Abstract
Jacques Rancière’s sophisticated critique of critical theory is the first step in his call for a renewal of a theory of emancipation. In the first part of the article, the authors outline this critique. Rancière combines pedagogy, art and policy in his attempt to develop a new understanding of equality and emancipation. The authors try as conscientiously as possible to present this argument in the second part of the article. Social and cultural inequalities are increasing in Western societies and have become inconspicuous in schools, and it is against this backdrop that a theory of equality and emancipation is important in regard to early childhood. How can equality be unfolded and interpreted, and put to use for young children? The article advances a case for greater consideration of the emancipation aspects of Rancière’s theory.
Introduction
The task of modern schooling is to transmit academic knowledge, general education, social skills and moral values to children and youth. In addition, it has been a central goal in the educational policy of many countries to facilitate an environment for learning in which social inequalities are reduced. Up until the end of the 1960s, sociologists, philosophers and educational theorists regarded education as important for continued harmonious and functional societal development (a functionalist approach). Education was seen as a mechanism for economic growth and reducing social inequality. But since the late 1960s, education has been regarded as a product of underlying power structures (a critical approach) and considered to be a mechanism for the reproduction of social inequality (Karabel and Halsey, 1977; Sakslind, 2002; Shain and Ozga, 2001; Skarpenes, 2014). 1 New insights influenced educational reforms in the 1970s (Skarpenes, 2014). In the educational policies of social democracies, principles of equality and social inclusion are important elements in the model of the unified school. For instance, in the Norwegian school, the inspiration can be traced to Karl Marx (1970) and his critique of the Gotha Programme, and the famous quote: ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’ In the social democratic school project, this translated into equality in results (Skarpenes, 2014). When pupils are leaving school, the differences in school results, career plans and opportunities should not be influenced by – or should be influenced as little as possible by – social class, sex, religion, culture and ethnicity. Ideally, the school can be used as a tool in the process of reducing inequalities and promoting emancipation.
It has been difficult to develop this ideal school. Why? According to Rancière (2010), ordinary pedagogy starts with the axiom that inequality exits, and thus purports to create knowledge and pedagogical surroundings in order to reduce the inequality. This point of departure promises children an equality-to-come sometime in the future, but the promise is never fulfilled. On the contrary, crisis and reform represent normality in the educational system. A continued call for schools to eliminate societal inequalities will continue to lead to disappointment. Rancière links Bourdieu’s sociology of education with this position. In the first part of this article, we outline Rancière’s critique of (Bourdieu’s) critical theory. This is the first step in developing his argument.
Building on the critique of critical theory, we present, in the second part of this article, Rancière’s view that the school should try to teach people to be equal in a society ruled by inequality. There is always an equality of speaking beings that comes before all relations of inequality. This equality sets the stage for the very existence of inequality. We try as conscientiously as possible to present the steps in his argument, in which he combines pedagogy, art and politics in order to develop a new understanding of equality and emancipation.
Social and economic inequalities, as well as cultural and religious differences, are not decreasing in Western societies; on the contrary, they are increasing (e.g. Piketty, 2014; Putnam, 2015). Inequalities and differences are obviously also reflected in the classrooms our children enter from an early age. It is in this realm that we find a presentation of Rancière’s argument is important and relevant in a discussion of equality and emancipation in early childhood. How can this equality be unfolded and interpreted, and put to use for young children?
