Stud Philos Educ (2012) 31:407417

DOI 10.1007/s11217-012-9297-4

Initiating The Methodology of Jacques Rancie`re:

How Does it All Start?
Duncan P. Mercieca

Published online: 27 March 2012

 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Abstract Educationalists are currently engaging with Jacques Rancie`res thought on

emancipation and equality. The focus of this paper is on what initiates the process that
starts emancipation. With reference to teachers the question is: how do teachers become
emancipated? This paper discusses how the teachers life is made sensible and how sense
is distributed in her life. Two stories are taken from Rancie`res own work, that of Ingrid
Bergman and Joseph Jacotot, that give us an indication of the initiation process of
emancipation. Then I will see this in relation to the teacher, Mr Briggs, who is one of the
main characters of the play Our Day Out (1987) by Willy Russell.
Keywords

Rancie`re
Initiating emancipation
Teacher

Introduction
This paper questions how one starts to become emancipated, or, to use Rancie`res words,
how one learn[s] to be equal men in an unequal society (Rancie`re 1991, p. 133). Biesta
(2010) shows us that we have constructed a concept of emancipation that requires an
intervention from the outside; an intervention, moreover, by someone who is not subjected
to the power that needs to be overcome (my emphasis, p. 44). Emancipation is conceived
and understood as something that is done by someone and is future oriented, in that, 1 day,
you will become, like me, emancipated. Biesta goes to the work of Jacques Rancie`re to
think again about emancipation and equality, for Rancie`re topples the whole formulation of
emancipation and equality. Rancie`re, through his encounter with Joseph Jacotots writings
(see Rancie`re 1991), argues that equality should not be the endpoint of the journey, but
must be the starting point, which is based on an assumption that human beings are equal
not just in legal or moral terms, but also in terms of their intellectual and discursive
practices (Deranty 2010, p. 6): radical equality between human beings in terms of their

D. P. Mercieca (&)
University of Malta, Msida, Malta
e-mail: duncan.mercieca@um.edu.mt

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intelligence (Rancie`re 1991, p. 67). Emancipation, therefore, for Rancier simply means
to act on the basis of the presuppositionor axiomof equality (Biesta 2010 p. 51).
However, the aim of the paper is not to discuss Rancie`res ideas of emancipation and
equality. For those who want to engage in such ideas, I suggest Gert Biestas paper: A New
Logic of Emancipation: the methodology of Jacques Rancie`re, published recently (2010) in
Educational Theory as a good starting point. The title of this paper adds something to the
title (or at least part of the title) of Biestas paper. I take the second part of the title the
methodology of Jacques Rancie`re and add the idea of initiating before. This paper is seen
as an intervention on Biestas paper. It is not an adding to, rather it is, as Rancie`re says in
his work: to observe, to say and verify Biestas paper.
As Rancie`re repeatedly argues no party or government, no army or school, or institution, will ever emancipate a single person (Rancie`re 1991, p. 102). Every institution, for
Rancie`re, is a dramatization or embodiment of inequality (ibid., see also p. 105).
Emancipation is not a method that can be taught, such as a teacher teaching emancipation
to student or someone teaching emancipation to oneself. One engages in, one learns by
doing it; by their own efforts (Rancie`re 1995, p. 48). Rancie`re/Jacotot1 states that only
an man can emancipate a man (Rancie`re 1991, p. 102). But how does this happen? How
does this take place? How does it all start? I am aware that I am using a number of how
questionsalmost as if I am looking for a recipe. In this paper in particular, the focus is on
what initiates the process that starts emancipation for teachers. I use Willy Russells play
Our Day Out (1987) and write about Mr Briggs, a teacher in this story. Thus this paper is
an intervention on Biestas 2010 paper, on some of Ranciers work and also on Willy
Russells play.
There are tensions between these three interventions. Two are worth mentioning. First
tension: what is Biestas work in relation to Rancie`res? A master explicator? Well,
sometimes yes, he explains to me (the reader) parts and sections from Rancie`res works
and ideashe breaks down Rancie`res works into bits and pieces, devising a road that
progresses through Rancie`res ideas, etc. Also he links Rancie`res ideas together to give a
coherent picture of Rancie`res work. However, often as Biesta with Bingham (2010) attest,
their writings are more of a polemical intervention (Rancie`re 2009, p. 116), that is, a
polemical view of what ideas are and do (ibid.; see also Bingham and Biesta 2010, p. 158)
rather than an explanation, even if it is particularly tempting to speak in a way that is
policing rather than in a way that changes the redistribution of the sensible (ibid., p. 147).
The second tension concerns the relationship between Russells play to the ideas of
Rancie`re. I have purposefully matched these two as I use the former to relate the points
which I believe are relevant in Rancie`res work in the sphere of education. Rancie`re
himself elicits this tension between the theorist and practice when he recounts an experience which took place when he was carrying out archivial work on the history of the
workers movement in France in the 1830s. He came across a correspondence between two
friends. One recounts to the other his daily schedule in the Saint-Simonians utopian
community: work, exercises, games, singing and stories (Rancie`re 2007, p. 279), the
other friend answers him by telling him about the country outing that he had just gone on
with two other workers to enjoy their Sunday leisure (ibid.). What was surprising to
Rancie`re is that these workers were not seeking to restore his [their] physical and mental
forces for the following week of work (ibid.). Rather, they were engaged in a philosophical discussion, exchanging metaphysical hypotheses in a country inn (ibid.). These
1

