Todd May
The central divide in traditional political theory runs between those theories that advocate for liberty and those that advocate for equality. On the one side, theories that advocate for liberty argue that the most important human ability is autonomy: the ability to fashion life as one sees fit. In order to do that, people must be free to create themselves. Therefore liberty is the key political value. On the other side are theorists who argue that an unequal society is an unjust one. Societies that countenance inequality are unfair to their members. In addition, they deny real liberty to those who are less than equal, since without resources one cannot fashion life as one sees fit.
There is another way to cast this debate, one that will be helpful in understanding Jacques Rancière’s thought. We can think of the dividing line as one that runs, not between liberty and equality, but within equality itself. Theories of liberty can be seen as a type of theory of equality. What theorists of liberty seek is, in fact, equal liberty for everyone. Theorists of liberty do not endorse unequal liberty; they allow inequalities in other things, for example income or resources, in order to preserve equal liberty. For them, since liberty is the key value, we must maximize it for everyone. Moreover, to permit one person to have more liberty at the expense of another is to violate the autonomy of that other person. Everyone should have maximal equal liberty.
If we put matters this way, then the question for most traditional political theories is not: liberty or equality? Rather, it is: equality in what? What is it that everyone is to be equal in? What should be the central value? Should we be equal in liberty, in opportunity, in income, in access to goods (and what goods?), in some combination of these, or in something else altogether? Most traditional theories can be seen as casting their lot with some particular answer to that question. Libertarian theories endorse liberty. Liberal theories endorse a combination of liberty and opportunity. Socialist theories tend to opt for access to goods or income. But all these theories agree that there is something we should all be equal in.
There is another common element to these theories as well. They all endorse the idea that the state bears the ultimate responsibility for ensuring access to the value we should be equal in. Equality, for these theories, is something to be granted, protected or created by the state. (Some socialist theories do not ratify the central role of the state; they turn out to be closer to Rancière’s view.) For libertarians, the state protects liberty and does nothing more. For liberals, it both protects liberty and ensures (and sometimes creates) opportunity. For most socialists, the state ensures and creates access to goods and/or income equality.
We might put this idea another way. Equality, according to most traditional political theories, is something people receive from the state or some state-like institution. It is not something they create; it is not something they guide; it is not something they do. Equality happens to them. To be sure, they may utilize that equality in any number of ways. But the equality itself comes to them (or is protected for them) from a source outside themselves.
That presupposition – that equality is received rather than created – is inherent to most political theories, from right to left. And it is that presupposition that Rancière’s political view places in question. For Rancière, as for other political theories, equality is the central value. However, equality, for him, is created by people rather than for them. A democratic politics is a politics of the demos, of the people. It belongs to them, and not to anyone who claims to represent them. “[P]olitical activity”, Rancière writes, in a difficult passage we shall examine presently:
is always a mode of expression that undoes the perceptible divisions of the police order by implementing a basically heterogeneous assumption, that of a part of those who have no part, an assumption that, at the end of the day, itself demonstrates the sheer contingency of the order, the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being.
(D 30)
Politics, in short, a truly democratic politics, is collective action emerging from the presupposition of equality.
In order to understand how Rancière thinks of this democratic politics, we should recall briefly his idea of the police discussed in the previous chapter. Before that, we should comment in passing on his use of the term politics. When Rancière contrasts politics with police, he does not mean to say that the police is nothing political. Instead, he is marking the difference between a democratic politics – a politics of the demos – and a hierarchical politics of the police order. Sometimes he indicates this distinction in French by reserving the term la politique for a democratic politics and le politique for the politics of the police order. We shall keep this distinction by using the term “democratic politics” for Rancière’s politics of the demos, except, of course, when citing his writings.
In any case, a police order, as explained in the previous chapter, is hierarchical. It is based upon the presupposition that some are fit to govern and some are not. Otherwise put, a police order distinguishes between those who have a part and those who do not. In Rancière’s writing, that distinction is a fluid one. It is not that there are simply two groups of people lying on either side of the divide. In a particular society, there can be many types of hierarchy: gender, race, class, sexual orientation and so on. A complex police order will be characterized not by a single hierarchy but by a number of (often intersecting) hierarchies. However, in each hierarchy there is always the distinction between those who have a part and those who do not, between those who are fit to make decisions and to create lives and those whose lives are to be created for them.
