Jacques Rancière, Education, and the Art of Citizenship

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Jacques Rancière, Education, and the Art of CitizenshipAlex Means

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Jacques Ranciere, Education, and theArt of Citizenship

Alex Means

INTRODUCTION

‘‘Me too, I’m a painter!’’ (Ranciere 1991, 67) For Jacques Ranciere,this exclamation represents an inscription of equality and byextension the promise of democratic politics. Extracted from theexperimental thought of nineteenth-century French pedagogueJoseph Jacotot, the locution disrupts the fallacy that divides thosewho know from those who don’t; those included from those withno-part. It perturbs the sensible order of things by asserting thecreative power of all thinking and speaking beings. Thus, the dec-laration ‘‘Me Too I’m a Painter!’’ is an aesthetic event that affirmsand performs the radical egalitarian and poetic valences of humanpotential and democratic possibility. For Ranciere, such visions ofintellectual equality and agency constitute a presupposition for anemancipated democratic community. Ranciere (1991) states, ‘‘wecan thus dream of a society of the emancipated that would be asociety of artists. Such a society would repudiate the divisionbetween those who know, and those who don’t. It would onlyknow minds in action: people who do, who speak about what theyare doing, and who thus transform all their works into ways ofdemonstrating the humanity that is in them as in everyone’’ (71).

As these evocative comments suggest, Jacques Ranciere’s thoughtruns against the grain of traditional political theory as well as thedominant registers of modern educational discourse. Democracy,Ranciere tells us, is not located within constitutional law andcitizenship is not defined strictly by the content and depth of

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legal rights and obligations. For Ranciere, such official systems oforganization—what he refers to as the police—serve to tame demo-cratic energies by formalizing material and symbolic distributionsof shares and roles. Democracy, in contrast, is an anarchic and con-tingent force. It refers to the disruptive appearance of ‘‘subjects thatdo not coincide with the parties of the state or of society . . . subjectsthat deregulate all representation of places and portions’’ (Ranciere1999, 100). Ranciere thus imagines democratic politics as aestheticevents: moments and acts whereby those with no-part emerge asvisible and audible subjects of equality and in the process disarticu-late and restructure the sensible architecture out of which theyemerge. Similarly, Ranciere suggests that the essence of educationis found not in the rationalization of curriculum or in the pedagogi-cal act of transmission from teacher to student. Rather, education is aquestion. It represents an indeterminate process of attention andexploration: the becoming of each individual’s capacity as a creativeand equal subject in common with others. Education, in short, neces-sarily concerns the intersection of intellectual emancipation anddemocracy or what might be thought of as the ‘‘art of citizenship.’’

This article is part of a broader effort recently undertaken byeducational theorists to verify the implications of Ranciere’s workfor the field of educational studies.1 Rather than attempting tofashion productive linkages between Ranciere and other criticalpedagogues (Lewis 2009), to render a ‘‘new logic of emancipation’’(Biesta 2008, 2010), or explore the political efficacy of Ranciere’s‘‘dissensus’’ for considering educational justice movements (Means2011), this article explores the intersection of ‘‘intellectual emanci-pation’’ and ‘‘democratic politics’’ in Ranciere’s thought in orderto think experimentally about citizenship and citizenship edu-cation. I suggest that there is an unexplored continuity betweenRanciere’s educational theory of intellectual emancipation and thedemocratic event that provides an opening for conceptualizingcitizenship as a kind of activist ‘‘art’’ or ‘‘poetics’’ of politicalbecoming. Ultimately, I am interested in what this might meanfor questioning the theoretical valences and practices of educationfor democratic citizenship within neoliberal culture.

My argument develops as follows. First, I outline Ranciere’sperspectives on aesthetics and democracy, highlighting how theinstitution of politics as supernumerary event hints toward whatDavide Panagia (2009) has referred to as an ‘‘improper’’ form ofdemocratic citizenship. Second, I discuss Ranciere’s reading of

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emancipation within Joseph Jacotot’s radical pedagogy in order tounderstand the role of equality and intellectual agency withineducational, social, and democratic processes. In the third section, Ibring these elements together through a broader discussion ofRanciere’s thought in relation to developments in contemporarycitizenship studies. I suggest that intellectual emancipation as theverification of equality through what is common provides thesubstantive foundation for the democratic event. This enables us tothink citizenship as a kind of activist ‘‘art’’ or ‘‘poetics’’ outside thestrictures of political liberalism and the law. In the fourth and finalsection, I bring this formulation into conversation with liberal andcritical approaches to citizenship education. By way of conclusion,I consider a Rancierian art of citizenship within neoliberal cultureand argue that while Ranciere’s thought resists institutionalizationit nonetheless provides insight into critiquing and reimagining domi-nant assumptions and practices within citizenship education.

