Critical Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and
Radical Democracy at the Turn of the Millennium: Reflections on the Work of
Henry Giroux
By Douglas Kellner
After publishing
a series of books that many recognize as major works on contemporary education
and critical pedagogy, Henry Giroux turned to cultural studies in the late
1980s to enrich education with expanded conceptions of pedagogy and literacy.[1]
This cultural turn is animated by the hope to reconstruct schooling with
critical perspectives that can help us to better understand and transform
contemporary culture and society in the contemporary era. Giroux provides
cultural studies with a critical pedagogy missing in many versions and a
sustained attempt to link critical pedagogy and cultural studies with
developing a more democratic culture and citizenry. The result is an
intersection of critical pedagogy and cultural studies that enhances both
enterprises, providing a much-needed cultural and transformative political
dimension to critical pedagogy and a pedagogical dimension to cultural studies.
Crucially,
Giroux has linked his attempts to transform pedagogy and education with the
project of promoting radical democracy. Giroux's earlier work during the 1970s
and 1980s focused on educational reform, pedagogy, and the transformation of
education to promote radical democracy. In Border Crossings (1992),
Giroux notes "a shift in both my politics and my theoretical work"
(1). The shift included incorporation of new theoretical discourses of
poststructuralism and postmodernism, cultural studies, and the politics of
identity and difference embodied in the new discourses of class, gender, race,
and sexuality that proliferated in the post-1960s epoch. Giroux criticized
those who ignore "the sea changes in social theory" within the field
of education and called for a transformation of education and pedagogy in the
light of the new paradigms, discourses, and practices that were circulating by
the 1990s.
One of the key
new discourses and practices that Giroux was henceforth to take up and develop
involved the burgeoning discipline of cultural studies. In his initial
appropriations of cultural studies, he presented his shift as a "border
crossing" that involved transformative transdisciplinary perspectives
which overcame the disciplinary abstractions and separations of fields like
education, social theory, and literary studies. In metatheoretical discussions,
Giroux presented reasons for the importance of cultural studies in
reconstructing contemporary education, the need for new understandings of
culture, cultural politics, and pedagogy that went beyond the orthodoxy of both
Left and Right, focusing on how the transformation of education and pedagogy
could contribute to the project of radical democracy. Giroux thus uses cultural studies to transform and enrich critical
pedagogy and to provide new intellectual tools and practices to transform
education. In turn, he argues that cultural studies needs to see the importance
of pedagogy and to continue its commitment to radical democratic social
transformation, rather than to merely indulge in textualist readings or
audience studies of how people use and enjoy popular culture, as in some
versions of cultural studies that have emerged in the past decade.
For over a decade
now, Giroux has accordingly focused on developing the relationship between
critical pedagogy, cultural studies, and radical democracy in a series of
books, including Border Crossings (1992), Living Dangerously:
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Culture (1993), Disturbing
Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture (1994), Fugitive Cultures
(1996), Channel Surfing: Racism, the Media, and the Destruction of Today's
Youth (1997), The Mouse that Roared: What Disney Teaches (1999), Stealing
Innocence (2000), and Impure Acts. The Practical Politics of Cultural
Studies (2000).[2] This rich
and productive corpus crisscrosses the borderlines of educational theory and
pedagogy, cultural studies, social theory, and radical democratic politics,
promoting a genuinely transdisciplinary and transformative reconstruction of
education, theory, society, and politics.
My study will
accordingly engage Giroux's writing in these arenas over the past decade,
highlighting what I see as the most significant contributions to transforming
education and society, as well as some limitations of his work. At stake is
developing a critical pedagogy and cultural studies that will help empower the
next generation and enliven democracy as we enter a situation perilous to
democracy and the individual in the new millennium.
Giroux's work is important because it takes on many of the ³big² issues of the contemporary era. Several of his recent books have focused on the social construction and media representations of youth, in explorations of how youth have been both scapegoated for social problems and commodified and exploited by the advertising, consumer, and media industries. Giroux always situates his cultural analyses within a political and historical context so that, for instance, the war against youth is seen as part of an attack on the welfare state, public schooling, and democratic culture during the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years. Giroux also takes care to contextualize his writings within his own working class background, his history as a critical educator, and emergence as a radical critic of existing culture, society, politics, and the educational establishment. Giroux combines the personal and the political, the theoretical and the practical, in taking on the key issues of the day.
In the light of
the ongoing attack on youth and youth culture in the contemporary postColumbine
conjuncture, it is interesting to read in Giroux's 1996 Fugitive Cultures
analyses of how media were then scapegoating youth, especially youth of color,
as the source of social problems and the escalation of violence in society.
Giroux cites the disturbing statistic that "close to 12 U.S. children aged
19 and under die from gun fire each day. According to the National Center for
Health Statistics, 'Firearm homicide is the leading cause of death of
African-American teenage boys and the second-leading cause of death of high
school age children in the United States'" (cited in Giroux 1996: 28).
Giroux correctly
notes that the proliferating media stories about youth and violence at the time
generally avoid critical commentary on the connections between the escalation
of violence in society and the role of poverty and social conditions in
promoting violence -- a blindspot
that continues into the present. In addition, he astutely notes that the media
scapegoating of youth also neglect dissection of the roles of white men in
generating violence and destruction, such as "the gruesome toll of the
drunk driver who is typically white" (1996: 37).
At the same time,
working class youth and youth of color are being represented in the media and
conservative discourses as predators, as threats to existing law, order, and
morality. Most disturbingly, at the very time that poverty and division between
the haves and the have nots are growing, a conservative-dominated neo-liberal
polity is cutting back the very programs -- public education, job training and
programs, food stamps, health and welfare support -- that provide the sustenance
to create opportunities and hope for youth at risk. Giroux correctly rejects
the family values and moralistic critique of media culture of such
conservatives who lead the assault on the state and welfare programs while
supporting prisons, harsher punishment, and a "zero tolerance" for
youthful transgressions (Giroux, forthcoming).
Instead, Giroux
targets the corporations who circulate problematic images of youth and the
rightwing social forces that scapegoat youth for social programs at the same
time they attack programs and institutions that might actually help youth.
Giroux is clearly aware of media culture as pedagogy and calls upon cultural
critics to see the pedagogical and political functions of such cultural forms
that position youth as objects of fear or desire. In a series of studies,
Giroux notes how corporations exploit the bodies of youth to sell products,
manufacturing desires for certain products, and constructing youth as
consumers.
