Thiago dissed a piece by Michael Berube over at Long Sunday. Among other things, in the discussion he took issue with a remark in MB’s piece:
“familiarity with a subject should never preclude criticism of it but should always be a prerequisite for it”
On the face of it, this is a harmless remark that one can’t disagree with. But Thiago responds:
“I also don’t know how wise it is to tell people to wait until they know before they start criticising: specially if you are one of those who have the power to determine when the student has attained knowledge.”
MB made a reply implying that Thiago didn’t understand his piece, and this is why he doesn’t want people to be told “understand, then disagree”.
Thiago replied:
“The reason one should not make attaining recognised knowledge a condition of making criticism is that whoever has the power to determine when knowledge has been attained can ignore all criticism. It has little to do with bad faith. For it is always possible to say someone hasn’t understood you, if they disagree with you and you believe yourself to be right. People often suppress criticism with this intelligentsia’s certification, in perfectly good faith. Economists do this all the time. Whenever you point out that the demand slope doesn’t derive without absurd assumptions, they throw tantrums and tell you that you don’t know the secret Level 2 of the theory, which is hard to explain. But there is no secret Level 2, microeconomics is really, as a matter of mathematical fact, daft. We look at this and think, well, they must all be crazed ideologues, but this is not true. They are honest, scientifically minded people who believe themselves to be acting entirely fairly. They are not.”
This exchange exemplifies some of what Ranciere is on about in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. The teacher can - and must, in order to justify his (usually his, especially as one climbs further in the ranks of teachers) existence as teacher - always say “you haven’t understood, let me tell you why your understanding is flawed,” under any circumstances whatsoever, because it is the teacher who is arbiter of understanding. You haven’t understood until the teacher says you have. If you disagree, it’s because you misunderstand the criteria for deciding upon (mis)understanding.
If the student says “I disagree” and the teacher says “you misunderstand”, who is right? Judged from the teacher’s perspective, the teacher. Disagreeing with the teacher is tremendously difficult. Just as one can only sue the state in court if the state permits it (recognizes one’s claim as a case of potential wrong such that it worthy of litigation, rather than a simple dissatisfaction), one can only disagree with the teacher if the teacher agrees to ascribe the claim status as disagreement (which requires a prior or simultaneous ascription of the status of understanding, such that one is even able to disagree).
Of course, I say “one can only” but I mean rather “according to the teacher’s standards one can only…”. One may well reject those standards, based on any number of factors (pigheadedness, dislike for the teacher, the viewpoint of another teacher, one’s own knowledge of the subject, a gut feeling, etc). This position of mutual disagreement over the standards of evaluation is what Ranciere terms disagreement.
The situation where the teacher allows a student the status of understanding and the status of differing with the teacher (for instance, “we each have arguments for our readings of Freud’s theory of sexuality and we disagree”) is not disagreement in Ranciere’s sense. Disagreement in Ranciere’s sense is when two speakers face off and one (or both) does not take the other’s speech as speech at all. So, if we talk and each take each other’s talk for monkey noises, or the delusional chatter resulting from a severe episode of mental disturbance, or a human looking robot programmed to issue forth meaningless gibberish, those are cases of disagreement. Or when the student says “I disagree” and the teacher says “you misunderstand” and thereby withholds from the student the ability to even differ in the first place, that’s disagreement.
I need to revisit Ranciere on this, but my own sense of the matter is that disagreement is, by definition, not resolved by mutual understanding. Mutual understanding is ruled out of bounds by the very existence of disagreement. My sense is that what takes place is some sort of contest of power (intellectual, such as when teacher is forced to admit that student does make sense and is allowed to be ascribed the position of understanding and the subsequent position of differing from the teacher; or otherwise, such as when students skip class en masse or otherwise disrupt proceedings until teacher agrees to treat students as understanding, even if this treatment does not also involve sincere belief in the students’ actually understanding).
This touches on matters of equality. For Ranciere, equality is axiomatic. Regarding intellect, everyone’s intellect is equal. This means, essentially, what Thiago was saying, or how I want to read him. Ascribe no one the position of determining hierarchies of understanding or intellect. When such ascriptions are made, be wary and ask questions. The same with politics outside of intellect: ascribe no one as the arbiter of equality, in order to prevent any situation wherein some animals are judged more equal than others. Equality is point of departure, not point of arrival.
