Philip Watts
After The Nights of Labour (1981, English translation 1989) Jacques Rancière published a long essay on what it means to write history from below. The main object of The Names of History (1992, English translation 1994) is to challenge the so-called scientific approach that came to dominate French historiography after the Second World War. Taking on the Annales school and then working back to Jules Michelet, Rancière seeks to understand what is at stake when historians attempt to replace “the primacy of events and proper names” (NH 1) with the study of demographics, economics, statistics and structures of thought. What to many historians and cultural critics may have seemed like a great leap forward in the human sciences turns out, on Rancière’s reading, to be a deeply flawed approach to history. While the Annales school famously refused to study the lives of kings and diplomatic history, their approach nonetheless ended up overlooking the men and women who, for Rancière, are responsible for historical change. From his earliest texts through his more recent essays on literature and art, Rancière has argued that democratic politics comes not from institutions, disciplines or specialists, but from concrete individuals, often from the working classes, who are engaged in struggles and who remain conscious of their thoughts, words and deeds. Writing history from below means two things for Rancière. It means recovering the thoughts and speech and writings of these individuals and it means remaining aware of how the construction of knowledge can result in the silencing of democratic movements, aspirations for equality and new forms of thought.
The Names of History begins with the claim that history is a discipline in a sometimes contentious relation to science and to literature. What, Rancière asks, is the relation between the claims to science made by the Annales school and its reliance on the art of narrative? In order to answer this question, Rancière develops the concept of the “poetics of knowledge”, defined as “the set of literary procedures by which a discourse escapes literature, gives itself the status of a science, and signifies this status” (NH 8). Rancière’s “poetics of knowledge” is a way of analyzing how history produced what Michel Foucault called “truth effects” and what Rancière calls “the mode of truth” through which disciplines and forms of knowledge constitute themselves (ibid.). The modern age, writes Rancière, this “age of science” is also the “age of literature” and the “age of democracy”, and the goal of The Names of History is to discover the relation between the three.
Rancière begins his investigation of modern historiography by quoting the famous passage from Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the World in the Age of Philip II (1949) describing the death of the king. This scene is emblematic of Braudel’s desire to move away from the history of great leaders to the history of what Braudel calls the “humble masses” of the Renaissance. In this regard, one could claim that Braudel’s writings were democratic histories. At the same time, however, Rancière detects in Braudel a suspicion towards the masses that the new history claimed as one of its objects of study. For in his preface to The Mediterranean and the World in the Age of Philip II Braudel had also warned against putting too much stake in the writings and documents – the “masses of paper” – left by the poor, “eager to write” (ibid.: 17) but blind to their own actions and unconscious of what Braudel calls “the deeper realities of history” (ibid.). Rancière has always been a great practitioner of close reading and here he stops on a phrase Braudel uses to describe the poor: they were, Braudel tells us, “acharnés à écrire”. When Braudel calls their writing “masses of paper” – “ paperasses” – when he describes the poor as blind to their own actions, when he says that they are “acharnés à écrire”, he is implicitly claiming that these masses are speaking and writing and thinking out of turn. “Acharner” is the verb of relentless and misguided effort, and Braudel’s use of this term reveals, according to Rancière, the historian’s suspicion towards the speaking poor, the writing people, the thinking masses. At work in Braudel’s history is a “Renaissance of the poor” that denies that the poor had any sort of knowledge about the times in which they lived. This same historical approach repeatedly claims that the masses are un-knowing and that they act in ignorance and misrecognition. This leads Rancière to conclude that at the very moment that these humble masses are introduced onto the stage of history, they “immediately disappear from the scene” (ibid.). What Kristin Ross has called Rancière’s “battle with strategies whose aim is the suppression of time” is also a battle with strategies whose aim is the suppression of the thought, will and reason of the poor (Ross 2009: 22).