In a brilliant
critique of a series of Benetton fashion ads, Giroux argues that the 1985
United Colors of Benetton campaign used images of racial harmony to sell both
its clothing line and a banal view of cultural unity that erased class, racial,
gender, and sexual difference, inequalities, oppression, and suffering (1994:
3ff). In his sharp critique of the 1991 Benetton campaign which included
compelling images of a person with AIDS, poverty, war, and environmental
destruction, Giroux argues that the purported social realism of these ads was
used to aestheticize suffering and to sell an image of the Benetton corporation
as a vehicle of social responsibility. Giroux deconstructs the campaign by
disclosing the corporations' commitment to neo-liberal anti-government
positions, hostility to unions, and its attempt to position its fashion-line
within a global clothing market. Carrying out a detailed analysis of the
production and reception of the Benetton campaign, Giroux dissects how a major
global corporation uses images as vehicles of ideology and promotion of its
wares. His studies demonstrate the need for a visual pedagogy which engages the
production and reception of corporate images, as well as providing a
hermeneutical reading of the specific images and texts.
Giroux continued
his pedagogy of the corporate image and advertising in a critique of 1995
Calvin Klein ads. This advertising campaign deployed photos of youthful bodies
by Perry Meisel, posed in provocative sexual displays bordering on the
pornographic, to sell high-end clothing (1997, Chapter One). The ironic use of
underclass youth to sell expensive clothes underlines what Giroux sees as the
dual process of scapegoating youth while objectifying and commodifying them to
sell products. Young bodies are positioned in such images not as sources of
agency or resistance, but as a "site of spectacle and objectification,
where youthful allure and sexual titillation are marketed and consumed by teens
and adults who want to indulge a stylized narcissism and coddle a self that is
all surface" (1997: 21).
Giroux also
critically interrogates a Calvin Klein "heroin chic" campaign that
portrayed emaciated bodies and covertly romanticized drug use and youth
decadence (1999: Chapter Two), thus falling in line with conservative attacks
on youth as decadent and immoral. His intention, however, is not to engage in a
moralistic critique of such ads. Rather, Giroux undertakes to show how they
merge fashion and art to shape images of the youthful body in the interests of
commodification that serve corporate profits while providing highly problematic
role models and forms of identity for youth. Giroux is concerned that youth are
being increasingly driven from the public sphere, active democratic
citizenship, and empowering creativity into privatized spaces where they are positioned
as consumers and provided with identities that replicate commodified models and
ideals.
Channel
Surfing (1997) and his more recent Stealing Innocence (2000) provide
examples of critical pedagogy that demonstrate that "childhood" and
"youth" are social constructions and sites of struggle between
opposing political ideologies and forces. "Children" and
"youth" in Giroux's view are a complex site of hope and possibility,
as well as domination and exploitation. Giroux critically engages the pedagogies
in locales ranging from schooling to media culture and everyday life that shape
youth. In particular, he provides sustained critique of representations that
scapegoat youth for public problems at the same time that the political and
media establishment carry out attacks on public schools and programs and
policies which provide opportunities and hope for youth. Giroux criticizes
representations of youth such as are found in Calvin Klein ads, depictions of
irresponsible sex and drug use in films like Larry Clark's Kids (1996),
and a variety of urban films that especially vilify youth of color and help
foster public images of youth as decadent, corrupt, and in need of discipline
and control.
Against the
scapegoating and commercialization of youth, and the promotion of attitudes of
despair and hopelessness, Giroux wants to foster an ethic of hope and
possibility, conceptualizing youth as a contested terrain, as an arena both of
oppression and struggle. Giroux argues that by criticizing misrepresentations of
youth in media culture and the scapegoating of youth through negative media
images and discourses, we are combatting an attack on youth used to justify
cutbacks in education, harsher criminal penalties and other punitive measures
that are arguably part of the problem rather than the solution.[3]
Giroux sees
culture and the media as forms of pedagogy, every bit as important -- and in
some cases more so -- than schooling. He calls for a cultural studies that
provides a counterpedagogy to the teaching that is provided by mainstream
schooling and corporate and media culture, noting: "For years, I believed
that pedagogy was a discipline developed around the narrow imperatives of
public schooling" (1994: x). And yet, he notes that his own identity was largely
fashioned on the terrain of popular culture and everyday life that shaped him
more significantly than public education. Accordingly, he argues that pedagogy
needs to be theorized in terms of a variety of public sites that shape, mold,
socialize, and educate individuals. Indeed, Giroux convincingly demonstrates in
book after book that it is precisely corporate media culture that is shaping
our culture and everyday life, as well as institutions such as schooling and
cultural sites like museums, theme parks, shopping centers, and the like.
For Giroux,
"the politics of culture provide the conceptual space in which childhood
is constructed, experienced, and struggled over" (2000a: 4). Culture is
both the sphere in which adults exercise control over children and a site where
children and youth can resist the adult world and create their own cultures and
identities. It is thus important to critically question "the specific
cultural formations and contexts in which childhood is organized, learned, and
lived" (1994: x).
In a study of
child beauty pageants (2000a, Chapter 1), Giroux shows how this competitive
sphere imposes adults models on children, promotes restricted and problematic
gender roles, and displays provocative sexual displays in young girls. Giroux
does not, a la Neil Postman, lament the "adultifying" of the child
and disappearance of childhood (pp. 12ff and 40), but focuses on the
exploitation of children in these "nymphet fantasies" in which adults
project their desires and impose their models upon girls. Giroux's concern is
with how children and youth are exploited and socialized by commercial consumer
culture and the lack of public spaces and sites for the young to develop agency
and learn democratic and cooperative social relations and values in an increasingly
commodified and privatized culture and society.
Giroux's analysis
of the genealogy of child beauty pageants calls attention to often neglected
source of childhood construction that need to be engaged by a critical cultural
pedagogy. As an example of corporate pedagogy, Giroux devotes sustained study
of the multiple roles in childhood socialization, ideological indoctrination,
and commercialization of the Walt Disney corporation, resulting in a book on
Disney and its pedagogies (1999). Giroux's first study of "the Wonderful
World of Disney" cultural production, a slogan that he suggests itself
stands as a metonym for the United States, analyzes certain Disney Touchstone
films, targeted mainly at teenagers and adults.
