Abstract
This chapter suggests that a defense of genuine creativity and imagination within public schooling engage with what Jacques Rancière refers to as the “aesthetic regime.” This regime enables us to consider a reorientation of educational experience and value through an ethical fidelity to beauty and equality in the coproduction of an educational common. It thus signals a form of aesthetic education (Bildung), that in Friedrich Schiller’s words, might make possible “the most perfect of all works of art—the establishment and structure of a true political freedom.”
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Notes
- 1.
The negative consequences of zero tolerance policies, prison cultures, and criminal justice encroachment in schools have become widely acknowledged in educational research and theory. For some of the most insightful critical analysis see (Giroux 2009; Lewis 2003; Saltman and Gabbard 2010). My own work has sought to decenter the emphasis on militarized security in schools and educational research through a focus on the structural and symbolic threats to human security of which zero tolerance policy is only one manifestation of a broader devaluation of social and education life under neoliberalism (Means 2013).
- 2.
For further analysis of value and capitalism today see Max Haiven’s (2011) brilliant essay on value struggles over the radical imagination within the strictures of financialization.
- 3.
It is important to clarify and differentiate at this point the relationship between public schooling and the educational common. For Hardt and Negri, the common is considered an immanent site that includes shared resources and the coproduction of ideas, knowledge, relationships, and subjectivities. Hardt and Negri are often inconsistent in the way they define the relationship between the public and the common. They argue that the common is or should be considered a distinct third space beyond capital (private property) and the state (public property) with its own epistemological, ontological, and political make-up. At points in their book Commonwealth (2009), however, they include aspects of the “public” as part of the common. They describe public education, for instance, as a “basis for biopolitical production” and that its privatization and defunding serves to “drain the common” (p. 144). Moreover, Hardt and Negri conclude by arguing for strengthening the public as one specific way of enlarging the transformative and democratic potentiality of the common (as one example, they advocate for a guaranteed basic income). My own position is that the educational common includes certain elements of the “public” dimensions of public schooling while always exceeding these elements. Public schools are a province of the state and are subject to economic and technocratic rationalities and forms of control. However, public schools are also contested social resources that are, in ideal terms, supposed to be democratically responsive to the needs of diverse localities. At the same time, public schools are also a powerful site in the production of ideas, values, relationships, and possibilities. As contested sites of biopolitical production, public schools serve as a basis for the coproduction of an educational common that does not always simply fall in line with the either the demands of the state or capitalism. Quite often, the educational common stands in direct confrontation with them. This position is developed further in De Lissovoy et al. (2013).
- 4.
There are some important differences in the way that Hardt and Negri and Rancière frame the relationship between politics and the common. Michael Hardt (2009) has argued that Rancière’s conception of the common as the site of social distribution of parts and roles finds great affinity with the conception of the common that he and Negri defend. However, Hardt argues they differ on two specific fronts. First, he argues that that the common is not simply a natural fixture or condition of the social as Rancière sometimes seems to suggest, but that it is always being produced and reproduced. The issue at stake here for Hardt is that radical politics should not just be concerned with a disruption that rearranges the parts of the common, but should be engaged with how the common is currently produced and how it might be produced in the future in ways that are more radically democratic. Hardt states that “when politics and aesthetics begin, according to his [Rancière’s] notion, the common already exists and thus the central question is how its parts are to be shared, divided and distributed. No longer today, however, can we consider the common as quasi-natural or given. The common is dynamic and artificial, produced through a wide variety of social circuits and encounters. This recognition does not negate the importance of Rancière’s notion of partage and the common, but rather extends it further to account also for the production of the common” (p. 23). Second, Hardt argues that Rancière does not adequately account for the way capital and economic production and distribution have increasingly become biopolitical, and in the process, have made the common itself a central aspect of valorization and economic command. Hardt thus argues, as I have intimated in this chapter, that we thus must “consider the economic realm along with the political and the aesthetic” (p. 23).
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Means, A.J. (2015). Aesthetics and Educational Value Struggles. In: Lewis, T., Laverty, M. (eds) Art's Teachings, Teaching's Art. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7191-7_10
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