HISTORICIZING DISSENSUS: TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

Jacques Rancière’s The Lost Thread explores the much-studied advent of modern fiction in the nineteenth century, its emergence from the hierarchy of genres and subjects characterizing pre-modern fiction. But while much ink has been spilt about this in twentieth-century modernist and structuralist discourse, Rancière argues that the essential anti-representational stakes of this transformation of literary fiction have been missed. What occurred was nothing less than a revolution in the ontology of fiction, the consistency and ramifications of which have gone largely misunderstood. The Lost Thread is thus an attempt to historicize what he sees this revolution as being about, that is, its specific dissensus, or untimeliness. In this, it continues the work he did in Aisthesis, which bears on the texture and logic of what he calls the aesthetic regime of art.

For Aristotle, something could be counted among the arts if it was endowed with a story of significance, possessing a beginning, a middle and an end; if it had an organic structure in which all the details were subordinated to the work’s overall perfection. But the new world of sensation and affect forced a rethink of this rationality. Gustave Flaubert’s literary realism marked a point of rupture with representational logic, as literature began to appear as a sensible mode in its own right: fiction came to manifest a growing disproportion between the preparatives for action and the unfolding of its action, going so far as to abolish any regulated succession from the immateriality of thought to the materiality of action. Flaubert’s novels, like those of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf after him, undid the beautiful proportions that, since Aristotle, had defined fiction as a structure of rationality: the middle no longer appeared as a point of passage between a beginning and an end, but more as a milieu without meaning; details seemed to detach themselves from their internal organization; gaps opened up between effects and causes, depriving the tale of intelligibility through its temporal development; fiction lost its vertebral column, ceasing to be a body that stood by itself.

The new fiction came to be ‘cluttered’ with a twofold excess. It became inundated with what the rationality of representationalist poetics had necessarily excluded. If fiction had necessarily entailed the interconnected causal unfolding of events in accordance with the rules of verisimilitude, then what it excluded, as Aristotle claimed, is the kath’ hekaston, or empirical succession of historical facts as they simply occur, without rhyme or reason, one after the other. This story about fiction’s manifest signs of change is an old one. If Rancière gives it a new twist, it is not in the manner of a Roland Barthes, by providing another interpretation of its non-manifest workings as part of a governing narrative structure. Instead, he takes into account what structuralist and modernist accounts of this transformation necessarily miss, namely the other side of this excess inundating the new fiction. To the succession of random events that simply happen one after the other corresponds the people who, unable to think at the level of the whole in order to distinguish themselves through grand actions or refined feelings, cannot do otherwise than simply have things happen to them. The Lost Thread turns precisely on the singular ways in which the new fiction reinscribes this outside – of things and people encountered in the randomness of life – within itself.

Conservative critics at the time deplored this cluttering of the space of fiction once reserved exclusively for the thought and refinement of the elite by insubordinate details and the prosaic concerns of ordinary everyday individuals. A century later Roland Barthes would interpret this disproportion between the immobilities of description and the dynamics of action in new literature as an attempt to recover the lost verisimilitude of Aristotelian representationalist poetics: he conceptualized this excess of superfluous details hindering narrative action as an ‘effet de réel’, or reality effect. Fiction is cast here not as a structure of rationality but instead as an imaginary realm somewhere between being and nothingness. But it is productive: the specificity of this fiction, as Barthes has it, consisted in an attempt to reify (market) reality, at naturalizing history in a capitalist society in which the old fixed modes and genres and hierarchies of subjects that defined pre-modern fiction no longer held. Rancière takes issue with both the conservative critic and the progressive intellectual, whose positions are by no means opposed; for the real issue, which forms the central task of this book, is to grasp this ‘overcrowding’ of the space of pure fiction modern fiction as a dissensus with, and as a process of what I will call a ‘creative destruction’ of, the representational regime of fiction. It is nothing less than the forging of a new rationality of fiction itself – under what conditions and how this is done are the subject matter of this book.

