Reading Rancière for Education: An Introduction 3030960129, 9783030960124

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Reading Rancière for Education An Introduction Jane McDonnell

Reading Rancière for Education

Jane McDonnell

Reading Rancière for Education An Introduction

Jane McDonnell Faculty of Health and Education Manchester Metropolitan University Manchester, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-96012-4    ISBN 978-3-030-96013-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96013-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Maram_shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Michael

Preface

This book represents the culmination of reading Rancière’s writing and reflecting on its significance for education over the past fifteen years. I was first introduced to Rancière’s work by Prof. Gert Biesta, under whose supervision I carried out my doctoral research on education and democracy beginning in 2006. I immediately found Rancière’s writing to be a refreshingly radical tonic for some of the more conventional perspectives on democracy I was reading in the literature at the time. As someone who has always had a strong interest in the arts, I found that Rancière’s later writing on art and aesthetics, particularly his contributions on literature and cinema, resonated with my own interests, both academic and personal. Rancière’s highly unique perspective on both art and politics kept me coming back to his work over the years—sometimes in relation to an academic project and sometimes simply for pleasure. Working in the context of higher education over the past decade, I started to combine this interest with a reading of Rancière’s earlier writing on emancipation. One of the curious things about my introduction to Rancière’s writing is that it was not until much later, after my first foray into his work, that I read the text that has been most popular amongst educators, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. While I appreciate the appeal that this work has had for educationalists, I also consider it unfortunate that educational engagement with Rancière’s writing often seems to start and end with this text. Over the years, I have also had cause to vii

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question and reconsider some of the main applications of Rancière’s writing by educationalists in the field. This book is an attempt to address both these concerns and to offer my own individual perspective on Rancière’s writing, which I hope will also be of use and interest to others. I would like to thank Eleanor Christie, who first encouraged me to think about writing this book, along with Rebecca Wyde and all the staff at Palgrave Macmillan, who have helped in its production. I would also like to thank Gert Biesta, without whose encouragement I would never have picked up a book by Rancière in the first place. Finally, I would like to thank Michael and Marta for all their patience, support, and good will in helping me to complete this project. Manchester, UK

Jane McDonnell

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Why Read Rancière for Education?    2 The Structure of This Book    5 References   9 Part I Introduction to Rancière’s Interventions  13 2 On (Democratic) Politics 15 Defining Democracy for Democratic Education   16 Rancière’s Interventions on Democracy   20 Democracy in Rancière’s Writing   23 Political Philosophy in Rancière’s Writing   27 Politics and ‘The Police’   30 The Aesthetics of Politics and the ‘Distribution of the Sensible’   32 Consensus  33 Reflection  35 References  37

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3 On (the Politics of ) Aesthetics 41 The Politics of Aesthetics   43 Artistic Regimes  44 An Ethical Turn in Art and Politics   48 The Political Import of Art   53 Literature and the Social Sciences   55 Reflection  59 References  61 4 On (Intellectual) Emancipation 63 Rancière’s Interventions on Emancipation   65 Emancipation in Action   66 Intellectual Emancipation  70 Emancipation Across Rancière’s Oeuvre   81 Reflection  83 References  84 5 On Education 85 Rancière’s Critique of Foucault and Bourdieu   87 Critique of Foucault   88 Critique of Bourdieu   89 Education in The Ignorant Schoolmaster  91 Education in Rancière’s Writing on Democracy   94 From Intellectual Emancipation to Democratic Politics   94 The Pedagogical Logic of Consensus   95 Debates over Public Education   96 Education in Rancière’s Writing on Art and Aesthetics   99 Reflection 103 References 105 Part II Uptake of Rancière’s Writing in Education 107 6 Emancipatory, Democratic, and Political Education109 The Impact of Rancière’s Writing in Educational Philosophy and Theory  110

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Emancipatory Education  111 Democratic Education  114 The Public Role of Schools in Democratic Societies  117 Critical Evaluation  119 Reflection 126 References 128 7 Art(s) Education131 The Aesthetic Dimensions of Emancipatory, Democratic, and Political Education  133 Rancière’s Appeal in Art and Aesthetics  135 Art Education in Schools  137 Community Art Projects  141 Critical Evaluation  142 Reflection 146 References 150 8 Innovations in Educational Research153 Departing from Critical Theory  155 Educational Research in a Poetic Register  158 ‘Rancièrian’ Approaches to Educational Research in Practice  162 Questioning the Foundations of Educational Research  162 Performative, Poetic, and Arts-Based Research  164 Shifting the Focus of Educational Research  165 Critical Evaluation  167 Reflection 170 References 172 Part III Evaluating Rancière’s Contribution 175 9 Key Criticisms of Rancière177 Reconstructing a ‘Rancièrian’ Political Project  178 What Comes Before, After, and Alongside ‘Politics’?  179 Evaluating Criticisms of Rancière’s ‘Politics’  181

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The Interpretative Power of Rancière’s Work  184 What Counts as ‘Politics’ and What Conditions Does It Require? 184 Evaluating Criticisms of Rancière’s Interpretative Power  189 Reclaiming the Political Significance of Art  192 Discussion 193 Reflection 195 References 196 10 Conclusion199 Rancière’s Interventions  200 Applications of Rancière’s Writing in Education  201 Challenges, Limitations, and Possibilities  203 References 206 Index209

1 Introduction

A few years ago, I was invited to give a talk for students and colleagues, offering a ‘Beginner’s Guide’ to the writing of Jacques Rancière. This book is the indirect result of that talk. It is, essentially, an introduction to Rancière’s writing, and the use of his work in educational scholarship, for those who are interested in knowing more about what Rancière has to say and how his contributions have been taken up in education. Anyone who has a passing interest in Rancière’s writing and its relevance for education will immediately sense the difficulty of such a task. Explaining to ‘beginners’ the key concepts of a writer whose most famous intervention on education ostensibly offers a radical critique of the very notions of explanation and expertise draws one immediately into the realm of performative contradiction. Bingham (2010) has written on the specific irony of educational researchers and scholars writing about and thinking with Rancière’s work. He contends that, following Rancière, ‘the scholar must proceed as a storyteller rather than an explicator of the truth’ (Bingham 2010, p. 663). It is in such a spirit of storytelling that I have written this book—as the story of my own engagement with Rancière’s writing and my attempts to apply it to the field of education, in the hope that it will be of use and interest to others in the field. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. McDonnell, Reading Rancière for Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96013-1_1

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My own ‘intellectual adventure’ (Rancière 1991, p. 1) with Rancière’s writing began about fifteen years ago, when embarking on doctoral research on the role of art in the relationship between democracy and education. Since then, I have returned to his writing again and again for its unique style and its refreshingly radical reimagining of politics, art, and the social sciences. While I was first attracted by Rancière’s radical reappraisal of democracy and its applicability to rethinking the familiar coordinates of democratic education, I soon found that Rancière’s writing on art and aesthetics was equally appealing as a way of rethinking the political import of art in educational contexts, which is often framed as a way of achieving political ends through education. Later, as an academic working in higher education, I became interested in Rancière’s radical critique of the social sciences and of sociological explanations of inequality, which permeates so much of the work of educationalists. This book follows the trajectory of my own experience of reading Rancière for education, reflecting on the power and appeal of his writing for educationalists, as well as the challenges, dilemmas, and impasses that are often encountered when bringing his work into dialogue with educational debates. The book has three main purposes. Firstly, to introduce readers to the key contributions and insights offered in Rancière’s writing. Secondly, to outline and critically evaluate the ways in which educationalists have taken up Rancière’s writing in their research and scholarship. Finally, to illustrate some of the rewards and challenges of applying Rancière’s writing to educational research and scholarship via reflections of my own experience of trying to do this. The book is written primarily for educational researchers interested in the possibilities of Rancière’s writing for informing their own work, but I hope it will also be of interest to educationalists in general and anyone with an interest in knowing more about Rancière’s writing, particularly as it has been applied to educational questions.

Why Read Rancière for Education? Before detailing the book’s contents, it is worth considering why educationalists might be interested in reading (or reading more) about Rancière’s writing and why now. Firstly, the most obvious reason is the

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increasing popularity of Rancière’s writing, including in education. While Rancière’s work was not widely translated into English until the late 1990s and early 2000s, since then it has become increasingly popular in the English-speaking world in several fields, including art and aesthetics (see, e.g., Tanke 2011), political theory and philosophy (see, e.g., Chambers 2013; May 2008), and history (Steedman 2013). Although by no means a mainstream political thinker (Rancière’s writing remains both unusual and rather marginal in these fields), it is fair to say that Rancière has attracted a niche following amongst scholars interested in radically different perspectives on key contemporary issues spanning art, politics, and research in the social sciences. In education, there was a significant spike in interest in Rancière’s writing in the English-speaking world around ten years ago, following the seminal interpretations of his work in educational philosophy and theory by scholars including Gert Biesta (see, e.g., 2010, 2011; Bingham and Biesta 2010), Jan Maschelein (Maschelein and Simons 2010; Simons and Maschelein 2010), and Tyson Lewis (2010). For these scholars, Rancière’s writing has offered a way of radically rethinking not only any emancipatory, democratic, or political project, but also the nature and role of public schooling itself. Following these seminal works, it has become quite common to come across ‘Rancièrian’ language in educational literature. Terms such as ‘the equality of intelligence’, ‘police logic’, and ‘the distribution of the sensible’ are now almost commonplace in educational philosophy and theory. For this reason alone, it is worth engaging with Rancière’s work, to get a better sense of the meaning of these terms for Rancière and how they are (and might be) taken up in educational research and scholarship. A second reason why Rancière’s writing is particularly important now, not least for educationalists, is the commonly expressed sentiment that we are living in times of unprecedented political crisis, in which the sustainability of existing models of democratic government is under threat from resurgent nationalism(s) and populism(s) (see, e.g., Stavrakakis 2014). Rancière’s writing, which addressed similar concerns over twenty-­ five years ago, when discussions about the end of politics were more of the triumphal variety (Fukuyama 1989), is certainly worth revisiting now. Rancière’s diagnosis of the ailments stemming from the politics of consensus, his introduction of terms such as ‘post-democracy’ (Rancière

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1995, p.  102), and his horizontal approach to charting the ‘scenes’ (Rancière 2016, p. 83) in which genuine politics occurs, all provide incisive and innovative ways of making sense of our current political climate. This is true not only in relation to what might be known as ‘established democracies’ in Western countries and the global North but also in relation to nation states and political movements in non-Western countries and the global South. Despite criticisms that Rancière’s writing emanates from a Eurocentric, ‘unacknowledged centre’ (Sparks 2016) (these and other criticisms of his work are addressed in detail in the latter part of the book), his work has been taken up by many as a way of analysing political movements in South America, Africa, and Asia (see, e.g., Rajca 2018; Harley 2012; Cartier 2020). For educationalists, long concerned with the role that education may play in sustaining, saving, or reforming democracy and contributing to political and social change, his work offers an important, if challenging, contribution to understanding, appraising, and revisioning this role. Thirdly, there has been heightened interest in creative and artistic approaches, including the use of arts-based empirical methods, in educational research in recent years. This is aligned with, but not limited to, a ‘post-qualitative’ (St. Pierre 2018) turn in educational research and the attempt to rethink what constitutes social and educational inquiry in ‘the ruins’ (Lather 2001, 2017) of the paradigm wars that characterised the field in the late twentieth century and the ‘afterward’ of positivistic and neoliberal attempts to ‘discipline’ qualitative research (Lather 2013). Though this remains a rather niche area of educational research (in a field where large-scale quantitative studies now again predominate), some of the most innovative work on the philosophical underpinnings of educational research over the past twenty years has come from this perspective. Attempts to work with Lather’s (2001, 2013, 2017) concepts of ‘the ruins’ and ‘the afterward’ of qualitative research have often involved experimentation with arts-based methodologies, accompanied by a (re) emphasis on aesthetics, affect, and the corporeal in educational research. These innovations are also often inspired by the work of philosophers such as Barad, Deleuze, and Latour to address corporeality, materiality, and aesthetics in research, as well as the limits of educational research in a critical mode or paradigm (Denzin et al. 2017). Rancière’s writing on

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art, aesthetics, and politics, as well as his own idiosyncratic approach to research, his own style or ‘method’ (2009, 2016), and his critique of critical theory, provides another point of theoretical and philosophical reference in such a post-qualitative, post-critical, and aesthetic approach to educational research, including arts-based methods. For these reasons, Rancière’s writing has the potential to intervene generatively in several parallel debates and movements within educational research and scholarship. This book is an attempt to give an indication of what those interventions might involve and what difficult questions and challenges they raise. There are limitations to the book, of course. It is based on a reading of Rancière’s writing in English translations, rather than the original French, and on literature that has applied his writing to educational issues and debates written in the English language. Additionally, while Rancière’s writing is applicable to a range of contexts (as noted above), the examples I draw on from my own research to illustrate the import of his writing for empirical research on democracy, education, and the arts are all located in the UK and may be more readily recognisable to readers from the UK and Europe than other contexts. Finally, in attempting to offer an accessible introduction to Rancière’s writing, I have parsed his interventions into themes (democracy, aesthetics, emancipation, and education) that might imply a more discrete set of interventions than really exists in his work. Connections and overlaps between these themes are indicated throughout. I also discuss this decision and its implications in more detail in the conclusion.

The Structure of This Book The book is divided into three parts. The first part introduces some key themes, features, and terms in Rancière’s writing. Rancière (2009, p. 114) has insisted that he, ‘never intended to produce a theory of politics, aesthetics, literature, cinema or anything else’ (my italics) and that his works are, instead, ‘always forms of intervention in specific contexts’. My intention therefore is not to provide an account of ‘Rancièrian’ theory but to tease out some of the most incisive perspectives that emerge from his writing. This part of the book follows a ‘biographical’ rather than

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chronological or systematic logic; key themes in Rancière’s writing are discussed in the order in which I personally encountered them in my own academic work and my attempts to apply Rancière’s writing to empirical research and theoretical work in education. Each chapter in this part of the book begins with a personal anecdote to introduce some of the issues and debates that I encountered in my own academic journey researching the relations between democracy, art, and education, before offering an account of Rancière’s interventions that relate to these. Each chapter concludes with a brief, personal reflection on how I have tried to use Rancière’s writing in my own research and scholarship. The personal anecdotes and reflections are intended as a ‘way in’ to some of the key themes addressed in Rancière’s writing and a way of relating these to education. The main substance of these chapters therefore is an introductory outline and discussion of Rancière’s key contributions. Chapter 2 introduces Rancière’s writing on politics and democracy. In this chapter, I detail Rancière’s treatment of what he describes as the paradoxical situation in which democracy, by the late twentieth century, had fallen prey to a ‘discourse that pits democracy against itself ’ (Rancière 2016, p. 149) and presented as threat to democratic society and life itself. Ultimately, I argue, Rancière’s writing provides an optimistic, though iconoclastic, perspective on democracy, in which the power of the people, though radically redefined, is still vital. I conclude with a reflection on how I have attempted to incorporate such a radical view of democracy within my own research and scholarship on democratic education. Chapter 3 introduces Rancière’s writing on art and aesthetics, paying particular attention to Rancière’s view of the politics of art and aesthetics. I argue that Rancière’s writing offers an innovative way of thinking about the political power of art—one which elides questions of cause and effect and which resides in its heterogeneous mixing of forms and processes rather than content. I conclude by reflecting on my own attempts to reframe the relationship between art and democratic education in less instrumentalist terms than it is frequently framed, following this reading of art’s political import in Rancière’s writing, and the implications of this for analysing the use of the arts in education policy and research. Chapter 4 introduces Rancière’s writing on (working-class) emancipation. I outline Rancière’s interventions on this theme and argue that

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Rancière’s writing shifts the focus of intellectual inquiry from determining the correct way of constructing projects for emancipation to understanding the nature of actual moments or ‘scenes’ of emancipation. In doing so, his writing also makes it possible to think of a radical form of egalitarianism that escapes the dogma and hierarchies of influential traditions in critical thought—including in education. I conclude with a reflection on how Rancière’s interventions on these themes have informed my conversations with colleagues about the limits of education’s capacity to bring about social and political change. Chapter 5 addresses the question of education as a theme in Rancière’s writing. Education features in several ways in Rancière’s writing: in his critique of Bourdieu’s sociology of education, in his interventions on contemporary debates about public school reforms and curriculum, and in his critique of a pedagogical logic underpinning society, to name a few. I argue that while education runs as a theme throughout Rancière’s writing, it appears in different ways, with different implications. I conclude by reflecting on the applicability of Rancière’s writing to educational themes and his strong challenge to some of the most prominent theoretical perspectives behind educational research and practice. The second part of the book outlines and critically evaluates some of the main ways in which Rancière’s writing has been taken up and applied in education. Again, each chapter begins with a personal anecdote to introduce some of the specific challenges and debates to which Rancière’s writing has been, or could be, applied. Each chapter concludes with a brief reflection on some tensions, dilemmas, and challenges in my own research and scholarship, via which I hope to illustrate the complexity of working with Rancière’s writing in the educational field. Again, the personal anecdotes and reflections that begin and end each chapter are intended as a ‘way in’ to understanding the ways in which educational researchers and scholars have taken up Rancière’s writing and as a way of reflecting on some of the tensions and complexities inherent in these applications of Rancière to education. The main substance of these chapters therefore is a critical review of the educational research and scholarship on Rancière, outlining and critically evaluating applications of Rancière’s thought to educational questions and practices.

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Chapter 6 outlines and evaluates the uptake of Rancière’s writing in work on emancipatory, democratic, and political education. Despite the diversity of approaches in this area, I argue that much of this work is animated by a desire to reconstruct an overarching educational philosophy or pedagogic theory from Rancière’s writing. I outline various versions of this (including the significant trend of re-visioning emancipatory, political, or democratic education from Rancière’s writing) and discuss some of the problems this entails. I conclude by reflecting on how my own application of Rancière in theoretical writing has changed over time and where I see the limits of applying Rancière’s writing to specific visions of education. Chapter 7 outlines and evaluates the uptake of Rancière’s writing in art(s) education. Again, while there is a wide variety of approaches in this area, I argue that a pre-occupation with the aesthetic dimensions of any emancipatory or democratic project of political education is a key theme and that pedagogic readings of both The Ignorant Schoolmaster and The Emancipated Spectator inform many revisions of aesthetic education based on Rancière’s writing. I also discuss some of the ways Rancière’s insights have been brought to bear on specific debates within art(s) education, including but not limited to art education in schools. I conclude with a reflection on my own experiences of attempting to draw lessons from Rancière’s writing for specific debates in art(s) education, without being drawn into providing an overall theory of a political, aesthetic education. Chapter 8 outlines and evaluates attempts to apply Rancière’s writing to develop innovate approaches to educational research. I revisit Rancière’s strident critique of Bourdieu (discussed in Chap. 5) to outline the specific challenges that Rancière’s writing presents for educational research, as well as exploring how some researchers have taken Rancière’s work as an invitation to innovate in educational research. This includes the adoption of arts-based approaches that might ‘redistribute the sensible’. I discuss the appeal of such approaches, as well as my misgivings about some of their implications, and conclude with a reflection on my own, imperfect attempts to focus on emancipation and subjectification rather than domination in my empirical research.

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The third part of the book offers an evaluation of Rancière’s writing and its applicability to educational themes. Chapter 9 outlines and evaluates some of the major criticisms of Rancière’s writing in the literature. Ultimately, I argue that many of these criticisms result from a desire to reconstruct an overarching political and/or educational project from Rancière’s writing. That said, some important critical work on Rancière’s writing has highlighted that it is potentially more suited to the analysis of class than of race or gender and that his work pays inadequate attention to similar contributions from feminist, post-colonial, and critical race theory. The book concludes, in Chap. 10, with an evaluation of the overall contribution of Rancière’s writing and its potential interest for educationalists. Despite its many challenges, I argue that Rancière’s radical commitment to disruption and equality provides a vital and vibrant set of theoretical tools for those working within (and pushing the boundaries of ) educational research and scholarship. As noted above, the book is primarily intended as an introduction to Rancière’s ideas and their uptake in education. I hope that it will be of interest to educationalists thinking through the value of Rancière’s writing and the potential for engaging with it in their own empirical and theoretical work. Sharing my own experiences of reading Rancière for education is intended as a way of providing personal insight into the rewards and challenges this presents. While an overall argument about the value of Rancière’s work for education, as well as its use and misuse by educationalists, is implicitly developed throughout the book, and articulated in the conclusion, I hope that readers will also find the individual chapters helpful in introducing Rancière’s writing and Rancièrian scholarship on several discrete themes. Whatever way readers engage with the book (in parts or in its entirety), I hope that it proves an interesting and valuable companion on their own intellectual adventures in engaging with Rancière’s work.

References Biesta, G. (2011). The ignorant citizen: Mouffe, Rancière and the subject of democratic education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 30, 141–153. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-­011-­9220-­4.

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Biesta, G.  J. J. (2010). A new logic of emancipation: The methodology of Jacques Rancière. Educational Theory, 60(1), 39–59. Bingham, C. (2010). Settling no conflict in the public space: Truth in education and in Rancièrean scholarship. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 649–665. Bingham, C., & Biesta, G. J. J. (2010). Jacques Rancière: Education, truth, emancipation. London: Continuum. Cartier, C. (2020). Among greater issues of the day: Hong Kong in China, 2003–2013. Critical Inquiry, 46(3), 665–697. Chambers, S. A. (2013). The lessons of Rancière. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Denzin, N. K., Lincoln, Y. S., MacLure, M., Otterstad, A. M., Torrance, H., Cannella, G. S., Koro-Ljungberg, M., & McTier, T. (2017). Critical qualitative methodologies: Reconceptualizations and emergent construction. International Review of Qualitative Research, 10(4), 482–498. Fukuyama, F. (1989). The end of history? The National Interest, (16), 3–18. Harley, A. (2012) “We are poor, not stupid”: Learning from autonomous grassroots social movements in South Africa. In B. Hall, D. Clover, J. Crowther, & E. Scandrett, Learning and education for a better world: The role of social movements (pp. 1–22). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Lather, P. (2017). Thirty years after: From research as praxis to praxis in the ruins. In H. J. Malone, S. Rincón-Gallardo, & K. Kew (Eds.), Future directions of educational change (pp. 71–85). New York: Routledge. Lather, P. (2013). Methodology-21: What do we do in the afterward?. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 634–645. Lather, P. (2001). Postmodernism, post-structuralism and post (critical) ethnography: Of ruins, aporias and angels. In P. Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J.  Lofland, & L.  Lofland (Eds.), Handbook of ethnography (pp.  477–492). London: SAGE. Lewis, T.  E. (2010). Paulo Freire’s last laugh: Rethinking critical pedagogy’s funny bone through Jacques Rancière. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 635–648. Maschelein, J., & Simons, M. (2010). The hatred of public schooling: The school as the mark of democracy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 666–682. May, T. (2008). Political thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating equality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rajca, A. (2018) Dissensual subjects: Memory, human rights, and postdictatorship in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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Rancière, J. (2016). The method of equality (trans: Rose, J.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Rancière, J. (2009). A few remarks on the method of Jacques Rancière. Parallax, 15(3), 114–123. Rancière, J. (1995). On the shores of politics (trans: heron, L.). London: Verso. Rancière, J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation (trans: Ross, K.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Simons, M., & Maschelein, J. (2010). Governmental, political, and pedagogic subjectivation: Foucault with Rancière. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 588–605. Sparks, H. (2016). Quarrelling with Rancière. Race, gender and the politics of democratic disruption. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 49(4), 420–437. Stavrakakis, Y. (2014). The return of “the people”: Populism and anti-populism in the shadow of the European crisis. Constellations, 21(4), 505–517. Steedman, C. (2013). Reading Rancière. In O.  Davis (Ed.), Rancière now: Current perspectives on Jacques Rancière (pp. 69–84). Cambridge: Polity Press. St. Pierre, E. A. (2018). Writing post qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(9), 603–608. Tanke, J. J. (2011). Jacques Rancière: An introduction. London: Continuum.

Part I Introduction to Rancière’s Interventions

2 On (Democratic) Politics

In this first part of the book, I introduce several key interventions in Rancière’s writing, grouped around the themes of democracy, aesthetics, emancipation, and education. I preface each of these introductions to key aspects of Rancière’s writing with a personal anecdote from my own experiences, to illustrate some of the key issues at stake, and conclude with a brief reflection on how I have tried to apply Rancière’s writing in my own work. I begin here relating my own experiences of teaching and research in the area of democratic and political education, to illustrate some of the key issues, debates, and themes that run through the literature on this area of education and to indicate how Rancière’s writing, in setting out a radically different view of democracy, helps to offer a fresh perspective on these. About fifteen years ago, I was working as a teacher of religious education (RE) and personal, social, and health education (PSHE) in secondary school in England, where I worked closely with the sole teacher responsible for co-ordinating the delivery of citizenship education across the school. I was dimly aware of having been introduced to the existence of this new subject during my teacher education a few years previously, but it was not until I was teaching in this context that I encountered it in actuality—in the schemes of work and lesson plans drawn up to introduce students to their legal rights, in the visits organised to familiarise © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. McDonnell, Reading Rancière for Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96013-1_2

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pupils with democratic institutions, and in the presence of student teachers of citizenship education, some of whom were ready to defend their right-of-centre political views in ways that made them rather exceptional in our humanities staffroom. Something was clearly happening in the world of political education—something that shook my existing preconceptions of teachers and teaching, and something that brought my own political interests into sharp focus within the context of my professional work. A few years into my teaching career, I had the opportunity to pursue doctoral research on the relationship between democracy and education, against the backdrop of this policy context. Early on in my studies, I was introduced to the writing of Jacques Rancière. Having started with the naïve assumption that the democracy ‘element’ of my research would be the relatively stable one, I had already been happily confronted with the possibility that this might not be the case while reading Mouffe’s (2005) On the Political. As a teacher and former student of humanities disciplines, putting on the mantle of ‘social sciences researcher’ to conduct empirical work in the field did not immediately feel like a comfortable fit. To discover that reading and thinking about what democracy really means (and what it could mean) would be an integral part of my project was quite a relief. Rancière’s writing introduced me to a radically different way of thinking about democracy than I had previously encountered in the literature on democratic education. In this chapter, I want to introduce you to that way of thinking about democracy and share with you how revolutionary this can be for work focusing on democratic education.

Defining Democracy for Democratic Education A key feature of the literature on democratic education in the UK, at the time I was introduced to Rancière’s writing, was the claim that education could contribute to creating a more democratic society, through curriculum subjects such as citizenship education. This often involved a renewed emphasis on democratic dialogue and ‘active’, participatory citizenship (see, e.g., Crick 2007; Osler and Starkey 2006) or the expansion

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of  democratic school structures (see, e.g., Fielding 2004). Although a critical literature existed on the aims, purposes, and implementation of citizenship education (see, e.g., Frazer 2007; Kiwan 2007; Faulks 2006; Gillborn 2006), a key assumption in mainstream discourse was that more and better (dialogic, participatory) democratic education would lead to a more democratic society, made up of well-informed young citizens, skilled in the practices and processes of democratic institutions. Biesta and Lawy (2006; see also, Lawy and Biesta 2006) mounted perhaps the strongest challenge to such thinking, arguing that citizenship education was rooted in apolitical, individualistic, and instrumentalist assumptions about democracy, proposing instead more recognition of the actual practices that make up young people’s citizenship, which could contribute to their learning democracy. Biesta (2006, 2010) has extended his analysis of this dominant strand of thinking, offering not only a historical framework for interpreting the landscape of democratic education but also an innovative approach to the relationship between democracy and education. He traces the origins of common ways of thinking about this relationship from a Kantian concern with educating people for democracy to a Deweyan interest in educating through democratic experience, and proposes a new way of thinking through this relationship that has more in common with traditions of critical pedagogy, as a process of learning from democracy. As a student of Biesta, I was particularly informed by this framework and found that much of the literature on democratic education that I encountered treated democracy in the first register, that is, as something for which people need to be educated and prepared. Within this body of work, two ‘problems’ were commonly identified. The first of these was the supposed ‘crisis’ in democracy. Arguments and analyses from this perspective went something along the following lines: ‘Democracy in established democratic states is in crisis. Young people are apathetic and no longer care about politics. We must educate them so that they will love democracy again and will be informed and active citizens capable of exercising their democratic rights, thus saving democracy’. This is the line of argument that had led the ‘New’, Labour government of 1997 to 2010 in the UK to commission a report on ‘citizenship and the teaching of democracy’ in 1998 (Crick 1998) and in turn

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the introduction of citizenship education as a statutory subject in schools in England and Wales in 2002. This logic also informed similar developments elsewhere in the world (Print 2007), and variations of it can still be found today, though the immediate threat to democracy is framed less in terms of apathy and more in terms of ‘too much’ enthusiasm for politics, expressed in fears about right-wing populism and the capacity of democratic education to guard against it (see, e.g., Zembylas 2020). The second problem consisted in the idea that ‘democracy’ had become so anodyne and so universally accepted as a form of government (at least in Western countries) as to be meaningless. Arguments from this perspective went something along the following lines: ‘democracy is a catch-all term that can mean any number of things within the broadly accepted parameters of liberal democratic society. To argue for education in the service of democracy is as good as meaningless since no-one could possibly disagree that more democracy would be a good thing. More radical and critical diagnoses and solutions for the ills of society are needed than an insipid concern with promoting democracy’. Several critics of citizenship education in the UK took this view. Gillborn (2006), for example, argued that citizenship education acted as a ‘policy placebo’, directing attention away from the real problems of racism and inequality inherent in the education system. Similar arguments have been mounted in critique of newer education policies, such as the promotion of ‘fundamental British values’ (FBV) in England, where democracy features as a rather ill-defined, unproblematised, and de-contextualised ‘value’, divested  of its implication in colonial projects (see, e.g., Winter and Mills 2020). These problems might seem opposed, or at least their articulation might seem to come from opposite ends of a rhetorical spectrum; democracy is either in crisis and in need of saving, or it is a rather toothless idea that cannot really affect political change. Arguably, however, in both cases there is an implicit assumption that democracy is fixed, normal, and stable—something which has been achieved and which consists in the everyday practices and institutions of democratic societies. Whether this is seen as something that needs to be restored or whether it is something that is simply taken for granted, and perhaps inadequate to the task of political change, democracy itself remains stable. In other words, democracy, in these arguments, is seen as a ‘normal situation’ (Biesta 2007).

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Several educationalists have turned to the work of political theorists such as Mouffe (2005) as an alternative way of thinking through democratic education, paying more attention to the conflict, contingency, and instability inherent to democracy and according it a more radical status (see, e.g., Ruitenberg 2009; Todd 2008; Biesta 2007). Mouffe’s (2005) argument for the re-invigoration of politics via the creation of an ‘agonistic’ democratic sphere departs from such normalised views of democracy and instead places conflict and disagreement at its heart—rendering democracy an unstable and volatile entity. For Mouffe (2005), the democratic sphere is not simply a platform for competition between existing interests in society but is the sphere where people address deep disagreements and rifts over the social and political order—most often encountered in the left-right divide but also evident in other sources of fundamental disagreement. To fulfil its proper role, Mouffe argues, the democratic sphere must convert the antagonism inherent in social and political reality into a positive force—an ‘agonism’ that also converts people from moral enemies into political adversaries (Mouffe 2005, p. 20). Crucially, Mouffe  (2005, p.  121) argues that the agonistic democratic sphere should encompass contestation over the non-negotiable, ‘ethico-­ political’ principles of democracy itself, that is, liberty and equality. These remain the horizons of democratic contestation in Mouffe’s (2005) work. Though they may be variously interpreted, and politically re-negotiated and re-constituted, a commitment to liberty and equality remains the entry condition for participation in democratic life. For me, Mouffe’s (2005) work offered a window onto an entirely different way of thinking about democracy than I had been familiar with in the mainstream literature—a field of thought that has been described as ‘radical democracy’ (see, e.g., Amsler 2015). I was intrigued by Mouffe’s (2005) argument for the need to acknowledge real, deep-seated differences in how the social and political order is constructed, even within the structures and operations of democracy itself. But I struggled to see how this could be achieved given her insistence on a commitment to the ‘ethico-­political’ principles of liberty and equality, however variously defined, remaining the condition for participation in the democratic sphere. I was left with a question: if a commitment to liberty and equality (though politically constructed and contestable) is essential to democratic

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politics, where and how can disagreement and contestation over those constructions happen? Or, to put it another way: how are the structures and institutions of democracy ever to change, if contesting their foundations requires an initial commitment to them? The writing of Jacques Rancière, a philosopher whose writing developed in Paris in the aftermath of the failed uprisings of May 1968, seemed to offer some answers to these questions. While Rancière’s academic career unfolded alongside the work of some of his more familiar post-­ Marxist contemporaries, his conception of politics and democracy is quite unique, and his strong reaction against both the scientific Marxism of his former teacher, Louis Althusser, and the cultural Marxism of the French Communist Party of the 1960s and 1970s also sets his work apart from better known French theorists, such as Foucault and Bourdieu. The emergence of Rancière’s unique political worldview from this context, and his radical critique of other theorists’ work, is discussed in detail later in the book, in relation to his interventions on both education and the social sciences. The context of his writing is mentioned here to offer some familiar reference points and co-ordinates for situating Rancière’s oeuvre in the academic world and to indicate his particular interest in democracy, which, while developing out of this post-Marxist milieu, is quite distinct. Rancière’s work is notoriously difficult to pin down, but like Mouffe’s work on politics, his writing has also been described as belonging to the field of ‘radical democracy’.

Rancière’s Interventions on Democracy The first of Rancière’s texts that I read was Hatred of Democracy, the final of three extended interventions on democracy and politics at the turn of the twentieth century. In these texts, Rancière offers a scathing critique of discourses about the dangers of ‘too much’ democracy and associated calls for a return to political philosophy to restore democratic politics to its true nature and cure the ills of ageing democratic states. All this is set against the context of political events unfolding in France and elsewhere at the time, including globalisation and the offshoring of labour, anti-­ immigrant discourses and the resurgence of right-wing political parties,

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as well as ethnic and religious wars in Eastern Europe. Context is important, since, as noted in the introduction, Rancière has claimed that he never set out, ‘to produce a theory of politics, aesthetics, literature, cinema or anything else’ (Rancière 2009, p. 114) but rather to make interventions in specific contexts. Even in relation to politics, where some of his writing most closely follows the conventions of philosophical texts (Rancière 2016a, p. 121), his works remain ‘not ‘theories of ’ but ‘interventions on” (Rancière 2009, p. 116). The context for Rancière’s interventions on democracy, then, consists in what he describes as the paradoxical situation in which democracy and democratisation had come to be seen as the ‘problem’ or even the ‘enemy’ of democracy itself—or at least of a stable, ‘democratic’ political community. Rancière takes aim at specific arguments about democratic excess (the idea that too many people are claiming the rights and privileges afforded by democratic individuality) as well as the converse problem of democratic deficiency (the idea that democratic structures are a mere sham, covering over more fundamental inequalities) prevalent both among academics and in the media in France at the time. The particularly strong alliance between the two in French cultural life provides the specific backdrop to much of Rancière’s writing, but these arguments also resonate with broader discourses in the English-speaking world and elsewhere. As much as context, the style of Rancière’s writing is also crucial to understanding what he has to say about democracy and politics. Rancière (2009, p.  120) has claimed that his interventions are always polemic, always designed to disrupt and challenge familiar and seemingly uncontested concepts. He employs the metaphors of both cartography and conflict, to explain why ‘concepts’, in his writing, ‘don’t mean the same thing from the beginning of the travel to the end; firstly because the travel is a fight too…secondly because the travel—or the fight—continuously discovers new landscapes, paths or obstacles which oblige to reframe the conceptual net used to think where we are’ (Rancière 2009, p. 120). I will say more about Rancière’s style or ‘method’ (2009, 2016a) in the second part of the book, in relation to the difficulties of applying his work to education. However, it is important to note here that, across his interventions on this theme, Rancière does not set out to construct an

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overarching theory of democracy or politics but to disrupt established discourses and arguments about democratic excess or deficit, as well as appeals to political philosophy to recapture the true nature of politics. His interventions on democracy and politics are, therefore, also a way of undermining what is normally meant by these terms (2016b, p. 102). Within the overall context for Rancière’s writing on democracy and politics, each of his extended interventions on these themes—On the Shores of Politics, Disagreement, and Hatred of Democracy—addresses particular iterations of the paradoxical framing of democracy as antithetical to itself. These versions of the paradox are also connected to specific events and developments unfolding at the time, and the various responses to them from philosophers and public intellectuals on both the left and right of the political spectrum. In On the Shores of Politics, for example, Rancière (1995) specifically responds to proclamations about the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama 1989) and the triumph of liberal democracy in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, which framed political conflict and class struggle as anachronistic obstacles to progress. In Disagreement, Rancière (1999) addresses the ‘return of politics’ that swiftly followed its pronounced end—in the form of the ‘new political philosophy’ (1999, p. viii), including theories of deliberative democracy, such as Habermas’ theory of the ideal speech act and the primacy of rational argument (Rancière 1999, p. 47), which aimed to restore politics to its ideal form and thereby revive the ailing structures of established democracies. In Hatred of Democracy, Rancière (2006) tackles the emergence of a radical and extreme denunciation of democracy that equates it with consumerist individualism and the evisceration of politics in favour of humanitarianism. Because of his interest in reclaiming ‘democracy’ from common discourses, his writing is particularly helpful for challenging some of the associated arguments about democracy and education outlined above (that it needs restoring through a return to political education or that there is too much emphasis on democracy in education to the neglect of more radical concerns).

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Democracy in Rancière’s Writing The picture of democracy that emerges from Rancière’s writing is one that is dynamic and disruptive—a movement or logic that shakes existing political orders out of place and redistributes the roles, places, and spaces allocated to people in hierarchical organisations of the community. Not only is democracy dynamic and disruptive, but it is also radically egalitarian, shifting things out of place via claims for, or ‘verifications of ’, equality. Rancière describes an original democratic rupture taking place in ancient Athens (the emergence of the demos) as a scandalous event, which made visible the equality of all speaking beings and their equal entitlement to have a part in the public sphere. For Rancière, this original democratic rupture revealed not only the equality of all speaking beings but also the contingency of political government itself; as soon as there is no ‘natural’ hierarchical justification for the rule of some over others, all ways of ordering the community are subject to further contestation and change. Rancière offers different accounts of some original democratic ruptures in the ancient world across his writing. In Disagreement, he emphasises the abolition of indebted slavery, leading to the challenging existence of the demos made up of equally free beings. The newfound freedom of the slaves, Rancière (1999, p. 8) argues, is really their equality, since ‘[t]he people who make up the people are in fact simply free like the rest’. It is this equality which marks out democracy as the appearance of ‘the people’ and which, he argues, makes such a scandal for Plato and other philosophers. In Hatred of Democracy, Rancière (2006) refers to Cleisthenes’ re-composition of Athens’ tribes along non-familial and non-­geographical lines—a break in the link between government and any ‘natural’ composition of parts of the community. These examples of the dislocation and displacement of bodies, parts, and roles illustrate the very specific, concrete, and material foundations of democracy for Rancière. Though he describes democracy as ‘the logic of equality’ (2006, p. 55), it is always manifest in specific actions. This is very important to note, given some criticisms that Rancière’s writing takes a universalist or ahistorical view of democracy, which are discussed in further detail in Chap. 9.

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Rancière (1999, p. 9) describes the original acts of democracy in the ancient world as the appearance of the ‘part of those who have no part’, taking up Aristotle’s designation of the demos as those ‘who had no part in anything’. In making (or forcing) an appearance, this part without a part challenged the very composition of the community, drawing attention to an original ‘miscount’ and therefore a ‘fundamental wrong’ (1999, p. 9) in the ordering of society. Furthermore, the emergence of this part with no part, through the dislocation of the existing distribution of roles, places, and spaces, entailed a universal claim to be the whole of the community itself—the ‘people’. As Rancière writes, ‘[i]t is in the name of the wrong done them by the other parties that the people identify with the whole of the community. Whoever has no part—the poor of ancient times, the third estate, the modern proletariat—cannot in fact have any part other than all or nothing’ (1999, p. 9). As this reference to more modern iterations of the emergence of ‘the people’ suggests, Rancière sees democracy as an ongoing practice, rather than a ‘one-off’ event. Moving from scenes of the ancient world to modern democracies, Rancière explores how the democratic rupture is renewed and re-enacted in the ongoing practice of democracy, consisting in the staging of new, political disputes over what belongs to the public sphere and who has a part in it. As Rancière (1999, p. 42) writes, democracy ‘produces both new inscriptions of equality within liberty and a fresh sphere of visibility for further demonstrations’. For Rancière, every political community bears the traces of earlier claims to equality (i.e., democratic disruption). Indeed, for Rancière, democracy and politics are synonymous. In modern democracies, such traces are, most commonly, found in legal texts enshrining the equal rights of all citizens. When a previously unrecognised part of the community takes up these rights and claims their equal entitlement to them, democracy and politics are re-enacted. Rancière sets out the three-part characteristics of such enactments of democracy, as the ‘mode’ (1999, p. 99) of politics, consisting in the following: Firstly, the appearance of ‘the people’ as a newly visible entity or political subject. Secondly, the ‘unequal count’ of the people (revealing a fundamental ‘wrong’ or miscount of the parts of the community). Thirdly, the opening of a sphere of dispute, or a community of equals, where

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political subjects contest the very partition of roles and places in a community (Rancière 1995, pp.  96–97, 1999, p.  62). Politics, in a sense, then, is about litigation—testing the inscriptions of equality written into the foundation of ‘democratic’ societies (at least those that minimally admit the power of the people). These tests ‘verify’ the equality therein, which often sits in tension with the inequalities riven through the hierarchical organisation of the community. The actions that constitute democracy are therefore about new enunciations of ‘the people’, as divisive claims to equality, and the inauguration of new disputes about the arrangement of the community. Whereas the original acts of democracy in ancient Greece and Rome brought a public sphere of contestation into existence, Rancière (1995, 1999) argues that the democratic movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe and North America consisted in the expansion of this public sphere, through both the creation of new forms of public spaces and relations, and the creation of new political subjects. Rancière refers to the latter as a process of political ‘subjectification’ (1999, p. 35) in which supplementary subjects, not accounted for in the given composition of the community, come into existence through political action. This does not mean that new political subjects are simply invented out of thin air; they are fashioned through democratic acts that stage a political dispute. As Rancière writes, ‘[a] mode of subjectification does not create subjects ex nihilo; it creates them by transforming identities defined in the natural order of the allocation of functions and places into instances of experience and dispute’ (1999, p. 36). Each of these actions proceeds by way of what Rancière describes as syllogisms—bringing into play the duality of both equality and inequality inscribed in society’s founding texts and institutions. Some examples from Rancière’s writing help to illustrate this. In On the Shores of Politics, Rancière (1995) offers an example of the creation of new forms of public spaces and relations, drawn from his archival research into the lives of workers in France in the 1830s (see Chap. 4 for further discussion of this work). The example he offers by way of illustration of the expansion of the public sphere as an act of politics is the Paris tailors’ strike of 1833. The strike centred on the dispute between the workers’ case for revised rates of pay and the master tailors’ refusal to respond to it. It is this refusal

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that defines the political nature of the dispute as a claim or verification of equality, for Rancière. The workers were equal before the law, as written in the Charter of 1830, but considered as less than equal by their masters, who refused to respond to their demands. The workers’ action thus proceeded via a syllogism; it brought into play the contradiction between equality in the law and inequality in the workplace and demanded that the former be taken seriously. Rancière argues that the most important thing about this dispute is that it centred on ‘relations of equality’ which forced a ‘logical confrontation’ (1995, p. 47) between the major premise of equality before the law and the minor premise of inequality, as experienced in the workers’ lives. The most important outcome of the dispute was not an improvement in the workers’ pay and conditions but the fact that the relationship of work became a public relationship—no longer merely a private matter between employer and employee. In Hatred of Democracy, Rancière (2006) provides examples of the process of political subjectification. Again, these involve a syllogistic play on the equality and inequality that are both written into the founding texts of democratic societies. He refers to Olympe de Gouges’ statement in the Declaration on the Rights of Woman and the Citizen that ‘woman has the right to mount the scaffold, she must also have the right to mount the rostrum’ (De Gouges, cited in Rancière 2006, p. 60). The key point here is that the statement forces a choice—if the equality that makes it possible for a woman to be legally condemned to death is to have any logical sense, it must also be the case that she is able to stand for election. By bringing the two contradictory realities into play—of equality before the law and inequality in political representation—the statement becomes an act of political subjectification that forces a recognition of women as political subjects, who have a right to participate in the public sphere, rather than being relegated to the private sphere of domesticity. Similarly, Rancière refers to Rosa Parks’ famous actions as part of the civil rights movement in the USA. In taking up a seat on a bus reserved for ‘whites only’, Parks’ action syllogistically played on the tension between equality under the US constitution and inequality under state laws. Again, this action, and the civil rights movement as a whole, forced a choice between the major premise of the constitution (that all are created equal) and the minor premise of state laws (that African American citizens were not

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equally entitled to the same rights as white citizens), ultimately forcing the recognition of African Americans as equal citizens with equal civil rights. These examples also illustrate that, for Rancière, democracy is ‘sporadic’ (1995, p. 61) or ‘exceptional’—it is not the normal run of things. For Rancière, there is no such thing as a democratic or egalitarian society, only ‘the set of egalitarian relations that are traced here and now through singular and precarious acts’ (2006, p. 97). The only kind of community that democracy gives form to is a ‘community of equals’, that is a community of equal beings in contestation and dispute over a fundamental ‘wrong’ (1999, p. 21) or ‘grievance’ (1995, p. 97), over a miscount in the very composition of the parts of the community. This ‘wrong’ is uniquely political in that it is both addressable (unlike the theological concept of sin) and unresolvable (unlike the legal concept of damage) (1995, p. 97). Political dispute concerns more than a legal dispute between existing parties that can be resolved with careful application of the law, but it is less than an absolute transgression that can never be addressed. In this sense, Rancière ultimately offers an interpretation of democracy that is both realistic and optimistic. It will already be apparent to readers that the picture of democracy that emerges from Rancière’s writing not only is radically different to more familiar concepts of democracy derived from political philosophy but that it also has potentially very important implications for democratic education. I return to discuss these implications at the end of this chapter. However, I first want to address the ‘other side’ of this radical vision of democracy in Rancière’s writing as it were, that is, his view of those more established co-ordinates of political philosophy that animate and inform much mainstream work in democratic and political education.

