Supposing equality
As an epigraph to The Philosopher and His Poor, Jacques Rancière reproduces a scene from Adrien Baillet’s La Vie de Monsieur Descartes that recounts how Dirk Rembrantsz, a shoemaker by trade and autodidact mathematician and astronomer by avocation, sought out to confer with a certain René Descartes about important matters. Twice rebuffed by the philosopher’s attendants, on the third visit he was received by Descartes, who recognized Rembrantsz’s ‘competence and merit on the spot, and wanted to repay him with interest for all his troubles’. Descartes, Baillet adds,
was not satisfied in instructing him in all manner of difficult subjects and in imparting his Method to rectify reasoning. He also counted him as one of his friends: despite the lowliness of Rembrantsz’s estate, M. Descartes did not regard him as beneath those of the first rank, and he assured Rembrantsz that his home and heart would be open to him at all hours. (quoted in Rancière, 1983, xxiii; Baillet, 1691, II: 554–5)
The question is: how do we interpret this story of an unlikely friendship between philosopher and cobbler? Certainly, it shows Descartes exhibiting that ‘key to all the other virtues’, which is generosity (Descartes, XI: 454). But there is obviously more to the story. It is also perhaps a tale of perseverance, as Baillet notes that Rembrantsz had often cultivated his knowledge of mathematics at the expense of his livelihood. Today, some of our contemporaries might lay emphasis on how the shoemaker became ‘one of the foremost astronomers of his century’ (in Baillet’s words) and see in this story a testament to Rembrantsz’s ability to pull himself up by his bootstraps. Which means that we may as well say it is a fable of luck or chance. Yet these interpretations do not yet tell us why the story prefaces The Philosopher and His Poor. One of Baillet’s contemporaries, Antoine Boschet, may be of assistance. As Geneviève Rodis-Lewis points out, Baillet was attacked by his contemporaries upon ‘the appearance of his Vie de R. Descartes [sic], which was judged ridiculous for the importance granted to mere valets and women’; as Boschet writes, ‘There is no sex … no condition, no social rank, no profession, whom Baillet does not honor by placing them in his work’ (Rodis-Lewis, 1995, xiii). The scandal is that Baillet populates the pages of the life of the philosopher with those whose task it is to work and not to think. But for Descartes, there is no hierarchy of intelligences that makes it natural or obvious that some people work and others do astronomy or philosophy. ‘Good sense’ (bon sens), the Discourse on the Method begins, ‘is the best distributed thing in the world’ (VI: 1), though we need not truncate this observation with Montaigne’s irony.1 Instead, Descartes draws the consequence that there is an equality of intelligences and abilities shared by all human beings:
the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false – which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’ – is naturally equal in all men, and consequently that the diversity of our opinions does not arise because some of us are more reasonable than others but solely because we direct our thoughts along different paths and do not attend to the same things. (VI: 2)
It is this equality of intelligences – of good sense, reason, or the power of judgement – that Descartes opposes to the established authority of the schools, their arguments, and their disputations. However, were we to visit Egmont, perhaps, we would discover much wider social consequences of the equality of intelligences: a cobbler doing astronomy, letters from a princess corresponding about philosophy, and a philosopher practising a variety of sciences.2 This equality of intelligences, as Baillet’s contemporaries had seen, disrupts a social order premised on hierarchies of sex, rank, birth, profession, and wealth. Political philosophy, perhaps, had trained them well. Were they familiar with Plato, they could retort that in a just city each person is allotted one task; had they read Hobbes, they could note that unfettered intellectual equality gives rise to an ‘equality of hope in the attaining of our ends’ that produces a state of enmity and war (Hobbes, 1651, II: 100).
Descartes’s egalitarian gesture stands in sharp contrast to Plato or Hobbes. And we see in this episode from La Vie de Monsieur Descartes a hint of Rancière’s singular thesis: equality is not only disruptive, insofar as it challenges the contingent hierarchies of social distinctions, but that equality is emancipatory. Indeed, for Rancière, equality is the impetus for politics. He defines egalitarianism as ‘the open set of practices driven by the assumption of equality between any and every speaking being and by the concern to test this equality’ (Rancière, 1995, 30/53). Political praxis is egalitarian and emancipatory, he argues, when it creates new ways of doing, being and speaking, reconfiguring the roles and places that organize society, that is, when it introduces what he calls a new ‘distribution of the sensible’ (partage du sensible). The principle of equality, or more specifically, the supposition of the equality of intelligences and abilities of anyone and everyone, combats the prejudice of political philosophy that social organization requires experts and elites to guide mass participation, from Plato’s city, through Althusser’s ‘ossified Leninism’ (in Alain Badiou’s words), to today’s societies of consensus. Intellectual equality, as James Swenson summarizes it, ‘implies that people generally know perfectly well what they do and say, that the world is not – must not be – divided between those who think and those who need someone to think for them or to explain what they really want’ (Swenson, 2009, 258). Thus Rancière’s definition of equality challenges both the liberal assumption that the distribution of equality is merely a problem of governmental protections and the orthodox Marxist claim that equality is merely an ideological mask that veils the inequalities of capitalism. Instead of thinking politics as an interaction of individuals, political institutions, and governmental expertise, Rancière argues that equality is both the means and the end of political struggles to produce both forms for the organization of material life that overturn the logic of capital and places of collective praxis that break the monopoly of the governmentality of expertise.