Historicizing this dissensus of modern fiction – grasping it as a transformative event in the very structure of rationality of fiction itself – means grasping the new subjects and the new objects, the new problems and paradoxes, that it brings forth. But doing this means dismissing a twofold obfuscation of this event: on the one hand, the conservative critic’s view of the ‘cluttering’ of the space of fiction as a mere series of random events without backbone, a simple pile of facts. The critic dubs this ‘invasion’ of a space and time, now too cluttered by the ‘prosaic’ concerns of ordinary individuals to allow the distinguished elites the room to develop their grand actions and unfold their fine feelings, as follows: it is democracy in literature. But understanding this nomination pejoratively, he is nostalgic for the eternal time of the old order and fails to see the consistency of the revolution in the ontology of fiction underway. As Rancière reminds us, realist fiction in the manner of Flaubert or Conrad is for this critic simply a monster without order, a random succession of empirical facts without causal linkages, of details that signal an equality without rationality. It is viewed as a simple destruction of the old order, a fruitless ruination to be cast aside in the restoration of the proper representational order of fiction. As suggested above, the progressive intellectual, on the other hand, views this destruction, this proliferation of descriptive excess ruining representation, as a sort of stopgap to a loss of order. It is an attempt at reinventing representational effects by inundating the narrative structure with excessive description of a paradoxical usefulness: descriptions of objects, for example, whose sheer purposelessness indicate the unconditional realist of their being there. The usefulness of the figures and images go the new fiction, then, is precisely to signal the eternity of the new (bourgeois) reality, its historical permanence. For this intellectual, realist fiction thus maintains verisimilitude, against the background of a simultaneously destructive dimension, since it works to recode mores, demystify taboos, eradicate inherited psychic structures, and so on. However, its unidimensional and closed temporality – as is implied in its forging of a ‘reality effect’ – means it is unable to make the creative leap outside representation toward authentic artistic modernity, understood as a signifying process possessing its own autonomous logic. Barthes subscribes to the modernist vision of a historical event that breaks through History, separating out a time before and a time after. And this modernism links together a historical process of political emancipation and a historical process of the autonomization of artistic practices. Understanding representation as simple figuration or resemblance, for him the task, at once political and literary, was thus to sweep away all parasitic images of the real and bring about the purification of narrative structure. As Rancière magnificently shows, despite their differences, Barthes’s position thereby rejoins that of the conservative critic. For both encounter the ‘scandal’ of this excess that they insist on keeping out. Both thus necessarily maintain an emphasis, in their own ways, on the fictional time of cause–effect linkages, of action, which, as Rancière argues, is the very core of representational poetics.

Where Barbey d’Aurevilly and other critics could see only unstructured, irrational excess, and Barthes the ideological naturalization of historical process, Rancière unfolds for us the slow transformation of fiction in its break from the representational regime. The creations of modern fiction, rightly seen, have a consistency and rationality that is founded upon the ruin of the structure of rationality of the old fiction and its organic model of action. This process of destruction is an immanent one: it is not merely a negative term to be discarded or an intermediary step on the way to genuine creation but simultaneously a positive means of construction, an activity replete with its own temporality and logic – a creative destruction.

As diagnosed by Rancière, this rupture entails a full-blown revolution in the ontology of fiction. If new fiction is ‘democracy in literature’, pace Aurevilly it is because of the effects of equality it is able to generate. This democratic revolution, as Ranciere argues throughout, can only occur on the proviso that the ontology of action and the idea of thought that goes along with it – and which are hierarchical in essence – are shattered and new bodies and subjects able to emerge. It thus unfolds not through manifestos, but, as he points out, through dispersed attempts at reworking the relation between fiction and its outside, that is, at reorganizing the relation between two ways of linking events: on the one hand, fiction as a temporal development obeying a sequence of cause–effect relations subordinated to an overall end; and, on the other, the pile of data, or succession of historical facts as they occur. What occurs in this reorganization is that the split between the fictional plot and its outside becomes internal to fiction itself, through a work of thought and practices of writing that transform this outside by producing specific fractures with the regime of representation. What Rancière gives us to see through the genealogy of modern fiction, and the surprising collection of novelists, poets and playwrights that he summons here, is the consistency and the ramified consequences of this revolution.

