Start with Yourself: The Audio Manifesto as Social Practice

By Matt Gagnon (Interim Writing Coordinator, Hartford Campus) 

Sine Hebdo: You have always challenged the posture of the scholar and the authority of the master in general. Would you nevertheless define yourself as an intellectual?

Jacques Rancière: Not if it means belonging to a category whose function is to provide information about what is happening to those who do not understand it. If the term “intellectual” has any meaning to me, it is the reverse. It applies to those who representno category, no social power, and no institution. It applies to those who put into play an intelligence belonging to anyone. I was educated in Marxism, which teaches that people are dominated because they are ignorant and in need of science to liberate them. No doubt a multitude of scholars are able to describe why things are the way they are. But this does nothing to help us envision how they could be different. The tradition of progressive education promises that learning will bring equality. But inequality doesn’tbecome equality. We start with either a presupposition of equality or one of inequality. All thinking about real emancipation must be anchored in the knowledge of those who are supposed to be ignorant. They know an infinite number of things that the educated do not.

(Geil, “Writing, Repetition, Displacement: An Interview with Jacques Rancière,” 2014)

 

I begin this post by bringing together some reflections on Jacque Rancière’s peculiar but radical thinking about progressive education’s seemingly linear endgame and the presupposition of equality that he has spent years articulating through various texts on politics and aesthetics. As an educator working in the context of First-Year Writing, where our goal is to “provide a foundation [students] need to progress as writers and as college students,” I am interested in paying close attention to how this foundation can make use of Rancière’s challenge: “We start with either a presupposition of equality or one of inequality.”  

I realize that Rancière’s critique of progressive education, and the subtle questioning of our own roles as instructors, can feel discomforting. I mean, aren’t we the ones who regularly write, read, synthesize disparate sources and materials to make meaning, and so on, and do so with a sense that we are meaningfully participating in important conversations and scholarship? In many ways we see ourselves, perhaps not as masters, but as academics who know something about how writing at the University-level works, and it is up to us to impart or show this through instruction and modelling. And we may even recall moments in David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University,” in which he writes: “The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community” (60). In Bartholomae’s phrasing, there is the classic framing, which Rancière would recognize, that teachers must inculcate students to the values and habits of practice of particular discourse communities. And hunkering down on this position, Bartholomae tells us that “The student has to appropriate (or be appropriated by) specialized discourse, and he has to do this as though he were easily and comfortably one with his audience, as though he were a member of the academy or an historian or an anthropologist  or an economist…” (61). This double orientation of appropriating and being appropriated by discourse tells us a great deal about the kind of lurking hierarchies (who can or cannot participate in meaning-making activities given their position or category), and the “authority of the master,” that Rancière’s work is at great pains to disrupt.  

While my intent is not to throw stones at Bartholomae’s contributions to composition (I have been indebted to his way of thinking about teaching), to suggest that anything goes in student work, or to insist that students don’t need support from instructors, I do want to emphasize how Rancière’s writing has shown a path forward that attempts to blur the boundaries erected by academic disciplines. In “Writing, Repetition, Displacement: An Interview with Jacques Rancière,” this blurring gets at the larger questions of how disciplinary fields according to Rancière 

define a certain mode of writing, the way it bears a certain claim…that sustains the configuration of a disciplinary field and defines a certain mode of theorization and specific mode of writing. To a certain extent, all disciplines are ways of tracing borders, but this is not only about delineating a specific object of research. It is also tracing the borders between those who are inside and those who are outside, those who have the right method and those who do not. (303)

In other words, Rancière suggests how modes of writing are deeply embedded in border creation (and border policing), such as what counts as legitimate and meaningful discourse, and who can or cannot participate.  

Rancière’s words get me to reflect on my own teaching practices and to remember that students come to our classrooms with all kinds of experiences and knowledge that can likely thicken our course inquiries and help us better understand the world we live in. While I don’t want to romanticize this too much, I do want to put some pressure on the stance we take in the classroom and how through this stance we invite, and even implore, student writers to see themselves already as rich sources and capacities-in-waiting. This is not to say that we shouldn’t be helping students think about the kinds of analysis and research that academic disciplines practice in order to create new knowledge. If we insist that academic writing is a social activity, that is, writing done with and among others and for others, then we can also imagine a space in our classrooms where students’ ideas or desires are also transmissions that reflect already-in-the-making social practices.  

