Samuel A. Chambers
The three chapters of this part of the book are devoted to elucidating the key concepts that constitute Rancière’s work on politics. And doubtless, Rancière has made a crucial contribution to debates over how to understand or theorize politics. Indeed, his work gained much wider circulation outside France when his writings specifically on politics from the 1990s were quickly translated into English and powerfully affected a series of debates within contemporary critical and political theory. For these reasons, Rancière’s readers may be tempted to take up his writings as works in the tradition of political philosophy. Matters prove less than simple, however, since Rancière states directly, and with critical force: “I am not a political philosopher” (CR 10).
Rancière refuses this label not merely for the sake of avoiding disciplinary confines, but for two interrelated reasons. First, political philosophy has a very particular meaning within Rancière’s arguments: he entirely rejects the idea of taking “political philosophy” as a branch or “natural division” of the broader field of philosophy (D ix). More than this, Rancière argues that the ultimate aim of the project of political philosophy has been precisely the elimination of politics. This claim holds, according to Rancière, across the canon. From Plato to Aristotle, from Marx to Arendt, political philosophers have sought to supplant the anarchic disorder of politics with a hierarchical order of the philosopher. Secondly, the so-called “return of political philosophy” has a particular resonance in the context of French politics. Political philosophy was reputedly “reborn” in North America thanks to the work of John Rawls, his followers, and the debates his work spawned. While the conversations surrounding Rawls’s work in North America remained mostly academic, the importation of American political philosophers into France was carried out by thinkers such as Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry (minister under Chirac), who not only taught “political philosophy” but also brought it to bear directly on political debates. For Rancière, then, political philosophy played a key part in an ideological struggle against any contestation of “pure republicanism”. Thus we might say that Rancière disavows political philosophy on both philosophical and political grounds. But for precisely these reasons, Rancière remains committed to a thorough analysis of the relation between politics and philosophy, and herein lies his most significant theorization of politics.
This chapter explicates two key concepts that prove essential to Ran-cière’s overall project and that play a pivotal role in his understanding of politics: police and oligarchy. These are not standard terms within a contemporary theory of politics. Indeed, the list of “key concepts” for most contemporary political theorists would not include them, and therefore it may seem somewhat strange to begin the discussion of politics here. More than this, one might even worry that Rancière defends some sort of authoritarian vision of politics – centred on policing and committed to oligarchic rule. Of course, in Rancière’s own case, nothing could be further from the truth. In order to work towards Rancière’s radically democratic thinking of politics (see Chapter 5), we must begin with his own preparatory work. Rancière proceeds by way of a process that might best be called “re-definition”. That is, he starts with phenomena and ideas that his readers already have a clear sense of, those they can easily name. He then swiftly renames these phenomena – a conceptual move that has significant consequences for his theory of politics. This chapter focuses on two of the new names that Rancière gives to the familiar. To state the case succinctly at the outset: where we would see politics, Rancière sees “police”; where we would identify democracy, Rancière recognizes only oligarchy. This chapter will provide concise articulations of the key concepts “police” and “oligarchy”. But it will also clarify these concepts against the background of Rancière’s broader understanding of philosophy, and it will link these concepts to his radical defence of democracy as the essence of politics.
Chapter 3 has already shown how Rancière’s arguments emerge from his engagement with the philosophical tradition. In the context of developing Rancière’s concepts of police and oligarchy, it proves particularly important to grasp his critique of Plato. Articulating the relationship between politics and philosophy (through his reading of Plato) leads Rancière directly to an analysis of society as a hierarchical order. The Platonic philosophic order is, as we shall see, the police order par excellence. Plato’s Republic turns out to be an oligarchy.
On Rancière’s reading, Plato remains paramount not for the usual reasons: not because Plato’s teacher Socrates was the first philosopher and Plato himself was the first philosopher who wrote; not because Plato was the first political philosopher; not even because, as the first to answer the question “what is the best regime?”, he was the pre-eminent “classical” political philosopher (see Strauss 1959). Instead, Rancière argues for the importance of Platonic philosophy along a different register; Plato’s thought proves so significant because it is Plato who establishes a powerful and historically dominant relation between politics and philosophy. As will be developed below, Plato paradigmatically reduces politics to police.
This relationship depends on the connection that Plato draws between, on the one hand, the social order that he seeks to establish and maintain and, on the other, the threatening power of language to subvert that order. First, Plato builds his ideal regime upon a rigid, hierarchical social order: one very small group will be rulers of the regime (philosopher-kings); one slightly larger group will be soldiers and protectors (guardians); and one much larger group will be constituted by farmers and craftsmen. For Plato the justice of the city depends upon this order. Put more precisely, justice is this order, this structure, this hierarchy. In other words, justice for Plato proves to be a certain respect – a certain allegiance – to a social order of hierarchical inequality. Domination thus lies not just at the centre of Plato’s ideal regime, but at the heart of his conception of justice.
Plato injects hierarchy into the very structure of his account of justice by having the founders of the ideal city tell a “noble lie” through the construction of a myth. According to this myth, each member of the regime is born with a particular metal in his or her soul and the type of metal determines their station in the social order: gold for guardians, silver for auxiliaries, and iron and bronze for workers. More important for Rancière than the mere fact that Plato must lie in order to create a “just” regime is what he must do in order to preserve the order he has constructed. Rancière focuses on a much less famous passage of the Republic, one in which Plato argues rather viciously against the idea that mere workers would take up the noble discourse of philosophy. For Plato, says Rancière, the order of the city can be protected only if the “order of discourse” is kept out of the hands of the workers (PP 31–2). Plato understands well a point that proves central to Rancière: writing cannot be controlled. Writing gets in the hands of just about anyone and they can then choose to do just about anything with it. It is precisely this contaminating capacity of both philosophic discourse and poetic writing that runs the risk of disrupting and eventually tearing apart Plato’s carefully constructed city. The city is precarious because its foundation must make commensurate the hierarchical social order and justice itself. Because they threaten this foundation, Plato banishes both the sophists and the poets from his perfect regime: the former would circulate philosophical discourse among everyone, while the latter would circulate poetic writing freely and widely. In either case the purity of Plato’s philosophical order would come under threat.
Rancière wishes to associate this very disorder that threatens Platonic political philosophy, the impurity caused by the circulation of writing, the anarchy waiting at the gates of the Platonic kallipolis–Rancière associates all of this with democratic politics. For just this reason, he will argue that the project of constructing a philosophical order (and the commitment to order remains the raisond’etre of philosophy) must always lead to one central (if often unintended) consequence: politics’ eradication. In other words, and as the next two sections will expound, Plato’s philosophy constructs a police order that eliminates politics, but that, at the same time, always remains exposed to the risk of politics. Thus, for Rancière politics is always impure, and for that reason always scandalous. But philosophy tries above all else to “suppress” any such scandal as this; it aims to eliminate all impurity. Hence, “philosophy tries to rid itself of politics” (D xii). Thus the conclusion of the story as told through Platonic philosophy looks like this: the relation between philosophy and politics turns out not merely to be one of trade-offs and tensions, but one of conflict and antagonism. If philosophy would banish politics from the city in order to strengthen and support the hierarchical social order that the philosopher has constructed, then this is only because of a more fundamental conflict between politics and “police”.
The above allusions to politics make it sound as if perhaps Rancière does not quite understand what everyday politics is really all about. But Rancière has no illusions whatsoever about what “politics”, as we comprehend it, actually looks like. He states the point quite clearly in Disagreement when he takes the time to identify just those “regular” sort of phenomena: “Politics is generally seen as the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, [it denotes] the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution” (D 28). It is not that Rancière does not understand that this is how we typically see politics – as if someone needed to explain it to him. Instead, he wishes to resist this reduction of politics to bureaucratic administration and economic management. Therefore Rancière takes everything he describes above and renames it: he calls the system of distribution “the police”. Rancière repeatedly invokes the phrase “police order” to refer to any hierarchical social order – the orders in which we all circulate, each and every day. He uses “policing” to designate not only policy-making – as the term in English, though not in French, already connotes – but also parliamentary legislation, executive orders, judicial decisions, and the vast array of economic arrangements. Most of what we would take to be politics turns out to be police: from the principles of interest-group liberalism to the actions of bureaucrats and executives; from elections to welfare. Today’s technocracy proves to be a prime contemporary example of policing, for Rancière, and he repeatedly refers to the opinion poll as “the normal form” that policing takes today (D 31).