This is true not only of societies. It is also true of traditional political theories. The equality they seek is not an equality presupposed by those who act, but instead one granted or guaranteed by those who govern. Traditional political theories rely on the state or some other governing institution to distribute whatever type of equality is valued. That is why these theories are called distributive theories of justice. They embrace a value or small set of values, justify it, and argue that that value should be equally distributed to each member of the society. This, in itself, implies a hierarchy between those who govern and distribute, and those who are governed and receive.
This hierarchy is no different in kind from the hierarchies of the police order. Like social hierarchies, the hierarchy of traditional liberal political theory divides those who have a part – those who distribute and make decisions about that distribution – from those who do not. Even if, as in most liberal theories, those who distribute and make decisions must be voted into that position by those who do not, the hierarchy persists. Moreover, from the experience we have of elections in nominally democratic countries, we know that those who are voted into the position of distributors generally come from the class of people who already have a part.
A politics of the Rancièrean kind, a politics that presupposes rather than distributes equality, is in an important way the inverse of traditional liberal political theory. Where the latter sees equality coming from the distributor to the people, Rancière sees equality coming from the people. It is a presupposition out of which they act, the presupposition of their equality. In democratic political action, people take the hierarchies of a given political and social order to be, as Rancière says, contingent rather than natural or inevitable. The demos works against those hierarchies in the name of its equality. It is not that people necessarily demand equality, or even think of themselves consciously as presupposing equality (although often they do). Rather, it is there, in their political practices. If one looks, one can see it as an inherent presupposition lying within what they do. “Equality”, Rancière argues, “is not a given that politics then presses into service, an essence embodied in the law or a goal politics sets itself the task of attaining. It is a mere assumption that needs to be discerned within the practices implementing it” (D 33).
An example would help clarify this idea. One tactic of the US civil rights movement of the 1960s was the lunch-counter sit-in. At the time, there were many lunch counters in the South that did not serve African Americans. As a protest, integrated groups of three or four people would go to a discriminatory lunch counter, sit together, and wait to order lunch. They did not carry placards or shout slogans. They acted like customers, asking for menus and seeking to order a meal. They were usually followed into the restaurant by segregationists who taunted and sometimes beat them, and then by police who arrested them. But they did not fight back. They made it clear that they were there to order lunch like other people, and that they expected to be served.
In this example, the civil rights workers acted out of the presupposition of equality. They took themselves to be equal to those who were allowed to order lunch, and acted collectively out of that presupposition.
One might argue that equality was not a presupposition of their action but rather a goal. In that sense, one might say, the lunch-counter sit-ins were more characteristic of traditional political theories of equality. What the protestors sought, on this view, was to be treated equally by others. They wanted to receive equality, to have it distributed to them.
This would be too superficial a view of their actions. To be sure, those who sat in at lunch counters did seek to be treated equally. But they did not do so simply by asking for such treatment. They did so by acting as though they were already equal. They presupposed their equality and, through their actions, brought the social order into conflict with that presupposition. To be sure, many actions and movements that Rancière might be willing to call democratic seek to change a police order by means of recognizing equality. However, there is a difference between asking to be treated equally in order to think of oneself as equal and demanding to be treated equally by acting as though one is equal. In the first case, the power of equality lay with the distributor. In the second case, it lay with the actors, with the people or the demos.
In every democratic political movement, there is a conflict between those who act in the name of their equality (and those in solidarity with them) and the social order that presupposes their inequality. That conflict Rancière calls a disagreement (une mésentente), a term that he uses to name his most comprehensive political book. He defines a disagreement this way: “We should take disagreement to mean a determined kind of speech situation: one in which one of the interlocutors at once understands and does not understand what the other is saying” (D x). A bit further on he writes:
An extreme form of disagreement is where X cannot see the common object Y is presenting because X cannot comprehend that the sounds uttered by Y form words and chains of words similar to X’s own. This extreme situation – first and foremost – concerns politics.
(D xii)
This is an unusual way to define a disagreement in general and a political disagreement in particular, and we should unpack what Rancière means by it.
Rancière’s definition of a disagreement is indebted to a passage in Aristotle’s Politics, where Aristotle argues that what makes man alone a political animal is the capacity for speech.
Speech is something different from voice, which is possessed by other animals also and used by them to express pain or pleasure; for their nature does indeed enable them not only to feel pleasure and pain but to communicated these feelings to each other. Speech, on the other hand, serves to indicate what is useful and what is harmful, and so also what is just and what is unjust.
(Aristotle, Politics, 1253a)
Slaves, for Aristotle, do not engage in speech, properly understood; they are more like animals that can emit sounds but do not engage in language, although they can recognize language in men enough to follow orders. Or better, what sounds like language among slaves is only really a series of brute noises and cries. In Aristotle’s words, “the ‘slave by nature’ is he that can and therefore does belong to another, and he that participates in reason so far as to recognize it but not so as to possess it (whereas the other animals obey not reason but emotions)” (Aristotle, Politics, 1254b16).
Of course, when slaves make these noises, they certainly sound as if they are speaking. But the elites or the oligarchs cannot recognize these sounds as speech, because they cannot recognize their authors as speaking beings. If those same noises were uttered by someone they recognized as an equal, they would understand them as human speech. To put the point another way, those at the top of the police order do recognize the uttered noises as sounds that would be words, but cannot be because of who is uttering them: they at once understand and do not understand what the other is saying. And the reason for this is that they do not recognize the other as capable of forming words and chains of words similar to their own.
This is a disagreement. A disagreement does not concern, or does not primarily concern, competing views over an issue, for example whether a group of workers is underpaid. It concerns who gets to speak, whose voice counts. And, more deeply, it concerns who actually has a voice, who is capable of speech. Workers’ demands, women’s demands, the demands of those who are marginalized by race, class, immigration status and so on are not recognized as demands because they are not recognized as issuing from people capable of making real demands.
Now one might argue that, in contrast to Aristotle’s time, those at the top of a police order, particularly in contemporary societies that are usually thought of as democratic, do not really think that the demos is incapable of speech. Strictly speaking, this is true. However, we are not so far from Aristotle’s view as we might think. For most of the elites, whether in politics, business or elsewhere, even if the demos is capable of speech, it is not capable of saying anything worth hearing. The demos remains populated by people who do not understand and therefore have to have their interests watched over by those who do understand. This view is rarely articulated so boldly in public, but it does make an appearance every once in a while. A recent example is President George W Bush’s advice to the American people after the plane crashes of 9/11 that the best thing they could do for the country would be to go about their business and, especially, to shop.
A disagreement, then, does not centre primarily on any set of demands that are made, but rather on who gets to speak and make demands. Therefore it centres on the equality of those who are making demands. We can see, then, why it is that a democratic politics is collective action issuing from or expressing the presupposition of equality. What is at issue in politics is the equality of those who seek to participate. If the demos, the people, are less than equal, then their participation is unnecessary. They can justifiably remain, as Rancière says, a part that has no part. However, if they are equal, then being treated as less than equal is unjustified. A democratic politics is a matter of confronting a disagreement. The term Rancière uses for this confrontation is a wrong.
“Wrong”, Rancière says:
is simply the mode of subjectification in which the assertion of equality takes its political shape … Wrong institutes a singular universal, a polemical universal, by tying the presentation of equality, as the part of those who have no part, to the conflict between parts of society.
(D 39)
This passage, although abstract in character, captures the core of democratic politics movements. In considering it, we shall leave the term subjectification to the side for a moment. It is an important term that we shall return to below.
When a wrong ties the presentation of equality to a conflict between parts of society, it asserts the equality of the part of society that is not recognized in the police order as being equal. The wrongness lies precisely in the failure of the police order to recognize this equality. In this sense, a wrong is not so much claimed as it is displayed. We hear a great deal these days about politics being a matter of victimization. Everyone complains that he or she is a victim and therefore deserves recognition from the governing powers of a society. Rancière denies that the concept of a wrong is one of victimization. In some ways, the concept of wrong as he understands it is the opposite of victimization. With victimization, one claims to be wronged and demands compensation. The onus of recognizing equality lies on those who are supposed to provide that compensation. With a wrong as Rancière defines it, the project of recognizing equality lies first with the demos, with those who act on their own behalf. By expressing their equality, they display for all to see that the police order has all along denied it.
