Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Critical Inquiry
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
172
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
been entirely forgotten, and still today you cant find any of his books. So I
had to make an introduction in the same way as the teacher who introduces
a matter that is entirely unknown to the students. But I had to make it in a
different way. I created a kind of fiction. Intellectual emancipation subverts
the role of the master; he is no longer the one who knows and transmits his
knowledge but rather the one who tells his intellectual adventure. In a lesson, you are supposed to transmit your knowledge, but in a fiction you tell
an intellectual adventure. The book was my intellectual adventure with
Jacotot. I told the reader I met this person, and I tried to translate his work.
Jacotot wrote in a kind of language within an intellectual framework that is
now very far from us. And so it was necessary that I do precisely this sort of
translation. The word lesson is an ironic one, which makes reference to the
titles of many books, but, of course, the book is a series of lessons about the
question of what exactly a lesson means.
OLIVER: I wonder if a book can ever truly function as a leveling materiality,
the basis of an emancipatory exchange, given that words are so determined and overdetermined. I think we hit here upon what you call
poetic virtue, the kind of improvisation and de-idiomatization of
language that constitute poetic forcethat which moves language and
reconfigures it (IS, p. 64). Still, the fact remains that virtually every word
can be put in quotation marks because of its long history, and learning
through the leveling materiality of the book still basically takes place
through language, through words.
RANCIE` RE: Emancipation does not hinge on the power of words as such. It
hinges on the power of the relation with the book. The materiality of the
book is opposed to the position of the master; the book is in your hands,
and nobody is there to tell you how you have to understand words.
There is the possibility of a lot of translations being made by the reader
so that, in a certain way, it is the reader who transforms the book. And
even if you put the words in a certain order to convey a certain meaning,
and even if words are overdetermined, its up to the reader to change the
rules of the game. This is the first point.
J A C Q U E S R A N C I E` R E is professor of aesthetics at the University of Paris-VIII,
St. Denis. His most recent book is The Future of the Image. A N N E M A R I E
O L I V E R is assistant professor of intermedia and contemporary theory at the
Pacific Northwest College of Art FIVE and research scholar at the Orfalea
Center for Global and International Studies, University of California, Santa
Barbara. She is coauthor of The Road to Martyrs Square (2004) and is currently
working on a study of contemporary forms of literalism and the question of
style. Her email is amoliver@pnca.edu
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
173
174
The second point is that I used a strange idiom in this book, an idiom
in between the language of Jacotot and the language of our contemporaries. The language of Jacotot is not the one used today to discuss issues
of education. His lexicon is not the lexicon that is now used. There is a
kind of linguistic strangeness in my book that makes it very difficult to
read. Readers have to do something; they have to muddle through a
kind of strangeness. These are not the words that are usually used for
speaking about matters of education and politics. On the one hand, I
bridged the two languages and the two epochs. But, on the other hand,
I wanted to keep that strangeness, to throw a strange object into the
middle of the debate in France between the sociological view of education and the view of education that says that it is knowledge that emancipates; I threw into the debate this object with both its intellectual and
linguistic strangeness. Initially, the book was not read at all by professors. It was read mostly by social workers, artists, and psychoanalysts.
Academics read it only ten or twenty years after it was written, which
means precisely that it demanded a different treatment. The book was
addressed to people who try to find not a new doctrine but a new way of
dealing with wordswith words and meanings.
OLIVER: Im curious as to what you see is the difference between the spoken
word and the written word, the mode of the teacher and that of the
writer, perhaps even command and commandment, two words that
appear in The Ignorant Schoolmaster.
RANCIE` RE: I gave a positive turn to the Platonic criticism of writing. What
writing meant, according to Jacotot, is that words are like orphans. They
are not carried by the master of the word or by the person who is able to
put them in the right way in the soul of the student. So, there is this idea
of writing as a certain status of words when they are made available to
anybody for any kind of reading, transformation, reappropriation.
OLIVER: Is that the role of art in your opiniontransformation?
RANCIE` RE: Well, I think so, but I would say that the role of art or the practice
of art is a transformation of a certain state of relations between words
and things, between words and the visible, a certain organization of the
senses and the sensory configuration of what is given to us and how we
can make sense of it. Im not giving you a definition of art. There is also
a poetics of politics that consists in reframing the relation between
words and things. Let us think about the old polemic against democracy
that I studied in The Names of History. It is a polemic against some
empty words like people, freedom, and equality. The polemic has it that
those empty words are circulating, and anybody can appropriate them
to frame political subjects. This circulation of the written word has
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
always been viewed as a threat by all powers. But the issue of emptiness
is not a linguistic one. As a matter of fact, those words are not empty at
all. They carry a history, and they reframe the landscape of collective
experience.
