giroux - educated hope in an age of privatized visions

8/12/2019 Giroux - Educated Hope in an Age of Privatized Visions

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Educated Hope in an

Ageof Privatized Visions

HenryA. GirouxPenn State University

Questions of agency and hope are inseparable from questions of politicsand social struggle.As the vast majority of citizens become detached frompublic forums that nourish social critique, agency not only becomes a mock-ery of itself, it is replaced by market-based choices in which private satisfac-

tions replace social responsibilities and biographic solutions become asubstitute for systemic change.As the worldly space of criticism is undercutby the absence of public spheres that encourage the exchange of informa-tion, opinion, and criticism, the horizons of a substantive democracy disap-pear against the growing isolation and depoliticization that marks the lossof a politically guaranteed public realm in which autonomy, political partic-ipation, and engaged citizenship make their appearance. Drawing on thework of Cornelius Castoriadis, the author attempts to address the currentcrisis of meaning, political agency, and pedagogy and develop a culturalpolitics that links the notion of educated hope to the promise of a radicaldemocracy.

As to power-it sails away from the street and the market-place, from assembly halls andparliaments, local and national governments, and beyond the reach of citizens control,into the exterritoriality of electronic networks. Its strategic principles are nowadaysescape, avoidance, disengagement and invisibility.

-Bauman (2001a, p. 107)

There is a growing sense in the popular imagination that citizen involve-

ment, social planning, and civic engagement are becoming irrelevant in a soci-ety in which the public sphere is aggressively dismantled and important socialissues are trivialized in mainstream media. Those traditional, if not imagined,public spheres in which people could exchange ideas, debate, and shape theconditions that structured their everyday lives increasingly appear to have littlerelevance or political importance. Emptied of any substantial content, democ-racy appears imperiled as individuals are unable to translate their privately suf-fered misery into public concerns and collective action. The prevailing modesofdomination have been reversed.As Zygmunt Bauman (2001 a) pointed out,the public no longer dominates the private: &dquo;The opposite is the case: it is the

AuthorsNote: This piece draws some of its analysis frommyPublic Spaces, Private Lives: Beyond the Cul-ture of Cynicism (2001).

Cultural StudiesH Cnticat Methodologies, Volume 2 Number 1, 2002 93-112

2002 Sage Publications


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private that colonizes the public space, squeezing out and chasing away every-thing which cannot be fully, without residue, translated into the vocabulary ofprivate interests and pursuits&dquo; (p. 107).As the idea of the public is dissolved

into constituencies and the concept of public interest disintegrates into talkabout privatization and personal scandals of public figures, the language ofcommonality, shared values, a just society, and public goods are severed fromthe imperatives of a critical and substantive democracy (Wolin, 2000, p. 10).Civic engagementand political agency now appear impotent, and public valuesare rendered invisible in light of the growing power of multinational corpora-tions to privatize public space and disconnect power from issues of equity,social justice, and civic responsibility (McChesney, 1999).As democratic pub-lic spheres are either eliminated or commercialized, agency is no longer linkedto challenging and producing a crisis in established power.As the vast majorityof citizens become detached from public forums that nourish social critique,agency not only becomes a mockery of itself, it is replaced by market-basedchoices in which private satisfactions replace social responsibilities and bio-graphic solutions become a substitute for systemic change (Beck, 1992,p. 137).As the worldly space of criticism is undercut by the absence of publicspheres that encourage the exchange of information, opinion, and criticism,the horizons of a substantive democracy disappear against the growing isola-tion and

depoliticizationthat marks the loss of a

politically guaranteed publicrealm in which autonomy, political participation, and engaged citizenshipmake their appearance (Brenkman, 2000, pp. 124-125).As Margaret Kohn

(2001) pointed out, &dquo;Public sidewalks and streets are practically the onlyremaining available sites for unscriptedpolitical activity&dquo; (p. 71 ). Few sites nowexist &dquo;that allow people to talk back, to ask a question, to tell a story, to questiona premise&dquo; (p. 71). Rapidly disappearing are those public spaces in which peo-ple meet face-to-face, removed from the ravages of a market logic that under-mines the ability to communicate through a language capable of defendingvital institutions as a public good. One consequence is that political exhaustionand impoverished intellectual visions are fed by the increasingly popularassumption that there are no alternatives to the present state of affairs

(Bauman, 2001 a; Boggs, 2000; Jacoby, 1999). Within the increasingcorporatization of everyday life, market values replace social values and peopleappear more and more willing to retreat into the safe, privatized enclaves of thefamily, religion, and consumption.At the same time, power is removed frompolitics to the degree that it has become global and exterritorial; power nowflows, escaping from and defying the reach of traditional centers ofpolitics thatare nation-based and local. The space ofpower now appears beyond the reach

of governments and, as a result, nations and citizens are increasingly removed as

political agents with regard to the effect that multinational corporations haveon their daily lives (Bauman, 2001 a, p. 203). Once again, the result is not onlysilence and indifference, but the elimination of those public spaces that revealthe rough edges of social order, disrupt consensus, and point to the need for


