Impure Acts

The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies

Henry A. Giroux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135958664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popular en el arte

Henry A. Giroux challenges the contemporary politics of cynicism by addressing a number of issues including the various attacks on cultural politics, the multicultural discourses of academia, the corporate attack on higher education, and the cultural politics of the Disney empire.

one

Rethinking Cultural Politics

Challenging Political Dogmatism from Right to Left

… the multiculturalists, the hordes of camp-followers, afflicted by the French diseases, the mock-feminists, the commissars, the gender-and-power freaks, the hosts of new historicists and old materialists … [seem] to me a monumental representation of the enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act of overwhelming us.

—Harold Bloom, “They Have the Numbers; We Have the Heights”

If we wish to do politics, let us organize groups, coalitions, demonstrations, lobbies, whatever; let us do politics. Let us not think our academic work is already that.

—Todd Gitlin, “The Anti-Political Populism of Cultural Studies”

INTRODUCTION

Besieged by the powerful forces of vocationalism and neoconservative cultural warriors, on one hand, and the growing presence of left orthodoxy on the other, many academics are caught in an ideological crossfire regarding their civic and political responsibilities. Under pressure from conservatives, educators are increasingly being influenced to define their roles within the language of the corporate culture, buttressed by an appeal to a discourse of objectivity and neutrality that separates political questions from cultural and social issues. Within such a discourse, educators are being pressured to become servants of corporate power, multinational operatives functioning primarily as disengaged specialists wedded to the imperatives of academic professionalism. Yet conservatives are not the only ones willing to attack the notion of a progressive cultural politics—one that links knowledge and power to the imperatives of social change—as a democratic, countervailing force to the corporatizing of academic culture. A small but influential number of progressives and educators on the left are urging professors to renounce, if not altogether flee, the university in order to engage in “real” political struggles. Within this discourse, it is ideologically damning to argue, as Andrew Ross does, that cultural politics is “an inescapable part of any advocacy of social change.”¹

What is surprising about the current attack on education, especially in light of the growing corporatization and privatization at all levels of schooling, is the refusal on the part of many theorists to rethink the role academics might play in defending the university as a crucial democratic public sphere. Lost in these debates is a view of the university that demands reinvigorated notions of civic courage and action that address what it means to make teaching and learning more socially conscious and politically responsive in a time of growing conservatism, racism, and corporatism. Even more surprising is the common ground shared by a growing number of conservatives and progressives who attempt to reduce pedagogy to a reified methodology, on one hand, or narrowly define politics and pedagogy within a dichotomy that pits the alleged “real” material issues of class and labor against a fragmenting and marginalizing politics of culture, textuality, and difference on the other.

CONSERVATIVE AND LIBERAL ATTACKS ON CULTURAL POLITICS

The right-wing attack on culture as a site of pedagogical and political struggle is evident in the work of such traditionalists as Harold Bloom and Lynn Cheney and such liberals as Richard Rorty, all of whom bemoan the death of romance, inspiration, and hope as casualties of the language of power, politics, and multiculturalism. For Bloom, literary criticism has been replaced in the academy by cultural politics, and the result is nothing less than the renunciation of the search for truth and beauty that once defined universalistic and impartial scholarship. Bloom cannot bear the politics of what he calls “identity clubs,” arguing that “multiculturalism is a lie, a mask for mediocrity for the thought-control academic police, the Gestapo of our campuses.”² Bloom wishes to situate culture exclusively in the sphere of beauty and aesthetic transcendence, unhampered and uncorrupted by politics, the struggle over public memory, or the democratic imperative for self- and social criticism. For Bloom, cultural politics is an outgrowth of cultural guilt, a holdover from the sixties that begets what he calls “the School of Resentment.”³

Yet there is more at stake in delegitimating the investigation of the relationship between culture and power for Bloom and his fellow conservatives. Eager to speak for disenfranchised groups, conservatives claim that cultural politics demeans the oppressed and has nothing to do with their problems. It neither liberates nor informs, they maintain, but rather contributes to an ongoing decline in standards and civility by prioritizing visual culture over print culture, and popular culture over high culture. For Bloom, replacing Julius Caesar with The Color Purple is indicative of the lowering of such standards and the “danger of cultural collapse.”⁴ As a custodian of the good old days, Bloom holds no punches in equating literature that has been traditionally marginalized in the university with degrading forms of popular culture. He writes that

the Resenters prate of power, as they do of race and gender: they are careerist stratagems and have nothing to do with the insulted and injured, whose lives will not be improved by our reading the bad verses of those who assert that they are the oppressed. Our schools as much as our universities are given away to these absurdities; replacing Julius Caesar by The Color Purple is hardly a royal road to enlightenment. A country where television, movies, computers, and Stephen King have replaced reading is already in acute danger of cultural collapse. That danger is dreadfully augmented by our yielding education to the ideologues whose deepest resentment is of poetry itself.⁵

By conflating minority literature with popular culture and the decline of academic standards, Bloom conveniently and unabashedly reveals the contempt he harbors for minorities of race, class, and gender and their “uncivil” demands for inclusion in the curricula of higher education and the history and political life of the nation. Bloom’s tirade is all the more disingenuous given his appeal to excellence and objectivism. Bloom’s conservative stance would be more interesting if his disdain of the ideological could be read as simply ironic, but he appears, unfortunately, dead serious when he maps out his retrograde view of the canon, academics, and the purpose of the university as a position free from the tainted discourse of politics and ideology.

