[The Montana Professor 1.3, Fall 1991 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
David A. Gabbard
Educational Foundations
Eastern Montana College
In the introduction to Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling, Henry Giroux delineates a number of concepts that are crucial to a reading of his ensuing essays. Among these concepts, five can be identified as holding the utmost significance. They are (1) rationality, (2) ideology, (3) the problematic, (4) hegemony, and (5) culture. While each of these terms can be grasped independently of the others, such an approach would sorely limit a reader's understanding of the over-arching theoretical framework that Giroux attempts to construct in this work.
Moreover, the interdependent character of this set of concepts is essential for Giroux's development of a radical pedagogy. The relations between them, however, are partially obscured by the somewhat ambiguous definitions that he gives to the notions of rationality and ideology. Although this ambiguity may be regarded as benign, especially by those well-versed in the literature that Giroux draws upon, his failure to draw sharp distinctions between rationality and ideology could potentially present some readers with difficulties in differentiating between the two.
Because a sound comprehension of the interdependent relations between these two concepts is central to a complete understanding of Giroux's arguments, clarifying their distinctions is paramount. Although it is never explicitly stated in his work, the most significant distinction between Giroux's conceptualizations of rationality and ideology can be drawn by pointing to their unique loci of distribution and the means by which individuals acquire them.
Within the empty rhetoric that passes for political discourse over the airwaves and in the pages of most of America's media, the concepts of rationality and ideology are frequently represented as antonyms. Rationality is ascribed a positive normative connotation as a mode of consciousness that individuals should aspire to through the development and application of pure reason. Ideology, on the other hand, is indicted as an evil myth or as a form of false consciousness. In either case, it is represented as a sort of distorting lens that can be lifted from the eyes of the individual as she learns to develop her sense of reason on the way toward the pure light of rationality.
Situating his discussion of rationality within the context of what he identifies as the three predominate models of educational research and scholarship, it is clear that Giroux rejects the above described notion of rationality as a singular, unified, and/or aspired-to function of cognition. What substantiates this rejection is his assertion that each of these three models of research and scholarship is guided by its own specific mode of rationality. By acknowledging the existence of a multiplicity of rationalities, Giroux negates both the existence of a singular notion of rationality and any positive normative connotations that might be assigned to it. Concurrently, he is most explicit in his criticism of ideology represented as a form of false consciousness.
To overcome the limitations of each of these common notions, Giroux moves to develop them in a dialectical fashion. This maneuver involves postulating an implicit construction of the individual as both a subject and object within each definition. On the one hand, within the meaning that he ascribes to rationality, the individual functions as both a subject and an object of rationality. On the other hand, and similarly, within his definition of ideology, the individual functions as both an object and subject of ideology. The significance of my inversion of the subject/object dialectic in these statements will become more apparent as I proceed with this discussion.
To facilitate a more meaningful analysis, let us return to the original context in which Giroux raises the issue of rationality. Again, rationality is discussed here within the context of educational research and scholarship, which involves a variety of activities conducted by the agents of a rather small community. In their status as the active agents of this community, they are the subjects of one of the rationalities at work within their community. This community can be divided into even smaller units (sub-communities), and Giroux does just that when he identifies three models of educational research and scholarship. That there exist more than three sub-communities of research and scholarship within the field of education is of no concern to us here. What is important for us to consider is that the agents of any given sub-community are not born with this status. They acquire it through a series of ritual performances which constitute a kind of socialization process that is similar, though not identical, to the socialization that a child receives.
The most fundamental of these similarities is that the bulk of both socialization processes involves the acquisition of a language. As these individuals pass through their particular process of socialization and acquire the language of the significant others who have passed through it before them, they, concurrently, acquire the mode of rationality imbedded within that language used by those significant others. It is primarily through the acquisition of language individuals acquire a mode of rationality and become the subjects/agents of that rationality. The locus of a mode of rationality, then, lies in the language of a given culture, society, community, or sub-community. C.A. Bowers's work in educational theory is useful in clarifying this point:
As Heidegger put it, "the language already hides in itself a developed way of conceiving." To put it another way, the language of the culture provides the shared set of preunderstandings that will guide the interpretations the individual makes of new experiences; for the most part these preunderstandings will not be part of what the individual is aware of./1/
It is important to remember that the agents of a given sub-community (the "official" subjects of a sub-community's mode of rationality) are not born with their status, and that this status is only conferred upon them as they successfully negotiate their way through the appropriate process of socialization. Throughout this process, the fundamental relation of the individual to the sub-community that she is being socialized by is that of an object of the forces of socialization. As she acquires the language of that sub-community, she becomes a subject of its mode of rationality. That mode of rationality comes to have a strong influence over the manner in which she interprets her experiences and directs her actions. But, as Giroux would point out, this influence is not mechanically deterministic. "Modes of rationality," he claims, "bind" in a non-mechanistic way./2/ To fully understand the significance of his negation of this mechanistic determinism, we need to turn directly to his definition of rationality.