Giroux notes how
the terrain of Hollywood film provides an important ground of pedagogy and
takes on the politics of representation in two Disney Touchstone films of the
era, Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and Pretty Woman (1990). Giroux
presents Barry Levinson's take on Vietnam as an attempt to recuperate the sense
of U.S. loss over the Vietnam war, to establish an ethos of innocence for
American memory, and to erase from history the turbulence and violence of the
Vietnam era. The suffering and tragedy of Vietnam is displaced by Robin
Williams' "comic, manic improvisation" (1994: 35). Williams plays a
DJ for an Army radio station in Saigon circa 1965. Conflict focused on involves
what sort of music the DJ could play, and Giroux suggests that cultural
struggle over music replaces the dynamic of contestation over the war itself,
while the U.S. intervention is clothed in innocence, presenting U.S. soldiers
as tourists to an exotic locale.
Giroux also
criticizes the racism and sexism in the film, as in the representations of the
black side-kick to the DJ, played by Forest Whitaker, who is presented as
"a shuffling, clumsy grunt" and is positioned as the obedient servant
to the colonial master. Not surprisingly, the representations of the Vietnamese
are racist, with women displayed as sexual commodities for U.S. servicemen,
while in general the Vietnamese are present as exotic Others who are purveyors
of criminality and lawlessness.
Pretty Woman,
in Giroux's reading, also presents ideological representations of recent U.S.
history, this time in the Cindrella story of a working class prostitute, played
by Julia Roberts, who is groomed and redeemed by a corporate raider (Richard
Gere). Assimilating appropriate fashion and style imagery, in the Disney
redoing of the Pygmalion myth, the prostitute reconstitutes herself as an
suitable corporate trophy wife, and patriarchal relations and family values
thus triumph over sordid and inappropriate sex and style. The predatory
business practices of the corporate raider are erased in the chivalrous
behavior of the businessman, whose questionable business practices are
justified when he takes over his father's corporation, who had mistreated him
and his mother.
The Disney world
of innocence and family values is thus able to triumph and redeem even
disturbing and base historical and social conditions. Giroux's second sustained
critique of Disney ideology involved critical scrutiny of Disney animation
cartoons aimed at children (1996: Chapter 3 and its continuation in 1999). He
notes that while cultural studies has traditionally focused on youth culture,
it has largely ignored children's culture, such as animated films (1996:
89-90). Giroux scrutinizes the narrow gender roles in these films and finds
that although some of the young women portrayed, such as the woman-mermaid
Ariel in The Little Mermaid (1989) or the young woman in Beauty and
the Beast (1991), are initially depicted as feisty and active, they are
positioned to find true love and happiness in submission to male-dominated
romance. Other Disney films like Aladdin (1992) simply portray women as
handmaidens to male pleasure, or like The Lion King (1994) are strictly
patriarchal, depicting women in subordinate roles.
Giroux dissects
as well the stereotyping and covert racism in recent Disney animation films.
Arabs are depicted in vile racist representations and many of the villains in
Disney animation "speak through racially coded language and accents"
(106). The heros and heroines in these films, however, speak standardized American
and are portrayed in images modelled after idealized American youth. A Disney
cultural worker, for instance, admitted that the figure of Aladdin was modelled after Tom Cruise (106),
and, as Giroux suggests, heroines such as the little Mermaid or Pocahontas are
modelled after Southern California nubile teen models. Such representations
normalize whiteness and American fashion and style as the ideal for youth,
fostering insecurities and feelings of inferiority in youth of color or other
nationalities.
In addition, and
notoriously, Disney films erase the scars and ugliness of colonial history, as
in Pocahontas (1995) which shows no trace of the displacement,
suffering, and death inflicted indigenous peoples by the European colonists.
Moreover, Disney films like The Lion King display "deeply
antidemocratic social relations" (107), naturalizing authority, hierarchy,
structural inequality, and royalty as part of a natural order. Class, gender,
and racial inequalities are presented as benign and justified in this world,
displaying Disney nostalgia for a simpler and more harmonious world that erases
from cultural memory the turbulence and pain of history and the continuation of
social inequalities, injustice, and suffering in the present.
Giroux thus
critically dissects the sorts of pedagogy involved in the Disney world. He
analyzes ³what Disney teaches,² the implications of a big corporate
conglomerate playing such a major role in pedagogy and socialization, and the
ways that this influences education, politics, and our cultural and public
life, here in the U.S. and globally. Giroux¹s book on Disney includes
dissection of the structure and power of the Disney corporation, and raises
questions about the effects of the possession of so much cultural power.
Demonstrating the immense range of cultural sites occupied by the Disney
corporation, Giroux discloses the diversity of its products in critical
analyses of Disney's films, its forays into education and community building,
and its extensive marketing operations of toys and merchandise spun-off from
its films. Critically engaging such a cultural empire requires combining
historical, social and political analysis, textual readings, and studies of
cultural effects of a wide range of artifacts. Giroux thus produces a cultural
studies which deploys transdisciplinary perspectives, including analysis of
political economy and production, cultural artifacts and sites, and their
reception and effects.
Giroux thus
offers a wide-ranging model of cultural studies and greatly expands the domain
of pedagogy, demonstrating the importance of critically engaging the pedagogy
of a broad spectrum of cultural artifacts, often ignored by educators. Since
youth today are the subjects of education, critical teachers must understand
youth, their problems and prospects, hopes and fears, competencies and
limitations. Understanding and productively engaging youth in the context of
their everyday lives is clearly one of the big issues for educators, parents,
citizens, and those of us concerned about the future. For youth are the future,
and the quality of life and the polity of the new millennium depend on
educating youth and helping produce generations who can themselves create a
better, freer, happier, and more just society. Hence, Giroux constantly argues
that educators, parents, and citizens should be deeply concerned with youth.
This involves attempting to understand its culture and problems, combating the
ways that youth are being misrepresented in the media and miseducated in the
schools, and developing pedagogical strategies and cultural politics that will
reform and democratically transform media, education, and society.
