Reviews and Comments

Kornbluh's diagnosis seems correct. Across domains--writing, video, theory--there really does seem to be a resistance to anything that doesn't come neatly packaged, ready to consume. And much of supposedly "radical" thought is radical in style only, failing to take any sort of stance, to "draw lines." To exist in academic spaces is to see immediacy style, daily. I am persuaded and fully on board.

That said, I wished at times that Kornbluh would draw more lines of her own. To be clear, I'm not taking up the lazy response that a text fails to enact its own argument. Largely, Kornbluh’s does. But her insistence on the connection of the literary, and mediation broadly, to political practice seems wedded to an assumption of the importance of the humanities in a world where that importance has been radically diminished. In a sense, this isn't even a critique of Kornbluh, because I agree with her values. Mediation is necessary, and she has convinced me of the ways that it is under attack. I just wish that there was a bit less attention to how immediacy affects things like Safdie films, and more on how it affects labor conditions within the university, for example. Both topics are there, the balance just seems off. But maybe (honestly) this desire reflects my own investments in the "immediacy" of the useful. In any case, the book is well-argued, persuasive, and worth reading.

This book is difficult to categorize. Reminiscent of certain work of Michel Serres and other post-deconstruction French philosophers, Rancière is more interested in creatively orienting the reader toward their own thought and humanity than in presenting a unified philosophical argument. He begins with a seemingly forgettable curiosity in the history of French pedagogy where Joseph Jacotot taught Flemish students French with nothing but a single French text and a complete ignorance of the Flemish language. Across five essays, he extrapolates Jacotot’s method of “universal teaching,” that is, helping students to recognize their intellectual equality without the explication of “knowledgeable” teacher.

To say the book is about teaching, however, translates only a fragment of Rancière’s inquiry, which dances across topics as seemingly disperse as the history of Western philosophy and rhetoric; social inequality and class-systems; the fiction of progressive rationality; and the “secret of genius” that any student can achieve through an emancipated self-directed inquiry.

It’s helpful to know that this is not a book to be picked up on Friday to develop a lesson plan for Monday. It is a philosophy of pedagogy. That much is true. But Rancière is not only disinterested in helping teachers better deliver material to their students; he is critical of teaching through transmission, referred to throughout the book as explication, entirely.

Read more here.