Giroux states that "by rationality, I mean a specific set of assumptions and social practices that mediate how an individual or group relates to the wider society."/3/ A "rationality," then, for Giroux, is comprised of "a specific set of assumptions and social practices." And this constitutive set of assumptions and social practices "mediate how an individual or group relates to the wider society." It is important to consider that these "assumptions and social practices" constitutive of the sub-community's mode of rationality are embedded within the language that is passed on through a given socialization process. However, it is of even greater significance to note that Giroux uses the verb "mediate" to describe the role that rationality plays. His use of this verb signals the presence of the dialectical quality that he ascribes to the notion of rationality. This prevents his conceptualization from being a deterministic one.
While it is true, Giroux would argue, that an individual's exercise of rationality is restricted by the preunderstandings, assumptions, and social practices embedded within her acquired mode of rationality, her status as both a subject and an object of that rationality can, under certain circumstances, be transformed by experiences which are irreconcilable with that rationality's pre-established categories and logic. Or, as Giroux explains, "the knowledge, beliefs, expectations, and biases that define a given rationality both condition, and are conditioned by, the experiences into which we enter."/4/
For example, a teacher of Euro-American heritage who teaches Native American children would have her mode of rationality shaken by students and parents who seemed to place no value on punctuality. Her Euro-American mode of rationality's conception of time, and humanity's relationship to it, would be directly challenged by that shared by those within the Native American community. She might initially become upset and punish children who are consistently tardy, or she might attempt to convince them to renegotiate their mode of rationality in order to have them arrive to class on time. She might, however, decide that their mode of rationality is as valid as her own and cease to become upset by their tardiness. There is nothing within her mode of rationality that would explain this decision; the experience itself conditioned her adjustment of her mode of rationality. More importantly, that the teacher might choose to renegotiate her own mode of rationality is suggestive that rationality, in spite of its tremendous influence, does not determine the meanings that she gives to her experience. Rather, it plays a mediating role between consciousness and experience. The implications for critical pedagogy that are held within Giroux's dialectical formulation of how experience conditions rationality, as rationality conditions experience, will be discussed alongside his equally dialectical formulation of the relationship between the individual, society, and ideology.
That the locus of rationality is within the language acquired through socialization into any given sub-community has already been established. In order to make the fundamental distinction between rationality and ideology, then, the locus of ideology must be established. To accomplish this task, we need to return to the previous discussion of the process of socialization that individuals must pass through in order to become active agents/subjects of the mode of rationality present in some sub-community within educational research and scholarship. What I purposefully did not mention in that discussion was the fact that processes of socialization occur within specific institutional arrangements and within particular sets of social relations. As evident in Giroux's definition of ideology, it is within these arrangements and relations, as well as within specific social movements which might either support or contest them, that the locus of ideology can be identified.
According to Giroux, "political education needs a more dialectical notion of ideology,...one that stresses ideology as a mode of consciousness and practice that is related to specific social formations and movements."/5/ From the previous account of the socialization process, I formulated the claim that the locus of any given mode of rationality lies in the language of the sub-community in which that language is used. While much of an ideology can be passed on through language acquisition, the locus of an ideology, itself, lies elsewhere. This locus is within social formations and movements, which are concerned with either maintaining or transforming the status quo of social relations and institutional arrangements.
Within the institutional arrangements and social relations of many schools of education and most elementary and secondary schools, the student is constituted as a mere object, a passive recipient of the language and modes of rationality appropriate to the particular sub-community that she seeks full membership in. (Full membership, of course, comes to mean being certified to assume the role of the subject, for the professor is constituted within this institutional framework as the subject of authority of a particular mode of rationality, an active agent of knowledge's production, validation, and dissemination.) These prescribed roles, then, represent the social relations and institutional arrangements of the classroom. They also, however, communicate a particular ideology; that is, the student knows nothing and should remain passive in her acceptance and acquisition of the knowledge passed down to her by the authority figure of the teacher. (Knowledge, within this set of social relations and institutional arrangements, is reduced to a commodity that is produced by the authorities who know and consumed by those who have to accumulate it in order to achieve their desired status. Or worse, students may lose all interest in knowledge and become totally consumed with their acquisition of grades and the number of credit hours requisite for graduation.) Simply stated, within this particular set of institutional arrangements and social relations, individuals are conditioned to accept the circumstances in which they find themselves as a given. This acceptance signifies a moment of reification, a potentially, at least, temporal condition "whereby concrete relations between human beings are made to appear as objectified relations between things."/6/ Whenever this seemingly passive acceptance of existing social relations and institutional arrangements occurs among the majority of a society's population, the ideology embedded within those relations achieves what Antonio Gramsci referred to as hegemony.
Under the aforementioned ideological conditions, students do not learn that they possess the potential to give shape and meaning to their own environment, for they are not aware that, in their docility before the instructor, they are already participating in the re-creation and legitimation of the meanings that have been ascribed to that environment. Thus, they shape it in accordance with a kind of law of inertia.
As part of the socialization process, the influence of the ideology reflected in the institutional arrangements and the social relations within the school molds the individual's consciousness, resulting in a transference of her conditioned-docility to her perceived relationship to various other institutions and their respective authority figures. Central to a proper understanding of the dialectical nature of Giroux's notion of ideology is recognizing how, even in her docility, the student participates in the ideological process. Ideology, therefore, even though it exists in the institutional arrangements and social relations of the school which pre-exists the student's presence within it, does not shape the individual's consciousness in a mechanically deterministic fashion. That the individual participates in the ideological process suggests that she could possibly participate in such a manner which challenges the legitimacy of the social relations and institutional arrangements of the school or of any other institution. For Giroux, this form of participation constitutes what he refers to as resistance, the existence of which reconfirms and dramatically strengthens his contention that ideological forces do not circumscribe consciousness. And if, as indicated earlier, reified consciousness is a temporal objectification of social relations and institutional arrangements, then so, too, is hegemony a temporal phenomenon. Both, given their temporal natures, can be weakened by counter-hegemonic forces and overcome.
Mechanically deterministic models of rationality and ideology implicitly constitute the individual as a mere object of dominant social and political forces. This contributes to a nihilism which intimates that the injustices and forms of oppression generated by those forces are beyond transformation. By opposing such restrictive conceptualizations, and by imbuing rationality and ideology with a dialecticism which constitutes the individual as a subject as well as an object of rationality and ideological forces, Giroux creates for himself a politically charged discursive space from which to construct a language of opposition and a language of possibility. In providing his conceptualizations of rationality and ideology with a subjective component to rest beside the objective one, Giroux effectively incorporates these two concepts within the vocabulary of his language of possibility.
That Giroux has a language informs us that he also, then, has a mode of rationality. In fact, the analysis that I have conducted here takes a portion of that rationality as its primary object of inquiry. That one of the functions of his rationality is to engage in ideology-critique, that is, to critique the dominant ideology of contemporary society and its hegemonic forces, does not mean that Giroux's rationality is not accompanied by some form of ideology./7/ Because Giroux contests the prevailing set of institutional arrangements and social relations which reflect the dominant ideology of our time, his ideology can not be said to have its locus in those arrangements and relations. One of Giroux's most refreshing characteristics as an educational theorist is his open admission that he is a utopian thinker. While it would not be advantageous for us to explore the details of his utopian vision, it is significant to note that the locus of his ideology rests in that vision. Thus, insofar as counter-hegemonic forces such as Giroux's ideology represent a heretofore small, yet potential, threat to the existing order of things, his contention that ideologies are also related to social movements is well taken.
While certain ideologies such as orthodox-Marxism can lead to the brand of nihilism mentioned earlier because the mode of rationality manifested in their ideology-critique generates a mechanically deterministic conceptualization of both ideology and rationality, Giroux's more dialectical mode of rationality can be said to generate an optimism that is directly related to the utopian character of his ideology. By no means should this be taken as a criticism of Giroux. By applying what I believe to be a constituent of his mode of rationality, I m attempting to point out the interrelatedness of Giroux's concepts of rationality and ideology. In his view, every mode of rationality asks certain types of questions. At the same time, however, every mode of rationality fails to ask certain other types of questions. The set of questions raised by a particular mode of rationality, as well as those questions that it does not raise, constitute what Giroux calls a problematic. It is useful to quote Giroux at length on this point.
It should be stressed that the problematic of a given mode of rationality represents a response not only to its internal logic, but also to the objective struggles, tensions, and issues posed by the historical times in which it operates. Thus, the notion of problematic cannot be reduced to a mode of analysis "conditioned by purely internal criteria"; it also serves as a mode of theorizing that articulates a particular relationship between individuals and classes, and the social, political, and economic interests that govern the dominant society. In other words, the problematic represents more than the internal logic that governs a text, cultural artifact, or mode of reasoning; it is also the medium and the outcome of constituted and constituting social practices and, as such, must be viewed in terms of its particular relationship to those structural and ideological mechanisms that serve to reproduce an unjust social order./8/
It is through this politicization of his notion of rationality, which he accomplishes by introducing the concept of the problematic, that Giroux makes the most solid connection between rationality and ideology. Because the locus of Giroux's notion of rationality lies in language, the problematic can be viewed in terms of this locus, as well. If language is viewed as a technology which transforms consciousness into symbols, either oral or written, in order to facilitate communication, then, like all other technologies, it amplifies certain aspects of our objective reality within our consciousness while it reduces or ignores other aspects of that reality./9/
The automobile and the airplane, for example, are two technologies which have amplified or increased our consciousness of speed, the time that it takes to travel across space. On the other hand, in amplifying this aspect of our reality, they have reduced another. Because these technologies have increased our sense of speed, they have reduced our sense of distance. Prior to their appearance, the time that it took to travel from New York to Chicago was considered to be great, because the speed of the available means of transportation was slow. Concurrently, the distance between the two cities was also considered to be great. With the appearance of the automobile and, later, the airplane, however, speed, and humanity's experience of it, was greatly "amplified." While the actual distance between New York and Chicago did not change, the introduction of these technologies reduced our culture's sense of that distance. Because of the increased speed afforded by the technologies, our experience of distance has been greatly reduced.
Language effects the same sort of amplification and reduction. Consider the language which harbors the dominant technocratic mode of rationality described by Giroux. "Classroom management" is one of the dominant metaphors within the technocratic vocabulary. This phrase amplifies our experience of the classroom as a site in which students are managed. It also amplifies our experience of the pedagogical process as a mechanism of control. Thus, to reemphasize the rationality-ideology connection made by Giroux, the mode of rationality embedded within this language lends itself to the ideological forces which maintain the student's docility as a passive object, somewhat like a widget on an assembly line. The discourse of the "classroom management" model of pedagogy, then, also amplifies our experience of the student as a mere object, while, concurrently, reducing our experience of her as a subject. In doing so, this discourse and its accompanying mode of rationality reinforce the dominant ideology of contemporary society and modern institutions.
In the final analysis, neither technology, language, nor modes or rationality are ever neutral. Because of the problematic and the non-neutrality of language, all modes of rationality, including those within the realm of educational research and scholarship, are ideologically charged. They all bear some relation to the established set of social and institutional arrangements. What Giroux provides us in ascribing a dialectical quality to the notions of rationality and ideology, then, is an effective means of analyzing those relations without compromising the transformative potential of utopian politics. Herein lies the preeminent value that his writings hold for social and educational theory.
Notes
C.A. Bowers, Responsive Teaching: An Ecological Approach to Classroom Patterns of Language, Culture, and Thought (New York: Teachers College Press, 1990), 32.[Back]
Henry Giroux, Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 9.[Back]
Ibid., 8.[Back]
Ibid.[Back]
Ibid., 22.[Back]
Ibid., 20.[Back]
It is in his language of opposition that we can locate his mode of rationality that engages in ideology-critique.[Back]
Giroux, op. cit., 8.[Back]
For more on the educational implications of the amplification and reduction properties of language and technology, see C.A. Bowers's treatment of Don Ihde's work in The Cultural Dimensions of Educational Computing: Understanding the Non-Neutrality of Technology (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988), 33-34.[Back]
[The Montana Professor 1.3, Fall 1991 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]