After introducing the term “police”, Rancière quickly adds that it “no doubt poses a few problems”, and this because we typically take “police” to refer to uniformed officers, to patrol cars, to “the truncheon blows of the forces of law and order” (D 28). But Rancière reminds us, as Michel Foucault had done before him, that a much broader idea of “police” arises earlier, in seventeenth-century German and Italian discourses on the state, coming to some prominence with the emergence of political economy in Germany (ibid.; cf. Foucault 1979). “Police orders”’ therefore cut across culture, politics and economics; as Foucault says, “the police includes everything”, to the extent that any police order determines relationships between human beings (thus it creates a hierarchy) and determines the relations between “men and things” (thus it determines a material order as well) (Foucault 1979: 248). At the core of his argument, Rancière uses police to refer to the organization of society, the dividing up and distribution of the various parts that make up the social whole. Hence we see that police is Ran-cière’s term for what we usually understand by everyday interest-group politics. The distribution of goods and services, the allotment of roles and occupations, the management of the economy – all are part and parcel of the police order. Police, says Rancière succinctly, names “a symbolic constitution of the social” (TT 20).
Therefore, on the one hand, Rancière’s concept of police must be understood as quite distinct from the common notion of cops on the street. On the other hand, we can trace an important relation between police in the specific sense of those who enforce law and, above all, maintain order, and “police” as a core principle that names the primary arrangement of parts that make up this order in the first place. Rancière’s concept of police points to the general order that, in our everyday understanding, “the police” are meant to maintain. In terms of this relation between Rancière’s general and specialized understanding and our own particular and ordinary sense, we might say that a powerful police order will have less use for police officers. In other words, the “truncheon blows” of police officers become necessary only when a general police order has somehow been threatened or called into question.
Rancière maintains the distinction between his “broader sense” of police and particular understandings of or critiques of the police. For this reason he frequently emphasizes that, as it functions in his writings, police has little if anything to do with repression or overt physical violence. He also insists that the identification of a police order does not constitute a critique of police orders in general. For Rancière, such a critique would make no sense. A police order, some police order, is inevitable. Thus to think, understand or analyse any particular police order, we must refuse the temptation to project a realm of pure freedom as existing outside that order; there is no pure “outside” to the police order. Drawing all these points together helps to make sense of Rancière’s description of his own concept of police as “non-pejorative” (D 29). Rancière seeks neither an elimination of the police order nor a mobilization against police in general, and for this reason we must resist the notion of challenging the police order writ large. Hence Rancière’s project does not oppose itself to police in the way that, for example, an orthodox Marxist project would oppose capitalism.
But to say that some police order proves unavoidable, to maintain neutrality against the idea of a police order, is neither to abandon a critical position on the police nor to reduce all police orders to the same level. While there may well be no pure “outside” of the police order, this does not mean that the “inside” of all police orders is equivalent. Rancière keenly describes the order of police that he sees around him in European democracies; he insists that much of what we take for “politics” is best described as police. He thereby shows that we live in police orders, but he nevertheless reminds us that “we do not live in camps” (HD 73). And such a reminder serves to emphasize the fact that not all police orders are the same. Rancière formulates this argument succinctly: “there is a worse and a better police” (D 30–31). While Rancière himself does not explore the differences, his framework makes possible and gives value to an analysis of the variations and differences between and among given police orders. As we shall see below, such a project might not concern itself directly with politics, but it would be no less valuable for that.
Rancière focuses on explicating the concept of “police” in such a way as to throw into relief a distinct conception of politics. This sort of project depends upon “police” consistently referring to a particular arrangement of bodies – the arrangement of the social order, the allocation of places, roles, occupations. The police thereby “defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying” and for this reason any police order determines who has a part in society and who does not (D 29). This understanding of police as determining a distribution of roles within society, links the concept centrally to two other key concepts: politics (Chapter 5) and Partage du sensible (Chapter 7). Because of these links, an unexpected term like “police” proves to be the lynchpin of Rancière’s theoretical and conceptual work on politics. And the concept of “police” also reveals the powerful, necessary, but not always obvious connections between Rancière’s work “on politics” and his writings “on aesthetics”.
The arguments of Chapter 7 will make clear the tie between police and Rancière’s “politics of aesthetics”: as a distribution of bodies, the police order must be understood as one particular “distribution/partition of the sensible”–a way of determining the order of appearance, of what can be apprehended by the senses. Rancière insists that a police order is also “an order of the visible and the sayable” (D 29). This logic can be completed as follows: police determines not just the part that any party has in society; it also determines the intelligibility of any party at all. To have no place within the police order means to be unintelligible–not just marginalized within the system, but made invisible by the system. Police orders thereby distribute both roles and the lack of roles; they determine who counts and they decide that some do not count at all.
This notion of those who “do not count”, those who have “no part” in the given police order, connects Rancière’s concept of “police” to his novel understanding of politics. For Rancière, his radical redefinition of the term politics makes sense only in relation to police. But to explain this relation is to get ahead of the story to be told here. Chapter 5 will take up the task of explicating Rancière’s concept of politics. Before that, this chapter needs to complete the logic of the police in Rancière by extending the discussion to his other central concept in this project of redefining ordinary phenomena. If so much of what we take to be politics turns out be nothing more than “police”, then the analysis begs at least two decisive and essential questions. First, the question for the next chapter: what is politics? Secondly, the question for the next section: how do we understand the system of political rule under which we all live? In other words, if what we thought was politics turns out to be police, then can we still so easily and simply describe our political regime as “democratic”, or must we, in redefining much of politics, also redefine the systems of police under which we live?
In his more recent Hatred of Democracy, Rancière offers a vigorous defence of democracy against all the critiques of democracy – as individualist consumer society run amok – that have circulated in recent years, especially in France. In making this defence, however, Rancière also forwards a clear and powerfully polemical answer to the questions posed above. He states plainly, yet repeatedly, that “we do not live in democracies”. He offers his alternative formulation just as plainly: “we live in States of oligarchic rule” (HD 73). Rancière’s logic here parallels the move he makes from politics to police: all social orders are marked by hierarchy and domination, and all political orders (all political regimes) seek to naturalize the very inequality that the police order presupposes and enacts. The concept of “oligarchy” therefore proves central to Ran-cière’s understanding of the political and social worlds we inhabit, but it should be stressed that “oligarchy” emerges sharply only in some of Rancière’s most recent writings. Thus, while some of the “centrality” of this term comes about retrospectively for Rancière – as he reinterprets early arguments in light of this newer concept – Rancière’s conceptualization of oligarchy has become crucial to his overall project.
To understand what it means to say that we live under oligarchic rule, Rancière first exposes what he names the “scandal of democracy” (HD 51). This phrase must be interpreted carefully. “Scandal of democracy” refers not to a scandal that happens to democracy, not to some non-necessary incident that would mar an otherwise good or pure democracy (thus not to the type of scandal that marks a particular political administration). Rather, “scandal of democracy” names the scandal that is democracy. This scandal has to do with the right or the title to rule. Any political regime, says Rancière, is made up of those who rule and those who are ruled. In Greek, arkhe names the principle that identifies the rulers and the ruled; arkhe is the principle that designates who will take up which of the two categories. Rancière offers an important reading of Plato’s Laws, designed to sort out the various titles to arkhe–that is, legitimate claims to rule, to be a governor rather than merely to be governed. Plato lists seven titles to rule. The first four are titles of birth: parents over children, old over young, masters over slaves, nobles over commoners. The next two titles, says Rancière, “express nature if not birth”: strong over weak, intelligent over ignorant (HD 39–40). These first six titles express (and indeed, exhaust) the different forms that oligarchy can take. These six titles express six different principles of arkhe: all of them are, obviously, non-democratic, but they are also the principles that still rule in politics today. Nonetheless, for Rancière, the last title, the seventh title – a seemingly “extra” title – matters most. In his reading of Plato, Rancière describes the seventh title as “a title that is not a title, and that, … is nevertheless considered to be the most just”. It is the drawing of lots, the principle of randomness as the principle of rule (HD 40).It is a claim to rule that is not actually based on any principle at all. Thus, to clarify terms, this seventh title to rule is no arkhe at all. It is not an arkhe (a principle of rule), but a kratos (a mere prevailing) (OSP 94).
This seventh title that is not a title provides, of course, the only “title” to rule that can justify democracy. This should not be surprising since, as any student of politics or political theory knows, democracy means “rule by the people”, but the word comes from the Greek demokratia, a compound of demos (people) and kratos. Etymologically, arkhe plays no part in democracy. Rancière wishes to show that it also plays no part conceptually. Thus democracy is a kratos, a manner of prevailing, based on no natural principle. Democracy is rule by the people in the sense of “rule by those who rule”, that is, rule by those who have no other claim to rule than random luck – the throw of the dice. Here we see precisely why democracy is scandalous: because it is rule without principle (kratos without arkhe). Because a democrat’s title to rule is only this seventh “title that is not a title”, democracy separates political rule from any social order whatsoever. The first four titles to rule link a political regime directly to an order of birth: one is born a master, born a noble, and hence one rules. The second two titles disconnect rule from birth, but only so as to reconnect it to nature: one rules because one is best. But in democracy, rule itself is scandalous because it can be shored up in no social order. Rancière writes: “the scandal lies in the disjoining of entitlements to govern from any analogy to those that order social relations. … It is the scandal of a superiority based on no other title than the very absence of superiority” (HD 41). Unlike bureaucracy, which Hannah Arendt famously defined as “rule by no one” (1958: 40), democracy is indeed rule by someone, by the people. But since the people have no title to rule, democracy, we might say, is therefore “rule by anyone at all”.
To clarify the stakes of this argument, we can stress that while Ran-cière draws out his argument about oligarchy from ancient sources, one should not conclude that he confines his analysis to the ancient world: the very same principles of oligarchy remain prevalent throughout history. Indeed, the technocratic nature of modern policy-making only gives oligarchic principles more force and resonance. And while oligarchic principles of rule seem rather banal – oligarchy is surely not scandalous – oligarchy proves crucial to Rancière’s work precisely because he insists upon the scandalous nature of democracy. Democracy is not a regime, nor is it a form of society. It is not an arrangement of a state, nor is it a system of political institutions. “There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as democratic government. Government is always exercised by the minority over a majority” (HD 52, emphasis added). In one sense, then, all government is oligarchic.
Rancière knows the typical response to this claim quite well. In the face of the argument that nowhere in the world today can we genuinely say that the people rule, most commentators tell the same story. It is a standard narrative, frequently taught in the classroom, and easily locatable on any number of Wikipedia pages, including that of “democracy”. I have covered the narrative many times myself, and it always goes something like this. Ancient societies were ruled by direct democracies, wherein all citizens legislated directly; but modern mass societies prove ill suited to this form of rule. Put simply, they are too big, making it both financially and logistically impossible to implement direct democracy. In the face of this challenge, it proves imperative to distinguish carefully between direct democracy (practised in the ancient world but impossible today) from representative democracy. The latter, it is said, seeks to implement many of the same goals and principles of ancient democracy while paying full attention to modern realities. Thus one cannot criticize or dismiss democracy today by saying that “a minority rules” (one cannot call it oligarchy), since that minority is democratically elected and serves to represent the people as a whole.
Rancière has a powerful response to this standard narrative: it is very bad history. Representation was a system that emerged in Europe not in order to democratize regimes, but rather so that state power could be extended and more efficiently implemented. Representation “is, by all rights, an oligarchic form”. The same goes for voting: “originally the expression of a consent” and certainly not a device of democracy (HD 53). In the end, Rancière concludes that far from being redundant, as it often sounds to our ears today, the phrase “representative democracy” started off as an oxymoron.
Therefore, one cannot merely dismiss the crucial, even if obvious, empirical observation that today it is always a minority that rules. Rather than somehow cover over this fact with faulty historical narratives about democratic progress or mask it by way of technical distinctions between direct democracy and republican principles, Rancière proposes instead to tell it as he sees it. Democracy is not a regime, because all political regimes are oligarchic. “What we call democracy is a statist and government functioning that is exactly the contrary” (HD 72, emphasis added). Hence Rancière’s claim that “we live in States of oligarchic law”. We live in oligarchies, and only in oligarchies, precisely because that is all we can live in. Some rule while others are ruled, with the ruling group always smaller than the group being ruled. Yet, again, Rancière does not intend his claim to have some sort of levelling effect, as if to say that all regimes are oligarchies and are therefore all the “same”. As he puts it, the states of oligarchic law that North Americans and Europeans live in are always more or less constrained by a discourse of civil liberty and popular sovereignty. These limits surely have “advantages”, and, significantly, various manifestations of oligarchy “can give democracy more or less room” (HD 72–3). Thus oligarchies can be evaluated, challenged and transformed in various ways, but they cannot merely be praised for being democracies – that is exactly what they are not.
Rancière’s insistence that we live in oligarchies, like his insistence that we always live under particular police orders, serves not to narrow political possibilities, but rather to specify the form that democratic politics would take were it to occur. More to the point, by showing precisely that democracy is not a regime, and that all regimes are oligarchies, Rancière opens up a different space for thinking democracy. He separates out “the democratic” from interest-group competition, civil rights, liberal constitutionalism, and all the other institutional and legal forms with which democracy is so frequently conflated. By revealing the rule of oligarchy, Rancière broaches the possibility of democracy. Such a possibility depends on seeing that democracy is not a question of regimes; it is a question of politics.
Politics can come about only by opposing a given police order. Politics occurs when the logic of the police order (domination) finds itself challenged by a wholly different logic – that of equality (see Part I of this volume). Democracy can only emerge as something that thwarts the oligarchic rule that is the norm. Democratic struggle bases its claim to rule not on a principle different from that operative within the oligarchy, but on no principle at all. Democracy thereby undermines the principle of oligarchy, rather than replacing it with a new one. Thus democracy is the essence of politics (OSP 94).
While these statements all seem to take the form of simple and direct definitions of politics and democracy, they work instead, and more forcefully, to illustrate that politics and democracy are both relational concepts within Rancière’s writings. As such, they depend upon a full understanding of the terms that they oppose – police and oligarchy. Rancière’s theory requires a prior sense of how he redefines our ordinary understanding of democratic politics under the conceptual framework announced by “police” and “oligarchy”. A reader who can make sense of Rancière’s claims that so-called democratic regimes are actually oligarchies, and that much of what passes for politics is actually policing – that reader now sees the need to offer distinct and counterintuitive conceptualizations of both politics and democracy. In reading Rancière it is always important not to lose sight of the fact that, according to his account, the world is made up of, if not dominated by, police and oligarchy. And that explains why these concepts – surely less exciting or radical-sounding than many others in Rancière’s corpus – must come first in any account of his politics. They play a more fundamental role because these two concepts illuminate the world we live in.
Moreover, the democratic struggle that Rancière both joins and defends can be advanced only with a keen awareness of the dilemmas of police and oligarchy. In other words, to grasp the concept of police reveals the impossibility of eliminating police in favour of politics. Any effort to disrupt the police order will always be subject to co-optation by that very police order. Challenges to the police order will always be heard merely as calls to adjust its terms. And understanding what Rancière means by oligarchy exposes the obvious fact that we could never simply replace oligarchy with democracy. Rancière calls this latter paradox the “quandary of oligarchy”. It is a quandary proper to oligarchy yet unavoidable even by democracy. Just as every democracy for Plato risks being reduced to a tyranny (because mob rule was the perfect context for takeover by a tyrant), so for Rancière any effort to bring about democratic action, to mobilize democratic struggle, may fall prey to the dangers of oligarchy (HD 84). Rather that rejecting arkhe for kratos as democratic struggle intends, it may only replace one arkhe with another.
This is not to suggest that such paradoxes could ever be eradicated, solved or eliminated. The paradoxes of democratic politics can only ever be navigated, managed or engaged. To do so, however, will require intimate knowledge of police and oligarchy – terms that set the foundation for the chapters to follow.