Pedagogy as the Bedrock of the Political: Debord, Rancière, and Giroux in the Age of Neoliberal Fascism

Introduction

There has  been a long tradition of thinking about ‘the political’ in Western –– mostly, anticipated by German, French, and other European thinkers –– political theory. The European debates surrounding the political, as well as the alternatives that emerge within that horizon, have made the concept contested. Some adhere to the Schmittian logic, pleading for the friend/enemy dichotomy and emphasizing the necessity of the (nation) state as the sovereign power. Others pursue the Arendtian ideas and rely on an (idealized) Western tradition of thought –– Greek polis (people acting and speaking together) –– to describe the essence of the political. And some subscribe to the Lefortian framework to reconceptualize the political, given the present condition that there is no longer a ‘transcendental’ authority that is able to guarantee a society’s unity.

While these frameworks provide crucial insights regarding the traditional boundaries of the political, they usually overlook the foundational element of politics: pedagogy. What is often missing in traditional debates is the idea that ‘the political’ is not merely about the state, sovereignty or a symbolic space, but a pedagogical mechanism through which particular type of identities, desires, and agencies are (re)produced.

In the current era of ‘neoliberal fascism,’ this pedagogical dimension has taken a dark turn. We are witnessing the rise of a ‘business ontology’ that seeks to transform the political state into an economic state and then militarized one. In this conjuncture, neoliberalism necessarily works as a ‘disimagination machine’ that produces what Giroux calls ‘organized forgetting.’ By utilizing the ‘pedagogy of the spectacle,’ (to extend Guy Debord’s conception of the spectacle) I argue that the neoliberal system does more than commodification of life; it internalizes a consumerist logic that anesthetizes the public and narrows the scope of our imaginary power.

Therefore, understanding the political today requires us to stretch our conceptual lexicon. We must look toward the ‘pedagogical aspect of the spectacle’ and the pedagogical dimension of the ‘partition of the sensible’ to see how domination works in the neoliberal age. Following (and expanding) Guy Debord, Jacques Rancière, and Henry Giroux, I propose that the pedagogical is not simply a supplement to the political, but its foundational element. Furthermore, I argue that insofar as the contemporary police order maintains its power by educating subjects to accept violence as inevitable and to internalize their roles in society, the political necessarily manifests as a pedagogical rupture, a transformative and liberating force that may help us reclaim the collective capacity to imagine and design a world beyond the script of neoliberal fascism.

Neoliberalism, the Pedagogy of the Spectacle, and the Political

It must first be emphasized that context always matters to understand theory and apply it. In this sense, we have to understand what neoliberalism means and how it operates in our times. Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of neoliberalism is not its economic impact, but its political impact. As states become less willing to protect those poor, silent and subaltern, to contest enormous inequality and redistribute wealth, to provide effective public goods, and to restrain those who seek to exploit people and the living planet, our ability to say something through voting. What neoliberalism teaches us is that we can vote with our wallets — that consumerism is its own democratic exercise and reward. But in the ‘consumer democracy,’ or ‘consumer politics’ some people have eventually more voting power than others. Consumerism becomes therefore the defining feature of citizenship or in other words of the political: that defines how we do and understand politics. There is a long philosophical tradition, dating back to Thomas Hobbes, which sees humankind as engaged in a war of “every man against every man.” The ideologues of neoliberalism, such as Friedrich Hayek, argues that this frantic competition deliveres social benefits, generating the wealth that would eventually enrich everyone. But there is also political principle here. At stake in this sense is a remarkable transformation, driven by the bourgeoisie or the accumulation of capital, where its peril lies in the emergence of a new body politics, characterized by ruthless competition and limitless expansion. The political rise of the bourgeoisie or the emergence of bourgeois consciousness, so to say, appeals to this sort of politics, which requires the constant pursuit of ‘power after power’ (Arendt, 1973, p.140) as in the Hobbesian nature of Leviathan: men are driven by “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” (Hobbes, 2018, p.66).