The arguments in The Names of History were first developed in a series of lectures coinciding with the bicentennial of the French Revolution, and one suspects that beyond Braudel, the real object of Rancière’s critique may have been Frangois Furet and his famous premise in Interpreting the French Revolution (1975, English translation 1981) that the French Revolution was a non-event. At the core of Furet’s book is this claim that individuals – in this case Revolutionaries – had no real understanding of their actions. Published after the author’s own conversion from communism to a centrist neoliberalism, Furet’s study is an attempt to remove the Revolution from the grips of what he called a cartel des gauches school of historiography. What Furet wanted was a “cooling off” of the interpretations of the Revolution (Furet 1981: 10) which meant, in effect, a move away from what he saw as leftist, progressive and sentimentalizing approaches to the history of France. To do this, Furet needed to separate the actions of the Revolutionaries from their own thoughts. “[A]ny conceptualisation of the history of the Revolution”, Furet wrote, “must begin with a critique of the idea of revolution as experienced and perceived by its actors, and transmitted by their heirs, namely, the idea that it was a radical change and the origin of a new era” (ibid.: 14). To think the French Revolution, according to Furet, one must first reject the Revolutionaries’ perception of their action. One must deny that they knew what they were doing. This is the sad revelation of Furet’s title: his own interpretation starts by denying that the actors and their heirs could correctly interpret their own actions and words. And to buttress his claim, Furet turned to Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution, whose main thesis was that the Revolution had brought nothing new to France. The Jacobins may have thought they were creating a new society but they were actually completing the work of the state consolidation of power begun with Richelieu.
Certainly, Rancière has no interest in defending Albert Soboul and the official historiography of the French Communist Party, nor would he necessarily disagree with Tocqueville’s claims that the Jacobins had consolidated state power. Rather, the poetics of knowledge he puts in place allows him to locate and question those moments when scholars and experts, those whom Rancière calls savants, erect boundaries between their understanding and the misunderstanding they attribute to others. For Rancière:
No well-defined boundary separates the discourse of the woodworker who is the object of science from the discourse of science itself. After all is said and done, to trace these boundaries is to trace the boundary between those who have thought through this question and those who have not.
(TBD 11)
The Names of History denounces a form of hermeneutic oppression in which the thought, words and actions of others, in particular the working poor, are turned into forms of non-thought, misconceptions and eventually silence.
In all this, Jules Michelet stands as a paradoxical founding father. Michelet was the great Romantic historian, an indefatigable writer, an unrepentant literary stylist and a staunch advocate of the Republic. Still, according to Rancière, Michelet’s histories have a difficult relation with the words and gestures of the people that they put on stage. Michelet’s writing initiated “a revolution in the poetic structures of knowledge” (NH 42), but at the same time put in place the conditions that would allow later generations of historians, such as Braudel and Furet, to erase the thought and actions of the humble masses.
In order to reveal Michelet’s paradoxical revolution, Rancière turns to the famous distinction proposed by the linguist Emile Benveniste between “story” (histoire) and “discourse” (discours). “Story” is an enunciation that relates past events, relies on the past tense, supposes the absence of the speaking subject and proclaims the truth about the past. “Discourse”, for its part, is an enunciation that presupposes a speaking subject and an interlocutor, relies on first-person pronouns, readily uses the present tense, and is tied to persuasion and argumentation (Benveniste 1966: 237–50). For Rancière, the radical innovation of Michelet’s history is that he combines these two forms of enunciation. Michelet writes history in the present tense; he gives to the present, and to his own voice as a historian, the truth usually reserved for the impersonal declarations of historical narrative. He “breaks the system of oppositions” (NH 48) between the “present of declarations” and the “narrative prestige” of the past tense that had dominated forms of writing throughout the ancien régime. There is no doubt that, for Rancière, Michelet is the historian of the new democratic age. Michelet made the archives speak and showed us the paperwork of the poor, the documents and traces left by the actors of the Revolution. In this, according to Rancière, Michelet writes as the voice of a new historical moment, what Rancière calls the age of literature and what he will very soon come to label the “aesthetic regime”. This age of literature is defined by a new form of perception of the world in which laws of genre as well as social hierarchies have given way to the disorder of art and the arbitrariness of democracy. Rancière has spoken of this new age as characterized by the “reversal of the hierarchies of genre”, that is, the breakdown of the rules that governed poetics from Aristotle to Voltaire and that fixed for each subject an appropriate mode of expression. After 1800, these rules give way to a poetic principle that dissolved the “necessary connection between a type of subject and a form of expression” (PA 53). This is the “poetic revolution” that Stendhal evokes in 1823 when he summoned his generation to write new tragedies, tragedies in prose whose subject could be anyone at all (Stendhal 1970: 51). Tragedies were no longer reserved for kings and princes, and history was no longer a genre reserved for rulers and diplomats. This is precisely what is going on in Michelet’s histories, according to Rancière. By mixing “ histoire” and “ discours”, Michelet mixes narrative genres and creates a new way of speaking the truth about history. The birth of the new subject of history – the people – corresponds precisely to the invention of new poetic forms. This is how Rancière can conclude that in “affirming itself in its absoluteness, in unbinding itself from mimesis and the division of genres, literature makes history possible as a discourse of the truth” (NH 51).
