Coming of Age: Teaching and Learning Popular Music in Academia

Politics

A common dictionary definition sees politics as management or governing of public affairs. In academic textbooks, politics is often characterized as involving a public interest to reach consensus (Berndtson 2008). Deviating radically from such views, Rancière suggests that we see politics (la politique) as an outcome of disagreement between those whose voices are heard and those who are silenced in a society. Politics marks a “conflict over what is meant by ‘to speak’ and ‘to understand’”; it is a dispute over “the horizons of perception that distinguish the audible from the inaudible, the comprehensible from the incomprehensible, the visible from the invisible” (Rancière 2006, 88). Such dispute emerges when someone claims a right to speak, understand, or be visible equal to those who already get themselves heard, understood, or seen. Thus politics is a subversive activity that will “make heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise” (Rancière 1999, 30). Moreover, “politics only exists in intermittent acts of implementation that lack any overall principle or law” (Rancière 2006, 95). In other words, one cannot plan for politics to take place—only wait for it to happen. Such efforts are always exceptions, unpredicted ruptures in the social fabric.

Aesthetics

Whereas many philosophers place aesthetics and politics in different categories, Rancière makes a connection between them. For him, aesthetics (l’esthétique) covers more than appreciation of the arts or philosophical study of sense perception; it incorporates the “horizons of perception”—that is, the diverse ways in which we make distinctions in the sensible realm of everyday life. More specifically, “aesthetics” marks a “distribution of the sensible that determines a mode of articulation between forms of action, production, perception, and thought.” This distribution also delineates “the conceptual coordinates and modes of visibility operative in the political domain” (86). What is at stake in politics, then, is precisely the distribution of the sensible, or “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it” (7).

Education

The primary function of social institutions is to maintain modes of articulation in the sensible realm as basis of social differentiation. This also applies to educational institutions. For Rancière, the primary function of schools is to sustain the “police order” (l’ordre policier) of the society by establishing an epistemic power structure that controls the distribution of the sensible. In his idiosyncratic terminology, “police order” refers to “a system of coordinates defining modes of being, doing, making, and communicating that establishes the borders between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the sayable and the unsayable” (93). Rancière observes school as a specific “model of an inequality which identifies itself with the visible difference between those who know and those who do not know and which devotes itself, visibly, to the task of teaching those who are ignorant that which they do not know . . . thus reducing such inequality” (Rancière 2010, 8).

Rancière (1991) highlights the significance of the critique of educational “policing” for understanding how politics finds its way into public life (see also Bingham and Biesta 2010; Chambers 2012). In Le maître ignorant (The Ignorant Schoolmaster), he suggests that political acts can also emerge inside the police order of the school, as long as the “schoolmasters” abandon their roles as “explicators” and “stultifiers” and accept that learning is not dependent on pedagogical structures but rather on each learner’s ability and will to learn (Rancière 1991). Even if the teacher can influence the students’ wills to learn, the students’ abilities to learn are innate in the sense that they can learn practically anything in the same way they have learned their mother tongue—by gradually building the required competencies in informal transactions with other people and cultural products and by grasping the meanings of things by using them in everyday life (Dewey 2008b [1916], 19).[2]

For Rancière, this presupposition of each individual’s potential to learn—what he calls the “axiom” of equal intelligence—provides an analogue for understanding democracy, for democracy is based on its own “axiom” of equality that assumes that everyone can partake in the “communal distribution of the sensible” (Rockhill 2006, xiii). Democracy is “an act of political subjectivization that disturbs the police order by polemically calling into question the aesthetic coordinates of perception, thought, and action.” It is thus “an act of contention that implements various forms of dissensus” (Rancière 2006, 87). In Rancière’s scheme, political agency emerges as a function of the emancipatory process of learning, or of finding oneself as a subject with a voice in a democratic community. Learning is at the heart of politics—and so is aesthetics.

