Jean-Philippe Deranty
Read in order, the different chapters of this book retrace the intellectual journey accomplished by Jacques Rancière, from the early affirmation of his commitment to radical equality, to the application of this fundamental “axiom” in many areas of the social sciences (the history and sociology of the labour movement, historiography, education, politics), culminating in the seminal books of the last decade (Disagreement, Film Fables, The Future of the Image). As we look back on the rich and complex work this journey in radical equality has produced, five important threads become visible, the texture of which gives this work its amazing consistency. These are Rancière’s distinctive conceptualization of equality and freedom, his humanistic concern, his hermeneutic approach and his materialism. Identifying these threads helps us to better understand where the originality of Rancière’s thought lies, and the reasons that explain why his key concepts and arguments have become attractive to many theorists and practitioners.
Obviously, the major thread running through Rancière’s writings is the principle of equality. With Badiou, Rancière calls this an “axiom”, to indicate the fact that equality between individuals must be postulated because it can never be definitively proven. Indeed, many factual aspects of modern societies seem to run counter to this axiom. However, once postulated, the principle transforms the way in which individuals, society, politics and even the arts are seen. For Rancière a true theory of emancipation not only takes political emancipation as its object of study but aims to participate practically in emancipation. Such a theory must rely on this axiom of equality. Otherwise, it denies in its theoretical apparatus, in its assumptions and conclusions, the practical goals it sets out to support.
The emphasis on equality could seem trivial. The principle has been identified for a very long time as an achievement of modernity; it is one of the fundamental principles underpinning national and international constitutional and legal documents in modernity. As such, the principle has been taken up as a key assumption and commented upon by innumerable social and political thinkers, from the early nineteenth century onwards. The originality of Rancière, as the book has shown, lies in the scope of the principle’s application. Equality for him is not just a normative principle in law and politics, or a moral obligation. It is an overarching principle that elicits not just moral rules but leads to radically altered visions of entire fields: the social, the political, the historical, the literary, the aesthetic and so on. It is fair to say that equality in Rancière has not just a normative but also an ontological reach. Apart from Alain Badiou, no one in contemporary philosophy has propounded such an extensive theory of equality. As a result, Rancière has become an author of choice for all those, in social and political theory, who want to hold on to the idea of equality against all the methodologies, concepts and arguments that tend to limit its reach.
The second thread in Rancière’s work, closely linked to his commitment to radical equality, is his unwavering defence of freedom, and in particular, the freedom of action. His fundamental assumption, in all the debates in which he has taken part, is that people are always more free than the social scientists and external observers give them credit for. People should always be assumed to be capable of thinking and acting. We should avoid descriptions of the social realm and politics, analyses of domination and oppression, that lead to the conclusion that those suffering from them are fated to be crushed by them and are forced to accept them. Put negatively: the structures of inequality can always be denounced and struggled against. In positive terms: the unexpected can always occur. The task of theory for Rancière is to transform categories of thought and language so that we can be receptive to, and participate in, the emergence of new configurations, whether in social and political relations, in educational organizations or in artistic practices.
Given his commitment to equality and affirmation of the possibility and creativity of individual and social action, we must conclude that, in the end, Rancière’s thinking is deeply humanistic. This is a surprising conclusion to reach given the strong anti-humanistic tone of postwar French philosophy. What complicates the matter is that, undeniably, Rancière’s thinking and writing share many of the key moves and assumptions of that tradition. How credible then is the claim that his philosophy, in the end, is humanistic? The claim is not credible on a traditional conception of humanism, based on the assumption of essential traits of human nature. But this is not the only way to articulate a humanist concern. Rancière’s humanism is a paradoxical one, based on the positing of an axiom and enquiring into its effects in different fields, not on a general theory of human nature. Despite all the stylistic and conceptual overlaps with the other thinkers of his generation, Rancière is unique among them for his insistence on the irreducible freedom and capacity for action of individuals and groups. We might say that the paradoxical result of his embrace of the radical egalitarian motto, following the break of 1968, is a mediated return to a form of existentialist freedom.
Readers can easily recognize in Rancière’s writings echoes of the key concepts and methods of postwar French philosophy. His historical approach to social and political phenomena bears strong resemblance to Foucauldian genealogy. His insistence on the productivity of contradictions inherent in historical paradigms looks like a materialist version of deconstruction. The notion of political subjectivation underpinning his theory of democracy leans heavily on Badiou’s logic. His other central political concept, “disagreement”, sounds quite similar to Lyotard’s “différend”. Many other examples could be cited. Despite all the undeniable family resemblances, however, the humanistic and praxeological dimensions in Rancière’s work make it unique in postwar continental philosophy. Indeed, these dimensions are precisely the ones Rancière himself has emphasized in developing his critical responses to the main authors of that tradition.