There is no room in Blooms discourse for theorizing the dialectical connections between culture and politics. There is little regard for the ways in which cultural processes are inextricably part of the power relations that structure the symbols, identities, and meanings that shape dominant institutions such as education, the arts, and the media. Nor is there the slightest attempt to theorize how the political character of culture might make possible a healthy and ongoing engagement with all forms of pedagogical practice and the institutionally sanctioned authority that gives them legitimacy. Bloom has nothing but contempt for educators who attempt to understand how cultural politics can be appropriated in order to teach students to be suspicious, if not critical of dominant forms of authority—both within and outside the schools—that sanction what counts as theory, that legitimate knowledge, that put particular subject positions in place, and that make specific claims on public memory. Rather, Bloom echoes other right-wing spokespersons such as George Will, Dinesh D’Souza, Hilton Kramer, and Richard Bernstein who deride multiculturalists, feminists, and others for propagating “oppression studies,” “victim studies,” “therapeutic history,” and forms of “ethnic cheer- leading.” In this discourse, oppositional voices within the academy are dismissed as “barbarians” because they threaten what are alleged to be transcendent notions of “civilization,” “truth,” “beauty,” and “common culture.”

Pedagogy for Bloom is both depoliticized and unproblematic. Dismissing the contribution that radical educators have made to theorizing pedagogical practice, Bloom is utterly dismissive toward any critical attempts within the university to expand the political possibilities of the pedagogical. Lost in Bloom’s discourse is any serious attempt to grapple with the implications of treating pedagogy as a form of moral and political regulation rather than as a technique or fixed method. Similarly, Bloom’s arguments do not offer any theory of pedagogy. Hence, he is unable to engage pedagogical practice as the outcome of social struggles between different groups over how citizens are to be defined, the role pedagogy plays in mediating what forms of knowledge are to be considered worthy of serious inquiry, or how pedagogy provides the conditions for students to recognize antidemocratic forms of power. But this is clearly beyond Bloom’s theoretical and ideological reach, because to suggest that such issues are worthy of serious debate would mean that Bloom would have to recognize his own pedagogy as a political activity, and his criticism of cultural politics as participating in the very ideological processes he so vehemently dismisses.

Lynn Cheney, on the other hand, embraces the political as part of a more activist critique of leftist cultural politics both within and outside the university. As the former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the current director of the activist National Alumni Forum, Cheney argues that progressive trends in the academy are undermining what she terms the national cultural heritage. Claiming that “activist” faculty are abusing the principle of academic freedom, Cheney has sought to demonize progressive scholars by defining them as a threat to both the university and to the most valued traditions of Western civilization. Cheney has spelled this out in a speech to the American Council of Learned Societies. She writes,

When I become most concerned about the state of the humanities in our colleges and universities is not when I see theories and ideas fiercely competing, but when I see them neatly converging, when I see feminist criticism, Marxism, various forms of poststructuralism, and other approaches all coming to bear on one concept and threatening to displace it. I think specifically of the concept of Western civilization, which has come under pressure on many fronts, political as well as theoretical. Attacked for being elitist, sexist, racist, Eurocentric, this central and sustaining idea of our educational system and our intellectual heritage is being declared unworthy of study.⁶

Cheney’s attack on cultural politics in the university redefines the relationships among culture, power, and knowledge by shifting the political emphasis away from struggles over curricula to struggles over policy that would shape the institutional conditions under which knowledge is produced, faculty are hired and evaluated, and credentials awarded. As Ellen Messer-Davidow has brilliantly documented, this is evident in the efforts of conservatives such as William Bennett, and Irving Kristol, among others, along with the backing of conservative groups such as the Olin and Bradley foundations, to attack extraacademic institutions and resources in order to restructure higher education along retrograde ideological lines.⁷ Examples abound, and include conservative attempts to defund both the National Endowment for the Arts and the NEH, to dismantle affirmative action policies in universities and state agencies, and to encourage “alumni and trustees to censure and/or defund ‘inappropriate’ courses and curricula.”⁸ Under the charge of political correctness, conservatives such as Cheney deride the politicization of culture, the rise of “advocacy” programs such as those in African-American studies, cultural studies, and women’s studies. John Silber, the former president of Boston University, reveals in a 1993 report to its board of trustees the blatant disregard for academic freedom that parades under the rubric of fighting political correctness in the university. Silber writes, without irony, that

this University has remained unapologetically dedicated to the search for truth and highly resistant to political correctness … we have resisted the fad toward critical legal studies. … In the English Department and the departments of literature, we have not allowed the structuralists or the deconstructionists to take over. We have refused to take on dance therapy. … We have resisted revisionist history. … In the Philosophy Department we have resisted the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. … We have resisted the official dogmas of radical feminism. We have done the same thing with regard to gay and lesbian liberation, and animal liberation. … We have resisted the fad of Afrocentrism. We have not fallen into the clutch of multi-culturalists.⁹