When reading The Ignorant School Master, it is very difficult to say when Rancie`re is writing in his own
voice and when he is quoting Joseph Jacotot. This is whyI write Rancie`re/Jacotot.

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were able to blur (see Rancie`re 2007) the distinction between the opposites: those who
think and those who actthey were both. Rancie`re became aware that these men were
intellectualsand anybody is (ibid.). Rancie`res work can no longer present itself as a
sphere of pure thought separated from the sphere of (ibid., p. 280) Russells play which
focuses on practice. Rather, Rancie`res writing consists of a constant challenge between
discourse and knowledge (see Rancie`re 2009).
In the next section I briefly look at how the teachers life is made sensible and how
sense is distributed in her life. Two stories taken from Rancie`res own work follow. I show
how these stories give us an indication of the initiation process of emancipation. Then I
will see this in relation to my teacherMr Briggs.

The teachers sensible life

In On Ignorant Schoolmasters (2010a, in Bingham and Biesta), Rancie`re clearly argues
that inequality does not come about following the teachers individual failure (p. 6), but
it is rather a question of teachers who are caught up in a systematic axiom by which the
social system generally operates: the axiom of inequality (ibid.). Social systems generate
the idea that there are children and youths who do not want to develop their intellectual
powers further and are satisfied with not being able, to do so (ibid.). Besides this, there
is also always the assurance that others are even less able (ibid.). In Malta, in 2009, the
Directorate for Quality and Standards in Education published a policy document entitled
National Policy and Strategy for the Attainment of Core Competences in Primary. This
document argues that a Core Competences Benchmark needs to be developed (p. 8) and
that a Strategy needs to have the following priorities:

the prevention of attainment deficit in Core Competences through EARLY SUPPORT;

the EARLY IDENTIFICATION of Core Competences attainment deficit;
the INTEGRATION into mainstream teaching;
the INTERVENTION with respect to Core Competences attainment deficit in early
primary (emphasis in original, ibid.).

These four priorities focus at identifying children who have a deficitprimarily a

cognitive deficit as the Director General for Quality and Standards in Education argues in
the Forward of this policy (see ibid., p. 6)and what can be done to compensate, fix,
adjust, and bring to the level of acceptable development. It seems to advocate the need
to have a deeper knowledge of the child; or rather, of what the child cannot do in relation
to established targets. This is the pedagogical fiction which is the representation on
inequality as a retard in ones development (Rancie`re 1991, p. 119). This policy has been
imposed on teachers, schools and to some extent, parents, and has resulted in checklists
that help to identify the lack in the students level of achievement. Childrens lives are
divided into segments, milestones and developmental stages and areas, based on particular
established criteria. What this certainly implies is an establishment of a hierarchy between
those who know childrens development (the teachers who fill in the boxes established by
experts) and those who do not know (maybe parents themselves!), between those who can
talk correctly about children and whose speech therefore makes good sound, and those who
utterances about children is considered just noise.
This policy document is not only about the attainment of students in primary education,
but is one of the many policy documents that define teachers, students and their relationship. It is very clear that the starting point of such a policy is one of inequality, and it

