The Politics of the Police: From Neoliberalism to Anarchism, and Back to Democracy
Samuel A. Chambers
Jacques Rancière does political theory, if he does it at all, by staking out provocative positions and making provocative claims.1 As Davide Panagia puts it, for Rancière ‘politics is the practice of asserting one’s position [in a way that] that ruptures the logic of arkhê’ (Panagia 2001: §2).2 And one way to rupture a given order or logic is to rename or redefine terms. Rancière does this most famously with politics itself. Disagreement (1999), Rancière’s best-known work in English translation, made the bold and controversial move of redefining as ‘the police’ (la police) most of what political theorists and everyday political actors all traditionally recognize as politics. This has led to certain dislocations within the field of political thought. Some theorists have scrambled to make sense of Rancière’s radical (at best) or non-sensical (at worst) conception of politics as occurring only when the logic of equality interrupts the logic of domination. Others dismiss Rancière for conceiving of politics too narrowly (e.g. Dean 2009). These criticisms, however, miss their mark precisely because Rancière himself admits (or perhaps proclaims) that politics happens ‘very little’ (1999: 17).
That politics happens so infrequently only raises the question of how we are to understand the workings and functions of the police. It also leads us to ask: what is at stake in the police? On one level, my title, ‘The Politics of the Police’ gestures first of all to this simple but important query. At another level, however, my title looks like a contradiction in terms; since ‘politics’ and ‘police’ are diametrically opposed in Rancière’s thought, there can be no politics of the police. I will argue here that the degree to which we take ‘politics of the police’ to be an impossibility depends upon how we translate ‘politics’ and on how we conceptualize police. Finally, on a third level, ‘politics of the police’ points to the distinct ways in which particular theorizations of the police lead to different political articulations. My subtitle maps the movements I wish to track here: from Rancière’s critique of neoliberal interest-group politics, to Todd May’s vigorous defence of anarchism, to my own effort to return to a reworked (both with and against Rancière) democratic politics.
Rancière produces his concept of ‘the police’ precisely so as to redefine neoliberal consensus models (interest-group liberalism) as nothing more than ‘orders of the police’. This gives him the space to articulate his novel conception of politics, posed in stark and consistent opposition to police. But, despite its apparent centrality to his entire politico-theoretical framework, Rancière seems content to leave ‘the police’ somewhat undertheorized. He gives us a few pages on it in Disagreement, devotes one thesis to it in ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, and offers barely two short mentions of it in Hatred of Democracy. More than this, Rancière appears untroubled by the fact that most of what we typically take for politics has been redefined by this minimally developed concept of police. This makes politics special, and as Rancière says ‘rare’, but if the world we live in can only ever be a world of police orders, then do we not need to think more carefully and critically about the nature, extent, structure (and structural weaknesses) of those orders? Rancière offers few options, but he seems to imply that politics must be revolutionary, since political moments will prove so infrequent.
Into the space that Rancière opens but does not work within, Todd May inserts his own anarchist politics. In a book putatively devoted to Rancière’s political thought – it is titled, simply enough, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière – May develops an account of anarchism as the only true democratic politics, the only politics committed fully to the Rancièrean verification of equality in the face of social orders (i.e. police orders) of hierarchy and domination. To make this case, May must give a particular account of police orders precisely because his anarchist politics will remain committed to the complete obliteration of police. Along the way, I suggest – and precisely because police remains such an underdeveloped concept in Rancière’s political theory – May makes a significant contribution to a theory of the police.
My own efforts here to think through, augment, refine and perhaps reorient Rancière’s notion of ‘the police’ will be based partly on a critique and rejection of May’s anarchist project. May’s commitment to anarchism requires him to depart from Rancière precisely by misreading him. May wants to supplant police with politics. Therefore, for him, there can be no politics of the police; politics must destroy police. Put differently, May embraces the element of impropriety that proves central to Rancière’s thinking of politics, but he fails to retain any faith in Rancière’s concomitant commitment to an impure politics – to a rejection of any and all philosophical projects (from Plato to Althusser to Arendt) that would render politics pure (Rancière 2003c: 3). Thus, in this paper I call for a shift from May’s anarchism to a rearticulation of Rancière’s allegiance to democracy. But Rancière’s ‘democracy’, as he frequently reminds his readers, is not a regime. As he polemically explains, ‘we do not live in democracies’ (Rancière 2006b: 73). A theory of democracy inspired by Rancière – which may or may not remain a ‘Rancièrean’ theory of democracy – requires a theory of the politics of the police. It demands further development of Rancière’s provocative but elliptical comments concerning the ‘neutrality’ of la police and about the superiority of some police orders to others.
This essay clears the ground for such developmental work by taking on May’s reading of Rancière’s political thought, in section III. I challenge both May’s understanding of ‘the police’ in Rancière and the theory of anarchist politics that he develops from it. Most importantly, I show the essential connection between the two, thus indicating that there is a ‘politics of the police’ to just the extent that divergent readings of police will give rise to divergent politics. Prior to that encounter and preparatory to it I lay out, in section II, Rancière’s theory of the police such as it is developed in his writings, and I link his theory of the police with his practical intervention into and critique of neoliberalism. At the same time, I stake out the terms for further thinking of this crucial element in Rancière’s thought, suggesting a number of possible avenues for thinking the police. Finally, in section IV, I make the case for ‘the politics of the police’, an argument that offers a particular rendering of Rancière’s political theory and that demands further attention to the police.
II. Redefining Neoliberal Consensus Politics: la police
Rancière’s perhaps path-breaking, or perhaps merely curious, definition of politics is now well known in contemporary English-speaking political theory, and because of this, Rancière’s concept of ‘the police’, or ‘police orders’, also has some currency within the field. The two go together, of course, because Rancière redefines most of what we typically take to be politics, and relocates it under the broad heading of la police. This key move appears early on in Rancière’s best-known text in English, Disagreement. There he writes: ‘Politics is generally seen as the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, [it denotes] the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems of legitimizing this distribution’. He then goes on to state quite flatly that he would like to apply a wholly different name to such a system: ‘I propose to call it the police’ (1999: 28). If the reversal enacted here does not come through loudly enough, Rancière had already announced in the preface that he will ‘propose . . . the term policing’ for ‘what normally goes by the name of politics’ (1999: xiii).
