DRAFT

The Ignorant Statesman: Philosophy, Pedagogy and Politics ""The duty of Joseph Jacotot's disciples is thus simple. They must announce to everyone, in all places and all circumstances, the news, the practice: one can teach what one doesn't know." (The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 101) Rancire Michael Dillon University of Lancaster Fidelity to the Disagreement Goldsmiths College September 2003

Introduction: Fidelity to the Dis-agreement Our problem isn't proving that all intelligence is equal. It's seeing what can be done under that supposition. " (Jacques Rancire, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 4659.) For the sake of argument, then, let's agree. For the sake of argument let's agree first that throughout the 20th century continental thought has been distinguished by the argument that an ineradicable but ultimately unknowable remainder haunts what we are, do, write and say. And that, to the extent that human beings are a naturally occurring kind they are an extremely odd one whose oddity sets them apart from other naturally occurring kinds not least in understanding themselves this way. For the sake of argument let's agree, second, that Derrida was correct in insisting that, stripped of Marxist techne, Marx's message was messianic.1 Messianic in the sense of invoking the given, and the giving, of the excess of being over appearance as future to come whose ineliminable remainder fuels, but can never be exhausted by, a radical politics of freedom. One haunted by the ontological equality of our being in common goes by the name of 'democratic'. For the sake of argument let's agree, finally, that there is finitude to agreement, if not to dis-agreement, and that in addition to warranting disagreement this remainder also warrants, indeed requires, an emancipatory practice which is as irreducible to techne as it is impossible to institutionalise permanently in any social or political form. Different continental thinkers think this thought of the remainder and name it differently in different ways however. The differences are substantial philosophically and I do not want to diminish them here. They also have significantly different implications for how we think about politics after the continental turn in thought. In addition to Deleuze, Derrida, Nancy and others, Foucault, for example, argued as much throughout his exploration of power relations and not least throughout his contesting of the reduction of existence to the changing biopolitical form of the human and life sciences. In contesting Aristotle's speciation of politics - man is first an animal, then an animal that has logos in virtue of which he has politics - Giorgio Agamben also argues as much.2 Jacques Rancire does the same in his exploration of what he calls paradoxical magnitude.3 Or, at least something similar, since none of these thinkers argues their point in precisely the same ways and to precisely the same ends. Each nonetheless orients their argument around the motive force and overwhelming importance of something at work in, but ultimately intractable to, both knowledge and practice. However suspicious some of them are about the element of mystery that necessarily obtains here, some like Derrida are not, the invocation of that hidden excess remains a pivotal element in this kind of thinking. There is however an important distinction to be drawn within the conclusion that the world is not to be exhausted through knowing. There are those who argue that
1 2

Specters of Marx, See, for example, Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. 3 Jacques Rancire, Dis-agreement. Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999.

the world does not add up and those that argue that if it is subject to a metric there is no secure means of accessing whatever that metric may be. Not adding up is one thing, not being able finally to secure access to the metric that may ultimately be responsible for furnishing a coherent universe - let's call it truth - is quite another. However close they may appear to be, these adjacent thoughts lead down radically divergent tracks. Each seems bracketed also on the one hand by the messianic and on the other by the nihilistic. Nonetheless both agree that in the absence of a metric or without secure access to one, it is not possible to reduce politics to a technical activity. Each also has their way of demonstrating that the first move in any technologisation of politics is a de-mystification of the human. That de-mystification equates the human with naturally occurring kinds that are assumed - perhaps also wrongly, a move that challenges the anthropocentrism of the initial claim about human kind4 - to be exhaustively open to knowing. As Stanley Rosen puts it, and in terms that excite considerable resonance in an age increasingly dominated by the biophilosophical discourses emanating from molecularisation and code: "the demystification of politics renders nugatory the difference between human beings and other animals. One may well suspect that a purely scientific or technical analysis of politics leads to a disappearance of the art of the statesman, or to its redefinition as a branch of biology."5 Despite how much Rosen would differ from him there is an echo here of the dissent from biopower and biopolitics that begins with Foucault and continues with Agamben. If there is an excess of being over appearance responsible for the fact that the world does not add-up - however that excess is figured - the excess will inevitably become the pole around which thinking politically will begin to revolve. If, to take Rosen's account of the Platonic rendition of this position, the world does add up but we cannot know how, politics is reduced via mythos, techne, nomos and phronesis to the production of simulacra that produce bad copies of the Ideas that underwrite the universe.6 Commitment to the view that politics is a universe of bad copying leads to one kind of political thinking; that said to be common, for example, to the Straussean School.7 It is not the one I want to explore here. I want instead to use a Straussean as a foil to introduce a kind of thinking politically that is different because it not only figures this absent centre differently. It does so through dissent from Straussean Socratic pedagogy as well. In a way similar to but very significantly different from Rosen, Jacques Rancire nonetheless also declares that truth "is not given to us. [That] It exists independently from us and does not submit to our piecemeal sentences.for all that truth is not foreign to us, and we are not exiled from its country. The experience of veracity attaches us to its absent centre; it makes us circle around its foyerwe can see
4

My caveat concerning the attack on anthropocentrism is the same that Rancire, Jacotot and many others have registered in terms of those who ostensibly diminish themselves and their own intelligence: "Self contempt is always contempt for others." The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 79. In other words it does not follow that in equating the animal with the human one automatically elevates animal kind. 5 Stanley Rosen, Plato's Statesman, The Web of Politics, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 87. 6 The conclusion that Rosen comes to after his reading of, Plato's Statesman. 7 See, for example, Leo Strauss, The Argument and Actions of Plato's Laws, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1975.

and indicate truths."8 Thus in Rancire's telling of it: "Truth is not told. It is a whole, and language fragments it; it is necessary and languages are arbitrary."9 I therefore want to explore the politics of emancipation that Ranciredraws from his rendition of the excess of being over appearance - however much he may bridle at this Heideggerean expression of it - rather than the politics of bad copying that the Straussean Rosen draws from his. Whereas Rosen's concurs with the Platonic assertion that man is a sick animal, and seeks to verify it in a way that Rancirewould call stultifying, Rancire's supposes human equality and seeks to verify that in a way he calls emancipation. By invoking him, by supposing him, I seek to verify Rancire, but only of course, and necessarily so, in my own way: "me too, I'm a painter."10 Ultimately we are talking here about ways of being in the world. Without the space to argue the point, I think that Rancire's political way of being in the world, invoking to presence something in excess of what is already manifest, he calls it equality, in order to put it to work in the world necessarily voices itself in messianic tones. Supposing equality is messianic, verification its way of being in the world. Consider for example the gospel of good news announced in the epithet that heads this paper. 'By their works, then, shall ye know them'. The Question: Teaching What We Do Not Know. "It is true that we don't know that men are equal. We are saying that they might be and we are trying along with those who think as we do to verify it. But we know that this might be is the very thing that makes a society of humans possible." (The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 108) If the world does not add-up because there is no common metric by which we can measure what is, or if there is one no way in which the nature of things can be securely accessed, we cannot know for certain what politics is. Indeed it has been argued since ancient times that the very condition of possibility of politics is precisely the absence of such a common metric. If the world did add up there would be no need for politics. For those hostile to politics, frustrated or appalled by its practices, the end of politics has always been sought in the discovery, or imposition, of a metric that would make the world add-up. Such totalitarian impulses have often been successful at suborning politics but they never have in fact succeeded in submitting the world to a common metric. The absence of a common metric - that the initial logos is tainted with a primary contradiction,11 for example - is, in short, one of the sources of that disagreement which engenders politics in the first place. But the manifestation of the absence of a common metric is itself uncertain. It manifests itself differently, at different times, in different places and in different ways. And it often does so in the
8

Jacques Rancire, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 58. 9 The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 60. 10 Rancire explaining the principle behind Jacotot's pedagogy, "a statement that contains nothing bin the way of pride, only the reasonable feeling of power that belongs to any reasonable being." The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 67. 11 Rancire, Dis-agreement, p.16. How this primary contradiction is to be reconciled with Rancire's insistence on the existence of truth is another issue.

name of a common metric - such as those, for example, of the people, the proletariat, and the rights of man or, currently, human rights.12 In other words, it manifests itself as disagreement with the proposition that there is no common metric. Thus we cannot even say for sure that we know that politics is disagreement in the absence of a common metric. Not, at least, universally, conclusively and definitively. But, according to Rancire, we can generally, contingently and decisively verify it in every circumstance of disagreement. This state of affairs prompts me to pose the question that I want to explore in this essay. How can we teach and practice what we do not know? Specifically, not knowing for sure what politics is, how can it be taught and practised? This central question originates in a book by Jacques Rancire in which he recounts the story of Joseph Jacotot.13 Jacotot was a French polymath and pedagogue of the early 19th century forced to practice his crafts and earn his living as an migr at the University of Louvain. It turns out that Jacotot did in fact teach what he did not know and in doing so, according to Rancire, practised emancipation. Jacotot's inspiring story of 'universal teaching' becomes an account of the grounds for the politics of freedom that Rancire has explored and championed elsewhere. Indeed, and in effect, it is the object of that politics of freedom. Its ground is its purpose. That which it pursues - supposes and seeks to verify in the form of equality - is what supports it. Here, then, we have an account of politics as freedom practised through a pedagogy that teaches what it does not know in the process of practising an emancipation that it cannot securely fomalise as knowledge or indeed institutionalise as a regime of knowing or of government. It is nonetheless verifiable, and not only through disagreement, but also as the very practice of freedom that continuously inspires both. By example and exemplification, specifically here through Jacotot's universal teaching, it emancipates as well. Here, too, is a classical aporia, if not the classic aporia, one that tells us something important about the very nature of aporia itself, that aporias may excite as well as confound and that they may engender innovation, not just immobility, in response to the predicaments that they pose. As it manifests itself in relation to politics this aporia receives classic exposition in Plato's Statesman, the unhappy English translation of the Greek term Politikos. 14 Instead of addressing the nature of political regimes as he does in the Republic, in the dialogue of the Statesman Plato examines the question: What is it to do
12 13

Rancire, Dis-agreement. Rancire, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. 14 Cornelius Castoriadis complains. "Now the English title, the Statesman, is particularly intolerable. I've said on many occasions that the Greek term polis is not to be translated as city-state, for the Greeks didn't have a separate state apparatus. To call the person who was to be occupied with the running of the polis a statesman is, even in Plato's perverse construction concerning the so-called royal man, totally unacceptable." On Plato's Statesman, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. xxvii. Since we do not know for certain what politics is, and we are certainly not talking about the technicalities of commanding a state or conducting inter-state relations, I think that there is an advantage in preserving the original Greek term when referring to the political person. Politikos clearly connotes politics but since it is nonetheless strange it preserves the enigma and opacity that goes with something we are claiming is in any event unknowable. Precisely because it is not knowable politics is untranslatable. Best not to insist on the strict translation of the word for it then when exploring it's teaching and its practice. I will however stick with convention when referring to the title of Plato's dialogue itself.

politics? Hence, what is the nature of political activity? Or, as Rosen puts it, the task of Plato's Statesman is, "to define the political art."15 Moreover, that task is pursued pedagogically. Thus the intimacy of the relation between education and politics is extant from the beginning both in the staging and in the structure of the dialogue, in the dialogue as the dialogue. I conflate teaching and practising politics from the very beginning then in a way that might be thought inadmissible, but I don't think that it is. It is not incidental for example to note that Rancire dissents as much from the Socratic method - " the Socratic method, apparently so close to universal teaching, represents the most formidable form of stultification"16 - as he does from the politics that are variously drawn from it. Suffice it to say, then, that every account of politics recognises the intimacy of the relation between a political regime and the virtues it requires to be instilled in its citizens or subjects such that its politics is practised in its pedagogy and in its teaching. The distinction between teaching and doing depends, in addition, upon a distinction between theory and practice which, according to Rosen, the Eleatic Stranger of Plato's Statesman subverts. He does so through the very exercise of his pedagogy, an aspect of dialectics called diaeresis. "The Stranger is like Socrates," says Rosen, "in that both engage in advertisements for the excellence of logos, dialectic, and the diaeresis of pure forms, but neither of them actually gives us a detailed example of these desiderata."17 If, amongst drawing the theory practice distinction, only logos can also tell us what politics is and logos fails on both counts then we can neither know politics nor abide by the logocentric theory/practice distinction in respect of it: "theory is tangled together with practice.The more we separate theory from practice, the farther we are removed from human existence; the limit case is the contemplation of Platonic Ideas by pure noetic intuition.We cannot finally separate theory from practice because theory is itself in part practice. " (p.111) Rosen is understandably, but I think unjustifiably, a neglected political thinker. Understandably because although a student of continental thinkers he has not been part of the fashionable continental turn in American political theory. But he is nonetheless a scrupulous reader of political texts especially the classics. You could not therefore call his readings deconstructive. Rosen contests Heidegger's dekonstruction of metaphysics, for example, specifically Heidegger's account of being and non-being from which Derrida's deconstruction draws so much of its inspiration.18 Whatever a poststructuralist is supposed to be, Rosen is definitely not one. A student of Leo Strauss, Rosen is nothing if not, however, a didact. He shares the conviction of the Strauss school that since Plato wrote dialogues rather than treatise, the dramatic structure of the
15 16

Plato's Statesman, p. 98. Rancire, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p.59. 17 Rosen, Plato's Statesman, p.p. 137-138. Rosen emphasises that, "contrary to the first impression produced by the Stranger, diaeresis is insufficient for an exposition of political life." p. 51. In addition, the, "the most obvious errors, repetitions and confusions must have been intended by the Stranger. They are themselves part of the teaching." p. 65. More to the point the ineluctable conclusion to Rosen's reading of Plato and specifically here of the Statesman, is that: "Those who dislike irony and who prefer to think of the Statesman as a stalwart expression of Plato's intellectual progress must acknowledge the ironical consequence of the use of the techne of diaeresis to define the techne of politics. Philosophy is transformed into technology and the doctrine of Ideas into ideology." p. 36. 18 Stanley Rosen, The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

texts is of substantive importance in the reading of them. To acknowledge this is one thing, he says. To understand the dramatic form, he adds, is something else. It doesn't follow however that there is only one way of understanding drama, or even the drama of the dialogues.19 But Rosen's readings are productively destructive; destructive of any simple interpretation of singular meaning and he is one of very few thinkers to give Plato's Statesman an intensely close read. 20 Moreover, Rosen seems to agree that the drama concerns not knowing. Assuming the dramatic structure of the text Rosen dissects the methodology by which it ostensibly seeks to establish an epistemological understanding of politics as techne while demonstrating its impossibility. It is for that reason, and because so very few others have read the dialogue on the politikos so closely, that I lay-out Rosen's principal thesis. I take this to be that since philosophy cannot know we cannot know politics as techne or even phronesis by philosophical means. This then helps me to pose and explore the structure of the question that puzzles me and which seems to be so politically significant. If the means of knowing available to us in our tradition fails ultimately to know - even, as Rosen argues from the teaching of the Statesman, paradigmatically to know itself - then how can we know that thing which concerns us in particular here, namely politics. The Statesman. "Understanding must be understood in its true sense: not the derisive power to unveil things, but the power of translation that makes one speaker confront another. It is the same power that allows the 'ignorant' one to discover the secret of the 'mute' book." (The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p.p. 63-64) Rosen's reading goes like this. In order to understand the polis and the politikos we must be outside or beyond both. Thus the understanding of the politikos does not fall within the provenance of politics but the provenance of understanding. In other words, to understand politics you have to understand understanding, what we might call the logos of the logos. That task, in our tradition, falls to philosophy. Rosen makes the point this way: "The understanding of politics does not fall within the provenance of the statesman, odd though that may sound. It falls within the provenance, and I mean the extra-political provenance, of the philosopher."21 For Rosen then; "The unexamined problem that underlies all of the Platonic dialogues is precisely the possibility of philosophy as it is described explicitly by the interlocutors within the dialogues and as it is represented through the eikastic form of the dialogues themselves, which are embodied logoi."22 Note that the principal effect of this standard manoeuvre is immediately to establish a hierarchy between philosophy and every other activity. Thinking here enacts an original inequality. Given thought's failure to account even for itself, however,
19

Derrida's reading of the myth of the Khra in, The Timaeus is, for example, radically different. See On The Name, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. 20 Castoriadis is another but his seminar's on Plato's Statesman broach many more issues than the one I wish to stay focused on here. 21 Plato's Statesman, p. 137 22 Plato's Statesman, p. 138.