OLIVER: What, then, is the process of producing a solecism, a word that a
writer, a poet, does something to and with, makes his or her own? How
do you see that process working, and what does it mean to take a word,
particularly a religious remnant like parousia, incarnation, miracle, sacrilege, epiphany, chalice, or commandment, and to apply it to another
context, give it a different affect? What does it mean to make a word
strange?
RANCIE` RE: It is actually a two-way process. Parousia is not in origin a religious word. It is a common word that took on whatever religious meaning is in it and modifies it, but it is not in origin a religious word. What
interested me was precisely that circulation between empirical meaning
and theological meaning. I did not decide to use religious words, and I
did not use them in an innocent way, but, well, what is interesting,
whats interesting for me, is that there are a lot of connections between
theological concepts or religious expressions and the way in which we
speak about art or literature. Theology, in fact, is about the modes of
presence of the divine. And literature consists in changing the forms of
presence evoked by words.
Incarnation, for instance, refers to the Christian religion, but, at the
same time, it has been used as a common word, as when one says that an
actor incarnates a character. The point is that when we describe what
happens in a novel, or when we describe what happens on the surface of
a painting, there is this lexicon that reappears and sometimes takes on a
mystical and theological dimension, while at other times a word is used
just as a common word. What, of course, interests me is that we live in
a civilization that was structured by Christianity, and so there is a long
tradition of interpretation of literary words in relation to the Scriptures,
in relation to incarnation, the physical presence of God, and so forth. In
The Flesh of Words, I start with the end of the Gospel of John and the way
in which the text describes the miracle of the fish with very familiar
details and touches so as to translate the presence of the Word made
flesh into a matter of everyday experience. My interrogation has to do
with how we consider the physicality, the corporeality, of the words of
the novel in relation to this model of the Word made flesh. There is a
long tradition of thinking literature as a kind of making flesh of the
Word. What interests me is the way in which literature plays precisely
with this temptation and at the same time dismisses it.
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
175
176
There is always in literature and in poetry this promise or this temptation: now, the words will be more than words. As poetry and literature
consist in exceeding the ordinary use of words, the ultimate goal of that
excess is precisely for words to become physical reality. We can think of
this theme in the nineteenth centuryfor instance, the Whitmanian or
Rimbaldian idea of a new language, the idea that poetry must be a language accessible to all the senses. We can think also of the twentiethcentury idea that theatre must no longer be just words but rather must
become a kind of physical reality, and even words on the stage of the
theatre often become physical reality. Think, for instance, of Artauds
theatre of cruelty. It is a temptation, and, at the same time, the temptation is always postponed or dismissed.
OLIVER: In what ways and under what conditions should it be resisted?
RANCIE` RE: It is not that it should be resisted. On the one hand, the point is
that this dream of fusion is an impossibility because, ultimately, words
are still words. But, on the other hand, the will to overstep the separation
rests on a simplistic vision of the opposition between words and things.
There is something biased in the very idea of having words on one side
and reality on the other side because words are a certain kind of reality,
and they create a certain kind of materiality.
OLIVER: In translating Jacotot, you make the point that it is the very arbitrariness of language that causes people to try to communicate at all. So
much of language is not meant to be taken literally. Can we say that the
desire for the collapse of words and things is a kind of literalism, the
temptation of literalism?
RANCIE` RE: I would say that literalism is only one among several different
kinds of transformation of words, of words into things. I referred previously to the Rimbaldian idea of a language that would speak to all the
senses. You cannot call this literalism. For it involves not only the fact
that your sentence is taken at its word or at face value but also the idea of
words becoming more than words. In what you call literalism, in a certain way, words remain words, but in many political or literary dreams
and, of course, in religion, the distance of the word is supposed to be
abolished; the letter disappears in its spirit, the spirit becomes flesh. It is
a matter of transformation as if precisely there were a kind of sensory
reality that would abolish the very distance between words and things
and also the distance between one speaker and another speaker.
OLIVER: Delay and distance.
RANCIE` RE: Yes.
