NOTES on:
Pelletier, C. (2009) Emancipation,
equality and education: Ranciere's critique of
Bourdieu and the question of
performativity. Discourse: Studies in
the Cultural Politics of Education, 30
(2): 137-50.
by Dave Harris
Rancière has written widely on a number of
topics. In English work , he has been
associated with history, but his work on democracy
and subjectification as disruptive links in with
Badiou, Zizek, Laclau et al. The style of
writing is also difficult to classify—The
Ignorant Schoolmaster [IS]
is a novel, an archival study, and a treatise
[indirect free discourse, I reckon]. Its
focus on another era made it look irrelevant to
the contemporary debate in France [and is open to
DeCerteau's critique
that, like Foucault's history, it is so obscure
that no one can challenge it]. Among the
things that make him relevant is his critique of
Bourdieu [in the French Empire of Sociology,
in Philosophy of the Poor, and in the
essay that I think appears in Biesta's book].
Rancière says that Bourdieu has an
ethics, that is political effects, and features a
tension between 'the denunciation of domination
and the modeling of its ineluctable reproduction'
(138). The common criticism that there is no
political agency in Bourdieu is at the heart of it
for Rancière, that is because
the poor are objects of study and not intellectual
subjects. This is what makes Bourdieu
similar to Althusser, despite his denials.
Rancière says that he has had to reject
two traditions in Marxism—one that says class
consciousness only develops with the assistance of
an external science, and the other that says
consciousness would emerge from working class
activities and culture. The latter
misrecognises experience and has 'celebrated a
popular authenticity'. Both see the working
class as incapable of thinking beyond the limits
imposed by their way of life. [Not true of
the latter, surely, at least in the hands of
British gramscians who somehow thought these
experiences would spontaneously escalate into a
challenge to the system, an argument also found in
Hardt and Negri?].
IS does not refer explicitly to Bourdieu,
but it can be seen as negating him.
The argument with Bourdieu is similar to the one
with Althusser. Science is split from
ideology, and ideology is a discourse which
affects the thought of political and social
actors, as 'controlling illusions' (139).
Ideological representation prevents access to
science. Such access will bring about
emancipation. However, science has to
operate with 'specialized, exclusive methods',
which justifies scientists in delivering a
'lesson'. The dominated cannot emancipate
themselves from ideology. Only science
penetrates social illusions because of its purity
and reflexivity. Setting up the role of
science like this reproduces a distinction between
intellectual and manual workers, and gives the
former their importance. In Bourdieu, this
can be seen in the notion of misrecognition and
sociology 'as a science of the hidden. Schools
[regulate ambition], and what they teach is alien
to working class students: success is seen as a
result of a gift.
Rancière does not refute the
pervasiveness of the notion of giftedness, but he
takes exception to the argument that working class
students are fooled by this [argued not very well
in this article by referring to 'what everyone
knows': 'Yet who are these people who believe
schools offer equality of opportunity? Who
believes giftedness is divorced from social
background?'Actually, I've met quite a few who
believe in both]. Rancière thinks
mystification only exists in the discourse of the
demystifiers [ridiculous idealism: the practice of
assessment is far more important].
Mystification is special pleading for people who
want to establish a discipline separate from
politics and economics. Finding working
class exclusion, the effects of economic
inequality and different tastes are not
sufficient: it all has to be bound up with
misrecognition and being hidden, so the only
sociologists can reveal them. Bourdieu's
argument actually goes through several stages:
The working class are excluded and do not
recognize the real reasons for this [in the Inheritors];
this misrecognition is produced by the system
itself as a structural effect [as in reproduction].
Each proposition supports the other. Neither
party can see what's going on. Only
sociology offers radical critique and the
possibility of reform. The claims are based
on an argument that 'the social order could
[never] produce anything else than its own
misrecognition', and only elite sociologists can
see through this.
This explanation was good in explaining the
collapse of radical politics after 1968.
