Table of contents
1. Introduction…1 2.1 The framework…5 2.2 Method of reflexivity…9
2.3 Method of equality…12 3.1 Between two methods…15 3.2 The normativity of methods …16
3.3 Reworking the map…17 4.1 Education…21
4.2 The Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute…21 5. Method beyond the DGEI…27
6. Conclusion…29 7. Epilogue…32
1. Introduction
In the introduction of a thesis it is customary and also required to discuss the research question I address, the method in which I carry out my project, the theoretical framework that drives me, and provide an outline of the thesis. I will start from the last one and then I will move to discuss the rest.
I wanted to trace the debate between Bourdieu and Rancière that took place over pedagogy and education. By trying to do that, I realised that their disagreement is not anchored on the same theme -domination-, as it is has been portrayed so far. When I started reading them and having in mind to trace their disagreement I realised that such a disagreement goes beyond the question of how to counter-act domination in education. In fact, my research led me to see that the disagreement reaches the very manner in which they provide an ontology and the manner in which they try to legitimise such fundamental conceptual connections or disconnections. In short, then, the disagreement is anchored in the reflexive accounts they give about what they do. In this way, I came to understand it as based on their different understanding with which they try, on the one hand, to give conceptual tools in order to understand education and, on the other hand, to provide a legitimation of the nature and the choice of those tools.
Such tracing of their disagreement led me to see that their difference in ontology as well as in its legitimation is based on an agreement. The common feature that their disagreement flourishes on is the project of ‘radical Enlightenment’, if by this term we understand a project in which (1) reason provides its own self-constitution, and therefore what is at stake is the form the configurations of power take as configurations of the people (thought as demos and not as ethnos), and a project in which (2) these auto-configurations of power define and get defined by who counts as people and who does not. I add the adjective ‘radical’, because it seems to me that they want to think through this project in its most far-reaching implications through the way they try to provide a self-legitimation of their conceptual apparatus.
At that point of my research, I realised that I cannot approach them without having a framework that would let me see their disagreement the way I described it above: as a disagreement in the manner they provide the legitimation for their ontologies, their fundamental conceptual distinctions and connections they make. That is, since their disagreement is based upon a project that has to do with a radical self-founding of ontologies, it seemed to me to follow that I would try to develop a framework that would help me at the same time do two moves. (1) First, it would help me understand the manner in which they build the self-legitimation of their ontologies and in this way I could see what would count and what form it would take in the first place a ‘building of the self-legitimation of their ontologies’. (2) Secondly, the development of a general framework of my ‘own’ making -in short, an ontology- would help me trace not only what self-legitimation means and how this takes place in Rancière and Bourdieu, but also it would provide me with the rough guidelines as to what pitfalls and problems we can see in their project and what could be some possible ways out of them. The phrase of ‘my own’ should be thought in the weakest possible sense and probably ironically (that is the use of the quotation marks there), because it came out of my engagement with these two thinkers and it was written chronologically last, after I had written everything else. The fact that in the
ordering of the material it appears before the reading of Bourdieu and Rancière is due to the first reason I said. Otherwise I would have to make a lot of deviations in order to show my main arguments. The lack of reference to them while I develop my ‘own’ framework is also for the same reason: while writing about them, their thought grew on me and in the end I could not distinguish what part of Bourdieu and Rancière came to fit where in my account.
I tried to provide an immanent reading of their accounts of self-legitimation. The reason is not only due to the close reading I offer (I hope), but mainly because I tried to provide ‘my’ account of knowledge self-legitimation by building on the conceptual knots and dissociations they provided in the first place. In this sense, I used the same materials they used for their framework and I stayed and hopefully I advanced my thesis about self-legitimation within the project of the enactment of a radical version of Enlightenment. My critique on Bourdieu follows the line of similar critiques that have advanced towards him, especially from the side of Rancière. Against Bourdieu I claim that the manner he provides an account of of his ontology leads him to exempt his position from the rules of the social that he himself has laid down. My critique of Rancière is different in nature, due to the different way their acts of self-legitimation are staged. I show that Rancière’s claim about the enactment of equality, also in his own philosophical practice, can be made possible and seen as successful only because the nature of this enactment excludes any spatial -institutional and bodily- considerations.
However, I did not want to limit my research only to a textual reworking of these critiques and most importantly I did not want to provide a reworking of their framework without thinking the direct implications of such a reworking. For this reason, an experiment that comes from the early days of the tradition of urban geography -the ‘Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute’ (DGEI)- provides the testing ground in order to measure what kind of actual relations my reworking of Bourdieu and Rancière in the direction of radical Enlightenment can enact.
Central to my main argument are two ideas. First, that any attempt to explain, provide a legitimation or give a reflexive account of knowledge is not a depth (an explanation) of this knowledge but always new knowledge. Therefore, the act of knowledge self-legitimation does not give transparency or self-awareness to knowledge, but instead produces a dynamic split within knowledge: knowledge is always in a process of doubling, in a process of producing itself by distancing itself from itself when it tries to give an account of itself. The dynamic paratactical splitting of knowledge that happens every time it tries to provide its own self-legitimation gives knowledge a strict futurity. At the same time, the futurity of this split takes place as a logic of lack-surplus. That is, knowledge always lacks its own understanding, and at the same time knowledge always is a surplus, because its splitting is production of new knowledge.
From this follows the second main idea of my argument, that the process of knowledge splitting itself is where we have to inquire in order to see what kind of relations are produced in the world. Therefore, this process, this mode of knowledge auto-production, is the normative element in knowledge, exactly because it is where relations are created, destructed or changed. That leads me to claim that the manner which
knowledge doubles itself has reality-generating capacities. That is, knowledge is always an enactment of thinking and doing followed and preceded only by other enactments of thinking and doing.
Consequently, these two moves permit me to see knowledge as a manner of self-production and at the same time to see this manner as a continuously poietic, creative move. In this sense, I understand the making of conceptual separations, connections and dissociations -in short, the making of ontological relations- as a matter of poiesis and not as a matter of description of a reality ‘out there’. Understanding ontology in this way, then, means that it always is a polemic and strategic move as much as it is a creative move, a move that shapes relations between enactments of thinking and doing. Therefore, I do not understand ontology as theory. To put it differently, theoretical activity is always a move that makes and remakes reality, by denying, affirming or negotiating orderings of voices in time and orderings of bodies in space.
