Alison Ross
A provisional description of the concept of “literarity” needs to bring out Rancière’s distinctive intermeshing of the fields of aesthetics and politics. As we shall see in the first section, the concept of “literarity” is what the political term “equality” would do were it to become an aesthetic principle of analysis. It is not that “literarity” transposes a set of political concerns into aesthetics, but that if one were to ask what “equality” could mean in aesthetics, then one would answer: “literarity”.
How, we might ask, are we supposed to understand the political value of “equality” in the context of literature; how are we supposed to understand what “equality” does in the case of literature? In Rancière’s telling, the modern age is the age of equality. One of the features of this age, as we shall see, is the ways words and things are separated and united (FW 13–14; NH 57, 93). It is these relations between words and things that reconfigure the sensory field of experience and most especially social experience. It is important to emphasize, however, that the modern poetic revolutions are just one part of a broader revolution of societies’ frameworks. In so far as literature uses words to endow things with meaning and in so far as anything at all is able to bear expressive meaning, “equality” is germane to understanding the significance and effects of the modern poetic revolution. The events, the status of words and the institutions of modern literary production can all be analysed under the concept of “literarity” precisely because they are not a “simple matter of words” (NH 7). Modern literature disregards the hierarchies of the old representational systems. As such its “aesthetic” functions are immediately “political” because its use of words points in particularly powerful fashion to the possibility of setting up new relations to things that promise to reconfigure the sense data of experience. But then, if we look outside the field of “literature”, “literarity” in turn extends into politics as a specific structural feature of political speech, namely, as a condition of its democratization. A different cluster of questions intervenes from this angle: who can be heard and understood? Under what conditions does the democratization of speech extend effective audibility to a speaker? One may look at Rancière’s notion of parole muette (mute speech) as a snapshot of this dynamic movement between politics and aesthetics. Mute speech is his way of critically marking the factors involved in the democratization of words as well as the consequences of the inclusion of “equality” into the literary field.
“Literarity” brings with it layers of meaning from a number of different traditions and gathers nuances from the specific contexts in which Rancière deploys it, such as the analysis of the status of words in historical narratives, literature, philosophy and politics. The function of the term is inherently critical. As we shall see in the second section, “literarity” has a diagnostic function in Rancière’s discussion of the innovations and legacies of nineteenth-century and modernist literature. When he discusses Balzac, Melville, Flaubert, Mallarmé, Proust, Woolf or Blan-chot, Rancière wishes to identify the shared assumptions that distinguish modern literature as a field. He wants to make intelligible in a pointed way the new conditions under which literature occurs with the rise of modernity. Specifically, he wants to highlight the interactions between modern literature and modern democracy, on the one hand, and the new social and political modes of democratic suppression, on the other. His discussion of literature, like his discussions of the other arts, has the status of a counsel that calls for vigilance regarding the modern constitution of supposedly autonomous aesthetic fields. In the case of literature he wishes to underline the fragility, but also the political potentialities, of the distinction between the literary use of words in depicting the prosaic and “merely” prosaic, that is, non-literary, “common” words.
From his perspective, the practice of modern literature is a knot. Untangling the strands that literature ties together is also a new way of diagnosing the stakes and consequences of its practice. “Expressivity” and “mute speech” are two different ways of naming the knots that compose the literary field. The first critically evokes the Romantic assumption that the world is full of meaning. According to this assumption, the bodies of things are saturated, like hieroglyphs, with meaning and significance (PoL 17). The second underlines the paradox of this assumption. It is otherwise silent, prosaic things that literature makes eloquent; but literature also discovers how obstinately silent these things can be, how, in other words, any attempt at giving a literary rendering of them remains problematic, contingent, fraught and self-contradictory. The obstinate silence of things is productive: it demands of each writer and also in the exchanges between different writers constantly new efforts to make things speak (La parole muette). Above all, “mute speech” is used to articulate a critical perspective on pretensions to mastery. The expression of the plenitude of meaning in things is “mute” because it always escapes the posture of authority of the supposed masters of language, those such as the consecrated writers and experts who are presumed to own the “means” of expression (NH 54).