Bourdieu is able to be critical, while condemning
others for being naively optimistic, for
denouncing the system while admitting it is likely
to be perpetual. This produces '"an unusual
militant science", and a perpetual mourning for
the socialist and democratic hopes in Durkheim
(140). [So sociologists are incapable of
perceiving this for themselves and this requires
an external philosopher to point it out to
them]. Bourdieu represents a nostalgia for
class struggle: the elite display a bad faith and
hypocrisy, while the poor console themselves
romantically by remaining closer to nature and
necessity, 'eating only to stave off
hunger'. Only sociologists have the
intellectual insight and 'the ethical superiority
'to display this truth. 'In this respect,
Bourdieu upholds the very hierarchy he describes',
preserving sociology as something that denounces
and explains why it is eternally unpopular
[maybe. Althusser is pretty good at that as
well]
This is a caricature of texts like Distinction,
but the point is not to question the validity of
the research [well, he couldn't really could he,
having no research of his own] but point to its
'performative effect' (141). It is not just
there is a contradiction between misrecognition
and reflexivity, but rather that there is an
unfortunate image of the subject projected.
It is the image of the social that is in question,
in sociology and in literary texts. This
similarity turns on understanding texts as
performative, attempting to 'enact realities into
and out of being', especially making some
political arrangements more or less probable and
real. This is similar to the work of Law,
who suggests that we sees social science methods
as '"the enactment of presence, manifest absence,
and absence as Otherness"'. Rancière
says that social mixing is simply absent and other
in Bourdieu, so that each group can maintain its
role. This is Platonic, with some people
able to see truth, while others can only see
appearances, where everyone acts according to what
is proper in their place [but Bourdieu is
describing this is an effect of modern
capitalism? It is not his view? It is
a difficult empirical matter, as we can see with
later studies, like Bennett
et al on social mixing in leisure].
It is no good relying on 'a presumed given
empirical reality', however. Instead, we
should see where 'what a proposition brings to
presence'[massive idealism again].
Emancipation involves not just acquiring adequate
knowledge, but 'changing the "distribution of the
sensible"'. For Rancière, this means
altering the perceptual world and how it is
distributed, how people find out what's proper to
their social function, how they relate the
personal and the common, the private and the
public [I'm paraphrasing here. There is also
a Foucaldian bit about cutting up what is visible,
and "what is noise and what is speech"]. All
discourses are therefore political. There is
no agreed totality of social relations, 'as
implied in Bourdieu's notion of "field"', just
antagonistic ways of knowing reality and making
other's absent [again, is Bourdieu seeing the
field as anything other than a social arrangement
for mutual benefit, for example as in the
scholastic field? Rancière's critique
operates only by forbidding Bourdieu to do
empirical work and insisting that he must be a
philosopher with consistent axioms and all that].
So what is the relation between education and
emancipation? It is not a matter of
knowledge or consciousness. Bourdieu and
scientific Marxism alike assume inequality, so
that emancipation is the final stage in a process
of gradual reduction. Instead, 'there is no
other means of achieving equality than to assume
it, to affirm it, to have it as one's
epistemological starting point, and then to
systematically verify it'(142) [by asserting
equality as an axiom it saves all that nasty
empirical investigation. It is also what
liberals and other ideologists do, and now we
can't check their assertions, just assert right
along with or against them. So we choose
between Ranciere and Nick Clegg by voting? Can't I
just assert inequality, as racists do?].
This is 'dramatised' in IS. The
success of leaving students to read Télémaque
for themselves surprises Jacotot and makes him
revise his assumptions that teachers need to know
things that they can then explain to students,
using a student-friendly graduated pedagogic
method. He concludes that it is not a matter
of transferring knowledge, but 'establishing a
relationship of equality between master and
student, between the one who demands that
intelligence manifest itself and the other who
develops his or her own intellect' (143)
[interesting word that—'demands'. On what
authority?].
Rancière
uses his literary skill {NB} to develop an
argument more generally. He develops a
relation with Jacotot which demonstrates equality:
'the writing effects the collapse between subject
and object of knowledge advocated in the
narrative'[or appears to? It is a pretty one
sided indirect free discourse. Jacotot is
dead and cannot answer back.]. In practice,
teachers have to maintain a distance between
knowledge and ignorance, to demonstrate
incapacity, to divide intelligence into inferior
and superior varieties, to force students to rely
on people who will explain things to them, and
this 'stultification' affects the poor in
particular.