Always with the help and the immanent reworking of Bourdieu and Rancière, I tried to see how a certain arrangement of ontology would help me to advance the idea of enacting a radical Enlightenment after I had showed how Bourdieu’s and Rancière’s ways of self-legitimation had partly failed. Following them in the materials they used to construct and legitimise their ontologies -these were two, discourse and practice-, I tried to strike for a relation of simultaneity between discourse and practice without reducing the workings of the one to the other. In this way, I ended up with a formation of discourse and practice where in order to understand the ordering of voices (discourse) we have to necessarily and simultaneously take into account the ordering of bodies (practice) and vice versa. That is, there is a fundamental relation between how voices are ordered with the ordering of the space in which they are articulated.
To show the (radical, I think) implications of this relation of simultaneity -that again, I am not its first proponent- I moved to the example of the DGEI. There I showed how knowledge has to be simultaneously thought in its discursive and practical happening, what kind of relations this practically entails, and what are the possibilities for enacting a self-legitimation of knowledge that is consistent with the dynamic, paratactic account of knowledge I gave earlier (and thus in line with enacting a more radical version of Enlightenment). In the end, extrapolating from the practice of the DGEI, I considered how such enactment of of thinking and doing could be seen as a radical form of immanent institutional critique. In this spirit, I closed the main body of the thesis with a part where I explain how attempts to conceptualise the idea of knowledge self-legitimation have been consistently restrictive in their potential of enacting different realities.
So far, I developed the outline of my thesis. Narratively I put it in such a way in order to give the idea that the project I tried to carry out was an explorative one. This explorative character, however, is not about presenting my research in an after-the-fact way. Rather, it fuels it performatively. That element plays out in the organisation of the material of the thesis. That is, the way of organising the material cannot be understood as a neutral move (cf. Benjamin 1998). I do not want to put the research question, the methodology and the theoretical framework as if they hold a different status from the explorative process one undertakes when one writes. Therefore, I want to emphasise the explorative process of a research by not separating the methods I proceed, the questions I address, and the theory I use, from something that would
follow them, as if it would be something different from them. One finds methods, questions, and theory as one proceeds. Trying to present this process away from the manner one proceeds will not show this character of the research. I thought the place to put in practice these thoughts was the introduction.
This gives a certain circularity to my project. If the questions, the method, and the theory come out in the way I proceed, then whatever attempt I make to situate my project will again fuel all these three and thus become part of them. This is the reason that I chose to start abruptly and out of the blue. I thought that it would be interesting to put this circularity in this way, by putting first the seemingly more abstract part and then the more empirical one. Avoiding any kind of introductory remarks and starting with what should normally come last would reinforce the idea of circularity. In that way I aimed also to performatively show one of my arguments: that the making of ontological relations matters as much as the examples we take, because they work in a simultaneous way. Admittedly, this is not the only way nor the most clear one of showing this argument.
2.1 The framework
When you imagine a sword going through the boundary of the world, […] you conceive every place the sword reaches as a part of the world. -Descartes, Letter to More of April 15, 1649
[A]n ontology remains a kind of poem and you still have to understand how it constructs poetically its own relation to what it is supposed to ground. -Ranciere, 2005, 300
By knowledge I mean the enactment of thinking and doing. Enactment here should be thought not as a double process, i.e. that which exists and causes the enactment, and the enactment itself, the result. Instead, the enactment should be thought as deflated, and therefore thinking and doing are only preceded and followed by thinking and doing.
Having said that, an account of knowledge is the attempt to legitimise this enactment of thinking and doing. An ‘account of knowledge’ seems to denote something different from knowledge but actually it does not: the self-awareness that such an enactment shows is again thinking and doing and falls on the same deflated level as before. It is important to see this as a historical matter: since (at least after Enlightenment) we cannot imagine knowledge without an attempt to legitimise itself, then we have to accept that knowledge and accounts of knowledge go hand in hand. That is, the need of legitimation of thinking and doing is simultaneous with and ‘inherent’ in thinking and doing.
From this it follows that enactments of thinking and doing are, first, a world-making activity, and secondly, inherently normative. About the first, it is easy to see why they are poietic: enactments of thinking and doing means a capacity for and a realisation of reality-generation. About the second: since they are by definition reality-generating, then normativity means that this poietic activity is not a neutral act, but that it is always a certain kind of reality-generation. We have to note here that normativity lies on the same deflated level as thinking and doing, and therefore enactment of thinking and doing is by definition normative, as it is by definition reality-generating. As a result, it goes without saying that a judgement of the normativity of an enactment of thinking and doing is another normative judgement, and hence another enactment of thinking and doing.
We said that ‘knowledge’ and ‘account of knowledge’ are tautologous, because both are enactments of thinking and doing, yet the fact that a legitimation of knowledge is given through knowledge creates a split within the enactment. That is, knowledge tries to give an account of knowledge, i.e., legitimise itself with a move to go beyond itself and establish its own limits as observable from within and without, and yet ‘fails’ to acquire a self-transparency, because an account of knowledge is again enactments of thinking and doing. The split is both the attempt and the failure of knowledge to go beyond itself.
In this sense, we can say that there is a split between ‘knowledge’ and ‘account of knowledge’, or between knowledge as positivity and knowledge as its conditions of possibility. From the one hand, then, there is the enactment as a poietic activity, and on the other hand there is the enactment as an account of legitimation of this poietic activity. Knowledge embodies its own limit, its own ground, as continually confronted but never overcome. This split is caused by the attempt of knowledge to provide a justification of itself, and in this attempt it doubles itself, because it fails to go beyond it.
Of course, this split is paratactical: thinking and doing precedes and comes after thinking and doing. The poietic activity of knowledge and the legitimation of this activity are one and the same (enactments of thinking and doing), so any account of legitimation of knowledge is again knowledge and not something different. This split is embodied in the enactment, so it cannot be a split that separates two different things (e.g. thinking and doing from something else). As we said, there is no ‘depth’ in knowledge, something that precedes or follows it. It is a split that emmanes in the enactment. Therefore, the attempt of legitimation of knowledge creates a split in its attempt to justify itself, yet this attempt is again enactments of thinking and doing. We have to think this split, or this doubling, in paratactical terms and not in terms of transparency. An account of knowledge then should not be thought as the depth -the transparency- of knowledge.
In this paratactical split, between knowledge and account of knowledge, we have to look for the manner which it happens. That is, enactments of thinking and doing express their reality-generating, normative, effects in the moment they double themselves. Of course, because this doubling is paratactical, we have to look at the way, at the manner this happens and not to look for normativity at the account of knowledge, as if it is something that has made knowledge transparent. There then, in this doubling of knowledge on itself as something different from itself, is where we can inquire what kind of reality is enacted. The split is a manner of knowledge production, and this manner provides the key to see what normativity knowledge has.
