MODE05

"Instruction: Reducing intelligence" is written by Jan Ritsema for Sarai reader about Jacques Rancière and his efforts to a less destructive education

We think: Teaching can’t be done without instructors, those who explain, who adapt their knowledge to the intellectual capacities of the pupil. We think: No progress without the mediation of such instructors. We think we’re helpless without instructors. We think instructing the most efficient way to make people know. We are surrounded by instructors. In school, church and street, at the dinnertable, in theatre or on TV. So far not good.

What to think about this: almost all of us, regardless of gender, social condition and skin colour, are able to understand and use such a highly complicated system as the language of our parents, our mother tongue, learnt all by ourselves, that is, without the help of a master explicator. All learnt by hearing and retaining, by imitation and repetition, by making mistakes and correcting them, succeeding by chance and then continuing methodically again, by comparing and verifying the not yet known by the known, in short, by using our own general intelligence.

And as soon as the child who learnt to speak by her own intelligence and by instructors who didn’t explain language to her, we think she can’t continue like this any longer. From that moment on she needs instructors, explicators.

But, to explain something to someone is, first of all, to show her she cannot understand it by herself. How come? The child learnt perfectly, all by herself, her mother tongue and not only this, she taught herself how to handle things, how things work and don’t work. All by observing and retaining, repeating and verifying, by relating what she was trying to know to what she already knew, by doing and reflecting about what she had done.
It is the other way around: the pupil doesn’t need the explicator, it is the explicator, the instructor, who needs the incapable, it is he who constitutes the incapable as such. This pedagogical myth divides the world into two. More precisely it divides intelligence into two. It says there is an inferior intelligence and a superior one. The former registers perceptions by chance, retains them, interprets and repeats them empirically, within the closed circle of habit and need. The superior intelligence knows things by reason, proceeds by method, from the simple to the complex, from the part to the whole. It is this intelligence that allows the master to transmit his knowledge by adapting it to the intellectual capacities of the student and allows him to verify that the student has satisfactorily understood what he learned. (We don’t talk about an old-fashioned aged obtuse master who crams his students’ skulls full of poorly digested knowledge. On the contrary, we mean the enlightened schoolmaster, who is knowledgeable and of good faith, who will say: the student must understand and therefore we must explain even better. Such is the concern of the enlightened pedagogue: if the little one doesn’t understand, I will find new ways to explain it to him, ways more rigorous in principle, more attractive in form, and I will verify that he has understood.) Unfortunately, it is just this little word, this slogan of the enlightened -understand -that causes all the trouble. The child who is explained to will devote her intelligence to understand that she doesn’t understand until she is explained to.
But understanding is never more than translating, that is, giving the equivalent of a text, but in no way its reason. There is nothing behind a text, no false bottom that necessitates the work of an other intelligence, that of an explicator. There is stultification whenever one intelligence is subordinated to another. Whoever teaches without emancipating stultifies. Emancipation is that every common person might conceive his own dignity, take the measure of his intellectual capacity and decide how to use it. Whoever emancipates doesn’t have to worry what the emancipated person learns: she will learn what she wants, nothing maybe. The student must see everything for herself, compare and compare, and always respond to a three-part question: what do you see? What do you think about it? What do you make out of it? There is only one power, that of saying and speaking, of paying attention to what one sees and says. One learns sentences and more sentences; one discovers facts, that is, relations between things, and still other relations that are all of the same nature; one learns to combine letters, words, sentences, ideas. It will not be said that one has acquired science, that one knows truth or has become a genius. But it will be known that, in the intellectual order, one can do what any one can do.

Most of what is written here above are quotations from the first 30 pages of ‘The Ignorant Schoolmaster’, the inspiring book of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière. It is a must for everybody who is fed up with the standard repressive learning methods.

