The Violence of Organized Forgetting. Henry A. Giroux
are the pedagogical technologies and practices at work that create the conditions for people to act against their own sense of dignity, agency, and collective possibilities? Progressives and others need to make education central to any viable sense of politics so as to make matters of memory, imagination, and consciousness central elements of what it means to be critical and engaged citizens.
The American public needs more than a show of outrage or endless demonstrations. It needs to develop a formative culture for producing a language of critique, possibility, and broad-based political change. Such a project is indispensable for developing an organized politics that speaks to a future that can secure a dignified life for all: living wages, safe housing, educational opportunities, a sustainable environment, and public support for the arts and other forms of cultural enrichment, particularly for young people. At stake here is a politics and vision that informs ongoing educational and political struggles to awaken the inhabitants of neoliberal societies to their current reality and what it means to be educated not only to think outside of a ruthless market-driven rationality but also to struggle for those values, hopes, modes of solidarity, power relations, and institutions that infuse democracy with a spirit of egalitarianism and economic and social justice.
The Violence of Organized Forgetting not only demonstrates the ways in which America is under siege by forms of political extremism but also explains how too many progressives are stuck in a discourse of foreclosure and disaster and instead need to develop what Stuart Hall called a “sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people see things.”13 This is a difficult task, but what we are seeing in cities around the world is the need for the confluence of new and indigenous forms of resistance, a new vision of politics, and a renewed hope in collective struggles and the development of broad-based organizations, all of which are central in the struggle for a substantive democracy. This is a challenge for young people and all those invested in the promise of a democracy to transform the meaning of politics through a commitment to economic justice and democratic social change.
The issues of who gets to define the future, own the nation’s wealth, shape the reach of state resources, control the global flow of goods and humans, and invest in institutions that educate an engaged and socially responsible citizenry have become largely invisible. And yet these are precisely the issues that must be confronted in order to address how matters of representation, education, economic justice, and politics are to be defined and fought over. The stories told by corporate liars and crooks do serious harm to the body politic, and the damage they cause together with the idiocy they reinforce are becoming more apparent as America becomes increasingly pliant to authoritarianism and the relentless ambient influences of manufactured fear and commercial entertainment that support it.
There is a need for social movements that invoke stories as a form of public memory, stories that have the potential to unsettle common sense, challenge the commonplace, and move communities to invest in their own sense of civic and collective agency. Such stories make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative and provide a different sense of how the world is narrated. These are moments of pedagogical and political grace.14 As Kristen Case argues: “There is difficulty, discomfort, even fear in such moments, which involve confrontations with what we thought we knew, like why people have mortgages and what ‘things’ are. These moments do not reflect a linear progress from ignorance to knowledge; instead they describe a step away from a complacent knowing into a new world in which, at least at first, everything is cloudy, nothing is quite clear.”15 She continues: “We cannot be a democracy if this power [to imagine otherwise] is allowed to become a luxury commodity.”16 If democracy is to once again inspire a populist politics, it is crucial to develop a number of social movements in which the stories told are never completed but are always open to reflection, capable of pushing ever further the boundaries of our collective imagination and struggles against injustice, wherever they might be. Only then will the stories that now cripple our imaginations, politics, and democracy be challenged and possibly overcome.
ONE
AMERICA’S DISIMAGINATION MACHINE
People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence.
—James Baldwin
America—a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced, but celebrated—has become amnesiac. The United States has degenerated into a social order that views critical thought as both a liability and a threat. Not only is this obvious in the proliferation of a vapid culture of celebrity, but it is also present in the prevailing discourses and policies of a range of politicians and anti-public intellectuals who believe that the legacy of the Enlightenment needs to be reversed. Politicians such as Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich along with talking heads such as Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Anne Coulter are not the problem. They are merely symptomatic of a much more disturbing assault on critical thought, if not rational thinking itself. The notion that education is central to producing a critically literate citizenry, which is indispensable to a democracy, is viewed in some conservative quarters as dangerous, if not treasonous. Under a neoliberal regime, the language of authority, power, and command is divorced from ethics, social responsibility, critical analysis, and social costs.
Today’s anti-public intellectuals are part of a disimagination machine that consolidates the power of the rich and supports the interconnected grid of military, surveillance, corporate, and academic structures by presenting the ideologies, institutions, and relations of the powerful as both commonsense and natural.1 For instance, the historical legacies of resistance to racism, militarism, privatization, and panoptical surveillance have long been forgotten in the current assumption that Americans now live in a democratic, post-racial society.2 The cheerleaders for neoliberalism work hard to normalize dominant institutions and relations of power through a vocabulary and public pedagogy that create market-driven subjects, modes of consciousness, and ways of understanding the world that promote accommodation, quietism, and passivity. As social protections and other foundations provided by the social contract come under attack and disappear, Americans are increasingly losing their capacity for connection, community, and a sense of civic engagement.
The Rise of the “Disimagination Machine”
Adapting Georges Didi-Huberman’s term “disimagination machine,” I argue that a politics of disimagination has emerged, in which stories, images, institutions, discourses, and other modes of representation are undermining our capacity to bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics, and collective resistance.3 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 short-circuit the ability of individuals to think critically, imagine the unimaginable, and engage in thoughtful and critical dialogue, or, put simply, to become critically engaged citizens of the world.
Examples of the “disimagination machine” abound. A few will suffice. For instance, the Texas State Board of Education and other conservative boards of education throughout the United States are rewriting American textbooks to promote and impose on America’s public school students what Katherine Stewart calls “a Christian nationalist version of U.S. history” in which Jesus is implored to “invade” public schools.4 In this version of history, the terms “human trafficking” and “slavery” are removed from textbooks and replaced with “Atlantic triangular trade;” Earth is merely 6,000 years old; and the Enlightenment is the enemy of education. Historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin are now deemed to have suspect religious views and “are ruthlessly demoted or purged altogether from the study program.”5 Currently, 46 percent of the American population believes in the creationist view of evolution and increasingly rejects scientific evidence, research, and rationality as either “academic” or irreligious.6
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