Rancière, Public Education and the Taming of Democracy

Maarten Simons, Jan Masschelein, Maarten Simons, Jan Masschelein

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781444338430
• eBook ISBN: 9781444393859
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Rancière, Public Education and the Taming of Democracy introduces the political and educational ideas of Jacques Rancière, a leading philosopher increasingly important in educational theory.

In light of his ideas, the volume explores the current concern for democracy and equality in relation to education.

• The book introduces and discusses the works of Jacques Rancière, a leading philosopher increasingly important in the field of educational theory and philosophy
• The volume will have a broad appeal to those in the field of education theory and philosophy, and those concerned with democracy, equal opportunities and pedagogy
• Balanced in its introduction of the political and educational ideas of this author and in its exploration in line with his work of some important issues in education and policy today
• Contributors from diverse countries and intellectual and cultural backgrounds, including the UK, US, Belgium, Sweden, Spain, France, Canada

1

Introduction: Hatred of Democracy … and of the Public Role of Education?

Maarten Simons & Jan Masschelein

Introduction

Democracy and equality through (and in) education appears to be a major concern today: the organisation of democratic schools, the development of competencies for democratic citizenship and participation, policies on equal opportunities … . Most of the current initiatives assume that the reduction of inequality and the development of democracy are essentially policy concerns and objectives, and a matter of organisational reform or curriculum reform. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière does not take this (policy, organisational, curricular) concern for democracy, inclusion and equality for granted. Indeed, he is somehow a provocative voice in the current public debate; he wants to challenge the insistence on current procedures of deliberative democracy, participation, consensus and agreement (e.g. On the Shores of Politics (2007a); Hatred of Democracy (2007b)), as well as the taken for granted (unequal) pedagogic relation between master and pupils (e.g. The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991)). Instead of merely criticizing current practices and discourses, the attractiveness of Rancière’s work is that he does try to formulate in a positive way what democracy is about, how equality can be a pedagogic or educational (instead of policy) concern, and what the public role of education is (since equality and democracy are for Rancière closely related to ‘the public’).

The aim of this book is twofold. First, it is an introduction to the political and educational ideas of an author who is not well known in the field of educational theory and philosophy—although he is one of the leading philosophers in and outside France. Second, the contributions not only present scholarly work ‘on Rancière’, but attempt to explore ‘in line with Rancière’ the current concern for democracy and equality in relation to education. Before we introduce the different contributions to this book, we briefly indicate some of the main tenets of Rancière’s work as well as some of his basic ideas that can help us to clarify the overall focus of this book.

Of Masters, Intellectuals and Inequality

As a brilliant student of Louis Althusser at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in the 1960s, Rancière immediately set the tone for his future work when he distanced himself radically from his ‘master’ in La leçon d’Althusser published in 1974.¹ This work indicated a general line of argument that has continued throughout his subsequent work. As one of the leading Marxist theorists at that time, Althusser had been very critical about the revolt of May 1968. He was, however, attacked by Rancière, not initially for his reading of Marx or his understanding of the May events, but for the fact that his theory was above all an educational theory that justified the eminent value and superiority of the masters (or the intellectuals) themselves over the workers (or the people). The masters, on this view, are those who ‘think’ and objectively ‘know’ how society operates and therefore are the owners of the truth about what happens and is the case. The workers are those who do not think but just act; they are ignorant about the laws of history and the logic of capitalism, which motivates and ultimately determines their actions; and they are captivated by illusions about their ‘real’ situation and are prisoners of ideologies or bearers of a false consciousness. According to Rancière, it was, therefore, a theory that legitimized the inequality and distance between those who know and the ignorant, those in need of the knowledge they lack in order to be emancipated and truly conscious, i.e. in need of the explanations of the master. Althusser’s philosophical theory thereby confirmed and justified (as did most philosophy and educational theory according to Rancière) the labour division that gives it its place: the distinction between those who think and those who act, between those who know and the ignorant. Philosophy and educational theory assume the role of speaking for those whose supposed ignorance offers them their own reason for existence. Emancipation and (in)equality are thereby always related to knowledge and, hence, to the institution of a limit (or abyss/distance) between the ignorant and those who know. To a large extent Rancière’s work is about the unsettlement, suspension or displacement of the connection/relation between emancipation and knowledge, and the implied border/limit-setting.

