the new logic of emancipation

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A NEW LOGIC OF EMANCIPATION: THE METHODOLOGYOF JACQUES RANCIERE

Gert BiestaThe Stirling Institute of Education

The University of Stirling, Scotland, UK

Abstract. The idea of emancipation plays a central role in modern educational theories and practices.The emancipatory impetus is particularly prominent in critical traditions and approaches where the aimof education is conceived as that of emancipating students from oppressive structures in the name ofsocial justice and human freedom. What is needed to effect emancipation, so it is assumed in this tradi-tion, is an exposition of the workings of power, as it is only when one sees and understands how poweroperates that it is possible to address its influence. In several of his publications the French philosopherJacques Ranciere has raised questions about the logic of this view of emancipation. Throughout hiscareer Ranciere has also worked consistently on the articulation of a different approach, an alternativeway to understand and do emancipation. In this essay Gert Biesta provides a systematic reconstruction ofRanciere’s ideas on emancipation from three angles: political theory, political practice, and the practiceof education. Biesta argues that Ranciere provides us with a new and different way to understand howeducation might contribute to emancipation and also where and how, often in the name of emancipationand democracy, it actually hinders emancipation.

How can those whose business is not thinking assume the authority to think and therebyconstitute themselves as thinking subjects?1

Equality is not a goal that governments and societies could succeed in reaching. To pose equal-ity as a goal is to hand it over to the pedagogues of progress, who widen endlessly the distancethey promise that they will abolish. Equality is a presupposition, an initial axiom — or it isnothing.2

Equality is not given, nor is it claimed; it is practiced, it is verified.3

Introduction

The idea of emancipation plays a central role in modern educational theoriesand practices. Many educators see their task not simply as that of modifying orconditioning the behavior of their students. They want their students to becomeindependent and autonomous, to be able think for themselves, to make their ownjudgments and draw their own conclusions. The emancipatory impetus is partic-ularly prominent in critical traditions and approaches where the aim of educationis conceived as emancipating students from oppressive practices and structures inthe name of social justice and human freedom.4 What is needed to bring aboutemancipation, so educators in the critical tradition argue, is an exposition of the

1. Jacques Ranciere, The Philosopher and His Poor (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press,2003), xxvi. This work will be cited in the text as PHP for all subsequent references.

2. Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004), 223. This work will be citedin the text as PA for all subsequent references.

3. Jacques Ranciere, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1999), 137. This work will be cited in the text as DPP for all subsequent references.

4. See, for example, Ilan Gur Ze’ev, ed., Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today: Toward a NewCritical Language in Education (Haifa, Israel: University of Haifa, 2005).

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40 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y Volume 60 Number 1 2010

workings of power, for it is only when one sees and understands how poweroperates that it becomes possible to address its influence. This is why notionssuch as ‘‘demystification’’ and ‘‘liberation from dogmatism’’ play a central role incritical education.5 Because it is assumed that power also operates upon people’sunderstandings of the situations they are in, there is an important strand withinthe critical tradition in which it is argued that emancipation can only be broughtabout ‘‘from the outside,’’ that is, from a position that is uncontaminated by theworkings of power. This line of thought goes back to Marxist notions of ideologyand false consciousness, and finds a more recent expression in Pierre Bourdieu’snotion of misrecognition (see PHP, 165–202). Hence it becomes the task of criticaleducators to make visible what is hidden for those who are the ‘‘object’’ of theiremancipatory endeavors. Similarly the task of critical social science becomes thatof making visible what is hidden from the everyday view.

In several of his publications the French philosopher Jacques Ranciere hasraised questions about the logic of this particular model of emancipation. Whereasaccording to this logic the explanation of how the world really is leads toemancipation, Ranciere has argued that instead of bringing about emancipation itintroduces a fundamental dependency into the logic of emancipation, since the oneto be emancipated remains dependent upon the truth or knowledge revealed to himby the emancipator. The problem, as he puts it in The Politics of Aesthetics, is that‘‘where one searches for the hidden beneath the apparent, a position of mastery isestablished’’ (PA, 49). In his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Ranciere has shownin much detail how educational practices based on this logic of emancipationlead to stultification rather than emancipation.6 In other work, particularly ThePhilosopher and His Poor, Ranciere has shown that a relation of dependency is,in a sense, constitutive of Western philosophy and social theory more generally.Ranciere’s contribution lies not only in highlighting this contradiction within thelogic of emancipation. Throughout his career Ranciere has worked consistently onthe articulation of an alternative approach — an alternative way to understand and

5. See, for example, Klaus Mollenhauer, Erziehung und Emanzipation [Education and Emancipation](Munchen: Juventa, 1976), 67; Peter McLaren, Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissentfor the New Millennium (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997), 218. See also Gert Biesta, ‘‘‘Say YouWant a Revolution. . .’ Suggestions for the Impossible Future of Critical Pedagogy,’’ Educational Theory48, no. 4 (1998): 499–510; and Gert Biesta, ‘‘What Can Critical Pedagogy Learn from Postmodernism?Further Reflections on the Impossible Future of Critical Pedagogy,’’ in Critical Theory and CriticalPedagogy Today, ed. Gur Ze’ev, 143–159.

6. Jacques Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford,California: Stanford University Press, 1991). This work will be cited in the text as IS for all subsequentreferences.

GERT BIESTA is Professor of Education and Director of Research at the Stirling Institute of Education,University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA, UK; e-mail <[email protected]>; www.gertbiesta.com. Hisprimary areas of scholarship are the theory and philosophy of education; the philosophy of educationalresearch; and education, democracy, and citizenship.

Biesta A New Logic of Emancipation 41

do emancipation — both at the level of education and at the level of philosophyand social theory.

The main purpose of this essay is to reconstruct and review Ranciere’s ideason emancipation.7 I have chosen to refer to these ideas as a methodology.8 This isnot because I believe that Ranciere has given us a secure path that, when followed,will lead to emancipation; rather, my intent is to highlight that Ranciere’s ownwriting — and, not least, the form of his writing — is to a large extent consistentwith his ideas on emancipation in that the writing itself tries to avoid a positionof mastery. He refers to this as a ‘‘topographical’’ way of writing that articulates‘‘an egalitarian or anarchist theoretical position that does not presuppose thisvertical relationship of top to bottom’’ (PA, 49–50). In this way the methodologyof Ranciere’s writing provides an example of what his views on emancipationmight entail, both at the wider level of philosophy and social theory but also, andeven more importantly, in terms of education and pedagogy.9

This essay is structured in the following way. I begin with a brief discussionof the history of the idea of emancipation and highlight the main contradictionswithin this view.10 I then discuss aspects of Ranciere’s work in order to show howand in what ways he can help us to understand and do emancipation differently. I dothis from three angles: the angle of political theory, the angle of political practice,and the angle of education. I conclude with a discussion of Ranciere’s ideas.

Emancipation and Its Predicaments

The concept of emancipation stems from Roman law, where it referred to thefreeing of a son or wife from the legal authority of the pater familias — the fatherof the family. Emancipation literally means to give away ownership (ex: away;mancipum: ownership). More broadly it means to relinquish one’s authority oversomeone. This implies that the object of emancipation, that is, the person to beemancipated, becomes independent and free as a result of the act of emancipation.This is reflected in the legal use of the term today, where emancipation means thefreeing of someone from the control of another, particularly parents relinquishing

7. The focus of this essay, in other words, is on Ranciere’s ideas. It is not intended as a discussion ofemancipation more generally and does not aim to cover all the different traditions and approaches withinemancipatory and critical social theory and practice. Its purpose rather is to introduce the particulardifference that Ranciere’s work installs in the discourse on emancipation.

