Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity

JACQUES RANCIÈRE

I GAVE this text the title: “The Method of Equality.” I am aware there is something that sounds strange in the formula. Equality is not supposed to be a method. Equality is supposed to be either a fact—an effective relationship—or an ideal. And a method is supposed to be a set of procedures through which a definite effect can be produced or, at least, a path through which one must move to acquire a new knowledge or new practical abilities. On this basis, there are two usual ways of thinking about the relationship between method and equality. The first one consists in saying that a method is not committed to issues of equality and inequality. It is only committed to its own progress and results. The second one consists in saying that equality is certainly a good thing but that one must deal with it methodically. This means first defining what kind of equality you wish to achieve, secondly the path and steps by means of which it is possible to achieve it.

For instance, when I was young I was taught that political and social equality was certainly a nice purpose, but that for this to be reached, one had to proceed methodically. Domination and exploitation, so the argument went, are the effects of a whole mechanism of social relationships. Those who suffer from them are made passive because they ignore the laws governing that mechanism. They must be taught how inequality works in order to know how they can change it. Of course, it is not enough to know it. The point is acting according to that knowledge, shifting from passivity to activity. But at this point, it appeared that the most difficult thing was to know what to do on the basis of that science, in what circumstances it could be turned into action and how that could be done. I was warned that those who rebelled against the law of domination did it wrongly most of the time: some of them, because, as workers pinned down to their work place, they had no view of the global social structure; others, because, as petit-bourgeois intellectuals, they had no concrete experience of class exploitation, and so on and so forth.

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At this point, the lesson of the science of inequality appeared to be a double-edged one: on the one hand, it taught that the dominated are dominated because they ignore the law of domination. But at the same time, it taught that this ignorance is the product of the very mechanism of domination. Domination was said to impose itself by appearing to its subjects in an inverted manner in the ideological mirror of their consciousness. So the method appeared to be a perfect circle. On the one hand, it said: people get pinned down to their place in the system of exploitation and oppression, because they don’t know about the law of that exploitation or oppression. But on the other hand, it said: they don’t know about it because the place where they are confined hinders them from seeing the structure that allots them that place. In short, the argument read as follows: They are where they are because they don’t know why they are where they are. And they don’t know why they are where they are because they are where they are. This theoretical circle resulted in an endless spiral: the possessors of social science were always one step ahead, always discovering a new form of subjection and inequality. They never stopped finding a new type of illusion in the forms of consciousness of those who thought they were acquiring science, a new form of inequality subjecting those who thought they were moving toward equality. They never stopped demonstrating that people were ignorant when they thought they knew something, passive when they thought they were active, subjected to exploitation by the very illusion of being free, and so on. The method for reaching equality in an indeterminate future was in fact a method for postponing it indefinitely. It was a method for endlessly reasserting the grip of inequality and the incapacity of those who were subjected to it to acquire by their own capacities the knowledge that could free them. It was a method for reproducing indefinitely the separation between those who know and those who ignore. It was, strictly speaking, a method of inequality, reasserting continuously the division between the learned ones and the ignorant ones.

That circle of domination and ignorance could thus be read as the modern and progressive version of an old narrative that was first formulated in its rough conservative version in Plato’s Republic, namely, the identification of social hierarchy with a hierarchy of souls. Modern social science endlessly demonstrates why people stay at their place. But Plato had already dealt with the issue in a straightforward manner that made every future theory of ideology an academic joke. He said that there are two reasons why workers must stay at their place. The first reason is that they have no time to go elsewhere, because work does not wait, which appears to be merely an empirical fact. The second reason is that they have the aptitudes, the intellectual equipment that makes them fit for this occupation and for nothing else. So there is a perfect equation between an occupation and a mental equipment. According to that equation, being a worker is an occupation that entails that you have no time to be elsewhere than the place you are geared for occupying—which means that you have no time to chat on the agora, make decisions in the assembly, or look at shadows in theaters. This is what I call a distribution of the sensible: a relation between occupations and equipments, between being in a specific space and time, performing specific activities, and being endowed with capacities of seeing, saying, and doing that “fit” those activities. A distribution of the sensible is a set of relations between sense and sense, that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation that makes sense of it. It is a matrix that defines a whole organization of the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable.

What exactly is the difference between the notion of the distribution of the sensible and the concept of ideology? The difference is as follows: the distribution of the sensible is not a matter of illusion or knowledge. It is a matter of consensus or dissensus. To understand what consensus means, let us go back to what is apparently a flaw in the Platonic demonstration. It is easy to understand that when you are in a place you cannot be elsewhere. What is trickier is to recognize that the individual who is in that place has the exact aptitude to be there and nowhere else. Plato, of course, had an answer for this: the latter, he says, is a myth. We have to accept a story or a lie: the story has it that God mixed iron in the makeup of the artisans while he mixed gold in the makeup of the legislators who are destined to deal with the common good. The story has to be believed. Now the key point is what “belief” means. Obviously Plato does not demand that the workers get the inner conviction that a deity truly mixed iron in their soul and gold in the soul of the rulers. It is enough that they sense it, that is, that they use their arms, their eyes, and their minds as if it were true. And they do even more so as this lie about “fitting” actually fits the reality of their condition. The ordering of social “occupations” works in the mode of this as if. Inequality works to the extent that one “believes” it, that one goes on using one’s arms, eyes, and brains according to the distribution of the positions. This is what consensus means. And this is the way domination works.

From this point on, we can understand the signification of the science of inequality with which we were dealing at first. This science is a science of the verification of inequality, a verification of the verification that is performed by those who are subjected to it. The verification of the verification makes it more radical since it transforms the arbitrary story into a scientific demonstration. By the same token, it transforms the as if into an illusion. Plato said that the city should be organized as if the story of the division of the souls were true. Artisans did as if it were true by the very fact of doing their everyday job. But modern social science turned the practice of the as if into an illusion in their mind, an ideological delusion making them ignore the laws determining their condition. The method of inequality starts with the very distribution of the positions. There are two ways of doing so: Plato makes inequality a “story” that has to be believed in order to make inequality a reality. Modern social science makes inequality a reality and equality a goal to be reached from this starting point. But this simple dispositif is already the principle of an infinite reassertion of inequality. This is the point that was made as early as the 1820s by an extravagant French professor named Joseph Jacotot. At the time, all the progressive minds were concerned with the purpose of educating lower classes in order to make them move toward equality and take their part in modern society. Jacotot put the whole story upside down. He said that the method that pretends to move from inequality to equality is the way of perpetually reproducing inequality, since it continually makes the ignoramus lag behind the master. That is the bias of the pedagogical logic: the role of the schoolmaster is posited as the act of suppressing the distance between his knowledge and the ignorance of the ignorant. Unfortunately, in order to reduce the gap, he has to reinstate it ceaselessly. In order to replace ignorance with adequate knowledge, he must always run one step ahead of the ignorant and confirm the ignorance he is supposed to dismiss. By so doing, the presupposition that is at the core of the system is continually reproduced: the presupposition, namely, that there are two kinds of intelligence, or, in Platonic terms, two types of souls, iron souls that move in the darkness unless they are guided by golden souls who know the right path from darkness to light. Knowledge in fact means two things: it means the possession of this or that specific science, art, or practice, and it means the fact of occupying the position of one who knows. The master knows in two senses: because he knows grammar, arithmetic, or any other discipline, and because he occupies the position of the one who knows. And what the master knows is first and foremost the ignorance of the ignoramus. The same goes for the ignoramus: he knows what he has learned from the master and he knows that he would not know without the help of the master. In other words, his knowledge is a specific linkage of capacity and incapacity. If we translate the pedagogical logic in social terms, the artisan has the know-how of his job and he has—or he is supposed to have—the awareness that his lot in society is to perform his know-how for work that “does not wait” without caring for general issues about the organization of society. The progressive path from inequality to equality is entrapped in that logic, which is a logic of verification of inequality or what Jacotot calls a process of stultification that puts the subject that one is supposed to teach in the structural position of the ignoramus.

This means that there is no path from inequality to equality. There is either a path from equality to equality or a path from inequality to inequality. A method is always the verification of a presupposition and there are only two presuppositions: the presupposition of equality or the presupposition of inequality. What the presupposition of equality means is the rupture of the inegalitarian belief or inegalitarian knowledge. The name of this decision is emancipation. Emancipation is the decision to verify that there are not two kinds of souls or two kinds of intelligence. Intelligence is the same in all its operations and it belongs to everybody. All intelligences are equal, said Jacotot. This does not mean that all intellectual performances are equally valuable. This means that intelligence is the same in all its operations. The scientist constructing hypotheses and the young child listening and looking around proceed in the same basic way: they set out to discover what they don’t know yet by tying it to what they already know. Theirs is not a path from ignorance to knowledge. It is a path from an existing knowledge to further knowledge. The method of inequality supposes that you must start from this point and try to reach that point by following one step after the other. The method of equality supposes that you can start from any point and that there are multiple paths that can be constructed to get to another point and still another one that is not predictable. There is a multiplicity of paths, a multiplicity of ways of constructing one’s intellectual adventure, but a prior decision has to be made beforehand: the decision that one can do it because one participates in an intelligence that is the intelligence of anybody. Emancipation designates that prior decision to enact the capacity of anybody and verify it. There is no passage from ignorance to knowledge or from inequality to equality. Each situation can be dealt with either as an occasion for the verification of inequality or as an occasion for the verification of equality.

Jacotot had a pessimistic view about the possibilities of social change. He thought that only individuals could be emancipated so that they could live as equals in an unequal society. But this pessimistic view was turned upside down by the attempts of the workers who were his contemporaries to construct a world of equality within the world of inequality. Emancipation means that you must not wait to be taught about the mechanism of exploitation and domination. Such a mechanism is only too clear. What I called consensus means precisely the impossibility of ignoring it. Social emancipation began with the decision to ignore it. Ignoring it meant reconfiguring the way they occupied their space and time. Emancipation for those workers meant the attempt to get rid of the ways of being, seeing, saying, and doing that made them fit for their condition. What their texts first witness is the attempt to conquer the useless, the look of the aesthete, the language of the poet, or the time of the loiterer. It is the attempt to take the time that they “do not have” to go to the places where they are not supposed to have anything to do. There is no privileged starting point, said Jacotot. As a matter of fact, dissensus can start from an imperceptible modification of the forms of everyday experience. During the French Revolution of 1848, a revolutionary workers’ newspaper publishes the long description by a joiner of the working day of the jobber who is laying the floor of a rich house. We could think that a workers’ newspaper, in a time when revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces are in open conflict, would have more urgent concerns. But precisely what is at work in this apparently plain description is a redescription, a reconfiguration of daily experience that invents a time and space of freedom and equality in the space and time where the jobber is exploited by a boss to build a house that he will never live in. To understand how it works, I quote a brief extract of his narration: “Believing himself at home, he loves the arrangement of a room, so long as he has not finished laying the floor. If the window opens out on a garden or commands a view of a picturesque horizon, he stops his arms and glides in imagination toward the spacious view to enjoy it better than the possessors of the neighbouring residences.”¹

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Dissensus starts with a new belief: the joiner believes he is at home in the place where he is exploited. He enjoys the perspective through the window better than the possessors of the neighboring residences. In his Critique of Judgement, Kant made an apparently paradoxical statement about the disinterested character of the aesthetic judgement. He said that if I am asked whether I find this palace beautiful, I must let go of any “social” concern about the sweat of the workers that has been spent for serving the luxury of the rich and focus only on the form I am looking at. Aesthetic judgement is disinterested, which means that it does not look at its object as an object of knowledge or an object of desire. It is a power to appreciate appearance as such, and since this power has nothing to do with the reality of the object, it can be shared by anybody at all. That definition of the aesthetic judgement as “disinterested” judgement that can be shared by everybody has often been denounced as a typically idealistic view. A French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, devoted six hundred pages demonstrating that it denies social reality, which is that each class has the form of taste that befits its condition. But the core of emancipation is precisely the possibility of denying this kind of reality, the possibility of breaking the link between a social occupation and a mental equipment. The practice of dissensus actually started with the possibility of forgetting reality in favor of appearance and of casting a “disinterested” look on a building that is no longer an object of desire and frustration. The description made by the joiner gives that allegedly “idealistic” idea quite a materialistic meaning. The laborer stops his arms in order to let his eyes take possession of the place. His “disinterested” look means a disjunction between the activity of the hands and the activity of the eyes. We can call it an aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is not the experience of the aesthete enjoying art for art’s sake. Quite the contrary, it is a redistribution of the sensible, a dissociation of the body of the Platonic artisan whose eyes were supposed to focus only on the work of his arms. It is a way of taking the time he does not have. This is what emancipation first means: an exercise of equality that is an experience of dissociation of the body, space, and time of work.

This exercise of equality has the apparently paradoxical effect of making the worker “less aware” of exploitation. The text of the joiner spells out very clearly this dialectic of emancipation: since no look of a master precipitates his movements, the jobber “believes” that his powers are his own. He does not even hesitate to call this belief a “delusion” and to tell the consequence of this delusion. As he puts it, “He believes he is obeying only the necessity of things, so much does his emancipation delude him. But the old society is there to treacherously sink its horrible scorpion claws into his being and ruin him before his time, deluding him about the excitement of the courage that he uses for the benefit of his enemy.” He seems then to confess that the mastery he has gained is a mere illusion that contributes to his exploitation at the moment and to his unemployment later. But things are immediately overturned: this countereffect, which results from his way of reframing the space and the time of the exercise of his force of labor, is the source of a new pleasure, the pleasure of a new freedom in which even unemployment becomes a choice. I quote him: “This worker draws secret pleasure from the very uncertainty of his occupation.” The surplus of physical force given for a short time to the powers of domination is exceeded by the surplus of freedom that has been gained for long in relation to the whole logic of domination. The same joiner invented for himself a countereconomy of everyday life, where all budget items—food, clothing, and the like—were calculated to both minimize expense and optimize freedom.

This is what dissensus means: dissociation between the know-how of a job and the awareness of a condition, between the exercise of the arms and the exercise of the eyes; it means the dismemberment of the worker’s body, which was accustomed to domination, a revolution in the very balance of pain and pleasure. One thing, of course, must be emphasized, namely, the very fact of his writing the “narration” of this “day at work,” the very fact of his getting into the world of writing. This is the point where aesthetics and politics mean the same thing. At the beginning of the Politics, Aristotle made the famous statement about man as a political animal. He said man is a political animal because he has the power of logos, the power of the speech that spells out issues of justice and injustice, while the other animals are restricted to the voice that expresses their feelings of pleasure and pain. I translated this statement by saying that man is a political animal because he is a literary animal. Now it is well known that the traditional distribution of the sensible has it that the major part of humankind is made of noisy animals, enclosed in the oral world of mere pain and pleasure. Therefore writing about this day at work did not mean expressing the pleasures and pains of the worker. It meant affirming himself as a literary animal. The power of the literary animal is the power of the sensible operation that is the preliminary condition of any justice: the possibility of exchanging a pain for another. This exchange is made possible by the appropriation of words, even in the form of a bad metaphor: the “scorpion claws” of exploitation. It is precisely this excess of the words that matters: exploitation has no scorpion claws. What matters is the very use of the metaphor, the very use of words that are not supposed to belong to the vocabulary of the everyday of the poor. Those words—the emancipated worker first found them in the random literature of the sheets of paper used by the grocers to wrap the vegetables, before getting to real books. In a letter to a friend, the same joiner tells him to “plunge into terrible readings” because, he says, “that will awaken passions in your wretched existence, and the laborer needs them to stand tall in the face of that which is ready to devour him.” What is needed in the process of emancipation is first and foremost passions. As has been well known since Plato, passion means a certain balance of pleasure and pain. What is provided by writing and reading is a new way, a human way, of feeling pleasure and pain. This is why the “terrible readings” he recommends to his friends are not books describing the horrors of capitalism and the wretched condition of the poor. On the contrary, he recommends to him the books of the great romantic writers. Those books told the misfortunes of characters whose sorrow was that of not having a place and an occupation in society, of being born for no definite job or task, of having “nothing to do” out of their life. This was not the case of those workers, indeed: they suffered from the contrary, from the fact of having a place in society, of being born for a definite way of living and doing and being unable to escape that necessity. But this is what literature is about: exchanging one’s pain for another’s pain. And this is what those workers needed: exchanging their pain for another’s pain; making their voice not the voice of their condition but the voice of anybody, the expression of the capacity of anybody, confronting the social distribution of capacities and incapacities. The same goes for those “terrible readings” as for the reframing of the time and space of labor operated by the joiner: those forms of “aesthetic experience” do not work by providing definite messages or conveying specific forms of energy. They work by disrupting the way in which bodies fit their functions and destinations.