Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture. - book reviews

Criticism, Spring, 1997 by Jerry Herron

By Henry A. Giroux. New York: Routledge, 1994. Pp. xi 202. $52.50 cloth; $16.95 paper.

A great deal gets written, and said, these days about the "public intellectual," and whether or not such a thing, or person, can skill meaningfully exist, with the frequently stated corollary that if the fumes were better, so too would be the people who serve them. But is this really true, or is the whole so-called argument just another--perhaps more palatable--way of saying that "we" who make such claims don't like the intellectuals we've got, so rather than dignifying their presence with reasoned response, we'd prefer simply to define them out of existence? In other words, for the sake of a certain homebound comfort we would prefer not to do the intellectual work that comes too visibly to hand, so a pose of nostalgic know-nothingism (perhaps no pose at all) is more expedient.

In his new collection of essays, Henry Giroux returns to Adorno's injunction that "it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home" (147), and then offers a useful critique of the unawareness--regardless of how intentional--that informs much posturing about the question of intellectual work, and the institutional encounter with the "Other," which is the greatest public challenge now confronting America's academic middle class. Giroux's proximate text, in his discussion of intellectual homes, is the work of Paulo Freire, specifically Freire's pedagogy of "critical literacy" (141). Giroux differentiates between the locatedness of Gramsci's "organic intellectual" and the "homelessness" of Freire as a "border intellectual":

Of course, this is not meant to suggest that intellectuals have to go into

exile to take up Freire's work, but it does suggest that in becoming

border crossers, it is not uncommon for many of them to engage his

work as an act of bad faith. Refusing to negotiate or deconstruct the

borders that define their own politics of location . . . . [and] From the

comforting perspective of the colonizing gaze, such theorists often

appropriate Freire's work without engaging its historical specificity and

ongoing political project. (148)

This failure of engagement--or rather the argument against it--is key, and key to the concerns that animate not only the current volume, but Giroux's whole career: as scholar, teacher, public figure.

Henry A. Giroux is the Waterbury Chair Professor in Secondary Education at Pennsylvania State University; he is the author of numerous books and articles, and is well known as a public and impassioned presenter of his work. Disturbing Pleasures collects (in revision) pieces that first appeared in such journals as Cultural Studies, College Literature, The Review, of Education, and Cultural Critique. There are nine essays in all (one of which is co-authored with Roger I. Simon); each makes good on the subtitle, "learning popular culture." That is what Giroux is doing here: learning the popular culture that, after Adorno, is the "home" we must work critically not to be at home in; the home that Americans make for themselves with results that redound upon the rest of the world. The topics range from fashion advertising to Walt Disney, photography to the privatization of public education, academic cultural studies to Paulo Freire. The discussion of Freire is particularly valuable, not only as a meditation on the possibilities of the "border intellectual," but as a cautionary reminder of how not to appropriate Freire's frequently over-popularized work. In other discussions--of Benetton advertising, or popular films (Good Morning, Vietnam; Pretty Woman; Grand Canyon)-Giroux shows himself an able reader, and teacher, of popular culture; it is here most vividly that he makes his case for a "pedagogy of representation" (89), and the responsibility intellectuals bear--particularly ones who are publicly funded--to undertake it:

The challenge of a new cultural politics, one that takes popular and media

culture seriously, is as much a pedagogical challenge as it is a political

one. The issue for cultural workers is not merely to recognize the

importance of cultural texts such as Good Morning, Vietnam and Pretty Woman

in shaping social identities, but to address how representations are

constructed and taken up through social memories that are taught, learned,

mediated, and appropriated within particular institutional and discursive

formulations of power. (45)

Evident here, as throughout the book, is Giroux's commitment--for him as passionate as it is necessary--to the crucial relation between institutional work and public life: the one impossible in any meaningful sense without the other.

This commitment has led him more than once into conflicts, from which he has never shrunk; and it leads him here, inevitably, into a consideration of "cultural studies," which is the stage on which a great deal of academic politics and presumption get publicly acted out. "I want to . . . argue," Giroux writes,

that cultural studies is skill too rigidly tied to the modernist academic