Rancière uses this critical perspective to defend his ontology as well as to characterize the functioning of discursive protocols in diverse fields of knowledge. His position appeals to two different sources of evidence: first, the obstinate silence of things to expressivity means that they exceed the power of words to name or evoke them in any absolute way; and secondly, words themselves are, in a way, “silent”, that is, they exceed the authority of those who speak the meaning of the meaningful things. Words are incapable of placing things and bodies in fully determined positions. This is because there is no necessary structural link between “ways of doing, ways of being and ways of speaking”. Rather, Rancière’s ontology holds that the relations between ways of doing, being and speaking “are” malleable and democratic. Words, accordingly, bear a political potency to alter the relations between the order of bodies and the order of words: it is when those who had been rendered inaudible by the socially authorized distribution of roles effectively communicate their claims that the social hierarchy is altered and new ways of doing, being and saying come into view.
In addition to its role in the discussions of the prospects and conditions of modern literature, the vocabulary of literarity is also used to identify the work of discursive protocols in knowledge fields like historiography (Michelet) and philosophy (Deleuze). As we shall see in the third section, in these cases too the diagnostic function of the term “literarity” carries an explicitly critical aim. This latter is elaborated in different ways in Rancière’s discussion of literature and discursive knowledge protocols, on one hand, and in his work on politics, on the other. Further, because he intends to fuse aesthetics with politics the critical function of literarity in these respective contexts needs to be carefully specified. Above all, it is important to be alert to the effects of these different contexts so that the critical edge of Rancière’s commentaries on literary procedures is not obscured. I will briefly describe the different functions of literarity in light of his fusion of aesthetics and politics in the fourth section.
The term “literariness” is used by Rancière in his 1992 book, Les noms de l’histoire (1992, English translation 1994 as The Names of History). This book develops the critical import of what he terms the “excess of words” and refers, as well, to the status of the human being “as a literary animal” (NH 52). However, the concept of “literarity” first appears in the 1995 book – La Mésentente: Politique et philosophie (1995, English translation 1998 as Disagreement). This is striking given that this book is a book of political theory. Its place here indicates that the term cannot be successfully contained to the context of his studies in literature. Rather, it is the orientation of Rancière’s political theory that frames the use and even motivates his commentaries on the topic of literarity in the case of modern literature. In Disagreement, Rancière defines literarity as a threefold excess of words (i) over what they name, (ii) over the requirements for the production of the necessities of life, and (iii) over the modes of communication, which legitimate and reinforce a given social order. With this definition Rancière develops a structural analysis of the relation between word-use and social order. In particular, he aims to show that it is the structural excess of words over their actual use (production of necessities) and meaning (communication and naming) that disrupts hierarchical social orders. It is because words exceed their function of naming that the distribution or positioning of things in social space is always provisional. Similarly, words exceed needs and thus have disposition over the social hierarchies that govern the division of labour. Finally, words are not fully identified with the patterns of established communication, and this means that they may be a resource for the redistribution of the social roles and positions of other patterns of social order. More precisely, words are able to effectively communicate new redistributions of roles and positions and to do so on account of their structural excess over prevailing distributions. Rancière links these three types of literary excess to his “ontological” characterization of “ways of doing, ways of being and ways of saying” as the fabric of social order. In his view, the sharing out of the sensible and the apportioning of positions within the sensible are the hierarchical function of the police. Words are ways of rendering effective the redistribution of the order of sensibility.
Rancière reformulates Aristotle’s dictum regarding “man’s” status as an animal with the additional capacity for politics in order to argue that “[t]he modern political animal is first a literary animal, caught in the circuit of a literariness that undoes the relationships between the order of words and the order of bodies that determine the place of each” (D 37). His understanding of words as able to effect “a disiden-tification” from “the naturalness of a place” supports a perspective on politics that takes “words” in the expansive sense of contributing to and shaping places and sites of intelligibility (D 36). In the context of politics Rancière thus focuses on the relation between the structural features of words and bodies. But he also wishes to mark the specifically modern democratic “circuit of a literariness that undoes the relationships between the order of words and the order of bodies”. Thus, in Disagreement, Rancière gives the example of the Aventine Hill succession when the plebs carry out a “series of speech acts linking the life of their bodies to words and word use” (D 25). This scene, in which the Aventine plebs establish “another partition of the perceptible” in constituting themselves “as speaking beings sharing the same properties as those who deny them these” (D 24) is retold by the nineteenth-century French thinker, Pierre-Simon Ballanche. Ballanche reprimands the Latin historian Livy for failing to understand this event as “anything other than a revolt”. Ballanche restages the modern significance of the event of the Aventine succession in terms of the pivotal status of speech in reconstituting social order (D 23). From this example we can see that Rancière understands the political to be the exercise of a particular kind of speech. More specifically, Rancière cites Ballanche’s modern retelling of the Aventine event in order to show that
politics exists because the logos is never simply speech, because it is always indissolubly the account that is made of this speech: the account by which a sonorous emission is understood as speech, capable of enunciating what is just, whereas some other emission is merely perceived as a noise signalling pleasure or pain, consent or revolt.
