The Aesthetics of Education The Aesthetics of Education: Theatre, Curiosity, and Politics in the Work of Jacques Rancière and Paulo Freire Tyson E. Lewis Continuum International Publishing Group A Bloomsbury company 80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP www.continuumbooks.com © Tyson E. Lewis 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publishers. ISBN: 9781441118264 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction: The Aesthetics of Education 1 Chapter One: From Stultification to Emancipation: Althusser avec Rancière 22 Chapter Two: Aesthetic Forms: Teaching, Theatre, and Democracy 39 Chapter Three: The Beautiful and the Sublime in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed 56 Intermission: Equality, Freedom, and Emancipation: A Case for Pedagogical Dramaturgy 73 Chapter Four: The Aesthetics of Curiosity 88 Chapter Five: The Knowledge of Ignorance 115 Chapter Six: The Future of the Image in Critical Pedagogy 137 Chapter Seven: Freire’s Last Laugh 154 Conclusion: Death and Democracy in Education: Freire’s Easter Revisited 174 Bibliography 182 Index 190 Acknowledgments There are many people I would like to thank for their assistance with this book. First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge Gert Biesta who has supported my project from the beginning and has given me generous feedback on several chapters of this book which appeared as separate articles in his journal Studies in Philosophy and Education. Also, my Belgian colleagues, Jan Masschelein, Maarten Simons and Joris Vlieghe have been instrumental in providing insight into many of the ideas presented in the following pages, and their imprint on this manuscript cannot be underesti- mated. It is also important to recognize Eduardo Duarte, Daniel Friedrich, Megan Laverty, Rene Arcilla, David Backer, and Mike Schapira who all participated in a Rancière reading group at Teachers College. In particular, Megan inspired me to take a closer look at the Kantian dimensions of Rancière’s writings, Eduardo provided persistent skepticism of several of the claims that formed the backdrop of my project, Daniel remained a constant source of insight into Rancière’s work, and Rene provided me with a set of challenges which I hope to have met. Finally, my graduate assistant, Olivier Michaud, helped me track down obscure references and provided help with the translation of several French sources. This acknowledgement would be incomplete if I did not recognize my wife, Anne Keefe, and her infallible editorial advice and her keen eye for the turn of a phrase and the power of a metaphor for unlocking the poetics of my own writing. But most importantly, I would like to end with an acknowledgement that is also a dedication. Before reading Rancière’s book The Nights of Labor, I had already been introduced to its basic thesis. In fact, the book seemed to be a shockingly simple and elegant affirmation of something that my father, Steven Lewis, had taught when I was a young child: that nights are not for sleeping but for dreaming, creating, and thinking. As a man with only a high-school education, my father refused any predetermined role as a mere laborer whose nights should be spent sleeping in order to replenish his labor-power for the following day. Instead, he spent his nights singing in bands, writing songs, and teaching himself various instruments. With little formal education, he denied the Acknowledgments vii predictions of cultural habitus and took up reading novels, critical theory, and political analyses. Indeed, my father is one of those unlikely individuals who has consistently challenged the divisions of labor that scar our society: divisions between the hand and the mind, the night and the day, the literate and the illiterate. As such, the pages of this book are infused with the spirit of my father. Thanks, Dad. Introduction: The Aesthetics of Education The development of man’s capacity for feeling is, therefore, the more urgent need of our age, not merely because it can be a means of making better insights effective for living, but precisely because it provides the impulse for bettering our insights. —Fredrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man In the novel The City and the City by China Mieville (2010), the reader follows the Kafkaesque journey of Inspector Tyador Borlu through the labyrinthian political conspiracy set in two politically autonomous yet terri- torially overlapping cities: Beszel and Ul Qoma. Although “grosstopically” interwoven like topographic doppelgangers, the two cities are perceived as distinct political and cultural territories. Even as citizens from the two cities intermingle on divided streets, live in buildings where different floors exist in different cities, and children climb on trees territorially split (“crosshatched”) down the center, they must learn to “unsee” and “unnotice” one another. The major role of education is to teach children the peculiar skill of literally unseeing what one is seeing—a paradoxical gesture which demands both seeing and not seeing simultaneously. For instance, Ul Qoman drivers must avoid collisions with oncoming Beszel traffic all the while “unseeing” the cars they must avoid. Looking out the window of Senior Detective Qussim Dhatt’s house, Ul Qoman detective Borlu summarizes this startling situation: From their living room I saw that Dhatt and Yallya’s [Dhatt’s wife] rooms and my own overlooked the same stretch of green ground, that in Beszel was Majdlyna Green and in Ul Qoma was Kwaidso Park, a finely balanced crosshatch. I had walked in Majdlyna myself often. There are parts where even individual trees are crosshatched, where Ul Qoman children and Besz children clamber past each other, each obeying their parents’ whispered strictures to unsee the other. (Mieville 2010, 195)