Calling On Action: A Review of Henry Giroux's 'Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis'

By Yanis Iqbal

Henry Giroux’s new book “Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis”, published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2021, is an informed, impassioned and insightful response to the politico-economic conjuncture in which we are living. Organized into four sections, the book discusses a variety of things: the significance of the COVID-19 pandemic for neoliberalism, the phenomenon of Trumpism, the continued relevance of fascism, and the role of education in bringing about a new world. Operating with a whole network of organically interpenetrating concepts, Giroux does not content himself with isolated terms and one-sided definitions. He is always trying to integrate the totality of particular points and phases in a dynamic movement without suppressing the existential vitality of the individual elements. It is this internal characteristic of the book which makes it a worthwhile read.

Pandemic Pedagogy

Pandemic pedagogy is one of the central themes of the book. It serves as a concentrated expression of the multiple modalities through which neoliberalism has created a reactionary ideological configuration to stabilize pandemic profiteering. Giroux writes: “Pandemic pedagogy is the enemy of critical pedagogy because it is wedded to reproducing a debased civic culture while renouncing democratic social and political relations. It is a pedagogy for which power functions in the cultural sphere to depoliticize people while replacing democratic forms of solidarity with a social order invested in ultra-nationalism, social atomization, hyper-masculinity, a war culture, and an unbridled individualism”. Pandemic pedagogy emerges directly from the various ways in which the pandemic has mapped onto existing inequalities and social injuries plaguing the American society.

Unlike liberals who consider the pandemic as a “great equalizer”, Giroux says that “Its disproportionate effects on the poor and vulnerable, especially black and brown communities, pointed to the widening chasm between the rich and powerful wealthy few and the vulnerable and precarious majority. The inequities that this crisis revealed made clear how disasters unfold through relations of power, making it easier to challenge the myth that major catastrophes such as pandemics that affect everyone equally.”

According to Giroux, the necropolitical reality of neoliberalism is concealed through the deliberate individualization of social problems: “As a politics of control, neoliberalism privatizes and individualizes social problems, i.e., wash your hands, do not sit on toilet seats, and practice social distancing, as a way to contain the pandemic. In this instance, we learned how to be safe while being depoliticized, or uninformed about the role that capitalist economies play in producing a range of ideological viruses that gut the social welfare state and public health systems, if not resistance itself”. Pandemic pedagogy is present at every level of society and has morphed into a seemingly unshakeable “common sense”. An example of this “common sense” is the discourse on pandemic education which, as Giroux says, “is dominated by a technocratic rationality obsessed with methodological considerations regarding online teaching and learning.”

Afraid that deteriorating material conditions would increase the appeal of socialist politics and strengthen the class cohesion of the proletariat, pandemic pedagogy uses conservative ideological tools to discursively decompose class. Trumpism is an example of such a tool wielded by the ruling class to continue to maintain a gap between the objective structure of class and its self-conscious subjective awareness among the people belonging to that class.

Trumpism

Giroux conducts the analysis of Trumpism in two steps. First, he posits that Trumpism is integrally interlinked to neoliberal capitalism. While reflecting on the movement of the pandemic through the medium of neoliberal social relations of production, Giroux writes: “neoliberalism could not be disconnected from the spectacle of racism, ultra-nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and bigotry that dominated the national zeitgeist as a means of promoting shared fears rather than shared responsibilities. Neoliberal capitalism created through its destruction of the economy, environment, education, and public healthcare a petri dish for the virus to wreak havoc and wide-scale destruction.”

The dense feeling of alienation engendered by the intensifying capitalist crisis provides the soil on which Trumpism grows. As the distinction between consumers and citizens is increasingly blurred by the marketization of each sphere of life, people become culturally deracinated. In a situation like this, Trumpism promised to supply these alienated masses with an identitarian anchorage, a cultural fixity witch which they can associate themselves. Insofar as Trumpism aims to satiate the emotive needs of its support base, it is based on irrationalism. Giroux delineates how such irrationalism manifests itself in Trump’s everyday performative politics: “Trump’s…language exhibited a mounting compulsion and hyper-immediacy that flattened out and vulgarized any viable notion of communication…Trump employed a pandemic pedagogy in which language became unmoored from critical reason, informed debate, and the weight of scientific evidence. Instead, it was tied to pageantry, political theater, and the consolidation of power, as well as the dictates of violence.”

Situating Trump’s politics within a wider panorama of historical processes allows us to confront it not as an individual problem but rather as a symptom of a sick society. As Giroux writes, “Cruelty is not something that can be simply personalized in the figure of Donald Trump. Neoliberalism produces its own forms of institutional cruelty through its austerity measures, its decimation of the welfare state, and its support for racialized mass incarceration.” Insofar that Trump is enmeshed in the structural conditions generated by neoliberalism, his authoritarian politics can neither be eliminated through the simple transfer of executive and legislative power to a thoroughly corrupt and corporate Democratic leadership nor through an impeachment process. Commenting on the latter, Giroux says: “The impeachment process with its abundance of political theater and insipid media coverage mostly treated Trump’s crimes not as symptoms of a history of conditions that have led to the United States’ slide into the abyss of authoritarianism, but as the failings of individual character and a personal breach of constitutional law.”

To prevent people like Trump from capturing power, we need to build robust movements capable of uprooting the conditions which make people vulnerable to the propaganda of demagogic leaders. Giroux is forthright in acknowledging this: “the criminogenic response to the crisis on the part of the Trump administration should become a call to arms, if not a model on a global level, for a massive international protest movement that moves beyond the ritual of trying Trump and other authoritarian politicians for an abuse of power, however justified. Instead, such a movement should become a call to put on trial neoliberal capitalism while fighting for structural and ideological changes that will usher in a radical and socialist democracy worthy of the struggle.”