(D 22–3, original emphasis)
In contrast to his examination of the structural features of words in their capacity to enable individuals to transcend their social place, the use of “literarity” in his discussions of modern literature accentuates the historical frame of reference that gives literarity its modern political significance. Rancière understands modern literature to inaugurate what he calls the “aesthetic regime of the arts”. This regime installs a particular conception of sensibility in which any and all things are saturated with aesthetic significance or meaning. Rancière has an ambivalent attitude towards this regime. From one perspective, the equality it installs regarding what can have aesthetic significance means that the line separating aesthetic from non-aesthetic objects can now be seen to be tenuous. According to Rancière, this insight comes into view first in modern literature in the frailty of the distinctions between poetic and prosaic words, as well as that of worthy and unworthy objects for literary treatment. One feature of this insight is the generalized status of the poetic, which extends, for instance, to Kant’s account of nature’s “cipher language”, which Kant had used to defend the idea that nature “communicates” moral ideas (PM 58).
In particular, Rancière details the way that the aesthetic regime of the arts expresses the life of a people, and in this respect markedly departs from the classical, Aristotelian rules regarding the representation of the lives of gods and heroes in terms of the form and style appropriate to noble lives (PM 62). It is important to keep in mind that he supposes that there is an intimate parallel between the social system of order and the order of genres and styles in classical aesthetics. Rancière’s analysis dovetails with Erich Auerbach’s position in Mimesis (Auerbach 1953). The aesthetic regime of the arts is important to him because it refuses the distinction between the poetic depiction of noble action and merely prosaic life, and thus expresses the structural features of “equality”.
From another perspective, however, the aesthetic regime suppresses the consequences of its democratic conception of aesthetic significance. The crux of the contradiction of this regime lies in its very principle of aesthetic equality. According to this principle, the regime sweeps away the hierarchy of genres and aesthetic styles, and yet the aesthetic regime replaces the hierarchies pertaining to aesthetic treatment with the defence of a singular concept of art. Thus one of the ways Rancière characterizes modern literature is in terms of this contradiction between the equality of words and the idea of literature as a discrete field of writing. He uses the same insight regarding the frailty of the distinction between art and non-art to characterize the visual arts and cinema. In each of these contexts he also specifically makes the point that an art is first of all an “idea” of art (FF; FI). His discussion of the knots and contradictions of modern literature clearly has the status of a critical commentary on the uneven features of the aesthetic regime of the arts. For instance, “literarity” is used to mark out the paradoxical limit at which “literature” is indistinguishable from other forms of discourse. Thus conceived, the term identifies the discursive procedures that establish the scientific credentials of modern academic discourses like history, sociology and political science. In literature, as in these latter discourses, it is the excess of words over what they name and communicate that renders their meanings malleable and susceptible to being reshaped.
We can understand the force of such commentaries in relation to Rancière’s view that literature, like the political practice of literary dis-incorporation, carves out new conditions for sensory perception. This position is also the source for his criticisms of the aesthetic regime of the arts: the political significance of such a reframing of perceptual conditions is lost when literature is deprived of its connections to the field of the prosaic, or non-literary. It is in this context that Rancière draws on Hegel’s articulation of the features of Romantic art (PM 62, 65–7). Hegel describes many of the features of what Rancière terms the “aesthetic regime of the arts” under the category of (the dissolution of) Romantic art (Hegel 1998: 81). Art no longer has to be fine art; among the signs of this alteration in what and how a work is classified is the incorporation of the everyday into works of art. In the case of literature Hegel refers specifically to the incorporation of ugly things as topics for writing and notes as well the lack of proportion in the way such things are treated. Heinrich von Kleist is his favourite example of this phenomenon. Hegel also describes a similar disregard for “what” is an appropriate object for art and “how” it may be represented in the case of painting (Hegel 1998: 593–602).
We see that there is an intimate connection between the use of lit-erarity as a tool of criticism in literature and politics. This intimacy follows from Rancière’s original thesis regarding the establishment of equality as a structural feature of social life in modernity, which, however, emerges only with revolutions. This thesis underpins the relation between literarity in the contexts of literature and politics as well as his tendency to focus on post-revolutionary French literature, although he is also interested in its legacies in modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf. The convergences due to the way he uses the concept in these contexts show that “literarity” cannot be fully or satisfactorily defined in either context. Thus Rancière describes “literarity” both as the “contradiction” and the “essential link” between politics and literature (FW 108). To elucidate this claim, I would now like to look in more detail at Rancière’s treatment of the concept of literarity in the context of his discussion of modern literature.
The main theme in Rancière’s discussion of the paradoxes of literature is the fragility of the very concept of “literature”. This fragility has to do with the difficulty in finding criteria able to adequately distinguish between the words of literature and non-literary words. Rancière explains this difficulty as the outcome of the passing of the classical and normative belles-lettres. This passing inaugurates the modern literary field. Instead of the classical rules of genre that determine appropriate subjects for poetic treatment as well as the style in which they are to be treated, modern literature is “democratic” in the sense that it speaks about prosaic matters in styles that are indifferent to what they treat; anything may be a topic for literature. This democratic attitude to topic and style mirrors the post-revolutionary shift in the hierarchical distribution of roles and capacities within the social body. Noble action belonged to the realm of the poetical, and prosaic life had its own territory. After the Revolution:
The traditional expressive relationships between words, feeling, and positions collapsed … There were no longer noble words and ignoble words, just as there was no longer noble subject matter and ignoble subject matter. The arrangement of words was no longer guaranteed by an ordered system of appropriateness between words and bodies.
(PA 57)
Rancière’s favourite example of this “democratic literarity” is the consummate French stylist Gustave Flaubert, who was in fact apolitical (PoL 21). Rancière makes frequent mention of how Flaubert’s Madame Bovary treats the mediocre affairs of a farm girl according to Flaubert’s dictum that “style is an absolute way of seeing things”. Against the hierarchical rules of belles-lettres, Emma Bovary’s love affairs are a worthy subject matter; but this is the case not because Flaubert’s style dignifies them, as if they could be beautified and adorned in the manner of a kind of “literary” redemption of mediocrity. Instead, for Flaubert, the absolute manner of seeing things refers specifically to “the manner of enjoying sensations as pure sensations, disconnected from the sensorium of ordinary experience” (WHY 241). Flaubert’s writing thus belongs to the constellation of the “aesthetic regime of the arts” on account of the way he describes what “happens” at the micro-level of sensations. Whenever something “happens” in the novel, “the real content of the event” is the sensory details, which Flaubert meticulously describes, such as the “’draught beneath the door’” that blows “’a little dust over the flagstones, and [Charles] watched it creep along’”; this, for instance, is the “content” of the event that occurs “when Charles first falls for Emma”:
When Emma falls for Rodolphe, she perceives little gleams of gold about his pupils, smells a perfume of lemon and vanilla, and looks at the long plume of dust raised by the stagecoach. And when she first falls for Leon, “weeds streamed out in the limpid water like green wigs tossed away. Now and then some fine-legged insects alighted on the tip of a reed or crawled over a water-lily leaf. The sunshine darted its rays through the little blue bubbles on the wavelets that kept forming and breaking.” This is what happens: “little blue bubbles” on wavelets in the sunshine, or swirls of dust raised by the wind. This is what the characters feel and what makes them happy: a pure flood of sensations
(WHY 242, translation from Flaubert is Rancière’s own)
n this attention to micro-sensation Flaubert “follows the principle that constitutes literature as such”: “there are no noble subjects or ignoble subjects … there is no border separating poetic matters from prosaic matters, no border between what belongs to the poetical realm of noble action and what belongs to the territory of prosaic life” (WHY 237). But he also radicalizes this principle in so far as he makes it the task of “literature” to detail the register of micro-sensations. As a consequence, his novels may be characterized in terms of the schism between the failings of characters “who are still trapped in the old poetics with its combinations of actions, its characters envisioning great ends, its feelings related to the qualities of persons, its noble passions opposed to everyday experience, and so on”, and the structuring perspective of the writing that places these characters in the new regime of the arts. This regime is a way of characterizing things in fundamental terms, of framing the experience of things within a new ontology of sensibility. And the principle of this ontology is that “life has no purpose. It is an eternal flood of atoms that keeps doing and undoing in new configurations” (WHY 243). Flaubert’s idiosyncratic Spinozism (which attempts the dissolution of the world into atoms) is one of the possible ways of implementing the general condition of modernity, which in Rancière’s account is favourably disposed to the destruction of social–political hierarchies. Thus he uses “literarity” as a new grammar for “the politics of literature”, which he specifically understands as the questioning of established ways of organizing in advance the perception of the sensible world (PM 108).
We can see that Rancière uses the example of Flaubert to make a number of points about the nature of words. He wishes to emphasize, for instance, that the politics of writing has nothing to do with the political commitments of writers, but concerns the way words partition the sensible, in this case making visible and audible a new way of experiencing things. For this reason, Flaubert’s aesthetic stands apart from the types of politically motivated criticisms it attracts. The negative reaction of his conservative contemporaries to his shunning of the hierarchies of belles lettres and the censure of his indifference to politics by writers like Sartre who speak in favour of politically committed literature are then both irrelevant to Rancière’s way of assessing things (PoL 11–12). What Rancière emphasizes in his treatment of Flaubert are the paradoxes that condition Flaubert’s conception of writing. Rancière thus does not argue against Flaubert’s aesthetic commitment to the writing of micro-sensations. Rather, he holds up to scrutiny Flaubert’s suppression of the consequences of literarity, which he did so much, at the same time, to pursue as faithfully as possible.
Ultimately, this leads to the provocative thesis that Flaubert had the well-known suicide, Emma Bovary, “killed” on account of her insubordinate desire to “decorate” her life and furnishings, as if “life” were under her “aesthetic” discretion, as if she too had disposition over “style” and, most crucially, as if “style” could be realized, against the features of the new aesthetic regime, in purchased “things”. Rancière phrases her punishment as a censure directed, before the fact, against what we now know as kitsch:
literature means to her a nice blotting pad and an artistic writing case. Art in her life means nice curtains on her windows, paper sconces for the candles, trinkets for her watch, a pair of blue vases on the mantelpiece, an ivory work box with a silver gilt thimble, and so on.
Such is the disease that the pure artist wants to display as the contrary of his art. We can give it its name: the aestheticization of everyday life. The expression does not yet exist at that time for sure. But the concern does. … Flaubert already deals with what Adorno will spell out as the problem of kitsch. Kitsch does not mean bad art, outmoded art. It is true that the kind of art which is available to the poor people is in general the one that the aesthetes have already rejected. But the problem lies deeper. Kitsch in fact means art incorporated into anybody’s life, art become part of the scenery and the furnishings of everyday life. In that respect, Madame Bovary is the first antikitsch manifesto.
(WHY 239–40)
For Rancière, Flaubert is representative of the stylistic disposition of a whole cohort of nineteenth-century authors like Victor Hugo whose writing about “the people” coexists with the wish that they remain enclosed in their beautiful silence (NL xxx). The people who do not understand the meaning of words are characterized as being in possession of a “mute eloquence” (ibid.). He makes a similar point about enclosing people in silence in the case of Jules Michelet who, he writes, substitutes the prolix words of the village scholars for the “picture of a silent people” (NH 45). In each of these cases the “chattering” of the mute letter is emphasized. This chattering is a consequence of the democratic status of the written word, which emancipates meaning from the ownership of any expert class and also encourages as well their expression of the wish for silence.
Flaubert wishes to protect Art: “if the future of Art lies in the equivalence of Art and nonartistic life, and if that equivalence is available to anybody, what remains specific to Art?” (WHY 238). In other words, Flaubert aims to disentangle two equalities: the equality of Art and non-artistic life from the equality that would make this latter available to just anybody. Against Flaubert: one of the functions of the concept of “literarity” is to show that this democracy of art and non-art is available to just anybody and this is so on account of the orphan status, the “muteness”, of words. It is worth noting the parallel with the case of Jacotot (see Chapter 2). Words can be appropriated by anyone (they do not require the authority of a mediator) and for this reason democracy is shown to be at work in education as much as it is in politics. Rancière also names “mute speech” “trop bavarde”, by which he means to underline the “indifferent chatter” of too many words (IE 34). This position draws on the ambiguity of Plato’s position in which the book is “at once silent and too loquacious” (IS 38). In his Phaedrus Plato compares the “solemn silence” of writing with the mute presence of a “painting”. In the same breath he objects to the way that “once it is written, every composition trundles about everywhere in the same way, in the presence both of those who know about the subject and of those who have nothing at all to do with it”, and he insists that this democracy of the written word requires “its father to help it; for it is incapable of either defending or helping itself” (Plato, Phaedrus, 275d5–e5).
Rancière’s use of the phrase “parole muette” emphasizes the reversibility of the position of “things” and “words” in modern literature. If the “things” that words name and poeticize are “mute”, then “words” too are “silent”; that is, they always stand ready for further elaboration or adaptation, and they do so, in no small measure, on account of the fact that they are “orphans” and hence without any authorizing figure able to police the ways by which, nor by whom, they are used and understood (PM; FW). Rancière often casts the words of literature in terms of Plato’s pejorative designation of “writing” as “silent”, by which he means that they are silent in the face of how they are used and understood. Words do not of themselves furnish any clarifying commentary or reproach (FW 3–4; PA 15).
Rancière, furthermore, is interested in the narrative consequences of Flaubert’s attempt to suppress this feature of words in the modern regime. Rancière describes how, for Flaubert, the “temptation” to put art in “real” life needs to be “singled out in one character and sentenced to death in the figure of that character, the character of the bad artist or the mistaken artist. Emma’s death is a literary death” (WHY 240). Similarly, the eponymous clerks Bouvard and Pécuchet find themselves unable to use the words of the books of medicine, philosophy, pedagogy, agronomy, geology and so on in their lives and end up returning to their old job of copying the words in books. This is Flaubert’s medicine “for the disease of literariness and its political disorder”; it quashes the aspiration for just anybody to use words in life and also dismisses its corollary, namely, that there is a continuity between the words of literature and life (PoL 22). Flaubert may quash the presumption that art could be in life (and thus open to anybody), but he writes precisely on the premise that life itself is already art. For this reason, his “treatment” of the disease of literarity is also
the self-suppression of literature. The novelist himself has nothing more to do than to copy the books that his characters are supposed to copy. In the end he has to undo his plot and blur the boundary separating the prose of “art for art’s sake” from the prose of the commonplace. When “art for art’s sake” wants to undo its link to the prose of democracy, it has to undo itself.
(Ibid.)
In his account of political equality Rancière draws attention to the structural contradiction of modern politics: the axiom of equality is the necessary presupposition of modern politics, but this axiom is constantly suppressed by the institutional organizations of social and political life. A similar contradiction provides the context for his pointed analyses of modern literature. Flaubert, for instance, rejects the consequences of literarity, but these consequences are also the condition of possibility for literature. Moreover, one of the chief consequences of literarity is the untenability of the distinction between literature and the commonplace, so that the condition of possibility for literature is also the mark of its fragility as a practice and category.
Rancière addresses the topic of this fragility in a number of places. For our purposes what is important is the critical perspective that this point opens up on the aesthetic regime of the arts – of which Flaubert is exemplary. The case of Flaubert shows that words have a structural excess over the modes of communication that legitimate what is “proper”, such as the distinction between “art” and “life” and, just as importantly, the policing of the hierarchy between who should speak and who should remain silent. In this respect, the new field of sensibility that the works of modern literature configure communicates a new distribution of the sensible. The excess of words refers in this case to the way that words exceed Flaubert’s attempt to retract the features of the field he depicts.
In general, Rancière’s terminology of “mute speech” designates the fundamental character of the different species of literature in the modern age of equality and democracy, from the sacralization of literature in Mallarmé to the privations of Blanchot, from the committed literature or conception of literature in Zola or Sartre to the indifference of Flaubert. Rancière wants to make these different forms and conceptions of writing intelligible aspects of the same constellation, namely, the contradictions that arise from the political project of speaking the egalitarian axiom of the modern age.
One of the key corollaries of this position is the way it opens a new perspective on the full variety of the different authors of the modern literary canon. Each writer responds in different ways to the contradictory specifications of the new regime of the art of writing that is literature. The fact that different writers respond in unique, locally specific ways to the exigencies of the literary regime shows that Rancière understands mute speech as a productive contradiction, and one, we might add, that is not confined to literature. Modern literature, it is true, inaugurates a new conception of the mute things of the world as forces able to speak. But this inauguration, in turn, installs new practices that are susceptible to analysis from the perspective of “literarity”.
Rancière’s theses regarding literature cannot be confined to the “new regime of writing” that literature constitutes, when one of the defining characteristics of this field is that it is unable to adequately differentiate itself from the field of non-literary words, and this as a direct consequence of the “new regime” it installs. Two examples of this paradox may be given here to show how Rancière’s formulation of the contradictions of literature, and especially his account of the absence of a border to separate poetic matters from prosaic matters, opens up an array of topics to the critical perspective of “literarity”.
(1) His work on the “poetics” of knowledge is especially instructive regarding the scope of this perspective. As Rancière tells it, the shift from the “representative” to the “aesthetic regime of the arts” is first and foremost a rejection of Aristotle’s hierarchy between poetry and history. Aristotle famously described poetry as “more philosophical” than history because “it deals with combinations of actions, while history deals with ‘life’, where things just happen without necessity, one after the other. Action versus life: the formula tied poetical hierarchy to social and political hierarchy” (WHY 237).
Now, it is clear that the core principle of the aesthetic regime – the refusal of the distinction between noble action and prosaic life – is both the principle that constitutes literature and a rehabilitation of the vocation of modern history vis-à-vis the hierarchy of Aristotelian poetics. This is true in the sense that Rancière explains: modern history is the discipline that finds meaning in the prosaic. We can cite as examples of the assumption of the meaning-laden status of the ordinary the histories that are written of mores and everyday practices (especially in the French Annales school), as well as the attempts to chart otherwise invisible social and economic changes through the use of statistical studies able to identify and track them (NH 100–101). But Rancière also wants to draw attention to the literary protocols that shape and enable such meaning and that also credential history, under these new conditions of meaning, as a science (see Chapter 8). He pursues a poetics of knowledge through literary resources, where the suppression of the contribution of these resources is the counterpart to Flaubert’s suppression of the consequences of literarity in the figure of the character of Emma Bovary. In particular, Rancière takes the example of Michelet’s practice of bringing the silent, mute subjects of history to voice. Michelet is used as the representative figure of the practices of modern historiography in much the same way that Flaubert was taken to be representative of the paradigms of modern literature. In the case of Michelet, the double reference to muteness as the condition under which things are brought to speech, and to the orphan status of speech, that is, the muteness of writing in the face of how and by whom it is circulated and understood, is emphatic.
Michelet’s narration of the “new subjects” of history belongs to the aesthetic regime of the arts and comports the constitutive contradictions of this regime: it attempts to speak the events, things and persons it describes and to suture thereby the gap between the past and its narration. Michelet endorses the Romantic idea of the expressivity, the plenitude of meaning that belongs to the world. He thereby commits the contradictions of “mute speech” because when he makes the past speak, he also encounters the difficulties of redeeming silent things in speech. Rancière argues that Michelet makes the silent voice of the meaning of things the voice of the figure of the conditional in order to give “a logical structure” to his images:
The only one who speaks is the only one who would be able to speak. The silent voice of the conditional is that which can come back to us only through the tombstone or the cries of the rocks: a voice without paper, a meaning indelibly inscribed in things, which one may read, which one would be able to read endlessly in the materiality of the objects of everyday life.
(NH 57)
But the narrative that wishes to “gather everything” is, in Rancière’s words, a “utopia … that does not know the emptiness of words” (SVLP 100). Further:
Beneath his pen the historian’s utopia becomes one with the end of literature. Literary excess is entirely absorbed into the ability to express a world in which there are only the living and the dead – none of those quasi beings produced by fiction – where all speech is the murmur of a well or the voice of a grave and makes manifest the configuration of a place or the state of a subject.
(SVLP 99–100)
Like Flaubert, Michelet brings into visibility a new register of experience that an older distribution of the sensible had obscured from view (NH 45). He inaugurates a practice of history that shows us the mute subjects of history (not just women and children, but also the “silence” of the elements and quotidian things like mud) (PoL 18); but, as such, his practice does not just utilize the features of literary excess but it also disowns them in the last instance, since it undermines the capacity of the dispossessed and silent to author their own speech (NH 54).
Here again it is possible to see Rancière criticize the way that the aesthetic regime that frames the practice of modern historiography effects a dis-placement, but stops short of fully embracing the principle of “literarity” that enshrines dis-placement as a feature of words. Again, Rancière interprets this shortfall in terms of the suppression of the political implications of radical equality: historians, like the poets and writers of his analyses of modern literature, shy away from the equality that their work does so much to uncover.
This analysis of words in the new aesthetic regime, especially if we consider the insistent pattern it forms in his work, raises the question as to the status of this “principle”. How is one faithful to “literarity”? What use of words or literary practice could keep in mind the structural excess Rancière finds in them? These questions bring up the topics of Rancière’s style, voice and approach: is his writing “faithful” to “liter-arity”? In some of his other writing on the use of literary procedures to procure credence for knowledge claims (which entails in the case of Althusser’s science/ideology distinction a furious denial of “literary dereliction”), it is clear that sensitivity to “literarity” is seen to entail modesty regarding the scope of the claims made for superior knowledge (FW 138). In this way the concept of “literarity” is used, among other things, to assert the need for intellectual modesty. This modesty takes the form of adhering to the guidance of hermeneutic methodological principles, such as treating each discursive object in terms of its own aesthetic qualities, and within its specific historical context, thus leaving room for new ways of reinterpreting and reusing these objects. Rancière practises such modesty in the careful way he treats each discursive case as uniquely crafted machinery, designed to deal with the potentialities and contradictions of mute speech.
(2) As a final example, we may look at Rancière’s account of Gilles Deleuze’s ontology. Deleuze puts in words the conception of sensibility as a pre-personal logic of sensation without direction or purpose. He thus renders into a fundamental ontology the perspective on sensation that Rancière describes as that of the “aesthetic regime of the arts”. In a series of important essays on Deleuze, Rancière argues that Deleuze suppresses the discursive mode in which this ontology is presented, and that this suppression characterizes too his treatment of the literary corroboration he seeks for his work. Deleuze uses literary features like “plot” (in Kafka’s novels) and “character” (in the stories of Herman Melville) to elucidate his ontology of pre-personal singularities in which these very features are seen as a false carapace over the primary field of sensation (ITDA; FW). The presence of these literary contradictions in Deleuze shows how Rancière’s “literarity” may be used critically for identifying and analysing the utopian impulse that confuses what is described in words with the fundamental way things “are”. The “literariness” of words means that they are expressive, but they are also mute: the words themselves do not speak, they do not bind a thing or idea to a relation of final meaning. As such, as the very condition of their functioning, words exceed Deleuze’s aspiration to incorporate, to place in bodies, the ideas of his ontology. Deleuze uses Kafka’s story Metamorphosis to defend the thesis that words encode and also transform experience; he charges that literary critics misunderstand the pragmatic efficacy of words when they describe Kafka as a “metaphorical” writer (Deleuze & Guattari 1986, 1987). In contrast, Rancière points out that Gregor Samsor’s “transformation is indeed literal, and at the same time it is not so” (FW 153). He argues that Deleuze shuts down the prospects of words redistributing meanings by virtue of his utopian view that meanings are somehow embodied in particular literary operations. As a consequence, Deleuze leaves himself open to the charge that the ontology he describes is “only” words precisely because he fails to consider the ways literary meanings may be reshaped and redirected.
In each of these cases the concept of “literarity” thus has a function of criticism: it helps to elaborate a genealogy of the contradictions of the aesthetic regime that literature inaugurates, but it does so primarily to show that literary displacement works against attempts to finalize the meanings and references of words. It remains to ask how such treatments of the topic of literarity in literature, historiography and philosophy have any necessary connection with the political question of the disruption of the “relation between an order of discourse and its social function” (DW 115).
At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that it was possible to identify the main threads of the knot that Rancière’s “aesthetic politics” presents to us in order to analyse the constituents and functions of “literarity” as they are treated in relation to the specific features of modern literature. Identifying these features helps to distinguish the significance of his use of “literarity” in the context of literature, from the political significance the term has in his work as the conditions under which the relations between words and bodies may be altered. In the case of literature (and its progeny) Rancière refines his account of the contradictory elements of the “aesthetic regime of the arts” to make legible the scope and efficacy of literary operations in this regime. In this context it is clear that “literarity” becomes a tool of analysis able to establish terms for the critical reflection on the use of literary–discursive protocols in literature, history and philosophy. The constituents of “literarity” may be described in terms of the contesting forces of the aesthetic regime: at once literature inhabits the landscape inherited from Romanticism in which the expressivity of things and persons is pressing for literary articulation; but at the same time this articulation, like the things that call for speech, is mute. Words are indifferent to who uses them and how they are used; crucially, they are indifferent to the ideas and things they “express”. Rancière thus understands modern literature to be constituted out of a series of fundamental contradictions regarding the power and effects of words. In the face of these contradictions, Rancière states that “literarity” is more than the condition of literature; it is also the “contradiction” and “essential link between politics and literature” (FW 108). The conception of literature “as a historical mode of visibility of writing, a specific link between a system of meaning of words and a system of visibility of things” (PoL 12) is the core of his conception of literature as political. Literature earns its link to politics on account of its participation in the ontological partition of the perceptible. The way words are used is effective in partitioning space and dividing and apportioning capacities. “Literarity” thus nominates a new poetics of knowledge. It describes the mechanisms of a new aesthetic of perception and proposes too a new thesis regarding the politics of literature.
Literarity, however, is not just about the political background of aesthetics (in the axiom of equality), the politics of poetics (as this relates to knowledge protocols) and the politics of literature (in the ontological partition of the perceptible). Literarity crucially points to the l iterary condition of modern politics. Rancière had first articulated this literary condition in La Mésentente. It is only with the full explication of the literary paradigm in the contexts of aesthetics, poetics and literature that this condition of modern politics becomes fully intelligible.