One of the most intriguing, disturbing and fascinating ways in which he did this was inspired by the ideas of the collective Les révoltes logiques (Collectif Révoltes Logiques, 1984),² which vividly documented the experiences and voices of workers/labourers of the early 19^th century who transcended the limits imposed on them (e.g. La Nuit des prolétaires. Archives du rêve ouvrier (1981); Courts voyages au pays du peuple (1990); La parole ouvrière, 1830/1851 (Faure & Rancière 1976); Louis-Gabriel Gauny. Le philosophe plebeian (1985)). In his work Rancière approached these workers as equals and took seriously what they had to say about their conditions. More particularly, he revived more or less marginal figures whose emancipation consisted in claiming the time that the bourgeoisie claimed for itself: the time which is not the time of labour and necessity but free or dead time i.e. un-economic time. These were figures who claimed the right to think and thereby disrupted the definition of their social category as workers (who don’t think but do/work). Although Rancière made sure these voices maintained their individual and historical specificity, he also decontextualised them by involving them in a diagnosis of the present and bringing them back in time, creating untimely voices that interfered in the timely debate on the issues of equality and democracy. It was also during his investigations in the archives of the labour movement, looking for the ‘proper’ voice of the ‘people’, that Rancière stumbled upon Joseph Jacotot, who at the beginning of the 19^th century announced the equality of intelligence of all people and elaborated what he called ‘universal teaching’ including the possibility to teach what one does not know and the capacity of the illiterate to emancipate their children. This figure not only became the central character in Rancière’s wonderful story of the ‘Ignorant Schoolmaster’ but also continues to accompany him (closely) throughout all his work (there is indeed almost no text, where Jacotot does not in one way or another appear).³ At the time of its publication in 1987 Rancière wanted to intervene through this story in the intellectual debate on the public role of education with regard to equality and democracy, which was a central debate in France at that time. The intervention took the form of an ‘activation of the archives’ (Badiou, 2006): a displacement, translation and repetition of the untimely discourse of Jacotot through a rephrasing and rewording of his story. A story that will also be recalled and retold extensively in various forms throughout this volume and that we, therefore, want to leave for now.

Rancière did not only revive the voices of emancipated people of the 19^th century, however, but time and again criticized the intellectuals (sociologists, philosophers, historians, educationalists …) who claimed to know the ignorance of the others, who thought that they had to explain this ignorance and to speak for those who don’t know (as argued for example in his texts The Philosopher and his Poor (2004); Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (1998); Hatred of Democracy (2007b)). According to Rancière, those intellectuals, including Althusser, Bourdieu, Milner among others, always teach us first and above all a lesson in inequality. While they always start from the assumption of inequality they continuously prove inequality, and by proving it they constantly rediscover it. For example, whether one conceives of the school as a machine that reproduces social inequality (Bourdieu) or as an instrument to reduce inequality (Milner), the effect remains the same: a distance is inaugurated and maintained between a future equality and a present inequality, between a future intellectual richness and an actual intellectual poverty. It is about a distance that is installed in the order of discourse and is reinstituted and reconfirmed time and again. The effect is that the ignorant and the poor remain in their place (in the social order), the place which, according to the discourse, corresponds to their ‘nature’ or their ‘capacities’. Rancière is not looking for counter-arguments, however, but instead refuses the attitude or position that ascribes a body (also a social body) to a certain type of utterance and a certain place in the social order. In this context, Jacotot embodies the counter-position to Bourdieu, Althusser and Milner, in that he does not claim that inequality can or has to be undone gradually. Equality constitutes no criterion or goal that would define the time needed to transform today’s society into what it should become in the future. Equality is for Jacotot the starting point, the axiom or hypothesis that fosters thought, experiment and invention. Equality is neither a promise nor an (empirical) fact, but a practical hypothesis to start with. Equality is a practice, not a reward in a distant future. Jacotot’s ‘lesson’ in emancipation says that all people have at their disposal an equal intelligence and that emancipation means to actualise/realise this equal intelligence, i.e. the ability to speak, think and act.