To be clear, of course, this is not necessarily anti-hierarchical. Ranciere admits of hierarchies of will, just not of intellect. One can (and should) use will to push another. In a sense, will can add with will. You push me, support me, I read more, get more work done, improve my ability to do work, to exercise my will to serve my intellect. If you do the work for me, I don’t work (or, I do only the work of waiting and of obeying when told to wait and to watch you do the work). It is in this sense we should read Deleuze’s analogy of teaching as swimming lesson: the best teachers say “do this with me”. A composition of wills. Wills are compossible, intellects are incompossible.
Wills can co-exist at one point at one time. Intellects can not.
“Wait and understand,” then, is the mutual occupation of intellects at the same point, which is to say, the suppression of one or more intellects by another. It is a recommendation to inactivity, which means one learns not to be inactive, and waits, puts off learning - teaching oneself - to be active. One who told a small child learning to talk “shh, wait till you know the language better so you won’t make these mistakes and talk in that funny way” would encourage the child to never speak or to be afraid of speaking. Similarly, “wait until you know” says “wait until you can speak without error” which can never be guaranteed. If this habit is not broken, one ends up always apologizing for not having adequate expertise or authority to speak.
If we reject the idea that anyone can be arbiter - at least on intellectual grounds - of who is worthy of speaking then we must reject the injunction to wait. We can also say that this situation is an example of what Ranciere means by politics and by disagreement. It is the situation wherein, alongside of/simultaneous with any other contents of speech one says “wait, you’re not qualified to speak” (implying “I am qualified to determine 1. who is worthy of speech and who is not, 2. who is qualified to judge who is worthy of judging, and 3. you are neither”) and another says “I won’t wait, I declare myself qualified” (and thus implies “I am worthy of speech” as well as either “I am qualified to determine who is worthy of speech” or “no one has a monopoly on worth determination” or “we are all worthy of speech”), and this declaration serves to disrupt the distribution of positions as either worthy or unworthy of speech.
This touches on matters of equality. For Ranciere, equality is axiomatic. Regarding intellect, everyone’s intellect is equal.
Intellect qua faculty or intellect qua knowledge? If the former, then this is but a truism and, if the latter, then why are you in graduate school? Call me old fashioned, but I’m inclined to think that someone specializing in a given subject area and teaching in that area and researching in that area is to be trusted on the disagree/misunderstand issue more than a cocky second-year undergraduate. But, like I said, maybe its me. And, maybe its me, but I take my specialization quite seriously. This doesn’t mean my intellect and knowledge is infallible, but it does mean I know more than a nineteen year old.
Comment by Craig — February 15, 2006 @ 5:58 am
Craig,
Faculty. Not knowledge.
It is a truism. What’s the problem with that? Here’s some more: torture is bad. One shouldn’t t be management. Capitalism is exploitive. Really these are prescriptive, which is the point.
As for why I’m graduate school, it’s simple. I worked several years in nonprofits and it was destroying my emotional, physical, and social/relationship health. I left that arena, and spent two years in really bad financial and labor market straits. The only other qualifications I had were the ones that would help me get into school and sell my labor power as a grad employee. It was a huge relief to get in and to know I was not going to have job hunt (except, it turns out, for summer time work) for the next five year.
There are times when I’m convinced that university is nothing but a racket and that there’s no merit to being here/required to be here (other than the merit of knowing how to jump through hoops properly, ie, the merit of being a certain type of low entropy person). I’m not sure about that all the time, I waver. At the end of the day, even if that turns out to be true, the university seems like a reasonably good place to try and take refuge and to be able to do some things I enjoy that have a relatively low negative impact. That opinion may change and I may go do something else, if something better presents itself. Based on my past experience, that doesn’t seem likely.
It’s interesting that your take on second year undergraduates was the response someone gave to Adam K in the rather ugly debates about John Holbo’s paper on Zizek, except it was that he was just a grad student in theology. I was initially actually swayed by that appeal to authority, but have since changed my mind.
