THE RADICAL PEDAGOGIES OF FRANC OIS BON AND

JACQUES RANCIE`RE*
OLIVER DAVIS
UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK
Abstract
This article interrogates contemporary writer Francois Bons conception of the creative
writing workshop in the light of work by political philosopher Jacques Rancie`re on
intellectual emancipation. Bons radical programme, based on over twenty years
experience as one of Frances leading practitioners of the writing workshop, in Tous les
mots sont adultes: methode pour latelier decriture (revised edition, 2005), is examined
alongside the critique of ordinary pedagogy in Rancie`res Le Matre ignorant: cinq
lecons sur lemancipation intellectuelle (1987), his account of the maverick nineteenthcentury educationalist Joseph Jacotot. After setting out and discussing the principles of
Bons creative writing workshops and of Rancie`res approach, this article compares the
way in which Bon and Rancie`re seek to create equality within the pedagogical
encounter, before asking to what extent their work also succeeds in suggesting how the
cause of equality may be furthered in the wider world. It will be argued that the creative
writing workshop, as Bon conceives it, puts into practice aspects of the radical
egalitarianism theorized by Rancie`re.

How can creative writing be taught? The question often signals indignation, with
a stress on the can, as though it went without saying, almost, that creative writing
cannot be taught, or on the taught, or on the creative, as though to teach a creative art
were a contradiction in terms. Since creative writing is in fact taught, such indignation
can safely be left at the threshold: let us say instead that the teaching of creative writing
involves a set of highly complex processes of cultural transformation. This article
attempts to tease out some of the aesthetic and political questions raised by one particular
example of this fascinating cultural practice. Francois Bons understanding of his ateliers
decriture is implicitly, but not explicitly, political: I shall argue that theirs is a mode of
pedagogy which is premised on, and which seeks to produce, an experience of radical
equality. As such, Bons writing workshops and the processes of aesthetic and political
transformation implied in them are a cultural practice which demonstrates a profound
affinity with the iconoclastic pedagogical method of nineteenth-century educationalist
Joseph Jacotot, as expounded by Jacques Rancie`re. While I am not suggesting that Bons
workshops are directly or indirectly inspired by Rancie`res work, I shall argue that if one
wanted to look for real examples of
I am indebted to Jeremy Ahearne for introducing me to Rancie`res work and
grateful to him, Sam Haigh, Nick Hewlett, Sean Hand, and the two anonymous readers
for their responses to earlier drafts.

# The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Soc iety for
French Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email:
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cultural practices which embody Rancie`res conception of authentic politics then these
forums would be a very good place to start. Francois Bons creative writing workshops
Creative writing workshops, in the French context, were associated from the
outset with a challenge to ordinary pedagogy. The first workshops in France are widely
believed to have taken place in 1968, some fifty years after the teaching of creative
writing had first entered the curriculum in the US and in a decade in which some three
hundred creative writing programmes were already running in American universities.
1 Whereas the American workshops had developed relatively smoothly out of
established methods of teaching prose composition, in France ateliers decriture were
linked from the beginning to the questioning of educational institutions associated with
May 1968.
2 Even if the term workshop was already being used in the US, where it served
to emphasize the practical, collective and non-hierarchical nature of the writing process,
the term atelier, when used in the French context, in 1968, implied a more concerted
challenge to institutional authority in its resonance with the Atelier populaire des BeauxArts, in which striking art-school students and teachers from the prestigious institution
collaborated on revolutionary artistic projects.
3Creative writing workshops flourished in France in the 1970s, though mainly
outside established educational institutions.
4 By the 1983 Cerisy conference on the teaching of creative writing, two extreme
tendencies had emerged: the psychotherapeutic (Elisabeth Bing) and the formalist (Jean
Ricardou and the Oulipo group).
5 As part of attempts by educational policy-makers in the early Mitterrand years
to render schools more inviting, extracurricular forums, also called ateliers, were created
in colle`ges and lycees, for the teaching of dance, music and other arts. At the rentree in
1990, creative writing was added to the list.
6 Bons first published account of a writing workshop, which he ran at the Lycee
Jacques Brel in La Courneuve, appeared in 1992, very soon after the institutional
framework for the writing workshops had first been put in place.
7 With the publication of the first edition of Tous les mots sont adultes: methode
pour latelier decriture
1 Odette and Michel Neumayer, Animer un atelier decriture: faire de lecriture
un bien partage (Issy-les-Moulineaux: ESF, 2003), p. 11; D. G. Myers, The Elephants
Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880, 2nd edn (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006),
pp. 2, 101.
2 Myers, The Elephants Teach, Chapters 13.
3 Alain Andre, Babel heureuse: latelier decriture au service de la creation litte
raire (Paris: SyrosAlternatives, 1989), p. 23.

