Raving Rationally as Artists in the Irrational Social Order: A Defense of Rancière’s Intellectual Emancipation
Introduction
Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991) reimagines emancipatory politics by shifting its focus from a total overthrowing of the social conditions to a subjective awakening that rethinks equality in terms of pedagogical methods. Instead of envisioning the roadmaps of transformative emancipation, Rancière proposed a starting point that prepares one to be intellectually disruptive and potentially politically disruptive. The book begins with an intellectual experiment conducted by a French educator in Belgium, Joseph Jacotot, who surprisingly encountered the power of independent intellects that only obeyed themselves when his students learned French by studying a book with translations of Flemish and French amongst themselves under his request. In Jacotot’s story, the traditional masters, who resembled the intellectual authority and conducted teaching through mere explications to students presumed to be their inferiors, disappeared. And what emerged was an equal intellectual relationship where the students maintained their full capacity to understand by trusting their own intelligence and obeying only Jacotot’s will to study the assigned book. This encapsulates the essence of emancipation for Rancière, such that one is obliged to believe in her own intelligence as equal to the authorities and apply them accordingly with will and attention. And “universal teaching” (Rancière 1991, 16), which allows one to fully utilize her intelligence without being explicated to by the socially determined hierarchies, embodies that emancipation.
In universal teaching, there is no presumed gap between the intelligence of either party and the studied material is an egalitarian bridge between them. Contrary to traditional and institutional teaching, where students are subordinated to the masters’ explications of the subject, which results in stultifications of the student’s own capabilities, universal teaching allows the master to be ignorant of what he teaches so that the only subordination occurs when the students submit their wills to the masters’ supervisions of their attentions on the subject. Therefore, the ignorant masters supervise the wills but do not explicate the knowledge. It is a rather radical claim, but the central message of universal teaching is that both the master and the student become emancipated once they break free from the hierarchy that traditional teaching presupposed and realize their equal intelligence through reciprocal discourses. Thus, it offers a unifying understanding of equality, where people are not differentiated by their intellectual capacities but by the social order itself. Then, political emancipation can take off from this disruptive understanding of pedagogical institutions and other social institutions alike that force us to surrender to the hierarchical differentiations that trap us in self-contempt and laziness and retires us from the effort to change or revolt.
In this essay, I defend Rancière’s general case of the emancipative potential that universal teaching offers through historical and contemporary cases of people who emancipated themselves by realizing equal intelligence in thoughts and in action. Specifically, I examine Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton’s intellectual journey and how that is incorporated into the public education programs of the party. I also refer to a piece of news from 2021 where a factory worker in China from rural regions studied philosophy by himself and translated academic works from English to Chinese. These stories testify to intellectual emancipation with political reverberations that contest the existing social orders, incite societal disruptions, and prompt individual reflections. However, I also highlight one inconsistency in Rancière’s work which is the recognition of the superiority of artworks but not the superiority of artists. Overall, I align with Rancière’s hopefulness on the emancipatory potential from the axiom of equal intelligence and argue that an intellectually emancipated society can be of material effects in forms that are not institutional.
Disruptive Rationality Regained with Equal Intelligence
Rancière considers it easy, and lazy even, to submit ourselves to the social model where one confirms his inferiority in the face of someone else’s superiority. And it is our habit to think under the inequality of minds constructed behind social accomplishments and be acquiescent to inequality’s passion that forces us to irrationally reconstruct this fiction of unequal intelligence time and time again (1991, 81). Such that, we always attribute superior talent to others’ successes and excuse us from making the effort to try. This irrationality is only clear when we understand that our equal intelligence is being rendered unequal by the social circumstances, such that “equality remains the only reason for inequality” (1991, 88). Therefore, rationality is only regained through a conscious realization of the need to disrupt those unequal circumstances by emancipating oneself from the authorities that confine us to be conventionally obedient.