8. See also Andrew Gibson, ‘‘The Unfinished Song: Intermittency and Melancholy in Ranciere,’’Paragraph 28, no. 1 (2005): 61–76.

9. Although I quote extensively from Ranciere’s writings in this essay, I have no space to pay anydetailed attention to the particular form of Ranciere’s writings. I hope to return to this topic in futurework and, for the moment, refer the reader to The Ignorant Schoolmaster and The Philosopher and HisPoor as two of the most poignant examples of this particular quality of Ranciere’s writing.

10. This section is partly based on Gert Biesta, ‘‘Toward a New ‘Logic’ of Emancipation: Foucaultand Ranciere,’’ in Philosophy of Education 2008, ed. Ronald David Glass (Urbana, Illinois: Philosophyof Education Society, 2009), 169–177, an essay in which I offer a reading of Michel Foucault onemancipation that was inspired by my reading of Ranciere. Although the way in which I stage theencounter between Foucault and Ranciere in that essay is entirely mine, Ranciere, in discussing hismethodology, has noted that his approach is in some respects ‘‘similar to Foucault’s’’ (PA, 50).


authority and control over a minor child. In the seventeenth century emancipationcame to be used in relation to religious toleration, in the eighteenth century in rela-tion to the emancipation of slaves, and in the nineteenth century in relation to theemancipation of women and workers.11 The Roman use of the term already indi-cates the link with education, in that emancipation marks the moment when andthe process through which the (dependent) child becomes an (independent) adult.

A decisive step in the history of emancipation was taken in the eighteenthcentury when emancipation became intertwined with the Enlightenment andenlightenment came to be understood as a process of emancipation. We can seethis most clearly in Immanuel Kant’s essay ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ in whichhe defined enlightenment as ‘‘man’s [sic] release from his self-incurred tutelage’’and saw tutelage or immaturity as ‘‘man’s [sic] inability to make use of hisunderstanding without the direction from another.’’12 Immaturity is self-incurred,Kant wrote, ‘‘when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolutionand courage to use it without the direction from another.’’13 Enlightenment thusentailed a process of becoming independent or autonomous, and for Kant thisautonomy was based on the use of one’s reason. Kant contributed two furtherideas to this line of thinking. First, he argued that the ‘‘propensity and vocationto free thinking’’ was not a contingent historical possibility, but should be seenas an inherent part of human nature; it was man’s ‘‘ultimate destination’’ and the‘‘aim of his existence.’’14 To block progress in enlightenment was therefore ‘‘acrime against human nature.’’15 Second, Kant argued that in order for this capacityto emerge, we need education. In his view the human being can only becomehuman — that is, a rational, autonomous being — ‘‘through education.’’16

Kant’s position clearly exemplifies what I suggest be referred to as themodern educational nexus: a set of interlocking ideas that characterizes moderneducational thinking and that, through both education and psychology, has hada profound impact on modern educational practice. Kant assumed that thereis a fundamental difference between immature and mature beings and that thisdifference maps onto the distinction between childhood and adulthood. He definedmaturity in terms of rationality — the (proper) use of one’s reason — and sawrationality as the basis for independence and autonomy. Education is seen as thelever for the transition from immaturity to maturity, which, in turn, means thateducation is intimately connected with the question of freedom. All of this is

11. The Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com.

12. Immanuel Kant, ‘‘An Answer to the Question ‘What Is Enlightenment?’’’ (1784), in Post-Modernism:A Reader, ed. Patricia Waugh (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), 90.

13. Ibid.

14. Immanuel Kant, ‘‘Uber Padagogik’’ [On Education], in Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschicht-sphilosophie, Politik und Padagogik (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1982), 701 (my translation).

15. Kant, ‘‘An Answer to the Question ‘What Is Enlightenment?’’’ 93.

16. Kant, ‘‘Uber Padagogik,’’ 699 (my translation).


aptly summarized in Kant’s formulation of the ‘‘educational paradox’’: ‘‘How do Icultivate freedom through coercion?’’17

From this point onward we can trace the history of emancipation along tworelated lines: one is educational, the other philosophical. The idea that educationis not about the insertion of the individual into the existing order but entailsan orientation toward autonomy and freedom played an important role in theestablishment of education as an academic discipline in Germany toward the endof the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. It also was a centralelement in Reformpadagogik, New Education, and Progressive Education, whichemerged in the first decades of the twentieth century in many countries aroundthe world. In most cases the argument against adaptation was expressed as anargument for the child. Many educationalists followed Jean-Jacques Rousseau’sinsight that adaptation to the external societal order would corrupt the child.This led to the idea, however, that a choice for the child could only mean achoice against society. This was further supported by theories that conceived of‘‘the child’’ as a natural category, a given, and not as something that had to beunderstood in social, historical, and political terms.

Whereas the idea that education is about the emancipation of the individualchild helped the development of education as an academic discipline, the limita-tions of this view became painfully clear when it turned out that such an approachcould easily be adopted by any ideological system, including Nazism and fascism.This is why, after the Second World War, educationalists — first of all in Ger-many — began to argue that there could be no individual emancipation withoutwider societal transformation. This became the central tenet of critical approachesto education. In Germany, a major contribution came from Klaus Mollenhauer,whose critical-emancipatory approach drew inspiration from the early work ofJurgen Habermas.18 Two decades later, following the precedent of John Dewey,George Counts, and Paulo Freire, among others, a similar body of work emerged inNorth America, particularly through the contributions of Michael Apple, HenryGiroux, and Peter McLaren. As a critical theory of education, the emancipatoryinterest of critical pedagogies focuses on the analysis of oppressive structures,practices, and theories. The key idea is that emancipation can be brought aboutif people gain an adequate insight into the power relations that constitute theirsituation — which is why the notion of demystification plays a central role incritical pedagogies.

It is here that we can link up with the history of emancipation in philosophy,at least to the extent that this history is part of the development of Marxism andneo-Marxist philosophy.19 It is, after all, a key insight of this tradition that in order

17. Ibid., 711 (my translation).

18. See Mollenhauer, Erziehung und Emanzipation.

19. I confine myself here to the way in which the idea of emancipation has been articulated withinMarxist and neo-Marxist thought, partly because this has played a formative role in Continental andin North American versions of critical pedagogy, and partly because it exemplifies most explicitly the


to liberate ourselves from the oppressive workings of power and achieve emancipa-tion, we first and foremost need to expose how power operates. What the Marxisttradition adds to this — and this, in turn, has influenced critical and emancipa-tory pedagogies — is the notion of ideology. Although the exact meaning of thisconcept is a topic of ongoing debates,20 one of the crucial insights expressed in theconcept of ideology is not only that all thought is socially determined — followingKarl Marx’s dictum that ‘‘it is not the consciousness of man that determines theirbeing but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their conscious-ness’’21 — but also, and more importantly, that ideology is thought ‘‘which deniesthis determination.’’22 The latter claim is linked to Friedrich Engels’s notion offalse consciousness: the idea that ‘‘the real motives impelling [the agent] remainunknown to him.’’23 The ‘‘predicament of ideology’’ lies in the suggestion that it isprecisely because of the way in which power works upon our consciousness that weare unable to see how power works upon our consciousness.24 This not only impliesthat in order to free ourselves from the workings of power we need to expose howpower works upon our consciousness; it also means that in order for us to achieveemancipation, someone else, whose consciousness is not subjected to the workingsof power, needs to provide us with an account of our objective condition. Accord-ing to this logic, therefore, emancipation is ultimately contingent upon the truthabout our objective condition, a truth that can only be generated by someone whois positioned outside of the influence of ideology — and in the Marxist traditionthis position is considered to be occupied either by science or by philosophy.