4 With the notable exception of the University of Aix-en-Provence, where Anne

Roche and her circle continued, not always uncontroversially, to try to integrate creative
writing into the curriculum. In March 1974, a poem from the Aix programme, which had
been left on a photocopier, was sent anonymously to Le Figaro. Historian and acade
micien Pierre Gaxotte objected vigorously to the poem and the programme in a frontpage article. See Anne Roche, Premie`res rencontres nationales des ateliers decriture:
interventions et actes, Aix-en-Provence, fevrier 1993, ed. by Claire Boniface (Paris:
Retz, 1994), p. 95.
5 For a detailed account of these psychotherapeutic and formalistic extremes, as
well as the intervening cases, see Claire Boniface and Odile Pimet, Les Ateliers de
criture (Paris: Retz, 1992).
6 Bulletin officiel, 17 May 1990.
7 F. Bon, Sang gris: un atelier decriture a` La Courneuve (Paris: Conseil Gene
ral de Seine-Saint-DenisVerdier, 1992).
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in 2000, Bon became one of the most prominent advocates of ateliers decriture in
France, a position consolidated with the revised edition of 2005. The book reflects on his
experience running series of workshops at the social margins, in countless colle`ges and
lycees professionnels in ZEPs (Zones dE ducation Prioritaire) across France, in prisons
and community centres in quartiers difficiles, as well as, as though by way of contrast, at
the E cole Normale Superieure, rue dUlm. The book is supplemented by Bons
accounts of some of his workshops on one of his websites. 8 Running in parallel with,
and drawing upon, the workshops is Bons own body of published work, much of which
also dwells at the margins of contemporary French society and is concerned in particular
with the social effects of the built environment and the human consequences of deindustrialization and globalization. Bon readily acknowledges that his own writing is
indebted to the ateliers and their participants. 9 Bons workshops have run in series which
typically last several months and involve small groups of participants drawn from a
particular institution or locale. The reader is referred to Tous les mots for a full account of
Bons practice but the remainder of this paragraph is intended to offer a few salient
examples of his teaching method for those unfamiliar with that work. The workshops
start with the reading aloud of a short stimulus text from modern or contemporary
literature, which is briefly commented upon; participants are then invited to write in a
manner which reflects a particular feature of the stimulus text; participants texts are read
aloud to the whole group and their authors may be questioned about the texts
construction, or a commentary may be offered by the facilitator or by other participants.
Because most of those with whom Bon has worked have had no previous experience of
creative writing, the early workshops place particular emphasis on undoing inhibiting
assumptions about writing, in particular that it requires inspiration and must be personal.
The opening session in the series begins with the inventory and is placed under the aegis
of Georges Perec, short excerpts from whose work are used by Bon as stimulus texts, or
declencheurs decriture (TM, p. 14). Bon invites participants to draw up a list of

places where they have slept, or a list of objects on the table before them. This practice of
the inventory is designed to show participants that creative writing is not a matter of
inspiration, that their lives are sufficiently full to give rise to writing and that this writing
can continue as easily as any list. It also has the advantage of cutting the text free from its
reliance on private memories in the abrupt transition from one item to the next: ainsi,
cest une traversee de soi-meme qui va conduire au souvenir, mais celui qui ecoute ou
lit le texte devra faire appel a` ses propres sensations pour le reconstruire, sans avoir
acce`s a` lorigine autobiographique: et cest ce qui constitue le texte dans son
fonctionnement litteraire. (TM, p. 24) 8 ,http://www.tierslivre.net/spip/spip.php?
rubrique12. [accessed September 2008].
9 F. Bon, Tous les mots sont adultes: methode pour latelier decriture, 2nd edn
(Paris: Fayard, 2005), hereafter Tous les mots and TM, p. 14.
One text is explicitly a blend of writing by Bon and the participants in a series of
ateliers he ran in Lode`ve: F. Bon, Cetait toute une vie (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1995).

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A similar effect will be sought later in the series when Bon will invite participants
to describe the mental and physical experience of a moment of intense emotion, during
which they lost control, without allowing its cause to be discernible from the text (TM,
pp. 16263). Other workshops focus on particular areas: the city and the journey, identity,
the image, dialogue, writing for theatre. As in the opening session, with its use of the
inventory, Bon shows particular fondness throughout for iterative forms, for example
when he asks participants to begin each line of a text with je dis non or moi tout seul
(TM, pp. 12930), or when he asks them to list places familiar to them and then to
describe in each case how they appear by day in one column and by night in another
(TM, pp. 8384). At the end of the series of workshops the participants gather together all
of the texts they have written and are invited to reflect on the connections and
discontinuities between them in the hope that they can see in these evidence of their own
singular voice and encouragement to continue writing on their own (TM, p. 327). This
may all sound tame enough; yet it will be my contention that Bons workshops enact a
radical egalitarian pedagogy. If, in Tous les mots, he repeatedly bemoans the failure of the
educational establishment fully to embrace the workshops, such reluctance as he has
encountered may not be altogether surprising: policy-makers may have correctly sensed
that these forums imply a far-reaching challenge to established conceptions of the social
functions of both education and literature. Bons ateliers decriture are politically
disruptive in that they start out from the assumption that people whose perspectives on
the world are not usually valued should be taken seriously as witnesses to shared social
reality. The ateliers intend to be aesthetically disruptive in their belief that by
democratizing the entitlement to creative expression, the shape and meaning of the
literary field will be changed; for, as things currently stand, he claims, la voix des
humbles, la voix des anonymes, ne resonne encore que bien trop faiblement dans la litte
rature (TM, p. 300). This politico-aesthetic interest in la voix des anonymes is

