Art, Equality and Learning (Pedagogies against the State)

In this book the notions of real learning and equality are approached as processes of becoming leading to the figuration of new worlds through local curations of learning and practice. Though its main theses are mainly grounded in the context of art practice and education they have a much wider application to other (perhaps all) contexts of learning through the notions of pedagogies against the state and pedagogies of the event. Learning is conceived as a political act rather than, for example, an incremental process of psychological or sociological development. Most chapters of the book deal with a series of tensions between tradition and the new; between art in education and contemporary art; between ontologies of practice and epistemologies of assessment; between socio-cultural notions of difference and an egalitarian notion of the Same, between an ethics of reality, of established values, principles and practices and an ethics of the real; between the different ontological domains of the artist and the teacher which are brought together in the constituency of the artist-teacher, between knowledge and not-knowing, between know¬ledge and truth. The intention is not to resolve such tensions as such attempted resolution will always be incomplete, rather they are discussed in the spirit of an imperative to decide what kind of future we want for pedagogical spaces of teaching and learning. The text draws upon key ideas from the philosophical work of Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Jacques Ranciere, Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Lacan and others and these are applied to pedagogical spaces in order to initiate a debate about teaching and learning. The book raises some important questions relating to subjectification, ethics, multiculturalism and the struggles inherent to the tensionalities of becoming an artist-teacher.