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modes ofeducation that link learning to the conditions necessary for develop-ing democratic forms of political agency and civic struggle (Giroux, 2001).As those public spaces that offer forums for debating norms, critically

engaging ideas, making private issues public, and evaluating judgments disap-pear under the juggernaut of neoliberal policies, it becomes crucial for progres-sives to raise fundamental questions about what it means to revitalize a politicsand ethics that takes seriously &dquo;such values as citizen participation, the publicgood, political obligation, social governance, and community&dquo; (Boggs, 2000,p. ix).A renewed and vibrant politics would take on the challenge of creatingthe necessary discourses for investing in public life and for keeping opendemocracy as a site ofpermanent struggle and ongoing possibility &dquo;where thefullest human experiences-social, intellectual, political-could best be real-ized&dquo; (Boggs, 2000, p. 95). The call for a revitalized politics and civic con-sciousness grounded in a thriving democratic society substantively challengesthe dystopian practices of neoliberalism-with its all-consuming emphasis onmarket relations, commercialization, privatization, and the creation of a

worldwide economy ofpart-time workers-against its utopian promises. Suchan intervention confronts progressives with the problem as well as challenge of

developing those atrophied public spheres-such as the media, higher educa-tion, electronic communities, and other cultural sites-that provide the condi-

tions for creating citizenswhoare

capable of exercising their freedoms, compe-tent to question the basic assumptions that govern political life, and skilledenough to participate in effectively shaping the basic social, political, and eco-nomic orders that govern their lives. Neither homogeneous nor nostalgic, thepublic sphere points to a plurality of institutions, sites, and spaces (Fraser,1990) in which people not only talk, debate, and reassess the political, moral,and cultural dimensions of publicness but also develop processes of learningand persuasion as a way of enacting new social identities and altering &dquo;the verystructure of participation and the very horizon of discussion and debate&dquo;

(Brenkman, 1995, p. 7).As the promise of a radical democracy along with social, economic, and

racial justice recedes from public memory, unfettered brutal self-interestscom-bine with retrograde social policies to make security a top domestic priority.One consequence is that all levels of government are being hollowed out astheir policing functions increasingly overpower and mediate their diminishingsocial functions. Reduced to dismantling the gains of the welfare state and con-

structing policies that now criminalize social problems and prioritize penalmethods over social investments, government is now discounted as a means of

addressing basic, economic, educational, environmental, and social problems(Parenti, 1999). Zero-tolerance policies link the public schools to the prisonsystems as both substitute education, amelioration, and compassion for man-

datory intolerance and a culture of regulation and punishment. The police,courts, and other disciplinary agencies increasingly become the main forcesused to address social problems and implement public policies (Giroux, 2001 ).


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Labeled by neoliberals and right-wing politicians as the enemy of freedom(except when it aids big business), government is discounted as a guardian ofthe public interests (Bourdieu, 1998). Disparaged as a provider of essential ser-

vices and for assuming a responsibility for providing crucial safety nets for theless fortunate, government bears no obligation for either the poor and disposedor the collective future of our children. Public goods are now disparaged in thename of privatization, and those public forums inwhich association and debatethrive cease to resonate as sites ofutopian possibility, as fundamental spaces forhowwe reactivate our political sensibilities and conceive of ourselves as criticalcitizens, engaged public intellectuals, and social agents. The growing lack of

justice and equity inAmerican society rises proportionately to the lackofpolit-ical imagination and collective hope (Unger, 1998;

Unger& West, 1998). We

live at a time when the forces and advocates of hyper capitalism and the market-place undermine all attempts to revive the culture of politics as an ethicalresponse to the demise of democratic public life. In fact, they aggressivelywagewar against the very possibility of creating noncommodified public spheresandforums that provide the conditions for connecting critical education to social

change, political agency to the defense of public goods, and intellectual cour-

age with the refusal to surrender knowledge to the highest bidder. Understoodas both a set of economic policies and an impoverished notion of citizenship,

hypercapitalismrepresentsnot

justa

series of market-drivenprograms but alsoa coherent set of cultural, political, and educational practices.

Rather than believe the fraudulent, self-serving hegemonic assumption thatdemocracy and capitalism are the same or that politics as a site of contestation,critical exchange, and engagement is in a state of terminal arrest, it is crucialthat progressives respond with a renewed effort to merge politics and ethicswith a revitalized sense of the importance ofproviding the conditionsfor formsof critical citizenship and civic education that provide the knowledge, skills,and experiences to produce democratic political agents. In part, this would

demand engaging the alleged death ofpolitics argument as not only symptom-atic ofthe crisis ofdemocracy but also as part ofthe more specific crisis of vision,

meaning, education, and agency that disconnects public values and ethics fromthe very sphere ofpolitics. Politics devoid of a radical vision often degeneratesinto either cynicism or appropriates a view ofpower that appears to be equatedonly with domination. Some social theorists such as Tony Bennett (1998), IanHunter (1994), and Todd Gitlin (1997) made the plunge into forms ofpoliti-cal cynicism easier by suggesting that any attempt to change society through acultural

politicsthat links the

pedagogicaland the

politicalwill simply aug-

ment the power of the dominant social order. Lost from such accounts is the

recognition that democracy has to be struggled over-even in the face ofa most

appalling crisis ofpolitical agency. Within this discourse, little attention is paidto the fact that the struggle over politics, power, and democracy is inextricablylinked to creating public spheres where individualscan be educated as politicalagents equipped with the skills, capacities, and knowledge they need not only


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to actually perform as autonomous political agents, but also to believe thatsuch struggles are worth taking up. The struggle over politics, in this instance,is linked to pedagogical interventions aimed at subverting dominant forms of

signification to generate a renewed sense of agency and a critical subversion ofpower itself.Agencynow becomes the site through which, as Judith Butler haspointed out in another context, power is not transcended but reworked,

replayed, and restaged in productive ways (cited in Olson & Worsham, 2000,p. 741). Central to my argument is the assumption that politics is not simplyabout power, but also, as Cornelius Castoriadis (1996a) pointed out, &dquo;has to dowith political judgements and value choices&dquo; (p. 8), indicating that questionsof civic education-learning how to become a skilled citizen-are central toboth the

struggleover

political agencyand

democracyitself.

Finally,there is the

widespread refusal among many progressives and critical theorists to recognizethat the issue of civic education-with its emphasis on critical thinking, bridg-ing the gap between learningand everyday life, understanding the connectionbetween power and knowledge, and using the resources of history to extenddemocratic rights and identities-is not only the foundation for expandingand enabling political agency, but that such education takes place across a widevariety of public spheres, mediated through the very force of culture itself.