This unique redefinition of almost everything we usually call politics, this renaming of a broad swath of phenomena under the category of ‘police’ obviously opens up the space for a new way of thinking politics. It comes us no surprise, then, that most accounts of Rancière’s political theory immediately move on to his definition of politics: a logic antagonistic to all policing, a logic that disrupts and rearranges that order by countering the police order’s logic of domination with the political assumption of equality (1999: 29). But in making this move so quickly, these commentaries on Rancière account for his concept of police as little more than a foil for the more important argument about politics (e.g. Panagia 2006; Dillon 2003). It seems worth noting, then, that in his own presentation in Disagreement, Rancière spends a great deal more time sorting through the meaning of police before moving on to his conception of politics.
My wager is as follows: that closer attention to these passages in Rancière’s texts will produce a subtle but significant reorientation of our understanding of Rancière’s political thought. The formal starkness of Rancière’s claims about politics may tempt his readers into playing up the singularity of his thinking, particularly when it comes to a definition of politics that from some angles looks like nothing one has ever heard before. Perhaps this makes Rancière into a ‘unique’ thinker of the political, but it simultaneously makes his thought less salient for making sense of the political world we inhabit. To put it bluntly, if all we take from Rancière are rare and beautiful political moments, which are easily boiled down to revolutionary moments, then how do we orient thinking or action within the realm of police orders that are our lives? In other words, if we take Rancière’s concepts of police and politics seriously, do we not also have to admit that we live in police orders, not in a space of politics? Politics is not really a space in Rancière, as it is for Arendt, but merely a disruptive force. We cannot live in, nor even aspire to live in, Rancière’s ‘political’ in the way we might with Arendt.3 Our realm is that of police, and it therefore seems prudent for us to take seriously Rancière’s understanding of police.
Critical attention to Rancière’s ‘police orders’ has often been avoided by reducing the idea of ‘the police’ to little more than a creative renaming exercise. In other words, the equation ‘Rancière’s police our politics’ makes space for the new term, ‘Rancière’s politics’. But to take police as a simple substitution for ‘regular’ politics prevents us from seeing the links between Rancière and other thinkers. That is, taken in context, Rancière’s approach to the police may not turn out to be so strange or curious as it has appeared to some of his North American readers. We should note then, the tradition of understanding la police as something far broader, something more historically and politically significant than officers on the streets. What’s more, on this point – and unlike so many others – Rancière actually signals his own continuity with this history and with other thinkers. In other words, while in general Rancière appears to studiously avoid citing other thinkers (especially contemporary French thinkers), and while he vigorously resists having his thought associated with other (perhaps more famous) French theorists, when it comes to his concept of the police, he notes its connections to one of the most famous French thinkers of all, Michel Foucault. Immediately after introducing the term in Disagreement, Rancière himself freely admits that it surely ‘poses a few problems’. It is here that Rancière first insists that we dissociate his thinking of ‘police orders’ from the actions on the ground of either beat cops or feds. But Rancière stresses that the distinction should be drawn not as a matter of definitional fiat, since a ‘narrow definition [of police] may be deemed contingent’ (1999: 28). And we know this because of the work of Foucault, whose lectures on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘reason of state’ showed that ‘the petty police is a more general order that arranges that tangible reality in which bodies are distributed in community’ (Rancière 1999: 28).4
The link to Foucault and the argument made here prove crucial: they show already, in the first page, that Rancière introduces the term ‘police’, that a police order is a partition of the sensible (partage du sensible). That is, ‘police order’ designates not only phenomena much more general than the ‘petty police’ but also irreducible to simple domination or inequality. A police order is not just an order of powers, it is ‘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’ (Rancière 1999: 29, emphasis added). Here we see what it means to say that the police order is one specific partition of the sensible. In his ‘Ten Theses on Politics’ Rancière introduces the term police in a manner parallel to the presentation in Disagreement. But here again, Rancière has a great deal more to say about police than to state the mere fact that it re-describes our everyday, conventional understanding of politics. Indeed, the presentation in ‘Ten Theses’ indicates something of the broader significance that Rancière places on the concept. First, Rancière claims that there are two ways of (ac)counting (for) the parts of the community. He then says: ‘we will call the first police[: it] only counts empirical parts – actual groups defined by differences in birth, by different functions, locations, and interests that constitute the social body, without any supplement’ (Rancière 2001, §19).5 The explanation for this definition comes not from a theory of politics (Rancière would refuse the idea that he has such a thing) but rather from a linking up of ‘police’ with partage du sensible. The ‘police order’ names a particular type of partition of the sensible. The 7th thesis states: ‘the police is a partition of the sensible whose principle is the absence of a void and of a supplement’ (Rancière 2001). The police order distributes bodies without remainder and without exclusion; there is nothing it does not account for, nothing left over or external to its process of counting.6
But this does not, according to Rancière, make the police order totalizing in the sense of determining a repressive State order. Hence the importance of the other intellectual context that Rancière provides, when he subtly suggests that the concept of police order must not be confused with Althusser’s concept of State Apparatus (1999: 29).7 State apparatus, says Rancière, cannot be disconnected from a conception of State standing in opposition to society, a notion that depends, from Rancière’s perspective, on confusing politics with police. But more than this, to take police as a repressive force is to miss the crucial disclaimers that Rancière offers concerning his concept of ‘police order’. In other words, while as readers of Rancière we tend to celebrate politics in its very opposition to police, it would be too easy to simply dismiss or denigrate all police as repression or violence. But Rancière warns his readers to avoid such a faulty interpretation. I wonder if we have paid proper heed to these alerts. Perhaps they are worth enumerating:
1.Police is a neutral and non-pejorative term (1999: 29).