The manner which enactments of thinking and doing generate reality -via the split between knowledge and account of knowledge- operates with the logic of the υπόλοιπο (remainder). This word signifies not only that in a process of transformation a part is leftover, was not fully transformed, and therefore the transformed part carries on with a lack (non-transparency of knowledge). Also, it signifies that this leftover is a surplus in a process of transformation and therefore the transformed part does not really lack in something (the splitting of knowledge as new knowledge). The remainder is a lack and a surplus at the same time. To transpose this to the paratactical split between ‘knowledge’ and ‘account of knowledge’: the attempt to provide an account of knowledge as the transparency of knowledge creates knowledge again and therefore the split between them produces a lack and a surplus at the same time. It produces a lack, because the account of knowledge does not become the depth of knowledge. It produces a surplus, because the account of knowledge becomes new knowledge.
In other words, the attempt to provide a self-legitimation leads to new enactments of thinking and doing, so an account of knowledge tries to leave knowledge behind (the lack), but in the end it produces again itself, new knowledge (surplus). This shows how any attempt of knowledge to articulate its own legitimation
gives -instead of transparency- again knowledge, enactments of thinking and doing. That establishes a remainder at the heart of any account of knowledge, any attempt of self-legitimation. In every enactment of thinking and doing there is always a remainder, one that makes enactments to always have a ‘shadow’, something that does not permit them to be transparent, while at the same time this ‘shadow’ creates their reality-generating activity. To sum up, the split between knowledge and account of knowledge is an remainder (both a lack and a surplus) and the split takes place as a manner of expression/production. Therefore, the remainder signifies a manner of expression/production, the kind of reality-generation we have.
Now it is important to recognise that the logic of the remainder, because it expresses how enactments of thinking and doing are produced, becomes also a way to conceptualise the relations between enactments themselves. Knowledge is inherently intersubjective, for this reason. That is, enactments generate new enactments and these are always paratactical and always in a relation of lack-surplus. Therefore, the relations among enactments of thinking and doing and the new ones have to be thought within the manner of production that the remainder signifies. Because of the paratactical nature of the split and the fact that the remainder is a process, we can say that the intersubjective relations between enactments can never be denoted. Put differently, any denotative act is also a poietic one, so the conceptualisation of intersubjective relations within knowledge have to be thought that the very act of conceptualising is both the stage and the staging of intersubjective relations between enactments of thinking and doing. The relations are paratactical, so any conceptualisation of intersubjective relations is an act of creating them.
The result of this is that the manner in which an account of knowledge generates intersubjective relations is not to be located in the manner it describes them, but in the manner it stages them. Any attempt to describe and capture an enactment of thinking and doing is at the same time a creation of a relation to this enactment, and not its explanation. Staging is not something that precedes or follows the enactment of thinking and doing, but rather it is the manner this enactments take place and happen. In this sense any description of intersubjective relations, e.g. in philosophical texts, are a staging of intersubjective relations themselves and not denotative of something else. That is, any denotative and connotative move is inherently a poietic move.
To put this in another way, the enactments of thinking and doing cannot articulate their limit as if to look it and understand it from the outside. This limit seems more like a horizon, hence becomes an ‘internal’ limit. Therefore, the articulation of the relations between of enactments of thinking and doing (intersubjective relations) are not describable or captured, but made and enacted at the time they are described or said or captured. The moment we try to capture these relations -give an account of knowledge- we are producing these relations with the manner we are trying to capture them. The enactments of thinking and doing then are ways of interrelation between them.
So far we have said that the split between knowledge and account of knowledge is a remainder (both a lack and a surplus), that this is a manner of expression/production, and that this manner of expression is itself a production of relations between enactments of thinking and doing. And to connect it with the ones
that came before, this manner of production is where we find the kind (the normativity) of the reality-generating effects of knowledge.
In order not to have to use this whole paragraph every time, I am going to give the name ‘method’ in order to signify the logic of paratactical split and of the remainder as a manner of knowledge production in the act/attempt of knowledge self-legitimation. Method here is a specific term, and as such it is going to be used from now on. Method then signifies the kind of reality that a manner of self-grounding generates in the act of its self-grounding. Method is of importance here, because it covers the manner in which reflexive accounts of knowledge in their doubling (positivity and conditions of possibility, or knowledge and accounts of knowledge) enact such and such kind of poiesis.
We have to think method then as a dramaturgy. That is, what counts as method each time is not the same, but we have to look into it each time to understand under what terms the reality-generation takes place, i.e., how knowledge tries to legitimise itself. Each time there is a different staging of knowledge self-legitimation. Enactments of thinking and doing follow and are followed by enactments of thinking and doing, so each time we have to see what kind of enactments happen and take place. They are not the same every time.
That gives method an unstable character, because what knot of enactments will be brought to light each time will be different and it will create a different ‘map of (im)possibilites’ each time (another name for the scenes of dramaturgy that are enacted). That is, the moment of examining the splitting of knowledge when knowledge tries to legitimise itself, is a moment that we bring to the fore such and such relations and intersections between enactments, and therefore the visibility that is created in this instances permits us to see, think and do certain things. The bringing-together, what is made visible each time, is what stages and re-stages enactments of thinking and doing. There is an infinite, unstable intersectionality in the dramaturgy of method, because the very limits and the very elements that count in the staging of a scene of knowledge self-legitimation are not fixed nor objective.
Thus, we start with method in order to inquire into kinds of reality-generation. Here is the moment to introduce and stage the Bourdieu-Rancière debate, in order to make these remarks more concrete. Despite their manifest differences, both ask the question of knowledge in its doubleness. That is, even though they provide different framings and answers of the question of knowledge, it is on the basis that they both try to account for the doubleness of knowledge that a debate between them can be staged. Both ask: what kind of legitimation do they see themselves offering for the knowledge they produce? What kind of epistemologico-ontological presence do they construct?
I proceed in the following way. I treat them each separately, Bourdieu in the section ‘method of reflexivity’ and Ranciere ‘method of equality’. Each time we have to do with two different ways knowledge self-legitimation is staged. First, every time I show that they actually ask the question of knowledge as I put it here. Second, I see how they frame what counts as relevant for knowledge construction and in what way they try at to provide an account of knowledge through their framing of knowledge. In this sense, I am able to see the accounts of knowledge they produce as expressions of enactment of reality-generation (method) and
therefore thirdly, I can show what I think are the pitfalls of each one in the way they provide these accounts of knowledge: that is, see how they create intersubjective relations by staging them.
2.2 Method of reflexivity
Here I am examining reflexivity as method. To begin with, let’s establish that what Bourdieu does is a self-grounding move that aims to give an account of knowledge: “all the propositions that this science [sociology] enunciates can and must be applied to the subject who practices this science”. This “objectifying”-the name that the account of knowledge goes by- is necessary (“must”) in order to establish a democratic understanding of scientific discourse. Otherwise, “the sociologist proves right those who see in him [or her] a sort of terrorist inquisitor, available to carry out all the actions required by symbolic policing” (Bourdieu 1990, 177).