OLIVER: In The Flesh of Words, speaking of Proust, you write of the blurring
of the line between art and life, the lie of artistic truth, of art reduced to
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
the true-to-life; the original sin against literature that stems from
the illusion that art is in life, that it is made to serve it and that lifes
purpose is to imitate art.2
RANCIE` RE: In a text of Proust, there is the idea of a book that would be made
of something like the substance of our happiest moments, fragments of
life itself. There is this idea of the book, but, of course, the book is made
of words. I would say that there are two levels or layers in his poetics.
There is the idea that the book is made of moments that are impressed or
sensations that are imprinted in ourselves, so that we should have only
to try to transcribe what has been impressed, what has been imprinted
in us, by sensation. But sensation doesnt imprint. Sensation affects us,
but it doesnt imprint. So Proust has to create a form of discourse that is
an analogue of what would be a print made by sensation, the equivalent
of the text written by sensation. I would say that Proust is writing his
book precisely between two temptations. The first temptation is the idea
that the book is already printed by life itself. And the other temptation
appears because he finishes his book at the time of the war, a time of
patriotism, when there was faith in a living truth of the nation, a truth of
the collectivity. I quote a letter that Maurice Barre`s published at the
same time in one of his patriotic manifestosa letter of a mother to her
son, who is a soldier. Barre`s sees in this letter the expression of the heart
of the national community, the incarnation of its living truth, as if the
community itself wrote through the mothers pen. Prousts writing, I
would say, has to thread its way between his own dream, the dream of
the book written by sensation, and the patriotic dream of the time, the
dream of the collectivity, of a writing that would be the flesh of its living
spirit.
OLIVER: The mother-child dyad often seems to stand in for a suspicious
craving for convergence and fusion at other levels, for example, the level
of the collective.
RANCIE` RE: In Proust, there is the original scene in which the boy writes to
the mother because he wants the mother to come and kiss him before
going to bed. What Proust designates here is a certain idea of writing as
the pursuit of an immediate relation with the mother and as a natural
process, so the relation with the mother is an immediate relation between an act of writing and an act of love.
But the figure of the mother may intervene in very different ways. In
this case, the figure of the mother is a promise of immediacy, of imme2. Rancie`re, The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford,
Calif., 2004), p. 124; hereafter abbreviated FW.
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
177
178
diate fusion of the body and immediate fusion of linguistic communication. Now, in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, the mother doesnt
intervene as a figure of fusion but rather in a very different form. She
intervenes as a figure of equality. As long as the ideology of instruction
opposes the teacher to the mother, she represents the equal capacity of
anybody to be for anybody else a cause of learning. She carries the
egalitarian power of the mother language, la langue maternelle, which
everybody learns without a schoolmaster. The Ignorant Schoolmaster
has to do with the question of the ability of anybody to learn by himself
or herself, to learn as he or she has learned the mother tongue. So, in this
case, I would say that the mother tongue is not a promise of fusion. It is
rather an experience of equality. There is a kind of learning that is involved in the acquisition of the mother tongue. And, with this, there is
for Jacotot the idea that even the illiterate mother can play for the child
the role of the ignorant schoolmaster. In this case, the mother is a figure
of equality and not a figure of fusion.
OLIVER: Through mothering fantasy, you write, literature is led back to
what denies it and what it denies, the truth of the book that is made spirit
of flesh; the circle of the spirit that is offered as victim on the cross is
made spirit of stone, spirit of the mother, spirit circulating between the
mothers kiss, the patina of stones, and the fusion of them all in the
collective epic (FW, p. 123).
RANCIE` RE: I distinguish two figures of the motherthis symbiotic figure
that is set up and denounced in Prousts books and the relation with the
mother tongue as it is presented in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. In The
Ignorant Schoolmaster, education through the relation with the mother
tongue implies a certain continuity between life and learning, which is
opposed to the idea that learning is a kind of autonomous worldthe
idea of the school against the family, for instance.
OLIVER: The mothers tears, the mothers kiss, the mothers lullabies, the
ribbons by which the mother teaches the child to speak could this not
be a paradigm for a different kind of learning rather than simply the
threat of a dangerous fusion? The problem of inequality in this relation
is a fact but doesnt seem an issue. A child learns from his mother
through some unknown process of symbiosis, patterning, and rhythm.
Was this relation never a pedagogical model for Jacotot?