Huey P. Newton, the leader of the revolutionary Black Panther Party in the mid-1960s, went through Rancière’s emancipative process where one retraced the intelligence that was kept captive by the irrational social hierarchy and eventually volumized that retrieved rationality among others through political organizing. Newton, in his teenage years in Oakland, California, resembled the typical “juvenile delinquent” picture who constantly clashed with his high school teachers, got into fights, and was caught by the police for minor offenses such as stealing (Newton and Blake 1995, 47–50). Newton was aware that the stultifying education system labeled him inferior, given his social records. As a functional illiterate who scored 74 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, Newton was diagnosed by his counselors as unfit for college. Fortunately, Newton admired his brother, who was in college at the time and had a genuine spirit of defiance at heart. He ignored what the masters of traditional education pronounced of him and started learning by himself using Melvin’s poetry and philosophy books. Newton spent arduous hours reading these books with a dictionary and joined Melvin and his friends for intellectual conversations (1995, 53-54). Despite the learning struggles, he attended to the books at hand with the utmost attention that Rancière calls for.
In this process, Newton is practicing what Rancière saw as being unconsciously practiced for centuries, by following one’s own intelligence yet being subjected to the wills of others in the form of universal teaching. Melvin was the ignorant schoolmaster for Newton. Melvin did not explicate and only provided the means necessary for Newton to devote himself. Newton profoundly experienced the stultification and the shame associated with it when he couldn’t pronounce some words on the rare occasions that he turned to Melvin for explications. Nevertheless, Newton’s fear and pain were overcome by his “own strength of will”, “discipline, and determination” (1995, 54). This is the kind of determination Rancière deemed necessary when one understood her intelligence to be the same as the one behind all other creations by the human mind and whole-heartedly immerses oneself in using that intelligence on the principle of equal intelligence (1991, 18). And it was with this same principle that Newton recruited the poor and the uneducated into his Afro-American association when he started attending Oakland City College, hurling along the lumpen proletariats to join with him in the emancipative process (1995, 63). And just as Rancière prescribed, universal teaching is the most urgently needed for the poor (1991, 18), who are most deceived by the hierarchy that they are of inferior intelligence to others because of their social position.
Newton’s experience is the most demonstrative of the effect of universal teaching. When he was repeatedly discouraged by the public school system of every level, including university, he vehemently believed that “I could think, I could read, and I could retain the most difficult ideas” (1995, 69). This is the most powerful emancipation one can give oneself, which can lead one to wholly realize one’s own intellectual potential and enlighten others through mutual reciprocations. In Newton’s case, he knew that between him and his books, he was not “dumb,” as the social order told him. Later on, this axiom of equal intelligence became the guideline of the public education offered by the Black Panther Party under the Intercommunal Youth Institute with the slogan “Each one teach one” (Hilliard 2008, 5). The institute consisted of teachers with and without accreditations and students that are primarily black and poor youth. They “live, work and play together” with “mutual love and respect” (2008, 6). Moreover, this institute is founded on Rancière’s emphasis on egalitarian discourses, which seeks not to instill knowledge of the superior in the inferior but to cultivate critical ideas among the youth out of the recognition of their own intellectual abilities. In the end, Newton and his political organizing understood that intelligence is only verified out of equality “between self-esteem and the esteem of others” (Rancière 1991, 79). Through a collective effort that preserves the principle of equal intelligence in learning, Newton magnified his regained rationality from the hands of the social order and integrated it into his intercommunal political organizing.
From being a self-emancipated student to an ignorant schoolmaster, Newton was challenging the societal irrationalities detected by Rancière that continuously stultified the disenfranchised and reproduced the hierarchy. To be rational, is to realize the equal intelligence one possesses as Newton did, and what follows that realization can be politically disruptive in the forms of small and collectivized egalitarian dialogues in universal teaching.
Raving Reasonably as Citizens and Intellects
Rancière is opposing the order itself, whether it is the conservative order or the progressive’s order. As long as it is an “order over disorder” (1991, 91), that social scale of superiors and inferiors would be present. And any formal institutionalization of universal teaching has to involve explications as a social act, which inevitably re-establishes the hierarchy that it aims to disrupt. Therefore, Rancière only considers universal teaching to be a method directed at individuals and not on a societal level. This may seem counter-intuitive to the progressives. How does one emancipate from the immediate social condition if no massive reforms are ever to be actualized? To that, Rancière suggests that we all should be raving reasonably as citizens of the irrational madness and as emancipated intellects that safeguards our rationality. Because even the most progressive ideas are still rooted in the “incapacity of people” (1991, 129), where the vanguards are the saviors that bring forth equality for all, and this “infantilization of individuals” (1991, 133) is precisely the source of explication and of inequality. Thus, there are no institutional destinations for equality, and one must always live as an equal individual in an unequal society with the irrational duties of being a citizen to the stultifying social order and the rationalities that realize our self-emancipation.