Egalitarian politics, on Rancière’s account, is disruptive, subversive, and emancipatory, although it is also transitory and rare, for politics is a momentary suspension of the inegalitarian relations that structure society. He opposes egalitarianism to the inequality that is produced by what he calls policing. By referring to the ‘logic of policing’ or the police, Rancière does not only mean cops – in the way that we understand that cops are one part of a larger penal apparatus. Policing is a set of procedures that organize society, distributing roles – such as the rights and duties of those who rule and those who are ruled – and legitimating the concomitant inequalities that are part of these procedures. As Rancière writes in Disagreement,
The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and that another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise. (1995, 29/52)
While acknowledging his specific debt to Michel Foucault’s analyses of the apparatuses of power/knowledge, Rancière stipulates that policing is defined less by techniques of discipline than by modes of inclusion and exclusion within a given set of social relations – distinctions between the visible and invisible, speech and noise, as well as public space and private space. As an example of how policing apparatuses patrol modes of visibility and speech, let us return to Baillet’s account of Rembrantsz’s efforts. Baillet acknowledges the social constraints that condition Rembrantsz’s reception among Descartes’s attendants, the social constraints that link a mode of visibility to a lack of speech. After first being rebuffed
as an impudent peasant … Rembrantsz returned in the very same suit of clothes and asked to speak to M. Descartes … . His appearance did not help him win a better reception than the first time. When the attendants brought word to M. Descartes, they portrayed him as an importunate beggar who, in search of alms, asked to speak to M. Descartes about philosophy and astrology. (quoted in Rancière, 1983, xxii, tm; Baillet 1691, II: 554)
Appearing at the door in a peasant’s outfit meant to Descartes’s attendants that Rembrantsz could not speak about philosophy and astronomy, but rather that philosophy and astrology were but a ruse by which to collect alms. A peasant speaks about work or poverty or astrology, but not philosophy or astronomy. And, while we might find this particular story quaint, in our times there are similar forms of policing that govern who can speak about what, and where one can speak.
From this point on, we will mean by politics the enactment of the logic of equality through a process of political subjectivation that emerges through disagreement, challenging a wrong committed by a given regime of policing. Rancière argues that political disagreement (la mésentente) ‘occurs whenever contention over what speaking means constitutes the very rationality of the speech situation’; disagreement concerns what is counted as speech and what is noise, who counts as one who speaks, and who counts as addressee, and who is excluded from the declaration of speech (1995, xi/13). Therefore, politics introduces, through disagreement, new ways of speaking, being, and doing.3 Rancière argues that politics in this sense and policing are ‘entirely heterogeneous’ (1995, 31/55).4 Thus Rancière insists that politics is a radical break with apparatuses of policing or power/knowledge; he notes that while ‘Foucault uses the term biopolitics to designate things that are situated in the space that I call the police … he was never drawn theoretically to the question of political subjectivation’ (Rancière, 2000, 93).
Political philosophy: Archipolitics, parapolitics and metapolitics
We will examine Rancière’s account of political subjectivation below. But first we must address the radical difference between Rancière’s definition of politics and what is so often called political philosophy. The conventional ways of thinking about political issues – even in parliamentarian forms of so-called democracy – reflect upon techniques of policing, not politics in Rancière’s sense of the term.5 In fact, far from being egalitarian, political philosophy functions to persuade us that there are principled, even necessary, reasons to accept inequality. As Rancière argues, politics and police are heterogeneous. Political philosophy, by contrast, eliminates this heterogeneity by identifying politics with police procedures for ‘determining the distribution of the sensible that defines the lot of individuals and parties’ (1995, 63tm/97). In short, political philosophy seeks to substitute some principle or arkhê for the ‘ultimate contingency of equality’ (1995, 17/38) or ‘egalitarian facticity’ (1998a, 171).
Rancière identifies three paradigmatic forms of political philosophy: archipolitics, parapolitics, and metapolitics. Plato’s Republic presents the exemplar of archipolitics, which suppresses the lack of foundation of politics and elaborates a project ‘founded on the complete realization, the complete awareness (sensibilisation) of the arkhê of community’ (Rancière, 1995, 65tm/100). Plato’s city is organized according to techniques that account for each member of the community according to his or her function. Having a part in the city is having a function or occupation. For Plato, ‘the image of justice’, as Rancière writes in The Philosopher and His Poor, ‘is the division of labor’ (1983, 25). The division of labour, however, is not a moment of class conflict, but the realization of the so-called ‘natural’ aptitudes of individuals and parts of society, where each practises the virtue appropriate to his or her function and does not meddle with others’. In an archipolitical project, there is neither a supplement nor void in society, neither democratic excess nor the nothingness of equality that could challenge a wrong or an apparatus of domination. Instead, the ‘egalitarian anarchy’ of the demos is identified with a regime – democracy – or a modality of the corruption of the city, in which ‘full of freedom and freedom of speech’ (557b) of anybody and everybody inverts the roles and functions that order the well-governed city and equality reigns between ‘equals and unequals alike’ (558c): the ruled behave like rulers, rulers behave like the ruled, while citizens and slaves and foreigners, children and adults, as well as men and women, behave as equals. Even domestic animals are more free in a democratic city (563c).
By contrast, in Plato’s city all parts of society are governed by the justice of doing one’s own task and no other: having a part in the community is defined by one’s function in society and practising one’s particular virtue: ‘it is right for someone who is by nature a cobbler to practice cobblery and nothing else, for the carpenter to practice carpentry, and the same for the others is a sort of image of justice’ (443c; Rancière, 1983, 25). According to Plato, the cobbler has an occupation in society, but she has no part in any other activity, let alone deliberating about the governing of the city. For the worker whose capacity to reason is ‘naturally weak’, there is no harm in being ruled by a superior (590c–d). As Peter Hallward writes, in ‘Plato’s Republic, to each kind of person there is but one allotted task: labour, war, or thought’ (2009, 142). And to each there is but one allotted virtue: moderation, courage, or wisdom. Yet, as Rancière notes, with each individual identified with her function and virtue, her part or share, and with democracy but a regime of the corruption of the city, the possibility of egalitarian politics is suppressed.