There is more at stake here than recognizing the limits and social costs of a

neoliberal philosophy that reduces all relationships to the exchange of goodsand money; there is also the responsibility on the part of critical intellectualsand other activists to rethink the nature of the public and how new forms ofsocial citizenship and civic education that have a purchase on peoples everydaylives and struggles might be expressed through a wide range of institutions andspheres. I believe that intellectuals and other cultural workers bear an enor-mous responsibility in opposing neoliberalism by bringing democratic politi-cal culture back to life. This is not meant to suggest that before neoliberalisms

current onslaught on all things public that liberal democratic culture encour-

aged widespread critical thinking and inclusive debate-an argument thatallows any appeal to democracy to be dismissed as nostalgic.Although liberaldemocracy offers an important discourse around issues of &dquo;rights, freedoms,participation, self-rule, and citizenship,&dquo; it has been mediated historicallythrough the &dquo;damaged and burdened tradition&dquo; of racial and gender exclusionsand a formalistic, ritualized democracy that substituted the swindle for the

promise of democratic participation (Brenkman, 2000, p. 123).At the same

time, liberal and republican traditions of Western democratic thought have

givenrise to forms of social and

politicalcriticism that at least contained a &dquo;ref-

erent&dquo; for addressing the deep gap between the promise ofa radical democracyand the existing reality. With the rise of neoliberalism, referents for imaginingeven aweak democracy or, for that matter, understanding the tensions between

capitalism and democracy (which animated political discourse for the first halfof the 20th century) appear to be overwhelmed by market discourses, identi-

ties, and practices on one hand, or a corrosive cynicism on the other hand.


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Democracy has now been reduced to a metaphor for the alleged &dquo;free&dquo; market.It is not that a genuine democratic public space once existed in some ideal formand has now been corrupted by the values ofthe market, but that these demo-

cratic public spheres, even in limited forms, seem to no longer be animatingconcepts for making visible the contradiction and tension between the realityof existing democracy and the promise of a more fully realized, substantivedemocracy (Unger, 1998).

Part of the challenge of creating a radical democracy suggests constructingnew locations of struggle, vocabularies, and subject positions that allow peoplein a wide variety ofpublic spheres to become more than they are now, to ques-tion what it is they have become within existing institutional and social forma-tions and, as Chantal Mouffe pointed out, &dquo;to give some thought to their expe-riences so that they can transform their relations of subordination and

oppression&dquo; (cited in Olson & Worsham, 1999, p. 178). In part, this impliesresisting the attack on existing public spheres such as the public schools while

simultaneously creating new spaces in clubs, neighborhoods, bookstores,schools, cyberspace, and other locationswhere dialogue and critical exchangesbecome possible to create the pedagogical and political conditions for individ-ual resistance and active social movements.

In spite of the urgency ofthe current historical moment heavilyweighted bythe

full-fledgedattack on democratic

publiclife

being waged bythe

right-wingBush administration, progressives must avoid at all costs crude antitheoreticalcalls to action. More than ever, progressives need to appropriate scholarly andpopular sources and use theory as a critical resource to name particular prob-lems and make connections between the political and the cultural-to breakwhat Homi Bhabha has called &dquo;the continuity and the consensus ofcommonsense&dquo; (cited in Olson & Worsham, 1998, p. 11).As a resource, theorybecomes

important as a way of critically engaging and mapping the crucial relations

among language, texts, everyday life, and structures of power as part of a

broader effort to understand the conditions, contexts, and strategies of strugglethat will lead to social transformation. I am suggesting that the tools oftheoryemerge out of the intersection of the past and present and respond to and are

shaped by the conditions at hand. Theory, in this instance, addresses the chal-

lenge of connecting the world ofthe symbolic, discursive, and representationalto the social gravity and force ofeveryday issues rooted in material relations of

power. If theory is to escape from its most retrograde academic uses, it mustavoid any form of theoreticism-an indulgence in which the production oftheoretical discourse becomes an end in itself, an expression of languageremoved from the possibility of challenging strategies of domination. Ratherthan treating theory as a closed circuit, it must be mined critically to performthe bridging work between intellectual debates and public issues; at best, the-

ory should provide the knowledge and tools to connect concrete academicissues with broader public debates, opening up possibilities for new approachesand ways to address social problems and social reforms. To mobilize power as a


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constructive cultural and political force, theory should not be used by academ-ics simply to incorporate knowledge into specialized disciplines or be reducedto a methodology for reading texts. For theory to connect learning to social

change and knowledge to power, it must acknowledge and contest the presenceand manifestation ofknowledge and power in public life, particularly as bothfunction interrelatedly either to expand or close down democratic relations andpractices.

The overriding political project at issue here is one that suggests that pro-gressives produce new theoretical tools-a new vocabulary and set of concep-tual resources-for linking theory, critique, education, and the discourse ofpossibility to the demands ofa more fully realized democracy. In part, such aproject points to constructing both a new vocabulary for connecting what weread to howwe engage in global movements for social change while recognizingthat simply invoking the relationship between theory and practice, critiqueand social action is not enough.Any attempt to give new life to a substantivedemocratic politics must also address how people learn to be political agents,what kind of educational work is necessary withinwhat kind ofpublic spaces toenable people to use their full intellectual resources and capacities to provide a

profound critique of existing institutions and struggle to create, as Stuart Hallput it, &dquo;What would be a good life or a better kind of life for the majority of peo-

ple&dquo; (cited in Terry, 1997, p. 55). Bauman (200 1 b) added to the gravity of sucha political project by calling for progressives to fully address the &dquo;hard currencyof human suffering,&dquo; to undertake an ethical activism whose taskwas &dquo;to cry atthe wolves, not to run with them ... to count human costs, alert others to them,arouse consciences to resist them, to think of alternatives, less costly, otherwaysof living together&dquo; (p. 343). One challenge facing progressives at the presenttime is that we need to understand more fullywhy the tools we used in the pastoften feel awkward in the present, more times than not failing to respond toproblems now facing the United States and other parts of the globe. More spe-cifically, we need to understand the inability of existing critical discourses tobridge the gap between how the society represents itselfand how and why indi-viduals fail to understand and critically engage such representations to inter-vene in the oppressive social relationships they often legitimate. Such forms ofintervention are complicated by the pressing requirement to construct politicsas a mode of intervention that runs counter to the natural order of things, buton a scale in which individual empowerment is viewed as inseparable frombroader social and political transformations. Intervention in this sense is com-

plicated bya dialectical

understandingof the

relationshipbetween local

changeand global structures as well as the imperative to view public engagementwithin a global notion of social transformation (Dirlik, 2000).

