Notes
on: Lewis, T (2011) 'The Future of the Image in
Critical Pedagogy' Studies in the Philosophy
of Education 30: 37--51
Dave Harris
Discussing aesthetics seems irrelevant in the face
of more urgent concerns and philosophical tasks,
and philosophers of the aesthetic conventionally
start with an apology [Marcuse is one
example]. The same thing is found in radical
educators working in difficult schools: aesthetic
theory seems anachronistic and
inappropriate. However, what questions like
what constitutes the beautiful or the sublime are
crucial in critical pedagogy. Critiques of
popular culture are common [including Giroux], but
the fine arts need attention as well.
Freire is one of the few who have used art in his
'culture circles', as a guide to raise
consciousness, but there are additional
considerations and these are provided in Rancière,
especially with notions like the pensive image and
the emancipated spectator. Rancière revives
the notion of Kant's aesthetic community. We
should see how this has affected his more
educational work. Most of those who have
drawn on Rancière have not focused sufficiently on
the work on visual arts, however. We also
need a reassessment to 'bridge the pessimism of
Rancière' with 'Freire's utopianism'(38).
Freire argues for a democratised culture through
the notion of the culture circle [in Education
for Critical Consciousness 1973]. This
encourages debate to clarify situations, and
action which might then arise. The point is
to see that students themselves are active in the
production and transformation of culture, as
Subjects rather than Objects of history, to
encourage their own creative acts, including
searches and inventions. Freire uses
'"codified" existential situations' to accomplish
this (39). This includes using images
'designed to visually represent a particular stage
of critical consciousness on its path toward self
recognition'. Images were to be decoded by
the participants. One example includes image
of 'a man standing with book and hoe poised
between a tree (nature) and the house and a well
(culture)'. The idea is to get people to see
how human beings can create and recreate the
world, to connect nature and culture.
Notions of literacy and liberation are extended
with the use of 'a corresponding generative word'
which is supposed to represent '"the oral
expression of the object perceived"'.
Dialogue proceeds until the decoding is exhausted.
The whole exercise presupposes a 'correspondence
theory between intention, codification,
decodification and action', but there are other
possibilities to see students as 'creative
interpreters and translators'. Rancière
provides us with new options in the move from
codified image to pensive image, and from passive
to emancipated spectators. Freire has at
least pointed to the aesthetic 'dimension to
emancipation', however (40), and how 'forms of
visibility' are linked to 'manners of speaking',
but his work is still limited and demonstrates
conventions through 'the intentional fallacy, the
fallacy of artistic hierarchicization, and the
fallacy of spectatorship'.
For example, Freire offers a contradiction between
his democratic goals and his pedagogical activity,
which in practice involves 'a careful selection of
codes to illustrate particular messages',
according to some theory of the stages of the
development of critical consciousness. In
turn, this implies that images can be decoded 'in
a rather transparent manner' under guidance.
This implies some correlation between the
intention of the artist, the representation, and
the interpretation of the students. This is
not really 'the creation of the new', nor are
agents really inventive ones, but discover 'an
ideal causality that translates intentions to
images to signs'. In particular, the
oppressed cannot 'disidentify themselves with
their own pictorial representation'. In
another example, a picture depicts a conventional
seated audience being addressed by a coordinator,
'an image that offers little distinction from the
depiction of a banking classroom'. If
students do identify with the picture of the
audience, 'they actively participate in their own
objectification' (41) [which assumes that there is
no place for passive learning in the move towards
critical consciousness: it is equally paradoxical
to insist that students must immediately be
'active', even if this means rejecting to learn
how to read]. Freire has not discussed these
possible 'ambivalences'which affect the whole
'pedagogical act of dialogue'.
This use of images is still conservative and
conventional. Rancière [in his Dissensus...]
has offered a criticism of pedagogical art and the
underlying view that images are merely signs of an
intention by the artist, designed to induce some
kind of passive edification, such as resistance
against spectacle, or a critique of conventional
forms of representation. Freire's tactic
depends on this simple identification between the
people in the image and the viewer's subject
position. It is the underlying pedagogy that
needs attention, however, not the use of art in
education.
There is no direct cause and effect relationship
between intention and effect, word and image,
despite the classical notion that the visible just
illustrates what the words say, assuming that
speech governs the forms of the visible, for
Freire. This is detectable in the notion of
dialogue as the teacher uses the image to
illustrate the word. This makes students
dependent on the word provided by the coordinator
to point to the meaning of the image. In
turn, this imposes a hierarchy, with speech as the
most important, while Rancière would see images as
just 'another mode of the sensible that becomes
visible'. Indeed, we can even have a split
between what is seen and what is thought, 'and
between what is thought and what is felt'.
This permits 'a space of dissensus', breaking with
common sense.
Freire 'reenacts the paradox of spectatorship
found in avant-garde theatrical experiments'
(42). Politically, this postpones democracy
and liberation until after insight [in his case
literacy] is established. Some theatrical
radicals, including Brecht and Artaud attempted to
break the passivity of the spectator and replace
them with an 'active community of participants'.