comparable to that of Pierre Bourdieu and his team in La Mise`re du monde, as well as to
the work of the Association pour lAutobiographie, an organization which seeks to
construct an archive of autobiographical accounts by non-professional writers.
10 More relevantly still to the present discussion, it clearly reflects Rancie`res
understanding of emancipation: [s]emanciper [. . .] cest saffirmer comme copartageant dun monde commun.
11 Jacques Rancie`res critique of progressive pedagogy Rancie`res recounting of
the life and work of nineteenth-century educationalist Joseph Jacotot is considerably
more relevant to issues in education policy in
10 P. Bourdieu and others, La Mise`re du monde (Paris: Seuil, 1993). The affinity
between Bon and late Bourdieu is noted in Anne Roche, Andree Guiguet and Nicole
Voltz, LAtelier decriture: elements pour la redaction du texte litte raire (Paris:
Armand Colin, 2006), p. ix, and in Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and
Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 391,
n. 91.
11 J. Rancie`re, Aux bords du politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), p. 91.
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France in the 1980s and 90s than it may initially appear to be. Rancie`re has
remarked that the Jacotot he presents in Le Matre ignorant: cinq lecons sur le
mancipation intellectuelle is a philosophico-mythical figure, who is projected [. . .]
bluntly upon the scene of the pedagogical debates occurring in France while I was
writing, in the 1980s.12 The provocative bluntness of Rancie`res Jacotot lies in the way
he questions the assumptions of leading figures in educational policy debates, not least
ministers Alain Savary (198184) and Jean-Pierre Cheve`nement (198486). Policy
debates at the time were informed by Bourdieus analyses of the ways in which
educational institutions tacitly reproduce social injustices, work which called into
question the traditional Republican faith in the capacity of the school system to further
equality and social justice.
13 Even if Savary and Cheve`nement took very different approaches to the
perceived failure of the education system, with the former striving to make learning a
warmer, more accessible, experience and the latter moving in the opposite direction,
towards traditionalism (more grammar, more formal assessment and more selection),
both shared the assumption that it is the ultimate aim of education to bring about
intellectual and social equality. As Kristin Ross has noted, Rancie`re disagrees with both
approaches for different reasons.
14 His main target, however, is the underlying assumption they and Bourdieus
work all share: that the education system should operate in such a way that it eventually
furthers equality and social justice. Rancie`res Jacotot, by contrast, begins with the
assumption of intellectual equality and seeks to build an emancipatory pedagogy on the
strength of this premise. Forced into exile by the Restoration, Jacotot became Reader in
French Literature at the University of Louvain. Because he spoke no Flemish and many
of his students spoke no French but still wanted to attend his classes, he turned to a

recently published parallel text edition of Fenelons Telemaque and asked them to learn
the first part of the French text with the aid of the translation and then to repeat it back,
before getting them to finish the book and retell the story in their own words. He then
asked them to write, in French, about what they had read and was surprised to find that
many did so with remarkable fluency. Because this had been achieved without recourse to
explanation, Jacotot became profoundly sceptical of its value in education: La reve
lation qui saisit Joseph Jacotote rame`ne a` ceci: il faut renverser la logique du syste`me
explicateur. Lexplication nest pas necessaire pour remedier a` une incapacite a`
comprendre. Cest au contraire cette incapacite qui est la fiction structurante de la
conception explicatrice du monde. Cest lexplicateur qui a besoin de lincapable et non
linverse, cest lui qui constitue lincapable comme tel. Expliquer quelque chose a`
quelquun cest dabord lui demontrer quil ne peut pas la
12 Davide Panagia and Jacques Rancie`re, Dissenting Words: A Conversation
with Jacques Rancie`re, Diacritics, 30.2 (2000), 11326 (p. 121).
13 In the Introduction to Le Philosophe et ses pauvres (Paris: Fayard, 1983), p. ix,
Rancie`re claims that wellintentioned educational reformers inspired by Bourdieu were
unwittingly contributing to the very problem they sought to address. He accuses them of
a politically self-defeating form of dumbing-down.
14 For a useful summary of relevant aspects of French education policy debates,
see Kristin Ross, Rancie`re and the Practice of Equality, Social Text, 29 (1991), 5771.
This article incorporates Rosss introduction to her English translation of Le Matre
ignorant, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
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comprendre par lui-meme. Avant detre lacte du pedagogue, lexplication est le mythe
de la pedagogie, la parabole dun monde divise en esprits savants et esprits ignorants,
esprits murs et immatures, capables et incapables, intelligents et betes.
15 What does this suspicion of explanation mean in practice? The teacher no
longer dispenses knowledge to the student but rather encourages the student to acquire
that knowledge for him- or herself through an encounter with a written text. In the
experiment which led to Jacotots discovery, Telemaque formed the bond between
students and teacher and Jacotots role here amounted to little more than repeatedly
sending them back to the text. When the experiment is radicalized and Jacotot finds
himself teaching subjects about which he knows nothing, it is only the existence of a text
if not Telemaque then some other demonstration or example from the relevant field
of knowledge which saves the notion of le matre ignorant from mere absurdity.16 It
is Telemaque, or its equivalent, which allows Jacotots pedagogy to be simultaneously
egalitarian and meaningful: teacher and student are equal before the book.
17 The emancipatory role played by the written text here fits neatly with
Rancie`res tendency in his other work to privilege the liberatory political possibilities
of the written text over the hierarchical authoritarianism of the spoken encounter.
18 Although Rancie`re struggles to avoid admitting it, Jacotots method looks, at times,
suspiciously like an elaborate form of autodidactism, a learning experience in which the