Political Philosophy in Rancière’s Writing The ‘community of equals’ outlined above, and its sphere of dispute, provides a very different picture of democracy from that commonly found in political philosophy, which seeks instead to discern a sound rationale for the foundations of a democratic society. For Rancière, however, such a

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rationale can never be established, since the original, egalitarian acts of democracy precede political philosophy. Rancière (1995, p.  12) even argues that ‘political philosophy’ is an oxymoron, preferring instead to focus on the polemical encounter between philosophy and politics and the ‘primordial tension’ (1995, p.  12) between the two. For Rancière, politics exists only once the democratic rupture has occurred and not before. Before that there is simply rule—monarchic, theocratic, tribal, and so on. It is only after the fact of democracy and the institution of politics that philosophy is obliged to address ‘the problem politics poses for philosophical thinking about community’ (1999, p. 3). For Rancière, then, political philosophy is a reaction to and against politics. Several phases emerge in Rancière’s treatment of ‘political philosophy’, as a project which, he argues, has successively sought to replace, suppress, or eliminate politics and democracy. He refers to three ‘figures’ of political philosophy in the ‘archipolitics’ of Plato, the ‘parapolitics’ of Aristotle (and modern enlightenment theorists of liberal democracy), and the ‘metapolitics’ of Marx. Platonic ‘archipolitics’, Rancière argues, seeks to replace politics with the smooth organisation of the community along hierarchical lines—a community in which everyone and everything has its place, all working towards the good of the whole. This is not a simple return to the pre-­ political, inegalitarian rule of divine monarchs but an alternative vision of the founding principle of the community, which minimally incorporates the freedom and equality of the people. It does so by making a common virtue out of knowing one’s proper place within the organisation of the community. Plato’s myth of the metals—with gold in the souls of the rulers, silver in the souls of the soldiers, and bronze in the souls of the artisans—becomes the founding myth behind this ‘archipolitical’ alternative to politics. This is accomplished via the inverse distribution of roles in the public sphere: the magistrates have political power but receive no money, while the artisans receive material sustenance at the expense of having time and space to exercise their political power. This also means that Plato’s ‘archipolitical’ response to the ‘problem’ of politics is one in which everyone and everything must be accounted for, with no ‘empty space’ or ‘time out’ (Rancière 1999, p. 68).

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Aristotelian ‘parapolitics’ resolves the ‘problem’ of politics by making the instruments of the state imitate the names and forms of politics. So, the dispute over the original wrong or miscount of the community transforms into the safe and sanitised interplay of competition between parties and interests. The parts of the political conflict—the ‘demos’, the assembly—become the parts of a new ‘parapolitical’ distribution of places and roles. Parapolitics is a system that operates on appearances, in which ‘the good regime is the one that takes on the appearance of an oligarchy for the oligarchs and democracy for the demos’ (1999, p. 74). Rancière sees the parliamentary systems of modern states as heirs to Aristotelian parapolitics and the parapolitical project taking a new turn with Hobbes and Rousseau in modern politics. With these philosophers, the parts of the political dispute are dissolved, so that there are no longer parts of the community but only individuals, and the conflict becomes one between sovereign citizenship and bare humanity—the social contract or the war of all against all. Marxist ‘metapolitics’ resurrects the conflict between classes and parts of the community only to declare the falseness of democracy and reduce politics to the social. The metapolitical project, Rancière argues, lies either in finding the true social class that will embody the new, post-­revolutionary community or in demonstrating that all politics is false because it does not resolve the real situation of material inequality. Rancière (1995, pp. 63–92) discusses the doomed attempts of communism to reify the moment of equality that politics reveals—doomed because of their insistence on achieving social, material equality at the expense of the political equality of all speaking beings. For Marxist metapolitics, the duality of the people expressed in ‘man and the citizen’ is the fatal flaw that makes all manifestations of the people false. For Rancière, this duality is the pretext for new enactments of democracy, in the staging of new political disputes. However, just as parapolitics imitated the parts of the political dispute, politics also shares some of the names of Marxist metapolitics (the ‘proletariat’, ‘class’ etc.). The difference lies in the use of these terms; Marxist metapolitics seeks to reify classes and find the true social class of the equal community, while politics dissolves them through acts of disidentification that are also the political subjectification of new, supplementary subjects. For Rancière, then, political philosophy, far from being

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the source of answers about how  to revivify democracy in ‘established democracies’ (an argument that is often applied to education), is actually a way of suppressing the possibility of genuine politics and democracy.

Politics and ‘The Police’ For Rancière, the polemical encounter between politics and philosophy bears witness to a constant struggle between, on the one hand, various attempts to organise the community in a harmonious fashion—by distributing parts, places, and roles—and, on the other, those exceptional or sporadic moments of democracy, when a political dispute is staged, and that harmonious ordering is disrupted. Rancière has described these as, ‘the two opposed logics of police and politics’ (Rancière 2006, p. 55). It is worth exploring Rancière’s use of these terms in more detail, since they feature heavily both in his writing and in educational applications of this work—particularly in scholarship on democratic education. Rancière (1999, p.  29) defines ‘the police’ as, ‘the law, generally implicit, that defines a party’s share or lack of it’. Rancière (1999, p. 32) acknowledges his debt to Foucault in defining ‘the police’ or ‘police order’ as something which, ‘extends well beyond its specialized institutions and techniques’. However, he argues that his use of the term differs from that of Foucault. For Rancière, the ‘police’ is about the extension of police logic beyond the forces of law and order, but it is not about the total domination of state power, nor a matter of saying that everything is political because power is everywhere. Indeed, Rancière (1999, p. 29) does not identify ‘the police’ with the state or any ‘state apparatus’ but sees this in more diffuse and aesthetic terms as a ‘configuration of the perceptible’. For Rancière (1999, p. 29), ‘[p]olicing is not so much the “disciplining” of bodies as a rule governing their appearing, a configuration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed’. Rancière (1999, p. 29) then defines ‘politics’ as, ‘an extremely determined activity antagonistic to policing’. Such activity is, ‘whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination’ (1999, p. 30). Rancière also draws a distinction between the normal use

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of the term ‘politics’ (le politique) to refer to the kinds of ‘parapolitical’ activities of parliaments and state institutions, and ‘politics’ (la politique), as the very determined political activity of bringing into play the political dispute over parts in the community. For Rancière, politics has no specific content; it is not the subject of a dispute that defines it as political but its form, that is, whether it brings into play a dispute over the distribution of roles and places in society. As Rancière writes, ‘[t]he same thing—an election, a strike, a demonstration—can give rise to politics or not give rise to politics’ (1999, p. 32). This is a particularly stark example of Rancière’s polemic style or method of undermining what is meant by familiar terms such as democracy and politics. On a Rancièrian view, many of those things we would normally describe as ‘political’ (governmental institutions and processes, protests, activism) do not necessarily entail ‘politics’ as such. This is also important to bear in mind when considering how Rancière frames the relationship between police and politics. While it is tempting to read these as the opposition between an oppressive, ‘bad’ police and a resistant, ‘good’ politics, this is not how Rancière frames his discussion. Indeed, Rancière (1999, p. 29) proposes to use the term ‘police’ in a neutral, ‘nonpejorative’ sense. There are different forms of policing, and as Rancière (1999, p.  31) claims, not only is there ‘a worse and a better police’, but also, the police, ‘can procure all sorts of good, and one kind of police may be infinitely preferable to another’. Similarly, Rancière makes clear that, although the police and politics are always opposed and antagonistic to each other, they are also always intertwined. As he puts it, ‘’[w]e should not forget…that if politics implements a logic entirely heterogenous to that of the police, it is always bound up with the latter’ (Rancière 1999, p. 31). Indeed, Rancière has more recently referred to the struggle between politics and the police as the ‘politics-police relationship’ (2016a, p.  150). It is also important to know that Rancière understands this antagonistic relationship between politics and the police as something which takes place on the terrain of aesthetics. I turn to this dimension of Rancière’s writing below and its implications for contemporary politics.

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 he Aesthetics of Politics and the ‘Distribution T of the Sensible’ As the arrangement of places, roles, and bodies central to Rancière’s view of politics and the police would suggest, there is also an aesthetics at the heart of politics for Rancière, which consists in an underlying ‘configuration of the perceptible’ (Rancière 1999, p. 29). Rancière (2004) refers to this configuration as the ‘partage du sensible’ (2004, p.  12). Variously translated as the ‘partition of the perceptible’, the ‘partition of the sensible’, and the ‘distribution of the sensible’, this not only governs the specific distribution of roles, parts, and places in any given police order but also forms the backdrop against which the ‘politics-police relationship’ plays out. This aesthetics at the heart of politics emerges from Rancière’s re-reading of Aristotle’s distinction between humans, as uniquely political animals, by virtue of their capacity for logos (reasoned speech) and other animals who simply possess phone (voice). Rancière reinterprets this by referring to the double meaning of ‘logos’ as both speech and account. As Rancière (1999, p.  22) argues, [p]olitics exists because the logos is never simply speech, because it is always indissolubly the account that is made of this speech’, that is, what counts as speech determines who counts as part of the public sphere. The very capacity for speech, Rancière argues,—the ability to use it and not merely understand it (aesthesis)—is the political dispute underlying the emergence of the demos. Rancière (1999, p.  57) writes, ‘[t]he aesthetic configuration in which what the speaking being says leaves its mark has always been the very stakes of the dispute that politics enlists in the police order’. Rancière (1999) contrasts two stories from the ancient world (the story of the Scythian slave revolt and the story of the ‘Secession of the Plebs’) to illustrate how the accounting of speech matters for politics. For Rancière, the ‘exceptional nature of the “Secession of the Plebs” …stage[s] a fundamental conflict that is at once marked and missed by the slave war of Scythia’ (Rancière 1999, p. 27). The ‘Secession of the Plebs’ involves a dispute over who can speak and what counts as speech. In addressing the Plebeians to explain to them their inequality, Rancière suggests, Menenius Agrippa demonstrated their equality as speaking beings. By contrast, the

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Scythian slave revolt failed because the former slaves, who had revolted against their masters and set up their own community, ultimately took up arms in their struggle, thus reinstituting their places within the existing configuration of the perceptible. Both actions involve a claim of equality, but it is only in the logical (in the double sense) staging of a dispute over who counts as a speaking being and therefore as having a part in the political community that the ‘Secession of the Plebs’ qualifies as politics.

Consensus The aesthetics at the heart of politics is also crucial to Rancière’s conclusions about the state of politics and democracy at the turn of the twentieth century. Rancière concludes his interventions by painting a picture of a new consensus emerging around the limitless growth of global capital and the self-declared powerlessness of nation states to stop it. In Hatred of Democracy, Rancière writes, ‘we do not live in democracies…we live in States of oligarchic law’ (2006, p. 73), which, he argues, make it their business to balance their own interests against the demands of globalisation. Consensus politics is therefore about much more than the rehabilitation of supposedly pure or ideal forms of democratic dialogue—though this is also part of it. It is about a distribution of the sensible in which a tacit agreement has consolidated around the limitlessness of global capital and its necessary management by nation states. Anything else has become simply unthinkable and unsayable. Rancière (1995, p. 98) describes this situation as ‘post-democracy’— the end point of philosophy’s encounter with politics, in which governments attempt to move beyond democracy’s troubling demonstration of equality, instead operating in a technocratic mode, where the art of politics has become the expert management of the national-global trade off between goods and rights. This, for Rancière, is a new form of ‘metapolitics’ and is, in a sense, the final completion of political philosophy’s project—by eliminating democracy and the power of the people from the equation, politics has finally established its true foundation—in the combination of science and faith required to carry out this expert management. The will of the people is constantly represented in the form of

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opinion polls and focus group data that prevent any appearance of a dissenting part by presenting the community back to itself in a completely transparent and always available form. Any disagreement with this consensus is framed as ‘populism’ and summarily dismissed. Rancière (2016a) has elaborated this analysis of ‘populism’ within the context of more recent anxiety around the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and elsewhere. Here, Rancière (2016b, p. 104) reiterates this argument about the way the term ‘populism’ is used to reinforce the consensus logic and argues that the term does not express any passions ‘emanating from the depths of the body popular; it is a satellite that profits from the strategies of the state and the distinguished intellectual campaigns’. For Rancière, ‘populism’ is a term used about the people, not by them. Rancière suggests that this completion of political philosophy’s project is also, ironically, the end of political philosophy itself. As the spaces for real political dispute are reduced at the national level, a global ‘politics’ of humanitarianism emerges and philosophy relinquishes its claim over politics, concerning itself with ethics instead (1999, p. 137). The dark side of this consensual ‘post-democracy’ and elimination of political dispute is, Rancière argues, the re-emergence of ethnic conflict and new forms of racism—specifically those that centre on the figure of ‘the immigrant’. The political dispute over the organisation of parts of the community (most commonly in the form of class conflict in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) arguably kept another form of division at bay—the ethnic division between the ‘One’ of the community and the ‘Other’. The re-emergence of these at the ‘end of politics’ is, for Rancière, no coincidence; new forms of racism appear as the ‘disease of consensus’ (1995, p.  101), and new movements arise based on non-political framings of community. Rancière’s response to this situation is variously more optimistic and pessimistic across his writing. In On the Shores of Politics, Rancière (1995, p. 106) makes the case for responding creatively to this situation, arguing that, ‘what we must do…is repoliticize conflicts so that they can be addressed, restore names to the people and give politics back its former visibility in the handling of problems and resources’. In Disagreement, he doubts the possibility that ‘some new politics could break the circle of cheerful consensuality’ (1999, p.  139), emphasising the difficulties it

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would face and arguing there are, ‘good reasons for thinking that it will not be able to get around the overblown promises of identity’ (1999, p. 140). In Hatred of Democracy, however, he suggests that democratic politics will continue despite these challenges, limited as it is to the ‘constancy of its specific acts’, which nevertheless can ‘inspire courage and hence joy’ (2006, p. 97). What such a view of democracy means for education, and for a potential project of democratic education, is discussed below, with reference to some attempts to address this in my own work.

Reflection I began this chapter by setting out some of the problems associated with defining the term ‘democracy’ when carrying out research into the relationship between democracy and education. I noted the tendency, in the literature on democratic education, to present democracy either as something that is in crisis, and in need of saving, or as something which is so bland as to be meaningless. I also noted that both these positions rest on the assumption that democracy is a normal situation, to be restored or simply ignored in favour of more meaningful political change, and referred to problematisations of this position—both in educational theory (Biesta 2007) and in political theory (Mouffe 2005). I noted the value of Mouffe’s (2005) work in bringing the question of conflict back into discussions of democracy but also identified a question associated with Mouffe’s view; that is, if participation in the democratic sphere still requires a commitment to the ‘ethico-political’ principles of liberty and equality (though variously interpreted), how and where does change in the social order and in the interpretation of those principles happen? As will be evident from the introduction to Rancière’s writing on democracy, politics, and political philosophy offered in this chapter, Rancière’s writing helps to address some of these problems and answer some of those questions. Rancière’s writing challenges the idea of democracy as a normal situation. Democracy, and its claims or verifications of equality, is antithetical to the organisation of the community in accordance with any pure logic or principle of government. Democracy is not a form of government but the dramatic disruption of the claims to

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rationality on which all political governments rest. As with Mouffe (2005), Rancière’s work helps to move beyond the notion of ‘democratic states’, ‘democratic societies’, or even simply ‘democracies’. Unlike Mouffe, however, in his portrait of the ‘politics-police relationship’ (Rancière 2016a, p. 150) as one of constant struggle between the disruptive and organising tendencies of each, Rancière locates democracy as something which occurs in relationship with, but not entirely within, existing political structures. Rather than building an argument about how state structures need to reform to revitalise democracy, Rancière demonstrates how changes to the social order—and the principles that underpin them—happen through the specific political activity of staging a dispute over the existing configuration of that order. From a ‘Rancièrian’ perspective, therefore, arguments about the need to save democracy in times of youth apathy (often through a renewed emphasis on encouraging young people to participate in rational debate and deliberative democratic processes) echo those arguments for the renewal of such processes and the revival of political philosophy that Rancière targets in Disagreement. Similarly, fears about young people being drawn into the ‘wrong kinds’ of political engagement rather than participating through established channels can be understood as part of a broader suspicion of democracy that condemns all appearances of the people as ‘populist’ to dismiss them—as outlined in On the Shores of Politics. Rancière’s writing on democracy implies that another approach to questions of democracy and education is possible—one which is optimistic not about the ability of educators to teach or facilitate democratic behaviour and attitudes amongst students but about the capacity of anyone and everyone, including students, to engage in democratic politics spontaneously. Rancière’s writing thus helps to challenge some of the most familiar arguments encountered in the literature on democratic education and suggests new ways of thinking about democracy that escape the logic of many discussions of its relationship to education. It shifts the ground from one of defending or critiquing the project of teaching people to be more democratic to exploring how and where democracy and education are related to each other. In doing so, however, Rancière’s writing also poses new problems for thinking through the possibilities of democratic

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education. Indeed, like ‘political philosophy’, the term ‘democratic education’ might seem oxymoronic when democracy is read in the radically disruptive sense that Rancière gives it. This challenge is discussed in greater detail in Chap. 6, when I consider how educational philosophers and theorists have made use of Rancière’s work. My own attempts to think through the relationship between democracy and education via Rancière in the end formed part of a theorisation intended to ground empirical research. Inspired by Biesta’s (2006, 2010) view of democratic learning as a process of learning from one’s experiences of democracy (or the lack of them), I used Rancière’s work to help theorise what those experiences might look like when viewed within the context of ‘politics’ ‘the police’, and ‘consensus’. This would mean that an important focus for educational research into democratic education would be the eruption of exceptional moments of democracy and politics—and the policing of them—as experienced in young people’s everyday lives. As an extension to Biesta’s work in this area, I theorised that paying attention to the aesthetics of such moments, the sensory experience of them—their visual, aural, and tangible dimensions—would also be an important part of such educational research (McDonnell 2014). The emphasis on the aesthetics of politics that formed part of my study also prefaces another aspect of my research and another aspect of Rancière’s writing, that is, the ‘politics of aesthetics’ and the relationship between politics and art, which forms the focus of the next chapter.

References Amsler, S. S. (2015). The education of radical democracy. London: Routledge. Biesta, G. J. J. (2010). How to exist politically and learn from it: Hannah Arendt and the problem of democratic education. The Teachers College Record, 112 (2), 557–572. Biesta, G. J. J. (2007) “Don’t count me in” Democracy, education and the question of inclusion. Nordic Studies in Education/Nordisk Pedagogik, 27 (1), 18–31.  Biesta, G. J. J. (2006). Beyond learning. Democratic education for a human future. London: Paradigm.

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Biesta, G.  J. J., & Lawy, R. (2006). From teaching citizenship to learning democracy: Overcoming individualism in research, policy, and practice. Cambridge Journal of Education, 36 (1), 63–79. Crick, B. (2007). Citizenship: The political and the democratic. British Journal of Educational Studies, 55 (3), 235–248. Crick, B. (1998). Education for citizenship and the teaching of democracy in schools: Final report of the advisory group on citizenship and the teaching of democracy in schools. London: Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Faulks, K. (2006). Rethinking citizenship education in England: Some lessons from contemporary social and political theory. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 1 (2), 123. Fielding, M. (2004). Transformative approaches to student voice: Theoretical underpinnings, recalcitrant realities. British Educational Research Journal, 30 (2), 295–311. Frazer, E. (2007). Depoliticising citizenship. British Journal of Educational Studies, 55 (3), 249–263. Fukuyama, F. (1989). The End of History? The National Interest, 16 (12), 3–18. Gillborn, D. (2006). Citizenship education as placebo: ‘Standards’, institutional racism, and education policy. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 1 (1), 83–104. Kiwan, D. (2007). Citizenship education in England at the cross-roads? Four models of citizenship and their implications for ethnic and religious diversity. Oxford Review of Education, 34 (1), 39–58. Lawy, R., & Biesta, G.  J. J. (2006). Citizenship-as-practice: The educational implications of an inclusive and relational understanding of citizenship. British Journal of Educational Studies, 54 (1), 34–50. McDonnell, J. (2014). Reimagining the role of art in the relationship between democracy and education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46 (1), 46–58. Mouffe, C. (2005). On the Political. London: Verso. Osler, A., & Starkey, H. (2006). Education for democratic citizenship: A review of research, policy, and practice 1995–2005. Research Papers in Education, 21 (4), 433–466. Print, M. (2007). Citizenship education and youth participation in democracy. British Journal of Educational Studies, 55 (3), 325–345. Rancière, J. (2016a). The method of equality (trans: Rose, J.). Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Rancière, J. (2016b). The populism that is not to be found. In A.  Badiou, J. Butler, G. Didi-Huberman, S. Khiari, J. Rancière, & P. Bourdieu (2016). What is a people? (pp. 101–105). New York: Columbia University Press. Rancière, J. (2009). A few remarks on the method of Jacques Rancière. Parallax, 15 (3), 114–123. Rancière, J. (2006). Hatred of democracy (trans: Corcoran, S.). London: Verso. Rancière, J. (2004). The politics of aesthetics (trans: Rockhill, G.). London: Continuum. Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement (trans: Rose, J.). Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, J. (1995). On the shores of politics (trans: Heron, L.). London: Verso. Ruitenberg, C. W. (2009). Educating political adversaries: Chantal Mouffe and radical democratic citizenship education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 28 (3), 269–281. Todd, S. (2008). Democracy, education, and conflict: Rethinking respect and the place of the ethical. Journal of Educational Controversy, 3 (1), 1–11. Winter, C. & Mills, C. (2020). The Psy-Security-Curriculum ensemble: British Values curriculum policy in English schools. Journal of Education Policy, 35 (1), 46–67. 10.1080/02680939.2018.1493621 Zembylas, M. (2020). The affective atmospheres of democratic education: pedagogical and political implications for challenging right-wing populism. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 1–15. 10.1080/01596306.2020.1858401

3 On (the Politics of) Aesthetics

About a year into my doctorate, I started carrying out empirical research in art galleries, observing and talking to young people engaged in gallery education projects. The projects all formed part of a larger scheme designed to foster democratic ways for young people and gallery educators to work together with artists to produce and exhibit work. One of the things that struck me about the projects was the wide variety in what the gallery educators, artists, young people, and their teachers all wanted to get out of the projects. The gallery educators were particularly interested in the co-construction and co-exhibition of artwork between the young people and the artists. The artists understood democratic ways of working in various ways—often as the achievement of consensus amongst the young people but sometimes also as a process of experimentation, spontaneity, and focus on process over product. Many of the young people found this focus on process over product frustrating, though they also enjoyed the relative freedom of working in gallery settings as opposed to schools. For their teachers, the projects were variously seen as a way of helping to develop students’ social skills, or as an adjunct to their school artwork, one which would help them develop their skills. Some teachers, too, were disappointed by the lack of focus on a final product. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. McDonnell, Reading Rancière for Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96013-1_3

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In a sense, this wide range of opinions, experiences, and investments in a set of arts education projects with specifically social and political goals offers a snapshot of arguments about the social and political uses of art in education at the time. I was immersed in the literature surrounding this topic as part of my studies and therefore in a position to make connections with some of the major trends in the field. One important such trend is what might be described as an instrumentalist approach to art as a way of ‘solving’ or addressing particular social and political problems, often through education. The most common version of this at the time was the use of art for achieving social and cultural inclusion, often through community education projects, arguably to compensate for the vast material inequalities resulting from decades of neoliberal reform and decline in investment (Buckingham and Jones 2001). Older versions of this ‘instrumentalist’ approach include the tradition of ‘education through art’ (Read 1943), with its emphasis on the civilising potential of art and the more situated and radical ambitions of the community arts movement of the 1970s, focused on building participation. Such ambitions have not gone away, as arguments for the role of art in educational and research projects aimed at community regeneration attest. In addition, neoliberal arguments about the value of art in education for a creative global economy have gained pace (Robinson et al. 2019). Clearly these arguments are diverse. It is not the same thing to claim that art can help people in communities left behind by the ‘progress’ of neoliberal economies towards new ways of valuing collective life, as it is to claim that the creative skills gained through school art will equip young people with the entrepreneurial acumen needed to get ahead in such economies, and give pupils a competitive advantage in the job market. However, both claims assume that art is a way of achieving social, economic, and political ends, often through education. Though such an approach is not unusual, it risks reducing both art itself, and the complexity of the political aims and purposes it serves (see, e.g., Houston 2005; Sanderson 2008; Scullion 2008). In my own research, I sought out other ways of framing the political and educational significance of art— or its role in the relationship between the two. Essentially, I was interested in exploring different ways of understanding the political nature of art and its potential within political and democratic education. As with

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redefining ‘democracy’ for understanding democratic education, it was Rancière’s writing that helped me to do this. In this chapter, I offer an introduction to Rancière’s interventions on art and aesthetics, before offering some reflections on its relevance to research on the role of art in political and democratic education, via a discussion of my own experiences of applying Rancière’s insights to this field.

The Politics of Aesthetics In the previous chapter, I outlined how, for Rancière, a ‘configuration of the perceptible’ (1999, p.  29) or ‘distribution of the sensible’ (2004, p. 12) forms the backdrop to the antagonistic relationship between ‘politics’ and ‘the police’. Just as this distribution underpins the police ordering of roles, places, and spaces in the community, so politics disrupts and disturbs these, making new things doable, visible, sayable, and thinkable via processes of subjectification. In other words, ‘politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time’ (Rancière 2004, p. 13). This constitutes what Rancière describes as ‘the aesthetics of politics’ (2016, p. 55). However, the question of the distribution of the sensible can also be approached from the opposite direction, that is, from the point of view of art and the ‘politics of aesthetics’. One question that often animates discussions of art and politics is the extent to which art is political and in what ways. Rancière (2009a, p. 23) argues that, ‘[a]rt is not, in the first instance political because of the messages and sentiments it conveys concerning the state of the world’. Rather, he argues, art is political because of the ‘type of space and time that it institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples this space’ (2009a, p. 23). It is because of its relationship to the distribution of the sensible—its support for existing distributions of sense and community, or its disruption and reconfiguration of those—that art has anything to do with politics. This ‘politics of aesthetics’ does not mean the same thing as the ‘aesthetics of politics’ (Rancière 2016, p. 55), however. Art and politics are related at the level of the distribution of the sensible; both can unsettle, disrupt,

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and rearrange it, making new things visible, sayable, and doable. However, the consequences of such disruptions will be different. As with politics and democracy, Rancière’s writing on art and aesthetics needs to be read as a set of polemical interventions on specific discourses and debates. Rancière outlines his project as one of rethinking the ‘conditions of intelligibility’ (2004, p.  10) for contemporary debates about art and politics by addressing the denunciations of ‘aesthetics’ common in art criticism and art theory, as well as claims about crises in art and fears for its future (2009a, p. 1). Rancière argues that the complexity of the relationship between art and politics has been obscured by deterministic readings of ‘modernity’ as a clean, ‘anti-representative’ break in artistic practice—the moment when art stopped trying to faithfully resemble things and instead started to deal in abstractions, followed by a postmodern turn to hybrid forms. In response, he traces an alternative history of Western art and its political import, which, he argues, helps to make better sense of what arguments denouncing aesthetics and decrying the ‘end of art’ or the ‘death of images’ really mean. Because Rancière’s revision of aesthetics challenges some of the established co-ordinates for understanding both art and its relation to politics, it also helps to address the role of art within political and democratic education from a very different perspective. Below, I outline some of the key terms and ideas that feature in Rancière’s alternative history of art and its relation to politics, before returning to the question of the implications of this for education and educational research.

Artistic Regimes Rancière in effect offers an alternative history of art and aesthetics, encompassing not just shifts in art itself but, more importantly, shifts in ways of thinking about various forms of doing and making and how they come to be considered art or not. Three ‘artistic regimes’ feature in Rancière’s alternate history of art and aesthetics: the ‘ethical regime of images’ (2004, p. 20), the ‘representative regime of the arts’ (2004, p. 21), and the ‘aesthetic regime of art’ (2004, p.  52). Each of these are outlined below.

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The ‘ethical regime of images’ is associated with Plato’s distinction between true images and simulacra. In this regime, Rancière argues, there is no such thing as ‘art’, nor even ‘the arts’ but only images—images which are judged to be either true or false, helpful, or harmful to the collective life of the community. Plato’s regime endorses those true images that support the hierarchical organisation of the community and condemns those false images and forms of artistic practice that undermine it. Mimesis (broadly understood as forms of representing) here is viewed negatively, as the mere imitation or simulacra of true forms. This ethical delineation of images incorporates Plato’s mistrust of the written word, which circulates freely from person to person (as opposed to speech, which addresses only the intended addressee), and of the theatre, which sets up a deceptive space of split reality. In this regime, the political power of images is well known and their disruptive potential is suppressed. As Rancière (2009a, p.  26) writes, ‘Plato simultaneously excludes both democracy and theatre so that he can construct an ethical community, a community without politics’. The ‘representative regime of the arts’ is established by Aristotle’s delineation of ‘the arts’ in his Poetics. In contrast to Plato’s ethical regime, mimesis is here given a positive role. This regime, Rancière argues, consists in regulating the relations between poesis (ways of doing and making) and aesthesis (effects on feelings) via mimesis (ways of representing) (2009a, p.7). This regulation also implies a framework for making numerous distinctions: between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ representations, between the subject matter deemed appropriate for each art form (poetry, sculpture, theatre, etc.) and, fundamentally, between what is considered an art form (e.g., poetry) and what is not (e.g., history). This framework is also hierarchical—some artistic forms and strategies are valued over others (e.g., narration over description), with the tragic action of poetry accorded the highest status (2004, pp. 21–22). Importantly, Rancière argues, the hierarchies and distinctions of this regime are analogous to those in society. Rancière argues that Aristotle’s representative regime of the arts ‘enters into a relationship of global analogy with an overall hierarchy of political and social occupations’ (Rancière 2004, p.  22). So, the representative regime is a way of governing the relations between different art forms,

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between different artistic practices, and between the arts and life that is also analogous to soceital hierarchy. The ‘aesthetic regime of art’ marks a break with the representative regime of the arts, in that it involves the mixing of different genres and forms, and the mixing of different kinds of subject matter within and across different art forms. Rancière (2009a, p. 38) describes this as the ‘aesthetic revolution’ and locates it in a series of changes that occurred both in artistic practices and in ways of thinking about artistic practices around turn of the nineteenth century. These include not only art criticism but also the emergence of ‘aesthetics’ itself as a branch of philosophy. Rancière argues that the emerging philosophers of aesthetics (Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Schiller, and others) all sought to capture and make sense of the shifts occurring in artistic practices of the time. Common to these philosophers, Rancière argues, is their identification of art as that which achieves the unity of thought and non-thought, knowledge, and non-knowledge, logos and pathos. This is exemplified in the Kantian idea of ‘genius’, unaware of its own origins or power, Schelling’s idea of art as the identity between conscious and unconscious processes, and Schiller’s aesthetic state, ‘that suspends both the activity of the understanding and sensible passivity’ (Rancière 2004, p. 23). Importantly, the idea of ‘art’ in the singular only makes sense in the context of the emergence of this aesthetic regime. Previously only ‘the arts’ were visible. The aesthetic regime breaks down the tightly regulated system of distinctions that operated in the representative regime. All manner of subject matter is now appropriated by all manner of ‘art forms’—the lives of everyday people and the objects of everyday life become the legitimate subject matter for new novels narrating the lives of the poor and ‘still life’ paintings depicting vegetables, fruits, and interiors. Ways of displaying and talking about paintings change too, as pictorial art starts to populate museums and galleries instead of churches and palaces, thus becoming detached from its intended audiences and purposes (Rancière 2009a, p.  9). It is because the aesthetic regime breaks down all these distinctions that ‘art’ in the singular becomes thinkable. The aesthetic regime gives art its autonomy. However, this autonomy at the same time makes the relations between art and ‘real life’ indistinct, since there are no longer any generally accepted ways of distinguishing

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between what is art and what is not. This is the paradox of the aesthetic regime—‘art’ exists, as such, because the distinction that separates it from other ‘ways of doing and making’ has been broken down (Rancière 2004, p. 23). While these artistic regimes are historically situated in Rancière’s writing, they are not teleological or deterministic. The logic inherent to these different regimes of art co-exists (2004, p.  50). Neither ethical judgements about images (such as religious prohibitions on depicting God or gods) nor classical ideas about representation (including which genres and forms are appropriate to which subject matter, and distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art) have ceased to exist because of the shifts effected by the aesthetic regime. Rancière again recognises an affinity between his work and that of Foucault  here, in thinking through the conditions of possibility that have, historically, made certain practices thinkable or not. However, for Rancière, unlike Foucault, there is not a certain point beyond which some things are no longer thinkable. As Rancière writes, the aesthetic regime of art ‘is a system of possibilities that is historically constituted but that does not abolish the representative regime, which was previously dominant. At a given point in time, several regimes co-exist and intermingle in the works themselves’ (2004, p. 50). Rancière’s re-writing of the history of Western art and aesthetics via this focus on ‘artistic regimes’ already offers a fresh perspective on art and aesthetics that can be applied to understand and challenge arguments within art education. In Chap. 7, I outline how researchers working within art education have, for example, taken up Rancière’s artistic regimes to analyse art education curricula. However, this outline of artistic regimes also allows Rancière to advance a particular argument about the relationship between art and politics that also has implications for understanding the role of art within political and democratic education. This argument about art and politics is outlined below.

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An Ethical Turn in Art and Politics Rancière’s history of artistic regimes allows him to address a central concern in his writing, that is, contemporary claims about the end of art (or at least of its political import) that operate within the current climate of consensus. This climate, as discussed in Chap. 2, is about much more than a political system. It is in fact an entire way of seeing the world, which precludes the dispute proper to politics by effacing this under ethics and morality. The shift from politics to humanitarianism is the prime political example of this in Rancière’s writing. Rancière’s interventions on aesthetics allow him to show that this consensus also means the effacement of art under ethics. This argument is articulated perhaps most clearly in Aesthetics and Its Discontents, where Rancière (2009a) challenges denunciations of ‘aesthetics’, which (on various grounds) try to separate out art from politics and philosophy to restore its autonomy. In this text, Rancière first reminds us that the ‘aesthetic revolution’ means that ‘art’ is always already embroiled in both philosophy and politics. Indeed, the existence of ‘art’ as such, in the singular, is bound up with the emergence of ‘aesthetics’ and the aesthetic regime. Furthermore, Rancière argues, the work of those philosophers who sought to define ‘art’ at this time points to a fundamental connection between art and politics. The suspension of the faculties of reason and imagination in Kant’s ‘aesthetic experience’ and the suspension between active intelligence and passive sensibility in Schiller’s ‘aesthetic state’ also involve suspensions of the normal rules and hierarchies that govern ‘the arts’ in the representative regime. As outlined above, these regulations and hierarchies are also  analogous to the hierarchies and distinctions in society itself—between different roles and occupations in the community. This means, Rancière (2009a, p.  8) argues, that art has an emancipatory potential, captured in Schiller’s theory of an ‘aesthetic education’ that would pave the way for a ‘humanity to come’. It constitutes, in other words, a ‘revolution of sensible existence itself ’ (Rancière 2009a, p. 32). The various twists and turns in the historical development of this emancipatory potential of art are defined by what Rancière describes as the two great forms of the politics of aesthetics or, more precisely, the

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‘metapolitics’ of aesthetics (2009a, p. 33). Rancière uses the term ‘metapolitics’ here to denote the fact that these are not ‘politics’ in the strict sense that he defines it. Rather, they are ways of effacing such politics, either in the grand ‘political’ project of building a new community through art, or the promise of such a community found in art’s autonomy (see Chap. 2 for a more detailed discussion of Rancière’s term ‘metapolitics’). Rancière describes these two forms as, ‘the politics of the becoming-life of art and the politics of the resistant form’ (2009a, p. 44). In The Politics of Aesthetics, Rancière (2004, p. 26) uses the term ‘modernatism’ to refer the former while referring to the latter as a ‘simple modernism’, which associates modernity with a definitive, ‘anti-mimetic’ break, securing the autonomy of art in its abstract form. The politics of the ‘becoming-life of art’, Rancière argues, has been heavily influenced by the Marxist ideal of a revolution in material production and is most obviously evident in utopian art movements such as futurism in the Soviet Union. However, it is also present in projects such as the Arts and Crafts movement, Bauhaus, and Art Deco (2009a, p. 38), where the beauty of art is brought into everyday lives through furnishings and decoration. In the politics of ‘resistant form’, on the other hand, the role of art is conceived not in terms of intervening in politics or creating a new sensible world but in terms of bearing witness to such a possibility at a detached distance. Rancière writes, ‘[i]ts programme is encapsulated in a rallying cry: protect the heterogeneity of the sensible that forms the core of art’s autonomy and therefore constitutes its potential for emancipation’ (2009a, p. 40). This form of metapolitics is evident in modernist claims about the purity of each art form—pigment on a two-dimensional surface in abstract painting, for example, or the ‘language of sounds set free from any analogy with expressive language’ in music (2004, p. 26). Readers familiar with art curricula in schools will easily recognise these two forms in art education, for example, in the hopeful insistence that art can change the world for the better and in arguments about the value of pure form. Rancière argues that ‘postmodernism’ began as a playful and joyful response to the impossibility of such a simple modernist purity (through a renewed mixing of forms and genres) but quickly transformed into a denunciation of the failure of the ‘modernatist’ project to achieve its

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revolutionary and emancipatory aims. Rancière finds the most extreme example of this latter movement in Lyotard’s re-reading of the Kantian sublime. This re-reading, Rancière (2009a) argues, does two things. Firstly, it makes the artwork itself the locus of the sublime (as opposed to the aesthetic experience in Kant’s philosophy) (2009a, p. 89). Secondly, it makes the purity of art, as ‘resistant form’, into an absolute shock—the shock of the ‘unrepresentable’ (2004, p. 26; 2009a, p. 123). Lyotard’s re-­ reading of the Kantian sublime is, Rancière argues (2009a, p. 105), in fact a reversal of the emancipatory potential of art in the aesthetic regime: ‘The shock of the sensuous exception that in Kant was a sign of freedom, and in Schiller a promise of emancipation, in Lyotard signifies exactly the opposite, namely a sign of dependency’. Rancière (2009a) argues that Lyotard’s reversal of the Kantian sublime takes an ethical turn, as art’s inability to represent thought becomes analogous to humanity’s inability to atone for the original sin or ethical catastrophe of the Holocaust— some things (thought, the Holocaust) are simply unrepresentable. In its inability to represent thought or address this original sin, all art can do is attest to the absolute power of the ‘Other’ (Ranciere 2009a, pp. 127). The hopeful commitment to art’s ability to change the world here becomes a pessimistic insistence that all art can do is bear witness to a fundamental and irredeemable catastrophe or flaw in humanity. Rancière takes issue with Lyotard’s theory for several reasons. Firstly, Rancière addresses what he sees as the faulty logic at the heart of Lyotard’s argument; it confuses representability for the rules of representation in the representative regime. It is only in the logic of the representative regime that things are ‘unrepresentable’—and then only in the strict sense that they can only be represented in certain ways, by certain art forms. In the aesthetic regime, art can and does represent all sorts of subject matter in all sorts of ways. Rancière (2007) refers to the film Shoah, by Claude Lanzmann, representing the Holocaust, as an example to refute Lyotard on this point. For Rancière, Lyotard’s notion of the ‘unrepresentable’ confuses a technical impossibility of representing with an ethical injunction not to represent (a form of aesthetics more akin to Plato’s ethical regime of images). And this is the second, perhaps more important, issue that Rancière addresses in Lyotard’s argument: in its absolutisation of the resistant form of art, it dissolves both art and politics in a turn to ethics.

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As with the climate of consensus that governs in the world of politics (humanitarianism and anti-terrorism), for Rancière (2009a), Lyotard’s ethical reading of art replaces specific and addressable wrongs with absolute and irremediable trauma. Rancière (2015, 2009a) detects similar ethical turns, based on the desire to isolate art’s singularity, in the work of both Badiou and Deleuze. Rancière (2009a, p.  87) argues that Badiou’s ‘inaesthetics’ ultimately, ‘joins forces with the proclamation of the Other’s commandment proper to the aesthetics of the sublime’ found in the writing of Lyotard. For Rancière (2009a, p. 87), this means that ‘[e]ach of them isolate art from aesthetics, only to prostrate it before the indistinction of ethics’. Rancière (2015, pp. 190–191) also finds resonances of Lyotard’s view of the singularity of art, based on its capacity for resistance, in Deleuze’s more optimistic theory of a ‘people to come…rendered fraternal through the experience of the Inhuman’. Rancière (2015, pp. 190–191) argues that the ‘political becoming of art’ in Deleuze’s thinking, ‘becomes the ethical confusion, in which, in the name of their union, art and politics both vanish’. For Rancière, the insistence on the specificity of art and its power of resistance, which effaces the tension central to ‘art’ as such in the aesthetic regime (as both singular and always imbricated with other forms of life), does not necessarily lead to the happy conclusion that Deleuze’s theory supposes. The nihilist conclusions of Lyotard and the optimistic conclusions of Deleuze are, for Rancière, two facets of the same attempt to collapse the very tension that has made ‘art’, as such, possible for the past 200 years. Rancière also refers to ‘critical art’ as ‘almost a third politics of aesthetics’ that seeks to ‘build awareness of the mechanisms of domination to turn the spectator into a conscious agent of world transformation’ (2009a, p. 45). Rancière argues that this third politics, encapsulated in critical art, has transitioned from critique of domination to a critique of critique itself, in which ‘[t]he current disconnection between critical procedures and any prospect of emancipation simply reveals the disjunction at the heart of the critical paradigm’ (2009b, p. 45). In its softer versions, this transition in critical art has led to the kind of ‘relational art’ that aims to restore social bonds by encouraging spectators to participate in the artwork and with each other. In its harder versions, it involves a cynical

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disavowal of all forms of political engagement, mocking forms of protest that critique the mechanisms of domination as much as it attacks those mechanisms themselves. Rancière argues that, ironically, just as critical art seems to have abandoned its political motives, art finds itself tasked with performing a critical role more than ever, as spaces for genuine politics are reduced. For Rancière, art will only be able to do this if it escapes the cynical tenor of critical art today. A genuine, ‘critique of critique’, he argues, ‘cannot be a further inversion of its logic’ (2009b, p.  45) but must involve a re-­ examination of the very procedures of critical art itself. The key question, he argues, is whether contemporary art ‘can reshape political spaces or whether they must be content with parodying them’ (2009a, p.  60). Rancière is not entirely pessimistic about this, referring to examples of artworks, such as Alfredo Jaar’s installation work on the Rwandan genocide, which have managed to forge new configurations of verbal, visual, and material elements that challenge the nihilistic cynicism of critical art and therefore engage with politics in more generative ways (2009b, p. 97). This optimistic note also suggests that Rancière does hold out hope for a kind of critical art that can have political significance—one which educationalists may find interesting for exploring the continued role of art within political education. The possibility that art can generatively engage with politics in a way that moves beyond the cynicism of much critical art but also remains realistic in its confrontation of inequalities might offer a helpful addition to arguments about  the educative potential of art. However, it is important to note that Rancière’s view of art and aesthetics implies that the political significance of art is always indeterminate and unpredictable—something that also presents a challenge to educationalists who wish to enlist art to make specific changes. This particular understanding of the political import of art is discussed further below, and its implications for research and practice in art education are discussed in detail in Chap. 7.

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The Political Import of Art Rancière’s unique view of the politics of aesthetics clearly implies a particular understanding of the political significance of art. For Rancière (2004), the relationship between art and politics is always indeterminate. Neither the commitment of artists to a political cause nor their choice of artistic methods can guarantee an artwork’s political effects. Likewise, the subject matter of the art itself does not define its politics. Unlike the representative regime of ‘the arts’, in the aesthetic regime of ‘art’, ‘there is no criterion for establishing a correspondence between aesthetic virtue and political virtue’ (2004, p. 61). This does not mean that art has no political effects. However, there is no way of establishing a direct relationship between these and the artwork itself. On the question of ‘politicised art’, Rancière (2004) argues that it is better to think in terms of how political projects make use of artistic practices, rather than the other way around. Rancière (2004) refers to several examples to illustrate this. One is Brechtian theatre; despite having an identifiable ‘political formula’, designed to bring about political awareness, the historical circumstances that determined the uptake of Brecht’s work meant that ‘the encounter between this particular form of politics and its supposed audience (workers conscious of the capitalist system) never took place’ (Rancière 2004, p. 63). If the artist’s political commitment cannot guarantee any political effects, neither can the artistic strategies employed. Referring to Scorsese’s film The Deer Hunter, which deals with the subject of the Vietnam war and in which ‘the war scenes are essentially scenes of Russian roulette’ (2004, p. 61), Rancière argues, ‘[i]t can be said that the message is the derisory nature of the war. It can just as well be said that the message is the derisory nature of the struggle against war’ (2004, p. 61). Since there are no established criteria for determining such relationships in the aesthetic regime, the same artistic strategy can be read in different ways. It is not only that the relationship between art and politics is indeterminate, for Rancière, but that art and politics occupy different planes in Rancière’s writing. For Rancière, the question of the relationship between art and politics must be addressed therefore at the level of the distribution of the sensible. Both art and politics act upon the distribution of the

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sensible in ways that either support or disrupt the given co-ordinates of sensibility—of what is sayable, visible, and doable, and by whom. Art can contribute to, or coincide with, ‘politics’ (in Rancière’s strict sense of the term) when each effects a redistribution of the sensible that disrupts existing hierarchies. However, it does not necessarily do so, and this cannot be anticipated in advance. As Rancière writes, ‘[t]he images of art do not supply weapons for battles. They help to sketch new configurations of what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought and, consequently, a new landscape of the possible. But they do so on condition that their meaning or effect is not anticipated’ (2009b, p. 103). Even when art and politics do coincide, and art contributes to a redistribution of the sensible in this way, the disruptions of art are still not the same as those of politics. As Rancière writes, ‘politics has its aesthetics and aesthetics has its politics’ (2004, p.  62). This is illustrated in one of Rancière’s discussions of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, in which he writes about the different kinds of equality at play in the novel. Rancière argues that Madame Bovary, as an example of literature in the aesthetic regime, represents the equality of the written word that Plato denounced, available to anyone and everyone, while also displaying an equality of subject matter by taking the life of a farmer’s daughter as its central theme. In these senses, the equality of Flaubert’s novel coincides with political equality and the advances of democracy—disrupting hierarchies and circulating amongst anyone and everyone. However, the novel also manifests another kind of equality—an ‘aesthetic equality’ that favours the description of objects and everyday details over the causal arrangement of events into a plot. But, Rancière argues, Madame Bovary is also constructed as a polemic against yet another kind of equality—the equality of art and life, in which a young woman seeks to make her life into art, that is, as a reaction against one of the great ‘metapolitics’ of art. It is for this reason, Ranciere (2008, p. 1) argues, that for Flaubert, she ‘had to be killed’. This indeterminate view of the political significance of art has important implications for both art education and the use of art within political education. These are touched upon in the reflection that concludes this chapter and addressed in further detail in Chap. 7. However, I first want to elaborate on how Rancière’s understanding of the specificity of art, and

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its relation to politics, is applied in his writing to address specific fields and practices—including those considered artistic and those more commonly considered academic, social, and educational.

