REVIEW ESSAY

A CRITICAL PEDAGOGY OF POPULAR CULTURE?

C A M E R O N R I C H A R D S

Queensland University of Technology

Giroux, Henry (1994) Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture, Routledge, New York/London, 202 pages, ISBN 0-415-90901-5 (paperback), AUD$32.95. Giroux, Henry and McLaren, Peter (1994) Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies, Routledge, New York/London, 280 pages, ISBN 0- 415-90901-5 (paperback), AUD$32.95.

Henry Giroux's rationale for attempting to relate critical pedagogy and an influential model of cultural studies is the following claim made in the preface to Disturbing Pleasures: 'Though I do not wish to romanticise popular culture, it is precisely in its diverse spaces and spheres that most of the education that really matters today is taking place on a global scale'. While many teachers might question what Giroux means exactly by 'education that really matters', probably most would accept that the seductive effects of popular culture do inevitably represent a challenge to their pedagogical practices, and do increasingly encroach into the classroom in terms of influencing the identities and interests of students of all ages. So does Giroux's attempt to marry critical pedagogy and cultural studies offer the average teacher a productive way or framework of working with popular culture rather than against it? Can they still be part of an 'education that really matters' ?

After reading the preface I was hopeful that Giroux might avoid the contradiction which it seems to me that the most influential versions of cultural studies tend to fall into; that is, no longer privileging 'high' cultural forms such as canonical literary texts, but nevertheless still implicitly reinforcing privileged condescension towards the mass or populist appeal of popular cultural forms and practices. Admitting that the book was inspired by his own experiences, Giroux briefly describes in the preface his personal journey to rediscover ambivalent

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youthful memories of popular street culture in the working-class neighbourhood of Providence, Rhode Island. As Giroux recalls it, such memories were contradicted, denied and repressed by the imperatives of schooling, by his own escape into 'a middle class world' after winning a college scholarship. Giroux's symbolic as well as physical 'return' thus involved a renewed recognition that pedagogy is not so much a discipline but about the creation of a public sphere of schooling which embraces popular culture, which is grounded in 'the territory where pleasure, knowledge, and desire circulate' (Disturbing Pleasures, pp. ix- xi). However, the way in which popular culture functions as a language and not just an economy of desire provides a central issue for considering Giroux's efforts to develop a critical pedagogy of cultural studies.

The theory of pedagogy connected to popular culture in Part 2 of Disturbing Pleasures (the framework also of Between Borders) is based on studies in Part 1 which merely deconstruct cultural texts and make no allowance for the often diverse and conflicting responses to such texts. Whilst pedagogy is seen as inevitably extended into a postmodernist realm and politics of representation (i.e. a global public sphere of electronic media in which politics do not exist outside of representation), Giroux portrays this 'post-Fordist' imperative of consumerism as a monolithic domain and status quo that teachers and their students can only hope to resist by critically distancing in a way that is ultimately quite arbitrary. The photographic image defines the kind of politics of cultural representation by which Giroux would reconceptualise critical practice in the classroom--a poststructuralist politics and 'visual' rhetoric of centre-margin differences. Thus, mass advertising is seen as a key site of a politics and pedagogy of representation.

As exercises in deconstruction the chapters which comprise Part 1 of Disturbing Pleasures are exemplary. In Chapter One, Giroux powerfully deconstructs several Bennetton advertisements that use seductive and political images of ostensible social harmony to sell commodities, yet simultaneously reinforce ideological codes of domination. Isolated from social and historical contexts by a 'hyper real' media, such images of cultural pluralism are conceived to represent spectacles that privatise individual responses to social events. In other words, according to Giroux, these images alienate individuals at the same time providing an illusion of community and agency. This is similarly the case with popular films which, as Giroux points out, serve to represent collective memories and histories. In Chapter Two, the corporate strategies of Disney films are seen as representing a 'politics of forgetting' through a contradictory mixture of innocence, nostalgia and desire. Giroux interprets implicit ideologies of sexism, racism, nationalism and imperialism within such

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'innocent' movies made by the Disney subsidiary Touchstone Films as Good Morning Vietnam and Pretty Woman..

In a separate chapter significantly titled 'White Utopias and Nightmare Realities', Giroux's reading of the film Grand Canyon constitutes his most instructive interpretation of not only American but postmodernist popular culture generally (one which also resembles various 'cultural studies' interpretations of contemporary Australian culture). Giroux argues that this film's attempt to represent white liberal efforts to confront and overcome racial, ethnic, and class differences inevitably reinforces the rigid binaries of a politics of difference as 'an empty pluralism'. Put another way, Giroux believes that despite messages of tolerance, liberalism and multicultural diversity, American society is becoming increasingly racist in a subtle way. He thus views popular culture as a kind of fundamental opposition between a hegemonic public centre that is 'white, male and privileged' at one pole, and the marginal discourses of women, blacks, and migrants at the other. In this context, the texts of mass culture are held to inevitably reinforce this oppositional politics of difference. Another version of this chapter is included as Giroux's own contribution to the collected essays of Between Borders. In this version Giroux goes further to identify 'the new racism' as the main target and justification for a critical pedagogy of popular culture.

