This is from my honors thesis. It was the last essay in that work, and I finished it at the very end of 2010, then revised it in early 2011 and resubmitted it to the university with my small changes. I have been interested in Ranciere's call for a "presupposition of equality" since i first learned of it, and remain interested.
Essentially, what an
emancipated person can do is to be an emancipator: to give, not the key to
knowledge, but the consciousness of what an intelligence can do when it
considers itself equal to any other and considers any other equal to
itself.
~ Jacques Rancière The
Ignorant Schoolmaster (39)
A friend is writing about the sexual
and other abuse she and her siblings experienced as well as the difficult
aftermath, which is, of course, the rest of their lives. She notes that many victims don't know anyone
who has had those experiences and has then gone on to have healthy
relationships and care for themselves competently. She stresses the importance of example, which
is why she is writing her book. Knowing
someone (personally or through the intimacy of a memoir) who has not only survived
but learned to flourish lifts the pervasive hopelessness so many victims
feel. Imagining a better life and
specific ways to create it are crucial.
This makes me think about how
difficult it is to re-imagine and re-create life beyond our commodified,
capitalist society. A professor of mine
said to me we can't have revolutionary education without a revolution. And an unschooling mother I know told me she
believes in living as if the revolution already happened. She buys from small
independent businesses and lives a somewhat Bohemian lifestyle. Like me, she's educated her kids outside of
schools, and their learning has been primarily interest-led. Her 'revolution'
must be quite different than the one my professor, who has taught classes for
years on the Cuban Revolution and African independence struggles, has in
mind. Both applications have their
difficulties. Children grow up to find capitalism and all its attendant ills
waiting. Even while they are kids, wars
rage, ecosystems deteriorate, billions suffer, and their own families' economic
security can dissipate. Those small
businesses she buys from may have employees who are more exploited and less
able to unionize than a large company's workers. Creating spaces outside the commodified
system can keep us from being fully processed or destroyed by it, but we must
find ways to keep these from becoming merely a retreat or private
solution. Relationships which
transgress hierarchies and boundaries teach us things we can't learn any other
way, and remind us over and over, as we confront the suffering of so many, that
the revolution has not happened. But as
much as I respect that professor and recognize the validity of his point, the
problem is that without revolutionary education, we won't have people capable
of bringing about revolution. Thus, we
have to see ourselves to be, not before it, nor after it, but perpetually
making the revolution, and creating revolutionary education in whatever ways
are available to us now.
Telling the truth about the abuse is
an important part of my friend's work, so that people understand how it affects
those forced to endure it, and victims gain some perspective by recognizing
variations of their experience in the lives of so many. She then teaches through example that another
life is possible. The more radical academic theories about society work
similarly to the truth-telling component of her work, with important
exceptions. They provide us with needed insight into the structural realities
in our society, but are too seldom used by students and professors to analyze
our positions and experiences within our own institution. We learn about struggles in other times or
places without applying them to the time and place in which we can actually
have power. Marxist theories explain how
capitalist society perpetuates itself, but Marx's basic tenet is generally ignored:
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point
is to change it” ( Theses on Feuerbach). Thus, radicalism itself is contained,
safely ensconced in class discussions and essays, which then add up to grades,
credits, degrees, and ultimately, jobs in the capitalist economy. This strikes me as somewhat akin to providing
abuse victims with well-developed theories about why their abuse occurs and how
it affects them, but not stopping the actual ongoing rape. It's better than nothing, but falls far short
of an adequate response.
As horrifically common as rape is in this
society, it isn't normalized in the ways that the commodification of life is so
entrenched. What would happen if my
friend had tried to free herself and others, but wherever she went, rape was a
way of life? For those who find the
comparison offensive, I point to ten million people dead from starvation every
year in a world which refuses to feed them, because they don't have paper and
coins to exchange for food. I could also
point to ecological devastation, or locally to the one third of all students in
a charter school who were recently homeless, according to a professor I
know.
Where do we find the examples which
do what my friend's example does, modeling specific actions which add up to
transformed lives? Who can demonstrate for us that a whole society rooted in
love of life is possible? That education
is not to compete against others in a race to turn living beings and
experiences into lifeless objects, but for mutual benefit and growth? Where are the emancipated whom French
philosopher Jacques Rancière says can in
turn become emancipators? How do we wake
up tomorrow or next week or next year with a dramatically better society?