I am a theatre director. Sometimes I teach, which means that I give daylong workshops for several weeks to young performance artists, directors, actors, dancers, choreographers. But in both cases, as of the actors who prepare for a piece and students who join a workshop, they all want to be instructed. They all want to know what to do. I call this: “they all want to be under the roof of a task”. Seek to learn some quick techniques they can take home with. I refuse. I always refuse this. I can only teach what the students themselves want to be taught. And I can only do this on a colleagueal base: let’s try to formulate together what we want to know or want to do or have done away with and how we might come to know, to do this, beginning with what we already know. Can we all be and stay the masters of the process of discovering possible answers to the tasks we formulate. Can we keep the learning process transparent, followable and controlable by all of us. Can we all stay emancipated and not subordinated to the authority of the one who has the answers and expertise. In arts education there is a lot of mystification, many instructors who say that they feel that something is right, that it works, without being able to express what it is, to clarify the parameters of their assesment. As all other instructors who make the student believe that it is right what has been taught, art education is even more mystifying.
But they give me hard times. I don’t start when they don’t tell me what their professional concerns are, when they don’t tell me what they are working on and what they want to develop out of that. They have to formulate what their concerns are. Not what they want to be taught, as these would be new techniques and approaches they are not familiar with, which they want to apply as quickly as possible. Quite often the students refuse my proposal. They paid for the workshop and want some clear results. Quite often I have been thrown out of the workshop as the teacher who is unwilling to teach what they want to be taught. Most students refuse to teach themselves. I mostly end up with a handful of students who want to use their own capacities to make something singular to the situation, a problematic arising from the knowledge the group builds by itself. Students who can work by themselves, who do not need me to verify, let alone assess their doings, but who can use me as their sparring partner, co-thinker, as the one who is as curious as they are for the things to be discovered. “Whoever looks always finds. He doesn’t necessarily find what he was looking for, and even less what he was supposed to find. But he finds something new to relate to the thing that he already knows. What is essential is the continuous vigilance, the attention that never subsides without irrationality setting in.” (Rancière, 35-36)
The reason of my stubbornness is that when I do concessions, when I start to agree on using repressive schooling methods, they will continue to do this themselves with others and their artistic work will be repressive towards their audiences. The being repressed not seldom looks for objects and subjects to repress and dominate. A continuous chain of deliberately undergone subordination which corrects and compensates itself by contemptful domination is at work in action and reaction, as some bare law, as something that is part of the human constitution. I do not believe in the concept of human, I observe the conjunctions between the human, the animal and the machine, the organic and anorganic. I don’t think in terms that we are certainly like so and so, or like anything else. We are made and make ourselves and all this making is subject to change.
What is it that allows the thinker to scorn the worker’s contempt for the peasant – like the peasant’s for his wife, the wife for his neighbor’s wife, and so on unto infinity. Social irrationality finds its formula in what could be called the paradox of the “superior inferiors”: each person is subservient to the one he represents to himself as inferior, subservient to the law of the masses by his very pretension to distinguish himself from them. “Thus the social world is not simply the world of non-reason; it is that of irrationality, which is to say, of an activity of the perverted will, possessed by inequality’s passion. (Rancière, 82) Breaking this chain is what motivates me.

Godard in the film “Le scénario du film Passion” tells how he introduced a painting of Tintoretto at the first meeting with the crew and the cast. He had no further ideas than just this painting. He wanted to start a discussion, to develop ideas, ‘but’, he says, ‘they all started to fill it in with themselves’. Their answers to the discussion were limited to the observation “what can I (as the cameraman or as the actress) do with it”. They start and end from what they know. They don’t want to learn anything, they are not after anything else than what they know about themselves and where they think they are good at. Unlike an emancipating student they subordinate to themselves. Self-explication is as stultifying and limiting as explication.