So where does the organising focus of popular culture as a language of desire fit into Giroux's scheme? Interspersed between the sections of Between Borders which deal with the relation between critical pedagogy and popular cultures in such terms as racism, multiculturalism, post-colonialism and nationalism is a section that focuses on this issue, bell hooks' paper passionately argues that pedagogy needs to be grounded in desire in the sense of encouraging life- affirming enthusiasm for teaching and learning, hooks suggests that a critical pedagogy which does not does this merely reinforces old mind/body, nature/culture binaries. In short, she suggests a fundamental distinction between hierarchical and corrupting strategies of desire on one hand, and an interactive kind of strategy which celebrates difference on the other.

Michael Dyson's paper goes further than hooks' to discuss a pedagogy of desire. It focuses on the basketballer Michael Jordan as a public p~lagogue with cultural capital. Jordan is identified as ambivalently representing a contemporary 'culture of consumption' in depoliticised contexts on one hand, but also possibilities for cross-cultural dialogue and the 'meaning of human possibility' (or agency) on the other, which ultimately appropriately the latter. Dyson challenges a merely pessimistic reading of popular culture to recognise the transformative potentials of a public pedagogy of desire. Similarly, Ava Collins' paper challenges the cultural studies model of television audiences which merely opposes naive readings rooted in basic passions and pleasures with privileged

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criticism that ironically derides the bad taste of most viewers. She, like Dyson, proposes a framework of response which does not oppose critical reflection and popular culture as a language of desire, which does not reduce popular culture to terms of either mass culture or mere populism.

These papers imply a challenge to the way Giroux locates a critical pedagogy of popular culture in terms of knowledge arbitrarily defined by a politics of power relations. Dyson, hooks and Collins indicate how popular culture ambivalently deploys a language of desire in a productive sense that is not ultimately reducible to terms of a manipulated mass consumerism or a politics of difference as Giroux seems to assume. They also suggest that the interpretation of cultural texts is a naive or popular activity in which readers are able to bring their own ambivalent personal strategies as well as different social, cultural, and situational contexts into the act of reception--to potentially transform any text, and not remain determined by it. Giroux's readings of cultural texts can thus be challenged in terms of how, say, popular films do serve irreducible basic needs of identification (even when their basic strategy may be to distort, manipulate and seduce), and do have a certain autonomy in being open to interpretation.

Moreover, Giroux's readings might be also challenged in the context of how a critical reading merely mirrors--in such terms as the model of the photographic image--the very politics of difference or centre-margin relations projected by the critical reader. Such critical readings as Giroux makes of the film Grand Canyon can ignore very easily the implicit transformations and 'dialogue' (i.e. between Self and Other, Us and Them) which inform the rhetorical lucanae of popular culture, which--as an interactive language of desire--do potentially transform fixed power relations. The key assumption informing Giroux's reading of Grand Canyon seems to be that it is not possible to represent the encounter with 'otherness' by people who ostensibly represent the social centre without implicitly reinforcing a politics of difference. Yet, on the other hand, when insisting that racial and other cultural differences provide a critical focus for 'radicals, minorities and others' (Disturbing Pleasures, p. 78) to press for political, social, and educational reforms in opposition to stereotypical 'conservative, racist whites', Giroux seems to underestimate the extent to which this strategy of polarisation does produce a backlash by groups (white middle- class males in particular) who feel threatened and themselves marginalised in the public sphere. In short, Giroux needs to consider the extent to which such a strategy often does become self-fulfilling prophecy or reinforces a victim mentality.

Giroux's own reading of popular cultural texts in Part 2 of Disturbing Pleasures provide a model of how he develops a critical pedagogy of representation can be developed and applied to classrooms. He suggests a re-

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ordering of the curriculum using popular texts to 'break down student resistance, promote collaborative engagement and destabilize fixed notions of what constitutes valuable social knowledge' (p. 121). This is proposed in a context that, like other 'cultural workers', teachers must learn to recognise how they themselves are inscribed in relations of power. They must 'unlearn' such discourses and ideologies of dominance in order to be able to teach their own students to be aware of the dynamics of power in the classroom and beyond, to recognise a politics of difference, and to deconstruct the texts of popular culture. Thus, a key focus of 'the cultural studies classroom' is on teachers giving up their traditional authority and teaching students to 'de-centre authority'(p. 123). Accordingly, Giroux develops a number of useful strategies for approaching the texts of popular culture in terms of a critical pedagogy: for instance, through cross-disciplinary studies, through explorations of the relations between language and experience in terms of a struggle for meaning, and above all by encouraging students to be actively self-reflective or critical about their own social and cultural contexts and actions.

