What in the hell …

Notes on Ranciere. awaiting completion in the future…

In his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Jacques Ranciere reads the work of a 19th century French teacher, Jacotot. Jacotot ended up having Flemish students with whom he could not adequately communicate, as they did not speak French and he did not speak Flemish. In order to instruct them in French, he had them each get a copy of Telemachus in Flemish and in French. He had them read the book in their own language until it was very familiar. Then he had them read the book in French and compare the two, slowly, painstakingly. Over time, the students learned French. Reflecting on this, Jacotot decided that while the students had learned, it was not clear if or how he had taught them. His own knowledge of French had not been transmitted to the students, or even been relevant to the students’ learning. If the students had learned without Jacotot’s knowledge entering into play, then didn’t this mean that one did not have to know to teach? As an experiment, he undertook to teach painting and piano, which he did not know. And his students learned painting and piano.

Jacotot called this method universal teaching. From this experience, he derived a proposition by turns startling and simple: intelligence does not admit of differences of quantity. Everyone is as intelligent as everyone else. Application or access to intelligence is a matter of will. Learning then is an act of will, and the training and strengthening of will. In other words, learning is emancipation, at least when it occurs via universal teaching.

If universal teaching is emancipation, what is other teaching? It is stultification. Ordinary teaching methods are based on explication, which implies an assumption of the inferiority of the student: the student is unable and deficient, and therefore needs the explicator to guide the student through their education, to give them knowledge. A partly remembered quote from Stirner comes to mind – ‘having been licked into shape, they in turn lick others into shape’, a process which has nothing to do with educating people into liberty and their own power. This education is fundamentally one which inculcates inferiority: starting from the supposition of inferiority, education produces material inferiority in the form of stultification – lack of knowledge of and ability to exercises intelligence. We can say that education is something like a sad passion in Spinoza, something which diminishes our (access to our) power.

Pushed far enough, Jacotot’s ideas raise questions about whether it makes sense to even say universal teaching is a method: “if you think about it a little, the ‘method’ he was proposing is the oldest in the world (…) there is no one in the world who hasn’t learned something by himself and without an explicator.” (Ignorant Schoolmaster, 16) That is, universal teaching, to be emancipatory (in the sense of being aware of “the consciousness of that equality” of intelligence in/accessed by all people), must admit that emancipation is always self-emancipation. Otherwise universal teaching becomes yet another stultifying doctrine.

For Ranciere, the idea of equality of intelligence which arises out of the experience of universal teaching is not an ontological matter. Rather, it is a supposition. “Let’s see what we can do if we assume this to be the case.” [Find reference.] It is a principle to be continually tested and verified. This point also raises the question of what can be done or is done by the assumption of inequality of intelligence (for Ranciere and Jacotot what is done is stultification). The emphasis, then, is on practices.

On the practice of speech:
“Each word is sent off with the intention of carrying just one thought, but, unknown to the one speaking and in spite of him, that speech, that word, that larva, is made fruitful by the listener’s will; and the representative of a monad becomes the center of a sphere of ideas radiating out in all directions, such that speaker has actually said an infinity of things beyond what he wanted to say; he has formed a body of an idea with ink, and the matter destined to mysteriously envelop a solitary being actually contains a whole world of those beings, those thoughts.” [Jacotot, quoted by Ranciere, Ignorant Schoolmaster 63)

These characteristics of speech are evidence of universal teaching practiced, often without being aware, by everyone. Stultification is directed precisely at producing this condition of being unaware.

Ranciere writes “explication is not only the stultifying weapon of the pedagogues but the very bond of the social order. Whoever says order say distribution into ranks. Putting into ranks presupposes explication, the distributory, justificatory fiction of an inequality that has no other reason for being.” (Ignorant Schoolmaster 117) It may be recalled that Ranciere charged Althusser with being a philosopher of order [find reference, in intro to Nights of Labor]. This passage also recalls the section of the Grundrisse where Marx writes that production requires a prior distribution, a distribution of social relations and people in positions within those relations [find reference].

Stultification plays out in historical narratives:

“The most elementary hierarchy is that of good and evil. The simplest logical relationship that can serve to explain this hierarchy is that of before and after. With these four terms, we have the matrix of all explications. Things were better before, say some (…) Let’s try then to preserve or revive that which, in our distinctions, still holds us to the principle of the good. Happiness will come tomorrow, respond the others: the human species was like a child left to the caprices and terrors of his imagination (…) Now, minds are enlightened, customs are civilized, and industry spreads its benefits. (…) Capacity must from now on decide social ranks, and it is education that will reveal and develop it.”

Digression on Negri:
This passage just quoted evokes and characterizes the concerns I’ve been coming to with regard to Negri’s work and the related work of others, for obvious reasons. The questions regarding Negri which arise are: does Negri’s historical narrative of the becoming-intelligent of people, the becoming-equaly, (one of increasing good after, to use Ranciere’s four point grid) stultify? If so, how, and with what results? Two other questions: the principle behind or implied in universal teaching, equality of intelligence, as well as the quote about words as larvae, parallels what Negri and others call general intellect or the common. Only, for Ranciere/Jacotot, this – I am tempted to call it ‘universal intellect’ – has always existed (and so, by extension, has always been in relation to capitalist production as long as it has existed), rather than the entry into production by general intellect or the becoming-common of labor narrated by Negri et al. How could Negri answer the challenge posed by this idea? As I see it, the options are to deny the supposition of equality, or to announce that equality has come about recently, or to say that there is a difference in production today such that immaterial labor, unlike prior labor, is emancipatory or allows a measure of emancipation, while prior labor was solely based on (solely produced) stultification. The second other question is regarding immaterial labor. If immaterial labor and the immaterialization of material labor are the bases for the political project and political possibilities, how does this avoid re-instantiating hierarchy? That is, if immaterial labor is labor with the capacity to emancipate itself, if it is intelligent labor, then presumably the level of immateriality should correspond to a level of potentiality or intelligence (Negri does not measure immateriality, but the idea is implied: if there is material labor, immaterial labor, and material labor that is undergoing a process of immaterialization, then this implies quantities of immaterialization/immateriality. The fact that measurements have not been invented for this does not matter, as the point is implied in Negri’s work), then this must mean an instantiation of inequality at the theoretical level. Finally, Negri’s historical narrative is, at a minimum, a narrative of inequality between before and after, that is, it is a story which attributes incapacity to times earlier than the present: only in the present is multitude possible, only from today onward can self-emancipation and communism happen.

[Find Ranciere quote re: intelligence and multitude. Re-read the book, find quotes and references, see if anything else comes up.]