Cultural studies
is useful here because it provides access to youth culture, to the actual
culture that socializes and educates youth -- or in some cases miseducates it
--, and thus potentially increases our understanding of the youth we are
teaching and working with. Clearly, Giroux demonstrates the importance of media
education for a reconstruction of schooling and the importance of cultural
studies for a transformative critical pedagogy. He also consistently argues
that key social phenomena such as the situation of youth can only be grasped
through their race, gender, and class configurations, that youth are
articulated by these concrete social determinants which must be addressed in
any adequate analysis.
For Giroux,
culture matters precisely because such constituents of everyday experience as
youth, gender, race, class, sexuality, and so on are constructed in and through
cultural representations. Often, these representations are invisible and their
effects are unperceived. Hence, a critical cultural studies must make visible
how representations construct a culture's normative views of such things as
class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, place, occupation, and the like, and
how these representations are appropriated to produce subjectivities,
identities, and practices.
Some of Giroux's
first concrete cultural studies of the 1990s involve analysis and critique of
how Hollywood celluloid culture constructs a pedagogy of class, race, and
gender. He indicates the need for critical media pedagogy to disclose how these
texts are constructed and to help enable students to critically dissect and
interpret media representations, narratives, and their effects. In a reading of
Dead Poets Society (1993: 40ff.), Giroux tells how his students initally
identified with the rebellious teacher Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams.
Keating set out to reinvigorate education at a conservative boys boarding
school, Welton Academy, which functioned to prepare elite males for Ivy League
colleges and ruling class life. At first, Giroux notes, students saw the
Williams' figure as an ideal of transformative education, passionately
committed to teaching, and helping to change his students life in an
emancipatory fashion.
But a closer
reading of the film, Giroux remarks, discloses a "politics and aesthetics
of nostalgia" which looks back to past cultural forms (e.g. romantic
poetry) as privileged cultural texts, thus in effect affirming a conservative
canon as the heart and soul of pedagogy. Thus, while the film does provide a
critique of authoritarian and disciplinary education, it does not go beyond
conservative individualism and aestheticism and fails to engage the problems,
conflicts, and struggles of the present, to see the past as a contested
terrain, or to engage those voices and texts that more radically contest the
inequities and injustices of Western civilization. Moreover, when Keating
himself is challenged by the authorities for his unorthodox teaching practices
and unjustly dismissed over the suicide of a student, he politely and
respectfully submits to his fate, rather than exhibiting any critique,
resistance, or struggle against the repressive and authoritarian power
structure that rules the institution.
Furthermore,
Giroux criticizes the representations of women in the film "that are
misogynist and demeaning" (1993: 47). Women are positioned primarily to
support and provide pleasure to men, they are relegated "to either
trophies or appendages of male power" (48). Women are not presented in the
film as active subjects with their own dreams and agency, but as "reified
object[s] of [male] desire and pleasure" (48).
Of course, race
is invisible in Dead Poets Society which "privileges whiteness,
patriarchy, and heterosexuality as the universalizing norms of identity"
(42). The film takes for granted the equation of whiteness with class privilege
and does not trouble its nostalgic narrative with the disruptive dynamics of
race and sexuality. Likewise, in another probing cultural study of the period,
Giroux shows how the contemporary conflicts over gender, race, and class are
ideologically smoothed and absorbed in the narrative machine of Grand Canyon
(1993: 104ff). In this film, the white yuppie family of the story come to
recognize racial and cultural difference in the present, but in a manner that
reassures them that they do not have to surrender power and privilege and that
difference can be harmoniously absorbed into the existing order.
Indeed, Giroux
has intensely engaged over the past decade the problematics and dynamics of
race --, clearly one of the major issues of our time, -- as well as the intersections
of race, class, gender, multiculturalism, and the crisis of democracy and
public schooling in the U.S. (see especially Giroux 1993, 1996, and 1997). He
enriches these topics with his combination of critical pedagogy, cultural
studies, and a sustained political situating of representations and struggles
over race within the context of burning issues and conflicts of the day.
In discussing
issues of violence in the media and the effects of media violence on youth and
society, Giroux argues that discussions of violence and media must include race
and class (1997, Preface and passim). In a series of texts, he has carried out
sustained critiques of media stigmatizing of youth as the source of social ills
through analysis of depictions of violent youth in the media and journalism,
cinematic representations of youth in Hollywood film, and political discourses
that call for "zero tolerance" of youth indiscretions and crimes
(forthcoming).
In particular,
Giroux shows how media representations of blacks stigmatize youth and, more
broadly, people of color. In Fugitive Cultures (1996), Giroux documents
the role of media presentations of blacks which have helped promote what he
calls "a white moral panic" (1996: 97). During the era of the O.J.
Simpson trials in the mid-1990s, major magazines featured threatening black
males on their covers with stories like "A Predator's Struggle to Tame
Himself" and "The Black Man Is in Terrible Trouble. Whose Problem is
That?" (ibid). Giroux points out that the endless repetition of these
images "reproduce racist stereotypes about blacks by portraying them as
criminals and welfare cheats"; it also "remove whites from any
responsibility or complicity for the violence and poverty that has become so
endemic to American life" (1996: 66).
Racial coding of
violence and the association of crime with youth of color was evident in the
attacks on rap music and hip hop culture that circulated throughout the 1990s.[4]
As an example, Giroux cites the hypocrisy of Bob Dole's attack on rap and
Hollywood films' depiction of violence, drugs, and urban terror. For Dole
refused to criticize violence in the films of the Hollywood right, such as
those of Republicans Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenneger. Moreover, he was a
fervent supporter of the NRA and critic of stricter gun laws, and failed to
address the ways that poverty and worsening social conditions generated
violence (produced in part by Republican policies that Dole spearheaded).
Moreover, Dole had often not even seen the films nor heard the music attacked
(1996: 67ff).
Always clearly
pointing to the political consequences of such cultural and political
discourses and representations, Giroux notes that "such racist
stereotyping produce more than prejudice and fear in the white collective
sensibility. Racist representations of violence also feed the increasing public
outcry for tougher crime bills designed to build more prisons and legislate
get-tough policies with minorities of color and class" (1996: 67). Hence,
racist and brutal depictions of people of color in media culture contribute to
intensification of the culture of violence, and fuel campaigns by rightwing
organizations that stigmatize racial groups. Such representations also promote
social and political conditions that aggravate rather than ameliorate problems
of crime, urban decay, and violence.