At the heart of neoliberalism is what Henry Giroux calls the fantasy of escape: escape from taxation, regulation and welfare, from the European Union, international law and organizations, from social obligation, and from democracy and politics — an escape, eventually, to a ‘starlit wonderland’ beyond politics, beyond people and beyond democracy. In this conjuncture, the political state becomes an economic state: it serves only financial and economic interests, serving only billionaires like Elon Musk and others. It is, in other words, this business ontology that dominates the political and the state. Anything other than economic profits does not matter as Milton Friedman clearly and shamelessly states that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud” (Friedman, 1970, p.162). What has happened since the 1970s is the emergence of a politics surrounded by multibillionaires, a politics that leads to the colonization of the public realm and the eventual overtaking of truth by corporate interests or the spectacle.

There is, however, more to the colonization of the political by financial and corporate interests; today, the question of neoliberalism and the question of fascism are inseparable as the state turns into a militarized state in almost all over the globe. The point that must be raised here is that violence or coercion is not exceptional anymore, it is the organizing principle of life, society, politics and governance. As Judith Butler brilliantly points out that “. . .the social organization of violence and abandonment, traversing both the sovereign and biopolitical operations of power, constitutes the contemporary horizon. . .” (Butler, 2020, p. 49). The wars on Iran and Palestine, imperial agression in Venezuela, the attack on critical education, the racist language, the visceral violence of ICE, the state-sanctioned killing of citizens, such as Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, the imprisonment of journalists and opposition politicians in Turkey (and somewhere else), and the criminalization of dissent cannot be understood in isolation from the overarching logic of neoliberalism and capitalism. Henry Giroux unfolds this relationship between neoliberalism and fascism as follows:

At the core of this politics of disconnection, private suffering is severed from public responsibility, structural causes disappear from view, and crises intensify in isolation. It is under these conditions that authoritarianism mutates into rebranded forms of fascism, nourished by economic abandonment, historical amnesia, and the systematic evacuation of political accountability and ethical and social responsibility. (Giroux, 2026, para 4)

The fundamental question still remains: what is it in the culture that creates Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Viktor Orbán and that kind of violence and coercion? What is going on in people’s lives — what forms of alienation — that creates not revolution or resistance, but scapegoats? Many political and cultural theorists (even the most critical ones like Wendy Brown, Giorgio Agamben and many others) provide different answers to this question, but usually miss the critical notion that neoliberalism is a form of education, a pedagogical tyranny that is always at odds with politics, democratic language, and the public realm. It is a, in Giroux’s terms, teaching machine working on multiple levels of culture. The ultimate point here is that the questions of class, domination, and violence cannot be separated from the question of culture: together, they operate as a pedagogical mechanism that shapes our identities and agency. This mechanism creates a fascist and totalitarian subject that kills at a distance, celebrates cruelty, death, and violence, and harbors hatred toward immigrants, refugees, and a spectrum of gender identities.

I argue that Guy Debord, the Marxist philosopher, is among the first thinkers to recognize that culture (or one may argue pedagogy) — the spectacle — takes the power as economics. The point is that the spectacle extends beyond commodification. The spectacle does more than transform all aspects of life into commodities; it relegates them to appearing or images. As Debord famously argues that “the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images” (Debord, 1967/2014, p.115). This accumulation signifies that capital moves beyond its economic origin and permeated into the very fabric of our consciousness. Debord explains this shift as follows: “The present stage, in which social life has become completely occupied by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing-all ‘having’ must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances” (Debord, 1967/2014, p.5). The transition from having to appearing points to the internalization of the spectacle. We are not simply the spactators watching from the outside; we perform it from within. We become the spectacle, and capitalism becomes us.

From this point of view, I argue with Debord that the spectacle is not merely a collection of images but a form of education that teaches people a very corrupted form of politics, consumerist culture, performative roles, and hyper individualization. It provides the scripts for a particular form of identity, agency and hence politics, imposing on us what it means to be a good citizen, a consumer, or a ‘successful individual’. The point is that the spectacle necessarily works as a pedagogical mechanism that upholds individualist, consumerist, and capitalist values. As Debord points out that “in all of its particular manifestations—news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment—the spectacle is the model of the prevailing way of life” (Debord, 1967/2014, p. 2). The spectacle is therefore a pedagogical reality that conditions the boundaries of the political, educating subjects to become mere spectators rather than active citizens.