There is no relativism. Jacotot is
methodical and demanding [but this seems to be
good because 'knowledge and authority are no
longer amalgamated'] if we start from the basis
that there is equal intelligence, the problem then
is not prove it but to see what can happen as a
consequence [this is still a kind of proof through
practice?]. There is no need to assume
'empathy or shared interests', and Jacotot would
not accept excuses based on claims to be
inferior. Unlike Habermas, Rancière
[actually, it is supposed to be Jacotot who is
speaking here] says there is no need to build
consensus on mutual understanding—'rather it
appears more as a kind of confrontation between
the teacher's and the student's will'[so equal
intelligence but unequal will? Where do
these unequal wills come from?].
We use this kind of approach, 'universal teaching'
all the time, where we do not recognize
intellectual superiors. It is the
educational system itself that instills a
hierarchy and remakes incapacity. Students
have to accept this if they are to make individual
progress [quite close to Althusser here
then?]. This contradicts the public goals of
mass education, such as making people ready for
democracy. Instead, it makes them ready for
social order based on some predefined notion of
progress. The quality is to be realized, but
'perpetually deferred'. Inequality is to be
rationalised, just justified more
progressively. This is the role of education
systems [a reproductive one then? Why don't
people see through it?]. Social progress 'is
the idea of a pedagogy applied to the whole of
society', and according to Rancière
'" Jacotot was the only egalitarian to perceive"'
this representation and institutionalisation of
progress [this is so obviously contradictory that
needs no further comment—Jacotot is allowed to
offer these marvelous insights based on his
experience, but Bourdieu is condemned as an
elitist and a waverer when he tries to do the same
on the basis of empirical evidence! This is
really a philosopher denying the need for
empirical evidence?]
Both Rancière and Bourdieu are
skeptical about education as emancipation.
One argues that the reality of inequality is
concealed, the other that it is naturalized,, or,
in other words, for Rancière 'equality is not
an illusion that conceals inequality; rather,
equality (in the future) is precisely that which
legitimises the presupposition of inequality (in
the present)'(145) [Illusion for whom?Legitimates
it for whom? Only sociologists seem to be taken
in?] . [I think that Bourdieu argues for the
second one as well, maybe without explicitly
distinguishing present and future].
Inequality is made to look 'utterly apparent and
obvious—or "sensible", to use Rancière's
term'.
Rancière's critique of Bourdieu turns on
claiming that inequality arises because sociology
presupposes some 'epistemic difference' from
everyday statements [he is not alone of
course]. Sociology is needed because people
cannot overcome their own incapacity, and 'they
are captured by the logic of bodily
practice'. His analysis serves to explain
[in the sense of justifying] inequality—the poor
have an habitus that stops them formulating
critical insight and scholarly discourse. Rancière
insists that the poor do not succeed because their
discourse is not seen as scholarly, and is
therefore excluded, and Bourdieu's work confirms
this too [so what we need is some concrete
investigation of the discourse of the poor, maybe
like the empirical studies in Distinction,
or other studies like those of Willis or
Skeggs? Or perhaps we should just stay with
the basis of making different assumptions!].
We can compare Rancière with Butler on gender and
her attack on the notion of fixed identity
categories which confirm social status.
Butler's worry is with feminist discourses that
confirm a foundational identity for women, despite
their emancipatory intent. Rancière makes
a similar point, that the very critique of
domination presupposes fixed identities for the
dominated, in this case for the working class.
Butler sees drag as a challenge to these sensible
categories, through imitation which challenges
ontological assumptions about sex and
identity. It is not just a celebration of
parody, but a strategy which uncovers the constant
effort made by heterosexuality to become
hegemonic. Rancière similarly uses
archival material to look at the way in which
workers imitate their social betters, and how this
also disrupts class identities. In both
cases, acting out or doing makes equality
'perceivable or imaginable' (145). When the
rejected speak and enunciate, visions of social
totality are challenged and made to look
contingent [but they recover extremely quickly and
recuperate challenge—drag appears on popular
television! There is a problem comparing
historical and current examples as well—is the
assumption that current drag artists have not read
Butler, that they have worked out their stand
solely on the basis of their own
experiences? We know the historical workers
could not have read Rancière, of course—but
did they read nothing? CF Rose's study].