learner grapples, alone, with the content embodied in the text, while the teacher, at most,
seeks to sustain the students focus with relentless questioning. Jacotots method is taken
by Rancie`re to constitute a radical critique of the Enlightenment model of progressive
pedagogy and its institutions. Jacotot, says Rancie`re, derives the mad notion that all
intelligence is equal and that this equality is a presupposition that requires demonstration
and not a goal that needs to be attained; [. . .] he derives the notion that the ideals of
progress and the progressive movement are, in and of themselves, principles of inequality
by proposing equality as a social end and entrusting certain educational experts with the
task of reducing the effects of the clash between an equality to come with existing
inequality means, in short, to institute inequality as a principle whose reproduction is
infinite. [sic]
19 Rancie`res attack on progressive pedagogy in Le Matre ignorant is thus a
dual attack on two logically distinguishable entities which he elides: the syste`me
15 J. Rancie`re, Le Matre ignorant: cinq lecons sur lemancipation
intellectuelle (Paris: Fayard, 1987), hereafter MI, p. 16.
16 The pedagogue can be ignorant because the text is savant. There is no need for
the bewildering redefinition of ignorance as openness to the other proposed by Maria
Beatriz Greco in her Rancie`re et Jacotot: une critique du concept dautorite (Paris:
LHarmattan, 2007), pp. 5051.
17 The book, or its equivalent, is what saves Jacotots experiment from
inconsequential absurdity. Although Rancie`re has emphasized, in an interview, the
importance of ce dispositif materiel in the encounter, it is not clear what kind of object
is substituted for Telemaque when the experiment is radicalized and Jacotot teaches
painting, or the piano: a book (a treatise on colour, or harmony) or a work (a painting or
sonata)? J. Rancie`re, Lactualite du matre ignorant: entretien avec Jacques
Rancie`re, Le Telemaque, 27 (May 2005), special issue devoted to Le Matre ignorant,
2136 (p. 27).
18 See, in particular, J. Rancie`re, La Parole muette: essai sur les contradictions
de la litterature (Paris: Hachette, 1998), pp. 8284. 19 Rancie`re in Panagia and
Rancie`re, Dissenting Words, p. 122.
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explicateur by which the student is led progressively to intellectual freedom through a

series of explanations of gradually increasing complexity and the progressivist political
thesis that education is the social route to emancipation, or democracy in the fullest sense.
According to Rancie`re, Jacotots importance lay in his awareness in the educational
arena of the way in which the Enlightenment conception of social progress was
supplanting the Cartesian and Revolutionary presupposition that all are intellectually
equal. He lived in the particular historical moment at which social progressives began to
put in place the institutions they believed would gradually bring about equality through
education: une enorme machine se mettait en marche pour promouvoir legalite par

linstruction. Cetait la` legalite representee, socialisee, inegalisee, bonne pour

