Alex Thomson
‘[A]ny mode of thinking that is the least bit singular reveals itself in always saying basically the same thing, which it cannot but hazard every time in the colorful prism of circumstances’ (Rancière 2004: xxviii). I propose in this chapter to take Rancière at his word. His writings are essayistic in two senses: they combine close attention to literary presentation with the restlessness of the experimental thinker. The consequence is that their styles are nearly as various as their topics; and that if certain phrases, themes or examples recur, there is no underlying attempt to form a system, to elaborate a theory or to defend a new philosophy or methodology. But for all their variety, from the time of the break with Althusser, through his archival work and involvement with Les Révoltes Logiques to his most recent writings on politics, art and literature, the unfolding of a single project can be clearly discerned. The consistency of Rancière’s work is that of the repeated thrust of a single point, the challenge of equality, posed as a polemical intervention into two counter-posed domains, those of philosophy and history.
The challenge of equality is summed up in the scene of reading at the heart of The Ignorant Schoolmaster: ‘The book – Télémaque or any other – placed between two minds sums up the ideal community inscribed in the materiality of things. The book is the equality of intelligence’ (1991: 38). Two minds meet in the presence of a third object. It need not be a masterpiece, or a classic, although in this case it happens to be the latter. It need not even be a book: it could be any product of human agency. Each mind judges the other equally able to understand the third. Each can challenge the other on their understanding, and through doing so verify not only the other’s understanding but also the presence of an intelligence: ‘the book seals the new relation between two ignorant people who recognize each other from that point on as intelligent people’ (1991: 38). ‘Society as such’, The Ignorant Schoolmaster tells us, ‘will never be reasonable, but it could experience the miracle of reasonable moments arising not in the coincidence of intelligences – that would be stultification – but in the reciprocal recognition of reasonable wills’ (1991: 96). The possibility of such miracles, of moments of equality in practice, is the central presupposition of Rancière’s authorship. In On the Shores of Politics he describes this as setting a heading based on trust, rather than suspicion: ‘starting from the point of view of equality, asserting equality, assuming equality as a given, working out from equality, trying to see how productive it can be and thus maximising all possible liberty and equality’ (1995: 51–2).
In accordance with this principle, Rancière’s work seeks again and again to illuminate the meaning of equality in principle and show its practical survival in the modern era. The critical defence of the intelligence of people in general, of artisans and spectators, of imitation and aspiration, of artisans who wish to think, of workers who wish to drink and dance rather than plot a revolution, of slumming bohemians and aspiring poets, against the practitioners of intellectual distinction is itself an affirmation of the equality of anyone with anyone. There is no despair in Rancière’s writing, despite a persistent bemusement at the inegalitarian traps into which the self-assigned path of the intellectual seems so recurrently to lead. If Hatred of Democracy (2006) is caustic about the failures of democratic thinking in the current situation, this analysis remains underpinned by a cautious affirmation of what in The Ignorant Schoolmaster he names ‘the democracy of the book’ (1991: 38), the defence of a modern world in which mass literacy and the circulation of print culture signal not the ‘hydrophobia’ (1994: 20) feared by Hobbes, in which the opinions of the multitude threaten the progress of truth and the stability of authority, but new possibilities for the revolt of intelligence against inequality.
Rancière’s caution with regard to philosophy is exemplary. In the closing pages of The Philosopher and His Poor he makes what with hindsight may seem a surprising proposition, given what is often taken to be his unrelenting hostility towards the very idea of philosophy. Looking back over the argument of his book, and situating his work in the context of the apparent triumph of ‘sociocracy’, he wonders whether ‘certain questions of philosophy could recover some of their vigor’. ‘It remains important today’, Rancière suggests, ‘to be able to judge if what our institutions, our images, and our discourses imitate is democratic hope or its mourning’. This is a project in which ‘philosophy can find itself implicated without pretending to give lessons about it’, but the cost would be of putting at risk its own self-definition, which has up until now always consisted in ‘linking its purity with the vigilant guarding of its borders’. This would be a philosophy ‘detached equally from the melancholies of the origin and an eagerness to eclipse modernity. The stake for this is not “totally ahistorical” ’ (2004: 216–7).