But as enthusiastic as Rancière seems to be about Michelet’s “revolution”, he remains cautious about the legacy. For when Michelet begins to speak about history in the present tense, he neutralizes what Rancière calls “the appearance of the past” (NH 49). By mixing “story” and “discourse”, Michelet sets up what Rancière calls “an essential poetic structure of the new historical knowledge” (ibid.), the historian’s claim that “all” is true. By speaking of past events in the present, Michelet erases the uncertainties of histories. By speaking in maxims, these grammatical bundles of truth, the historian is erasing the speech, the events – in a word the disturbances – of the past. Michelet shows the paperwork of the poor, but in his paraphrases he papers over “the democratic disturbance of speech” (NH 90). And, in a surprising turn of phrase, Rancière writes that Michelet, like Plato, has traded in “the dead letter in the name of living speech” (NH 50). The phrase is surprising in its evocation of Derrida’s critique of logocentrism, and while Rancière has rarely commented upon Derrida’s work, this one phrase points to momentary alliance in an investigation of the ways in which language participates both in the presence and in the disappearance of the past (Guerlac & Cheah 2009).
The Names of History raises far-reaching questions about how the production of knowledge is tied to the production of silence. Rancière’s is a corrective voice, suspicious, like Roland Barthes, of “scientific arrogance”, those moments when claims to authority become gestures of intimidation and domination (Barthes 2007: 152). What unites Rancière and the late Barthes is this kind of wariness towards claims of authority coming from the scientific community, especially in the humanities. This does not mean that Rancière is advocating a generalized indeterminacy, but rather that he is intent upon identifying the stultification that comes when the savant claims that there are those who know and those who do not know, those who understand and those who cannot, those who see the ideological domination and those who persist in acting in blindness, illusion or misrecognition.
The debate with the historians is thus a continuation of the founding principle of Rancière’s work, that democracy and education come about only when we presuppose the equality of intelligence of everyone with everyone else. Along with books such as The Nights of Labour and The Ignorant Schoolmaster, in which Rancière works through this presumption of equality, he has also dedicated a sizeable amount of his scholarship to ferreting out forms of knowledge that explicitly or implicitly deny the thought of ordinary men and women. This work is at the heart of The Philosopher and his Poor (1983, English translation 1991), which begins with a critique of “Plato’s lie”, the philosopher’s division of the world into those who can philosophize and those who cannot. One of Rancière’s boldest claims is that the core of the Western philosophical tradition rests upon this initial gesture of intellectual arrogance in which philosophy claimed for itself the right to think and handed down to others the virtue of manual labour. This is what Rancière calls stultification, and this stultification is also at work in Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology. In Bourdieu’s The Inheritors (1964, English translation 1979) and Reproduction (1970, English translation 1990), his famous studies on the ways in which socially dominant classes maintain their domination through education and taste, Rancière identified what he called Bourdieu’s “tautology” (SP 366). Here is how Rancière sums up Bourdieu’s approach: children of the working class are excluded from the university because they ignore the real reasons for their exclusion. And this ignorance is the product of the very system that excludes them. Only the sociologist can reveal to the poor the rules that govern their exclusion from higher education. The triumph of the sociologist thus depends upon the continued ignorance of the poor.
Rancière’s attacks on Bourdieu have been scathing at times, and Rancière enthusiasts run the risk of overlooking the real breakthroughs in Bourdieu’s work. Any reflection on pedagogy would, it seems to me, be severely lacking if it rejected out of hand Bourdieu’s attempts to expose the mechanisms of social domination. Still, Rancière’s point is well taken: a premise in Bourdieu’s thought is that society is governed by hidden forces that only the expert can detect, and that the poor, because they are poor, will never be able to see without the assistance of the scholar.
At the heart of Rancière’s poetics of knowledge we thus find a critique of demystification, this hermeneutic process that claims to unveil hidden truths. Since the end of the Second World War, in France at least, demystification had been one of the most useful intellectual tools of the Left, allowing critics and scholars to reveal forms of power and ideological constructions that often operated by making themselves invisible. But this mechanism also served to maintain another form of power, that of the critics, scholars and intellectuals who deployed it and who, in deploying it, presupposed that the audience could not see the truth on its own. Demystification, whether coming from the public intellectual or the teacher, is part of what, at the end of a stunning essay on Roberto Rossellini’s film Europe 51, Rancière calls the “stupefaction”, the abrutissement of the public by “well-meaning souls” intent upon protecting us from the power of images and the excesses of language (SVLP 130).
