I’m fucking sophisticated as fuck. No, for real. Check this shit out.
Okay, seriously, just some notes on some stuff I’ve been reading and stuff I’ve tried to make sense of before. Trying to find a thread.
Kant begins “What Is Enlightenment?” with a description. Enlightenment is release from self-incurred tutelage. (Kant On History, p3.) Tutelage is defined as inability to use understanding “without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from an another.” He then quotes the motto from Horace, “Sapere aude!”, “Dare to know!”, “Have courage to use your own reason!”
The absence of this courage is due to laziness and cowardice. This absence lasts, in some cases, a lifetime. A result of this condition is others setting themselves up as guardians: tutors, to provide the direction lacking by the one in tutelage. It’s interesting to note here that Kant states that tutelage makes guardianship easier, and yet, in the same paragraph suggests tutelage is a cause of what could be described as guardianship:
“If I have a book that understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself.” (3.)
Does the guardian cause tutelage, or is it a cause of guardianship? Neither. Kant is very clear. Tutelage is self-imposed. Guardianship is in a sense also self-imposed: one does not trouble oneself or the guardians, in the same nontroubling.
It can appear as if one does not impose tutelage on oneself - or, at a minimum, participate in producing oneself as in the condition of tutelage. Kant writes of the guardians making “their domestic cattle dumb.” The guardian does act, but so does the one in tutelage. (The formulation is clumsy, not least because it implies a difference between guardian and one in tutelage. Guardians may themselves be in tutelage, and will function better if they are.)
Leaving tutelage is difficult, because one becomes “fond” of the condition. (4.)
Against this Kant posits freedom: “if only freedom is granted, enlightenment is almost sure to follow.” (4.) What’s unclear, however, is what the distinction is between freedom and enlightenment. If enlightenment is release from self-incurred tutelage, and self-incurred tutelage is a form of unfreedom (as it must be considered) then release therefrom must be release from unfreedom.
Implied here are two types of freedom, a negative and a positive. The negative freedom is absence of constraint, constraint on the use of reason. The positive freedom is the free act of using reason, the self-provision of direction to the use of understanding.
The negative freedom is unclear. Kant seems to suggest that it is possible to put constraints upon reason, to impose tutelage. Whether or not this is what Kant means, this view would be a mistake. Rather, tutelage is self-imposed. One can be encouraged to self-impose tutelage, however. Tutelage can be made the most attractive option, conditions can be created in which it is to be expected that many people will exist in tutelage. But the outcome can not be universally guaranteed. There’s more to say on Kant’s piece but I’m going to leave it for later. (I may also comment on the differences between the translation I have and this one. Does anyone know if the text is online in German? My German’s bad but I’d like to give it a go.)
Foucault’s commentary on Kant’s text, of the same name, is quite interesting. He writes, “Kant defines Aufklarung [englightment] in an almost entirely negative way, as an Ausgang, an “exit”, a “way out.”" Foucault expands the point. Enlightenment is an exit from “a certain state of our will which makes us accept someone else’s authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for.” (In Essential Works v1, p305.)
Foucault comments on an ambiguity in Kant’s essay. “Enlightenment is defined by a modification of the preexisting relation linking will, authority, and the use of reason” (305) but it is not clear whether it is addressing an individual or collective condition and response. For Foucault, it is both. “Enlightenment must be considered both as a process in which men participate collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally.” (306.)
Another ambiguity occurs, in Kant’s use of the term “Menschheit,” his word for humanity. “The importance of this word in the Kantian conception of history is well known. Are we to understand that the entire human race is caught up in the process of Enlightenment? In that case, we must imagine Enlightenment as a historical change that affects the political and social existence of all people on the face of the earth. Or are were to understand that it involves a change affecting what constitutes the humanity of human beings? But the question then arises of knowing what this change is. (I’ve commented on this term before as used in an essay by Adorno. The title of Adorno’s essay, “Progress,” demonstrates that among the issues bound up here one of them is the narration of time.)
Foucault’s reflections on Kant’s essay are in large part captured when he states that enlightenment is a political problem. (308.)
Foucault remarks on modernity in relation to Kant that it might be thought of “as an attitude rather than as a period of history.” That is, “a mode of relating to contemporary reality, a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling”. (309.) This is modernity as a synonym for enlightenment, also not an era. Foucault thus reject a certain temporal or historical-narratival homogenization. He remains ambivalent about the relationship of individuals to groups, though. Foucault remains in the piece in some respects a contemporary of Kant, or better yet, Foucault attempts (to think through) a similar set of moves in his own location, one which entails “a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.” (319.)
