Читать книгу Portraits of Violence - Brad Evans - Страница 9

How do we educate

about violence?

Henry A Giroux

There has never been a more urgent time to develop the necessary

pedagogical tools to critique forms of violence in the contemporary period.

Unfortunately, we live at a moment in which ignorance appears to be one

of the defining features of political and cultural life. Ignorance has become

a form of weaponized refusal to acknowledge the violence of the past,

and revels in a culture of media spectacles in which public concerns are

translated into private obsessions, consumerism and fatuous entertainment.

As James Baldwin rightly warned, ‘Ignorance, allied with power, is the most

ferocious enemy justice can have.’

What I have called in my work the violence of organized forgetting signals

how contemporary politics are those in which emotion triumphs over reason,

and spectacle over truth, thereby erasing history by producing an endless

flow of fragmented and disingenuous knowledge. The lessons here are clear.

Without a critical formative culture, and the public spheres that nourish it,

a type of symbolic violence, engineered by the active disavowal of thought,

emerges in which it becomes difficult for people to think critically and act

with responsibility and informed judgment.

What I have stressed is that the culture of ignorance functions to depoliticize

people by immersing them in a culture of immediacy, thrill and pleasure,

a withdrawal into private obsessions, conspicuous consumption and the

spectacle of keeping up with popular celebrities.