The growing attack on all aspects ofthe democratic public sphere inAmeri-can society may say less about the reputed apathy of the populace than it mightabout the bankruptcy ofolder political vocabularies and the need for new lan-

guages and visions for clarifying our intellectual, ethical, and political projects,


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especially as they work to reabsorb questions of agency, ethics, and meaningback into politics and public life.Along these lines, Sheldon Wolin (2000) hasrecently argued that we need to rethink the loss of political agency and how it

affects the possibility for opening up democratic public life. Wolin pointed tothe need for progressives, theorists, and critical educators to resurrect and raise

questions about &dquo;what survives of the defeated, the indigestible, the unassimilated,the cross-grained, the not wholly obsolete

&dquo;

(p. 4). He argued that &dquo;something ismissing&dquo; in an age of manufactured politics and pseudo-publics cateringalmost exclusively to desires and drives produced by the commercial hysteria ofthe market. What is missing are languages, movements, and visions that eitherrefuse to equate democracy with consumerism, market relations, and privatiza-tion, or refuse, as Ulrich Beck (1998, p. 38) argued, the equation of politicswith traditional arenas of struggle and political agency with duly authorizedparties, trade unions, and business-sponsored coalitions. In the absence of suchlanguages and the social formations and public spheres that make them opera-tive, politics becomes narcissistic and caters to the mood of widespread pessi-mism and the cathartic allure of the spectacle. In addition, public service andgovernment intervention is sneered on as either bureaucraticor a constraint on

individual freedom. The age of manufactured politics and neoliberal values nolonger translates private problems into public issues or collective solutions.

Emptiedof its

politicalcontent,

public space increasinglybecomes a site of

self-display, a sphere dominated by a notion of freedom that is located exclu-sively in an inner world marked by the spectacle ofthe media confessional onone hand, and the social Darwinism of reality-based television with its endlessinstinct for theweaknesses of others and its masochisticaffirmation of ruthless-

ness and steroidal power on the other hand. Escape, avoidance, and narcissismare now coupled with the public display, if not celebration, of those individualswho define agency in terms of their survival skills rather than their commit-

ment to dialogue, critical reflection, solidarity, and relations that open up the

promise of public engagement with important social issues.

III

We should be, without hesitation or embarrassment, utopians.At the end of thetwentieth century it is the only acceptable political option, morally speak-ing... irrespective of what may have seemed apt hitherto either inside or outsidethe Marxist tradition, nothing but a utopian goal will now suffice. The realitiesofour time are morally intolerable.... The facts of widespread human privationand those ofpolitical oppression and atrocity are available to all who want them.

They are unavoidable unless you willfully shut them out. To those who wouldsuggest that things might be yet worse, one answer is that of course they mightbe. But another answer is that for too many people they are already quite badenough; and the sponsors of this type of suggestion are for their part almostalways pretty comfortable. (Geras, 1999, p. 42)


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Against an increasingly oppressive corporate-based globalism, progressivesneed to resurrect a language of resistance and possibility, a language thatembraces a militant utopianism while constantly being attentive to those forces

that seek to turn such hope into a new slogan or punish and dismiss those whodare look beyond the horizon ofthe given. Hope, in this instance, is one ofthe

preconditions for individual and social struggle, the ongoing practice of criti-cal education in a wide variety of sites, the mark of courageon the part of intel-lectuals in and out of the academy who use the resources of theory to address

pressing social problems. But hope is also referent for civic courage and its abil-

ity to mediate the memory of loss and the experience of injustice as part of abroader attempt to open up new locations of struggle, contest the workings ofoppressive power, and undermine various forms of domination.At its best,civic courage as a political practice beginswhen ones life can no longer be takenfor granted. In doing so, it makes concrete the possibility for transforminghope and politics into an ethical space and public act that confronts the flow ofeveryday experience and the weight of social suffering with the force of individ-ual and collective resistance and the unending project of democratic socialtransformation. Ifprogressives are to revitalize the language of civic educationas part of a broader discourse of political agency and critical citizenship in aglobal world, they will have to consider grounding such a call in a defense ofmilitant

utopian thinkingin which

anyviable notion of the

politicaltakes

upthe primacy of pedagogy as part of a broader attempt to revitalize the condi-tions for individual and social agency while simultaneously addressing themost basic problems facing the prospects for social justice and global democ-

racy. Militant utopianism addresses what Ernst Bloch (1988) called the possi-bility of the not yet.&dquo; Bloch believed that utopianism could not be removedfrom the world and was not &dquo;something like nonsense or absolute fancy; ratherit is notyet in the sense of a possibility; that it could be there ifwe could only dosomething for it&dquo; (p. 3). For theorists such as Bloch, utopian thinking was

anticipatory and not messianic, mobilizing rather than therapeutic.At best,utopian thinking, as Anson Rabinach (1977) argued, &dquo;points beyond the givenwhile remaining within it&dquo; (p. 11). The longing for a more human society inthis instance does not collapse into a retreat from the world but emerges out ofcritical and practical engagements with present behaviors, institutional forma-tions, and everyday practices. Hope in this context does not ignore the worsedimensions of human suffering, exploitation, and social relations; on the con-trary, it acknowledges the need to sustain the &dquo;capacity to see the worst andoffer more than that for our consideration&dquo; (Dunn, 2000, p. 160). The great

challenge to militant utopianism, with its hope of keeping critical thoughtalive, rests in an emerging consensus among a wide range ofpolitical factionsthat neoliberal democracy is the best we can do. The impoverishment of intel-

lectuals, with their growing refusal to speak of addressing (if not ending)


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human suffering, is now matched by the poverty of a social order that cannotconceive of any alternative to itself.