In The Names of History Rancière adopts the term “heretical history” to describe those writings, thoughts and actions that have been papered over and silenced by scholars working in the archives. The term is apt. Heresy is a dialogue with the invisible, with silenced voices and hidden bodies. It is invariably oppositional and dedicated to recovering the moments when what Rancière calls “a hitherto unknown subject of speech” (NH 92) makes itself heard.
In an illuminating essay, the historian Arlette Farge has written that Rancière’s work is dedicated to teaching us how not to fear time, or language or even death (Farge 1997: 466). Rancière’s work takes the form of an attempt to restore, to account for and to remain open to the “excesses of language” of “heretical history” that academic disciplines and forms of science have often silenced. From his earliest works, Rancière has attempted to construct a counter-history, a history that acknowledges the thinking of the working classes and that restores the possibility of progressive politics. The Nights of Labour, is a detailed demonstration of how certain workers around 1830 struggled for their emancipation not by making another Revolution, but by writing poetry, reading Goethe and Chateaubriand, imagining utopias, publishing pamphlets, dressing up as bourgeois and speaking in public. Take, for example, a passage about love. In one of the archives in which Rancière spent many years, he found a letter from a woodworker named Gauny to a friend who had helped him in a moment of despair: “’On my brow when you spilled the light of dawn, when the dew of your life spilled on my tempest-tossed ground, no, I was no longer from here, I had escaped from the revolts of my being … I have become a flower’” (NL 122). This, for Rancière, is not a simple declaration of love and friendship from one worker to another; it is a reconfiguration of what can be said and done by individuals whom the institutions of society have attempted to turn into unthinking manual labourers. It is an uncalculating exchange where love is given freely. It is the creation of “a community of excess” in which Rancière locates what he calls the “overturning of a world” by workers who challenge the roles assigned to them by society’s divisions of labour. Rancière’s study is a magisterial work on emancipation as performance. Heretical history, as Rancière practises it, is a form of working with texts that remains open to how words and images can reshape our understanding of the world. This was Rancière’s goal when he turned to the workers’ archives to write The Nights of Labour, and this has guided Rancière’s work from the archives through his current writings on contemporary art and forms of spectatorship.
In this journey, Rancière occasionally cites fellow travellers, and near the end of The Names of History, he calls forth British historian E. P Thompson’s 1966 work The Making of the English Working Class. With this book, Thompson produced a landmark study on how to retrieve the silent narratives of history from what he called “the enormous condescension of posterity” (Thompson 1966: 12). What Thompson described in his great book was a working class seizing language in order to constitute itself as a social and political entity, and individuals using speech in order to constitute themselves as thinking and voting subjects. In this history from below, the work of the historian consists in scouring the archives in order to restore to individuals their capacity for action, these moments of subjectivization in which the working class was “present at its own making” (ibid.: 9). For Thompson, as for Rancière a few years later, restoring to individuals their capacity to effect concrete historical change also meant taking seriously their capacity to think, to understand their situation in their own terms. One can imagine how sympathetic Rancière must have been to Thompson’s description of a seemingly spontaneous riot in 1795: in this “mob” action Thompson located what he calls “unsuspected complexities” and a “legitimizing notion of right” that subtended and justified the workers’ actions. Only a few years after the publication of Thompson’s book, Rancière would begin his attacks on Louis Althusser’s advocacy of theory over spontaneous action, and what Rancière saw as the transfer of power in Althusserian theory from the militant working classes to the public intellectual. For Rancière, as for E. P Thompson, the lesson of Althusser was a cautionary tale about the poverty of theory.
There may be one more point in common between the English historian and the French philosopher, and that has to do with their insistence upon naming the actors of the history they are recounting. As we read Thompson, we encounter well-known figures of the time, Thomas Paine, for instance, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and Wordsworth as an early enthusiast of the French Revolution. But we also discover Thomas Spenser, a coiner, the Reverend William Winterbotham, the attorney John Frost, sent to the pillory for having publicly declared: “I believe in equality” (Thompson 1966: 124), Edward Marcus Despard, a Luddite and advocate of Irish independence, beheaded for treason in 1803, Gravener Henson, an early union leader, Citizen Lee, a vitriolic pamphleteer. These are precisely the names that have been silenced not only by the traditional history of kings and diplomacy but also by the structuralist analyses of later Marxist historians. These names stand as instances of an alternative history, a “heretical history” of political speech and struggles for “egalitarian and democratic values”. The names of history are words in an archive, but they are also traces of action and of thought, a record of the action and the thought that is both most significant and most fleeting in the struggle for equality.
