Žižek at the Gogglebox

Abstract

The mediation of pedagogy in popular culture rarely provides a space for a critical discussion of either education itself or the social practice of teaching. The contemporary philosopher Slavoj Žižek provides an analytical perspective for discussing the ideological power at work in apparently liberal mediation, through which we are given a space for a sentimental, but profoundly uncritical response to inequality. This chapter addresses, through a Žižekian approach, the mediation of pedagogy via its secondary-encoded, hyper-mediated reception. The subject-object / viewer-viewed “characters” of Channel 4’s Gogglebox will be discussed in relation to their responses to Educating Yorkshire’s most publicly impactful moment—the “triumph of Musharaf,” the student whose debilitating stammer is “cured” via the intervention of his English teacher. In so doing, the response will attempt to work through a parallax reflection on the program’s failure to disrupt, in the moment of our collective reception, the alienating regime conditions from which its hero is temporarily granted salvation. The chapter will suggest that the Googlebox households’ emotional and apparently reflective, publicly circulated readings of the text operate on three levels—as secondary encodings to frame, validate or question our own responses; as a hegemonic (non) antidote to education’s violence; and to reproduce the enduring ideological myth of “non engagement” with education as a deficit to be “cured” at all costs. In taking up Žižek’s challenge to refuse the disavowal of structural relations in the mediation of capitalism, and pedagogy within it, this analysis seeks to interrogate the Goggleboxers’ encoding of Educating Yorkshire as an example of the disavowal of structural relations in the mediation of education.