Bourdieu says that such self-legitimation takes place at the level of the propositions of science. However, what determines these propositions does not actually come from them: “[t]he naive question of the power of words is logically implicated in the initial suppression of the question of the uses of language, and therefore of the social conditions in which words are employed” (Bourdieu 1991, 107). In fact, “[i]t is clear that all the efforts to find, in the specifically linguistic logic of different forms of argumentation, rhetoric and style, the source of their symbolic efficacy are destined to fail as long as they do not establish the relationship between the properties of discourses, the properties of the person who pronounces them and the properties of the institution which authorizes him to pronounce them” (Bourdieu 1991, 111).
In this way, discourse is the surface, because what actually determines it is something more fundamental, the logic of practice. Bourdieu emphatically proposes that discourse is, in the end, epiphenomenal in front of the practical, institutional conditions, when he says that “one of the most disastrous errors that can be made in the human sciences” is “passing off, in Marx’s well known phrase, ‘the things of logic as the logic of things’”. There is a “real principle behind strategies [of discourse], namely the practical sense, or, if you prefer, what sports players call a feel for the game, as the practical mastery of the logic or of the immanent necessity of the a game” (Bourdieu 1990, 61).
Since the practical sense is the real principle, and thus discursive articulations are by-products of it, it follows that there exists a fundamental separation between the two. The result is that practical sense cannot be accessed via discursive means. On the one hand there is discourse, and on the other practice. The order of discourse does not obey that of practice. The order of practice, though, gives us the actual order of discourse and the reasons it is in such and such way. Therefore, to come back to our original question here, the account of method Bourdieu wants to provide is one that will tackle the self-legitimation on the level of practice, because that is how Bourdieu stages what counts as the act of knowledge construction.
The logic of practice, however, as Bourdieu has shown, cannot be accessed from the logic of discourse. Even though the practical sense is what determines knowledge, it cannot be actually proffered, fully said. Bourdieu shows this belief in the impotence of his own words (his ‘theory’) to actually give us an actual access to the practical sense (‘action’) when prefacing his ‘theory of action’ (the subtitle of the book,
Bourdieu 1998): “I am aware that I have little chance of succeeding in truly transmitting, through the power of discourse alone, the principles of this philosophy and the practical dispositions, the ‘métier,’ in which they are embodied. Furthermore, I know that by designating them as a philosophy, through a concession to ordinary usage, I risk seeing them transformed into theoretical propositions, subject to theoretical discussions” (Bourdieu 1998, viii; my emphasis).
As a result, the practical sense gains a hidden, unconscious quality. The practical sense, what determines conscious linguistic articulations, is “one which works outside of conscious control and discourse (in the way that, for instance, techniques of the body do)” (Bourdieu 1990, 61). The movement of the bodies and what these do determines what language says, not the other way around. For Bourdieu, knowledge is located at the level of practice, not on the level of discourse. If we want to inquire into the staging of knowledge self-legitimation, we have to look at the practical and bodily conditions of possibility.
This is the reason the main opponent of reflexivity is the scholastic/intellectualist bias. The very first lines of the ‘Outline of a Theory of Practice’ (Bourdieu 1977) read: “[t]he practical privilege in which all scientific activity arises never more subtly governs that activity […] than when, unrecognised as privilege, it leads to an implicit theory of practice which is the corollary of neglect of the social conditions in which science is possible” (Bourdieu 1977, 1). For Bourdieu there is one true logic, the logic of practice. One who does not understand this simple fact is condemned to misrecognise what she knows.
However, Bourdieu has raised a huge challenge for himself in the way he framed the problem of knowledge self-legitimation. If the discourse is epiphenomenal and therefore does not play a role in providing an account of knowledge, then the only way to give a self-legitimatory account of knowledge is through the practical sense. But since a connection between practice and discourse is only one-way (from practice to discourse), how can someone access and articulate this logic? It seems that if someone was to stick fully to the way Bourdieu has framed the problem of knowledge so far she would have to confront this paradox. Unsurprisingly, Bourdieu indeed takes up this challenge.
If we examine what kind of answer he gives to the problem he framed, it will eventually lead us to see what kind of reality-generation the method of reflexivity enacts. It seems to me that the problem (of how to account for the practical sense, if discourse is its outcome) points out to two opposed possibilities. Firstly, a practical activism: since practice is accounted by practice, then an account of knowledge should be given practically. However, it is obvious that such a solution would accept fully the epiphenomenal nature of discourse, and therefore would lead in some kind of discursive quietism, since it does not really matter what we say, but what we do. This first possibility would mean that Bourdieu would have to give a practical account of self-legitimation of knowledge, by treating his own words as mere ‘noise’. Moreover, Bourdieu would have to explain in what sense knowledge (as practical knowledge) self-legitimation can be given practically.
However, it is obvious that Bourdieu neither fell into some kind of practical hyper-activism, nor did he stop writing. He offers reflexive accounts of knowledge in discursive form, despite the impotency of discourse, and against the scholastic bias. Bourdieu claims that he is able to offer a discursive reflexive
account of knowledge that it is perfectly fine, despite all the epiphenomenal nature of discourse: “Now, I can constitute as such my own point of view [by objectivation of the subject of objectivation] and understand it at least partially as it objectively is (in particular as regards its limits) only by constructing and understanding the field within which it defines itself as occupying a certain position, a certain point” (Bourdieu 2004, 96; cf. Bourdieu 2000, 10).
This is the second, opposed, possibility that Bourdieu took up as an answer to the way he framed the problem of knowledge self-legitimation. If Bourdieu’s account of knowledge is able to be discursive, even though it is about the logic of practice that cannot be determined by discourse, the reason is that there is an exception to discursive impotence. The answer of Bourdieu is to make an exception, to grant a privileged point of access: in short, he makes a vertical exception in the paratactical order of practice he had previously constructed. In such a case, even though the logic of practice is still what determines discourse, there are exceptions in the ways in which discourse can account for this logic.
This option of privilege is what has puzzled readers of Bourdieu and the point for which he has received a lot of criticism. In order to save discourse and himself from ‘quietism’ an exception is made in the order of the discourse. Thus the access to the practical sense is gained against the logic of practice. Therefore, practical sense can be given an account, yet not everyone is able to do that. What I am arguing here is that the framing of the problem of knowledge self-legitimation led Bourdieu to these two paradoxical solutions. It is obvious that Bourdieu opted for the second one.
