Jacques Rancière and the Educational Turn: A Case Study of the Relationship between the Contemporary Art World and Theory

Abstract This article looks at the claim that Jacques Rancière's work, particularly The Ignorant Schoolmaster, played a formative role in the “educational turn” in contemporary art. This article shows that the idea that art-world actors relied on Rancière as they worked to make education the “form and content of curatorial and artistic projects” is plagued by historical and conceptual difficulties. The article starts by showing that Rancière is entirely absent from the founding projects of the educational turn: the cancelled Manifesta 6, unitednationsplaza, and the two major exhibitions organized under the rubric A.C.A.D.E.M.Y. This absence extends, in fact, to all the major projects now widely regarded as part of the turn. Through this historical analysis, it emerges that Rancière only starts to be linked with the turn much later and in the work of scholars and commentators who write about the turn rather than in the texts where the curators of the turn's various “exhibitions-as-school” lay out their pedagogical models. The conceptual claim we find in these readings of the turn is that its models all share the same conviction, to wit: that it is only by eliminating the figure of the teacher that they can create horizontal pedagogical structures populated by equals or “co-participants.” I show, however, that this misreads Jean-Joseph Jacotot's “ignorance” as his “absence” from the “experimental situation” he created with his students. And, further, I show that equality does not depend on lack (“ignorance”) but on the affirmation of the equality of intelligences. The article concludes with a reflection on the relationship of contemporary art to theory. Although it is often acknowledged as, and even dubbed, a “dependence,” it is rarely studied as a set of individual relationships. This article is, ultimately, an attempt to cut against the grain of that tendency with a careful mapping and discussion of one instance of the relationship between art and theory.