PE The plan was to outline your development in the first part, to clarify a few important concepts in your critical thought, and then to deal with your current perspective on politics and aesthetics, which differs from the traditional understandings of these concepts. But first I’d like to return to a question about the sensual, more precisely to your concept of the ‘division of the sensual’.9 It’s a very important concept for you, and one that doesn’t fit into the traditional distinction between the sensual and the intelligible.
JR It was important to me to say that the sensual doesn’t exist as something general, but rather that everything which exists is always a construction or a configuration of the sensual. With reference to Kant, for example, one can say that the Critique of Pure Reason develops a particular conception of the sensual and the Critique of Judgement another. In other words, the sensual does not exist as such. What I call the ‘division of the sensual’ isn’t a matter of two terms, the given material aspect on the one hand and the intelligible on the other. What one can call ‘the sensual’ is from the outset a connection, is always a particular relationship between sense and sense. In French, as in German, one uses the same word (sens) to refer both to what is sensually given and to the sense of this given, its interpretation. This first point is important for what I call a division of the sensual. We don’t have two terms, for example a thing that is given and an authority that reflects on this given; rather, one always has a pre-existing, a priori relationship between a thing that is perceived and a sense that is ascribed to it.
The second aspect, which is very important to me, is that the way one defines the relationship between sense and sense, between the perceptible and the thinkable, is always also a way of dividing up human individuals or groups by assigning abilities or inabilities to them which concern their place. That’s why the traditional philosophical question, ‘What is thought?’, is actually always a way of deciding who can think. If, for example, one sets up a hierarchy between the different parts of the soul, as Plato does, one is already deciding who can think. An idea of the sensual and an idea of thinking always act as the precondition determining who is afforded the ability to think. A division of the sensual is never just a form of phenomenological constitution of the perceptible, the utterable and the thinkable. It is always also a form of hierarchy among sentient beings. When Aristotle says that politics is the concern of those with language, as opposed to animals, which only have a voice, one can immediately see that there is a division here. When he goes on to say that slaves understand language but do not possess it, one has the idea of a hierarchy, an allocation of human beings that is always based on a distinction between faculties of perception, faculties of the sensual and faculties of the intellect. Whenever I’ve spoken about the way in which politics or aesthetics represent a particular allocation of the sensual, I’ve always emphasized the constitution of a thinking in this subject area. This constitution is always also a form of declaration about who has the ability to perceive and think these subjects, and who doesn’t.
PE So the division of the sensual also encompasses the construction of what one calls social distinction?
JR Yes, one can say that social distinctions and hierarchies are, in a sense, distinctions between the sensual and material faculties of those on the one side and those on the other. In my commentary on Plato’s Republic I emphasized that Plato thinks workers and artisans should stay in their place for two reasons: firstly, because nature has given them this or that talent, not another; and secondly, because the work doesn’t wait.
In a sense, space and time are constructed from the outset not as containers or empty directions, but already as a way of dividing creatures. It’s a form of social allocation that differs from sociological distinctions, or distinctions between individuals according to their economic situation. My thought, fundamentally speaking, is that there’s a level of sensual experience where the identity ascribed to individuals and groups is, at the same time, a configuration of space and time which they enter, and an allocation of their abilities and inabilities. I think the constitution of politics is based a priori on these forms, on this allocation, and all regimes for identifying art are connected to modifications of this allocation.
PE So it’s really a fundamental concept!
JR Yes, for me it’s a fundamental concept that stands in opposition to a certain kind of Marxist hierarchy that has the economic at the bottom, then the social, above that the political, and finally the ideological at the top. In a sense, the economic, the social, the political and the ideological are quantities in an allocation, in a division of the sensual. In the Marxist theory of ideology there’s an idea that people are oppressed because they’re not aware of the social machinery, because ideology ensures that they see things in false ways. This schema presupposes that there is a kind of power which presents itself to its subjects only as a fantastic semblance, and hence that there is a producer of illusions. I don’t agree with that. It’s not that there’s the law of the system, and on top of that a system of illusion which conceals this law. There’s an assignment of creatures to particular places. The people know very well that they’re being exploited; it’s not a matter of attaining an awareness of that exploitation in order to escape it. The problem is how to change one’s sensual universe and one’s universe of perception. In my analysis of the problematics of emancipation, I showed that it’s not just a question of freeing oneself of illusions, of gaining consciousness to change one’s situation, but of changing one’s sensual universe.
PE Could we now return from here to the question of how you define aesthetics and politics?
JR The basis of politics is a system of relationships which implies that there are things which are considered communal. Differently put, politics presupposes that one constructs a sensual universe in which there are things, problems and matters that are seen as communal matters, which are the concern of the community, not simply private matters. Let’s take the area I examined, the history of the workers. One can say that politics in this area begins where, for example, the workers say that an employment contract isn’t something that should be negotiated between two individuals, but rather a concern of the community that should be decided communally, that there is a collective which debates with a collective, and that this debate is a public matter. The birth of the strike consists in saying that the level of the wage paid for a particular number of hours isn’t subject to a private relationship between two individuals, but rather a public matter to be dealt with publicly. That’s one example. Politics begins at the moment when a certain number of private things become communal things. That’s the fundamental principle underlying the modern revolutions: what used to be a matter for monarchs is now a matter for everyone. That’s one point.
Another point is that one declares that certain individuals, certain groups, are capable or incapable of dealing with community matters. Regarding this, I recalled the distinction between active and passive people, which has nothing to do with whether one does more or is more active, but rather constitutes a distinction between people who live in different sensual universes. If one looks at universal suffrage in modern Western states, one can see that it demands abandoning this division between active and passive people. Even during the French Revolution, there were many republican constitutions that distinguished between active and passive citizens. The active citizens were the people who could pay taxes. The passive people were those who weren’t subject to taxation because they simply lived from the labour of their hands and owned no property. Roughly speaking, the active citizens were the propertyowning ones. So there was the idea – which also appears in the first American constitutions – that only those who own property and have something to defend should take part in politics. Or let’s take the issue of women: it’s well known that women were excluded from suffrage for a very long time because they were considered dependent on their husbands or their fathers. As politics is made by free subjects, women, who weren’t free subjects, couldn’t vote. It’s very important to determine who is involved in directing communal matters, and who isn’t; that presupposes a decision about the quasi-physical identity and sensual faculties of individuals or groups.
So politics exists first of all in keeping with a particular allocation of the sensual, and exists in so far as one presupposes that there is an ability shared by everyone, no matter who they are, beyond all the abilities that are specific to the professor, the doctor, the scholar, the strategist. There’s a joint ability shared by everyone. So in that sense, one can say that politics is based on an allocation of the sensual.
PE In the sense that this allocation determines access or non-access to politics?
JR There are two opposing principles here. There is the principle of what I’ve called the ‘police’, where the joint ability is actually reserved for certain people. There are those who work with their hands, who earn their personal living, and there are those who deal with the concerns of the community. So the principle of police is a principle of allocating places that attributes abilities according to identity: workers have the ability to do things with their hands, women have the ability to bear and bring up children, but the educated, enlightened property owner has the ability to deal with the concerns of the community. That’s the principle that I call police, whereas real politics takes place where one opposes this with an ability that’s the ability of all, no matter who they are. That’s the basis for the idea of a political government in the true sense, which isn’t simply the government of the head of the family, the chief or the scholar. In Plato one repeatedly finds the notion of the politician as a shepherd. To me, that notion is the principle of police, not politics. The true principle of politics is that there is no shepherd, no special competency, but rather a competency of all, no matter who they are. What one usually calls the political is, in reality, the conflict between two antagonistic principles – the principle of police and the principle of politics.
PE Can one conceive of a politics in the part of society that’s excluded?
JR It’s not a matter of defining the parts of society where politics exists. I think there are two levels here. One fundamental level is the basis for the idea of politics, the idea of a competency of all, no matter who they are, in contrast to the competency of the doctor, the sage, the chief, the father of a family and so forth. Now, naturally one could say that what we call politics is actually a form of conflict between the principle of politics in general and the fact that the forms of government, the forms of leadership in communal matters, are actually claimed by small minorities for themselves, minorities that purport to know: by experts, elders, whomever.
PE And what about political parties?
JR Political parties as we know them belong, one could say, to a class of people who supposedly have the specific competency to direct the concerns of the community. But for me, politics exists when there are forms of deviation from this specialization, when there is a specific power among those who have no specific power and no specific office. In the Laws, Plato distinguishes every possible form of power and compiles a catalogue of all existing forms of authority. Theirs is the power of the father over the children, of the old over the young, of the scholars over the ignorant, and at the end of the list is a completely incomprehensible, abstruse power: the power of destiny. It is the power of democracy as a regime in which there is no form of authority that exists in advance and determines which people should exercise power. For Plato, that’s a small oddity at the end of the list. For me, on the contrary, this oddity at the end of the list is the true principle of politics, namely the existence of a power of all, no matter who they are, constantly embodied in the forms of action and the forms of assembly among those who are excluded from directing power.
PE I think I follow you now. You view that as the genealogy of power?
JR Politics is fundamentally tied to the division of even the idea of power. If one takes another look at Plato’s list, there’s a whole series of powers that are somehow tied to a natural form of superiority: the scholar knows, the ignorant person does not, the father is the father, the son is the son, the old man is old, the young boy is young. There are all sorts of powers that are self-legitimized, you could say. That could just as easily be the archaic power of the patriarch or the modern knowledge of the expert. All these archaic and modern powers belong to a system of self-legitimization, that is, there is already a pre-existing relationship in which there is a more powerful and a less powerful party. But there is a point where a power appears that doesn’t belong to this system, precisely because such a division – a division between those who are naturally destined for power and those who are naturally destined to be ruled – doesn’t exist. That’s the democratic principle.
PE Is this democratic principle a principle that’s no longer natural?
JR Yes, a principle that no longer has a natural justification, that’s not self-legitimized. This principle is the only basis for the existence of a political governance as such. When patriarchs rule, one has a patriarchal government, not a political one. Really, democracy isn’t a specific regime; it’s the democratic subject that provides the basis for the existence of politics in the first place. That’s why, when one looks at our governments, our Western systems, one sees that they rest on a twofold legitimacy: the people possess the principle of power, and the small groups of political experts, bankers and so on who exercise power are obliged to do so in the name of the people, and at once in the name of the competency which they supposedly have and the people do not have. So we are really operating within systems of dual legitimacy and a competition between legitimacies. Take the example of the European constitution or the contract for the European Union, on which the French populace was consulted – as it’s a contract between peoples, one asks the people to decide. The entire political class – the right and the left – agreed that one should vote ‘yes’ in the referendum on the contract. The result of the referendum was ‘no’ by a large majority. This ‘no’ led to the negotiation of a new contract. The president at the time, Sarkozy, was asked whether there would be a new referendum, and he decided that there wouldn’t be one, because contracts between peoples are a serious matter that shouldn’t be determined by the chance results of a plebiscite. So here we see two opposing legitimacies: on the one hand, the legitimacy of the people which is unavoidable as an authority if one wants to be considered a democracy; and on the other hand, a legitimacy that one invokes when the people don’t make the right decision, which consists in having important things decided by serious people – in this case, people who know that this contract is necessary. And so the contract is signed, despite being rejected by the people.
PE So you’re not surprised to find these two principles at work?
JR No, one sees the tension between two systems of legitimacy exposed, as it were.
PE Are these two principles constitutive for democracy?
JR There’s a form of legitimacy which is democratic in the true sense, but at the same time, I would say it’s constantly interwoven with a form of oligarchic legitimacy which states that only the serious people can take care of the serious things.
PE So democracy isn’t a form of politics …
JR No, it’s not a constitutional form, but rather the actual principle of politics. It causes politics to exist. If one looks back at Plato again, one sees that he considers the king as a shepherd to be the right model, the shepherd who cares for his flock, and that democracy is something wayward by comparison. But to me, this deviation is politics itself, and it ensures that there is a political government, not simply governments consisting of priests, scholars, patriarchs and so on.
PE Does this mean that the dictatorships of the twentieth century were a return to this Platonic principle?
JR One’s never dealing with a completely pure model; all models are interwoven. But yes, one can say that there is a return to the model of the shepherd who looks after his flock.
PE I’m interested in the dimensions of democracy. Are the dictatorships of Stalin or Hitler deviations? Do they stand outside of politics, if one defines politics as democracy?
JR As I say, one’s never dealing with completely pure models where one can say where politics is and where police is. But, at the same time, these dictatorships constitute the maximum distance from politics because they try to create a kind of relationship between the power and the people in which the power lies in the hands of an authority which embodies the people in the form of the Führer, in the form of the party of the avant-garde and so forth. One can say that dictatorships rest on a negation of politics, with the constitution of a space that’s no longer a political space.
PE That’s important, because even today there are some who wish to solve economic problems through dictatorial and authoritarian regimes.
JR That tendency does exist, as an extreme manifestation of the rule of police over politics. Take the case of China. What’s notable about it is that here one has an example of a capitalist force ruled by a communist party, where the existence of a communist party – along with the election of a communist party and the supposed dictatorship of the proletariat – becomes, in a sense, the ideal instrument for regulating capitalism. There’s the possibility of suppressing workers’ rights and a large number of other rights that constitute obstacles to the rule of capitalism. Here we have the paradox that the strongest capitalist power, which we also acknowledge as the most remarkable, is controlled by a communist party.
PE There are voices which praise this model as the solution to our problems.
JR I don’t know if there are people who say that; but this paradox certainly shows that there’s no natural connection whatsoever between capitalism and democracy, as some would like to think.
PE Let’s talk about some of the more recent social movements that have formed in the last few years – I’m thinking of the protest movement Occupy, for example, which resists social and economic inequality, or of the revolts in the Arab world that were welcomed euphorically as the ‘Arab Spring’, although this initial enthusiasm has largely given way to disillusionment. At any rate, there are movements initiated by people who have been excluded from the political system until now, and are trying to develop new forms of discourse, new ways to show themselves, to address the concerns of the community or to be included in the regulation of communal matters. How do you see these phenomena, and what are the prospects for new social movements today?
JR I would say that there’s something here which reminds us of what democracy means. It’s interesting that these demonstrations have targeted both dictatorial regimes and so-called parliamentary or representative democracies. Even if young people in Spain are in an entirely different situation from those in Tunisia, there’s still something like a shared feeling of being the victim of an economic system and of being excluded from the forms of collective decision-making. That takes on completely different forms, far more extreme ones in Tunisia and Egypt than in Spain, the USA or other countries where this movement of the ‘outraged’ arose. In all of these cases one could observe the demonstration of a people who are no longer represented by the head of state or by the state, the government or the parliament, but are instead the people of all, no matter who they are. What was noticeable about the Arab Spring and the movement of the ‘outraged’ was that one was no longer dealing with a people consisting of social groups, of identifiable classes; instead, there was a form of shared condition that affected all these people. The protesters included the simple Tunisian merchant whom the police prevented from doing his work, as well as European university graduates who have PhDs but no jobs. I think a general precarity is developing that’s tied to the economic system, but is also a form of transversal subjectification of existing social identities. That comes very close to what I call the manifestation of those with no part (sans-part). They can be very poor or not so poor; they can be Spanish or American graduates, or unemployed Tunisians or Egyptians. I would say they’re all involved in the same general conditions of capitalism today, and emphasizing the same distance from the system. They’re also emphasizing this same ability to be there, to remind people of their presence and to emphasize that they too are the people, that it’s their turn to speak and that they demand a say in running their country and world events. That’s the interesting thing about the idea of ‘We are the people’ or ‘We are the 99 per cent’, because it reminds us of the foundation of politics: the opposition between two logics. On the one hand, there’s an oligarchic system – I call it a police system – in which supposedly competent people control all forms of circulation, such as the circulation of cash flows or the circulation of people or, via international education agreements, the circulation of knowledge. And then there’s the reality of the people who live in this system and who, for various reasons, are excluded from it or made completely precarious. They actually can’t be represented anymore by so-called political parties, which are now simply parts of a state apparatus. I would say that these movements remind people of the principle of democracy, namely that there is a power among those who have no share in power or no competency. They’re people who are ultimately declared incapable of dealing with the concerns of the community. It’s a manifestation of democracy, especially in their opposition to our oligarchic systems, though the systems call themselves democracies.
One can say that all these movements remind people what ‘democracy’ really means. This brings up the problem of inscribing these movements in their time, a problem one must separate from the clichés about spontaneity and organization at all costs. What we saw in the movements in city squares was the self-assertion of a different form of people, a people of the nameless rather than the people organized by the state via the electoral process, but it’s clear that the problem is how to maintain the ability to achieve this independence. The organizations that grew from this movement had to develop their own agendas, aims and forms of assembly, action, information and dissemination instead of submitting to the state and media agendas, whose temporality is shaped by the rhythm of elections and election polls. The city square movements didn’t manage to create such organizations. Either their potential was exhausted or it was appropriated by organizations like Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain, which confined the autonomous temporality of these movements to the election calendar and the typical logic of the ‘radical left’, which attempts to exploit the people’s disappointment with the traditional left for its own ends.
PE So we’re living in a double system?
JR Yes, we’re living in a double system of power in which the scales sometimes tip more to the one side, sometimes more to the other. It’s obvious that the oligarchy has more weight at the moment, and that’s why democracy today can only assert itself in movements that stand outside the usual forms of political representation or social movements. I think we’re no longer in the realm of political parties, nor in the realm of trade union action. We’re dealing with something like a manifestation of the people as such, that is, a people of the anonymous, of individuals who are all in the same situation of exclusion – though this exclusion doesn’t mean they have to be poor. That’s what I was trying to say when I referred to those with no part. They’re persons who, to varying degrees, are effectively excluded from the system, and that system is becoming increasingly generalized.
PE At the other end of the traditional spectrum we have the far right. Doesn’t it have the same logic as those protesters? In Austria, France and elsewhere, it got thirty per cent of votes or more, it has power. How do you see this phenomenon?
JR In the case of the French right, the Front National, we really have a combination of two phenomena. On the one side there’s a radical right which holds the opinion that the traditional right isn’t hard enough in its positions. On the other side there’s a group whose cohesion rests on a feeling of being excluded from the system. That’s especially true in France, in a presidential system with majority representation, where one can say that the system governing transitions of power is a monopoly system with two parties. So, on the one hand, the far right is a far right, but on the other hand it’s also something else, an expression of the feeling of exclusion from the system. That’s why this part of the far right can recruit voters who had previously voted for socialists, communists or labour parties. I think that when the people are forgotten by the system, what results is a kind of mythology of a people of the forgotten, the uncounted, the true people, which can be exploited by the far right. These are deeply opposing forms, but ultimately they’re both a consequence of the consensual system. In the case of France, one can say that the far right grew together with the consolidation of the presidential majority system, a system of alternation between two dominant parties that have the same politics, broadly speaking.
PE One can observe this tendency all over Europe.
JR Yes, it’s like a caricature of the power of the democratic people, which is always excessive compared to the people as embodied by state logic. The far right responds to this with a different form of imaginary embodiment by purporting to be the ‘true’ people, the real people. But there’s no such thing as the ‘true’ people, there are only ever competing constructs of a people.
PE Let’s go back to the idea of a return to communism as an ethical principle. Is that a political alternative?
JR I think the starting point has to be the fact that there’s no communist alternative at present. There are parties, certainly. We know that there are still communist parties in power, in Cuba, in North Korea, in China. But one sees that ‘actual’ communism, the kind of communism that operates in China, is the regulation of a capitalist economy by a single party. One can say that it’s the rule of the capitalist class over the popular classes. That’s the reality of communism today. Then there are also the Western communist parties, which are all extremely weak. The French communist party, which, together with the Italian party, was one of the great surviving communist parties in Western Europe, is now forced to hide in an alliance that calls itself Front de gauche. So there’s an extreme weakness among the representatives of historical communism, which is defeated and transformed everywhere; they become capitalists, as in Russia, or hide behind other left-wing groups, as in Western Europe. Generally, one can say that the historical communist movement has virtually disappeared.
As we discussed earlier, there are people who are adopting the communist label again, but I’d say it’s no more than a label, because those people have no programme whatsoever that might tell us what the communist society of the future will look like. They have no historical perspective at all, no strategy at all that leads to a future society. They simply wave a flag and say that democracy is just capitalism. They recount a long history of the crimes of capitalism in order to qualify the crimes of communism, and argue that everyone committed crimes. Because capitalism is a system of domination, exploitation and inequality, they recommend hoisting the communist flag again. I say, it’s always just a flag! As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been to one or two colloquia whose goal was to rekindle the communist flame, and I never heard a single description of a future communism, I never saw a single outline for a programme describing how to move from capitalism in its current form to communism.
The idea of communism today consists of two basic things: firstly, the idea that capitalism is a bad and criminal system, which one can agree with, and secondly, the idea of a society that is organized for the benefit of as many people as possible by a power that expresses the ability of as many people as possible. However much certain theorists, including Badiou and Žižek, might place the communist idea in opposition to the democratic idea, there is no more to their communist idea than to the democratic idea, except that they adopt Plato’s critique of democracy. They formulate the idea of communism by transforming it into a Platonic idea, into an intelligible idea that controls the democratic material. To me, this idea is no different from the idea of a power of the majority, which is based on the idea of an ability shared by as many people as possible.
PE Is there still a belief today that one should return to early Marx, the dream of a return to a humanistic communism that hasn’t been compromised?
JR I don’t think that anyone is espousing the idea that one should return to early rather than late Marx. There was a time, during the fifties and the sixties, when this idea preoccupied communist movements.
PE At the time that was to avoid the dictatorship of the proletariat.
JR Yes, it was the idea that one could retrieve a form of Marxist humanism, a form of humanist striving with which one could oppose the system of power confiscation that had existed in the USSR and so-called people’s democracies. That got hopes up in a few Eastern countries. And there were actually hints of it in Hungary, Yugoslavia and in a few Western movements, but this ‘humanitarian’ Marxism was criticized and swept away by Althusserianism, by the idea that this humanist Marxism is not true Marxism, that true Marxism is a scientific Marxism. I think that existed at the time, but I don’t really see anything of the kind today. So I don’t think that the current will to return to communism is based on the idea of a humanist Marx in contrast to a scientific and dictatorial Marx. I think that today, Marx’s thought is being taken as a kind of block again. And what lives on as the core of Marx’s thought? Essentially the conception of class struggle. I think an important aspect of this revival of Marxist thought is to say that what’s described in terms of the necessary, inescapable global situation is in reality a state of class struggle. I think it’s important to remind people of that today – against the predominant analyses, which refer to a historical necessity. Since the fall of communism, the Marxist argument of historical and economic necessity has, broadly speaking, been adopted by the bourgeoisie, by the ruling power, except that instead of claiming that universal history leads to communism, it declares that it leads to the triumph of the market. One can see how the old Marxist arguments of economic necessity, the necessity of breaking through the old barriers, were actually taken up by capitalism, by the ruling classes and the ruling ideology, to say that there’s an inescapable necessity: the necessity of the free market, the absolute power of the market.
Regarding that, I think it’s important to foreground those analyses which say that the world situation isn’t the result of a necessary global evolution, but a state of class struggle. It’s clear that the ruling classes, the worldwide alliance of the ruling classes, are in a position of extreme strength, but one shouldn’t mistake this worldview for historical reality. So I think that Marxist thought plays an important part in breaking up what’s being sold to us as the inevitable evolution of the world.
PE The concept of class had a very clear definition in Marxist theory that doesn’t apply to the current situation. If one uses the concept of class, one can’t really understand a phenomenon like the global precariat. Perhaps one can’t use it at all to describe the real social divisions?
JR One has to take into account that there are many interpretations of the class concept. There’s the strictly sociological interpretation of classes, for example. But the idea of class struggle contains the basic thought that the classes are defined by the struggle itself. The proletariat, for example, isn’t just the class of all those who are exploited by capitalism. The proletariat is, quite fundamentally, the class of those who can form an alternative power to capitalist rule. The idea of class struggle doesn’t state that first of all there are classes, and then they enter the struggle; it states that there’s a power system and there are forces which fight against this power system.
Of course, if one thinks of the ‘proletariat’ in the sense of a mass of workers who get up and leave the Renault factory, one can spend a long time looking for it today; one won’t find it in our society. But this doesn’t mean that the proletariat doesn’t exist elsewhere; these giant factories don’t exist in France anymore, nor in Austria or Spain. They’re in China, Singapore, Korea, almost everywhere in the Far East, sometimes also in Eastern Europe. That’s why people say that this class of proletarians doesn’t exist anymore; yet it’s clear that it certainly does still exist but in a new part of the world: there one finds this traditional proletarian class, including the familiar forms of exploitation. If one looks at the slums of Mumbai, for example, one recognizes forms of capitalist exploitation – starting with labour at home – that recall the forms of exploitation which existed in nineteenth-century England and are described by Marx. So, on the one hand, there’s a kind of traditional proletariat in countries where the conditions for struggle are very difficult, especially in China – because if there’s one country with a proletariat of the old kind, it’s surely China. But this proletariat lacks all the means of organization and struggle that were available to the proletariats of Western countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the other hand, in the countries where we live, there’s a kind of fragmentation which is no longer focused on the masses of workers organized in the factory, the business and the trade unions. It’s a fragmented condition, but a shared one nonetheless. That’s why I believe in the importance of these new democratic movements, large parts of which are expressions of this precariat. So there’s class struggle, first of all in the sense that there’s a ruling class which carries out the class struggle, and does so very systematically. Let’s take a look at what’s happening at the European level: the EU Council dictates to the Greek government that they have to lower wages and cut social benefits. There were elections, a new government, a referendum – the Greek people’s rejection of these measures was confirmed repeatedly. But the Troika imposed its will, the joint will of the European government and the financial institutions. There’s a manifest praxis of class struggle, and today it’s the capitalists who are taking the initiative in that struggle.
The problem today isn’t that there are no classes anymore. The capitalist international exists, it holds the power. On this side there’s class struggle, there are no problems here. What’s difficult is the organization of the precarious class. The problem is also the relationship between this precarious class and the traditional working class, which is far away, which one doesn’t see anymore, but which exists. And thirdly, there are masses of migrants crossing borders in search of possibilities for a better life, and of refugees fleeing from war and oppression in Syria and elsewhere. So I think there’s a fierce class struggle today, with a well-placed class on one side, the ruling class, and on the other side, elements that don’t succeed in coming together as a class.
PE That’s very interesting. If the communist position refers to a traditional concept, doesn’t that prevent a search for new concepts? Isn’t the resurgence of communism, of the communist idea, an obstacle to the development of new ideas for a way out of the crisis?
JR So far we’ve only examined one aspect of this communist revival. But one shouldn’t forget that there are other aspects to this revival too, and they’re connected to the development of a new make-up of the different classes. If one considers the whole tradition of Italian workerism, the reflections by Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, one can see an attempt to base communism once more on the idea of an evolution, a transformation of status and the relationship between the classes. Concepts like the precariat, for example, were first advanced in the Italian workerist tradition in an attempt to follow the transformations of the old working class. That led especially to deliberations on the idea of the intellectual worker in immaterial capitalism, that is, on the idea that immaterial capitalism produces a new class which possesses instruments of collective intelligence.
I think there’s also another problem: knowing how to conceive of the relationship between the present and the future. According to the old Marxist model, capitalism creates the conditions for its own removal – the famous formulation about capitalism producing its own gravediggers. So one sees how workerist thinking remains somewhat tied to the schema in which capitalism brings about its own ruin. This attempt to envisage the status of the proletariat using a specific category – that of the so-called intellectual worker – is extremely double-edged, because what’s described there could just as easily be a working class that’s completely integrated into the system. So I think one mustn’t forget that the capitalism of material production continues to exist, and that the fact that we hardly see it in Paris or Rome doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist in China, Malaysia or India. That’s the first point. Secondly, I think there’s no necessity for immaterial production to beget a category of workers that holds some form of communist future. In other words, I don’t think that the ways of collectivizing capitalist power automatically beget any form of future communism. The fact that there are numerous businesses today in which the people working at the computers own the means of production, in a certain sense, doesn’t mean that this creates the conditions for a communist class of the future in which the people own their means of production. No, I think the two things are very different. Furthermore, there are also two different lines of thought within this workerist tradition itself. There’s a line of thought that one could call traditionally Marxist in which capi talism, by transforming itself, brings about the conditions for a new society, which means that communism already exists inside of capitalism. That’s a thesis I consider radically wrong. And there’s another version of this where capitalism doesn’t produce a class of immaterial workers, but rather a class of producers of material or immaterial riches who have no control at all over the totality of the system, and no say at all in public matters. Behind the fantasy of the intellectual worker of the future, I think, lies the reality of the precarious worker – who, as I said, could just as easily be the Tunisian merchant or the Spanish or Portuguese computer scientist. At this point, it’s conceivable that there’s genuinely a milieu in which not only forms of struggle but also forms of life could develop slightly outside the system. The concept of ‘exodus’ was famously successful for a while in the workerist tradition; this was tied to the idea of the possibility of autonomization in the class of immaterial workers produced by capitalism. I think that at this point one comes back to the old choice: either one thinks that the future is created by the development specific to capitalist production and organization – an idea whose historical failure is proven – or one believes that any departure from the system results not from the development of the system itself, but from the development of all the forms of resistance and autonomy that one attains in relation to the system. But that, as we know, is an old debate about the issue of autonomy. To what extent do forms of autonomy come about now through forms of work, and do they really come about?
I think it’s never the system itself that creates the conditions for this. For there to be autonomous forces which possibly become forces of the future, these forces have to produce their own life system, thought system and information system, even their own institutions. And that, if we return to the question of the more recent social movements, is where the problem lies. Are these movements condemned to being simply a kind of official declaration that says ‘We’re here’, or are these movements capable of initiating a kind of autonomous development, creating their own forms of discussion, their own forms of life, their own economic organization, their own institutions of information and knowledge? That’s the real question for me. I think the model of a necessary development from one regime to another, one system to another, is obsolete. What’s still imaginable, if not the development of a kind of autonomous system of forms of the future in the present? That’s essentially what interested me, and what I examined historically via the problematics of workers’ emancipation. It’s the development of power forms that are autonomous in relation to the prevailing system. As we know, that was very pronounced in the European labour movement, but was stamped out by the communist parties on the one hand and the capitalist powers on the other. Could that exist today, now, under the new conditions of labour division, of class division? That’s the question that arises. And I don’t know if there’s much more to say about it.
PE Can we now connect this question of the possibility of developing autonomous forms of power with your second line of thought, with your reflections on aesthetics and the analysis of artistic practices? If I understand you correctly, artistic activity can have this ability to establish new, autonomous worlds.
JR In my opinion, art as such doesn’t have a purpose. I don’t think that art as such necessarily has a political purpose, but it’s certain that under the conditions of the aesthetic regime and the conditions of contemporary art, we’re no longer dealing with the old relationship between art and politics, where people asked themselves how artists should take part in the political struggle. We’re no longer in the old problematics of commitment, as in Sartre’s day, but rather in a system where what we call art has many forms of existence that are completely heterogeneous. There are people who paint, who paint abstract or representational pictures … and there are countless people who use different means – installations, photography, video – to create something like a different visibility of the world we live in, and other systems for circulating images, circulating information. One can see very clearly that this isn’t limited to individual artist-activists. Whatever international exhibition one goes to – Biennale, documenta or others – there’s a whole range of forms that essentially amount to a circulation of information. Many things that happen in the world are familiar to us less through the official information routes, not through television and newspapers, but through the work of artists who investigate and document all sorts of things. In a sense, many artists have taken over and transformed the tasks of sociologists, journalists or even political agitators. That’s very important, I think. With the Arab Spring, for example, one assumes that there is a connection – albeit an indirect one – between the emergence of these movements and the work of many artists in the Middle East and North Africa, who were trying to create anew the visibility of what was happening in their countries and questioning the traditional depictions of the rulers and the victims, or of the relationship between society and religion. And the type of activist one sees at the centre of recent protest movements is also the same as that one encounters in the major artistic fora, the major international art exhibitions. A kind of milieu is developing of people who stand between the artist and the political activist, who try to redesign the visibility of the divisions of today’s world.
PE The artists who don’t have any success on the art market of the capitalist system have long formed a precariat. There are many artists in this area.
JR Here one has to take several things into account. There are indeed unsuccessful artists who belong to the precariat. In the nineteenth century, whenever there were revolutionary movements, the right wing claimed they were led by writers without readers, artists without buyers, or prostitutes without customers. There was always this equation of unsuccessful writers or bad artists with discontented persons expressing their discontent.
But there’s something else that runs deeper, I think, which is connected to the change in artistic forms and practices. Today the word ‘art’ refers to extremely varied things. One immediately thinks of the artists Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and so forth, the darlings of the market, but the art world doesn’t only consist of successful and unsuccessful artists. It consists of a multitude of places and different activities. Thus a single art school, let’s say the Goldsmith College in London, produces Damien Hirst as well as all sorts of people who, without being artists in the true sense, become independent exhibition curators or professors at art academies or take on intermediate functions whose tendency is to blur the image of the artist. I think a certain blurring of the image of the artist, which ensures that there isn’t politics on one side and the artist on the other, with the function of illustrating it – as with Fernand Léger and the communist party – is an important phenomenon. There’s really a very important area of indistinguishability between the means of artistic practice and those of politics. And one must always take into account that today’s artists do a wide range of things. They’re not simply artists who have varyingly favourable relationships with the market; they work with all sorts of institutions. Many artists also teach, and teaching means that one’s involved in all the systems of educational reforms, such as the Bologna Process. Artists and artistic practices are integrated into entirely different processes from the traditional ones and those restricted to selling art. The membership of artists in a form of precariat isn’t the same thing as the Bohème of the nineteenth century. It’s something completely different in so far as artists also work on social conditions and are the carriers of social struggles. Look at the struggles of freelance artists, for example – that is, all those whose social security depends on working for a number of hours as an actor, say, but also as staff members at art academies, as dancing instructors or orchestral musicians. So there are all kinds of social occupations and forms of subjectification that are brought together in the concept of the artist. Many musicians in major orchestras are also freelance artists, as are many people who work in television. There’s a whole category of people who are not only involved in the art market, but also depend on normal employment and precarious working conditions, part-time work and so forth. Many artists are in this situation, as is the university lecturer with a part-time job or no permanent position. So on the one hand, there’s the integration of a large number of artists into what one could call the conditions of this new precariat, and on the other, there’s the transformation of artistic practices themselves. What artists do with words, photos, pictures, videos or installations very often aims no longer to create a work of art as such, but a veritable system of documentation, information and construction of the visibility and conceivability of the world.
What I said about the relationship between the perceptible, the utterable and the thinkable is also significant in contemporary art. Many contemporary art forms are forms of the relationship between different media that question the relationship between a visual form, words and the thought regime in which these visual forms and words can go together. Think of all these forms that attempt to comment on performances and put an action or a performance into images or words. I think the forms of contemporary art are largely ways of enacting the relationships between the words, the visual forms, the images, the times and the spaces, and at the same time they create a kind of sensual fabric that reframes the visibility of labour today, for example, or the situation of migrant workers. I’m thinking of something like the film Colossal Youth by Pedro Costa, which is something like an attempt to reframe the figure of immigrant so that he’s no longer viewed as a poor devil, but as a traveller with his own experience, his own view of the world, the new world he lives in. Think of all the ways of reframing labour that have also resulted from artistic practices, and the ways in which artists follow the redistributions of working methods. Allan Sekula’s exhibitions and films, for example, show how American factories are transported to Korea or China. So while the typical opinion is that there are no more factories, one suddenly has these fairly unspectacular photographs or films that show a factory in the USA being dismantled and loaded onto a ship, and then rebuilt in Korea. This renders visible a dominant form of capitalist circulation which is concealed both by the shipping spaces full of colourful, silent containers and by the talk of production becoming immaterial. That’s just one of many examples. I’m also thinking of the work of Lebanese artists who are trying to reshape the visibility of their country by not revelling in misery and showing ruins and victims, but instead by being interested in changing the landscape, in the question of depicting what has disappeared, or by inverting the typical question and looking at what the war has done to pictures materially, quite concretely, because many pictures vanished during the civil war, couldn’t be developed or even taken, because there were no film rolls (this was before the digital age). In this way, art no longer treats war as an object of representation. The two questions merge in one and the same work about the visible and the invisible. So there’s work to achieve a change of perspective, which I consider very important. It’s one example next to a thousand others showing that the manifold ways in which artists put words and images together suddenly interfere with the consensual view that’s constructed by governments and the dominant media.
PE Even if a large number of artists are in a precarious situation that’s not of their own choosing, they did choose one thing: not to be reduced to the condition of the worker. So their role within the precariat is important because they, unlike other persons and groups in the precariat, are active.
JR Yes, that’s undoubtedly important, because it presupposes abandoning a traditional thoughtfigure of the relationship between the artist and politics that’s focused on the question of whether the artist should commit to something or not. Today we’re in situations where this question doesn’t arise, because the artist has de facto become a part of a particular condition resulting from the current power system, and because the topic which so many artists address in their work, broadly speaking, is information, the construction of the images of our world. In that sense, we’re completely outside the traditional divisions between the artist and society or the artist and politics – even if it exists. If a successful actor raises money to help with a natural disaster or in a crisis situation, or sets up their own charitable foundation, one’s probably dealing with the traditional figure of the artist who champions a cause. But that’s something which, compared to the other figure, has very much moved to the background: the figure of the artist who committed within a form of a social network and in a particular relationship with the image and text.
PE So for you it’s new milieus, new life experiences, that give hope for a social change?
JR It’s not just about life experiences. There’s really a dialectic: certain forms of life, like the precariat, can produce new forms of political consciousness and new forms of political expression today. Conversely, the question is whether these political forms of expression can themselves produce their own forms of life, their own forms of development. To be meaningful today, a political movement needs to have its own forms of assembly, forms of discussion, knowledge and information production; its aims must be independent of the aims of official politics, of presidential or parliamentary elections, it needs to have its own agenda and possibly develop alternative economic forms. So that’s a long haul, with fluctuations, with ups and downs. Fundamentally, I believe that if there’s a force which leads out of the current power system, then part of it has to grow from these new experiences of the precariat, from these new forms of labour, from these new forms of the relationship between politics and the work, of information practice, social practice, political practice. I don’t know if there’s any more one can say about it, but I don’t think there’s any future to be gained purely from the development of the system itself. The protest that has grown from the forms of life produced by the capitalist system must be able to create autonomous forms of life and resistance, forms of action that are independent of the ruling logics that we know. That’s all we can say, I think. After that one can still discuss whether the democratic or the communist idea is the right flag. I think it’s more the democratic than the communist idea, but naturally one can ultimately define a kind of common foundation, a common principle of these two ideas.
PE So you do at least see a purpose in the ethical concepts that oppose the current situation?
JR I don’t know if I’d call it an ethical concept, but I think it’s always productive to oppose the current distribution of power by conceiving the creation of collective forms of power that embody an ability of all, no matter who they are. That’s why, for me, one could say there’s a kind of democratic precondition, in the sense of a creation of forms that embody this power of all, no matter who they are, in contrast to the traditional model of an avant-garde which prepares the future.
PE Thank you, Jacques.