The quotation marks around the phrase ‘totally ahistorical’ refer us back to a passage Rancière cites from Bourdieu, who has sought to distinguish sociology from philosophy on the grounds that the latter is ‘totally ahistorical, like all philosophical thought that is worthy of the name’ (2004: 197). In doing so they ought to remind us of the extent to which a text by Rancière is rarely a statement or manifesto but is always the exploration of a particular historical conjunction of intellectual forces, an attempt to inhabit and make a home in the ravaged terrain over which opposing positions contend. So rather than attempt to outline the elements of Rancière’s thinking which do recall the contemporary revival of practical philosophy, hermeneutics or deconstruction, we should remember that what is at stake here is not a defence of philosophy as such, but rather a counter-attack on the sociological claim to have overcome philosophy, a claim shown by Rancière to rest not only on a naïve repetition of positions already to be found in Plato, but in a radicalization of these positions. The instituting requirement for philosophy that it pose the question of its own distinction from opinion has hardened in Bourdieu’s work into the claim that every opinion may be traced back to its social ground. The strategy of reversal by which Rancière shows Bourdieu to be a latent Platonist exposes the parallel overstatement which since ‘the technological passion that seized the philosopher in the modern age’ (2004: 165) pairs the philosopher’s claim to be exempt from history with the sociological claim to have mastered it.
What the modern philosopher and his sociological opponent overlook is not the self-delimitation by which philosophy distinguishes itself from other forms of knowledge, but the limits which philosophy draws in regards to its possible knowledge of its objects. Philosophy draws up in front of history because it acknowledges that the realm of action is not governed by causal necessity, but is instead marked by fate and accident, just as politics is essentially a sphere of power, opinion and persuasion rather than of truth. Can philosophy do justice to the realm of praxis? That this is an open question does not mean that we need reject philosophy, but rather that we carry a properly philosophical hesitation into the disciplines to which our knowledge of the sublunary world has been entrusted. This exploration into the possibility of a properly historical philosophy in part determines Rancière’s return to the ancients: ‘I refer to Plato and Aristotle because they are in fact the most modern theorists of the political. In terms of the political, they are the basic thinkers, and they are therefore the most modern thinkers’ (1997: 30). ‘Properly historical’ turns out to mean suitably anachronistic.
Responses to his work by both historians and philosophers underscore the extent to which Rancière frustrates and challenges the categories of both philosophy and history. His works seem to offer us histories of politics, of literature, of modern art; but in his interviews and methodological reflections he stresses both the strategic, polemical and occasional nature of his writing, and the apparently trans-historical or universal ideal of equality to which his whole enterprise is devoted. The verification of the possibility of equality must be sought in the world of history, of practice: but there can be no history of equality, which breaks with the time and strategies of historical narration. Although select historical references remain an important tactical weapon in his writing, they are deployed critically, as much to undercut the authority of his own voice as to challenge his opponents through his display of historical erudition.
So for all that his work plays history off against philosophy, Rancière remains on the shores of the historical discipline, as Kristin Ross has argued. For Ross (2009), Rancière’s orientation towards temporality is a powerful antidote to the spatial turn in cultural studies, but is inspired by a persistent emphasis on the surprise of an event which mainstream historiography tends to efface. Indeed, Ross’s study of May ‘68 and Its Afterlives (2002) inherits the original programme of Les Révoltes Logiques, seeking to show the ways in which subsequent accounts of the events by intellectuals and historians have tended to subject them to powerful revisionist strategies which close down the event as an experience of new possibility. The task of the historian, they had argued, was ‘to recognize the moment of a choice, of the unforeseeable, to draw from history neither lessons nor, exactly, explanations, but the principle of a vigilance toward what there is singular in each call to order and in each confrontation’ (cited Ross 2002: 128). But if he has been an inspiration for Ross, as for Arlette Farge (1997a; 1997b) and others, Rancière is not exactly a historian himself: his work is more strategic, transdisciplinary, problematic. Ross notes that although ‘[h]is concern is, first and foremost, with what specific historical actors have said and written in contingent situations’ he will ‘use history against philosophy’, treating history more like fiction in order to reframe the arguments of his opponents (2009: 25).
