A new logic of emancipation: The methodology of jacques rancière

Educational Theory

Volumn 60, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 39-59

  Biesta, Gert ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77955165497     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2009.00345.x     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. Jacques Rancíere, The Philosopher and His Poor (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2003), 26
2. Jacques Rancíere, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004), 223
3. Jacques Rancíere, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 137.
4. Ilan Gur Ze'ev, ed., Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today: Toward a New Critical Language in Education (Haifa, Israel: University of Haifa, 2005).
5. Klaus Mollenhauer, Erziehung und Emanzipation [Education and Emancipation] (München: Juventa, 1976), 67
6. Peter McLaren, Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millennium (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997), 218.
7. Gert Biesta, "'Say You Want a Revolution' Suggestions for the Impossible Future of Critical Pedagogy," Educational Theory 48, no. 4 (1998): 499-510
8. Gert Biesta, "What Can Critical Pedagogy Learn from Postmodernism? Further Reflections on the Impossible Future of Critical Pedagogy," in Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today, ed. Gur Ze'ev, 143-159.
9. Jacques Rancíere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1991
10. The focus of this essay, in other words, is on Rancíere's ideas. It is not intended as a discussion of emancipation more generally and does not aim to cover all the different traditions and approaches within emancipatory and critical social theory and practice. Its purpose rather is to introduce the particular difference that Rancíere's work installs in the discourse on emancipation.
11. Andrew Gibson, "The Unfinished Song: Intermittency and Melancholy in Rancíere," Paragraph 28, no. 1 (2005): 61-76.
12. Although I quote extensively from Rancíere's writings in this essay, I have no space to pay any detailed attention to the particular form of Rancíere's writings. I hope to return to this topic in future work and, for the moment, refer the reader to The Ignorant Schoolmaster and The Philosopher and His Poor as two of the most poignant examples of this particular quality of Rancíere's writing.
13. Gert Biesta, "Toward a New 'Logic' of Emancipation: Foucault and Rancíere," in Philosophy of Education 2008, ed. Ronald David Glass (Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 2009), 169-177
14. An essay in which I offer a reading of Michel Foucault on emancipation that was inspired by my reading of Rancíere. Although the way in which I stage the encounter between Foucault and Rancíere in that essay is entirely mine, Rancíere, in discussing his methodology, has noted that his approach is in some respects "similar to Foucault's" (PA, 50).
15. The Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com.
16. Immanuel Kant, "An Answer to the Question 'What Is Enlightenment?"' (1784), in Post-Modernism: A Reader, ed. Patricia Waugh (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), 90.
17. Immanuel Kant, "Über Pädagogik" [On Education], in Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädagogik (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, (my translation). 1982), 701
18. Kant, "An Answer to the Question 'What Is Enlightenment?"' 93.
19. Kant, "Über Pädagogik," 699 (my translation).
20. Mollenhauer, Erziehung und Emanzipation.
21. I confine myself here to the way in which the idea of emancipation has been articulated within Marxist and neo-Marxist thought, partly because this has played a formative role in Continental and in North American versions of critical pedagogy, and partly because it exemplifies most explicitly the logic Rancíere seeks to question. This is not to suggest that Marxism and neo-Marxism are the only resources for emancipation or that they are the only tradition within which the idea of emancipation has been articulated and developed. Feminism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory are but three examples of approaches that have not only widened the discussion about emancipation by making use of different theoretical resources (such as poststructuralism and psychoanalysis), but have also done this in ways that are often deeply critical of Marxist and neo-Marxist ideas.
22. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, rev. ed. (London and New York: Verso, 2007).
23. Marx, Quoted in Eagleton, Ideology, 80.
24. Engels, quoted in Eagleton, Ideology, 89.
25. Eagleton shows that this particular view was articulated early on in Marx's career and was modified in his later work (Eagleton, Ideology, 63-91).
26. The reason for posing these (rhetorical) questions in this way has to do with Rancíere's claim that equality and inequality "are not two states" but "two 'opinions,' that is to say two different axioms" and that "all one can do is verify the axiom one is given." Jacques Rancíere, "On Ignorant Schoolmasters," chap. 1 in Charles Bingham and Gert Biesta, with Jacques Rancíere, Jacques Rancíere: Education, Truth, Emancipation (London and New York: Continuum, in press). The formulation of the questions aims to highlight, in other words, what happens when one starts from the assumption of inequality rather than from the assumption of equality. I return to this subsequently.
27. Rancíere, "On Ignorant Schoolmasters."
28. Jacques Rancíere, On the Shores of Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 48