The multitude of possible answers
correspond with the vast array of life itself on this earth. Historical examples can be theorized to
determine how new people with different sets of circumstances to contend with
might apply those lessons. And throughout
this thesis, I call for an education in which we form long-lasting
relationships with the people we learn with, and an education deeply embedded
in the rest of life. The right kind of
relational education, the kind which transgresses authoritarianism, becomes an
oppositional force in itself, leading people to 'take' rights deemed
illegitimate, acting as rescuers. And
because my primary area of study has been literature, I've asked what
literature contributes to relational education, finding that, as the poet Randall Jarrell
said, we learn certain “differing and contradictory truths” through our written
art which can't all be learned in other ways.
Literature teaches us empathy, and shows us fleshed out, extended
embodiments of truth which otherwise might only remain abstract arguments.
Yet relationships which cut across
hierarchy don't always erode authoritarianism.
They may help one individual with a 'higher up' friend, but that isn't
the same as transforming our institutions and society into one which is
participatory and egalitarian.
Relationships can weaken our ability to fight for rights; think of
workers who won't organize or join a union because they are 'friends' with
their bosses. Relationships can even
corrupt, as exemplified by politicians
who initially went into politics to represent the common person but are altered
by their friendships with corporate leaders and other politicians. Or, consider union bureaucrats and lawyers
who have closer relationships with management and the lawyers on the other side
than they do with rank and file union members.
Clearly, for those who want a just,
communal society, not just any kind of relationship will do. We have to ask ourselves: if we model our
relationships after a commodified society's 'business' relationships, how will
we ever move beyond objectified categories
interacting with other objectified categories?
People who protest that they 'simply' have 'nothing in common' with
those who are, in terms of power and privilege in this society, 'less than' and
'other,' perpetuate that reality by making it the defining basis of their
relationships. They accept it as a
static state rather than as a shortcoming in their knowledge and current
comfort zone which can and should be altered.
Would academics say, when encountering a difficult text for the first
time, that they 'simply' have 'nothing in common' with it because understanding
it requires that they stretch beyond who they are now? If they are willing to work at it, to push
beyond their interpretative abilities by spending time with that text, what are
they implying if they're unwilling to broaden themselves in their relationships
with other human beings? Clearly, the
idea driving that decision is that they have nothing of value to learn from
'those people,' that building relationships with them would be only an act of
pity because they cannot imagine an equal relationship. In We
Make the Road By Walking, Paulo Freire tells a story about a student who
goes to the fishing village and keeps questioning a fisherman about who the
president is, who the governor is, or finally, the local authority, and the
fisherman doesn't know the answer to any of these questions. Then the fisherman asks him if he knows the
name of this fish, or how about this one, or surely this one, at least. The student knows none of them. The fisherman replies, “Do you see? Each one with his own ignorance” (150).
I don't have one recipe for how to
form these relationships or for creating relational education. But I know that unless we make a conscious
choice to forge egalitarian relationships, we'll tend to revert to what feels
'natural.' We live in a society
saturated in authoritarianism and inequality; what seems normal and standard to
most people is often fundamentally unjust, ultimately held onto because it
props up privilege or because people are attached to it as a tradition. A situation in which some people have a
certain natural authority in the sense that they have a knowledge base or set
of skills that other people want to learn from them does not require the
perpetuation of hierarchical relationships.
Friends can teach friends; it happens all the time. What is harder is for friends to grade
friends or pay them as little as possible or fire them. But that is precisely my point. It should be hard – so hard that we
ultimately recognize the inherent inequality in it, and let go of these worn
out methods for humans to dominate other humans.
There are ways to push toward
greater relationship even with those acting as oppressors, if we do so from a
position of strength. In his sermon,
“The Drum Major Instinct,” Dr. Martin Luther King explained that while he and other
demonstrators were in a Birmingham jail, the white wardens liked coming to talk
about “the race problem” arguing for segregation and against demonstrating and
intermarriage. Because he always tried
“to do a little converting,” Dr. King reasoned with them about their true position
without weakening his stance.
And then we got down one
day to the point—that was the second or third day—to talk about where they
lived, and how much they were earning. And when those brothers told me what
they were earning, I said, "Now, you know what? You ought to be marching
with us. You're just as poor as Negroes." And I said, "You are put in
the position of supporting your oppressor, because through prejudice and
blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in
American society oppress poor white people. And all you are living on is the
satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking
that you are somebody big because you are white. And you're so poor you can't
send your children to school. You ought to be out here marching with every one
of us every time we have a march. (King)
King was
'speaking truth to power' while inviting the holders of what is in actuality a
pseudo-power – a force for their own oppression – to cast it off by opening their eyes, joining
their fellow oppressed human beings and taking hold of genuine, meaningful
power. By explaining it this way to his
listeners, Dr. King called them to do the same, to not water down their convictions but to magnify them by
using them to bring as many as possible around to seeing clearly.