Philosophers such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Alain Badiou have had equal trouble accommodating his work. For Nancy, Rancière remains a philosopher despite everything – the desire to exit from metaphysics being a familiar strategy of the metaphysician – courting but unable to answer the necessarily speculative question about the eruption into history of the political division whose principle he celebrates (2009: 85; 87–8). Badiou comments on Rancière’s historical virtuosity – ‘he is capable of erudite scholarship and is a keen archivist’ – but seems to hint that he is hiding there: ‘In this regard, Rancière is an heir to Foucault [. . .] whose approach consists in a rebellious apprehension of discursive positivities’ (2006: 107). He notes too the ‘sharply anti-philosophical tone’ of his work, but although Badiou sees this as ‘a subtle variation on the anti-Platonism of the twentieth century’, we might equally remark that Rancière has regularly noted a disconcerting proximity between the positions he explores and those already made by Plato. Like Nancy, Badiou suggests that the violence of Rancière’s polemical opposition to philosophy is a form of blindness to philosophical presuppositions, which limits his work’s power of engagement with political philosophy.
It seems that Rancière’s parallel challenges to philosophy and history sets up something like an interference pattern, particularly dense at the point where the two domains converge: at which we ask what kind of knowledge is possible of politics. We should note too that the polemical context of Rancière’s political writing over the last 20 years has forced him to wage war on two fronts at once. On the one hand, by identifying politics with democracy, he seeks to defend democracy against its enemies, who would suppress it in the name of politics. Against those who have argued for a return of political philosophy, of the necessity of accommodation to political reality, or of a revival of properly political virtues, Rancière has argued that a politics without democracy would be the abolition of politics itself. On the other hand, by identifying democracy with politics, he seeks to defend democracy from its professed friends, for whom democracy entails the suppression of politics. The identification of democracy with dissensus is aimed not just against those for whom democracy means rational agreement, an ideal of civic or ethnic community, but also those pluralists for whom democracy entails the managed conflict between competing interests and values.
These political aims require Rancière to argue on the one hand against the revival of political philosophy in France, largely under the guise of political history, and on the other against the revival of metaphysics, under the guise of new materialist ontologies. This results in a double gesture: to play history, as the realm of contingency, off against ontology, which can only be thought in terms of necessity; but at the same time to outflank historical responses to political thought, which share the sociological tendency to distribute appropriate modes of political activity.
The tension involved in this double movement is reflected in Rancière’s interest in anachronism. As Rancière told an interviewer:
it is imperative to revoke the authoritative principle derived from the succession of historical events. And it is the implications derived from this second transgressive imperative that I understand to be critical to an idea of contemporaneity. To conceptualize the contemporaneity of thought requires the reliance on a certain anachronism or untimeliness. (2000: 121)
There is a longstanding tension within the discipline of history between the relevance of our understanding of the past for the present, and the critical displacement by which the past is constructed as an object of knowledge that authenticates the objectivity and authority of the historian herself. So Rancière’s apparent distrust of historicism might equally be seen as a critical fold within the historical discipline, rather than as a polemic addressed to it from without. What I will argue in the rest of this chapter is that the pursuit of the challenge of equality requires Rancière to step outside the disciplinary identification of the historian, and towards that of the philosopher, in exploring something like the conditions of possibility, not only of historical writing, but of history itself. Or as he puts it in The Names of History: ‘There is history – an experience and a matter of history – because there is speech in excess, words that cut into life, wars of writing’ (1994: 88). However this project remains short of any attempt to open up questions of an ontological or phenomenological type concerning the ‘historicity’ or temporalization of experience itself.
The Names of History is a characteristically dense and at times polemical intervention into debates about the status of history as a discipline. At one level it poses a fairly straightforward analytical question: what is the specificity of history as a modern discipline? But at a more radical level, it asks about the ways in which the constitution of history as a discipline functions politically. The result is the presentation by Rancière of an aporetic relationship between the work of the historian and the regime of ‘historicity’ which underlies it: ‘[g]iving the republican age the means of thinking and writing its own prehistory, the contract prohibited it, in the same gesture, from conceiving its own history and the forms of its writing’ (1994: 95). Rancière’s own experience of archival work in the 1970s had led him to question the possibility of a social history that could do justice to the variety and plurality of the voices of the workers (cf. 1986). But what had in earlier writings (cf. Rancière 1981) been seen as an empirical failure of the French historical profession to adequately respond to the demands of social history is, in The Names of History, traced back to the constitutive features of the writing of modern history itself.