RANCIE` RE: I dont think so because this case presupposes a kind of relation
that is entirely specific. And Jacotots theory is about the fact that you
can learn in any kind of situation, so everybody can play for you the role
of the ignorant schoolmasterthe mother like the teacher, but also
anybody like the mother. There need not be a specific relation. Of
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
179
180
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
can put together many different forms of physical presence, and so, of
course, there is a temptation to think that an installation is a kind of
language, a material language. Many installations are like discourses but
discourses made of things and images, which, of course, convey not only
their meaning but also a kind of material evidence. I would say that they
tend to anticipate their own efficiency.
There is a temptation in many art forms today to think that they have
become realities or that they have become political action because they
occupy a space, and they occupy it with real, solid things and not only
with shadows and with words. In this case, I would say that the danger is
the danger of tautology. You construct a discourse in a kind of physical
form, and you presuppose that your program is realized, that it is implemented in reality, and so you anticipate the effect; this is why, of
course, I have pleaded for a new sense of distance, which implies a
certain idea of emancipation. My view of emancipation is that art emancipates or literature emancipates when it doesnt tell us how to use art or
literature how we have to understand, how we have to see, how we
have to read, and what we have to understand. This is my argument.
There is always this idea, this temptation, that art speaks and becomes
an action precisely because it is programmed to produce a specific kind
of efficiency, but, in my view, what emancipates is precisely the possibility of the reader or the viewer constructing or reconstructing that
efficiency himself or herself.
OLIVER: By efficiency, do you mean the drive to something like total theatre?
RANCIE` RE: I would say that what is practiced today in that direction is rather
a kind of caricature. There was a time for the idea of the total work of art,
a kind of immediate fusion of theatre and life. For instance, at the time
of the Soviet revolution, Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold, the Russian
stage designer, attempted to fuse theatrical performance with political
performance. The news from the civic world was announced during the
presentation of the play, and actors and spectators tended to identify
themselves as soldiers of the Red Army, too. It was a temptation at the
timethe idea of an identity of the artistic spectacle and a communion
of the masses. I think we are no longer in this kind of configuration, but
there is, I would say, a reenactment of it in the mode of parody. Many
contemporary exhibitions or spectacles make this kind of appeal to efficiency or, in the case of the theatre, to the theatre of the body, some
kind of neo-Dionysianism in which the body performs a new kind of
sacrifice for the community. I would say that we are no longer situated
in the context of the great ideologies that would take over the idea of the
total work of art; rather, we are in the context of nostalgia and parody.
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
181
182
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
imaginary world of virtual reality. There are many ways of using these
techniques. What is true is that any new technique that becomes a medium brings about a certain kind of spiritualism, a new spiritualism, and
this was already true with photographs, with film, with videoany time
that a new medium gives the sensation or the illusion that you can get
out of reality and enter a spiritual world.
OLIVER: But the nature of the relation between reality and representation is
perhaps changed each time.
RANCIE` RE: First, we should avoid drawing a clear-cut line between reality
and representation. The so-called representations are realities. Madame
Bovary is supposed to be the perfect case of the substitution of imagination for life. But Flaubert said of his character that she was sentimental at the same time that she was matter-of-fact. Her imaginary life was
also a way of changing her real life. At the time, there were no media.
It was only imagination. But we can say that the media are forms of
objectification of that imagination. What we mean is, above all, the
increased availability of words and images for everybody. It is a retrospective view to think that the media have created out of their own
power such worlds of imagination.
OLIVER: But Madame Bovary, we can say, earned her world and her delusions and paid the price for them, whereas now you can just buy them.
RANCIE` RE: The point is that you cannot have it both ways. You have to pay
with your own flesh if you want that imagination really to change your
life. If imaginary worlds are ready-made and you have only to buy them,
they dont really reframe your life. For the same reason, you cannot
accuse the imaginary worlds produced by the new media both of being
too cheap and of disturbing our lives in depth. You buy imaginary
worlds; they are among the commodities that you can buy. But very few
people live only in Second Life, for instance. They also live every day in
the same kind of life and with the same problems, problems of relations
with real persons, so I think we must not overstate the role played by
commodified imaginary worlds.
OLIVER: I think the concern and, sometimes, fear that people have about
these worlds has to do with the fact that they are almost neuronalso
potentially total that they threaten to devalue harder forms of imagination, harder forms of creativity, resistance, thought, and inner life. This
is the lure or temptation of a phenomenon like Second Life, which, for
sure, is now but a fringe phenomenon, but the hope is that Second Life
will become the new face of the net, and it is more neuronal, more
plugged-in, more interactive and virtual than anything that has come
before it in widely available form.
