Henry Giroux and counternarratives

Henry Giroux has been writing about, and engaging in, critical pedagogy for over 30 years, and his work - with Paulo Friere and Peter McLaren - has profoundly influenced my own teaching and research. In particular, I have been affected by his exhortation to create space for counternarratives, in the classroom and elsewhere. In a similar vein, bell hooks talks about teaching to transgress.

Today I came across an article written by Giroux for the online journal Dissident Voice (3/11/08). The article is entitled "Slouching Towards Bethlehem: the New Gilded Age and Neoliberalism's Theatre of Cruelty" and I am excerpting some of it here:

What is often ignored by many theorists who analyze the rise of
neoliberalism in the United States is that it is not only a system of economic power relations, but also a political project of governing and persuasion intent on producing new forms of subjectivity and particular modes of conduct....

I want to begin with a theoretical insight provided by the British media theorist, Nick Couldry, who insists that “every system of cruelty requires its own theatre,” one that draws upon the rituals of everyday life in order to legitimate its norms, values, institutions, and social practices.(Nick Couldry, “Realty TV, or the Secret Theatre of Neoliberalism,” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies (forthcoming), p. 1).

Neoliberalism represents one such a system of cruelty, one that is reproduced daily through a regime of commonsense and a narrow notion of political rationality that “reaches from the soul of the citizen-subject to educational policy to practices of empire.” (Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press,2005), p. 40)

What is new about neoliberalism in a post-9/11 world is that it has become normalized, serving as a powerful pedagogical force that shapes our lives, memories, and daily experiences, while attempting to erase everything critical and emancipatory about history, justice, solidarity, freedom, and the meaning of democracy.

Wedded to the belief that the market should be the organizing principle for all political, social, and economic decisions, neoliberalism wages an incessant attack on democracy, public institutions, public goods, and non-commodified values. Under neoliberalism everything either is for sale or is plundered for profit....

Citizenship has increasingly become a function of market values and politics has been restructured as “corporations have been increasingly freed from social control through deregulation, privatization, and other neoliberal measures.” (William K. Tabb, “Race to the Bottom?” in Stanley Aronowitz and Heather Gautney, eds. Implicating Empire: Globalization & Resistance in the 21 Century World Order (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 153)

Bleak, indeed. As a new section, I suggest that we consider a panel on counternarratives for ASPA 2009, especially since so many of us feel outnumbered in our schools and universities, having to clamor in louder and louder voices against the growing Leviathan of neoliberal ideology. Read, for example, the exchange on empiricism in Administration & Society's Disputatio Sine Fine section, beginning with Larry Luton's article on "Deconstructing PA Empiricism" in July 2007.

Echoing Cam Stivers' lament in the January 2008 issue, I too feel as if I'm experiencing some strange reversion: haven't we heard all this already, and isn't it SO last century? Sadly, it appears, there is a large contingent of neoliberals and empiricists who are determined to drag the debate forward. Perhaps it's part of the ontology: a worldview anchored in competition and social darwinism means someone has to win; anything less is failure. All this indicates, to me, that the need for strong counternarratives will continue, and we should prepare ourselves for a long bout of resistance.

--posted by Lisa Zanetti