particularly noteworthy innovations in this epistemological configuration. This is despite the fact that many other, primarily textual forms – from Web homepages to blogging or Twitter – have been studied explicitly as “new,” “digital technologies of the self” which “allow the individual’s self/selves to emerge publicly and be worked upon …” (Abbas and Dervin, 2009, p. 3).

Instead of being illustrated in any one textual or instructional innovation, the notion of the internal dialog has undergone a substantial process of theoretical generalization. It is seen not so much as a way that writers and students might creatively engage with a given text, but more as a practice or phenomenon that is nothing less than constitutive of the self and the “human” per se. The notion of internalized conversation, with a clear emphasis on self-generated thoughts, ideas

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and concepts – rather than reflection on acts or deeds, or a response to written prompts – appears nothing short of natural and indispensable to the human intellect. An early example is provided by the notion of the “dialogical self” developed by G. H. Mead in the first decades of the 20th century. Such a self is one whose sense and selfhood is established through the internalization of everyday social language used around it. “A person who is saying something is saying to himself what he says to others,” Mead observes, adding wryly: “otherwise he does not know what he is talking about” (1934, p. 147).

It is with Vygotsky, however, that a broadly dialogical and linguistic conception of the self takes on a developmental dimension, ultimately to leave a deep impression on educational psychology that is palpable to this day. At the center of Vygotsky’s psychology is the proposition that “all the higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals” (Vygotsky 1978, p. 57). The internalization of language in the child’s “internal speech” is the paradigm for this developmental process. Through it, Vygotsky says, the child is “culturally reconstituted” to become a “new psychological entity.” This internalization of the use of “linguistic tools” Vygotsky further explains, “is the distinguishing feature of human psychology, the basis of the qualitative leap from animal to human psychology” (1979, p. 57).

Cognitive and socio-cognitive variants on this influential thesis translate terms such as “language” and “speech” into data and information. The notion of their internalized use becomes a matter of ongoing cognitive activity or “processing.” As such, this intra-personal processing of linguistic data has come to be seen as a phenomenon that can be harnessed in both instruction and research. Herbert Simon, for example, developed the notion of “talk aloud” or “think aloud” proto-cols – in which “subjects’ verbal … reports of their own mental states and mental processes” are seen as valuable “psychological datum” (Ericsson and Simon, 1984, pp. 7, 9). Although this adds further confirmation to Foucault’s hypothesis con-cerning the importance of vocalization, as the labels “talk aloud” or “think aloud” suggest that such verbalization is typically understood not as conscious, reflexive or explicitly “self-referential” in nature. The subject is seen as simply “saying aloud” or vocalizing the datum that would otherwise be processed silently through ongoing mental data processing. In the language of computation which cognitivism takes as its own, such vocalization is roughly equivalent to activating audio output capa-bility for data that is otherwise circulated frictionlessly among the computational components of the mind.

In a paper appearing in Educational Psychology in 1993, Alfred Bandura critiqued these and similar computational constructs as reflecting an unnecessarily “austere cognitivism.” This restrictive early cognitivism, Bandura explains, “has neglected self-regulatory processes that govern human development and adaption.” In its place,

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Bandura suggests the investigation of these and other regulatory “self-phenomena” or “self-processes” as they operate in a variety of contexts, including learning and academic study. Although Bandura’s own principle focus is on “self-efficacy” – people’s beliefs about their capabilities to exercise control over their own level of functioning and over events that affect their lives” – his position and investigation helped to establish a focus on self-phenomena. Among the most prominent of these currently is “self-explanation” and “self-regulated learning,” both of which can be said to involve processes of internal dialogue or “intra-personal” communication.

Self-explanation, like Bandura’s self-efficacy, has been studied in contexts of academic learning and performance. More specifically, the use of self-explana-tion in self-study has been understood as having statistically significant effects particularly in relationship to the development of solutions to inductive problems posed in textbooks. In studies of this particular phenomenon, subjects are asked to think (or cognize) aloud while attempting to develop a solution to a textual or textbook problem. When students make use of self-explanation, when they are able to “refine and expand the conditions for parts of the example solutions, and relate these actions to principles in the text,” their performance is demonstrably improved. Such “self-explanations are guided by accurate monitoring of [students’] own understanding and misunderstanding.” “Good students,” the researchers venture, “explain examples to themselves[,] learn better [and] make more accurate self-assessments of their understanding … while solving problems” (VanLehn et al. 1992, p. 1). This can be seen as giving a new, if somewhat positivistic conceptual frame to the technology of the self developed by Pestalozzi through the inductive method. When students are carefully guided through concrete, inductive steps in addressing a textbook problem, they are more likely to be able to arrive at a correct solution. One might indeed conclude that the present use of the printed text to elicit such self-dialogue is little different from its use throughout much of the 19th century – and has resonance with Aurelius’ own writing techniques some 2000 years earlier.

