What do you think?
Rate this book
Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies
Henry A. Giroux challenges the contemporary politics of cynicism by addressing a number of issues including the various attacks on cultural politics, the multicultural discourses of academia, the corporate attack on higher education, and the cultural politics of the Disney empire.
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
1 person is currently reading
29 people want to read
About the author
Henry A. Giroux
128 books227 followersAmerican cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory.
A high-school social studies teacher in Barrington, Rhode Island for six years, Giroux has held positions at Boston University, Miami University, and Penn State University. In 2005, Giroux began serving as the Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
Giroux has published more than 35 books and 300 academic articles, and is published widely throughout education and cultural studies literature. Since arriving at McMaster, Giroux has been a featured faculty lecturer, and has published nine books, including his most recent work, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex.
Routledge named Giroux as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in 2002.
A high-school social studies teacher in Barrington, Rhode Island for six years, Giroux has held positions at Boston University, Miami University, and Penn State University. In 2005, Giroux began serving as the Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
Giroux has published more than 35 books and 300 academic articles, and is published widely throughout education and cultural studies literature. Since arriving at McMaster, Giroux has been a featured faculty lecturer, and has published nine books, including his most recent work, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex.
Routledge named Giroux as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in 2002.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 20, 2014
Cultural studies is a strangely betwixt-and-between kind of discipline - which I think is what I like most about it. I much prefer it when bits and pieces of ideas are brought together from all over the place and allowed to just work together, to show new patterns between things that otherwise might seem utterly disconnected. This book is an attempt to understand the place that culture plays in society and why or even if culture is important, you know, rather than just being an epiphenomenon - which is what is it often taken to be.
The author begins the book by addressing criticisms from both the right and the left. I can deal with the left rather quickly - it is the idea that the economic substructure completely determines the cultural superstructure, and so the only things worth noticing in culture are how that superstructure defends the substructure. Or to put it more crudely, there are rich people and there are people who produce culture and the people who produce culture either do so to amuse the rich people, or to confuse the rest of us into believing the rich deserve to be rich.
This is a problem not only because there do seem to be artists and other cultural workers who seem to be actively trying to undermine the system - but also because it seems quite clear that culture gives us the tools with which to think about the world - and so, unless we are completely automatons purely responding to the dictates of the economic system we are living in, having cultural tools with which to think about our world would seem to be, dare I say it, about as revolutionary an act is we are probably capable of.
The criticism from the right tends to focus on the notion of 'dumbing down'. That there are worthwhile texts, these are known as the canon, and there is effectively rubbish. Too much time is being spent on studying rubbish texts. What is interesting here is what is defined as rubbish. Mostly these are works by people of colour, women, gays and so on and so on. That is, people who speak with voices that are generally silenced in our society and about issues with which we rarely hear. The other complaint is that we spend too much time studying film - cheap entertainment, rather than texts of more weighty value. I find this quite amusing. I went to a fairly middle class high school a life time ago - and both of my daughters ended up going to the same high school - and then I did my first teaching rounds there too - all terribly confusing - anyway, my first introduction to Shakespeare was in Year 11 with MacBeth - we studied no other play by him in the six years of high school. My daughters studied a play by him in every year post Year 9. Rather than increasingly neglecting the canon, it seems students are being infinitely more exposed to it.
However, the texts they are much more likely to be exposed to in life are films. We do so little to teach them how to understand film. A couple of my supervising teachers and I showed kids the various camera techniques used and talked about general impressions these make on the audience - low camera angle makes the person filmed look big and powerful, high angle diminishes them and so on. But none of this was ever spoken about again after the initial - let's tell you about camera angles - lesson. Certainly, the film was never stopped to question why a particular camera angle was being employed and what other angles might have been possible. Film is much more able to directly manipulate our emotions than I think text can - and we have the tools, or at least are taught the tools, to understand such manipulation when it comes to us in text - but if the text is film we really aren't given those tools.
If you get to define the canon, you get to define what can and cannot be said and so, you also create truth by what can be said and what is valid to be discussed and what is not valid. The ability to tell people to shut up, by grossly simplifying what they have to say and then not allowing them a right of reply is a remarkably effective technique.