Other experimental theatre does the same. Boal is
close to Freire here with his notion of a 'theatre
of the oppressed' [see link]
but he has a deliberate policy to oppose
spectatorship.
But Rancière points to the contradiction in this
pedagogical relation as well—only the schoolmaster
can abolish the distance between knowledge and
ignorance, and this involves recreating the
distance. Instead, we should be allowing
spectators to translate images and this will
inevitably lead to dissensus. We have to
realise that this is positive for Rancière,
producing something heterogeneous, something
aesthetic, in that it makes some things visible
and audible despite attempts to regulate these
possibilities. The moment of dissensus and
dis-identification produces the possibility of
democracy, and makes spectators actively engaged.
Freire thinks that dialogue can eventually be
exhausted, but again this implies some
'predetermined final destination'(43), with the
danger that dialogue itself becomes 'nothing more
than dialogic explication', with dialogue as
merely illustrating a linear narrative.
Rancière wants to propose instead '"silent
speech"', which arises when images initially
resist speech and refuse interpretation and thus
remain silent. Otherwise, the image becomes
a mere symptom to be explained by speech.
The silence of the image is a constant reminder of
this resistance. It stops spoken dialogue
managing the image. In democratic politics,
it is important to retain 'contingency',
dissensus, to avoid materials that provide
lessons, and to open new configurations, whose
meanings are not anticipated. In this sense,
images can reconfigure common experiences of the
sensible, in Rancière's terms, beyond anyone's
intentions.
This is what makes images 'pensive', something
which escapes both the author's intention and the
surprise of the punctum [see Rancière] ,
but conjoins both of these possibilities or
'"regimes of expression"'. It provides 'a
surplus in the field of the sensible', by
overlapping different forms of indeterminacy,
which escape the agency of the artist - or the
teacher. For Freire, there is always a
danger that the illustration 'interpellates the
viewers' by its immediacy, and that dialogue
domesticates pensiveness. Instead, images
can offer different regimes of expression,
different sorts of thoughts and questions, which
are not regulated by submitting to the 'classic
regime of art' (44). The images Freire uses
are always more complex than he suggests, for
example combining 'realism, abstraction, and
poetry', both mimetic and figural,
representational and abstract. But there is
'a rush towards narrative closure'. What is
missed is the more general political concept of
arts as a way of producing new ways of seeing the
world, something that can work directly on 'the
sensorial apparatus' of the viewer, requiring no
use of 'dialogue as a suturing or coordinating
intervention'.
The 'democratic leveling' of the visual and the
verbal produces 'aesthetic pensiveness', but this
is managed by Freire's dialogue. Even at the
first stage, nature and culture are distinguished,
even though the image itself offers 'a state of
creative surplus between dichotomies'. In
the precise image itself, there is even a
'marginalised woman in the background' and she
could be seen as standing between categories [more
likely to be seen as on the side of nature, I
would have thought, although Lewis does not read
it that way and says she stands between the
two]. The full political gesture of the
image is both the man confidently demonstrating
cultural mastery and the woman standing aside from
such identifications. This is the full
'marginal, pensive detail' (45), but to get to it
would mean refusing Freire's identification.
The woman is the unstable element, 'the unintended
event of democratic disordering', which resists
colonizing dialogue. In
The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancière
specifically refers to mothers as figures of
equality, something representing equal capacity,
carrying the mother language. The continuity
between mother and child refers to 'a continuity
between life and learning', unlike
institutionalized schoolmasters. She
opoposes male mastery of nature and the world, for
Lewis, and represents 'the zone of indistinction
where anybody can be a teacher'. At the
least, analysing that element of the image raises
questions and makes it a pensive image.
In Freire's 8th image, there is a drawing of
'human forms intermingled with natural elements'
on one page, and a poem on the other. The
dialogue emphasises the nature/culture split
again, and argues that poetry 'is a distinct
cultural artefact'. This is a classic
indication of the approach taken to link words and
images, poetry and language. The ambiguity
of poetry is ignored, and the illustration becomes
'nothing more than a mere prop, subservient to the
arrival of the word as the final destination'.
What could have been explored is that 'words
themselves are images and the images are words',
so that there is something between literacy and
illiteracy—'a state of open possibilities or
dissensual arrest'. Freire does say that
words are to be visualized as images, and this
could have led to a new understanding of the
relation between the visible and the intelligible,
one where words are seen as 'phonic images', which
can be juxtaposed. Rancière talks of the
'sentence - image' [in The Future of the Image]
which combines two aesthetic functions rather than
seeing text as representing image: texts offer a
'the conceptual linking of actions', while the
image is the '"supplement of presence that
imparted flesh and substance to it"'. Words
represent images of the 'phonic pieces'which can
be recombined, producing 'a generative literacy
tool'. This operation is quickly bypassed by
Freire, however, in the interests of 'a myth of
progressive overcoming'.