Indeed,
throughout the 1990s and continuing into the new millennium there have been
copious media spectacles featuring dangerous blacks, including sustained
attacks on rap music and hip hop culture, black gangs and crime, and urban
violence in communities of color. Latinos are also stigmatized with political
(mis)measures such as Proposition 187 "which assigns increasing crime,
welfare abuse, moral decay, and social disorder to the flood of Mexican
immigrants streaming across the borders of the United States" (Giroux
1996: 66). Social scientists contribute to the stigmatization in books like The
Bell Curve which assert black inferiority and provide "a respectable
intellectual position" for racist discourse in the national debate on race
(1996: 67).
Hollywood films
and entertainment media contribute as well to negative national depictions of
people of color. In his discussion of Hollywood cinematic portrayals of inner
city youth, Giroux analyzes how communities of color are shown as disruptive
forces in public schools, contributing to white moral panic that youth of color
are predatory, violent, and are destroying the moral and social fabric of the
country. Films like Boyz N the
Hood (1991), Juice (1992), Menace II Society (1993), and Clockers
(1995) present negative representations of black youth which Giroux argues feed
into rightwing moral panics and help mobilize support for harsher policing and
incarceration of ghetto youth. Against these prejudicial and sensationalistic
fictional representations, Giroux valorizes Jonathan Stack's documentary Harlem
Diary (1996) in which urban youth are themselves provided with cameras and
cinematic education to explore their situations and to give voice to their own
fears and aspirations (1997: 62).
In addressing the
culture of violence in Fugitive Cultures (1996), Giroux engages what he
calls "hyper-real" violence in the films of Quentin Tarintino's Reservoir
Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994). Giroux argues that Tarintino's
use of excessive and exaggerated violence in these films aestheticizes the
brutality of violence, contributing to a cynical and nihilistic cinema. Reservoir
Dogs uses a gritty realism and stylized violence to represent extremely ruthless
crime in ways that "revels in stylistic excess in order to push the
aesthetic of violence to its visual and emotional limits" (1996: 71).
Pulp Fiction,
in Giroux's reading, promotes the same cynical ethos of Tarintino's earlier
film, but in the register of a more hip, cool, and stylized postmodern idiom.
Pastiching the crime genre of "pulp fiction," Tarintino fragments his
narrative structure, deploys a sadistic irony and ultra hip talk and music, and
puts on display a misanthropic amorality to promote what Ruth Conniff has
called "a culture of cruelty" (1996: 76). Tarintino, in Giroux's
reading, deploys violence for shock and schlock effects, playing with cinematic
conventions, without critically analyzing, contextualizing, or contesting the
patterns of violence in his films. Violence in Tarintino's films is gratuitous,
contingent, and ubiquitous, rather than emerging from specific contexts and
social conditions. It can erupt anywhere, anytime, to anyone, rather than being
generated by specific social causes and conditions. It is aestheticized and
used for shock effects rather than to probe into what causes violence and its
horrific effects on human beings and communities. Such films thus contribute to
promoting a culture of brutality by naturalizing and romanticizing major forces
of human suffering and tragedy.
Giroux also
critiques the racism and sexism in Tarintino's film, noting the racist language
and obsessive use of the "N-word," as well as the highly problematic
representations of women and homophobia. Indeed, Giroux suggests that the rape
of a black by two white thugs in Pulp Fiction combines homophobia with
racism (82), presenting at once highly derogatory images of gay sex and
positioning the black man as a deserving target of white male rage (he is about
to kill the Bruce Willis character for honorably refusing to throw a fight, as
the black thug ordered). Giroux also points out how the sociopath Jules (played
by Samuel Jackson) misuses the African-American tradition of prophetic language
in his pretentious use of religious discourse in the context of committing
heinous crimes (82).
Giroux insists
that such cinematic transgression and irony is not innocent or merely playful,
but has harmful political and cultural effects. Yet Giroux does not himself
stigmatize Hollywood films or the media for the alarming escalation of violence
in the U.S., calling attention instead to conditions of poverty, social
injustice, and urban decline that contribute to the larger problems of the
contemporary era. Attacking Bob Dole's and other hypocritical assaults on
Hollywood and the media, Giroux argues that it is precisely conservative
policies which cut back public institutions that would provide adequate
education, welfare, employment, public spaces, and life opportunities for youth
that helped generate the alienation, violence, and nihilism that is all too
evident in contemporary American life -- and not only in communities of color,
as we are aware in the post-Columbine epoch.
Hence, a critical
cultural studies and pedagogy should at once carry out critical discussion of
the politics of representation in media culture, focusing on the images and
discourses of race, gender, class, and sexuality, but at the same time
contextualize the critique within broader social conditions, discourses, and
struggles. While ethical and ideological critique of specific forms and texts
of media culture are certainly appropriate, the critical pedagogue avoids
moralizing assaults on media culture per se. The focus is instead on how
racism, sexism, poverty, political discourses and policies, and the social
context as a whole produce phenomena like violence and suffering. Although
media culture can be contributory, it is not the origin of human suffering, and
thus censoring media images is not the solution to problems like societal
violence and injustice. Rather there are a complex nexus of conditions that
cause violence and youth nihilism, and while media culture can be criticized
for its representations it should not be scapegoated.
The political
contextualization, critique, and focus of Giroux's work, however, sometimes
lead his exercises in cultural studies and critical pedagogy to what might be
called a political and ideological overdetermination of his readings of
specific cultural texts. While Giroux increasingly focuses on the importance of
cultivating the ethical dimensions of education and critical pedagogy, his
readings of specific cultural texts usually privilege political critique over
valorization of positive ethical, aesthetic, and philosophical dimensions to
the text. There is in Giroux a perhaps too quick collapse of the aesthetic and
textual into the political in some of his readings. This procedure is arguably
justified in discussions of films like the works of Tarantino or Fight Club
(Giroux, forthcoming-b), which aestheticize violence and indeed themselves
collapse aesthetics into politics. This is also the case with ad campaigns that
Giroux criticizes for their aestheticizing and commodification of youthful
bodies, promoting "heroin chic" and other dubious ideals for youth.
And Benetton ads or other images that aestheticize urban deprivation and
suffering in glossy images also merit sharp critique.
But certain
cultural texts have an aesthetic excess, a polysemic overdetermination of
meaning, contradictory moments and aspects that can be read against the
ideological grain even of conservative texts and those that aestheticize
violence. For instance, although I agree with Giroux that Larry Clark's Kids
is highly problematic and can be read as part of a set of representations and
discourses which demonize youth as nihilistic, decadent, and immoral (1997:
45), the film also provides a cautionary morality tale warning of the
consequences of causal drug use and unsafe sex. While visiting at Wake Forest
University, I attended a showing of the film in which afterwards a visibly
shaken audience seriously discussed the danger of AIDS and unsafe sex. There
was also a heated discussion of race and representation provoked by the film.
Thus while Kids does depict urban youth as "decadent and
predatory," as Giroux argues, it also allows for a diagnostic critique of
children going astray without responsible parenting, or adequate mentoring. The
film shows adults as almost completely absent from children's life and society
at large as negligent and failing to provide adequate parenting, supervision,
education, and spaces to provide youth the opportunity to develop agency, moral
responsibility, and healthy communities.
Thus, in addition
to political and ideological critique, films and other media texts can be read
diagnostically to provide critical insight into contemporary society (see
Kellner 1995). Consequently, on one hand, one can agree with Giroux that in
films such as "Boyz N the Hood (1991), Menace II Society
(1993), and Clockers (1995), black male youth are framed through narrow
representations that fail to challenge and in effect reiterate the dominant
neoconservative image of Œblackness as menace and 'other'" (1997: 45). Yet
a diagnostic critique can also discern how these films provide insights into
the constraints that black youth face and the need to fight the injustice of
racial oppression and inequality.[5]
Hence, in addition to enacting ideological and political critique, a critical
cultural studies can read texts to gain critical knowledge of their conjuncture
and can valorize oppositional or utopian moments that can work against the
grain of their otherwise conservative or hegemonic problematics.
Nonetheless,
Giroux is right to call for political critique of cultural texts, to take
culture seriously as a site of pedagogy and the construction of our sense of
gender, race, class, sexuality, and other potent markers of contemporary
experience and practice. His politicizing of cultural studies provide a
salutary alternative to depoliticizing or aestheticizing cultural studies that
either focus on banal consumer use of media artifacts, that refuse ideological
or hermeneutical critique, or that flatten cultural texts into one-dimensional
non-signifying surfaces as in some "postmodern" versions of cultural
studies. By contrast, Giroux's political readings and critique of cultural
texts, his contextualizing of media artifacts in the social and political
struggles in which they emerge, and his insistent focus on the politics of
representation encompassing the full dimensions of class, race, ethnicity,
gender, and sexuality provide productive models for cultural studies and
critical pedagogy. This work demonstrates the need for their articulation to
provide more responsible and responsive theoretical and political models and
practice.
Throughout his
work within cultural studies, Giroux sees "culture as the site where
identities are constructed, desires mobilized, and moral values shaped"
(2000b: 132). Importantly, culture "is the ground of both contestation and
accommodation" and "the site where young people and others imagine
their relationship to the world; it produces the narratives, metaphors, and
images for constructing and exercising a powerful pedagogical force over how
people think of themselves and their relationship to others" (2000b: 133).
Hence, culture is intrinsically pedagogical, it forms, shapes, and cultivates
individuals and groups and is thus in important site for radical democratic
politics.
While culture can
be conservative and shape individuals into conforming to dominant modes of
thought and behavior, it also presents a site of resistance and struggle. A
critical pedagogy and cultural studies thus attempt to give voice to students
to articulate their criticisms of the dominant culture and to form their own
subcultures, discourses, styles, and cultural forms. Navigating the tricky and
treacherous shoals between those who would claim that culture has nothing to do
with politics and would engage in elitist or textualist pedagogy abstracted
from concrete political and historical conditions and struggles, contrasted to
those, mostly on the Left, who deny that culture is crucial for politics,
Giroux wants to insist that both culture and politics have an important
pedagogical dimension. In his recent Impure Acts. The Practical Politics of
Cultural Studies (2000b), Giroux notes the irony that in a time of
technological and cultural revolution marked by new media, technology, and
forms of culture, there is crisis of democratic culture. This era is marked,
Giroux argues, by rampant consumerism, the suppression of dissent, corporate
conglomerate control of major culture sites, and reduction of schooling to
prepare students to get better test scores and fit into the new global economy.
In this context, he calls upon teachers, theorists, and cultural activists to
perceive that "struggles over culture are not a weak substitute for a
'real' politics, but are central to any struggle willing to forge relations
among discursive and material relations of power, theory and practice, as well
as pedagogy and social change" (2000b: 7).
In the
contemporary conjuncture, Giroux stresses the importance for teachers and other
cultural workers to reinvigorate democratic culture and to intervene in the new
cultural spaces to revitalize democracy. For Giroux, cultural studies deals
with media culture contextually and politically, seeing the ways that media
texts either reproduce existing relationships of domination and subordination
in relation to gender, class, race, and other hierarchies, or resist modes of
inequality, injustice and domination. Culture can promote democracy by
projecting images of a more egalitarian and just social order, or providing
more empowering images of youth, women, people of color, and other oppressed
groups. Further, media culture can provide useful moral education, critical
knowledge of contemporary conditions, and empowering representations which can
help generate more informed, educated, and active subjectivities.
By combining
cultural studies and critical pedagogy during the past decade, Giroux took a
postmodern turn that saw the potentiality for a reconstructive project
democratically transforming education, pedagogy, culture, and society. For
Giroux, the new "post" theories provided the resources for new
discourses, pedagogy, practices, and politics. It supplied the material and
tools for reinventing education and radical democratic politics. Giroux's main
focus was the reconstruction of education and pedagogy in the service of
radical democracy. This involved a heightened focus on culture in which
cultural studies not only engaged contemporary cultural texts, but helped to
cultivate the ability to retrieve histories and imagine new futures. Giroux's
critical pedagogy sought not only new media literacies and ways of reading
culture, but also ways of reinventing education in the service of a
transformative democratic politics.
Thus while some
versions of the postmodern turn took their avatars into the realms of
increasingly abstract and pretentious discourse, Giroux sought a new language
for critical pedagogy and radical democracy.[6]
Whereas some champions of the postmodern turn (especially followers of
Baudrillard, Virilio, and some of the more exotic brands of French postmodern
theory) fell into a hopeless nihilism and pessimism, perceiving the collapse of
Western civilization and modernity in the implosive postmodern realms of new
media, technology, and social conditions, Giroux called for a reconstruction of
Enlightenment narratives of democracy, emancipation, and social justice and
transformation. He sought new subjects for a transformative practice that would
help realize the progressive promises of the Enlightenment rather than
promoting anti-Enlightenment and anti-rational thought and practice (which
themselves, as Habermas constantly reminds us, can be enemies of democracy and
social justice).
Avoiding extreme
and problematic versions of the postmodern turn, Giroux was able to develop
radical critiques of modern theory, pedagogy, and politics, while providing
reconstructive alternatives that draw on both modern and postmodern traditions.
His reconstructive and radical democratic postmodern politics are evident in
his deployment of the categories of identity and difference. Whereas modern
theory tends to erase or cover over difference with its emphasis on unified
subjects, common culture, universal reason, truth, and values, Giroux defends
an affirmation of difference that also articulates shared experiences, goals,
and democratic values. Thus, while an extreme postmodern valorization of
difference would erase all universals, commonalties, and shared identities, Giroux
deploys a dialectic of identity and difference which sees the complexity,
multiplicity of social identities and the possibility for producing more
democratic and just subjectivities, discourses, and practices.
Likewise, where
an extreme postmodern identity politics would verge toward separatism, or
reduce politics to construction of highly specific racial, gender, sexual or
other identities that often fetishize difference, Giroux calls for a
"border politics" where individuals cross over and struggle together
for democracy and social justice. Giroux has developed a pedagogy of
representation, place, performance, and
transformation. His pedagogy of representation and place involve
grasping the larger historical contexts that produce various oppressions,
resistance and struggle, identity, and differences. His pedagogy of
representation involves perceiving how media, education, political discourses
and practices, and other institutional forces generate cultural images and
discourses that produce and reproduce forms of oppression and domination, but
also generate transformative struggles for a freer and more just society. But
his pedagogy of representation also involves the construction of subjectivities
and practices that would be able to give voice and expression to their own
histories, oppressions, and aspiration, to fight against domination and for
transformative democracy and social justice. Here Giroux's pedagogy of place
cultivates the ability to retrieve hidden or submerged life histories and those
of one's groups, to situate these histories in the political context of the
present, and to activate them within the political struggles for the future
(see, for instance, Giroux 1993, Chapters 2 and 4).
Thus, Giroux has
promoted a pedagogy that cultivates both a retrospective grasp of one's
historical past, a perception of the dominant forces of oppression and
resistance in the present, and an anticipation of a better future rooted in
historical struggle and vision. The pedagogy of place and representation in
Giroux's work involves also cultivating a pedagogy of the popular. For it is
the popular forms of media culture that often shape an individual's sense of
history, the present, and the future, as well as one's understanding of the
dynamics of race, gender, class, sexuality, and so on. Here, cultural studies
provides the critical tools to provide competencies that enable teachers,
students, and citizens to develop the ability to analyze and criticize cultural
representations that promote domination and oppression. It also, as Giroux
argues, can help foster resistance and the construction of transformative
concepts of history, possibility, and a more democratic and egalitarian
configuration of class, gender, racial, and other identities.
But in linking cultural
studies with critical pedagogy, Giroux also wants to animate capacities to
produce alternative subjectivities and practices in the struggle for radical
democracy and social justice. This involves seeing teachers as cultural workers
who provide the theory, language, and skills to both dissect the dominant
culture and construct a new more democratic culture and more empowered and
ethical identities. In this vision, intellectuals and teachers are cultural
workers engaged in a struggle to represent the present, past, and future.
Giroux has a democratic faith in the potential of teachers, students, and
citizens to educate themselves and to struggle together for a better world.
Giroux thus sees
cultural politics as encompassing education, artistic work, and the pedagogy of
social movements. His performative pedagogy (see the Introduction to Giroux and
Shannon 1997 and Giroux 2000b, Chapter 6) attempts to demonstrate how cultural
texts enact broader societal and political issues in a pedagogy that makes visible
relations of power, domination, and resistance in media culture. For Giroux,
educators and radical intellectuals are cultural workers who should struggle to
nurture and keep alive democratic culture, educating individuals for democracy
and promoting citizenship and moral education. Giroux has always been
steadfastly on the Left, but has long opposed a form of Marxist orthodoxy which
privileges the working class as the primary agent of social change and that
valorizes economic issues over all other cultural, social, or political issues
and struggles. In Living Dangerously (1993), Giroux wrote:
"Contrary to the conventional left thinking,... the greatest challenge to
the right and its power may be lodged not in the mobilization of universal
agents such as the working class or some other oppressed group, but in a
cultural struggle in which almost every facet of daily life takes on a degree
of undecidability and thus becomes unsettled and open to broader collective
dialogue and multiple struggles" (36).
In particular,
Giroux has stressed how education, youth, race, gender, and culture in general
have been contested terrains. Schooling, in his view, is a site of struggle
between conservative, neo-liberal and more democratic forces -- and continues
to be as we enter a new millennium. Likewise, youth is a site of contestation
with corporate and conservative forces attempting to colonize, commodify, and
control youth, while more democratic and emancipatory forces attempt to educate
and empower young people, stressing hope, possibility, and the possibility of
collectively creating a better world. The intense struggles over race and
gender during the past decades bring cultural representations and a wealth of
political, cultural, and social issues to the fore which require that critical
pedagogy, cultural studies, and a radical democratic politics work to struggle
for social justice and equality in an environment hostile to such ideals.
As we enter the
new millennium, the turbulence of the technological revolution and global
restructuring of capitalism creates a volatile situation where established
orthodoxies and authorities are becoming questioned, new technologies,
discourses, and practices are emerging, and the entire social field is one of
contestation between corporate, conservative, neoliberal, and democratizing
forces. Giroux's contribution over the past decades has been to always side
with radical democratizing forces on the issues of the restructuring of
education, political transformation, and a democratization of all forms of
social, political, and cultural life. Giroux thus advances forms of radical
democratization and social justice which balance support for civil rights, an
egalitarian democratic culture, and a revitalized public sphere with respect
for difference. This project provides marginal and excluded voices a chance to
participate and creates the democratic institutions -- schooling, media, cultural forms, public spaces, and so
on -- which make possible a genuine participatory democracy. It directs
critical pedagogy and cultural studies to struggle for democratization and
against injustice and not just to provide more sophisticated methods of reading
cultural texts. In these ways, Giroux encourages those of us involved in the
project of cultural studies to not forget democratic politics and social
struggle as we attend to our pedagogical and public performances.