It isn't just that students are not taught to read voices similar to their own, or even voices that are fundamentally different from their own - the point is that limiting the texts that are worth studying to those of the canon is likely to deny those students the ability also create their own texts as well. It is very hard for anything new to be in the canon - except for those amusing ads for Disney films that talk of them as being 'the all new Disney classic'.
But this book is seeking to do more than provide tools to understand culture - it sees there as being a crisis in popular culture in the US and, in particular, how popular culture defines 'the public sphere'. This is a constant theme in things I have been reading lately, but no less important for that. Much of popular culture seeks to define most people's participation in society as that of consumers rather than citizens. You are what you buy - what it does not do is encourage active participation in the decision making processes that guide how society might develop. In fact, most popular culture seems designed to encourage cynicism towards the role most people can play and the impact they can have.
Popular culture helps to define what is common sense, and as such, if any kind of social change is capable of being achieved, teaching ways to subvert this common sense would appear to be necessary.
A large part of this book is a critique of higher education and how it has increasingly been taken over by corporate interests. The magnitude of this change is quite striking. Although there are surely still people who see universities as ivory towers, the reality is quite different with large cuts in public funding meaning that universities tend to increasingly rely on private funding and the consequent limitations such funding imposes - not least in applying a purely instrumentalist perspective on research. Again, the public sphere is beholden to the private sphere. The ethical issues associated with research are also cast aside.
Another terrifying aspect of the discussion here is to do with the remarkable use of the US prison system - it is hard to imagine that the 'land of the free' spends so much of its resources on putting its citizens in gaol and is home to a quarter of all people in prison in the world. But there are even more appalling figures detailed here - like that one-third of all Black American men in their 20s are either in gaol, on parole or awaiting trial. That this is so rarely referred to as a crisis says a lot about American culture. As do the figures that show that spending on corrections has increased by 95% while spending on education has decreased by 5%. And thus a society's priorities and preferences are made clear.
If learning is instrumental, then pedagogy is increasingly irrelevant, as learning is merely a matter of the transmission of knowledge. Why bother with so many teachers when you can have a single teacher on a MOOC automatically beamed to the ever more portable computers of the world? Endlessly pouring knowledge into the waiting and empty minds of millions of willing students.
Mass culture does much to capture our desires and thereby to help create our identity. There is a lovely line in this about ignorance being a choice - that it is performative and part of the desires inculcated in us by our culture. As a friend of mine likes to say, there is a certain class of Australian who, if the conversation turns from sport or curtains to politics or religion, "This is all getting a bit heavy, isn't it?" The will to ignorance is encouraged by our culture, rather than being something that just happens. Culture, then, is used to not only define the thinkable, but to define the tastes that will even allow certain thoughts.
There is a chapter here on Disney as a kind of worked example of the corporate take over of culture, innocence and pedagogy - but I'm not going to say anything about that chapter, as I'm nearly finished the author's book on Disney called The Mouse that Roared and virtually everything said here is reiterated there.
The author begins the book by addressing criticisms from both the right and the left. I can deal with the left rather quickly - it is the idea that the economic substructure completely determines the cultural superstructure, and so the only things worth noticing in culture are how that superstructure defends the substructure. Or to put it more crudely, there are rich people and there are people who produce culture and the people who produce culture either do so to amuse the rich people, or to confuse the rest of us into believing the rich deserve to be rich.
This is a problem not only because there do seem to be artists and other cultural workers who seem to be actively trying to undermine the system - but also because it seems quite clear that culture gives us the tools with which to think about the world - and so, unless we are completely automatons purely responding to the dictates of the economic system we are living in, having cultural tools with which to think about our world would seem to be, dare I say it, about as revolutionary an act is we are probably capable of.
The criticism from the right tends to focus on the notion of 'dumbing down'. That there are worthwhile texts, these are known as the canon, and there is effectively rubbish. Too much time is being spent on studying rubbish texts. What is interesting here is what is defined as rubbish. Mostly these are works by people of colour, women, gays and so on and so on. That is, people who speak with voices that are generally silenced in our society and about issues with which we rarely hear. The other complaint is that we spend too much time studying film - cheap entertainment, rather than texts of more weighty value. I find this quite amusing. I went to a fairly middle class high school a life time ago - and both of my daughters ended up going to the same high school - and then I did my first teaching rounds there too - all terribly confusing - anyway, my first introduction to Shakespeare was in Year 11 with MacBeth - we studied no other play by him in the six years of high school. My daughters studied a play by him in every year post Year 9. Rather than increasingly neglecting the canon, it seems students are being infinitely more exposed to it.