My problem with Giroux's attempts to frame this as a critical pedagogy in both books has to do with his constant claims that the ability to critically 'theorise' will in itself empower students to be active agents of popular culture. In his chapter 'The Turn to Theory' (Disturbing Pleasures), Giroux argues that a critical pedagogy overcomes the a historical and decontextualising tendencies of poststructuralism and cultural studies by locating students as 'agents within rather than outside historical struggles'. It seems to me this prescription is negated in Giroux's work by a confusion between personal and social agency, that it tends to only happen in theory and not in practice, and that it ironically turns out to be a naive use of critical theory.

This contradiction in Giroux's pedagogical methodology, I would suggest, reflects an implicitly privileged and elitist framing of popular culture. Moreover, it naively offers a critical model developed at a tertiary level (Giroux does mention that the students he trialled this method with were generally aged between 25 and 60; Disturbing Pleasures, p. 133) as one appropriate for younger students. This is indicated by how Giroux would get students to approach popular cultural texts. He would have them wholly deconstruct (and not just provisionally destabilise) the meanings of such texts in terms of hegemonic power relations, ignoring the ambivalence of how they are also represented as a language of desire. It is only after this stage he would suggest that they develop 'counter- narratives that invoke communities of memory.., in which new visions, spaces, desires, and discourses can be developed' (Disturbing Pleasures, p. 105). However, by arbitrarily deconstructing cultural texts and developing oppositional 'counter-narratives' in a critical vacuum, the students also deconstruct popular

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cultural contexts. In other words, they will therefore tend to locate themselves in a privileged and pessimistic relation to the mass distortions and hegemonic power relations of popular culture.

Giroux thus goes on to unconvincingly talk about 'the production of knowledge, subjectivity and agency' in terms of a utopian pedagogy of hope (Disturbing Pleasures, pp. 105, 127-129). In doing so, however, he does not distinguish between such a pedagogy as wishful thinking or mere escapism on one hand, and as a strategy to take control of either personal or collective agency and destiny on the other. Although he does attempt to frame his model of pedagogy in terms of the latter strategy, he nevertheless seems to reinforce the predicament of the former kind of utopian perspective.

One reason why Giroux frames popular culture in this way is that, like Nancy Fraser in her Between Borders paper, he directly equates it with a 'public sphere' of oppositional discourses and dominance relations in which democracy is only possible as a utopian discourse. Although he ostensibly embraces a postmodernist framework of diversity and change, he nevertheless frames this in terms of the very kinds of categories (such as the opposition between radicals and conservatives) such a framework is held by many theorists to subvert. He holds on to a privileged Enlightenment conception of democracy as the model as well as goal of a critical pedagogical practice, even if he does regard this as an impossible dream. This contrasts with Roger Simon's view of democracy as a productive tension between popular memories and strategies of opening up such memories to contestation (Between Borders, p. 133).

Yet if Giroux understood culture rather as the typical patterns of individual and collective activity open to transformation then he might also recognise that it is the ambivalent functions of desire which mobilize any kind of agency---either individually or collectively, naively or critically. What is required, it may be suggested, is a framework for relating critical pedagogy to the study of popular culture in terms of how such functions also transform the very structures of power which seduce and exploit this, and the very structures of knowledge which manipulate and distort it. As a key motive for developing a critical pedagogy in the classroom, the desire for social justice needs to be framed in terms of students being able to distinguish between the use and abuse of popular cultural forms rather than just in terms of a politics of difference.

This can be further discussed in light of Giroux's provocative suggestion that as cultural workers teachers can also apply a critical pedagogy in their classrooms as 'border intellectuals'. Giroux's use of the 'border' metaphor is borrowed from Abdul Janmohamed (whose discussion of Freire's critical pedagogy in these terms is included in Between Borders). This metaphor is based on the basic poststructuralist opposition between identity and difference and

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describes this critical state of alienation or distancing (i.e. a threshold of oppositional delineation between centre and margins, home and away, us and them) as a permanent condition of postmodernist culture as well as an arbitrary pedagogy. Giroux suggests that teachers might construct their classrooms as postmodernist borderlands where their students might also become 'border crossers' and where 'hybridised identities might emerge'. Such a critical pedagogy would teach students to identify and resist hegemonic power relations, and only then to hope and dream about achieving what he identifies as 'the central issue of modern politics and life in the United States - the goal of achieving a multicultural and multi-racial democracy' (Disturbing Pleasures, p. 140).