29. Jacques Rancíere, "Politics, Identification and Subjectivization," in The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).
30. Gert Biesta, Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future (Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2006).
31. The French word here is partage, which can be translated either as "division" or as "distribution." Whereas "distribution" highlights the fact that each particular distribution of the sensible gives everything a place, "division" highlights the fact that subjectification redistributes the distribution of the sensible, and thus both distributes and interrupts.
32. In French Rancíere sometimes (but not always and not always consistently) makes a distinction that is difficult to translate (and that has not always been picked up by translators consistently) between la politique and le politique. The first refers to the domain of politics in the general sense, whereas the latter indicates the moment of the interruption of the police order (la police or l'ordre policier). The latter, according to Rancíere, is the "proper" idea of politics, and in several of his publications Rancíere has shown how political philosophy, in particular, but also specific forms of politics have tried to suppress the political moment.
33. Gert Biesta, "'Don't Count Me In': Democracy, Education and the Question of Inclusion," Nordisk Pedagogik 27, no. 1 (2007): 18-31
34. Gert Biesta, "Sporadic Democracy: Education, Democracy and the Question of Inclusion," in Education, Democracy and the Moral Life, ed. Michael Katz, Susan Verducci, and Gert Biesta (Dordrecht and Boston: Springer, 2009).
35. See also my subsequent discussion. Although some of Rancíere's writings may give the impression that he is primarily - or perhaps even exclusively - concerned about questions of inequality in relation to social class, Rancíere's configuration of emancipation is definitely not restricted to this. Emancipation is about the verification of the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being. Dissensus is therefore always about the redistribution of the demarcations between "noise" and "voice," not in terms of a politics of recognition where those with a voice grant a voice to those who up to now were considered only to be able to produce "noise," but on the basis of the "simple" claim that one is producing "voice" rather than "noise."
36. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
37. Biesta, "Sporadic Democracy."
38. Jacques Rancíere, The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
39. Rancíere also argues that in modern times this pedagogical logic has become a social logic. In this situation "society thus presents itself as a vast school, with its savages to civilize, and its problem students to put right." Rancíere, "On Ignorant Schoolmasters."
40. The idea of the equality of intelligences does not mean "that all the actions of all intelligences are the same," but rather highlights "that there is only one intelligence at work in all intellectual training." Explanation, on the other hand, operates on the assumption that students themselves are not (yet) capable of what the teacher is capable of, and therefore are in need of explanation. Emancipatory schoolmasters do nothing more (but also nothing less) than demand that their students make use of their intelligence. They forbid "the supposed ignorant one the satisfaction. of admitting that one is incapable of knowing more." Rancíere, "On Ignorant Schoolmasters."
41. The idea of "discussion partners" would assume that Rancíere's work is just one voice within a space that is already defined. Rather than adding his voice to the discussion on emancipation, we might perhaps read Rancíere's work as an intervention, or, in his own words, as a staging of dissensus. In this sense we might see Rancíere's work itself as a political act or an act of politics.
42. Rancíere, "On Ignorant Schoolmasters."
43. Jacques Rancíere, "Ten Theses on Politics," Theory and Event 5, no. 3 (2001): 17-34, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory and event/v005/5.3ranciere.html.
44. Rancíere, "On Ignorant Schoolmasters."
45. In "On Ignorant Schoolmasters," Rancíere provides a very helpful distinction between three different aspects of the notion of ignorance: as teaching that which is unknown to the teacher, as teaching without transmitting knowledge, and as refusing the "knowledge of inequality that is supposed to prepare the way to 'reduce' inequality."
46. Rancíere not only emphasizes that "the distinction between 'stultification' and 'emancipation' is not a distinction between methods of instruction. It is not a distinction between traditional or authoritarian methods, on the one hand, and new or active methods, on the other: stultification can and does happen in all kinds of active and modern ways." He also argues that emancipation cannot be mediated by social institutions. The "heavy price to pay" for the insight that "there are no stages to equality" - since, as soon as we being to think of equality as something that can be achieved starting from inequality, we have already given up the possibility of equality - is that "there is no social emancipation, and no emancipatory school." The reason for this stems from the insight that "if explanation is a social method, the method by which inequality gets represented and reproduced, and if the institution is the place where this representation operates, it follows that intellectual emancipation is necessarily distinct from social and institutional logic." Rancíere, "On Ignorant Schoolmasters."