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
183
184
RANCIE` RE: When you say it is more neuronal, well, there are certain fictions
that are literally in our life every time there is the idea of a new form of
the collective imaginary. I think that we already have experience in the
past with new forms of social imagery that were supposed to be allencompassing media. If you think about cinema in the 1920s, for instance, there was the idea that the cinema was a kind of cage in which
people were entirely subjugated by the light and the shadows, the idea
that people would become obedient idiots. But cinema has become a
kind of ordinary forma form used for entertainment and also a form
of art that has not much to do with the idea of subjugation, of subjugation of the mind. It is very difficult to anticipate and predict what a new
technological device constructing imaginary worlds will become.
OLIVER: Certainly, film has made individual visions widely available to
people all over the globe and has had enormous influence on thought
and behaviorand not just as entertainment.
RANCIE` RE: There is a multiplicity of ways of seeing, of perceiving, and of
decoding films, and I dont think there is this kind of capture, this
necessary collective capture, of groups by film.
OLIVER: We might speak about the phenomenon of hypnotism.
RANCIE` RE: Its not just hypnotism.
OLIVER: Induction, suggestibility.
RANCIE` RE: We have a lot of dramatic films, special effects do they really
produce hypnotism? Most people use them as entertainment, and being
hypnotized is also a form of entertainment. It doesnt mean that your
brain is really captured.
OLIVER: In your recent book, The Future of the Image, you draw a distinction between the Image, which refers to an Other, and the Visual,
which refers to nothing but itself, and go on to say that alterity is
attached to something other than the material properties of the medium.3 What is that something other? Doesnt the matter matter?
What is a medium? And what is it that is being mediated? Are there
formal, structural, or material properties of different media that make
possible different types of illusions, realities, embodiments, communications, commonalities, and interventions; shared percepts, affects, and
ways of being in the world? Do various kinds of media get at reality in
different ways? Are all of them equally susceptible to the temptation of
immediacy? Can we differentiate media in terms of degrees of passivity
and activity, transitivity and intransitivity, thickness and thinness, com3. Rancie`re, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London, 2007), pp. 12, 3.
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
185
186
don completely the old language, images, and ideas? We do things with
them, play with them, reconfigure them, yes, even dismiss them, yet
their force and compulsion remain. I wonder if what this type of representation evokes and expresses is more akin to a longing for belonging,
the dream of a common language, rather than fusion, and if they can be
kept apart.
RANCIE` RE: For me, it is not a matter of old language. It is clear that a lot of
concepts that we use in the description and judgment of artistic practices and works come from the religious language of incarnation since it
is the language that accounts for the junction between the sensible and
the supersensible. I never advocated dismissing those concepts. On the
contrary, I have often denounced the positivistic attitude entailed in the
claim for proper language in art or in politics. Now, what is at stake is
the way in which not only religious words but religious attitudes are
brought up in artistic practice and in the interpretation of art. In the
past, this religiosity mostly took the form of the Eucharistic gathering
that was literalized with Wagners ceremony of the presentation of the
Graal in Parsifal. Currently, artistic religiosity deals, instead, with the
celebration of Otherness. This tendency started from the modernist will
to differentiate the sensorium of art from the sensorium of everyday life.
Look, for instance, at Lyotards text After the Sublime, the State of
Aesthetics, in which he states that the principle of artistic modernity is
to approach matter in its alterity. In such a way, he emphasizes its
commitment to the unique quality of a tone or a nuance, the grain of
someones skin or a fragrance. But soon he makes all those singularities
interchangeable because they all designate the event of a passion and,
ultimately, the feeling of an obscure debt.4 In such a way, the commitment to matter becomes the mere sign of dependence on a radical
alterity. The task of art is thus to inscribe a shock, which means the
dependence of the mind on the law of the Other be it the Lacanian
Thing or the God of Moses. The privilege that philosophers like Lyotard
or artists like Lanzmann give to the voice over the image relies clearly on
a religious ground. The difference had to be a material one. But, in a
second step, matter was identified with Otherness in general and Otherness with the alterity of the God that forbids representation.