Rosen's reading not only of Plato's Statesman but also of Plato as such, one wonders then about the principal purpose of philosophy. Philosophy knows this - and Rosen's interpretation of the irony of the Platonic dialogues is precisely that this what their dramatic teachings are intended to demonstrate - philosophy can never do what it sets out to do, to establish its own credentials as a secure means of accessing truth. Perhaps the original intention of thought is in fact, and instead, then to enact an originary inequality in the domain of reason. Perhaps also that manoeuvre was inspired by in a vain attempt to trump or finesse the everyday inequality it encounters in the realm of the social and the political; assuming that only inequality can overcome inequality and that philosophy's is to be preferred because it is based upon a supposed hierarchy of reason. Perhaps, finally, that is why the reason of philosophy can never realise freedom, equality and emancipation; and Boetheus's consolation comes down to retaining one's sense of superiority even while incarcerated. An absolutely fundamental point of divergence emerges clearly here, however, between the one who thinks philosophically and the one who thinks politically. As Rancirenotes: "Equality was not an end to attain, but a point of departure, a supposition to maintain in every circumstance. Never would truth speak up for it."23 Thinking politically supposes equality - not least in fact by supposing that both philosopher and politikos are thinking - and strives to enact or verify it in practice. Thinking philosophically one has however to enact inequality and then suppose it in justifications. Plato's Statesman is above all a drama for Rosen. As it struggles and fails to determine the logos of politics, specifically also the techne of politics and the declension of politics to phronesis, the drama of the politikos enacts the failure of philosophy as such. "The fundamental question raised by the Statesman is then not at all that of the nature of the royal art, but rather the nature of dialecticthis amounts to the assertion that the fundamental theme of the Statesman is the question of the nature of philosophy and so, by extension of the philosopher."24 That "there is no dialogue dedicated to the philosopher,"25 is taken to confirm his point. "I suspect that the nonexistence of the promised dialogue on the philosopher is intentional: there is no way at all in which to pin down his nature."26 If philosophy fails to understand understanding, understanding politics fails as well. "In sum, nothing that I have said here is intended as an assertion that a philosophical understanding of politics is possible, if by such an understanding one means a complete and coherent logos. In my view, there is no such logos of any totality, whether it be the cosmos, the city, or the individual soul."27 In fact of course, as noted above, this holds for every enterprise. It is he says simply more evident in the Statesman.

23 24

The Ignorant Statesman, p. 138. Plato's Statesman, p. 100. 25 Plato's Statesman, p. 137. 26 Plato's Statesman, p. 107. It is important to note that Castoriadis, for example, dissents from Plato's description of the politikos as the royal art. On Plato's Statesman. 27 Plato's Statesman, p. 137.