Second, Giroux frames Trumpism within the problematic of fascism. It is important to note that Giroux does not interpret fascism in the narrow way of the setting up of a police state. Instead, he perceives it as “a particular response to a range of capitalist crises that include the rise of massive inequality, a culture of fear, precarious employment, ruthless austerity policies that destroy the social contract, the rise of the carceral state, and the erosion of white privilege, among other issues.” Since fascism is invariably tied to specific social conditions, it will not be homologous to the state structures established in interwar Italy and post-WWII Germany. Giroux is spot-on here: “Fascism does not disappear because it does not surface as a mirror image of the past. Fascism is not static and the protean elements of fascism always run the risk of crystallizing into new forms…comparisons to the Nazi past withered in the false belief that historical events are fixed in time and place and can only be repeated in history books”.

Another important feature of Giroux’s conception of fascism is its dynamic nature. He writes: “Fascism is often an incoherent set of assumptions combined with anti-intellectualism, ultra-nationalism, and a demonizing rhetoric aimed at a group singled out as different and undeserving of human rights…Fascism does not operate according to an inflexible script. On the contrary, it is adaptive, and its mobilizing furors are mediated through local symbols, as it normalizes itself through a country’s customs and daily rituals”. This argument resembles Jairus Banaji’s assertion that “fascist ideology is actually only a pastiche of motifs, it is a pastiche of different ideological currents, it has very little coherence on its own.”

When the aforementioned two aspects of Giroux’s analysis of Trumpism are combined, we are presented with the concept of “neoliberal fascism” - “a new political formation…in which the principles and practices of a fascist past and neoliberal present have merged, connecting the worst dimensions and excesses of gangster capitalism with the fascist ideals of white nationalism and racial supremacy associated with the horrors of authoritarian states.” Neoliberal fascism is not the apogee of an empty struggle between authoritarianism and democratic ideals. Rather, it is a “fierce battle on the part of demagogues to destroy the institutions and conditions that make critical thought and oppositional accounts of power possible.” With this statement, Giroux delves into an incisive study of the deep impacts of neoliberal fascism on agency.

Agency and Hope

Agency, defined as conscious, goal-directed activity, is heavily impacted by neoliberal fascism. Agency is the condition for every struggle and hope is a prerequisite of agency. With the arrival of neoliberal fascism, “the connections between democracy and education wither, hope becomes the enemy of agency, and agency is reduced to learning how to survive rather than working to improve the conditions that bear down on one’s life and society in general.” The overwhelming of hope by “the sheer task of survival” is elaborated in the book “Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously”, where Brad Evans and Julian Reid develop the new category of resilience to capture the broad contours of neoliberal asociality and passivity. Resilience, the authors say, is not about overcoming or resolving a crisis but about the ways and means of coming to terms with it. They argue that resilience teaches us to “live in a terrifying yet normal state of affairs that suspends us in petrified awe.”

The re-molding of agency and loss of hope is fundamentally aided by ignorance which renders us incapable of problematizing our structural conditionedness and piercing through the open-ended nature of history. According to Giroux, “Ignorance has lost its innocence and is no longer synonymous with the absence of knowledge. It has become malicious in its refusal to know, to disdain criticism, to undermine the value of historical consciousness, and to render invisible important issues that lie on the side of social and economic justice. Ignorance has become the organizing principle of a pandemic pedagogy that collapses fact and fantasy, truth and lies, evidence and opinion.” Ignore needs to be combated by the constant utilization of history which will make it possible to de-naturalize hierarchies and intensely engage in a movement for social justice. Whenever history is used as a terrain of struggle for hegemony, as a space for opening up to a contextualized understanding of world and as a lens to re-think and constantly evolve our own views, a new politics of memory is developed. Memory becomes an act of moral witnessing and helps to counter what Giroux calls the “bankrupt white supremacist notion of nostalgia that celebrated the most regressive moments in U.S. history.”

Need for Action

Throughout his book, Giroux refers to the imperative need for concrete action. He is not satisfied with a mere shift in consciousness or an educative endeavor aimed at empty verbosity. He is unfailingly dedicated to the construction of a movement capable of fighting against the state’s repressive and ideological apparatuses.

In an extremely important passage, Giroux writes: “I do not want to suggest…that the strength of argument can change the political balance of power exclusively through an appeal to interpretation, rationality, and the force of dialogue… Ideas gain their merit, in part, through the institutions that produce them, and as such merit the importance of recognizing that the knowledge/power/agency connection is both a battle over ideas as well as over cultural apparatuses and institutions, and the power relations that create them…Matters of critique now merge with the imperative of actions bringing together not merely critical ideas and balanced judgment, but theory and informed action.”

 A major takeaway from Giroux’s book is that the politico-strategic logic of hegemony should occupy a central position in socialist organizing. Mere academicism is totally incapable of overthrowing the bourgeois state. What is needed is the constant re-interpretation of the world in the context of struggles. Whether this re-interpretation is correct or not is decided from the practical consequences that might conceivably result from that intellectual conception. In sum, knowledge and pedagogy need to be dialectically located in the ecology of struggle where they get endlessly embodied in concrete consequences and thus, help in consolidating the dynamic of action and reflection in conversation with each other. Giroux’s book is an example of precisely that kind of knowledge-in-struggle which is singularly committed to the goal of socialism.