References
Aronowitz, Stanley and Henry Giroux (1985; second
edition 1993) Education Still Under Siege. Westport. CT: Bergin and
Garvey.
Aronowitz, Stanley and Henry Giroux (1991) Postmodern
Education. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Giroux, Henry (1992) Border Crossings.
Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education. New York: Routledge.
___________ (1993) Living Dangerously: Multiculturalism
and the Politics of Culture. New York: Peter Lang Publishers.
_____________ (1994) Disturbing Pleasures.
Learning Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
____________ (1996) Fugitive Cultures. New
York: Routledge.
___________ (1997) Channel Surfing: Racism,
the Media, and the Destruction of Today's Youth.
___________ (1999) The Mouse that Roared: What
Disney Teaches. Lanham, MD.: Rowman and Littlefield.
___________ (2000a) Stealing Innocence.
New York: St. Martin's Press.
___________ (2000b) Impure Acts. The Practical
Politics of Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge.
____________ (forthcoming-a) ³Zero Tolerance and
Mis/Education: Youth and the Politics of Domestic Militarization.²
____________ (forthcoming-b) ³Private Satisfactions
and Public Disorders: Fight Club, Patriarchy, and the Politics of
Masculine Violence.²
Giroux, Henry and Peter McLaren, eds. (1989) Critical
Pedagogy, the State, and the Struggle for Culture. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY
Press.
Giroux, Henry and Peter McLaren (1994) Between
Borders: Pedagogy and Politics in Cultural Studies. New York and London:
Routledge.
Giroux, Henry, Peter McLaren, Colin Lankshear,
and Mike Cole (1994) Counternarratives. New York and London: Routledge.
Giroux, Henry and Patrick Shannon (1997) Cultural
Studies and Education: Toward a Performative Practice. New York and London:
Routledge.
Giroux, Henry and Simon, Roger (1989) Popular
Culture, Schooling & Everyday Life. Granby, Massachusetts: Bergin &
Garvey.
Kellner, Douglas (1995) Media Culture.
London and New York: Routledge.
_________ (forthcoming) ³New Technologies/New
Literacies: Reconstructing Education for the New Millennium.²
Bio=
Douglas Kellner is George Kneller Chair in the
Philosophy of Education at UCLA and is author of many books on social theory,
politics, history, and culture, including Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of
Marxism; Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity; Jean
Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond; Postmodern
Theory: Critical Interrogations (with Steven Best); Television and the
Crisis of Democracy; The Persian Gulf TV War; Media Culture;
and The Postmodern Turn (with Steven Best).
Abstract =
In my study, I
engage Henry Giroux¹s project of articulating cultural studies with critical
pedagogy and radical democracy. I argue that Giroux provides cultural studies
with a critical pedagogy missing in many versions with the aiming of helping to
develop a more democratic culture and citizenry. The result is an intersection
of critical pedagogy and cultural studies that enhances both enterprises,
providing a much-needed cultural and transformative political dimension to
critical pedagogy and a pedagogical dimension to cultural studies.
[1]. For his first sustained presentation of the importance of cultural studies for critical pedagogy and the reconstruction of education, see Giroux 1992: 161ff; on the need for a richer understanding of culture, cultural politics, and pedagogy than in conventional orthodoxies, see Giroux 1992; 180ff; some of the positions in his cultural turn were anticipated in Giroux and Simon 1989. For my own takes on media culture and cultural studies, see Kellner 1995.
[2]. Giroux also co-edited a series of books on critical pedagogy and cultural studies, signalling the collaborative nature of the enterprise; see Giroux and Simon 1989; Giroux and McLaren 1989 and 1994; Giroux, McLaren, Lankshear, and Cole 1994; and Giroux and Shannon 1997. One might also cite Giroux's collaborations with Stanley Aronowitz who also worked to combine cultural studies, critical pedagogy, and radical democratic politics (1991 and 1994).
[3]. For an excellent study of the ongoing and escalating war against youth, see Giroux's recent paper on "Zero Tolerance and Mis/Education: Youth and the Politics of Domestic Militarization" (forthcoming).
[4]. For my own analysis of the political attack on rap in the early 1990s, see Kellner 1995, Chapter Four.
[5]. Giroux's reading of Juice is more nuanced and provides a better context for productive engagement with contemporary films dealing with black urban youth (1996: 39ff). While Giroux is rightfully concerned that the film could help promote "white panic" and negative images of black youth, he notes the critique of violence in the film. While I would agree with Giroux (1996: 44) that one needs to go beyond mainstream Hollywood films to texts like Julie Dash¹s Daughters of the Dust or Leslie Harris¹s Just Another Girl on the IRT to find more progressive and complex representations of African-Americans, I would argue that even films which have negative representations can be engaged by a critical cultural studies to produce productive discussions and insights into contemporary social conditions and the dynamics of race, gender, class, and other sites of representation.
[6]. For Giroux's defense of theoretical language, see 1993, Chapter 6 and 1994, Chapter 6. In retrospect, I would agree with Giroux on the usefulness of theory and need for new theoretical languages to describe new social, cultural, and political conditions and to develop more complex discourses to capture the turbulence, intense changes, and novelties of the present. But in the present conjuncture, I would want to mediate between those who call for clarity and accessibility in discourse and writing contrasted to those who defend high theory and complexity. Hence, while I believe it was salutary to appropriate and deploy the new theoretical discourse of the past decades, and have done so myself, I think in the present conjuncture, it is important to try to become as clear and accessible as possible. Moreover, I would argue that a virtue of Giroux's recent work is that it is indeed more lucid and accessible to a broader public than his late 1980s and early 1990s work when he was himself, as were many of us, learning new languages and developing new theories and pedagogies. Finally, I would suggest that engaging the new cyberculture and transformations of education and everyday life brought on by new technologies requires complex theoretical language and analysis, as well as new pedagogies and a democratic restructuring of education; see Kellner, forthcoming.