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asks the teachers to work in such constructions. Equality is attained by going through the
steps and targets in the checklistsit is the (never-ending) journey through which the
students can approach the teacher. Just like the students are viewed as made up of little
targets which need to be achieved, we can say that the teachers can also be seen as the
adding up of various (sometimes conflicting and contradictory) policies, official statements
and practices. These are based on particular criteria made by those who see themselves as
fit to govern teachers (principles, education officers, directors, inspectors, etc.), implying
that teachers are not able to govern themselves. Those who govern are caught in what
Rancie`re calls disagreement: one in which the interlocutor at once understands and does
not understand what the other is saying (Rancie`re 1999, p. x). Those who govern, hear the
voices of those governed (the teachers), but cannot recognize these sounds as speech,
because they cannot recognize their authors as speaking beings (May 2010, p. 74).
Teachers are considered as uncounted (Rancie`re 1999, p. 38) and not seen as people
capable of making real demands (May 2010, p. 74). Those that make decisions in educational institutions recognise the papers filled by teacher as speech but not the teacher
sound. It is established that teachers can only communicate through this prescribed
medium. Those who govern hear the teachers sound, but they do not acknowledge them as
speaking beings, therefore, their sound is never acknowledged as voice.
This is how the sensible is constructed and distributed, which brings about predictability. All that is seen and perceived occurs through preconstituted objects deemed
worthy of perception (Panagia 2010, p. 96). So the distribution of the sensible has to do
with how bodies, for this paper, teachers bodies, are ordered according to pre-established
criteria: the order of distribution of bodies into functions corresponding to their nature
(Rancie`re 1999, p. 101). Lewis (2009) stresses the aesthetic aspect of this ordering of the
bodies; it is an order of the visible and the sayable (p. 288). This is what Rancie`re refers
to as policing,2 that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of
saying (Rancie`re 1999, p. 29). The police governs the very appearance of bodies and
subjects in the first place (Lewis 2009, p. 288). Rancie`re argues that this social order
that everyone knows his placeis brought about by the paradigm of explanation, arguing
that explanatory logic is a social logic; it is a way in which the social order is presented
and reproduced (Rancie`re, in Bingham and Biesta 2010a, p. 6).
The school, schooling systems and education, are at the heart of distributing the
sensible, and Rancie`re, using Jacotots idea, argues that schools and society symbolize
each other without end (Rancie`re, in Bingham and Biesta 2010a, p. 14). Rancie`re shows
that education is not simply an instrument, a practical means of working to reinforce the
social order (ibid., p. 8) but is actually an explanation of society (ibid). The education
of people through explanation has a triple effect:
First, to pull people away from retrograde practices and beliefs that keep them from
participating in the increase of wealth and development, and that create resentment
towards the ruling elites.
Second, to establish, between elites and the people, a minimal common set of beliefs
and pleasures that precludes a society fractured into two separate, and potentially
hostile, worlds.
2

What we normally understand by politics, Rancie`re calls policing, the police order. Rather than police
force the idea of policing implies policy-making, parliamentary legislation, executive orders, judicial
decisions, economic arrangements, interest-groups, etc. What all these have in common is that they situate
us in a particular position, with a particular understanding and rolethey position us according to predetermined criteria.

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Three, to assure a minimum of social mobility which gives to all the feeling of
improvement, which allows the peoples most gifted offspring to climb the social
ladder and to participate in the ruling elites renewal (ibid.).
Does this mean that there is no possibility for us and the teacher, Mr Briggs working in his
school, to ever become emancipated? To disrupt the sensibleto produce a different
discourse in the discourse of the sensible? To bring about dissensus? If this is so, then it is
tragicif it is so, then all we are doomed. When one reads Rancie`res The Ignorant
Schoolmaster (1991), it is easy for the reader to assume that he or Jacotot want to do away
with the teacher. However, in his chapter On Ignorant Schoolmasters (2010a) he clearly
says that his retrieving of Jacotots writings is not to propose some new pedagogy. It is the
idea of the ignorant schoolmaster (teacher) that is able to produce a dissensus, a gap in
the very configuration of sensible concepts, a dissociation introduced into the correspondence between ways of being and ways of doing, seeing and speaking (ibid., p. 15). The
gap that Rancie`re takes from Jacotot is the dissociation of teaching from knowledge
based on explication (see ibid., p. 14) which is the principle of the schooling (society)
institution. Rancie`re tells us that this critique does not forbid teaching; it does not forbid
the teachers role (ibid.). What society/school does is merge the teacher working in an
institution, with her competence as learned researcher and the activity as citizens into a
single energy that advances, in one effort, knowledge transmission, social integration, and
civic conscience (ibid., p. 15). What the ignorant schoolmaster does is disrupt, he brings a
gap in this logic, by knowing that a learned person is not a teacher, that a teacher is not a
citizen, that a citizen is not a learned person (ibid.). A gap is created in this closed
economy. He brings two heterogeneous processes to meet (Rancie`re 1999, p. 30): that of
inequality and that of equality. Therefore, Rancie`re thinks that it is possible to become
emancipated: The circle of emancipation must be begun (Rancie`re 1991, p. 16).
However we are still left with the question: How does this all start? In the coming two
sections I look at two stories recounted by Rancie`re that may help us to look at the initial
moments of the emancipatory process.