What this brief history of emancipation begins to reveal are the contours of acertain logic of emancipation, a certain way in which emancipation is conceivedand understood. There are several aspects to this logic. One is that emancipationrequires an intervention from the outside; an intervention, moreover, by someonewho is not subjected to the power that needs to be overcome. This not only showsthat emancipation is understood as something that is done to somebody. It alsoreveals that emancipation is based upon a fundamental inequality between theemancipator and the one to be emancipated. Equality, on this account, becomesthe outcome of emancipation; it becomes something that lies in the future.Moreover, it is this outcome that is used to legitimize the interventions of the

logic Ranciere seeks to question. This is not to suggest that Marxism and neo-Marxism are the onlyresources for emancipation or that they are the only tradition within which the idea of emancipationhas been articulated and developed. Feminism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory are but threeexamples of approaches that have not only widened the discussion about emancipation by making useof different theoretical resources (such as poststructuralism and psychoanalysis), but have also done thisin ways that are often deeply critical of Marxist and neo-Marxist ideas.

20. See Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, rev. ed. (London and New York: Verso, 2007).

21. Marx, quoted in Eagleton, Ideology, 80.

22. Ibid., 89.

23. Engels, quoted in Eagleton, Ideology, 89.

24. Eagleton shows that this particular view was articulated early on in Marx’s career and was modifiedin his later work (Eagleton, Ideology, 63–91).


emancipator. Whereas this view of emancipation follows more or less directlyfrom philosophical considerations, particularly around the notion of ideology, itis not too difficult to recognize a particular pedagogy in this account as well. Thisis a pedagogy in which the teacher knows and students do not know yet; where itis the task of the teacher to explain the world to the students and where it is thetask of the students to ultimately become as knowledgeable as the teacher. Wecan say, therefore, that the logic of emancipation is also the logic of a particularpedagogy. Although much of this will sound familiar — which, in a sense, proveshow influential this modern logic of emancipation has been — this ‘‘logic’’ ofemancipation is not without problems or, to be more precise, it is not withoutcontradictions.

The first contradiction is this: although emancipation is oriented towardequality, independence, and freedom, it actually installs dependency at the veryheart of the act of emancipation. The one to be emancipated is, after all, dependentupon the intervention of the emancipator, an intervention based upon a knowledgethat is fundamentally inaccessible to the one to be emancipated. When there isno intervention, there is, therefore, no emancipation. This raises the question ofwhen this dependency will actually disappear. Is it as soon as emancipation isachieved? Or should the one who is emancipated remain eternally grateful to hisor her emancipator for the ‘‘gift’’ of emancipation? Should slaves remain gratefulto their masters for setting them free? Should women remain grateful to men forsetting them free? Should children remain grateful to their parents for setting themfree?25 Or could all of them perhaps have asked why they were not considered tobe free in the first place?

Modern emancipation is not only based upon dependency — it is also basedupon a fundamental inequality between the emancipator and the one to be eman-cipated. According to the modern logic of emancipation, the emancipator is the onewho knows better and best and who can perform the act of demystification that isneeded to expose the workings of power. According to the modern logic of emanci-pation, the emancipator does not simply occupy a superior position; it could evenbe argued that in order for this superiority to exist, the emancipator actually needsthe inferiority of the one to be emancipated. Again, we can ask when this inequalitywill actually disappear. After all, as long as the master remains a master, the slavecan only ever become a former slave or an emancipated slave — but not a master.The slave, in other words, will always lag behind in this logic of emancipation.

The third contradiction within the modern logic of emancipation has to dowith the fact that although emancipation takes place in the interest of those to be

25. The reason for posing these (rhetorical) questions in this way has to do with Ranciere’s claim thatequality and inequality ‘‘are not two states’’ but ‘‘two ‘opinions,’ that is to say two different axioms’’ andthat ‘‘all one can do is verify the axiom one is given.’’ Jacques Ranciere, ‘‘On Ignorant Schoolmasters,’’chap. 1 in Charles Bingham and Gert Biesta, with Jacques Ranciere, Jacques Ranciere: Education, Truth,Emancipation (London and New York: Continuum, in press). The formulation of the questions aims tohighlight, in other words, what happens when one starts from the assumption of inequality rather thanfrom the assumption of equality. I return to this subsequently.


emancipated, it is based upon a fundamental distrust of and suspicion about theirexperiences. The logic of emancipation dictates, after all, that we cannot reallytrust what we see or feel, but that we need someone else to tell us what it is thatwe are really experiencing and what our problems really are. We need someone,in other words, who ‘‘lifts a veil off the obscurity of things,’’ who ‘‘carries obscuredepth to the clear surface, and who, conversely, brings the false appearance of thesurface back to the secret depths of reason.’’26 And once more we can ask what itwould mean for those waiting for their emancipation to be told the ‘‘truth’’ aboutthemselves, their situation, and their problems.

These contradictions not only permeate the general logic of emancipation;they are also present in the way in which this logic is manifest in a particularmodern — or, as Ranciere has argued, progressive — pedagogy (IS, 121). I now wishto turn to Ranciere in order to show how he has problematized this specific wayof understanding emancipation and how he has sought to articulate a differentway both of understanding and ‘‘doing’’ emancipation and of posing the problemof emancipation in the first place.

Emancipation, Politics, and Democracy

In On the Shores of Politics Ranciere characterizes emancipation as ‘‘escapingfrom a minority.’’27 Although this could be read as a formal definition of emancipa-tion since it refers to ending a situation in which one is a minor, the use of the word‘‘escape’’ already signals a different dynamic from the one outlined previously byassociating emancipation with an activity of the one who ‘‘achieves’’ emancipationrather than presenting it as something that is done to somebody. Ranciere indeedwrites that ‘‘nobody escapes from the social minority save by their own efforts’’(OSP, 48). Emancipation is, however, not simply about the move from a minorityposition to a majority position. It is not a shift in membership from a minoritygroup to a majority group. Emancipation rather entails a ‘‘rupture in the order ofthings’’ (PHP, 219) — a rupture, moreover, that makes the appearance of subjectiv-ity possible or, to be more precise, a rupture that is the appearance of subjectivity.In this sense emancipation can be understood as a process of subjectification.

Ranciere defines subjectification as ‘‘the production through a series of actionsof a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within agiven field of experience, whose identification is thus part of the reconfigurationof the field of experience’’ (DPP, 35).28 There are two things that are importantin this definition, and they hang closely together. The first thing to emphasizeis the supplementary nature of subjectification (PHP, 224–225). Subjectification,Ranciere argues, is different from identification (OSP, 37). Identification is about

26. Ranciere, ‘‘On Ignorant Schoolmasters.’’

27. Jacques Ranciere, On the Shores of Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 48. This work willbe cited in the text as OSP for all subsequent references.

28. See also Jacques Ranciere, ‘‘Politics, Identification and Subjectivization,’’ in The Identity inQuestion, ed. John Rajchman (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).


taking up an existing identity, that is, a way of being and speaking and of beingidentifiable and visible that is already possible within the existing order — or,to use Ranciere’s phrases, within the existing ‘‘perceptual field’’ or ‘‘sensibleworld’’ (PHP, 226). Subjectification, on the other hand, is always ‘‘disidentifica-tion, removal from the naturalness of a place’’ (OSP, 36). Subjectification ‘‘inscribesa subject name as being different from any identified part of the community’’ (OSP,37). When Ranciere uses the notion of ‘‘appearance’’ in this context, it is not, ashe puts it, to refer to ‘‘the illusion masking the reality of reality’’ (PHP, 224).Subjectification is about the appearance — the ‘‘coming into presence,’’ as I havecalled it elsewhere29 — of a way of being that had no place and no part in theexisting order of things. Subjectification is therefore a supplement to the existingorder because it adds something to this order; and precisely for this reason, thesupplement also divides the existing order, the existing ‘‘division of the sensible’’(PHP, 224–225).30 Subjectification thus ‘‘redefines the field of experience that gaveto each their identity with their lot’’ (OSP, 40). It ‘‘decomposes and recomposesthe relationships between the ways of doing, of being and of saying that define theperceptible organization of the community’’ (OSP, 40).