Flaubert, as Ranciere argues in the opening essay, was the first to see clearly that the real of old fiction had been undermined. The time of action, which formed the core of the representational regime, and its hierarchy of life forms, which had ‘defined the space of fiction and commanded its organic unity’, had simultaneously given way to a space of sensible coexistence of all individuals, things and situations – what Rancière elsewhere calls an aesthetic democratism. Flaubert’s solution as to how to reconfigure the rationality of fiction under these conditions, he knows, cannot come through the series of concepts that once defined the fictional whole. It must come in and through the kath’ hekaston, on the condition, however, that its status is altered. In Flaubert, the random succession of empirical facts is no longer the outside of poetic rationality, but becomes the time itself of a ‘democracy of sensible coexistences’, ‘a chain of sensible events that weaves thoughts and wills’ themselves, that which constitutes the contingent interlacings informing individual experiences. The whole is now in the kath’ hekaston, in the detail; or rather, it is in the power of linking, in the impersonal breath that holds together sensible events and has them produce ‘those singular condensations that are called love or desire’ (34). It is this impersonal Life of micro-events that enables the modern fiction writer to provide fiction with a new texture, one corresponding to the equality of all subject matter, which is to say the negation of any relation between a determinate genre and a determinate form of life.

For the question, Rancière argues, is not about the ontological status of the real – it is not to know, as he puts it pace Barthes, whether ‘the real really is real’ – but instead is about the texture of this real. And the texture of the real is not about analysis, but rather about the life lived by those who inhabit it. This texture is one that undoes the hierarchies of the old fiction and thereby operates, as Rancière so convincingly shows, an effect of equality. This new real is a ‘de-hierarchized’ one. As we read in Un Coeur simple, from now on, it is the preserve of any woman from the lower classes to be able reach the vertiginous heights of passion formerly reserved for the elite, with a force of passion that rends holes in the routine of existence. But the effect of Flaubert’s new absolute style is that the status of the thoughts, feelings and wills that unfold in the narrative also changes. Everything under the writer’s pen is treated with the same care. The character can therefore no longer be a subject that is the source and master of its thoughts and feelings. Instead, it becomes a simple point of conjunction between, on the one hand, the ‘rain of sensible events’ that unconsciously inform thoughts and feelings – which thus seem reduced to the status of epiphenomena – and the plot logic of social identities and causal relations, which become merely dream-like but nevertheless still obtain. In the Flaubertian novel, these two times of cause–effect linkages and of the kath’ hekaston thus become interwoven in a new logic. In this logic the status of narrative action is altered, since the novelistic action moves forward only through the impulses received from random coming together of sensations, affects, memories, etc. But the forward movement is nonetheless interpretable by the novel’s characters in representational terms (in Madame Bovary Emma interprets the love she feels/is made to feel for Rodolphe as her love for him). So, Rancière argues, Flaubert at once cements the ruin of the old fiction and, by having the time of the kath’ hekaston work in conjunction with that of verisimilitude, makes a concession to it.

With the novels of Conrad, which Rancière explores in the book’s second essay, the interlinking of these two times of new fiction gets radicalized. Conrad takes further this logic of the ‘luminous halo’ of sensible micro-events, in and through which thoughts, wills and dreams are produced. He abolishes the logic of verisimilitude and its category of probability. What is interesting for him, Rancière argues, is no longer to be able to anticipate the probability of what happens in its effects. The moment is no longer a moment in a time of succession leading to a possible social end; instead it becomes the moment in which the time of regulated succession is blown apart altogether. Conrad’s description of Lord Jim’s leap from the Patna belongs to the order not of the possible but of the real – it sets in motion a chain of events that tears Jim from the ordinary time of succession, and brings to light that which stood for Conrad as the sole certitude: our being inevitably caught in the unmasterability of the real. The leap attests, among other things, to the split in any moment: a moment can be a link in a verisimilar plot, or it can be the point at which an entirely inconceivable and real rupture occurs in one’s existence and which, by suspending the false solidity of verisimilitude, reveals the lie of the plot. What Rancière calls the ‘clarity of the detail’ is the impossibility of reconstructing the act’s conceivability. Ultimately, Conrad constructs a time-space in which it is not that the real is reached so much as the idea that any notion of the real is a fiction. But this is not to say that all is dream, but instead that all is real; it means that the real and dream are caught in a fundamental indistinction.

