A good seminar today. We committed ourselves to a session in which we would focus on some of our own thematic concerns (as they have emerged across the first six weeks of our work together) and, importantly, on our final project (a concrete plan for which is starting to feel urgent). I took responsibility for the write-up of the session, so here we go…
We spent the first hour and a half or so discussing the three readings, with a focus on Yves Citton’s précis of Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster. There was a little resistance from the outset to the “Jacotot theory of learning” — and such ambivalence is by no means unreasonable. Lauren offered a personal story that involved the enormous pleasure (and relief?) of being taught. Meaning, having someone pick up the chalk, go to the blackboard, and explain the problem: where it came from, ways of solving it, and directions for further inquiry.
Chandler followed up and expressed skepticism about the ubiquity of “intellectuality.” What might this even mean? What kinds of fantasy must one indulge even to posit such a thing?
Lauren spoke of her friend who is a social worker, whose committed lifework involves, to a significant extent, the enormously challenging business of trying to get marginalized and compromised people to engage in the most basic forms of self-care (showering, eating, sleeping). This is teaching. To suggest that, under the right conditions, such persons might somehow better be permitted to “discover” such matters on their own initiative can seem, in context, positively cruel (consider, for a moment, R. D. Laing’s experiments at Kingsley Hall in the 1960s).
And yet, we also had Julia’s striking story of teaching poetry in a penurious mental asylum in Argentina: yes, it was overwhelming to try to read and write poems with individuals of enormous poverty who had spent lives, in some cases, as outcasts of society, and who were subject to spells of genuinely frightening mental instability; at the same time, how overwhelming, in a very different way, to discover the extraordinary poetic genius that emerged in such environments.
It is difficult to do justice to the richness of the conversation about pedagogy that ensued. But there are some shining moments. I think all of us were probably affected by Navjit’s contribution. She offered us two very different (but equally beautiful) images from her own public education in India: on the one hand, the open lecture halls of the public universities permitted a coming and going of those who were interested (exams could structure individual trajectories, but there was little formalized “course of study” that brought students under the surveillant scrutiny of professorial expectation or curricular programming); on the other hand, her training at the hands of a recognized master of (as I understood it) Hindustani vocal performance (where for five years she rarely, if ever, was permitted to sing more than a single note for her guru/teacher—who sequenced her through a lengthy and tributary novitiate). Others, too, had teaching stories, and learning stories.
Before we moved on, I did try to underscore how powerfully I had been affected by Rancière’s argument on this read. Yes, I have made my way through his texts before. Yes, if pressed (like, in a generals-exam setting), I could have “given” his argument. I knew the story. But, as I admitted to you all, only on this reacquaintance did I genuinely feel how completely I had missed the dialectical power of the core claims of Rancière’s work.
He is really flipping the script on us professor-types. Did you all fully inhabit this?
I think it is not easy for people like us to do so. We wouldn’t be in a graduate seminar if we didn’t, in some basic ways, “believe” in the form of education (its methods, its implicit theory of knowledge, its sociology) characteristic of the modern research university — where we seem to be intent on nesting ourselves in perpetuity, if at all possible. In that context, we are probably a little “hard of hearing” when what is being said is “the educational project you are part of is in fact an elaborate machine for producing ignorance/stultification — things which are in no way natural, and come into being through the dynamic of ‘teaching.’”
I asked us to attempt, heuristically, fully to inhabit such a perspective. Did we succeed?
Hard to say. I’m not sure I myself can fully get there.
But perhaps doing so involves really zeroing in on the political stakes. Since the question is NOT “Don’t some people know how to do math problems better than other people?” (The answer to that is, presumably, “sure.”) The question Rancière is asking us to ask ourselves, the question Rancière is saying Jacotot was asking, is “What is the right kind of education in a democracy?” And more specifically, “What is the form of education suitable to a truly egalitarian ethos?”
The key moment appears on page 33 of the Citton, where Rancière is quoted as follows: “Equality is not a given, nor is it claimed; it is practiced, it is verified.”
This is, I think it must be acknowledged, a proposition of challenging profundity. If it is true (and is it not?) then a form of education that genuinely works to practice and verify equality may indeed be something more than just “nice” in a democratic polity. It may be absolutely obligatory, and possibly even constitutive of a meaningful democratic politics.
But if this is the case, is it not also the case that the deepest presuppositions of the educational system of which we are (I believe, all of us) the products, and which we propose to extend and perpetuate are hopelessly wrong-headed — indeed, diametrically at odds with what is wanted?
Strong medicine. We walked this inquiry into a conversation about academic training (grad school) as opposed to undergraduate teaching, etc. But, interesting as that was, I don’t want to lose the force of the original challenge. Our system of teaching and learning stratifies, sorts, and very definitely produces an attunement to (nominally justifiable) dominance. As in “this person is better than that person.” Our education system is ALL ABOUT THAT.