The profound antiutopianism that is spurred by visions of the market onone

hand, andvisions of

displacement bysome versions

of poststructuralistand postmodern discourses on the otherhand, either commodify the subject oreliminate even the possibility of theorizing a notion of agency out of the nowfashionable discourse of pluralized subjectivity. The radical socialist ideal ofrealizing the potential of the full human being has given way to a debilitatingpessimism that finds it hard to imagine a life beyond capitalism, or for thatmatter a life beyond the failure ofthe present. The limits of the utopian imagi-nation are related, in part, to the failure of intellectuals and cultural workers in

a variety of public spheres to not only conceive of possibility as capacity and

intervention, but also to imagine what pedagogical conditions might be neces-sary to bring into being forms of political agency grounded in the knowledge,skills, and capacities that enable people to govern democratically the majorinstitutions that shape the economy, state, civil society, culture, and everydaylife. In opposition to this position, Ruth Levitas (1993) commented on theneed to locate utopian longings in a process of concrete experience and social

change. She pointed to a notion of hope based on the recognition that it is onlythrough education that human beings can be informed about the limits ofthe

presentand the conditions necessary for them to &dquo;combine a gritty sense of lim-its with a lofty vision of possibility&dquo; (Aronson, 1999, p. 489). Levitas (1993)wrote,

The main reasonwhy it has become so difficult to locate utopia in a future credi-

bly linked to the present by a feasible transformation is that our images of the

present do not identify agencies and processes for change. The result is that uto-pia moves further into the realms of fantasy.Although this has the advantage ofliberating the imagination from the constraint of what it is possible to imagine aspossible-and encouraging utopia to demand the impossible-it has the disad-

vantageof

severing utopiafrom the

processof social

changeand

severingsocial

change from the stimulus of competing images of utopia. (p. 265)

Educated hope, in this instance, combines thepedagogical and the political inwaysthat stress the contextual nature of learning, emphasizing that different contexts

give rise to diverse questions, problems, and possibilities. In doing so, such hopebrings to the fore the call for cultural studies theorists and other critical intellectualsto be attentive to theways inwhich institutional and symbolic power are tangled upwith everyday experience, and how any politics ofhope must tap into individual

experiences while at the same time linking individual responsibilitywith a progres-sive sense of social destiny. Emphasizing politics as a pedagogical practice andperformative act, educated hope accentuates the notion that politics is played outnot only on a terrain ofimagination and desire, but is also grounded in relations of

power mediated through the outcome of situated struggles dedicated to creating theconditions and capacities for people to become critically engaged political agents.


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As a form of utopianism, educated hope engages politics through the intercon-nected modalities of desire, intervention, and struggle.As Houston Baker, Jr.(1994) argued in a different context, the imagination does not point simply to the

realm offantasy and escape, but to a form ofsocial practice, a site that is marked bythe intersection ofpolitics and pedagogy on one hand, and agency and possibilityon the other hand. Baker argued,

No longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is elsewhere), nolonger simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete pur-poses and structures), no longerthe elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of

ordinary people) and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms ofdesire and subjectivity), the imagination has become an organized field of social

practices,a form ofwork... and a form of

negotiationbetween sites of

agency(&dquo;individuals&dquo;) and globally defined fields of possibility. (p. 12)

Educated hope engages the imagination as social practice and takes seriouslythe importance of civic education while recognizing that such education takes

placewithin a vast array ofpublic spheres and pedagogical sites throughout theculture.As a form of utopian thinking, educated hope provides the founda-tional connection that must be made among three discoursesthat often remain

separated: democracy, political agency, and pedagogy.

The concept ofeducated hoperests on an

expansive notion ofpedagogy bypointing to broader considerationsabout the role that education now plays in a

variety of cultural sites, and how the latter have become integral to producingmodels ofhuman nature through the pedagogical force of a &dquo;capitalist imagi-nary&dquo; based almost &dquo;exclusively on economic exchange&dquo; (Castoriadis, 1997b,

p. 347).A democratically engaged cultural politics requires that progressivesunderstand and challenge how neoliberalism undermines meaningful democ-

racy in its relentless attempts to valorize private space over public space, com-mercial goods over public goods, and a wholly privatized, personal notion of

citizenship over public citizenship and social provision. Progressives will haveto challenge forcefully the portrayal of public space as simply an investmentopportunity and the increasing attempt by neoliberals to represent the publicgood as a metaphor for public disorder-epitomized in the now familiar man-tra used by the right that any investment in the public good should be sum-

marily dismissed as an indulgence ofthe tax-and-spend policies of &dquo;big govern-ment.&dquo; In doing so, they will have to address the pedagogical force of thebroader culture in producing public transcripts and modes of political agencythat shut down democratic relations, identities, and visions. But ifprogressivesare to develop an oppositional cultural politics, it will require more than simplythe language ofcritique.As important as immanent critique might be, it alwaysruns the risk ofrepresenting power in the absolute service ofdomination, thus

failing to capture the always open and ongoing dynamic ofresistance at work inalternative modes of representations, oppositional public spheres, and modes


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of affective investment that refuse the ideological push and institutional driveofdominant social orders (Castoriadis, 1991 ).