If conservatives are to be believed, they are not engaging in a form of cultural and institutional politics, at least the ideological version, but simply purging the university of feminists, multiculturalists, and other progressive groups in order to promote excellence, raise academic standards, and create an objective scholarly climate that facilitates the intellectual pursuit of truth and beauty. Such actions, underwritten with resources and power provided by conservative forces such as the Madison Center for Educational Affairs, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the Olin Foundation, and the National Association of Scholars reveals a dangerous ideological orthodoxy. In this instance, the threat to academic freedom comes less from left-wing professors than it does from administrative demagogues and right-wing organizations willing to police and censor knowledge that does not silence itself before the legitimating imperatives of the traditional academic canon.

LIBERALISM AND THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING

Although Richard Rorty does not reject the political as a meaningful category of public life, he does abstract it from culture and in so doing legitimates a sharp conceptual division between politics and culture as well as an ideologically narrow reading of aesthetics, pedagogy, and politics. According to Rorty, you cannot “find inspirational value in a text at the same time as you are viewing it as a … mechanism of cultural production.”¹⁰ Rorty steadfastly believes in the rigid division between understanding and hope, mind and heart, thought and action. He rejects implicitly the work of such critical theorists as Stuart Hall, Larry Grossberg, Paulo Freire, and others who believe that hope is a practice of witnessing, an act of moral imagination and political passion that helps educators and other cultural workers to think otherwise in order to act otherwise. Moreover, Rorty shares with Bloom—though for different reasons—the fall-from-grace narrative that seems to be the lament of so many well-established white male academics. Rorty wants progressives to be more upbeat, to give up their whining cultural politics and provide positive images of America. He wants feminists to stop indulging in victim politics by linking the political and the personal so that they can get on with a politics that addresses the “real thing.” Moreover, as Lindsay Waters points out, “Rorty wants to hear good stories. He is not, however, interested in popular culture, even though it sometimes presents positive images of America, because popular culture, in his view, is a source of chauvinistic, right-wing, simpleminded images of America. Its ‘high culture’ that concerns him.”¹¹

Given Rorty’s distaste for popular culture, it should not come as a surprise that he is equally dismissive of educators who situate texts within the broader politics of representation and engage pedagogy as a political practice. Yet the brunt of his criticism is reserved for a cultural left that refuses to “talk about money,” legislation, or welfare reform and squanders its intellectual and critical resources on “such academic disciplines as women’s history, black history, gay studies, Hispanic-American studies, and migrant studies.”¹² Rorty disdains progressive academics for elevating cultural politics over real politics, and, as Waters points out, “accuses the aging New Leftists who populate the academy of something worse than a failure of nerve. They are quislings, he says, collaborators: in permitting cultural matters to supplant ‘real politics,’ they have collaborated with the Right in making cultural issues central to the political debate.”¹³

For Rorty, the cultural left needs to transform itself into a reformed economic left that addresses “concrete” political issues such as changing campaign finance laws, abolishing the local financing of public education, and fighting for universal health insurance. These are laudable goals for any left, but for Rorty they cannot be addressed by means of a cultural politics that complicates and burdens political resistance through a language that speaks to how power works within popular culture or engages politics through the connected registers of race, gender, and sexuality. Nor, for Rorty, can such goals be addressed by expanding the political field to include various social movements organized around issues such as AIDS, sexuality, environmentalism, feminism, and antiracist struggles. He seems to forget, as Homi Bhabha points out, that his call for a reconstructed politics of the left comes perilously close to reproducing the legacy of an orthodox Marxism. Constitutive of such a legacy are: “the reduction of the cultural public sphere to the realm of economic determinism; the support of trade unions at the expense of raced and gendered workers whose ‘differences’ and discriminations become subordinated to class interest; the homophobia and xenophobia that so easily perverts patriotism.”¹⁴

Rorty, along with conservative ideologues like Harold Bloom, believes that the university and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 0.Revitalizing the Culture of Politics: An Introduction
• 1. Rethinking Cultural Politics: Challenging Political Dogmatism from Right to Left
• 2. Schooling and the Politics of Corporate Culture
• 3. The Limits of Academic Multiculturalism
• 4. Teaching the Political with Homi Bhabha
• 5. Teaching the Cultural with Disney
• 6. Performing Cultural Studies
• Notes
• index