In King's interactions with these white wardens, he did not in any way replicate their notions of him as an 'inferior' speaking to 'superiors.' He instead enacted what Rancière calls a “presupposition of equality.” In her translator's introduction to Rancière's book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Kristin Ross explains his position:
In King's interactions with these white wardens, he did not in any way replicate their notions of him as an 'inferior' speaking to 'superiors.' He instead enacted what Rancière calls a “presupposition of equality.” In her translator's introduction to Rancière's book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Kristin Ross explains his position:
Rancière's critique of
the educational theories of Bourdieu, Althusser, and Milner shows them to have
at least one thing in common: a lesson in inequality. Each, that is, by beginning with inequality,
proves it, and by proving it, in the end, is obliged to rediscover it again and
again. Whether school is seen as the
reproduction of inequality (Bourdieu) or as the potential instrument for the
reduction of inequality (Savary), the effect is the same: that of erecting and
maintaining the distance separating a future reconciliation with a present
inequality, a knowledge in the offing from today's intellectual impoverishment
– a distance discursively invented and reinvented so that it may never be
abolished … But what if equality, instead, were to provide the point of
departure? What would it mean to make
equality a presupposition rather than a goal, a practice rather than a reward
situated firmly in some distant future so as to all the better explain its
present infeasibility?
When I was
a child, my parents periodically played in our home an album of Dr. King's
sermons. My parents, and my father in particular, do not play anything they
love at low volumes; they play it loud, and they call your attention to it by
occasionally saying things like, “Isn't that great?!” and (in response to especially key moments in
songs or speeches), “He's working it!”
They are not fans of the tepid.
And by not only exposing us to these speeches, but responding to them
with strong emotion, my parents helped us learn to connect the moral,
intellectual, and socially significant with the emotional.
“The Drum Major Instinct,” preached
at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia,
on February 4, 1968, is the sermon I most remember. King begins with Mark 10:35.
Imagining that Jesus
will soon restore the kingship and rule the earth, two of Jesus' apostles,
James and John, have asked to sit on his right and left hands when that time
comes. In walking us through this
passage, King manages to simultaneously empathize with us, lead us to empathize
with James and John as well as the other apostles, make us honest with
ourselves, and identify a crucial aspect of human nature:
But before we condemn
them too quickly, let us look calmly and honestly at ourselves, and we will
discover that we too have those same basic desires for recognition, for
importance. That same desire for attention, that same desire to be first. Of
course, the other disciples got mad with James and John, and you could
understand why, but we must understand that we have some of the same James and
John qualities. And there is deep down within all of us an instinct. It's a
kind of drum major instinct—a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the
parade, a desire to be first. And it is something that runs the whole gamut of
life.
Then,
doing something I haven't heard preachers do in quite the same way when
visiting friends' churches, King shares elements of his secular education in a
way which brings his audience in on that knowledge. His knowledge isn't
presented patronizingly or used to exclude.
He doesn't assume that his listeners know what he's talking about, not
does he assume that they don't know. It
is a metaphorical breaking of bread, an offering of what he can
contribute.
We all want to be
important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade.
Alfred Adler, the great psychoanalyst, contends that this is the dominant
impulse. Sigmund Freud used to contend that sex was the dominant impulse, and
Adler came with a new argument saying that this quest for recognition, this
desire for attention, this desire for distinction is the basic impulse, the
basic drive of human life, this drum major instinct.
What I
find particularly moving here, and again, later, when King mentions reading
back periodically in Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is that
he's not conceiving of his audience, as Eduardo Galeano puts it, as “heads and
hands.” This is a practice or
“verification” of Rancière's presupposition of equality.