The difference between religion, between belief and knowledge is: no belief with doubt and no knowledge without doubt. About knowledge we can dispute, about belief we can only fight. One cannot believe a little bit in God, Allah, Reincarnation. One can’t say: it might be possible that God or Reincarnation exist. One either believes or does not believe. A belief demands the acceptance of unverifiable factors. It presupposes the truth procedure called subordination which passivizes its subject.
The pedagogical myth, the bare law of pedagogy is that knowledge needs to be taught and student needs to be instructed by a teacher because there is a gap between learning and understanding that the ignorant has to be helped to overcome. She needs the master explicator to explain to her what she doesn’t know, to mediate knowledge. But there is a political mechanism about the act of receiving the words from another. The master explicator explains with authority the right knowledge. Things are as the master has told you. Like in the subordinated relation to what one beliefs, one has to believe the master. Stultification happens when inequality is installed between the master, the possessor of knowledge and the ignorant. The master presents knowledge through making the ignorant dependent of his explanation. The ignorant is made stupid and passive.

In theatre, the field in which I operate, it is common that performance ultimately reduces to arousing emotions in the audience. Art in general is supposed to appeal, first and foremost, to emotions. All the rest is often dismissed as dry intellectualism. The spectator wants to be dragged into another world. She wants to experience, undergo a strangely remote life of another and forget herself in order to find herself back again, more firmly rooted in the common beliefs. She sits there to anticipate something (exciting) to happen. A phenomenon.
Emotions are states of being, as religions are, they know no doubt, they are. Thoughts and ideas we can discuss, emotions we can only fight. Emotions are like truths, like religions and stultifying educations are. ‘Believe me, I feel this, I know this, it is like this, this is how I see it, how I need it to be.’ But nothing is. Everything is in process, is a becoming. Everything and nothing else. I mean: everything and not just something individual, particular standing for the universal.

I see an analogy between the emancipated student and the need to emancipate the Western theatre spectator. The stultification which usually happens in theatre has to do with the subordinating of the spectator to the sentimental and spectacular mechanisms that entertain her. The spectator is invited to observe the performance – a spectacle – from the seat in the dark auditorium with the pathos of distance. She is literally spoken to, and figuratively spoken in the name of, by the performers on stage. The performance succeeds in the extent to which it represents the impossible for the onlooker (the overwhelmingly great, or the infinitely small, the socially/psychologically ‘abnormal,’ the aesthetic ideals of beauty and fragility, as well as the ethics of consolation); or, on the contrary, it may mirror the dramas of everyday life. But in both cases, it represents the difference for the spectator to recognize herself in, or identify with. The performance explicates in that it does the work for the spectator: playing “as-if” and sucking the spectator by stimulating her desire to identify and fill the event with herself. In the Western daily economy the evening out at a performance serves the need for instant condensed experience of a live event. Voluntary subordination.

An emancipated spectator, to follow Rancière’s thought, is invited to the intellectual challenge to observe, relate, compare, verify what she sees with what she knows, provided that there is a wanting necessary for doing, a will for discovering and combining new relations. And not to undergo, nor be impressed by stable opinions about people, the world, the artist, expressing views on the human, the self and the fellow people. Only when the work itself is made out of the will to explore, to discover, instead of confirming the already known in order to communicate the safety of recognizing, presented to the audience as an object for exploration, it provides the consciousness of equality, it states the sovereignty of everybody’s intelligence.

I seek out a situation where the performance looks back. Conventionally performances are made to be looked at. A performance that looks back regards the audience in the plural of emancipated spectators, whose access to the performance, understanding and experiences necessarily differ. I try to make performances which don’t unite the audience in consensus, nor do they split them in an apparent struggle for good/bad meaning, but stimulate them to think further by the proposition of a thought, a reasoning, a bodily movement of thinking and being immersed by a thought-process. Thus they can exit the theatre without leaving their chairs, and make relations with its outside by themselves. Without the panic of losing themselves in the heterogeneity of worlds and registers that might connect in their thinking bodies.

What has been stated here is not some utopia for an other world to be constructed. There is no other world. There is only the activity which emancipates. It keeps me, and I hope the spectators I manage to reach, out of and away from the self-reappropriation that relegated theatre, after the death of the church, to the moral institution of the middle-class.
For us, unlike Hamlet, doesn’t remain only silence. What remains for us to do is to continue the multiplication of ideas and actions.

Jan Ritsema

Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, translated by Kristin Ross, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1991, isbn 0-8047-1969-1