In order to understand this, we can return to the example of the lunch-counter sit-ins. The sit-ins were a staging of a wrong. The participants in the sit-in movement did not primarily ask for recognition of their equality. They acted as though they were already equal. In doing so, they confronted a social order that did not recognize them as equal. In effect, rather than saying, “You have wronged us and you need to do something about it,” their message was, “We are equal to you, and now we’re going to see whether or not you recognize that.” The failure of the social order to recognize that equality displays the wrong. It stages it, in a theatrical sense. And when it is displayed or staged as a wrong, what Rancière calls a single or polemical universal emerges.
That universal is one of equality. It is a singular universal because it is the equality of a particular group in a particular set of social circumstances. The people sitting at lunch counters did not display the general idea that all people are equal, although they probably thought that. Their actions were more local in character. Their message was, more specifically: we are equal to others who sit here. The wrong, then, lies in the failure of the police order to incorporate that equality into itself.
What is this equality that is presupposed in democratic political action? What is its character? In one way, it has no particular character. It operates instead by undercutting the particular characters assigned by a police order. If a police order distinguishes men and women, blacks and whites, gays and straights, immigrants and citizens, it does so for the purpose of constructing hierarchies. We might see these terms as purely descriptive, but that is not how they operate in constructing a police order. These distinctions serve to divide those who have a part from those who do not. If this is so, then equality is, in a particular sense, an empty term. It signifies the rejection of classifications characteristic of a given police order. As Rancière puts it, “The essence of equality is in fact not so much to unify as to declassify, to undo the supposed naturalness of orders and replace it with the controversial figures of division” (OSP 32–3). (The division Rancière refers to here does not refer to the divisions posited by the police order, but to the dissent of one group from the consensus sought by the police order for those divisions.)
In this sense, the term equality has no content. It serves instead to mark the refusal of a particular content posited by the police order. In another, more pedestrian, sense, however, we can say that the term does have content. If the distinctions posited by the police order are unjustified, this is because we are all equal. But what is it we are equal in that undermines the justification of a police order? It is that each of us is capable of constructing a meaningful life alongside others. We can think for ourselves, converse with others, and together and separately create lives that have significance. We do not need an authority to tell us who we ought to be or where our good lies.
If we were incapable of this, then a police order would indeed be justified. It would be necessary for those who are competent to have a part, and for others, less competent, not to have a part. Rancière does not argue this particular point, but does hint at it in a couple of places. In Disagreement, he says:
There is order in society because some people command and others obey, but in order to obey at least two things are required: you must understand the order and you must understand that you must obey it. And to do that, you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you. It is this equality that gnaws away at any natural order.
(D 16)
If we take this argument as concluding that equality means identity of intellectual ability, it is not a very good one. However, if we take it more as a rejoinder to Aristotle – that speech is characteristic of both those who give and those who receive orders – and as claiming the ability of everyone to give and receive orders, then it can stand for the rejection of any justification for others to order our lives.
The other place where this equality is given content is in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, discussed in Chapter 2. If we think of the equal intelligence posited by Joseph Jacotot as indicating that everyone is equally capable of solving Fermat’s last theorem or writing brilliant poetry, then it is plainly wrong that we are all equally intelligent. It is certainly true that we are more nearly equally intelligent than our police orders recognize, and the educational experiments performed by Jacotot are evidence of that. However, we are not equally capable of performing high-level abstract tasks, any more than we are equally capable of performing high-level athletic feats. On the other hand, if we take equal intelligence in a more pedestrian sense to indicate that we are capable of building meaningful lives alongside and in interaction with others, then the concept of equal intelligence becomes both more compelling and more politically relevant. This is the underlying theme of The Ignorant Schoolmaster: not just the equality (or near equality) of intelligence required to perform well in school, but the equality of intelligence required to undercut any justification for the hierarchical divisions of a police order.
So far, we have discussed the underlying character of a democratic politics. We have said nothing about its results. This is for good reason. If a democratic politics were defined by its results, then its democratic character would be founded on the success (or failure) of its goals. This would shift things away from Rancière’s own framework of thought in two ways. First, it would found the democratic character of a movement not in its motivation but in its end-point. This would, in effect, deny that democratic movements emerge out of the presupposition of equality. If, for Rancière, equality lies at the source of political action, and if we define the democratic character of a movement by reference to its goal or its results, then equality would no longer be that by which a democratic movement is defined.
Secondly, and related, to focus on results would hold the democratic character of the movement hostage to the context in which it is undertaken. If that context is not conducive to success, then that would damage the character of the movement as democratic. This is a position very much counter to the spirit of Rancière’s thought. Imagine a movement that emerges out of the presupposition of equality, but struggling against a police order that is so entrenched that it fails to make changes in that order. If that lack of success were relevant to the question of whether the movement is democratic, then the democratic character of political engagement would no longer be defined by the demos but by outside forces. It is better, then, to leave results to the side when asking about what constitutes a democratic politics. A movement that arises from the presupposition of equality but that does not have an impact is a failed, but nevertheless democratic, movement. And even then, the fact of the movement itself probably introduces changes into the lives of those who participate in it (and those who may come later and refer to it as a touchstone in their own struggle), even where they fall short of their goals. To count a movement as failed because it does not achieve its goals is often to view the effects of that movement in overly simplistic terms.
There is a phenomenon, however, that emerges, not from but within a democratic movement. Rancière calls it subjectification. It is not the type of subjectification discussed, for example, by Michel Foucault, where the power relations around us turn us into subjects. In some sense, it is the opposite. Subjectification is the process of becoming a collective subject through acting out of the presupposition of equality.
By subjectification I mean the production through a series of actions of a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience, whose identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience.
(D 35)
The process of subjectification will be a familiar one to those who have studied the history of democratic political movements. Previous to these movements, the lives of people in the demos are disparate and isolated. Those who have no part are each trying to survive, often taking on the denigrating character the police order assigns them. As Rancière says, “There is only the order of domination or the disorder of revolt” (D 12). As a democratic political movement begins to take hold, a we emerges that was not there before. A group begins to emerge where there was none before. In that sense, the social field of experience is reconfigured. It is reconfigured for those who have a part, since they are forced to see others they have not seen before, or at least not in that particular way. And it is is reconfigured for the demos, who see a social order in which they may have a part. As a result, within the demos people begin to feel empowered. This empowerment is not individual but collective. Rather than seeing others among the demos as competitors for the same scarce goods (whether those goods be material or abstract – beauty, for example, in the case of women), one begins to see them as just like oneself, engaged in the same struggle, confronting the same adversary. For instance, I was on a human rights delegation in Palestine in 1988, during the first intifada, where this process was on display first hand. People described how they were coming together for a common purpose – ending the Israeli occupation – whereas before they were often at odds, each trying to make the best for himself or herself from within the stranglehold Israel placed upon their lives. As an example of this, during curfews imposed by the Israeli army, people would pass food from door to door to make sure everyone was fed. This would have been largely unthinkable in many places before the intifada began.
We should not see subjectification as a result of a democratic movement, but rather as part of one. We noted above that Rancière defines a wrong as “the mode of subjecification in which the assertion of equality takes its political shape”. Subjectification, then, is not the result of a democratic politics but one of its elements. It is the element that is constituted by a collective we that is co-extensive with collective action. The we is neither the source of the action nor its outcome. It emerges alongside the ongoing activity, feeding and being fed by it.
For Rancière, then, politics – a democratic politics – has nothing to do with what people are given or what they can expect. It has nothing, at least nothing directly, to do with fair treatment. Democratic politics is not something that happens to people. It is something they do. They do it when they act together, alongside those in solidarity with them, under the presupposition of their equality within a police order that does not recognize that equality. Such a thought of politics is timely. In a period in which we are encouraged to become passive, to expect rather than to act, to shop rather than to organize, there are fewer theoretical tasks more urgent than that of reminding us that for politics to become our politics, we cannot be its audience; we must instead be its actors.