etre perfectionnee, cest-a`-dire retardee de commission en commission, de rapport en
rapport, de reforme en reforme, jusqua` la consommation des temps. Jacotot fut le seul
a` penser cet effacement de legalite sous le progre`s, de lemancipation sous
linstruction. (MI, p. 222) Ordinary progressive pedagogy, according to Rancie`re,
perpetuates inequality by leading the student to believe that his or her capacity to
understand is dependent upon the teachers explanations. Rancie`res presumption of
intelligence amounts to much more than a pious injunction to have faith in the students
ability to learn. It implies a profoundly different understanding of the relationship
between student and teacher: Entre le matre et lele`ve setait etabli un pur rapport de
volonte a` volonte: rapport de domination du matre qui avait eu pour consequence un
rapport entie`rement libre de lintelligence de lele`ve a`celle du livre cette intelligence
du livre qui etait aussi la chose commune, le lien intellectuel egalitaire entre le matret
lele`ve. (MI, p. 25) In other words, the teachers role is to place the student in a
situation from which they can only escape by using their own intellect. Teaching in such
a way as to promote intellectual emancipation thus involves a paradox: if emancipation is
something which can never be given but only taken, to teach is to construct a series of
puzzles from which the student can only escape by seizing knowledge. This is very much
the spirit of Bons ateliers: the facilitator devises constraining tasks which confine the
participants to a place from which they can only escape by writing creatively. Bons
approach, like that of Rancie`res Jacotot, relies primarily not on the transmission and
reception of explanations but rather on the head-on confrontation of subjects assumed to
be intellectual equals and the production of work which, like the writing by Jactotots
students in response to Telemaque, tends towards des phrases decrivains et non point
decoliers (MI, p. 11).
20 It will be clear from what has already been said of Bons ateliers that he is not
as averse to explaining as Rancie`res Jacotot. Yet Jacotots suspicion of explanation may
seem so excessive as to verge on incoherence: why is it better to defer to the authority of
Telemaque than the explanations of a good teacher? Jacotots aversion to explanation is
exaggerated to the limits of plausibility and,
20 There nevertheless remains some room for explanation in Bons practice of the
ateliers, notably in his short commentaries on the stimulus texts.

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no doubt, his value to Rancie`re lies in the provocative distance he marks from ordinary
common-sense thinking about education. Yet this suspicion of explanation is not
incoherent: it is best understood in institutional and political terms. From Jacotots mad
perspective, when students are taught in the normal way, by being led gradually from
imperfect explanations to less imperfect ones, this unwittingly fosters the intellectual
dependency and authenticates the sense of intellectual inequality which are crucial to the

survival of the institution and the perpetuation of the social status quo. Jacotots word for
such education is abrutissement (MI, p. 16). The sense of intellectual inequality which
such institutions produce is thought of as one of the mainstays of other forms of social
inequality because it rationalizes the division of society into those who are born to think
and govern and their inferiors in intelligence who are fit only to follow instructions.
Equality within the pedagogical encounter Rancie`re and Bon are both implicitly critical
of the institutional legacy of May 1968. One of the more unusual features of their implied
critique of the progressive is that it comes firmly from the Left. If the spirit of May 1968
was egalitarian, both suggest that attempts to translate this into educational policy have
led perversely to new inequalities. They suggest that the desire to understand
underachievement has given way socially, institutionally and individually, to an
acceptance of it which ultimately does most harm to those whose social background puts
them at greatest disadvantage. The well-intentioned desire not to blame students for their
failure to achieve has slipped into a widespread indifference to their progress and a
complacent readiness to redirect underachievers into more appropriate forms of learning
because high culture, and in particular literary culture, is thought not to be for everybody.
21 Bon resists this strongly in his own work as a practitioner of ateliers de
criture, the premise of which is that literature and creative writing are, in reality, for
everybody. Rancie`re and Bons radical pedagogies both treat their students as intellectual
equals from the outset. In the case of Bons ateliers, this presumption of intellectual
equality is enacted to a great extent in the structure of the workshops, which in effect
places texts by participants and texts by established authors on an equal footing. The
ateliers typically begin, as I have indicated, with a reading aloud of a short stimulus text,
not usually longer than a third or half a page, followed by a short presentation, by the
facilitator, of the author concerned and an explanation of the significance of that excerpt.
This commentary is intended to open up the text to the participants, to encourage them to
see it not as a cultural object to be admired passively but rather as the demonstration of a
particular approach, mood, technique or stylistic musique which can be taken up by
them.
21 See Antoine Prost, Ecoles, colle`ges et lycees de 1968 a` 1984, in Prost, E
ducation, societe et politiques: une histoire de lenseignement de 1945 a` nos jours, 2nd
edn (Paris: Seuil, 1997), Chapter 8, pp. 15684. Prost underlines the disciplinary role
played by the threat of orientation (placing a student in a less prestigious stream than the
one which they and their parents had chosen) in a school system lacking in other forms of
sanction: Travaillez, sinon vous serez orientes, p. 172.

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from

22 Participants are then invited to write in response to a suggestion of the

facilitators,who in turn responds to their texts and engages them in what is supposed to
be a non-judgmental discussion about what they have written.

23 Bon emphasizes the need for the facilitator to welcome participants texts and
remarks that: le vocabulaire purement artistique par quoi nous apprenons a`constituer un
accueil non jugeant du texte, en reconnatre la singularite, les potentiels, cest au the
atre ou a` la musique quil nous faut en puiser lirreductible part technique (TM, p. 15,
italics in original). Thus in the structure of the workshops there is a mirroring of the
opening commentary on the stimulus text and the later commentary on, or accueil of, the
participants texts. This structural mirroring establishes a presumption of intellectual
equality between facilitator, participants and the published authors from whose work the
stimulus texts are drawn. The facilitator is enjoined to appreciate the participants texts,
but what exactly is the significance of Bons reference here to theatre and music? It lies in
the notion of performance (or production, in the theatrical sense). There is an implicit
analogy between the relationship of one performance of a play, or piece of music, to the
work as such and the relationship of potential to its realization in any particular piece of
writing: the participants text can be seen as a one-off performance, behind which it is
the facilitators role to look for other ways in which that same potential could have been,
and can in future be, performed or produced. Bon seems to think this analogy allows
him to talk in terms of developing potential without needing to criticize, in the negative
sense, and without needing to discuss openly questions of aesthetic value: there are
simply different ways of staging plays and different productions, or performances, reveal
different qualities in the piece.24 Yet the analogy and the aesthetic relativism it seems to
sanction break down when we consider that, in the case of the participants, the right to
perform differently is circumscribed by the facilitators inevitable preconceptions about
what constitutes good writing. Although explicit discussion of questions of aesthetic
value is avoided in Tous les mots, where developed evaluative discussion might be
expected there are often to be found instead rather terse adjectives expressing personal
preference or purporting to sum up a text, work or author: one stimulus text is
indispensable, another tre`s bref et tre`s dense, another intime et dense, another
essentiel; Kafka is said to be un des quatre principaux auteurs du Xxe sie`cle.25 There
is no invitation to question these judgements, nor the evident aesthetic preference for
stimulus texts which are formally experimental, unplotted, fragmentary and materially
descriptive, in other words a preference for a certain kind of avantgarde writing: there
seems to be no place here for the differently different

22 For example: la musique de Novarina etablie, et cette pure fascination pour la

suggestion du langage, nimporte quel contenu pourra en etre traverse, TM, p. 156.
23 Bon takes it for granted in TM that negative feedback has no place in the
workshops. Cf. Andre, Babel heureuse, p. 95.
24 Cf. Bon, Sang gris: une page ecrite vaut telle quelle est, des tentatives
chacune charpentee et batie, a` la voix reconnaissable, et impliquant la prehension
visuelle et singulie`re dun univers, p. 135.
25 Bon, TM, pp. 30, 55, 123, 143, 97.

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music of, for example, Marguerite Yourcenar, Pascal Quignard or indeed Michel
Houellebecq. Bon has a very clear sense of what he thinks makes for good writing and of
which texts and authors he considers important, yet nowhere are these judgements offered
for discussion.26 Not that there is anything devious about Bons approach in Tous les
mots: the back cover states that the work constitutes un traite de poetique personnelle.
Yet the absence of debate about literary value within the book is hardly redeemed by the
subjectivism of this remark: the risk is that this translates, in practice, into imitative, nonreflective, learning rooted in networks of transmission and reception which are covert and
fraternal rather than open and democratic (like what I say I like and do as I do, but dont
ask me why). Ultimately, however, these objections may be less serious than they
appear, for there is no necessary reason why the workshops cannot also include some
fuller discussion of the rationale behind the choice of texts than that which is suggested
by, and contained in, Tous les mots sont adultes. Jacotot, as Rancie`re describes him, also
goes to great lengths to prevent the pedagogical encounter from stalling at the point at
which the teacher evaluates the work produced. Thus in the case of a student who
produces a less accomplished piece of work, this instance of underachievement is not
allowed to reflect back onto the students sense of their own potential, or the teachers
view of it: je dirai que peut-etre il a fourni un moins bon travail parce quil a moins bien
travaille, quil na pas bien vu parce quil na pas bien regarde. Je dirai quil a porte a`
son travail une moindre attention (MI, p. 86). This is an explanation consistent with the
premise of intellectual equality and recalls Bons view of participants contributions as
performances of an underlying potential. However, at this crucial moment in which the
teacher confronts the learners work, the pedagogical styles of Bon and Rancie`re differ
in outward appearance. Whereas Bon tells facilitators to be non-judgemental in their
response to partcipants work, which they should welcome and appreciate, in Rancie`res
case the teacher who might more accurately be called not a facilitator but a
difficilitator is enjoined to be intraitable (MI, p. 67), to question remorselessly in an
attempt to expose non sequiturs and obscurities. Yet the shared aim of both approaches,
different though they certainly are, is to elicit new performances which better realize the
underlying potential of the student. Neither approach can be reduced to that simple faith
in students capacity to learn which characterizes many a conventional pedagogy: Bons
facilitator is tentative and humble as he or she questions the participants on the
construction of their text and the job of Jacotots pedagogue, by contrast, is to maintain a
combative vigilance to inconsistency. Both certainly believe in the capacity of their
students to learn, yet their conceptions of how this faith is expressed in the student
teacher relationship depart dramatically from the platitudes of ordinary pedagogy.
26 Trying to formulate persuasively judgements of this kind is part of literary
scholarship in the full sense. Bons dismissive remarks about this activity in TM suggest

he sees it as little more than a dry exercise in cataloguing works cruelly devised to sap the
creative energies of young minds. See TM, pp. 8, 302.