AESTHETICS, SUBJECTIFICATION, DEMOCRACY: CITIZENSHIPAS ‘‘IMPROPER’’ EVENT

At the core of Ranciere’s philosophy is an attempt to elucidate thecomplex aesthetic dimensions and relations that makeup and div-ide the social and the political. This entails a methodology thatrejects what Gaston Bachelard once referred to as ‘‘a science ofthe hidden,’’ an ideological hermeneutics that privileges the intel-lectual as enlightened truth agent seeking to uncover and revealmystifications buried beneath the world of appearances. Ranciereposits instead a methodological ‘‘topography that does not presup-pose this position of mastery’’ (Ranciere 2004, 50). This is an analy-tics interested in mapping aesthetic distributions as conditions ofpossibility within horizontally distributed systems of organization.Here aesthetics are understood to deal ‘‘with time and space asconfigurations of our ‘place’ in society, forms of distribution ofthe common and private, and of assignation to everybody of hisor her part’’ (Ranciere 2005, 13). In Kantian terms, aesthetics referto the a priori fields of visibility and sayability that make up thesocial order. It is in this field of legibility where the parts of the com-mon are arranged, material shares and allotments are apportioned,and distributions of rights and commitments are normalized andlegitimated. Ranciere refers to this as the ‘‘distribution of the

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sensible,’’ by which he means the systems of organization wherebythe ordering of bodies, roles, and material shares stabilizes inunequal yet consensual frames of reference. This distribution isgoverned by the police: formal systems that maintain the natural-ness and legitimacy of the hierarchical arrangements endemic toall social orders.

Ranciere contends that, while aesthetics are fundamental to thesocial order and to any form of politics, politics as such are rare.This is one of the significant distinctions between Ranciere andother theorists of his generation such as Michel Foucault and GillesDeleuze. While sharing much in common with these thinkers, parti-cularly his critique of representational thought, Ranciere situatespolitics as singular moments of possibility rather than as intrinsicto everyday relations of power. For Ranciere, ‘‘nothing is politicalin and of itself for the political only happens by means of a princi-pal that does not belong to it: equality’’ (Ranciere 1999, 33). Politics,in other words, represent a radically contingent articulation ofhuman equality, understood as a condition that finds meaning onlythrough its expression. Equality, in Ranciere’s words, is a ‘‘presup-position’’ rather than ‘‘a founding ontological principal . . . a con-dition that only functions when it is put into action’’ (Ranciere2004, 52). Thus, rather than begin from a position of inequality suchas in the Althusserian tradition that searches for unequal equiva-lences between different levels of speech, knowledge, and con-sciousness, Ranciere’s philosophy begins first by verifying thefundamental capacity of all to think, speak, and act as equals.

This vision of equality articulates a kind of absent ontologicalspace at the heart of the political that requires an event in orderfor it to be occupied and=or actualized. Politics, or dissensus asRanciere refers to it, occurs when the universal presupposition ofequality is pressed into service in a singularized form, when a groupor individual articulates a wrong and thus gives form and content totheir fundamental equality within the political community. Politicsis thus a process of subjectification: a contingent moment when thoseoccluded from the political community (the ‘‘supernumerary’’element or ‘‘part of no-part’’) constitute themselves as equal subjectsand in turn disarticulate and reconfigure the partitions of the sensi-ble order. Ranciere states that ‘‘politics exists because those whohave no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselvesof some account, setting up a community by the fact of placing incommon a wrong that is nothing more than this confrontation, the



contradiction of two worlds in a single world: the world where theyare and the world where they are not’’ (Ranciere 1999, 27). In otherwords, politics occur because subjects engage in acts of dissensus—forms of thinking, speaking, writing, and acting—that enable theirverification as equal subjects and in turn reconfigure the socialcoordinates out of which they emerge.

Ranciere states that the police constitute ‘‘that set of procedureswhereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved,the organization of powers, the distribution of the places androles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution’’ (1999, 28).According to Ranciere, the primary logic of the police is the sup-pression of politics through alignments of consensus: the legalcodes and given systems of value and perception that demarcatethe conditions that define who counts, where, how, and why.Hence the police represent the Platonic tradition of defining andmaintaining the borders of ‘‘the proper’’: the distribution of formalqualifications that delineate to each their apportioned social partand the inscription of these parts and roles within a perceptual con-figuration. The police thus deny political energies by instituting con-sensual orders that naturalize and legitimate the ‘‘proper’’ and the‘‘given.’’ In contradistinction to the police, Ranciere theorizesdemocracy as a force that resides in the egalitarian and creativepower of the demos. Irreducible to either a constitutional form or rea-son of state, democracy represents the contingent polemical exerciseof politics itself. In Ranciere’s words, ‘‘democracy is, properlyspeaking, the symbolic institution of the political in the form ofthe power of those who are not entitled to exercise power – a rupturein the order of legitimacy and domination’’ (Ranciere and Panagia2000, 124). Rather than a rational negotiation of competing interestsor opinions, democracy turns on the process of subjectification; thatis, the moment when those without qualifications challenge the‘‘proper’’ distributions of shares and roles of the police order consti-tuting themselves through the assertion of equality. As Slavoj Zizeknotes, by raising a particular demand to the level of the universal,subjects are able to politicize the depoliticizing impulses of policelogic by revealing the ‘‘symptomal antagonism’’ between the univer-sal claims of police consensus and the supplementary demand orwrong denied a count (Zizek 2000, 2004). Democracy is thus said toexist when subjects both individually and collectively are able toengage in practices—material, artistic, intellectual, and linguistic—that challenge the ‘‘place’’ assigned to them and in turn have this

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challenge verified by others. We become democratic subjects, in otherwords, by rupturing and reconfiguring the aesthetic space of thesocial through inscriptions of equality.