In the early stages of his argument, Rancière follows a trajectory traced earlier in the work of Paul Veyne and Paul Ricoeur. Both had insisted on the inherent narrative dimension of historical writing, and had shown that despite the sociological turn in French historical thought associated with the Annales School, and the displacement of political history by analyses based on economic, geographic or demographic factors, its major works remained premised not only on remarkably literary presentation, but even on the very events and plots whose abolition they had pronounced. In Writing History (1971, trans. 1984), Veyne had argued in nominalist and pluralist fashion that histories are the arrangement into series of unique, nonrepeatable events, that any fact can become an event by virtue of being arranged into a historical series, and that consequently there is an indefinite number of possible histories, subject only to the time and ingenuity of historians. For Veyne there is no such thing as historical explanation, only the arrangement of facts into comprehensible series; the major contribution of the Annales School being to have enriched historical study by treating as events new kinds of facts, and therefore inventing new plots. Writing History is an extreme statement of a sceptical epistemology that divides the practice of the historian from any attempt to legitimate it on the grounds of its contribution to political, public or historical consciousness.
Although he accepted the tie between history and narrative, Michel de Certeau was to criticize Veyne for failing to take due account of the way in which the choices of historians were themselves circumscribed by their own desires, and by their institutional, historical and political situation (1972: 1323; 1988: 60); and had also stressed the connection between history and the suppression of the past. In turn, Paul Ricoeur had shown in much greater detail the way in which the writing of the Annales School (in particular, that of Fernand Braudel) relied on what he called ‘quasi-events’ (cf. 1984: 206–25). Ricoeur further suggests that the attempted displacement of the history of events by those of structures and conjunctures must remain incomplete because an event (of whatever scale and duration) is always a function of emplotment. For the historian to make historical change visible requires the construction of narratives in which the long sequences of historical time are treated as if they were events. Whereas for Veyne this results from the subjective action of the historian in his composition of a historical plot, for Ricoeur this instead reflects characteristics of time itself. Ricoeur argues that history is a distinctive form of knowledge because of its relationship to narrative on the one side and to scientific objectivity on the other: ‘a discipline that, in virtue of its scientific ambition, tends to forget this line of derivation which continues nevertheless tacitly to preserve its specificity as a historical science’. (1984: 91) Compare Rancière: ‘the power of articulation of names and events that is tied to the ontological indeterminacy of the narrative, but that nevertheless is alone suited to preserving the specificity of a historical science in general’ (1994: 7).
In his later work, Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur notes Rancière’s original extension of his own analysis of Braudel’s work, through which both demonstrate the recurrence of a plot based around events in the heart of the new history (2004: 341). Rancière argues that Braudel inherits Michelet’s refusal to maintain a clear distinction between the present tense of the historian’s narration, and the past tense in which the events he is retelling occur. The events speak; the historian situates himself and his implied addressee among them, in an ongoing process. In effect Rancière provides an analytic demonstration of de Certeau’s suggestion that the function of history is as much to impose the present on the past as it is to let us perceive the past in its absence. It introduces a rift between past and present as much as it joins them in a continuity (de Certeau 1988: 85). For Rancière, the discourse of the historian is ‘the neutralization of the appearance of the past [which] takes on what is said of nontruth: uncertainty, death, inessentiality’ (1994: 49).
The audacity of the historian in the Annales line is a figure of his subtlety: this is most clear in the ambivalent role played by Michelet in Rancière’s argument. On the one hand, ‘Michelet is the initiator of this revolution in the system of tenses which characterizes the writing of the new history’ (1994: 48). This is to take seriously the claims of Lucien Febvre, one of the founders of the Annales School, who calls Michelet ‘the very embodiment of history’ (1973: 28), and in doing so to seek to understand more clearly the political implications of their historical poetics. As the epitome of the democratic Republican historian, Michelet exemplifies the way in which the people are silenced by their historians; and the institution of ‘republican-romantic’ history echoes – but displaces and shuts down – the founding of the Republic itself. Indeed, Rancière’s chapter heading puns on the ‘récit fondateur’, although the complex term récit is flattened in English translation as ‘narrative’: we might take this to refer to the story that Michelet tells about the revolution which founds the history of the people, and his own historical project; the founding role of his own story in relation to the new history; but also as the organizing role to be played by the example of Michelet in Rancière’s staging of his own explication.