Story One: Short Voyages to the Land of the People

This story is about the voyage of Ingrid Bergman. It is recounted in the film Europe 51
produced by the Italian Roberto Rossellini. Ingrid is entertaning people in her house, she is
trying to be a good host. Her son wants her attention, the mother asks him what it is that he
wants and he answeres niete (nothing) so she ignores him. He tries to commits suicide.
He jumps down the stair shaft. He does not die, but breaks his hips. He later dies in hospital
due to some complication. Just before dying he says something but the mother, Ingrid, does
not know what he said.
Something is happening (Rancie`re 2003, p. 109), an event, that Rancie`re argues
changes their manner of being one with their representation (ibid.). For Rancie`re what
makes this event intolerable is not the repetition of an impotence, but rather the
apprenticeship of the unique power that goes forth to meet the event (ibid.). The labour of
reminiscenes that are triggered from the event is one question: what did her son say before
dying? What sets Ingrid on the path to her truth is the mystery of the words that the child
must have said at the hospital (ibid., p. 111). So she starts her journey. She goes to her
cousin, Andrea (a communist journalist) because he has heard the words of the son.
Andrea, Rancie`re tells us, knows the reasons of this pain and he knows that it will not

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be cured by words (my emphasis, ibid., p. 112). So he proposes a journey to her: he will
propose a cure to the suffering mother: to go see, to learn the great suffering of others
(ibid.).
It is a guided tour which has no guide, but does have a programme (p. 115116). Andrea
acts as the guide, the go-between, through him connections will happen (mettere in relazione). He takes her on a tram journey. At the end of this jorney there are people. The
go-between takes her to see a sick child whose cure depends upon no words, no psychological problem, but simply upon the absence of money for treatment (ibid., p. 112).
The go-between provides Ingrid with a frame where there are lots of people (ibid.,
113) and as Rancie`re points out: this is enough (ibid.). What we have here is a necessary and sufficient structure of representation (ibid.). Ingrid comes to know a world she
did not know about, she did not imagine such a world in her comfortable life and home.
Andrea, the go-between, is able to teach Ingrid what is behind words and on the hidden
side of society (ibid., p. 114). What I find interesting is that for Rancie`re, Andreas
capability of uniting together the two sides: Ingrid and the people, is seen as educational.
The cure that he is suggesting is an education (ibid.).
Earlier, I stated that according to Rancie`re this is a guided tour which has no guide, but
does have a programme (p. 115116). Andrea takes Ingrid on an journey, but the events
that take place in this journey are not knownIngrid meets a sick child and she helps him
financially. But it has a programme: once this programme is accomplished she is on her
way back to the tram, since she now knows the route (ibid., p. 116).
We assume that Ingrids journey is overthis event and the space created by it, of
meeting the people, comes to a close, but instead suddenly she turns around: a conversion
(not on the spiritual sense) but the twisting of a body called by the unknown (ibid.).
Rancie`re argues that it is the action of a gaze that turns around and pulls its body along
with it toward the place where its truth is in question (p. 116). She tips over into the
unrepresented. All of a sudden space becomes disoriented (ibid.)there are various ways
how to read this: the frame which closed down the people inside has holes in it, it is is
punctured, or rather it could be just outside the frame. She no longer is a visitor or at
home in society (ibid.).
This is more, it is beyond the cure that Andrea thought for Ingrid. The time of connecting and explanations are over now. It is rather in the event and the way how it is
recalled and narrated that sets us walking another way, an interminable walk in the course
of which the subject exceeds everything that it intelligibly could be said to be one with
(ibid., p. 118). For Rancie`re, Ingrid was invited to look behind things (ibid., p. 121) but
now she looks to the side (ibid.). When we look behind things we try to explain and
give justifications. Lewis (2011) contrasts Paolo Freire and Rancie`re on fine arts and
aesthetical experiences, and argues that while Freire is working within the classic
assumption that speech is what governs the forms of the visible (Rancie`re 2000, p. 22),
Rancie`re questions the assumed links between word and image (Lewis 2011, p. 41).
When arguing about the arts, which include theatre, Rancie`re suggests that there is no
straight path from the viewing of a spectacle to an understanding of the state of the world,
and none from the intellectual awareness to political action (Rancie`re 2010b p. 143 in
Lewis 2011, p. 41). The looking side ways gives Ingrid, a different possibility. Rather
than explaining through words, she has multiple possible worlds that resist speech,
interpretation and she often remains silent (ibid., p. 43). For Rancie`re it is a question of
converting ones gaze: practicing a new kind of thoughtfulness or respect (ibid., p. 123).
To start seeing from the point of view of foreigness. The foreigners gaze that puts us in
touch with the truth of a world (ibid., p. 125). What the foreigner perceives is the assault