Virginia Woolf’s novels, as Rancière details in the third essay, then come to deepen the problematic – one which cuts through any categorization of writers into realist or modernist (indeed, for Rancière, the history of modern fiction in literature is the history of the realist novel). Woolf radicalizes the ways in which the luminous halo is able to suspend the tyranny of the plot, her novels being about exploring differing ways in which this can happen and the tension between them. She makes clear the other limit of realist fiction: it can never dissolve purely into a musical phrasing of the luminous halo of sensible micro-events, precisely because this impersonal Life has no proper form of its own. Thus, while the ontology of realist fiction is monist, its practice is necessarily dialectical: it consists in staging the ‘tension between the grand lyricism of impersonal Life and the arrangements of the plot’ (67). Woolf’s major novels, Mrs Dalloway in particular, represent a singular achievement in the way she presents the dialectic that structures fiction by dividing it.

This first part devoted to exploring the tensions of the realist novel takes up half the book. Brief as the above remarks are, perhaps we can nonetheless venture to claim that Rancière gives us fresh insight into Fredric Jameson’s musings on the hybrid character of the notion of realism. As Jameson notes, realism presents both an epistemological claim (for knowledge or truth) and an aesthetic ideal of beauty or satisfaction. However, for Jameson these dimensions remain incommensurable, whereby joining them together has fatal consequences for both: the claim to social truth or knowledge leads us to ideology; while the claim to an ideal of beauty or aesthetic satisfaction traps us in ‘outdated styles or mere decoration (if not distraction)’.1 Yet this is clearly only the case if realism is deemed to have ‘a vested interest, an ontological stake, in the solidity of social reality, on the resistance of bourgeois society to history and to change’.2 But, for Rancière, the aesthetics of the realist novel – the clarity of details, the absolute style that translates the ‘very life of the whole, the impersonal breath that holds together the sensible events’, etc. – manifest precisely the contrary of the immediate emotional gratification and lack of intellectual effort that characterize kitsch, nor do they have anything to do with the ornamental devices of epidiectic oratory. At the same time, Rancière demonstrates that the suspensive capacity of the grand impersonal Life is about revealing the lie of the plot, and thus about transmitting situations ‘at the limit of the recountable’. What is thus transmitted in them is the paradoxically contingent state of whatever passes as reality. In response to Jameson, it might thus be said that these two dimensions – of truth and aesthetic style – far from being incommensurable, actually imply one another. Moreover, the idea of the politics of fiction that can and must be drawn from modern fiction cannot be said to simply lapse into ideology; the specific politics of fiction concerns the ways in which it constructs its own logic(s) of equality. Literature is not political by attempting to reify the so-called (politico-economic) real. As Rancière has argued in numerous works, it has its own politics, and it has them because it constructs its own logics of equality: logics that stand in dynamic, irreducible tension with one another; logics that, in this tension, are irreducible to any construction of a given reality.

Part Two of the book, The Republic of the Poets, explores the developments of modern fiction in poetry, with separate essays on John Keats and Charles Baudelaire. In the first, Rancière discusses the politics of Keats’s poetic work, which he sees as developing a metapolitics that is fundamentally irreducible to the usual split between contextless, apolitical beauty on the one hand, and the promotion of a concrete political determination on the other. Keats approaches the question of the ‘justice of the poem’ through that of the ‘availability of works’. This latter question shifts considerations of the politics of the poem. For Keats, the question is one of the quality of their availability. Why? Because for him poetry is not essentially as a way of writing but instead as a way of reading and of transforming what one has read into a way of living. Poetic disinterest is the work of an imagination that does not attempt to configure the common fabric of life so as to ensnare its reader; instead, it ceaselessly takes from and gives to this fabric in such a way as to address itself to another intelligence. Keats understands that this can only be done by viewing the democracy of co-presences horizontally, and thus in opposition to the vertical Christian interpretation of it, which reserves a special place for the poet, alone able to see and show to others the divinity of creation in each singular manifestation of life. A thorough-going equality demands the exercise of the paradoxical (in)activity of ‘diligent indolence’: the idea of an equality of fragments, sensations or signs, equally animated by the power of the whole, is not something that can just be discovered among ordinary beings on the road; instead, it requires a practice of weaving the web of poetry that, traced bit by bit, extends to infinity the power of a singular arrangement of these sensations or these signs. Reciprocally, all individuals have this ability to weave a poem on their own account, attaching to all the infinity of different leaves that others have made available. From this, Rancière is able to shed light on what he sees as Keats’s unique version of a certain poetic vision of the community, qua community of individuals who participate in a sensible equality that is ‘experienced in the singularity of encounters and of communications, and not in the universality of laws’.