In the Politics, Aristotle argues that Plato’s archipolitical project is impractical. Submitting the entire city to the principle of unity empties the city of politics. Rather than tending toward unity, a city is ‘by nature’ a plurality. The question, for Aristotle, is to establish stability within plurality. While it is best for the most virtuous to rule, it is not politically possible, since the ‘natural equality of the citizens’ entitles them a share in ruling the city (1261b1). Since not all citizens can rule at once, it is necessary to allow for transitions in rule, with different citizens ruling at different times. Thus over time, each will have a share in governing.
In opposition to Plato’s archipolitics, Aristotle introduces a model of parapolitics, which is an imitation or mimesis of democratic discord (Rancière, 1995, 75/111). On Rancière’s account, politics occurs when political subjects enact egalitarian logic and praxis to challenge the inequalities of society; politics involves a conflict between two heterogeneous logics. Though he acknowledges the conflict at the centre of the plurality of the city, Aristotle nevertheless reduces the conflict between egalitarianism and policing into a conflict between the interests of different factions of society, ‘transforming the actors and forms of action of the political conflict into the parts and forms of distribution of the policing apparatus’ (Rancière, 1995, 72/108). Politics becomes a problem of government, the demos a faction within society, and conflict a matter of interests. The task of political philosophy and good government is to mediate between the interests of different groups, for the rich claim wealth is the principle by which rule is established in the city while the poor claim that rule is to be distributed according to freedom (1280a5–7). Aristotle’s solution is that a form of government must adopt principles that limit (or at least appear to limit) their own interests in the name of stability: in a democracy (the rule of the many and the poor), the people must aspire to elect the best of citizens to office so that nobles are not ruled by inferiors, while in an oligarchy citizenship must be distributed widely enough to make ‘the entire governing body stronger than those who are excluded’ (1318b33–37; 1320b26–8).6 Although Aristotle glimpses the ‘egalitarian contingency’ that undermines the archipolitical project, he reduces the wrong that defines politics – the conflict between heterogeneous logics and praxes – to a conflict of the interests of different factions (Rancière, 1995, 71/107).
A modern form of parapolitics can be found in the work of Hobbes, who, like Aristotle, reduces the opposition between the logics of equality and policing to the problem of differing interests. For Hobbes, though, interests are constituted by individuals rather than by factions in society. Hobbes suppresses the possibility of politics by placing it outside of the community, substituting for politics as the conflict of egalitarian logic and police logic two differing states of right: the state of nature, in which ‘every man has a Right to every thing’; and the state of sovereignty, in which the individual right to meet ends and interests is alienated or transferred to the sovereign (Hobbes, 1651, II: 105). However, as Rancière points out, in the attempt to legitimate sovereign power through the ‘fable of the war of all against all’, Hobbes inadvertently demonstrates that ‘there is no natural principle of domination by one person over another’ (Rancière, 1995, 79/115–16). For Hobbes, natural equality is defined by intellectual equality rather than brute physical equality:
as to the faculties of the mind … I find yet a greater equality amongst men than that of strength. Prudence, is but Experience; which equall time, equally bestowes on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto … For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves … But this proveth rather that men are in that point equall, than unequall. For there is not ordinarily a greater signe of the equall distribution of any thing, than that every man is contented with his share. (1651, II: 99–100)
But, like Aristotle, in Hobbes’s parapolitics the equality that undermines all distinctions is reduced to interest: for Hobbes the equality of intelligences and abilities will not activate a moment of political disagreement, but rather results in the equal right of anyone to achieve his or her interests or ends.
The third paradigmatic form of political philosophy is metapolitics, which Rancière defines as a symptomology or ideology critique that aims to unmask the ‘absolute wrong’ structuring social inequalities, to show how politics (again, identified with policing apparatuses of the state) conceals real injustice. Metapolitical interpretation seeks to uncover the true scene of an absolute wrong that is misrepresented by politics. Rancière claims that the ‘canonical formula’ for this ideology critique is found in ‘On the Jewish Question’, where Marx argues that political emancipation – insofar as all parts of society would be treated equally before the law – does not result in human emancipation; rather political emancipation reveals the limits of politics, ‘its powerlessness to achieve the properly human part of man’ (Rancière, 1995, 83/120). Behind appeals to legal equality there lies the inequalities of private property and money (what Marx will later identify as the inequalities produced by the accumulation of capital through expropriation and dispossession). Rather than human emancipation, political emancipation gives way to the atomism and egoism of individuals pursuing private interests and whims irrespective of the community (Marx, 1843, 54). On the one hand, then, metapolitics denounces the gaps between words and things (Rancière, 1995, 85/123), while on the other hand, metapolitics also functions as a scientific complement of political struggle insofar as it isolates those forces of history of which politics is only an appearance. As Marx writes in the ‘Preface to A Critique of Political Economy’, the ‘anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy’ (1859, 389), that is, political superstructures must be traced back to their real foundations in the contradictions of the forces of production. Whether they are interpreted in vanguardist, scientistic, or economistic forms, these forces determine political superstructures until the victory of the proletariat and the destruction of capitalism brings ‘the prehistory of human society to a close’ (1859, 390).
Philosophy and equality
Reading Rancière, we are often left with the impression that philosophy is little more than a discourse and discipline that serves to legitimate inequality. The guiding thesis of this study is that it is possible to read and to do philosophy so that it does not serve to legitimate regimes of policing, that it does not assume that it is reasonable or natural to distinguish those whose task it is to think and those for whom their only occupation is work. But the questions guiding this approach to philosophy are different from many of the traditional questions of the discipline. To seek out egalitarian moments in philosophy requires looking at the ways that equality interrupts first philosophy – be it metaphysics, ontology, or ethics – and political philosophy. In the first chapter, for instance, I will argue that Rancière practises what I call Cartesian egalitarianism, which is defined by the way it conceptualizes political subjectivity rather than by Descartes’s metaphysics; Rancière is more interested in Descartes’s methodological commitment to the equality of good sense than substantial difference between thought and bodies. Rancière’s refusal to prioritize ontology or some other form of first philosophy over the politics of equality defines his method (see Chambers, 2013, 18–21), and allows him to think through the question of equality in relation to a disparate set of theoretical frameworks. Much like Rancière’s account of ‘political moments’ that challenge ‘the obviousness of a given world’, these egalitarian moments open new possibilities for thinking emancipatory practices (Rancière, 2009b, ix).
To search in those traditional domains of philosophy for egalitarian moments, to register the difficulties posed to philosophy by the egalitarian facticity that defines the being-in-common shared by those political animals we call humans, requires reading philosophy through what I will call ‘philosophical misunderstanding’. By this term I mean something similar to Rancière’s definition of ‘literary misunderstanding’ (q.v. Chapter 3), in which literature introduces new relations between bodies and meanings, words and things, introducing excess bodies and words to upset ‘the paradigm of proportion between bodies and meanings, a paradigm of correspondence and saturation’ (2006b, 41). However, whereas literary misunderstanding works on ‘percepts and affects’ (2006b, 43), what I call philosophical misunderstanding works on concepts and arguments. Perhaps it bears some affinities with what we call deconstruction, but like Rancière, I am not focused on a critique of the metaphysics of presence. Philosophical misunderstanding is much closer to what Miguel Abensour calls a ‘hermeneutics of emancipation’, for which ‘the task of the critic is to interpret every political question so as to translate the particular language of politics in the more “general” language of emancipation’ (1997, 36). In a similar vein, Rancière argues that ‘the political processing of wrong never ceases to borrow elements from “political philosophy” to build up new arguments and manifestations of dispute’ (1995, 78/115).
The impetus for reconsidering philosophy through philosophical misunderstanding is to open new possibilities for egalitarian thinking and acting. Rancière’s radical redefinition of politics as egalitarian, which is at odds with the definitions of politics used by political philosophy, is meant to cast in stark relief the inegalitarianism of much of philosophy. And yet, his ‘political’ interpretation of philosophy also shows how the arguments and demonstrations to prove that inequality is reasonable nevertheless require accepting the supposition of equality. He writes: ‘My practice of philosophy goes along with my idea of politics. It is an-archical, in the sense that it traces back the specificity of disciplines and discursive competences to the “egalitarian” level of linguistic competence and poetic invention’ (Rancière, 2011b, 14).
In what follows, I will use the concepts and methodologies of Rancière’s philosophy, politics, and aesthetics to reconsider several key figures and texts – though not necessarily canonical figures and texts – in the history of modern philosophy. This book is divided into two parts: Part I focuses on Rancière’s account of the politics of equality and political subjectivation, while Part II contrasts Rancière’s aesthetics with competing accounts of the history of modern art that rely on the concepts of modernity, modernism, and inaesthetics. While Part I deals with political subjectivation and Part II aesthetics, both focus on different practices of dissensus. Though the term dissensus is Rancière’s, I will use it broadly to refer to the ways that philosophy, politics, and aesthetics interrupt and challenge established discourses and practices of a given distribution of the sensible. In this regard, my use is functional, as Rancière’s is. In the book-length interview La méthode de l’égalité, he states that he introduced the term dissensus to ‘translate’ la mésentente (disagreement), which, in French, carries a set of connotations that makes the term a ‘polemical knot between different meanings of “entendre” (to perceive, to understand, to agree), which epitomize the sensible and conflictual dimension of the political community’ (2012a, 151). Given that these connotations do not necessarily translate into other languages such as English, Rancière chose to replace la mésentente with ‘a Latinate word which nevertheless does not belong to the Latin language – dissensus: a word which loses the power of understanding that belongs to real languages in favor of the possibility of a functional definition’ (2012a, 151). While he chose the term to translate or replace la mésentente, dissensus now names what politics and aesthetics share insofar as they challenge, interrupt, and transform relationships between discourses, practices, and affects. The ‘functional definition’ highlights one more crucial dimension of Rancière’s use of dissensus: that the practices of political disagreement and aesthetic equality cannot be defined in advance, meaning that moments of dissensus open the possibility for unforeseen social, aesthetic, and political emancipation.7
In Part I, I argue that Rancière’s account of political subjectivation provides an impetus for reconsidering Cartesianism and existentialism from an egalitarian standpoint. The difference between traditional philosophical questions and the hermeneutics of emancipation or philosophical misunderstanding should become evident with the interpretation of Descartes that I propose in Chapter 1. So often Descartes’s legacy is evaluated according to the implications and consequences of the dualism that divides thinking substance and extended substance. I will not argue that this approach is wrong, for there is no doubt that Descartes would have wanted to be judged according to the strengths or flaws of the principles of his first philosophy. Post-Heideggerian philosophy has thus criticized Descartes for granting, through the cogito, primacy to presence while reducing being to a calculable, objective world. However, I do not think that this critique exhausts the significance of Descartes’s thought. By focusing on the legacy of the very supposition that makes the system verifiable – the supposition of good sense – we will outline a genealogy of what I will call Cartesian egalitarianism, a current of political thought that includes the work of François Poullain de la Barre, Joseph Jacotot, Simone de Beauvoir, and Rancière. These Cartesian egalitarians are less interested in adhering to Descartes’s metaphysics than they are with thinking through the socio-political implications of the intellectual equality of good sense.
Therefore, in Chapter 1, I outline three characteristics of Cartesian egalitarianism. First, these Cartesians think political agency as a practice of subjectivity. Second, like Descartes, they maintain that intellectual equality is the basis of the subjectivity. Finally, they politicize the egalitarian subject. While Descartes makes the egalitarian subject one of the central principles of his philosophy, he circumscribes the consequences of his critique of the prejudices of intellect, authority, and habit to epistemological and metaphysical questions. In this sense, Descartes himself is not a fully committed Cartesian egalitarian. Beginning with Poullain, Cartesian egalitarians conceptualize politics as a processing of a wrong, meaning that politics initiates new practices through which those who were previously oppressed assert themselves as self-determining political subjects. As we will see, these Cartesian egalitarians – from Poullain, through Beauvoir, to Rancière – are all critics of Descartes’s metaphysics. Nevertheless they maintain that good sense is the basis of emancipatory political subjectivation.
In Chapter 2, I reconsider the relationship between Sartre’s existentialism and Rancière’s egalitarianism. Despite his critique of Sartre’s later work in The Philosopher and His Poor, I argue that Rancière owes several important intellectual debts to Sartre. First, I suggest that Sartre’s analysis of the practico-inert – that is, his account of how identity, interests, and exigencies are operations of seriality – anticipates Rancière’s account of how policing stratifies and classifies members of a given society according to roles, places, and occupations. If identity is a function or operation of oppressive or exploitative social relations, then both Rancière and Sartre contend that political praxis emerges through a dynamic of disidentification, whereby political subjects reject or disrupt the roles, occupations, and identities that are ascribed to them. Nevertheless, I show that there are significant differences between Rancière and Sartre. In The Philosopher and His Poor, Rancière argues that Sartre’s account of political praxis is hyper-instrumentalized, that is, praxis is always submitted to the exigencies of either the practico-inert or the dialectic of organizing and totalizing that introduces both stability and inertia into group praxis. By contrast, in Disagreement, Rancière proposes an account of politics that emphasizes the disruptive and transformative effects of the supposition of equality. Politics and policing, he argues, are heterogeneous: while policing structures interests, identities, and exigencies, politics is a paradoxical praxis that has neither interest nor end other than momentary emancipation.
Second, I argue that Rancière’s use, in Disagreement, of the terms freedom, contingency and facticity to characterize egalitarian political praxis is indebted to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. This does not mean that Rancière holds the ontological commitments of Sartre’s existentialism. Instead, I think that Rancière appropriates these concepts in order to think egalitarian praxis historically. First, he appropriates them to show how the formation of subjectivity through freedom is a dynamic that introduces new ways of speaking, being, and doing, instead of being a mode of assuming an established identity. Rancière says as much when he states that his ‘own rejection of identitarian fixations (fixations identitaries) was first satisfied in Sartrian [sic] freedom, its rejection of fixed identities, and the opposition it establishes to Being of doing things and making oneself’ (Rancière, 2012b, 207). Although this claim is retrospective, and although it discusses his intellectual formation even before encountering Althusser, it remains instructive. Reading Rancière with Sartre amplifies the dynamic character of political subjectivation, which insofar as it is transformative, must be what it is not and not be what it is. Second, Rancière uses the concepts of freedom, contingency, and facticity to demonstrate the historical contingency of any situation or social order, a contingency that is the possibility of egalitarian praxis. Therefore these concepts provide a minimal theoretical structure to think politics historically.
Part I concludes with the observation that politics is, on Rancière’s account, rare. When he concedes that politics – as an event that interrupts policing – is rare, this concession could leave the impression that, absent politics, a regime of policing and the operations by which it organizes a given distribution of the sensible are relatively static or overwhelmingly practico-inert. In Part II, I argue that what Rancière calls the politics of aesthetics is a micropolitics that takes place in the interval of the heterogeneity of politics and policing. By stipulating that aesthetics is a form of contestation and transformation that operates at the micropolitical level, it is possible to cast a stark contrast between Rancière’s aesthetics and the theorists of modernity, modernism, and inaesthetics that he critiques. Ranciere’s account of aesthetics does not, however, assume the historical validity of concepts such as modernity and modernism. Instead, he contends that there are three major regimes of the identification of art and the arts: the ethical regime of images, the representative regime of the arts, and the aesthetic regime of art. Concepts such as modernity, modernism, and inaesthetics are subsequently evaluated in relation to this classification of regimes.
I have set two tasks for Chapter 3. First, I outline Rancière’s account of the historical emergence of the aesthetic regime of art. Then I examine his critique of Greenberg’s sociologization of the politics of modernism and Benjamin’s messianic critique of modernity. Rancière argues that the aesthetic regime emerges through a literary or aesthetic revolution that dispenses with the norms that govern the representative regime of the arts. The norms of the representative regime govern the production and reception of acceptable and successful forms of artistic mimesis. However, mimesis does not merely mean the adequate artistic and technical representation of an art’s subject matter. Instead, Rancière contends that, within the representative regime, mimesis names a set of norms or principles that bind artistic values and hierarchies to social values and hierarchies. Thus when the representative regime distinguishes between genres and arts, these distinctions are defined by the subjects that each art or genre can appropriately represent.