Is this what we want? Is it just happenstance that we have ended up with such a system (in a democracy that feels less and less “democratic”)? Is it happenstance that the system we DO have accords so smoothly with the needs of transnational meritocratic capitalism?
And even if you find that question sort of tediously knee-jerk leftist, do you not smell something weird in the way the “democratic education” we are endlessly subserving can never show us equality now, but only offer a (notional) equality of endowment (anyway dubious) or an aspirational equality of outcome (which is continuously and assiduously deferred/falsified by the very educational apparatus itself)?
Smells fishy to me…
* * *
We pivoted away from all this at the end of the first half of class, and talked about the footnote piece from Critical Inquiry, and we also stirred in a bit of quick appreciation for Proctor’s agnotology essay, by this point we were basically all ready for a short break.
WHEN WE CAME BACK, we dug in on the final project proposals.
I am not going to try to résumé this conversation qua conversation. I am instead going to go ahead and try to do the work of formulating a WORKING PROPOSAL out of what got said (while also taking a moment to surface some of the ideas that were a bit off the emergent “path” of collective energy—some folks may want to opt for developing this or that aspect of those, and going other directions…)
In the end, I sensed that a lot of us might be able to coalesce around something like this:
- Everyone gets to choose a “text” (this could also be an image; it could be found or made; but we presume it will be of value in thinking the themes of our course, and will engage more or less directly with stuff we have discussed). We will need to zero in on a STANDARD FORMAT for these (to enhance comparability and formal coherence). Let’s say, for the sake of argument, it needs to fit legibly on a single side of a single piece of paper not to exceed six inches square.
- Then, everyone takes some time, working individually (but also in emergent groups, as needs-be), to produce a SET of “annotations” to these “primary texts.” We have not yet set the number or character of those annotations, but there is going to need to be some kind of “rubric” that (again) makes those annotations “comparable” – and that gives the final project, again, some formal coherence. So, it would be something like, say: A) everyone does a total of 12 annotations; B) we do these in two rounds of 6 (so there can be annotations on the annotations); C) everyone does at least 3 annotations “from their disciplinary position” and at least 1 that is “explicitly about inter/trans disciplinarity”; the rest may be (intelligently) indifferent to, or resistant to, “disciplinary” orientations; D) some (say, as many as 4) will be direct citations/quotations/reproductions from existing works; E) at least two will be images; F) at least two will be handwritten or hand-drawn.
- Yes, all that sounds like a lot of bullshit and preformatting. But if we agree to roll with something like that, I think the final thing will take on a texture and balance exceeding what might otherwise be hoped for in a collaboration that will be, of necessity, limited in duration (and in the iterative labor required of intense and deepening projects of this kind). So I would ask you not to dismiss my suggestion here – though we can surely discuss!
- If we go with something like this, we will need to come up with a “plan of work.” In the sense that we need to lay out a timeline for the elements, as well (again) as some formal conventions. But I foresee the final project being, in effect, “assembled” (out of the drafted “parts”) in a one-time final class session – meeting in-person, in a studio space of some kind (to be determined!).
- I think it is not an “exhibition” or anything, and I think we do not plan for the thing to be “public.” Though we can take up the question of “documentation” downstream.
So something like that?
If we go this route, there is some stuff that will, to some extent, get left on the cutting room floor. So a moment on a few of those elements that jumped out for me. (And if I am omitting stuff you were into, just poke, and I can add…):
- I was REALLY into Ben’s idea of exploring obsolescence (as a patterned conception of knowledge within knowledge-producing domains like academic disciplines), and I thought the idea of doing so by means of a project that involved the BOOK as a form (the codex having been invented to preserve knowledge; the book currently feeling like an increasingly “obsolete” medium). Ben also suggested our writing texts that were, in a sense, “pre-programmed” for obsolescence. (Wait, do we ever do anything else?) But seriously, this idea too struck me as odd and promising, and like it might (as he suggested) link to the “time-capsule” idea. Chandler put the concept of the “gimmick” in here, which felt relevant. And we took a moment to play around with some ideas of self-destructing books, etc. Not sure what could be exactly done with this line of inquiry, but I was intrigued.
- Also thought that Foivos introduced a very interesting/promising referent with the “seed bomb.” Not quite sure how it might best be “activated.” But rich terrain, both in terms of material culture, and by way of metaphor.
- Finally, would not want to lose Lauren’s invocation of the potential of various chromatic investigations. (I was the one who started talking about zippers! That was NOT why she showed us that sample book!)
We will pick all of this up in the first half of our session next week, with Professor Hare…
-DGB