What implications might this conceptualization of democracy asaesthetic event have in thinking an experimental image of demo-cratic citizenship? For Ranciere, citizenship is primarily operativeas a category of the police: a set of juridical-legal qualifications ema-nating from the intellectual justifications and procedures of politicalphilosophers, constitutional authorities, and jurists. However, asDavide Pangaea (2009) has suggested, Ranciere’s thought is never-theless suggestive of a kind of ‘‘ill-mannered’’ or ‘‘improper’’ formof citizenship. This is an image of democratic citizenship definednot by the depth and content of legal rights and obligations belong-ing to political philosophy and the police, but rather a contingentpolemical eruption of human equality within the social space bythose denied a part. In a Nietzschian sense, these are active asopposed to reactive moments of creativity and self-constitution,where subjects without qualifications create scenes through asimultaneous disruption and reconstruction of the sensible order.Subjects thus enact citizenship as a practice of disagreement andsocial invention disarticulating and refiguring the hierarchicalnormalizing orders out of which they emerge.

Before commenting further on such an image of citizenship aswell as its implications for considering citizenship education, Iwant to first outline Ranciere’s reading of intellectual emancipationwithin Joseph Jacotot’s educational theory. This aims, on one hand,to develop Ranciere’s axiomatic reading of equality within a radicaltheory of education and, on the other hand, to explore the role ofintellectual emancipation and agency within democratic politics.

EDUCATION AND THE POETICS OF INTELLECTUALEMANCIPATION

In his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991), Ranciere engages theexperimental thought of nineteenth-century French intellectualJoseph Jacotot. On one level, the book is an exegesis of the peda-gogical method that Jacotot would ‘‘discover’’ in his position aslecturer of French literature at the University of Louvain. But onanother, it is a poetic springboard for Ranciere’s own aestheticand political reading of intellectual emancipation. Moreover, the



book also functions as an immanent critique of the French edu-cational system as well as the logics guiding prominent educationalreformers and sociologists, particularly the work of Pierre Bourdieuand Jean Claude Passeron. For Ranciere, the problem with theEnlightenment tradition, modern variants of ‘‘progressive’’ edu-cation, as well as the new sociology of Bourdieu, was the problemof inequality. Following Jacotot, Ranciere suggests that inequalitybelongs to an order of educational thought that is condemned torehearse a tautology: Where one assumes the presence of inequalityone will continue to reproduce it over and over again whether thisis through efforts to control and rationalize curriculum or throughsociological analysis. In contrast, the key to educational emanci-pation, for Ranciere, resides in a rather different order; that ofequality itself.

In 1818, Joseph Jacotot attempted a curious experiment. Whileteaching a group of Flemish students who did not read or speakFrench, he proposed that the students independently translate abilingual French language text. As Jacotot did not speak Flemish,he would have the students repeat what they had learned in French.This relatively straightforward process of translation and repetitiongave way to a series of insights. As the students mastered the con-tent of the book and performed what they had learned, Jacotot beganto question the foundational premises of teaching and learning.Jacotot’s ‘‘discovery’’ that his students were perfectly capable oflearning their lessons independently from the master, compelledhim to observe as false an order of pedagogy that assumes theinequality of intelligences. Thus, rather than affirming the relation-ship between the master knower (the teacher and bearer of truth)and the ignorant mind (the student), Jacotot’s experiment suggestedthat such a division of intelligence constitutes a fiction: the ‘‘myth ofpedagogy,’’ understood as ‘‘the parable of a world divided intoknowing minds and ignorant ones, ripe minds and immature ones,the capable and the incapable, the intelligent and the stupid’’(Ranciere 1991, 6).

This myth of pedagogy, Ranciere explains, turns on explication;that is, the process of transmission between a presumed omnipotentteacher and ignorant student. ‘‘The important business of the mas-ter is to transmit his knowledge to his students so as to bring them,by degrees, to his own level of expertise’’ (1991, 3). Ranciere sug-gests that such a pedagogical imperative is grounded within anirreconcilable distance between the master and his knowledge,

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‘‘the taught material and the person being instructed, the distancealso between learning and understanding’’ (1991, 5) By positing thisinequality in distance, explication is bound to discover it time andagain by consigning the student to an unbridgeable gap betweenlearning and understanding, existence and knowledge. Throughfurther pedagogical experiments, Jacotot came to reject the orderof explication and the divisions that it both assumes and repro-duces embracing instead a method based on the equality of intelli-gence. As Ranciere explains, this notion of equality of intelligenceneed not assert that all human beings possess uniform qualities,but that by virtue of existence as speaking and thinking beings allhumans share the same qualitative capacity to meaningfully engageand act in the world. This can be understood as a reversal of theCartesian maxim ‘‘I think therefore I am.’’ Instead, Jacotot cameto understand that, ‘‘man thinks because he exists’’ (1991, 62). Thisreversal led to Jacotot’s conception of intellectual emancipation: theverification of all human beings to think and speak as equals.