Bourdieu, by opting for the second solution, brings in a fundamental misrecognition at the heart of his discourse. Since the access to the logic of practice is an exception, this creates two orders within the order of discourse: one that can access and understand practice, and one that cannot. Therefore, those that have been already exempted from the privileged position, always misrecognise what they know and what they do. This is the reason why Bourdieu’s discourse has to be played against the rest of the discourses, whether these are the those of philosophers or other academics in general, or other social agents. There is the discourse that is self-conscious and there is the spontaneous discourse, the one that cannot understand itself. “The break” is entitled the very first chapter of Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron (1991), where we read: “the social fact is won against the illusion of immediate knowledge”. “Everyday opinion” and “scientific discourse” (the exception in the order of discourse) are particularly blurred in social sciences. Thus, the sociologist has to “struggle with spontaneous sociology”, a battle that is an “unending polemics against the blinding self-evidences which all too easily provide the illusion of immediate knowledge” (Bourdieu, Chamborendon and Passeron 1991, 13).
This double order of discourses is the one that permits Bourdieu to speak about the “science of the hidden” which “oblige[s] the truth of power relations to come into the open, if only by forcing them to mask themselves yet further” (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990, xxi). Bourdieu’s exception in the end forces him in a very peculiar position: reflexivity, the manner in which he sought out to provide an account of how knowledge grounds its own grounding, is provided against the framework Bourdieu himself gave.
To sum up, we can make four remarks. First, Bourdieu considered the question of knowledge self-legitimation. Secondly, he took discourse and practice as the two fundamental elements that could give such an account of knowledge. Thirdly, he gave such an account through discourse, although he explicitly made practice the primary element of knowledge production. Therefore, four, Bourdieu’s method (in the technical sense we defined above) is ‘exceptionalistic’, because he creates a privileged position for himself.
As I have said, method covers the manner in which accounts of knowledge in the act of self-legitimation enact such and such kind of poiesis, such and such kind of self-generation. The kind of world-making that Bourdieu’s method of reflexivity enacts is an asymmetrical one. For now it suffices to say these four points. Later, after we have also seen Rancière’s method, we will able to say something more about it.
2.3 Method of equality
This section is about how Rancière tries to account for what we called method. Exactly as Bourdieu above, he is quite explicit that such grounding is self-grounding and self-legitimatory. The act of grounding, writes, “means a path”, but “not the path that a thinker follows”. Instead, this path is self-created, it the path that one “constructs, that you have to construct to know where you are, to figure out the characteristics of the territory you are going through, the places it allows you to go, the way it obliges you to move, the markers that can help you, the obstacles that get in the way” (Rancière 2009, 114). Therefore, it is clear for Rancière that the staging of the construction of an account of knowledge is a self-referential and self-generating account. As Bourdieu too, this self-grounding move has to do with the way this construction will give a map of the visible that points to a certain kind of reality-generation and legitimation of knowledge, in the sense of who is allowed to speak and govern and who is not (Rancière 2009,116-117). In the case of Rancière the aim is to generate democratic relations of equality, to put it schematically.
Surprisingly or not, at the heart of knowledge self-legitimation is the relation between discourse and practice. However, contrary to Bourdieu, for the self-grounding of knowledge discourse is given the lead role. While Bourdieu referred to Marx for justifying the primacy of practice, Rancière’s primacy of discourse is won against Marx. “‘Ideas are material forces’, Marx says, ‘when they take over the minds of the multitudes’”, but according to Rancière this formula is “only half-materialistic” (Rancière 2009, 114). The act of knowledge construction is always located at the level of discourse: “Ideas always […] tak[e] over bodies, giving them a map of the visible and orientations for moving” (Ibid; my emphasis). Discourse is the material in which to look for the staging of knowledge self-legitimation.
The primacy of speech over practice (body) is obvious. Whether it is about democracy, politics, or something else, it is always about “sentences”, “verses”, “narrations”, “statement[s]”. In each case the issue is to “know whether” animals, plebeians, demos, women, tailors “do or do not speak” (Rancière 2009, 116-117). The use of words is indicative: the mobilisation of bodies are “ideas at work” (Rancière 2009, 116). The act of speech is what determines and shapes practice. When he says that politics starts with a
“modification in the posture of the body”, that is because this modification happens “within” the “fabric of discourse” (Rancière 2009, 117). Discourse creates the practice.
This is the reason Rancière’s focus is discourse when he conducts polemics. When he criticises sociology, this takes place on the basis of which such a discourse provides speaking possibilities. “The sociologist who explains to the reader why the interviewee [inhabitant of poor suburbs] does not understand the reason of what he feels” constructs a certain “mode of intelligibility” (Ibid.) which defines what inhabitants of the suburbs can and cannot do. Knowledge (modes of intelligibility) are discursive. Another example is disagreement as a central category in Rancière’s politics. What challenges a such and such political configuration, a “commonsense” (Ibid.) are acts of speech (of those who were though that had none). Bodies challenge a “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière 2004, x) to the extend that these have already been “taken over” by ideas, i.e. discourse (Rancière 2009, 114; cf. Rancière1999).
Under this light, we can also understand what Rancière means when he says that his works are not ‘theories of ’ but polemical ‘interventions on’ (Rancière 2009, 116). Since discourse determines the knowable and bodies, it is crucial that Rancière’s discourse becomes the place where the ‘intervention on’ a distribution of the sensible is to be fought. In this sense, Rancière want to enact politics (in his sense) through his discourse. “If we are unable to differentiate systematically Rancière’s working assumptions from Gauny’s [Nights of Labour], if we fail to disentangle ‘objective’ narration from free indirect discourse, this reflects the book’s commitment to an equality legible even in the form of its Darstellung” (Parker 2004, xiii).
Such a way of putting the matter of the self-legitimation of knowledge transforms all theories and discourses, no matter on what they are about, to polemical interventions. There is no ‘depth’ of description here, since description is a discourse too and thus plays on the same level as the rest; what kind of possibilities it establishes. In the same way, all practical matters, because they ultimately derive from discourse, become discursive matters. The ‘logic of practice’, to be reminded of Bourdieu, is not cut off from discourse. In Rancière, it is made completely assimilated to it, as if space never existed. The logic of practice is redundant, because there is only one logic, the logic of discourse.