When students come to our writing classrooms, many have already internalized all kinds of narratives and orientations around writing, and more often than not, they don’t take themselves seriously as writers or composers with something to say. I want to suggest that this is, in part, a reflection of secondary education, which often seems less of a place to interrogate how knowledge and social practices emerge from powerful sets of reproduced epistemologies, and more of a place where “learning will bring equality.” It’s this linear trajectory that worries me. It’s a trajectory that I want to break with first year writing students, many of whom may already come to our University feeling like bits of capital in the education mill.  

It’s tempting to read Rancière as being provocative about his understanding of who gets to be called an intellectual. But I don’t think this is his intent. Rather, and quite simply, for Rancière, “inequality doesn’t become equality. We start with either a presupposition of equality or one of inequality.” And this presupposition should begin with the understanding that an intellectual “represent[s] no category, no social power, and no institution. It applies to those who put into play an intelligence belonging to anyone.” It is this radical way of blurring the boundaries between the power of anyone and the power of, say, an academic, that is part of Rancière’s challenge to what he calls the police order.  

This is to say that I think our work in First Year Writing offers us a way to reimagine our roles with students. In keeping with the habits of practice that inform the work we ask of students, I like to begin the semester, roughly around the fourth class (Week 2), with an Audio Manifesto studio assignment that asks them to see themselves as sources of valuable experience. I would even extend this language to include a more robust and capacious framing that views students as active wills and repositories of desires. We often say, start with yourself.  

What this means in my iteration of ENGL 1007 emerges from our course inquiry, Being Heard, Being Seen. Students are invited to think alongside our first reading, Robin D.G. Kelley’s chapter, “When History Sleeps: A Beginning,” from his book, Freedom Dreams: The Radical Black Imagination. In his opening chapter, which presents a coming-of-age to political consciousness and activism, we learn of Kelley’s deep roots in his mother’s vision. Kelley puts it this way: “She wanted us to imagine a world free of patriarchy, a world where gender and sexual relations could be reconstructed. She wanted us to see the poetic and prophetic in the richness of our daily lives. She wanted to visualize a more expansive, fluid, ‘cosmospolitan’ definition of Blackness, to teach us that we are not merely inheritors of a culture but its makers” (2). In these fraught times, it may seem a bit risky to call on Kelley’s work, but I would counter that his warm writer’s voice, and openness to working with and hearing the desires of young people, makes his text a place to put into play the habits of practice around collecting and curating, which asks students to start with themselves and to explore what others in the course are experiencing.  Kelley’s book is written “for anyone bold enough still to dream,” and this invitation to dream, to discover what’s worth struggling for, is an open-ended, non-doctrinaire, point of exploration for students to discover.  

Our work for the first six weeks of ENGL 1007 has students building their ideas around the following question that Kelley poses: “The question remains: What are today’s young activists dreaming about? We know what they are fighting against, but what are they fighting for?…Revolutionary dreams erupt out of political engagement; collective social movements are incubators of new knowledge” (7-8). Their first major project is composing an activist webpage designed for stakeholders. To support the construction of their webpage, I use the first two studio workshops to make an Audio Manifesto and then an Instagram reel. The audience for the former is classmates and instructor and the audience for the IG reel is working more closely to be rhetorically sensitive to the needs of their imagined stakeholders.  

To help students get things stirred up, to see themselves as “incubators of new knowledge,” I also draw from Caroline Levine’s book, The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis, specifically her closing chapter, “Three Weeks To Political Action: A Workbook,” which offers some practical thinking and questions that can help students to address the often-repeated refrain about activist practices: I don’t know where to start. The workbook activities I reproduce and modify from Levine’s chapter offers me a way to resist inserting myself into the conversation on activism and enables students to reflect on their own knowledge, skills, and capacities to enter a conversion on activism. Early on, they use these workbook questions to explore their past experiences and to connect them with group work and skills: 

