Jacques Rancière’s Aesthetic Regime and Democratic Education

This article examines the shared crisis in art and education through the lens of Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic theory. Using China Mieville’s novel The City and the City as a literary model for understanding the relation between these two practices, the author argues that democratic education is, first and foremost, a reconfiguring of the distribution of the sensible. Through a critical analysis of lifelong learning, relational pedagogy, and stultifying pedagogy, the article concludes with a theory of democratic education that finds its inspiration in not only Rancière’s theory but also in Mieville’s novel.