This understanding of emancipation would be incomplete, how-ever, without considering its relationship to the question of veracity.Truth, Ranciere tells us, is a whole, but one that cannot be told. Thearbitrary and incomplete nature of language fragments the truth,which means that ‘‘thought is not told in truth, but expressed inveracity.’’ Veracity is the ethical ground of intellectual emancipation,the will to question and express thought outside a position of mastery;‘‘not the key to any science, but the privileged relation of each personto the truth, the one that puts him on his path, on his orbit as a seeker.It is the moral foundation of the power to know’’ (Ranciere 1991, 57).Since truth can only be grasped in its partiality, it must be subjectedto the difficult but necessary intellectual labor of interrogation,translation, and communication. The intellectual journey of theemancipated must be shared: ‘‘spoken, manifested in works, commu-nicated to other thinking beings’’ (Ranciere 1991, 62). If emancipationrequires the desire to understand and to be understood, then veracityis the will to share and to act upon this desire in solidarity with others.Here Ranciere is suggesting that the contingency of knowledge andthe impossibility of mastery are not obstacles to be overcome, butpreconditions for the exercise of collectively oriented and liberatorymodes of education, social practice, and democracy.

Following Jacotot, Ranciere suggests that the emancipated are bynature artists. The impossibility of speaking the truth compelssubjects to translate thought into poetic works and to communicate



the veracity of these works to others. This requires improvisation: thetranslation of thought into words and words into acts, ‘‘in the act ofspeaking, man doesn’t transmit his knowledge he makes poetry; hetranslates and invites others to do the same. He communicates as anartisan: as a person who handles words like tools’’ (Ranciere 1991,65). Thought is located as a creative and shared practice, more adoing-in-common than a knowing. Ranciere would thus situateemancipatory thought as an agency that refuses the closed circle ofmastery: the division of those who know from those who don’t; thoseincluded from those with no-part. It is an agency that finds resonancewithin aesthetic practices that are shared in common, ‘‘ways of doingand making’’ that enter into the general and shared distribution ofwords, images, affects, and sounds. Importantly, for Ranciere, thisnotion of intellectual agency and solidarity concerns the potentialitycontained within the relationship between thought and the poetic act.In other words, it places the egalitarian and poetic valences of thought‘‘held in common’’ as central to any form of democratic politics.

THINKING AN ART OF CITIZENSHIP

As I have outlined, for Ranciere, citizenship is largely a categoryoperative within police logic. Citizenship as it is understood inpolitical philosophy is primarily a legal inscription that defines aparticular constellation of places and roles within a set of given con-stitutional and social authorizations and limits. As Davide Panagia(2009) has suggested, however, Ranciere’s thought is suggestive ofa kind of ‘‘ill-mannered’’ or ‘‘improper’’ form of citizenship. This isan image of citizenship that does not coincide with the juridicalapparatus of the state. It is rather an interruption and reconstruc-tion of the perceptual coordinates of the social by those denied qua-lifications and the legitimate authority to speak. According toPanagia (2009), ‘‘Ranciere’s democratic citizen is not one who pass-ively absorbs that which is assigned to her. She is, rather, the onewho actively disrupts this referential operation by taking part insomething to which she has no right. The democratic citizen isthe agent of this improper part-taking’’ (303).

Such a reading of democratic citizenship finds some affinity withrecent theoretical developments in the field of citizenship studies.These developments have sought to imagine citizenship beyondEnlightenment and liberal articulations that found perhaps their

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most paradigmatic expression in the thought of T. H. Marshall,particularly in his seminal essay ‘‘Citizenship and Social Class.’’Here Marshall (1998) frames citizenship as a nationally boundedset of universal legal and social rights and duties evolving out ofthe emerging historical and socioeconomic developments of thepost-war Keynesian state. Since its initial reception, Marshall’sarguments have been debated and critiqued on a variety ofgrounds. Among the most common criticisms are that Marshall’saccount ignored the exclusions upon which modern citizenshipwas founded and thus failed to account for how class conflictsand racial, gender, and sexual antagonisms have historicallyshaped claims to citizenship across Western democratic states. AsBryan Turner (2001) suggests, the citizen within Marshall’s pro-gressive narrative is imagined largely as a ‘‘passive’’ recipient ofrights rather than as an ‘‘active’’ political subject. It thus tends toelide how subjects have historically made claims and struggled todefine and achieve social recognition, legal rights, and what itmeans to practice substantive citizenship.