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on the gaze (ibid.), that is, the gaze undoes the confusion of what is represented. (ibid.,
p. 123).
This is the storythe voyage of Ingrid. It all starts with an event which disrupts her
which she tried to explain and understand through various encounters, but then she was
able to gaze at the encounter without trying to find an explanation for it. She gazes and
looks at these encounters like a foreigner. All this will give her the possibility to recall and
narrate her story.

Story Two: The Ignorant SchoolmasterAn Intellectual Adventure

What do we know about Joseph Jacotot? First, we are told that he was a lecturer in French
literature, who believed that the important business of the master is to transmit his
knowledge to his students so as to bring them, by degrees, to his own level of expertise
(Rancie`re 1991, p. 3). He thought that students had to be spared the chance detours
(ibid) of the mind. The aim of the master was to explicate: to disengage the simple
elements of learning, and to reconcile their simplicity in principle with the factual simplicity that characterizes young and ignorant minds. To teach was to transmit learning and
form minds simultaneously, by leading those minds, according to an ordered progression,
from the most simple to the most complex (ibid.). Second, we are told by Rancie`re (ibid.,
p. 1112) that Jacotot started off as a professor in rhetoric, joned the army and soon
became captain, became a chemist, a very good mathematician, then he studied Hebrew.
What Rancie`re emphasises is that Jacotot knew what the will of individuals and the peril
of the country could engender in the way of unknown capacities, in circumstances where
urgency demanded destroying the stages of explicative progession (ibid., p. 12). Therefore, Jacotot had himself experienced learning not in a traditional way (where the teacher
explains everything to students).
Then the adventure starts: its main ingredient beingchance and necessity (ibid., p. 9).
Chance decided differentlya grain of sand had gotten into the machine (ibid., p. 3).
It wasnt supposed to be there. This minute, almost insignificant thinga grain of sand
sends everything into haywireit disrupts. It is violent to the whole machineit creates
dissensus. This leaves me wondering: if Jacotot had known basic Flemish, or the students
some basic French, the experiment would not have taken place! If the King of the Netherlands did not intervene, probably Jacotot would have never been given a teaching post in
Louvain. If the students did not highly appreciate his lectures and some students wanted
(wished) that he could teach them more, all of Jacotot, and maybe we can even say
Rancie`re, would not have been (given that all his work published after the Ignorant
Schoolmaster is marked by Jacotots experiment). Also, a bilingual edition of Telemaque
was being published at that time in Brussels.
What Jacotot does is give orders to his students through a translator: to see the words,
learn French with the help of the translation, repeat over and over, and to read until they
could recite it. Then write what they thought about what they had read (see ibid., p. 2).
Did Jacotot believe in the experiment? No, he expected horrendous barbarism, or
maybe a complete inability to perform. How could these young people, deprived of
explanation, understand and resolve the difficulties of a language entirely new to them?
(ibid., p. 2).
What happens: a sudden illumination brutally highlighted what is blindly taken for
granted in any system of teaching: the necessity of explication (ibid., p. 4). A fact,

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reasoned and conscious, was established and the fact was that his students had learned to
speak and write in French without the aid of explication (ibid., p. 9).