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Le Matre ignorant is remarkable for the way it reprocesses resistance from learners:
expressions of inability are systematically retranslated into a language of potential and
emancipation. The paradigm of this retranslation is Jacotots wonderfully intransigent
response to the student who replies je ne peux pas, je ne comprends pas, when asked to
recite and comment on Telemaque: ne dis pas que tu ne le peux pas. Tu sais dire je ne
peux pas. Dis a` la place Calypso ne pouvait . . . Et tu es parti. Tu es parti sur une route
que tu connaissais deja` et que tu devras desormais suivre sans discontinuer. Ne dis pas:
je ne peux pas dire. Ou alors, apprends a` le dire a` la manie`re de Calypso, a` celle de
Narbal ou dIdomenee [. . .] Tu nen finiras pas de trouver des manie`res de dire je ne
peux pas et bientot tu pourras tout dire. (MI, p. 42, italics in original) And Rancie`res
book can itself be considered a demonstration, or performance, of the emancipatory
intellectual and political force of a language of equality, as Charlotte Nordmann has
suggested.27 Rancie`res work seeks to demonstrate the power of declarations of
equality, both intellectual and political. Bon and Rancie`re are in agreement that
educational institutions function as though their aim were to limit, or negate, this
particular power, to instil a sense not of potential and capability but rather of intellectual
and political inequality, through regimes of marking, examinations and redoublement, as
well as in the subtext of everyday interactions between students and teachers. In Bons
case, the way in which literature is conventionally approached in the classroom is thought
to be mortifyingly limited: the writing workshops are not primarily intended to produce
publishable authors, but rather to transform participants relationships to language and
literary culture and to overcome their belief in their own intellectual inferiority. Bons
aims and approach make him, in many respects, a modern-day Jacotot, as the latter is
ventriloquized by Rancie`re commenting on the teaching of painting: il ne sagit pas de
faire des grands peintres, il sagit de faire des emancipes, des hommes capables de dire
et moi aussi je suis peintre, formule ou` il nentre nul orgueil mais au contraire le juste
sentiment de pouvoir de tout etre raisonnable (MI, p. 113). For Bon and for Rancie`res
Jacotot, any pedagogy worthy of the name begins with a mise en confiance (TM, p. 62):
le proble`me nest pas de faire des savants. Il est de relever ceux qui se croient infe
rieurs en intelligence, de les sortir du marais ou` ils croupissent: non pas de lignorance,
mais celui du mepris de soi, du mepris en soi de la creature raisonnable (MI, p. 168).
There is thus a dimension to these egalitarian pedagogies which may be characterized as
psychotherapeutic, although I expect neither Bon nor Rancie`re would be especially
happy with this term.28 Indeed in Rancie`res

27 C. Nordmann, Bourdieu/Rancie`re: la politique entre sociologie et philosophie

(Paris: Amsterdam, 2006), p. 130. See also p. 137.
28 Bon never lingers over the psychotherapeutic side benefits of some of the
exercises he discusses in TM, placing the emphasis instead on their aesthetic objectives,
yet these are clearly visible just below the surface (Bon, TM, pp. 42, 162, 269, 279, 302
03). Bons reluctance to dwell on these psychotherapeutic effects can be explained in
terms of a personal aversion to psychoanalysis but must also be a reaction against one
particularly pronounced tendency in the creative writing movement in France, associated
with Elisabeth Bing, which saw creative writing as a form of psychotherapy. Responding
to a question at a conference devoted to his work (Francois Bon, eclats de realite,
Saint-E tienne, 2224 March 2007), Bon remarked of psychoanalysis: je nai pas ces
lectures, jen ai dautres, et je nai pas a` me justifier la`-dessus.

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case it has been suggested that his very particular understanding of the political is
problematic precisely because it amounts to little more than the adopting of a positive
mental attitude to lifes vicissitudes and does not sufficiently enable action to influence
positively the state of the world. The next section examines these criticisms and asks to
what extent the equality demonstrated in the pedagogical encounter has effects in the
wider world. Equality beyond the pedagogical encounter Bon and Rancie`re both start out
from the radical assumption that, contrary to common belief, all human beings are
intellectually and creatively equal. For Rancie`re, the purpose of education is not to
establish hierarchies of ability but rather to demonstrate this basic equality; similarly,
Bons ateliers enact, through their structure and approach, the premise of equality
between participants, facilitator and published authors. In Rancie`res case, this way of
thinking is allied to an explicit critique of the idea that progress towards a more just
society can be achieved through enlightened educational policy and progressive, forwardlooking, institutions. The question is whether the enactment of equality within Bons
creative writing workshop and whether the demonstration of equality in the
pedagogical encounter as Jacotot and Rancie`re conceive it are capable of furthering
the cause of equality and social justice in the wider world. For might they not be merely
the consoling dream, spectre or shadow, the shadow-play, dumb-show or imitation, of
real emancipation? Nick Hewlett writes: if equality is taken as given and as a starting
point not a goal then it seems the struggle for a better life is not a practical one but
a state of mind, a particular consciousness, which is ironically rather unthreatening to the
police state of affairs and possibly rather unmotivating for people wanting to get involved
in a struggle for a fairer world.29 Peter Hallward likewise suggests that Rancie`res
trenchant egalitarianism seems perfectly compatible with a certain degree of social
resignation, even an almost passive acceptance of de facto inequalities.30 These related
criticisms go to the heart of Rancie`res conception of the political, which he theorizes in