In November 2021, a piece of news made headlines in China about a migrant worker named Zhi Chen, who studied philosophy after work and translated Richard Polt’s Heidegger: An Introduction by himself (Zhang 2021). Chen was a college dropout with no formal training in the academic discipline of philosophy. Yet he was always fascinated by philosophy, even though he could barely understand the catalogs of Being and Time when he was flipping through the book in the library during the abysmal time he spent in university. As someone who grew up in the rural regions of China’s Jiangxi province without a university degree, Chen worked in factories in the peripheries of urban cities that produced apparel and electronics. He devoted as minimal as possible of his mental energy to the monotonous and grueling job he had and spent the rest of his day studying philosophy. In Rancière’s language, Chen conquered himself by controlling the sacrifices he needed to make to subsist as a citizen, yet he did not give in to the irrational social hierarchy that placed him as an unintelligent and uneducated factory worker who was only capable of wearisome manual labours. Chen participated in local philosophy seminars and discussion groups and constantly shared his thoughts on philosophical works on Douban, the largest Chinese online social media platform for book and film reviews. Under some of the most unreasonable conditions, Chen was always verifying the power of his own reason and intelligence through interactive channels with other equal intellects. Investing the least energy into the madness of the social order, Chen was raving reasonably by remaining true to his own reason and controlling the suspension of this reason to work in his debilitating social role, which is necessary for him to live as an equal intellect in an unequal world.
After Chen posted his translations online, hoping to garner attention from publishers so that he could use that as sufficient proof for re-entry into the Chinese university system, his story was picked up by the media and provoked waves of public debates from various angles. One of the focuses was on why the pairing of Heidegger and a migrant worker in the same story could conjure so much social unease. Philosophy is widely conceptualized as the abstract of the abstract and is put on a pedestal as the garden of Eden that cannot be contaminated by the ignorance of the common people. It belongs to the sacred classrooms of universities and the clandestine dinner parties of the elites. It is out of reach and undecipherable by the wretched of the earth. However, this image of philosophy as the high art is the explicit result of the explicative social order that stultifies our consciousness and capitulates us to let go of our reason and intelligence. Why shouldn’t a migrant worker read Heidegger? Or rather, why shouldn’t we all do that? Chen’s story is a reminder to us all to question that self-contempt that had kept us saying “I can’t” and to start asking, “Why not me?”. Why must I surrender to the social order that deprives me of the equal intelligence behind every human invention and stultifies me to concede that what I have to do every day is already the most I can do? Why can’t I also rave reasonably by suspending myself from the ever-lasting contributions to authoritative social order and respect my own intelligence by subjecting it to wills and efforts?
Chen’s story is about how an intellectually emancipated person can have effects on individuals, by invoking reflections and asserting influences so that collectives are formed to verify each other’s equal intelligence and supervise each other’s wills. Through this practice, we might envision a society of all that raves reasonably as citizens and intellects, who refuses to ever be framed as superiors and inferiors.
The Making of Artists and Masterpieces
Rancière upholds the power of everyone to reclaim their intelligence by recognizing their own capability to communicate through any language, whether it be painting, poetry, or an actual language. By saying, “Me too, I’m a painter”, It is not a matter of feeling pride in artistic achievements but regaining that rationality that allows us to be emancipated as an equal intellect (1991, 67). Nevertheless, Rancière admits the differences between a painting and a masterpiece by which he saw the “great distances” (1991, 66) between them. However, Rancière’s view of what makes the artistic geniuses is their vigilant exercises of universal teaching with the modesty of equal intelligence enacted in “leaning, repeating, imitating, translating, taking apart, putting back together” (1991, 68). A contradiction then arises. What makes one an ingenious artist? Is it the caliber of their work that Rancière categorizes into the mediocre and the exceptional? Or is it their insistence on producing works on the ground of an emancipated intellect that allows others to be equally reckoned as artists through interpretations of their works?