Literature and the Social Sciences The emergence of novelistic literature occupies a particularly important place in Rancière’s discussion of the aesthetic revolution. Indeed, Rancière (2004, p.  58) has referred to literature as the ‘privileged site’ in which broader anxieties about the breakdown of the social bond in post-­ revolutionary France were given visibility. Rancière (2004, p. 56) argues that this visibility plays out in a ‘positive contradiction’ between the power of words as a form of ‘disincorporation’ from representative hierarchies and the desire to construct a ‘new body for writing’. In this new body for writing, ‘language would be the direct expression of a potential for being that was immanent in beings’ (Rancière 2004, p. 57). This, for Rancière, has been the ‘galvanising tension’ that makes literature in the aesthetic regime function, but which also threatens to cancel it out. Literature, in other words, is exemplary of the tensions in the aesthetic regime, seeking to achieve the kind of unity of thought and non-thought quintessential to aesthetic experience and, in doing so, illustrating how precarious the balance is between breaking free of existing hierarchies and reinstituting them in a new form. Rancière uses the term ‘mute speech’ to capture this and refers to two types of mute speech in literature. First, there is the ‘mute speech’ in which the descriptive detail of visual and sensory elements ‘tells’ the story in place of plot. Rancière frequently refers to descriptive passages from the writing of Balzac and others to illustrate this. In these descriptions, Rancière argues (2020, p.  79), ‘Balzac thus made the furniture of the Maison Grandet speak, as he did the façade of the hôtel du Guénic in Beatrix or that of The Cat and Racket’. Second, there is the mute speech in which rational language is taken as the deceptive surface of appearance, which must be penetrated to reach the truth of feeling and sensation. Rancière refers to Ibsen’s dramas as exemplary of this second kind of mute speech, in which, ‘the voiceless speech of a nameless power…lurks

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behind any consciousness and any signification’ (2009c, p.  41). Each negotiates the tensions of the aesthetic regime but risks being eliminated—either in the abyss or in the indifference of words. As Rancière (2020, pp. 79–80) writes of Balzac’s descriptions, ‘[e]ach of them signifies a society and an era’, but in this same way, ‘fictional action becomes lost in this or that moment’. The tension between disincorporation and reincorporation is what makes literature function in the aesthetic regime, but it also threatens to eliminate literature in the autonomy of language itself. In a sense, literature, for Rancière, is always performing a balancing act between the different uses of language and their emancipatory or dominating potential. As with contemporary art, Rancière is optimistic about the capacity of writers to put this ‘galvanising tension’ or ‘positive contradiction’ to new uses, to go on inventing new forms and genres that strike this balance in new ways. He refers to the work of W. G. Sebald, as the emergence of a new genre in which history, memory, and invention intermingle in a new use of knowledge, ‘that produces not only a new sort of fiction but another sort of common sense which links without subordinating or destroying’ (2020, p. 125). For Rancière, literature has been hugely influential on the social sciences. Rancière argues that the blurring of boundaries affected by literature in the aesthetic revolution pertains to those boundaries not only between various art forms but also between ‘the arts’ and other practices. This means that, in the aesthetic regime, other forms of doing, making, and making sense of the world are no longer separate from the world of art; both art and other forms create ‘fictions’ (Rancière 2004, p. 36). In Rancière’s terms, ‘fiction’ is not opposed to truth but is a kind of rationality, which, in the representative regime, was opposed to the empirical logic of facts. Aristotle’s distinction between poetry (which arranges events in causal order) and history (in which events simply happen, one after the other) is exemplary of this opposition. In the emergence of the aesthetic regime, the boundaries between these two logics were blurred and fictional rationality became the mode of intelligibility not only for art but also for history, politics, and new sciences of sociology and psychology—even though this ‘fictionality’ (Rancière 2004, p. 36) was itself changed. No longer the causal ordering of events, ‘fictionality’ in the

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aesthetic regime consists in the arrangement of signs found in everyday actions and objects: ‘signs inscribed in the general aspect of a place, a group, a wall, an article of clothing, a face’ (Rancière 2004, pp. 36–37). For Rancière, history, psychology, and sociology, then, all share a common, literary, heritage in the practices that brought about the aesthetic revolution. Rancière’s primary purpose here  is not to argue that these sciences are more literary than they are scientific but to show that these new ‘social sciences’ were only possible because of the shifts that occurred as part of the aesthetic revolution, particularly in literature. Rancière argues that ‘literature itself was constituted as a kind of symptomatology of society’ (2004, p. 33), which focused on the commonplace and minutiae of everyday life as signs of deeper truths about a civilisation. Rancière (2004) refers to Balzac’s celebration of Georges Cuvier, the natural scientist who constructed classifications of species based on the study of fossils and living animals, as illustrative of this. Rancière writes of Balzac, ‘when he makes Cuvier the true poet reconstructing the world from a fossil, he established a regime of equivalence between the signs of the new novel and those of the description or interpretation of the phenomena of a civilisation’ (2004, p. 37). There are, of course, different ways of describing and interpreting civilisations in such reading of signs, and Rancière argues that these have played out differently in the various social sciences. History, Rancière (1994, 2004) argues, inherited literature’s interest in the commonplace as a symptomatology of society but tried to separate this out from the ‘mute speech’ of literature, which finds beauty in everyday objects, sometimes as traces of a deeper truth. This figure of the everyday object, as a beautiful trace of the true, Rancière (2004) argues, was taken up more enthusiastically in sociology and psychology. Rancière (2009b) argues that Freudian psychoanalysis was also only possible because of the aesthetic revolution and its definition of art in the unification of thought and non-thought— a kind of ‘aesthetic unconscious’ that precedes the unconscious of psychoanalysis. Accessing hidden depths is also a key element of Marx’s philosophy and the critical sociological traditions derived from it. Rancière (2004, p. 43) argues that, according to Marx’s theory of fetishism, ‘commodities must be torn out of their trivial appearances, made

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into phantasmagorical objects, to be interpreted as the expression of society’s contradictions’. In both cases, however, Rancière (2004, 2009b) argues, this meant an attempt to re-constitute the Aristotelian logic of fiction in the representative regime. Rancière (2009b) argues that Freud’s analyses of artworks try to impose a causal logic that would explain the artist’s inventions or the protagonists’ actions in terms of an original trauma that could be cured. Similarly, he argues that Marx tries to stage a classical Aristotelian tragedy between the ‘characters’ of the coat and the linen, to construct a ‘tale of the commodity’s enchantments’ and the obstacle these presents to defeating capitalism (Rancière 2020, p. 56). However, this relationship between literature and the social sciences works in both directions. Rancière (2020) argues that literature has also tried to re-appropriate an Aristotelian logic of fiction in the genre of the detective novel, in which the protagonist’s attention to hidden details reveals the falseness of appearance; nothing is what it seems. For Rancière (2020, p.  84), this manoeuvre in literature echoes Marx’s positioning of the scholar or social scientist as the one who stands outside the economic process and is able to perceive it in a way that the ‘agent of production’ cannot. Rancière’s reappraisal of the relationship between literature and the social sciences, both rooted in the aesthetic revolution, offers an important critique of the ‘science of the hidden’ central to sociology and psychology, and the privileged role of the social scientist. Rancière’s discussion of literature and the social sciences and the ‘fictions’ common to both are also an important feature of his writing on emancipation and education. Indeed, Rancière mounts a very strong critique of the social sciences that is central to interventions on both working-­class emancipation and education, and the relationship between the two—particularly in his most well-known text amongst educationalists, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. This critique is discussed in detail in Chaps. 4 and 5, as I address Rancière’s interventions on emancipation and education, respectively. In Chap. 8, I discuss the implications of Rancière’s critique of the social sciences for educational research and outline how innovative work in methodology for educational research has drawn on Rancière’s strident critique of key figures for both sociology and education—notably Bourdieu.

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Reflection At the beginning of this chapter, I highlighted the instrumentalism inherent in many prominent approaches to the use of art in education for political ends. Such instrumentalism takes different forms, including the promotion of a social and cultural inclusion agenda in museums, galleries, and other cultural institutions; ambitions of political engagement and economic regeneration in community arts projects; the civilising agenda of education-through-art and the use of art to enhance pupils’ social and emotional wellbeing or increase creativity in the service of the economy. These forms have led to some important gains (e.g, the inclusion of art subjects on the curriculum and the funding of art and cultural activities in community settings). However, the instrumentalist logic that underpins them also risks reducing the complexity of both art and politics; art is reduced to a tool at the service of politics, while politics is reduced to a set of shared goals, around which there is an assumed consensus. Rancière’s work provides a way into rethinking the relationships between art, politics, and education beyond such instrumentalism, by challenging common assumptions about the political import of art. Not only does Rancière argue that the political impact of an artwork cannot be determined in advance but he also argues that the nature of art’s politics is different from ‘politics’ itself, existing on a kind of parallel plane to politics. His unique way of viewing the history of Western art and aesthetics also helps to revise some common assumptions about art’s value and the nature of ‘politicised art’. Rancière’s writing therefore challenges not only the instrumentalist logic behind many claims about the uses of art in education but also some of the assumptions about the shared political goals they may bring about. Claims about social inclusion and community regeneration look different in the light of Rancière’s arguments about the politics of inclusion and of community arts focused on restoring the social bond. These, he argues, represent the soft version of an ethical turn in both politics and aesthetics, which contribute to the climate of consensus (2009a, p. 130).

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In my own research, I tried to apply Rancière’s insights by exploring the indeterminate and unpredictable, but nevertheless significant, political import of art for young people. Guided by Rancière’s insight that art can, sometimes, create channels for political subjectification and that art always has political effects (albeit varied, unpredictable, and unanticipated), I set out to capture moments in which young people were able to perform new subjectivities through art and to understand the role of their broader engagement with art in their overall political formation. Observing young people negotiate physical space in a gallery setting without talking to each other led me to consider the ways in which art can facilitate non-discursive forms of democratic practice and allow for experiences of democratic subjectivity (McDonnell 2018). Hearing the same young people tell me about strategies adopted in a boycott they had taken part in, I saw the influence of their engagement with contemporary art in their consideration of the best use of artistic strategies, such as silent ‘sit-ins’, for political action (McDonnell 2014a). Talking to other young people about their participation in more informal settings (a music group for young carers, an amateur dramatic society), I wove these experiences into my accounts of their political awakenings and frustrations (McDonnell 2014b). Of course, such an approach is not without its problems. Rancière’s view of the relationship between art and its political effects poses a serious problem for educators, whose work so often consists in setting out to make specific changes. The gallery project I researched also employed a certain instrumentalist logic. In seeking to make sense of the political import of young people’s experiences in that setting and elsewhere, I was perhaps too keen to attribute democratic significance to moments in which the young people used artistic practices to communicate or applied their newfound appreciation of artistic strategies to their involvement in political action. The instrumentalist logic is hard to escape—both in art and in education. So too is the tendency to evidence demonstrable changes in educational research. A key insight from my experience of trying to apply new perspectives drawn from Rancière’s writing in research into art and democratic learning therefore is that Rancière’s non-­ deterministic view of the political significance of art can be very helpful in analysing the complexity of young people’s (and others’) experiences of

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art in their overall education. However, it presents a stumbling block for attempts to carve out an artistic approach to democratic and political education. These themes are taken up further in Chaps. 7 and 8, where I address the applications of Rancière’s writing to both art(s) education and educational research.

References Buckingham, D., & Jones, K. (2001). New Labourʼs cultural turn: Some tensions in contemporary educational and cultural policy. Journal of Education Policy, 16 (1), 1–14. Houston, S. (2005). Participation in community dance: A road to empowerment and transformation? New Theatre Quarterly, 21 (2), 166–177. McDonnell, J. (2018). Is it ‘all about having an opinion’? Challenging the dominance of rationality and cognition in democratic education via research in a gallery setting. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 37(2), 233–243. McDonnell, J. (2014a). PFI and the performative politics of dissent: lessons for democratic education. Power and Education, 6(3), 307–317. McDonnell, J. (2014b). Finding a place in the discourse: Film, literature, and the process of becoming politically subject. Journal of Social Science Education, 13(4), 78–86. https://doi.org/10.2390/jsse-­v13-­i4-­1353. Ranciere, J. (1999). Disagreement. (trans: Rose, J.) Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ranciere, J. (2008). Why Emma Bovary had to be killed. Critical Inquiry, 34(2), 233–248. Rancière, J. (2020). The edges of fiction (trans: Corcoran, S.). Cambridge: Polity. Rancière, J. (2016). The method of education (trans: Rose, J.) Cambridge: Polity. Rancière, J. (2015). Dissensus (trans: Corcoran, S.) London: Bloomsbury. Rancière, J. (2009a). Aesthetics and its discontents (trans: Corcoran, S.). Cambridge: Polity. Rancière, J. (2009b). The emancipated spectator (trans: Elliot, G.). London: Verso. Rancière, J. (2009c). The aesthetic unconscious (trans: Keates, D. & Swenson, J.). Cambridge: Polity. Rancière, J. (2007). The future of the image (trans: Elliot, G.). London: Verso. Rancière, J. (2004). The politics of aesthetics (trans: Rockhill, G.). London: Continuum.

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Rancière, J. (1994). The names of history (trans: Melehy, H.). Minnesota, MA: University of Minnesota Press. Read, H. E. (1943). Education through art. London: Faber and Faber. Robinson, Y., Paraskevopoulou, A., & Hollingworth, S. (2019). Developing ‘active citizens’: Arts Award, creativity and impact. British Educational Research Journal, 45(6), 1203–1219. Sanderson, P. (2008). The arts, social inclusion and social class: The case of dance. British Educational Research Journal, 34 (4), 467–490. Scullion, A. (2008). The citizenship debate and theatre for young people in contemporary Scotland. New Theatre Quarterly, 24 (4), 379–393.

4 On (Intellectual) Emancipation

I grew up in a family of working-class ‘intellectuals’ and autodidacts in an environment where radical left-wing politics, mostly in the form of an implicitly absorbed Marxism, permeated every aspect of the political culture in my immediate surrounds. In my household, Marxist ideology and communist dogma were held (paradoxically) in the same infallible regard as the Catholic faith that was also a key feature of my childhood. My grandfather, like many of his fellow workers on the Birkenhead docks, had joined the Communist Party as a young man and fought in the British Army during the war, though (true to is critical stance and internationalist commitments) refused to accept the medals he was awarded from the imperial power that sent him to fight. The experience of being in the army had, he claimed, taught him how to be, ‘a bit thick and a bit quick’. In the eulogy given at his funeral it was noted that he was a bright man with a love of learning, who might have gone to university in other times. My father, who attended a secondary modern school in the 1960s and never took any formal qualifications at school, spent his working life gaining vocational qualifications, while spending his evenings quietly becoming something of an expert on Mozart, the American Civil War, and James Joyce. My intellectual curiosity made the dogmatic Marxism of my childhood untenable long before I parted company with the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. McDonnell, Reading Rancière for Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96013-1_4

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Catholic Church, but an interest in, and commitment in principle to, a radically egalitarian politics never left me. Much later, following completion of my doctorate and now working in a faculty of education, conversations with colleagues also interested in the writing of Rancière and other ‘post-Marxist’ theorists often centred on the extent to which these authors offered any helpful solutions to the problem of recovering a radically left-wing politics from the ruins of Marxism or theorising domination (and how to escape it) in new ways. These conversations were particularly pertinent to our work in education because the assumption that education should have something to do with emancipation, freedom from domination or, at the very least, social change in the service of creating a more equal society, is arguably as old as mass education itself. As Biesta (2010, 2017; Bingham and Biesta 2010) has argued, the idea of education as a tool for emancipation is one that runs throughout its history, from the Kantian, Enlightenment ideals of liberation through knowledge to the more radical commitments of Freire and other critical pedagogues committed to social change through critical awareness of education’s complicity with domination. Biesta (2010, 2017; Bingham and Biesta 2010) finds in Rancière’s work an entirely different ‘logic’ of emancipation, one which can be used to help rethink the assumptions and co-ordinates of the relationship between education and emancipation. Having only been implicitly aware of this strand of Rancière’s writing before completing my doctorate (having focused on his writing on politics and aesthetics), now I wanted to better understand this contribution to rethinking emancipation and its implications for education. In this chapter, I outline the key features of Rancière’s interventions on (working-class) emancipation before briefly bringing these back into conversation with scholarship on the aims, purposes, and mechanisms of education, to illustrate how his work offers a fresh perspective on these. The educational implications of Rancière’s writing on emancipation are discussed in more detail in Chap. 6.

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Rancière’s Interventions on Emancipation Although Rancière’s writing on working-class emancipation is the last theme that I came to in my reading of his work, it is the start point of Rancière’s academic career and in a sense, all Rancière’s writing addresses this concern. As Rancière (2016, pp. 156–157) has written, ‘[f ]or thirty-­ five years, I’ve tried to keep an open space or thinking…about all that I’ve understood by the noun emancipation’. In Rancière’s (2009, 2016) own accounts, he explains that his writing on emancipation intervened into a particular context and a particular set of intellectual debates in France following the failed uprisings of May 1968. Rancière’s interventions articulated his disappointment with, and rejection of, the scientific Marxism of his teacher, Louis Althusser. As Rancière has written, ‘[t]he great Althusserian project of a struggle of science against ideology clearly turned out to be a struggle against the potential strength of mass revolt’ (2011, p. 7). In essence, Rancière came to question the insistence that the scientific knowledge of experts superseded the knowledge of those people it claimed to be liberating. Central to Rancière’s rejection of scientific Marxism was a critique of the ‘perfect circle’ of false consciousness, according to which the poor stay poor because they do not understand the conditions of their domination, and ‘only scientists able to perceive the logic of this circle could lead them out of their subjection’ (2012, p. ix). In the wake of this, Rancière refers to the emergence of a new set of cultural theories that aimed to reclaim and revalorise an authentic working-­class culture. It was here that many of the Marxist activists of the post-68 era found refuge, Rancière argues, in the, ‘rediscovery of a people that was more firmly rooted and more light-hearted, more playful, than the austere proletariat of Marxist theory’ (2011, p. 8). Rancière (2003, p. xxvi) has also described this newfound enthusiasm for popular culture, or cultural Marxism, as ‘exclusion by homage’; for Rancière, this kind of celebration of working-class culture functioned all the better to keep the working classes in their place and doing what they were ‘naturally’ supposed to be doing, in keeping with their ‘authentic’ culture. At the same time, Rancière has argued, a new vein of philosophy and sociology, epitomised in the work of Foucault and Bourdieu, was gaining

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popularity by explaining the failure of May 1968. Rancière has argued that these new philosophers and sociologists benefited from both a denunciation of institutional powers and a rather fatalistic acceptance of them. For Rancière, this was problematic, since it, ‘gradually called into question, through the denunciation of Marxism, all the aspects of the revolutionary tradition’ (Rancière 2009, p.  115). Rancière’s rejection of both  scientific and cultural Marxism, as well as these emerging post-­ revolutionary explanatory theories, led him in a different direction from much critical work at the time, carrying out archival research into working-­class lives and movements in France in the 1830s. Below, I outline Rancière’s interventions on emancipation deriving from this research. The Ignorant Schoolmaster is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the text that is most familiar to educationalists in terms of Rancière’s articulation of emancipation. However, as I will show in the following chapters, this text is a pivotal point in Rancière’s oeuvre, one which draws on the extensive archival research that had underpinned much of his scholarship in the 1970s, and one which was published prior to this. The below discussion offers a sense of Rancière’s interventions on working-class emancipation across his oeuvre.

Emancipation in Action Rancière’s archival research into these working-class lives and movements challenged representations of the working-classes within both Marxism and existing histories of the labour movement. Taking workers’ own descriptions of their lives, alongside the accounts of members of the new socialist movements of the day, this work focuses on the nuanced, complex actuality of those lives and their relation to broader political projects. As Rancière (2012, p. 23) has described it, this research (published in the book Les Nuits Proletaires, and first translated into English as The Nights of Labor, then as Proletarian Nights) examined, ‘the mixed scene in which some workers, with the complicity of intellectuals who have gone out to meet them and perhaps wish to appropriate their role, replay and shift the old myth about who has the right to speak for others by trying their hand at words and theories from on high’. The appropriation of forms

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and activities (philosophy, poetry, journalism) that were not ‘meant’ for them is a key feature of Proletarian Nights. We might pick out three key figures, moments, and movements that Rancière revises in this text. Firstly, there is the figure of the worker and proletarian. Departing from the classic Marxist figure of the factory worker, Rancière presents the figure of the ‘artisan’ as the epitome of working-class life during the period. He highlights all the piecemeal, temporary, precarious work of such individuals, as well as the nature of the worker-employer relations that characterise them. Attending to the lives of painters, carpenters, shoemakers, and other ‘jobbers’ (Rancière 2012, p. 87), Rancière finds in these lives not the standard figure of the alienated factory worker, nor the harmonious dignity and pleasure found in one’s craft, posited as the ‘other’ of alienation in Marxist theory, but the precariousness of living a life dependent on finding work. These artisans, like the solid proletariat figure of Marxism, are also afflicted by ‘an unremitting anguish’ (Rancière 2012, p. 54). However, it is ‘associated not with working conditions or pay but with the very necessity of working itself ’ (2012, p. 54). Thus, Rancière’s figure of the artisan or worker, moving from one paid job to the next, debunks some of the orthodoxies of both scientific and cultural Marxism, in the figures of the alienated or authentic worker. This account of artisan workers always looking for work in an eternal relation of dependency to their employers also offers a perspective on working-class lives that resonates today. Rancière has recently noted that, while his research appeared anachronistic to many of his readers at the time, our contemporary ‘gig economy’ bears a striking resemblance to the world of the artisan workers in his archival research. However, Rancière (2012, p. xi) posits this now in opposition to a new idea of immaterial work rather than the classic figure of Marxism, arguing, ‘[T]he present forms of capitalism … are creating experiences of work and forms of life that may well be closer to those artisans of the past than that world of non-material work and frenetic consumption whose complacent picture we are offered’. Rancière’s account of the precarity of these lives, defined by ‘the pain of working for a living’ (2012, p. 58), may have more to say to us about the reality of working lives today than sociological accounts

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that posit a ‘modern world’ of ‘computer programmers, high-tech workers and consumers saturated with products and spectacles’ (2012, p. xi). Secondly, Rancière’s research offers an alternative vision of emancipation, as something which consists in the ‘transgressive’ moments in which workers stepped outside the places and roles assigned to them and appropriated the places, spaces, attitudes, language, and behaviour of intellectuals, writers, and artists. The book also deals with the relationship between work and leisure and offers an account of what the workers of 1830s’ Paris did with their ‘free’ space and time outside of work, including their nights. As Rancière (2012, p. ix) has written, his archival work documented the moments in which these workers freed themselves ‘in the very exercise of everyday work’ or won back ‘from nightly rest the time to discuss, write, compose verses, or develop philosophies’ (2012, p. ix). Exemplary of these is the figure of Gauny, a floor-layer, who used the in-between time (between the construction of a house and its occupancy) to effectively take ownership of the space himself, to lose himself in work and engage in philosophy. These ‘gains’, Rancière (2012, p. ix) argues, ‘were the revolution, both discreet and radical’ (my italics). Rancière (2012, p. x) also alludes to the process of ‘intellectual emancipation’ practised in these moments—a term drawn from the work of Joseph Jacotot, also a subject of Rancière’s archival research, whose work is addressed in detail in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Rancière (2012) therefore gives an account of the actuality of working-­ class emancipation in the nineteenth century, as experienced by individuals he researched through the workers’ archives. In doing so, he shows that the emancipation of these workers happened when they were able to transgress the places allocated them as ‘workers’ made only for work and not for leisure. These transgressive acts are the real centre and substance of working-class emancipation, for Rancière, not the avant-garde projects and grand theories of emancipation that Marxist philosophy might suppose. These grander theories, however, are not redundant in the story of working-class emancipation that Rancière offers. Thirdly, then Rancière (2012) offers a different reading of the effects of Marxist and socialist theories and movements on the lives of the working-­ class people they sought to act upon. Writing on the Saint-Simonian movement’s attempt to institute a new, socialist religion, in which

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workers and intellectuals would work side-by-side in the creation of a new society, Rancière (2012) traces how the emancipatory moment of working-class transgression and dislocation was muted by the recreation of a new hierarchical structure in the Saint-Simonian community itself. Recounting descriptions of its new working-class recruits, Rancière (2012) details how these consisted in ‘misfits’ who did not belong to established guilds and associations of workers at the time, or who lived in precarious circumstances. For Rancière, this marked the potential for emancipation, as the dislocation from allotted spaces and roles. However, this emancipatory potential was lost in the recreation of a hierarchy in the new socialist religion of the Saint-Simonians that valorised work (for the workers) while appointing bourgeois leaders as its ‘apostles’ (Rancière 2012, p. 217). It is not that the grand theories and projects of left-wing politics at the time had no import at all in the story of working-class emancipation that Rancière offers but that their relationship to the reality of emancipatory experience is much more nuanced and complex than established accounts of working-class struggles might suppose. Rancière (2012, p.  7) has described his project in this archival research as one that, ‘aimed to retrace the history of working-class thought and the workers’ movement in France, in order to grasp the forms and contradictions that had characterized its encounter with the Marxist ideas of class struggles and revolutionary organization’. The encounter with new socialist movements gives hope, even though it ends in the creation of a new hierarchy. As Rancière points out, this failure is not enough to, ‘erase the memory of that fleeting moment and that singular dream … in short: the emancipation of the workers’ (2012, p. 48). There is a moment of emancipation and equality associated with the grander narratives of Marxism, communism, and socialism but in the institutionalisation of these as political projects, such emancipation and equality are effaced by the creation of new hierarchies. It will already be clear to readers that the picture of working-class emancipation that emerges from Rancière’s writing is one which challenges established narratives about the role of education in emancipation—either in terms of the complicity of education in keeping workers ignorant of the conditions that constrain them, or in terms of providing the knowledge that would set them free. Rancière’s understanding of

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emancipation, as a spontaneous and transgressive process of appropriation that is only tangentially related to the grander narratives of Marxism and communism, runs entirely counter to such common conceptions of the relationship between education and emancipation. This is perhaps why many have found his work so compelling and enlivening in conversations about this relationship, the co-ordinates of which are explored in his most famous  text (at least in educational circles), The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Below, I discuss this text and the notion of ‘intellectual emancipation’ that emerges from it in some detail. I first offer a synopsis of the text, and a detailed outline of the arguments therein, before discussing the overall picture of emancipation that emerges from Rancière’s writing.

Intellectual Emancipation In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancière (1991) narrates the story of Joseph Jacotot, a professor exiled in the Netherlands following the French revolution. Rancière (1991) takes up Jacotot’s story at the point when he found himself in the unusual position of teaching students with whom he shared no common language; Jacotot’s knew no Flemish, and his students knew no French. To get around this problem, Jacotot used a bilingual edition of Télémaque (the story of Odysseus’ son Telemachus which is also a treatise on the ideal society). This bilingual text (with French and Flemish on opposing pages) acted as a ‘thing in common’ (Rancière 1991, p. 2) between Jacotot and his students. Jacotot asked his students to read the text with the help of the translation, then repeat it over and over until they could recite it. At the end of the course, the students were able to write about the book in French very well. Rancière (1991, p. 2) tells us that the results of this chance ‘experiment’ represented an important discovery for Jacotot about ‘the equality of intelligence’ and, subsequently, working-class emancipation. This discovery (that people could become emancipated by using their own intelligence and verifying the equality of their intelligence with any other), and his application of it in practice, earned Jacotot some fame for a time, and attempts were made to incorporate his approach into educational

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institutions. The failure of these attempts is just as important a part of Rancière’s (1991) retelling of Jacotot’s story as the experiment itself. Rancière elaborates ‘five lessons’ in intellectual emancipation from Jacotot’s story. The first lesson recounts Jacotot’s chance discovery that his students could be taught without explanation and the conclusions that Jacotot drew from this about the ‘equality of intelligence’ (Rancière 1991, p. 46), i.e. that there is only one kind of intelligence at work in all human understanding. As Rancière (1991, p. 9) puts it, Jacotot’s experiment revealed to him that, ‘all sentences, and consequently all the intelligences that produce them, are of the same nature’ (my italics). It is important to note here that the ‘equality of intelligence’ refers to an equality of kind, type, or nature, as this is sometimes misunderstood. This important discovery reveals the shaky foundation of what Rancière (1991, p. 4) describes as the ‘explicative order’ that ordinarily governs not only all teaching but also all models of an orderly society. This explicative order is based on the premise that there are two kinds of intelligence (and therefore two kinds of humanity) and that some require explanations from more knowledgeable others. Jacotot’s experiment revealed that this logic is ‘stultifying’ (it literally renders stupid those it aims to teach) since, ‘the child who is explained to will devote his intelligence to the work of grieving: to understanding, that is to say to understanding that he doesn’t understand unless he is explained to’ (1991, p. 8). Teaching, in the explicative order, renders intelligence unequal. Rancière (1991, p. 13) argues that Jacotot’s revelation created, ‘a rupture with the logic of all pedagogies’, whether traditional or progressive, active or passive. Because Jacotot’s own intelligence was taken out of the equation (it was only his will that was directed towards his students in asking them to study the text), the students were obliged to use their own intelligence and were thus emancipated from the ‘circle of powerlessness’ (Rancière 1991, p.  15) established in the explicative order of what Rancière refers to as the ‘Old Master’. Another important implication of Jacotot’s discovery, then, was that people can teach what they themselves do not know, simply by directing others to use their own intelligence. An ‘ignorant’ and ‘emancipatory’ master (Rancière 1991, p.  12) can teach others. This approach is completely opposed to the stultifying logic of the

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‘Old Master’. Rancière (1991) suggests that Jacotot was able to perceive and respond to this because of his personal experience and because of the historical context of his life; he was a man of the Enlightenment, educated in both the classics and science, and had fought during the French  revolution. The revolutionary nature of Jacotot’s discovery is therefore political and societal as much as it is pedagogical (if not more so). As Rancière (1991, p. 14) argues, ‘beneath the pedagogical relation of ignorance to science, the more fundamental philosophical relation of stultification to emancipation must be recognised’. As Rancière (1991, p. 15) recounts, Jacotot’s discovery about equality—the equal intelligence of anyone and everyone—challenged a logic of inequality that is ‘always already there’ in ‘the very workings of the social world’. The second lesson, which Rancière (1991) stages as a dialogue between Jacotot and his critics, is that his students did not need to have anything explained to them to learn. They could do so by comparing one thing to another because everything they needed to know was in the book, that is, Télémaque. As Rancière (1991, p. 26) writes, ‘[a]ll the power of language is in the totality of the book’ and, ‘[a]ll knowledge of oneself as an intelligence is in the mastery of a book, a chapter, a sentence, a word’. In other words, ‘everything is in everything’ (Rancière 1991, p. 26). This extends beyond Télémaque. If Jacotot’s students could learn French by comparing what they knew (the Flemish text) to what they didn’t know (the French text), then it follows that anyone can learn anything by comparing something they know to something they don’t. Rancière (1991, p. 25) uses the example of a locksmith who learned to read and write by comparing letters (L and O) with shapes (the square and the round). The principle also extends beyond literacy: ‘[i]t makes no difference whether the act is directed at the form of a letter to be recognized, a sentence to be memorized, a relation to be found between two mathematical entities, or the elements of a speech to be composed’ (Rancière, p. 25). The same kind of intelligence is at play in all these activities, and all that is needed for someone to learn is to direct their attention to it (by force of their own will or another’s). Knowing this (that the same kind of intelligence is at play in all intellectual endeavour) has the power to emancipate. As Rancière (1991, p. 27) argues, ‘[e]mancipation is becoming conscious of this equality of

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nature’ (1991, p. 27). As Rancière points out, the significance of Jacotot’s discovery lies in emancipation not learning; the students who learned under Jacotot’s practice may have learned more quickly, but this is not important. What matters is that Jacotot’s practice emancipates based on the assumption of equality. And it emancipates not only students. Since anyone can teach something they do not know, it follows that illiterate parents could teach their children to read. In the staged interlocution between Jacotot and his detractors, objections raised to this supposition, based on parents’ lack of ability to discern whether a child has really learned, are dismissed via the following argument: parents need only verify that the child has paid sufficient attention to the work, and they will know this is the case by comparing the child’s application of intelligence to their application of their own intelligence in other contexts. The power of Jacotot’s practice therefore lies in its emancipatory power for both student and teacher—in, ‘the consciousness of emancipation that it realizes in the master and gives birth to in the student’ (1991, p. 36). This has important implications for society also. Rancière (1991, p. 35) refers to Plato’s hierarchical organisation of the ideal society and its equivalent in modern society, where it is the, ‘harmonious balance of instruction [in school] and moral education [in the home] that keeps people in their place’, to illustrate this. The verification of the ‘equality of intelligence’ practised in the relation between the child, the book, and the parent breaks down this harmonious balance and challenges the hierarchical structure of society. In a sense, Jacotot’s practice verifies what Plato feared. As Rancière (1991, p.  38) writes, ‘[t]he book is the equality of intelligence. This is why the same [Platonic] philosophical commandment prescribed that the artisan do nothing but his own affair and condemned the democracy of the book’. And the hierarchical organisation of society, underpinned by a belief in, or fiction of, inequality (Plato’s myth of the metals is the prime example), is stultifying not only for the ‘common people’ but also for ‘the superior mind who condemns itself to never being understood by inferiors’ (1991, p. 39). This belief in intellectual inequality permeates society to its detriment, leading to a kind of madness whereby any conversation across the fictional distinction between different kinds of intelligence is rendered impossible and ‘reason is lost’ (1991, p. 41).

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The third lesson relates to the possibility of a ‘community of equals’ stemming from Jacotot’s discovery. In this lesson, again staged as an interlocution between Jacotot and his detractors, Rancière (1991) shows how the verification of equality central to Jacotot’s emancipatory practice proceeds via the scientific method. It is not necessary, he argues, for Jacotot to prove that intelligence is equal, only for him to show that this is a reasonable opinion that can be tested and that the opposite opinion (the inequality of intelligence) cannot be proven. For Jacotot, the problem ‘isn’t proving that all intelligence is equal. It’s seeing what can be done under that supposition’ (Rancière 1991, p. 46). Rancière (1991) goes on to debunk the opposing arguments to Jacotot’s position, demonstrating that these really come down to observations about differences in manifestations of intelligence. Observed differences in the achievements between different people do not prove the inequality of intelligence; such differences can just as equally be attributed to more and less attention being paid to the tasks at hand. Unless Jacotot’s opponents want to side with the pseudoscientists of phrenology and physiology, Rancière (1991, p. 48) argues—which they do not, insisting instead on a superiority of minds of a more ‘spiritual nature’—this argument is tautological; it merely names what it purports to explain. Furthermore, Jacotot’s alternate position (that differences in human achievements are just that and can just as easily be attributed to differences in attention as to differences in intelligence) holds not only for differences between individuals but also for differences between classes. As Rancière (1991, p. 51), following the logic of Jacotot’s argument, writes of ‘the common people’, ‘[i]t is useless to discuss whether their “lesser” intelligence is an effect of nature or an effect of society: they develop the intelligence that the needs and circumstances of their existence demand of them’ (1991, p. 51). Rancière (1991, p. 52) argues that this way of looking at intelligence implies a revolutionary new formulation of humanity (contra the Cartesian ‘cogito ergo sum’) of the human being as a ‘will served by an intelligence’. This reformulation, with its ‘new thinking subject’ (Rancière 1991, p. 55), implies that anyone can do anything and that ‘the most frequent mode of exercising intelligence, much to the dissatisfaction of [supposed] geniuses, is repetition’ (1991, p. 55). This is also, Rancière (1991) argues, the essence of reason. A reasonable person

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is someone who knows what intelligence is (how it is exercised by the will) and does not lie to themself about it. The reasonable person knows that they are applying their own intelligence just like anyone else and that the amount of attention they give to any intellectual exercise is what will determine its success or failure. Some further implications emerge from this alternative formulation of humanity and reason. The first is that for people to become emancipated, they must take their own path. They must apply their attention to what they see in a search for truth that can never be fully articulated. This is what Rancière describes as the ‘principle of veracity’ (1991, p.  57) as, ‘each one of us describes our parabola around the truth’ (1991, p. 59). Everyone has their own ‘orbit’ around the truth and makes their own ‘intellectual adventures’ (Rancière 1991, pp.  59–60). This also means that emancipation is not societal but individual. Paradoxically, Rancière (1991, p. 58) argues, what unites people is ‘nonaggregation’. The second implication is that thought precedes truth and language. Jacotot’s emancipatory practice implied that, ‘[t]here was no language of intelligence, no language more universal than others’ (1991, p. 60). Rancière (1991, p. 61) emphasises the revolutionary nature of this implication; asserting the arbitrariness of language is like asserting the arbitrariness of all social hierarchies because of the prevailing, ‘analogy between the laws of language, the laws of society and the laws of thought and their unity’. In contrast, Jacotot’s discovery implies that everyone is always using language arbitrarily to make themselves understood and to try to understand others. As Rancière argues, ‘[i]t is because there is no code given by divinity, no language of languages, that human intelligence employs all its art to make itself understood and to understand what the neighbouring intelligence is saying’ (1991, p. 62). This mention of ‘art’ is significant. Rancière views the communication between equal intelligences as a kind of ‘perpetual improvisation’ (1991, p. 64). In the act of speaking, Rancière argues, (1991, p. 65), ‘man does not transmit knowledge, he makes poetry’. Indeed, Rancière views poetry and storytelling as being at the heart of emancipation, since they assume the reader or listener’s equal intelligence, their equal capacity to understand. Working on the assumption that everyone is always struggling to approximate their own relationship to truth via language, the poet uses

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artistry to say something that will resonate with another person’s relationship to truth, knowing that neither can fully grasp or articulate it. What is more, Rancière (1991, p. 68) argues, this artistry is not the work of ‘genius’ but the work of carefully, ‘learning, repeating, imitating, translating, taking apart, putting back together’ (1991, p. 68), something which anyone can do if they turn their attention to it. For Rancière, therefore, ‘[t]he artist’s emancipatory lesson, opposed on every count to the professor’s stultifying lesson, is this: each one of us is an artist to the extent that he carries out this double process [of translation and counter translation]’ (1991, p. 70). For Rancière (1991, p. 71), Jacotot’s discovery opens up the possibility of a ‘community of equals’ or, ‘a society of the emancipated that would be a society of artists’ (1991, p. 71). This society would consist of ‘minds in action’ (1991, p. 71) who know that, ‘no one is born with more intelligence than his neighbour, that the superiority that someone might manifest is only the fruit of as tenacious an application to working with words as another might show to working with tools’ (1991, p. 71). An emancipated community of equals would also be a society of people telling their stories and figuring out the stories of others. Furthermore, Rancière (1991) argues that a belief in equality, an opinion about the equality of intelligence, is what makes society in general possible; we must assume that we can equally well understand one another to live in any kind of community at all. As Rancière writes, ‘[t]he equality of intelligence is the common bond of humankind, the necessary and sufficient condition for a society of men to exist’ (1991, p. 73). The fourth lesson addresses the way in which this potential ‘community of equals’ is weighed down by society as it actually is. Unequal society functions by way of an exchange of inferiorities and superiorities, which shores up the ‘superior superiority’ of some over others. The superiority of one intelligence over another is the prime example of such an  exchange; ‘superior minds’ denounce their abilities in one area to maintain the privilege that their supposedly superior intellect earns them in the areas that really count. I am put in mind here of a chess grandmaster proudly announcing his inability to change a lightbulb on television several years ago. Rancière (1991, p.  81) argues, however, that this inequality is a fiction, a reaction against the demonstrable equality of all

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human beings and one that ‘brings its own consequences’. The entire social order, and the pedagogic, explicative order that sustains it, is animated by an irrational fiction of inequality. This is what Jacotot’s discovery of the equality of intelligence shows. However, not only does the equality of intelligence demonstrate the irrationality of the social order, but it also demonstrates the irrationality of any attempt to change it, since ‘there are no reasonable motives for change’ (Rancière 1991, p. 89). There are no reasonable motives for change. To demonstrate this, Rancière takes us on a detour via political philosophy. In effect, Rancière (1991) tells us, Jacotot’s own philosophy and approach offers a re-reading of the social contract and the duality of ‘man and the citizen’, in which rationality and reasonableness exist only in the world of humanity (between equal human beings) not in the world of citizens (unequal society). In other words, all political projects for organising society are irrational. This goes not only for actual organisations of society but also for any vision of society in its ideal form. As Rancière writes, ‘[p]hilosophers are undoubtedly right to denounce the functionaries who try to rationalize the existing order. That order has no reason. But they deceive themselves by pursuing the idea of a social order that would finally be rational’ (1991, p.  89). In an inversion of Marxist readings,  for Rancière,  the equality of human beings is masked by the inequality of the irrational social order, whatever form that takes—monarchical, meritocratic, or communist. In Jacotot’s re-reading of the social contract, reasonable human beings submit to the social order for the sake or order itself. The reasonable person knows that, ‘the social order has nothing better to offer him than the superiority of order over disorder’ (Rancière 1991, p. 91). However, reasonable beings retain some rationality for themselves. Though political assemblies operate on irrational rhetoric, reasonable people can always appropriate this rhetoric for their own, reasonable purposes. Jacotot’s philosophy that ‘everything is in everything’ shows that this is possible; any language can be learned. As Rancière writes, ‘[r]eason is the power to learn all languages. It will thus learn the language of the assembly and the tribunal. It will learn to rave’ (1991, p.  94). Rancière (1991, p.  91) describes this as the ability to ‘[r]ave reasonably’ and argues that it consists in, ‘a question of verifying, in all cases, reason’s power, of always

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seeing what can be done with it, what it can do to remain active in the very heart of extreme irrationality’ (1991, p.  95). Emancipation then resides in this reasonable exercise of one’s rational intelligence within the irrationality of society, not in the creation of a new, egalitarian society. The significance of learning to ‘rave reasonably’ (1991, p. 91) is illustrated in Rancière’s discussion of the ‘Secession of the Plebs’ in ancient Rome (see also Chap. 2). In this story, the secession is averted by Menenius Agrippa’s speech, whose words, Rancière argues, ‘matter little. The essential is that he is speaking to them, and they are listening to him; that they are speaking to him and he hears them’ (1991, p. 97). This, for Rancière (1991), means that retaining one’s reasonableness in irrational society does matter; communication between reasonable beings has an effect. As Rancière (1991, p. 98) writes, ‘one can always, at the very heart of inegalitarian madness, verify the equality of intelligence, and that verification has an effect…that every Plebeian felt himself a man, believed himself capable and his son, and any other person capable, of exercising the prerogatives of intelligence—this is not nothing’ (1991, p. 98). For Rancière (1991, p. 98), this is the meaning of emancipation; while there will never be an emancipated society, individuals can be emancipated and emancipate others, increasing the number of people who will recognise each other’s equality and, ‘seek the art of raving as reasonably as possible’. The fifth lesson addresses failed attempts to incorporate Jacotot’s emancipatory practice into schools and other institutions. Rancière (1991) recounts how several interested parties tried to institutionalise Jacotot’s ‘method’ of intellectual emancipation within military schools or systems of mass education, some adapting it such that teachers were no longer teaching what they did not know and some giving it the name, ‘universal teaching’ (Rancière 1991, p.  126). This, of course, did not work because the importance of Jacotot’s method—or ‘anti-method’ (Rancière 1991, p. 129)—was one of emancipation not of teaching, nor was it a ‘social method’ for achieving a better society. Moreover, emancipation (for Jacotot and Rancière) is antithetical to projects of societal organisation, since ‘every institution is an explication, in social act, a dramatization of inequality’ (Rancière 1991, p.  105). Citizens submit to society, but emancipation lies in the freedom that rational human beings retain for themselves while nevertheless participating in it. As Rancière

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(1991, p. 102) writes, ‘there is only one way to emancipate. And no party or government, no army, school, or institution, will ever emancipate a single person’ (1991, p. 102). The irony is that it was not those associated with the pedagogic methods of the ‘Old Master’, who were the greatest threat to intellectual emancipation in Jacotot’s day but the ‘progressives’ who were attracted to it as an expedient method of public instruction. Attempts to institutionalise ‘universal teaching’ within public instruction were not carried out in the spirit of intellectual emancipation but instead aimed, ‘to hasten the progress of the people’s education’ to improve economic production (1991, p. 113). However, as Rancière (1991, p. 108) points out, ‘with a used copy of the Télémaque, or even a pen and some paper to write down a prayer, they can emancipate the inhabitants of the countryside, make them conscious of their intellectual power; and the peasants themselves will set about improving cultivation and grain conservation’. Though the methods of the progressives were different from those of the ‘Old Master’, they still resulted in stultification—the separation of humanity into two, the belief in inequality and the existence of two kinds of intelligence. The context for all this, Rancière (1991) argues, is the emergence of a belief in ‘Progress’ (a perversion of the Enlightenment ideals of scientific discovery and advancement) as the dominant form of explication and the dominant fiction of inequality in Jacotot’s day. In the new inegalitarian fiction, Rancière argues, ‘Progress’, as a social good, had taken the place of ‘progress’ as the work of individuals engaged in scientific inquiry. In this way, Rancière (1991) argues, education became written into the fiction of inequality that sustained society in the post-revolutionary, post-­ Enlightenment era of early nineteenth-century France. Education’s purpose then, from the beginnings of mass education, was to sort society into ranks and explain the necessity of this, that is, to provide a rationale for inequality. Furthermore, Rancière (1991, p.  119) argues, while the old explicative order of a divinely ordained society was at odds with the ‘spontaneously progressive’ (1991, p.  119) work of teaching, the new explicative order looked and sounded liberating, adopting the language of ‘progress’. Ironically, Rancière (1991) argues, this made the new explicative order even more formidable as a way of shoring up the inegalitarian fiction of society. Because the old explicative order was evidently at

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odds with progress, it still left room for emancipation through education. As Rancière writes, ‘[t]here was a discordance between the grand explanation [of society] and the little explicators [teachers]’ (1991, p. 119). In the new explicative order, ‘the dominant fiction and the daily stultification went in the same direction’ (1991, p. 119) leading to an enclosed circle in which ‘[p]rogress is the pedagogical fiction built into the fiction of society as a whole’ (1991, p. 119). In this situation, Rancière (1991) argues, the perfecting of pedagogic methods became seen as the way for society to achieve progress. In its institutionalised version, Jacotot’s practice of intellectual emancipation, renamed ‘universal teaching’, was stripped of its meaning. As Rancière writes, ‘what had to be prevented above all was letting the poor know that they could educate themselves by their own abilities, that they had abilities—those abilities that in the social and political order now succeeded the old titles of nobility’ (1991, p. 130). In fact, therefore, the pedagogies of the progressives and the ‘Old Master’ worked together in the creation of an education system designed to shore up inequality and preclude emancipation by excluding all ways of learning other than their own. As Rancière (1991, p. 130) writes, ‘[f ]rom this point on, the Old Master, with the help of the perfecters, would increasingly use his examinations to curb the liberty to learn by any means other than his explications and the noble ascension of his degrees’. The implications of this evidently extend far beyond the education system. Rancière (1991, p. 130) argues that the logical end point of ‘progress’, as the dominant inegalitarian fiction, is the creation of a ‘society pedagogicized’. In such a society, ‘public instruction is the secular arm of progress’, but ‘[e]verything is still played out according to the sole principle, the inequality of intelligence’ (Rancière 1991, p.  131). Attempts to make an equal society through education only result in ‘the integral pedagogicization of society—the general infantilization of the individuals that make it up’ (1991, p. 133). Emancipation is the opposite of this. As Rancière (1991, p. 133) writes, for emancipation, ‘[o]ne need only learn how to be equal men in an unequal society’. For Rancière (1991, p. 134), Jacotot’s story is particularly instructive because it offers a window into an important moment in the history of social and political thought; ‘his was a moment when the young cause of emancipation, that of the equality of men, was being transformed into

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the cause of social progress’. Rancière (1991) argues that this morphing of emancipation into social progress even took its name—emancipation became synonymous with this version of social progress, manifest in both society and the education system. For Rancière (1991), Jacotot was the only egalitarian who saw this at the time. Of course, Rancière (1991, p. 134) acknowledges, there were others who opposed public instruction for more conservative reasons, but Jacotot saw, ‘public instruction as the grief-work of emancipation’ and, ‘refused all progressive and pedagogical translation of emancipatory equality’. Jacotot’s work went on instead outside institutions—in families and amongst individuals. Jacotot kept his ‘anti-method’ (Rancière 1991, p.  129), which is always available but  which can never be institutionalised, and which consists in telling stories not proclaiming truths. This latter point is important also. Jacotot’s work was very different from that of the philosophers of his day. Writing on the significance of Jacotot’s story, Rancière argues that, ‘the old philosophers said the truth and taught morals. They supposed, for that, a high degree of learning. [Jacotot] on the other hand, didn’t say the truth and preached no morals. And it was simple and easy, like the story a person tells of his intellectual adventures’ (1991, p. 137). This approach of storytelling is also a form of intellectual emancipation and verification of equality. For Jacotot, ‘equality was not an end to attain, but a point of departure, a supposition to maintain in every circumstance’ (1991, p.  138). This is not something that can be institutionalised, but it is something that is always possible.

Emancipation Across Rancière’s Oeuvre The picture of emancipation that emerges in Rancière’s writing then is one that takes a radical departure from the Marxist view of revolution and all other versions of societal emancipation. For Rancière, emancipation is not about solidifying around a common cause or the creation of a community. Rather, it is about dislocation, rearrangement, and disincorporation from collective bodies, be they the older forms of hierarchical society based on divine order and kinship or the new political movements bent on overhauling these to create a new, egalitarian society. For Rancière,

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society is always inegalitarian, in the sense that it is founded on the fiction of inequality—variously conceptualised in terms of birth rights, wealth, religious authority, or (most pertinently in modern society) intellectual capacity. Ironically, however, for Rancière, society can only function based on an assumed equality between reasonable beings capable of communicating with each other. Intellectual emancipation is what happens when people acknowledge this fundamental equality and endeavour to communicate rationally with one another as equals—even in the context of the ‘madness’ and irrationality of inegalitarian society. While such an endeavour might seem rather modest when viewed from the perspective of grand political projects committed to societal change, this kind of activity is not futile, in Rancière’s eyes. The verification of the equality of intelligence of all human beings has an important effect; people who are thus emancipated, who see and acknowledge the equality of intelligence without which society cannot function, can also emancipate others. And the lingua franca of emancipated people, living within an unequal society, is poetry. It is important to note that this view of emancipation runs throughout Rancière’s later work on democracy, politics, art, and aesthetics. Rancière’s writing on democracy and politics takes the presupposition of equality first elaborated in The Ignorant Schoolmaster and translates this to the political sphere. However, Rancière (1995) argues that this presupposition, which remains within the context of a voluntary exchange in Jacotot’s writing, must involve a logical force to be truly political. As Rancière (1995, p. 86) writes, ‘[w]hereas Jacotot’s critique confined the verification of equality within the continually recreated relationship between the wish to say and the wish to hear, such a verification becomes ‘social’, causes social equality to have a real social effect, only when it mobilizes an obligation to hear’. Rancière’s (2012) archival research provides some examples of democracy, as the verification of equality in this public, demanding way—the 1833 Paris tailors’ strike being one example (see Chap. 2). Finally, the artistry of communication in the ‘society of equals’, where poetry is the lingua franca of equality, and the claims of some of Jacotot’s students that they too were painters (1991, p.  65)

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preface Rancière’s interest in both the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics.

Reflection I began this chapter by recounting some of my own experiences in struggling to remain committed to any ‘left’ politics, following disillusionment with Marxism. Rancière’s writing offers a radically egalitarian politics that departs from Marxism and re-writes the history of working-­ class emancipation. By focusing on the lives of workers in nineteenth-­ century, post-revolutionary France and the projects of emancipation associated with them, Rancière challenges the foundations of scientific Marxism. As for the Marxist, socialist, and communist projects dedicated to creating an equal society, Rancière shows that society can never be equal (only human beings can). Rancière’s work thus offers a ‘way through’ the dilemma of post-Marxist politics. His writing encapsulates a radically egalitarian and yet also radically liberating perspective. For me, Rancière’s writing was the first that offered any truly satisfying answer to the question of what an ex-Marxist does next. And the satisfaction is not least in the poetics of equality that Rancière posits. Rancière shows us that the poetic expression of equal human beings in their own imperfect orbit around the truth is the rationality that keeps us sane in the irrationality of an unequal society. Perhaps my grandfather’s motto for surviving the army holds for society too; one does indeed need to be, ‘a bit thick and a bit quick’: ‘thick’ enough to submit to the irrationality of society and ‘quick’ enough to hold on to one’s reason and even to ‘rave reasonably’ when required. I also noted that these questions of emancipation and society were important for education and recounted how conversations with colleagues brought my attention to the difficult question of what (if anything) education can contribute to emancipation. As will be evident from the above discussion of emancipation in Rancière’s writing and in The Ignorant Schoolmaster in particular, Rancière’s writing presents a very radical challenge to the notion of education as a force for emancipation or societal change. This has certainly informed my own view of the

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possibilities for education, as teased out in conversations with colleagues. Ultimately, I would argue, it is important to remember that a school (or any other educational institution) is not a polity, and the hope of instituting equality or democracy there, or of marshalling education within any democratic or emancipatory project, is perhaps misplaced. The educational significance of Rancière’s writing both in The Ignorant Schoolmaster and across his texts is discussed in greater detail in Chap. 5. Finally, I noted that Biesta (2010, 2017; Bingham and Biesta 2010) has argued that Rancière’s work offers a ‘new logic of emancipation’ that can be used to rethink what emancipation means in education. His conclusions about the kind of emancipatory education that might emerge from this, as well as those of other educational philosophers and theorists, are discussed in Chap. 6.

References Biesta, G. J. J. (2017). Don’t be fooled by ignorant schoolmasters: On the role of the teacher in emancipatory education. Policy Futures in Education, 15(1), 52–73. Biesta, G.  J. J. (2010). A new logic of emancipation: The methodology of Jacques Rancière. Educational Theory, 60(1), 39–59. Bingham, C., & Biesta, G. J. J. (2010). Jacques Rancière: Education, truth, emancipation. London: Continuum. Rancière, J. (2016). The method of equality (trans: Rose, J.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Rancière, J. (2012). Proletarian nights (trans: Drury, J.). London: Verso. Rancière, J. (2011). Staging the people. The proletarian and his double (trans: Fernbach, D.). London: Verso. Rancière, J. (2009). A few remarks on the method of Jacques Rancière. Parallax, 15(3), 114–123. Rancière, J. (1995). On the shores of politics (trans: Heron, L.). London: Verso. Rancière, J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation (trans: Ross, K.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ranciere, J. (2003). The Philosopher and His Poor. (trans: Drury, J., Oster, C. & Parker, A.) London: Duke University Press.

5 On Education

At the first educational research conference I attended, Stephen Ball gave the keynote lecture, in which he outlined the argument expressed in his book Education Plc. In it, he applies a Foucauldian analysis to detail the marketisation by stealth of the education system in England, bringing with it new forms of governmentality, surveillance, and subtle power. As my first introduction to educational research, the experience left me energised, relieved that the world of educational research was taking a critical stance on education policy, naming the problems of neoliberalism that lay behind it and challenging them. In my previous role as a teacher, this was not something that I habitually had the chance to do or reflect on. While I and my fellow teachers often felt uneasy about much of the focus on standards and results that affected our day-to-day teaching, it was not something I would have necessarily articulated in the terms that Ball described them; I was mainly just ‘getting on with the job’ of teaching and getting students through their exams. It felt good to be able to name a problem we were grappling with. At the first parallel session of that same conference, I heard a detailed analysis of how a new policy initiative would, despite what could only be assumed were the government’s best intentions, inevitably result in reinforcing and reproducing the inequality it claimed to address. Drawing on © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. McDonnell, Reading Rancière for Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96013-1_5

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Bourdieu, the researchers’ analysis was meticulous in characterising the precise details of the mechanisms via which this reproduction would occur. At other conferences, in the following years, I would hear working-­ class culture described in monolithic, almost entirely negative terms, as something that people within it would necessarily want to escape. It was a description that did not ring true from my own experiences and did not seem to capture the diversity and variety of working-class lives and perspectives. It also ended in the conclusion that the escape so desired by the people under study was, alas, impossible. Detailing the ways in which the education system failed the working classes and other disadvantaged groups, while offering depictions of those groups’ experiences from the outside seemed to be a major pre-occupation of educational research. Later, teaching undergraduates on Education degrees, I worked alongside colleagues who held the sincere belief that it was their job to disabuse their students of any optimistic preconceptions about the education system and reveal to them how and why that system only ever reproduces inequality to serve its own ends. At the time that I was entering the world of educational research, theoretical perspectives inspired by the work of Foucault and Bourdieu dominated much of the field. It is not difficult to see why; such perspectives have extraordinary explanatory power for naming the problems of lived experience in the education system and for offering intellectually satisfying answers as to why inequalities persist. They also help to address important questions in educational research including the extent to which education can and does contribute to social mobility, the reasons why such mobility might be considered necessary and desirable, and the role that the education system plays more broadly in sustaining or disrupting political power and social hierarchies. However, such perspectives have come under increased scrutiny in recent years as researchers return afresh to these questions. The emergence of ‘post-qualitative’ research has been fuelled, in part, by an interest in the limits of such critical methods and of critique itself (see, e.g., Denzin et al., 2017). Pelletier (2009) has suggested not only that Rancière’s writing offers one of the best critiques of such tendencies in educational research but also that it provides possibilities for alternative approaches to researching

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education. Rancière’s critique of Bourdieu’s sociology, and the sociology of education, form an important part of his contributions on education. So too do his interventions on specific debates about the education system in France in his writing on democracy and his critique of a pedagogic logic that runs throughout society, as elaborated most clearly in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. The application of this critique of the ubiquity of a pedagogic logic in society is also applied to questions in contemporary art in Rancière’s later writing on art and aesthetics, particularly as elaborated in The Emancipated Spectator. These aspects of Rancière’s writing offer several entry points for reading his work in relation to educational theory, research, and practice. In this chapter, I outline these interventions on education in Rancière’s writing, before returning briefly to the question of how Rancière’s writing challenges some of the most common ideas in education.

Rancière’s Critique of Foucault and Bourdieu While Rancière was carrying out archival research into working-class lives and movements in the nineteenth century (see Chap. 4), he was also engaged in a polemical critique of what he describes as the work of ‘the new philosophers’ and the ‘new sociology’ in France at the time, principally represented by the work of Foucault and Bourdieu. Rancière (2012) characterises the emergence of both these as a reaction to the failed uprisings of May 1968 in Paris, which was not least a revolt against the power of universities, professors, and teachers. Rancière (2012) argues that the celebration and reification of working-class culture found in cultural Marxism was one of the first responses to this; on the intellectual left, the ‘real’ knowledge of the suffering masses was placed in higher regard than the academic knowledge of university professors, who were required to abandon their social privilege, to go out and experience the workers’ reality, and be re-educated by them. However, Rancière (2012) argues that this quickly morphed into a critique of all revolutionary thought that paradoxically repositioned philosophers and sociologists in a new position of mastery.

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Critique of Foucault Referring to the rise of ‘public intellectuals’ in the 1970s and 1980s in France, Rancière (2012) argues that while many philosophers left the university to go out and experience ‘real’ working-class life following the failure of the May 1968 uprisings, many of them regained their power as social commentators and interpreters, labelling themselves ‘dissident intellectuals’ and ‘activists of the people’ by virtue of their participation in those events. As Rancière writes, ‘what enables the words of the ‘new philosophers’ to crown the edifice of the intellectuals’ new social power is the legitimacy they have acquired in activist struggle’ (Rancière, 2012, p. 81). By virtue of their representation of workers and activists in legal trials, Rancière (2012) argues, the relations between intellectuals, activists, and the people were rearranged, so that the philosophers became, firstly, the spokespersons for the people but then quickly, in contrast, became the representatives of the people to the political classes, helping those in power to better manage and contain the power of the people. This shift was achieved, Rancière (2012, p.  80) argues, through the ‘extraordinary success of Foucault’s discourse’, in which power is seen as, ‘at the same time both everywhere and nowhere’ (Rancière, 2012, p. 93). He argues that this Foucauldian interpretation of power in fact places these philosophers in a position in relation to the people (as the intellectuals who alone understand the workings of power) quite like that of the Marxist philosopher (who alone understands the true workings of capitalism). If power is no longer located in one specific location (capital) nor in several specific locations (evident in local struggles) then it is no longer subject to specific challenge. What is more, its diffuse nature needs to be interpreted by the philosopher or the intellectual, who is set up as ‘the Other of power’ (Rancière, 2012, p. 93). Rancière (2012, p. 79) argues that this privileged position of philosophers and public intellectuals finally became exercised in a kind of ‘social seismology’ for politicians to make use of in their management of the people. For Rancière (2012), then, the work of the ‘new philosophers’, inspired by Foucault, ended up recreating the problems of scientific Marxism, which they explicitly rejected.

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Critique of Bourdieu In the work he carried out with the collective behind Les Revoltes Logiques, later summarised in an essay on ‘The Ethics of Sociology’ and in The Philosopher and His Poor, Rancière takes issue with the argument developed in Bourdieu and Passeron’s works The Inheritors and Reproduction. In these texts, which address the lack of progression of working-class students through the education system into higher education, Rancière traces a cyclical argument in which the education system reproduces inequality through dissimulation of its processes. According to Bourdieu and Passeron, Rancière argues, the education system promises equality of opportunity to everyone, but its mechanisms result in working-class children self-excluding because they do not believe themselves capable of the skills and knowledge rewarded by the system. Furthermore, the real reason why these working-class children self-exclude is because they do not know the reasons for their self-exclusion—because of their misrecognition of the system. As Rancière (2012, p. 161) writes in summary of this circuitous argument, ‘they [the children of the working classes] are excluded because they do not know that they are excluded; and they do not know why they are excluded because they are excluded’. For Rancière, this tautological argument represents a closed circle that precludes all emancipation and change. According to this argument, no disruption of the reproduction of inequality can ever occur, and no one can ever escape this circle because to attain the knowledge that would explain their own exclusion, working-class children would have to join the ranks of the educators who reproduce inequality. Put succinctly, Bourdieu and Passeron’s argument consisted in, ‘the radical critique of a radically unchangeable situation’ (Rancière, 2012, p. 159). Furthermore, any success that working-class students achieve simply proves the theory because that success itself hides the reality of a system that endlessly reproduces inequality. As Rancière (2012, p. 162) writes, ‘there is always a hidden reason to hide (from oneself ) the hidden reason’. Rancière (2012, p.  159) traces a line in Bourdieu and Passeron’s work from an initial suggestion of an emancipatory project for education in the form of, ‘a rational pedagogy that gives everyone the means of rational

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apprenticeship in educational culture’ to the later conclusion that, ‘rational pedagogy, in any system, can only teach the rationality of this system itself ’. The stakes of this critique go beyond any appraisal of the education system. Rancière (2012) argues that Bourdieu’s theory creates a situation in which sociology is accorded the privileged position of being the sole discipline capable of ‘demystifying’ the mechanisms of inequality in society, while ultimately doing nothing to change them. What is more, Rancière (2012) argues, this is a sociology not of society or the social as such but only of the mechanisms of self-deception (captured in Bourdieu’s concept of misrecognition) from which people require demystification. However, this kind of demystification is one that ultimately reveals nothing other than the eternal reproduction of inequality, resulting in a self-­ defeating ‘critique’, in which the big ‘reveal’ is that everything always stays the same. In addition, it is only the sociologist who really knows why; everyone else is condemned to misrecognise the situation. As with the ‘new philosophers’ inspired by Foucault, the ‘new sociology’ (2012, p. 161) ultimately results in the view that the people’s knowledge (in this case their self-deception about the reasons for their inequality, and in the case of the philosophers, their subjection to power) is available only to the intellectual. Again, this ironically re-stages the unequal relation between the true knowledge of scientific Marxism and the people incapable of knowing the reasons for their own domination that both the new philosophers and sociologists of the post 1968 era rejected. Rancière (2012) argues that this empty critique became the dominant form of intellectual engagement both in academia and in public debate in the 1980s. As Rancière (2012, p.  167) writes, ‘[n]othing is more common-­place, amongst the post-democratic and post-Marxist intelligentsia, than this idea of “demystification”  ’. Rancière (2012, p.  167) argues that this cynical form of critique has permeated all intellectual discourse with an ‘ethics of suspicion’ that no longer leaves any room for sincere objectives such as enlightenment, solidarity, or class struggle. Furthermore, he argues that this kind of social science in the cynical mode of suspicion in fact creates its own hierarchies and further fuels inequality, as the privileged knowledge of self-deception and power keep intellectuals and others in their elevated place—not least in academia.

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Rancière’s critique of Foucault and Bourdieu therefore strikes at the heart of questions about science, knowledge, authority, and education, re-­ staging his critique of scientific Marxism, to which, in a sense, Bourdieu and Foucault are the unlikely inheritors. His critique addresses both the privileged position of the social sciences in general and a dominant strand in the sociology of education, which continues to inform educational research, as I discovered in my experiences recounted at the beginning of this chapter. This critique is also taken up more obliquely in Rancière’s writing about the education system in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, which I discuss below.

Education in The Ignorant Schoolmaster Rancière brings this critique together with his archival research on working-­class emancipation in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, which offers not only treatise on (intellectual) emancipation and its import for society (see Chap. 4) but also an intervention on several educational themes. Most obviously perhaps, the text offers a polemic intervention on the origins of mass education and the system of public instruction in France. In doing so, it also implicitly intervenes in debates about the curriculum and school system in the 1980s, in which Bourdieu’s sociology of educational reproduction was influential. Finally, there is a radical critique of the logic governing pedagogy itself and its extension to all aspects of society in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, including the management of the people by politicians with the aid of philosophers, sociologists, and public intellectuals. Here, the educational assumptions of inequality underlying scientific Marxism, as well as the work of the ‘new philosophers’ and ‘new sociology’, come under attack. For Rancière (1991), Jacotot’s story offers a glimpse into a time when the relations between knowledge, science, politics, and education were shifting. From the chaotic scientific experimentation of the Enlightenment, full of intellectual adventure and the promise of emancipation, a more orderly view of scientific and political progress emerged, supported by the institutionalisation of education and the perfection of new pedagogic methods. Jacotot, Rancière (1991, p.  134) argues, ‘was alone in

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recognizing the effacement of equality under progress, of emancipation under instruction’ (1991, p. 134) and ‘the only egalitarian to perceive the representation and institutionalization of progress as a renouncing of the moral and intellectual adventure of equality’ (1991, p. 134). By unearthing and rehearsing Jacotot’s story, Rancière (1991) shines a light on this moment in the history of education, re-writing the inauguration of public schooling as an imposition upon the people, rather than a gift to them, in an attempt to contain and suppress the emancipation and equality that the scientific and political revolutions of the preceding years had unleashed. Viewed through Jacotot’s eyes, the institutionalisation of mass education becomes ‘the grief-work of emancipation’ (Rancière, 1991, p. 134). This also has ramifications for debates about education in Rancière’s own day. Ross (1991), in her introduction to The Ignorant Schoolmaster, refers to a fierce debate about public schooling and the curriculum represented by two opposing camps within the French ministry of education at the time. The first, inspired by the sociology of Bourdieu, advocated ‘progressive’ reforms aimed at reducing inequality in the school system. To achieve this, it promoted (among other things) the implementation of specific curricula for schools in poorer areas. The second, inspired by older traditions of education, advocated a ‘republican elitism’ focused on rigour, examination, selection, and a universal curriculum. Ross (1991) refers to Rancière’s (1984, cited in Ross, 1991) critique of the work of Jean-Claude Milner, an important figure in this second camp. While Rancière agreed with some of Milner’s critique of the sociologically inspired reforms of the time, arguing, with Milner, that such reforms were both ‘infantilizing’ and ‘racist’ in their assumptions about the kind of curriculum best suited to working-class and immigrant children, he disagreed with the solution of a, ‘return to some notion of pure, scientific transmission à la Jules Ferry, for such a thing had never existed’ (Ross, 1991, p. xv). Though Rancière does not explicitly address these arguments in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, the text can be read as an oblique intervention on this debate, in which Rancière casts a plague on both houses. By taking Jacotot’s perspective on the educational developments of his time, Rancière demonstrates at least two things about his own day. Firstly, the

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questionable foundations of the French education system as one of objective truth and equality (as claimed by republican elitists) and, secondly, the perpetual deferral of equality enacted by the ‘progressives’, who have ‘no power other than that ignorance, that incapacity of the people on which their priesthood is based’ (1991, p. 129). Just like the pedagogues of Jacotot’s day who perfected the methods of teaching necessary for social progress, the sociologists of Rancière’s day were busy perfecting the methods necessary for ‘demystifying’ the self-evident inequalities of the education system. Each position starts and ends with inequality. As Ross (1991, p. xix) has written of Rancière’s argument, [w]hether school is seen as the reproduction of inequality (Bourdieu) or as the potential instrument for the reduction of inequality (Savary), the effect is the same…the poor stay in their place’. The advocates of the ‘new sociology’ are not the only ones who are subject to implicit critique in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. The rising power of public intellectuals and the ‘new philosophers’ also come under fire in Rancière’s vision of a ‘society pedagogicized’ (1991, p. 130), i.e., ‘the integral pedagogicization of society—the general infantilization of the individuals that make it up’ (Rancière, p. 133). For Rancière this is the logical end point of a society in which the pedagogic fiction of ‘progress’ has become interwoven into the fiction of inequality fuelling society. While the education system acts as the ‘secular arm of the societal fiction of inequality’ (1991, p. 131), Rancière (1991, p. 119) argues that, ‘progress is the pedagogical fiction built into the fiction of the society as a whole’. This infusion of a pedagogic logic into the inegalitarian fiction of society ultimately justifies, ‘the intelligent caste’s management of the stupid multitude’ (1991.p. 131) who are considered too backward to understand or accept the belief in ‘progress’ fuelling society. We can detect resonances here with the ‘social seismology’ (2012, p. 79) of the new philosophers. Although Rancière’s (1991) retelling of Jacotot’s story takes us into the territory of educational reforms, debates about public schooling, and arguments about the perfection of pedagogic methods, it is in his illustration of how a pedagogic fiction has been woven into the current fiction of inequality, which keeps society functioning, that the book perhaps offers its most important insights into education, politics, and society. In the sections that follow, I discuss how Rancière’s treatment of these

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themes also reverberate in his later writing on democracy, politics, art, and aesthetics.

Education in Rancière’s Writing on Democracy The educational themes outlined above are again taken up in On the Shores of Politics, Disagreement, and Hatred of Democracy. In a sense, The Ignorant Schoolmaster acts as an important pivot point in Rancière’s body of work. It stands between, on the one hand, his initial interests in working-­class emancipation, the shortfalls of scientific Marxism, and his polemic critique of the ‘new philosophers’ and ‘new sociology’ and, on the other, his interventions on democracy, political philosophy, art, and aesthetics. In effect, The Ignorant Schoolmaster forms the blueprint for an extended intervention on equality, democracy, and the effacement of politics under consensus over the progress offered by global economic growth, supported by a pedagogic logic of inequality, which he develops in these later texts.

From Intellectual Emancipation to Democratic Politics In On the Shores of Politics Rancière (1995) revisits key moments from Jacotot’s story to elaborate on the nature of democracy. Rancière posits the ‘community of equals’ (1991, p. 71), first elaborated in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, as the essence of democracy and sets this against not only hierarchical society but also communist dreams of creating an equal society. The latter, he argues, with illustrations from his earlier archival research, as well as arguments taken from Jacotot’s writing, were doomed to failure because equality cannot be institutionalised. Jacotot’s demonstration of the ‘equality of intelligence’, Rancière (1995, p.  83) writes, revealed, ‘the disconcerting message that there was no principle of the community of equals which was also the principle of social organization’. This statement echoes the arguments set forth in The Ignorant Schoolmaster that intellectual emancipation cannot be incorporated into a school, an army, or any institution. Emancipation is about disincorporation from

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society, not incorporation within it—even if that new society promises to be organised along more egalitarian lines. Rancière (1995) also returns to his discussion of the ‘Secession of the Plebs’ in On the shores of Politics to show that democracy consists in the rational verification of equality amongst reasonable beings in an irrational society. These themes are taken up further in Disagreement, where Rancière (1999) again revisits this ‘scene’ of democracy to posit the verification of equality as ‘rational disagreement’, an elaboration on the ability to ‘rave reasonably’ (1991, p.  91) in unequal society. However, as noted in Chap. 4, while Rancière offers a view of democracy based on the ‘community of equals’ and Jacotot’s demonstration of the ‘equality of intelligence’, he is careful to maintain a distinction between equality verified through intellectual emancipation and equality verified as the practice of democracy. We could say that Rancière’s (1995, 1999) elaboration of democracy is derived from the ‘discovery’ of the equality of intelligence in the practice of the ‘emancipatory master’ (Rancière, 1991, p. 12). In a sense, Jacotot’s ‘anti-method’ (Rancière, 1991, p. 129), based on the presupposition of equality, is the prototype for democracy as the verification of equality in the form of rational disagreement over a wrong in the count of the community—but it is not exactly the same thing.

The Pedagogical Logic of Consensus In these later interventions on politics and democracy, Rancière (1995, 2006) also shows how the vision of a ‘society pedagogicized’ (1991, p. 130) had become realised in a new ‘post-democracy’, involving a consensus around the limitlessness of global economic growth (1995, p. 98). In Hatred of Democracy, Rancière (2006) offers a caustic assessment of the role that public intellectuals have played in shoring up this consensus. Echoing his conclusion about the ‘intelligent caste’s management of the multitude’ (1991, p. 131), he argues that these individuals set themselves up as experts who can educate ‘the people’ out of their anachronistic and selfish concern with rights, to see the light of economic progress (2006, p. 92). Rancière (2006) is here addressing a new, more acerbic turn in contemporary political thought, in which ‘democracy’ had come to stand

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in for notions of greedy individualism and an insatiable demand for rights. In doing so, he shows what the pedagogic logic woven into the fiction of inequality looked like towards the end of the twentieth century, that is, teaching people how to accept the progress promised by globalisation, the expansion of global markets, and economic growth. In other words, the logic of consensus around the limitlessness of economic growth is a pedagogic logic.

Debates over Public Education While contemporary debates about educational reform remain implicit in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancière addresses these explicitly in his later interventions on democracy and politics. In On the Shores of Politics, Rancière (1995) rehearses his incisive critique of Bourdieu and Passeron’s sociological argument about the reproduction of inequality through education. Situating this within his overall account of the effacement of democracy in this text, Rancière argues that Bourdieu and Passeron posit the failure of school to achieve social equality as exemplary of democracy’s failure. Rancière (1995, p. 52) argues that the ‘democratic school’ is used to demonstrate that, ‘democracy is lying to itself, that it is ill-adapted to the equality which it proclaims’. Like democracy, which for its ‘socialist demystifiers’ is based on a ‘fundamental lie’ that there is any possibility of real disruption of the existing ‘sociopolitical regime’, Rancière (1995, p. 54) argues that public education is seen by sociologists as something which promises to reduce inequality but delivers instead only an elitist form of education that serves a privileged few. The model underlying this, argue the detractors of democratic, public education, is the Greek schole in which people of leisure can choose to dedicate their time to study. Rancière (1995, pp. 54–55) re-appropriates the terms of this debate to offer a more optimistic re-reading of public schooling, arguing that, in one sense, ‘democratic education is the paradoxical heir of the aristocratic schole’ as a form which, ‘separates intellectual leisure from productive necessity’ and thus opens the public school up to a variety of interpretations, invested with different meanings by different members of society. These include equal citizenship, social mobility, or education itself, in

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abstract terms, as a fundamental right in democratic societies. Rancière (1995, p. 55) argues that, ‘[m]ost of the time, these meanings mingle, making education neither the mask of inequality nor the instrument of inequality’s reduction, but the site of a permanent negotiation of equality between the democratic state and the democratic individual’. For Rancière then, the public school, as a site of contestation over equality in the community, still has an important role to play in democracy—but not in the sense that it is most often imagined, either by its champions or by its detractors. In Disagreement, Rancière (1999) extends his discussion of the debates over educational reforms, deconstructing ‘republican elitist’ arguments in favour of a universal curriculum, which align with a parallel interest in rediscovering and reclaiming a pure foundation for politics in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and the supposed triumph of Western, liberal democracy. Here, Rancière (1999) traces a broken line from Plato’s archipolitical project of a republican education, which would extend to all aspects of society to institute and maintain a harmonious, hierarchical order, through to Jules Ferry’s modern republican project and on to recent arguments for minimal, neutral instruction to all students, as well as the sociological critiques of these. He argues that the various twists and turns in discussions about the public role of education have really been a rearrangement of terms. Rancière (1999, p. 70) argues that all sides in the debate, ‘overlook the initial nexus established by archipolitics between a community based on the proportions of the cosmos and the work of the sciences of the individual and collective soul’. For Rancière (1999), education has always been bound up with political philosophy, and the new social sciences of psychology and sociology reflect a similar concern with harmonising society, contra the disruption of politics. In other words, there is a Platonism at the heart of the social sciences (see also Chap. 3) as they are applied to the question of public education. In Hatred of Democracy, Rancière (2006) updates his interventions on these debates, in the context of his broader argument about a new, radical rejection of democracy based on its equation with consumerist individualism. Rancière (2006) notes a shift in arguments for a universal curriculum in the 1980s away from ‘republican elitism’ towards a new kind of elitist argument. Rancière (2006) argues that where once this elitism was

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based on secular principles of reason, it had become based on something more archaic. As Rancière (2006, p. 29) puts it, ‘the issue yesterday concerned transmitting the universality of knowledge and its egalitarian power. What it comes down to transmitting today…is simply the principle of birth, the principle of sexual division and of kinship’. Again, Rancière (2006, p.  30) is keen to point out the Platonism underlying such arguments. In a kind of ultra-Platonic attempt to revert to pre-­ democratic authority, Rancière (2006, p. 30) argues, ‘good government today rediscovers the name that it had before it had to make way for the name of democracy. That name is pastoral government’. For Rancière, it is this kind of anti-democratic thinking that motivates arguments about a return to tradition in education. Crucially, Rancière (1995, 1999, 2006) argues that arguments surrounding educational reform are predicated on an assumption of inequality. All share a common desire to replace the division and disruption of democracy with a harmonious and hierarchical organisation of the community. While this might be more immediately apparent in elitist arguments about a universal curriculum, it is also true of sociological critiques and calls for progressive reform. For Rancière, such sociological critiques are premised on the assumption that inequality really exists and that schools need to act in measured steps to reduce it—for example, by adapting the curriculum to suit the inherent (in)capacities of those working-­ class and immigrant students who are not, because of their ‘authentic nature’, able to access a curriculum designed by and for a leisured elite. All such arguments are, ultimately, informed by a kind of Platonic view of education in the service of the ideal society, which allots appropriate places and roles to every person, from which they ought not to deviate. Schools, as places where different claims and counterclaims about equality collide with each other, can be the site in which the disruptive and divisive forces of democracy erupt but programmes of education or educational reform, however they propose to achieve or honour equality, will never be about democracy. Here we can see the incisiveness of Rancière’s critique of the Bourdieuian sociology that still animates much work in the world of educational research and which coloured my own experiences of being inducted into that world, as I recounted at the beginning of this chapter. We can also see how Rancière’s take on schools

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and education challenges one of the most central claims of education, that is, to change society for the better and make it more equal. Rancière’s challenges to such arguments are discussed in greater detail in Chap. 6.

 ducation in Rancière’s Writing on Art E and Aesthetics In the sense that all the artistic regimes that make up Rancière’s politics of aesthetics constitute configurations of what is sayable, doable, and possible, they also align with certain kinds of aesthetic education. Each of these artistic regimes view artistic practices as educative in that they can contribute to supporting or disrupting certain visions of the community—or at least of the sensible co-ordinates underpinning these (see Chap. 3). This is most evident in the ethical regime of images and the aesthetic regime of art, where the political import of artistic practices is overt. In the ethical regime of images, this educative power of art consists in the distinction between ‘true’ images that support the hierarchical organisation of the community and ‘false’ images, which threaten that organisation by dislocating bodies from their ‘naturally’ assigned roles and places. In the aesthetic regime, this educative power of art is first expressed in Schiller’s argument for an emancipatory education that would suspend the hierarchical distinctions between doing and thinking. The ‘modernatist’ projects aimed at creating a new political community and the modernist insistence on art’s singularity are further examples of the educative power of art in the aesthetic regime. Rancière views Lyotard’s art of the sublime (as well as other ‘ultra-modernist’ approaches such as Badiou’s ‘inaesthetics’ and Deleuze’s ‘people to come’) as an end point of thinking about art in the aesthetic regime that return full circle to an ethical view of the educative power of art. The political and educative import of artistic practices is somewhat muted in the representative regime, where hierarchies and distinctions between ‘the arts’ are analogous to those in society. However, Aristotle’s distinction between ‘the arts’ and non-art, his delineation of the subject matter appropriate to each art form, and the hierarchy amongst those art

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forms offer the basis for arguments about ‘high’ and ‘low’ art and culture. Moreover, the very definition of the classical arts sets up a distinction between what is considered worthy of the name ‘art’ and what is not. Although the principle of making these distinctions belongs to the representative regime, it is still marshalled today—including in sociological arguments about the kinds of (‘high’ and ‘low’) art and culture specific to different classes, based on the premise that, ‘separate classes have distinct senses’ (2009a, p. 13). In Aesthetics and Its Discontents, Rancière (2009a, p. 43) argues that the same representative logic underpins both, ‘the pedagogy aiming to bring art closer to the social groups to whom it is foreign’ and the, ‘demand to re-establish a republican style education to counter the democratic dissolution of forms of knowledge, behaviours and values’. In this sense, the representative regime of the arts is also implicated in Rancière’s (1995, 1999, 2006) discussion of the educational debates over curriculum and school reforms outlined above. Educational themes in Rancière’s writing on art and aesthetics are most explicit, however, in The Emancipated Spectator, where Rancière (2009b) applies his critique of the pedagogical logic underpinning inequality in society and his argument about ‘intellectual emancipation’ developed in The Ignorant Schoolmaster to debates in contemporary art. In this text, Rancière (2009b) traces current thinking about spectatorship in contemporary art to their origins in discourses on the theatre. In doing so, he establishes the ‘paradox of the spectator’ as the figure that is both necessary to theatre and yet also viewed negatively because of its ignorance and passivity, ‘separated from both the capacity to know and the power to act’ (2009b, p. 2). Responses to this paradox, Rancière (2009b) argues, have tended to try to make spectators active—either by involving them intellectually and/or emotionally in the drama unfolding on stage, or by making them part of the drama itself, through participatory methods. In this way, theatre sets itself up as the solution to a problem it has itself imposed—the inactivity of the spectator, who must be roused from their passive state. Rancière (2009b) argues that, via Marx’s critique of alienation and Debord’s critique of the society of the spectacle, dominant thinking about spectatorship involves a denunciation of the separation entailed in mere ‘spectacle’, as set against the essence of community action found in

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true ‘theatre’. While the terms of the equation are different, Rancière argues that this formula obeys the same logic as Plato’s prohibition of theatre. He writes, ‘[r]eformers of theatre have reformulated Plato’s opposition between ‘choros’ and theatre as one between the truth of the theatre and the simulacrum of the spectacle’ (Rancière, 2009b, p. 5). This also means that theatre sets itself the task of eliminating the distance between actors and spectators—theatre must abolish its own mediation, so that there can be a true communion of action. In this way, Rancière (2009b, pp.  7–8) argues, the, ‘theatrical stage and performance thus become a vanishing mediation between the evil of the spectacle and the virtue of true theatre. They intend to teach their spectators ways of ceasing to be spectators and becoming agents of collective practice’. Rancière (2009b) sees a parallel between the logic of theatre as a means of curing spectators from a passivity it has itself imposed on them and the stultifying pedagogical logic that seeks to cure pupils of an ignorance it has itself attributed to them. Just as the pedagogue sets up an, ‘interminable practice of the ‘step ahead’, separating the schoolmaster from the one whom he is supposed to train to join him’, Rancière (2009b, p. 9) argues that a different, non-pedagogic logic based on a belief in the ‘equality of intelligence’ would mean acknowledging the equal capacity of the spectator to translate, interpret, and compare what they see to what they have seen before, to make their own interventions and ‘compose their own poem’ (Rancière, 2009b, p. 13). It would mean assuming that the spectator is not passive but active, ‘the spectator also acts, like the pupil or scholar’ (Rancière, 2009b, p. 13). It also means that the ‘third element’ (the book or text in the case of the pupil and the performance or artwork in the case of the spectator) is crucial to any emancipation. Eliminating this mediation in favour of the direct transmission of knowledge or feeling means assuming the ignorance/passivity of the pupil/spectator. When directors and playwrights insist on making spectators see or feel what they wish them to, they employ the same logic as the stultifying pedagogues who make their pupils learn exactly what they teach. Emancipation is about disrupting this logic of cause and effect. The implications of this argument go beyond theatre, of course. Rancière (2009b) argues that contemporary art, through its mixing of forms and media, including the use of performance in gallery spaces and

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the dislocation of visual art into the common space of the street, and so on, seems ideally placed to affect that kind of ‘dissociation’ necessary to disrupt the logic of cause and effect. However, Rancière (2009b) points out that the mere fact of such mixing and dislocation does not ensure any emancipatory function for art. Rancière (2009b) is particularly critical of the assumption that participatory art will necessarily result in emancipatory results. There are types of contemporary art which stultify and those which, ‘problematize the cause-effect relationship itself and the set of presuppositions that sustain the logic of stultification’ (2009b, p. 22). He offers an example of the latter in Alfredo Jaar’s installation work addressing the Rwandan genocide, which, in its use of concealed images of victims, accompanied by the visible text of their names, ‘disturbs the ordinary regime of that connection [between the verbal and the visual] such as it is employed in the official system of information’ (2009b, p. 95). Crucial to Rancière’s (2009b) argument is the idea that the political effects of art cannot be anticipated. For art to contribute to emancipation, ‘[i]t requires spectators who play the role of active interpreters, who develop their own translation in order to appropriate the ‘story’ and make it their own’ (2009b, p. 22) and to invent new ‘intellectual adventures’ (2009b, p. 15). This also has implications beyond art, and the relationship between stultifying pedagogy and stultifying art are not merely analogous. Both form part of the political climate of consensus, in which the social sciences have the role of bridging the gap between intellectuals and those ordinary people whose lives they seek to explain. Rancière refers to his own intellectual adventures in his archival research into the lives of nineteenth-­century workers, which led him to conclude that, ‘[t]here was no gap to be filled between intellectuals and workers, any more than there was between actors and spectators’ (2009b, p. 20). Extending his argument about the ‘community of equals’ in opposition to a ‘society pedagogicized’, elaborated in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancière asserts that ‘[a]n emancipated community is a community of narrators and translators’ (2009b, p. 22). This holds true of people’s engagement with art as much as it does for any text or practice. Rancière’s strident critique of the social sciences and their pedagogic logic, based on an assumption of  inequality equality, is something which animates his writing on

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education, art, and politics. This critique is central in disturbing the dominant logic of educational research and scholarship, which I outlined in the introduction to this chapter.

Reflection I began this chapter by outlining some of the dominant features of educational research, theory, and practice as I entered the world of academic research in education. Two key issues stood out. The first was the dominance in educational research of theoretical lenses based on the work of Foucault and Bourdieu. Detailing the mechanisms via which inequality is reproduced and governmental power infuses every aspect of the education system was (and arguably still is) a major pre-occupation of educational research, despite several challenges to this ‘orthodoxy’ in the new forms of innovative, ‘post-qualitative’ research that aims to move beyond critique. This enterprise is attractive in its explanatory power but also, arguably, unsatisfactory in that it often leads to a dead end, offering no solutions or accounts of change. Rancière’s writing, developed in the same, post-1968 context as Foucault and Bourdieu, takes a radically different approach. Not only does Rancière (2012) offer an important critique of their work, as theories that ultimately bolster the ‘superior’ position of intellectuals in society and, like the scientific Marxism they sought to reject, recreate a relation in which ‘real’ knowledge (of inequality’s misrecognition or the diffuse mechanisms of power) is reserved for the sociologist and the philosopher. It also provides a critical history and alternative perspective on the place of education in society and in relation to democracy and politics. Rancière (1995, 1999, 2006) is critical of the Platonism or ‘neo-­ Platonism’ that suffuses all attempts to construct a grand educational project in service of a democratic or egalitarian society. However, he also argues that the situation of the public school as a site of contestation over competing views about education and equality means that it is at least one of the institutional contexts bearing inscriptions of equality that can be brought into the service of democracy in the staging of political disputes. Finally, Rancière (1991, 2009b) alerts us to the ‘stultifying’ effects

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of a pedagogic logic extending into all aspects of society, often in the service of a political consensus around the ‘progress’ inherent in limitless economic growth and the need to educate the ‘backward’ people out of their resistance to it. These ‘stultifying’ effects are also  evident in the application of such a pedagogic logic to the kind of ‘political art’ that aims to produce specific, emancipatory effects (Rancière, 2009b). Rancière’s notions of a ‘community of equals’ (1991, p.  71) and ‘an emancipated community of spectators’ (2009b, p. 22) stand in contradistinction to these stultifying effects of a society ‘pedagogicized’. Rancière’s writing therefore offers some fresh perspectives on the questions for education and educational research I posed at the beginning of this chapter. Educational research that details inequality and power in the education system, often via the theories of Foucault and Bourdieu, can only go so far. It does not offer solutions, nor does it shine any light on the emancipatory and political moments that may be happening right under our noses when people assume that anyone and everyone is their intellectual equal. Moreover, such research risks reinforcing the very inequality and imposition of power that it claims to address. If only we, as researchers, are the ones able to truly discern the workings of power and inequality that teachers and students suffer, we place ourselves in a position of superiority over them. One possibility for educational research is to pay more attention to moments of democracy, emancipation, and the verification of equality that happen despite the inequalities of the system (see Chap. 7 for a more detailed discussion of this). In terms of educational theory and practice, Rancière’s writing challenges us to think differently about the relations between the education system and the state, and the possibilities for democracy that this affords. In my own research, I have tried to pay attention to those moments when political subjectification does occur (McDonnell, 2014a) and to theoretically rethink the relationship between education and democracy (McDonnell, 2014b). The challenges and rewards of this are discussed in more detail in Chaps. 6, 7, and 8.

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References Denzin, N. K., Lincoln, Y. S., MacLure, M., Otterstad, A. M., Torrance, H., Cannella, G. S., Koro-Ljungberg, M., & McTier, T. (2017). Critical qualitative methodologies: Reconceptualizations and emergent construction. International Review of Qualitative Research, 10(4), 482–498. McDonnell, J. (2014a). PFI and the performative politics of dissent: lessons for democratic education. Power and Education, 6(3), 307–317. McDonnell, J. (2014b). Reimagining the Role of Art in the Relationship between Democracy and Education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46(1), 46–58. Pelletier, C. (2009). Emancipation, equality and education: Rancière’s critique of Bourdieu and the question of performativity. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 30(2), 137–150. Rancière, J. (2012). The intellectual and his people. Staging the people, volume 2 (trans: Fernbach, D.). London: Verso. Rancière, J. (2009a). Aesthetics and its discontents (trans: Corcoran, S.). Cambridge: Polity. Rancière, J. (2009b). The emancipated spectator (trans: Elliot, G.). London: Verso. Rancière, J. (2006). Hatred of democracy (trans: Corcoran, S.). London: Verso. Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement. (trans: Rose, J.). Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, J. (1995). On the shores of politics (trans: Heron, L.). London: Verso. Ross, K. (1991). Translator’s introduction. In J.  Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five lessons in intellectual emancipation (trans: Ross, K.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rancière, J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation (trans: Ross, K.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Part II Uptake of Rancière’s Writing in Education

6 Emancipatory, Democratic, and Political Education

In the first part of the book, I outlined several key interventions in Rancière’s writing, grouped around the themes of democracy, aesthetics, emancipation, and education. In the second part of the book, I turn to address how Rancière’s writing has been taken up by scholars and researchers working in education. I address this via three key areas of educational research and scholarship—firstly on emancipatory, political, and democratic education, secondly on art(s) education, and thirdly on innovations in educational research. As with the first part of the book, I preface each of these discussions with a personal anecdote from my own experiences, to illustrate some of the key issues at stake, and conclude with a brief reflection on how I have tried to apply Rancière’s writing in my own work. I begin here with an example of my experiences of entering the world of scholarship in educational philosophy and theory—one of the key areas of education in which Rancière’s work has had an impact, particularly in terms of questions about the possibilities for emancipatory, democratic, and political education. One of my first experiences of delivering a paper as an academic was at a philosophy of education conference, where I presented on the theoretical framework for my doctoral research, rethinking the relationships between democracy, art, and education. While many attendees were © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. McDonnell, Reading Rancière for Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96013-1_6

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interested in my work, some were surprised that I had not engaged with The Ignorant Schoolmaster in my paper, nor presented an overall philosophy of education—choosing to address the import of his writing on democracy and politics at one remove from educational practice. I think my experiences reflect an interesting tension in educational philosophy and theory. Many in this field have tried to reconstruct a theory of emancipatory, democratic, or political education from Rancière’s writing, often based on pedagogic readings of The Ignorant Schoolmaster (sometimes combined with other aspects of his writing), which is difficult to justify. Indeed, the very project of constructing an overall theory of education, something that is so central to educational philosophy and theory, is rather at odds with Rancière’s own project or method of disruptive, polemic intervention. Marrying the two can lead to many difficulties and challenges. In this chapter, I first summarise the influence of Rancière’s writing on the development of theories of emancipatory, democratic, and political education, before evaluating the contribution of this work, including offering a critical discussion of the difficulties and problems associated with developing any ‘Rancièrian’ view of education. Finally, I reflect on my own, challenging experiences of trying to theorise about and for education, following my reading of Rancière.

 he Impact of Rancière’s Writing T in Educational Philosophy and Theory While Rancière’s writing remains something of a niche interest in education, the publication of Bingham and Biesta’s (2010) book Education, Truth, Emancipation and a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory, edited by Simons and Masschelein (2010), marked a growing interest in Rancière’s writing in educational philosophy and theory around ten years ago. These authors, and some of the contributors to the latter, including Lewis (2010), Ruitenberg (2010a), and Säfström (2010), have been among the most prominent interpreters of Rancière’s writing for education. Although in-depth engagement with Rancière’s writing is quite rare, it is now quite common to see at least passing references to Rancière in educational research and scholarship. In this chapter, I focus on three

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interrelated themes that I would argue have been of central concern to educational philosophers’ and theorists’ application of Rancière’s writing to the field—namely emancipatory education, democratic or political education, and the public role of schools in democratic societies.

Emancipatory Education In Chap. 4, I noted the significance of Biesta’s (Biesta 2010a; Bingham and Biesta 2010) elaboration of a ‘new logic of emancipation’ from Rancière’s writing. Biesta’s (2010a; Bingham and Biesta 2010) argument traces the history of the relationship between emancipation and education from a Kantian insistence on emancipation through enlightenment and reason to the demystification of, and conscientisation around, oppression in the critical pedagogy of Freire and others. Biesta (2010a; Bingham and Biesta 2010) argues that, while these views of emancipation differ in terms of the kind of knowledge necessary for emancipation, each views knowledge, imparted through education, as a way of achieving it. Biesta (2010a; Bingham and Biesta 2010) argues that this familiar view of the relationship between education and emancipation is problematic for several reasons. Firstly, it installs dependency (the student is dependent on the teacher for knowledge). Secondly, it presupposes an inequality (between the teacher who knows and the student who does not). Thirdly, it is based on a mistrust of people’s experiences (students’ own knowledge of their situation is relegated in favour of the teacher’s superior knowledge). Biesta (2010a; Bingham and Biesta 2010) argues that Rancière’s understanding of emancipation, as disruption of the social order, as well as his insistence on the presupposition of equality lying at the heart of emancipation, allows us to think of the relationship between education and emancipation differently. On this alternative view, emancipation is not something to be achieved through the acquisition of knowledge, to reduce inequality, but something that happens when equality is taken as a presupposition. Following Rancière’s discussion of Jacotot’s discovery of the ‘equality of intelligence’, his practice of ‘intellectual emancipation’, and his critique of the ‘explicative order’, Bingham and Biesta (2010,

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p. 47) propose a new approach to the ‘practice of emancipatory education’, in which students’ own intelligence is revealed to them by an act of will, rather than by the teacher imposing their own intelligence or knowledge on the student. This revision of emancipatory education retains an important role for the teacher. However, unlike in more familiar versions of liberal or critical education, the authority of the teacher is not based on their superior knowledge but on the exercise of their will—insisting that students look, listen, and pay attention to what they study. As Bingham and Biesta (2010, p. 47) argue, ‘the difference here…is not between learning with a master and learning without a master…[t]he difference is between learning with a ‘master explicator’ and learning without a ‘master explicator’. Bingham and Biesta (2010) distinguish this approach from critical pedagogy, making an explicit comparison between the work of Rancière and Freire. While there may be some superficial similarities between the two, they argue, Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed remains riven with the problems of dependency, inequality, and suspicion that their Rancièrian approach escapes. The relations between the student and the teacher are also crucial to this new approach to emancipatory education. Biesta (Biesta 2010b, Bingham and Biesta 2010) refers to the centrality of speech in Rancière’s writing, to suggest that referring to students as ‘speakers’ rather than ‘learners’ or ‘students’ leaves open more space for emancipation in the pedagogic relationship. Bingham and Biesta (2010) echo Jacotot’s vision of the ‘emancipatory master’ (Rancière 1991, p.  12) as the one who denies their students the satisfaction of saying they cannot do something, arguing that the difference here is, ‘between the teacher who overwrites the speech of her students … and the teacher who reminds her students that they can already speak, the teacher who refuses her students the satisfaction of admitting that they are incapable of speaking’ (Bingham and Biesta 2010, p. 154). Biesta’s (2010a; Bingham and Biesta 2010) elaboration of a ‘new logic of emancipation’ is echoed in other contributions aimed at rethinking emancipatory education and correcting the problems of critical pedagogy (see, e.g., Vlieghe 2018;  Anwaruddin 2015; Galloway 2012;  Lambert 2012; Friedrich et al. 2010) based on a reading of Rancière’s work. Often such work makes explicit comparisons between Rancière and Freire.

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With Biesta (2010a; Bingham and Biesta 2010), Galloway (2012), for example, insists on the importance of the relation of ‘will-to-will’ between teacher and student in a Rancièrian emancipatory education but argues that the content of educational materials does not matter for Rancière, as they do for Freire. Vlieghe (2018) takes issue with this interpretation. Re-centring Jacotot’s insistence on ‘the book’ as a ‘thing-in-common’ between the student and the emancipatory master, Vlieghe (2018) makes the case for a more radical emancipatory pedagogy in Rancière’s writing than that of Freire, whose approach, he argues, remains within an instrumentalist view of education as the vehicle for emancipation, rather than being emancipatory in and of itself. Vlieghe’s (2018) emphasis on the ‘thing-in-common’ echoes Masschelein and Simons’ (2010) work, which represents another important touchstone in the interpretation of Rancière’s writing for educational philosophy and theory. Masschelein and Simons (2010) combine an argument about the public role of the school in democratic societies (see below) with reflections on what Rancière’s writing has to offer to questions of emancipatory education. Taking up Rancière’s understanding of emancipation as a suspension, break, or escape from the given order of society, Masschelein and Simons (2010) argue that while emancipation cannot be institutionalised, schools can still be important sites for emancipation, as places in which societal order is suspended. They argue for the school as a place of space-time suspension, in which, ‘[e]conomic, social, cultural, political, or private time is suspended, as are the tasks and roles connected to specific places’ (Masschelein and Simons  2010, p.  675). Further, Masschelein and Simons (2010, p.  675) argue that schools fulfil this function to the extent that they are places where ‘common things’ are ‘put on the table’ between teacher and student. This emphasis on the ‘thing-in-common’ has been taken up by others in educational philosophy and theory to argue for a ‘thing-centred’ (Vlieghe 2018) rather than student-centred emancipatory pedagogy. Cornelissen (2010), for example, uses the figure of the ‘ignorant schoolmaster’, who insists on attention to a ‘thing-in-common’ to challenge the more student-­ centred notion of ‘teacher-as-facilitator’. From varying perspectives then, educational philosophers and theorists have proposed versions of emancipatory education based on rather pedagogic  readings of Rancière that prioritise his discussion of the

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dynamics of Jacotot’s ‘anti-method’ of emancipatory practice. Scholars have placed emphasis on different aspects of Rancière’s account of Jacotot’s practice in these versions of emancipatory pedagogy. Some have emphasised the role of the emancipatory teacher as one who exerts a will rather than knowledge or intelligence over students (2010a; Bingham and Biesta 2010; Galloway 2012). Others have emphasised the importance of a ‘thing-in-common’ between students and teachers (Masschelein and Simons 2010; Vlieghe 2018; Cornelissen 2010). In this sense, these scholars have all tried to elaborate a theory of (emancipatory) education from Rancière’s writing, as noted in my introduction to this chapter. As I will argue later, this is an interesting approach but one that is not without its problems.

Democratic Education Several applications of Rancière’s writing in educational philosophy and theory address the question of democratic, political or citizenship education. These also overlap with discussions of emancipatory education but tend to draw more heavily on Rancière’s writing on politics and democracy. They also tend to place Rancière’s work within the broader tradition of ‘radical democracy’ (Amsler 2015), exploring how such conceptions of democracy might challenge existing, dominant conceptions of democratic (citizenship) education. Biesta’s work (Biesta 2007, 2009, 2011; Bingham and Biesta 2010) has again been influential in this regard. Biesta (2007, 2009; Bingham and Biesta 2010) offers a critique of approaches to democratic education centred on democracy as inclusion and compares the normative theory of ‘deliberative democracy’, in which participation in democracy is supposed to lead to the transformation of opinion in search for consensus, with an ‘aggregative’ approach in which the preferences and opinions of democratic participants is merely ‘added up’. Biesta (2007, 2009; Bingham and Biesta 2010) argues that, while deliberative democracy is arguably more democratic, more educative, and leads to greater commitment to democratic decisions, the question of exclusion remains, since deliberative democracy imposes, ‘entry conditions for participation and deliberation’ (Bingham and Biesta 2010, p.  78). This is true whether

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those entry conditions are defined in the narrow terms of rationality, as for example in Habermas’ theory of the ideal speech situation, or whether they also take account of ‘internal exclusions’ (Young, cited in Bingham and Biesta 2010, p. 81). Biesta (2007, 2009; Bingham and Biesta 2010) argues that deliberative democracy conceptualises inclusion in quantitative and ‘colonial’ terms— as a process whereby those on the outside of the democratic sphere are ‘brought into’ the democratic sphere by those on the inside. Democratic education, Biesta (2007, 2009; Bingham and Biesta 2010) argues, is then seen as the enabler of this process by, for example, preparing citizens for their future participation in the democratic sphere. Biesta (Biesta 2007, 2009; Bingham and Biesta 2010) further argues that this view of democratic education assumes that democracy can and should be a ‘normal situation’. Biesta (2007, 2009; Bingham and Biesta 2010) argues that Rancière’s view of democracy as a disruption of the distribution of the sensible and of politics as a process of political subjectification involving the creation of new, supplementary subjects provides a different, ‘qualitative’ rather than ‘quantitative’ view of democratic expansion. Biesta (Bingham and Biesta 2010, p. 85) argues, ‘with Rancière, we might want to reserve the terms ‘democracy’ and ‘democratisation’ for such qualitative changes of the distribution of the sensible rather than for strictly quantitative shifts’. Biesta (2007, 2009; Bingham and Biesta 2010) argues that the radical view of democracy that emerges from Rancière’s writing invites a different perspective on the inclusion-centric discussions of much democratic citizenship education. Biesta (2011, p. 150) further argues that, since, for Rancière, ‘democratic politics’ is always about the disruption of existing institutions and the given political order, his work helps to re-orient attention in democratic theory to the borders of the democratic sphere, rather than simply on what goes on within them. Biesta (2011) brings together several features of his own educational theory in this argument, including his work on the various functions of education (which he describes as qualification, socialisation, and subjectification) (see, e.g., Biesta 2020) and his revision of the relationship between democracy and education as one of learning from rather than through or for democracy (Biesta 2006, 2010c). Based on Rancière’s view of ‘democratic politics’ as political

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subjectification, he argues, ‘Rancière shifts education from its traditional place as the ‘producer’ of political subjectivity’ (Biesta 2011, p. 150) and makes the case for a ‘subjectification conception’ of democratic citizenship education as opposed the to ‘socialisation conception’ that animates much existing work in this area (2011, p.  152). Furthermore, Biesta (2011) argues, developing such an approach to democratic education would entail an engagement with political theory (rather than learning theory) and allow for students to learn from their political experiences of democratic engagement. Ruitenberg (2008, 2010a, b, 2015), whose work has also been influential in the translation of Rancière’s writing to educational philosophy and theory, shares many of Biesta’s concerns about the limitations of democratic citizenship education based on deliberative models of democracy. Like Biesta, Ruitenberg (2008, 2010a, b, 2015) problematises the stable and ‘inclusive’ views of democracy upon which such work is based. Ruitenberg (2008, 2010a) also focuses on the assumption of equality and the process of political subjectification in Rancière’s writing but asks whether the concept of ‘democratic education’ in schools is even possible, when we understand democracy in Rancière’s radical terms. For Ruitenberg, ‘schools are part of what Rancière calls the ‘police’ (la police) or ‘police order’ (l’ordre policier)…[b]y definition, schools do not facilitate the disruption of that order (although politics may still be able to enter in spite of school order)’ (2010a, p. 624). As a result, she argues, ‘perhaps the best that can be done at the institutional level of schools and school systems is not to seek to offer democratic education, but rather to leave space for democracy to enter’ (2008, p. 5). For Ruitenberg (2010b, 2015), then, the key implication of Rancière’s writing is at the level of governance and school community, not at the level of pedagogy. The question of whether Rancière’s writing can ever be incorporated within a project of democratic education is also echoed in Friedrich et  al.’s (2010) work, which asks whether, in Rancièrian terms, ‘democratic education’ is in fact an oxymoron. Friedrich et al. (2010, p. 579) argue that ‘Rancière’s thought is helpful in exposing the deeply problematic link present in the notion of ‘democratic education’  ’ and turn to other theorists (Deleuze and Derrida) to supplement Rancière’s work, arguing for a, ‘democratic education to come’ (Friedrich et  al. 2010,

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p. 580). Means (2011) also sees in Rancière’s writing a more radical view of democracy that can be helpful for rethinking dominant ideas in democratic citizenship education. Via engagement with radical work in citizenship studies, Means (2011) argues that Rancière’s vision of democracy can be read as complimenting a kind of ‘activist citizenship’ and combines this with work on emancipatory education to argue for a more radically open and egalitarian form of citizenship education. However, Means (2011) recognises that ‘valid questions remain as to how a Rancièrian art of citizenship can be made useful for educators and cultural workers engaged in building civic democratic cultures in schools and within the broader public sphere’ (2011, p. 45). Rancière’s writing has perhaps been most helpful in challenging some of the assumptions inherent in existing approaches to democratic education and citizenship education, offering a fresh perspective on the view of democracy on which these are based. In terms of developing a pedagogical approach to, or philosophy of, democratic education, scholars have found the work of political theorists and philosophers whose work is adjacent to Rancière’s more helpful. Biesta (2011) has been most forthright in developing an approach to democratic education from Rancière’s writing, arguing for a form of democratic education based on a ‘political subjectification’ conception of democratic citizenship. Contributions in this area also go to heart of questions about whether Rancière’s interventions on democracy, politics, and political philosophy can ever be translated to an overall theory of democratic education or an approach to practice. Again, this question of whether it is possible to reconstruct a theory of (democratic) education is addressed in my discussion below. First, I turn to one further line of application of Rancière’s writing in educational philosophy and theory.

The Public Role of Schools in Democratic Societies Scholars in educational philosophy and theory have also taken up Rancière’s writing to reconsider the public role of schools in democratic societies and to address systemic and policy issues in education. This work overlaps with interests in emancipatory and democratic education,

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but the emphasis here is on the school as a public site, and on education systems, as part of democratic societies. In this regard, scholars have primarily been inspired by Rancière’s critique of the origins of mass education, his interventions on debates about educational reforms, and his elaboration of a ‘society pedagogicized’ (see Chaps. 4 and 5). Masschelein and Simons’ (2010) work has been particularly influential in this regard. They argue that while Rancière’s work could be read as an argument that democracy, equality, and emancipation happen despite the school, an alternate argument can be extracted from his writing in On the Shores of Politics and an earlier essay on education. In these texts, they note that, Rancière argues that school is ‘the site of the symbolic visibility of equality and its actual negotiation’ (Rancière 1995, cited in Masschelein and Simons 2010, p. 667). Taking up Rancière’s polemic use of the term schole to illustrate how the school is the site of contrasting models of equality in society, they argue that the public school can act as a suspension of the police and of the distribution of the sensible that underpins the sociopolitical order, thus allowing for emancipation. They further argue that because this is the case, the ‘school’ as a figure of potential emancipation inspires the kind of hatred that Rancière argues has been directed at democracy (2006). Indeed, Masschelein and Simons (2010, p. 679) argue that the public school is the ‘mark of democracy’, since it is about ‘separation from a position, from a place in the order of inequality’ (2010, p. 679). Friedrich et  al. (2010) and Säfström (2010) have also taken up Rancière’s critique of the establishment of mass schooling in nineteenth-­ century France as a way of critiquing more contemporary trends in education policy. Friedrich et al. (2010) use Rancière’s term, ‘the equality of intelligence’ to critique the kind of comparative, competitive neoliberal approach of much education policy today. Säfström (2010) introduces the notion of the ‘educational state’ to illustrate the imbrication of politics with a pedagogic logic, as outlined in Rancière’s discussion of a ‘society pedagogicized’. Säfström (2010) refers to Rancière’s work as a way of critiquing the current logic of schooling that pervades such ‘educational states’, one which essentially keeps people in their place, aided by educational research that takes a social scientific approach, particularly in terms

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of the application of psychological concepts such as child development to educational contexts. Though the works cited above also have things to say about emancipation and democratic education, there is a discernible strand of critique in educational philosophy and theory that centres on a reappraisal of education policy and the organisation of education systems in contemporary societies, as well as the role of the public school in democratic societies, based on Rancière’s writing. This work takes Rancière’s critique of the institution of mass schooling, his notion of a ‘society pedagogicized’ his interventions on debates over school reforms and his radical critique of the social sciences seriously. Finding contemporary parallels with some of the objects of critique in Rancière’s work, it offers fresh insights into the workings of neoliberal reforms in education, obsessions with meritocracy and inclusion in national education systems, and the prominent application of psychological concepts to educational policy. In doing so, such work offers illustrations of the power of Rancière’s critique for understanding and re-evaluating education today and potentially for offering different models of the relations between school and society.

Critical Evaluation The themes outlined above are clearly not exhaustive. Scholars writing in educational philosophy and theory have also taken up Rancière’s work to address questions of education, learning, and teaching in more general terms (see, e.g., Dunne 2016; Fullam 2015, Stamp 2013), or to connect Rancière’s work to innovations in educational thinking that come from broader perspectives such as post-colonialism (Harney and Linstead 2009) and posthumanism (Chiew 2018; Kabgani et al. 2018). However, it is fair to say that a pre-occupation with questions about the relationship between education and the broader political projects of progress, emancipation, and democracy has been an important theme in the uptake of Rancière’s writing in educational philosophy and theory. This can be characterised in terms of discussions of emancipatory education, democratic education, and the role of schools in society.

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Clearly, there is a good deal of overlap here. Discussions of emancipatory pedagogy have been combined with reappraisals of the education system in some arguments about democratic education (see, e.g., Means 2011), and key contributors such as Bingham and Biesta (2010) and Masschelein and Simons (2010) have addressed all these issues. Questions about whether and how schools can and ought to make any contribution to broader political projects run throughout all three sets of contributions and are addressed particularly sharply in appraisals of the practical value of Rancière’s writing for democratic education (see, e.g., Ruitenberg 2010b, 2015; Friedrich et  al. 2010). However, there are some distinct characteristics to each of these sets of contributions that may prove helpful for understanding both the benefits and the complications of how Rancière’s work has been taken up in educational philosophy and theory. Not least of these is the emphasis that each places on different aspects of Rancière’s writing, as well as their purposes in doing so. In the work on emancipatory education, readings of The Ignorant Schoolmaster and, particularly, Rancière’s account of Jacotot’s emancipatory practice are particularly prominent. These are often applied to offer a radical reappraisal of critical pedagogy. In the work on democratic education and citizenship education, Rancière’s writing on democracy, and particularly his use of the terms ‘politics’ and ‘police’ in texts such as Disagreement and Hatred of Democracy, are given more weight. The aim here has been to re-evaluate democratic education based on the radical view of democracy that emerges in Rancière’s writing. Finally, work on the role of schools within democratic societies tends to take up Rancière’s notion of a ‘society pedagogicized’, his critique of mass education, and his interventions on educational debates in France, applying these to analyse and evaluate contemporary educational systems and policies. In the discussion that follows, I focus on how these authors have engaged with Rancière’s work to offer an appraisal of the value of these contributions and highlight some of the problems associated with them. The uptake of Rancière’s work in educational philosophy and theory, as outlined above, has been important in several respects. It has offered new ways of thinking about the political role of education, particularly in re-orienting critical pedagogy along more egalitarian lines and in ways that take the lived experiences of students more seriously. Biesta’s (2010a;

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Bingham and Biesta 2010) contribution in outlining a ‘new logic’ of emancipation in education has led the way to numerous creative ways of rethinking projects of critical or emancipatory pedagogy. It has also been helpful in challenging dominant approaches and assumptions in democratic education, opening this area up to more radically egalitarian approaches. Again, Biesta’s (2007, 2009, 2011; Bingham and Biesta 2010) work has been particularly important here, challenging the centrality of inclusion and the influence of deliberative democratic models on theories of democratic education, as well as proposing a new ‘subjectification’ concept of democratic citizenship education. It has also provided a fresh critical perspective on the neoliberal landscape of contemporary education policy and systems. Here, Masschelein and Simons’ (2010) work has been particularly illuminating in illustrating how Rancière’s interventions on debates over educational reforms in both the nineteenth century and his own day are still relevant to understanding contemporary education systems and policies today, as well as for rethinking the role of the public school in democratic societies. However, there are also several problems with how Rancière’s work has been taken up in educational philosophy and theory. In a sense, these can be (at least partly) explained by the nature of educational philosophy and theory itself, which is concerned with developing educational philosophies and theories of education, with a particular focus on pedagogy. This, of course, sits in tension with Rancière’s method of making interventions on specific debates and polemically re-theorising familiar concepts. Where attempts are made to attribute a particular educational philosophy to Rancière or to reconstruct a ‘Rancièrian’ theory of education, problems arise. Such problems are particularly evident in discussions of emancipatory education. In this work, there is a tendency to attribute theories of emancipatory education to Rancière—in more and less strident terms. Bingham and Biesta (2010) are careful to make clear that Rancière’s work does not imply the adoption of any specific pedagogic approach and that emancipation cannot be institutionalised, in Rancière’s view (in the school or elsewhere). However, they invoke the figure of the ‘emancipatory pedagogue’ (2010, p. 132) from Rancière’s writing in The Ignorant Schoolmaster in their argument about the continued importance of the authority of the

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teacher in their proposed new vision of emancipatory education. This distance between Rancière’s writing and new approaches to emancipatory education is somewhat collapsed in Biesta’s (2017) retrospective analysis of the uptake of Rancière’s work over the past decade or so. Here, Biesta attributes, ‘a strong argument for emancipatory education’ (2017, p. 53) to Rancière. Others, inspired by Biesta, have made similar attributions. Galloway (2012, p. 176), for example, refers to ‘Rancière’s emancipatory education’. While all of this might seem to be a matter of semantics, I think an important manoeuvre is made here, whereby educational philosophers keen to outline a particular vision of emancipatory education have attributed to Rancière a theory or philosophy of (emancipatory) education that is simply not there in his writing. This manoeuvre is mainly achieved through pedagogic readings of The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Regardless of what precise language these scholars choose, each outlines a vision of emancipatory education that is premised on the dynamics of Jacotot’s ‘anti-method’ of emancipatory practice or ‘intellectual emancipation’, as recounted by Rancière in this text. The emphases in these arguments are varied. In Biesta’s work (2010a, 2017; Bingham and Biesta 2010), the relation of ‘will to will’ rather than ‘intelligence to intelligence’ between teacher and student in Jacotot’s practice is taken up in an argument for the continued role and authority of the teacher, echoed by Galloway (2012). In Masschelein and Simons’ (2010) work, Jacotot’s insistence that, ‘[e]verything is in the book’ (Rancière 1991, p. 23) animates their emphasis on the ‘thing-in-common’, which the emancipatory teacher ‘puts on the table’ (Masschelein and Simons 2010, p.  675), echoed in Vlieghe’s plea for a ‘thing-centred’ pedagogy (Vlieghe 2018, p. 923) and Cornelissen’s (2010) critique of the ‘teacher-as-facilitator’. While these reconstructions of an emancipatory education based on the dynamics of Jacotot’s emancipatory practice are an interesting and potentially worthwhile exercise in themselves, they do not, I would argue, represent any ‘Rancièrian’ view of emancipatory education. Rancière is primarily concerned with the implications of Jacotot’s story, including the failure of projects designed to institutionalise his practice as one among many pedagogic methods, as Bingham and Biesta (2010) themselves have pointed out. Furthermore, this interest lies primarily in the political and

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societal implications of Jacotot’s story—for understanding the nature of emancipation and the impossibility of societal emancipation, as well as the pedagogic logic that infuses societal ‘fictions’ of inequality. There is a tendency to apply a pedagogical reading to Rancière’s discussion of Jacotot’s efforts in the work on emancipatory education by educational philosophers and theorists, which, as Rancière (1991) reiterates again and again, was primarily about emancipation not teaching. To impute to Jacotot a ‘philosophy of teaching’ (Anwaruddin 2015, p. 744) is to risk repeating the mistake of those who tried to institute a form of ‘universal teaching’ (Rancière 1991, p. 129) derived from Jacotot’s practice. Biesta (2017) is critical of both the application of Rancière’s writing to educational theory and practice in general (as opposed to a strict focus on emancipatory education) and to what he sees as Rancière’s abandonment of his interest in the role of the teacher in favour of a constructivist view of learning in his later writing, particularly in The Emancipated Spectator. He writes, ‘Rancière’s argument is an argument about emancipation and the role of the teacher in emancipatory education, and not a general theory of education’ (Biesta 2017, p. 63, my italics). Biesta (2017, p. 67) goes on to argue that, in The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière ‘seems to have shifted from a focus on emancipatory teaching to a more general account of education as a teaching-learning situation’. However, I would argue that the ‘role of the teacher in emancipatory education’ and the ‘focus on emancipatory teaching’ that Biesta attributes to Rancière (Biesta 2017), p. 63) were always Biesta’s, not Rancière’s. That Biesta was able to reconstruct such an interest from Rancière’s writing is because of a very specific focus on the dynamics of Jacotot’s practice (in particular, the exercise of the emancipatory master’s will in demanding and then verifying the exertion of a student’s effort). But even for Jacotot—and Rancière is not Jacotot, as Biesta (2017, p. 63) himself reminds us—this exercise of will is not primarily a form of emancipatory teaching or a pedagogic method. It is the practice of intellectual emancipation. Also, while Biesta (Bingham and Biesta 2010) does take seriously Rancière’s broader critique of a pedagogic logic underpinning inequality in society, he limits this to a critique of the ‘explicative order’, rather than the more radical critique of a  pedagogic logic, per se, in the political sphere, which I would argue is central to Rancière’s discussion of a ‘society pedagogicized’. In The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière extends this

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critique to the politics of art and aesthetics, critiquing the pedagogic art projects that aim to control art’s political impact, which for Rancière is always indeterminate. This is where Rancière’s central interest lies in The Emancipated Spectator: in the indeterminate political import of art and misguided attempts to direct the relationship between cause and effect (see Chap. 3)—not in a ‘general account of education’, as Biesta (2017, p. 67) suggests. In this text, Rancière (2009a) applies his critique of the pedagogic logic of society advanced in The Ignorant Schoolmaster to the pedagogic logic of much art practice. Accusing Rancière of advocating a kind of ‘neo-liberal freedom’ (Biesta 2017, p. 67) in this text only makes sense if it is first viewed as a text about (emancipatory) education, which, I would argue, it is not. Biesta is not alone in attributing a theory of emancipatory education to Rancière, but the seminal nature of his contribution in this area, his extended discussion across various texts, and his later critique of Rancière’s work for not faithfully following the teacher-centred emancipatory education Biesta attributes to him illustrate why such attributions are so problematic. This is perhaps best evidenced in the emergence, more recently, of work that takes issue with a ‘Rancièrian’ pedagogy based on the exercise of the teacher’s will, as exemplary of a ‘neoliberal’ obsession with accountability and self-reliance (see, e.g., Bojesen 2018). Bojesen’s (2018) assertion that, ‘the ignorant schoolmaster might in fact be the ultimate neoliberal ‘educator’ or instructor: an accountant of attentiveness and effort, as well as facilitator and attributor of value’, surely cannot be attributed solely to a lack of serious engagement with Rancière’s writing. Reconstructed theories of  a  ‘Rancièrian’ emancipatory education, and the role of the ‘emancipatory pedagogue,’ within it contribute to making such misrepresentations of Rancière’s writing legible within educational philosophy and theory. In the work on democratic education, the attribution of a (emancipatory) theory of education to Rancière is less of a problem. Work in this area tends to draw primarily on Rancière’s writing on democracy and politics in works such as On the Shores of Politics, Disagreement, and Hatred of Democracy (though some combines this with more ‘pedagogic’ readings of The Ignorant Schoolmaster as outlined above). For this reason, I would argue that this work remains closer to Rancière’s writing and offers a more faithful reading of it. Although Rancière makes clear that

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his works are ‘not ‘theories of ’ but ‘interventions on’ (2009b, p.  116) democracy and politics (amongst other things), it is far less jarring to read of a ‘Rancièrian’ political philosophy or theory of democracy than a ‘Rancièrian’ theory of education. It also clearly makes sense to take up the key terms in Rancière’s political thinking (e.g., ‘police’, ‘politics’, ‘political subjectification’, and ‘the community of equals’) in work that addresses Rancière’s vision of democracy and its implications for democratic education. The educational import of Rancière’s writing here is (rightly, I would argue) at one remove. However, there are still some problems arising from this interpretation of Rancière within educational philosophy and theory oriented towards the question of democratic education. There is a tendency in this strand of work to ‘domesticate’ and stabilise Rancière’s view of democracy. This is evident, for example, in Means’ (2011) argument that an ‘activist citizenship’ can be read into Rancière’s view of democracy or even in Biesta’s (2011, p. 150) use of the term ‘democratic politics’. While Biesta (2011) is clear that, in Rancière’s terms, ‘democratic politics’ refers to a very specific kind of political action that happens rarely or sporadically, this is a term that Rancière rarely uses himself, preferring simply ‘democracy’ or ‘politics’ alone. This composite term might imply more stability than is really present in Rancière’s writing. Additionally, Biesta (2011) risks attributing a theory of democratic education to Rancière, when he claims that, ‘Rancière shifts education from its traditional place as the ‘producer’ of political subjectivities’ (Biesta 2011, p. 150). Again, the problems arising from this are evident in critical readings of a ‘Rancièrian’ approach to democratic education, such as that of Leiviskä (2020), who offers a defence of deliberative democracy against what she sees as the increasingly popular, ‘disruptive’ view of democracy provided by Biesta (2007, 2009, 2011; Bingham and Biesta 2010). In making this argument, she refers to the ‘subject of Rancierian education’ (Leiviskä 2020, p.  503), again illustrating how such educational readings of Rancière’s work have become part of the mainstream discourse of educational philosophy and theory. In the work offering novel critiques of the education system and education policy trends, following Rancière’s critique of mass schooling, educational reforms, and a ‘society pedagogicized’, the attribution of an educational theory to Rancière’s writing is again less of a problem. This

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strand of work takes much more seriously the fact that Rancière’s primary contribution in The Ignorant Schoolmaster is a political and societal one addressing equality. However, there is still a tendency to draw conclusions about emancipatory or democratic education in these contributions. For example, Masschelein and Simons’ (2010) interpretation of Rancière’s use of the term ‘schole’ to indicate the school as, ‘the site of the symbolic visibility of equality and its actual negotiation’ (Rancière 1995, cited in Masschelein and Simons 2010, p. 675) perhaps underplays the irony of Rancière’s polemic re-appropriation of this term from the critics of ‘educational failure’ (Rancière 1995, p. 55). Again, for Rancière, the implications of the school’s suspension of space-time relations are primarily societal and political, as the school acts as a site in which competing narratives of equality in society collide. Masschelein and Simon’s (2010) interpretation, in contrast, emphasises the emancipatory potential of this for pupils, allying it to an emancipatory pedagogy.

Reflection I began this chapter by outlining some difficult questions about the extent to which Rancière’s writing can be applied to educational theory and practice in a way that is both meaningful and faithful to the spirit of his work. I noted that this is a particularly acute question in educational research and scholarship where questions about the capacity of education to contribute to broader political and emancipatory projects have been of central concern. I also noted that Rancière’s work has been particularly influential in educational philosophy and theory and that this presents its own challenges, since educational philosophy and theory is primarily concerned with developing theories of education, something which sits in tension with Rancière’s method of contributing interventions on various debates, including those in education. In this chapter, I have outlined and discussed work in educational philosophy and theory that translates Rancière’s writing for education, noting both the important contributions of such work and the problems that arise from it. I noted three key areas of contribution, each with their own challenges: the reconstruction of theories of emancipatory education, the problematisation of

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prominent approaches to democratic education and citizenship education, and analyses of education policy and the public role of schools in democratic societies. In terms of my own research and scholarship, my ‘point of entry’ into these debates relates to the second theme, that is, in the problematisation of prominent approaches to democratic education. Inspired by Biesta’s (2007) critique of the focus on inclusion in programmes of democratic education that are based on deliberative models of democracy as the gradual expansion of the democratic sphere from a stable centre, I too turned to Rancière’s work for a more disruptive and radical view of democracy. In my own theoretical work, I also considered the implications of this for democratic education and argued for greater attention to the aesthetic dimensions of political experience and the role of art in young people’s democratic learning (McDonnell 2014). Such democratic learning was understood, following Biesta (2006, 2010c), as a process of learning from moments of democratic subjectivity, which, following Rancière (2004), are always also aesthetic and may be connected to art, though in indeterminate ways (McDonnell 2014). I argued that this carried important implications for research (in terms of the significance of young people’s aesthetic experiences and their engagement with art for understanding their overall democratic learning) and for practice (in terms of the fact that young people need to be supported to reflect on the politically and aesthetically disruptive experiences that might aid their democratic learning). As far as theories of democratic education go, this is, evidently, rather minimal. With Ruitenberg (2010a), I would argue that democratic moments may happen in schools but that we should not assume that they will, and it is not possible to plan for them. In terms of a minimal democratic education that may connect to this, pupils can be encouraged to reflect on and learn from those moments when democracy does ‘enter’ (Ruitenberg 2008, p. 5). This minimalism is itself problematic. All the applications of Rancière’s writing within educational philosophy and theory that I have discussed in this chapter go to the heart of this very difficult question about the role of schools in larger political projects, one that is very acute for educationalists, who may be tempted to ask themselves what they are doing if they are not contributing to emancipation

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and political change. Perhaps Rancière’s own comments on any practical educational lessons to be drawn from The Ignorant Schoolmaster, in the essay that opens Bingham and Biesta’s (2010) book, best address this problem. He writes, ‘The virtue of the ignorant schoolmaster lies in knowing that a learned person is not a teacher, that a teacher is not a citizen, that a citizen is not a learned person. Not that it is impossible to be all at once. What is impossible, instead, is to harmonize the role of these figures’ (Rancière 2010, p. 15).

References Amsler, S. S. (2015). The education of radical democracy. London: Routledge. Anwaruddin, S. M. (2015). Pedagogy of ignorance. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47(7), 734–746. Biesta, G. J. J. (2020). Risking ourselves in education: Qualification, socialization, and subjectification revisited. Educational Theory, 70(1), 89–104. Biesta, G. J. J. (2017). Don’t be fooled by ignorant schoolmasters: On the role of the teacher in emancipatory education. Policy Futures in Education, 15(1), 52–73. Biesta, G. J. J. (2011). The ignorant citizen: Mouffe, Rancière, and the subject of democratic education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 30(2), 141–153. Biesta, G.  J. J. (2010a). A new logic of emancipation: The methodology of Jacques Rancière. Educational Theory, 60(1), 39–59. Biesta, G. J. J. (2010b). Learner, student, speaker: Why it matters how we call those we teach. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 540–552. Biesta, G.  J. J. (2010c). How to exist politically and learn from it: Hannah Arendt and the problem of democratic education. Teachers’ College Record, 112(2), 556–575. Biesta, G. J. J. (2009). What kind of citizenship for European higher education? Beyond the competent active citizen. European Educational Research Journal, 8(2), 146–158. Biesta, G. J. J. (2007). “Don’t count me in” Democracy, education and the question of inclusion. Nordic Studies in Education/Nordisk Pedagogik, 27(1), 18–29. Biesta, G.  J. J. (2006). Beyond learning. Democratic education for a human future. London: Paradigm.

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Bingham, C., & Biesta, G. J. J. (2010). Jacques Rancière: Education, truth, emancipation. London: Continuum. Bojesen, E. (2018). Passive education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(10), 928–935. Chiew, F. (2018). A posthuman pedagogy with Rancière and Bateson. Critical Studies in Education, 59(3), 297–312. Cornelissen, G. (2010). The public role of teaching: To keep the door closed. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 523–539. Dunne, É. (2016). Untology. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 49(4), 571–588. Friedrich, D., Jaastad, B., & Popkewitz, T. S. (2010). Democratic education: An (im)possibility that yet remains to come. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 571–587. Fullam, J. (2015). “Listen Then, or, Rather, Answer”: Contemporary Challenges to Socratic Education. Educational Theory, 65(1), 53–71. Galloway, S. (2012). Reconsidering emancipatory education: Staging a conversation between Paulo Freire and Jacques Rancière. Educational Theory, 62(2), 163–184. Harney, S., & Linstead, S.  A. (2009). Faith and fortune in the post-colonial classroom. Management Learning, 40(1), 69–85. Kabgani, S., Niesche, R., & Gulson, K. N. (2018). Psycho-politicising educational subjectivity: A posthumanist consideration of Rancière and Lacan. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(13), 1259–1270. Lambert, C. (2012). Redistributing the sensory: The critical pedagogy of Jacques Rancière. Critical Studies in Education, 53(2), 211–227. Leiviskä, A. (2020). Disruptive or deliberative democracy? A review of Biesta’s critique of deliberative models of democracy and democratic education. Ethics and Education, 15(4), 499–515. Lewis, T.  E. (2010). Paulo Freire’s last laugh: Rethinking critical pedagogy’s funny bone through Jacques Rancière. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 635–648. Masschelein, J., & Simons, M. (2010). The hatred of public schooling: The school as the mark of democracy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 666–682. Means, A. (2011). Jacques Rancière, education, and the art of citizenship. The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 33(1), 28–47. McDonnell, J. (2014). Reimagining the role of art in the relationship between democracy and education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46(1), 46–58.

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Rancière, J. (2010). On ignorant schoolmasters. In C. Bingham & G. J. J. Biesta, Jacques Rancière. Education, truth, emancipation (pp.  1–24). London: Continuum. Rancière, J. (2009a). The emancipated spectator (trans: Elliot, G.). London: Verso. Rancière, J. (2009b). A few remarks on the method of Jacques Rancière. Parallax, 15(3), 114–123. Rancière, J. (2006). Hatred of Democracy (trans: Corcoran, S.). London: Verso. Rancière, J. (2004). The Politics of Aesthetics (trans: Rockhill, G.). London: Continuum. Rancière, J. (1995). On the shores of politics (trans: heron, L.). London: Verso. Rancière, J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation (trans: Ross, K.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ruitenberg, C. W. (2015). The practice of equality: A critical understanding of democratic citizenship education. Democracy and Education, 23(1), 2. Ruitenberg, C.  W. (2010a). Queer politics in schools: A Rancièrian reading. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 618–634. Ruitenberg, C. W. (2010b). Conflict, affect and the political: On disagreement as democratic capacity. In Factis Pax, 4(1), 40–55. Ruitenberg, C.  W. (2008). What if democracy really matters. Journal of Educational Controversy, 3(1), 1–8. Säfström, C.  A. (2010). The immigrant has no proper name: The disease of consensual democracy within the myth of schooling. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 606–617. Simons, M., & Masschelein, J. (2010). Hatred of democracy … and of the public role of education? Introduction to the special issue on Jacques Rancière. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 509–522. Stamp, R. (2013). Of slumdogs and schoolmasters: Jacotot, Rancière and Mitra on self-organized learning. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45(6), 647–662. Vlieghe, J. (2018). Rethinking emancipation with Freire and Rancière: A plea for a thing-centred pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(10), 917–927.

7 Art(s) Education

Some years after completing my doctoral research, I found myself delivering a draft paper on the relevance of Rancière’s writing for debates in education and the arts at an educational research conference. After presenting my work, which included displaying a reproduction of a Gaugin painting, discussed in detail in Rancière’s 2007 work, The Future of the Image (see Chap. 3), questions were invited. As the first question was asked, I was surprised by the evident offence and consternation my paper had caused, as the speaker prefaced his question with a critique of the way in which philosophers (of education) approach the discussion of art. Of particular concern was the presentation of a relatively poor-quality digital image of an artwork, to illustrate a particular theoretical point, thus in the speaker’s view undercutting the power of the work itself. In my naivety or ignorance, it seemed, I had unwittingly wandered onto the terrain of a fierce debate about the role of theory and philosophy in the field of art and aesthetics. It was not so much what I had said but the fact I was saying it (as someone speaking from the perspective of educational philosophy) and the way in which I was saying it (applying theory to an artwork without due consideration of the presentation of the work itself ) that had caused offence. The reasons behind my foray into this world of art and art theory were partly circumstantial. Having left my reading of Rancière to one side for © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. McDonnell, Reading Rancière for Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96013-1_7

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some time, I was drawn back to it when a fellow academic asked me to participate in a symposium exploring Rancière’s writing from several educational angles. This opportunity allowed me to return to some questions that I had not fully addressed when reading Rancière’s work earlier. When reading Rancière’s writing for insights into democracy and democratic education, I had paid closer attention to his commentary on the aesthetics of politics than the politics of aesthetics (see Chaps. 2 and 3). Though intrigued by his writing on artistic regimes, literature, cinema, and contemporary art, I had focused more keenly on Rancière’s insights into the act of politics as an aesthetic rupture in the distribution of the sensible. Now, I wanted to explore the politics of aesthetics in Rancière’s writing in greater detail and explore its relevance for debates in art(s) education, including the provision of art education in formal, non-formal, and informal settings. In this chapter, I begin by outlining how Rancière’s writing on aesthetics has been taken up in the arguments about emancipatory, democratic, and political education discussed in the previous chapter. I then go on to outline some of the main ways in which Rancière’s writing on art and aesthetics has been taken up in the literature on art(s) education and discuss some of the main difficulties associated with such applications. Principal among these is the indeterminacy of art’s political impact in Rancière’s writing, which sits in tension with the intentionality of education, often concerned with bringing about specific, political outcomes. This tension runs throughout questions about the relevance of Rancière’s writing for art(s) education in formal and non-formal contexts. I conclude the chapter with a reflection on my experience of trying to engage with Rancière’s writing in considerations of art(s) education, to illustrate the potential rewards and challenges of this.

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 he Aesthetic Dimensions of Emancipatory, T Democratic, and Political Education The potential of Rancière’s writing for informing emancipatory, democratic and political education has been a key concern for educationalists.  Scholars in educational philosophy and theory have  also used Rancière’s writing to consider the aesthetic dimensions of emancipatory, political, and democratic education. Lewis’ (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013) work is particularly significant in this respect, applying Rancière’s writing to offer an aesthetic re-reading of Freirean critical pedagogy. Lewis (2009, p. 297) has described his overall project as one of reading Freire and Rancière with/against each other to radicalise Freire’s critical pedagogy, on the one hand, and to ‘utilize Freire to complicate Rancière’s theory of education’ on the other. A central argument in this project is that ‘the redistribution of the sensible through education is an aesthetic event’ (Lewis, 2009, p. 269). Specifically, Lewis (2009, 2012) argues that Rancière’s elaboration of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ helps to understand Freire’s reconfiguration of the teacher-student binary (in which teachers become students and vice versa) as not only an educational disruption but also a political and aesthetic one. Lewis augments this central argument with readings of specific aspects of Rancière’s writing, including his discussions of the Kantian sublime, the aesthetic unconscious, and the changing nature of the image through the history of Western art. Lewis has variously argued for the need to pay greater attention to humour and laughter in critical pedagogy (2010), for the use of images in critical pedagogy that is more ‘ambiguous’ than that of Freire but more ‘optimistic’ than Rancière (2011) and for a greater attention to curiosity in critical pedagogy (2012). Moving from a relatively narrow focus on Freirean critical pedagogy towards the broader question of political and democratic education, Lewis (2013, p. 53) has argued, based on his reading of Rancière, that, ‘a truly democratic education must first and foremost work on the level of the senses themselves’. This emphasis on the political, democratic, and emancipatory potential of the redistribution of the sensible as an educational and an aesthetic and political event is a crucial contribution of Lewis’ work.

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Lewis’ contribution has also been influential on other work in educational philosophy and theory. Todd (2018), for example, has combined broader discussions of Rancière’s writing in the field with Lewis’ (2012) insights on the aesthetic dimensions of any critical, emancipatory, or democratic education that has social change as its aim. Following Lewis (2012), Todd (2018, p. 974) argues that democratic education ‘has an inherently aesthetic dimension’ in terms of its capacity to affect a redistribution of the sensible. Todd (2018) draws on Lewis’ (2012) insights to argue that, ‘while education is also about conserving tradition through its aims of socialisation, the aesthetic dimension allows us to consider both a reimagining of and possible resistance to that tradition as a key feature of educational practice’ (Todd, 2018, p.  975). Wildemeersch (2019), similarly, has drawn on Rancière’s notion of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ to consider the political and educational dimensions of community art projects, paying particular attention to the indeterminacy of art’s political effects in Rancière’s writing. As Wildemeersch (2019, p.  177) argues, ‘Rancière’s analysis interferes with the hopes that various practices, be they artistic, political, or educational, can instrumentally change the hearts and the minds of people in a particular direction’. Ruitenberg (2011) has also explored this aspect of Rancière’s writing and its implications for the act of teaching within emancipatory, democratic, or political education. Ruitenberg (2011) maintains that emancipation remains the implicit (and often explicit) goal of much education and argues that Rancière’s writing acts as an important corrective for those who wish to establish a direct relationship between their teaching and its emancipatory or political effects. Ruitenberg (2011) takes up Rancière’s argument about spectatorship in The Emancipated Spectator to highlight the problems of art projects that seek to establish specific and determined political ends. Ruitenberg (2011) highlights assumptions about the inequality and passivity (of spectators) underlying such educational projects. Ruitenberg (2011, p. 221) argues that Rancière’s writing therefore offers ‘an important cautionary tale for educators who claim that their work is emancipatory or aimed at political change’. Drawing on Biesta’s (2010, Bingham and Biesta 2010) argument about the role of the teacher in emancipatory education, Ruitenberg (2011, p. 222) further argues that, ‘the educator who heeds Rancière’s warning offers

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students texts and images to be interpreted and sends them back to these texts and images if they do not play close attention’. The key element of the pedagogic relationship in emancipatory education for Ruitenberg (2011) then is the teacher’s insistence that the student pays attention—a relation of ‘will-to-will’. This interest in using Rancière’s writing on aesthetics to elaborate and extend discussions of political, emancipatory, and democratic education forms an important strand of work in educational philosophy and theory. Where Lewis (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013) takes up Rancière’s writing on aesthetics to offer a fresh perspective on Freirean critical pedagogy, Ruitenberg (2011) takes up Rancière’s writing to elaborate and extend Biesta’s (2010, 2017; Bingham and Biesta 2010) argument about emancipatory education. Todd (2018) and Wildemeersch (2019) also draw on Rancière’s writing (and interpretations of this in educational philosophy and theory) to explore the potential of educational art projects within a new, aesthetic version of emancipatory, political, or democratic education. It is interesting to note that while this work adopts Rancière’s writing on the politics of aesthetics to map out different ways of thinking through the connections between art and politics, it often also suggests new educational approaches within emancipatory, democratic, or political education and, in doing do, tends to privilege pedagogic readings of The Ignorant Schoolmaster and The Emancipated Spectator that I outlined in Chap. 6. The problems arising from this are discussed later in this chapter. First, however, I want to outline how Rancière’s writing has been taken up in the field of aesthetics and art theory.

Rancière’s Appeal in Art and Aesthetics Some of the mistrust of philosophers that I alluded to in my anecdote at the beginning of this chapter has also been noted in the literature on Rancière’s uptake in the art world. Tanke (2010), for example, refers to ‘a certain amount of suspicion about further incursions by theory’ but also notes that Rancière’s work has gained considerable attention in the art world since the publication of The Emancipated Spectator in 2009. Tanke (2010, p.  2) attributes the appeal of Rancière’s writing in part to his

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articulation of a continued political role for art (though envisioned as always indeterminate and unpredictable) and to his strong critique of more pessimistic interpretations of art’s future (see Chap. 3). As Tanke (2010, p. 3) argues, ‘[Rancière’s] work attempts to cultivate a theoretical position that will allow us to understand how art can be active on the political stage rather than simply lament the failures of aesthetic and political collaboration throughout the twentieth century’ (2010, p. 3). Integral to Rancière’s argument about the politics of art and aesthetics are two important theoretical manoeuvres. One is the ‘rehabilitation of the aesthetic’ (Bishop 2012)—particularly Rancière’s (2004, 2009a) revival of the ‘aesthetic experience’, elaborated by Kant and Schiller, as a potentially emancipatory and political experience. As Tanke (2010) writes, ‘in returning us to some sources that are … no longer fashionable—Kant, Schiller, and Schlegel—he attempts to shed light on the metapolitics of our current art practices’ (2010, p.  13). The second is Rancière’s elaboration of ‘artistic regimes’, and their disruption of the neat, chronological characterisation of the transition from modernism to postmodernism that has dominated art theory and art history. As Gilbert-­ Rolfe (2011, p. 9) argues, ‘Rancière’s contribution to thinking about the post-modern as something other than the not-modern’ secures his place as a key reference point for pedagogy in art education. Tanke (2010, pp. 14–15) notes that Rancière’s challenge to the ‘chronological markers of modernity and postmodernity’ also make his work well suited to the exploration of ‘so-called new media’ in contemporary art. Bishop (2012) has made a particularly significant contribution to applying Rancière’s insights to the world of aesthetics and art theory. As with Tanke (2010), Bishop (2012) sees the value of Rancière’s writing in its articulation of the political significance of art beyond the pessimistic binary of Lyotard’s ‘art of the sublime’ and Debord’s critique of the ‘society of the spectacle’. Bishop (2012, p. 18) argues that Rancière has, ‘rehabilitated the idea of aesthetics and connected it to politics as an integrally related domain’. Taking up Rancière’s critique of the ‘ethical turn’ in art, which, in its softer versions, aims to restore social bonds (Rancière 2009b), Bishop (2012, p. 25) takes issue with the emphasis on compassionate identification in the discourse surrounding participatory art, in which, ‘an ethics of interpersonal interaction comes to prevail over a

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politics of social justice’ (Bishop 2012, p. 25). For Bishop (2012), as for Rancière (2009a), the problem with participatory art and relational aesthetics is that they operate in an ethical rather than political register. For Bishop (2012), following Rancière, the political effects are to be found more in its ability to disrupt and dislocate than in its power to unify. Bishop (2012) also takes up Rancière’s work to address a common feature of both participatory art and contemporary art in general, that is, its disavowal of ‘the aesthetic’ as an elitist and exclusive concept. By this logic, Bishop (2012, p. 27) argues, ‘art is perceived both as too removed from the real world and yet as the only space from which it is possible to experiment: art must remain autonomous in order to initiate or achieve a model for social change’ (Bishop 2012, p.  27). However, applying Rancière’s (2004, 2009a) understanding of art in the aesthetic regime as paradoxically both singular and always already political, Bishop (2012, p. 27) argues that such thinking is ill-founded and that, ‘the exemplary ethical gesture in art is therefore a strategic obfuscation of the political and the aesthetic’. Consequently, Bishop (2012, p. 29) argues, contra to many claims in contemporary art, that, ‘the aesthetic doesn’t need to be sacrificed at the altar of social change, because it always already contains this promise’ (Bishop 2012, p. 29). Based on Rancière’s notion of artistic regimes, Bishop (2012) argues that the kind of thinking that judges art in ethical terms is anachronistic. In the sections that follow, I outline how these arguments about the applicability of Rancière’s writing on art and aesthetics have been applied to questions about art(s) education in formal and non-formal settings including schools, universities, and community arts projects.

Art Education in Schools Questions about the emancipatory, political, and democratic potential of education feature significantly in applications of Rancière’s writing to art education in schools. In the UK context, Atkinson (2012) has engaged with Rancière (in combination with Badiou), primarily via Biesta’s (2010; Bingham and Biesta 2010) argument about emancipatory education, to argue for a ‘pedagogy of the event’ in which the teacher retains the

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important role of demanding the attention of students. The learning involved in such education, Atkinson (2012, p. 12) argues, ‘constitutes a political act, the confrontation of two worlds through which that which was previously invisible becomes visible’. Though drawing on examples from art education in schools, Atkinson’s (2012) argument also relates to educational theory in general. He is concerned with rethinking education in disruptive and radical terms, drawing on readings of Rancière and others. The same could also be said of Thulmert’s (2015) work, which makes an interesting and original argument in favour of the disruptive innovations of new technologies that form part of the ‘do-it-yourself ’ (DIY) movement, via an engagement with the figure of the ‘new amateur’. Thulmert (2015) sees in such innovations, involving enthusiasts creating artistic outputs that would otherwise be impossible, parallels with the emancipatory activities of the ‘worker-artists’ of Rancière’s archival research. For Thulmert (2015, p.  123), this insight has important implications for educational theory and for considerations of emancipatory education, including in art education, as it disrupts the ‘pedagogic fictions’ of traditional educational practice and suggests that formal educational spaces might be ‘made porous’ to the egalitarian disruptions of the new amateurs. Like Ruitenberg (2008, 2010b), Thulmert (2015) sees the value of Rancière’s work in highlighting the kinds of disruptive, egalitarian moments that cannot be anticipated or planned in educational contexts, but which nevertheless may occur within and thus disrupt formal education. In the US context, an important strand of work applying Rancière’s writing to art education in schools has involved a Rancièrian critique of current models of art education, combined with suggestions for more egalitarian (Phùng and Fendler 2015), democratic (Siegesmund 2013), and political (Kalin 2018) alternatives. These contributions engage with Rancière’s writing on aesthetics, in particular his reappraisal of the history of Western art in terms of artistic regimes, which, as Tanke (2010, p. 14) has noted, help to challenge, ‘the chronological markers of modernity and post-modernity’. Siegesmund (2013) and Phùng and Fendler (2015) each take up Rancière’s writing to critique the knowledge-centric approach of the Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE)  model

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dominant in the USA. Siegesmund (2013) places Rancière’s reading of Schiller within a longer history of art education. Identifying different streams within this history, including ‘artistic education’ (technical training), art education (developing empathetic skills through art), and ‘aesthetic education’ (appreciation of cultural forms), he argues for an unapologetically ‘useless’ (non-utilitarian) view of art within a broader programme of democratic education. Phùng and Fendler (2015), meanwhile, argue that the hierarchical distinction between forms of artistic practice in the DBAE, with its focus on developing skills for the global economy, mirrors the hierarchical distinctions of the representative regime in Rancière’s writing. This, they argue, alluding to Biesta’s work, is allied with a view of art education as primarily concerned with the qualification and socialisation functions of education. Drawing on Simons and Masschelein’s (2010) argument for ‘pedagogic subjectivation’, they propose a new, more emancipatory approach to art education, in which art is understood as experimentation and education as subjectification. While Siegesmund (2013) and Phùng and Fendler (2015) address the problems of knowledge-based instrumentalist approaches to art education that focus either on technical skills or on knowledge and appreciation of art—what Siegesmund (2013) refers to as ‘artistic’ and ‘aesthetic’ education, respectively—Kalin (2018) addresses the new ‘pragmatic’ turn in art education represented by the ‘Partnership for twenty-first Century Learning’ (P21) strategy in the USA. She argues that this new approach is informed by the logic of socially engaged, relational, ‘NGO-esque’ (Kalin 2018, p.  374) work. Kalin (2018) argues that while such work might seem politically progressive and socially beneficial, it in fact often ends up reinforcing the neoliberal status quo by filling in the gaps left by de-funded public services and therefore enacts a form of policing, rather than politics, in Rancière’s terms. Drawing on Rancière’s critique of the apolitical consensus logic of contemporary governments, Kalin (2018) argues, ‘[w]ithin Rancierian perspective…democracy requires disagreement, incongruity and disruption of common sense. Instead NGO-esque art education risks the perpetuation of neoliberal common sense in the name of conviviality and service’ (2018, p. 274). Kalin’s (2018) argument is essentially a critique of the ‘depoliticization of art education’ (2018,

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p. 374) associated with the P21 and its pragmatic approach to art education, with an implicit suggestion that art education could and perhaps ought to retain a more political role. The work of educational philosophers and theorists who have been key translators of Rancière’s writing features significantly in the above contributions on art education. Atkinson (2012) draws on Bingham and Biesta’s (2010) interpretation of Rancière’s work, while Phùng and Fendler draw explicitly on Simons and Masschelein (2010) and implicitly on Biesta’s concept of the qualification, socialisation, and subjectification functions of education (see, e.g., Biesta 2020) in their argument for educational subjectification as a key aim for a more egalitarian art education. Brodén (2020) offers an extended engagement with, and critique of, Biesta’s (2017) interpretation of Rancière’s writing in an argument concerning the nature of what Siegesmund (2013) refers to as aesthetic education, that is, education involving knowledge and appreciation of artworks. Brodén (2020) takes issue with Biesta’s educational reading of aesthetic interpretation in The Emancipated Spectator, which leads him to characterise Rancière’s writing in this text as an argument in favour of constructivist learning (see also Chap. 6). Brodén is keen to remind readers that The Emancipated Spectator is a text that deals with theorisations of spectatorship, not simply with the figure of the spectator. Essentially, Brodén (2020) argues, Biesta is too keen to read into the figure of the spectator the figure of the student, resulting in his interpretation of Rancière’s contribution as an argument for constructivist learning in which the interpretations of the student are paramount. Though critical of Biesta’s (2017) interpretation of Rancière’s argument in The Emancipated Spectator, Brodén (2020) turns to Biesta’s work on educational subjectification (see, e.g., Biesta 2020) and a pedagogic reading of The Ignorant Schoolmaster in his argument concerning aesthetic education to argue for an ‘ambivalent’ approach to education in the appreciation of aesthetic works, in which there is balance between the ‘thing-in-common’ (the artwork) and the responses of teacher and student in the interpretation of the work. This, he argues, can be an occasion for educational subjectification, in Biesta’s sense of ‘coming into presence’ (2020, p. 41).

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Finally, it is worth noting that Rancière’s discussion of spectatorship in The Emancipated Spectator, which starts with a discussion of theatre but extends to contemporary art in general, has been influential in the field of theatre and drama education. Fryer (2010, 2015) has set out theoretical arguments about the kind of pedagogy that might stem from an indeterminate view of the relation between artworks and spectators in theatre education. Allen and Laine (2018) and De Coursey and Trent (2016) have carried out empirical work with theatre and drama educators, exploring the extent to which Rancière’s concepts are helpful for understanding the work of educators in this field. Shawyer (2019) offers insights into the application of a Rancièrian approach (based on a pedagogic reading of The Ignorant Schoolmaster and The Emancipated Spectator) to theatre history courses in higher education, to encourage students to take ownership of their education, and to be ‘emancipated spectators of theatre, history and of the world around them’ (Shawyer 2019, p. 420).

Community Art Projects Working generatively with Rancière’s notion of the aesthetic regime, Bishop (2012) discusses examples of contemporary art practices to explore how and where the emancipatory potential of the aesthetic experience might be found in art today, including those which, in their participatory form, take on a pedagogic or educative dimension. She offers a reading of Rancière’s work in which ‘good art’ is that which best negotiates the paradox of art in the aesthetic regime, that is, which balances the singularity and autonomy of art with its fundamental relation to politics. Furthermore, Bishop (2012, p. 30) argues that Rancière’s work implies that there is ‘no privileged medium’ and that ‘the meaning of artistic forms shifts in relation to the uses also made of these forms by society at large’. On this reading, there is nothing inherently ‘good’ about participation, the meaning of which changes over time and in different contexts. Interestingly, however, when addressing the question of ‘pedagogic art projects’, as contemporary practices expand to take on educational forms, Bishop (2012, p. 267) turns to a comparison of Rancière’s writing in The Ignorant Schoolmaster with the work of Freire, to assess the import

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of such projects. Drawing on these and other frameworks for understanding the educational potential of contemporary (participatory) art, she cautions against an uncritical approach in which such projects become simply ‘edutainment’ or ‘pedagogical aesthetics’ (Bishop 2012, p. 274). It is also worth noting that some of the arguments about the aesthetic dimensions of emancipatory, democratic, and political education, and some of the critiques of art education curricula and policies discussed above have addressed the question of practice in community arts education. Todd (2018) relates her argument about the potential for a new, aesthetic form of political education to empirical examples of community arts projects. Wildemeersch (2019) too takes community arts projects as the principal context for exploring the relevance of Rancière’s insights on the indeterminate political impact of art. Kalin’s (2018) critique of the relational ‘NGO-esque’ turn in art education in schools in the USA is directed at the apolitical reading of community art that is inherent in such an approach.

Critical Evaluation Scholars have addressed the implications of Rancière’s writing on art and aesthetics for education from several perspectives. From the perspective of educational philosophy and theory, one common approach has involved aesthetic readings of emancipatory, political, or democratic education. Rancière’s elaboration of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ as the fundamental level at which art and politics are related has informed such readings, as well as Rancière’s arguments about spectatorship and the indeterminacy of art’s political impact. Lewis’ (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013) prolific work in this area has been particularly significant. Themes common in the uptake of Rancière’s work in educational philosophy and theory for rethinking political  education  in general (see Chap. 6)— including comparisons with Freire (Lewis 2009, 2012), questions about the extent to which schools can contribute to political education (Ruitenberg 2011), and arguments about educational subjectification (Todd 2018)—feature in these aesthetic readings also. Along with theorisations of the aesthetic dimensions of emancipatory, political, and

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democratic education, scholars working in this tradition have also analysed contemporary examples of educational and socially engaged art practices, often referring to examples of projects which, they argue, have affected a redistribution of the sensible. From the perspective of art theory and aesthetics, a key theme that has interested researchers and scholars is the ‘rehabilitation of the aesthetic’ (Bishop 2012) and a renewed emphasis on the political import of art (Tanke 2010) that Rancière’s writing allows. This aspect to Rancière’s work, and particularly his reappraisal of the meaning of aesthetic experience and aesthetic education via Kant and Schiller, has informed several theoretical arguments for new kinds of aesthetic education with an important political dimension. It has also informed new analyses of educationally and socially engaged contemporary art practices, particularly in Bishop’s (2012) evaluation of the extent to which ‘pedagogic art projects’ achieve the balancing act between the autonomous and political nature of art in the aesthetic regime. When applied to art(s) education in formal and non-formal settings, these theoretical insights have led to a Rancièrian critique of current trends and dominant thinking in art education curricula, along with the presentation of more egalitarian, democratic, or political alternatives. Rancière’s reappraisal of the history of Western art via his notion of ‘artistic regimes’ has informed much of this work. An important contribution of such work is a fresh critical perspective on the hierarchical emphasis on knowledge and technical skills in much art education, often in the service of the global knowledge economy (Siegesmund 2013; Phùng and Fendler 2015). Such work also takes up Rancière’s critique of relational art and the ethical turn in both politics and aesthetics to address more recent, ‘pragmatic’, participatory, and ‘apolitical’ approaches to art education, in which community arts projects are sometimes seen as a cost-cutting shortcut to economic regeneration rather than a site of genuine political change (Kalin 2018). The value of this work lies in the expansive theoretical contributions that are brought to bear on questions and debates in art(s) education, resulting from the intermingling of art-critical and educational perspectives. Thulmert’s (2015) contribution, for example, addresses very current trends of artistic practice in the mode of ‘DIY’ and the ‘new amateur’

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as a deeply political and educational concern, making an interesting and original connection between these and the activities of the subjects of Rancière’s archival research. It is the expansiveness of Rancière’s work, as well as his appeal to theorists across several disciplines, that makes this possible. Equally, contributions such as Lewis’ (2010) intervention on the role of laughter in critical pedagogy, and Ruitenberg’s (2011) metaphorical application of Rancière’s critique of relational aesthetics to the limits and possibilities of politically engaged education, offer extremely inventive perspectives on education. Scholars working in art education have also been able to apply Rancière’s writing very creatively to concrete problems in policy and practice, as, for example, Phùng and Fendler’s (2015) interpretation of the DBAE as a contemporary example of the logic of the representative regime of the arts in practice. Although this hybridisation has been extremely generative, it can also lead to some problems. Occasionally, scholars working in this area refer to Rancière’s writing in ways that suggest a homogeneous ‘theory’ encompassing politics, art, and education in his work, rather than reflecting the complexity and diversity of his interventions. This is evident, for example, in Lewis’ (2009, p.  295) assertion that, ‘Rancière argues that the uncounted introduce a condition of unrepresentability into all educational practices’. Here, Lewis (2009) combines terms from Rancière’s writing on politics (‘the uncounted’) and aesthetics (‘unrepresentability’) to imply a synthesis of these in an overall approach to educational practice, which does not feature in that is not present in Rancière’s writing. While Rancière’s writing cannot be regarded as intervening on entirely discrete categories, there are still some important distinctions to be drawn in the arguments he develops. Rancière’s own distinction between the ‘aesthetics of politics’ and the ‘politics of aesthetics’, as well as his discussion of the difficulties of trying to unite the two, is particularly illuminating here. Rancière writes, ‘[y]ou have to accept that things that refer to the same of objective—political equality and aesthetic equality, for instance—don’t fit. That’s sort of why I set up this bipolarity between the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics’ (Rancière 2016, p. 55). Broadly speaking, when educational philosophers address the distribution of the sensible as an educational site for transformation and the emergence of new subjectivities, they are writing about the aesthetics of

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politics. When art theorists and educators develop new visions of an aesthetic education based on Rancière’s re-reading of Kant and Schiller, they are writing about the politics of aesthetics. Attempts to draw both these things together within an overall theory of education arguably go too far in trying to ‘define the relationship between the two as a systematic globality’ (Rancière 2016, p. 55), which for Rancière is simply not possible. Another problem with how Rancière’s writing has been applied to questions of art, aesthetics, and education is that, while this work engages seriously with Rancière’s interventions on aesthetics to address both art and politics in innovate ways, it often falls back on pedagogic readings of The Ignorant Schoolmaster and The Emancipated Spectator to offer coherent educational theories and approaches. Ruitenberg (2011), for example, offers a very interesting discussion of Rancière’s interventions on relational aesthetics but ultimately rests on a pedagogic reading of The Ignorant Schoolmaster in her argument about the role of the teacher within politically engaged education. Atkinson (2012) draws exclusively on Rancière’s writing in The Ignorant Schoolmaster in his argument about a ‘pedagogy of the event’, despite an extended discussion on recent developments in contemporary art that have been the subject of Rancière’s writing. In prioritising these interpretations of Rancière’s work in their educational contributions, these scholars risk reproducing some of the problems of an overly pedagogic reading of Rancière in educational philosophy and theory (see Chap. 6). This is particularly evident in references, for example, to ‘Rancière’s own educational philosophy’ (Lewis 2009, p. 287), Rancière’s ‘more radical model of education’ (De Boever 2011, p. 39), or the ‘educational writing of Jacques Rancière’ (Atkinson 2012, p.  11). Again, Biesta’s (2010, 2017; Bingham and Biesta 2010) reconstruction of an emancipatory education in which the teacher has the important role of directing students’ attention is influential here. Ruitenberg (2011), for example, states that, ‘In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancière argues that the teacher who wishes to emancipate should take care not to confuse the will and the intelligence’ (Ruitenberg 2011, p. 220), and Lewis (2012, p. 11) claims that, ‘the task of the teacher is not to explicate but to demand that the learner employ his or her intelligence’. As I argued in Chap. 6, such pedagogic readings of The Ignorant

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Schoolmaster tend to focus on the dynamics of Jacotot’s emancipatory practice (itself not primarily an act of teaching), rather than on Rancière’s overall argument about emancipation in this text. The roots of these problems may lie partly in the nature of academic work in education, particularly in educational philosophy and theory, as a field of inquiry that seeks to develop new philosophies and theories of education. This, of course, is quite different from Rancière’s project of offering interventions on various themes and phenomena, including education. They may also lie in the fact that educational philosophers and art theorists speak different languages and come with different frames of reference. This is highlighted in Brodén’s (2020) critique of Biesta’s (2017) analysis of Rancière’s argument in The Emancipated Spectator, which, he argues, fails to distinguish between educational and artistic contexts and engages insufficiently with the aesthetic import of Rancière’s writing. In the desire to formulate theories of an aesthetic, emancipatory education from Rancière’s writing, scholars in education risk both reducing the complexity of Rancière’s writing on diverse themes and over-emphasising questionable, pedagogic interpretations of Rancière’s work. Below, I offer a reflection on my own experiences of navigating this complex terrain, returning to the story with which I opened the chapter by way of illustration.

Reflection I began this chapter by recounting my experiences of trying to draw some lessons from Rancière’s writing for art and education, as well as some of the difficulties and challenges associated with this, including working across the fields of educational philosophy and art theory. All these themes feature the wider literature applying Rancière’s writing to questions in art, aesthetics, and education. Scholars working in this area have made important contributions to these questions and have encountered some of the same problems I did. Reviewing these can help to address how Rancière’s writing might be helpful in addressing questions related to art, aesthetics, and education, as well as highlighting some of the challenges associated with applying his writing in this area.

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Rancière’s writing on artistic regimes is helpful in offering fresh perspectives on established debates, common sense assumptions, and orthodox theories in art education. This is something I tried to address in my paper, in an argument about the false dichotomies between modern and postmodern, as well as old and young, which often persist within debates about the purposes of art education. Writing from the perspective of educational philosophy, my work only really touched upon these deeply entrenched ideas and debates. Drawing on Rancière’s critique of arguments about the invasion of images by words in contemporary art, I was referring to what Tanke (2010) has clearly articulated as the challenge that Rancière’s writing presents to chronological assumptions about modernity and postmodernity. Others writing from within art education have applied this insight to offer much more detailed critiques of such assumptions, with concrete applications for policy and practice (Siegesmund 2013; Phùng and Fendler 2015). Additionally, Rancière’s notion of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ as a configuration of ways of doing, saying, and being that are fundamental to both politics and aesthetics is particularly helpful for theorising the aesthetic dimensions of politically engaged education, when understood in radical terms. My contribution to theorising this aesthetic dimension was to argue that a version of democratic education aimed at supporting young people to learn from their experiences of democracy should involve attention to the aesthetic dimensions of such experiences, as well as their potential connection to arts practices. Lewis (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013) has offered a much more comprehensive argument about the aesthetic dimensions of critical pedagogy and other forms of politically engaged education, even going so far as to argue that the act of teaching and the educational relationship between teacher and student are themselves aesthetic phenomena. Authors such as Todd (2018) and Wildemeersch (2019) have applied aesthetic understandings of democratic and emancipatory education to analyse specific art projects. Finally, Rancière’s writing on contemporary art draws attention to some current trends in artistic practice that are worth analysing from the point of view of education. Community art, so long embedded within socially and politically engaged educational traditions, also often adopts participatory approaches that align with the shifts in critical art and the

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emergence of relational aesthetics. Again, writing from the perspective of educational philosophy and theory, I tried to see how Rancière’s writing might add to our understanding of the complexity of such art projects, including their political potential. Bishop (2012), writing from the perspective of art theory and criticism, has offered a much more detailed discussion of such work, based on her reading of Rancière and others. Her work demonstrates how Rancière’s revision of aesthetic experience and his articulation of the aesthetic regime of art can be particularly helpful in challenging conceptions of art (including educational art projects) that denigrate its aesthetic and/or political dimensions in favour of ethical aims. One of the main challenges of applying Rancière’s writing to questions of art and aesthetics in education (particularly in terms of politically engaged education) is the indeterminacy of the relationship between art and politics in Rancière’s writing. For Rancière, while aesthetics and politics are related at a fundamental level, and art can have an important political impact, this impact is always uncertain and cannot be planned. Incorporating such a view into any understanding of democratic, political, or emancipatory education is therefore difficult. Scholars working in this area have found various, inventive ways of approaching this. Ruitenberg (2011) uses Rancière’s insights on this as a cautionary tale for emancipatory educators, warning against any too direct attempts to change students’ views and have any predefined effects. Lewis (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013) instead uses Freire’s work to soften the edges of Rancière’s radical interventions on both politics and aesthetics. My own attempts to address this question have been more in line with Ruitenberg’s (2011) approach, outlining a view of democratic education in which aesthetic experiences of democracy are understood as phenomena that happen sporadically and cannot be planned—though they may happen in educational contexts, people can learn from them, and teachers can encourage such learning through reflection. Another challenge of applying Rancière’s writing to questions of art and aesthetics in education is the hybridity and disciplinary border crossing that this involves. As I noted above, such hybridity can be very generative, leading to exciting and inventive theoretical interventions. However, it does have its risks. Writing from the perspective of

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educational philosophy and theory in my work, I underestimated not only the hostility to philosophy in some quarters of the art world that perhaps partly informed the response to my conference paper but also the ‘blind-spots’ and different points of reference in educational philosophy and art theory. Brodén’s (2020) critique of Biesta’s (2017) argument about Rancière’s work in The Emancipated Spectator is perhaps best illustrative of the problems this can engender. In my work, I was certainly guilty of missing some of the nuances of debates within art education and aesthetics in my interventions on the art curriculum and on contemporary practice in community education. While others have perhaps navigated this gap more successfully, a related problem with this hybridity is the tendency to conflate different aspects of Rancière’s writing, misleadingly, into an overall ‘theory’ of art, politics, and education, as I discussed above. Finally, a related challenge in this area is balancing the nature of educational scholarship with the kind of writing that Rancière engages in, that is, a poetic and often oblique set of interventions on diverse themes, including art, politics, and education. While educational scholarship, and particularly educational philosophy and theory, tends to offer philosophies and theories of education or clear recommendations for educational practice, Rancière’s writing is a set of interventions on, not ‘theories of ’, education, art, politics, etc. These are challenges I also encountered in my work on Rancière’s relevance to questions of art and aesthetics in education. While I avoided any pedagogic reading of Rancière’s work, I was, on reflection, too willing to adhere to the conventions of writing for publications in educational philosophy and theory in my attempt to draw my observations across three areas into one overall, coherent argument about political and aesthetic equality (McDonnell 2017). By hanging my argument on the equivalence of political and aesthetic equality in Rancière’s writing, I was also perhaps guilty of trying to, ‘define the relationship between the two as a systematic globality’ (Rancière 2016, p. 55). In conclusion, Rancière’s writing does have significant relevance for questions of art and aesthetics in education, as well as art education in schools and beyond. The breadth of Rancière’s writing and the radical departure it takes from theoretical orthodoxies in both politics and aesthetics open the path for innovative, exciting, and radical contributions

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to thinking about the aesthetics of politically engaged education and the political dimensions of art education. However, it is difficult to tease out this significance while also remaining faithful to the spirit of Rancière’s writing as an unconventional and often poetic or artistic set of interventions on related phenomena while not offering any overarching theory, formula, or plan of action. This is a challenge in relation not only to questions of art and aesthetics in education but also to the application of Rancière’s writing to education in general. The nature of Rancière’s writing and its implications and challenges for educational research are further explored in the next chapter.

References Allen, D., & Laine, E. (2018). The integrated spectator: theatre audiences and pedagogy. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 23(4), 598–612. Atkinson, D. (2012). Contemporary art and art in education: The new, emancipation and truth. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 31(1), 5–18. Biesta, G. J. J. (2020). Risking ourselves in education: Qualification, socialization, and subjectification revisited. Educational Theory, 70(1), 89–104. Biesta, G. J. J. (2017). Don’t be fooled by ignorant schoolmasters: On the role of the teacher in emancipatory education. Policy Futures in Education, 15(1), 52–73. Biesta, G.  J. J. (2010). A new logic of emancipation: The methodology of Jacques Rancière. Educational Theory, 60(1), 39–59. Bingham, C., & Biesta, G. J. J. (2010). Jacques Rancière: Education, truth, emancipation. London: Continuum. Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial hells. Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. London: Verso. Brodén, D. (2020). Acknowledging ambivalence in teaching about art and aesthetics. Educational Theory, 70(1), 31–42. De Boever, A. (2011). The philosophy of (aesthetic) education. In J. E. Smith & A. Weisser (Eds.), Everything is in everything. Jacques Rancière between intellectual emancipation and aesthetic education (pp. 24–48). Zurich: JRP/Ringier.

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De Coursey, M., & Trent, J. (2016). Stultification and the negotiation of meaning: drama for second language education in Hong Kong Schools. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 21(4), 524–534. Fryer, N. (2015). The ‘third thing’: Rancière, process drama and experimental performance. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 20(3), 331–336. Fryer, N. (2010). From reproduction to creativity and the aesthetic: Towards an ontological approach to the assessment of devised performance. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 15(4), 547–562. Gilbert-Rolfe, J. (2011). Preface. In J. E. Smith & A. Weisser (Eds.), Everything is in everything. Jacques Rancière between intellectual emancipation and aesthetic education (pp. 7–9). Zurich: JRP/Ringier. Kalin, N. M. (2018). NGO art education. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 37(3), 367–376. Lewis, T. E. (2013). Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic regime and democratic education. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 47(2), 49–70. Lewis, T.  E. (2012). Teaching with pensive images: Rethinking curiosity in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 46(1), 27–45. Lewis, T.  E. (2011). The future of the image in critical pedagogy. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 30(1), 37–51. Lewis, T. E. (2010). Paulo Freire’s Last Laugh: Rethinking critical pedagogy’s funny bone through Jacques Rancière. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 635–648. Lewis, T. E. (2009). Education in the realm of the senses: Understanding Paulo Freire’s aesthetic unconscious through Jacques Rancière. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 43(2), 285–299. McDonnell, J. (2017). Political and aesthetic equality in the work of Jacques Rancière: Applying his writing to debates in education and the arts. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 51(2), 387–400. Phùng, T., & Fendler, L. (2015). A critique of knowledge-based arts education: Ars gratia artis through Rancière’s aesthetics. Sisyphus Journal of Education, 3(1), 172–191. Rancière, J. (2016). The method of equality (trans: Rose, J.). Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Rancière, J. (2009a). Aesthetics and its discontents (trans: Corcoran, S.). Cambridge: Polity. Rancière, J. (2009b). The emancipated spectator (trans: Elliot, G.). London: Verso. Rancière, J. (2007). The future of the image (trans: Elliot, G.). London: Verso. Rancière, J. (2004). The politics of aesthetics (trans: Rockhill, G.). London: Continuum. Ruitenberg, C. W. (2011). Art, politics, and the pedagogical relation. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 30(2), 211–223. Ruitenberg, C. W. (2010b). Conflict, affect and the political. On disagreement as democratic capacity. In Factis Pax, 4(1), 40–55. Ruitenberg, C. W. (2008). What if democracy really matters? Journal of Educational Controversy, 3(1), 1–8. Siegesmund, R. (2013). Art education and a democratic citizenry. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 32(3), 300–308. Simons, M., & Masschelein, J. (2010). Governmental, political and pedagogic subjectivation: Foucault with Rancière. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 588–605. Shawyer, S. (2019). Emancipated spectators in the theatre history classroom. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 24(3), 420–425. Tanke, J.  J. (2010). Why Rancière Now? The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 44(2), 1–17. Thulmert, K. (2015). Affordances of equality: Rancière, emerging media, and the new amateur. Studies in Art Education, 56(2), 114–126. Todd, S. (2018). Culturally reimagining education: Publicity, aesthetics and socially engaged art practice. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(10), 970–980. Wildemeersch, D. (2019). What can we learn from art practices? Exploring new perspectives on critical engagement with plurality and difference in community art education. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 38(1), 168–181.

8 Innovations in Educational Research

Around five years ago, I attended a seminar in a series celebrating experimental and innovative approaches to social and educational research. The seminar involved the presentation of research data on an educational topic I no longer recall. What I do recall is that in presenting the data, the researchers shared with us the reasoning behind their decision not to transcribe and parse the data into codes, categories, themes, or any other familiar unit associated with established approaches to the analysis of qualitative data but instead to digitise the data into a soundscape. The researchers subsequently scored this soundscape and created a piece of music, which they performed on a guitar. Reactions to the presentation varied. Some valued the way in which the researchers’ presentation work played with the conventional notions of qualitative research and pushed the boundaries of research itself. Others were disappointed not to hear more about the topic of the research and were openly critical of the experimental approach taken. All seemed fully aware that this conversation— about the nature of research itself at something of a crisis point in confidence in the notion of ‘science’—was of central importance to the whole endeavour of educational and social research. Having spent the years since completing my thesis in intensive teaching roles, and therefore © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. McDonnell, Reading Rancière for Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96013-1_8

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somewhat sheltered from such methodological concerns, I left the seminar perplexed and intrigued. What I had stumbled upon was the world of ‘post-research’ (Lather and St. Pierre 2013) and ‘post-qualitative inquiry’ (St. Pierre 2018), which, although it represents only a very small portion of educational research overall, has become an important area of methodological innovation over the past twenty years. The ‘post-’ of ‘post-qualitative inquiry’ can be understood to refer to questions about what comes next, after the ‘paradigm wars’ of the end of the last century (see, e.g., Hammersley 1992). This includes the attempts of interpretative and critical inquiry (with their primarily qualitative methods) to mirror, critique, or find equivalents for the standards of validity and reliability that were legitimised by dominant scientific paradigm (with its primarily quantitative methods). Lather’s (2001) coining of the terms ‘the ruins’, her subsequent elaboration of this, and the associated notion of the ‘afterward’ (2013) perhaps best capture this landscape. Whether post-critical, post-qualitative, or even post-paradigmatic, attempts at innovation in research methodologies working around these questions aim to unsettle the binaries and disciplinary boundaries of educational research, challenging established notions of truth, accuracy, legitimacy, applicability, and impact, and developing new ontologies, epistemologies, and methods to do so. Many scholars and researchers working in this ‘post-’ vein have found allies in the arts and arts-based inquiry. Some, including Lather (2012), have found inspiration in Rancière’s writing. As I became more aware of this new area of thinking around educational research and research methodologies, I was intrigued to know more about how Rancière’s writing was being taken up by researchers to address these aims. In this chapter, I outline some of the ways in which Rancière’s writing (particularly his critique of the social sciences and of Bourdieu and Foucault in particular) has been applied to push the boundaries of educational research, before offering a critical evaluation of these applications and a brief reflection on my own experiences of working with Rancière’s writing in arts-based empirical research.

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Departing from Critical Theory Given Rancière’s own innovative writing style or ‘method’ (Rancière 2009, 2016), his strong critique of Bourdieu and critical theory, his unique genealogy of the social sciences, and his interest in art and aesthetics, it is perhaps not surprising that this small, niche area of educational research is another in which Rancière’s work has been given some serious attention. Several scholars have engaged with Rancière’s writing explicitly as a way of reconsidering some of the familiar approaches, assumptions, and methods that underpin educational research. Rancière’s interventions on the social sciences, and in his critique of Bourdieu in particular, have been seen by some as an important corrective for educational research. Hattam and Smyth (2015, p.  272), for example, have argued that while the critical sociology of education does a good job of chronicling and, ‘explaining the persistent nature of educational inequality’, typical gestures within this kind of research, such as naming schools and pupils as ‘disadvantaged’, often have the effect of reifying inequality. At its worst, this can result in blaming the poor for their poverty, ‘focusing on what is wrong with poor people’ (2015, p. 272). They argue that critical sociologists of education ‘need to be thinking past Bourdieu and specifically engaging with those critiques of his conceptualizations of inequality, misrecognition, and habitus’ (Hattam and Smyth 2015, p. 277), including Rancière’s. Hattam and Smyth (2015) are concerned with how educational research might start to interrupt and shift the narratives that reify poverty rather than perpetuating them. They argue that a Rancièrian approach to educational research might start with equality as an assumption, for example, by treating young people as ‘uncanny theorists of their own lives’ and teachers as ‘intellectuals’ (Hattam and Smyth 2015, p. 281). Sellar et al. (2014) have also argued that Rancière’s work opens new avenues for thinking about educational research that move beyond the orthodoxies of critical theory. Like Hattam and Smyth (2015), Sellar et  al. (2014, p.  466) are sceptical about the usefulness of dominant approaches to the critical sociology of education, writing of an, ‘over-­ supply of critical work pointing to the threat of markets and the

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deleterious effects of neoliberalism in education’. Not only do Sellar et al. (2014, p. 466), ‘worry about how much difference reiterating such critiques actually makes’ but they also note, following Rancière, that such work, ‘positions the critic as having privileged insight into the social order’. Drawing on Rancière’s notions of dissensus and disagreement, they argue for more disagreement in educational research over what counts as critical and suggest that an interesting moment of politics is occurring within educational research as people dissent from the ‘policing’ of critical educational research. Like Hattam and Smyth (2015), they also suggest a new kind of approach to educational research, suggesting it might be possible, ‘to analyse politics and policy as if its authors and actors were our intellectual equals, rather than adopting the position of the critic who must show others what they cannot see for themselves’ (Sellar et al. 2014, p. 467). For some, Rancière’s own style or ‘method’ (Rancière 2009, 2016), which is not easily categorised into philosophy, history, or literature (many have remarked that The Ignorant Schoolmaster reads like a novel), has been an important source of inspiration. Indeed, Rancière’s is a ‘method of equality’ (Rancière 2009, 2016; Bingham 2009), which transgresses disciplinary boundaries and treats all subject matter and styles of writing as, in some sense, equal. Bingham (2009, 2010) reflects on this aspect of Rancière’s writing, as well as Rancière’s ‘agnostic’ stance on the truth to explore what scholars and researchers aiming to write in a Rancièrian way might accomplish. Bingham (2009, p. 414) argues that Rancière’s method is characterised by, ‘an adherence to reconfiguring ‘the distribution of the sensible’ ’. Bingham (2009, p. 415) argues this is, ‘precisely what Rancière advocates as an emancipatory political and artistic goal when he advocates that thinkers change the world’s understanding of things’ (Bingham 2009, p. 415). For Bingham (2009), the implication of Rancière’s writing, methodologically speaking, is that educational researchers can redistribute the sensible by building a ‘stage’ (2010, p. 662) in their scholarly work that allows for aesthetic and political disruption. On this view, the educational researcher must proceed as a storyteller, not as an ‘explicator of truth’ (Bingham 2010, p. 663). This idea of research as a redistribution of the sensible is also evident in Sellar et  al.’s (2014) contribution. As well as critiquing the continued

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insistence on a rather narrow understanding of what counts as ‘critical’ in educational research, Sellar et al. (2014) argue in favour of a new direction for educational research that is experimental and transgressive, particularly in terms of overcoming the disciplinary boundaries that characterise educational and social inquiry. Sellar et  al. (2014, p.  466) suggest that the old methods and approaches of critical theory have ‘lost their force’ and instead see a need, ‘to forge new conceptual tools and research practices that might help us to change the terms of the critical-­ theoretical and political malaise of our capitalist realist present’. Significantly, they argue that ‘[t]he distribution of the sensible is not limited to a world of politics ‘out there’…it extends into the field of humanities and social science research’ (2014, p. 467). Leaney and Webb (2021) develop a similar line of argument in their assertion of a ‘new feminist ethic’ in educational ethnography that has affinities with feminist work, including Lather’s (2001) work and Butler’s concept of a ‘liveable life’ (Butler 2014, cited in Leaney and Webb 2021, p. 45). They argue that such a feminist ethic of research would be political in the Rancièrian sense of redistributing the sensible. Indeed, they see a dual role for research both in drawing attention to the redistributions of the sensible found in ethnographic data and in carrying out ethnographic writing itself as a disruptive, political act, arguing that ethnographic representation is, ‘always a site of politics, as it antagonises what can be assumed’ (Leaney and Webb 2021, p. 56). Greteman (2014), offering a queer reading of Rancière’s notion of dissensus also notes the significance of moments of redistribution of the sensible for educational research. Ruitenberg (2010a), in a theoretical contribution to discussions of queer politics in schools, also sees Rancière’s work as an extension of the Butlerian concept of ‘performative resignification’ (Hey 2006). Arguing that many student support interventions remain at the level of identification (with existing subject positions such as ‘gay’), the term ‘queer’ could be the ‘new proletarian’ (in Rancière’s sense of the double-edged term that enacts the political subjectification of the part with no part). She points to examples of political subjectification and ‘queering the distribution of the sensible’ (2010a, p. 631) in schools, such as students writing new signifiers, including ‘trans’ over forms that pose questions about gender and sex in binary terms. However, both Ruitenberg (2010a) and

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Greteman (2014) stop short of arguing that educational research might constitute an act of redistribution of the sensible, in the way that Bingham (2009, 2010), Sellar et al. (2014), and Leaney and Webb (2021) all argue (though with different emphases). Instead, they advocate greater attention in educational research to the moments in which students and others affect redistributions of the sensible (Greteman 2014) and acts of political subjectification (Ruitenberg 2010a) in educational contexts (Greteman 2014). From a variety of perspectives then, scholars have taken up Rancière’s writing as a way of questioning the common assumptions of educational research and suggesting new approaches. Several important themes emerge in the way these scholars have drawn inspiration from Rancière’s work. One is Rancière’s critique of the assumptions and effects of the Bourdieuian sociology that still underpins much educational research (and which some would argue is redundant for facing the educational crises of the current moment). Another, related to this, is Rancière’s notion of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ and the significance of this for educational research (either in paying attention to the moments in which redistributions of the sensible occur in research settings or as an aim and ambition for educational research itself ). Rancière’s own unique style and ‘method’ (Rancière 2009, 2016), as a way of transgressing disciplinary boundaries, is significant on this latter point—as an artistic or even poetic form of writing.

Educational Research in a Poetic Register Perhaps the most comprehensive re-theorisation of educational research, following Rancière, is that of Pelletier (2009a, 2009b), whose work variously prefigures, echoes, and combines many of the concerns and insights outlined above. Pelletier (2009a, 2009b) offers a coherent argument for a performative, ‘poetic’ view of research, based on a close reading of Rancière’s writing across a range of texts. Pelletier (2009a, 2009b) combines Rancière’s critique of Bourdieu with his more general critique of the Platonism inherent in the social sciences and his notions of dissensus, disagreement, and the distribution of the sensible to argue for a very

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different research agenda than has been dominant in education. Such a performative ‘poetic’ educational research agenda, in which researchers’ work is seen as capable of transgressing disciplinary boundaries and redistributing the sensible, also responds to some of the questions raised by feminist researchers working in the ‘ruins’ of qualitative inquiry (Lather 2001). It is worth rehearsing Pelletier’s (2009a, 2009b) argument in some detail here since it has been particularly influential (both implicitly and explicitly) on researchers attempting to apply insights from Rancière’s writing to methodological questions in educational research. Like others (e.g., Hattam and Smyth 2015), Pelletier (2009a, 2009b) takes up Rancière’s critique of Bourdieu’s sociology as a ‘description of domination’ that only ‘a small elite will ever understand’ (2009a, p. 140). However, Pelletier (2009a, 2009b) goes beyond this observation about the sociologist, as the one who sets himself above the world he claims to demystify, to argue that Rancière’s critique is levelled at the performativity of Bourdieu’s sociology, in terms of what it makes visible, that is, what image of the world emerges from it. As Pelletier (2009a, p. 141) writes, ‘Rancière’s argument with Bourdieu is precisely with its ‘politics’ … with the way in which it makes certain things more real than others’ (2009a, p. 141). Pelletier (2009a, 2009b) combines this insight into Rancière’s critique of Bourdieu with his writing on the emergence of the social sciences in aesthetic terms, noting their shared inheritance with literature (2009a), and their common concern with the world of fantasy, as expressed in Rancière’s (2009) genealogy of psychoanalysis in The Aesthetic Unconscious. In doing so, she argues that in fact, all social science research is performative. Rancière, Pelletier (2009a, p. 141) argues, is critical of the kind of sociological research that divides the world into two in a Platonic fashion—between ‘those able to see “truth” and those only able to see appearances’. He also takes issue with the claims of social science to produce, ‘a discourse that is of a different order to that which is their object of study: non-illusory knowledge, or knowledge which is not rooted in ideological fantasy’ (Pelletier 2009b, p. 268). For Pelletier (2009b, p. 268), Rancière’s writing challenges such claims by ‘undoing the basis on which discourses legitimate themselves as epistemologically superior to the other’. In this regard, Pelletier (2009a, 2009b) views Rancière’s writing as having similarities with Butler’s work

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on the performativity of discourse. Rather than offering a ‘description of domination’ (Pelletier 2009a, p.  140) that splits the world into two, Rancière’s writing resignifies identities and redistributes the sensible. Pelletier (2009a, 2009b) argues that Rancière’s work does this, in part, by disrupting the identity categories that normally operate in the social sciences. As an illustration of this, Pelletier (2009a) draws a comparison between Butler’s discussion of drag and the imitation of poets, journalists, artists, and so on, by the workers in Rancière’s archival research. She argues, ‘Rancière and Butler both focus on the expropriation of statements assigned to specific bodies’ (2009a, p. 145) in their troubling of fixed identity categories. However, Pelletier (2009a, 2009b) argues that Rancière’s writing also transgresses disciplinary boundaries (of history, literature, philosophy etc.). For Pelletier (2009a, 2009b), Rancière’s writing constitutes, or performs, a redistribution of the sensible, in and of itself, by ‘taking issue with more conventional social histories and what they fail to symbolize’ (2009, p.  276). Not only does Rancière’s writing involve ‘grasping the other in its separation from itself ’ (2009b, p. 275) and refocusing attention on an overlooked phenomenon in social sciences research (what workers did at night) but also ‘reconfiguring the field of knowledge to undo the partitions which divide people into territories’ (Pelletier 2009b, p. 274). For Pelletier, Rancière’s own writing ‘reads like an experiment in politics’ (Pelletier 2009b, p. 146). Two very different kinds of performativity emerge in Pelletier’s (2009a, 2009b) understanding of social research then. On the one hand, there is the performative gesture of sociology and social science in the Bourdieuian mould, which divides the world into two—the knowing and unknowing, those capable of understanding the truth and those doomed to live in a world of self-deception, misrecognition, and illusion. This kind of research involves ‘the mournful tracing of an inescapable symbolic violence’ (Pelletier 2009b, p. 281). On the other hand, there is the performative gesture of writing that aims to disrupt, reconfigure, and redistribute sensible perceptions of the world through transgressing boundaries and valorising those moments in which others transgress. From this performative view, Pelletier (2009a) suggests an alternate agenda for educational research. Based on Rancière’s (1991) intervention

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on the emergence of mass education in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Pelletier (2009a) argues that the function of educational research is normally seen as one of detailing the reasons for inequality and perfecting the methods to reduce it. She writes, ‘[e]ducation research, from this perspective, becomes about improving the distribution of knowledge, through ever-­ better, modernised methods’ (2009a, p. 147). However, Pelletier (2009a, p. 148) argues that Rancière’s work suggests a very different agenda—one ‘which is concerned with performative subjectification in the act of interpreting the world’. This potential new agenda for educational research also foregrounds an interest in the aesthetic and, Pelletier (2009b) argues, has important affinities with the work of feminist researchers in education working on ‘similar intellectual terrain’ (2009b, p.  270). As with some feminist scholars, such as Hey (2006), who also takes up Butler’s concept of the performativity of discourse or ‘performative resignification’, for Rancière, ‘the aim is not to get away from fantasy in academic writing, but to structure it in more egalitarian ways’ (Pelletier 2009b, p. 279). For Pelletier, as with work in the vein of ‘post-’ methodologies, Rancière’s work moves beyond attempts to rationalise qualitative, interpretative research within the terms of a positivist paradigm that was never made to fit it, via strategies such as reflexivity and the narration of small or ‘partial truths’ (Pelletier 2009b, p.  279). Instead, Pelletier argues, Rancière’s writing asserts, more boldly, a different kind of truth, which is, ‘suggestive of the way in which ethnographic accounts can, without apology, reject positivistically inflected conceptions of methodology’ (2009b, p. 280). The implications of Pelletier’s ‘Rancièrian’, performative view of research for methodological debates in education today are significant. Pelletier (2009b, p. 280) argues, ‘if science is thought of as constituting the world rather than understanding it, the problem of how to account for “ruined” research practice, or “partial” truths is removed’. In this thorough-going reconsideration of educational research, Pelletier (2009a, 2009b) makes several important manoeuvres. Combining Rancière’s critique of Bourdieu with his discussion of the social sciences, Pelletier (2009a, 2009b) illustrates how Rancière’s writing prompts a reconsideration of the foundations of educational research, following scholars such as Lather (2001), who have questioned what

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might be done in the ‘ruins’ of qualitative inquiry. Extrapolating from Rancière’s own writing, as an unstable ‘experiment in politics’ (2009a, p. 146), Pelletier also suggests that research can be a performative, poetic act of redistributing the sensible—redrawing what is visible, sayable, and doable. Perhaps most significantly, Pelletier (2009a, 2009b) shifts the focus of attention in educational research from the pessimistic and ‘mournful’ (Pelletier 2009b, p.  268) description of the conditions of inequality and their perpetual reproduction to a more optimistic focus on emancipation, disidentification, and the transgression of boundaries. As Pelletier (2009b, p.  268) writes, ‘What Rancière’s work effects is a re-­ centring of this agenda [of educational research] around the other of power, and the other of domination’. Pelletier (2009a, 2009b) therefore argues that breaking down the binary assumptions underlying educational thinking, policy, and practice (such as ‘inclusion/exclusion’, ‘gifted/ disadvantaged’, and ‘progressive/traditional’) is an important objective for educational research.

‘Rancièrian’ Approaches to Educational Research in Practice A small body of research has emerged, applying some of the insights above to empirical research in education. Although Pelletier’s (2009a, 2009b) work is not the only influence here, given its systematic and thorough revision of educational research, following Rancière, I utilise the key manoeuvres of Pelletier’s (2009a, 2009b) work outlined above (questioning the foundations of educational research, carrying out research in a performative, ‘poetic’ register, and shifting the focus of attention in educational research) to structure an overview of these studies below.

Questioning the Foundations of Educational Research Leaney and Webb (2021) revisit ethnographic data from two research projects through the lens of a ‘new feminist ethic’ of educational ethnography, which, following Rancière, they see as a way of ‘redistributing the

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sensible’. As with Pelletier (2009a, 2009b), they draw on both Butler and Rancière to develop such a performative view of research. Leaney and Webb (2021, p. 51) view ‘valorising speech which is usually dismissed’ in data as an important application of Rancière’s work, as well as viewing ethnographic representations as potentially disruptive in themselves. As Leaney and Webb (2021, p. 52) write, ‘both the moment of the ethnographic encounter and the production of the ethnographic text, become sites of politics’. Leaney and Webb (2021) illustrate this with reference to their own data, noting, for example, the unstable performances of racialised identities among young children playing at a community centre and the complexities of negotiating discourses of inclusion within the context of a school play. Gonçalves et al. (2012) also cite both Rancière and feminist scholars, including Lather (1992, cited in Gonçalves et  al. 2012) in their work developing innovative methodological approaches for educational research. Working in policy analysis, Gonçalves et  al. (2012) develop what they describe as a ‘hermeneutics of externality’, in which official policy texts from within the policy-making context are brought into conversation with texts and concepts from outside policy circles. They apply this method specifically to offer fresh perspectives on policy relating to lifelong learning in the European context. While their development of this methodological approach relies more on Deleuze than Rancière (they use Rancière’s writing in The Ignorant Schoolmaster as one of the ‘outside’ texts brought into conversation with policy), Gonçalves et  al. (2012) acknowledge Rancière’s writing as an important motivator for developing such an innovative method. Gonçalves et  al. (2012, p.  277) see their work as a response to a ‘re-conceptualization of critical theory’ by various authors including Rancière. Working from the different methodological perspectives of ethnography and policy analysis, both Leaney and Webb (2021) and Gonçalves et al. (2012) illustrate the influence of Rancière’s writing on educational researchers trying to push the boundaries of what counts as educational research. Both sets of researchers see Rancière’s writing as part of the impetus behind the move to rethink the foundations of social and educational research in the twenty-first century. They are inspired by the notion that Rancière’s writing might help to move educational research beyond

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its restrictive, positivist, and critical modes, and apply this insight to empirical research on community education, educational inclusion, and lifelong learning as policy agendas and align this with the innovative work of feminist scholars in the field, such as Lather (2001).

Performative, Poetic, and Arts-Based Research Gonçalves et al.’s (2012) work takes somewhat of an aesthetic, performative, and ‘poetic’ approach to policy analysis, bringing novels and other works of literature into conversation with policy texts. Liu (2011), researching notions of educational progress in teacher education, takes an explicitly arts-based approach, developing a methodology of ‘poetic bricolage’, which, she argues, ‘has the potential for reconceptualising the purposes and approaches of educational progress’ (2011, p. 4). Liu (2011, p. 5) describes this as a form of ‘aesthetic inquiry’ that re-presents participant voices in artistic and aesthetic forms (using poetic language, textiles, and visual arts) to create a, ‘new relationship between making and seeing’. For Liu (2011, p. 7), this responds to Pelletier’s (2009a) call for a new kind of educational research that does not position the researcher in a privileged position over research objects who ‘cannot know’, instead challenging the subject-object relationship in research. Essentially, Liu’s (2011) work claims that her arts-based approach of ‘aesthetic inquiry’, deploying ‘poetic bricolage’, is a way of applying what Pelletier (2009a, 2009b), following Rancière, urges researchers to do in making research a political and performative act of redistributing the sensible. Barney and Kalin (2014) take a similar approach within the context of the educational research community. These authors draw on their experiences of disrupting a poster session at an international educational research conference, to trouble dominant discourses about what counts as research. Rather than producing and displaying a poster, the researchers brought the materials for creating a poster into the conference space and invited attendees to create a poster in situ. As such, this intervention involved the use of arts-based methods associated with collaborative, participatory, and relational art, which invites spectators to be part of the artwork itself. Barney and Kalin (2014, p. 601) describe their poster as a

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‘research installation’ and a space of ‘joint production and collective action’ (2014, p. 602), which, they claim, constituted an ‘aesthetic and tactical’ (2014, p. 601) act of redistributing the sensible and disrupting the ‘policing order’ of the conference and its organising body (2014, p. 596). From this intervention, they develop an argument for a critical, arts-based approach to research, which they argue is emancipatory, democratic, and political in a Rancièrian sense. From various perspectives, Gonçalves et al. (2012), Liu (2011), and Barney and Kalin (2014) have all attempted to draw on arts-based methods to reframe educational research as a performative act of redistributing the sensible. For Gonçalves et al. (2012) and for Liu (2011), these arts-­ based strategies are a way of challenging specific discourses in education (lifelong learning and educational progress, respectively), whereas for Barney and Kalin (2014), the object of the research is educational research itself (or, more specifically the conventions and disciplinary boundaries that govern it). All are engaged in the broader project of applying a performative approach to educational research as a practice that can potentially redistribute the sensible and transgress the disciplinary boundaries that would demarcate arts-based approaches as inappropriate to serious educational research.

Shifting the Focus of Educational Research Claims to redistribute the sensible through educational research also feature in research studies, which, following Rancière’s writing, attempt to redress the familiar co-ordinates of educational thought and discourse. Such work aims to disrupt the binaries that often animate the orthodoxies of educational thought, policy, and practice. In this regard such work aligns with, and sometimes explicitly draws on, Pelletier’s (2009a, p. 148) call for educational research to address, ‘the means by which discourse and subjects are split into intelligible and unintelligible, essential and inessential, theoretical and practical, academic and vocational, abstract and concrete’. Pelletier (2011) herself has applied this approach to the notion of educational ‘inclusion’. Pelletier (2011) employs the writing of Rancière and

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others to argue that ideals of inclusion are in fact founded on assumptions of exclusion. Drawing on Rancière’s argument about mass education being both charged with solving the problem of inequality and constantly blamed for failing to do so (Rancière 1995, 2006—see Chap. 5), she illustrates how discourses of inclusion play into a narrative of educational failure and argues that Rancière’s perspective might help to redress this. As Pelletier (2011, p.  270) writes, ‘the repeated failure of education…to make people equal and included is a strong argument for trying to live this failure differently: not as a failure of practice, but of the fantasy itself ’. Others have taken up Pelletier’s (2009a, 2009b) call for a refocus of attention in educational research to the disruption of common discourses and assumptions that underpin educational thought, policy, and practice. Liu’s (2011) and Gonçalves et al.’s (2012) attempts to develop and apply aesthetic approaches to educational research also address significant educational policy discourses—educational progress and lifelong learning, respectively. Other educational discourses tackled from this perspective in research studies that apply a specifically Rancièrian approach include system alignment in schools and teacher education (Stickney 2015), the construction of ‘at-risk’ students (Gershon 2012), equality of educational opportunity (Blumsztajn 2020), and educational technology as an unalloyed good (Orlando 2014). Others have explored the ‘uneducated’ as an emerging political category in established democracies (Gerrard 2021), notions of digital and educational disruption (Farr 2021), and the depoliticisation of education through neoliberal education policy (Clarke 2012). These studies variously take up Rancière’s writing on politics, democracy, emancipation, education, and aesthetics, as well as employing well-­ established readings of Rancière from educational philosophy and theory. In some senses, this work coincides with work in educational philosophy and theory that takes Rancière’s writing as a starting point for critiquing educational policy and practice (see Chap. 6). Both Simons and Masschelein (2010) and Säfström (2010), for example, start with the analyses of specific education policies and system reforms to suggest a new, Rancièrian view of education. Bingham and Biesta (2010) also apply Rancière’s writing to tackle global educational research agendas

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including education for international development, as well as debates about neoliberal educational reform. In the studies cited above, however, the emphasis tends to be on the methodological power of educational research that draws on Rancière’s writing to destabilise educational discourses and implicitly redistribute the sensible co-ordinates of educational thought, policy, and practice.

Critical Evaluation Attempts to re-theorise educational research, following Rancière, have helped to push the boundaries of what counts as important and legitimate inquiry in the field. Pelletier’s (2009a, 2009b) work has been particularly significant in articulating the specific problem for educational research that Rancière’s work poses. Pelletier (2009a, 2009b) combines Rancière’s critique of Bourdieu with his commentary on mass education and other aspects of his work, including his genealogy of the social sciences, his notion of the distribution of the sensible, and his concern with disagreement and dissensus in her Rancièrian reappraisal of educational research. In doing so, Pelletier (2009a, 2009b) not only diagnoses the problem of an over-reliance on circuitous critical theory in education research that seeks to document the material forms of inequality, and which institutes an unequal relationship between researcher and researched, but also proposes a new, performative research agenda for education in which genuinely critical inquiry concerns itself with disrupting the consensus around established orthodoxies in educational thought, practice, and policy. The work of Pelletier (2009a, 2009b, 2011), along with others who have tried to rethink educational research in innovative ways via Rancière’s writing and apply these in their empirical and theoretical studies, has helped to move educational research beyond the re-articulation, description, and explanation of inequality and the perfection of attempts to reduce it that are, paradoxically, always also doomed to fail before they start. This remains a marginal activity in educational research, which is still dominated by large-scale quantitative studies and critical work in the mould of Bourdieuian sociology. However, the importance of such a

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rethinking of the project of educational research is starting to make inroads, at least in relation to the latter (Ball 2021). Following these readings of Rancière, such critical approaches to educational research come under increasing scrutiny, with questions asked about their adequacy to the task of genuinely critical work in education. Sellar et  al. (2014, p. 466) articulate this particularly clearly in their suggestion that, as educational researchers, we need to be doing something other than, ‘lamenting the effects of capitalist markets or dusting off strategies that have lost their force’. Rancière’s writing, and its uptake by those interested in its methodological implications, can instead help to, ‘forge new conceptual tools’ and move educational research out of this ‘well-worn groove’ (Sellar et al. 2014, p. 466). As a solution to this problem, Sellar et  al. (2014, p.  467) suggest, ‘experimenting with modes of research that have the capacity to engage others in our work, rather than fortifying partitions between the critical researcher and others’. The kinds of experimentation that have followed from such observations and from Pelletier’s (2009a, 2009b) suggestion of an aesthetic, performative, and even ‘poetic’ or artistic approach to educational research have resulted in exciting, innovative, sometimes amusing, entertaining, and even outlandish results. Barney and Kalin’s (2014) poster-installation-as-research-intervention stands out as an example, combining artistic, performative, and relational logics with an element of surprise in the tightly bounded disciplinary space of an international educational research conference. The use of arts-based methods also lends an interesting and unusual dimension to Liu’s (2011) study of the discourse around ‘educational progress’ in teacher education and Gonçalves et al.’s (2012) analysis of lifelong learning policy in the European Union. Innovative approaches to educational research in this performative mode are also significant in that they take Rancière’s unusual style and ‘method’ (Rancière 2009, 2016) of writing—its idiosyncrasy, oddness, and disciplinary anarchy—seriously and positively. Bingham’s (2009, 2010) work is particularly illustrative of this, advocating a ‘storytelling’ approach to educational research and putting into practice some elements of Rancière’s own ‘method’ (Rancière 2009, 2016). Pelletier (2009a, 2009b) makes this an important element of her argument for a performative and ‘poetic’ approach to educational research that would

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also transgress disciplinary boundaries, as well as the binaries that constitute established discourses in education. Sellar et al. (2014) suggest that such boundary crossing might extend not only out of the disciplinary area of education but also out of academia, by establishing connections with ‘policy-makers and scholars in other fields who are partitioned from us by the prevailing distribution of the sensible’ (2014, p. 468). Rather than seeing this unruliness and transgression in Rancière’s writing as a problem, these authors take this feature of his writing as a form of inspiration—an invitation to move beyond the confines of what is already considered legitimate educational research. While the innovations of the scholars and researchers discussed in this chapter have played an important role in moving educational research beyond the tired confines of critical theory and towards a new, experimental, and performative mode, they also involve some questionable interpretations of Rancière’s writing and result in some problematic effects. In terms of interpretation, research that aims to redistribute the sensible assumes that such a redistribution is something that can be planned and carried out in the field. There is an intentionality here that runs counter to Rancière’s consistent position that moments of aesthetic and political disruption (redistributions of the sensible) are rare, sporadic, and unpredictable, and that the political impact of artistic practices is always indeterminate (see Chaps. 2 and 3). To set out to ‘redistribute the sensible’ does not really make sense within a Rancièrian frame. Moreover, in some cases (e.g., Barney and Kalin 2014), the artistic practices employed by researchers attempting such redistributions of the sensible involve the kind of participatory and relational art that Rancière critiques (see Chap. 3). If researchers set out with the intention to change things in a specific way, through artistic approaches that Rancière has argued are deeply problematic, it is questionable whether they are really carrying out research in a Rancièrian mode, as sometimes claimed. More significant than questions of interpretation, however, are some of the implications that result from viewing educational research in a performative mode—as a redistribution of the sensible and a transgression of boundaries undertaken by researchers. Pelletier (2009a, 2009b), Bingham (2009, 2010), and others are interested in the way Rancière’s writing (e.g., in his archival research with nineteenth-century workers)

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breaks down the subject-object relations of research, placing the agentic writing of workers centre-stage. However, positioning the researcher as the one who (deliberately) redistributes the sensible runs the risk of re-­ establishing the hierarchies of research in the critical mode, where the researcher is the one who knows how to act politically to disrupt the status quo. While Rancière’s writing may be a political and aesthetic disruption, in and of itself, to set out to do the same thing as a researcher seems ambitious at best and hubristic at worst. The problems associated with this are particularly discernible when the political terrain that researchers seek to disrupt is their own territory of educational research. Disrupting the logic of educational discourses such as inclusion (Pelletier 2011), the labelling of ‘at-risk’ students (Gershon 2012) and the promotion of educational technology as an unalloyed good (Orlando 2014) have clear political implications that might lead to liberating outcomes for the students, teachers, and citizens. The political implications and beneficiaries of the disruption of the rules governing poster presentations at a research conference are less evident.

Reflection I began this chapter by acknowledging an important movement in educational research that has challenged both traditional criteria for validity and the reliance on critical theory, exemplified in the work of Lather (2001, 2012, 2013) and others in a ‘post-qualitative’ turn. While recognising that this is still a niche area of educational research, I noted that it was an important one in terms of methodological innovation. I remarked that I was intrigued by how Rancière’s writing has been taken up by those seeking to push the boundaries of inquiry and research in education and posed the question of what use Rancière’s writing might be in supporting such efforts. As the discussion in this chapter has shown, a growing body of scholarship has demonstrated how Rancière’s writing might be helpful in this endeavour—particularly in moving beyond the circuitous and self-defeating logic of critical theory towards an experimental, performative, and aesthetic approach to research that transgresses disciplinary boundaries.

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In my own research, I have been much more modest. Rather than trying to redistribute the sensible through research myself, I have tried to capture, document, and draw attention to the moments when students and others have disrupted the distribution of the sensible that defines their lived realities in educational contexts and beyond. My discussion of students staging a boycott of their school canteen in such a way that exploited the gap between their public identity as students and their private identity as consumers (McDonnell 2014) is illustrative of this. In my discussion of students’ accounts of the boycott, I paid attention to the aesthetic and affective dimensions of their experience—the sight of the school all gathered in one place and the press being kept out of the school building by the private company that owned it, the emotional impact of seeing canteen staff upset by the boycott, the regret at not having staged a silent ‘sit-in’ instead. My research aligns with Greteman’s (2014) and Ruitenberg’s (2010a) suggestion to pay more attention to those moments in which students and others engage in dissensus in educational contexts—those sporadic and happenstance occurrences that break through the consensus logics of institutions and society. This project also aligns with the work of Pelletier (2009a, 2009b) and Leaney and Webb (2021), who argue for educational research not only as a redistribution of the sensible but also as a valorisation of those moments when others disrupt perceptible givens. Like these authors, I also combined a reading of Rancière with insights from Butler’s (1997, 2006; Salih and Butler 2004) writing on the performativity of discourse and the notion of ‘performative resignification’ (Hey 2006) in my methodological approach as a way of noticing, describing, and witnessing those moments. I find myself impressed by some of the re-theorisations of educational research that I have discussed in this chapter and inspired by some of the innovative methodological practices that have arisen from them. Pelletier (2009a, 2009b) offers a convincing argument for why such re-­theorisations are necessary and how Rancière’s work might help in this regard. Orlando’s (2014) suggestion that teachers might take online platforms seriously as a way of staging a kind of syllogistic political disruption of the global consensus around the use of educational technology seems to me a particularly astute translation of Rancièrian politics to educational research.

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However, I am also wary of researchers setting themselves the task of deliberately redistributing the sensible. There is a risk here of re-­ establishing hierarchies in which the researcher becomes the one who knows and acts (or sets out a programme for how others might act) politically. The use of arts-based methods within such an agenda also risks the assumption that one’s artistic interventions will have a specific political effect, something which Rancière’s insistence on the indeterminacy of art’s political import (see Chap. 3) challenges. Finally, in concentrating on the constraints of the disciplinary boundaries and assumptions of educational research, there is a risk that we over-state the political nature of these and lose sight of genuinely political issues in the public sphere. These, I would argue, and not the co-ordinates of research itself, ought to remain the primary terrain of interest for educational researchers, however innovatively they address these.

References Ball, S. J. (2021). Response: Policy? Policy research? How absurd? Critical Studies in Education, 62:3, 387–393, https://doi.org/10.1080/1750848 7.2021.1924214 Barney, D. T., & Kalin, N. M. (2014). The poster and the poster: Critical arts-­ based research as dissensual aesthetics. Cultural Studies? Critical Methodologies, 14(6), 595–605. Bingham, C., & Biesta, G. J. J. (2010). Jacques Rancière: Education, truth, emancipation. London: Continuum. Bingham, C. (2010). Settling no conflict in the public place: Truth in education, and in Rancièrian scholarship. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 649–665. Bingham, C. (2009). Under the name of method: On Jacques Rancière’s presumptive tautology. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 43(3), 405–420. Blumsztajn, A. (2020). The empty form of fairness: Equality of educational opportunity as an instrumentalizing force in education. Policy Futures in Education, 18(7), 834–849. Butler, J. (2006). Response. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 27 (4), 529–534.

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Butler, J. (1997). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New  York: Routledge. Clarke, M. (2012). The (absent) politics of neo-liberal education policy. Critical Studies in Education, 53(3), 297–310. Farr, E. R. (2021). Disruption and Disagreement: Emancipation and Education in Clayton Christensen and Jacques Rancière. Critical Education, 12(5). Gerrard, J. (2021). The uneducated and the politics of knowing in ‘post truth’ times: Rancière, populism and in/equality. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 42(2), 155–169. Gershon, W. S. (2012). Troubling notions of risk: Dissensus, dissonance, and making sense of students and learning. Critical Studies in Education, 53(3), 361–373. Gonçalves, T. N., Gomes, E. X., Alves, M. G., & Azevedo, N. R. (2012). Theory and texts of educational policy: possibilities and constraints. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 31(3), 275–288. Greteman, A. J. (2014). Dissenting with queer theory: Reading Rancière queerly. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 35(3), 419–432. Hammersley, M. (1992). The paradigm wars: Reports from the front. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 13(1), 131–143. Hattam, R., & Smyth, J. (2015). Thinking past educational disadvantage, and theories of reproduction. Sociology, 49(2), 270–286. Hey, V. (2006). The politics of performative resignification: Translating Judith Butler’s theoretical discourse and its potential for a sociology of education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 27 (4), 439–457. Lather, P. (2013). Methodology-21: What do we do in the afterward? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 634–645. Lather, P. (2012). The ruins of neo-liberalism and the construction of a new (scientific) subjectivity. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 7(4), 1021–1025. Lather, P. (2001). Postbook: Working the ruins of feminist ethnography. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 27(1), 199–227. Lather, P., & St. Pierre, E.  A. (2013). Post-qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 629–633. Leaney, S., & Webb, R. (2021). Representation as politics: asserting a feminist ethic in ethnographic research. Ethnography and Education, 16(1), 44–59. Liu, L. B. (2011). Poetry as Progress: Balancing Standards-Based Reforms with Aesthetic Inquiry. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 12(12), 1–22. McDonnell, J. (2014). PFI and the Performative Politics of Dissent: lessons for democratic education. Power and Education, 6(3), 307–317.

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Orlando, J. (2014). Educational technology: a presupposition of equality? Asia-­ Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 42(4), 347–362. Pelletier, C. (2011). Beating the barrel of inclusion: Cosmopolitanism through Rabelais and Rancière–A response to John Adlam and Chris Scanlon. Psychodynamic Practice, 17(3), 255–272. Pelletier, C. (2009a). Emancipation, equality and education: Rancière’s critique of Bourdieu and the question of performativity. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 30(2), 137–150. Pelletier, C. (2009b). Rancière and the poetics of the social sciences. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 32(3), 267–284. Rancière, J. (2016). The method of equality (trans: Rose, J.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Rancière, J. (2009). A few remarks on the method of Jacques Rancière. Parallax, 15(3), 114–123. Rancière, J. (2006). Hatred of democracy (trans: Corcoran, S.). London: Verso. Rancière, J. (1995). On the shores of politics (trans: Heron, L.). London: Verso. Rancière, J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation (trans: Ross, K.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ruitenberg, C. W. (2010a). Queer Politics in Schools: A Rancièrean reading. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 618–634. Säfström, C.  A. (2010). The immigrant has no proper name: The disease of consensual democracy within the myth of schooling. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 606–617. Salih, S. & Butler, J. (Eds.) (2004). The Judith Butler reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Sellar, S., Savage, G. C., & Gorur, R. (2014). The politics of disagreement in critical education policy studies: A response to Morsy, Gulson and Clarke. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 35(3), 462–469. Simons, M., & Masschelein, J. (2010). Governmental, political and pedagogic subjectivation: Foucault with Rancière. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 588–605. Stickney, J. (2015). System alignment and consensus discourses in reforms: School Effectiveness Frameworks and Instructional Rounds. Philosophical responses with Oakeshott, Mouffe and Rancière. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 18(4), 487–513. St. Pierre, E. A. (2018). Writing post qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(9), 603–608.

Part III Evaluating Rancière’s Contribution

9 Key Criticisms of Rancière

In the first part of the book, I offered an introduction to some key contributions of Rancière’s writing (on democracy, art, emancipation, and education), as I had come across them in my own academic journey. In the second part of the book, I outlined and critically evaluated some of the main ways in which Rancière’s writing has been applied to the field of education—in the work on emancipatory, democratic, and political education, on art(s) education, and in innovative approaches to educational research. In this third and final part of the book, I offer an evaluation of Rancière’s contribution and its applicability to education. The purpose of this part of the book, then, is to introduce the reader to some of the key criticisms of Rancière’s writing and to evaluate these, particularly as they relate to the application of his interventions to questions in education and to offer some conclusions on the overall value of Rancière’s writing both in itself and for education. I began this book by sharing my experience of being asked to prepare and deliver a ‘beginner’s guide’ to Rancière’s writing. Aside from the evident irony of such a task (‘explaining’ for ‘beginners’ the work of a writer for whom pedagogic ‘explication’ is a target of acerbic criticism), the experience reminded me of many criticisms of Rancière’s writing in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. McDonnell, Reading Rancière for Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96013-1_9

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academia. In conversations with colleagues following my ‘beginner’s guide’, several important questions were raised. One colleague asked me about the logocentrism implicit in Rancière’s writing—to the detriment of more embodied and material understandings of public life. Another queried whether Rancière’s insistence on politics as an egalitarian rupture to the status quo was in fact tenable; surely this stance leaves itself open to the possibility of non-egalitarian (e.g., fascist, extreme right-wing) ruptures ‘counting’ as politics? Or, conversely, if the latter are dismissed as undemocratic, surely Rancière’s position implies a universalist, normative, or even moral prioritisation of equality that undermines his otherwise political approach to democracy? Others were simply left wondering what was Rancière’s overall project? In this chapter, I address these and other objections as I outline and discuss some of the major criticisms of Rancière’s writing in the literature, centred around three key questions. The first of these is about the kind of political project that Rancière’s work implies. In other words, what, if anything, would a Rancièrian politics look like, and how could those interested in furthering egalitarian goals get behind it? The second is about the interpretive power of Rancière’s writing for understanding politics today. In other words, how does Rancière’s writing help us to make sense of recent political struggles and their success (or otherwise)? The third relates to the role that art might play in any political project. In other words, where does Rancière’s work leave us in thinking through the political power of art—both in terms of its reception and its production? Each of these questions is tackled below, as I outline and then evaluate the main criticisms from each of these perspectives.

Reconstructing a ‘Rancièrian’ Political Project One of the major criticisms of Rancière’s writing in the literature is that it does not offer a clear political project or an adequate vision for a new egalitarian politics. This criticism has been directed at Rancière’s writing from more radical and reformist angles. From both quarters, the problem identified here is that Rancière’s writing offers, ‘a politics of moments, rather than a politics of movements’ (Clarke 2013, p.  21). Several

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interrelated objections inform this position. These include Rancière’s lack of attention to what precipitates ‘politics’, his inattention to the organisation needed to sustain political action, and his lack of elaboration on what a ‘better’ police might look like, i.e., what kind of political society we might aspire to. Each of these is explored in more detail below.

What Comes Before, After, and Alongside ‘Politics’? The question of what precipitates the political moment of rupture in Rancière’s writing has been articulated by several commentators. An important theme in the critical literature on Rancière has been a comparison of his writing with that of Badiou, who also offers a radically egalitarian politics of ‘the event’ and who has, himself, made several criticisms of Rancière (Bassett 2014, 2016; Barbour 2010). Bassett (2016) argues that while neither Badiou nor Rancière offers a comprehensive account of what happens before the event of politics, Badiou’s work comes closer to recognising the importance of analysing the ‘pre-evental’ world, such as a crisis in capitalism. For Rancière, Bassett (2016, p. 285) argues, the circumstances surrounding and leading up to the ‘event’ of politics require, ‘more historically relevant analysis than he generally provides’. Woodford (2015, p. 814) also recognises this perceived limitation in Rancière’s writing, noting that many critics argue Rancière’s writing does not give enough credit to, ‘the smaller moments in our lives that may contribute to, or lay the groundwork for, the much grander-­sounding moments of ‘politics’ ’. Criticisms about a lack of attention to what comes before the moment of ‘politics’ are accompanied by a somewhat related charge, particularly from those on the radical left, that Rancière’s writing pays too little attention to the organisation required during and after the moment of politics, in order to sustain political action and achieve real change. Badiou’s argument about the need for ‘militants of truth’ who will faithfully work towards the realisation of principles contained in the political event, and his related criticism of Rancière on this point, is particularly pertinent here. According to Bassett (2016, p. 283), ‘Badiou’s criticism has been that Rancière’s view of politics suggests a democratic transition to a new

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regime’ based on sporadic moments, whereas Badiou sees the need for the formation of an organised and disciplined body operating outside state structures. Badiou’s concept of the primary political subject as the ‘militant of truth’ who remains faithfully committed to ‘the trace of the original event’ (Bassett 2016, p.  282) is central to this view of organised politics, occupying a privileged position as the figure who becomes politically subject through this fidelity to the truth-event. A final criticism of the ephemeral and fleeting nature of Rancière’s ‘politics of moments’ (Clarke 2013, p. 21) is that Rancière fails to elaborate on what a ‘better’ police (Rancière 1999, p. 28) might look like, that is, what might come after the moment of politics. Myers (2016, p. 55) offers a particularly clear articulation of this, arguing that Rancière’s radically anti-institutional stance is, ‘not particularly hospitable to forms of radical democratic politics that aim to create, preserve and enlarge egalitarian relations throughout society, including its major institutions’. Myers (2016) argues that attempts to read more lasting effects into Rancière’s writing via an emphasis on reconfigurations of the police order (Chambers 2013, cited in Myers 2016) or inscriptions of equality (Norval 2012, cited in Myers 2016) are inadequate because the police order itself is always inegalitarian, for Rancière, and inscriptions of equality within any reconfigured order are found only in texts, not in structures and practices. For Myers (2016) then, Rancière’s view of politics is incompatible with working towards the reform of political institutions. From a different perspective, political theorists on the radical left have argued that a lack of elaboration of what would constitute a ‘better’ police is a weakness in Rancière’s writing, leaving open the possibility of radical disruptions that are not egalitarian. Woodford (2015, p.  821) summarises Laclau’s argument on this point, noting that, ‘[i]n Laclau’s interpretation we find concern that ‘the uncounted’ might construct their uncountability in ways that are ideologically incompatible with what either Rancière or [Laclau] would advocate politically (in a Fascist direction for example)’.

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Evaluating Criticisms of Rancière’s ‘Politics’ In a sense, the three interrelated criticisms outlined above all centre on Rancière’s rejection of the institutionalisation of politics (the fact that it occurs only sporadically in democratic moments) and his conception of the police-politics relationship as something that is in constant, antagonistic tension. For those on the radical left (Badiou, cited in Bassett 2014, 2016; Dean and Laclau, cited in Woodford 2015), Rancière’s view of politics does not set up any rival set of organisational structures outside of the police order and even makes use of the language, structures, and practices of the police in the process of open-ended political subjectification and disidentification. Conversely, for those in favour of developing a more institutional, democratic politics (Myers 2016), Rancière’s rejections of the institutionalisation of equality are too radical. It is worth pausing to consider the validity of these criticisms before addressing some more fundamental questions at their heart, as well as their relation to questions of education. There are a couple of points within these criticisms, which we might want to reject simply on the grounds of accuracy or emphasis. For example, on Rancière’s lack of attention to the material conditions that precipitate politics, it is not quite accurate to say that Rancière leaves this point entirely unaddressed. As Barbour (2010) points out, for Rancière, politics always addresses a ‘wrong’. As Barbour (2010, p.  260) writes, ‘Rancière does not seek to depoliticise social relations. Instead, he claims that democratic politics begins with the assertion of a ‘wrong’, and the eruption of a voice’. The precise details of the wrong and its assertion will always be specific and local, and they cannot be predicted in advance, but they do exist—as for example in the labour relations that precipitated the Paris tailors’ strike or the fact of women’s exclusion from holding public office. Similarly, Rancière’s lack of attention to the lasting effects of politics is somewhat exaggerated. It is not quite accurate to argue, for example, that Rancière offers no elaboration of what a ‘better’ police might look like (Myers 2016, p.  56). Beyond Rancière’s (1999, p.  31) well-­ known definition of the ‘better police’ as, ‘one that all the breaking and entering perpetrated by egalitarian logic has most often jolted out of its

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“natural” logic’, he has more recently elaborated on the kinds of practice that typically characterise such a ‘better police’, noting the infinitely preferable situation of living in a state where one can approach political officials or hold demonstrations in the street without fear of violence to one where this is impossible. As Rancière (2016, p.  154) writes, ‘that’s an important criterion, the fact you don’t have to be frightened of stepping inside the headquarters of the supreme government of the nation’. However, some points of criticism reflect more fundamental questions about the potential application of Rancière’s writing to theorising a new, egalitarian political project. For example, it is certainly accurate to say that Rancière does not offer any sustained discussion of the kind of organisation needed to make politics take hold and have an effect— before, during, or after the moment of politics. The unpredictability and equality inherent in Rancière’s view of politics would preclude such an organisational framework. This is no accident. As Bassett (2016, p. 285) has argued, Rancière and Badiou work with very different conceptions of equality—for Rancière, ‘equality is not an ontological principle at all but a presupposition that only exists through practical verification’ or, as Rancière would put it, ‘a condition that only functions when put into action’ (Rancière 2004, p.  52). Similarly, the criticism that Rancière’s minimal elaboration of what would count as a ‘better police’ lacks any ideological foundation and therefore lays itself open to non-egalitarian (as well as egalitarian) ruptures and reconfigurations highlights a fundamental difference in the understanding of equality and democracy in Rancière’s writing and those which normally pertain in political theory and philosophy. As Woodford (2015, p. 821) has articulated very clearly, ‘Rancière’s ‘politics’ cannot be fascist or anarchist or communist but neither can it be ‘democratic’ in the sense of being committed to any particular way of institutionalizing political practice … it is based on the universal claim to equality’. Rancière’s radical departure from the familiar concepts, co-ordinates, and strategies of political theory helps to explain the fundamental problem at the heart of these criticisms. All these criticisms derive from attempts to recreate or reconstruct from Rancière’s writing, a coherent political project, vision, or course of action for a new (left) politics. But such attempts are antithetical to Rancière’s whole project, which is partly

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one of polemic interruption, disruption, and redistribution of political theory itself. Rancière does not ‘disregard’ or ‘ignore’ the need for organised political activism to make politics ‘take hold’; he actively disrupts, questions, and challenges the logic which makes such political activism necessary. As Barbour (2010, p. 259) argues, ‘Badiou’s elevation of the militant, or the one seized by a truth-event, to someone able to discern the ‘real situation’ effectively reintroduces on another level the asymmetry of intelligences that Rancière rejects’. In other words, such a commitment to an organised political activism always results in the kind of hierarchies that Rancière denounces, as illustrated in the fate of the Saint-­ Simonians in The Nights of Labour. Similarly, Rancière’s rejection of institutionalised politics is not a tangential aspect of his writing that can be ‘worked around’ to provide a more inclusive, egalitarian, ‘Rancièrian’ approach to institutional politics. This is something that Myers (2016) recognises and the reason why she ultimately concludes that, ‘Rancière’s thought poses more formidable barriers to the pursuit of egalitarian ‘ordinary politics’ than has been acknowledged’ (Myers 2016, p. 59). But, of course, the pursuit of ‘ordinary politics’ was never Rancière’s project. Quite the contrary, he has been one of the foremost critics of the parliamentary systems that are made to stand in and count for ‘democracy’. The inscriptions of equality contained within them (not only textual but also structural and practice based, I would argue) are important for politics (both as egalitarian gains resulting from it and as the impetus for the further staging of politics), but they are not ‘politics’ itself. As Rancière (2016, p. 123) has argued, he is ‘not against institutions per se’, but he is, ‘against all that comes along and redirects the idea of an institution based on liberty and equality towards the idea of an institution within the state power game as it is defined’. It is not only Rancière’s intentions but also his style and ‘method’ (Rancière 2009, 2016), along with the context in which his specific interventions are written, that are important factors in relation to criticisms of his writing as inadequate to the task of providing a new left politics. Clarke (2013) makes the important observation that Rancière’s writing needs to be understood in terms of the specific debates he was intervening in. Rancière’s disavowal of any ‘militant’ organisation of politics is

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part and parcel of his rejection of both the scientific Marxism of his former teacher, Althusser, and the cultural Marxism of the French Communist Party in the years surrounding May 1968. Likewise, his rejection of institutional politics is bound up with his critique of deliberative democracy and the attempts to find a pure political philosophy of parliamentary politics in the late 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the celebratory tone of the ‘ordinary politics’ of Western democracies at the time.

The Interpretative Power of Rancière’s Work Another major criticism of Rancière’s writing is that, as an interpretive framework, it does not provide an adequate way of understanding political struggles today. For example, Bassett (2014) has applied the specific critique of Rancière’s writing found in Badiou to explore the efficacy of Rancière’s writing for understanding the significance of the Occupy movement. An important feature of this criticism is the concern that Rancière pays far too little attention to what precipitates politics and makes it possible. Some have argued that there is a lack of attention in Rancière’s writing to the social, material, and historical conditions necessary for ‘politics’. Others have levelled charges of logocentrism at Rancière, arguing that his emphasis on speech excludes important activities from counting as ‘politics’. Others still have argued that his account of politics ignores or minimises the gendered, racialised, and heteronormative conditions of both domination and political subjectification. Each of these are considered in greater detail below.

 hat Counts as ‘Politics’ and What Conditions Does W It Require? Lane (2013, p. 28) observes that while many have welcomed the ‘generosity of spirit’ of Rancière’s work, particularly his notion of the presupposition of equality, some have worried that, ‘such generosity betrays an unrealistic lack of attentiveness to the material contexts which act to limit

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such equality’. For these critics, Rancière’s work is ‘hopelessly unrealistic’ (Lane 2013, p. 28) about the material conditions surrounding political subjectification. Some have even argued that Rancière’s writing could be synthesised with that of sociologists such as Bourdieu, to offer a more realistic account of what politics is and how it occurs (Nordmann 2006, cited in Lane 2013). Lane (2021) has extended his discussion of such charges of a lack of realism with specific reference to the Rancière’s use of the term ‘literarity’ and his claim that, ‘man is a political animal because he is a literary animal who lets himself be diverted from his “natural” purpose by the power of words’ (Rancière 2004, p.  39). Here, Lane (2021) addresses accusations that Rancière’s view of ‘literarity’ is naïve and ahistorical, ignoring the specific material, economic, and educational conditions necessary for people to employ such ‘literarity’ to bring about politics and affect political subjectification. Lane (2021) further argues that a more radical charge of ‘intellectualism’ might also be levelled at Rancière from this perspective; if only those who are literate and have access to literature are able to use their ‘literarity’ to achieve political subjectivity, then Rancière’s insistence on equality is seriously undermined. This objection to Rancière’s notion of ‘literarity’ not only implies an intellectualist standpoint in Rancière’s writing but also a certain logocentrism, which overlooks, ‘that whole realm of non-discursive human ‘practice’ ’ (Lane 2021, p. 555) addressed in sociological work. The charge of logocentrism takes a different form in some related criticisms of Rancière’s work. Garrett (2015), for example, and Watkin (2013) have both argued that Rancière’s prioritisation of speech excludes those who, for whatever reason, lack the physical capacity for speech. Writing from the perspective of social work, Garrett (2015, p. 1217) notes that, in practical terms, ‘there is a need to keep in vision those whom practitioners often work alongside, who may lack the capacity to speak because of issues related to age (the very young) and/or disability’. Watkin (2013) raises a similar objection, arguing that Rancière’s view of equality rests on a human capacity (speech) and is thus limited and exclusive. Referring to Rancière’s examples of speech as an egalitarian act, Watkin (2013, p. 526) argues, ‘what—or rather whom—these examples exclude, however, are those with an impairment sufficiently grave to bar them even from participation in a linguistic or educational context in the first place’. In other

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words, Watkin (2013, p. 526) argues, Rancière’s view of equality excludes, ‘those who cannot speak or understand others (because of severe disability, senility, or extreme youth, for example)’. As Garrett’s (2015) and Watkin’s (2013) observations indicate, a literal reading of Rancière’s insistence on the equality of all speaking beings carries important implications for practical applications of his work—particularly in educational and social contexts and particularly in terms of inclusion and disability. A further manifestation of the logocentrism charge levelled at Rancière is found in the work of Foela (2014), who argues that, in privileging speech, Rancière’s writing neglects the importance of listening for real political change to occur. Taking up Rancière’s critique of deliberative democracy and his more radical framing of speech as the demanding political force that obliges others to hear and respond, Foela (2014) argues that Rancière privileges the speech act over its reception. Foela (2014) therefore suggests a political framework for listening that would attend to those things that disrupt, challenge, shame, or unsettle the listener. For Foela (2014), this is not about the extension of an inclusive, deliberative model which removes all barriers preventing certain people from having a voice but part of an, ‘emancipatory practice that could work against such foreclosures on who speaks and who matters in democratic space’ (Foela 2014, p. 518). In essence, Foela (2014) sees an over-emphasis on the speaker rather than the addressee in Rancière’s view of politics and argues for more attention to the motivations and conditions under which the demand for equality gets heard. This issue of the balance between claims for equality and the responses they elicit also features in criticisms of Rancière’s work that detect a lack of attention to the gendered and racialised conditions of both domination and political subjectification. Related to such criticisms is the charge that Rancière’s work is inattentive to the contributions of scholarship from critical race theory, feminism, and post-colonialism. Fraisse (2013), for example, criticises Rancière’s trenchant aversion to producing further documentation of inequality and domination, in favour of paying attention to moments of politics, subjectification, and emancipation. Fraisse (2013) argues that while this might be a valid response to the over-­ emphasis on such documentation in terms of working-class emancipation, it is not necessarily appropriate to considering female emancipation

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and the problem of male domination. While it may be true to say that domination of the working classes has been sufficiently, or even overly, documented, resulting in the need to turn our attention elsewhere, Fraisse (2013) argues that this is not the case for male domination. As a result, Fraisse (2013, p. 49) argues that it is still necessary to document the lived realities and material conditions of male domination, ‘to convince people about the reality of domination, to localize it, to visualise it, to make it visible’. Referring to Rancière’s historical examples of female emancipation (e.g., Olympe de Gouges’ Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Jeanne Deroin’s presentation as an electoral candidate), Fraisse (2013) also highlights a lack of attention to the gendered, embodied nature of female domination and subjectivation and argues for greater recognition of where different emancipations compete. This question of the embodied, lived experiences of domination and subjectivation is explored by Sparks (2016) in terms of both gender and race. Noting a growing interest in Rancière’s writing amongst political theorists in the USA, Sparks (2016) acknowledges the importance of Rancière’s work in offering new ways of thinking through contemporary political activism and dissent. However, Sparks (2016) argues that Rancière’s work side-lines important insights from feminist and critical race theory, as well as queer and post-colonial perspectives. Sparks (2016) argues that greater attention to these theoretical contributions would help to offer a more complex reading of the citational processes involved in politics, for example, in terms of Butler’s concept of the performativity of discourse, with which Rancière’s work shares much in common (see also Chap. 8). Sparks (2016) argues that paying greater attention to these cognate theoretical contributions would afford better understanding of the way politics is embodied in gendered and racialised ways. Furthermore, it would allow for an understanding of politics that also considers those discursive practices that are not so radical and do not always result in change. Sparks (2016) refers to concrete examples from the Welfare Reform movement in the USA on this latter point, illustrating how performative resignifications of gender, class, and race informed the actions of women involved in this movement but only occasionally in ways that resulted in a redistribution of the sensible.

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Referring to Rancière’s example of Rosa Parks’ actions and the bus boycott that followed in the US civil rights movement as an example of politics, Sparks (2016) also notes Rancière’s lack of attention to the ongoing work of activism that preceded this moment and the similar actions of others that did not gain such attention. For Sparks (2016), Rancière’s inattention to these aspects of politics, as well as his failure to engage with feminist, queer, post-colonial, and critical race theory, results in a narrow view of politics that privileges novelty and singularity. As such, Sparks (2016) argues, Rancière’s writing comes from an unacknowledged centre, in which the success of politics is conceived in terms of the moment in which new subjects become visible to those at the centre (in the case of Rancière’s example, those racialised as ‘non-white’ did not need the bus boycott to become aware of their own equality). In levelling this criticism at Rancière, Sparks (2016) also questions whether Rancière’s acceptance and popularity amongst political theorists in the USA indicates the decentred theorising of political philosophy and theory itself. Bromell (2019) shares this concern, arguing that it would be beneficial to bring Rancière’s writing into conversation with the work of African American political thinkers, especially when his writing is applied to black history. Gündoğdu (2017) addresses Rancière’s lack of attention to post-­ colonial and critical race theory, arguing that Rancière’s notion of political subjectification might be expanded with reference to such work. Gündoğdu (2017) takes up Rancière’s (1999) illustration of the difference between logical and military revolt via the examples of the ‘Secession of the Plebs’  and the Scythian slave revolt respectively (see Chap. 2). Gündoğdu (2017) sees a similar logic at play in Rancière’s refusal to recognise the violent uprisings in the banlieues of Paris in 2005. In Gündoğdu’s (2017, p. 195) words, ‘[a]ccording to Rancière, the banlieue youth [like the Scythian slaves] engaged in a military confrontation with the police and defensively reasserted their marginalised identity’. However, Gündoğdu (2017) argues that Rancière’s strict definition of politics does not take account of the hybrid nature of much political activism (the Paris uprisings involved both violence and more ‘logical’ strategies involving petitions and creative uses of the French flag). Gündoğdu (2017) advocates a more expansive notion of political subjectification, as an impure form that oscillates between military and logical

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revolt. In doing so, Gündoğdu (2017) also points out that greater attention to contributions from post-colonial theory could challenge Rancière’s reading of the uprisings as not ‘politics’, given, for example, the policing of youth in the banlieues using laws developed in the context of French colonial rule in Algeria.

 valuating Criticisms of Rancière’s E Interpretative Power In summary then, several authors have argued that Rancière’s writing does not offer an adequate interpretive framework for understanding the nature of political struggles today. For some, Rancière’s lack of attention to the social and material conditions leading up to the moment of politics renders his writing incapable of offering a meaningful account of such struggles (Nordmann, cited in Lane 2013). For others, the ahistoricism of Rancière’s discussion of class struggles sidesteps an assumed precondition for politics in the form of literacy and educational access, thus excluding from politics some of those Rancière claims to count as ‘equal’ (Davis 2010, cited in Lane 2021). For others, Rancière’s insistence on the ‘equality of all speaking beings’ rules out political subjectification by those physically incapable of speech (Watkin 2013; Garrett 2015), while a less literal form of ‘logocentrism’ in Rancière’s work leads to accusations of a lack of attention to the embodied nature of political domination and subjectification. For some, Rancière’s inattention to the gendered and racialised nature of this embodiment is a further limitation of his writing (Fraisse 2013; Sparks 2016). An important question that lies at the heart of these criticisms is what legitimately counts as ‘politics’ for Rancière, and who can take part in it, with the implication that Rancière’s definition of politics is too narrow and excludes some of the most important forms of political activism and struggle today. Lane (2013) mounts a strong defence against accusations of inattention to social conditions in Rancière’s writing. He argues that such criticisms are ‘fundamentally mistaken, manifesting a failure to grasp the radical nature of Rancière’s critique of the social sciences’ (Lane 2013, p.  28). Lane (2013) reminds us that Rancière’s critique of the social

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sciences identifies a strong Platonism in their positivist attempts to ascribe certain qualities and capacities to particular people, thus reinstituting new hierarchies and inegalitarian distributions of the sensible. In other words, positivist accounts of what it means to be working-class will never succeed in thinking through the possibility of equality, emancipation, or political change. For this reason, Lane (2013, p. 46) argues, ‘to assume that we can correct Rancière’s alleged idealism simply by appealing to established methods of sociological or historical enquiry would thus indeed seem to lead us inexorably back into the dead-end of Platonism’. Context, and the style or ‘method’ (Rancière 2009), of Rancière’s writing is again important here, as Clarke (2013) has observed. Lane (2013, p. 29) argues, ‘there is no sense in which Rancière simply overlooks questions of historical context or material circumstance’. Quite the contrary, Rancière’s writing mounts a polemic critique of the over-emphasis on these dimensions in established accounts of domination, emancipation, and politics. Lane (2021) extends this defence against the charge of idealism in his discussion of Rancière’s notion of ‘literarity’, which also offers a defence against the charges of logocentrism levelled at Rancière. Lane (2021, p. 561) argues (contra the criticism that this implies an ahistorical view of emancipation dependant on certain material conditions such as minimal education and literacy being in place) that, ‘all humans, regardless of condition, are political animals because they are literary animals’. He does so via reference to examples of literary disidentification in material conditions that might seem the least amenable to political subjectification, arguing that Rancière’s use of the terms ‘bodies and quasi-bodies’ (2004, p. 39) in his elaboration of the effects of literarity, could be read, on a micro-level, as referring to human bodies as the material and discursive site on which social imperatives may be incorporated but also made to resignify. Quintana (2019) offers a similar defence against charges of logocentrism in Rancière’s writing, arguing that too little attention is paid in political theory to the embodied nature of emancipation in Rancière’s early writing, particularly in his archival research into the lives of nineteenth-century workers. Quintana (2019, p.  214) refers to Rancière’s descriptions of the bodily ‘torsions’ that accompany Gauny’s emancipatory dislocation from established class identities as an example.

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I find the criticisms of Rancière’s inattention to the gendered and racialised dimensions of politics and to the important contributions of feminist, queer, post-colonial, and critical race theory much more convincing. Fraisse (2013), though perhaps over-stating the extent to which class-domination is an accepted fact (in a way that male domination is not), highlights the possibility that Rancière’s writing is better suited to interpreting questions of class than of sex or gender. Equally, Sparks’ (2016) observation that Rancière writes from an unacknowledged centre raises important questions about the suitability of his work for interpreting gendered and racialised political struggles in the USA. These objections seem particularly important given that Rancière does address questions of female emancipation and African American history in his writing. Sparks’ (2016) and Gündoğdu’s (2017) argument that applications of Rancière’s writing would benefit from greater attention to feminist, queer, post-colonial, and critical race theory than is afforded by Rancière himself is also a convincing one. The examples of gendered and racialised political struggles in the Welfare Reform movement (Sparks 2016) and the Paris banlieues uprisings (Gündoğdu 2017) illustrate this well in terms of feminist post-structuralist theory and post-colonial theory, respectively. It is also worth noting that Lane’s (2021) and Quintana’s (2019) embodied reading of Rancièrian political subjectification relies more and less implicitly on a Butlerian notion of ‘performative resignification’ (Hey 2006). The similarity between this and Rancière’s ‘citational’ politics (Sparks 2016) is something that has also interested feminist educational researchers in their attempt to apply Rancière’s writing to empirical educational research (see Chap. 8). In bringing this similarity to bear on the very material question of human bodies, Lane (2021) and Quintana (2019) make the important contribution of aligning Rancière’s writing with significant developments in feminist new materialist scholarship, which sees the body as a site of both material and discursive subjectivity.

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Reclaiming the Political Significance of Art Finally, an important set of criticisms have emerged in relation to Rancière’s view of the relationship between politics and aesthetics, and in particular his view of the political significance of art. Rancière’s view that the political impact of an artwork can only ever be indeterminate has attracted considerable scrutiny in the literature, and some scholars have viewed this as rather a weak understanding of art and politics. Davis (2013), for example, has tried to construct a stronger argument about the political nature of art from Rancière’s writing than Rancière himself offers. Davis’ intention (2013, p. 156) is to, ‘show that Rancière’s ongoing work in fact allows us to go further towards a single, unified account of the politics of (aesthetic) art’ than his own, rather ‘non-committal’ statements suggest. Tanke (2013), on the other hand, has argued that Rancière’s focus on individual works of art prevents him from providing a more nuanced analysis of aesthetic experience, resulting in Rancière emphasising its democratic and emancipatory potential over its more destructive aspects. Lampert (2017) also takes issues with Rancière’s focus on individual works of art but sees this in terms of the narrow focus of Rancière’s interest on art reception. For Lampert (2017), Rancière offers, ‘a politics of art’s reception and not a politics of art itself ’ (Lampert 2017, p. 182). Part of the reason for this, Lampert (2017) argues, is that Rancière focuses on the artworks of successful, recognised artists rather than art production in a broader sense. Lampert (2017) seeks to remedy this by arguing instead for a more expansive treatment of the politics of art as a ‘politics of production’. He argues that art can be political in and of itself (contra Rancière’s narrow focus on its reception) if its production and existence itself redistributes the sensible. Lampert (2017, p. 197) argues, ‘if we can show that the artwork or production in question is a democratic disruption of the status quo, it will be enough to call the artwork political’. In other words, according to Lampert (2017), the claim to equality central to Rancière’s view of politics can be manifest as art. Lampert (2017) refers to British punk music in the 1970s as an example, arguing it was the music itself (not just the punk movement, with its DIY ethic) that was

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political. Lampert (2017) further argues that this view of art as political in and of itself merits looking at art history differently, including examples of failed political art, as well as successes. This latter point resonates with Sparks’ (2016) argument about Rancière’s work prioritising novelty, singularity, and success, giving relatively little attention to the more mundane and ongoing acts of political activism that may or may not be successful in affecting a redistribution of the sensible. As with Sparks’ (2016) and others’ criticisms of Rancière’s writing as an interpretive tool for understanding political struggle, at the heart of these criticisms is the concern that Rancière’s view of the political significance of art may be rather limited and narrow, excluding important practices and artworks.

Discussion Although Rancière’s writing remains rather marginal, it has drawn increasing attention in the English-speaking world over the past two decades, with political theorists in particular turning to his work to explore innovative ways of addressing the political challenges of global capitalism (as well as the left’s potential response to it) and as a way of understanding new forms of political struggle emerging in the twenty-­ first century. His work has also attracted attention more generally for its unique approach to art, politics, and research. With this increasing interest, Rancière’s work has also begun to draw more criticism—for its supposed inadequacy to provide a blueprint for a new left politics (or a realistic, institutional democratic politics), its inability to explain and interpret new political movements, and its limited view of the political significance of art. Accusations targeted at Rancière’s writing in this critical literature include his inattention to the material conditions necessary for ‘politics’ to occur and his lack of interest in the kinds of everyday political activism and organisation that happen before, alongside, and following the ‘moment’ of political rupture. As a result, Rancière’s work has also been accused of offering a narrow view of what counts as ‘politics’ in ways that can exclude not only certain people (the uneducated, the very young, the disabled) but also important practices that might otherwise be considered genuinely political, including some forms of activism

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and art production. For some, one of the key problems with Rancière’s work is that he writes from an unacknowledged centre, which makes his work unsuitable for addressing the gendered and racialised lived experiences of both political domination and political struggle. Some of these criticisms have quite strong justifications and add an important new perspective for understanding and applying Rancière’s writing—including in education. The argument that Rancière’s work neglects similar contributions from the perspective of feminist, queer, post-colonial, and critical race theory, for example, is certainly borne out in his writing. A strong case can be made that this reflects an unacknowledged positionality, which could in turn render his work less suitable for addressing issues of gendered and racialised domination and political subjectification than those related to class, notwithstanding the examples of female emancipation and civil rights discussed in Rancière’s work. Indeed, it could be argued that such ‘blindness’ (Bromell 2019) in Rancière’s writing is particularly problematic because of his discussion of these examples and that great care needs to be taken by researchers who wish to apply his writing as an interpretive tool for understanding a range of political struggles today. Scholars who have advocated allying Rancière’s writing with insights from feminist post-structuralist theory (Sparks 2016) or tried to apply this in their research (Lane 2021; Quintana 2019) have perhaps offered the most significant contributions to taking up and extending Rancière’s work in innovative ways to attend to the embodied dimensions of both domination and subjectification implied in his writing. I find many other criticisms of Rancière’s writing less valid, however, offering little in the way of new directions for applying and building on Rancière’s work. For example, as Lane (2013) has rightly observed, suggestions that Rancière’s writing could be enhanced by combining it with Bourdieuian or other sociological perspectives grossly miss the point of his writing, failing to grasp the radical nature of Rancière’s critique of the social sciences. In addition, some criticisms of Rancière’s writing over-­ exaggerate certain aspects of his work. For example, although it is true to say that Rancière emphasises the political ‘moment’ over the conditions and actions leading up to or following it, it is not fair to argue, as some have (see, e.g., Myers 2016), that Rancière makes no mention of these.

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Even in her re-reading of Rancière’s discussion of the Plebeian secession, acting as an illustration of Rancière’s inattention to the impact and effects of political action, Myers (2016) wrongly asserts that Rancière makes no mention of the tribunes won through this action (see Rancière 1991, p. 98). Similarly, as both Lane (2021) and Quintana (2019) have pointed out, bodies do play a significant role in Rancière’s writing, thus rendering charges of logocentrism rather exaggerated. Above all, however, I would argue that it is important to remember that Rancière never set out to provide a comprehensive theory of politics—either as a guide for action or as an interpretive tool for understanding all examples of political activism and struggle (understood in the ordinary sense of the term ‘political’). Rather, he has made several specific interventions on contemporary debates in politics, interventions which are also polemical in nature and aim to reconfigure the very terms of these debates. While these do form a ‘Rancièrian’ view of politics, in a sense, and may resonate with forms of political action today, attempts to try to make Rancière’s work ‘do everything’ will falter. This is true not only of attempts to translate Rancière’s writing into a unified theory of politics but also into a unified theory of education. Some of the debates and difficulties encountered in applications of Rancière’s writing in educational philosophy and theory stem from the same ill-fated desire to make Rancière’s work provide a specific programme of action—pedagogic, political, or both.

Reflection I began this chapter by describing some critical questions raised in relation to Rancière’s writing by my colleagues. These included the implied logocentrism in Rancière’s writing, the consistency of his contingent understanding of equality with forms of political rupture and organisation today, and the coherence of Rancière’s overall theoretical and political project. All these criticisms are reflected in the critical literature on Rancière’s writing, particularly in the field of political theory, and some resonate with applications of Rancière’s writing to education. Most convincing of all the arguments presented in this chapter, for me, is the need

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to be attentive to what Rancière’s work obscures (particularly in terms of gender and race) when applying his writing to interpret contemporary political struggles. Some of the responses to these criticisms have also caused me to reflect on my own application of Rancière’s writing in empirical research. As discussed in the previous chapter, I, like many others, have tried to combine Rancière’s insights with a Butlerian view of ‘performative resignification’ (Hey 2006), to capture rare moments of political subjectification as they occur (McDonnell 2014). Some of the scholars whose work I have discussed in this chapter have inspired me to push such application beyond the discursive to account for the more material and embodied forms of resignification that had, until recently, remained tacit in Rancière’s writing for me.

References Barbour, C. A. (2010). Militants of truth, communities of equality: Badiou and the ignorant schoolmaster. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(2), 251–263. Bassett, K. (2016). ‘Event, politics, and space: Rancière or Badiou’?. Space and Polity, 20(3), 280–293. Bassett, K. (2014). Rancière, politics, and the Occupy movement. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(5), 886–901. Bromell, N. (2019). “That third and darker thought”: African-American challenges to the political theories of Jacques Rancière and Axel Honneth. Critical Philosophy of Race, 7(2), 261–288. Clarke, J. (2013). Rancière, politics and the social question. In O. Davis (Ed.), Rancière now. Current perspectives on Jacques Rancière (pp. 13–27). Cambridge: Polity Press. Davis, O. (2013). The politics of art: Aesthetic contingency and the aesthetic affect. In O. Davis (Ed.), Rancière now. Current perspectives on Jacques Rancière (pp. 155–168). Cambridge: Polity Press. Foela, M. (2014). Speaking subjects and democratic space: Rancière and the politics of speech. Polity, 46(4), 498–519. Fraisse, G. (2013) Emancipation versus domination. In O. Davis (Ed.), Rancière now. Current perspectives on Jacques Rancière (pp.  47–65). Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Garrett, P. M. (2015). Active equality: Jacques Rancière’s contribution to social work’s ‘New Left’. British Journal of Social Work, 45(4), 1207–1223. Gündoğdu, A. (2017). Disagreeing with Rancière: Speech, violence, and the ambiguous subjects of politics. Polity, 49(2), 188–219. Hey, V. (2006). The politics of performative resignification: Translating Judith Butler’s theoretical discourse and its potential for a sociology of education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 27(4), 439–457. http://doi. org/10.1080/01425690600802956. Lampert, M. (2017). Beyond the politics of reception: Jacques Rancière and the politics of art. Continental Philosophy Review, 50(2), 181–200. Lane, J. F. (2021). Rancière’s ‘literary animals’: the conditions of possibility of ‘political subjectivation’. Textual Practice, 35(4), 545–563. Lane, J. F. (2013). Rancière’s anti-Platonism: Equality, the ‘orphan letter’ and the problematic of the social sciences. In O.  Davis (Ed.), Rancière now. Current perspectives on Jacques Rancière (pp. 28–46). Cambridge: Polity Press. Myers, E. (2016). Presupposing equality: The trouble with Rancière’s axiomatic approach. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 42(1), 45–69. McDonnell, J. (2014). Finding a Place in the Discourse: Film, Literature and the Process of Becoming Politically Subject. JSSE-Journal of Social Science Education, 13(4), 78–86. Quintana, L. (2019). Jacques Rancière and the emancipation of bodies. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 45(2), 212–238. Rancière, J. (2016). The method of equality (trans: Rose, J.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Rancière, J. (2009). A few remarks on the method of Jacques Rancière. Parallax, 15(3), 114–123. Rancière, J. (2004). The politics of aesthetics (trans: Rockhill, G.). London: Continuum. Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement. (trans: Rose, J.). Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation (trans: Ross, K.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sparks, H. (2016). Quarrelling with Rancière: race, gender, and the politics of democratic disruption. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 49(4), 420–437. Tanke, J.  J. (2013). Why Julien Sorrel had to be killed. In O.  Davis (Ed.), Rancière now. Current perspectives on Jacques Rancière (pp.  123–142). Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Watkin, C. (2013). Thinking Equality Today: Badiou, Rancière, Nancy. French Studies, 67(4), 522–534. http://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knt148. Woodford, C. (2015). ‘Reinventing modes of dreaming’ and doing: Jacques Rancière and strategies for a new left. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 41(8), 811–836.

10 Conclusion

I began this book by setting out my intention to introduce Rancière’s writing and its uptake in education, in part by sharing my own experiences of reading Rancière and attempting to apply insights from his writing in my work. I hope that this book has given you a sense not only of Rancière’s radical revisioning of several familiar fields of thought (democracy, art, emancipation), but also of some of the main ways in which his writing has informed educational scholarship—on emancipatory, political, and democratic education, on art(s) education and on the nature of educational research itself. I hope I have also given you a sense of some of the rewards, but also the difficulties and challenges, of applying Rancière’s insights to education and educational research, as well as some of the important criticisms of Rancière’s writing that carry implications for this. In this final chapter, I aim to summarise Rancière’s key contributions and their uptake in education before offering a final reflection on what I consider to be the most fruitful applications of his writing in education, that is, the use of his writing to challenge the boundaries of what counts as educational research and to make the case that despite the many difficulties, Rancière’s work is still worth reading for education.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. McDonnell, Reading Rancière for Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96013-1_10

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Rancière’s Interventions In the first part of this book, I introduced some of the major contributions of Rancière’s writing. One of the most important and challenging contributions that Rancière’s writing offers is a radically disruptive vision of democracy that unsettles established notions of what it means to live in a democratic society, to work within democratic institutions, or to set forward any project of democratic education. This view of democracy is one that is based on conflict and dissensus over what counts as belonging to the public sphere and who gets to have a say in it. Rancière demonstrates that any political government (i.e., one that is not based purely on any ‘natural’ entitlement to rule, e.g., birth, wealth, talent) is established upon contingent foundations that are always subject to disruption and contestation. Far from being a failing of the political community, Rancière views this contingency as its very essence. Contra to most political philosophy, which always searches for a secure, stable, and sound foundation for politics, Rancière’s view of democracy places contestation, conflict, and disruption at its centre. Such disruption, for Rancière, is always based upon a claim to equality, addressing a ‘wrong’ or a miscount in the parts of the community, and it always involves a reconfiguration that is also aesthetic—shifting the distribution of the sensible that underpins all political configurations and determines what is sayable. Rancière’s writing not only offers a radical revision of democracy as a disruptive practice based on a logic of equality. It also offers an alternative view of the politics of art as always unstable, unpredictable, and indeterminate. While art does have political import for Rancière, he does not conceive this in terms of a direct relationship between cause and effect, in which the political intentions of the artist result in specific, determined political outcomes. Rather, he sees the political effects of art as the ways in which they disrupt the distribution of the sensible. While politics may take up these disruptions and reconfigurations, there is no necessary connection between the two, and equality in art is not the same thing as equality in politics. One of Rancière’s critiques of the logic of cause and effect in art relates to the kinds of relational and participatory art projects

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that aim to restore social bonds, as part of an ethical turn in artistic practice, away from more political notions of art. Rancière’s writing also offers a view of emancipation that is individual rather than societal and premised on the presupposition of equality—a presupposition that anyone can make at any time, but which only becomes political and social when it is accompanied by the obligation on others to respond to that presupposition of equality. Additionally, Rancière’s writing offers a critique of educational debates that problematises discourses of educational failure, sees a different but still relevant role for education in democratic societies (as the site in which different narratives about equality come into contact with each other), and highlights the problem of a pedagogic logic in society, as well as in the educational research that sets itself the task of documenting educational inequalities or perfecting the methods of reducing inequality. Central to these insights is Rancière’s critique of Bourdieu’s sociology and its concepts of reproduction and misrecognition, which result in a pessimistic, closed circle of perpetual inequality.

Applications of Rancière’s Writing in Education In the second part of this book, I outlined and critically evaluated the main ways in which Rancière’s writing has been taken up in educational research and scholarship. Here, I argued that educationalists (particularly those working in educational philosophy and theory) have sometimes been too keen to apply pedagogic readings of Rancière’s writing to reconstruct theories of emancipatory, democratic, or political education from his work. Such readings tend to focus on the dynamics of Jacotot’s emancipatory practice and the figure of the ‘emancipatory master’ (Rancière 1991, p. 12) in The Ignorant Schoolmaster and Rancière’s (2009) use of a pedagogic metaphor for his exploration of contemporary art in The Emancipated Spectator. In doing so, educationalists have come up against significant challenges in translating Rancière’s specific ‘interventions on’ into ‘theories of ’ (Rancière 2009, p. 114) education, which is quite antithetical to Rancière’s ‘method’ (Rancière 2016, 2009). As a result, some have rejected Rancière’s writing as a foundational source for developing a

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coherent vision of emancipatory, democratic, or political education (see, e.g., Ruitenberg 2010, 2008). Others have combined their readings of Rancière with the work of other theorists such as Deleuze and Derrida (see, e.g., Friedrich et  al. 2010) or developed very creative readings of Rancière’s writing (see, e.g., Biesta 2017, 2010, 2011; Masschelein and Simons 2010) to offer new theories of emancipatory and democratic education. In a sense, these pedagogic readings of Rancière in educational philosophy and theory are understandable because of the nature of such theoretical work itself, i.e., as an intellectual exercise with the purpose of developing new theories and philosophies of education, often with a specific emphasis on the dynamics of learning and teaching. However, I would argue that they have also acted as something of a barrier to serious engagement with Rancière’s writing, particularly those aspects of his work that do not immediately seem to have a lot to do with education. Anecdotally, The Ignorant Schoolmaster is still the most read of Rancière’s texts amongst my colleagues, often seemingly under the assumption that this is a book about teaching. While I do not wish to suggest that the work of the educational philosophers and theorists mentioned above offer such simplistic readings of The Ignorant Schoolmaster, the popularity of this text and the most familiar interpretations of it within educational philosophy and theory have led to a problem whereby some scholars’ primary engagement with Rancière has manifest as a superficial rejection of Jacotot’s supposed pedagogy or philosophy of teachin. Pedagogic readings of Rancière’s writing are a problem not only in educational philosophy and theory but also in research and scholarship on art and aesthetic education. Several scholars writing on these concerns have tried to develop new theories of an aesthetic, political education from Rancière’s writing (see, e.g., Davis 2013), or aesthetic versions of the emancipatory, democratic, and political education, which has been such a pre-occupation for educational philosophers and theorists (see, e.g., Lewis 2013). Despite serious engagement with Rancière’s writing on art and aesthetics in this literature, there is still some reliance on pedagogic readings of The Ignorant Schoolmaster and The Emancipated Spectator

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when it comes to developing implications for educational thought, practice, and policy, as well as a tendency to compare Rancière’s writing with Freire, in a way that treats both scholars as theorists of (emancipatory) education. For me, it is in educational research where the most interesting applications of Rancière’s writing can be found. This literature takes seriously the nature of Rancière’s style and ‘method’ (Rancière 2009, 2016) to explore the implications of his work for developing an innovative and optimistic educational research agenda—in opposition to the kind of critical research that has dominated in education until recently. This argument is articulated most clearly in Pelletier’s (2009a, 2009b) engagements with Rancière’s writing and has been put into practice by researchers in empirical and theoretical studies in education. This application of Rancière’s writing to education does carry its own challenges and risks, however. The most significant of these is the danger that, in setting out to ‘redistribute the sensible’ (sometimes through arts-based methods), researchers will re-establish the hierarchical inequalities between researcher and researched that Rancière’s critique of the privileged position of the sociologist, philosopher, or other intellectual has debunked. Nevertheless, the argument that educational research should be paying more attention to moments of emancipation, democracy, and political subjectification—the ‘other of domination’ in Pelletier’s (2009b, p. 268)—is an important one.

Challenges, Limitations, and Possibilities The account I have offered in this book points to some important challenges and limitations inherent in reading Rancière’s writing for education. As some of the criticisms of Rancière’s writing (detailed in Chap. 9) have highlighted, Rancière’s interventions seem to suggest a rather minimal political project that does not offer any real solutions for what we can do to make politics happen or to extend and institutionalise its effects. This is also an important theme in the uptake of Rancière’s writing in education. Rancière’s writing certainly does not offer a coherent political

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or educational project, and attempts to reconstruct such projects from his writing face serious challenges or risk misinterpreting his work. However, whether we see this as a problem or not is a different matter. Rancière’s writing does not so much offer a new vision of political or aesthetic education, as a new way of approaching the relationship between politics, aesthetics, emancipation, and education. It is perhaps in the implications of Rancière’s writing for educational research that this becomes most apparent and offers the sharpest insights. Here Rancière’s writing offers an important theoretical and philosophical tool for rethinking the aims, purposes, and methods of educational research in more optimistic terms. There are also, of course, some limitations to my own account of Rancière’s writing, and its uptake in education, as offered in this book. As will be evident at this stage, Rancière’s writing is difficult to ‘pin down’, not only in terms of being able to reconstruct any overall theory from Rancière’s writing but also in terms of its breadth and wide-ranging implications across a diverse set of debates. While I have presented Rancière’s writing on seemingly discrete themes, it will be evident that these also overlap and intersect with each other. Rancière’s interventions on democracy and politics are elaborated from the central interest in equality that informed his early interventions on working-class emancipation and his polemic critique of scientific and cultural Marxism. This polemic critique also informs Rancière’s broader critique of the social sciences, particularly Bourdieu’s sociology, which has been so influential in educational research. Rancière’s own interventions on education bring this critique into conversation with wider themes of emancipation, equality, and the role of both schools and the social sciences in societies that call themselves democratic. Running through all these interventions is an interest in the aesthetics and artistry of democracy and emancipatory practice, which have also overlapped with the extended interventions on the politics of aesthetics in Rancière’s later writing. It could be argued that while Rancière does not offer a coherent ‘theory of ’ (Rancière 2009, p. 114) any of these themes, there is a certain ‘Rancièrian’ perspective on the world that encompasses all these themes.

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While it is therefore somewhat artificial to parse Rancière’s writing into his contributions on democracy, aesthetics, emancipation, and education, as I have done in this book, I feel that this artificiality serves some important purposes. Firstly, while these themes are addressed in somewhat holistic terms in Rancière’s writing, they are often treated more discretely in broader literature and scholarship. I hope that detailing Rancière’s interventions in relation to these themes has been helpful for orienting some of the major contributions of Rancière’s writing as they pertain to existing debates and discussions across several fields. Secondly, as Clarke (2013) has rightly observed, it is important to remember that Rancière’s writing has been developed in specific contexts and in opposition to specific trends, debates, and theoretical traditions. By dividing up Rancière’s contributions across several themes, I also hope to have indicated something of this specific context, as, for example, in Rancière’s specific reaction against attempts to rediscover a pure political philosophy to underpin democratic societies in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and claims about the triumph of Western democracy. Finally, I believe that there are important distinctions in emphasis across Rancière’s writing which might have been unhelpfully collapsed, had I presented his writing in more holistic terms. The most obvious example is perhaps the distinction between the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics in Rancière’s later writing, which Rancière (2016) himself has noted as a challenging aspect of his own intellectual journey. A further limitation (or perhaps characteristic) of the book is the highly personal nature of the account of Rancière’s writing I have offered. Although I have tried to represent a range of perspectives, including criticisms of Rancière’s work, I cannot hide my own enthusiasm for his writing nor my conviction that his work is still worth reading for education but perhaps not in the way that many working within education have assumed. In telling the story of my own intellectual adventure through Rancière’s writing, I have shared with you my own reflections on how the themes, problems, and debates that have arisen in the application of Rancière’s writing have helped me in my own educational research and scholarship. I have done so in the hope that this might be helpful to you, as you embark, or continue, on your own intellectual adventures through Rancière’s writing.

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References Biesta, G. J. J. (2017). Don’t be fooled by ignorant schoolmasters: On the role of the teacher in emancipatory education. Policy Futures in Education, 15(1), 52–73. Biesta, G. J. J. (2011). The ignorant citizen: Mouffe, Rancière, and the subject of democratic education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 30(2), 141–153. Biesta, G.  J. J. (2010). A new logic of emancipation: The methodology of Jacques Rancière. Educational Theory, 60(1), 39–59. Clarke, J. (2013). Rancière, politics and the social question. In O. Davis (Ed.), Rancière now. Current perspectives on Jacques Rancière (pp. 13–27). Cambridge: Polity Press. Davis, O. (2013). The politics of art: Aesthetic contingency and the aesthetic affect. In O. Davis (Ed.), Rancière now. Current perspectives on Jacques Rancière (pp. 155–168). Cambridge: Polity Press. Friedrich, D., Jaastad, B., & Popkewitz, T. S. (2010). Democratic education: An (im)possibility that yet remains to come. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 571–587. Lewis, T. E. (2013). Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic regime and democratic education. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 47(2), 49–70. Masschelein, J., & Simons, M. (2010). The hatred of public schooling: The school as the mark of democracy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(5–6), 666–682. Pelletier, C. (2009a). Emancipation, equality and education: Rancière’s critique of Bourdieu and the question of performativity. Discourse: Studies in the cultural politics of education, 30(2), 137–150. Pelletier, C. (2009b). Rancière and the poetics of the social sciences. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 32(3), 267–284. Rancière, J. (2016). The method of equality (trans: Rose, J.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Rancière, J. (2009). A few remarks on the method of Jacques Rancière. Parallax, 15(3), 114–123. Rancière, J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation (trans: Ross, K.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Ruitenberg, C. W. (2010). Conflict, affect and the political: On disagreement as democratic capacity. In Factis Pax, 4(1), 40–55. Ruitenberg, C.  W. (2008). What if democracy really matters. Journal of Educational Controversy, 3(1), 1–8.

Index

A

Aesthetic regime of art, 44, 46, 47, 50, 53, 99, 137, 141, 143, 148 Aesthetic revolution, 46, 48, 55–58 Aesthetics, vii, 2–6, 8, 15, 21, 30–33, 37, 41–61, 64, 82, 83, 87, 94, 99–103, 109, 124, 127, 131–150, 155, 156, 159, 161, 164, 166, 168–171, 192, 200, 202, 204, 205 Aesthetics (of politics), 6, 32–33, 37, 43, 83, 99, 124, 132, 135, 136, 144, 145, 204, 205 Archipolitics, 28, 97 Aristotle, 24, 28, 32, 45, 56, 99 Art, vii, 2–6, 8, 33, 37, 41–57, 59–61, 75, 78, 82, 87, 94, 99–103, 109, 117, 124, 127, 131–150, 154, 155, 164–165, 168, 169, 172, 177, 178, 192–194, 199–203

Artistic regimes, 44–47, 99, 132, 136–138, 143, 147 B

Badiou, Alain, 51, 99, 137, 179–184 Biesta, Gert, vii, viii, 3, 17–19, 35, 37, 64, 84, 110–117, 120–125, 127, 128, 134, 135, 137, 139, 140, 145, 146, 149, 166, 202 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 8, 20, 58, 65, 86–93, 96, 103, 104, 154, 155, 158, 159, 161, 167, 185, 201, 204 C

Cinema, vii, 5, 21, 132 Communism, 29, 69, 70 Communist Party, 63

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. McDonnell, Reading Rancière for Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96013-1

209

210 Index

Community art, 42, 59, 134, 137, 141–143, 147 Community of equals, 24, 27, 74, 76, 94, 95, 102, 104, 125 Contemporary art, 52, 56, 60, 87, 100–102, 132, 136, 137, 141, 143, 145, 147, 201 Critical mode (of educational research), 4, 164, 170 Critical race theory, 9, 186–188, 191, 194 Critical theory, 5, 155–158, 163, 167, 169, 170 Critique of critique, 51, 52 D

Debord, Guy, 100, 136 Deleuze, Giles, 4, 51, 99, 116, 163, 202 Democracy, vii, 2, 4–6, 15–31, 33, 35–37, 43–45, 54, 73, 82, 84, 87, 94–99, 103, 104, 109, 110, 114–120, 124, 125, 127, 132, 139, 147, 148, 166, 177, 178, 182–184, 186, 199, 200, 203–205 Democratic education, 2, 6, 8, 16–20, 27, 30, 35–37, 42–44, 47, 96, 109–128, 132–135, 139, 142, 143, 147, 148, 199, 200, 202 Democratic politics, 15–37, 94–95, 115, 125, 180, 181, 193 Disagreement, 22, 23, 34, 36, 94, 95, 97, 120, 124 Distribution of the sensible, 3, 32–33, 43, 53, 115, 118,

132–134, 142, 144, 147, 156–158, 167, 169, 171, 190, 200 E

Education, vii, 1–5, 15–20, 41, 64, 85–104, 109–128, 131–150, 155, 177, 199, 201–203 Educational philosophy and theory, 3, 109–127, 133–135, 142, 145, 146, 148, 149, 166, 195, 201, 202 Educational research, 2–5, 7–9, 37, 44, 58, 60, 61, 85, 86, 91, 98, 103, 104, 109, 110, 118, 126, 131, 150, 153–172, 177, 191, 199, 201, 203–205 Egalitarian logic, 181 Egalitarian politics, 64, 83, 178, 179, 182 Emancipated Spectator, The, 8, 87, 100, 123, 124, 134, 135, 140, 141, 145, 146, 149, 201, 202 Emancipation, vii, 5–8, 15, 49–51, 58, 63–84, 89, 91, 92, 94–95, 101, 102, 104, 109, 111–113, 118, 119, 121, 123, 127, 134, 146, 162, 166, 177, 186, 187, 190, 191, 194, 199, 201, 203–205 Embodied, 178, 187, 189–191, 194, 196 Equality, 9, 19, 23–26, 28, 29, 32, 33, 35, 54, 69–74, 76–78, 80–84, 89, 92–98, 102–104, 111, 116, 118, 126, 144, 149,

 Index 

155, 166, 178, 180–186, 188, 190, 192, 195, 200, 201, 204 Equality of intelligence, 3, 70, 71, 73, 76–78, 82, 94, 95, 101, 111, 118 Ethics, 34, 48, 50, 51, 136, 157, 192 Event (politics of ), 20, 133, 179

211

J

Jacotot, Joseph, 68, 70–82, 91–95, 111–114, 120, 122, 123, 146, 201, 202 L

G

Literature, vii, 3, 5, 9, 15–17, 19, 21, 35, 36, 42, 54–58, 132, 135, 146, 156, 159, 160, 164, 178, 179, 185, 192, 193, 195, 202, 203, 205 Logocentrism, 178, 184–186, 189, 190, 195 Lyotard, Jean Francois, 50, 51, 99, 136

Global capital, 33 Government, 3, 17, 18, 23, 33, 35, 36, 79, 85, 98, 139, 182, 200

M

F

Feminism, 186 Foucault, Michel, 20, 30, 47, 65, 86–91, 103, 104, 154

H

Hatred of Democracy, The, 20, 22, 23, 26, 33, 35, 94, 95, 97, 120, 124 Humanitarianism, 22, 34, 48, 51 I

Ignorant Schoolmaster, The, vii, 8, 58, 66, 68, 70, 82–84, 87, 91–94, 96, 100, 102, 110, 120–122, 124, 126, 128, 135, 140, 141, 145, 146, 156, 161, 163, 201, 202 Inaesthetics (Badiou’s), 51, 99 Intellectual emancipation, 63–84, 91, 94–95, 100, 111, 122, 123

Marx, Karl, 28, 57, 58, 100 Marxism, 63, 64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 83 Marxism (cultural), 20, 65–67, 87, 184, 204 Marxism (scientific), 20, 65, 83, 88, 90, 91, 94, 103, 184 Marxist metapolitics, 29 Metapolitics, 28, 29, 33, 49, 54, 136 Methods, 4, 5, 31, 53, 74, 78–80, 86, 93, 100, 110, 122, 123, 154, 155, 157, 161, 163–165, 168, 172, 190, 201, 203, 204 Method, the (of Jacque Rancière), 21, 91, 121, 126, 155, 156, 158, 168, 183, 190, 201, 203 Modernatism, 49 Modernism, 136

212 Index N

Night of Labor, The, 66 Novelistic literature, 55 O

Occupy, 53, 55, 184 On the Shores of Politics, 22, 25, 34, 36, 94–96, 118, 124

124, 125, 132, 135–137, 139, 141–145, 147–149, 156, 157, 159, 160, 163, 166, 171, 178–193, 195, 200, 203–205 Politics of aesthetics, 37, 41–61, 83, 99, 132, 135, 144, 145, 204, 205 Post-colonial theory, 189, 191 Proletarian Nights, 66, 67 Psychology, 56–58, 97

P

Parapolitics, 28, 29 Performative research, 167 Performative resignification, 157, 161, 171, 187, 191, 196 Performativity, 159–161, 171, 187 Philosophy, 3, 8, 20, 22, 27–30, 33–36, 46, 48, 50, 57, 65, 67, 68, 77, 94, 97, 109–127, 131, 133–135, 142, 145–149, 156, 160, 166, 182, 184, 188, 195, 200–202, 205 Philosophy of education, 109, 110 Plato, 23, 28, 45, 50, 54, 73, 97, 101 Platonism, 97, 98, 103, 158, 190 Plebs, Secession of, 32, 33, 78, 95, 188 Police logic, 3, 30 Police order, the, 30, 32, 116, 180, 181 Police, the, 30–32, 37, 43, 116, 118, 120, 125, 181, 188 Political dispute, 24, 25, 27, 29–32, 34, 103 Political philosophy, 20, 22, 27–30, 33–37, 77, 94, 97, 117, 125, 184, 188, 200, 205 Politics, vii, 2–6, 15–37, 41–61, 63, 64, 69, 82, 83, 91, 93–97, 99, 103, 110, 114–118, 120,

Q

Queer, 157, 187, 188, 191, 194 Queer politics, 157 R

Racism, 18, 34 Rationality, 36, 56, 77, 83, 90, 115 Rational speech, 22, 55 Representation, 26, 45, 47, 50, 66, 88, 92, 157, 163 Representative regime of the arts, 44–46, 48, 53, 99, 100, 144 Research, vii, 2–9, 15, 16, 25, 35, 37, 41–44, 52, 58, 60, 61, 66–69, 82, 85–87, 91, 94, 98, 102–104, 109, 110, 118, 126, 127, 131, 138, 144, 150, 153–172, 177, 190, 191, 193, 194, 196, 199, 201–205 Revolt, 32, 33, 65, 87, 188, 189 S

Social sciences, 2, 3, 20, 55–58, 90, 91, 97, 102, 119, 154, 155, 157–161, 167, 189, 194, 204

 Index 

Sociology, 7, 56–58, 65, 87, 90–94, 97, 98, 155, 158–160, 167, 201, 204

U

T

W

Thing-in-common, 70, 113, 114, 122, 140

213

Universal, 24, 75, 92, 97, 98, 182 Universal teaching, 78–80, 123

Wrong, 24, 27, 29, 51, 95, 155, 181, 200