While there might be a possibility for emancipatory learning in school, from Rancière’s standpoint, such learning does not take place in the way that critical educationalists proclaim—that is, the students are not emancipated by the kinds of teachers who make it their mission to open their students’ eyes to the ideologically masked social realities (see Bingham and Biesta 2010, 23–24). For Rancière, the teacher’s task is not to close the epistemological gap between him or herself and his or her students by explicating how things are and why they are as they are. Rather, teachers should feed the spark of learning and help each student find his or her own learning trajectories, to use Wenger’s term (Wenger 1998). This necessitates that teachers are able and willing to make a distinction between two logics—namely, the logic of “the act of intellectual emancipation” and the logic of “the institution of the people’s instruction”—and critically look for ways they can support the former in the conditions established by the latter (Rancière 2010, 9).

Emancipatory pedagogies, when successful, can help students empower themselves as political subjects, bringing forth new “identities that were not part of and did not exist in the existing order” (Bingham and Biesta 2010, 35). Consequently, becoming a political subject is as much a matter of learning how to be oneself as a matter of social adjustment. At the heart of emancipation is what Rancière calls “subjectification”: “the production through a series of actions of a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience, whose identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience” (Rancière 1999, 35). Becoming oneself, politically speaking, is a poietic act in the sense that it generates new agencies. Such production of agencies is also the core process of democracy. Instead of seeing democracy merely as “a form of government” or “a system of social life” that adjusts the interests of disparate parties, Rancière sees it as “random process that redistributes the system of sensible coordinates without being able to guarantee the absolute elimination of the social inequalities inherent in the police order” (Rockhill 2006, xiv–xv). Like John Dewey, Rancière conceives democracy as a continuous project, but more so than Dewey, he emphasizes the uniqueness of its constitutive political acts.

Let us sum up at this point: From the Rancièreian perspective, politics is based on dissident impulses that stem from the attempts of individuals to operate along with the axiom of equality. The potential of such dissident impulses is realized in political acts—that is, in particular “sensible events” that redistribute the aesthetic realm, restaging our relationships to each other and to the things around us (Rancière 2006, xi; Holmboe 2014). As such, political acts are productive, and what they produce are new sensible orders—new configurations of the aesthetic. In Rancière’s (2006) own words, there is “an ‘aesthetics’ at the core of politics,” and vice versa (8). Any intervention that has the power to disrupt the distribution of the sensible can be seen as a political act, even if it would not lead into major improvements in society. Such interventions are also possible in school, the prototypical police order of the modern society.

One interesting consequence of Rancière’s view is that power emerges from politics rather than producing it. While power is invested in politics, what precedes the emergence of both politics and power is the police order, the organized distribution of the sensible. Here we can observe a disparity between Rancière and Michel Foucault. Whereas Foucault (1990) understands power as a condition of political action and claims that all resistance is based on power (95), for Rancière (1999), “nothing is political . . . merely because power relationships are at work in it.” Still, “anything may become political” as far as it “gives rise to a meeting of . . . two logics”—namely, the logic of the police order and the logic of politics proper (32). If this is true, popular music can become political as well, and its political significance does not have to have anything to do with advocating a commitment—that is, music can gain political significance without making an explicit statement.

The Aesthetic Regime of Art

The realization of the historical singularity of art emerges from what Rancière (2013) calls “the aesthetic regime of art”: “a form of specific experience” that “has only existed in the West since the end of the eighteenth century” (ix, xii). This claim is based on an observation that it is possible to discern three historically distinct but culturally overlapping “regimes of identification” “with regard to what we call art” (Rancière 2006, 16).

