The Significance of Critical Pedagogy for Cultural Studies

Henry Giroux’s work has turned increasingly to the pedagogical task of transforming popular culture into a site of political analysis. Such a turn in scholarly direction may not in itself impress. But what is impressive about Giroux, among other things, is the position from which he writes. Now the Waterbury Chair in Secondary Education at Pennsylvania State University, Giroux has authored some twenty books since the early 1980s in an extraordinary effort to transform the antiquated curricular philosophies which have come to dominate the nation’s teacher preparation programs. Despite the marginalization of radical democratic social theory from schools of education, his influence on a generation of democratic intellectual workers has been substantial, although only recently has his work been accorded the recognition it deserves outside the confines of critical educational theory. Giroux’s latest book, Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies provides a comprehensive framework for clarifying the arguments so provocatively opened in previous writings. While I think that Impure Acts offers greater thematic integration than Disturbing Pleasures (1994), The Mouse That Roared (1999), or Stealing Innocence (2000), I still found these earlier works powerful in their capacity to render contemporary events political for my students as citizens-and teachers-in the-making.

Giroux tells us that Impure Acts is intended to contribute to the “ongoing debate about the purpose and meaning of cultural studies, particularly one that links theory and practice, knowledge and power, and economic justice and cultural politics as part of a broader project of deepening and expanding the principles of radical democracy to all aspects of society.”[1] In light of these aims, Giroux is alarmed at the “growing academicization” of cultural studies among progressive cultural workers and educators, and at the “cynicism and despair” which saturates the national political culture (13). As always, his criticism of academics who pose as intellectual priests for corporate capitalism is in high-gear. But since Giroux’s position here is well known, and for that reason, perhaps less remarkable, I won’t devote much attention to this theme. Rather, I think it will be more useful to examine chapter 1 in-depth, “Rethinking Cultural Politics,” in which Giroux responds to Richard Rorty and Todd Gitlin, among others, for strongly refuting the political potential of cultural studies. In my view, Giroux’s wide-ranging and trenchant analysis of this conflict represents the heart of Impure Acts. What it means to be political and what it means to be a public intellectual are the foundational questions which occupy Giroux in every chapter of the book.

At stake in this debate is whether cultural studies will evolve into a mere boutique-subject, tantalizing yet irrelevant, or whether it will manifest itself as an insurgent force capable of provoking novel discussions about social justice and democracy both inside and outside the academy. In this regard Giroux’s opening jeremiad deserves close attention:

Cultural studies, like education, no longer appears as a way of intervening in the production of an active citizenry. Too much of what passes for analysis in these fields represents the bad faith of careerism and the obscure discourse of hermetic academics who no longer believe it is necessary to either speak with and to a larger public or address important social issues. Where the vestiges of careerism are not in place, the cultural politics of the left appears to be embroiled in what Michel Foucault once called polemics. Lost here is any attempt to persuade or convince, to produce a serious dialogue. All that remain are arguments buttressed by an air of privileged insularity that appear beyond interrogation, coupled with forms of rhetorical cleverness built upon the model of war and unconditional surrender, designed primarily to eliminate one’s opponent but having little to say about what it means to offer alternative discourses to conservative and neoliberal efforts to prevent the democratic principles of liberty, equality, and freedom from being put into practice in our schools and other crucial spheres of society.

(14)

Significantly, Giroux echoes the same charge of political irrelevance that...