Rancière in context
Rancière’s own position and theory should be put in context. The idea of emancipation is essential in sociology and philosophy. In a brief introduction to Rancière, Bingham and Biesta (2010) took Kant’s famous essay ‘Was heißt Aufklärung?’ as their point of departure. Kant formulated the educational paradox as follows: ‘How do I cultivate freedom through coercion?’ An important work linking the theories of freedom and discipline with real social change was Wagner’s (1994) analysis of modernity. A short summary of his work recapitulates the different interpretations of emancipation and presents a contextual (time and space) background for Rancière’s theory. Wagner shows that a core problematique in Western modernity is how we solve the dilemma between discipline and liberty. 2 He discusses how the problem is addressed in different institutions in various countries, each following its own national trajectory. Moreover, from a perspective of the history of ideas, he shows how sociological and philosophical theories in different times and spheres (contexts) have treated the various solutions to this core conflict in modernity. Wagner identifies the first crisis of modernity around the time of and after the First World War, when different types of sociologists and philosophers, such as Lukács, Simmel, Weber and the Frankfurt School, problematized how the rise of modern institutions disciplined rather than emancipated the individual. The period after the Second World War, however, was characterized by a time of socio-democratic expansion, institution-building and economic growth in the USA and Western Europe. In this period of what Wagner calls ‘organized modernity’, sociological theory was dominated by functionalism, according to which society is in a phase of harmonious development – what Parsons called ‘a moving equilibrium’. At the end of the 1960s, a crisis in organized modernity occurred in Western countries. Obviously, there were great differences between national states, but some common traits were identifiable in the economy, the political sphere and science. ‘The Keynesian consensus to develop a national consumption-based economy eroded; the organizational rules that fixed and secured position and task for each actor were reshaped; and technical innovations whose applications tended to break existing conventions were no longer upheld’ (Wagner, 1994: 125). In addition to the economic crisis, there was ‘a bureaucratic crisis of the welfare state’, and a crisis in ‘the organized mode of representation’ (141). A key year was 1968, with its social revolutions in the name of economic equality and its cultural revolution in the name of individuality and emancipation. The cultural revolution (and especially the ‘artistic critique’ (Boltanski, 2002: 6; see also Rancière, 2012: 54)) was an attempt to break away from those social conventions and collectives that were supposed to prevent individual self-realization or emancipation.
The critique of organized modernity was directed towards the growth ideology of industrial capitalism; the environmental threat became a theme, and the values associated with bourgeois society were becoming perceived as problematic. Closely linked to the cultural critique was ‘the crises of representation’ (Wagner, 1994: 147). Together, these processes contributed to destabilizing organized modernity. Out of this second crisis in modernity arose a number of new critical perspectives. A new generation of critical philosophers/sociologists from the Frankfurt School (Habermas, Honneth) appeared, and in France prominent intellectuals such as Althusser, Barthes, Foucault and Bourdieu made huge impacts on the trajectory of philosophical and sociological thought. Sophisticated theories of the emancipation of women, workers, the Third World, students and school pupils, and so forth, were developed. Decades of debate within the learned community have not solved or even dissolved – but, as outlined above, have perhaps clarified some of the epistemological disagreements in the interpretation of – the educational paradox: that is, (1) education as emancipation in the period of organized modernity, where a functionalist approach dominated, or (2) education as alienation during the first and second crises in organized modernity, when different Marxist-inspired critical theories dominated. The second crisis in modernity is the context in which Rancière made his contribution. He is sceptical towards the functionalist approach (and its current neo-liberal cousin, new conservatism), but he is also sceptical towards Marxist-inspired criticism that seeks to uncover hidden, underlying power structures. It is through his criticism of the critical theory that his own theory appears most clearly.
Rancière’s critique of critical theory
Bourdieu (with Passeron) developed the concept of culture as ‘capital’ to show how the educational system in France reproduced class (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). The culture (language, style, knowledge) learned in school represented the dominant classes, and this culture could be used as ‘symbolic power’ towards the lower classes. When the school attempts to reduce inequality by distributing knowledge equally to all, the consequences are the reproduction of inequalities because the knowledge taught is embedded in the culture of the middle class. In Rancière’s (2010: 10) interpretation of Bourdieu, the appearance of equality is precisely the driving force behind educational inequality. It is then up to the children’s talents, and talents are nothing but the cultural capital of the middle and upper classes. The children of the privileged classes do not want to know this, and the children of the unprivileged classes cannot know it. The latter give up ambitions to climb in the social hierarchy when they become aware of their lack of talents. Symbolic domination works when the lower classes deny themselves what they are denied. The school acts unfairly since it does not know how inequality works, and it does not want to know. Rancière argues that this ‘refusal to know’ can be interpreted in two opposite ways. One interpretation, according to Rancière, is simply ignorance of the conditions for transforming inequality to equality; the teacher lacks knowledge and needs to be enlightened by a sociologist to really create equality. But the refusal can also be understood in a way according to which the teacher is an ‘agent in the process of the reproduction of cultural capital which, through a necessity inherent to the very functioning of the social machine, infinitely reproduces its conditions of possibility. Every program of reform thus appears immediately futile’ (Rancière, 2010: 10). This is the conclusion of Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1977) book Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. So, Rancière discovered a duplicity in the argument – on the one hand, a reduction of inequality is possible; on the other, reproduction of inequality is perpetual. In Rancière’s words, this duplicity is nothing other than pedagogical progressivism. Distribution of knowledge does not have any egalitarian consequences for social order, neither in the traditional pedagogical (naïve) way nor in the modern progressive way. Sociologists call for school reforms and assert that there is a ‘crisis in school’, but do not realize that crisis and reform are, in fact, the normal function of the system of today. In this system, the pedagogical reasons and social reasons are made indistinguishable from one another. When the point of departure is inequality, education does not lead to equality. When our societies present themselves as homogeneous societies where all are equal but certain people lack the necessary intelligence or energy to compete, the school is charged with the task and responsibility to fill the gap between the proclaimed equality of conditions and de facto inequality (Rancière, 2010: 12–13).
