In August 2004, this interview by Marcelo Rezende was published in the Brazilian journal Cult.
Cult: Political philosophy runs through your work, your articles, and the debates in which you participate. What is the role and place of political philosophy today?
Jacques Rancière: In fact, I prefer the term “politics” or “the political” to “political philosophy.” To me, the last term designates an effort to obscure the constitutive paradox of the political summed up by the word “democracy”: the government of the people, which is to say the government of those who have no competency to govern, or the government of incompetents. The existence of the political means the contingency of domination. What we traditionally call politics is in fact a compromise, made in the name of the community, between this paradox—the government of anyone—and the governments of various oligarchies. Political philosophy has always tended to conceal this paradox behind visions of the political as the fulfillment of a communal essence of the human being, a knowledge of the common good, a capacity to bring together and lead men, etc. This means that it has always tended to conceal the anarchic bedrock of the political, which is the power of anyone. This was particularly evident during the restoration years that followed the great blossoming of the 1960s and ’70s. The conservative restoration was carried out in the name of a return of the political, or a return of political philosophy against the utopias of the social movements. In the name of thinkers like Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt, there was a call for politics to be renewed in the purity of its expressive freedom, as opposed to the economic and social necessity that Marxism stood for. But this call simply served to impose another economic necessity, that of global capitalism, by condemning all forms of resistance as encroachments on social necessity and as attachments to archaic systems of social protection. The task of political thought is to oppose this dominant figure of political philosophy. It is to question the alliance of a supposedly pure politics and a supposedly inevitable economic necessity. It is to reassert political impurity—that is, the fact that there is no specific sphere and no specific competency for politics. Politics is precisely the permanent questioning of the established divisions that make one thing political and another social, one side public and the other one private. In the end, all of these divisions come down to a determination of who has the capacity to manage public affairs and who does not. The task of political thought is to break these barriers, to release the political—that is, the power of the assertion of equality—from so-called social movements. This does not mean that everything is political, but rather that the political can exist anywhere. The notion of biopolitics tends, on the other hand, to identify the political as a totalizing power of the whole over its parts. We have given Foucault’s thoughts on biopower a reach they did not previously have, subjecting the political to an ontology of life, which is something Foucault certainly never intended to do. In my view, the political is not based in any ontological power of the common. The political is not the assertion of life but its division. The political means that there is no single essence of a community, only perpetual conflict among many configurations of the common within it.
Cult: So the only solution is to speak of politics—and not the political—as you write in On the Shores of Politics?
Rancière: I don’t contrast politics and the political. On the contrary, I question the attitude of those who want to isolate a kind of pure essence of politics as the realization of an essential being-in-common. I present politics as a space of confrontation between two logics. On the one hand, there is what I call “police logic,” the logic that structures the community according to a distribution of functions and places, competencies and shares. On the other hand, there is “the political,” the activity that adds things to this order. The properly political is the power of the equality of anyone with anyone. Talking about politics is not talking about a pure reality. It is a node between two logics: between the inegalitarian logic that wants to account for the whole in the distribution of parts and shares, competencies and functions; and the egalitarian logic that undoes the whole, exposing its dissensual nature. Politics exists as long as there is dissensus. Dissensus is not the same thing as conflict between groups with different interests. It is the splitting up of sensible appearances themselves. Politics exists as long as there is conflict between the very data of a situation and the subjects capable of redefining it. The political always consists of splitting up the common space and imposing additional issues on it.
Cult: You are critical of Toni Negri and Michael Hardt’s book Empire. You said it was a kind of displaced Marxism. Is it possible to think of a social model outside Marxism and its heritage?
Rancière: Empire takes up the old Marxist thesis that capitalism will be its own gravedigger. The book argues that the capitalist mode of production is doomed to explode under the pressure of the productive forces it develops, which contain a new social reality. This thesis has never been confirmed by the historical development of capitalism, which has always managed to swallow the new technologies that should cause it to implode. This has not prevented communism from being constantly reasserted, or from taking more reformist and radical forms in different eras, including the revisionism of the Second International and the communist parties of the 1960s, the autonomous movement in Italy in the 1970s, the theory of the multitudes today. Each time, it attempts to prove that the nature of industrial production makes products increasingly common for all, and each time a new naturally communist subject is posited. Today the computer revolution is supposed to complete this process by making goods immaterial and thus completely common. The reality of capitalist production tends to be identified with an expression of collective intelligence. Unfortunately, there are many collective intelligences. And the collective intelligence that supports the technological revolution is much more than random human capacity transmitted via the immateriality of the networks. It is the collective intelligence of capitalism, the renewal of forms of exploitation through the global division of labor, overexploitation, de-localization, displacements of populations, etc. The technological revolution in fact accompanies a strengthening of the forms of private appropriation of the common power.
These visions of capitalism generate the conditions of its own demise. But obviously the Soviet disaster of violent attempts to establish an anticapitalist order made this model of capitalism’s downfall a pitfall. The problem is that faced with the global capitalist order, we are trapped within the heritage of Marxism. But this heritage itself is twofold, and Marxism has never stopped oscillating between the economic logic of the implosion of capitalism and the voluntarist logic of the blank slate. Marxist critique does not, in itself, define any other form of society. The conditions for asserting the common power of intelligence must be sought elsewhere than in the capitalist organization of the forces of production. They must be sought in assertions of the capacity of anyone. We must stop identifying, as the Marxist tradition did, the egalitarian capacity of anonymous people with the immanent collective power of the exploitative capitalist order.
Cult: What does a revolutionary ideal mean today?
Rancière: The starting point here is the fact that there is no revolutionary ideal today, if we mean the idea of a new society that doubles as the destination of a historical movement. This is due, of course, to the fact that the revolutions carried out in the name of Marxism led to forms of exploitation and oppression that heaped lasting doubt on the possibility of an order more just than the present one. It is also due to the fact that capitalism proved able to co-opt the heart of Marxist belief with the assertion of inevitable economic necessity. The constitutive elements of the revolutionary ideal that we have known in the past—the idea of a new society and complete faith in historical inevitability—have simultaneously gone missing, and I do not think they can be willfully reconstituted. Instead, we have to see things the other way around. We try to deduce the democratic and revolutionary movements of the past two centuries from a horizon of Messianic expectation and faith in history, and now it is claimed that we need a utopia to regain our momentum. But it is the power effectively asserted by movements for equality that creates historical horizons of expectations. Thus, the emancipation of the worker amounted to an immediate assertion of the public capacity of workers, which police logic had confined to the order of economic life. It was this before it was a revolutionary sentiment that was the promise of history. Today, the dominant system boasts of a consonance with the irreversible movement of history. And what must be done, first of all, is to reassert the capacity of anonymous people by distinguishing this capacity from any teleology of collective intellectual power. What needs to be restored is not a project for a new egalitarian society, but the very basis for any socialization of equality: the idea of the capacity of anonymous people, a feeling of the contingency of systems of exploitation and domination, and the capacity of anyone to participate in the collective destiny.
Cult: Do you believe that we are currently in a moment of restoration of the political, and that what we need is a real critique of Western society?
Rancière: It’s not so much a restoration of the political as an attempt to erase the political. To me, that is the underlying meaning of the idea of consensus prevailing in most advanced societies. Consensus is not simply an agreement between major parties over the supposed general interests of the nation, or over the supposed necessities of the global economic order. Rather, it is an attempt to bring the conflicting logics of politics into a single logic, in which the superfluity of the political vanishes, reducing it to the management of a population identified by its objective elements and their objectifiable interests. The political is what disrupts the simple logic by which the flow of commodities, money, and populations is managed. It is always threatened by an identification of the common power of a population with its empirical life. And it is never simply a matter of opposing one model of society to another. There is an established opposition between ways of counting the community and shaping common power. The dominant group tells us that, “We are all in the same boat. We are all equally powerless to oppose the course of things.” But “we are all powerless” ultimately means: “In any case, you are incapable. Leave it to us.” It is this axiom of powerlessness that must be rejected.
Cult: Is there political nostalgia? Is the resurgence of Guy Debord and situationism a symptom of this nostalgia in the new generation?
Rancière: The relationship between the two is complex. Situationism embodied the contemporary form of the thinking of young Marx—that is, a radical critique of alienation situated from the start beyond the political, which considers man and digs to the roots of his drive to objectify the products of his activity outside himself. This thinking goes further back than Marx, to the era of German Romanticism and the idea of a radical revolution in the very forms of the sensible world, a simultaneous humanization of the natural world and development of a new sensibility in the theoretical and political man. Situationism thus functions a little like a Marxist encore, reasserting the radicality of this revolution beyond the political while distancing it from the Marxisms embodied and compromised by state power. Its way of bringing the forms of economic and state domination back to a single schema perfectly suited the movement of May ’68, in which all the legitimacies of the social order simultaneously and abruptly collapsed. But for the same reasons, situationism aged badly and stood up poorly to the global capitalist counterrevolution. It is true that the critical power of Debord’s texts holds a fascination for many of today’s youth. In my generation, the contrary was true; the situationist critique tended to become banal and to gradually get confused with the philosophy of resentment, which transformed many revolutionaries into contemptuous poseurs, disenchanted with media society, mass democracy, etc. Beyond politics tended to become below politics, and to be identified with a convenient attitude set at a moralizing distance from society. From that perspective, society appears no longer worth engaging in politically. Then critique functions as mourning for the political.
Cult: What does it mean “to be in resistance” today?
Rancière: I don’t really like the idea of resistance. It reduces any assertion of equality to a reaction to a system of domination that is projected as the normal condition of public affairs. Resistance lends this fundamentally defeatist position a heroic air. A host of intellectuals today declare themselves “the last resistance.” They are cast as guardians of thought threatened by the communication-media empire; guardians of art threatened by the culture industry or the cultural state; and guardians of civilization threatened by the barbarians of the suburbs. Energies formerly devoted to critiquing commodity fetishism or ideology tend to be reinvested—under the guise of resistance—in the most traditional defenses of Western values. There is talk of resistance, but it most often conceals submission to the order of things behind a heroic posture. The so-called resister shores up a feeling of his own intelligence and subversive virtue by asserting the imbecility and spinelessness of the masses. So I don’t talk about resistance but assertion. The power of equality must be asserted wherever inequality is found: in the status for immigrants, in the struggle to defend the solidarity and redistribution won by social struggles, in the assertion of land rights, and in the concept of the educational system. I believe the present is ruled by attempts by the dominant classes to erase all historical achievements of equality. We could say that fighting against this offensive is resistance. But this resistance must be given an affirmative egalitarian content. Many displays of resistance do nothing but show contempt for the capacity of anonymous people.
Cult: What is the role of the intellectual in this moment of political crisis?
Rancière: There is no role of the intellectual in general. There is a political conflict over the very question of the distribution of intelligence. On one side, there are stereotyped roles that suit the scholar or thinker, such as the prince’s advisor, or the voice of resistance to power. But there is no reason to believe that an educated person or academic is more lucid than anyone else about the state of society, nor more resistant to seductions of power. Experience shows us every day that the academy is sensitive to the same movements and countermovements as the rest of society. More profoundly, what is at issue is the idea of a specific class of intelligence that has a role by virtue of its superior capacity. This is what I mean by police: a category that participates in a way of thinking about community in terms of a distributions of functions that involves the place-holding of identities and competencies. The political is a rejection of this distribution of competencies. It is intelligence emerging in unexpected places and unexpected forms. From this starting point, an alternative position of intellectuality can be defined, in which the term “intellectual” designates those who work to assert everyone’s intellectual capacity. The intellectual then becomes a figure who abandons his standard role of running the social system to affirm that he also has something to say about the machine he operates. The intellectual is then also an academic who works to make heard expressions that the machine typically drowns out, and who, more profoundly, constructs a nonhierarchical image of thought by asserting the intellectual capacity of anyone against all privatization of intellectual power. In my modest way, this is what I have always tried to do by crossing the borders meant to separate the domains of the philosopher, historian, sociologist, etc., by addressing texts that would otherwise never enter into dialogue. These include texts such as Plato’s Republic, the manuscripts of a self-taught cabinetmaker, the articles of an extravagant educator on intellectual emancipation, etc.
There is no role for the intellectual or academic. There are only two opposing viewpoints. We start with either equality or inequality, with intelligence as shared or intelligence as a distinct, privatized power.
Cult: And what is the current task of education?
Rancière: Following the same logic, I would say that it is a trap to define a function for education. It is possible to define various policies toward the educational system. A system of education always fulfills a plurality of functions, including the transmission of knowledge, social integration, the reproduction of systems (starting with itself), and even, sometimes, intellectual emancipation. It is a mistake to try to unify them in any direction, or to believe, for example, that the transmission of knowledge automatically results in psychic emancipation, or conversely that the reproductive function of the school precludes emancipation. An egalitarian or emancipatory point of view understands that equality has no social institutions and always works through mechanisms in which it is bound to its opposite.
A teacher is part of the reproduction of the university and social system. This does not prevent him from working, if he wishes, to support forms of intellectual equality. But this requires that he distinguishes his function. A teacher is not the same thing as a scholar. A scholar is not the same thing as a citizen. One can certainly be all three things at the same time, but attempts to unify them under a single logic—defining oneself, for example, as someone who trains citizens by transmitting knowledge—will always lean towards the dominant social fiction.