The Two Stories

By subjectification I mean the production through a series of actions of a body and a
capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience, whose identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience
(Rancie`re 1999, p. 35).
The two stories could be seen as the two ends of a spectrum. Ingrid, in the film, ends in an
asylum while Jacotot becomes famous. There are some commonalities between them with
regards to the emancipation process that I want to draw out of these two stories in order to
help me plot the process of initiation of emancipation. However, these four steps cannot be
taken as a recipe of the initiation process of the method of Rancie`re. If so this paper would
be caught in the contradiction of explication that it is trying to argue against:
First, we need to acknowledge that it was an event (an occurrence) that started off the
process: an unplanned circumstance, situation, or encounter. It is just coincidence and
contingent: for Ingrid the attempted suicide and death of her son, for Jacotot it is his exile,
and the train of events which led to him facing students of whose language he was
ignorant. These are not determined or planned events, but rather something that sparks off
an event, which however creates facts. Nietzsches idea of the dice throwing could be a
good way of explaining this. It is an event that brings about an opening, a new spacea
gap in our sensible way of being, doing, seeing and speaking.
Second, in both stories there is an attempt to explain the spaces created by the event
through the distribution of the sensible. Jacotot did not believe that his experiment would
be successful; for Ingrid it is Andreas who explains the meaning behind things. The closing
down of the opened space into the sensible (closed, order, hierarchical, meaningful) space.
Third, both Jacotot and Ingrid look at the space produced by event (or a series of
events), and at the new possibilities brought about by this new space. Previously, in
Ingrids section, I wrote about the gaze that she engaged ina gaze which brings about
possibilities. However, in this section I refrain from using the idea of gaze because, as
Tyson Lewis argues, the gaze is here understood in a Foucauldian way, as a visual
practice of mastery and control (Lewis 2009, p. 293). It is predicated on regulation,
normalization, and homogenization rather than a practice of freedom (ibid.). This
understanding is precisely the opposite. Lewis (ibid.) suggests Bals (1996) idea of glance
as opposite to gaze, which can also be used here. As he points out the glance is a
temporally bound, self-aware, and always already partial form of looking and perceiving
the glance is receptive to the agency of the other (p. 293).
Jacotot and Ingrid glance at the space produced by this event as though foreigners. What
happens in this space catches their attention; they are attracted towards it. This new space
gives them the opportunity to look at the side of things rather than behind things and trying
to understand them. The moment they glance, their body twists with this glance and moves
away from the sensible. Rancie`re also uses this idea of the body twisting when he writes
about becoming political (see Rancie`re 1999, p. 28). It is almost as if the body tries to
escape the compartmentalised boxes of the sensible, almost squeezing in-between the
sensible boxes. This is the opposite of the distribution of the sensible, which for Rancie`re
implies the positioning of the body according to pre-established orders. They twist, which

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implies the engagement with the possibilities offered by this new space, by this new world
(see Rancie`re 1999, p. 27); they experiment and engage rather than understand and make
sense. The twisting, the distortion of the body from its linear mode of being, brings about
antagonism (see Rancie`re 1999, p. 21). All this focus on body actions from Rancie`re
seems to complement the focus of intellectual emancipation that he puts in The Ignorant
SchoolmasterAn Intellectual Adventure (1991).
Fourth, their way of being, of doing and seeing and speaking, produces a counter
discourse in the sensible, which disrupts it and brings dissensus in the sensible. They are
part of those who have no part (ibid., p. 30). Rancie`re calls both Jacotot and Ingrid
madnot within the norm. They establish another order, another partition of the perceptible (Rancie`re 1999, p. 24) that breaks disagreement and brings about the wrong,
that is, the failure of those who establish the sensible to recognise the new order. Through
the establishment of this new order, they also show that the sensible is in fact as contingent
as the event they engaged with.
These four steps can be seen as a continuous process in Ingrid and Jacotots life. One
cannot do away with the distribution of the sensible (life would be unsustainable), but we
can help in the reconfiguration of the sensible. We have to accept that once this reconfiguration takes place it becomes part of the sensible. One does not become emancipated
once, but is continually becoming emancipated. Also, both Jacotot and Ingrids experience
of emancipation is a vulnerable one. This may sound strange as we usually think of the
acquisition of some strength and power as resulting in emancipation. Here, their journey is
vulnerability, of making themselves open to others who judge, comment, laugh at, and
maybe even ridicule them.

