dinsdag 19 augustus 2014

Henry Giroux 14

Henry A. Giroux on "The Violence of Organized Forgetting"

Tuesday, 19 August 2014 00:00By Victoria Harper, Truthout | Interview
2014 819 gir st(Photo: Susan Searls Giroux)Discussing his new book, Henry A. Giroux argues that what unites racist killings, loss of privacy, the surveillance state's rise, the increasing corporatization of US institutions and growing poverty and inequality "is a growing threat of authoritarianism - or what might be otherwise called totalitarianism with elections."
Victoria Harper: Your new book has a very provocative and suggestive title: The Violence of Organized Forgetting. How does the title work as an organizing idea for the book?
Henry A. Giroux: We live in a historical moment when memory, if not critical thought itself, is either under attack or is being devalued and undermined by a number of forces in American society. Historical memory has become dangerous today because it offers the promise of lost legacies of resistance, moments in history when the social contract was taken seriously (however impaired), and when a variety of social movements emerged that called for a rethinking of what democracy meant and how it might be defined in the interest of economic and social justice.

Fear, privatization and depoliticization are the organizing principles of American society at the current moment.

Including violence and organized forgetting in the title was meant to signal how mainstream politics devalues reason, dissent and critique, and the formative culture and institutions that support these crucial moments of thinking, agency and collective struggle necessary for a democracy. It also registers how dominant regimes of power have resorted to a culture of fear, state repression and the militarization of large parts of the society in order to enforce a state of terror, conformity and privatization. Violence signals the state's complicity in creating a culture that is utterly commodified and privatized, one in which the obligations of citizenship are reduced to pursuing narrow individual interests and the demands of consumerism. How we define ourselves as Americans has a deeply historical character and to the degree that this history is impoverished, any viable notion of agency, justice, education and democracy is devalued.
To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.
Fear, privatization and depoliticization are the organizing principles of American society at the current moment and as such the defunding of critical public spheres such as schools is matched by forms of state repression that link education to purely instrumental interests, at least for most young people. The social and political cleansing of history, memory and thought itself is in essence a part of a larger attack on dissent, critical thinking, engaged agency and collective struggles. Purging dissent and public memory not only promotes among young people retreat from the public realm, it also empties out politics. As the public collapses into the private, injustices are viewed as a nuisance that interfere with private interests. Believing in a cause gives way to the quest to get ahead, while matters of social and civic responsibility disappear in a self-absorbed culture of narcissism, narrow individualism and privatization.
What we are discovering and what the book attempts to map out in a number of chapters is how the attack on history, witnessing and critique breeds anti-democratic horrors including what my colleague, David L. Clark, terms "the wars against thought, and the flirtations with irrationality that lie at the heart of the triumph of every-day aggression, the withering of political life, and the withdrawal into private obsessions." This may be one reason why we are seeing such an upsurge of violence against black youth, college protesters, and those who have been part of the now quiet Occupy movement. Young people have become the chief object of oppression and punitive social policies because they represent the most promising group for reclaiming memory as a central political issue and using elements of the past to rethink a future very different from the one we now occupy. This may be one reason the state is attempting to depoliticize young people through the onslaught of a consumer culture, the burden of extreme debt, and other social policies and survivalist pedagogies that lower their expectations while keeping them too busy to be able to address the political and social issues that underlie what it means to be young in a suspect society.
What do you mean by "Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination Machine," the subtitle of your book?
Borrowing from and modifying Georges Didi-Huberman's use of the term, "disimagination machine," I argue that the politics of disimagination refers to images, institutions, discourses and other modes of representation, that undermine the capacity of individuals to bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and collective resistance. The "disimagination machine" is both a set of cultural apparatuses extending from schools and mainstream media to the new sites of screen culture and a public pedagogy that functions primarily to weaken the ability of individuals to think critically, imagine the unimaginable, and engage in thoughtful and critical dialogue. Put simply, for them to become critically informed citizens of the world.

At the same time, the cultural apparatuses of the mainstream media disavow critical issues by producing news and modes of popular culture that constitute an echo chamber for dominant class and financial interests along with the production of a celebrity culture and spectacles of violence that trivialize everything they touch.

The concept of the disimagination machine signals a new and powerful moment in how authority depoliticizes, privatizes and infantilizes Americans. It narrows the expanding circle of moral conscience, undercuts the radical imagination and imposes on society the regressive morality of neoliberalism. The machinery of disimagination does not constitute a new form of social control that relies on colonizing subjectivity through the use of education in various sites to shape the identities, desires, values, modes of identification and subjectivities of Americans in the interest of social control as much as it suggests more intensive and reconfigured attempts, aided by the new digital technologies, to generate a culture of mass forgetfulness, obedience and conformity.
As all aspects of American life are transformed into a war zone, the state employs the mechanics and practices of a disimagination machine coupled with state terrorism. For instance, public schools are being privatized and militarized while higher education is being turned into a training ground for all but the elite in order to service corporate interests and power.
At the same time, the cultural apparatuses of the mainstream media disavow critical issues by producing news and modes of popular culture that constitute an echo chamber for dominant class and financial interests along with the production of a celebrity culture and spectacles of violence that trivialize everything they touch.
Moreover, these structural and symbolic mechanisms function increasingly in a digital world in which communication exhibits little respect for contemplation, critical dialogue or informed judgment. Speed and an overabundance of information replace the time to think, just as being alone in privatized orbits of digitized technospheres constitutes a derailed notion of community.

The collective sense of ethical imagination and social responsibility towards those who are vulnerable or in need of care has been increasingly viewed as a scourge or pathology.

In the broader society, entertainment is the new mode of education with its delivery of instant stimulation, excitement, gratification, and escape from the world of social and political responsibility while broader notions of education harness peoples' subjectivities to the narrow values of a market-driven society. In school, pedagogies of repression wage war on the critical and imaginative capacities of students. Under such circumstances, the disimagination machine represents a constellation of symbolic and institutional forces that attempts to shut down the possibility of critical thought and social agency.
The disimagination machine combines Orwell's notion of state terror through a culture of fear, violence and surveillance with, as Bill Moyers put it, Huxley's notion of"people genetically designed to be regimented into total social conformity and subservient to the group think of the one percent [who] could easily have walked right out of Huxley and straight into Roger Ailes' Fox News playbook or Rush Limbaugh's studio." There is more at stake here than limited political horizons, as David Graeber has suggested. What is also put up for grabs is the notion of subjectivity in a neoliberal age along with its deracinated view of agency and struggle.
The concept of disposability plays a central role in your book. Can you explain what it means, why it is new, and how it tends to manifest itself?

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