The Aesthetics of Education: Theatre, Curiosity, and Politics in the Work of Jacques Ranciere and Paulo Freire

201 Pages·2012·0.59 MB·English

by  Tyson E. Lewis

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)