On Lessons, Equality, Democracy

Indeed, Rancière subtitled his story on Jacotot ‘Five lessons in intellectual emancipation’. It is worthwhile to give this a moment’s thought since it seems paradoxical to speak about lessons when one wants to question precisely the idea of education as the teaching of students by a master. In fact, Rancière’s lessons in emancipation do not teach anything, they do not explain. They tell the story, recite the utterances and recall the actions of Jacotot in such a way that the experiences of Jacotot ‘are blown out of the past into the present’ in such a way that they can cut into the present (see Ross, 1991). These lessons do not explain, but tell a story. Telling stories is one of the two basic operations of any intelligence, according to Rancière/Jacotot, the other being ‘to guess’. Both are operations to verify the equality of intelligence. Both start from equality. But can they then still be called lessons? A question even more pressing since it is difficult to define the genre of the text and the discipline to which it belongs (is it a philosopher, an educationalist/pedagogue, an historian who is the author?). The book seems to escape any clear classification. It disturbs the borders between genres and disciplines and the limits they define regarding what legitimately can be said (within the discipline) and what can’t, what can be done (within a genre) and what can’t. Moreover, this difficulty and uncertainty is increased by the fact that it is difficult to know who actually is speaking: Jacotot or Rancière? It is unclear who might be the author of the lessons, but it is equally unclear to whom the lessons might be addressed. There is no public that could be defined and positioned in relation to a science/knowledge that it would lack and need. The lessons have no real pupil/student. The book is not addressed to anyone in particular. It addresses individuals, not institutionalised actors (that is, actors defined by institutions as the school, scientific disciplines and departments, etc.). The lessons, thus, disturb the position of the author and of the reader, as well as the positions of the knowing and the ignorant. The question ‘who teaches who?’ loses its pertinence. The lessons are not teaching or explaining something, but are making something public, making it present so that we can relate to it, or not: ‘It sufficed only to announce it’ (Rancière, 1991, p. 18).

The lessons, then, are untimely and improper lessons in intellectual emancipation. But what is emancipation? Emancipation is not about becoming conscious of an exploitation, alienation or disregard of which one would not otherwise be aware. According to Rancière, those who emancipate themselves did, and do, so by claiming and practicing a way of thinking, of speaking, and of living, which was not or is not ‘thei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Hatred of Democracy . . . and of the Public Role of Education?
• Chapter 2: The Public Role of Teaching: To keep the door closed
• Chapter 3: Learner, Student, Speaker: Why it matters how we call those we teach
• Chapter 4: Ignorance and Translation, ‘Artifacts’ for Practices of Equality
• Chapter 5: Democratic Education: An (im)possibility that yet remains to come
• Chapter 6: Governmental, Political and Pedagogic Subjectivation: Foucault with Rancière
• Chapter 7: The Immigrant Has No Proper Name: The disease of consensual democracy within the myth of schooling
• Chapter 8: Queer Politics in Schools: A Rancièrean reading
• Chapter 9: Paulo Freire’s Last Laugh: Rethinking critical pedagogy’s funny bone through Jacques Rancière
• Chapter 10: Settling no Conflict in the Public Place: Truth in education, and in Rancièrean scholarship
• Chapter 11: The Hatred of Public Schooling: The school as the
• Chapter 12: Endgame: Reading, writing, talking (and perhaps thinking) in a faculty of education
• Index
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