Three contradictions in critical theory
From his readings of Bourdieu and critical theory in general, Rancière identifies three major contradictions in critical theory. The first contradiction is that although emancipation is oriented towards equality and freedom, it still installs dependency at the heart of the act of emancipation. 3 The one to be emancipated depends on the intervention of the emancipator. When will this dependency disappear? Why was the one to be emancipated not free in the first place? Second, this way of viewing emancipation is based on an assumed fundamental inequality between the emancipator and the one to be emancipated. The emancipator occupies a superior position, being the one who knows how to perform the demystification, and in order for this superiority to exist, the emancipator actually needs the inferiority of the one to be emancipated. Epistemologically, this is a difficult position to defend without being self-referentially inconsistent. Another way of understanding the argument is to see it as a critique of the structural approach. As Lamont (1994) argues, studies inspired by Bourdieu, Foucault and Derrida presume that cultural differences automatically translate into domination: the sane and the insane, the normal and the abnormal, and – we can add – the emancipated and the alienated; these are cultural constructions and, since they are defined in opposition to each other, they generate hierarchies of meaning, discipline and repression. In such a model, the slave will never be anything other than an emancipated slave – the inequality can never totally disappear. In our interpretation, it is precisely hierarchies originating in ‘already existing inequalities’ that create dominance. In addition, the consequence of this critique can be interpreted as a form of paternalistic exercise that constructs new categories with stigmatizing effects, despite good intentions (Hacking, 2004).
The third contradiction has to do with the fact that although the emancipation is based on the interests of those to be emancipated, it is always based on a fundamental suspicion regarding their own experiences. This contradiction is of great relevance in much sociology of education that aims to show how inequalities are reproduced in education. For instance, Lynch and O’Neill (1994) argue that the inequalities experienced in the education system by working-class people have been colonized by middle-class academics for their own professional purposes. They point out that: ‘to globalize one’s point of view in academic writing requires both freedom from the urgency and necessity of survival, and intellectual legitimacy. Working class people lack both’ (307). There is an absence of the working-class voice when working-class experiences are interpreted. Lynch and O’Neill argue that the working class occupies a contradictory role in relation to education. Other oppressed groups do not lose their defining minority or identity by being educated – an educated woman never ceases to be a woman, an educated black person never ceases to be black, and a physically disabled person who is educated never ceases to be disabled. The structural relationship between social class and education is different from that of gender, ethnicity, and so on, because members of the working class cease to be working class when they are educated; they must get rid of their own experiences and their own culture. Rancière, on the other hand, argues that emancipation is more than a move from a minority position to a majority position. It is a rupture in the order of things. According to Bingham and Biesta (2010: 33), this is a process of ‘subjectification’. It is a process about appearance – ‘the coming into presence’ – and it represents a supplement to the existing order because it adds something to this order. Following Bingham and Biesta’s interpretation of Rancière, emancipation is not the process of a political subject becoming aware of itself or finding its voice, but the very act of equality – that is, an open set of practices driven by the assumption of equality between every speaking being:
If traditional emancipation starts from the assumption of inequality and sees emancipation as the act through which someone is made equal through an intervention from the outside, Rancière conceives of emancipation as something people do for themselves. For this, they do not have to wait until someone explains their objective conditions to them. Emancipation ‘simply’ means to act on the basis of the presupposition or axiom of equality. In this sense it is a kind of testing of equality. (Bingham and Biesta, 2010: 38)
In the case discussed above, this means that the colonization of social class in education must be brought to an end. We do not need middle-class academics to interpret the working-class people’s underachievements; we need the working-class people’s own interpretations, expressions and actions.
