Rancière as Post-Foucauldian

• In Event: Taking Rancière to School: An Impossible Curriculum

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast Foucault’s concepts to their elaborations in the work of Jacques Ranciere. I will especially attend to how Ranciere helps us understand what can be rather baffling Foucauldian arguments regarding the role of the intellectual in the social order as something “behind and to the side of” as opposed to “leading’ anyone anywhere; the critique of social justice work as impositional and counter-productive; the critique of the teacher as “the one who knows”; the critique of distributive models that position people as recipients rather than actors, where critique fits in under assumptions of all as capable of constructing worthwhile lives and conducting their own affairs; seeing what can be done under the presupposition of equality; the obligation to hear dissensus; the enactment of democracy from those who struggle, for example, what sense can be made of “a group of not-learners” or disobedient children organized in dissensus against the police order of the classroom/currriculum? How do we, in Rancierian terms, modify the regime of the sensible through actions of those who act like political subjects against the invisibility to which they are consigned? How is this related to Foucault’s “we are freer than we think”? How do these ideas map onto developments in feminist methodology?

If, indeed, Foucault’s major interest was in theorizing the subject in history, what theory of the subject emerges from Ranciere in terms of our moment of now and what might this have to do with practices of curriculum? What sort of shifting in curriculum studies might become thinkable or at least less impossibly thinkable if we were to take Ranciere to school? What critiques of Ranciere do we need to take into account in thinking with and against him in the context of education? Here I am particularly interested in Pelletier’s (2009) arguments on “Left melancholy,” Ranciere’s method of equality and feminist methodology.

The theoretical framework is a mix of post-structuralism and critical theory well leavened with feminist theory. The mode of inquiry is philosophical comparison or what Piem calls “flagrantly theoretical” (2009, p. 239). The data sources or “evidence” for my arguments is the existent literature on Ranciere and education as well as that on Foucault. The “results” have to do with what we might learn from comparing and contrasting their ideas, perhaps particularly around the claims of “use-value” so attached to a field of practice such as education (Peim, 2009). The scholarly significance of the paper is to bring to an education audience a discussion of a theorist who is being used across wide swatches of the social sciences and humanities and to ask if theory-driven modes of research are really so useless in terms of rethinking practice, policy, the politics of knowledge and what Carl Grant has called “the shifting production of difference/otherness” (VP Vision Statement, July 2011). How can we move beyond what is exhausted and tired in the blackmails of quality, use-value, rigor and logic?

Author

• Patti A. Lather, The Ohio State University