Broadly speaking, the representative regime is a poetics of the great deeds of great men, regulated by norms that establish a ‘causal rationality of action’ modelled on speech (Rancière, 2006b, 9). This model of efficacious speech is structured by the ‘will to signify’, a relationship of address and mode of intelligibility that establishes a causal relation between the will of the speaker and the will of the addressee that must act in turn; this address both drives the plot of the work while inculcating the norms of the ‘world of action’ that direct what is appropriate for an audience to think and to feel (2006b, 14). For example, Aristotle – whose Poetics invents the paradigm of the representative regime – argues that tragedy effectively produces catharsis when those of ‘great reputation and prosperity’ fall into misfortune due to ignorance or error (1453a10). While comedy can imitate those who are worse than ordinary people, tragedy must represent those who are more noble; it would lack cathartic effects if it portrayed the noble falling into misery, the ignoble attaining happiness or the already undeserving falling from happiness to misery. The norms of mimesis that govern the representative regime require that characters’ actions are appropriate to their social standing.
The aesthetic regime dispenses with these norms; it ‘strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres’ (Rancière, 2004b, 23). The aesthetic regime is a historical set of practices and discourses of visibility and intelligibility that are defined by artistic novelty and social change whereby any part of the everyday world could become prosaic and aesthetic. Rancière argues that the aesthetic regime art is a domain of socially lived experience that provisionally inscribes and reinscribes the boundaries of art and non-art, that contests the social divisions that govern what and who are portrayed in, and who produces, art. While the representative regime is a form of policing the arts, the aesthetic regime produces forms of micropolitics that open new possibilities of aesthetic emancipation by producing art that is either imbricated in everyday social life or separated out from life as an autonomous domain that is heterogeneous to the imperatives of the canons of taste and circulation of commodities.
Given that the terms art and aesthetics name a regime that is both provisional and historically contingent, Rancière criticizes the teleological aspects that define – for different reasons – prevalent accounts of modernity and modernism. We will look first at Greenberg’s account of modernism. He argues that the autonomy of each art is guaranteed by the unique opacity of its medium. By virtue of the interrogation of the opacity of a medium – for instance, painting interrogates the flatness and two-dimensionality of pictorial space – an art produces an experience that is irreducible to any other experience. But Greenberg’s account is not merely descriptive of one approach to art. Instead, he traces a seeming historical teleology from Manet to ‘American type’ painting (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still) whereby modern art arrives at abstraction: ‘it seems to be a law of modernism … that the conventions not essential to the viability of a medium be discarded as soon as they are recognized’ (Greenberg, 1958, 208). Such a teleological account – the outcome of modern art is a politics of resistant form – seems to relegate the practices that attempted to revolutionize art and life by abolishing their separation to a liminal space between serious, modernist art and kitsch.
Rancière’s critique of Greenberg extends beyond the latter’s narrow description of the history of modern art; he also attacks Greenberg’s sociologization of art for producing a form of intellectual and aesthetic stultification. Indeed, in a recent interview, Rancière contends that the modernist paradigm elaborated by Greenberg is a ‘liquidation of the dominant tendency of the aesthetic regime, which is to abolish the boundaries between “mediums”, between high art and popular art, and ultimately between art and life’ (Rancière and Davis, 2013, 204–5). Greenberg denies the possibility of aesthetic equality. Instead, he argues that the modernist avant-gardes are tasked with preserving living culture against bourgeois philistinism and proletarian kitsch. More specifically, he claims: first, that the modernist avant-garde is necessary because the masses by definition lack the leisure, time and knowledge necessary to appreciate high culture; but second, that the proletariat’s demand for culture and entertainment, ultimately satisfied by kitsch, poses one of the greatest threats to living culture. On Rancière’s account, Greenberg’s modernist avant-garde plays a role similar to that described of communist intellectuals in The Communist Manifesto. The division of aisthesis between those who have leisure and those who do not, in Greenberg’s account, ultimately stultifies and forecloses on what Rancière considers to be the emancipatory possibilities of the politics of aesthetics.
If Greenberg’s politicization – sociologization – of modernism is both anti-egalitarian and anti-aesthetic (insofar as it liquidates the aesthetic regime of art), then Rancière should have more in common with the hermeneutics of emancipation that guides Benjamin’s analyses of politics, history, and art. Benjamin’s discussions of the ‘literarization of the conditions of living’ anticipate in part Rancière’s account of the revolution of literature (Benjamin, 1934b, 742). This process of the literarization of life, according to Benjamin, subverts the distinctions that classify the differences between genres, between culture and politics, and between writer and reader. Nonetheless, Rancière critiques Benjamin on two points. First, he avers that Benjamin’s work overstates the role of technology and technical means in making possible new forms of emancipatory artistic practices. Second, and more importantly, Rancière argues that Benjamin’s ‘weak messianism’ submits politics and art to the historical teleology of redemption. On Rancière’s account, a teleological account of the history of politics and aesthetics traps the struggle of the oppressed between the catastrophe of progress and an always approaching redemption, meaning that the political task of the present is to decipher – through a kind of messianic symptomology – and bear witness to the fragments of a past that once redeemed will ‘become citable in all its moments’ (Benjamin, 1940, 390). To the messianic Benjamin, Rancière opposes the archivist Benjamin who gathers the materials that could link the history of social practices to a history of subjectivation while simultaneously reflecting on the conditions of its own archival construction, disentangling its emancipatory aims from teleological and symptomological motifs (Rancière, 1996a, 39–40). In other words, to messianic redemption, Rancière opposes a micropolitics of fragmentary emancipation, misinterpretation and literary misunderstanding.
In Chapter 4, I continue to test the hypothesis that Rancière’s politics of aesthetics designates micropolitical practices that interrupt the practico-inert structures of everyday life. In addition, I take up his claim that the emergence of the aesthetic regime of art does not foreclose on the possibility of the historical existence of other regimes of art (Rancière, 2004b, 50), to contend that both the aesthetic regime and what I call the Platonic regime of art become possible when the mimetic rules that structure the representative regime lose their normative force. Acknowledging the conflict of historically possible regimes serves to detotalize Rancière’s account of the aesthetic regime – which he sometimes treats as a general historical apparatus of artistic production and reception and at other times as a praxis of staging a particular type of aesthetic experience – in order to underline how today the politics of art remains an open question.
The Platonic regime is not equivalent to what Rancière calls the ethical regime of images. This ethical regime, as it is set out in Plato’s Republic, judges images according to the way that they affect the community. Hence the arts of painting and poetry are evaluated as any other craft – how they imitate a model or Idea. The arts of painting and poetry, which are imitations of crafts that imitate models, are twice removed from knowledge. But Plato’s condemnation of art (if we may use an anachronistic term here) is not merely that art imitates truth. As Rancière points out, Plato also condemns poets and painters for transgressing the Idea of justice predicated on the supposition that each member of the city has but one occupation. Indeed, the poet is a double of the philosopher whose task it is to deliberate upon all human affairs, virtue and vice, and the nature of the gods – but where the philosopher legislates by means of reason, the poet persuades by means of images and rhetorics that appeal to an audience’s unruly desires. Insofar as she produces merely the appearance of truth and uses these appearances to upset the order of the city, the poet is the artisan of injustice.
Chapter 4 is dedicated to showing how the Platonic regime of art – as it is constructed in the works of F. W. J. Schelling and Badiou – differs from the ethical regime of images and the aesthetic regime of art. While Schelling and Badiou require, like Plato, the ontological verification of art in relation to the Idea, they both maintain that art is an autonomous domain that bears on truth. Since art is an autonomous domain that relates to truth, it cannot be evaluated like just any other craft (that is, evaluating art as an imitation of a craft that is produced in accordance to the knowledge of a model or Idea). Instead, to say that art relates to the Idea means that philosophy formulates a ‘relation of rupture’ (Noys, 2009, 385) that separates artistic events from a given state of a situation. Schelling names this Idea of the relation of rupture totality, which means that art exhibits thought in its totality as the identity or indifference of freedom and necessity, self and nature, subject and object. The totality of the artwork breaks with the fragmentary and mechanistic relations that govern contemporary society and points toward the possibility of a new mythology that would unify a people within an organic community. For Badiou, the relation of rupture is the Idea of subtraction, by which art makes visible the ‘monumental construction, projects, the creative force of the weak, [and] the overthrow of established powers’ that democratic materialism declares inexistent (Badiou, 2004, 133). Art is monumental by virtue of subtracting itself from the circulation of commodities and the levelling force of consensus.
I argue, then, that the irreconcilable difference between the Platonic regime and the aesthetic regime concerns the scope of the politics of art. For Schelling and Badiou, art must be monumental or evental, while for Schiller and Rancière, the politics of art is micropolitical. As Schiller writes:
In the midst of the fearful kingdom of forces, and in the midst of the sacred kingdom of laws, the aesthetic impulse to form is at work, unnoticed, on the building of a third joyous kingdom of play and of semblance, in which man is relieved of the shackles of circumstance, and released from all that might be called constraint, alike in the physical and in the moral sphere. (Schiller, 1795, 215)
The monumental concept of the politics of art, I conclude, is not problematic in itself. That is, we should not dismiss the possibility of monumental art – I can’t help but think here of Vladimir Tatlin’s ambitious project, the Monument to the Third International (1919–20) – despite the fact that such monumental projects seem to be relics of the past. Instead, the Platonic account of monumental art is flawed because it dismisses the micropolitical possibilities of artistic production and aesthetic experience. As Badiou writes, ‘It is better to do nothing than to work formally toward making visible what the West declares to exist’ – as if an artwork’s current inscription within a given distribution of the sensible exhausts its potential intelligibility (Badiou, 2004, 148). Art, from Badiou’s Platonic standpoint, must be monumental, or it will not be at all – it will be merely culture or kitsch. By contrast, one could construct a micropolitical account of aesthetics while remaining attentive to the possibility of an art exhibiting a monumental relation of rupture. Both Schiller and Rancière affirm that the micropolitics of aesthetics takes place in the interstices of the practico-inert structures of a given distribution of the sensible, and that this micropolitics interrupts and transforms established forms of visibility, intelligibility and place. Politics is rare, as Rancière notes, but the micropolitics of aesthetics, which happens in the intervals between policing and egalitarian politics, works to transform everyday life.
In the Conclusion, I examine the valences of Rancière’s references to everyday life or social life in Aisthesis. While the present study considers Ranciere’s politics of equality and his account of aesthetics in turn, these concluding remarks allow us to reflect on the practice of writing as a political and aesthetic form. As he notes, in The Politics of Aesthetics, ‘a theoretical discourse is always simultaneously an aesthetic form, a sensible reconfiguration of the facts it is arguing about’ (Rancière, 2004b, 65). Therefore I will ask what, in Aisthesis, Rancière’s repeated use of life as a metonymy for the politics of aesthetics makes visible and what it occludes. In Aisthesis, he argues that the aesthetic regime of art undermines the forms of social causality and social stratification that govern the other regimes of art (the representative regime and the ethical regime) and Greenberg’s sociologization of modernism. Aesthetics opens a field of free play and free appearance that, in contrast to the models of social causality, allows anyone and everyone to ‘do nothing’. In other words, life names both the emergence of a regime of aisthesis whereby aesthetic equality becomes available to anyone and everyone and a practice of artistic production whereby ‘anyone can grab a pen, taste any kind of pleasure, or nourish any ambition whatsoever’ (Rancière, 2011a, 51). Rancière’s Aisthesis, concerning these theoretical points, is consistent with his other works on aesthetics. However, I will conclude by noting that the political scope of aesthetics has changed. In Aisthesis, Rancière outlines the politics of aesthetics – the politics of the aisthesis of life – in relation to the other regimes of art and Greenberg’s modernism. In effect, aesthetics is a politics that affirms the emancipation of words, bodies, and affects by virtue of being neither the representative regime of the arts nor the ethical regime of images. But, as I have argued, and as Rancière contents in his other works on aesthetics, the micropolitics of aesthetics names a constellation of discourses and practices that intersect – that is, by turns affirm, interrupt, and contest – with the many ways that lived experience is socially mediated: other regimes of art, the apparatuses of policing, and the emancipatory politics of equality.