However, there is a paradox here that I would like to unfold. If discourse ‘takes over’ bodies, and if bodies and practice are generated by enactments of speech, then what exactly does discourse take over? If discourse and practice are one, then that means space, bodies, institutions, and everything that could be called material, should change instantly when the ordering of voices in discourse changes. However, it does not. When we are faced with the question “what can one do”, the answer is simple: “[Rancière’s] answer is ‘not very much’, insofar as all one can do is enact equality in one’s own writing” (Pelletier 2009a, 274). Exactly here the paradox starts to unfold. If discourse and practice are one, then that means space, bodies, institutions, and everything that could be called material, should change instantly when the ordering of voices in discourse changes. No matter how by producing discourse where “speech is to be taken neither literally nor figuratively” (White 1994, xix) and no matter how this strategy “dramatise[s] equality at the level of discourse” and therefore “treat[s] discourse as a kind of practical interaction” (Pelletier 2009b, 146), still such dramatisation does not touch upon any kind of spatial configurations.
My argument is that Rancière runs into the problem of understanding practice as a hollow shell that is completely visible in the ordering of voices in the discourse. Discourse can only account as a literal practical intervention only in the case bodies and practice never had any reality. Therefore, Rancière has accounted for practice in the absence of it.
It seems that practice was a different ‘logic’, as Bourdieu would claim, because it is ‘taken over’ by discourse. Yet if there never was a different ‘logic’, as Rancière seems to claims, then what discourse ‘takes over’ is not bodies, but other discourse. As a result, Rancière leaves spatial considerations aside. In any case, the account faces the problem with two options. First, Rancière would have to recognise a different logic of discourse, and therefore slide more to what he explicitly argued against (e.g. Marx, Bourdieu). Second, he has only produced an absence of practice by trying to account for it, because he presupposed a ‘taking over’ while at the same time there was nothing there in the first place to be ‘taken over’.
In front of these two solutions Rancière has opted for the second one. This has led him to a certain ‘awkwardness’, so to say, towards practice. When equality is to be enacted, it is as if it happens without any connection whatsoever to the actual space, place and institution it is taking place. In fact, it seems that to imply that his “universal method” is universal, because there never existed any locality, any difference in space and bodies. For this reason, it is not surprising that everything in the method of equality is centred around texts and voices but not places and bodies. We read about Télémaque, about reading, repeating and speaking in such and such manner but never about moving differently. This awkward absence of practice is present also in the very logic of emancipation: emancipation is not to happen in society, in institutions, in schools, but it happens despite them, away from them: individually, as if these never had any reality. The method of equality is not a social method (Rancière 1991, chapter 5). Therefore, the universal in method here is won not against transcendence (that would be unthinkable in Rancière considering his comments on discourses as polemics), but against practice, space and bodies.
To sum up, we can make four remarks, as we did in Bourdieu’s case. First, Rancière considered the question of knowledge self-legitimation. Secondly, he as well took discourse and practice as the two fundamental elements that could give such an account of knowledge. Thirdly, he gave such an account through discourse seen as practical, and he was able to do that by not actually accounting for practice. Therefore, four, Rancière’s method (in the technical sense we defined above) is ‘exclusionary’. As I have said, method covers the manner in which accounts of knowledge in the act of self-legitimation enact such and such kind of poiesis, such and such kind of reality-generation. The kind of world-making that Rancière’s method of equality enacts is a symmetry, but it is a symmetry in the absence of itself. That is, Rancière enacts a symmetrical self-generation of reality only because this symmetry lacks and excludes any practical manifestation.
3.1 Between two methods
So far we have seen how the two methods, reflexivity and equality, proposed by Bourdieu and Rancière respectively, tried to answer the main question of my inquiry: how does the act of knowledge self-legitimation take place and what kind of reality-generation does it enact?
The point of friction between Bourdieu and Rancière is not the answers to the problem of knowledge self-legitimacy, but exactly the manner in which the problem has been staged: they both propose a very different configuration between discourse and practice. It is on the basis of the problem of knowledge as always attempting to offer a self-legitimation that a common inquiry can be staged between them, and it is in such a different framing of what counts as account of legitimation that their differences have to be investigated.
This is the reason that I inquired into their methods separately, yet grounding this inquiry on the same question. In this way I was able to show that the act of staging knowledge self-legitimation is already the moment this act produces possibilities and becomes poietic. As I proceeded in such a manner in my inquiry, I was able to trace Bourdieu’s and Rancière’s method in order to locate the dead ends and the ways out their staging of the problem gave us. In this way I was able to locate the ‘maps of (im)possibilities’ they provide us and to see their methods (in the technical sense) in the level in which they enact certain realities.
This tracing permitted me also to do another thing. If their answers to the problem of knowledge is inextricably interconnected with the manner they framed it, then I could provide, in an internal and immanent way, a critique of each one’s answers’ pitfalls according to their own framing. Of course, such critique was not meant in the sense of pointing out mistakes, as if what is needed is a correction , but it was 1 more to show that they were led to such and such answers, because the arrangement they proposed between the elements they considered relevant for knowledge -their ontologies.
After that, I can see the debate between Bourdieu and Ranciere as a debate about the staging of the problem of knowledge self-legitimation, of how to enact such and such intersubjective relations. This permits me to pin-point their common ground, and see what it can be done concerning the problem of self-legitimation. Both framings used the same materials and points of concern: discourse and action (what I termed earlier thinking and doing). Thus, the framing takes places with the same materials. The way these were arranged is what is their point of fundamental disagreement and not what are the fundamental, relevant elements.
What this point show is what is at stake. If the point of disagreement is an arrangement of the materials, then Bourdieu’s and Ranciere’s disagreement is on what kind of reality such and such arrangements generate.
To understand a method (in our technical sense) in the above way means that both such acts of knowledge and the relevant materials they select to carry out such acts do not have an ex-nihilo character.
That would not only imply that we already know what is the best framing for knowledge self-legitimation, but more
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Rather, we can see them as con-stitutive moves only because they appear as modifications and negotiations of already existing acts of knowledge self-legitimation. In this sense, knowledge enactments do not appear out of nowhere. Rather, they are in media res. For this reason, we see the choice of what they consider relevant (to count as knowledge) as expressions of this condition. Symmetry and asymmetry are some of the names we have used so far and signify the manner that knowledge self-legitimations express their reality-generation towards others -that is, create intersubjective relations.
3.2 The normativity of methods
What we have said so far is that the political, normative dimension of a self-legitimation of knowledge is not separate from the epistemological and ontological ones. To remind what method as defined here means, it is the manner in which reflexive accounts of knowledge in their act of self-legitimation enact such and such kind of poiesis, such and such kind of intersubjective reality-generation. I have shown that the act of this generation is the manner in which what is relevant for knowledge production is identified (e.g. discourse, voice, practice, body, space) is arranged in a certain formation (e.g. discourse determines bodies and practice). This formation, in turn, is what enacts a map of (im)possibilities (what could and should and could not and should not be done), at the same time that this enactment (this map) is realised as a relation towards others, taking the form of a kind of relation (e.g. asymmetrical).
Therefore, in order to find the normative dimension of Bourdieu’s and Rancière’s project we have to pay attention to the act of self-legitimation of knowledge, and from there we can say what kind of project lies in their accounts of legitimation. I think I can put this in the following manner. Bourdieu and Rancière, by taking up the problem of knowledge self-legitimation explicitly head-on, they share a specific political project: how to arrive at a legitimation of knowledge which will self-realise the most radical effects of Enlightenment. If by Enlightenment we understand the initiation of a project in which reason achieves a realisation of its self-constitution in all its manifestations (epistemology, ontology, ethics, politics, aesthetics), then Bourdieu and Rancière share a common stage, despite their different framing and answers to this question. The reason is that both want to provide an account of knowledge self-grounding which is able to realise this self-con-stitution in its most far-reaching manner. By far-reaching manner, I mean by how much the form the configurations of power will take as self-configurations of the demos will also be interruptive to the tradition of reason in Enlightenment . 2
We can see this project lingering behind Bourdieu’s and Rancière points of return, such as education and science. These two (among others, e.g. history, art) are taken up in their work in relation to the ways they
By radical Enlightenment I do not understand this project anywhere close to the one initiated by Israel’s book by the
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same name (Israel 2001). Radical Enlightenment is not a specific tradition of Enlightenment nor within it nor some overlooked strand of it. Rather, by that I simply mean the enactments of Enlightenment thought that can challenge this tradition. Of course, I do not aim to read the whole tradition of Enlightenment thought and then specify which enactments are or are not part of a radical Enlightenment. That would require a completely different project. However, I hope to show what such an example would be today, by using the example of the Detroit Geographical Expedition
achieve a certain radical Enlightenment, so to say, and are interrogated to the extent they produce forms of self-legitimation that are or are not in line with such an understanding of Enlightenment. Consequently, this means that they both try to think in the configurations they find always already themselves in, and in this sense, thinking Enlightenment in new ways takes the form of thinking the present differently -“how not be governed like that”, as Foucault would say (Foucault 2007, 28).
Under this light, Bourdieu’s effect of misrecognition and Rancière’s effacement of practice is their failure to realise their own promise, an enactment of radical Enlightenment. The reason is that their staging of the self-legitimation of knowledge has not been able to realise the potential of enacting different configurations of power by the very act of providing their accounts of knowledge self-grounding. That is why it was important for my project to locate the problematic knots in Bourdieu’s and Rancière’s ontologies. Of course, such a judgement comes from within their proclaimed aims, and not from an external vantage point. Besides, my criticism towards them is not aimed to deny the importance of them or their work, but rather to see where can we go by reworking their ontologies in a certain direction.
I hope I have shown what kind of normative claims and what kind of political dimension Bourdieu’s and Rancière’s project show in their tackling of the problem of knowledge self-legitimation. The issue then now becomes what to do after that. What was the problem with Bourdieu and Rancière was that both ‘missteped’, in different ways (‘misrecognition’ and ‘exclusion’ respectively), to stage such a radical version of Enlightenment. Their ‘missteping’ was not to locate the problem, but rather to provide a convincing account of self-legitimation that would be faithful to such problematics of radical Enlightenment . 3
3.3 Reworking the map
From now on I am taking on the issue of knowledge self-legitimation where Bourdieu’s and Rancière’s attempts left it. This project of immanent reworking comes along with two implications. First, it means that I abide by the source of their normative project, radical Enlightenment. Secondly, I am not going to question the relevant materials of knowledge that have already been identified as fundamental from both of them, discourse and practice (or thinking and doing). As a result, my framing of the problem of knowledge self-legitimation is going to work with their re-arrangement. In this way, I hope that I am showing how any new attempt to provide a knowledge self-legitimation happens in media res. Reality-generation, as we have said already, is to be taken as an activity of re-negotiation in a bundle of enactments and not as an activity that exists in vacuum.
I can also say maybe a few words more about these two implications. In reference to the first one, I do not re-negotiate the assumption of a radical Enlightenment, because I hope to show -in the process of making this assumption explicit via the construction of a different arrangement between discourse and Here I do not use the writings that are considered more ‘political’ in order to make my argument. The reason is that
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my argument so far has been that the manner they set up their framework is where we can find their normativity. In this way, I do not differentiate amongst their writings, but I try to take education as the ‘political’ point of their ideas. However, I am ready to accept that my project should have addressed also other writings of them in order to strengthen
practice- that the enactment of such version of Enlightenment can help us rethink the relation between knowledge and education in the present.
In reference to the second implication, I can say that discourse and practice come a long way before Bourdieu’s and Rancière’s use. I am going to take them here only as I found them, because this is my starting point. Therefore, my inquiry from now on is an immanent reworking of some specific ideas. Besides, it seems that discourse and practice carry a lot of explanatory force, since they are names under which a lot of ‘stuff ’ can be grouped. In a sense, though, I cannot say much on this, because these are the materials that I found my project in. To question these would require to write something completely different from what I have written so far.
At this point it is also helpful to make explicit what I take discourse and practice to mean, drawing from both authors. These will be specific definitions and are going to be used as such from now on (exactly as happened with the word ‘method’ few pages earlier). Discourse: one of the two fundamental elements of knowledge according to Bourdieu and Rancière. Discourse signifies the manner in which voices (in any form of presentation, e.g. speech, writing) is in such and such ordering (e.g. symmetrical/equal or not). Practice: one of the two fundamental elements of knowledge according to Bourdieu and Rancière. Practice signifies the manner in which material formations (e.g. bodies and objects) form a certain order of matter (e.g. the distribution of bodies and objects in a classroom).
I will try to provide a frame in which a different arrangement of discourse and practice could be possible, an arrangement that aims to bypass the shortcomings of Bourdieu’s and Rancière’s. Consequently, I take head-on the project of providing an account of knowledge self-legitimation that could give possibilities for the enactment of a radical version of Enlightenment. I am starting at the point where Bourdieu and Ranciere reached some fundamental agreement, after their agreement on the project of a radical Enlightenment.
It seems that despite the different framing of the problem, there was a fundamental agreement in that discourse is the way to start an inquiry into knowledge self-legitimation. Whether, in Bourdieu’s case, it is the exceptionality of a certain (scientific) discourse, or, in Rancière’s case, it is the ordering of voices within the presentation of discourse, it seems that both place their point of departure on discourse. For this reason, I will start to build an arrangement between discourse and practice departing from discourse.