However, the texts they are much more likely to be exposed to in life are films. We do so little to teach them how to understand film. A couple of my supervising teachers and I showed kids the various camera techniques used and talked about general impressions these make on the audience - low camera angle makes the person filmed look big and powerful, high angle diminishes them and so on. But none of this was ever spoken about again after the initial - let's tell you about camera angles - lesson. Certainly, the film was never stopped to question why a particular camera angle was being employed and what other angles might have been possible. Film is much more able to directly manipulate our emotions than I think text can - and we have the tools, or at least are taught the tools, to understand such manipulation when it comes to us in text - but if the text is film we really aren't given those tools.
If you get to define the canon, you get to define what can and cannot be said and so, you also create truth by what can be said and what is valid to be discussed and what is not valid. The ability to tell people to shut up, by grossly simplifying what they have to say and then not allowing them a right of reply is a remarkably effective technique.
It isn't just that students are not taught to read voices similar to their own, or even voices that are fundamentally different from their own - the point is that limiting the texts that are worth studying to those of the canon is likely to deny those students the ability also create their own texts as well. It is very hard for anything new to be in the canon - except for those amusing ads for Disney films that talk of them as being 'the all new Disney classic'.
But this book is seeking to do more than provide tools to understand culture - it sees there as being a crisis in popular culture in the US and, in particular, how popular culture defines 'the public sphere'. This is a constant theme in things I have been reading lately, but no less important for that. Much of popular culture seeks to define most people's participation in society as that of consumers rather than citizens. You are what you buy - what it does not do is encourage active participation in the decision making processes that guide how society might develop. In fact, most popular culture seems designed to encourage cynicism towards the role most people can play and the impact they can have.
Popular culture helps to define what is common sense, and as such, if any kind of social change is capable of being achieved, teaching ways to subvert this common sense would appear to be necessary.
A large part of this book is a critique of higher education and how it has increasingly been taken over by corporate interests. The magnitude of this change is quite striking. Although there are surely still people who see universities as ivory towers, the reality is quite different with large cuts in public funding meaning that universities tend to increasingly rely on private funding and the consequent limitations such funding imposes - not least in applying a purely instrumentalist perspective on research. Again, the public sphere is beholden to the private sphere. The ethical issues associated with research are also cast aside.
Another terrifying aspect of the discussion here is to do with the remarkable use of the US prison system - it is hard to imagine that the 'land of the free' spends so much of its resources on putting its citizens in gaol and is home to a quarter of all people in prison in the world. But there are even more appalling figures detailed here - like that one-third of all Black American men in their 20s are either in gaol, on parole or awaiting trial. That this is so rarely referred to as a crisis says a lot about American culture. As do the figures that show that spending on corrections has increased by 95% while spending on education has decreased by 5%. And thus a society's priorities and preferences are made clear.
If learning is instrumental, then pedagogy is increasingly irrelevant, as learning is merely a matter of the transmission of knowledge. Why bother with so many teachers when you can have a single teacher on a MOOC automatically beamed to the ever more portable computers of the world? Endlessly pouring knowledge into the waiting and empty minds of millions of willing students.
Mass culture does much to capture our desires and thereby to help create our identity. There is a lovely line in this about ignorance being a choice - that it is performative and part of the desires inculcated in us by our culture. As a friend of mine likes to say, there is a certain class of Australian who, if the conversation turns from sport or curtains to politics or religion, "This is all getting a bit heavy, isn't it?" The will to ignorance is encouraged by our culture, rather than being something that just happens. Culture, then, is used to not only define the thinkable, but to define the tastes that will even allow certain thoughts.
There is a chapter here on Disney as a kind of worked example of the corporate take over of culture, innocence and pedagogy - but I'm not going to say anything about that chapter, as I'm nearly finished the author's book on Disney called The Mouse that Roared and virtually everything said here is reiterated there.
Currently reading
May 1, 2009Very interesting if you are at all concerned about some of the issues surrounding higher education.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews