Jean-Philippe Deranty
This chapter deals with Rancière’s first writings, following his rupture with Althusserian Marxism, whose post mortem is drawn in the 1974 book-length essay, Althusser’s Lesson. Rancière’s disillusionment with the orthodoxy of his time coincided with his involvement in the movements following the 1968 student and workers’ revolts. The egalitarian spirit fuelling these movements led to a radical challenge of all social hierarchies. Rancière’s research in that decade sought to apply this radical egalitarian acumen at the point where “logos”, as the catchphrase for all the forms of reasoned discourse (from the arts and sciences to political deliberations), meets with the institutions of social life. This led him in particular to concentrate his research on “the workers’ dream in nineteenth century France” (the sub-title of The Nights of Labour, the master work of that period). By recovering the theoretical and poetical writings, the organizational plans and political manifestos, the hopes and complaints of the nineteenth-century proletarians, Rancière aimed to achieve a double aim: on the positive side, to demonstrate the capacity of the dominated to use the resources of logos, their ability to articulate their own thoughts and feelings on the basis of their specific experiences; on the negative side, to unveil the boundaries and divisions that are projected from the social into the intellectual realms, and that prevent the dominated from having their discourses count as meaningful and significant.
The first key concepts in Rancière’s work thus stem directly from his intensive research into the writings of the proletarian philosophers, poets and activists of the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet his general objective to bring class struggle into logos, to describe and accompany all the different “logical revolts” (Révoltes logiques), also led to a radical gesture in terms of philosophical writing. Rancière refused to express the conclusions reached in studying the writings of the proletarian thinkers in the abstract languages, or using the canonical references, of academic philosophy and social theory. Rather, the key concepts encapsulating his initial approach were simple terms, down-to-earth words, but ones that contained deep and complex meanings. The general inversion of hierarchies was thus brought to bear on style itself. The concrete and the everyday, the simple material, that level, namely, at which working people are deemed by intellectuals and dominating classes to be stuck, was shown to hide magnificent thoughts and sublime feelings comparable to the established philosophy and poetry. Three such expressions in particular capture the constellations of ideas articulated in Rancière’s initial research: the voice of workers (la paroleouvrière); the nights of proletarians (la nuit desprolétaires); the land of the people (le pays du peuple).
The expression that probably summarizes Rancière’s overall theoretical practice most accurately is the early motto of the “Révoltes logiques”, logical revolts, a motto borrowed from the prose poem “Democracy” by Arthur Rimbaud (Rimbaud 1957: 128). When the young militants chose this title for their new journal, they were explicitly aiming to unite under the same banner the revolts of the early nineteenth-century workers and the creator of poetic modernity in France. This was an original research project, suggestive on many levels. It suggested that there is no qualitative gap between the poems of the glorified genius and the best writings of obscure proletarian poets, philosophers and reformers. It demanded therefore that the same intellectual application, care and sophistication be used in reading their writings as was demanded in reading the great poet, or indeed the established philosophers (see the later reading of Rimbaud in FW but also the readings of Mallarmé in M and PL). It perhaps even suggested that Rimbaud, as a late child of the nineteenth century and a young witness of the Paris Commune, might have been an unconscious heir, together with the socialists of this generation, of these early proletarian writers. Altogether, it suggested that the early revolts of the proletarians were as much revolts in speaking, writing and thinking, “logical” revolts, revolts within logos, as political, social or economic ones. It set up already the constant to and fro between class positions, articulated around uses of language, that is the hallmark of Rancière’s method.
Kristin Ross’s indispensable book on May ‘68 in France documents the important editorial statement in the first issue of Révoltes logiques. One passage is worth quoting in full:
Révoltes logiques wishes simply to listen again to what social history has shown, and resituate, in its debates and what it has at stake, the thought from below. The gap between the official genealogies of subversion – for example, the “history of the workers’ movement” – and its real forms of elaboration, circulation, reappropriation, resurgence. The disparity in forms of revolt. Its contradictory characteristics. Its internal phenomena of micropowers. What is unexpected about it. With the simple idea that class struggle doesn’t cease to exist, just because it doesn’t conform to what one learns about it in school … Révoltes logiques … will try to follow the transversal paths of revolt, its contradictions, its lived experience and its dreams.
(Ross 2002: 128)
Another document, the preface to the anthology of early proletarian writings published with Alain Faure (La Parole ouvrière), makes a comparable declaration of intent:
to return to the concrete conditions of the elaboration of a revolutionary tradition that was specifically proletarian; to analyse the ways in which it encountered social theories in problematic fashion, from utopian socialisms to Marxism; but also to highlight the internal problems inherent in this tradition, its contradictions and its limits.
(PO 338, my trans.)
The programme of research is clear: to undercut theoretical accounts of the social question that have been developed from outside and imposed from above, and instead, to let the workers speak for themselves, to read seriously and reconstruct painstakingly their own efforts of expression and organization. The theoretical opponents are numerous: Marxist dogmatism, which, starting with Marx himself, tends to pour contempt over much of these efforts of expression and organization because they do not conform to the ideal line that is supposed to lead from the formation of class consciousness to universal emancipation via party discipline; gauchiste spontaneism, nomadic desire or “nouveaux philosophes” line, which all overlook the intellectual sophistication of proletarian thinking in their search for the fantasmatic innocence of “the people”; the folkloric interest in “popular culture”; the Foucaldian method of genealogical reconstruction, always prompt to identify the logic of power hiding in discourses and practices seeking emancipation.
Against these trends, Rancière wanted to retrieve the force and complexity of “la parole ouvrière”, “the workers’ voice”, or “workers’ speech”. But doing justice to the sophistication and complexity of the “thought from below” is not to sacralize it. In some instances, the patient historical and exegetical work is able to demonstrate how refined this thought can be, how crude the intellectual reconstructions applied to it from outside. For instance, in an article of 1979, against the suspicions raised by genealogists of the time, Rancière retrieves the intellectual inventiveness and political courage of those women (notably Suzanne Voilquin) who, in the 1850s, strove to translate for themselves, from the specific perspective of their gender position, the Saint-Simonian religion of universal emancipatory love or the teachings of Fourier (SP 85–95). In other instances, however, the ambiguities and paradoxes of the thought from below must be highlighted, as when Rancière underlines the ambiguous relationship of an essentially male labour movement to female emancipation (SP 63–84; GE), or the compromising of twentieth-century unionism with the Vichy regime (SP 117–63). From the most sublime to the most ambiguous, however, in every case it is a matter of letting sense emerge from the speech and actions of the actors themselves.
La parole ouvrière still had an implicit Marxist agenda. The anthology and the commentary organizing it aimed to study the reality of class consciousness, in the multiplicity of its forms, below the overbearing discourse of organized Marxism. This explains the book’s focus on the 1830–51 period. This was a period when new forms of workers organization were devised in France; new forms of speech were created, and a true, collective “workers’ voice” emerged. The workers’ active participation in the regime change of 1830, followed by the first mass strikes of the 1830s (notably the Canut rebellion in Lyon in 1831), led directly to the creation of a proletarian political voice, which played a decisive role in the democratic revolution of 1848. Against the orthodoxy of science versus ideology, the concept of “parole ouvrière” aimed to uncover the great multiplicity of forms of speech, but it was still aiming to pursue the emergence of the unified consciousness of one class.
In the master work of this period, The Nights of Labour, the perspective has shifted. The period studied is the same. The book’s three parts are organized chronologically, starting with the first attempts at self-expression following on from the workers’ participation in the 1830 revolution; continuing with a study of the Saint-Simonian projects developed during in the 1830s and 1840s; and finishing with the great disillusionment following the failures of the Icarian colonies in Egypt and the USA, in the 1840s and 1850s. But this time, Rancière’s intention is no longer simply to capture a collective proletarian discourse in the diversity of its voices. This time, the focus is on individual voices, like the philosopher-carpenter Gauny, the seamstress Désirée Véret, the laundry-maid Jeanne Deroin or the metal-worker Pierre Vingard, to name but a few of the most unusual characters in the book, beside the names from the labour movement that history has remembered, like the leaders of the Saint-Simonian movement, Cabet and Enfantin. Later in the book, Rancière’s analysis focuses more squarely on the paradoxes, contradictions, ambiguities, dialectical difficulties encountered by the proletarian thinkers in their attempts to articulate their experience, understand the mechanisms of oppression, organize new modes of work, and create new forms of community. The underlying intuition driving the project seems to have shifted. Now, there is no conclusion, not even, as in the other texts of the time, conclusions that could be drawn implicitly from the historical narratives and exegetical readings. The demonstration of the insoluble knots encountered by the proletarian writers seems to be the main point. This makes for a puzzling book. What is Rancière attempting to show with this series of allusive and aporetic readings of obscure, early proletarian writers?
It seems that the very impossibility to draw definitive, neat and consistent, black and white conclusions from the trials and tribulations of these isolated voices of the early labour movement is by itself the deep political, indeed the deep philosophical lesson Rancière wants to learn, and wants us to learn from his research into “the workers’ dream”. The book attempts to accomplish performatively through his reading of the obscure proletarian writers and our reading of his intricate renderings of them, the type of dis-identification that these workers were forced to experience in their flesh, in their militant action, and in their thinking. The ultimate logic of Rancière’s paradoxical reading is therefore that there is no ultimate, essential grounding of a politics of emancipation. Every time emancipatory political action attempts to ground itself in some essential property, it falls into contradictions and paradoxes that make it miss its self-given target, transform it into its opposite: neither the ethical value of work, nor the demand for full employment or general education, nor individual needs, nor collective happiness, nor universal love, nor some specific proletarian identity, nor gender identities can by themselves stabilize the struggle against domination and make it a univocal, unambiguous project.
However, some positive lessons remain beyond the sceptical, aporetic, perhaps pessimistic, message drawn from the exemplary fates of these proletarian writers: the grandeur of the sentiments expressed in their writings; the unique beauty of their prose, despite their homage to the canons of their time; the sophistication of their political and organizational discussions, despite the paradoxes and contradictions they encountered. Precisely, Rancière implicitly shows that “real” thinkers avoid these contradictions only because they paper over them, mainly because they do not have to live them. All this combined leads to an important, positive political and theoretical message. It commands all the master thinkers, academics, experts and other well-wishers of the working classes to stop pontificating about them from above, and to simply let them speak, hear their voices, trust their capacity to spell out their needs and aspirations. The sceptical, pessimistic message is thus inverted into a message of political hope: the oppressed and the down-trodden already possess the intellectual means to articulate their plight and demand their rights. All they require are the opportunities (the allies, the material resources, the institutional openings) to make their speech public and implement their plans.
The concept of the “nights of labour”, or rather, as Rancière’s title says literally, the “nights of the proletarians”, thus points to the other side of all that is supposed to exhaust proletarian reality: the reality of work, the clichés about working-life folklore, the economic or sociological truths about working classes, and so on. The “nights of labour” is only a vague signifier encapsulating all the different attempts by which those who were deemed unable to think, speak or write, mainly because they were tied to work, prove otherwise and thus escape the reifying categories through which they are viewed. But, as history shows, the content of those “nights” cannot be specified in advance. Different individuals, at different times, in different contexts, fill them differently. Indeed, this is one of the positive contents to be drawn from the empty concept: that beneath the clichés and reifying views, the “people” (the dominated, the exploited, the suffering classes, and so on) do not exist as such, always escape the definitions superimposed upon them. Despite the plasticity of the concept, however, some formal traits are common among all the different ways of filling these “nights” (i.e. of escaping the social destiny associated with working life): the desire to rebel; the courage needed to do so; the necessity to use intelligence, imagination and eloquence in order to implement the reversal of fortune.
In the years that followed the publication of his first master book, the shift in Rancière’s position became more pronounced as he began to look at politics from the other side of the “barrier”, to use another one of his key metaphors at the time (GT). That is, he no longer studied the possibilities and difficulties of political and intellectual emancipation by restricting himself to the discursive realm of those who had the most to gain from it. Rather, he combined this perspective (the “thought from below”) with a more traditional critical dialogue with established writers and theorists.
Short Voyages to the Land of the People, which was published in 1990 (English translation 1991) but gathered studies written just a few years after Nights of Labour, signalled this shift from the immanent historical research into the labour movement and its obscure thinkers and poets, to more recognizable critical studies into politics and aesthetics.
The book describes a series of travels in which the geographical, the political and the literary are tightly interwoven. Most chapters are dedicated to artists (mostly poets, such as Wordsworth, Georg Büchner and Rainer Maria Rilke) whose geographical journeys lead them also to “the land of the people”, in other words, to an encounter with the lower classes, in experiences of transgression of class boundaries. Other chapters recount the destinies of individuals “from the people” who transgressed class boundaries in the other direction, and did so not just spatially and sociologically, but also and crucially by reading and writing. This constellation of interests is representative of the development of Rancière’s thought after his “proletarian” decade and captures the spirit of his later work. The singular voices of the proletarian poets and philosophers, beyond their limitations and contradictions, demonstrated the radical change brought about by the political revolutions characterizing modernity. Now, anyone can in principle speak about anything, even though the tendency to categorize forms of speech according to class distinctions remains ever-present and powerful. But this liberation of speech is not just of political relevance. Since speech is at play (expression and deliberation), the revolution ushering in modern society also has a direct aesthetic import. More specifically, Rancière was sensitive from the beginning to the fact that the dis-identification operated by the proletarian voices was expressed in, and in fact required, reference to literary practices. Increasingly, Rancière links the drifting journeys of individuals disengaging from their social destinies with the radical freedom gained by literature in the wake of the Romantic revolution. He becomes fascinated with figures of individuals from the people who encounter “drifting” letters, that is texts that represent in their narrative, or incarnate in their themes or styles, the detachment of the written text from the traditional circuit that used to take it unequivocally from the well-identified authorial voice to a well-identified target audience, and the ways in which proletarian lives are transformed by this encounter with the drifting qualities of modern literature. Conversely, he is fascinated by modern writers who discover that the words they use can attach to places and people they had not foreseen when they wrote them.
The concept of “the land of the people” is the knot at which all these different threads are tied together. It designates first of all the place within society where traditional boundaries between classes, occupations, modes of thought and expression are radically challenged, as those “from below” demonstrate over and again how incorrect and unjust the assumptions were that relegated them to this position within the hierarchy. As a result, the concept also designates an aesthetic point of contestation: the point where the clear correspondences between words and reality are also challenged, and the letter is shown to be open for a multiplicity of uses and interpretations. This signals already one of the most striking aspects of Rancière’s work, namely the seamless continuity, indeed the intimate link, it establishes between the equality of individuals in the political and the equality of materials and topics in the aesthetic.