The essay on Charles Baudelaire likewise sets the Baudelairian reverie of the ‘infinite taste of the Republic’ against the vast set of transformations that affect the poetic paradigm in his time. On the one hand, knowledge has become divorced from the finite world required for the organic model of action; the world is now too vast for the calculation of probable causes and effects. Its scene extends beyond the finite world required for the logic of mastered action. On the other, impersonal life, as a power that that traverses bodies, exceeds their limits and disorganizes the very relation of thought to its effects. As such the agent of the action no longer has a temporality that coincides with the source of its action. It is this context against which the transformations of the poetic form and the creations of reverie are to be grasped. Rancière’s interpretation of reverie thus differs from Benjamin’s, which sees it as a poetic transcription of the devastated experience of modernity in the era of High Capitalism. This enables him to show that this ‘infinite taste’ is not merely the passing fad that once saw Baudelaire actively side with the 1848 revolts; instead, it is the category of a consistent aesthetic politics. Nor is reverie a withdrawal into oneself due to disappointment experienced with the external world; more crucially, it is a mode of thought that challenges the boundary that the organic model imposed between ‘inner’ reality, in which thought decides, and ‘outer’ reality, in which it produces its effects.

Finally, the last essay, on the theatre of thoughts, examines what happens in the theatre chiefly of Maurice Maeterlinck and Georg Büchner within this configuration, in which life turns the stage into the place of a new dramaturgy, a dramaturgy of coexistence. The forms of this coexistence involve a separation of the powers of thought, speech and action. As three powers of the theatre, they must therefore receive a new articulation: the breath of the great impersonal Life demands the development of a new rationality of theatre. It demands that an image of the thought of theatre be forged that is in rupture with both the Platonic and Aristotelian ones. Rancière’s argument is that the new law of theatre is precisely that thought acts only inasmuch as it is an unmasterable territory. Thought in this new configuration becomes a twofold excess: first, over acts, which are unable to follow the rhythm of the succession of thoughts; and second, over itself, as their provenance is something the mind ‘cannot master, determine the justice of, or fix by itself the means of realization’. Büchner endeavours to radicalize the status of thought, as a law of the outside. Here we see a complete undoing of the opposition between thought qua unity of the multiple and the isolated succession of facts that we started with. Thought itself becomes subject to line of infinite fracturing, ruining both the Aristotelian and Platonic models. It becomes a disordered succession of ‘facts of thought’.

What all these essays thus contribute to doing is to mapping the historicity of the revolution of modern fiction and its dissensus with the regime of representation. Rancière is careful to avoid attributing this revolution any global cause. Its development, to be grasped, must be thought of immanently: every transformation effected within it is describable in terms of how it undoes, or suspends, distinctions constitutive of the former fictional rationality, each time in a new, singular fashion. Every new destruction of this old paradigm is a sort of repeat affirmation of this revolution and is in turn inseparable from a new phrasing of connections, a new landscape mapped, and a novel way of inventing solutions or aporias – in short, from its own creative activity. If modern fiction cannot be reduced to a deformed expression of any such cause, then, it is because its specificity, as Rancière so brilliantly shows, rather lies in the various ways in which it suspends cause–effect logic and explores the moment as a point of potential rupture.