But for the thinker attuned to equality, the replacement of one regime of historicity by another is the substitution of one form of inegalitarian story for another. So, while revolutionary in both politics and methodology, Michelet is also the first to put into operation the new historiographical displacement of politics. The historian fabricates the nation out of the voices of the poor, but its visibility depends on precisely this substitution of the historian’s account for the hubbub of the mass. Through the invention of a new narrative technique, the historian’s reading of the documents of the past allows us to understand the structural conditions of events, but allots to the historian the privileged focal point from which the new history is given visibility. Unity comes out of plurality through the intervention of a single organizing intelligence. Here again Rancière is close to Michel de Certeau, who also cites Michelet in The Writing of History to illustrate the proposition that the historian’s production of the people depends on their silence:
Another, graver mourning is added to the first. The People are also separated. ‘I was born of the people. I had the people in my heart [. . .] But I found their language inaccessible. I was unable to make it speak.’ It is also silent, in order to become the object of this poem that speaks of it. (de Certeau 1988: 2)
The historian becomes the privileged interpreter of the people’s past, dependent on the literary production of a scientific warrant that undermines the people’s ability to understand their own history without the mediation of the historian.
For de Certeau, as for Rancière, the work of the historian becomes a privileged form of a more generalized conception of social praxis as productive. Yet the subsequent accommodation to the place of narrative in history among leading figures in French historiography is not necessarily a progressive transformation but rather a repetition of some of its leading features. When Roger Chartier cites Rancière alongside de Certeau and Ricoeur in recognition of this settlement, he neglects the specific difference of Rancière’s account: the political question of equality (1997: 16). Since it is already internal to the constitution of the discipline, a new self- consciousness about the implication of narrative in history need not mean a political transformation. In this sense, Rancière may be closer to Veyne’s scepticism, closely allied to that of Foucault, about the efficacy of history, than to de Certeau. Moreover the thrust of his argument about the subsumption of politics in any statement of identity should lead us to question any temptation to organize an account around assertions about cultural identity or ethos.
Rancière’s procedures are more descriptive than directly critical. It is not a question of attacking the methodology of the new history, or of claiming that it is insufficiently grounded in theory. This is appropriate to the claim being made: a story is not something that can be disproved, although it may always be retold from another point of view. This kind of approach to intellectual history is familiar from the techniques laid out by Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge. Foucault suggested that in the analysis of a particular discourse what one seeks is ‘a group of rules that are immanent in a practice, and define it in its specificity’ (2002: 51). His work directs us away from the analysis of different forms of knowledge as the expression of an underlying cultural unity to an analysis of heterogeneous discursive practices, each following its own developmental trajectory. Moreover, as de Certeau notes, The Archaeology of Knowledge also marks the intrusion into Foucault’s problematic of the social conflicts in which historiography, as a discursive practice itself, must be involved (1988: 60).
Rancière’s definition of his aim in The Names of History is similar: ‘It is a question of the conditions in which the writing of the knowledgeable historical narrative takes place in the democratic age, of the conditions of articulation of the threefold – scientific, narrative, and political – contract’ (1994: 21). In fact one could see Rancière as radicalizing a proposition of de Certeau who notes: ‘Stable societies allow history to favor continuities and tend to confer the value of a human essence upon a solidly established order. In periods of movement or revolution, ruptures of individual or collective action become the principle of historical intelligibility’ (1988: 48). Insofar as for Rancière the point is to intervene in the present by affirming the possibility of discontinuity, all forms of stability become forms of ordering, or what he calls, in Disagreement, policing. Policing implies a homogeneous time of planning and control which is in fact heterogeneous to our experience of time:
There is an event, history happens (in the sense that things happen) insofar as the human being is a being who is non-contemporaneous with itself. Events happen because there are different times which are jumbled together, events happen because there is futurity, the future in the present, because there is also a present which repeats the past, because there are different temporalities within the ‘same’ time, etc. (1994b: 93, my translation)
I quote from an interview given following the publication of The Names of History in order to remark the fact that this question of the constitutive temporal disorder of human existence is given no place in the book.
