The Ignorant Sifu

Here is the abstract for the paper I will be giving at The Pedagogics of Unlearning Conference in Dublin in September. My title is 'The Intimate Schoolmaster and the Ignorant Sifu: Poststructuralism, Bruce Lee and the ignorance of everyday radical pedagogy':  

This paper explores the conference theme 'The Pedagogics of Unlearning' by way of a consideration of three figures: First, 'the ignorant schoolmaster' as constructed by Jacques Rancière in The Ignorant Schoolmaster; second, 'the intimate schoolmaster', as fantasized and feared by a diverse range of theories and theorists (but attention will specifically go to this figure as he features in a key moment of poststructuralism, namely Derrida's Dissemination); and third, 'the ignorant sifu', as the figure which exemplifies a strong impulse in many modern movements in approaches to martial arts, self-defence and combat training. These three figures are constructed as Joseph Jacotot, Plato/Socrates and Bruce Lee. The paper does this in order to explore an undecidability at the heart of the binary ignorance/knowledge, and in order to point out that ignorance has always been a key (even if unacknowledged) premise of the dominant textual and discourse approaches of poststructuralism, as well as to offer some reasons why we might try to unlearn some of our dominant understandings of or assumptions about the political and cultural importance of pedagogy.