Henry A. Giroux - Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance

Pedagogy of Resistance

Also available from Bloomsbury

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Pedagogy of Resistance

Against Manufactured Ignorance

Henry A. Giroux

For Rania

For Tony Penna

For Stanley Aronowitz

One must say Yes to life and embrace it wherever it is foundand it is found in terrible places.... For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Contents

The cover of Pedagogy of Resistance adorned with Isaac Cordals haunting image speaks to an unfolding moment of peril, a creeping machinery of death that offers a view of education as a space of colonization, ethical abandonment, and a pedagogy of repression. Pedagogy has turned lethal, lost its innocence, and reveals its political dark side. The room in the image is a cavernous vortex of meditated punishment. The stench of oppression fills the barely breathable air. In the background, what look like students surveying the ruins of their own education appear dressed from head to toe in quarantine outfits which are cloaking them in a fabric thats less protective and more suffocating. They appear like educational lab rats, where they are the experiment. There is also a purity to the cloths whiteness thats identifiable and yet disturbing. But what is the virus here? The students look at items, which seem like infected remnants from a disaster thats just happened. As they forensically survey these artefacts on neatly set out tableaus, the neat and linear organization of power is purposefully suggested. Its tempting to read this terrifying and yet all too familiar scene as politically revealing, seeing these items as books that can no longer be read on account of the fact that their contents are too dangerous to those in power. The now toxic thoughts of a Paolo Freire or Henry Giroux, held at a safe distance, as the students have been taught to look upon these items with alarm and profound suspicion. Meanwhile, a sinister skeletal figure looks down from on high, certain of his mastery and position. His watchtower an eery reminder of a past we misguidedly thought had been defeated. The students are already obedient, their allegiance to the nihilism of the present appears beyond question. They belong to a generation thats lived through some plague. They are the survivors, but now forced to live in a lockdown of a more terrifying kind. And just like in the times of Bruegel, whats triumphed is the triumph of death, even while people are still alive. But this is not about the spectacle that so haunted the Flemish artist. This is about a more mediocre and yet no less devastating violence. The brutalities of the fascism of the everyday.

Cordals The School is a brilliant work that provides a perfectly fitting accompaniment to Henry Girouxs Pedagogy of Resistance. It offers a damning visual testimony to our times; one where new forms of fascism have been mobilized and where the importance of education has never been more crucial. It is suggestive to see Cordals School as a warning. A dystopian vision wherein The dictatorship of ignorance, as Giroux terms it, proves ultimately victorious. And yet, as Giroux shows, this nightmarish vision is not some distant promise or modelling for an alternative universe. Nor is it some phantasmic vision, which in any way stretches the imagination. If we can learn anything from Orwell, it is that dystopian visions like his 1984 simply didnt go far enough. Cordals School then, as Giroux explains it, is symbolic of the perilous world currently being inhabited. A world where critical thinking is being surveyed like some dangerous relic from a considered past, and where the plague of violence has liberated its deeply set germination patterns to now widely infect the political body. A world where the afterlife to fascism shows how futile it would be to simply reduce it to a single person such as the abhorrent Donald Trump.

Every book should be taken on its own terms. It should be read, and its intention understood. Yet it would be impossible to make sense of the importance of this book without reading Girouxs wider corpus. There is a need to recognize the authors tireless fight, from his earlier works that really changed how education was to be seen as a form of political intervention to recognizing the importance of culture and the demand to speak with multiple grammars. This would include his critiques of the Wars on Terror and the mobilization of war, which only stoked the xenophobic fires, to the way he provided such critical insight into the brutalities of the punishing state and its racialized violence. It would also include his concern with the politics of disposability and the ravages of neoliberalism, onto his anticipation of the arrival of Trump and how he merely accelerated in the most visible ways many terrifying dynamics already on play. Girouxs Pedagogy of Resistance is not, therefore, simply an isolated cry for a better world. It is the latest volume in a meticulous and always enriching mapping of history and its many devastating trajectories. It is also the latest life chapter in his personal fight to have us find reasons to believe in this world.

If there is a singularity to this text, I would suggest it reads something like this: While the forces of fascism may seem insurmountable, there is always hope in a pedagogy of resistance. In the face of death, this is a book whose intention is to put itself on the side of life. It invokes an affirmative sense of what resistance might look like, and how another world might be reimagined. Still, nothing is certain here. Fascism remains a formidable enemy which, as Giroux shows better than anyone, must be also understood as a pedagogical force. There is then a reason why the university matters, Giroux explains. For education is on the frontlines to this battle. A battle that has only been accelerated and become all the more pronounced following the global lockdown.

I could spend a considerable amount of time here explaining more fully what Giroux brings to our understanding of fascism and why a pedagogy of resistance is so important in these perilous times. But thats better left for Giroux. What I will say is that this is not a book that will please orthodox social scientists or any academic who believes in the idea of some neutral or objective basis to research and enquiry. And its all the better for it! Fascism is never neutral, although its effects are often neutralizing. Fascism is never objective, although it so often objectifies as it destroys. Passivity in the face of a system that seeks to colonize the very language of the viral and the toxic in order to harness its terrifying energy and turn it back upon itself is a world where everyone is already co-opted. Mindful of this, Giroux presents more than a troubling diagnostic of our times. He gives us a powerful manifesto for how education can be harnessed in the presence of the death-driving machines whose educational toxicology seeks to kill off the critical in thought.