terms of moments of uprising, in which the repressive order of social hierarchies he calls
the police is, for a short time, held in abeyance. Yet such a theory, Hewlett and Hallward
suggest, does little to explain how this order can be modified in an enduring way so as to
relieve any of its ordinary injustices. In other words, the accusations levelled
here against Rancie`res work suggest that it may be powerless to inspire enduring
change: it is not so much wrong as not useful. It is striking that these charges echo the
central thrust of Rancie`res own attack on Bourdieus work: Bourdieus suspicious
analyses of educational institutions and cultural capital are flawed, Rancie`re argues, not
so much because they are descriptively inaccurate the education system clearly does
serve to reproduce inequality, Rancie`re will readily agree but rather because they are

29 N. Hewlett, Badiou, Balibar, Rancie`re: Re-thinking Emancipation (London:

Continuum, 2007), p. 107.
30 P. Hallward, Jacques Rancie`re and The Subversion of Mastery, Paragraph,
28.1 (2005), 2645 (p. 42).

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unable to inspire change for the better.31 Rancie`re thinks he sees a paralyzing,
depressive, tautologous bleakness in the sociologists work which cannot but have a
disempowering effect. The criticisms of Rancie`res work, by contrast, suggest that it too
may also fail to empower but for the opposite reason: by being far too blithely
affirmatory in the face of a multitude of materially and economically entrenched
inequalities, by choosing to marvel at intermittent moments of equality without thinking
about how these might either be prepared for or perpetuated. It would be wrong to expect
too much of Rancie`re or any other single theorist. We should be looking elsewhere, to
innovative cultural practices such as Bons ateliers, for examples of how the idea, which
Rancie`res work shelters, of political and aesthetic equality, can be made real. As I have
shown, Bons creative writing workshops aspire to counter the effects of cultural
dispossession by democratizing access to aesthetic experience without compromising on
the quality, or difficulty, of the works and processes involved. In framing such encounters
they disturb the division of society into those whose role it is to think (and who are
destined to govern) and those whose role it is to attend to the material conditions of that
societys survival (who are governed). In other words they disturb what Rancie`re has
called le partage du sensible.32 In cultivating the capacity and the confidence of
participants to use language creatively and by encouraging them to consider themselves
the equals, at least in their potential, of major published authors, the ateliers are a
contemporary manifestation of the radical emancipatory pedagogy theorized by
Rancie`re. I am not suggesting that either Bon or Rancie`re is exemplary of the other in a

reductive sense, nor that they are similar in every respect, but rather that in the areas I
have outlined their relationship can be understood as one of reciprocal exemplification.
Rancie`re would perhaps resist the juxtaposition I have argued for in this article. In a
recent interview he voiced scepticism about the value of un activisme artistique qui tend
vers le service social, charge par exemple daller dans les banlieues pour creer du
lien.33 Yet Bons multifaceted project cannot easily be reduced to such a twodimensional caricature and many of the presuppositions underlying his practice of the
ateliers are sufficiently similar to Rancie`res own elaborations of the relationship
between the aesthetic and the political to merit far more serious consideration. Bon has
been reluctant to theorize his writing workshops in overtly political terms, unlike the
pioneer of popular education Paulo Freire, although Bon and Freire undoubtedly share
what may broadly be termed a concern with language as a route to the invention of
citizenship.34 Rancie`res theoretical work is somewhat short on analysis
31 Nordmann has argued persuasively that Rancie`re overstates the case against
Bourdieu and ends up caricaturing the sociologists position. Nordmann,
Bourdieu/Rancie`re, pp. 10003.
32 J. Rancie`re, Le Partage du sensible: esthetique et politique (Paris: La
Fabrique, 2000).
33 Jacques Levy, Juliette Rennes and David Zerbib, Jacques Rancie`re: Les
territoires de la pensee partagee, ,http://www.espacestemps.net/document2142.html,
January 2007. [accessed April 2008].
34 P. Freire, Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. by
Robert R. Barr (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 30.

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of contemporary examples of the egalitarian political and cultural practice for which it
persistently calls. Thus Rancie`res work enables a theoretical understanding of the
politics of Bons workshops and these, in turn, supply one concrete example of what
Rancie`res conception of the political might look like.
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