"As to the hunt for the statesman," Rosen continues, "it is conducted by myths and images, including some that masquerade as logoi."28 "to make this assertion more precise, we can say that the Stranger not only champions diaeresis as a prototypical mathsis universalis but shows its short comings by a kind of reductio ad absurdum that implicates him in the obscurities of mythical discourse rather than in the clarity and distinctness of eidetic intuition. The constructive powers of techne are employed in the attempt to defend human beings from the disjunction within nature that they themselves exemplify but which for that very reason they can never master." (p. 7) The myth of the techne of politics that takes place in the drama of Plato's Statesman is designed in other words, "to exhibit how we may render possible the impossible rule of phronesis." However, since, "[i]t is impossible for the Stranger or anyone else to give a logos, in other words a detailed description or account, of phronesis or its decisions,"29 the regress of the drama continues until ultimately, Rosen concludes: "What gets applied from the paradigm of phronesis is the abstract structure of commanding-obeying."30 It therefore all comes down to this: the structure of commanding-obeying as depicted by the dialogue through the dialogue as one that cannot ultimately be divined or commanded by the philosophical method of the dialogue. What does this mean? It means that philosophy cannot attain the object of its affections. Moreover, however much Rosen insists upon the dramatic, ironic and comedic character of the dialogues, his reading seems to lack precisely these qualities. Rosen therefore ends with the teaching that politics consists in the application of a structure of command and obedience - phronesis - that, escaping philosophy's originary inequality because philosophy fails, must default to the hierarchy of traditions, laws and powers of any given political regime. Philosophy quarrels with politics-as-regime over reason not equality since, like any such regime, philosophy first enacts itself as an originary inequality. What gets renewed in this account of teaching politics is then surprise -the hierarchy of command and obedience. What about this structure of command and obedience? Perhaps it is assumed that a good structure of command exhausts the issue of obeying? Why, however, should men obey? Or, to put it in the provocative and productive terms that Rancire uses in Dis-agreement, what, in particular, does their very capacity to obey tell us about their status not only in relation to each other but in relation also to that in virtue of which they hold their being in common without being able to attain secure proprietorship of it? This is another fundamental point at which Rosen and Rancire part company to political effect. Rancire's position - both political and pedagogic - is in fact also grounded in an account of command and obedience. His conclusions are as different from Rosen's, however, as they possibly could be: "only an emancipated person is untroubled by the idea that the social order is entirely conventional; only he can scrupulously obey superiors that he knows are his equal."31 Pedagogically,
28 29

Plato's Statesman, p. 137. Stanley Rosen, Plato's Statesman. The Web of Politics, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 169. 30 Plato's Statesman, p. 171. 31 The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 109.

Rancire counters that, "[t]he Socratic method of interrogation that pretends to lead the student to his own knowledge is in fact the method of the riding school master,"32 and notes that the problem is not in any event, "to create scholars", much less obedient scholars, the task "is to make emancipated and emancipating men."33 Politically he counters that in order to obey men must be the equals of those that command. Hence to Rancire for an account of pedagogy that is as different as the politics that it enacts. The Ignorant Schoolmaster. "one can teach what one doesn't know if the student is emancipated.In short, the circle of emancipation must be begun." (The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p.p. 15-16) For Rancire too the realms of the pedagogic and the political, are those of excess whose principal qualities are, in some sense also, those of drama: "the impossibility of our saying the truth even when we feel it makes us speak as poets."34 At the heart of the drama is the absent presence of the excess that calls to emancipation: "the poem in a sense, is always the absence of another poem,"35 since, "language does not allow everything to be said."36 For Rancire as well, the task is to bring something to presence that is not there - equality - but that can be supposed and verified by actions emancipation - that put it to work in presence: one might say, that present it. For Rancire, finally, there is also no exhausting that task. Emancipating emancipation, the work that brings to presence an excess that is to be supposed only because it exceeds the finite determination of current materiality not because it is unreal, is politics. One teaches what one doesn't know through an emancipation that makes space for others to learn. That, too, is political. This is how Rancire tells the story of how Joseph Jacotot learned this lesson from teaching about teaching whose lesson ultimately is a political one. The return of the Bourbons in 1815 forced Joseph Jacotot into exile at the University of Louvain. His students did not speak French. Jacotot knew no Flemish. But they had something in common, a bilingual copy of Fenelon's Telemaque, and Jacotot asked his students to use it to learn French. They did. And they did so without the explication of their teacher: "He had given no explanation to his students on the first elements of the language. He had not explained spelling or conjugations to them. They had looked for the French words that corresponded to words they knew and the reasons for their grammatical endings by themselves."37 Jacotot's experience caused him to reflect on the nature of teaching and learning as such. And there he understood for himself how teaching as expert explication must first do what philosophy must first do, establish an order of inequality: "The
32 33

Rancire, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 59. The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p.p. 101-102. 34 The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 64. A changing understanding of the poetic is central to these texts. There is of course no single understanding of the poetic. How one understands the poetic is always intimately involved in how one understands and construes philosophy politics and teaching. 35 The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 69. 36 The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 70. 37 The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p.p. 4-5.

