I will announce right off that I am only going to speak well of Jacques Rancière. In the past, I have spoken critically of him so often that my stock of negative comments has run out.1 Yes, yes – we are brothers. Everyone sees that, and in the end, I do too.
To speak only well of Jacques Rancière is not an easy task, given the positions that the two of us occupy. Perhaps my constant praise might in fact be the worst fate that I could have in store for him. Would doing so be precisely the most underhanded way to attack him? If, for example, I were to announce that we are in agreement on a number of important points, how would he take that? Would he rather just as soon change his mind on all those points and leave me behind?
The ethical principle that I am advancing up front is to stay away from all manner of comparisons with myself. I will say nothing about myself, neither in agreement nor in disagreement – nothing of the sort. Rather, we should maintain a pure Rancière, praised in his totality. In order thus to approach his work from a point of departure that is as far removed from my own as possible, I have chosen a point of entry that seems to belong to someone else: the relation between knowledge and power. This dialectic of knowledge and power is today thoroughly academicized in the established systematic reference – one-sidedly, no doubt – to Foucault. Indeed, its vulgar form (‘All knowledge is power, down with the authority of knowledge!’) has been a sort of commonplace since the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. Certainly, if someone can rightly claim to have developed this conceptual frame more and better than Foucault, it has been none other than Rancière. This was the intention from the beginning, as is clear from the title of his first book, Althusser’s Lesson, which meditates on the relationship between the ‘theoreticism’ of Althusser, his defence of science, and the reactionary political authority of the French Communist Party; between the knowledge of the intellectual and the power of the party of which he is the fellow traveller with or without deviation.
To understand the provenance of this meditation, we should return to the context of the 1960s and particularly to the crucial sequence between 1964 and 1968, reaching its culmination in 1966. For the question we are concerned with, this context was absolutely paradoxical: it prepared and organized a tipping of the balance, from 1968 onwards, from a scientific position that fetishized concepts to a ‘practicist’ position that fetishized action and the immediate ideas of its agents. We should not forget that these were Rancière’s formative years.
Let us see what happened around 1966-1967. The reign of structuralism in those years was also incontestably the reign of science. Its motif was profound, because this was no ordinary scientism. Rather, this neo-scientism centred on the theme of formalization, having learned its lesson from the achievements of structuralist linguistics, particularly with respect to phonology. In the dominant methodologies of the human sciences – those of Marxism and psychoanalysis – it is able to read veiled theories of form: in the former, the modes of production constituted the forms of History; in the latter, the psychic apparatuses constituted the forms of the Subject.
Althusser and Lacan, each in his own way, led the way in these movements and took on the ideal of science, that is, the ideal of formalization: Althusser by radically distinguishing between science and the history of ideology; Lacan by making this formalization, in a canonical text, the ideal of psychoanalysis itself. We thus find ourselves in a context where the question of knowledge in its most rigorous and solid sense is paradigmatic, in the formalized sciences like logic, mathematics and the phonological core of linguistics.
However, in the mid to late 1960s, there appeared a completely opposite disposition. Such was the initial paradox that one needs to keep in mind for a well-grounded understanding of Rancière’s trajectory. This paradox is perhaps the originary example that was also to be subjectively decisive for what he will later name (as his primary categories) the relation of a non-relation, or the non-relation conceived as a relation.
We should recall that during the period of intense activity of the Cultural Revolution in China, between 1965 and 1968, the main question was that of the forms of intellectual authority. The student revolt rallied against what the Red Guards named the ‘monkish academics’, demanding their dismissal without hesitating in their cruel persecution. We had, on a large scale, an anti-authoritarian revolt aiming at the reversal of hierarchies founded on the access to knowledge. The revolts in the factories established their political form precisely in Shanghai in January ’67, when anti-hierarchical revolts challenged the engineers and bosses whose status was founded on the authority of techno-scientific knowledge. The idea was that the direct experimentation of workers should be at least as important as the authority of their leaders. Here we had a sequence which was to be the key reference for a number of young philosophers – Rancière, myself and others – who at the same time were engaging in the apology of the scientific concept and its liberatory authority. The question of knowing whether we were rightly or wrongly fascinated with the Cultural Revolution is a marginal debate. The fact is that an immense political phenomenon seemed polarized on the question of the denial or radical contestation of the set of authorities based on the centralization of knowledge. That being the case, for the revolutionary scientists that we were aspiring to be, this constituted the most violent of our internal paradoxes.
Now let us return to France. Beginning in 1967, there were a series of factory revolts leading to the month of May 1968. These revolts were qualitatively new because, being organized by nuclei of young workers who frequently were not unionized, they also proposed to overturn the internal hierarchy of the factory, with actions that constituted a particular form. These actions began first as a reticence towards or even a frank opposition to the overall unionized framing of the movements, and, then, developed into a fairly systematic humiliation of all existing authorities. In the months after May ’68, this was followed by the spread of a rather confrontational practice: the sequestering of factory bosses. I just want to mention a kind of stylistic résumé of all this in a film by Jean-Luc Godard, Tout va bien, which we might consider as an artistic document of the way in which consciousness was formed by the experience of this upheaval in the relation between knowledge and power.
Finally, prepared as well by the many prior dissident movements, notably on the question of sexual and social inequalities, the student revolts of May ’68 and the following years were explicitly directed against the top-down organization of the transmission of knowledge. These revolts questioned academic authority, the choices concerning one’s education and the courses of study, the testing of knowledge and the possibility of self-led education by students who would organize themselves in the absence of any figure of the professor-scholar.
All of these events organized the paradox: the tension between a kind of dominant philosophical ideology under the paradigm of the absoluteness of scientific knowledge, and a series of politico-ideological phenomena which, on the contrary, strengthened the conviction that the connection between knowledge and authority is a politically oppressive construction that should be dismantled, if necessary by force.
Although we each lived with the paradox in our different ways, Rancière, I and many others were met with the same considerable question: How do we untie or undo the existing configurations of the relation between knowledge and authority, between knowledge and power? This question emerged naturally in the context that I spoke of, from the moment we rallied to the side of the movement, which at the time was our inaugural gesture as young professors. But I think that the question develops into a more complex form around the following problem: If it is necessary to depose the authority of knowledge, instituted as a reactionary function in the oppressive figures by which knowledge is monopolized, how then will experience be transmitted? The question of transmission becomes a particularly acute question. If it is not the concept but rather practical and actual experiences that form the real sources of emancipation, how does this experience transmit itself? In the first place, of course, we are speaking of the revolutionary experience itself. What are the new protocols of this transmission? What emerges once we have undone, untied and terminated the canonical joint authority of power and knowledge that has served institutionally as the space of this transmission? What is a transmission that is not an imposition?
We can also ask: What is the new figure of the master that results if one excludes all validation by the institutional authority? Are there masters outside of the institution? Or are there no more masters at all? The importance of the question of the master is certainly clear for Rancière, but it is also absolutely crucial in the work of Lacan. It not only emerges contextually in the abstract or genealogical question of the relations between knowledge and power, but also and above all in the immediate consequences of the engagement in the mass global movement of youth and workers between at least 1965 and 1975.
Since the start of the Cultural Revolution, this crucial question of transmission outside the institution had been formulated by Mao when he inquired about the successors of the cause of the proletariat. Given that he supported the students and the workers in their revolts, it became clear that this question of transmission could neither pass through the channels of the established authority nor through the channels of the Communist Party in power. The party, as the depository of authority and the supposed concentration of experience, became with each passing day the principal target of these activities. The result was the movement’s establishment of Mao as the figure of the absolute master. On the question of whether there are masters outside the institution, the response was: the master untied from the institution is the master of the movement itself. He is a paradoxical master, since he is the master of the movement that aims to depose the masters. But what then was Mao if not a proper name? What the Red Guards proposed was the subsumption of revolt, infinite and dispersed, under the transcendence of a proper name. The authority of the singular name replaced those of disparate institutions and bureaucracies. To transmit meant: to study collectively what is equal to the name. Such was the role of Mao’s little red book: to give form to what is guarded by the name in the fire of experience. It is almost impossible today to imagine the enthusiasm around this donation of form, the exaltation that prevailed around the theme of study, which was tied to those previously unseen political trajectories and those unprecedented actions.
In this we find a characteristic example of the problems and particular solutions of the time. Lacan himself personally took on the question of mastery. Not only did he produce a matheme of the discourse of the master but he meditated on the relation between mastery, transmission, and institution as well. He had, in particular, advanced the remarkable idea of a sort of equivalence for the new schools of psychoanalysis, as spaces of transmission, between foundation and dissolution. If one follows the genesis of a veritable institution for the case of Lacan, one will first notice that it proceeds nonetheless under the radical guarantee of the proper name of a master who takes exception to the instituted forms of mastery (there again, ‘Lacan’ just like ‘Mao’ expresses a condition of transmission). And then one notices that if an institution, in an effort to avoid the ‘effet de colle’, attempts to assure the transparency of transmission, it must approach the edge of its own dissolution with each passing day.2
This whole context, this historical and subjective paradox, constitutes our origin – for us, for the ‘generation’, as one might say, who were struck by lightning in May ’68. This origin illuminates Rancière’s trajectory of thought, and it does so in the long run for the simple reason that, in contrast to so many others, Rancière never reneged on it. This is the same reason why it illuminates my trajectory as well. It is so much the case that, in renouncing the opening comments of my own essay, I believe it obligatory to engage in some comparisons between Rancière and myself.
I obviously return to my initial difficulty: how do I compare myself to Rancière without immediately implying that he is wrong and I am right? The Rancière/Badiou comparisons are, little by little, on their way to becoming somewhat canonical in some limited but international, and – without appearing too shameless – significant contexts. We do not – neither I nor Rancière – draw any particular pride from this. Full of good sense, Jacques told me one day, ‘You know, we are advancing only by virtue of seniority’. That’s true, but we might congratulate ourselves on the passage of a faithful seniority and not that of the social advantages found by some colleagues in their trumpeted renunciations (‘We were mistaken, oh dear – we believed in communism, we were totalitarians – yes, yes, yes, long live democracy’).
Some words are in order about the methodology concerning this recent practice of the comparison between Rancière and myself. As a general rule, it has three functions. The comparisons serve above all to open a critical apparatus, in demonstrating our differences with respect to certain figures like Mallarmé or Plato, or Straub or Godard. Sometimes comparison serves as a synthetic method for constituting a supposedly unnoticed problem that circulates ‘between’ the two of us. And finally, it serves to positively shed light on the work of one of the two of us. This third function is the one that I shall undertake, trying at each instant – more or less clumsily – to place myself in the negative role. I will maintain the axiom to ‘speak only well of Rancière’, albeit at the cost of speaking negatively of myself.
On the problem at the heart of the context that I have mentioned – that is, on the question concerning not only of the relation between power and knowledge, but also the singularity of transmission in the undoing of an instituted relation between knowledge and power – I would say that Rancière holds a democratic hypothesis with respect to the possible configuration of a new type of transmission. I call a hypothesis ‘democratic’ insofar as it relates to an eruption, a movement of the masses, a lightning-like rallying together. I also refer here to a ‘social’ separation between those at the bottom and those on the top. The two descriptions establish a correlation between a new regime of transmission and mastery, on one hand, and an always incomplete unraveling of old instituted practices, on the other. In the background, one also finds the correlation of the themes of equality and inequality in their current modes of articulation, that is, in the non-relation which is, in turn, a relation.
My first remark is that this hypothesis constrains Rancière to mediations of a historical character. In effect, a democratic hypothesis thusly conceived applies itself to observations concerning the dysfunction of certain instituted regimes of distribution. In this dysfunction what insinuates itself as if in a breach is the possibility of a different distribution of power, of knowledge, of active bodies, and finally of the visible order itself. This different distribution reorganizes a new modality of transmission, a fragile and transitory modality, which no longer passes through the channels of instituted knowledge at all but rather, changing the insignia of power-knowledge, inscribes itself into the part of that which, in the former distribution, was the no-part. This transmission is truly democratic because it articulates itself directly on the differential of the instituted regime of distribution. It is articulated at the point where the ‘polis’, the virtual city of the collectivity of equals, separates itself suddenly, while at the same time remaining in contact with the ‘police’. In this, the ‘police’ indicates not only the regime of the established distributions with their unequally distributed parts but also the no-part, the necessary figure of all subsequent redistributions.
I insist on the fact that Rancière’s epochal account unites the consequences of a renewed democratic hypothesis, simply because my own hypothesis is not his. To speak honestly now, and this is where I begin to take on a negative role. I believe that my hypothesis is, simply put, aristocratic. The emergence of a new transmission, for me, presupposes a post-evental constitution of the effects of a heterogeneous body. However, this heterogeneous body is not immediately democratic in nature because its heterogeneity affects the multiplicity – the demos – at the heart of which it is constituted, in an immanent but separating manner. What makes possible the existence, or at least the propagation, of the egalitarian hypothesis is not itself an immediately equal regime.
It is a bit like mathematics: what is more egalitarian than the pure connections in an equation? Thoughts are strictly identical in the face of this formal game where rules are entirely explicit, where everything is inscribed and nothing is hidden. This is exactly why Plato accorded to mathematics the status of an obligatory stepping stone on the way to the dialectic, leading us through the most evident case of equality. Such is his democratic ideal: equality before the Idea. However, it is clear that the formation of the body of theorems and the organization of their proper transmission is ultimately always the work of a small group of inventive mathematicians. Hence, the mathematicians properly speaking form a particularly aristocratic milieu, even if their personal disinterestedness and the total dedication of their capacities to the universal are never in doubt. It is from this case or this paradigm of deep democracy that Plato drew his conclusions about the rarity of guardians. This rarity is maintained while at the same time asserting their position of radical equality – with the inclusion of women – and the commitment to absolute communist disinterestedness in the forgoing of private property. It is in this sense that I speak of an aristocracy of transmission, a ‘communist’ aristocracy, which is today faced with the problem of having to distance itself from everything reminiscent of the form of the political party.
To sidestep the problem, Rancière sticks closely to the collective process in its operation to undo the established forms of transmission rather than going further along in the investigation of the very means of the material organization of consequences.
Here, we find the most condensed form of our differences: we have two distinct oxymorons. For Rancière, it is the ignorant master, and for me it is the proletarian aristocracy. In certain regards these two oxymorons, taken as maxims of judgement, are very similar. Viewed from afar, they are the same thing, but focussing more closely now, we find them to be extremely different. Why? Here we have a philosophical question that we might say is precise or well formed. Why is this ‘ignorant master’ not substitutable by the ‘proletarian aristocracy’ as a balance sheet of the paradox of the 1960s and 70s?
The oxymoron of the ignorant master activates its place, which is the place of the non-place, in contingent collectives. There, it undertakes a transmission without any guarantee of what takes place or what it affirms under this title. The ignorant master is an activation disposed in a sort of potential universality, an activation of what exists and what is becoming. The historical phenomenon of this transmission is at the same time immediate and sequential.
That which I call a ‘proletarian aristocracy’ is an aristocracy that is contingent as well as prescriptive. It does not democratically testify to the powers of taking place [l’avoir-lieu], of the becoming placed [devenir placé] of the out-of-place [hors-place]. It prescribes what it considers important, and this it transmits without any guarantee as well. However, its transmission occurs by way of incorporation into its own duration, which is a completely different mode of transmission than that practised by the ignorant master. Here I am simply introducing this term of ‘proletarian aristocracy’ for the sake of clarifying the oxymoron of the ‘ignorant master’ and also to say that these two new and paired names serve conceptually to name a certain account of the paradoxical context which I spoke of a little earlier.
This duality leads to many shared usages but also to all sorts of differences. We can take Plato as an example. Rancière and I certainly understand – as did Foucault, who would have laughed at seeing all this attributed to him – that the disjunctive dialectic of knowledge and power is first of all, in philosophy, a Platonic affair. Plato argues, in innumerable pages, for the proposition that there should be a privileged relationship between the protocols of the acquisition of knowledge and the distribution of the positions of power – that is, the hierarchical constitution of the city (the guardians, the warriors, the artisans…). For Rancière and me, with respect to this proposition, Plato has been a constant and fundamental interlocutor. Plato is something like a fault line, a shared edge where I believe we walk. In this, we are nevertheless facing in different directions.
If you observe the construction of the Republic, which is thematically paradigmatic, you could say that the text can be treated either from the aspect of the global distribution of occupational positions – the aspect of its social vision, as we might say today – or alternatively by concentrating our attention on the education of the guardians. In the first case, we have the conclusion of Rancière, that the essence of Plato is a critique of democracy. Why? Because the principle that governs the distribution of places is that those who only perform one duty, who are constrained to only perform one duty, cannot really participate in the direction of political affairs. Rancière insists strongly on this point. In the end, that which founds the ‘social’ anti-democracy of Plato is not really the need of a scholarly idleness or the rigid division between manual and intellectual work. No, what is essential is once again the question of the One and the multiple. The hierarchical distribution of powers according to Plato is guided by the conviction that whoever is assigned a productive task cannot properly perform it unless they only perform that task. For the artisan (here the ‘technique’ comprises the poetic technique, art) the principle of the One is strict: one task, one person. What we have then is a practical univocity. On the contrary, the guardians of the city – in other words, the political leaders – are obliged to do several things all at once, even if they are excluded from manual production. For example, they have to do mathematics, gymnastics, martial arts, dialectical philosophy…
One can say that, in our general approach to Plato, Rancière insists on the reactive dimension of this practical univocity (everyone in his place) while I focus on the theoretical multiplicity (the place of the leaders, always, is displaced). If, with the abstraction of the social schema, we consider the guardians as a metonymy of a polyvalent humanity, we can find in Plato a communist paradigm. Here we find a coexistence, in the dialogues, of a severe hierarchy that places the productive artisan at the bottom but also affirms a generic communism that hypothesizes, despite being a terrifying but inevitable hypothesis in the eyes of Socrates, the participation of women in leadership. Plato’s division is thus a projection of the division between the oxymoron of the ignorant master who organizes thought according to a practical univocity, a ‘social’ hierarchy, and according to its unbearably anti-democratic side, and on the other hand, the oxymoron of a proletarian or communist aristocracy, which on the contrary extrapolates the Platonic vision of guardians as the paradigm of a polyvalent multiplicity, of a generic humanity (without class), as the real support of an authentic equality.
Plato concludes this relation between knowledge and power with the suggestion that the key question of politics is education. It is thus interesting to ask oneself how Rancière treats education philosophically. To introduce a bit of tension, we might remark that, for Foucault, the anti-dialectic of knowledge and power does not lead towards a theory of education. Foucault seeks rather to uncover what we might call the unforeseeable diagonal of practices and, in particular, the pathological and local practices, plebeian and excessive, which border on the unnamable and which in this sense trace all kinds of diagonals across the schema for the articulation of knowledge and power.
It is time to affirm that Rancière occupies an absolutely original position due to the system of formalization that he has constructed, little by little, from the paradoxical experience of which we spoke in the beginning. Rancière’s work merits particular mention in terms of the circulation, produced by his writing, between the properly philosophical origins of the question as well as materials gathered from the experiences of the worker’s actions in the nineteenth century; between the theses of his contemporaries, in particular those of Foucault, as well as the study of the positions of sociologists and historians, among them some significant polemics with the Annales School. He also investigates literature as well as, more generally, aesthetics and, finally, cinema. In looking at this broad interweaving, we might see how it makes for a possible formalization of our situation in the 1960s and 70s. The heterogeneous material in Rancière’s work prepares, in my view, a convincing formalization of the original paradoxical experience.
What are the stakes of the problem of education? Rancière does not affirm that education occupies a central place in the political process. In this sense, he does not confirm the Platonic position. Yet neither does he affirm the contrary, that education should not have any privilege as a superstructure. This is a good example, but perhaps also the source of what I might call Rancière’s ‘median’ style. By ‘median’, I do not mean centrist, but rather, one that is never immediately conclusive. This median style stems from the fact that Rancière always looks for a point where the inherited solutions encounter problems that obscure them, while this obscurity, in turn, proves that the inherited solutions are not as clear as they pretended to be.
The events that I spoke about earlier were foundational for Rancière. He took from them, as did I, the conviction that the struggle is always a struggle on two fronts. This was the principal lesson of Maoism. In politics, the struggle was naturally against the strongholds of bourgeois power, against the capitalist and the imperialist power, but this principal struggle could not succeed if we did not also struggle equally against the Communist Party and institutional trade unionism. It was certainly necessary to fight American imperialism, but we could not hope to reach the other side without stigmatizing the complicity of Soviet social-imperialism. To be brief: a true leftist revolutionary fights the official ‘left’ as well as the right. Such was the very powerful and vast context of upheaval right up to the beginning of the 1980s, framed by this idea of a struggle on two fronts.
With respect to the theoretical points that remain important today, there was also a struggle on two fronts. There was the struggle against the idea that politics can be dependent on science and, thus, on institutional transmission, a model according to which politics should be taught to the ‘ignorant workers’ and ‘common people’ by the experts or the party of the working class. However, Rancière equally struggles against the idea that politics is a blind spontaneity, a vital energy foreign to the concept and totally encapsulated by the gesture of revolt. There is neither a knowing party overseeing movement from on top, nor is there an immanent vital movement such that the gesture of revolt absorbs or encapsulates the totality of political substance.
With respect to the first front, Rancière had to enact a break with Althusser – just as I did in those years – in his writing Althusser’s Lesson. For Althusser, science remained the fixed point from which ideology could be divided. This might be why he remained faithful to the Party for such a long time, long after the sequence of years that I spoke of. It is important to realize that behind Althusser, who was the figure of the knowing master, we found what the Maoists of the time called ‘ossified Leninism’. This was the conviction that apart from any movement, consciousness comes to the workers from the outside, rather than being immanent in workers’ knowledge, and that this outside is the positive science of the history of societies – in other words, Marxism.
But we should not forget that there is a second front. Here Rancière must detach politics from all its vitalist identifications, and maintain its status as a declaration, its discursive consistency, and its status as a figure of exception. Against the active prolonging of forms of life such as they are, his thesis is rather that if politics is not transitive to science, on the first front, it is nonetheless productive of various forms of knowledge that are necessary to the workers engaged in conflicts. Here, on this front, he puts in place an entirely new dialectic of knowledge and ignorance.
In the end, the question of the political unbinding of knowledge and power, constrained by the necessity of achieving nonetheless something like a new type of transmission, results – in the conceptual field – in the proposition of a new dialectic of knowledge and ignorance, and more generally, of mastery and equality. These are the dialectics that in my eyes form the heart of Rancière’s work – the part of his work that formalizes those original experiences mentioned earlier.
This dialectic can be laid out in two very subtle theses, it seems to me. Their interrelation is subtler still. Formalizing Rancière’s formalization, here is how I would write these two theses:
1. Under the condition of a declared equality, ignorance is the point from which a new knowledge can be born.
2. Under the authority of an ignorant master, knowledge can be a space for equality.
To be clear, we retain an essential point, which has become synonymous with the accomplishment of Rancière’s work as a whole: equality is declared and is never programmatic. This may be obvious for the convinced Rancièrians that we are, but we should also stop to punctuate this major contribution of his enterprise. It was he who first introduced into the contemporary conceptual field the idea that equality is declared rather than programmatic. This was a fundamental reversal, and I announced my absolute agreement with this thesis very early on.
Here we pause again for another short comparative sequence. Rancière and I are in agreement on the declared dimension of equality, but we do not share the same hermeneutics with respect to it. For me, that equality is declared rather than programmatic means that equality is, in reality, the invariant axiom of all real sequences of the politics of emancipation. This axiom is (re)declared each time that an event opens a new sequence of emancipatory politics. It is what I called in 1976, during the period contemporaneous with the initial context, the ‘communist invariants’.3 The communist invariant par excellence is the egalitarian axiom as the axiom of a given political sequence. A declared equality is the maxim of an aristocratic politics that is grappling with a specific or singular form of inequality. This contingent aristocratic politics is an active body that carries out the maxim in a singular sequence and that has no other task than its deployment to the extent it is possible in a given situation. This aristocracy is absolutely contingent and uniquely identifiable in the sense that it is articulated in the very effects of the embodiment of the maxim in a given sequence.
All this is quite different for Rancière, who distrusts principles and more still the idea of a prescriptive relationship between principles and sequences. I would say that for him, equality is simultaneously a condition and a productive process. Such is the profound sense of the two theses that I formalized just a moment ago. On the one hand, equality is the condition of a new figure of knowledge and transmission. On the other hand, under the sign of an ignorant master, this new figure in turn strengthens equality by creating a new place or space for it in society.
Equality is a condition insofar as its declaration institutes a new relation to knowledge, creating the possibility of knowledge there where the distribution of places did not foresee any such possibility. This is why the master of such a sort of knowledge must be declared ignorant. In its capacity qua condition, the egalitarian prescription institutes a new regime of knowledge and its transmission in the guise of an unexpected undoing of the established relation between knowledge and ignorance.
Equality is a production insofar as the new configuration of knowledge brings about a space of equality that did not previously exist. We had given our blessings on the beautiful formula according to which a part of no-part comes to exist. But I have always felt it just a little too structural to truly summarize Rancière’s thought. Everything here is process, occurrence, a lightning bolt of meaning. And in this process what is key is that equality is a double occurrence, one of condition and one of production. It is the knotting of these two functions that makes equality the event par excellence.
This tempts me to once again enter into the forbidden terrain of comparison. Yes, one can say that the declaration of equality is, for Rancière, the event itself, the event insofar as it provides a space to an indelible trace. In my vision of political matters, the egalitarian declaration is made possible by the event and is not to be confounded with it. It is that which organizes the body but in the context of a given evental condition, which is thus not homogenous with the declaration itself.
To draw out this comparison with even more complexity, we might consider the fact that we took leave of the Party in different ways, something that our shared experience made necessary.
Rancière’s departure from the Party was not accompanied by a maintenance of the motif of organization: he left that in suspense. If I decided to change the title of my piece, for the moment I would rename it, ‘Rancière or the organization in suspense’. In his departure from the Party he is concerned with staying as close as possible to the point of inscription of politics. This does not mean that he was for the movement and against the Party. He left, but remained close to its inscription. And yet – as a supernumerary point – this inscription was ineffaceable; all this happened in the gap, in the non-related relation. Of this one was sure. This much existed. Perhaps it still exists at times. History testifies to it and we continue to stand by this insight.
Even more than Rancière, I was fraught with concerns and difficulty over my departure from the Party. I was concerned since my conviction was that we could not sacrifice the notion that political continuity is always something necessarily organized. What is it that constitutes a heterogeneous, aristocratic embodiment of equality which is not also an inherited form or an imitation of the wise post-Leninist Party, the party of experts? Philosophically, the difference between putting the organizational principle in suspense and giving it a central place in political preoccupations has considerable impact on the treatment of the relation between event, participation, body and consequences. We thus arrive at two philosophical definitions of politics that, while being close to one another, are also sufficiently distinct as to not always be in friendship.
As such, we might have presupposed that the two theses (on the double occurrence of equality) could have helped us complete our understanding of Rancière with a few definitions about politics. However, the difficulty of extracting a few precise definitions from Rancière’s texts is not theoretical in origin. Nor do I believe that it is the anti-Platonic slant, a difficulty with the transcendence of Ideas, which results in the resistance to definition. On the contrary, his prose is very definitive. There are clearly many surprising formulae that resemble definitions to the point that sometimes I tell myself that his prose is all too definitional and not sufficiently axiomatic. That perhaps it is too Aristotelian … but, for me, that is an accusation so serious that I would immediately strike it from the record.
Rather it is necessary to think that the difficulty concerning precision is a formal difficulty connected to Rancière’s philosophical style. This style is very singular. It is direct and compact and has certainly not finished charming us. However, for a Platonist such as I am, charm is always something ambivalent in philosophy. This was true even, or above all, for Plato! When Rancière charms us, what he looks to do is to cut a path across an equivocation.
Rancière’s style has three characteristics. He is assertive. He connects affirmations, but he does so with a singular fluidity that makes it seem as though his assertions are derived only by virtue of his style. It would be very interesting to compare this in detail with the style of Deleuze, who exhibits an equally assertive style, although of a different sort. Second, Rancière’s is a style without argumentative discontinuity. One does not find moments where he proposes an isolated demonstration to support a given thesis. It is, finally, a style that seeks a conceptual unfolding of examples with the goal of creating certain zones of undecidability between actuality and the concept. It is not a question of empiricism. Rather, if Jacques will forgive me, it is a Hegelian inflection: it is a question of showing the presence of a concept there, in the real of historic eruptions, in the effectiveness of its rhythmic behaviour. Certainly my own style is more axiomatic and formulaic, containing more separations in the various dimensions of arguments. In any case, Rancière’s stylistic approach – the fluid affirmation without argumentative discontinuities, the smooth unfolding of examples – renders it difficult to extract precise definitions.
I would like to examine this style, taking a famous passage, one that clearly approaches a definition of politics and rearticulates almost all of the themes that we have brushed against in this essay. It is the beginning of the end of Disagreement:
[P]olitics exists wherever the count of parts and parties of society is disturbed by the inscription of a part of those who have no part. It begins when the equality of anyone and everyone is inscribed in the liberty of the people. This liberty of the people is an empty property, an improper property through which those who are nothing purport that their group is identical to the whole of the community. Politics exists as long as singular forms of subjectification repeat the forms of the original inscription of the identity between the whole of the community and the nothing that separates it from itself – in other words, the sole count of its parts. Politics ceases wherever this gap no longer has any place, wherever the whole of the community is reduced to the sum of its parts with nothing left over.4
Now, that is the direct and compact style of which I spoke. The intelligibility of the movement is completely guided by the syntax. In saying that Rancière’s style is essentially syntactic, with a singular semantic distribution between the concept and the example, it would thus be difficult, in this text, to extract the precise definitions of politics, equality, mastery, knowledge … But I will attempt to do so all the same.
Let us begin with a very singular definition. What can we call the ‘end’ of politics or even the ‘end’ of the very existence of political action in a particular conjuncture? It is a question of sequences wherein a politics of emancipation exists. Politics ends, Rancière tells us, when the whole (the collective) of the community is reduced to the sum of its parts with nothing left over. On this point, I indicate a very suggestive difference between Rancière and myself, a difference more esoteric than other differences, since it concerns an ontological question. This question of the sum of the parts presupposes an ontology of the multiple that Rancière does not really provide for us. If we are speaking truly rigorously, a set cannot simply be brought back to the sum of its parts. There is always something in the count of the parts that overflows the set itself. This is precisely the excess that I name the state – the state of the multiple, the state of the situation. When a collective is nothing but the management of the sum of its parts, we have what Rancière calls the police and what I call the state. But the similarities end here. For Rancière, the protocol for the cessation of politics is the moment where the collective state, or the policing of the parts, is restored. In my view, there is no possible cessation of politics in this sense, since the excess of the state is irreducible. There is always some element in the state whose capacity overflows the pure presentation of the collective. There is always some non-presented in the state. One cannot then imagine that politics ceases in the figure of the collective brought to the sum of its parts. I will not continue further on this point but to say that, for me, there is no possible structural description of the cessation of politics. This is the reason why I do not share Rancière’s political diagnostic of the existence of politics: because we do not share the same protocols for diagnosing its cessation. For him, there is a definable structural form for the end of politics; it is the moment where the supernumerary is abolished for a restoration without remainder of the totality as the sum of its parts. The affirmation of such a protocol of cessation of politics allows him to designate its absence, its end. Since I do not share this protocol, politics, at least structurally, always remains an open question for me. This is probably the place where a difference in the diagnostics of our conjunctures receives a purely ontological expression. And no doubt we can find here the root of an empirical difference. Unlike me, Rancière has not engaged in organized politics for quite some time now.
Now, can we define equality? Equality is a declaration. Although situated in a given regime of inequality, it affirms that there occurs a time of the abolition of this regime. Equality is not the programme of this abolition, but rather the affirmation of its occurrence. I am profoundly in agreement with this essential gesture. We see then that this exercise of equality is always registered on the order of its consequences, and never on the order of the pursuit of an end. What is affirmed is causality or consequences, but not finality. This is essential. What we have, and what we need to organize, are the consequences of an egalitarian declaration, not the means by which we pursue equality as an end. On this point, too, I am absolutely in agreement. In Rancière’s conception, what follows is that equality is never an idea. It is not susceptible to being an idea since it is a regime of collective existence in a given time in history. The fundamental declaration, in its varying and locally situated forms, is that ‘we are equal’. Although historically supernumerary, it is actualized in the series of consequences that follow from it. Such is the vision of Rancière. For me, equality is fundamentally an Idea, but in a very particular sense. It is an Idea because it is an invariant in the political declarations such as they are constituted in the various sequences of a politics of emancipation. It is thus eternal in its being, even though its local constitution in a determined world is its only possible form of existence. In speaking of ‘eternity’ and the difference between ‘being’ and ‘existing’, I continue to play the role – you might agree – of the lingering dogmatic. It is without doubt on this point, at the heart of political action, that the separation continues to play between Platonism and non-Platonism or anti-Platonism: the status of the idea of equality. At the same time, Rancière and I agree that the exercise of equality is always registered on the order of consequences. However, is this practical agreement sufficient to counterbalance our ontological disagreement? Certainly not, or perhaps only in some local circumstances, but never across the board, as we will eventually find ourselves at odds simply because the eternity of the egalitarian axiom relies on a sort of continuity that Rancière simply cannot maintain.
On the basis of politics and equality, we can enter into a critique of the figure of the master, something like a third definition of Rancière’s work. On another occasion, it might be very interesting to do a comparison of the figures of the master in contemporary French philosophy. The well-established critique of mastery has led to a new figure that Rancière has described with much refinement. Through the doublet, ignorant master and community of equals, this figure has the capacity of undoing the relation instituted since Plato between the master of knowledge and the leader of the city, between knowledge and power. In Lacan’s terms, this means putting an end to the confusion between the discourse of the master and that of the university. I believe that, on this terrain, Rancière demonstrates the fecundity of resources drawn from the inventions and revolutions of the working class in the nineteenth century. We need to salute this extraordinary gesture of the activation of the archives, something that, in my opinion, is more efficient and less melancholic than Foucault’s earlier achievements. The worker’s archive, dusted off and reactivated by Rancière’s magnificent texts, shows its speculative fecundity. Precisely on the question of an absolutely original figure of transmission, it constitutes a direct engagement with the original questions we spoke of at the start. In my own terms, I would say that Rancière has found a form for the eternal conceptualization of our original paradoxes. He has produced a new Idea of transmission outside of the institution.
All this, in the end, turns on the question of what knowledge is. That is to say, what is knowledge when it is thought under the condition of an egalitarian maxim, in a new relationship with ignorance, and in the opening of a new space for equality? It is obviously a form of knowledge that is displaced with respect to the institution. In my own jargon, this would mean that we obtain a form of knowledge that is equal to the status of one truth at least. For Rancière, I believe knowledge – true knowledge – is what a declaration of equality illuminates or accentuates in a regime of inequality. What presumed ignorance, named as such in a regime of inequality, produces under the authority of an egalitarian declaration is a new figure in discourse. In earlier times we would have said that it is a revolutionary or emancipatory knowledge – a true knowledge, in the sense that Nietzsche speaks of a ‘gay science’. We might also say that such knowledge is the effect produced on consciousness by an encounter with an ignorant master. Besides, here, we are rather close to what Rancière would consider to be the ‘good’ Plato. Evidently, as with all anti-Platonists, he has his good Plato. It was Plato who encountered, or perhaps invented, the ignorant master. The first to have said, ‘The only thing that I know is that I do not know anything’ and, thus, to have presented himself as the ignorant master was certainly Socrates. What was produced in the conscience of the youth in this encounter with an ignorant master merits the name of a new knowledge or a true knowledge.
I have not approached anything but the tip of the iceberg, but with all this in mind, we might return to the question of education. I believe that the overturning of the question ‘Who educates whom?’ is Rancière’s principal reformulation of the question of education. More to the point, the problem is that this question is poorly posed. It poses a false dilemma between the assumption of the figure of the master and that of anarchy where knowledge and non-knowledge are equivalent in the capacity of life. If everyone educates everyone else, then no one educates anyone. This is a canonical example of the struggle on two fronts. We neither accept the One of the knowing master nor the inconsistent multiple of spontaneous knowledge. The struggle continues against the university and the party, but also against the spontaneous vitalists; the partisans of the pure movement or what Negri refers to as the multitude. The new conception of the relation between knowledge and politics neither confirms the vision of enlightened parties, which is despotic, nor the anarchist vision, which is at the service of opinion; remaining more or less merely the manipulation of the regime of inequality. In both cases, following Rancière’s vocabulary, the polis dissolves under the police.
The appropriate formula is the following: the anonymous process of education is the construction of a set of consequences with respect to a situated egalitarian declaration. Here we find a form of emancipatory education. The question ‘Who educates whom?’ disappears. All that we can say is ‘We, we educate ourselves in this process’. Here, the ‘we’ is understood as being singular at each point, where each point in the situation reaffirms that the only universal maxim is equality. Conceived in this manner, education is neither a condition of politics as it is the case for Plato, for ossified Leninism, or for Althusser; nor is it indifferent to politics, as it is in the spontaneous vitalisms of the immanent creation of the movement. We are led to a difficult expression that I hesitate to propose with Rancière, or in his name: Education is a fragment of politics, a fragment equal to other fragments.
There is no doubt of my formal agreement on any of this. The difficulty, the space of our contestation, is over the definition or the delimitation of the anonymous ‘we’, in the formula ‘we educate ourselves in the process’. Rancière does not provide us with a prescription on this point; there is no true opening, because of the defence of democracy. Democracy, in a certain sense, takes as a fundamental precaution not to circumscribe any ‘we’ even at the level of the concept. It certainly speaks abundantly to the central motive of utopian communisms, the community of equals. Yet it clearly takes this to be a regulative myth, which is moreover a social result and not an instrument of the political process. We might say that for Rancière, there is no established figure of the militant. On the other hand, in the Platonic lineage that I named aristocratic, the ‘we’ is the body of equality, the body of the maxim in a given moment of its process. As a contingent aristocracy, of course, the ‘we’ does not have any other function than the treatment of the relation of the non-relation, the relation to that which is heterogeneous, in bearing out the consequences of the maxim of equality to the full extent of its possibility. It is thus defined by a group of militants, the militants that constitute a body situated in the consequences of truth.
Being a militant means to take on the trajectory, to redefine the limits, to draw improbable connections … Within the context with which we began our discussion, this meant the very improbable connection between intellectuals and workers. In the end, this whole affair is simply the history of that connection. We have been discussing, without giving the impression of really touching upon it, the philosophical or speculative history of the connection between intellectuals and workers, as a possible or impossible relation, as a relation or a non-relation, as a gap, and so on. With the Maoist elements of the time, this is what we called the link with the masses, but this link dialectically implied the power of delinking. It is the originary delinking that unleashed, in an incredible newness, the possibility of this linkage. This possibility, however, only constructs its own temporality within a political organization.
In more conceptual terms, we might summarize Rancière’s thought as follows. For Rancière, that which has value is always the fleeting inscription of a supernumerary term. For me, that which has value is the discipline of putting a fixed measure on an excess. For Rancière, the supernumerary term can be described, in a given regime of inequality, as the part of no-part. For me, the result of the discipline of a truth can be described as generic multiplicity, subtracted from all predication. For Rancière, there is no other exception than the epochal or historic. For me, there is no other exception than the eternal.
This allows me to finish by giving consistency to my ethics of praise with a pointed critical remark. It concerns Richard Wagner and the question of the power of the delinked, or the generic, such that art can produce its embodied multiplicity. In one of his books, Rancière proposes an interpretation of the third act of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Mastersingers of Nuremberg).5 The subject of Die Meistersinger concerns the necessity of a reconstitution of the relationship between the people and art. The ‘mastersingers’ were an artistic corporation of artisans who maintained and taught a particular tradition of singing. In Wagner’s opera, the key character of this institution was an artisan of the lowest degree. He was a cobbler. We could think of his status as close to that of an ‘untouchable’ in the Indian sense. Yet, as it happens, here we find ourselves at a juncture where it becomes necessary to institute a non-relation as a relation between the people and art. What is clearly illuminated in this fable is something exemplary for Rancière and me – here, once again, with respect to our original imperatives. In the figure of a young aristocrat, Walther, we find the emergence of a new artist, a new art, a new song. Walther, whose name echoes the name Wagner, competes in a singing contest organized by the masters. The prize of this competition is the hand of a maiden in marriage, the beautiful Eva. The prize of a maiden as the reward for a new art is certainly agreeable to Wagner, and to other artists as well. This competition is directed by the horrible Beckmesser, whose name echoes the name Meyerbeer, and who represents the most entrenched advocates of tradition obviously opposed to the new song. The central character, the cobbler Hans Sachs, was to be the mediator in this reconstruction of the relation where the non-relational dimension of the new song could be inscribed. He resorts to cunning and intrigue. The details are far too complicated to explain here. All we need to recount is that the young gentleman is allowed to compete, takes the prize, and through this we find a public construction of a new internal relation interweaving art, tradition, the people, and invention. The ‘militant’ goal of Hans Sachs is to articulate artistic invention to tradition, and to do so in such a way as to reconstitute a new fundamental relation between the people and its historicity in the medium of art.
Rancière and I propose somewhat different interpretations with respect to the section where the knight, surmounting all obstacles, comes to the competition, sings his new melody, and captivates the people. He then is told, ‘Now, you should go and join up with the mastersingers’. But having experienced all the humiliations inflicted on him, the arrogant and solitary Walther, unrepentant romantic that he is, refuses the mastersingers. At this point, the cobbler intervenes with a major declaration. He explains to his young protégé that he needs to accept the guild, because it is only in establishing this non-relation as a relation that a new organon of the collective becomes possible. The people will not be constituted by art unless the non-relation between the traditional and the new, in one way or another, is exercised as a relation. In Sachs’s long tirade he continues in laying out a vision of the destiny of Germany. Here, Hans Sachs supports a very particular thesis, which in my view is quite accurate: that the ‘true’ – that is, universal – destiny of Germany is none other than German art. Finally, the knight accepts. However, the people do not cry out ‘Long live Walther!’, but instead ‘Long live Hans Sachs!’ It is the cobbler that is crowned with laurels under the chorus of cheers. All told, the master of the whole process, as recognized by the people, is the miserable cobbler.
Rancière remarks that this is all quite melancholic since the epoch of the possibility of a true relation between a new art and cobblers has passed. When Wagner composed his opera, he staged a pure nostalgic fiction – the nostalgia of the young Wagner who climbed onto the barricades of Dresden in 1848 – to imagine the public crowning of a cobbler, a spiritual sovereign of the figure of art. Wagner knew quite well that we were already well along the way towards a complete disjunction between the arts of the avant-garde and the collective of the people.
It is on this point that I note my differences. This scene announces that, in the crossing of a non-relation, if art is not reconciled with the powerful assent of the people, then it will become insignificant and will be replaced everywhere by consumable ‘culture’, the stereotype that Beckmesser embodies. Hans Sachs lends a theatrical and musical figure to an anticipatory Idea, still in suspense today, one that even ‘socialist realism’, which attempted to recapture it, could not replace: the Idea of a great art which is neither reserved for the educated bourgeois nor degraded as booming sing-a-longs. The Idea is a great art of the masses, something that may sometimes be found today, from Chaplin to Kitano in cinema. This Idea, since the nineteenth century, has been in the torturous process of the becoming of its actual eternity. To crown Sachs the cobbler in this scene for having realized this idea in its course of becoming eternal is certainly justice rendered even in view of the difficult history of this process in the last century and a half. All this might perhaps have been more convincing if in place of a singer singing a new song, Walther had come onto the scene saying: I have a camera, I have invented cinema. In fact, he does not really bring forth an art that, while inheriting the legacy of popular traditions, would also be the creation of a strong artistic novelty. It is really nothing more than a singer singing a somewhat newer song. Indeed, it is one of the most beautiful of Wagner’s arias … Yet in the end, the real of the scene is in that which it affirms rather than in what it does not. Neither Walther’s aria nor Sachs’s declaration is musically dominated by melancholy. This opera, from the spring-like architecture of its overture onwards, is artistically the opera of constructive gaiety. It is interesting to see the dimension of Sachs’s abandonment (he knows that the new song is for Walther to sing and that he is nothing but a mediator, and thus, even if he is the symbolic father and an admirer of Eva, it is the young man who should marry her). This abandonment, like the lively softness of the theme of the midsummer’s night – the sonic invention of the scent of lime tree – is absorbed in the general energy of a folk tale, under a sort of comic hullabaloo in the second act, and, in the third, a blend of patriotic and working-class imagery.
From this we can see how music creates on its own a generic figure of artistic discipline as an analogy of political discipline, which, for its part, remained in suspense after 1848 and would remain in suspense, after the crushing of the Paris Commune, until Lenin and the revolution of 1917.
This minimal difference is interesting because it concerns the question of history. Rancière incorporates our contemporary standpoint into his evaluation of Wagner’s allegory. It is true that the hopes of the revolution of 1848 were all but undermined by 1850, but I take my reading in a reverse direction. I argue that the artistic allegory is prospective, anticipatory, and a temporal beacon of the becoming-eternal of the Idea. The circumstantial failures of history should not force us into melancholy, but should rather activate the deployment of the Idea in the tension of its future, albeit a future to be persevered for a long time. This is what Wagner, through the artistic fanfares, understands by the crowning of Hans Sachs the cobbler. This Wagnerian question, ‘Who is the master of the arts?’, has all the while been present in my efforts concerning the work of Rancière, particularly in what has been said about cinema.
Ideas, in their process of becoming within disparate worlds, should be judged not by what determines the circumstances of their apparent failure in this or that sequence of history, but by the becoming – point by point, through their traversal of unforeseen new worlds – of their universal imposition.
Translated by Tzuchien Tho, revised by Bruno Bosteels