So, I’ve recently become interested in affect — well, not so recently, but it’s come up to the foreground again. I’d like to quote a little more from Giroux and Simon:
What is particularly missing from these perspectives are questions regarding how cultural forms can be understood as mobilizing desire in a way the elaborates how such forms are engaged. For example, through what processes do cultural forms induce an anger or pleasure that has its own center of gravity as a form of meaning? How can we come to understand learning outside of the limits of rationality, as a form of engagement that mobilizes and sometimes reconstructs desire? These questions suggest that pedagogy is not so neatly ensconced in the production of discourse. Rather, pedagogy also consitutes a moment in which the body learns, moves, desires, and longs for affirmation. These questions also suggest a rejeciton of the pedagogy of modernism, one that serves up “ideal” forms of communication theory in which the tyranny of dioscurse becomes the ultimate pedagogical medium, that is, talk embodied as a logic abstracted from the body itself. We need to reemphasize that the issue of consent opens up pedagogy to the uncertain, that space that refuses the measurable, that legitimates the concreate in a way that is felt and experiences rather than merely spoken. In this argument, we are not trying to privilege the body or a politics of affective investment over discourse as much as we are trying to emphasize their absense in previous theorizing as well as their importance for a critical pedagogy. (171)
…
[H]e [Colin Mercer] has focused on the ways in which consent is articulated not only thorugh the structuring of semantically organized meanings and messages, but also through the pleasures invoked in the mechanisms and structuring principles of popular forms. The theoretical insight at work in this position is in part revealed through the quesiton of why “we not only consent to forms of dominant which we know, rationally and politically, are ‘wrong’, but even enjoy them.”… It is important to stress than an overreliance on ideology critique has limited our ability to understand how people actively participate in the dominant culture through processes of accomodation, negotiation, and even resistance. (172-173)
…
This suggests a number of important political and pedagogical principles. First, in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggles, the production and regulation of desire is as important as the construction of meaning. This means that the constitution and the epxression of such desire is an important starting point for understanding the relations that students construct to popular and dominant forms. Second, the idea and experience must be constituted politically so that we can analyze how the body becomes not only the object of (his-patriarchal) pleasure, but also the subject of pleasure. In this case “pleasure becomes teh consent oflife in the body,” and provides an important corporeal condition of life affirming possibility. This argues for a discriminatory notion of pleasure that is not only desirable in and of itself, but that also suggests “at one and the same time… a figure of utopia in general, and for the systemic revolutionary transformation of a society as a whole.” Third, we must recognize how popular culture can constitute a field of possibilities within which students can be empowered so as to appropriate cultural forms on terms that dignify and extend their human possibilities. (173)
Perhaps I’ll return to this essay when I am less tired…
Giroux, Henry A., and Roger I. Simon. “Popular Culture as a Pedagogy of Pleasure and Meaning.“ Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education. 2nd ed. Henry A. Giroux. New York: Routledge, 2005. 157-184.
