Miško Šuvaković Epistemology of Art - TkH

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Self-education appears as an effect of critique and decentering the
‘empirocentric’ role of the charismatic teacher who, from the centre
of his ‘stage’, performs an exceptional situation of initiation and
bestowing contingencies of knowledge upon his fellows of choice.
Nevertheless, self-education also appears as an effect of critique and
decentering the ‘empirocentric’ role of the bureaucratic teacher who
represents the power of the institution by way of his choices, value
judgements, validation and implementation of its standards. One of
the paramount critiques of the ‘school/teacher’ power structure was
outlined by Roland Barthes in his essay ‘Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers’
from 1971. Barthes described the complex process of introducing
asymmetric and unstable relationships into the teaching process in a
brief and critically precise manner, as follows:
In short, within the very limits of teaching space as given, the need is
to work at patiently tracing out a pure form, that of a floating (the very
form of the signifier); a floating which would not destroy anything but
would be content simply to disorientate the Law. The necessities
of promotion, professional obligations (which nothing then prevents
from being scrupulously fulfilled), imperatives of knowledge, prestige
of method, ideological criticism – everything is there, but floating. 187
In his Leçon 188 for Collège de France, Barthes argued that teacher’s
task is to daydream his research – not to judge, select, inaugurate,
nor subordinate himself to specialized knowledge.
On the other hand, it turned out that liberal emancipatory schools,
in their efforts to provide uniform education to pupils/students from
different social strata and classes, most commonly – failed. According
to Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron’s sociological critique
of practices of public education 189 , this failure results from the fact
187 Roland Barthes, „Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers“, from Stephen Heath (ed), Roland
Barthes: Image Music Text, Hill and Wang, New York, 1977, p. 215.
188 Roland Bart, „Pristupna Beseda“, Treći program RB no. 51, Belgrade, 1981, pp. 173-
189. (Roland Barthes, Leçon, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1978)
189 Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron, Monique de Saint Martin, Academic Discourse
– Lingusitic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power, Polity Press, Cambridge
GB, 1994.
that in ‘emancipatory liberal schools’ the knowledge transfer appears
as detached from social inequalities. In other words, such schools
have been raising a ‘fence’ against the society, while seeking the ideal
autonomy of educational processes. They failed to adapt their educational
content (exert particularization of universal knowledge) to
students from different social strata, notably those excluded – due
to family background – from high elite culture. As opposed to the
liberal emancipatory school, ‘republican school’ – e.g. according to
Jules Ferry – also used protection of the school walls against social
inequalities, but not to lower its criteria, but to provide a fair encounter
with universal knowledge to all its beneficiaries, whereas position
of the teacher was in critical and auto-critical terms submitted to
assessment and discussion, determinated as it was by essential educational
disparities between the one who knows and the one who is being
taught. Both liberal and republican models faced contradictions pertaining
to the ‘right to knowledge’, and relations between particular
and universal knowledge. Furthermore, Jacques Rancière notes that
engagement with contemporary school in mass market conditions of
contemporary ‘democratic individualism’, manifests itself as ‘average
knowledge’ for the equal or equal knowledge for the indifferent. 190 In
his lectures on intellectual emancipation 191 , Rancière pointed out the
contingencies of activation and engagement of creative intelligence,
ever to open and govern the learning process. He started from a
strong argument that all humans possess potentialities of intelligence,
whereas the very process of education contains elements of inequality
eventually to be externalized. What propels students’ intelligence
is not the ‘master’ 192 , but their desire/will to know, and that will –
regardless of their social status – excels in learning as emancipatory
change. Rancière’s philosophy of education reclaims the role and im-
190 Jacques Rancière, „Od pobjedonosne do zločinačke demokracije“, from Mržnja
demokracije, Naklada Ljevak, Zagreb, 2008, pp. 33-42. (Jacques Rancière, La haine
de la démocratie, La Fabrique, Paris, 2005)
191 Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation,
Stanford Univetsity Press, Stanford CA, 1991.
192 Jacques Rancière, „An Intelectual Adventure“, from The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five
Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1991,
pp. 1-18.