Subjectification — and this is the second point — is therefore highly politi-cal, as it intervenes in and reconfigures the existing order of things, the existingdivision or distribution of the sensible — that is, of what is ‘‘capable of beingapprehended by the senses’’ (PA, 85). In order to grasp the supplementary natureof subjectification and hence the supplementary nature of politics itself, Rancieremakes a distinction within the notion of the political between two concepts: police(or police order) and politics.31 In a way that is reminiscent of Michel Foucault,Ranciere defines police as ‘‘an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways ofdoing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and that sees that those bodies are assignedby name to a particular place and task’’ (DPP, 29). It is an order ‘‘of the visible andthe sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that thisspeech is understood as discourse and another as noise’’ (DPP, 29). Police should notbe understood as the way in which the state structures the life of society. It is not,in Habermasian terms, the ‘‘grip’’ of the system on the lifeworld; rather, as Ranciereexplains, ‘‘the distribution of places and roles that defines a police regime stems as

29. Gert Biesta, Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future (Boulder, Colorado:Paradigm Publishers, 2006).

30. The French word here is partage, which can be translated either as ‘‘division’’ or as ‘‘distribution.’’Whereas ‘‘distribution’’ highlights the fact that each particular distribution of the sensible giveseverything a place, ‘‘division’’ highlights the fact that subjectification redistributes the distribution ofthe sensible, and thus both distributes and interrupts.

31. In French Ranciere sometimes (but not always and not always consistently) makes a distinction thatis difficult to translate (and that has not always been picked up by translators consistently) betweenla politique and le politique. The first refers to the domain of politics in the general sense, whereasthe latter indicates the moment of the interruption of the police order (la police or l’ordre policier).The latter, according to Ranciere, is the ‘‘proper’’ idea of politics, and in several of his publicationsRanciere has shown how political philosophy, in particular, but also specific forms of politics have triedto suppress the political moment.


much from the assumed spontaneity of social relations as from the rigidity of statefunctions’’ (DPP, 29). Policing is therefore not so much about ‘‘the ‘disciplining’of bodies’’ as it is ‘‘a rule governing their appearing, a configuration of occupationsand the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed’’ (DPP, 29,emphasis in original). One way to read this definition of police is to think of it as anorder that is all-inclusive in that everyone has a particular place, role, or position init; there is an identity for everyone.32 This is not to say that everyone is included inthe running of the order. The point simply is that no one is excluded from the order.After all, women, children, slaves, and immigrants had a clear place in the democ-racy of Athens, specifically, as those who were not allowed to participate in polit-ical decision making. In precisely this respect every police order is all-inclusive.

Politics then refers to ‘‘the mode of acting that perturbs this arrangement’’(PHP, 226), and that does so in the name of or with reference to equality. Rancierereserves the term politics ‘‘for an extremely determined activity antagonistic topolicing: whatever breaks with the tangible configuration whereby parties andparts or lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by definition, has noplace in that configuration’’ (PHP, 29–30). This break is manifest in a series ofactions ‘‘that reconfigure the space where parties, parts, or lack of parts have beendefined’’ (PHP, 30). Political activity so conceived is ‘‘whatever shifts a body fromthe place assigned to it. . . . It makes visible what had no business being seen, andmakes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise’’:

Political activity is always a mode of expression that undoes the perceptible divisions of thepolice order by implementing a basically heterogeneous assumption, that of a part of thosewho have no part, an assumption that, at the end of the day, itself demonstrates the sheercontingency of the order [and] the equality of any speaking being with any other speakingbeing. (PHP, 30)

Politics thus refers to the event when two ‘‘heterogeneous processes’’ meet: thepolice process and the process of equality. The latter has to do with ‘‘an open setof practices driven by the assumption of equality between any and every speakingbeing and by the concern to test this equality’’ (PHP, 30).33

For Ranciere politics understood in this way is always democratic politics.Democracy is however ‘‘not a regime or a social way of life’’ — it is not and cannot

32. See also Gert Biesta, ‘‘‘Don’t Count Me In’: Democracy, Education and the Question of Inclusion,’’Nordisk Pedagogik 27, no. 1 (2007): 18–31; and Gert Biesta, ‘‘Sporadic Democracy: Education, Democracyand the Question of Inclusion,’’ in Education, Democracy and the Moral Life, ed. Michael Katz,Susan Verducci, and Gert Biesta (Dordrecht and Boston: Springer, 2009).

33. See also my subsequent discussion. Although some of Ranciere’s writings may give the impressionthat he is primarily — or perhaps even exclusively — concerned about questions of inequality in relationto social class, Ranciere’s configuration of emancipation is definitely not restricted to this. Emancipationis about the verification of the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being. Dissensus istherefore always about the redistribution of the demarcations between ‘‘noise’’ and ‘‘voice,’’ not in termsof a politics of recognition where those with a voice grant a voice to those who up to now were consideredonly to be able to produce ‘‘noise,’’ but on the basis of the ‘‘simple’’ claim that one is producing ‘‘voice’’rather than ‘‘noise.’’ See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ in Marxism andthe Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, Illinois: University ofIllinois Press, 1988).


be, in other words, part of the police order — but should rather be understood ‘‘asthe institution of politics itself’’ (PHP, 101). Every politics is democratic not in thesense of a set of institutions, but in the sense of forms of expression ‘‘that confrontthe logic of equality with the logic of the police order’’ (PHP, 101). Democracy, sowe might say, is a ‘‘claim’’ for equality. Democracy — or, to be more precise, theappearance of democracy — is therefore not simply the situation in which a groupthat has previously been excluded from the realm of politics steps forward to claimits place in the sun. It is at the very same time the creation of a group as ‘‘group’’with a particular identity that did not exist before. Democratic activity is to befound, for example, in the activity of nineteenth-century workers ‘‘who establisheda collective basis for work relations’’ that were previously seen as ‘‘the productof an infinite number of relationships between private individuals’’ (PHP, 30).Democracy thus establishes new political identities, identities that were not part ofand did not exist in the current order — and in precisely this sense it is a process ofsubjectification. Or, as Ranciere puts it, ‘‘democracy is the designation of subjectsthat do not coincide with the parties of the state or of society’’ (PHP, 99–100).