Having shown that the invention of history for the democratic age is constituted around the substitution of the nation, or the people as bound to a specific territory, for the voices of the people, Rancière contrasts this with the actual nature of democratic politics. Democratic politics is not the emancipation of a specific defined group, but the assertion of the equality of anyone with anyone. It is limitless, and must call into question all forms of bounded politics:
The class that declares itself in the pure invocation of its limitlessness of number is rather identified with the act of a speech without place and of an uncountable collectivity, one impossible to identify. It is the advent [avènement ], in the field of politics, of a subject that is such only in its recrossing and disjunction of the modes of legitimacy that established the affinity between discourses and bodies. (1994: 92)
The movement of democratic politics specifically calls into question political settlement based on territory or on belonging, whether portrayed in biological, spiritual or civic terms. Rancière contrasts the disorderly and anachronistic way in which politics makes use of names and precedents to the historians’ desire for the ordering of events. In a later essay he phrases this more unequivocally: history ‘functions as an ethical principal of adherence, defining what can be felt and thought by the occupants of a space and time’ (2006: 8). The emergence of the democratic political subject is not the birth of the Republic, but the violent eruption of the democratic avènement.
We might take Rancière’s term avènement to signal something more than an event [evènement]. Bernard Flynn’s gloss of the use of the term by Merleau-Ponty and Lefort is helpful here: ‘The advent, unlike the event, is not absolutely singular and, unlike the essence, is not subject to identical repetition; although historical, the advent has a signification which overflows its possibility. It continues to preside over a certain space and time; it opens possibilities, even ones it does not itself realize’ (2005: 44). The advent of the modern age of democratic politics is a scandal that exceeds the orderly recounting of history. A subject without limit cannot be the object of a history, which as Rancière notes, ‘is a series of events that happen to subjects who are generally designated by proper names’ (1994: 1). We can tell the story of a political event, but the temporality of a political advent is predicated on the impropriety of the subject constituted and the possible anachronism of the name invoked.
If one of the objects of a poetics of knowledge is to allow for the improper time of political advent, it must in some sense outflank the ordering of historical time. Moreover, it sharpens the political question as to the efficacy of historical understanding or knowledge. In fact this was implicit in Rancière’s rejection of the possibility of social history: he suggested in 1981 that ‘perhaps we overestimate history as a form of memory leading to self-possession and self-recognition’ (1981: 268). Democratic man is not chained to the narrative of his own proper people, class or nation, nor does the researcher trawling the archives to establish a faithful record of times past best represent him: ‘the democratic man is a being who speaks, which is also to say a poetic being, a being capable of embracing a distance between words and things which is not deception, not trickery, but humanity’ (1995: 51). Questioning the political efficacy and presuppositions of history and memory is to challenge both progressive and conservative accounts of the political value of historical consciousness yet to affirm that the democratic condition of politics is latent in every social formation because innate in man’s intelligence.
Although Rancière argues that politics exceeds history, this does not mean that he makes the modern subject of politics unspeakable. Clearly one aim of the poetics of knowledge is precisely to try to make democracy apparent through tracing the pressure that the excess of the political advent exerts on the discourse of history. A similar project is at work in Disagreement where Rancière traces the parallel deformation of political philosophy by its attempt to reckon with democracy. But beyond what could be mistaken for something akin to psychoanalysis, a way to make the absence of politics from history and philosophy felt as an absence, the poetics of knowledge also puts into operation a powerful affirmative impulse, stemming from the term ‘poetics’ itself. The poetics of knowledge is an ambiguous term in The Names of History because it describes both the work of the historian and Rancière’s own project. In refusing the authority of history Rancière not only asserts the equality between his project and theirs, but an underlying kinship, a point reiterated in his recent essay on method:
He thinks it is possible to construct in that way interesting and useful poems (you must remember that this term has no pejorative overtone for him), interesting paths allowing us to move from one point to another on the territory of the war of discourses, on condition that they opt out of the pretension to give us the ‘foundations’ of knowledge and action. (2009: 119)
This privileged place of poetics in Rancière’s writing brings into the foreground the extent to which his procedures flow from the challenge of equality.