OLIVER: In the chapter Are Some Things Unrepresentable? you discuss
treatments of the Holocaustnamely, Robert Antelmes The Human
Race and Lanzmanns Shoahwhich exemplify your concluding sen4. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman, trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby
(Stanford, Calif., 1991), p. 141.
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
187
188
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
aspects when he says that style is an absolute way of seeing things. This
does not mean at all that the style is the mark of the sole personality of
the writer. It is just the opposite: style is the way in which the writer
disappears, the way in which the writer tries to reach a kind of impersonal view, which means getting in front of things and beings in the very
absence of meaning. It is a way of getting rid of all the conventions of the
presentation of characters. It is an attempt to coincide with the life of
things when they are not related to our interests, to our knowledge, to
our judgments.
OLIVER: So style, we could say, is that which is inescapable about oneself?
RANCIE` RE: Style is not the mark of the personality of the writer. On the
contrary, it is a getting rid of all the marks of personality; it is the impersonality of the flow of sensations, which in a certain way means the
dismissal of the ordinary idea of style as the mark of personality.
OLIVER: But, at that level, can we not say that personality has become impersonal? Its very difficult, for instance, for someone to change or manipulate his or her handwriting; and, in that respect, it is something
almost impersonal rather than personal or perhaps, paradoxically, both.
RANCIE` RE: Yes, certainly, but I think that modern literature is based on the
idea of dismissing what is the personality of the writer and trying to
reach a kind of impersonal state. Im not giving a kind of prescription of
how one must write, just trying to describe a historical shift.
OLIVER: Everything is in everything can that be said to be something
like a law of synonymy, analogy, or correspondence?
RANCIE` RE: Everything is in everything is a sentence from The Ignorant
Schoolmaster, a Jacototian principle (IS, p. 41). It means that in order to
learn you can start from any and every point, that the chain of learning
is a chain that you can grasp at any point. So, everything is in everything is not a proposition about reality. It is not a statement of general
synonymy. It is just the idea that there is no preprogrammed order for
learning, the idea that you can start from every point. From one sentence, you can begin to learn grammar, to learn politics, to learn philosophy, to learn history. This is what it meansthat the starting point
has no importance. You start from one point one sentence, one chapter, one bookand you try to find all that is enclosed in this part, what
is in this sentence, in this structure, in this book. Jacotot says that if the
ignorant person knows but one prayer by heartas everybody did at
the timeit is always possible to provide him with a written copy of the
prayer. From this point on, he can begin comparing the words of the
prayer that he knows with the signs written on the paper that he does not
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
189
190
know. There is at every point the possibility to weave a way toward other
points, always the possibility to go forwardthis is what it means.
OLIVER: But the panecastic dream is one of wholeness, isnt it? Yes, there are
centers, and centers are distributed in a certain way throughout a whole,
but the fact that you can start at one center rather that another does
imply some sort of correspondence between the centers; otherwise,
there would be no wholeness. A book is a totality of sorts, a center to
which one can attach everything new one learns; a circle in which one
can understand each . . . new thing. . . . This is the first principle of
universal teaching. One must learn something and relate everything else
to it (IS, p. 20).
RANCIE` RE: The point is that wholeness means different things, opposite
things. The principle of stultifying teaching is progressiveness, which
means incompletion. The master sets up the process of learning as an
infinite way toward an unattainable totality. In this way, the master is
always ahead; he is the only one to know how to go from one step to the
following one. The student has only fragments in his hands, and the
master is the only one to know the principle of totalization of these
fragments. The book is never whole; the lesson is never finished. There
is always knowledge left on the side of the master. The more the student
learns, the more he is confirmed in the position of the ignorant. The
panecastic principle opposes to this strategy of eternal incompletion
and eternal dependence another wholethe whole that is already
present in every fragment. The book is a whole; this means first that it is
there, at hand, for the student as well as the master. There is nothing that
escapes the student, nothing left up the sleeve of the master. And this
also conveys another idea of totalization. It is not progressive totalization, the steps of which are decided by the master. It is a free totalization,
an aleatory totalization; neither the student nor the master knows all of
what can be learnt from the process and in how many ways. There is an
infinity of ways that can be tried, an infinity of possible connections.
This infinity of capabilities is opposed to the infinity of ignorance that is
entailed in the progressive logic. So it is a matter of opposing two
forms of wholeness and two forms of infinity.
OLIVER: Were now back to where we started. Thanks.
ParisPortland, Oregon, 2007
This content downloaded from 87.77.110.234 on Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:50:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms