Abstract

This essay conducts a critical reading of the US Television show Breaking Bad, framed in terms of the radical pedagogy of Jacques Rancière. I use Rancière's polemical claims about equality and mastery, about stultification and emancipation, as a tool to mine Breaking Bad for its cultural politics. In turn, within the context of this engagement with Breaking Bad I demonstrate that Rancière's emancipatory pedagogy remains utterly entwined with his polemicization of politics as a disruption of the given distribution of the sensible. A Rancièrean politics is a pedagogical politics: the pedagogical refusal to stultify operates as political resistance to any naturalization of the hierarchy of the social order.

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