Challenging and expanding the Marshallian legacy, a diverserange of theorists have sought to redefine citizenship within newglobalizing processes and alignments of social and civic life. Isinand Turner (2002) suggest that the twin processes of ‘‘globaliza-tion’’ and ‘‘postmodernization’’ have upended the nation-state asthe sole authority and scale at which citizenship and democracyare imagined and practiced today. First, intensified global flowsof capital, information, culture, technology, and labor have com-bined with new relationships among urban, regional, and transna-tional economic and ecological systems to put new pressures andlimitations on the nation. It is argued that these processes, com-bined with trends toward transnational forms of governance andglobal human rights, have rescaled citizenship upward through‘‘post-national’’ and=or ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ visions of citizenship andcivic possibility (Held 1995; Hoffman 2004). Second, as we enterwhat has variably been described as ‘‘late,’’ ‘‘post,’’ or even,‘‘liquid’’ modernity, we have witnessed the downward proliferationof ‘‘new social movements’’ and demands for ‘‘group differentiatedrights’’ and ‘‘social recognition’’ (Taylor and Gutman 1994; Kymlica1995). Here historically marginalized groups and political activistshave increasingly voiced claims for ethnic and racial justice, genderequality, immigrant rights, indigenous rights, disability rights,LGTB rights, and environmental justice and in the process drawn



attention and critical reflection on citizenship as both a politicalpractice and as a multidimensional site of cultural struggle.

From a different angle, thinkers like Zygmunt Bauman (2001),Wendy Brown (2005), and Henry Giroux (2008), among others, haveexpressed concerns over the erosion of substantive democratic cit-izenship. They have argued that this can be understood within anascendant ‘‘post-political’’ consensus that has accompanied the riseof global neoliberal governance and culture. In their own uniqueways, these scholars have analyzed the ‘‘hollowing out’’ of civic lifeand the subsequent colonization of citizenship by market-basedrationalities and practices. According to Brown (2005), neoliberalism

. . . reduces political citizenship to an unprecedented degree of passivityand political complacency. The model neoliberal citizen is one who strate-gizes for her- or himself among various social, political, and economicoptions, not one who strives with others to alter or organize these options.A fully realized neoliberal citizenry would be the opposite of publicminded; indeed, it would barely exist as a public. (43)

Neoliberalism is thus imagined to foreclose politicization bydenying the translation of private problems (the particular) into com-mon (universal) concerns. It does so by individualizing politicsthrough the inauguration of a pervasive ‘‘consumer ontology’’ thattends to privatize and moralize race and class inequalities—reducingthem to concerns over personal risk management, lifestyle=identitydistinctions, commodified ‘‘choices,’’ and an unreflective multicul-tural emphasis on ‘‘tolerating’’ the Other. Through its ideology of‘‘there is no alternative,’’ neoliberalism assigns to everyone a‘‘proper’’ place, creating what Ranciere refers to as a ‘‘partition ofthe sensible’’ that disavows the antagonistic decisional elementinherent to democratic politics and=or enactments of citizenship.

Parallels and distinctions can be made here between Ranciere’sphilosophy and the work of Chantal Mouffe. In her rereading ofCarl Schmitt’s critique of liberal constitutionalism, Mouffe (1993,2005) argues against the ‘‘third way’’ politics associated withAnthony Giddens, the liberalism of John Rawls, as well as the delib-erative notion of democracy advocated by Jurgen Habermas.Following Schmitt, Mouffe argues that politics always involve arelational conflict and fundamental division between competingalternatives or social visions. As a rational liberal consensus is notpossible without some form of exclusion (the this not that ofpolitics), radical democratic projects and forms of citizenship should

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be conceived from the perspective of ‘‘a vibrant ‘agonistic’ publicsphere of contestation where different hegemonic political projectscan be confronted’’ (2005, 3). Democracy, for Mouffe, thus requiresbalancing a radical form of pluralism without effacing or foreclosingthe political either through appeals to consensus and=or throughviolent moralism. As such, Mouffe recognizes alongside Rancierethat notions such as equality, universality, and identity are alwaysnecessarily plural—constituted in relation to social struggle.However, whereas Mouffe would have hegemonic ‘‘articulations’’of competing interests and rights reinscribed within political liberal-ism at an institutional, social, and=or juridical level, Ranciere assertsa political subject of democratic equality standing in immanentconfrontation with any such formal inscription or representation.

While sharing some common ground with Mouffe and withother thinkers grappling with neoliberal post-politics, a Rancierianimage of citizenship finds primary resonance with more experi-mental research agendas. For example, in his focal essay in theedited collection Acts of Citizenship (2008), Engin Isin outlines a con-ception of citizenship that is irreducible to concerns over nationallybounded legal inscriptions and=or to ‘‘habitus’’ (i.e., embodied dis-positions, values, perceptions, and practices). Isin suggests that cit-izenship be considered from the standpoint of ‘‘acts,’’ thosesingular moments, ruptures, and deeds whereby subjects enact cit-izenship through creative forms of political claims-making andpart-taking. Echoing Ranciere, Isin (2008) states that ‘‘the essenceof an act, as distinct from conduct, behavior and habit, is that anact is a rupture in the given’’ (25). For Isin, this should not be con-fused with yet another call for ‘‘active’’ citizenship and he makes animportant distinction between ‘‘active’’ and ‘‘activist’’ forms ofengagement: Activist forms are creative, transforming subjectsand scenes, while notions of ‘‘active’’ citizenship found within somany neoliberal governing programs including citizenship edu-cation programs largely work to maintain or solidify the given.According to Isin (2008), ‘‘to act, then, is neither arriving at a scenenor fleeing from it, but actually engaging in its creation. With thatcreative act the actor also creates herself=himself as the agentresponsible for the scene created’’ (27).