This patient labor, the attitude of enlightenment, the practice of exit - these are political, as Foucault states clearly. They are opposed politically to the guardians, and to the tutelage which underwrites guardianship. (Another name for the system of guardianship is the education ideological state apparatus, which I just made some notes on in relation to the new Althusser collection.)
Max Stirner writes in “The False Principles of Our Education” (a different translation of which is here) that “the ultimate object of education can scarcely be knowledge,” instead it is “the will born of such knowledge.” (No Gods No Masters, 11.) Self-incurred tutelage is precisely a willing of oneself into a state of not willing, directing oneself into a lack of direction. “[T]he field of pedagogy too is numbered among those where the point is that freedom should not be allowed access, and opposition not tolerated: what is sought is submissiveness.” The relationship between wills in education is a political relation. “For the most part, what are our fine gentlemen brimful of intellect and culture? Sneering slavers and slaves themselves.” The guardian too is under tutelage. And should the slave not be sufficiently “slavish”, then force. ” The spirit by which most teachers are driven is dismally poignant proof of what we say. Licked into shape, they themselves lick into shape at best: tailored, they tailor.” (12.)
Against this, another Ausgang, an exit: “The starting point of pedagogy” should be “to shape free personalities (…) there must be an end to the sapping of a will hitherto brutally ground down.” (12.) “[T]he equality of free persons.”
This is the sensibility Ranciere finds in his The Ignorant Schoolmaster, in his reading of the teacher Jacotot (I’ve commented on this previously, here.) Ranciere, however, differs from Stirner in that Stirner dreams of schools that take up this principle. For Ranciere the project is impossible in schools. It can only occur outside institutions.
There seems to be a contradiction here, since for Ranciere it can occur and has occurred in the family. The family is a type of institution and it lists with the school in Althusser’s treatment of ideological state apparatuses. Althusser, however, adds a footnote, that the family has “other ‘functions’ than that of an ISA. It intervenes in the reproduction of labour power.” [note8, p17] The perspective of reproduction is the perspective of class struggle [find this quote…]. Ranciere’s proposal is a conflict around and against the production of docile bodies that carry the commodity labor power into the labor market and which submit to use once purchased, but it is a conflict which occurs in different spaces and times than those of the purchase/sale and the use of labor power.
What Ranciere neglects, however, is the condition of the labor of preparing future labor power in schools. His account of it is like Stirner’s, and the two both inadequately recognize what the political nature of enlightenment entails. Enlightenment and its absence, and conflict around that, are political. Put more simply: the stultifying educator and the would be self-emancipating student may confront each other in the class room. (Or if not there, then elsewhere, in relation to the pastor, the physician, the writer as mediated through the book, etc.) This relationship is one which Ranciere has already characterized, though not explicitly. It is a condition of disagreement. Stultification and emancipation are incommensurable perspectives. They can not communicate. One can oscillate between them, but the two do not mix. Each sounds to the other like noise, and thus the people who represent each, insofar as they act out those desires, are in a condition of disagreement. And the eruption of politics, the declaration of emancipation against stultification can not but be a disruption, a new (ac)count which includes emancipation - under any form other than excluded - is not possible within a stultifying order.
There’s more to say on all this, of course, particularly on belonging and Kant’s “public,” but not now and perhaps not from me, at least not without more thinking and reading.
For now, a long quote from the Republic on the myth of the metals (the sentiment in the end of which is also present in a sad angry lovely ditty by Propagandhi about school and the educational function [ISA?] of video games).
“Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honour; others he has made of silver, to be auxillaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children. But as all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son. And God proclaims as a first principle to the rulers, and above all else, that there is nothing which should so anxiously guard, or of which they are to be such good guardians, as of the purity of the race. They should observe what elements mingle in their offspring; for if the son of a golden or silver parent has an admixture of brass and iron, then nature orders a transposition of ranks, and the eye of the ruler must not be pitiful towards the child because he has to descend in the scale and become a husbandman or artisan, just as there may be sons of artisans who having an admixture of gold or silver in them are raised to honour, and become guardians or auxiliaries. For an oracle says that when a man of brass or iron guards the State, it will be destroyed. Such is the tale; is there any possibility of making our citizens believe in it? (Via.)
Not in the present generation, he replied; there is no way of accomplishing this; but their sons may be made to believe in the tale, and their sons’ sons, and posterity after them.
I see the difficulty, I replied; yet the fostering of such a belief will make them care more for the city and for one another. Enough, however, of the fiction, which may now fly abroad upon the wings of rumour, while we arm our earth-born heroes, and lead them forth under the command of their rulers. Let them look round and select a spot whence they can best suppress insurrection, if any prove refractory within, and also defend themselves against enemies, who like wolves may come down on the fold from without; there let them encamp, and when they have encamped, let them sacrifice to the proper Gods and prepare their dwellings.” (Via.)