This further means that ‘‘the place where the people appear’’ is the place‘‘where a dispute is conducted’’ (PHP, 100). Ranciere emphasizes that this dis-pute — which is the proper ‘‘form’’ of democracy — ‘‘is not the opposition ofinterests or opinions between social parties’’ (PHP, 225). Democracy, he explains,

is neither the consultation of the various parties of society concerning their respectiveinterests, nor the common law that imposes itself equally on everyone. The demos that givesit its name is neither the ideal people of sovereignty, nor the sum of the parties of society, noreven the poor and suffering sector of this society. (PHP, 225)

The political dispute rather is a conflict ‘‘over the very count of those parties’’(DPP, 100). It is a dispute between ‘‘the police logic of the distribution of places andthe political logic of the egalitarian act’’ (DPP, 100). Politics is therefore ‘‘primarilya conflict over the existence of a common stage and over the existence and statusof those present on it’’ (PHP, 26–27). The essence of democracy/politics thereforeis dissensus rather than consensus (PHP, 226; see also DPP, 95–121). But dissensusis not the ‘‘opposition of interests or opinions. . . . It is the production, within adetermined, sensible world, of a given that is heterogeneous to it’’ (PHP, 226). Inprecisely this sense we could say that politics is productive or poetic in that itgenerates subjectivity rather than being dependent on a particular kind of politicalsubjectivity. This is not about creating ‘‘subjects ex nihilo’’ — politics, as a ‘‘modeof subjectification,’’ creates subjects ‘‘by transforming identities defined in thenatural order’’ (DPP, 36). In precisely this sense Ranciere argues that politics isaesthetics ‘‘in that it makes visible what had been excluded from a perceptual field,and in that it makes audible what used to be inaudible’’ (DPP, 36; see also PA).

This is also why Ranciere emphasizes that a political subject ‘‘is not a groupthat ‘becomes aware’ of itself, finds its voice, imposes its weight on society,’’because establishing oneself as a subject does not happen before the ‘‘act’’ of politicsbut rather in and through it (DPP, 40). Ranciere characterizes a political subject as

an operator that connects and disconnects different areas, regions, identities, functions, andcapacities existing in the configuration of a given experience — that is, in the nexus of


distributions of the police order and whatever equality is already inscribed there, howeverfragile and fleeting such inscriptions may be. (DPP, 40)

Ranciere gives the example of Jeanne Deroin who, in 1849, presented herself as acandidate for a legislative election in which she could not run. Through this ‘‘shedemonstrates the contradiction within a universal suffrage that excludes her sexfrom any such universality’’ (DPP, 41). It is the staging ‘‘of the very contradictionbetween police logic and political logic’’ that makes this into a political ‘‘act’’(DPP, 41). It is the ‘‘bringing into relationship of two unconnected things [that]becomes the measure of what is incommensurable between two orders,’’ and thisproduces both ‘‘new inscriptions of equality within liberty and a fresh sphere ofvisibility for further demonstrations’’ (DPP, 42). This is why for Ranciere politicsis not made up of power relations but of ‘‘relationships between worlds’’ (DPP, 42).

It is important to see that for Ranciere the point of politics is not to createconstant chaos and disruption. Although Ranciere would maintain that politics isbasically a good thing, this does not mean that the police order is necessarily bad.Although this may not be very prominent in Ranciere’s work — which means thatit is easily overlooked — he does argue that democratic disputes can have a positiveeffect on the police order in that they produce what he refers to as ‘‘inscriptions ofequality’’ (DPP, 100) — they leave traces behind in the (transformed) police order.This is why Ranciere emphasizes that ‘‘there is a worse and a better police’’ (DPP,30–31). The better one is, however, not the one ‘‘that adheres to the supposedlynatural order of society or the science of legislators’’; it is the one ‘‘that allthe breaking and entering perpetrated by egalitarian logic has most jolted out ofits ‘natural’ logic’’ (DPP, 31). Ranciere thus acknowledges that the police ‘‘canproduce all sorts of good, and one kind of police may be infinitely preferable toanother’’ (DPP, 31). Still, he concludes, whether the police order is ‘‘sweet andkind’’ does not make it any less the opposite of politics. This also means thatfor Ranciere politics is quite rare — or, as he puts it in On the Shores of Politics,politics, and hence democracy, can only ever be ‘‘sporadic’’ (OSP, 41).34 Becausepolitics consists in the interruption of the police order, it can never become thatorder itself. Politics ‘‘is always local and occasional,’’ which is why its ‘‘actualeclipse is perfectly real and no political science exists that could map its futureany more than a political ethics that would make its existence the object solely ofwill’’ (DPP, 139).

There is one final element in Ranciere’s thought that needs clarification, andthis is the idea of equality. It is not difficult to see that the idea of equalitypermeates everything that Ranciere has to say about politics, democracy, andemancipation. But what is peculiar about Ranciere’s position is that he does notconceive of equality as something that has to be achieved through politics. ForRanciere democracy does not denote a situation in which we all have becomeequals, nor is emancipation the process by which we move from inequality toequality, that is, a process through which we overcome inequality and become

34. See also Biesta, ‘‘Sporadic Democracy.’’


equals. According to Ranciere, equality is not a goal that needs to be achievedthrough political or other means; equality, as he puts it, ‘‘is a presupposition,an initial axiom — or it is nothing’’ (PHP, 223). What we can do — and what,in a sense, drives politics or makes something political — is to test or verify theassumption of equality in concrete situations. Ranciere explains that what makesan action political ‘‘is not its object or the place where it is carried out, but solelyits form, the form in which confirmation of equality is inscribed in the setting upof a dispute, of a community existing solely through being divided’’ (DPP, 32). Fora thing to be political, therefore, ‘‘it must give rise to a meeting of police logicand egalitarian logic that is never set up in advance’’ (DPP, 32). This means thatnothing is political in itself, but anything may become political ‘‘if it gives riseto a meeting of these two logics’’ (DPP, 32). Equality is therefore not a principlethat politics needs to press into service; ‘‘it is a mere assumption that needs tobe discerned within the practices implementing it’’ (DPP, 33). Yet equality onlygenerates politics ‘‘when it is implemented in the specific form of a particularcase of dissensus’’ (PA, 52), and it is then that ‘‘a specific subject is constituted, asupernumerary subject in relation to the calculated number of groups, places, andfunctions of society’’ (PA, 51).

The Practice of Emancipation

If traditional emancipation starts from the assumption of inequality and seesemancipation as the act through which someone is made equal through an inter-vention from the outside, Ranciere conceives of emancipation as something thatpeople do themselves. To achieve this they do not have to wait until someoneexplains their objective condition to them. Emancipation simply means to act onthe basis of the presupposition — or ‘‘axiom’’ — of equality. In this sense it is akind of ‘‘testing of equality’’ (OSP, 45). More than a reversal of the traditionalway to understand emancipation — which would still accept as legitimate theformulation of emancipation as a problem sourced in inequality that needs tobe overcome — Ranciere seems to displace the vocabulary of emancipation andsuggests new questions as much as new answers.

To appreciate Ranciere’s contribution fully, it is important to recognize thathis ideas are not simply philosophical or theoretical but are informed by historicalinvestigations into practices of emancipation. The thesis he puts forward in hisbook The Nights of Labor is that working-class emancipation was neither aboutthe importation of scientific thought — that is, knowledge about their objectivecondition — into their world nor about the affirmation of a worker culture.35 Itrather was ‘‘a rupture in the traditional division [partage] assigning the privilegeof thought to some and the tasks of production to others’’ (PHP, 219). Rancierethus showed that the French workers ‘‘who, in the nineteenth century, creatednewspapers or associations, wrote poems, or joined utopian groups were claimingthe status of fully speaking and thinking beings’’ (PHP, 219). Their emancipation

35. Jacques Ranciere, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).


was thus based on ‘‘the transgressive will. . . to act as if intellectual equality wereindeed real and effectual’’ (PHP, 219). Ranciere argues that what the workers didwas different from how emancipation is traditionally conceived. He explains thisin terms of the ‘‘syllogism of emancipation.’’ The major premise of the syllogismis that ‘‘all French people are equal before the law’’ (OSP, 45). The minor premiseis derived from direct experience, for example, the fact that tailors in Paris wenton strike because they were not treated as equals with regard to their pay. Thereis, therefore, a real contradiction. But, as Ranciere argues, there are two ways inwhich this contradiction can be conceived. The first is the way ‘‘to which weare accustomed,’’ which says ‘‘that the legal/political words are illusory, that theequality asserted is merely a facade designed to mask the reality of inequality’’(OSP, 46). ‘‘Thus reasons the good sense of demystification,’’ Ranciere points out(OSP, 47). The second option, the one the workers chose, is to take the majorpremise seriously. The tailors’ strike of 1833 thus took the form of a logical proof:what had to be demonstrated through their strike was precisely equality.

