Notes on:
Lambert, Cath (2012) 'Redistributing the sensory:
the critical pedagogy of Jacques Ranciere'.
Critical Studies in Education 53 (2):
212--27. DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2012.672328
Dave Harris
Ranciere presents difficulties because of his
unusual approach and broadranging work, but it is
worth it, because the work reenergises critical
approaches. Critical pedagogy is defended as
political in the sense that pedagogy has a role in
'constituting the social'(211), and this becomes
even more important in the current state of
financial deficit and neoliberal reform.
These have produced 'cynicism, anger and
despair'. There is a new urgency to debates
about politics, knowledge power and authority, and
the 'aesthetic organization of the social
order'. He sets out to criticize the
pedagogic social and political status quo,
especially in terms of its institutionalisation of
ignorance.
His work is based on a critique of politics of
explication, and the explicating intellectual or
teacher. This 'is bound up with Ranciere's
biography as a student of Louis Althusser' (212).
His Lesson
and the subsequent journal Revoltes Logiques
link theory and politics, pedagogy and power
relations. Althusser believed that
knowledgeable masters should be the ones who make
sense of the 1968 Revolts, and Ranciere saw this
as denial. R went on to criticize other
thinkers like Sartre and Bourdieu, and to support
Jacotot instead.
His antagonism can be difficult, but it is
generative and committed to dissensus. This
seems to display suitable 'tropes of struggle,
diversity and ruin' to grasp current educational
experience, and to go further than conceptual
thinking. In particular, 'ruin is utilized
not as a site of loss and despair but as the locus
for critique and regeneration'. He can be
used to support radical pedagogies in the
Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research
which set out to disturb hierarchical knowledge
relations in the university and generate
alternative discourses and practices. In
particular, undergraduates are encouraged to
become research active collaborators. The
notion of the 'Student as Producer of
knowledge'replaces the officially sanctioned
passivity of the consumer. In particular,
two pedagogic installations, 'Sociologists
Talking… and The Idea of the University'are
explored for their potential to open up equality
and aesthetics.
[The work on Jacotot
is summarized 213 - 14, with emphasis on
becoming conscious as an intellectual
subject. The aim is to think through the
implications of equal intelligence rather than to
demonstrate it, and this is illustrated as well by
the historical work, as 'workers reconfigure the
aesthetic territory of the social
order'(214)]. Progressive pedagogy is
critiqued [in the sense of sequential?].
Current progressivism [different kind] has allied
itself with neoliberal educational discourses and
policy, producing support for [incorporated]
flexible work, innovative pedagogy, and enhancing
the student experience.
R leads to critiques of certain models of critical
pedagogy, but also 'resonates in important ways'
(215) with Dewey, Freire, Giroux, and even Canaan
and Shumar [according to Bingham and
Biesta]. These approaches 'share a faith in
the capacity of people to construct and produce
knowledges' based on some 'preemptive view of
equality'. The same ideas underlying the
notion of Student as Producer. They
sometimes operate in a spirit 'based on disruption
rather than transformation', but not to the extent
of deferring liberation as in progressive
pedagogy. They are more challenging and
risky. They place R's aesthetics at the
core.
Rancière sees the aesthetic as a distribution of
the visible and invisible and '"Politics revolves
around what is seen and what can be said about
it"' (216, quoting R 2004) this characterizes the
struggles by worker intellectuals in the
1830s. Such troubles are rare compared to
the effects of the police order which 'distributes
and legitimates the roles and subject positions
that people occupy'. It is 'contingent and
arbitrary', which makes it open to radical
disordering. Critical educators are already
in the business of critiquing methods which name
and count people and knowledges, and some have
attempted to create alternative
'space-times'. In her case, this led to 'the
curation and production of research - based
pedagogic art exhibitions'. The intention
was to resist explication and open a space of
communication for others to make their own
meaning, and new intellectual adventure in line
with R, assuming equal intelligence and desire to
share thoughts and ideas.
[details follow on Sociologists Talking,
217--20]. Interviews with 23 sociologists
were anonymized and rerecorded as audio
podcasts. People talked about academic
identity, teaching for complexity, change in HE,
pedagogic relations and research.