A Rancierian perspective compliments and extends this readingof citizenship as creative ‘‘act’’ of political claims-making. First,contra Mouffe, who maintains a commitment to political liberalism,Ranciere’s aesthetic reading of the political enables us to think



citizenship outside and beyond liberal orders of rights and recog-nition. While formally political liberalism grants rights and protec-tions on a universal basis, the discursive and aesthetic space ofthe social is marked informally by persistent hierarchical divisionsand unequal distributions of material and symbolic power. The rolethat Ranciere ascribes to equality within the democratic eventenables us to think a citizenship that explodes these informaldivisions. It does so through the assertion that any expression ofuniversality is necessarily unstable: a result of social struggle.Building on Ranciere, Slavoj Zizek (2000) states that ‘‘politics thusalways involves a kind of short circuit between the Universal andthe Particular: the paradox of the singulier universel, a singular thatappears as the stand-in for the Universal, destabilizing the ‘natural’functional order of relations in the social body’’ (176). The margin-alized enact their equality by making a demand that exceeds itsown particular content, becoming a universal expression that recon-figures the social edifice by revealing and breaking down the exclu-sions internal to it. Following Zizek’s Hegelian motif, one might saythat here equality is made concrete in opposition to the abstractequality granted by the law. This challenge to political liberalismneed not be taken as a rejection of the law per se, but as the recog-nition that the law always stands in confrontation with processes(democratic and otherwise) that exist necessarily outside its domain.

Second, Ranciere situates his conception of democratic politicswithin a theory of education and intellectual emancipation. Onone hand, intellectual emancipation refers to the presuppositionand verification of equality through aesthetic=poetic acts that areshared in common. On the other hand, democratic politics concernsingular polemical moments of antagonism arising from the super-numerary institution of equality that ruptures and redefines thevery social coordinates out of which it emerges. As I have outlined,through Jacotot’s pedagogical reflections, Ranciere situates theegalitarian and poetic valences of thought and intellectual agencyas central to any form of democratic politics. I want to suggest herethat intellectual emancipation can thus be understood as demo-cratic potentiality. This is another way of saying the emancipationis immanent to, yet, irreducible to the political. As equality actedupon in common, intellectual emancipation denotes the potentialfor democratic politics: the capacity of subjects to disarticulateand transform unequal distributions of material shares, powers,and symbolic allotments. This entails the creation of scenes that

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refuse the division between those included from those with no-part,directly challenging and reconfiguring the consensual sedimenta-tions of police logic. Here citizenship is rendered a kind of activist‘‘art’’ or ‘‘poetics’’ of political becoming. This importantly shifts ourtheoretical bearings from considering citizenship solely as an ‘‘act’’of disruptive claims-making or as an ‘‘improper event’’ to the con-ditions that make such eruptions possible. As an ‘‘art,’’ citizenshippoints toward the power of thought as it is exercised in common.This places citizenship beyond the order of mastery, conceiving itinstead on an immanent basis: as the a priori of democratic actionand ‘‘improper’’ part-taking. The art of citizenship thus describesboth the potential and concrete condition of democratic politics.

BECOMING POLITICAL: LESSONS FORCITIZENSHIP EDUCATION

What problems and possibilities might such a political ontologyraise for considering educational processes and for thinking exper-imentally about citizenship education? In order to approach thisquestion it is first useful to make some distinctions betweenRanciere’s theory of education and other pedagogical and philo-sophical approaches, namely, those located broadly within liberaland critical traditions in educational philosophy. Certainly, thereis nothing new about the notion that education and educationalprocesses are fundamental to developing and promotingcitizenship. Citizenship is indeed the central problematic both ofand for democratic education. As Derrick Heater (2004) and manyothers have demonstrated, education has historically been con-sidered the primary means for promoting the habits, values, andpractices of citizenship from ancient Greece up to the present.While the social and theoretical basis of citizenship can be fiercelycontested as evidenced by the sheer multitude of philosophicalarguments, programs, and curricula aimed at citizenship education,a number of generalizations and distinctions can nonetheless bemade that would distinguish a Rancierian approach.