Many of the contributors to Between Borders are aware of the contradictions that can be involved in developing a critical pedagogy in terms of the study of popular culture. Indeed, when arguing for the relevance of this in the book's introduction, Lawrence Grossberg identifies the implicit elitism that inadvertently informs a number of 'progressive pedagogical practices' as a basic model of domination and resistance. In an insightful discussion of the relation between pedagogy, politics and popular culture, Grossberg suggests a critical pedagogy in which teachers use their authority to challenge their students and mobilise their 'memories, fantasies, and desires' (p. 20).

Chandra Mohanty's paper discusses the dilemma of applying a critical pedagogy to cultural studies in terms of a reversal that confronts many third world academics and teachers in America. They can be uncritically and tokenly received as the authoritative voice of not only 'the Other' but also an encounter with 'the Other'. Hence, black students can also be constructed as the real 'knowers' in such a critical pedagogy classroom, whilst white students are conversely located as marginal observers 'with no responsibility to contribute and/or with nothing valuable to contribute' (p.154). Similarly, Michelle Wallace identifies how, in contemporary debates over multiculturalism, white academics often tend to 'theorise nativist data' and solicit 'token third world intellectuals' to speak about issues of racism and multiculturalism (ie. the problem of the 'other') for them. Citing Fanon's psychoanalytic analysis of colonialism, she argues that individual identities and desires, the agency of specific 'bodies', should not ultimately be reduced to terms of centre-margin cultural stereotyping (pp. 184- 185). Also adapting Fanon's model of 'decolonisation as learning', Kenneth Mostern argues in his paper that the narratives of popular national cultures can be productively used by intellectuals to develop a critical pedagogy.

Taking his cue from Wallace, Giroux's co-editor Peter McLaren also discusses the dilemma of postmodernist critique in relation to the debate over multiculturalism. However, he identifies the problematic opposition between

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ludic and resistance postmodernism in similar terms to how Giroux frames cultural forces of desire and power. Whilst advocating--with not a great deal of conviction in this particular paper--a resistance postmodernism, McLaren's paper also seems to be secretly fascinated with a ludic strategy that he ostensibly opposes. Not only does he appear to flirt with the seductive possibilities of popular culture (as if the writing of this paper was an aesthetic performance or clever language-game), but also--at timesmthose of a developing critical pedagogy.

But to be aware of such contradictions is not sufficient to avoid them, especially when attempting to develop a substantial model of pedagogical practice (which I think, ultimately, that both McLaren and Giroux are genuinely committed to achieving). In Disturbing Pleasures Giroux convincingly argues that any pedagogical practice is inevitably informed by the politics of popular culture. As he points out, not only teachers but their students should be approached as cultural workers. My concern has been with how he would reconcile this with a view of teachers as public intellectuals, with a view of popular culture as a public sphere determined by a politics of difference. Giroux develops the connection between pedagogy and popular culture within a framework which ultimately, it seems to me, reinforces the very oppositions and situations it purports to challenge. It promotes not only an arbitrary and privileged notion of critical practice, but an implicitly elitist condescension towards the texts and contextual patterns of popular culture.

In sum, Giroux's critical pedagogy of popular culture seems to ignore how popular culture might be productively and optimistically utilized in the classroom to motivate student learning in general as well as the basis for developing a critical pedagogy. Students need to understand that cultural texts do often function in contradictory ways and thus learn to distinguish between their use and abuse by different people in different contexts rather than just being able to identify the representation of a politics of difference. Despite mentioning in the preface how his own youthful dreams and desires were focused on basketball, Giroux's own model of pedagogical practice does not apply a framework which is able to appreciate the ambivalent ways that Michael Jordan, say, functions in the public sphere as a popular cultural pedagogue.

Nevertheless, both Disturbing Pleasures and Between Borders can be recommended for other reasons. Whatever its limitations and self-contradictions, Giroux's work does make a productive contribution to education in these books in terms of challenging old preconceptions, identifying new intersections of thought, and generally providing a focus for recognising that teachers need to consider ways of utilizing popular culture in the classroom rather than the increasingly futile tactic of just ignoring it. Disturbing Pleasures is written in an

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accessible style and structure which connects many different theories and discourses as well as demonstrating an exemplary practice of 'deconstructive' critical thought. The way in which Giroux is a productive focus of intersecting debates and critical inquiry, and not just an obligatory or pretentious reference (although there is some evidence of that as well), is presumably indicated by the extent to which his work is quoted by the other contributors to Between Borders.