2.Police can be reduced neither to repression nor even to ‘control over the living’ (2001: §19).
3.Police is not a leveling mechanism; not all police orders are the same (1999: 30).
4.‘There is a worse and a better police’ (1999: 30–1).
5.Police orders may make more or less space for the emergence of democratic politics (2006b: 72).
This list opens up an enormous area of inquiry for explaining and developing Rancière’s understanding of police, its role in his political theory and its salience for a broader thinking of contemporary politics. I will come back to these dimensions later, for now I simply want to bring my logic here to some closure by pointing out the limitations to an approach that would take police in Rancière as nothing more than a counterweight to politics. If we refuse to reduce police to a mere first postulate, a given necessary to Rancière’s thinking of politics, then we are left with a different set of questions. Most important among them: what work does the concept do for us? In the context of Rancière’s writings from the mid-1990s, I argue that police serves to specify and to focus a political critique. Here I mean ‘political critique’ in its ordinary language sense: an argument meant to challenge the form of the political regime, the actions of its leaders or the dynamics of its processes. This suggests one possible interpretation of my always potentially oxymoronic title (a danger I return to in greater detail in my final section, below). There is a politics of the police in that Rancière’s concept of the police serves particular ends within the specific political circumstances in which he publishes. Put in another way, we might say that Rancière’s use of ‘the police’ has significance in the way that it speaks to a particular political context. This claim can be made to resonate more broadly when we consider that Rancière introduces the term ‘police’ somewhat late in his career and he drops it relatively quickly.8 In other words, does it matter that Rancière proposes the term police at a particular historico-political juncture? I contend that the timing proves more than coincidental, as it appears concomitantly with Rancière’s critique of what he often calls consensus politics, or ‘post-democracy’. As Todd May has helpfully articulated, Rancière’s critique of consensus democracy – which Rancière calls a ‘conjunction of contradictory terms’ (1999: 95) – implies a radical challenge to neoliberalism (May 2008: 146).
As we know, ‘interest groups’ and the interactions between them are the basic building blocks of neoliberal politics. But for Rancière ‘conflicts of interest’, the very core of what we call ‘interest group politics’, are exemplary and exclusively matters of the police. What Rancière calls politics has nothing to do with the coordination of interests: ‘the political dispute is distinct from all conflicts of interest between constituted parties of the population’ (1999: 100). Neoliberalism forms and founds a particular police order. However, to say only this would be to miss the force of Rancière’s critique, since he is not content to throw names at neoliberalism (by calling it ‘police’). Neoliberalism, or consensus democracy, articulates a particular arrangement between any given police order and the potentially disruptive force of democratic politics. In other words, it is not just that neoliberalism is not politics, but that neoliberalism seeks the end of politics. As leverage for his critique, Rancière refers to this neoliberal form of consensus democracy as ‘postdemocracy’. He defines it as follows:
Postdemocracy is the government practice and conceptual legitimation of democracy after the demos, a democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount, and dispute of the people and is thereby reducible to the sole interplay of state mechanisms and combinations of social energies and interests. (Rancière 1999: 102)
Rancière’s understanding of democracy, as I will discuss in greater detail below, will always depend upon the centrality of struggle. ‘Consensus democracy’, in contrast is committed to the degradation and possible elimination of struggle. Consensus democracy is thus the end of democracy – ‘in a word, the disappearance of politics’ (Rancière 1999: 102; see also May 2008: 146).
The concept of ‘the police’ provides the crucial leverage for the critique of consensus democracy. Rancière’s ability to take the neoliberal marketing of ‘consensus’ and show how it boils down to the curious and feeble form of ‘post-democracy’ depends upon the critical lens provided by la police. Rancière’s polemic here amounts to much more than merely decreeing that consensus democracy contains no politics, that it is only police. That is, of course, true. But on Rancière’s terms it would also be true of almost all institutionalized political regimes. The key to the critique lies in showing that consensus democracy commits itself to the elimination of politics. It is a police order devoted to its own pure and perpetual preservation, a police order that strives for its own perfection as a police order. Thus, consensus democracy is post-democracy in the same way that the Platonic kallipolis would be post-democracy; it does not merely exclude politics from policing, it puts an end to politics. Doubtless, it does this self-consciously in calling for just that, ‘the end of politics’. This means that post-democracy operates in a similar manner, although on very much distinct terrains, to political philosophy. For Rancière, the latter is a philosophical ordering project designed to replace politics with police. The former is a putatively ‘political’ project aiming for the same goal. Both use the name ‘politics’ as a banner under which to seek the elimination of politics.9
Here then I have suggested one significant sense in which we find a ‘politics of the police’. That is, to just the extent that the concept of police works in the service of Rancière’s own political interventions. In this context I want also to emphasize the different levels on which Rancière’s most explicitly ‘political’ texts operate (i.e. On the Shores of Politics, Disagreement and Hatred of Democracy). Disagreement, for example, can easily be read as an abstract and detached philosophical work. After all, it opens both its preface and its introduction with quotes from Aristotle; it operates on a dense and philosophically obtuse level of logical reasoning; it seems to cite only historical examples, and to do so in the service of very broad and general points. And, indeed, most commentators read Disagreement the way they might read Arendt’s The Human Condition or any other work in political theory: as a project of philosophy or of political ontology. This approach can be encouraged by assigning students only the first 60 pages of the text to read (I plead guilty). Perhaps this is why most explorations of Rancière’s political theory centre themselves on the first half of Disagreement, supplemented by some of the theses from ‘Ten Theses’.
The worry is that such an approach turns Rancière into a political philosopher, when he himself has mounted a damning critique of the project of political philosophy. How do you theorize politics while avoiding the trap of political philosophy? Perhaps you link your political ontology to your assessment of and engagement with the contemporary political situation. Thus, to engage with Rancière’s thinking of politics means to work with his political interventions as well. And if we broaden our reading of Rancière, we see those engagements peppered throughout the very texts in which he articulates his concepts of politics and police. For example, Chapter 5 of Disagreement – which contains the critique of post-democracy that I have just been discussing – troubles those readings that would turn Rancière into a thinker of concepts. In that chapter Rancière engages not with Plato or with Marx but with the contemporary discourse of ‘consensus democracy’. The essays in Shores and Hatred also ill fit any attempt to make Rancière into a philosopher, since these are direct political engagements; many of the essays that make up those two books were previously published in popular periodicals. And Rancière has himself argued that we might read Disagreement backwards, seeing it first as a political intervention (Rancière 2003a: §4; Thomson 2003: 9).
Therefore, to get at the politics of the police, we need not only to take the concept of the police more seriously and to read it much more broadly, but also to draw the connections between Rancière’s thinking of the police and his political interventions. In this section, I have connected the dots between Rancière’s own use of the police and his critique of neoliberalism. I now turn to a very much distinct sense of the politics of the police by offering an analysis and assessment of a politics of anarchism drawn from Rancière’s work.
III. Defending Anarchism: Pure Politics
Perhaps I should remove all possibility of confusion at the outset of this section: it is not I who will be ‘defending anarchism’, but Todd May who does so in his recently published book, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière (2008). Indeed, as I hinted at the beginning of this essay, while May’s book offers a vibrant, engaged and always thought-provoking set of arguments in and around Rancière’s writings, it seems a very oddly- titled work. Simply put, it does not set out to articulate ‘the political thought’ of Rancière; rather, it seeks to mobilize a particular reading of Rancière’s work in support of a spirited defence of anarchism. (Hence the title of this section.) But I turn to May not merely because his book constitutes the entire reading list of English-language books specifically on Rancière’s political thought, but because his particular approach to Rancière proves invaluable for clarifying the stakes of Rancière’s concept of la police. Because May’s appropriation of Rancière’s thought for anarchist purposes requires a very determined and distinct interpretation of police, his argument helps me to work through what I’ve called ‘the politics of the police’. Let me state the argument succinctly before unpacking it through my reading of May. May ‘elevates’ politics to a pure form of action, while reducing police to an anti-political and implicitly repressive order of domination and injustice. This leads, I argue, to an unproductive conception of ‘the police’ in the service of a limited theory of politics.
The steps to reach this conclusion prove subtle, since in so many ways May appears to be an exemplary reader of Rancière. Most praiseworthy is May’s refusal to make Rancière into a philosopher; May sees clearly, and reminds his readers frequently, of the political stakes of the Rancièrean project. But on my reading, Rancière’s politics are not the same as May’s, and May is thereby often forced to creatively appropriate – or sometimes simply misread – Rancière in order to get to the anarchist conclusions that May had quite clearly decided on from the outset.10 This divergence likely begins with May’s account of ‘the police’, which, as mentioned above, proves notable precisely because May gives the police so much attention. May begins by emphasizing Rancière’s own point, that the idea of a broadly understood ‘police order’ can be tied back to Foucault’s lectures from the 1970s, where Foucault traces the genealogical origins of the term in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European thought. May shows the extent to which Rancière’s use of the term overlaps with Foucault’s, while noting that Rancière develops the term quite differently. But when it comes to that development, May makes a very significant interpretive choice. At just this juncture, he writes: ‘policing, as Rancière defines it, is deeply embedded in Western political philosophy’ (2008: 42). Indeed, May contends that Rancière locates the first occurrence of such policing in Plato, and May explicates the concept of the police primarily through a summary of Rancière’s interpretation and critique of the Platonic philosophy of order (May 2008: 42–3).
But this is a curious exegesis, since when Rancière himself introduces the term police, he defines it in a context outside the project of political philosophy. As I have already argued above, for Rancière, police names an order of intelligible bodies, a distribution and counting of the parts of society. Police is ‘a symbolic constitution of the social’ (2001: §19). Now, it is very much true that in both Disagreement and ‘Ten Theses’ Rancière goes on, later, to make a crucial argument about Platonic political philosophy and policing. But the claim is not that Plato is an example of policing. The claim is that Plato’s political philosophy substitutes police for politics, that the structure of Plato’s philosophical project operates precisely so as to identify politics with police. And this identification of the two amounts to the elimination of politics, as Rancière understands it. Thus, within the terms of political philosophy, particularly in the Platonic project that Rancière names (as May rightly notes) ‘archipolitics’, the police is substituted for politics. But this substitution occurs as a part of, inside as it were, the philosophical project; nowhere does Rancière say that it is essential to the constitution of a police order as such. And this fact renders May’s own definition of the police extremely problematic. Immediately after summarizing the critique of Platonic archi-politics, May comes to his most succinct statements on the police. He writes: ‘in the end, the goal of policing is precisely that of eliminating politics’ (2008: 43, emphasis added). Thus, this claim makes policing, by definition, a mechanism for the destruction of politics. Unsurprisingly, then, May proceeds to interpret Rancière’s conception of politics as follows: the goal of politics is to eliminate the police. Politics, according to May, not only disrupts the police order (as Rancière clearly contends) but also says ‘no’ to that order in its entirety – something Rancière never asserts (May 2008: 49). Such a reading fits perfectly, of course, with an anarchist project in which true freedom and equality come only from the people and after the elimination of government.
But that is getting ahead of the story. Let me step back then and try to assess May’s claim that the police order seeks the elimination of politics. This reading of policing is tied directly to May’s understanding of archipolitics; he repeatedly refers to the latter as a ‘form of policing’ (e.g. May 2008: 43, 45). That is, archipolitics is one way that police tries to eliminate politics, meta-politics is another, and so on. But to put the relation between archipolitics and police in this way is to miss the entire brunt of Rancière’s critique of the Platonic project. If the police order always and somehow naturally sought the elimination of politics, then there would be nothing especially problematic or even interesting about Plato. It is the fact that political philosophy seeks to replace politics with police that makes the Platonic (and Marxist, and Hobbesian, etc.) project so dangerous. The critique of political philosophy proves necessary, within Rancière’s framework, because of the need to challenge, question and arrest this substitution. Rancière’s entire approach to ‘political philosophy’, his effort to think politics outside its terms, therefore depends upon conceptualizing police as an order distinct from politics, but not as an order with an inherent drive to supplant politics.
By failing to take account of the difference between an empirically given police order and the mobilization of the police within the Platonic project, May turns politics and police into versions of matter and anti-matter: they can never actually meet except in some final, universe-altering confrontation, but they stand ultimately opposed to one another.11 Hence May’s claim that ‘the goal of policing’ simpliciter is the destruction of politics. Put directly, however, Rancière says no such thing about the police. Indeed, he explicitly rejects the notion of police or politics as pure forms in this way. After laying out the basic terms of politics as an activity antagonistic to and disruptive of policing, Rancière reminds his readers that politics remains inescapably twined with police. He writes: ‘we should not forget either that if politics implements a logic entirely heterogeneous to that of the police, it is always bound up with the latter’ (1999: 31; cf. Rancière 2001: §21).12
At this point one might accuse me of being either unfair to May (in the narrowness of my hermeneutic criticisms) or at least somewhat pedantic. I would respond by arguing that the stakes of these differences in conceptions of the police turn out to be quite high. They begin to emerge in May’s reading when he develops his anarchist account of democratic politics. May’s anarchist framework provides him with a structure in which to interpret some of the most complex, subtle, and/or vexing elements of Rancière’s thought. Primary among these may be the fact that in taking almost everything we thought was politics and calling it police, Rancière opens himself to the question of when or where his politics happens. As I noted at the outset of this essay, Rancière offers a direct response, when he freely admits that politics occurs ‘rarely’ (1999: 17). But for most readers, especially political theorists, such an answer seems necessarily unsatisfying unless and until we provide one of two possible supplements to it: 1) we can supplement the response with an account of how to bring about such political moments; or 2) we can add to this answer a further elaboration of why and to what extent we should concern ourselves with phenomena that do not always add up to political moments.
The first option seems the obvious choice for May. Indeed, one of the ways in which Rancière’s writings clearly do resonate with the project of anarchism is on this point. Whereas so many readers of Rancière balk at the notion of politics happening so little, May positively likes the fact that democratic politics is made rare on Rancière’s account. Why? Because the rarity of politics resonates with the revolutionary project of anarchism. May wishes to define democratic politics as a process that ‘enhances the lives’ of those who engage in it. Democratic politics should be attractive to potential political actors for just this reason, and the fact that there are few historical examples of democratic politics, the fact that democratic politics is rare – all this only makes it more attractive. Why be a revolutionary anarchist if anyone can do it or if it has all been done before? May therefore wants to work within a space of political thought that calls on the revolution to come, that plans for it. That Rancière defines politics so as to make actual occurrences of it scarce poses no problems for May’s political thought; rather, this dimension turns out to be an asset.13
For May, then, democratic politics comes into focus as a pure politics of the people. Anarchist thought depends upon maintaining a crucial distinction between government and the people. For example, May approvingly cites Kropotkin on communist anarchism: ‘the name given to a principle of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government’ (Kropotkin 1995 [1910], cited in May 2008: 83). Passages like this shed light on May’s reading of Rancière’s politics/police. Police takes the place of government in traditional anarchist thought, and politics plays the role of anarchist action. This leads to the essential twist that I have outlined above: police must not just be disrupted or re-ordered; it must be eliminated. Perhaps the most telling line in May comes early on, in his first and primary elucidation of Rancière’s concepts of politics and police – that is, prior to his exploration of the history of anarchism as providing the ‘roots’ for Rancièrean politics. May turns from police to politics (just as Rancière does in Disagreement), arguing that ‘politics . . . is not a matter of how distributions occur’. This is straightforward enough: politics is not police; it is not about ordering and distributing, not about the counting of those parts that already have a part. May, however, completes the logic in a striking move: ‘distributions are what governments do, [b]ut they are not what people do’ (2008: 47, emphasis added). This final claim fits perfectly well with the project of anarchism, but it does not fit at all into the broader frame of Rancière’s project. In Rancière’s terms we would have to say that, of course, distributions are things that people do. Rancière goes further, insisting that ‘the police can procure all sorts of goods’ (1999: 31). This, Rancière reminds us, does not mean that we should confuse police with politics, but it ought to give us pause when May claims that police stands opposed to people. Why does May feel compelled to make this seemingly unwarranted shift?
The answer, unsurprisingly, likely lies in May’s commitment to anarchism. Anarchism, as May articulates it, requires a fundamental separation of spheres: anarchist politics must commit itself to the elimination of all injustice, the destruction of all orders of hierarchy. And this means, in addition, that anarchist politics must attempt to bring about a substantive equality. May forcefully defends a conception of anarchism as maintaining a radical commitment to equality. But again, none of this meshes very well with Rancière’s understanding of politics or police. First, Rancière has himself actively resisted the idea of reducing his thought to anarchism.14 More substantively, we can show that when Rancière argues, as I quoted above, that politics will always be ‘bound up’ with police, he continues as follows: ‘the reason for this is simple: politics has no objects or issues of its own’ (1999: 31). These are not isolated remarks; in later writings Rancière expands and develops this notion, precisely as clarification of his project. In a 2003 lecture, he argued: ‘the opposition between politics and police goes along with the statement that politics has no “proper” object, that all its objects are blended with the objects of police’ (Rancière 2003c: 4, emphasis added). Politics cannot be uncoupled from police; it only appears in this ‘blended’ form.
In contrast, May seeks a politics not only de-linked from police, but also fully self-referential and committed to the substantive ground of equality. Equality, for Rancière, is nothing like a substantive ground. Deranty puts it succinctly: ‘equality is not an essence, a value or a goal’ (Deranty 2003a: §1). Equality proves to be an assumption that can be verified, but it grounds nothing at all in Rancière’s thought.15 Yet because he insists on reading Rancière with and against the grain of distributive theories of justice, May feels the need to repeatedly ask Rancière for normative grounds (e.g. May 2008: 119). And while he remains very sensitive to Rancière’s own understanding of equality as not providing such grounds, May still frequently implies that, perhaps equality serves this function in (a reconstructed) Rancièrean thought, after all (May 2008: 118).