Combining the discourse ofcritique and hope is crucial to affirm that criti-

cal activity offers the possibility for social change.An oppositional cultural pol-itics can take many forms, but given the current assault on democratic publicspheres, it seems imperative that progressives revitalize the struggles over socialcitizenship, particularly those struggles aimed at expanding liberal freedomsand civic rights while developing collective movements that can challenge thesubordination of social needs to the dictates of commercialism and capital.Central to such politics would be a public pedagogy that attempts to make visi-ble in a wide variety of sites alternative models of radical democratic culturethat raise fundamental questions about the relationship between social justiceand the distributionofpublic resources and goods on one hand, and the condi-tions, knowledge, and skills that are a prerequisite for political agency andsocial change on the other hand.At the very least, such a project involves

understanding and critically engaging dominant public transcripts and valueswithin a broader set of historical and institutional contexts. Making the politi-cal more pedagogical in this instance suggests producing modes ofknowledgeand social practices that not only affirm oppositional cultural work but offer

opportunities to mobilize instances of collective outrage, if not collectiveaction,

against glaringmaterial

inequitiesand the

growing cynicalbelief that

todays culture ofinvestment and finance makes it impossible to address manyof the major social problems facing the United States and the larger world.Most important, as I mentioned previously, such work points to the linkbetween civic education and modes of oppositional political agency that arepivotal to elucidating a politics that promotes autonomy and social change.Unfortunately, many progressives have failed to take seriouslyAntonioGramscis (1971) insight that &dquo;every relationship of hegemony is necessarilyan educational relationship&dquo; (p. 350)-with its implication that education as a

cultural pedagogical practice takes place across multiple sites as it signals how,within diverse contexts, education makes us both subjects of and subject torelations ofpower. I want to build on Gramscis insight by exploring in greaterdetail the connection among democracy, political agency, and pedagogy byanalyzing some of the work of Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis.Castoriadis has made seminal and often overlooked contributions to the poli-tics of hope and the role ofeducation central to the regime ofpolitical democ-

racy. I focus on this work to reclaim a legacy of critical thinking that combines aconcrete and militant sense of utopianism with the imperatives of a participa-tory civic education designed to enrich and enable the possibility of politicalagency and its crucial role in strugglingfor a radical democracy. This traditionof critical thought signals for progressives the importance of investing in the

political as part of a broader effort to revitalize notions of democratic citizen-

ship, social justice, and the public good.


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iii1

We must return to the original meaning of the word, &dquo;democracy.&dquo; Democracydoes not mean human rights, does not mean lack of censorship, does not meanelections of any kind.All this is very nice, but itsjust second-or third-degree-consequences. Democracy means the power (kratos) of the people. (Castoriadis,199Gb, p. 21 )

Cornelius Castoriadis was profoundly concerned about what it meant tothink about politicsand agency in light of the new conditions of capitalism thatthreatened to undermine the promise ofdemocracy at the end of the 20th cen-

tury. Moreover, he argued that education in the broadest sense is a principlefeature of politics because it provides the capacities, knowledge, skills, andsocial relations through which individuals recognize themselves as social andpolitical agents. Linking such a broad-based definition of education to issues ofpower and agency also raises fundamental questions that go to the heart of anysubstantive notion ofdemocracy: How do issues ofhistory, language, culture,and identitywork to articulate and legitimate particular exclusions? If culturein this sense becomes the constituting terrain for producing identities and con-

stituting social subjects, education becomes the strategic and positional mech-anism through which such subjects are addressed, positioned within social

spaces,located within

particularhistories and

experiences,and

alwaysarbi-

trarily displacedand decentered as part of a pedagogical process that is increas-ingly multiple, fractured, and never homogenous.

Castoriadis has in the past 30 years of the 20th century provided an enor-mous theoretical service in analyzing the space of education as constitutive ofthe site ofdemocratic struggle. Castoriadis pursued the primacy of educationas a political force by focusing on democracy as the realized power of the peopleand a mode of autonomy. In the first instance, he insisted that &dquo;democracymeans power of the people... a regime aspiring to social and personal&dquo; freedom

(1996b, p. 19). Democracy in this view suggests more than a simply negativenotion of freedom in which the individual is defended against power. On the

contrary, Castoriadis (1991) argued that any viable notion ofdemocracy must

reject this passive attitude toward freedom with its view ofpower as a necessaryevil. In its place, he called for a productive notion ofpower, one that is centralto embracing a notion of political agency and freedom that affirms the equalopportunity of all to exercise political power to participate in shaping the most

important decisions affecting their lives. He ardently rejected the increasing&dquo;abandonment of the public sphere to specialists, to professional politicians&dquo;(1991, p. 91), just as he rejected any conception of democracy that does notcreate the means for &dquo;unlimited interrogation in all domains&dquo; (19976, p. 343)that closed off in &dquo;advance not only every political question as well as everyphilosophical one, but equally every ethical or aesthetic question&dquo; ( 997b, p. 341 ).Castoriadis also refused a notion of democracy restricted to the formalistic pro-


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106

cesses of voting while at the same time arguing that the notion ofparticipatorydemocracy cannot remain narrowly confined to the political sphere.