1. Reflecting on your past experience of groups and collectives, what would you say are your strengths in working with other members of a team? Maybe you are patient with people struggling with new tasks, or tenacious, or good at connecting people…It could be lots of things. 
2. What do you see as your weakness when working with others?
3. What skills do you already have that might be useful to a political organization or movement? Please check all that apply. 
   • Writing 
   • Teaching 
   • Presenting 
   • Convening discussions 
   • Organizing events 
   • Analyzing data 
   • Making images 
   • Doing research 
   • Asking questions 
   • Understanding institutions  
   • Creating relationships 
   • Listening  
   • Other (please describe)

(Levine 151-152) 

These kinds of questions from Levine’s workbook give students the time and space to position themselves more thoughtfully to possible activist orientations given our reading and work with Kelley’s historicizing of social movements like the kind of “poetic knowledge” generated by practitioners of surrealism in his black Afrodiasporic context. These surrealists taught Kelley that “any serious motion toward freedom must begin in the mind, but they have also given us some of the most imaginative, expansive, and playful dreams of a new world I have ever known” (5). This linkage of freedom, and the desire for a different present, as beginning in the mind and demonstrated through artistic practice, offers students a way, again, to see or even understand themselves as generators of meaning that they try out in their Audio Manifestos. 

In the Audio Manifesto assignment, I ask students to introduce themselves to our classroom community by way of developing a 90-120-second audio composition in which they use Kelley as an inspiration for exploring and narrating what their own dream(s) of freedom might look like and describing where this imagining of a different future comes from in their history and encounters with others (communities, institutions, etc.). The results of this studio workshop are of course quite varied, but I come back to Rancière’s claim: “We start with either a presupposition of equality or one of inequality. All thinking about real emancipation must be anchored in the knowledge of those who are supposed to be ignorant. They know an infinite number of things that the educated do not.” What I discover is that when we work with young people and support them through exposure to critical discourses, and set up opportunities for them to reflect on their ideas, values, and desires, we see them already concerned with class, poverty, the cost of education, bodily autonomy, and so much more. They are enroute to developing a language in which to make their words count. Some questions I pose for students to get going on their Audio Manifestos are the following: 

• What do you care about in the world? What do you want to struggle for? You might review some of the responses in the Questions Towards Political Action forms you have been doing in HuskyCT.  

• Kelley is specific in tracing the genealogy of his engagement with cultures and ideas that represent new ways of caring about the world. What specific encounters, either with a person, community, institution, text, cultural object, etc., have played a role inspiring you to think about what you want for the world and your place and others in it? Who or what has made a difference in the kind of dreams you have for a different society?  

• How might your dream of freedom disrupt or challenge the status quo or ideas centered around the marketplace or consumer culture?  

• How do you see your own imagining of a different future as something transformative that others might also find compelling and useful?  

• If you would like to think of yourself as an activist, what are you dreaming about? What would you like to fight for and why? And if we take Kelley’s charge seriously, what role can the imagination play for you? Or where have you seen imaginative forces put into play in a way that matters? What role has it already played for you? 

For me, the Audio Manifesto offers an exercise in community-building and shows students engaged in a social practice that creates a serpentine route through various points of entry in our course inquiry that cannot be predetermined in our classroom spaces. By engaging with Kelley’s ideas of “freedom dreams” and his insistence on the imagination for generating “new knowledge, new theories, new questions,” we open the classroom to the participation of anyone. At least that’s the dream.  

Here is a folder in OneDrive that includes student audio manifestos.  

 

Works Cited: 

Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” Writing On the Margins: Essays on Composition and Teaching. New York: St.Martin’s, 2005. Print.  

Geil, Abraham. “Writing, Repetition, Displacement: An Interview with Jacques Rancière.” Novel: A Forum On Fiction 47 (2) Summer 2014: 301-310. Print.  

Kelley, Robin D G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston, Beacon Press, 2002. 

Levine, Caroline. “Three Weeks to Political Action: A Workbook.” The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis. Princeton University Press, 2023. Print.  

Rancière, Jacques. “The Worst of Evils is Power Falling Into the Hands of Those Who Desire It.” Moments Politiques: Interventions 1979-2009. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014. Print. 

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