Writing about this event, Ranciere observes that one of the demands of thetailors ‘‘seemed strange,’’ as it was a request for ‘‘‘relations of equality’ with themasters’’ (OSP, 47–48). What they did through this was not to deny or to attemptto overcome the relation of economic dependence that existed between them andtheir masters. Yet, by making a claim to a different kind of relation, a relation oflegal equality — that is, by confronting the world of economic inequality with theworld of legal equality — they engendered, as Ranciere puts it, ‘‘a different socialreality, one founded on equality’’ (OSP, 48). What is important here — and this isthe reason I focus in detail on this example — is that emancipation in this casewas not about overcoming the economic inequality but consisted in establishinga new social relation, in this case, one in which negotiation between workersand their masters became a customary element of their relationship. Rancieresummarizes what was at stake here:

This social equality is neither a simple legal/political equality nor an economic levelling. Itis an equality enshrined as a potentiality in legal/political texts, then translated, displacedand maximized in everyday life. Nor is it the whole of equality: it is a way of living out therelation between equality and inequality, of living it and at the same time displacing it in apositive way. (OSP, 48)

Emancipation, as this example demonstrates, is therefore not a matter of ‘‘makinglabour the founding principle of the new society.’’ It rather is about the workersemerging from their minority status ‘‘and proving that they truly belong to thesociety, that they truly communicate with all in a common space’’ (OSP, 48). Theyprove through their actions, in other words, ‘‘that they are not merely creatures ofneed, of complaint and protests, but creatures of discourse and reason, that theyare capable of opposing reason with reason and of giving their action a demon-strative form’’ (OSP, 48). ‘‘Self-emancipation,’’ as Ranciere calls it in this context,is therefore ‘‘self-affirmation as a joint-sharer in a common world’’ (OSP, 49). Headds that ‘‘proving one is correct has never compelled others to recognize they arewrong’’ (OSP, 49). This is why the ‘‘space of shared meaning’’ is not a space ofconsensus but of dissensus and transgression. It is a forced entry into a common


world. This not only means that the call for equality ‘‘never makes itself heardwithout defining its own space’’; it also means that this call for equality mustbe articulated ‘‘as though the other can always understand [one’s] arguments’’(OSP, 50). Ranciere warns that those who on general grounds say that the othercannot understand them, that there is no common language, ‘‘lose any basis forrights of their own to be recognized’’ (OSP, 50). This is why the ‘‘narrow pathof emancipation’’ passes between the ‘‘acceptance of separate worlds’’ and the‘‘illusion of consensus,’’ but it is neither of these options.

Ranciere concludes that at the heart of this ‘‘new idea of emancipation’’ lies anotion of ‘‘equality of intelligences as the common prerequisite of both intelligibil-ity and community, as a presupposition which everyone must strive to validate ontheir own account’’ (OSP, 51). The ‘‘democratic man [sic]’’ — the political subjector subject of politics — is therefore ‘‘a being who speaks’’ and in this regard it is a‘‘poetic being’’ (OSP, 51). This democratic human being, Ranciere adds, is capableof embracing ‘‘a distance between words and things which is not deception, nottrickery, but humanity’’ (OSP, 51). The democratic human being is capable ofembracing what Ranciere refers to as ‘‘the unreality of representation,’’ by whichhe means the unreality of the idea of equality. But to say that equality is not realdoes not mean that it is an illusion — and it is precisely in regard to this point thatRanciere articulates a position that no longer relies on the need for demystification.He argues that we must start from equality — ‘‘asserting equality, assuming equal-ity as a given, working out from equality, trying to work out how productive it canbe’’ — in order to maximize ‘‘all possible liberty and equality’’ (OSP, 51–52). Theone who does not start from here but instead starts from a position of distrust, and‘‘who assumes inequality and proposes to reduce it’’ can only succeed in setting up‘‘a hierarchy of inequalities. . . and will produce inequality ad infinitum’’ (OSP, 52).

Education and Emancipation

The question of whether we should start from the assumption of equality orinequality is not only a question for politics — it is also a central question foreducation. One could even argue that the pedagogy of traditional emancipationis identical to the pedagogy of traditional education, in that education is oftenconceived as a practice in which those who do not yet know receive knowledgefrom those who do know (and are thus dependent upon those who know fortheir trajectory toward equality and emancipation).36 Education so conceived isgrounded in a fundamental inequality between the one who educates and theone who receives — and needs — education. The question for Ranciere is whetherthis is the only way in which we can understand the logic of education — andhence the logic of emancipation. In his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster Ranciererecounts the story of Joseph Jacotot, an exiled French schoolteacher who, inthe first decades of the nineteenth century, developed an educational approach

36. Ranciere also argues that in modern times this pedagogical logic has become a social logic. In thissituation ‘‘society thus presents itself as a vast school, with its savages to civilize, and its problemstudents to put right.’’ Ranciere, ‘‘On Ignorant Schoolmasters.’’


called ‘‘universal teaching’’ that did not conceive of education as a process thatstarts from inequality in order to bring about equality, but that was based on thefundamental assumption of the equality of intelligence of all human beings.37

Jacotot’s method was based on a discovery he made when he was asked, whilebeing exiled in Belgium, to teach students whose language he did not speak. Thesuccess of his endeavors taught him that what he had always thought of as beingessential for education — explication — was actually not necessary in order forhis students to learn. Jacotot thus began to see that explication, rather than beingthe core of educational activity, actually renders students stupid. The reason forthis is that to explain something to someone ‘‘is first of all to show him hecannot understand it by himself’’ (IS, 6). Explanation is therefore the ‘‘myth ofpedagogy, the parable of a world divided into knowing minds and ignorant ones’’(IS, 6). The explicator’s ‘‘special trick’’ consists of a ‘‘double inaugural gesture’’:on the one hand, ‘‘he decrees the absolute beginning: it is only now that the act oflearning will begin’’; but, on the other hand, ‘‘having thrown a veil of ignoranceover everything that is to be learned, he appoints himself to the task of lifting it’’(IS, 6–7). The pedagogical myth thus divides the world into two, and it dividesintelligence into two: ‘‘an inferior intelligence and a superior one.’’ Explication,from this point of view, becomes ‘‘enforced stultification’’ (IS, 7).

Whereas Jacotot did not teach his students anything — what they learned,they learned through their own engagement with materials such as books — thisdoes not mean that they learned without a master; they only learned without a‘‘master explicator’’ (IS, 12). As Ranciere puts it, ‘‘Jacotot had taught them some-thing [but] he had communicated nothing to them’’ (IS, 13). What Jacotot had donewas summon his students to use their intelligence. Ranciere characterizes this as a‘‘relationship of will to will’’ (IS, 13). Whereas explication — which is always stul-tification — takes place ‘‘whenever one intelligence is subordinated to another,’’emancipation takes place when an intelligence obeys only itself ‘‘even while thewill obeys another will’’ (IS, 13). From this perspective, the main educational ‘‘prob-lem’’ becomes that of revealing ‘‘an intelligence to itself’’ (IS, 28). This requiresnot explication but attention, that is, making the effort to use one’s intelligence.As Ranciere writes, what is needed is an ‘‘absolute attention for seeing and seeingagain, saying and repeating’’ (IS, 23). The route that students will take in responseto this is unknown, but what the student cannot escape, Ranciere argues, is ‘‘theexercise of his liberty.’’ This is summoned by a three-part question: ‘‘what do yousee? what do you think about it? what do you make of it? And so on, to infinity’’(IS, 23).