To emphasize a global cause is to allow the progressive intellectual to do what has apparently been reserved for him: to think at the level of the whole, in the name of a revolutionary humanity still impeded in its development by the strictures of ideology. Now, this is what could be called a sort of plot lie. The ‘falseness’ of the knot of relations it implies – between the revolutionary people championed by the intellectual, the knowledge of the intellectual, and the oppressive order of power – was something Rancière first encountered during the turbulent events known as May 1968. These events were fundamental in showing Rancière that between the intellectual bearing an aim of socio-political transformation, who brings to workers the knowledge of their oppressed condition from the outside, and the oppressive order of power there is not an opposition but a complicity. They both operate according to categories that imply the masses’ incompetence – structural or natural – concerning politics. It was this lie concerning the image of the people’s incompetence that May ’68 overturned, since during it ordinary citizens arose to verify, against the presupposition of its incompetence, that which had been denied them, namely the basic equality of anyone and everyone. And they did so by producing forms of argumentation, of knowledge and of experience that manifested a common competence, a common power of intelligence.

What Rancière has strived to show in many ways, ever since he first sought to grasp the fracturing of categorial divisions that had sustained the power/knowledge nexus, was the nature of the presupposition of inequality sustaining this nexus and its utter contingency. This fracturing effected by the people showed indeed that the science of the intellectual (or the schoolmaster’s pedagogy) is not based in any science of the real at all. Instead of having a position grounded in a knowledge of reality, what is occupied is the real of a position. This means that hierarchical positions of the sort are grounded only in their own exercise, only in the repeated creation of their conditions of existence. At the heart of progressist logic, therefore, another time opens up, which is the time of a continual reopening of the gap separating those who know from those who don’t, basically through the telling of the oppressed about their condition – and first and foremost, through getting them to understand their incompetence or inability to understand. But political dissensus shows that emancipation is not achieved by being in tow to intellectuals with an understanding of the whole, but instead through a movement that is subtracted from hierarchical divisions and in doing so reveals the common power of the equality of intelligences.

If I recall this part of Rancière’s trajectory, it is because The Lost Thread traces a similar knot in the modernist and structuralist reception of modern fiction. It is a reception that cuts too quickly through the web of transformations affecting poetic rationality (its rearticulation of the two ways of linking events we have rapidly traced) toward the unique cause to which all literary phenomena can be reduced. In so doing, it fails to take into account the population of fiction, a population whose emergence is inseparable from the singular effects of equality this literature operates.

Modernist and structural reception is thus also way off target when it claims to discern beneath the surface of the modern text a historical narrative (one with capitalism, for example, as its centre) with a concrete agent (the bourgeoisie); when it claims to see in Flaubert’s sentences a bourgeois strategy to thing-ify human relations to the detriment of the open future of action, of proletarian advance. In projecting this vision of the people and the radical emancipation of humanity, it fails to see those effective appearances of the people, those egalitarian forms of disidentification of one’s gaze from one’s body, of one’s speech from one’s social destination. This disidentification is not describable in terms of the positivity of the social field. Similarly, a specific politics of fiction is made possible only through the logics of equality specific to fiction itself, logics that tear it from the representational regime. Or, to put it another way, just as politics for Rancière involves blurring the boundaries between those deemed destined to politics and those regarded as inhabiting the social, through a demonstrative speech that departicularizes political universality, so too can fiction have a politics, properly speaking, when it is freed from representational conventions through a work of writing that anonymizes the real.

Modern fiction, Rancière shows, is both a literary, poetic and dramaturgical phenomenon, as well as being a symptom of the quality of social and political life. For if there is a historical point of anchorage for modern fiction, it resides precisely the forms of intellectual and political emancipation enacted by those that social destination would appear to have condemned to the endless repetition of bare life. Disincorporating themselves from that social plot, ordinary workers and women displayed an unprecedented capacity, a capacity of everyone and anyone. This anonymous power, which appeared only in singular, local suspensions of the social plot, is key to the revolution of modern fiction. Writers of new fiction would appropriate it for themselves, turning it into the impersonal power of writing that phrases the luminous halo. Yet, the nineteenth-century movements of emancipation will have been its absent centre.