Rancière’s equality in early education
Pedagogy
In a creative way, Rancière connects pedagogy, art and politics. What is needed is a way to test equality in educational practice. In this part of the article, we will briefly sketch the basic traits in Rancière’s theory of emancipation in education, focusing on the method of the ignorant schoolmaster, the potential of an emancipated spectator and the democratization of perception. In an interview with Anne Marie Oliver about The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Emancipation, Rancière states:
She [the mother] intervenes as a figure of equality. As long as the ideology of instruction opposes the teacher to the mother, she represents the equal capacity of anybody to be for anybody else a cause of learning. She carries the egalitarian power of the mother language, la langue maternelle, which everybody learns without a schoolmaster … the mother tongue is not a promise of fusion. It is rather an experience of equality. There is a kind of learning that is involved in the acquisition of the mother tongue … the idea that even the illiterate mother can play for the child the role of the ignorant schoolmaster. In this case, the mother is a figure of equality and not a figure of fusion. (Rancière, 2008: 178)
4
A process of early learning takes place on the basis of equality. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Rancière, 1991), we meet Joseph Jacotot, a post-revolutionary teacher who flew from France to Flanders when the revolution failed. 5 Joseph Jacotot and his pupils lacked a common language. They had to find ‘the minimal link of a thing in common’ (a bilingual edition of Télémaque) (Rancíère, 1991: 2). He asked them to read the book and, in French, write down their reflections. Jacotot’s method creates a meeting between a process of emancipation and a process of reign (the policy). His pedagogical project was to affirm equality. Accordingly, he withheld his own intelligence – he did not want to transfer knowledge or explain anything; instead, he let the students relate only to the book and their own intelligence. The pupils had nothing but the phrases in the book in their review of the content and style, and, according to Rancière, the pupils used the same kind intelligence they originally used when they learned their mother tongue – they created connections between the known and the unknown. What is important here, Rancière emphasizes, is the fact that Jacotot did nothing to explain; he let his students find their own way to the knowledge of the book. There is no such thing as a deep insight or deep knowledge – all knowledge is at the same level. Jacotot acted on the basis of the presupposition of equality – it is an act of performing equality; no hierarchies of epistemology exist. It is the job of the teacher to make it possible for students to find the answers themselves. Teachers should, according to Rancière, not transfer their knowledge to students, but should facilitate pedagogical situations in order to let them use their own intelligence and personal modes of reasoning. Therefore, who sees? What do they see? What do they think about that? This may not be pedagogically revolutionary per se, and there are several ways to criticize such an approach, but our goal here is not to pursue such criticisms. The pedagogical principle we extract for empirical use is Rancière’s thesis about the necessity of epistemological symmetry.
Art
In the next step in his reasoning on equality and education, Rancière engages his theory of art and the figure of the emancipated spectator. Often, in theatre and other art forms, the viewer/spectator is considered a passive figure. An epistemological symmetry is needed, analogous to the symmetry guiding Jacotot’s pedagogy. In order to perform an act of equality, the active spectator must be allowed to appear. As we have seen, Rancière is critical of critical theory, but he is also critical of the criticism of critical theory. Such a stand maintains the idea that one can reveal the picture’s inner secrets, freeing us as spectators from the underlying power structure to see things how they really are. But, according to Rancière, the picture or the drama is itself the reality – there is nothing behind or beside it. Thus, argues Rancière, the critique of critical theory contains the same critical procedures. One could, perhaps, say that critique (a critique of a first order) and a critique of critique (a critique of a second order) both distinguish between those who know and those who do not; thus, a critique of a second order only creates the illusion of illusions. Rancière believes that the critique of aesthetic criticism in the French theoretical landscape has resulted in a group that is best characterized as ‘left-wing melancholy’ and a group to which he gives the label ‘right-wing frenzy’ (Bale, 2012: 216). The problem is that the left-wing criticism is not activist, while the right-wing criticism is. In the case of the right-wing criticism, we end up in a situation where human freedom and democracy are reduced to the capitalist release of the individual desire and, in the case of the left-wing criticism, individual critiques will only strengthen the existing social order – a parallel would be that a critique of liberal democracy is a confirmation of the same, and we get examples of performative self-reinforcing mechanisms.