37. The idea of the equality of intelligences does not mean ‘‘that all the actions of all intelligencesare the same,’’ but rather highlights ‘‘that there is only one intelligence at work in all intellectualtraining.’’ Explanation, on the other hand, operates on the assumption that students themselves are not(yet) capable of what the teacher is capable of, and therefore are in need of explanation. Emancipatoryschoolmasters do nothing more (but also nothing less) than demand that their students make use oftheir intelligence. They forbid ‘‘the supposed ignorant one the satisfaction. . . of admitting that one isincapable of knowing more.’’ Ranciere, ‘‘On Ignorant Schoolmasters.’’


There are in Jacotot’s method only two ‘‘fundamental acts’’ for the master:first, ‘‘he interrogates, he demands speech, that is to say, the manifestation ofan intelligence that wasn’t aware of itself or that had given up,’’ and, second,‘‘he verifies that the work of the intelligence is done with attention’’ (IS, 29).Ranciere emphasizes that the interrogation should not be understood in theSocratic sense, where the sole purpose of interrogation is to lead the student to apoint that is already known by the master. While such an approach ‘‘may be thepath to learning,’’ it is ‘‘in no way a path to emancipation’’ (IS, 29). Central toemancipation, therefore, is the consciousness ‘‘of what an intelligence can do whenit considers itself equal to any other and considers any other equal to itself,’’ andthis is what constantly needs to be verified, that is, ‘‘the principle of the equalityof all speaking beings’’ (IS, 39), or, put differently, the belief that ‘‘there is nohierarchy of intellectual capacity’’ but only ‘‘inequality in the manifestations ofintelligence’’ (IS, 27). Emancipation is therefore not something ‘‘given by scholars,by their explications at the level of the people’s intelligence’’; emancipation isalways ‘‘emancipation seized, even against the scholars, when one teaches oneself’’(IS, 99). The only thing that is needed here is to summon other people to use theirintelligence, which means to verify ‘‘the principle of the equality of all speakingbeings’’ (IS, 39). After all, ‘‘what stultifies the common people is not the lack ofinstruction, but the belief in the inferiority of their intelligence’’ (IS, 39). The onlything that is needed is to remind people that they can see and think for themselvesand are not dependent upon others who see and think for them.

Does this mean that emancipation depends on the truth of the proposition thatall intelligence is equal? This is not how Ranciere, discussing Jacotot, proceeds. Forhim, the problem is not to prove that all intelligence is equal; ‘‘it’s seeing what canbe done under that supposition’’ (IS, 46). One thing that cannot be done under thissupposition is to make emancipation into a social method. Ranciere insists that‘‘only a man [sic] can emancipate a man [sic]’’ (IS, 102). There are ‘‘a hundred waysto instruct, and learning also takes place at the stultifiers’ school’’ (IS, 102), butemancipation is not about learning. Emancipation is about using one’s intelligenceunder the assumption of the equality of intelligence. There is, therefore, ‘‘onlyone way to emancipate,’’ and to this Ranciere adds that ‘‘no party or government,no army, school, or institution, will ever emancipate a single person’’ becauseevery institution is a ‘‘dramatization’’ or ‘‘embodiment’’ of inequality (IS, 102;see also IS, 105). ‘‘Universal teaching’’ — the teaching that makes emancipationpossible because it is based upon emancipation — can therefore ‘‘only be directedto individuals, never to societies’’ (IS, 105). In the final chapter of The IgnorantSchoolmaster, Ranciere demonstrates this by recounting how all attempts to turnuniversal teaching into a method and to institutionalize it failed from the point ofview of emancipation.

Ranciere is particularly suspicious of attempts to use education — or, to bemore precise, schools and schooling — to bring about equality. This is of coursethe ambition of the ‘‘progressives’’ who want to ‘‘liberate minds and promote theabilities of the masses’’ (IS, 121). But the idea of progress so conceived is based onwhat Ranciere refers to as ‘‘the pedagogical fiction,’’ which is ‘‘the representation


of inequality as a retard in one’s development’’ (IS, 119). This puts the educator inthe position of always being ahead of the one who needs to be educated in orderto be liberated. Ranciere warns, however, that as soon as we embark upon such atrajectory — a trajectory that starts from the assumption of inequality — we willnever be able to reach equality: ‘‘Never will the student catch up with the master,nor the people with its enlightened elite; but the hope of getting there makesthem advance along the good road, the one of perfected explications’’ (IS, 120).The ‘‘progressives’’ wish to bring about equality through ‘‘a well-ordered systemof public instruction’’ (IS, 121). Ranciere shows how Jacotot’s method could evenbe incorporated in such a system, and actually was adopted in this way, albeit‘‘except in one or two small matters’’ — namely, that the teachers using Jacotot’smethod were no longer teaching what they did not know and were no longerstarting from the assumption of the equality of intelligence (see IS, 123). But these‘‘small matters’’ are of course crucial. The choice, therefore, is between ‘‘makingan unequal society out of equal men and making an equal society out of unequalmen,’’ and for Ranciere the choice is clear: ‘‘One only need to learn how to beequal men in an unequal society,’’ as this is what ‘‘being emancipated’’ means (IS,133). But this ‘‘very simple thing’’ is actually ‘‘the hardest to understand’’ because‘‘the new explication — progress — has inextricably confused equality with itsopposite’’ (IS, 133). Ranciere thus concludes:

The task to which the republican hearts and minds are devoted is to make an equal societyout of unequal men, to reduce inequality indefinitely. But whoever takes this position hasonly one way of carrying it through to the end, and that is the integral pedagogicization ofsociety — the general infantilization of the individuals that make it up. Later on this willbe called continuing education, that is to say, the coextension of the explicatory institutionswith society. (IS, 133)

Conclusion

In the preceding sections I have reconstructed Ranciere’s ideas onemancipation from three different angles: the angle of political theory, the angle ofpolitical practice, and the angle of education. Whereas the three accounts differ inemphasis, context, and, to a certain extent, vocabulary, it is not too difficult to seethe common set of ideas that runs through them, nor is it difficult to discern theunderlying commitment that informs Ranciere’s writing. This is not to suggestthat it is easy to give a name to this commitment. What emerges from Ranciere’swork is a commitment to a cluster of interlocking concepts: equality, democracy,emancipation, and politics. But the significance of Ranciere’s work does not liein a commitment to this set of concepts in itself, not least because Ranciere’s‘‘discussion partners’’ — if this is an appropriate expression38 — are committedto the very same set of concepts. The ingenuity of Ranciere’s work lies first andforemost in the fact that he is able to show that what is done under and in thename of equality, democracy, and emancipation often results in its opposite in that

38. The idea of ‘‘discussion partners’’ would assume that Ranciere’s work is just one voice within aspace that is already defined. Rather than adding his voice to the discussion on emancipation, we mightperhaps read Ranciere’s work as an intervention, or, in his own words, as a staging of dissensus. In thissense we might see Ranciere’s work itself as a political act or an act of politics.


it reproduces inequality and keeps people in their place. What matters, therefore,is not that we are committed to equality, democracy, and emancipation, buthow we are committed to these concepts and how we express and articulate thiscommitment. Ranciere thus introduces a critical difference within the discourseon emancipation, equality, and democracy.