First, “the ethical regime of images” did not yet recognize art as such but “subsumed it under the question of images.” This question asked where different ways of doing and making come from and what they are for. The fundamental distinction between arts proper (as imitations of the truth) and arts as appearance (as imitations of imitations) was based on this twofold question. Plato famously made this distinction, arguing that the only arts really worth practicing are those that imitate actions that have precise ends. Such actions are also pedagogically significant, as they indicate the respective positions in the community for different social groups, thus maintaining harmony in the city-state. Virtually launching the Western philosophical discourse over the pedagogical value of the arts, Plato claimed that only such productive actions that imitate what is true, good, and beautiful have ethical value and are suitable for liberal education. According to Rancière, this ethical judgment of the value of the arts established a lasting hierarchy in the poietic realm that made it impossible to think about art “as such” for a long time (16).

Second, ethical regime of images replaced the “poetic—or representative—regime of the arts.” This regime identified the substance of the arts on the basis of the dual principle of mimesis/poiesis. Drawing inspiration from Aristotle, the poetic regime of the arts isolated each way of doing or making to its own productive domain on the basis of what kinds of imitations it produced. The principle regulating this compartmentalization also became a “normative principle of inclusion,” as it defined the conditions on which certain ways of doing and making can be identified as artistic. Furthermore, it defined the value of artistic products in terms of how “good or bad, adequate or inadequate” they are based on the criteria relevant to each domain. The principle of poiesis thus demarcated artistic genres, whereas the principle of mimesis offered guideposts for assessing the respective worth of their outcomes.

The poetic regime also established a new “regime of visibility” that defined the conditions of who could be counted as an artist. This differentiation of the social role of artists eventually rendered “the arts autonomous” and linked their autonomy to a more “general order of occupations and ways of doing and making.” Thus, the poetic regime of the arts established a new distribution of the sensible in Western societies, introducing a new police order in the aesthetic realm. Rancière argues that this order was based on a “logic of representation,” which entered “into a relationship . . . with an overall hierarchy of political and social occupations,” defining a “fully hierarchical vision of the community” (17).

Finally, with the emergence of the “aesthetic regime,” the “identification [of art] no longer occur[red] via a division within ways of doing and making.” Rather, identification of art was now “based on distinguishing a sensible mode of being specific to artistic products” (18). This new regime broke with three principles of judgment characteristic of the poetic regime: (1) the “hierarchy of high and low subjects and genres,” (2) the “Aristotelian superiority of action over life,” and (3) the “traditional scheme of rationality” that was defined “in terms of ends and means, causes and effects” (Rancière 2005, 14). Liberating art “from any specific rule . . . hierarchy . . . subject matter, and genre,” the aesthetic regime also destroyed “the mimetic barrier that distinguished ways of doing and making affiliated with art from other ways of doing and making” (Rancière 2006, 19). Thus art became to be seen as a general qualifier applicable to any creative act that has the potential to transform the conditions of our “sensory apprehension” (Rancière 2009, 29).

This redefinition of art as particular acts of creation of new aesthetic order made it a heteronomous matter. Aesthetic quality could now be claimed by any work that fits itself into “a specific sensorium,” finding itself “a mode of being” where it could be perceived as art (ibid.). Connected to this, art lost its specific place in the social order and became nomadic. The “artification” of common objects and events in contemporary art can be taken as archetypal form of such nomadic being, or rather becoming (Erjavec 2012). In the aesthetic regime of art, any ready-made object—a soap box, a cauliflower, a urinal, or ambient or industrial noise—can become an artwork or a part of an artwork, and it is not the artist’s technical skill but his or her vision that defines the aesthetic status of such works. Rancière’s notion of “art as life” (Rancière 2009, 51) grasps this heteronomy of artistic expression well: rather than just “made,” art is “lived through,” or “experienced,” as Dewey would say (Dewey 2008d [1934], 10; see also Shusterman 1992).

Again, Rancière makes a distinction between two coexisting “politics of aesthetics” that define the coordinates of art within the aesthetic regime: (1) the politics of the “becoming-life of art” and (2) the politics of the “resistant form” (Rancière 2009, 44). As described by Berrebi (2008), in the first instance, “the aesthetic experience . . . tends to dissolve into other forms of life”; art becomes life, life becomes art. In the second kind of politics, “the political potential of the aesthetic experience derives from the separation of art from other forms of activity and its resistance to any transformation into a form of life” (2). Hence the very aloofness of art as cultural determinant provides it political significance. As nomads, artists can point at—and inhabit—new places and positions in the sensible reality, transforming our common ways of perceiving.