My father was a carrier for the post office,
but he didn't limit himself to being merely a set of hands to deliver the
mail. My mother worked as a part time
bank teller, and she didn't think her mind was only good for holding onto a
monetary sum while she counted out cash to people with her hands. I don't know where they got the idea that of
course they would grapple with the intellectual (always in concert with the
emotional on some level), but they've always done this. Big topics were not discussed in their homes
growing up, but they were discussed in our home. We had no family or friends with any sort of
college degrees, and so we had no ideas about how we were 'supposed' to analyze
the material we read or listened to or viewed in conjunction with the world
around us, past and present. We just did
it, according to what made sense to us, freely debating with one another when
points of disagreement arose (often talking at the same time, but somehow
understanding each other). We were in
the conversation, whether the accredited intellectuals conversed with us or
not. And anyway, we had their books, and
so we could make them 'talk' to us. But King freely brings us all in on the conversation here.
Near the end, embracing the full
equality and humanity in everyone, he emphasizes Jesus' response and its
significance:
He said in substance,
"Oh, I see, you want to be first. You want to be great. You want to be
important. You want to be significant. Well, you ought to be. If you're going
to be my disciple, you must be."
But he reordered priorities. And he said, "Yes, don't give up this
instinct. It's a good instinct if you use it right …Keep feeling the need for
being important. Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be
first in love. I want you to be first in moral excellence. I want you to be
first in generosity ..." And he
transformed the situation by giving a new definition of greatness … If you want
to be important—wonderful. If you want to be recognized—wonderful. If you want
to be great—wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be
your servant. That's a new definition of greatness.
And this morning, the
thing that I like about it: by giving that definition of greatness, it means
that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don't have to
have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and your
verb agree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve.
You don't have to know Einstein's theory of relativity to serve. You don't have
to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul
generated by love. And you can be that servant.
Many of us
have been taught variations of this principle: “the greatest among you shall be
your servant.” But King makes the
principle exciting, makes it something to strive for, a way to achieve
“greatness,” rather than something to abjectly submit to. With the overt mention of Plato, Einstein's
theory, thermodynamics, and so on, he
simultaneously marries the intellectual to the moral while transcending it, so
that they're bound up together.
His conclusion must be listened to or at least
read in its entirety with his voice in your head; summarizing it can't begin to
do it justice. Repeatedly, he talks
about how he wants to be remembered after he dies. (And two months after this sermon, he was
killed.) It's a kind of poem, or music
even, to my ears. For all my remembered life, I've had that cadence in my head:
I'd like for somebody to
say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to love somebody.
I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question.
I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry.
And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked.
I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question.
I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry.
And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked.
I want you to say on
that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison.
I want you to say that I
tried to love and serve humanity.
Yes, if you want to say
that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I
was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of
the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind.
I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just
want to leave a committed life behind. And that's all I want to say.
If I can help somebody
as I pass along …. then my living will not be in vain.
This was
part of my revolutionary education. I'm
not conventionally religious, but this ethic of service and of wanting the
legacy of a “committed life” is at the core of any genuinely radical challenge
to the individualist, competitive, exploitative status quo. Many years later, while in my professor's
class on the Cuban revolution, I read Che Guevara's “Socialism and Man,” and
found a similar emphasis on the cruciality of love and service:
At the risk of seeming
ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings
of love. It is impossible to think of a
genuine revolutionary lacking this quality … One must have a large dose of
humanity, a large dose of a sense of justice and truth in order to avoid
dogmatic extremes, cold scholasticism, or an isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of
living humanity is transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as
examples, as a moving force. (225, 226)
Two of the vitally important revolutions in the twentieth century were the Civil Rights
movement and the Cuban Revolution.
Against formidable enemies and a seemingly entrenched status quo, both
succeeded. Their philosophies and practices were far from identical, but in both we find relationship and solidarity driving the
determination to 'take' rights for not only themselves, but with the exploited,
the 'less than' and 'other.' Or, as José
Martí, the revolutionary from Cuba's first revolution put it, “With the poor of
the earth, I want to cast my luck.”
Love, creativity, service, courage, and
integrity should drive and define our educational practices and our entire way
of being in the world. Together they
nourish the healthiest kind of growth in both the individual and society as a
whole. This is what education, art, and life itself is for.
Works Cited
Galeano, Eduardo. We Say No: Chronicles 1963-1991. New York: Norton, 1992. Print.
Guevara, Ernesto. “Socialism and Man in Cuba.” Che Guevara Reader. Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2003.
Horton, Myles & Freire, Paulo.
We Make the Road By Walking: Conversations On Social Change. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1990.
King, Martin Luther.
“The Drum Major Instinct.” http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/the_drum_major_instinct/
Rancière, Jacques. The
Ignorant Schoolmaster. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1991.
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