However, recent work in the second area mentioned above, “self-regulated learning,” has been used to develop approaches to the instructional use of dynamic, hypertextual media particularly for formal academic tasks of reading, calculating and writing. Consequently, this work suggests one or more possible points of de-parture for new media forms or technologies of the self. Winne (2010), an expert in self-regulated learning has defined the phrase in terms of “a dynamic blend of two metacognitive operations, metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive control.” “Metacognitive” designates cognition about cognition, or more colloquially, reflec-tion on how one thinks and learns. This “reflexive” or “second-order” cognition, as the definition indicates, is applied to the tasks of both monitoring and controlling

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or adjusting the ways in which basic “first order cognition” is directed. Learners, as Winne explains, engage in this type of cognition when they first

“gather data about factors in their environment – the internal environment of cognition and motivation, and the external environment – [and] then set goals and devise plans to reach those goals. As work on a task unfolds, monitoring may identify discrepan-cies between goals and achievements, and metacognitive monitoring may identify differences between plans for achieving goals and processes enacted.” (2010, p. 476)

The monitoring and adjustment typical of self-regulation allow first for the assess-ment of cognitive proficiency, and then the adaptation and optimization of this proficiency for academic (or other) purposes. As a practical example, highlighting, note taking or categorizing parts of a text while reading and reviewing may be seen expressions of basic cognitive functions and also of ways in which they are reflexively or “metacognitively” monitored and controlled. If the text in question is displayed digitally (on a screen), these acts can in theory be recorded, analyzed, aggregated and compared with the others’ interactions with the same content. This can be done by specialized software (e. g., Winne’s own nStudy package; figure 3), and by a number of ever-improving e-reader platforms. As the diagrams below show, readers can record precisely their actions on the text, and they can be offered the possibility to also seeing the highlights of others (figure 4, showing “public notes” in Kindle). While these e-readers offer access to information that is obviously only just beginning to be meaningfully aggregated and collated, specialized “self-regulation” software (figure 3) currently offer no such sharing of data between students. All the same, these new technical and textual combinations point to the possibility of new configurations of technologies for the self, for instruction and other purposes. Of course, the self that might be produced or transformed through such technol-ogies would not be one of autonomous Mündigkeit, but rather, one “socialized” in certain types of literary reception, or simply cognitively optimized for academic study.6 The briefest consideration of these types of possibilities form the basis for this chapter’s conclusion.

6 For a discussion of what such a computational, cognitively optimized self would be like, see: Friesen, N. (2013). Bildung and Educational Language: Talking of “the Self” in North American Education. In: G. Biesta, R. Edwards & J. Allen (eds.), Theorizing Education (Pp. 100-120). London: Routledge.

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Conclusion: From One-to-One to Many-to-Many

Foucault suggests that Aurelius’ use of writing as a technology of the self was enabled, in part, by the liberation of text from the strictures of dialogical exchange. It can be argued that we are currently witnessing a further liberation of the text that, in turn, might present possibilities for new technologies of the self. Such technologies would likely not be geared to refl ect thoughts and deeds back to oneself through writing, or to verbalization in confessional privacy. Nor are they likely to be either a direct refl ection of what is printed in a text (as in the catechism), or a hermeneu-tic response to the same that might “signify one’s own thoughts.” One’s thoughts, expressed as annotations, markings – or less hypothetically, as status updates or Twitter tweets – would remain central to this technology, but do so by joining the words and notations many others, aggregated around a particular passage, text, posting, photograph, etc., and capable (in theory) of being arrayed along temporal, spatial, thematic and other axes. (And although some of this has been realized in blogging and Facebook, new confi gurations of expressive practice may be able to extend and deepen these possibilities.)

Fig. 3 Study tool screen, showing text being studied on the right.

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Fig. 4 Web page showing passages commonly highlighted by Kindle readers.

It has been frequently observed that the Internet adds to two familiar human com-municative configurations a third possibility: To the one-to-one communication of dialog and the one-to-many configuration of broadcasting, the Internet offers many-to-many communication, as exemplified in social media technologies like Twitter and Facebook, particularly when status updates or tweets generate coherent cascades of replies or “forwards,” and subsequent response. Aggregated, layered forms of this many-to-many communication could be realized within the speci-ficity of the text as part of a new technology of the self, allowing for more explicit recognition of ways texts are received, read and acted upon. However, as has been the case for so many social media technologies like blogging or twitter, it is not so much a question simply of what is technically possible but what is culturally and epistemologically meaningful. The technical possibilities for blogs or Twitter were available with the advent of the Web (or even the Internet) one or more decades before they are actually and popularly realized. The technologies of the self that may emerge from these new possibilities are much more a question of what is culturally appropriate in the intimate but changing experience of reading, writing and of “private” thought itself. In 1962, McLuhan observed that “we are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographical and mechanical age” (1962, p. 1) and we have certainly made much less progress towards any digital possibilities for the self and its technologies.

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