Freire talks about poetry and its creative power,
but promptly defines it in terms of offering
access to a different form of action with its own
interests and needs, a specialisation. But
that too is 'an aesthetic partitioning of the
sensible', and a proper understanding of aesthetic
sensibility involves blurring these distinctions,
and questioning where poetry actually lives and
functions. And all these ways, the culture
circle loses a great deal of emancipatory
potential, which would be restored by seeing the
image is pensive, potentially dissensual.
The relation between image and word, production
and reception, and the different senses should be
seen as an 'event (not a pedagogical method
leading to a predetermined ends)'(47). This
event cannot be managed by considering only the
intentions of the artist, or a fixed kind of
dialogue. The potential has to begin with
displacement of the conventional notions of the
aesthetic, produced by 'the silent speech of the
image'.
We need to consider the Kantian notion of the
aesthetic community if we are to make a proper use
of images in education. For Kantians, the
aesthetic opens a possibility of politics,
especially, the possibility of community. It
is an actual community of people making judgements
that we have to consider, not an idealised
one. In such a community, no one can be
required to agree on what is beautiful, even
though that is claimed in any judgment, based on
the assumption that any rational being can see
beauty. [Sounds like Habermas on the isa].
The judgement of taste is not produced by
education but is 'the spontaneous accord between
the faculties of the subject and the
object'. This provides a radical openness to
all participants [in principle], and any subject
can participate. There is no need to
establish a consensus. The aesthetic
community is 'radically democratic', 'a community
founded on disagreement rather than on consensus',
a peculiar community indeed [organic solidarity?]
. There is no hierarchy 'between those who
have and those who do not have "taste"' (48).
Freire aims at community based on commonality,
agreement over the intended meanings of images,
and identification with those images. At
best, it tries to embody the Kantian
beautiful. But the sublime is needed if we
are to go beyond mere consensus and to permit
disagreement. The sublime produces
dissensus, 'inoperative communication', and this
is necessary to maintain 'the possibility of
politics'. Rancière suggests that his notion
of the aesthetic community refers to the 'sublime
nature of the beautiful itself', the combination
of attraction and repulsion, the inherent
ambiguity in the sentence-image. Aesthetic
experience is dissensual, denying the relationship
between sensation 'and the law of understanding',
and the distinction between sensory perception and
desire, denying both are 'conceptual determination
[and] consumable desire'. In this way, the
aesthetic community resists the main ways in which
power is exercised [through concepts, and through
commercialism?]. Overall, there is 'resistance to
any strict law of measure that hierarchicizes and
institutes an inequality'.
Freire advocates community through solidarity, but
this is a way of preparing people 'for
emancipation through literacy'. The
aesthetic community itself 'embodies democracy in
its constituting disagreement'. It values
pensive images and their ability to disarticulate
the senses, producing a zone of ambiguity where
'new subjects can be invented that do not fit
within predetermined allotments of activity and
passivity, nature and culture, human and animal,
etc.'.
Such a community might be built 'around the image
of performance/installation art'[apparently,
Rancière has been used to analyze the educational
possibilities of a particular work by
Hirschhorn
Bataille Monument]. This piece
apparently disrupts the partition of the sensible
between high and low, verbal and visual culture,
and thus challenges the conventions about who can
speak and think. Communities emerge which
are not confined to just recognition or belonging,
or even 'mere disintegration' but which are
invited to reorient the sensible. This works
by locating the museum within a slum area, and
using educational organizations like workshops and
libraries in alignment with 'parodic forms of
public transportation' to shuttle between elite
and slum areas, local television, the Web, and
some fast food services to create a possible
community, as '"the result of an assembly process,
open (to a certain extent) and unforeseen…
by artist or spectator"' (49). Connoisseurs
and local residents come into contact, art
institutions are connected to the affects of
global poverty, the museum becomes transgressive
rather than preserving aesthetic compartments, and
the slum area can now become 'the site for
artistic happenings'. This new community
does not depend on proximity, collective
acknowledgement or consensus, but features
'articulated distances': 'new narratives and new
translations' are required, especially to
translate across boundaries, and participants are
challenged to rethink conventional understandings
of community. The whole community becomes
pensive [well--the visiting critics do], focused
on a new distribution. Art becomes life, but
not through a consensual framing of the common
world, and life art, but not through the
operations of institutions like museums: both
options are collapsed producing 'an inoperative
dissensus', precisely as Rancière advocates.
The proper use of images in critical pedagogy
produces things that are 'necessarily ambiguous
and contingent' [the old argument about forcing
people to think], abandoning the usual roles as a
form of 'ideological interpellation or political
weapon', and insisting that there is a connection
to political life. In this way, aesthetic
experience lends value to educational experience
'as a disorganized pensiveness'.
[All of this ignores the Bourdieu point that
avant-garde experimentation induces hostility and
panic to those rooted in the popular
aesthetic. I would like to know who reacted
to this installation and how they reacted.
Lewis has been skeptical about whether a Brechtian
approaches have demonstrated any affects, but he
is entirely optimistic about this approach.
It is the old distinction really between material
politics and cultural politics that is at stake?].
back to Rancière page
|
|