In what follows, I consider equality, in its political and aesthetic forms, as a significant problem within the history of philosophy from Descartes to Rancière. The purpose of this study is to outline an egalitarian frame of reference for rethinking modern philosophy after Descartes. The following analyses of a number of egalitarian moments in philosophy are meant to engage Rancière’s terse and sometimes polemical historical shorthand. For example, he insists that political subjectivation is modelled on Descartes’s ‘ego sum, ego existo’, and in Chapter 1, I aim to make historical and conceptual sense of this claim. But what follows is not an exegesis or explanation of Rancière’s – or anybody else’s – work.8 There is, for example, no discussion of Rancière’s work on film. Nor do I intend for this study to be comprehensive.9 Instead, I place Rancière’s work in a historical context of considering equality as a political, philosophical, and aesthetic question, while reading the history of modern philosophy from an egalitarian standpoint. Using Rancière’s concepts and arguments to reconsider the history of philosophy while using this counter-history of egalitarian moments to situate Rancière’s work amounts, perhaps, to a hermeneutic circle or, as he would say, a historical fiction. But it is no more of a historical fiction than the way that the predominant frameworks of continental philosophy – such as post-Heideggerian phenomenology and deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and post-Marxism – formulate historical or genealogical accounts of thinking their present problematics. What counts is whether or not Rancière’s work and this history of egalitarian moments offer new and compelling possibilities for thinking our present engagements with politics and art.
The present study has been motivated by the fact that evaluating Rancière’s work using the assumptions and methods of these established frameworks in some way occludes important aspects of his thought. If one supposes that politics – or the political (which is something other than politics) – must be grounded in political ontology or the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, Rancière’s work might seem retrograde or even incoherent. Likewise if one expects his politics to decipher in the surfaces of political discontent the true demands of radical struggle. In what follows, however, I do not attempt to adjudicate the differences between Rancière’s egalitarian method and these established theoretical questions and frameworks. Instead, by tracing a provisional – and let me stress that it is provisional and non-exhaustive – account of a history of egalitarian moments in philosophy, I hope to show how Rancière, in ways unforeseen by other approaches in contemporary continental philosophy, asks compelling questions and makes compelling claims about equality. More importantly, though, I hope to draw attention to previously overlooked concepts and arguments that could still be taken up as new forms of dissensus.
Notes
1The source of this passage is probably Montaigne (see Rodis-Lewis, 1990, 170), who writes in his Essays, in the chapter ‘On Presumption’, that ‘It is commonly held that good sense is the gift which Nature has most fairly shared among us, for there is nobody who is not satisfied with what Nature has allotted him’ (II, XVII, 746). Note also how Hobbes’s discussion of intellectual equality echoes Montaigne’s remarks.
2Though some of these experiments, such as those involving vivisection, are reprehensible.
3There have been various translations of Rancière’s term subjectivation (see Rockhill’s ‘Glossary’ in Rancière, 2004b, 92). In Disagreement, Julie Rose translates the term as ‘subjectification’, and in previous publications I had adopted this translation. I have since decided to translate subjectivation as subjectivation. As Samuel Chambers argues, this distinguishes subjectivation from assujettissement (subjectification), a term used by the early Foucault – not to mention Lacan and Althusser – to designate forms of interpellation within networks of power/knowledge (Chambers, 2013, 98–101). I have silently modified subsequent quotations to accord with this translation choice.
4Strictly speaking, Rancière differentiates between ‘equality’ and ‘politics’. Equality is a principle that ‘is in no way in itself political’, but it becomes political when collective practices of political subjectivation challenge, through dissensus, regimes of policing (1995, 31–32/55).
5Todd May argues that conventional debates on equality focus on what he calls ‘passive equality’, which he provisionally defines as ‘the creation, preservation, or protection of equality by governmental institutions’ rather than any concept similar to Rancière’s radical or ‘active’ equality (May, 2008, 3). On this point, see Chapter 2.
6For Aristotle, the legislator ‘must not think the truly democratical or oligarchical measure to be that which will give the greatest amount of democracy or oligarchy, but that which will make them last longest’ (1320a1–4).
7There are numerous other terms that Rancière uses functionally, insofar as the meaning of these terms is at stake in dissensual practices. These terms include, but are not limited to: society, political life, community, a common world, and being-in-common.
8Here I will point the interested reader to a number of books with a more direct focus on Rancière (May 2008, Davis 2010, Tanke 2011, Chambers 2013), to an edited volume on Rancière’s key concepts (Deranty 2010a), and to two in-depth engagements with Rancière’s politics (May 2008, Chambers 2013).
9Indeed, each chapter could be read as a reflection or commentary that builds upon a work or small number of works of Rancière’s: in Chapter 1 it is The Ignorant Schoolmaster, in Chapter 2 Disagreement, Hatred of Democracy, and The Philosopher and His Poor, in Chapter 3 The Politics of Literature and The Politics of Aesthetics, and in Chapter 4 Aesthetics and Its Discontents and The Emancipated Spectator. Further study of egalitarian moments that also addresses Rancière’s relationship to post-Heideggerian thought, Marxism, and psychoanalysis could begin with, for instance, On the Shores of Politics, Althusser’s Lesson, and The Aesthetic Unconscious.