Aesthetic education and the coexistence of utopia and dystopia: Marcuse and Rancière

Abstract

While school is oftentimes described in dystopic terms, it can also be envisioned as a utopia – a place of freedom and equality where social hierarchies are irrelevant and time is dedicated to studying the world rather than serving profit and utility. Even if most contemporary schools tend much more towards the dystopian, the utopian dimension persists as an ever-present irreducible aspect of the school. Understanding what is at stake in school education requires an examination of the meaning and implications of this duality. To do that, I draw on two political thinkers: Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Rancière. By highlighting the aesthetic dimensions of their views, I demonstrate how, for both, utopia and dystopia coexist simultaneously. Marcuse draws on romantic poet Friedrich Schiller to conceptualize aesthetic experience as the realization of a free, utopian life existing alongside a dystopian reality. However, while Schiller envisions aesthetic education as a pathway to achieving the political ideal, Marcuse contends that the aesthetic dimension lacks the capacity to transform actual dystopian conditions. Rancière, for his part, critiques utopias framed in the distant future as ultimately perpetuating existing inequalities. Instead, his “method of equality” suggests an alternative: one can experience equality and inequality, utopia and dystopia, simultaneously—exemplified by a worker having an aesthetic experience while laboring. By connecting aesthetic experience to the time of scholè, I argue that school similarly enables the coexistence of utopia and dystopia, and point to the possibility of tipping the balance towards utopia.