Poetics in its most general sense refers to production or making. Traditionally, poiesis is distinguished from praxis or action, on the grounds that poiesis aims at, and is subsequently judged in terms of its success at, the production of a work, whereas an action produces an event. The end of poiesis is in the work, but praxis is consumed in the action (cf. Volpi 1999: 13–14). Because of the relationship between poiesis and mimesis, or imitation, this distinction has often been moralized in favour of praxis. In The Human Condition, for example, Arendt distinguishes praxis as the virtue specific to politics from poiesis, and diagnoses both the failure of political philosophy and the ills of the modern age in ‘the substitution of making for acting and the concomitant degradation of politics into a means to obtain an allegedly “higher” end’ (1998: 229). Reversing the formula, Rancière tends to make action an example of a more widespread imitative making. An example would be the way in which democratic politics seizes on names and examples from elsewhere in historical time and space in order to underscore the universal dimension of the principle of equality being invoked.
Rancière reverses the traditional philosophical disdain for poiesis. There are two grounds for this defence. The first is that poiesis is in some sense already demystified: it knows itself to be more than and less than the truth.
Poetic language that knows itself as such doesn’t contradict reason. On the contrary, it reminds each speaking subject not to take the narrative of his mind’s adventures for the voice of truth. Every speaking subject is the poet of himself and of things. Perversion is produced when the poem is given as something other than a poem, when it wants to be imposed as truth, when it wants to force action. Rhetoric is perverted poetry. (1991: 84)
The second is more strategic, and stems from the role given to poetry and language within the text of Rancière’s own production. By treating poetics as prior to rhetoric, Rancière suggests that even debased speech testifies to a fundamental equality. Eloquence, whatever its aims or effects, attests to the human capacity to make things in language. Rancière draws the political consequence. Man is neither a political nor a speaking animal, but first and foremost a poetic animal. This returns us to the point made in On the Shores of Politics:
The democratic man is a being who speaks, which is also to say a poetic being, a being capable of embracing a distance between words and things which is not deception, not trickery, but humanity; a being capable of embracing the unreality of representation. A poetic virtue then, and a virtue grounded in trust. (1995: 51)
Rancière rehabilitates mimesis as a fundamental constituent of human intelligence. In The Names of History, for example, he hints at the value of a more rhetorical form of history writing, in which the historian (the example is Tacitus) creates speeches, and in doing so ‘creates a model of subversive eloquence for the orators and simple soldiers of the future’ (1994: 29). To emphasize poetics rather than fiction is to emphasize the making of a work rather than the accomplishment of an action. To treat the production of life as the production of works is to emphasize human experience as something that might be repeated, or imitated, without identifiable beginning or implied end.
By contrast, modern historical procedures, distinguishing rigorously between the voice of the subjects and the voice of the historian, and by turning from those who speak on behalf of the people to the mute forces whose representatives are the people, re-routes the power of mimesis.
Historical science doesn’t win against the temptations of narrative and literature; it wins by the involvement of mimesis in narrative. It doesn’t win in spite of the excesses of romanticism; it wins in the very heart of the movement called romanticism, which first of all signifies the end of the mimetic reign and the transformation of the rules of belles lettres into the unconditioned of literature. (1994: 51)
The tie between literature and history here sets the co-ordinates for the future development of Rancière’s work. His later work on literature exploits the tie between what he calls literariness, meaning not the formal quality of the text as an artwork, but rather the lack of a specific addressee of any piece of writing, which implies therefore the potential equality of any reader with any other reader, and the historical characteristics of the age of democracy. But it also describes a repression of literariness inherent in the modern idea of literature, parallel to the suppression of the people’s voices in the historical poem in which the historian gives voice to the earth or the nation on their behalf. I note in passing that two further questions arise here: one as to the nature of the tie between the age of democracy and the ‘romantic’ revolution in forms of knowledge; the second as to the privilege accorded this knot which makes possible not only the modern regime of history, but also those of literature and art, in Rancière’s larger project.
If reading Rancière has proved perplexing, as the troubled responses from those who demand something more than the peripatetic pursuit of equality indicate, that may be because of the centrality to his work of this scene of endless reading, translation and making. To practise the poetics of knowledge is to attempt a form of writing that recognizes itself as poetry. But as Rancière demonstrates in The Names of History, for the writer or reader to know this is no more and no less than to affirm their equality with the historian, the philosopher or with whomever else they are conversing. So it costs Rancière little to admit that at the heart of history is the same poetics that his own book displays and exemplifies. The passage to the shores of history and back is not a debunking or a critical demystification, but an experiment in making visible the democratic condition as a facet of human experience.
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