The spectacle, as a form of pedagogy in the current neoliberal era, is still at work in a more expansive, pervasive, and violent form. It has, in fact, become more pertinent than ever, as the spectacle is so all-pervading that it is almost impossible to imagine an alternative to capitalism or an alternative vision of the political — one that is egalitarian, revolutionary, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, and embedded in anti-colonial solidarity, the upholding of the public realm, and democratic language. As Mark Fisher describes it, capitalist realism is “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Fisher, 2009, p. 2). He further explains that it operates as “a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action” (Fisher, 2009, p.16). The ultimate point here is that the pedagogy of the spectacle is tantamount to what Henry Giroux calls a ‘disimagination machine,’ whose ultimate aim is not simply to close off alternative features, but to teach that there is nothing beyond the present form of politics, economy, and life.

The last point we need to raise regarding the spectacle as a form of pedagogy in the current neoliberal era is that it relies primarily, though not exclusively, on violence and coercion. Guy Debord is right to argue that “the spectacle, like modern society itself, is at once united and divided,” and that “the unity of each is based on violent divisions” (Debord, 1967/2014, p.31). However, these violent divisions in Debord’s time were mediated by images, representations, and appearances—or what one might call a form of consent in the Gramscian sense. With neoliberalism’s marriage to fascism, the spectacle no longer feels the need to legitimize itself through the conventional sense of consent. This is not to say that consent is no longer reproduced, but rather that it is now manufactured through the normalization of visceral violence. Following Giroux, it can be argued that neoliberal fascism is fundamentally a pedagogical form of the spectacle that “educates people to disconnect, to see violence as inevitable, to accept militarism as common sense, and to normalize racial cleansing, white Christian nationalism, and authoritarian cruelty” (Giroux, 2026, para. 4). In this sense, the political is reduced to the Schmittian distinction between ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’—a binary logic that replaces democratic deliberation with the raw exercise of power and exclusion. Under this regime, the spectacle no longer relies on a social contract; instead, it operates as a pedagogical mechanism of fear and hate, dictating whose lives are grievable, whose are expendable, and who can be exposed to death.

Beyond the Spectacle: Jacques Rancière and the Partition of the Sensible

Jacques Rancière’s writings on politics, aesthetics, and democracy have been criticized for their abstract, obscure, and ‘Eurocentric’ nature; critics ranges from outright denunciations of Rancière’s indifference to material and structural conditions, to regarding him as a theorist of aesthetics who primarily, if not exclusively, rely on, and limited by, a Western philosophical tradition (e.g., Mignolo, 2011; Žižek, 1999; Mcnay, 2014; Bosteels, 2011). Among the most recent critics of Rancière, Lois McNay has persuasively argued that his conception of the political is bound to philosophical abstractions that disassociate politics from any critique of socio-economic realities, and that he upholds an obscure and abstract notion of disagreement/dissensus.

One of the fundamental features of the police order lies in “the configuration of the perceptible in which one or the other is inscribed” (Rancière, 1999, p.29). It pertains to the Aristotelian distinction, to which Rancière subscribes to, between what is the visible/sayable and what is the invisible/unsayable — in other words, between those who make ‘speech’ (logos) as a speaking (or political) being and those who make only ‘noise’ (phoné). It is thus the police regime that is responsible for regulating the parts of the community and assigning them their specific places, roles, and modes of being. Rancière thus ultimately describes the police “as an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task. . .” (Rancière, 1999, p.29) The police is therefore a realm of domination, a form of social organization that designates a hierarchical relation between the poor and the rich, the ruler and the ruled, or,  in Rancière’s terms,  between those who have part and those who have no part.

What his critics generally miss is the notion that the domination of the people is as much an aesthetic issue as it is of production, class, or material issue. We cannot separate the material exploitation of people from the symbolic distribution of bodies that determines who is perceived as speaking subject and who is perceived as someone who only make ‘noise’. To decouple the economic form of domination from the aesthetic order is to miss the very essence of the police order because it is fundamentally a regime that justifies exploitation by first ensuring that the exploited are perceived as invisible beings. This is not to deny, as critics of Rancière suppose, the fact that the poor are exploited economically by the rich, and is disempowered by the existing relations of production. Rather, there seems to be a fundamental connection, in his understanding, between economic forms of exploitation and the allocation of particular places, jobs and tasks to certain people. To put it more precisely, the distribution of roles and places and the symbolic division of bodies are what precede and enable economic exploitation and domination:

For before the debts that place people who are of no account in a relationship of dependence on the oligarchs, there is the symbolic distribution of bodies that divides them into two categories: those that one sees and those that one does not see, those who have a logos—memorial speech, an account to be kept up—and those who have no logos. . . (Rancière, 1999, p.22)