Moreover, “in the aesthetic regime of art, the future of art, its separation from . . . non-art, incessantly restages the past” (Rancière 2006, 20). Thus the aesthetic regime is not defined by modernist appeal to autonomy, uniqueness, and authenticity of the artist’s vision “that links the conquests of artistic innovation to the victories of emancipation” (4). Rather, Rancière uses the concept of the aesthetic regime to criticize discourses of modernism, claiming that both modern and postmodern theories of art are but “imaginary stories about artistic ‘modernity’” that inform “vain debates over the autonomy of art or its submission to politics” (13). For Rancière, “artistic modernity” itself is an “incoherent label” for historical changes in artistic practices, unable to grasp the complexity of the phenomena that can be best discussed under the notion of the aesthetic regime of art (19).

Justifying Popular Music as Art in the Classroom

At this point, two questions emerge: (1) What are the conditions for understanding popular music as art in the aesthetic regime? and (2) What are the conditions of understanding politics in connection to popular music in this regime?

Perhaps for some readers, to question the artistic value of popular music might seem anachronistic, a distant echo of the cultural wars of the 1960s and 1970s, put to rest by postmodern cultural critics who toward the end of the last millennium brought down the walls between high and popular culture (e.g., Shusterman 1992; McRobbie 1994; Gracyk 1996). There have been also music and music education scholars who have questioned the feasibility of judging music in aesthetic terms. Some of these scholars have pointed at the practical nature of music in general, arguing that it is pointless to try to find music a common nominator from aesthetic theories that are based on the idea of autonomy of the artwork (e.g., Alperson 1991; Elliott 1995; Regelski 1996, 2000; Bowman 2000). Yet it is still not uncommon to find philosophers, critics, and teachers who object to the inclusion of popular music in education on the basis of aesthetic criteria (e.g., Scruton 1999; Bayles 2004; Walker 2007). While I am not sympathetic toward such views, I do suggest that the issue of legitimation is important for music educators to deal with. After all, all of us eventually find ourselves in a position where we have to make value judgments about what we teach and justify such choices for our students, the powers that be, and ourselves. To paraphrase Rancière, such selection is part and parcel of the policing function of educational institutions, and it is impossible to avoid it when working within such contexts.

The issue of curricular justification of popular music is made even more complex when one observes that there are differences in educational cultures regarding what is taken as appropriate repertoire for musical classrooms. For instance, while rock music is accepted as classroom repertoire in many countries (including my own), in many other countries (such as the United States), it is still uncommon to find rock songs rehearsed during school music lessons (although the situation seems to be changing rapidly with the emergence of such initiatives as Little Kids Rock). Even in more lenient educational systems, there are popular genres and styles that teachers are not willing to accept as part of classroom repertoire. For instance, in a recent study, Alexis Kallio (2015) found that in order to avoid conflicts, Finnish music teachers often feel the need to navigate “the school censorship frame”—that is, the “broad and specific social narratives that draw associations between particular musics or songs and socially constructed notions of deviance” (ii). Such navigation is especially needed in situations where teachers have to decide whether to censure popular songs that imply such themes as overt nationalism, religion, sexuality, and ethnicity. While it can be argued that these decisions are part of every teacher’s work as cultural gatekeepers, they can also be seen as problematic if they give the student the message that “your music is not welcome in school” (i). Kallio suggests that through “recognizing, reflecting upon, and engaging with the political processes of legitimation and exclusion in popular repertoire selection . . . teachers and students may learn beyond bias and assumption, engage in collaborative critical inquiry, and interrogate who music education serves, when, why, how and to what ends” (ii). From this standpoint, to constantly reflect on the selection criteria of the repertoire is important in order to maintain critical distance to what is taught and learned in musical classrooms.

