Anca Parvelescu (2004) brings Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins into relationship with Jacques Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, arguing that, although using very different vocabularies and taking different conceptual routes, both books define education, or should we say 'learning and teaching’ or ’the pedagogic relation’, as something that takes place between two subjects, ‘I’ and my radical other, forming a Bakhtinian dialogism.
That is to say, the pedagogic relation is intersubjective, not simply a (phantasmal) relation between ‘I’ and my alter ego, but between the self system (ego - I plus alter-ego - me and like-me) and the wholly Other (not-I, not-me and not-like-me).
This distinction follows that made by Lévinas and Derrida. They argue that there are two chief alternative concepts of otherness: firstly, the other as a version of the same, in one way or another assimilable, comprehensible, able to be appropriated and understood; and, secondly, the other as truly and radically other.
In the latter case, radical otherness, the other cannot be turned into a version of the same. It cannot be made transparent to the understanding, and thereby dominated and controlled. It remains, however we try to deal with it, irreducibly other. (Miller, 2001: 1-2)
Following a Levinasian and a Derridean ethics, it is this radical other that ‘calls’, opening up a site of obligation and a loci of ethical practices. In Derrida’s terms, "The call of the other is a call to come, and that happens only in multiple voices." (Derrida, 2007: 47)
Readings talks about dissensus, Ranciere talks about equality, and Parvelescu introduces laughter into the discussion of the university of dissensus, countering the university’s status as one of the landmarks of modern high seriousness. This may be seen as a restoration of the humour and playfulness to which the university, along with the carnival and bohemia, once gave access (Parvelescu, 2004: 55, citing Sloterdijk, 1987: 117).
Parvelescu suggests that we may see Readings’ engagement with Bakhtinian dialogism as an attempt to bring laughter back into the university, to make humour, playfulness and laughter necessary to thinking about the university. The articulation of laughter, the inter-subjective choreography that laughter involves, Parvelescu thinks, is congruent to that of dissensus.
References
Derrida, J. (2007). Psyche: inventions of the other, Volume I, translated by Catherine Porter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Miller, J.H. (2001). Others. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Parvulescu, A. (2013). University of dissensus/university of laughter. Journal of Midwest Modern Language Association. 37 (1), 47–58.
Ranciere, J. (1991). The Ignorant schoolmaster: five lessons in intellectual emancipation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Readings, B. (1996). The University in ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sloterdijk, P. (1987) Critique of cynical reason. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