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pedagogical mythdivides the world into two. More precisely, it divides intelligence into two. It says that there is an inferior intelligence and a superior one."38 It is the job of the superior one of the master to explicate things to the inferior one of the student. As Rancire notes, "It is the explicator who needs the incapable and not the other way round."39 The rule of teaching is the rule of the hierarchy of rule. Philosophy, pedagogy and the politics of inequality seem then to enact similar manoeuvres in different contexts. But these are not similar manoeuvres in different contexts. They are precisely the same manoeuvre in precisely the same context: that of human being in common where the excess of equality over the appearance of inequality may excite - doesn't always excite - a certain way of being in the world that has to be argued for. It is one whose possibility, continuously verified in the most diverse of situations, is spoken about in terms of freedom and democratic politics. Overthrowing that hierarchy of rule in response to an accident of language obstructing the desire to communicate, it wasn't only the students who were emancipated by their happy discovery that they could learn without explication. Jacotot was too, and in this respect especially: he could teach what he didn't know. "The fact was that his students had learned to speak and to write in French without the aid of explication."40 But, of course, Jacotot knew French. So, in what sense had he taught them what he didn't know and had to learn also for himself. In this sense: "Without thinking about it, he had made them discover this thing that he had discovered with them.Understanding is never more than translating, that is giving the equivalent of a text, but in no way its reason.There is nothing beyond texts except the will to express, that is, to translate.It isn't the aptitude for changing columns [of words] that counts, but rather the capacity to say what one thinks in the words of others."41 And also, "what greater variety can be expected from a human being."42 Moreover, what had happened once, thenceforth became always possible. Jacotot had taught them something, but, "sinceit wasn't the master's knowledge that instructed the student, then nothing prevented the master from teaching something other than his science, something he didn't know."43 In each case also - teacher and learner - it was a matter of not knowing what it is that one doesn't know. Better perhaps to say that he was the occasion of their learning something that they would not have learned had he not occasioned himself along to teach, and they had not occasioned themselves along to learn. One cannot teach what one doesn't know without the chance of learning. The occasioning of this chance is necessarily subject to happenstance, surprise. Hence the adventure of learning. But perhaps also such an adventure can be a practice, one that may continuously be practised. Jacotot thought so, and spent the rest of his life in the experiment of it. The experiment was essentially this: emancipation from the authority of the hierarchy of rule that the explicative order of traditional teaching establishes as the principle of formation by which this relational order keeps the incapable subject to the rule of the capable. The explicative order is that in which the one who knows transmits what he knows to the one who does not,
38 39

The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 7. The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 6. 40 The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 9. 41 The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p.p. 9-10. 42 The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 11. 43 The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 14.

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continuously also renews his authority because it is precisely this authority that adjudicates whether or not there is more learning yet to be done. Both master and student are in fact subject to this order. Emancipation from it is the means by which one teaches what one doesn't know: "one can teach what one doesn't know if the student is emancipated, that is to say, if he is obligated to use his own intelligence."44 This is not a free for all. There is a structure to it, there is a relational order and there is a way of being in the world - a way of being in common - that comprises another kind of civility; or, invoking the polis of the Statesman, another urbanity. What was common to the relation between Jacotot and his students, Rancire explains, was, at least initially, the book, Telemaque. What was learnt by Jacotot was, however, more than pedagogy. What evidently becomes common in 'universal teaching' is a quality that Jacotot had not intended to teach, did not know in advance of his teaching that he was teaching it, and that is in any event not knowable. It is the truth of equality. And it is that excess of being in common over the appearance of rule that emancipation, putting it to work in the world, verifies without ever securing. Hence teaching what we do not know - politics - by assuming t as an originary equality that we hold in common in a relational order with others whose purpose is less to educate than to emancipate. Albeit, emancipation is itself another kind of education.

44

The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 15.

12