Even if censuring of popular music in classrooms does not have to mean that it is not accepted as art outside the school walls, it is still interesting to focus on the reasons at least some forms of popular music are disregarded in music education and to reflect on the possible philosophical ramifications of such patterns of exclusion. In what follows, I will present critical pragmatism as a possible philosophical point of departure for judging popular music as pedagogically legitimate study content. I will also apply critical pragmatism as a tool to reexamine Rancière’s notions of how, why, and when art-in-singular becomes a political category through the more specific questions of how, why, and when popular music suggests political potential.

John Dewey’s Naturalist Pragmatism on Experience, Education, and Art

Critical Theory and Popular Music Education

Dewey’s educational ideas are well known in the pedagogical academic discourse, and there is no need to scrutinize them further here. I have reviewed Dewey’s naturalist pragmatism in order to pay attention to the ideas underlying his mature educational thought and his egalitarian views that grant aesthetic potential for any artistic expression. More important than examining the naturalist pragmatist underpinnings of Dewey’s philosophy in this connection is exploring how his ideas have been contested by the critical pedagogical theories and what kinds of implications such encounters can have to our main problem—that of locating politics in popular music education.

Conclusion

From the aforementioned standpoint, the most important task of the music educator is to coordinate specific learning situations in ways that transform the students’ experiences toward more critically informed ways to participate in social-cultural life. This is also where naturalist pragmatists and critical theorists seem to find a common terrain. Indeed, in recent decades, several educationalists have worked on conceptual frames that mix cultural criticism and pragmatist perspectives (e.g., Giroux and McLaren 1994; Apple 1995). According to these writers, there is always tension between the freedom of an individual to construct new cultural reality in symbolic practices and the ideologically framed symbolic order that delimits such efforts—or, in Rancièrian terms, politics and police order. What critically prepared music educators can do in such conditions is help their students determine how the current symbolic orders afford reconstruction of meaning by looking for new critical possibilities in musical-cultural texts and processes. Rancière can be useful in understanding this pursuit, as he shows that political resistance is conditioned by existing distribution of the sensible that can be contested by specific acts of expression that can help us claim new discursive spaces. Such reclaiming of discursive space can take place as well in the classroom as outside the school walls, and it does not have to lead to major improvements in society. Yet all social improvement begins from particular attempts to redistribute the sensible; in this sense, all instances of redistribution of the sensible carry political potential, including those that are characteristic of popular culture.

Rancière’s philosophy suggests that there cannot be a universal rationale for understanding how politics figures in popular music. Likewise, politics of (and in) popular music education is as multifaceted and unexpected as politics in other realms of shared experience. The most music educators can do is help their students find themselves in situations that allow for political acts to emerge as artistic expressions. In my critical pragmatist reading, this means that however politics finds its way into music education, its appearance is based as much on the personal needs of the students to find new meanings in the sonic-cultural space as on their more general level need to transgress received perceptual orders. Hence, if popular music education wants to build on Rancièrian notions, music educators need to accept that their work is more than enculturation or socialization of their students to existing musical practices (or praxes). The task of a critically astute music educator is to empower his or her students to seek new niches for expressive acts in musical cultures that in one way or another can rearrange the distribution of the sensible in the realm of both primary and secondary aesthetics—that is, the realm of the sensible writ large and the specific realm of artistic expression. I will finish this chapter by suggesting one way in which music educators can rationalize such projects.