From this initial agreement -discourse is the starting point-, I take up the solutions that Bourdieu and Rancière did not explore in their framing of the problem of knowledge self-legitimation. That is, we are taking Bourdieu at the point when his theory was not yet a theory of misrecognition, and we take Rancière at the point in which his theory did not yet led him to a rendering of practice as an epiphenomenon to discourse. If we take this road, then we have, on the one hand, Bourdieu’s unexplored option that practice has to be accounted practically. On the other hand, we have Rancière’s unexplored option that the discourse has to be enacted in such a manner that does not reduce practice to speech.
The challenge, then, is how to account for a relation between discourse and practice in which neither discourse nor practice become redundant. That is, -and because our starting point has been decided to be
discourse- we require an account of how discourse could work in such a way that is neither reduced to an epiphenomenon (Bourdieu’s misrecognition), nor elevated to the sole element, and thus making practice epiphenomenal (Rancière’s exclusion). In this sense, we are trying to frame the arrangement in such a way in which, with Rancière against Bourdieu, discourse has meaning, and with Bourdieu against Rancière, this meaning extends beyond orderings of voices.
Under these considerations, what we need is to establish a tension inside enactments of discourse and practice so as to account for a uniting difference between them. That is, we have to establish the order of practice within and as an order of discourse, and vice-versa. That means that we need an account of ‘simultaneity’ between them, one though that will not make either of them epiphenomenal. That means a speech that is moving and a move that speaks, while the speech stays a voice and a move stays a body. What I want to show is that a voice is not only ‘attached’ to a body, but that the moves of the body have to be seen concurrently, simultaneously, with the articulation of speech in order to be understood.
My thesis on that is that the ordering of speech in time has weight: voice has shape. A sound is not only articulated within a temporal succession but also ‘takes place’ (quite literally), because it is a manipulation of the medium in which the sound is proffered (air). Discourse, along a temporal succession, is also a spacing. To put it with a simple example, a straight line in a piece of paper is not only a succession of points (in time), but also simultaneously the form these points acquire in their spacing: how fat, thin, yellow, gritty or plain the continuity they form is.
Considering this ontological junction we just made between discourse and space, I think we can build upon such an arrangement of these two materials as simultaneous. Discourse-as-practice and practice-as-discourse. Can we ever imagine a voice without a body, without coming from somewhere, or can we imagine a body without a voice? The ordering of voices in time straightforwardly signifies an ordering of bodies in space. Their ordering might differ, might be in tension, but what matters is that in order to see what map of (im)possibilites enact, we have to take these two orderings as if they were one and the same.
This is the arrangement of simultaneity between discourse and action. The reason we tried to account for such a fundamental unity between those two was because we wanted to frame the question of self-legitimation in such a way as that could help us enact intersubjective relations differently. How is the fundamental unity between discourse and practice that we sketched just now permit us to do such a thing? Simply by enabling us to incorporate practice within discourse without reducing it to the second (Rancière), and by enabling us to understand the fundamental connection between linguistic utterances and practices, without reducing the first as epiphenomenal (Bourdieu). Thus, what is the outcome? An arrangement that can account for the practice (against Rancière) and at the same time does not need to establish arrangements of misrecognition to account for it (against Bourdieu).
In this way, we are able to account for the other solutions that were not explored. Bourdieu, we remember, was facing the solution of quietism and to account practically for practice. Now, since practice is an internal characteristic of discourse, that means that accounting practically for practice is possible: that would mean that literally the institutional and spatial conditions of possibility could be accounted only by an
institutional and spatial shift, a paratactical dislocation in space. And since these institutional and spatial conditions of possibility are not external to discourse, that would mean that such a shift would also bring about a change in the way discourse enacts an order, a shift in the way the ordering of voices a discourse performs in its spatial dislocation.
It is important to show that such and such arrangement of the discourse and action does not lead to some abstract results. Rather, it makes sure that any kind of change and shift is materially and discursively traceable, and simultaneously. Since the order of space is at the same time an order of discourse, that means that these knots can be located and shown. This is a very important move for the matter we are inquiring into. That means that the method, as we defined it (the manner in which knowledge produces itself and its conditions of possibility as the act of knowledge production), is deflated twice: once, in the manner which the order of voices is an enacting of a map of the visible, a map of what is possible and what not; the second time, in the manner in which such a discursive map of (im)possibilites is simultaneously a material, spatial map of (im)possibilites.
Here I have to add an endnote in relation to the the task that I took up to provide an ontology. Once again I really want to stress that this is not a matter of describing reality, but rather is a matter of how to manage to do something differently with the materials that I found myself in. That means that this ontology has not a universal validity, but it has a validity from the moment someone takes this as a compass, a tool that would enable him/her to do, enact certain orders of discourse and practice.
4.1 Education
In order to show what is the value of this different arrangement between discourse and practice, I will try to show what this another map of (im)possibilities can permit us to see, say and do. As we said already, the ontological arrangement we have staged so far is not only a matter of a structure (e.g. how discourse is not epiphenomenal but is simultaneous with practice) but a matter of what this structure allows us to do, what kind of intersubjective relations it permits us to build.
This can map can be tested against the same field that both Bourdieu and Rancière have tested their own maps, that of education. For both of them the idea of education is not only important, but it is at the centre of attention in the manner they take up the task of knowledge self-legitimation. Why is that? Someone could argue that it is because they are both academics, so the institution of education is what they see and what is closer to them, thus this is why they focus on it. However, I think there is a more substantive reason why education is the heart of the problem for them, that does not have only to do with the fact that both were academic teachers (Rancière still is).
The fact that education is at the heart of Bourdieu’s and Rancière’s thinking is symptomatic of their inquiry of knowledge as always attempting to provide its own self-legitimation. Education, either emphasised more as a point where discourses form certain orderings (Rancière) or as a spatial point with bodily practices (Bourdieu), it becomes for them both the starting point (where knowledge is legitimised in society) and the ending point of the scene (where the institutional limits of this knowledge are manifested). Education is a matter of concern, because it is both an institutional space that determines how bodies should move (Bourdieu), and also a certain formation of voices that determines what kind of intersubjective relations of knowledge are enacted (Rancière). In short, it is the focal point where intersubjective relations acquire a formal recognition as pedagogical relations.
Therefore, education is for both of them a way to show ‘concretely’ what their ontologies permit them to do. Because of the fact that education for them provides the opportunity to test the mapping of their ontology, education becomes the discursive and spatial point which offers the metonymy for the manner knowledge production is institutionally a production also of its own self-legitimation. Since education is such a metonymy, it is only natural that education is going to be a metonymy for my inquiry too. Thus, the attempt to reconfigure the arrangement of discourse and practice in a different way than the one provided by Bourdieu and Rancière is going to be ‘tested’ in the field of education, to see what kind of possibilities it can enact.
4.2 The ‘Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute’
All places are full of bodies. -Descartes, Principles of Philosophy