The fourth main thread in Rancière’s work is also connected with the focus on the creativity of action. This thread relates to the importance of the historical perspective. In every one of the areas to which Rancière has contributed, his key arguments and concepts have been gleaned from an approach to the problems at hand in terms of key semantic and material shifts. But Rancière’s historicism is highly idiosyncratic. The comparison with Foucault has paradigmatic value in that it is representative of his relationship of simultaneous sympathy and critical distance with the main thinkers of his generation. Rancière’s historical method aims to undercut any form of essentialism in the approach to social and political phenomena. In this respect, it is close in spirit to Foucault’s genealogy. But Rancière’s historical reconstructions are also antithetical to it in other respects. Instead of attempting to unveil the epistemic categories through which specific historical worlds construct reality, Rancière’s histories are reconstructions of concrete practices (in politics, at work, in schools, in the arts) from within. The productive contradictions of the movements he studies (of the nineteenth-century Saint-Simonian utopians, of twentieth-century trade unionists, of modernist writers and painters, to name just a few examples) are not observed from an external position, but emerge from the logic of practice itself. This is a form of hermeneutics. It lets discourses and actions speak for themselves. This means first of all that the voices of the subjects studied are not covered by that of the theorist, beginning very simply by quoting at length the words and acts of those one studies, and making sure one does not squash them under the weight of theoretical references and abstract language. And secondly, letting discourse and action speak directly means that their inherent logic and contradictions are not teased out from an external position, but out of their own unfolding. One of Rancière’s favoured modes of enunciation is free indirect style, that is, a presentation of thoughts and actions that is in the third person but formulated from the perspective of the agents themselves.
This method is unique in contemporary philosophy and the social sciences. It gives the Rancièrean texts their unmistakable tone, which an increasing number of readers find productive and attractive. In all the areas in which Rancière has written, this method has produced original results and allowed him to develop productive critical stances towards established paradigms. In general terms, it has focused the interest on the agency of the actors, and undercut the disempowering effect of grand narratives. In the history of the labour movement, Rancière’s historical hermeneutic has uncovered the richness, complexity and contradictions of working-class experiences and expressions. This explains why he was taken up with great interest by those in the 1970s who were attempting to develop new forms of materialist critique outside the orthodoxy of the time. In political philosophy, Rancière’s herme-neutic stance leads to a robust defence of democracy, one however that is not grounded in unverifiable theoretical claims (extrapolations from psychoanalysis or set theory) or derived from some abstract normative principles, but arises from the trust in the efficacy and intelligence of the democratic struggles themselves. The conceptual path Rancière’s method thus prepares towards a recovery of democratic agency, one however that does not overlook the pitfalls and difficulties of real democratic movements, explains why so many political theorists today refer positively to him. Rancière’s method seems particularly well placed to account for the irreducible necessity yet tremendous difficulty of holding firm to the democratic ideal in contemporary challenges. Finally, Rancière’s hermeneutic stance leads to an approach to artistic practices and art works that does not pre-empt their meanings by framing them in large historical or metaphysical narratives. Rather, it is open to their unique modes of structuration, as well as their creative contradictions. This explains why so many in the art world today, in particular art practitioners, are drawn to Rancière’s difficult aesthetic texts. In them, they find a sophisticated account of the historical conditions under which arts are performed, but one that puts the focus squarely on the artist’s, and the audiences’, practical engagements.
One last strand remains to be mentioned, one that the secondary literature has not fully explored so far, but which undeniably runs throughout Rancière’s work, namely Rancière’s materialism. As in the case of his historicism and egalitarianism, Rancière’s materialism is highly idiosyncratic and paradoxical. It is starkly different from classical historical materialism, or contemporary philosophical enquiries exploring the relationships between the mental and the material. Ran-cière’s materialism relates to his continued insistence on the material embeddedness of discursive practices. Rancière does not propound a simple, one-dimensional dependence of human productions on material conditions. Rather, his historical enquiries, in politics and in aesthetics, often highlight how ideas about the social (a given “partage du sensible”, see Chapter 6), or “ideas of art” (Chapter 9), are materialized in ideas about social spaces, the media in which expressions are manifested, and so on. These materializations in turn affect the discursive and the conceptual. Discursive, conceptual realities, by informing the views of material realities, determine the types and forms of practice, and thus indirectly shape the material, while the material, being the only plane in which practical meanings can be realized, determines thoughts and discourses. It is as though Rancière’s radical extension of the axiom of equality reached all the way into the material. This extension becomes quite explicit in his aesthetics, since its central assumption is the fluidity of the boundaries separating different expressive media (in particular the visual and the intelligible, image and text), and more generally the discursive and the material. This materialism is paradoxical in that it is not premised upon a single, firmly defended metaphysical option, but emerges rather from a mode of thinking and writing that is sensitive to the constant exchanges and blurrings between mental and material realities.
As in the case of the other strands, this conceptual direction affects the very style of Rancière’s writing. One of its most striking features is its high level of sophistication, making his texts difficult to read, even as he avoids academic references and abstract concepts. His analyses display a dialectical subtlety equal to any philosophical classic, yet all the while using the prose of the everyday. No “-isms”, no big concepts, simple concrete words (the “nights” of labour, the “names” of history, the “barriers” around Paris to denote the people’s cultural world, the everyday term of “mésentente” as core political concept, and so on), which however entail complex critiques of theoretical assumptions and models. The enigmatic poetry of Rancière’s prose that arises from this combination of the arcane and the everyday, the philosophical and the material, probably explains in no small part the seduction exerted by his texts on so many readers today.