While most critical theorists following the teachings of the first Frankfurt school mistrusted the emancipatory value of popular culture, there was one interesting exception in their ranks. Whereas Adorno saw popular arts as providing a false illusion of freedom, denying the aesthetic potential of all mass-mediated cultural expressions, Walter Benjamin (2008 [1936]) defended the aesthetic value of art based on “mechanical reproduction.” Benjamin’s argument was based on the premise that even if art loses its authenticity (or “aura”) in the age of mechanical reproduction, and even if such auraless art offers itself easily to commodification, the very possibility of mechanical reproduction also “frees the work of art . . . from its existence as a parasite upon ritual” providing new possibilities of subjectification. In such conditions, Benjamin argues, art begins to be based on politics (sec. IV). This is because “mechanical reproduction . . . changes the reaction of the masses toward art” by transforming the sheer “quantity” of the available cultural products to new “quality” of perception (sec. XII, XV). Through constant exposure to reproductive art, “the masses” can learn to utilize their newly cumulated critical power and, in this way, build a new participatory culture where “the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character” (sec. X). With such development, the distinction between production and consumption becomes indistinct, providing everyone means of partaking in conjoint projects that transform the prevalent ways of cultural production. One way to make this happen is to liberate cultural objects from their original context of production by recombining and juxtaposing “the leftover cultural fragments,” thus creating new demands for aesthetic enjoyment (Moore 2012). In this way, the means of cultural production can be socialized, and everyone can become an artist.

While Rancière sympathizes with Benjamin’s attempt to show that mechanical reproduction is not a deathblow to people’s ability to subject art under cultural criticism, he opposes Benjamin’s attempt to deduce “the aesthetic and political properties of a form of art from its technical properties” (Rancière 2006, 27). Rancière suggests that we turn “things the other way around” and acknowledge that “in order for the mechanical arts to be able to confer visibility on the masses . . . they first need to be recognized as [art]” (28). Such recognition can only take place if “mechanical arts” are situated in the aesthetic regime, which presupposes a new way of thinking that can provide the conditions for identifying art-in-singular-as-political-act (27). In the case of popular music, we could then argue that we need to relate the technical modes of its production and reproduction to the general conditions of the aesthetic regime of art, making visible (and audible) its political potential.

How can this be achieved in music classrooms? Following Benjamin and Rancière, I suggest that music educators focus on how politics emerges in popular music specifically in two areas: (1) redistribution of musical sound in the digital culture and (2) integration of music with other arts, especially those that use sound as a central expressive device. These two areas best exemplify how contemporary technical modes of production and reproduction meet the political potential of the aesthetic regime of art in the domain of musical expression, expanding the latter across the borders of the traditional artistic disciplines. As Rancière (2011) eloquently puts it, “It is where the vast poem of yesterday’s music and sounds runs up against that of the needle that scratches and the amplifier that crackles, the synthesizer that creates and the computer that invents, that the fusion of the two contradictory powers comes about: that of the grand Schopenhauerian background . . . of the ‘ocean of sound’, whence all images emerge like specters, only to disappear once again; and that of the Schlegelian ‘poem of the poem’—of metamorphicity, collage and indefinite recreation produced in the basis of the great storehouse of images, ultimately identical to the life of the storehouse itself” (128).

Guided by a pragmatist confidence in the transformative meaning potential of all sonic expressions, combined with critical alertness to how the policed power conditions artistic expressions in contemporary media environment, we can perhaps best benefit from recognition of these contradictory powers. At present, digital music culture seems to offer the best opportunity to cash in such recognition in music education.

Notes

1. The chapter is based on my keynote presentation at Ann Arbor Symposium IV: Teaching and Learning Popular Music, held at the University of Michigan, November 18–21, 2015. This research has been undertaken as part of the ArtsEqual project funded by the Academy of Finland’s Strategic Research Council from its Equality in Society program (project no. 293199).

2. While from the standpoint of intellectual development such learning could be called accretion, understood in the rudimentary sense of “accumulation of data and facts that the memory system has available for organization or reorganization” (Sternberg and Berg 1992, 283), both Dewey and Rancière seem to also have in mind the more extensive process of enculturation, where one becomes socialized to the norms of one’s culture (Herskovits 1948, 39). Obviously both Dewey and Rancière see such learning as a basis for political room for maneuver.

3. Dewey ([1938] 2008f, 28) himself preferred the term “cultural naturalism.”