In Learning in the gap of feeling and espression I combined some statements of "The ignorant schoolmaster" by Jacques Rancière with the practice of automatique writing and moving in order to engage reflection which includes mind and body.

Here a short introduction and some statements

  Jacques Rancière (born 1940) is a French philosopher. Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St.Denis) who came to prominence when he co-authored Reading Capital (1968), with the structural Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

1.
Jacques Rancière wrote his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster – Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation as an intense argument for heterogeneity in languages and different ways of speaking and utterance. Furthermore, the book is an intense reflection on equality—which is, as Kristin Ross writes in her introduction, “the founding term of our political modernity” [2]—and questions some of the dominant orders of class, conventions, and categories that our Western democratic capitalistic society is built on, and still relies on. In Rancière’s view, thoughts and words are material, and language develops in the application of a certain order using (any) material. “In the act of speaking, man doesn’t transmit his knowledge, he makes poetry; he translates and invites others to do the same. He communicates as an artisan: as a person who handles words like tools. Man communicates with man through the works of his hands just as through the words of his speech: When man acts on matter, the body’s adventures become the story of the mind’s adventures.” [3] This is Rancière’s materialistic version of the speech act.

 2.“Universal teaching” exercised the following principles day by day: “1. All human beings have the same intelligence. 2. All is in everything. 3. The teacher does not transfer his knowledge through explanations. One can teach that wherein one is ignorant.” For Rancière the reason why this way of teaching fails if anchored institutionally or constituted as a method is that institutions are afraid of its consequences. “For as the usual instructor needs inequality, no government, no army, no school, no institution will ever produce a single emancipated human being,” he states. “As soon as universal teaching is constructed as a method and becomes part of the programs of reformatory or revolutionary parties, it is corrupted. Universal teaching can never specialize in producing a certain category of social actors. Only a human being can emancipate a human being.”

3. Rancière distinguishes between intelligence and will. Everyone has the same intelligence, but the will is closely related to attentiveness, which is “an immaterial fact in principle, but material in its effects: we have a thousand ways of verifying its presence, absence, or its larger or smaller intensity.” [6] Teaching is an encounter of two wills and intelligences. If the one will connects with the other, it is fine; however, if the one intelligence connects with the other, stultification is enforced. Whereas the act of an intelligence that only obeys itself, even if the will obeys another, is emancipatory.

4. For RancièreI one gets involved with his or her intellectual competencies through (the art of) observing, comparing, and combining in order to understand and practice the various forms of making.

5. It is the artist who, by and by, opposes the professor’s stultifying lesson. “Each one of us is an artist to the extent that he carries out a double process,” he states. “He is not content to be a mere journeyman but wants to make all work a means of expression, and he is not content to feel something but tries to impart it to others. The artist needs equality as the explicator needs inequality.”

Followed by

15min automatique writing session: keeping this statements in mind and relating it to our own experiences  of learning and teaching.
The aim is to write freely to not be occupied to produce something clever, but rather ingage in a process of thought, a stream of conciousness, which is not so much at the surface but related to sensation, emotion and words in a material way. Grammar, logic, syntacts and pronnouciation is in that case not so important.

At the end read through what you have written and underline what you find interesting; what you like, what surprises you, what you maybe dislike.
(This way of automatique writing realting to a specific thought is inspired by Vera Mantero, which whom I got to know this way of writing, thinking and moving.)

Followed by

20min automatique movement session: automatiqu movment sesssion is moving through and what is there at the moment and wants to be moved.

It can be triggered by sensation, feeling, form.

During this moving I asked some questions. Listen to my question as if you would listen to a song. Do you remember this dance you are doing. By whom or through what has it been inspired? Do you recognize this / these gerstures? How did they come to you? Did you ever learn them? From whom? Is this dance in realtion to your dance training? How? Is your body an archive? What could be a dance of the future?

Go back to the writing and see if there is something one wants to share:

it can be a trace of the moving experience, of some thoughts, of the writing.

It can be a combination of all.

Please decide what you will share and lets communicate through the materials exposed and not about the materials.

Thank you so much!

This is the quote from which I took the title

“One must learn near those who have worked in the gap between feeling and expression, between the silent language of emotion and the arbitrariness of the spoken tongue, near those who have tried to give voice to the silent dialogue the soul has with itself, who have gambled all their credibility on the bet of the similarity of minds.” [17] Turn to those who deal with this distance, question them. Investigate their works. One has to learn to question what one does oneself. Again and again. Universal teaching as the relationship of two people “who do not know how to read the book” dealing with this distance between emotion and expression. As a relationship of several, a temporary community of strangers who perform a joint research project in which each may follow his/ her own intelligence. This research is process and product and for sure deludes the lines of the system of art in society. It unfolds them ever anew in reflective actions in order to create “an experimental rather than an objective image, an image that does not point out its hidden meaning but complies with its production conditions.”

The book „The Ignorant Schoolmaster" is as pdf online:

 http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/ignorant-schoolmaster.pdf