I think to some degree what you’re saying is an insoluble issue for those of us who work in universities teaching undergrads. If they’re just as right, just as capable of being right as we are, then what right do we have to be on this side of the gradebook?
But, let me ask you Craig, do you think academia is meritocratic? That the people with the chalk and red pen in hand are where they are because they deserve to be by dint of some better quality/ability? We can take the example you lamented here -
http://www.theoria.ca/theoria/archives/2006/02/language.html
of the presentation using the phrase “dominant discourse,” which you took to be an empty term such that the presenter would not have been able to answer a question on what the term means. If that person presented that talk before second year undergraduates and one of them said “I think that phrase is empty when you use it, can you tell me that it’s not?” one easy teacherly response would be “you don’t understand” with much obfuscated wheel-spinning. Surely you’ve seen something like this. Or perhaps you’ve just attended institutions of education that are miles beyond the ones I’ve experienced.
This is not to say that the student is right and the teacher wrong, if I gave that impression then I was clumsy in my presentation. I used to get into big arguments with faculty at the conservative religious university where I did my undergrad. I think I’m right in my atheism. They think they’re right in their Christianity. At the end of the day, this may not be a question subject to mutually satisfactory resolution. As such, saying “you don’t understand” is a power play that pushes one position in favor over another incommensurable position, and in a way that masks the relationship between the two positions and the power play itself. (Incidentally and off topic, I think the religious example is an exact parallel with Marxist claims about the exploitive nature of captalism. That’s only true if one holds that workers are worth anything better. It’s not the case that Bush et al and the torturers they employ don’t understand our worth. It’s that we’re not worth anything to them.) At a certain level, I think this relationship of holding incommensurable positions to others is probably quite often the case with disagreements, and outcomes away from/other than deadlock are more likely the result of power relations than anything like reason in a classical sense.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — February 15, 2006 @ 6:33 am
(Apologies if this is brief, curt, and incoherent — I’m writing this before bed while finishing some notes on Durkheim; I’m not exactly focused!)
Faculty. Not knowledge.
Okay. But I’m hesitant to base a political position (equality, egality) on the basis of biology and physiology — for obvious reasons! Perhaps I am misunderstanding Ranciere’s point.
There are times when I’m convinced that university is nothing but a racket and that there’s no merit to being here/required to be here
Strict reference to the university isn’t entirely necessary to make the point.
If Ranciere’s point is that by the structure of our brains and minds that we are equal, then this is but a truism and isn’t particularly interesting. But if he is making a point about knowledge, then I begin to have problems with him.
“You don’t understand” versus “I disagree” isn’t a matter of capacity or faculty, but rather a matter of knowledge. One could legitimately make a claim that “You can’t understand Marx unless you understand Hegel; you don’t understand Hegel; ergo, you can’t understand Marx”. The student could reply, “I disagree”. Now, place this in the context of a course: the syllabus is designed as an introduction to Marx, but, first, the class is to read extracts from the Phenomenology and Logic. So, a student says, “Why are we reading this crap? We are here to read Marx!” And the instructor replies, “Well, if you want to understand Marx, you need to first understand Hegel.” To which the student says, “I disagree”. I’m going to side with the instructor on this one. This isn’t an issue of equality! We have a cocky, hot-shot, radical student who wants to get to the good stuff in Marx without putting in the required groundwork — and this is a scene we’ve all seen at one point in time in the academy.
It’s interesting that your take on second year undergraduates was the response someone gave to Adam K in the rather ugly debates about John Holbo’s paper on Zizek, except it was that he was just a grad student in theology.
The difference between a good undergraduate student and a good graduate student (in the case of adjuncts) or a good faculty member is much larger than between a good graduate student (Adam, for instance) and a good faculty member (although I don’t believe the person you’re referring to is actually in the academy!). I take it as a matter of courtesy (if not fact) that a decent and serious graduate student is treated as an equal by an equally decent and serious faculty member in part because the student/teacher dynamic in this relationship is signficantly different than the one in an undergraduate class.
But, let me ask you Craig, do you think academia is meritocratic?
Clearly not!
This is not to say that the student is right and the teacher wrong, if I gave that impression then I was clumsy in my presentation.
Clearly, but in any given situation — knowing that there are smart undergrads and stupid faculty — I’ll give the benefit of the doubt to the faculty even if I know, in the example you cite, that they are as about as stupid, unsophisticated and thickheaded as they come.
Comment by Craig — February 15, 2006 @ 6:54 am
Craig,
Let me echo your remark about writing before bed, sorry if it sounds curt and all. Briefly - it’s not biological. R calls it an opinion, a provisional assumption or hypothesis that one can safely hold until disproved. (Which is, on my reading, a smart rhetorical move to say those who are for inequality, intellectual or otherwise, should be the ones presenting cases for their views, not those who are for equality.)
As for siding with faculty vs students and all that, of course I agree and share your gut assumption. Not least because I’m friends with some faculty and many graduate students, whereas undergrads are more of a mass and a part of my job.
But to play devil’s advocate, take the case of Hegel and Marx: does one need to understand Hegel to understand Marx? That’s actually a tremendously controversial perspective in the history of marxism. And what do we mean by understand anyway? Know the history and biography of? Know how to use for reading literature? Know how to use for approaching economy? Derive a sense of class hatred from? All of this is controversial and I’m not sure it’s the case that people who differ on this stuff don’t understand each other or Marx so much as they disagree on some fundamental methods, motivations, and uses for reading Marx.
In my experience, at least some of the time what goes on in class syllabi is a certain scripted narrative arc whereby students are walked through the experience of being convinced to take something really, really seriously then having the ground washed from under them later, like Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz (I had this done to me in a phenomenal seminar on Hegel that ended with some short lectures on Schelling, it stands as one of the most exciting intellectual moments of my education, formal or informal). Sometimes a student will get ahead of the program either through brains or through some word from an older student or other faculty member and manage to guess the ending, so to speak, which risks fucking up the narrative arc and experience that one wants the students to have in order to get it. In those instances, one basically just wants the kid to shut up and let the script role so the other students might get their worlds rocked later on. That’s one reason to silence a student, and the easiest way to do that is to say “you don’t understand”. I’m just repeating myself now, sorry, it’s lack of sleep.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — February 15, 2006 @ 7:07 am
ps- Craig, I want to add, I’m not sympathetic to the student who says “I don’t want to read this”. Rather, when teacher tries to maintain order in the face of student who says “fuck Hegel, let’s get to the good stuff” my point is that “you don’t understand” is a powerplay. Given that that is so, why not just say “look, the assignment is to read Hegel before we read Marx. If you want to skip ahead in the reading and read Marx in addition to the Hegel, please do so by all means. In the meantime, I’m in charge and there will be sanctions if you don’t do the assignment.” I’m all for being in control. (And I’m not particularly sorry that that control may ultimately be arbitrary, such that I’m not nervous about seeming arbitrary unless it’s going to get me in trouble with my bosses or make me ineffective with the students.)
But I am stridently opposed to many “you can’t understand X without first understanding Y” kind of moves. That gets mobilized all the time to shut people up and is predicated on a prior unpresented set of decisions about what does and does not constitute understanding. That’s the part I don’t like. (For instance, “you make all these political claims but if you had read and understood Z thinker then you’d see that the world is actually such that…”) I don’t know if that makes any more sense.
good night,
Nate
Comment by Nate — February 15, 2006 @ 7:19 am
Let me echo your remark about writing before bed, sorry if it sounds curt and all. Briefly - it’s not biological. R calls it an opinion, a provisional assumption or hypothesis that one can safely hold until disproved.
Okay. Then it is not a faculty of the mind; as in a “part” of the structure of the mind or brain — “faculty of rationality”, of “perception”, etc. My choice of words, given that we are also talking about university faculty was likely unclear.
Regarding Marx and your questions (understood for what they are): yes, it is essential. Now, (1) a “complete” understanding is impossible. That is, understanding Marx the way he understood himself. Vis a vis Marx we are in both an unfortunate and fortunate position: we can both know more and less than him. More insofar as we have a hundred and fifty years of commentary, interpretation and experience to draw upon and less insofar as we can’t possibly put ourselves in Marx’s exact context (even though the meaning of Marx extends beyond the narrow context).
While I’m sympathetic to a reading of Marx that purges Hegel from Marx, to be able to purge Hegel and the Hegelian elements nonetheless presupposes a knowledge of Hegel and Hegelianism. In this sense, if you want to read Marx as part of the ‘one true materialist tradition’, you have to understand both materialism (Machiavelli, Spinoza) and idealism (Kant, Hegel).
Now, insofar as reading Marx is concerned, I’m not privileging Hegel compared to others: it is just as essential to read and understand Aristotle, Ferguson, Smith, Ricardo, etc.
my point is that “you don’t understand” is a powerplay.
Of course it involves power. The teacher/student relationship necessarily involves power even if we pretend it does not (in the dissertation supervisor/PhD student variation). It’s a classic problem of philosophy: how do you start out with an inegalitarian relation and end up with an egalitarian relation? (Expressed in Plato in terms of sexual relations between a citizen and a future citizen, by the way.) Pretending that the relationship does not involve power (knowledge and expertise) versus a lack of power (wanting knowledge and expertise) doesn’t help the matter at all. And part of a proper functioning relationship of this sort is to allow the more powerful party to just give an unconditional “No”.
(For instance, “you make all these political claims but if you had read and understood Z thinker then you’d see that the world is actually such that…”)
This is a different problem. To say that “in order to understand Zizek, you need to understand Lacan and Hegel” is one thing, but to say that “to understand the world, you need to understand Zizek” is another. To put it differently, if George Bush and John Kerry were arguing on TV and Bush, as he is prone to do, said something silly about politics and Kerry’s comeback was, “Well, you don’t understand Zizek”, then we’d rightfully say that Kerry has said something just as stupid as Bush. But, if Bush came up to Kerry and said, “You know, John, I really don’t understand this passage in The Sublime Object of Ideology. I saw that movie “Pride and Prejudice” on the airplane, but it makes no sense to me” and John said, “Well, George, that’s because not only have you not read Jane Austen, you haven’t read Hegel or Lacan.” While this would be rather surreal, it wouldn’t be illegitimate and stupid.
Comment by Craig — February 15, 2006 @ 1:08 pm
hi Craig,
Fair enough. I think we just disagree on at least one sense of ‘understand’, particularly when it comes to understanding Marx.
I don’t think it’s necessary to read anything by Hegel or Smith et al to have a reasonable understanding of Marx (in the sense of ‘be able to do interesting and exciting things with’). I suppose it comes down to the connection between purposes and understandings - if one wants to be a marxologist (I kind of do) then it’s probably useful to know some of that other material, but more useful to read everything Marx ever wrote ever. If one wants to place Marx in the history of some discipline or disciplines or modes of thought, then it makes sense to read him in connection with the people you name (though placing him in other contexts would involve reading him alongside other figures - Durkheim and Weber, say, or Freud and Nietzsche, or Melville and Baudelaire, or St. Simon and Proudhon, or Aristotle etc).
Thinking about it now, I can see three problems with the sense of understanding which means “to understand X requires reading Y”. First, it turns into an infinite regress of book thinkers to know. Like the example of reading Hegel to understand Marx. Presumably it’s not sufficient to just read Hegel, but to understand him. If so, then one must read Kant. But to understand Kant means you have to read Hume. But to understand Hume means… etc backward into history until the point where writings have been lost or things weren’t committed to writing.
Second, there seems to be an implied decision made about what topics are subject to being plugged into the Y, that is, what topics are required for understanding. And this decision’s criteria aren’t clear, and upon scrutiny become hard to justify. At the same time, said scrutiny expands the infinite regress in nearly all directions. So, to understand Marx, one could say, it is necessary to understand Marx’s relationship with his Jewish heritage. To understand that requires reading scriptures and rabbinical writings. To understand that requires… etc. Or, one could say, to understand Marx requires understanding Marx’s literary references and his frequent rereadings of Aeschelus (sp?) and Shakespeare. To understand Aeschelus and Shakespeare requires… etc. Or, one could say, to understand Marx requires understanding the language he wrote with, which requires reading the history of the German language, which can only be understood if one reads the history of Latin, which… etc. Or, one could say, to understand Marx requires understanding the economic conditions and workers movements of his day. That would require reading all sorts of other books and doing archival work, which would require… etc.
And this doesn’t even begin to address the can of worms that is opened if agrees with the relatively uncontroversial postulate that the best way to understanding something is to read its enemies or opponents. That would require whole other sets of reactionaries to read, and mainstream political economists.
Third, this version of understanding doesn’t necessarily have to mean this but it easily plays into the dynamic I’m uneasy about, the one that motivated my post and makes me excited to read Ranciere, which is the dynamic of who is authorized to speak and to have ideas about things they read. It’s not an uncommon assumption (I think it’s the requisite assumption behind academic labor) that one who is closer to the asymptote of understanding is more authorized to speak than another. I’m not keen on that, as I’ve said (especially when it’s internalized, and one constantly doubts oneself and one’s ability to understand, and then sets about inflicting this condition on others, just as Stirner said - ‘having been licked into shape the educator licks others into shape’). But it also seems to break down, given the multiplicity of different reading arcs one can take from any figure or problem as a starting point. This can break down in a good way, such that one loses the fear of speaking when not authorized. Or it can break down in a bad way, in a proliferation of masters capable of claiming that one has not understood and making the “don’t speak yet, you’re not authorized” power play.
This sense of understanding is, in a sense, I think, a version of the Levinasian view that Adam’s been advocating in the conversation with Jodi and me, here-
http://beforethelaw.typepad.com/before_the_law/2006/02/on_solidarity_i.html
here-
http://beforethelaw.typepad.com/before_the_law/2006/02/another_respons.html
and elsewhere: the relationship of reader to thinker is an infinite one, there’s an infinite obligation to reading etc. Basically it means “you need to read everything.” To be clear, I’m actually all for this sense of understanding. I certainly feel a need to read everything (though a lot less pressingly as I get older). I like this sense of understanding a lot, it has a tremendously attractive aesthetic and moral sensibility.
But, my other objections aside, simply by its rendering of understanding as an asymptotic and infinite task I think it’s reasonable to say that’s it’s also worth developing other senses of understanding, and ones which are not inferior to the infinite one.
And if I’m really honest, I’m for a type of fuzziness of boundaries (a relativey autonomy or relative heterogeneity, if you will) between different things, such that they can be productively read (understood in some sense, a non-infinite sense) in conjunction with or isolation from any number of other things, relative to one’s ends. Getting clear on the ends of reading is, of course, another matter that is super difficult and super important.
My own suspicion is that the infinite version of understanding has as its primary end the satisfaction of a certain desire for aesthetic pursuits (that’s certainly my one motivation for it - after the revolution I’m going to be an assistant librarian in some musty basement and just read constantly). I think it may also in some cases have the motivation of being a master, of having a certain position of power and prestige (to be able to tell other people to wait and that instead of speaking they should listen to one’s insights). I think this is an occupational hazard of academic labor (probably one of professional type employment generally, instantiated in a particular way in academic labor).
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — February 15, 2006 @ 2:48 pm
Thinking about it now, I can see three problems with the sense of understanding which means “to understand X requires reading Y”.
Your point is well-taken: you can’t read everything and you can’t understand it all either. However, this isn’t an excuse. Especially if you’re serious about your topic.
Second, there seems to be an implied decision made about what topics are subject to being plugged into the Y, that is, what topics are required for understanding.
Yes, of course, but, once again, this isn’t an excuse.
Third, this version of understanding doesn’t necessarily have to mean this but it easily plays into the dynamic I’m uneasy about, the one that motivated my post and makes me excited to read Ranciere, which is the dynamic of who is authorized to speak and to have ideas about things they read.
You can read everything and still get it wrong. This isn’t in dispute. But, once again, I’m inclined to trust the opinion of an expert over the opinion of a twenty-one year old undergrad. And, if you aren’t, then you aren’t advocating “equality” but, rather, an extreme relativism where there are no legitimate grounds upon which to adjudicate between claims.
If I end up writing my dissertation on Montesquieu — and I likely will — it won’t be for “aesthetic” reasons or for reasons of “power”!
Comment by Craig — February 15, 2006 @ 11:41 pm
Craig,
We’re talking past each other and I at least have moved to point in this exchange beyond my original intentions. Let me try to restate: if a student says to you “I don’t want to read Hegel, let’s get to the good stuff in Marx”, there’s two possibilities at least.
1. Student’s an impatient lefty or has some other motivation to say “fuck this I don’t want to read it”. I’m not sympathetic.
2. Student’s actually read the Marx and has some understanding of it such that they may have some legs to stand on in saying that one doesn’t need Hegel to understand Marx, at least in the sense that they understand Hegel. Now, I’m not interested in hashing out whether or not one needs to understand Hegel to read Marx. But I do think it should be noted that in that situation the claim “you don’t understand Marx” is misleading and not an argument. Now, if one wants to arbitrarily (from the student’s perspective) shut the student up and force them to read Hegel - which, as I think I made clear, I’m not particularly opposed to - then by all means, one should do so. But, to issue the utterance “you don’t understand” when the content is “shut up and do what you’re told” is misleading and has probably one of two effects if it works and shuts them up: 1. student perceives it as implied threat (sees through manifest content), sees teacher as arbitrary, and shuts up, or 2. student runs a mental operation approximating “I must not get it, I need the teacher’s expertise, since I don’t have that expertise I’m not authorized to speak”. If the outcome is 1, then great, but then there’s no argument for saying “you don’t understand” instead of “shut up, I’m in charge”. If the outcome is 2 that strikes me as pernicious in that it plays into a meritocratic conception of the university and a condition in which people don’t speak unless authorized (and that authorization is not presented as a revisable power relation but rather is occulted behind the veneer of meritocracy).
Also, given that by your own terms understanding is asymptotic, ie, infinite, not understanding does not suffice as a criterion for not being authorized to speak. So there must be some condition where one is enough free of misunderstanding to speak, but if understanding is infinite how do we measure it…?
Actually, never mind. I’m repeatig myself. Forget my clumsy excesses with Ranciere.
This is what MB said:
“familiarity with a subject should never preclude criticism of it but should always be a prerequisite for it”
This injunction to wait strikes me as precisely what Ranciere is on about (which is not to say that I like this matter because it reminds me of Ranciere but the reverse, I find Ranciere useful for thinking through this situation. Perhaps Thiago can comment on this line he object to in a way that is less jumbled than my comments and not a piece of hagiography for Ranciere).
In any case, the basic point (which I strayed from) is this:
What constitutes familiarity? Who decides (and on what grounds)? The teacher? If so, then within the field determined by the teacher’s decision (the classroom) the following conditions can not be told apart:
1. student is genuinely not familiar with subject and teacher decides student is not authorized to criticize.
2. student is making/wants to make a criticism teacher doesn’t like and teacher uses the power to decide familiar from unfamiliar to shut student up in a way that doesn’t look like arbitrary shutting up of a student.
Nor can the following:
1. Students are not familiar with material and teacher creates an environment within which they do not criticise, instead doing some pre-critical activity which will eventually lead them to the position of being able to criticise.
2. Students are ready and able to criticise (though they may still be wrong) but teacher create an environment within which students are shut up and are told to listen to teacher, with the claim “you are not yet familiar as alibi”.
I believe both types of case 2 do happen (of course, maybe I just don’t understand…). How about you? If so, that’s at least one problem with the “wait, you don’t get it yet and so you should not speak” perspective. And I don’t see any upside for this perspective. Do you?
The reasons I can think of for retaining this perspective might be the following:
1. it lets one appear not arbitrarily in charge in the classroom
2. it lets one say “read the book!” in the face of a hypothetical student who says “I don’t want to read this shit!”
3. it lets one feel very good about oneself for having attained requisite familiarity needed to criticize
4. it lets one bill onself to others as someone who ought to be listened to, because one has (and others lack the rare commodity that is the) requisite familiarity needed to criticize.