Gert Biesta (2008, 2010) has recently tracked a distinctly modernlogic of emancipation that permeates the legacy of Enlightenmentand liberal thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Emile Durkheim, JohnDewey, among others. Across this wide and diverse spectrum ofthought, questions of emancipation and education are often directly



related to concerns over citizenship as a subjective democraticcapacity; however, this is done so largely within a number of philo-sophical and pedagogical assumptions regarding the progressiveuniversality of modernist reason and the inviolability of the liberaldemocratic order. As Biesta suggests, modernist and liberal ration-alities tend to ascribe a necessary inequality between teacher andstudent mirroring the explicative myth of pedagogy highlightedand criticized by Jacotot and Ranciere. Here the teacher is posi-tioned as ultimate authority responsible for transmitting the formalknowledge and moral principles deemed necessary for creatingproductive liberal citizens. This engenders a pedagogical relation-ship of inequality wherein education reproduces a distinct set ofnaturalized hierarchical distributions of roles and shares. The teacheris positioned as the subject presumed to know, bestowing officialknowledge and inculcating habits of ‘‘good’’ citizenship. Further-more, liberal variants of citizenship education tend to take as a pri-mary goal the assimilation of subjects into a ‘‘proper’’ consensualand universal order of roles and shares. These pedagogical variantsthus tend to operate through the transmission of prescriptive prin-ciples oriented toward promoting functional participation withinthis distribution and to inculcate the capacities to maintain and=or solidify rather than challenge or transform the given order. Inshort, the modernist and liberal legacies in education for demo-cratic citizenship tend to remain ensconced in the normalizingparameters of Ranciere’s police.

For its part, the critical tradition, understood broadly as thoseinsights derived from the Freirian, feminist, and postcolonial lega-cies in critical pedagogy, largely attempts to re-tool these edu-cational assumptions by positing a dialogical relation betweenteachers and students and by emphasizing the liberatory potentialof human agency. Ranciere’s theory of education finds a great dealof resonance with these projects particularly in its emphasis on theimportance of human autonomy in the learning process and eman-cipation as development of critical intellectual and transformativecapacities. However, the critical tradition places its emphasis onidentifying the power relations and ideological conditions of socialinequality and domination as an axiomatic starting point forimagining and engendering democratic citizenship. While this isindeed an essential practice, the critical tradition tends to assumerecognition of social inequality at the outset as condition forintellectual emancipation and political action. In contrast, education

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for a Rancierian art of citizenship as democratic potentiality requiresan inversion of the critical tradition by making equality prior toemancipation and demystification and not the other way around.In other words, by positing a radical a priori equality Ranciere shiftsthe ontological and temporal dimensions and relations between edu-cation and the political onto an immanent terrain. As Tyson Lewis(2009) has argued, in Ranciere’s thought, aesthetic inscriptions ofequality stand as a precondition for the transformation of economicand ideological orders of social inequality within, through, andbeyond pedagogical relations. This compliments and deepens PauloFriere’s maxim that ‘‘education is revolutionary futurity’’ (alwaysnecessarily incomplete) by making immanently political the distinc-tions and continuities between educational processes, democraticagency, and the broader social order. Here citizenship educationwould require intellectual emancipation to become a structuringprinciple. This would demand that knowledge production and learn-ing be rooted of a notion of equality in common: the creative collab-oration of teachers and students outside the specter of mastery.

Ranciere’s thought compliments the critical tradition while offer-ing new imaginings for challenging and reorientating dominanteducational and pedagogical assumptions. Such critical imaginingsare particularly valuable given the normative frames markingrelations between education, curriculum, and citizenship today.Over the last three decades, decision-makers, politicians, and policyleaders have spearheaded a variety of efforts to develop policy fra-meworks and programs directed toward redefining citizenshipwithin education. In a comparative study of educational policy inthe United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, KatharynMitchell (2003) has argued that in line with neoliberal restructuring,Western educational systems have come to target the developmentof citizenship on the model of a market-ready, hierarchically con-ditioned, and politically passive subjectivity. This ideal neoliberal—‘‘strategic cosmopolitan’’—citizen can be identified with a numberof educational frameworks such as the U.S.-based No Child LeftBehind Act, which seeks to orient education policy within the dic-tates of global capitalism and curriculum within the inculcation ofcompetitive entrepreneurial habits and dispositions through theenforcement of rigid systems of testing, discipline, and account-ability. While such policy frameworks do often emphasize ‘‘active’’citizenship through service, voluntarism, and life-long learning,they do so largely by promoting forms of participation that tend



to reinforce, as opposed to challenge, the status quos. Hyslop-Margison and Sears (2006) in a careful survey of contemporaryapproaches to citizenship education have taken up Paulo Freire’s con-cept of false generosity in order to understand and critique this con-struction of ‘‘active’’ citizenship prevalent within contemporarycitizenship programs. They argue that false generosity is defined byencouraging student voluntarism without questioning and=or work-ing to change the systemic conditions that produce social exclusionsin the first place. In contrast, ‘‘true generosity consists not in fightingpoverty by offering temporary relief to neoliberalism’s most visiblevictims, but rather challenging the social and economic structuresthat marginalize individuals in the first place (Hyslop-Margison &Sears 2006, 21).’’ A Ranciereian art of citizenship speaks directly tosuch a conception of ‘‘true generosity’’ formulating it as a disruptiveparadigm of action oriented toward disarticulating and transforminggiven arrangements of power and domination.