Democracy, for Castoriadis, must also concern itself with the issue of cul-

tural politics. He rightly argued that progressives are required to address theways in which every society creates what he called its &dquo;social imaginary signifi-cations,&dquo; which provide the structures ofrepresentations that offer individualsselected modes of identifications, provide the standards for both the ends ofaction and the criteria for what is considered acceptable or unacceptablebehav-ior, while establishing the affective measures for mobilizing desire and humanaction ( 1997a, pp. 87-88). The fate of democracy for Castoriadiswas inextrica-

bly linked to the profound crisis of contemporary knowledge, characterized byits increasing commodification, fragmentation, privatization, and turn towardracial and patriotic conceits.As knowledge becomes abstracted from thedemands of civic culture and is reduced to questions of style, ritual, and image,it undermines the political, ethical, and governing conditions required forindividualsand social groups either to participate in politics or construct thoseviable public spheres necessary for debate, collective action, and solving urgentsocial problems.As Castoriadis (1993) suggested, the crisis of contemporaryknowledge provided one ofthe central challenges to any viable notion ofpoli-tics and educated hope. He wrote,

Also in question is the relation of... knowledge to the society that produces it,nourishes it, is nourished by it, and risks dying of it, as well as the issues concern-ing for whom and for what this knowledge exists.Already at present these prob-lems demand a radical transformation of society, and ofthe human being, at thesame time that they contain its premises. If this monstrous tree of knowledge thatmodern humanity is cultivating more and more feverishly every day is not to col-lapse under its own weight and crush its gardener as it falls, the necessary trans-formations of man and societymust go infinitely further than the wildest utopiashave ever dared to imagine. (pp. 153-154)

Castoriadis was particularly concerned about how progressives might addressthe crisis of democracy in light ofhow social and political agents were beingproduced in a society driven by the glut of specialized knowledge, consumer-ism, and a privatized notion of citizenship that no longer supported noncom-mercial values and increasingly dismissed as a constraint any view of societythat emphasized public goods and social responsibility. What is crucial to

acknowledge in Castoriadiss work is that the crisis of democracy cannot be sep-arated from the dual crisis of representation and political agency. In a social

order in which the production of knowledge, meaning, and debateare

highlyrestricted not only are the conditions for producing critical social agents lim-ited, but also the democratic imperative ofaffirmingthe primacy of ethics as a

way of recognizing a social orders obligation to future generations is entirelylost. Ethics in this sense recognizes that the extension ofpower assumes a com-

parable extension in the field of ethical responsibility, a willingness to acknowl-


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107

edge that ethics means being able to answer in the present for actions that willbe borne by generations in the future (Binde, 2000, p. 65). This leads directlyto Castoriadiss concernwith linkingthe meaning and purpose of democracy to

the project ofautonomy.As a project of autonomy, democracy implies a mode of politics that puts

into question a societys &dquo;already given institutions, its already established rep-resentation ofthe world&dquo; (Castoriadis, 1991, p. 136). Within this perspective,politics, in part, implies a rejection of all those forms of authority that imputetheir existence to transcendent and extra social sources (i.e., God, the market,

etc.), and in doing so produce a notion of authority that refuses to &dquo;render anaccount and provide reasons ... for the validity of its pronouncements&dquo;(Castoriadis, 1997c, p. 4).Autonomy as a project of democracy renders societyas a social-historical creation and politics as part of a broader concern withpower andjustice &dquo;to create citizenswho are critical thinkerscapable ofputtingexisting institutions into question so that democracy again becomes societysmovement... that is to say, a new type ofregime in the full sense of the term&dquo;

(Castoriadis, 1997c, p. 10). For Castoriadis, the project of autonomy was

incompatible with the corporatist emphasis on mastery, &dquo;perpetual restless-ness, constant change, a thirst for the new for the sake ofthe new and for morefor the sake of more&dquo; (Castoriadis, 1997a, p. 88).

Central to Castoriadiss(1991)

work is the crucial

acknowledgmentthat

society creates itself through a multiplicity of organized pedagogical forms thatprovide the &dquo;instituting social imaginary&dquo; (p. 145) or field of cultural and ideo-

logical representations through which social practices and institutional formsare endowed with meaning, generating certain ways of seeing the self and its

possibilities in the world. Not only is the social individual constituted, in part,by internalizing such meanings, but he or she acts on such meanings to also par-ticipate and, where possible, change society.According to Castoriadis (1991),politics within this framework becomes the collective activity whose object is

to put into question the explicit institutions of society while simultaneouslycreating the conditions for individual and social autonomy. Castoriadiss

unique contribution to democratic political theory lies in his keen understand-

ing that autonomy is inextricably linked to forms of civic education that pro-vide the conditions for bringing to light how explicit and implicit power can beused to open up or close down those public spaces that are essential for individ-uals to meet, address public interests, engage pressing social issues, and partici-pate collectively in shaping public policy. In this view, civic education brings to

light &dquo;societys instituting power by rendering it explicit ... it reabsorbs the

political into politics as the lucid and deliberate activity whose object is theexplicit [production] of society&dquo; (Castoriadis, 1991, pp. 144-145).Accordingto Castoriadis, political agency involves learninghow to deliberate, make judg-ments, and exercise choices, particularly as the latter are brought to bear as crit-ical activities that offer the possibility of change. Civic education as it is experi-enced and produced throughout a vast array of institutions provides


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108

individualswith the opportunity to see themselves as more than they are withinthe existing configurations of power of any given society. Every society has anobligation to provide citizens with the capacities, knowledge, and skills neces-

sary for them to be, asAristotle claimed, &dquo;capable ofgoverning and being gov-erned&dquo; (Castoriadis, 1997c, p. 15).A democracy cannotwork if citizens are notautonomous, self-judging, and independent, qualities that are indispensablefor them to make vital judgments and choicesabout participating in those deci-sions that affect everyday life, institutional reform, and governmental policy.Hence, civic education becomes the cornerstone ofdemocracy in that the veryfoundation of self-government is based on people not just having the &dquo;typicalright to participate; they should also be educated [in the fullest possible way] inorder to be able to participate&dquo; (Castoriadis, 1996b, p. 24).At stake here, as

John Binde (2000) wrote, is not only the legitimacy of civic education as a cul-tural practice, but utopian thinking as an ethics of the future:

The human city represents the ideal context for civic education and the promo-tion of the value of alterity. But, beyond the political feat involved, thestakes... are cultural. It is not merely a matter of transforming minds in order to

adapt them to the requirements of our contemporary world. It is also necessaryto change attitudes, customs, and lifestyles. Preparing citizens for the future is

just as much about giving them the means to think as about givingthem the free-dom and will to do so. If devoid of the

strengthof will and the

certaintyofdeci-

sion, knowledge is either suffering or sheer bliss. The ethics ofthe future there-fore deserves to be part and parcel of an educational design. (p. 71)

Castoriadis was deeply concerned about the relationship between autonomy, judg-ment, and critical participation in democraticpublic life. He recognized that peoplehad to learn from a variety of educational spheres the skills needed to be active citi-zens. But he never substituted the postmodern emphasis on skepticism and ironyfor the courage and judgments that were necessary for intellectuals and others totake a stand in the face of the current

onslaughts against humanityand

democracyby a rapacious neoliberalism and various updated versions oftotalitarianism. Skep-ticism was an element of autonomy but not an end in itselfAutonomy makes jus-tice the first resort of its discourse and dialogue; deliberation and social action itsoutcome. It rejects postmodern versions ofskepticism, which increasinglyhave lit-tle to say about the need to address how one must act in the interest ofthe greatest

possiblejustice.At the same time, autonomy does not offer up a politics of guaran-tees as much as it claims, as Jacques Derrida (2000) put it, that

there isno

&dquo;politics,&dquo;no

law,no

ethics without responsibility of a decisionwhich, to be just, cannot content itself with applying existing norms or rules butmust take the absolute risk, in every singular instant.... To that end, one must

change laws, habits ... the entire horizon of &dquo;the political,&dquo; of citizenship, ofbelonging to a nation, and of the state.


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Autonomy, according to Castoriadis, rejects any notion of skepticismthat doesnot open up the terrain of the political.At stake here is the call to not onlyproblematize the political, but to take the next step and extend its possibilities

by opening up new locations for resistance, struggle, pleasures, and social rela-tions that expand the public culture, social agency, and meaningful democracy.Autonomy, in this instance, is not only about problematizing meaning but also

providing the conditions for reappropriating and resuscitating political cultureas an ethical response to the demise ofdemocratic public life.

Castoriadiss work is important because it gives substance to the notion ofeducated hope as a mode ofpedagogical intervention that is crucial to the verynotion of political agency. For Castoriadis, the separations of politics and cul-ture was, in effect, a form of anti politics because it refused to recognize that the

struggle over power, goods, capital, and rights is inseparable from the struggleover forms ofidentification and agency linked to citizenship rights that expandthe imperatives ofa meaningful and substantive democracy. Castoriadis right-fully recognized that the realm ofculture had taken on a new role in the latterpart of the 20th century because the actuality of economic power and its atten-dant networks of control now exercised more influence than ever before in

shaping how identities are produced and desires mobilized, and shaping how

particular social relations take on the force and meaning ofcommon sense. He

clearlyunderstood that

makingthe

politicalmore

pedagogicalmeant

recogniz-ing that where and how the psyche locates itself in public discourse, visions,and passions provides the groundwork for agents to enunciate, act, and reflecton themselves and their relations to others and the wider social order. For

Castoriadis, democracy was not simply about guaranteeing individual rightsand extending democratic ownership and control to all aspects of cultural andeconomic life, it was also about creating the pedagogical conditions, cultural

spheres, and public spaces that allowed people to express and create the publicvalues and practices of a substantive democracy. The meaning of democracy

could not be defined simply through the lens of power, but also had to beunderstood as an ethical, political, and educational relationship. Castoriadisbelieved that democracy was about both dismantling hierarchical and oppres-sive relations ofpower and providing the social provisions for all individuals tohave access to the political and cultural resources that enabled them to partici-pate in and shape the larger society.

If one of the characteristics of the present time is a retreat from the politicalaccompanied by a growing disdain, if not cynicism, toward public life, thework of Castoriadis reminds us ofwhat it means to recognize that changingconsciousness and transforming institutions is as much a pedagogical issue as a

strictly political one.Any worthwhile notion ofpolitics must acknowledge that

although it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,any viable notion of struggle must foreground the crucial relationship between


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110

critical education and political agency and recognize that the longing for amore just society does not collapse into a retreat from the world but emergesout of critical and practical engagements with present behaviors, institutional

formations, and everyday practices. Hope in this context does not ignore theworse dimensions of human suffering, exploitation, and social relations; on thecontrary, it acknowledges the need to sustain the &dquo;capacity to see the worst andoffer more than that for our consideration&dquo; (Dunn, 2000, p. 160).

N ote

1.I purposely have not drawn in this case on the work of Paulo Freire because I havediscussed his notion

of utopianismand education in

great

detail in Giroux (2000).

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Unger, R., & West, C. (1998). The future of American progressivism. Boston: Beacon.Wolin, S. (2000). Political theory: From vocation to invocation. In J. Frank & J. Tambornino

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Henry A. Giroux holds the Waterbury Chair professorship and is currently thedirector of the Waterbury Forum in education and cultural studies at PennState University. His most recent books include: ImpureActs: ThePracticalPoli-tics of Cultural Studies (Routledge, 2000); The Mouse That Roared. Disney andthe End of Innocence (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001 ); Stealing Innocence: Cor-porate Cultures War on Children (St. Martins, 2001 ); and the forthcoming

Beyond the Corporate University, edited with Kostas Myrsiadis (Rowman andLittlefield); Public Spaces, Private Lives: Beyond the Culture of Cynicism(Rowman and Littlefield); Breakingln to the Movies: Film and thePolitics ofRep-resentation (Basil Blackwell); and a revised edition of Theory and Resistance inEducation (Bergin and Garvey). His primary research areas are cultural studies,

youth studies, critical pedagogy, popular culture, social theory, and the politicsof higher education.

giroux - educated hope in an age of privatized visions

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