Both see emancipatory potential in performativity,
although Butler does seem to be alert to the
prospect that 'emancipatory discourse can be
deployed to create new categories of abject
beings' (146) [the example was when the Dutch
government used claims made by queers to question
whether Muslims were ready for integration].
Rancière
is more concerned about the effects of his own
discourse [academic heroism], in particular his
questioning of forms of academic discourse and how
it subjectivates. This makes his own
iscourse look experimental, a political
intervention rather than an analysis of anything
external. [invites us to get political right
back!]
His main concern is to discuss inequality without
posing as occupying an external position.
This results in 'the obfuscation of the division
between subject and object. The aim, it
seems, is to dramatize equality at the level of
discourse'. This leaves the epistemological
status of his work ambiguous. Apparently, we
are not to take him neither literally or
figuratively, active or passive, offering neither
denotation or connotation [seems to render him
immune from just about every sort the criticism
then]. This is unlike Bourdieu's
'positivity'. However, it addresses the
ethics of writing, as well as the '" poetic
structures of knowledge"', quoting White.
There is some connection with both Law and Latour
on performativity.
Given this status, what follows for contemporary
educational research? There is no defence of
a particular pedagogic method in IS,
unlike, say, Freire. Teaching is not being
criticized in itself, indeed, it celebrates
education and the production of shared
space. It is not a utopian manifesto, or a
recommendation that public education be abolished,
and nor does it argue that we need to 'resurrect a
romanticised past'(147). It does help us
challenge the claims of the education system to
lead to democracy and social progress [but so does
Bourdieu, and scores of others].
These claims have also led to educational research
about methods of transmission, the needs of
learners who are 'falling behind'. Social
class has appeared as something outdated, and has
been replaced by a concern with gender, although
it is still a matter of distributing knowledge to
overcome inequality. Jacotot's story reveals
that these techniques can legitimize inequality by
making 'the distribution of social functions
appear rational. The education system will
also always be in some sort of crisis if we are
judging it by its efficiency in distributing
knowledge, and these apparent failures only
confirm the existing social order. Thus
'inequality is made innocent: it is simply an
ordering of capacity'(148) [more or less exactly
what Bourdieu and Passeron say]. Failures to
overcome inequalities mean that equality can be
infinitely postponed.
Biesta [Exeter Paper] sees Rancière
as offering a challenge to those ideas of
democratic education which simply refer to
inclusion in the existing order—this leaves that
order unchallenged. Instead, we should focus
on what is currently made incalculable by the
existing order, and including that in schools and
universities. Apparently, Bourdieu made
exactly this recommendation too, according to
Rancière, so they have similar ideas but
a specific issue where they disagree
[philosophical distinction].
Rancière does suggest that we should
focus on 'performity of subjectification in the
act of interpreting the world', an extensive
politicization of knowledge in a radical sense,
examining the consequences of different ways of
representing the world. These must be
assumed to be equal. Schools and
universities must be seen as inherently political,
facing constant challenge to the existing
hierarchy which stops 'underachievers' from being
heard. We should examine the current
divisions of discourse into academic subjects, and
all the other divisions as well: 'intelligible and
unintelligible, essential and inessential,
theoretical and practical, academic and
vocational, abstract and concrete'(148). We
should see how transgression constitutes subjects
and reconfigures the sensible [luckily, this
includes academic research and its performative
effects]. 'The issue then is not approve
equality, nor to know the causes of domination,
but to see what is made perceptible in the
verification of equality'[and after all these
dissenting visions appear? Might we expect
those with lots of power to effectively suppress
the ones that they disagreed with? Academic
discourse already works like this, pretending to
permit all sorts of opinions to be stated, and
then rewarding those that conform to academic
conventions—there are no right answers, but there
do seem to be lots of wrong ones].
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