Re: 1, I think my being in charge is arbitrary, so why occult it? Re: 2, there’s all sorts of institutional and disciplinary measures possible by which to sanction a student who refuses to read (and this is likely what happens if the student is not convinced by a claim of “you are not adequately familiar”). Re: 3, that does indeed feel very good but that’s hadly laudable and the kick is less if one owns up to it. Re: 4, I generally think the idea that academics should be listened to by nonacademics is questionable (the whole so-called “public intellectual” idea), and this also has a weird problem — if people are qualified (ie, familiar enough) to assess who to listen to and who not to listen to, then why can’t they be qualified to do the thinking that the academic is asking to be allowed to do for them? Or, put differently, if people aren’t qualified to criticize, why are they qualified to make a decision who to listen to? Such that if one buys into the ‘wait before criticising’ attitude then the desire to be listened to by lots of people is, in a sense, a desire to be listened to by people who may well not be able to understand one’s wisdom in the first place. To my mind this attitude is simply a frustrated desire to be in charge, fed in part by the working conditions of being in charge to a limited degree over undergraduate and graduate students, and is also a trait of many people in professional type employment generally.
So yeah, why wait before criticising? What’s the downside to not doing so?
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — February 16, 2006 @ 4:14 am
We’re talking past each other and I at least have moved to point in this exchange beyond my original intentions.
Stepping back seems like a good idea.
To be clear: my only point of contention (at least that I’m willing to argue right now) has to be with the following claim you paraphrase from Ranciere: “This touches on matters of equality. For Ranciere, equality is axiomatic. Regarding intellect, everyone’s intellect is equal.” To continue to be clear: I’ve never read Ranciere. So, most certainly, his claim is far more nuanced and subtle than could possibly be presented in a couple of sentences.
My point of contention, to reiterate, is that the weak version of his claim is a truism (”Intellect, as a faculty of the mind, is more or less equal in all human brains”) and dangerously nihilistic and relativistic in its strongest claim (”All that is produced by the intellect is equal”). If Ranciere’s claim is the former, then his claim isn’t particularly interesting and one would hope that it forms the basis for a longer argument. Nonetheless, I’m hesitant and relunctant to begin an argument on the basis of biology (i.e., intellect as faculty of mind). While the latter claim is certainly more interesting, it is also certainly far more dangerous. At the most extreme, we have a position that is tantamount to the sophist’s wriggling finger. In other words, if Ranciere is making the stronger claim, it becomes a serious question as to why you are pursuing rarified and expert knowledge when, in fact, there is nothing to distinguish a fart from Reading Capital.
Comment by Craig — February 21, 2006 @ 1:54 am
hi Craig,
I think it’s the former. I don’t think it’s quite the trivial true assertion though that it seems to you as. Then again, the book might not be useful to you as it was to me (you might not have the same itches needed scratched). My sense is that it’s a deflationary argument. I might be wrong, though - I generally really like deflationary arguments a lot and tend to want to find them places, and am not always clear where finding ends and misreading begins.
In any case…
Ranciere takes the example of two students in the same classroom who get different grades. One could point to the student with the better grade and say “this student is more intelligent”. Ranciere says, “Okay then, you are using ‘gets good grades’ and ‘is intelligent’ as synonyms. Fine.”
Where the argument’s deflationary power comes in is when one points to the student with the better grades and says “this student gets better grades because (s)he is more intelligent”. The axiom of equal intellect rules out this meritoratic move. If “is intelligent” and “gets good grades” are synonyms then it can not be the case that one causes the other. Clearly, it is the case that some students finish math problems sooner, learn languages faster, fix cars with less errors than others, but what does this say beyond the fact that it happens? I could be wrong, but I think one of Ranciere’s target is some idea like “leave the thinking to the experts, to the people who are smarter”. I hope that makes sense. If you’re interested, you could probably read The Ignorant Schoolmaster in an afternoon.
Also, this is off topic, but on this: “If “is intelligent” and “gets good grades” are synonyms then it can not be the case that one causes the other.” The conceptual move being objected to here is actually a common one I think. For instance, Saussure says somewhere, basically “We can see some phenomena in common across languages. I call these phenomena in common ’structure’.” Then later he says something like “There are these phenomena in common across languages. This is because of structure.” We could find similar moments in Marxism I think, if we looked, regarding laws of history and all that. The move seems to be posit X, rename it Y, then later claim Y explains X. I think the reason this move appeals is some sort of implicit belief that explanation has some kind of practical force simply by virtue of being an explanation.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — February 21, 2006 @ 4:01 am
I really have to read Ranciere.
Comment by TCO — February 24, 2006 @ 1:10 am