Participants and spectators were invited to engage
in a space that looked like a gallery, and audio
podcasts 'called for unfamiliar sensory
involvement'[unfamiliar?]. It was also
possible to read material, projected on various
surfaces, including Back on sociology as
listening. The material was 'not dissimilar
to those we might have made to coauthor a
traditional academic article, but the experience
was apparently different: the direction of
narrative was not imposed by linear text, 'but
depended on the visitors movements around the
room'. Movement was possible in multiple
directions, changing the ambience into a more
social and cultural space. Explanations were
not made immediately available, but varied
according to participants willingness to engage
[and their 'abilities to engage'(218)] this meant
the authors have much less control over preferred
meanings, while visitors all participants could
read the material in very different even
contradictory ways. As an art exhibition,
more people attended and would be reading a
journal article or paper.
Back himself wrote supportive paper [which also
notes that lecturers have 'no choice but to play
the game and establish standing {SIC} that can be
quantitatively recognized' but we should also
maintain a commitment to wider
communications. He also noticed an
incongruity between the posh setting and
subversive sentiments, again because 'we are not
able to step outside of our complex locations
within the hierarchies and structures of higher
education' (219). The most sophisticated
analysis still means a commitment to the very
conditions being critiqued, but [the tension might
be exploited] by this exhibition form. It
can be described as offering a heterotopia not a
utopia.
[Details follow of the subsequent The Idea of a
University, 220f] this followed collaborative
research with students on how the conventional
architecture of universities emerged, and what its
effects might be, at the University of
Warwick. The installation was shared with
'the radical artist collective Fierce!', and was
mounted in an actual gallery, not a modified
classroom. The large space was filled with
still images from archives, interview data in
audio and text, documentary film, a slide show, a
reading room. Discussions on particular
themes were introduced as a series of
events. The space itself emphasized
'disjuncture, dissensus and contradiction', which
emerged from the data. Visitors were made
aware of the structure of the space and
encountered 'surprise discoveries and dead
ends'(220). This permitted 'multiple
possible journeys' (222).
The idea was to explore what would happen if we
assumed equal intellectual capacity to make
something of the materials. There was no
clear explication, although there were 'preferred
readings' and guides towards interpretation 'that
reflected the intellectual and political opinions
of the researchers and curators'. However,
multiple experts were on hand, not just
intellectuals. Assuming equal intelligence
in fact made people aware that they were 'very
differently unequal', unlike the formal equality
of the classroom. There were new challenges
especially to people unfamiliar with modern
art. R himself acknowledges this uncertainty
and unintended effects. [Did anybody walk
out disgusted?].
The approach did require active interpreting and
translating compared to traditional methods of
dissemination. Some participants were
students, offering them real empowerment as
opposed to consumerist versions of the student
voice, and offering them a real output for their
research [within someone else's design] .
Overall, the boundaries between art, teaching and
research were challenged, provoking new thoughts
about pedagogy and the role of art.
The intention is not just to replace pedagogy with
art, or to make art explicative. The idea
instead is to encourage multiple engagements with
material and ideas in a new space - time. We
assumed active spectatorship. We agreed that
teaching is a work of art.
R's philosophy, his emphasis on equality as a
starting point, and his arguments for the
centrality of aesthetic redistributions 'may offer
resources'(223) in producing challenges to the
existing educational experience, as these examples
show. They called upon active spectatorship,
and they explored R's concept of equal
intelligence. They set out to challenge the
usual aesthetic regimes in education, if only to
'draw critical attention to the ways in which
teaching and learning both support hegemonic modes
of sense perception and have potential'. No
empirical claims of affects are possible however
[why not?] since this would 'require further
research drawing on (as yet underdeveloped)
sensory methods' (224). Ellsworth (2010) has
also suggested the need for a new way of thinking
aesthetically about pedagogy and its links with
space, time movement and so on, illustrating how
pedagogy is expressed through design rather than
just language. Subsequent experiments have
tried to explore this, and there are connections
with the sociology of emotion and the need to
address 'the haptic and experiential dimension of
social relations'. Work on visual research methods
is also relevant [citing Pink].
This will be required 'to push some of R's
somewhat tentative or underdeveloped ideas in
productive ways'. Nevertheless, these
installations began the process of a refusal
admired by R, and challenged boundaries between
research and teaching, knowing and doing,
aesthetics and politics. The undermined the
certainties of the role of researcher lecturers
student and so on, and aimed to cross disciplinary
boundaries. There is a need to generate
'counter hegemonic discourses and practices', and
R 'provides valuable resources for exploring (and
possibly realizing) the capacities of individuals,
communities and events to bring about social and
political disruption and re/distribution'.
Elsworth, E (2005) Places of learning: Media,
architecture, pedagogy. London:
Routledge
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