One of Ranciere’s central insights is that as long as we project equality intothe future and see it as something that has to be brought about through particularinterventions and activities that aim to overcome existing inequality — such asthe education of the masses or the integral pedagogicization of society — we willnever reach equality but will simply reproduce inequality. The way out of thispredicament is to bring equality into the here and now and act on the basis of theassumption of the equality of all human beings or, as Ranciere specifies in TheIgnorant Schoolmaster, the equality of intelligence of all human beings. To act onthe basis of this assumption requires a constant verification of it — not in orderto check whether the assumption is true in the abstract, but in order to practicethe truth of the assumption, that is, to make it true in concrete situations. AsRanciere puts it, the problem is not to prove or disprove that all intelligence isequal, but to see ‘‘what can be done under that supposition’’ (IS, 46). The nameRanciere gives the practice of verifying the supposition of equality is ‘‘politics.’’Politics is therefore not the practice that brings about or produces equality; nor isequality the principle that needs to be advanced through the activity of politics.What makes an act political is when it stages the contradiction between the logicof the police order and the logic of equality, that is, when it brings into a relationthese two unconnected, heterogeneous, and incommensurable worlds. This iswhy dissensus lies at the heart of political acts. Dissensus, however, should notbe understood as a conflict or a quarrel, as that would assume that the partiesinvolved in the conflict would already exist and have an identity. Dissensus is‘‘a gap in the very configuration of sensible concepts, a dissociation introducedinto the correspondence between ways of being and ways of doing, seeing andspeaking’’:

Equality is at once the final principle of all social and governmental order and the omittedcause of its ‘‘normal’’ functioning. It resides neither in a system of constitutional forms, norin the form of societal mores, nor in the uniform teaching of the republic’s children, nor inthe availability of affordable products in supermarket displays. Equality is fundamental andabsent, timely and untimely, always up to the initiative of individuals and groups who. . .

take the risk of verifying their equality, of inventing individual and collective forms for itsverification.39

This is also why the political act is an act of ‘‘supplementary subjects inscribedas surplus in relation to any count of the parts of a society.’’40 The political sub-ject — which for Ranciere is always also the democratic subject, the demos — istherefore constituted in and through the political act, which is why Ranciere argues


40. See Jacques Ranciere, ‘‘Ten Theses on Politics,’’ Theory and Event 5, no. 3 (2001): 17–34, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory and event/v005/5.3ranciere.html.


that politics is a process of subjectification. We might say, therefore, that Ranciere’scentral concepts — equality, democracy, and politics — all map onto each other inthat the political act consists of the verification of equality, and when we do thisthrough the staging of dissensus, democracy ‘‘takes place,’’ not as a political regimebut as an interruption of the police order. This is also true for the notion of ‘‘eman-cipation,’’ because to be emancipated means to act on the basis of the assumptionof equality. This has the character of a forced entry into a common world, which, asI have shown, not only means that the call for equality can only make itself heardby defining its own space, but that it must also proceed on the assumption that theother can always understand one’s arguments. Emancipation therefore does notappear as the outcome of a particular educational trajectory; rather, emancipation isabout using one’s intelligence under the assumption of the equality of intelligence.

What is important about Ranciere’s contribution is not only that he presentsus with an account of emancipation that is radically different from the traditionalaccount that I outlined previously, where emancipation is seen as something thatis done to somebody, based upon a fundamental inequality between the emanci-pator and the one to be emancipated, and with the aim to bring about equality asthe outcome of the process of emancipation. I believe that his approach is also ableto overcome the main contradictions within the traditional way of understandingand doing emancipation in that for Ranciere emancipation is not based upon afundamental dependency of the one to be emancipated upon the one who emanci-pates. Also, for Ranciere emancipation is not based upon a fundamental inequalitybetween the one to be emancipated and the emancipator. And, finally, Ranciere’sunderstanding is no longer based upon a fundamental distrust in the experiencesof the one to be emancipated to the extent that emancipation can only occur if theexperiences of the one to be emancipated are replaced by a proper and correct under-standing. This is not to suggest that there is no learning to be done, that there areno lessons to be learned from history and social analysis. But this learning shouldnot be seen as dependent upon explication; it should not be staged in terms of the‘‘myth of pedagogy’’ in which the world is divided into knowing minds (emancipa-tors/explicators) and ignorant ones. The difference here — and this is important inorder to appreciate the difference Ranciere aims to articulate in our understandingof the practice of emancipatory education — is not that between learning with amaster and learning without a master; the difference, rather, is between learningwith a ‘‘master explicator’’ and learning without a ‘‘master explicator.’’ WhatRanciere is hinting at, in other words, is not a school without teachers, a schoolwithout schoolmasters; what he sees as the main obstacle to emancipation is theposition of the ‘‘master explicator.’’ There is, therefore, still authority within eman-cipatory education, but this authority is not based on a difference of knowledge orinsight or understanding: ‘‘the ignorant schoolmaster exercises no relation of intel-ligence to intelligence. He or she is only an authority, only a will that sets the igno-rant person down a path, that is to say to instigate a capacity already possessed.’’41



Although on Ranciere’s understanding emancipation becomes in a certainsense ‘‘self-emancipation’’ (after all, to verify equality is not something thatsomeone can do for someone else), Ranciere continues to see as significant theeducator’s role. This is clear in his discussion of the ideas of Jacotot, where Rancieredistinguishes between a stultifying educator and an emancipatory educator who,he contends, can only be an ignorant schoolmaster, that is, a schoolmasterwho teaches without communicating.42 The emancipatory educator summonshis students to use their intelligence ‘‘under the assumption of the equality ofintelligence.’’ In this way, but only in this way, education can become a politicalact if it is engaged in the verification of equality. It is important to see, however,that the school is neither a necessary nor a natural site for this — and it is verylikely that everything that happens in the school from the official point of view(that is, from the point of view of the school as institution) goes directly against thepossibility for political action and hence for emancipation and democracy.43 Thequestion of whether the school can be political and democratic and in this sensecan ‘‘contribute’’ to emancipation is, to put it differently, not a question that can beanswered from the perspective of the school as institution. This is not to say thatpolitics cannot occur in the school, but if and when it does, it will manifest itself asdissensus, as an interruption of the police order rather than as an expression of thisorder. This, in conclusion, shows that Ranciere not only has important things tosay about politics, democracy, and education in general, but also makes it possibleto understand the political dimensions of education in a new and different way.

42. In ‘‘On Ignorant Schoolmasters,’’ Ranciere provides a very helpful distinction between three differentaspects of the notion of ignorance: as teaching that which is unknown to the teacher, as teaching withouttransmitting knowledge, and as refusing the ‘‘knowledge of inequality that is supposed to prepare theway to ‘reduce’ inequality.’’

43. Ranciere not only emphasizes that ‘‘the distinction between ‘stultification’ and ‘emancipation’ is nota distinction between methods of instruction. It is not a distinction between traditional or authoritarianmethods, on the one hand, and new or active methods, on the other: stultification can and does happenin all kinds of active and modern ways.’’ He also argues that emancipation cannot be mediated by socialinstitutions. The ‘‘heavy price to pay’’ for the insight that ‘‘there are no stages to equality’’ — since,as soon as we being to think of equality as something that can be achieved starting from inequality,we have already given up the possibility of equality — is that ‘‘there is no social emancipation, andno emancipatory school.’’ The reason for this stems from the insight that ‘‘if explanation is a socialmethod, the method by which inequality gets represented and reproduced, and if the institution is theplace where this representation operates, it follows that intellectual emancipation is necessarily distinctfrom social and institutional logic.’’ Ranciere, ‘‘On Ignorant Schoolmasters.’’

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the new logic of emancipation

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