Given that close readers of Rancière will tend to reject the foundationalist approach of Rawlsian or Habermasian normative political philosophy, the continued demand for normative grounds will strike some readers of May’s book as odd. Rancière’s conception of politics as dissensus, his understanding of subjectivization as disidentification, and his rejection of political ontology all seem to point away from the ‘normative grounds’ approach to political theory. And when Rancière argues famously in disagreement that ‘parties do not exist prior to the declaration of wrong’ he would appear to take the ground out from underneath the feet of foundationalists (1999: 39).16 I argue that the need for normative grounds is not intrinsic to Rancière’s arguments. Instead, this need is a product of May’s own logic. May’s project requires, what he calls, ‘normative force’ because of the unique way in which May comes to understand democratic politics itself. While May insists that democratic politics will always be connected to the world in some way, he defends a conception of politics that seems extremely inward-looking and self-referential. That is, democracy for May seems to be primarily about democratic actors. While politics might (or might not) change the world, its meaning, according to May, comes not from the world but from its agents. Thus, while politics has effects, May insists that we should not ‘confuse having social effects with the existence of politics’. He continues with a striking formulation:
A politics may or may not effect change. It is not in the consequence but in the acting out of a presupposition of equality that politics occurs. [. . .] A democratic politics is defined by the actions and the understandings of those who struggle, not by the effects upon or actions taken by those the police order supports. (May 2008: 72, emphasis added)
Despite the fact that Rancière’s own examples of politics all seem to involve new partitions of the sensible, the radical disruption and re-ordering of the police order – ‘the essence of politics is to disturb’ the police order, says Rancière – May insists here that the ultimate definition of democratic politics is found not just in the actions but in the understandings of democratic subjects. I have called this a ‘self-referential’ definition of politics, not because it is circular, but because it refers politics back to agents rather than to political effects.
It is just this dimension of May’s argument that suggests a need for augmentation in the form of normative grounds. In other words, if politics only exists when agents struggle, then there needs to be some leverage, some motivation, some way to mobilize that struggle. The substantive commitment to equality provides that normative edge, on May’s account. However, this redefinition of democratic politics as emerging out of the self-understanding of democratic actors has the curious but significant result of further denigrating the police. If politics refers only to itself, then police is only important as a foil for understanding politics. And May himself stresses this point when he insists that politics is not about changing police orders. Indeed, May echoes his lines from above, during his discussion of anarchism. He argues that anarchism does not strive for a change in government, a new form of government or a different set of people in power, but the overcoming of power. May first quotes Colin Ward, ‘anarchism . . . doesn’t want different people on top, it wants us to clamber out from underneath’, and then goes on to insert the following: ‘(Compare this statement to Rancière’s position that a democratic politics seeks to undermine police orders, not change or modify them.)’ (May 2008: 96, quoting Ward 1982).
This seemingly innocent parenthetical requires serious comment. First, May’s reference to ‘Rancière’s position’ is actually an internal cross-reference within May’s own text, since it is May himself, not Rancière, who argues that politics does not seek to change police orders (May 2008: 72; cf. May 2008: 43). But neither there nor at the moment of this parenthetical statement does May cite Rancière at all. And as I have shown, in Rancière’s hands, politics has no autochthonous goal that it seeks of its own volition. Politics stands opposed to police, but always in relation to police. And this ‘opposition’ always manifests itself in the form of transformed police orders, not undone police orders. But, second, what I say here is surely no surprise to May, or any other reader of Rancière. Just three pages later, May writes: ‘democratic politics . . . does not lead to a final state of justice but perhaps only to better conditions in a police order’ (May 2008: 99). What accounts for the difference, and apparent contradiction, between these two quotations from May? The first appears as a parenthetical commentary on a summary of anarchist thought; the second emerges during an attempt to directly sort out Rancière’s conception of politics from anarchist goals. In other words, May’s attempt to make Rancière play the role of resource and support for anarchism leads May to stretchings and distortions of Rancière’s thought that prove readily apparent to most readers of Rancière – including, at other points in his text, May himself.
In an effort to draw some conclusions from my critical interrogation of May’s interpretation of Rancière, I would suggest then that in the hands of May’s hermeneutics, the opposition between police and politics undergoes something of a Manichean transformation. Politics becomes a pure force, utterly and radically distinct from and in opposition to any and all police orders.17 As an obvious but significant corollary, the concept of police is denigrated in May’s hands: one utterly loses Rancière’s sense of the police as ‘neutral’ or ‘nonpejorative’, and instead sees police as the evil other to politics. The police order is quite simply that which must be destroyed. While it remains inevitable, it must take the shape of the big Other precisely so as to motivate and mobilize the utopian anarchist vision of the future. Indeed, May’s reading resists any sense of a meeting point between the logic of politics and the order of the police: politics, May argues, surely stands opposed to police, but it becomes unclear how politics would ever encounter the police.18 That is, like any Manichean view, May’s rendering of the politics/police dichotomy precludes an active engagement between the two realms; the only form that battle can take is the ultimate battle, in which an anarchist utopia will replace all police orders once and for all. I should stress that this comes about despite May’s own clear understanding that politics and police must meet in Rancière’s thought. May argues that the democratic dissensus creates two worlds. However,
if the worlds were entirely distinct, if they had no point of contact, every political struggle would be a fight to the death. Every democratic political struggle would reduce itself to a struggle between two competing visions, only one of which could prevail. There could be no democratic politics that wasn’t entirely revolutionary. (May 2008: 112)
But this is precisely what happens within the terms of May’s interpretation of politics and police. Police becomes pure domination and politics becomes purely revolutionary. Indeed, I would suggest that May articulates this problem so accurately precisely because it plagues his anarchist reinterpretation of Rancière. May recognizes that democratic politics does not work this way, yet May thinks that the Manichean separation of worlds is overcome by a sort of dialectical mediation of a third term: ‘there is at least one common normative element in any nominally democratic society that binds those who struggle and those against whom they struggle. This common element [is] a commitment to equality’ (2008: 112). May’s misreading of politics and police (as radically separate) must therefore be supplemented by a misreading of equality (as substantive ground). But Rancière’s own theory does not need a third term, since in Rancière’s understanding, politics and police never form separate worlds; they are always and already ‘bound up’ with one another. Rancière says it directly: ‘there is no “pure” politics’ (Rancière 2003c: 2; cf. Chambers n.d.).
And it is in this binding, in this unavoidable meeting of the logic of politics with the logic of the police, that we may locate a viable and salient thinking of ‘the politics of the police’. In the final section, then, I make the case for this rendering of police, and I counter May’s anarchist vision of politics with a reassessment of a democratic politics that retains both impurity and impropriety.
My engagement with and critique of May’s work sets the stage for the defence of my title that I promised earlier. How or why is ‘the politics of the police’ not merely oxymoronic? No doubt, my reading of Rancière has shown that politics is precisely that which stands opposed to and interrupts any order of the police, while police itself can never be understood as politics. And May’s reading of Rancière pushes the opposition to its extreme, in that May winds up defending a vision of pure anarchist politics that would obliterate each and every police order, once and for all. However, it is precisely May’s dialectical rendering of the police/politics difference that calls for a reassessment and rethinking of Rancière’s own categories. That is, the fact that May ends up, as I showed above, coming to such non-Rancièrean conclusions while working from Rancièrean premises should lead us to a reinvestigation of those premises. I have tried to carry out such an investigation here by taking seriously Rancière’s own understandings of la police, and by pushing his analysis further into an exploration of ‘the politics of the police’ – and doing so despite the potential risks involved.
Here I would close by delineating one other crucial dimension of la police and its politics and that is ‘the politics of the police’ in the most banal sense. In direct opposition to May, I want to argue that we must remain committed to and concerned with the politics of the police in the sense of changing, transforming, and improving our police orders. As Alex Thomson has very nicely put it, ‘there is doubtless much to do in terms of developing better rather than worse forms of police’ (2003: 11). When it comes to police we require a democratic vigilance, not a utopian dismissal. Rancière provokes his readers with his succinct assertion that ‘we do not live in democracies’; instead, and as the only alternative, we live in police orders (2006b: 73). May reads these claims as a utopian call to someday fashion a pure democracy. He reads them as not merely a critique but a denigration of the world we do live in (a police order) in favour of the ideal of a true democracy. Obviously, I read Rancière very differently. On my reading, we do not live in democracies, and we never will. We never will, not because we will never achieve what we ought to achieve, not because of failures on our part, but because that is not what democracy is about.
Democracy is not utopia. ‘To understand what democracy means is to hear the struggle that is at stake in the word’ (Rancière 2006b: 93). But this is not a struggle that contains its own telos, and it is not a struggle merely for the sake of those who engage in it. Democracy does not create equality; it does not eliminate government. Democracy is, instead, ‘the paradoxical condition of politics’ (Rancière 2006b: 94). And as I have shown in detail above, a paradoxical politics is an impure politics. Democracy is both: ‘democracy really means . . . the impurity of politics’ (Rancière 2006b: 62). This explains why democratic politics necessarily produces, and will continue to do so, ‘hatred of democracy’ (Rancière 2006b: 94). None of this, however, changes the fact that democracies, in short, are not to be lived in. Rancière writes: ‘there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as democratic government’ (2006b: 52). Once again, May might take this as reason enough to reject all government, but I take it as reason to cultivate a democratic politics more not less attendant to the possibility of transforming the police order.
Democratic politics is that which emerges in such a way that it disrupts our given police order. Furthermore, I would contend, without complaining, that we will always live in police orders. Democratic politics proves to be a transformative force, one that requires cultivation, care and direction. Politics is therefore absolutely vital. At the same time, however, we cannot forget that ‘nothing is political in itself’, and while ‘anything can become political’ such becoming political only occurs when the logic of equality is made to meet the order of the police (Rancière 1999: 32). In the Rancièrean spirit of provocation, let me wrap up with something of an enthymeme. If we all live in police orders, and if ‘[p]olitics acts on the police’, then the politics of the police (la politique de la police) must be central not only to political theory but also to our politics of ordinary life (Rancière 1999: 33, emphasis added).
Notes
For comments, criticisms, feedback, encouragement, enthusiasm and support related to earlier versions (both oral and written) of this essay, I would like to thank: John Altick, Paul Bowman, Rebecca Brown, Terrell Carver, Alan Finlayson, Andrew Schaap, Richard Stamp, Jeremy Valentine and all of the students in my Spring and Fall 2009 graduate seminars.
1.Sometimes it seems hard to tell what sort of thinker Rancière might be. For political theorists like myself it always proves tempting to read him as a political theorist, especially when focusing on his writings from the 1990s. Yet Rancière repeatedly insists that he is not a political philosopher, just as he vociferously rejects the project of political philosophy. Rancière rarely discusses political theorists (especially not contemporary theorists), and his remarks are predominately negative.
2.The ‘wrong’, that which underwrites all politics, ‘is the very impossibility of arkhê’ (Rancière 1999: 13). Here I am taking Panagia’s description of Rancière’s account of politics and using it to describe Rancière’s theory as practical intervention.
3.Rancière makes this point clear in a later lecture, when he says directly, ‘I wrote the “Ten Theses on Politics” primarily as a critique of the Arendtian idea of a specific political sphere and a political way of life’ (2003: 2).
4.See Foucault 1979; cf. May 2008: 41; and Muhle 2007. May and Muhle are the only commentators I know of who spend any time on the links between Rancière’s concept of police and Foucault’s work on governmentality. As I will argue below, while May notes the connection, he does not seem to give it any weight in his reading of Rancière. Muhle’s unpublished work here proves to be a great resource for my own argument.
5.This translation comes from Muhle, who notes that the English translation of the ‘Ten Theses’ simply leaves out this final phrase. Muhle notes her surprise at this decision, before going on to make a very persuasive case for this final phrase as the most important part of the claim: since ‘what politics does, is to make this supplement possible’ (Muhle 2007: 4). I concur.
6.In the context of discussing the police in ‘Ten Theses’, Rancière goes on to explain that the partition of the sensible is what ‘define[s] the modes of perception’ that make that order visible and sayable in the first place. Le partage du sensible indicates not just the empirical givenness of an order; it tells us something about the very intelligibility of that order. Putting this in a language that Rancière himself might resist, we might say that any particular ordering of the world depends upon an ontologically prior partition. Rancière writes: ‘the partition of the sensible is the cutting-up of the world and of “world” ’ (2001: §20). Hence, two points about such ‘cutting up’: 1) it suggests a partition (of the world) in that it simultaneously separates and joins; it excludes, and at the same time, it ‘allows participation’; and 2) it refers to the sensible (the ‘world’) in that it determines what can be seen and what can be heard.
7.See Althusser 1972. I call the suggestion ‘subtle’, because even though ‘state apparatus’ is obviously an Althusserian term, Rancière neglects (or refuses) to cite Althusser on this point. In ‘Ten Theses’, on the other hand, in the context of rejecting the notion that the police primarily interpellates subjects, Rancière does cite Althusser (2001: §22).
8.This fact seems significant in light of the relative consistency of Rancière’s thought across his more than 40 years of writing. Many of Rancière’s key terms remain with him from his early archival work, through his writings on politics and philosophy in the 1990s, and all the way on to his work on the politics of aesthetics over the last 10 years. It is striking then that ‘the police’ does not appear in On the Shores of Politics, the collection of essays first published in 1992 and it hardly appears at all in Hatred of Democracy, originally published in 2005. Only in the two major political works published in the middle of the 1990s – Disagreement (originally 1995) and ‘Ten Theses’ (originally 1997) – does Rancière offer any serious attention to the concept of ‘the police’. One might argue that le partage du sensible supplants la police in Rancière’s more recent work, capturing the idea of a police order but on a broader level. But that only lends more credence to the idea that ‘the police’ serves a particular purpose in terms of Rancière’s political intervention in the mid-1990s.
9.In this context, however, I would insist on not conflating Rancière’s analysis of post-democracy with his articulation of archipolitics, parapolitics and metapolitics. The difference matters because it is a difference in both objects and levels of analysis. Rancière’s analysis of archipolitics (for example) provides a critique of the project of political philosophy, whereas his analysis of postdemocracy provides a critique of contemporary politics. The latter therefore constitutes a political intervention in a sense different from the former. As I show in the text below, May sometimes elides these differences.
10.Another way of putting this would be to say that May did not discover anarchism through a reading of Rancière. Quite the contrary, May was already a committed, well-known and forceful defender of anarchist thought before he came to Rancière’s writings and folded Rancière’s thought into his own anarchist project. See May (1994).
11.Žižek (2004) outlines the paradox of this dialectical logic and accuses Rancière himself of falling prey to it (a false accusation according to my argument, as I show below). Alex Thomson (2003) had earlier worked through a similar logic in Rancière’s work and arrived at more subtle and productive conclusions. See also Valentine (2005).
12.While I present this reading as a critique of May, he himself might freely admit to the difference between his position and Rancière’s on this point. May departs from Rancière’s notion that politics begins with a wrong, with what Deranty helpfully calls an ‘ontological torsion’ (2003a: §5). Explicitly flagging his claim as an argument against Rancière, May claims that politics ‘is not necessarily antagonistic’ (May 2008: 51–2). May must, in a way, mark this difference from Rancière, because Rancière’s politics – as I explain below – always remains impure, always occurs in media res. Whereas, in contrast, anarchist politics must be self-contained, self-referential and sui generis. May sees in this difference a need to tweak Rancière; I see in this difference the very reason not to read Rancière as May does.
13.May frames his second chapter – wherein he offers his detailed explications of politics and police and provides the majority of passages on which I rely in my reading here – with the story of citizen mobilization and actions in the wake of the death of a young African-American man who was killed when he was hit by a car driven by a white male student in Clemson, South Carolina. In the aftermath, May himself worked for 2 years as a community organizer with a group trying to improve relations between the police force and the African-American community. The group eventually ran two candidates for city council, both of whom lost (with low African-American voter turnout). In concluding the chapter, May notes that the group won certain concessions from the police force. But May’s own assessment of the results of his two years of work is decisive: ‘politics did not happen at Clemson’ (May 2008: 75).
14.For example, see Rancière 2003: 1. On this point, compare Rancière’s own discussion of anarchism in the recently published issue of Anarchist Studies (2008a).
15.Politics therefore proves to be the demonstration of the assumption of equality; it occurs if and only if there is an encounter between the logic of equality and the logic of domination. It is precisely the assumption of equality that makes possible this clash between heterogeneous logics; it is precisely the verification of equality that results from such conflict. This explains why equality must be understood in Rancière neither as a substantive good nor as an ideal telos. But this means, contra May, that politics does not occur because of equality, nor does politics achieve equality. All politics does – and this is not enough for May, though it is for me – is to challenge, to thwart, to disrupt or dislocate, and perhaps finally to change the police order. This argument also reveals another problematic dimension of the title to May’s book: ‘creating equality’ has no part in ‘the political thought of Jacques Rancière’.
16.For more on the significance of this claim to Rancière’s project, particularly in relation to his notion of ‘literarity’, see Chambers (2005).
17.Žižek calls this ‘ultra-politics’ (2005: 71, 75).
18.While Žižek (2005) proposes this lack of encounter as a critique of Rancière and while Thomson (2003) delineates it as a potential trap for Rancière, it should be noted that an important body of commentators directly contests this line of reading, arguing instead that Rancière’s politics can never be pure (see Muhle 2007; Panagia 2006; Rockhill 2004).
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