Where does Rancière’s polemic leave us today? To be sure, most historians have moved beyond the model of the Annales school. Historians and sociologists working today are certainly aware of the difficulties tied to uncovering the names, words and voices of the archive. British cultural studies, E. P Thompson, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, feminist history, subaltern studies and the work of Ranajit Guha have, at least since the 1980s, shifted the humanities away from the structural and statistical history that was the object of Rancière’s polemic. These approaches all coincide with Rancière’s work in a number of ways, including their attempt to recover individuals as active and fully conscious participants in their own history. Ranajit Guha has written that in their studies of rebellions, historians have too often neglected the consciousness of the rebels themselves: “Historiography has been content to deal with the peasant rebel merely as an empirical person or member of a class, but not as an entity whose will and reason constituted the praxis called rebellion” (Guha 1994: 337). Readers of Rancière have been quick to pronounce on the radical innovation of his theories, but it seems to me that the real strength of Rancière’s writing can be located in its alliances with scholars and artists working outside France and thinking, like Rancière, about the relation between the production of knowledge and egalitarian practices.
Still, there may be one aspect to Rancière’s work that distinguishes it from that of the historians and philosophers with whom he is in dialogue. This has to do with what might be called his defence of literature. What Rancière has called the age of literature can be understood in two ways. In the first sense, Rancière is describing what he sees as an epistemological break situated around 1800 in which new forms of representation and new ways of perceiving the world (including the new definition of the word “literature” by Madame de Stael) were introduced. Shortly after writing The Names of History, Rancière would rebrand this “age of literature” the “aesthetic regime”, a wider-reaching phrase used to describe a world in which laws of genre and social hierarchies have given way to the disorder of art and the arbitrariness of democracy. But when he speaks of literature, Rancière is also designating a phenomenon in which literary production – novels, poetry, speeches, philosophy, history – is accessible to all, to every citizen of the nation willing to put in the time and the effort of reading.
For Rancière, the defining characteristic of literature is what he calls its “availability”. In The Names of History, after evoking Tacitus’ description of an uprising of soldiers against their officers, Rancière describes a kind of reappropriation.
And when the language of Tacitus has, as a dead language, taken on a new life, when it has become the language of the other, the language whose appropriation procures a new identity, the overly talented students in the schools and seminaries will fashion, in their own language and in a direct style, new harangues; the self-taught will in their turn take these as models … All who have no place to speak will take hold of those words and phrases, those argumentations and maxims, subversively constituting a new body of writing.
(NH 30)
This is a precise description of the purpose of reading literature: talented students but also autodidacts and, in the end, all those who are not supposed to read these texts, will be able to seize their words and phrases in order to form new texts of their own. Rancière makes the bold, though somewhat speculative, conclusion that it is precisely in reading about the revolts of slaves and soldiers in Tacitus that the revolutionaries in 1789 were able to imagine their own revolution and put into words their claims for equality. Literature participates, and will continue to participate, in the democratic project not only because of the ideas it transmits, but because it is available to men and women who, in the standard distribution of social roles, have no business reading or writing. Literature is the site where anyone can read anything at all and anyone at all can write. The democracy of literature, writes Rancière in a more recent book, hinges on its availability to all (PL 21–2). The work of the teacher is to struggle for this availability.
To argue that the writing of Flaubert and Balzac is available to all and that anyone and everyone can “claim” literature is not without its dangers. This defence of literature depends upon specific local conditions – generalized literacy, availability of books, free and mandatory public education – that are fragile at best. What is more, several generations of critics in France and the USA have shown that canonical literature has the potential for being complicit with a nation’s power structures, most specifically with an educational system bent on sorting out gifted students, and distinguishing a literary education from vocational training. To claim that Tacitus’ “dead language” will necessarily end up in the hands of revolutionary autodidacts may be placing too much faith in the democratic potential of literature, not to mention the good will of librarians.
Rancière would, of course, admit that there are structural and institutional impediments to literacy, and that these are a measure of an unjust society. This said, his great innovation has been to refuse to stop at the observation that illiteracy exists. Rancière’s entire career has been devoted to locating sites of equality precisely where others have claimed that equality does not, or could not, exist. After all, Joseph Jacotot discovered his universal method of education when he made the incongruous decision to ask his Flemish students to read Fénelon’s Télémaque. A worker thinking of equality when she should be sewing the queen’s dress, a cabinetmaker reading Goethe, coiners dedicating themselves to learning “the secrets of versification” (NL 118), these are the instances of equality that Rancière has set himself the task of bringing to our eyes. And if Rancière’s work has found such an enthusiastic reception among readers of all conditions, it is, perhaps, because of his assertion that literature is a common language, that we access freely, that we are all capable of understanding, that demands no specialized form of knowledge and requires from us nothing but effort and desire.