Summary
The disimagination machine is Henry Giroux’s name for the schools, media and other institutions that wear down people’s ability to remember, think critically and picture a different society. Giroux, a scholar of education, set it out in 2013, borrowing the term from Georges Didi-Huberman’s book on four photographs from Auschwitz. He calls it “a set of cultural apparatuses extending from schools and mainstream media to the new sites of screen culture”, from rewritten textbooks to partisan broadcasting.
Ronald Purser applied it in 2019 to the mindfulness industry, or ‘McMindfulness’, which he says sells the message that “individual action is the only real way to solve social problems”.
Rationale
A warning we take personally. Work on inner orientations can slide into telling people to fix themselves, so we keep asking: “What holds the current contexts in place, and who does that serve?”