AXEL HONNETH
LET ME begin by summarizing what I take to be the political ideas that Jacques Rancière presented in his work. These appear to involve two basic (but radical) philosophical moves: the first involves a redefinition of the so-called political order of society, and the second a redefinition of what should be called politics. In the following, I briefly reconstruct these moves and then analyze some of their implications. I hope that points of disagreement but also some interesting points of overlap or common concern will emerge from this.
THE POLITICAL ORDER OF SOCIETY
I begin with the first radical step, namely, the redefinition of the so-called political order. In Rancière’s view, such a political order consists in a legitimate form of government, which, according to tradition, is based on forms of mutual understanding described in either Arendtian or Habermasian terms; but, as he wants to show, this specific mode of political agreement always rests on the exclusion of some groups or people from the agreed-upon normative principles—thus all political agreements, throughout history and in all their possible forms, fundamentally rest on or are based upon an exclusion, that is, an exclusion of all those for whom there is no normative principle articulating their specific mode of existence. In a further step, Rancière also wants to show that such a political order (consisting in apparently agreed-upon principles that legitimate who has the right to govern) is reproduced via a process through which the normative principles become entrenched in visible and sensible forms: it consists not only in fictitious agreements on principles, but also in the establishment of a sensual world within which we only perceive what is dictated by the dominant categories. It is worthwhile to mention here that we both share this interest in the mechanisms of making people socially invisible.
1 The two aforementioned reasons—the basic mechanism of exclusion and the entrenchment of this mechanism in the sensible—allow Rancière to redefine what is traditionally called the “political” as the “police”: “police” is therefore the name for an accepted or fictitiously accepted political order that rests upon exclusion and consists in modes of governing the sensible/visible world. (It might come as a surprise that I agree, to a certain degree, with this kind of description; I would only alter or nuance certain points—and this may be decisive—but I will return to this difference.)
THE MEANING OF POLITICS
The second aforementioned step is the redefinition of politics, since the “political” has now been emptied of content. Politics no longer refers to the traditionally conceived kind of mutual agreement or public agreement about certain legitimate principles; it has to find a new definition. So the introduction of the word “police” as the correct notion for a political order allows Rancière to redefine the political.
In contrast to the approach of traditional political philosophy, Rancière wants to reserve the notion of “politics” for those moments when the “police order,” that is, the dominating political order, is called into question by interventions from those unaccounted for within existing principles of legitimation. “Unaccounted for” here means that there is no accepted language or category for their specific mode of existence and especially no category or language for their specific mode of suffering. A great deal of his efforts to rearticulate political philosophy therefore consists in the redescription of this mode of the “political,” of the interruption of the political or the police order, by demonstrating and articulating its foundation in an exclusion. As I understand it, there are four specific traits that characterize the “political” in this sense. I briefly identify these four traits, which are most important according to Rancière’s view of the political, as follows:
First, the interruption of the established order by those who do not count is only possible in negative terms, namely, by demonstrating an injustice. This is so, as Rancière shows, because the official language of legitimation does not include the categories or the vocabulary or the notions that are capable of making the exclusion and thus the suffering known. Therefore, the mode of the political as an intervention into the existing order always consists in the articulation of an injustice—a negative act—in calling something into question that cannot acceptably be called “just.” So the first trait of the political is negative since it is not capable of giving a positive account of what is claimed; it can only articulate forms of injustice that have to remain negative, because they lack any possibility of adequate conceptualization.
Second, the motivational force behind these political moments (the event of the interruption of the existing order), which are always possible, is a deep-rooted desire for
egalitarianism. Obviously Rancière wants to say that human beings as such—presupposing a kind of anthropology operating in the background of the theory—are
constituted by a wish or a desire to be equal to all others. It is not a wish to be included or a desire to be ungoverned or to be free, but an
egalitarian desire that brings about the exceptional
moment of politics. So the basic category in the political anthropology of Rancière is an egalitarian desire.
Third, Rancière describes the political moment of interruption as the situation in which anonymous human beings constitute themselves as subjects. Here Rancière works with a distinction between identification and subjectivization, which differs from the usual terminology of French political theory and which I find extremely helpful. It differs completely from the Althusserian notion of subjectivization, for example, because Rancière attributes nearly the opposite meaning to it. Whereas within a police order people are only “identified” according to certain normative categories that derive from legitimating principles, it is only in moments of rebellion and interruption that they manage to “subjectivate” themselves. As Rancière would say, they deidentify themselves, which means they make themselves independent from the categorical identification within the given political order, and in so doing they articulate a new kind of subjectivity. In this sense, they make themselves political subjects by a negative intervention into the political order.
Fourth, what is for me
the most interesting feature in Rancière’s conception, the “political” is characterized by a specific type of speech act, which profoundly differs from the use of language we normally attribute to the process of political will-formation. Since there is no accepted language for those who are excluded, they cannot use the “we” pronoun, the first-person-plural pronoun, in order to articulate their interests or desires in the form of speech directed toward understanding.
2 Instead, they have to interrupt the logics of mutual understanding by making use of the third-person perspective in order to articulate the injustice of being excluded. At the same time their speech has to include a moment of aesthetic world-disclosure, because it aims at undermining the existing order of the sensual (or the existing fixation of the sensual). The “aesthetization” of politics is therefore not a specific trait of some contemporary tendencies in politics, but an internal component of all forms of “real” politics as modes of interruption.
I think Rancière’s interpretation of the speech acts constituting politics is extremely interesting in two ways: If I understand correctly, this interpretation first and perhaps surprisingly indicates that the typical political intervention—in the sense of an interruption or “rupture”—is not articulated by using the first-person pronoun either in the singular or in the plural, because that would presuppose a shared language that would allow those who are excluded to already identify themselves and therefore would allow them to use the first-person perspective. Since that is not the case, they always have to refer to themselves via an indirect perspective, the perspective of a third person, which means they have to describe themselves from the third perspective. It also means that it is impossible to see that kind of speech act as being part of the ongoing process of mutual understanding, since it breaks out of it and doesn’t conform to its logic. This speech act in fact uses a language that, according to the Habermasian description, doesn’t allow it or doesn’t allow it without further ado. Only the observer can take that perspective, but here Rancière is describing the participant simultaneously as observer and as participant, because he or she, or they, have to construct a description from an observer-perspective of their excluded capabilities and do so in negative terms.
The second interesting point for me relates to the world-disclosure component of this reading, for if there is no legitimate way of articulating one’s own suffering, the political intervention has to consist in a mode of world-disclosure, which opens up a new sense of world, or at least shows the direction in which a new sense of world can be established. This is how I understand the core of Rancière’s proposal, and I would now like to comment on it.
QUESTIONS AND REMARKS
Leaving out any minor points of disagreement or doubt as well as all other points of agreement, I will limit my comments to three. I list these points of disagreement or points about which I am initially skeptical, not in order of their importance for the theory of Rancière, but in order of their logical sequence.
The first point concerns the presupposition of an egalitarian desire. The second concerns the description of a legitimate political order—the police, as Rancière calls it—which is based on the fictitious acceptance of normative justifying principles and also grounds political governments on the basis of social rankings, for example, age, virtue, degree of wealth, accomplishments, or whatever. In this case, I have a certain disagreement about the way in which he describes that legitimate political order as police. The third and final point concerns the definition of the mode of the political as the exercise or enactment of an interruption of the police order. Let me briefly expand on these in the following.
1. Concerning the presupposition of an egalitarian desire, it isn’t clear to me how Rancière can justify the strong claim that the motivational force behind all interruptions of a police order is a deeply rooted desire for egalitarianism. Isn’t the idea that we should treat one another as equals the result of a relatively late process of moral learning in human history? My suspicion would be that people in a number of earlier periods in history wouldn’t have been able to make sense of such a demanding idea of equality. They probably wouldn’t have been able to interpret their own claims as claims for equality, because they were living in a world that did not have social equality as part of its normative vocabulary. And if this were true (of the ancient Greek world or the Middle Ages), then it would be strange to presuppose an egalitarian desire. I would not even know exactly how to spell it out. Wouldn’t it therefore be preferable or advisable to introduce the motivational force behind all such total interruptions in a more formal (and cautious) way? Candidates for such a deeply rooted need or desire—which my own theory of recognition as well as Rancière’s theory both to a certain degree are in need of in order to be able to explain why there is this moment of rebellion against the existing political order—could be:
(a) The need to be included in a social order. This is what on a very formal level I would call the need for recognition, namely, the deep-rooted desire to be included in a social community as a member with a normative status.
(b) The wish or desire for
a given order to be justified. Because we are reasonable beings, we need to have the order within which we are living legitimized. This would be a much more formally defined desire, which doesn’t include as such any substantial normative component.
(c) The existential desire not to be governed by others, as we can see it articulated in some of the writings of Michel Foucault.
There are passages in Rancière’s work in which he mentions a need for freedom, instead of an egalitarian desire. The last of the above candidates is perhaps of a similar nature: a need or a wish to not be governed by others is a deeply rooted desire to not be governed by any kind of institutionalized principle. I offer these three candidates, because I have difficulties locating Rancière’s argument for the existence of such a deeply rooted, almost anthropologically given need for egalitarianism.
2. Concerning Rancière’s
description of the legitimate political order, allow me for a moment to identify what he describes as a police order with what I would call a recognitive order, that is, a stratified normative order of principles of recognition, which justify what we can legitimately claim as recognition. Indeed, I think he had in his remarks a certain tendency to do so. The use he makes of Aristotle would support this identification, for to say that a political order is characterized by the establishment of a normative principle that justifies an inequality between the subjects with reference to a certain social quality—and that principle can be either the principle of virtue, or of accomplishment, or, as in some earlier societies, of age—is to speak of principles of recognition. Such principles dictate how to recognize one another and, in that sense, they legitimate a certain political order. So the political order can be equated with a certain order of stratified principles of recognition, which then gets fixated—I would agree on this point—in the way we sensually perceive the world, which means that they determine the “sensible.” If Rancière allows me this identification, then I suspect that his description of such a political-social order is too rigid or too overregulated: all such principles, regardless of what they are, allow for new interpretations and appropriations, which lead to a higher degree of inclusion or a better way of understanding. So I think it is wrong to say that those principles—the principles that political orders use in order to legitimate themselves and especially to legitimate political government—are so fixed that conflicts about their meaning are not possible; I believe on the contrary that all such principles, whatever they are (even age, but especially virtue and accomplishment), are normative principles that themselves raise the question of how to understand them correctly. And therefore I think Rancière has to describe a political order not as a basically fixed order but as a social order or political government that in itself already entails the possibility of reinterpretation and reappropriation. I think this is extremely important when it comes to the question of the political.
3. If it were true that these principles are open for reappropriation and new interpretations, then it does not make sense to reserve the notion of the “political”—as a mode of intervention—only for those exceptional situations when the whole police order is called into question. We would need, rather, to draw a distinction between two types of such politics, which are both governed by specific modes of speech acts. I would like to conclude with a proposal for differentiating between two types of politics or political interventions.
The first type of political intervention concerns the generation of a new interpretation of one of the existing normative principles, which uses the language of the first-person plural and tries to convince the other side of the justifiability of a new appropriation or a new interpretation of the given principle. This is a form of politics that need not be understood as a form of interruption of the political order as such, but rather as a kind of
internal struggle for recognition, as I would propose naming it, namely, a struggle for recognition that does not call into question the existing principles of recognition or the existing principles of normative legitimation, but calls into question the existing modes of their interpretation. These internal struggles for recognition are therefore not in need of a new type of speech act, as Rancière proposes, but can be enacted by using the existing modes of political communication, that is, by using the first-person-plural perspective, by trying to reidentify your own community with reference to a new interpretation of the already accepted normative principles. So this is a different kind of struggle than the one Rancière has in mind, but I don’t see any reason not to call it a political intervention. I think we can differentiate from this kind of political intervention a second, more radical type: intervention as the enactment of an interruption.
The second type of political intervention concerns an interruption of the whole normative order, which doesn’t aim at an improvement of the application of one principle, but at an overcoming of the authority of the order as such. I surmise that the political understood as this kind of interruption is relatively exceptional in history. It represents those moments in history when a specific social class, let’s call it a collective of subjects, cannot find an acceptable notion for the description of their own modes of existence and suffering and therefore it has to call into question the entire apparatus of established normative principles. I think the typical example of this situation is the
bourgeois revolution, wherein those belonging to that undefined class could only find a way for “subjectivization” by calling into question not just interpretations of specific normative principles, but the whole normative order. For there was no place within that order which allowed them to redress their own claims or kinds of sufferings. And in that sense, such an intervention is for me typically or traditionally called “revolution.” I don’t want to deny the possibility of revolution, but I think that the disadvantage of reserving the notion of the political only for those kinds of total interruption is that we are forced to ignore the daily experiences of revolt and political subversion, which do not aim at, and are not necessarily for, overcoming the political order as such, but which have a more (we would say traditionally) “reformist” ambition, that is, the ambition to simply reinterpret the existing normative principles. And I think the typical case of politics today is not the case of total interruption, but rather that of the internal struggle for recognition, which I would differentiate from what we might call the
external struggle for recognition. With politics, or the “political,” Rancière has in mind the external struggle for recognition. However, to deal with everyday politics in our kinds of society, where it is hard to see how to reformulate injustice in such a way that the whole political order is called into question, I think it’s more important to deal with these small projects of redefinition or of reappropriation of the existing modes of political legitimation.