The political, as Rancière (1999) puts it in his book Disagreement, is the moment “when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part” (Rancière, 1999, p.123). Whereas the police is a realm of domination, a form of social organization that designates a hierarchical relation between the poor and the rich, the ruler and the ruled, or,  in Rancière’s terms,  between those who have part and those who have no part, the political is governed by what Ella Myers calls “axiomatic equality” (Myers, 2016). The relationship between those two realms becomes clearer when Rancière arguesthat “The distribution of the sensible reveals a world of places, tasks, and functions. This world is a world of inequality . . . Politics exists wherever the count of parts and parties of society is disturbed by the inscription of a part of those who have no part” (Rancière, 1999, pp.122-3).

What is at stake in Rancière’s conception of the police and politics is the lack of an account of how pedagogy is central to both. It is true that neoliberalism and capitalism constitute a form of aesthetic order, and it is contested by the part of those who have no part. However, the police order should not be understood, especially in the current form of neoliberalism, simply as something that divides society into different parts, roles and tasks. It does more than the regulation of the society, it has a profound pedagogical aspect that teaches people to recognize only the visible as the possible, thereby undermining the capacity or the agency to imagine alternative forms of the political, or to contest the existing form of the partition of the sensible. In the sense of Giroux, that kind of disimagination machine “[does] more than distort reality; [it obliterates] the capacity for dissent, replacing critical inquiry with conspiracy theories, fearmongering, and spectacles of hatred” (Giroux, 2025, p.131; my emphasis).

Thus, what I argue with Giroux is that the partition of the sensible is not simply a static allocation of bodies, but a pedagogical system that must be continuously reproduced. If the police order is responsible for assigning parts and roles, it does this task by educating subjects – through social media, entertainment, education and violence — to accept the limits of their own (in)visibility, or internalize their assigned roles in society. In this sense, neoliberalism relies on a pedagogical police order that not only divides society into different parts but also limits the horizon of the imaginable. Furthermore, the political no longer simply points to the interruption of the aesthetic order by the inclusion of the part of those who have no part; rather, it should be a pedagogical rupture that may restore the collective capacity to see beyond the existing boundaries of life and society. The point is that without challenging the pedagogical order, we cannot truly adress the aesthetic order, as any shift in the latter remains superficial if the subjects do not unlearn the internalized scripts that impose and dictate their roles and tasks. Politics is far more than a transient interruption of the police order; it is a transformative educational force through which the ‘part of no part’ reclaims the agency necessary to imagine a world outside the neoliberal script. Modern youth movements, such as Fridays for Future, March for Our Lives, and the pro-Palestinian student protests at campuses like MIT and Columbia, are prime examples of how the political manifests itself. That is, the political is the moment when these students challenge the pedagogical police order that normalizes violence and censors the imagination, reclaiming and protesting for a ‘radical imagination’ to design a world beyond neoliberal fascism, capitalism, war, and violence.

Pedagogy as the Foundational Bedrock of the Political: Henry Giroux and Making The Political more Pedagogical

As we have seen so far, we can and need to stretch our conceptual lexicon to understand and make sense of the current form of capitalism and neoliberalism. It is crucial to see the pedagogical aspect of the spectacle, the police order, and the political in Ranciere’s understanding, in other sense, of domination, liberation and dissent. Guy Debord’s and  Jacques Rancière’s conceptual frameworks are capacious enough to see how domination works in the current neoliberal age. However, the pedagogical aspect in their theories (and many others) are often overlooked. For that particular reason, I propose, following Henry Giroux, that the pedagogical is central to the political in the sense that “forms of domination are not merely structural but also intellectual and educational” (Giroux, 2025, p.97). The ultimate point here is that any struggle for political change “can only succeed if combined with a profound transformation of mass consciousness”, as neoliberal fascism maintains its hegemony not just through structural power or violent actions, but by using disimagination machines to colonize the public mind and erase historical memory. (Giroux, 2025, p.56)