Situating civic capacity within the limited and reductive sphere ofthe global economy places severe limitations on the conditions of possi-bility for citizenship education, capturing it within a technocratic andconsumerist order of common sense, and stripping it of its transforma-tive resonances. This is not to suggest that all citizenship education pro-grams today fit snuggly within a neoliberal mold, but that marketlogics form a set of dominant tendencies that limit and constrain thedevelopment of democratic values, capacities, and ‘‘truly generous’’forms of civic and democratic action. For Ranciere, the global marketconsensus serves to mitigate the political by defining for the demosthe ‘‘proper’’ spaces, grounds, and limits of political legibility. Underthe supposedly benevolent universalism of the market, questions con-cerning race, sexism, poverty, ecological sustainability, and social mar-ginalization are rendered invisible through their incorporation in andsubordination to the singular temporality of endless capital accumu-lation. Such a neoliberal consensus in its most strident articulationsmarks ‘‘the reduction of politics to the police . . . the ‘end of politics’and not the accomplishment of its ends . . . the return of the ‘normal’state of things which is that of politics’ non-existence’’ (Ranciere2001, Thesis Ten). In contrast, Ranciere’s thought provides a conceptualapparatus for critiquing and challenging the deadening aesthetics ofneoliberal educational orders and their attendant articulations of cit-izenship. By taking seriously the creative and transformative dynamicsof critical thought and human agency practiced in common, parti-cularly for those bodies and minds denied a part, Ranciere imagines

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a disruptive counterimage of democratic citizenship standing in imma-nent confrontation and disagreement with the stultifying economismand ‘‘false generosity’’ characterizing neoliberal pedagogy and culture.

With this being said, valid questions remain as to how a Rancierianart of citizenship can be made useful for educators and cultural work-ers engaged with building civic and democratic cultures in schoolsand within the broader public sphere. As a variety of criticalcommentators have noted (Badiou 2006; May 2008; Lewis 2009),Ranciere’s ideas resist reduction to a representational or institutionalschema. This is to say that to provide a prescriptive program ormethod for citizenship education is to enter into the field of the policeboth at the level of policy and pedagogy. For Ranciere, this non-accommodation with mastery need not cause undue consternation.While we can never fully escape police orders, institutional structuresand systems of authority can be transformed in the interest of humanfreedom by way of creative collaboration and the proliferation ofdemocratic struggles. Within the process of schooling, this might meandeveloping emancipatory forms of pedagogy that take seriously thechallenge of a radical notion of human equality and democratic possi-bility. This would necessarily require institutional and social change atthe level of policy and culture. It would also require fundamentallyreconsidering the basis for pedagogical authority and the system ofvalue in which it is embedded. Pedagogy for the art of citizenshipwould demand recognizing the autonomy of teachers while at thesame time working to create the conditions that would enable studentsto develop their intellectual and artistic potentiality in common so thatthey may refuse the position assigned to them—to make themselves ofsome account—by speaking, writing, and acting together in ways thatdisrupt and transform unequal and unjust relations within public life.This would mean that intellectual emancipation as equality in com-mon would become the basis from which to imagine an ‘‘improper’’form of education for democratic citizenship.

In this article, I have tried to think through how Ranciere’s ideasconcerning intellectual emancipation and democratic politics con-tribute to thinking experimentally about citizenship and citizenshipeducation. While this article has certainly not exhausted Ranciere’spotential for thinking about these questions, it has suggested thatintellectual emancipation as the verification of equality throughwhat is common provides the substantive foundation for thedemocratic event. This enables us to think citizenship as a kindof activist ‘‘art’’ or ‘‘poetics’’ outside the strictures of political



liberalism and the law. Citizenship is thus something that is‘‘enacted’’ in disagreement rupturing and reconfiguring the percep-tual plane out of which it emerges. Such an art of citizenship pro-vides a critical perspective from which to approach alternativeways of imagining educational processes and pedagogies for cit-izenship education within neoliberal culture. Such pedagogicalcommitments find strong resonance with a long tradition in criticalpedagogy that has rooted democratic education in discourses of eth-ics, hope, and possibility. Education for the art of citizenship offersways to deepen and extend this tradition through ethical and theor-etical propositions and possibilities for engendering nonprescriptivecommitments to equality and democratic potentiality. Not onlywould education for the art of citizenship refuse to subordinatethinking, learning, and teaching to a closed order of perception orvalue, but it would affirm the creative and incipient democraticcapacity of all human beings to interrupt and reconstruct the percep-tual coordinates and material conditions in which they are embed-ded. Such an art would recognize that we are all subject to policeorders, but would assert that democracy is not only always possiblebut immanent and necessary. Ranciere suggests that ‘‘this can pro-voke fear, and so hatred, among those who are used to exercisingthe magisterium of thought. But among those who know how toshare with anybody and everybody the equal power of intelligence,it can conversely inspire courage, and hence joy’’ (Ranciere 2006, 97).

NOTE

1. During the revision stages of this article, I was made aware of a forthcomingbook (Bingham and Biesta 2010) and a special issue ofEducationalPhilosophy andTheory(volume 42 number 5–6) focusing on Ranciere’s thought within the field of education.

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Jacques Rancière, Education, and the Art of Citizenship

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