Rancière is unclear as to what exactly constituted the great distances between paintings and masterpieces. Suppose a genius is only credited so due to her welcoming acceptance of others’ counter-translations of her works that are of equal intelligence. In that case, masterpieces should not even be worthy of being distinguished at all. For Rancière, a genius in any field must resign from all thoughts of being the one and only expert embodying superiority, for she must be able to equally recount and translate everybody’s feelings through his works. Being the superior, she would only see herself. And her works only have meaning if they are to be communicatively verified by other equal intellects through counter-translations. Therefore, Rancière runs into a paradox by postulating that there are no superior artists, but there can be superior art.
Rancière’s depiction of an ideal society is made possible by artists who, by acting on their own expressions, express the humanity in everybody. These artists conduct their works on the pure excellence of an emancipated intelligence that reasonably believes in their own capabilities and others equally. Then, how could the works produced suddenly contain a great contrast in their qualities given the same intelligence behind them? To this question, Rancière probably would point to the varied attention different artists paid to their works. And it would be these levels of dedication that differentiate masterpieces from mere paintings. However, consider an artisan who had dedicated his entire life to the craft of painting and yet never received any recognition for his work. He then would never be credited as an artist throughout his life. This is Vincent Van Gogh’s life story. His story is one that was filled with a fervent dedication to painting yet without the recognizable title of an artistic genius. During the last year of Van Gogh’s life, apart from his mental illnesses, he still painted industriously, believing in his own bold and expressive style that few peers from the art world resonated with. Even though a famous art critic, Albert Aurier, had published an enthusiastic review of him in France, Van Gogh sold very few paintings through his brother Theo during his lifetime (Van Gogh and Auden 1961). By Rancière’s account, Van Gogh is more than qualified to be an artistic genius who is certain of his own intelligence as equal to any other esteemed artist and applied that intelligence to his work with an enormous will. The problem now becomes, without the explicative social order that contains the appraisal system of artworks, including galleries and auction companies, Van Gogh’s paintings would never have been seen, let alone endorsed.
Owing to Van Gogh’s sister-in-law, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who actively promoted his works after he passed away, his oeuvre was made public through the appraisal system of the art market. Thus, the only reason that we now see Sunflowers or The Starry Night as masterpieces is because of an external evaluative structure that led to Van Gogh’s dedications being discerned and announced. Yet, to allow that structure would be to simultaneously allow the explicative order that defines superior artists. After all, without a totalizing structure of assessment, identifying the excellence of artworks based on the attention one pays to them is too subjective and precarious. But this structure is not to be tolerated by Rancière. Therefore, given the premise of there being masterpieces that need to be announced by the social structure for them to be circulated, and the premise of the dissolution of such a structure to preserve the modest geniuses of equal intelligence, Rancière is caught in an inconsistency.
Ultimately, to salvage the intactness of intellectual emancipation, this inconsistency can only be resolved if we ultimately abandon the criteria of masterpieces. So, the only option is to keep the second premise and cross out the first to settle the contradiction between masterpieces of external evaluations and artistic geniuses of equal intelligence. We must declare that we are all artists if we want to be, and any statements of superiority regarding our intelligence or the quality of our artworks are never to be conceived or uttered.
An Intellectually Emancipated Society of Artists
Rancière’s picture of emancipation is that of the emancipated artists without the arbitrary social divisions on our intellectual abilities (1991, 71). Intellectual emancipation is to be maintained on an individual-to-individual basis permeable in small collectives but never in the form of governments or institutions (1991, 102), and governments only exist to ensure and propagate the circulation of universal teaching (1991, 103). For Rancière, to institutionalize universal teaching for the purpose of emancipation is to commit the crimes of progress, which is a word that implies continuously verifying the new knowledge as the superior followed by explications of it as the new order (1991, 131). Even though I illustrated universal teaching as politically effective in fostering unification, reflection, and equality with the examples of Newton and Chen, this view can still be read as conservative by limiting emancipation to only small alliances of individuals. One may object by asking how Rancière’s emancipation could be of lasting effect if no material changes in the political foundations are to be allowed. To answer, I argue that we can begin by investigating the outcomes of having an institutionalized regime founded on ideas of freedom that, in reality, sustains or perpetuates social hierarchies. And from there, we need only imagine what a society of emancipated artists will truly be like by removing that hierarchy of superiors and inferiors in our consciousness.
Let’s begin by looking at the consequences of a social hierarchy built upon superiors and inferiors. Throughout the 20th century, we have seen the hegemonic power of the U.S. empire rising by acting as the only rational, the intellectually superior, and the vanguard for the third world. The U.S. government is not a novice when it comes to coups, and coups are undoubtedly one of the most severe violations of the principle of equality among nations. Whether it was in the name of anti-socialism when overthrowing the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, of Chile in 1973 (Harvey 2005, 7); or it was in the name of free trade and international aid when forcing Jamaica into debt together with the IMF to expropriate Jamaica’s natural and labour resources in the 1980s (Black 2003); or it was in the name of fighting terrorism when evading Iraq to control the oil resources in the 2000s (Harvey 2005, 6); a neo-colonial empire is established in the daylight. These acts of invasions and expropriations of resources are conducted out of the name of freedom, but freedom of whom? The U.S. economy. On Rancière’s grounds, to presume people from some parts of the world as incapable of realizing and effectuating their own freedom is the most anti-emancipatory thinking there is. And these violent acts in the name of “freedom” were archetypical of a society that operates by stultification of some who are deemed as having inferior intelligence and whose futures must be decided upon by their superiors.
Even if we turn to socialist states that are founded on the principle of collective emancipation, the vanguards that represented the wills of the people took roles that presumed the same kind of inferiority in the people they aim to serve. As the tension rose between the students and the Chinese Communist Party in 1989, where the former was demanding greater democratic freedoms, the party led by Deng Xiaoping, who avidly pushed for neoliberal reforms of the state, violently cracked down on the student protests with armed troops and tanks at Tiananmen Square (Harvey 2005, 123). From these authoritarian actions that originated from the alignment to some kind of social hierarchy, we can see that any idea of one social order as superior to another is an impediment to emancipation. And to dream of establishing complete societal emancipation by reforming the entire social conditions is destined to encounter this particular thinking. Therefore, mass-scale and institutionalized revamps to the social order are actually the reverse of emancipation and presume the intellectual inequality of people.
Now, it is easier to understand how a society of emancipated artists can lead to more peace and fuller actualization of our intellectual potential. The inter-state violence that occurs out of the exploitation of people in fragmented communities can find a stop in the face of the principle of true intellectual equality. No terrors were done out of genuine alignment with the principle of equality. And once that principle can be truly honored in an intellectually emancipated society, no state will descend below that principle to destroy our humanity by assuming others as inferiors that can be sacrificed or saved. To truly consider one another as capable of equal discourse is a subjective realization but an objective grounding to stop those gruesome acts that violate the unity of our humanity and the axiom of equal intelligence.
In this society, the CEO of the largest technology conglomerate and a waiter in a fast-food restaurant can mutually recognize each other as their equals, with no one possessing a more meaningful social position. They both consent to be in this irrational social order by working their daytime jobs but simultaneously conserve their intelligence by using them creatively and willfully. The CEO’s job can be overflowed with tedious business meetings and tiresome administrative tasks, and the waiter’s job can be oversaturated with the dreary details of customer service. They are equally imprisoned in the same inequality that hampers our faith in our own intelligence to be creative as artists that communicate with human emotions. And through our trust in universal teaching and the emancipative potential it bolsters, the CEO and the waiter can be emancipated in an alliance of mutual respect and understanding.
Living in an intellectually emancipated society of artists, we accept the irrationalities that require our suspensions of reason as citizens of certain social order, but we also nurture alliances through reciprocal acknowledgments of each other’s intelligence to create meaningful works as artists that creatively emancipate ourselves from that social order with reasonable attentions.
Conclusion
In this essay, I defended Rancière’s idea of intellectual emancipation to be politically disruptive and socially empowering with its affective influences to amplify among individuals. After clarifying the one inconsistency in his argument regarding the superiority of artworks, I also further defended Rancière’s vision of an intellectually emancipated society of artists by contrasting it with the social orders that act in the name of full progressive emancipations for all in order to also answer possible objections to the material effectiveness of Rancière’s intellectual emancipation. Overall, I argued for Rancière’s case and call for a pensive thought experiment for us all: to question our degrees of suspension of reason to the stultifying social madness and to reflect on the ways we can reclaim our reason through creative controls of our intelligence as the artists who speak for our humanity in their works of intensive will.
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