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to getting caught anew in impossible circumstance that cannot be escaped -- and discovering what can(not) be done in these circumstances

1. The challenge to socialization as necessary for social interaction
   1. routine, face to face, everyday interaction

      "Starting in the late 1940s, with a long unpublished but widely circulated paper by Harold Garfinkel on "The routine grounds of social action" ([1948] 2006), the sense that pre-established knowledge was necessary for social action (i.e. action with other human beings that are both synchronous in time and place, or grounded in action that other human beings performed in the past of a particularly present time and place). In philosophy, Merleau-Ponty argued that personal experience and expression (precisely not a self or identity) both required a pre-organized field (e.g. a particular language) and could only happen through the manipulation of this field and its limitations: "What if language is expressive as much by what is between words than by words?" (1960: 56)

      The implications for social science, and for education, are profound and it took many years to establish that such concerns might give us a better handle on humanity and disentangle some of these implications

   2. the openness of knowledge
      1. de Certeau, critiques of Bourdieu and Foucault, and the enunciation of a life (1984 [1980])

         Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center ... the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric or excess in both expenditure and production. (p. 91)
         The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be; it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them). It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and ictations into them (social models, cultural mores, personal factors). (p. 101)

      2. James Boon and the extra-vagance of culture (1999)

         Acts of extra-Vagance abound in human rituals and interpreting them, ludic languages and translating them, and multimedia and transposing them; engaging such acts can help unsettle cozy dogmas, complicate critical cliches, and reshuffle scholarly and popular prejudices. (1999: xv)
         [leading to discussions of menses, foreskins, Coca Cola in Atlanta and Bali -- among others matters]

   3. The impossibility of knowledge
      1. In the introduction to the 2006 formal publication of Garfinkel's 1948 essay, Rawls argues that he refused to publish until he had empirical evidence of his conjuncture. This required new forms of sociological investigations and experiments with an emphasis on examining action directly--including the action of interpretation, not only in the abstract but in society. Thus a classical experiment, easy to replicate, in which people are asked to explain to a person who takes the stance of radical ignorance what was just said, and had been completely successful in moving forward a social interaction. Eventually, one will observe that there is no way to describe exhaustively what would need to be known if anything had to be known:

         "But it does not account very well for the final impossibility, for it explains one facet of the task's "impossibility" as students' unwillingness to go any further, but it does not explain an accompanying sense, namely, that students somehow saw that the task was, in principle, unaccomplishable" (Garfinkel 1967: 28)

   1. In fact the explanations are the product of Garfinkel's own (pedagogical) authority to require them, and the students' attempt to instruct him given the ignorance he convinced them he had. The explanations were not necessary to proceed smoothly. And so the students were annoyed.
   2. In Garfinkel's later work (2002) a strong emphasis is placed on instruction triggered by the possibility of trouble. Plausibly, trouble is the product not of an absolute ignorance of rules but of an ignorance that has been made public and that triggers instruction (teaching) by those concern and until the trouble passes. No public acknowledgement, no trouble
      1. what social scientists refer to as the reliance of "common sense" by participants is in fact a projection on their part. Participants, together, take the absence of trouble as allowing to remain within the world of action (whatever it might be at that time) without requiring an embedded instructional sequence which, because of its very concrete practicality, must delay the actual action: while telling someone how to do something, neither is quite doing it. Thus, arguably the functional need to spend as little time on instruction as possible--unless of course the division of labor in complex systems allow certain people (intellectuals, teachers, etc.) to spend their time doing nothing else but instruct people whose labor is not otherwise needed...
2. Ranciere, Jacotot, and the power of ignorance

language does not unite people. On the contrary it is the arbitrariness of language that makes them try to communicate by forcing them to translate.-but also puts them in a community of intelligence.

1. a systematic critique of the "philosopher" (intellectual, researcher, critic), e.g. Plato/Socrates as in the Meno, as the philosophical discourse requires a distinction between special knowledge and common (not quite) knowledge: the "poor" cannot know in the way that the philosopher knows. Thus the philosopher (teacher, school system, democracy through its institutions) must instruct (develop personally and internationally) in the proper forms of (discursive) knowledge as it can be brought out and noticed by the philosopher
2. Jacotot as revolutionary (in the French 1789 basic sense), and as someone who found, without quite searching for it, in Flanders, a way of developing a social world (community of intelligence/practice?) where masters ignorant of the subject matter their students want to learn make it possible for these students to teach themselves this subject matter.
   1. This is not an attack on subject matter or expertise. It is an attack on the need for expertise to be delivered by an expert expertly (through the development of discursive curricula, pedagogies, examinations, etc.) (p. 7)
   2. It is the recognition that:

one could teach what one didn't know, and that a poor and ignorant father could, if he was emancipated, conduct the education of his children, without the aid of a master explicator. (p. 18)

1. an opening to all sorts of research questions: where/how do people become expert at what they are not taught
   1. a preliminary search is for situations where this form of un-schooled expertise may be found cross-historically and cross-culturally.
      1. classically: the not-yet Protestants developing alternate forms of Christianity
      2. recently: putting together computers in garages and programming them
      3. tragically: learning how to use modern technologies for guerilla warfare
3. Gundaker and one instance of the will to learn that which one is forbidden to learn
   1. note the exploratory method for which ethnography (even historical ethnography) is best suited: challenging that which we knew we knew by uncovering what earlier forms of knowledge ("e.g. slavery must lead to psychological collapse and passivity among the enslaved") systematically hid.
   2. Gundaker is not writing about the acquire properties of "them" but rather about the constraints on the possibility of learning. This is a very general statement illustrated through the case studies. In these cases, numbers are not at issue. This could easily be developed in a new attack on unwitting racism through "practice" theorizing.
   3. The optimism of all this must not make us blind, in turn, to the will not to teach so that competitors not learn, or, just as good, remain known as not having learned.
   4. A note on Gundaker's methodology:
      1. not what0 "they" (or even what "some of them") did
      2. but an indication of the organization of the setting that enabled certain kinds of activities (and disabled others)

Some questions
StudyPlace conversation
what remains of the notion of "acquisition" if one follows Rancière? how might one rewrite the common sense that some people are educationally disadvanted? if Teachers College is dedicated to "equity," what is one who appreciates Rancière to propose, practically?