Thus, in order to perform an act of equality, the logic of emancipation must change. How do we create equality between the image and the spectator? By engaging the ideas embodied and originating in the pedagogy of Jacotot. The image and the spectator’s experiences of the image must be entities on an equal level. The epistemological symmetry of pedagogy transferred into the experience of art means a spectator who actively creates his/her own experiences by bringing together former perceptions, views, knowledge and emotions, just as pupils do when they are learning a language. When such experiences are valued as much as the image itself, a process of emancipation is a possible outcome. 6
Policy
When linking pedagogy and aesthetics to policy, Rancière gets innovative. He introduces the idea of a democratic distribution of the sensual: le partage du sensible. This is a celebrated contribution to recent aesthetic and political debates, and has variously been translated as ‘the partition of the perceptible’, ‘the division’, ‘sharing’ and, more commonly, ‘the distribution of the sensible’:
The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed … it defines what is visible or not in a common space, endowed with a common language, etc. (Rancière, 2004, in Birell, 2008: 1)
The sensual is related to people’s life worlds. Rancière argues that the media – journalists, academics, politicians – have been given carte blanche to present their views of the sensual and, as participants in the media, they control the ‘right’ interpretation of the sensual. Thus, they control what the rest of us might possibly perceive, see or understand, and in this way the aesthetics can be nothing but political. Only these few are given the permission to sense. Paraphrasing Marx: ‘The ideas of the ruling chattering class are the ruling ideas’. Within this discourse, interpretations of art can be ranked on a hierarchical scale. A democratization of the sensible must have as a consequence the resolution of this discourse. There is no correct interpretation. Instead of searching for correct in-depth interpretations, we need to shine a light on the surface and reveal all the different and various interpretations. With this approach, there are no connoisseurs and non-connoisseurs; it is simply not the case that someone knows the truth and someone does not. The argument put forward by Rancière is that the surface is accessible to everyone, and here again we catch a glimpse of the principle of equality.
This sketch of Rancière’s view of equality based on the relations between pedagogy, art and politics suggests that a central goal in early childhood education, as well as youth education, should be to perform acts of equality. Facilitating the potential for emancipation in education depends on the creation of symmetrical situations where children are not having anything explained to them, but rather are given the opportunity to use their own personal skills and experience. A pedagogical piece of advice (if teaching) is to investigate how not only texts (as in Jacotot’s use of Télémaque), but all kinds of images can be used in pedagogical settings. Children are obviously surrounded by images, and they use images for all sorts of communication. They attach all sorts of thoughts and feelings to images. In modern schools, which include different social classes, nationalities, religions, ethnicities and sexes, schoolmasters cannot be anything but ignorant of all these different biographies and destinies. By letting children choose the images they wish to show and talk about, we achieve an opportunity for what we, with Rancière, could call a ‘symmetric equality’.
Conclusion
Asking pupils in schools to bring in images of their own choosing and allowing them to speak freely about these images might be fruitful pedagogical advice. Emancipation means that every experience of images is put on an equal level. When everyone is given the opportunity to use his/her own skills and individuality, and when all experiences are given the opportunity to be expressed and evaluated as equal, a democratization of the sensual might occur. This is a process through which children’s appearances ‘are coming into presence’ – and it represents a supplement to the existing social order because it adds something to that order. The events – the very element of performance per se – are emancipation and, as such, they contribute to the democratization of the social order. Accordingly, the pedagogical advice we propose is influenced by the thesis we deduce from Rancière’s theory: first, the idea of an epistemological symmetry in which there is equality between the teacher and children in educational situations (or at least in some educational situations); second, the idea that the interpretation of images is constructed by individuals through the activation of pre-existing experiences, impressions and reflections, and that all interpretations/constructions are valued equally; and third, the idea that individual communication of their experiences will reflect a process of emancipation per se. It is a process of emancipating on an individual level since everyone gets an equal opportunity to see, to feel and to think, and since individual emancipation is the very basis of a continuously developing democracy, this signifies a process of emancipation also on a societal level. Such a project would, we suppose, not produce individual idiosyncrasies. Although everyone has personal experiences and individual biographies, we would expect to find descriptions of experiences linking personal experiences to different sets of culturally embedded collective categories. In other words, the hypothesis is that children will try to connect their subjective experiences to different forms of generalizations. When allowing children to speak freely in such circumstances as described above, cultural and structural differences and similarities will naturally appear, but on a level constructed by the pupils themselves. Herein lies a real opportunity to achieve a new view of equality and for a bottom-up democracy. One of the most urgent contemporary issues is how Western schools can include young refugees. Maybe the Rancièrian approach can serve as one of several educational instruments to facilitate a much needed politics of inclusion.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.