Gaining Traction on a Chaotic Difference: Rancière, Equality, and the Politics of Subjectivization

• In Event: Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: Standards, Difference, and Competence: Boundaries and Borders in Contemporary Curriculum Studies

Abstract

Always changing chaos presents itself as a challenge to researchers, who often determine subjectivity in advance. Difference tends to be considered through identity-based diversity, precut by representation and placed into functions. Gilles Deleuze, however, conceptualizes difference prior to identity, without subjectivity, and existing in the “infinite speed” of chaos. This raises important questions, but while Deleuze finds little help in subjectivity, Jacques Rancière takes a different approach. From chaos, he emerges with his concept of equality—not a goal to be reached but the axiomatic principle through which a subject challenges the sensible. His approach extends the query into political terrain, offering understandings of democracy and equality not determined in advance but which maintain openness to constantly fluctuating chaos.

Author

• Bryn Jaastad, University of Wisconsin - Madison