In his seminal work, Assassins of Memory: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Erasure(2025), Henry Giroux posits that neoliberalism necessarily works as a ‘disimagination machine,’ in the sense that cultural apparatuses, like mainstream social media and news, actively produce ignorance. This is the basis of what he calls ‘organized forgetting.’ By erasing history and devaluing critical thought, the neoliberal system ensures that people cannot connect their private troubles to larger social structures or power relations. He points to the danger of this pedagogical assault: “Ignorance is no longer passive; it is weaponized, fostering a false solidarity among those who reject democracy and scorn reason.” (Giroux, 2025, p.154)

This is the point where the pedagogical ‘police order’ manifests itself, as state does not just police bodies in society or in streets, it polices the boundaries of the thinkable, the sayable, the visible, and, above all, the pedagogical. This policing of the pedagogical results in what Giroux identifies as a systemic erasure of the historical narratives that provide the foundation for critical agency. By narrowing the scope of what is imaginable, the neoliberal system causes the “moral mechanisms of language” collapse, leaving the public unable to articulate a future outside the logic of capitalism. (Giroux, 2025, p.7) In this sense, the police order does not merely suppress dissent through the partition of the sensible; it removes or even destroys the intellectual capacity or agency necessary to conceive of alternative ways of doing politics.

Another ultimate point is that the neoliberal spectacle turns into a pedagogical weapon that promotes a ‘culture of cruelty,’  where the visceral violence of neoliberal fascism is normalized. For Giroux, the transformation of educational institutions into the ‘American Homeland Security Campus’ is the ultimate reason that makes this kind of policing possible. When universities are reconfigured as ‘police precincts’ rather than sites of critical inquiry, the state effectively ‘assassinates’ the memory of collective struggle, concsciousness and democratic possibility.

Following Giroux, my ultimate contention here is that  the ‘profound transformation of mass consciousness’ is not a secondary principle but the primary site of insurrection or resistance. In other words, the pedagogical can not be understood as a supplement to the political, because domination is fundamentally educational, so the political must be fundamentally  a pedagogical project. To challenge the neoliberal spectacle and police order is to engage in a ‘pedagogy of resistance’ that reconnects historical memory to contemporary struggle, that may help us to connect our private troubles to larger social structures. I argue with Giroux, we must recognize that politics is not simply a contest over over power, it is a struggle over the very ‘consciousness of the age.’ Only by making the ‘pedagogical more political’ can we disrupt the police order and reclaim the public spaces where the ‘unthinkable’ can once again be voiced, seen, and acted upon. This is the only path toward a radical democracy that can withstand the assassins of memory, and it is the very moment that the political can manifest itself.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this paper demonstrates that the neglect of the pedagogical aspect within the political theories of Debord and Rancière (and others) stems from a fundamental failure to recognize pedagogy as the foundational bedrock of the political. I have tried to show that these theoretical frameworks remain capacious when extended beyond their traditional boundaries by incorporating a pedagogical aspect and being put in dialogue with Henry Giroux’s vision of critical pedagogy. Indeed, bringing together the conceptual frameworks of the spectacle, the police order, and the ‘disimagination machine’ reveals the profound entanglement of consciousness (or, of the political) and domination within the current era of neoliberal fascism.

By reframing the contemporary neoliberal era as a pedagogical ‘police regime’ of perception, I show that domination works as a pervasive disimagination machine that secures the current partition of the sensible through the manufacture of ignorance and organized forgetting, thereby closing off  the possibility of imagining a future beyond the logic of capital. Simultaneously, by treating modern dissent, from youth movements to campus protests, as an example of Rancièrian politcs, I highlight that the political must extend its reach beyond the disruption of the aesthetic order to challenge the very pedagogical order that underpins and reproduces it. In the sense of Giroux, the political does not only reconfigure the existing boundaries of the aesthetic order, but also dismantle the pedagogical order of organized forgetting that sustains neoliberal fascism and the partition of the sensible.

Ultimately, this dialogue suggests that the divide between pedagogy and politics is a false dichotomy; any meaningful struggle against exploitation and domination is fundamentally a pedagogical struggle over who has the capacity to see, speak, and imagine a future outside the logic of capital. The dialogue between Debord, Rancière, and Giroux provides a robust framework for seeing that the ‘part of no part’ can only challenge the structures of neoliberal fascism or the spectacle through a profound transformation of mass consciousness.

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Thumbnail: Elise Swaim, Eye Contact, 2023, retrieved from: https://mnartists.walkerart.org/pedagogy-and-propaganda-a-manifesto-for-anti-fascist-education

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