Story Three: Our Day Out

The story is situated in inner-city Liverpool. Mrs Kay, supported by two young teachers, is
taking her Progress Class (a remedial class) on a day trip to Conway in North Wales.
Although easy-going and very motherly, Mrs Kay is nobodys fool. However, fearing what
may result from her tolerant attitudes, the Headmaster sends the very much stricter Mr
Briggs along as well to be there and keep an eye on things just try to keep things in
some sort of order (Self 1987, p. 19). Mr Briggs reaction suggests that he does not want
to go, but has to go to keep some kind of order. Much of the play is taken up with the
different behaviour of the pupils at a roadside cafe, a zoo, at Conway Castle itself and later
on the beach. Exasperated by their behaviour along the journey, Mr Briggs addresses the
students in a disparaging way and leaves them in no doubt of his contempt and lack of
confidence in them.
At the castle the kids just race and chase and play havoc (ibid., p. 56). Mr Briggs and
Mrs Kay have an argument over the management of the childrens behaviour, and Mrs Kay
decides to take the children to the beach near the castle. Mr Briggs sits on a rock apart from
the main group. Mrs Kay, the other teachers and the children are running and playing.
However, all of a sudden Mrs Kay notices that one of the girls, Carol Chandler, is missing.
She calls Mr Briggs and the other teachers and they set off to search for her. Life offers
Carol so little in inner Liverpool that she has decided not to go back. It is Mr Briggs who
sees her at the edge of the cliff, and she threatens him to jump of the cliff if he goes near
her. There is a dialogue between the two. She tells him that he does not care about her and
the other children and that her life is not worth living. During all this, Carol moves more to

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D. P. Mercieca

the edge of the cliff. Mr Briggs is alarmed but unable to move, however he slowly hold out
his hand. He begs her to move away from the edge of the cliff:
Briggs: Carol. Carol, please come away from there [Streching out his hand to her]
Please.
[Carol looks at him and a smile breaks across her face]
Carol: Sir sir you dont half look funny, yknow.
Briggs: [Smiling back at her] Why?
Come on, carol [He gingerly approaches her]
Carol: whatll happen to me for doin this, sir?
Briggs: Nothing. I promise you.
Carol: Sir, ypromise now, but what about when we get back tschool?
Briggs: [Almost next to her now] It wont be even mentioned.
[she turns and looks at the drop the back at Briggs outstretched arm. Carol lifts her
hand to his. She slips. Briggs grabs her out quickly and manages to pull her to him.
Briggs wraps his arms around her].
They go back to the beach. Mrs Kay is going to start talking to Carol and him about it, but
he quickly dismissed her: Its all right, Mrs Kay. Ive dealt with all that (ibid., p. 71).
There are a number of ways how this story can be read. I have purposefully not written
extensively about Mrs Kays character, attitude and how she deals with children, as I did
not want to fall into the trap of creating a dichotomy of placing one teacher at the good
end and the other teacher as not as good; or one that loves and cares about children and
the other that wants order and rules to be obeyed and is cold with children. In relation to
this paper, what I think the story highlights, is that teachers have a number of encounters
with unexpected events. From the moment the Head of School asks Mr Briggs to go on the
trip, to Carol wanting to jump down the edge of the cliff.
In this paper, I have argued above that something unexpected happens in ones life that
brings about an event (or series of events) that gives one the possibility to start becomingemancipated. The question is: do teachers working in schools and schooling systems,
where the sensible is distributed (and, as Rancie`re argues, where institutions are not
emancipatory), have the possibility of events? The story of Mr Briggs can be considered a
series of unplanned, unexpected and contingent events happening in one school daywith
the girl Carol threatening to commit suicide as the apex of the day for Mr Briggs.
One might argue that these events were possible because they happened outside the
school premisesperhaps even the physical structure of schools are such that do not allow
for events. In retrospect I realise that in all three of the above stories, a journey/exile/outing
is recounted. And yet, we do know that things do happen in schools, of both joyous as well
as tragic naturethings which, through their radical nature, make the body twist in order to
apprehend them. Perhaps when one is outside the familiar context one is made more
vulnerable and thus more open to an event, whereas when in school, there is much to
distract. All three protagonists in our stories were forcibly made to halt in their tracks and
to think again about themselves and their practices, at least for the moment. The events
created a space, an opening for Mr Briggs. To ask if he engages with the spaces provided
by the event is beyond the scope of this paper. The event (or series of events) is the
ignorant schoolmasterthat which encourages someone to do something, that which
presents the other with possibilities. It provides us with the possibility to see, compare,
analyse, reason, reconsider and verify. The event that does not know or explain anything, it
just is.

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417

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