Alberto Toscano
Reflecting on the current fortunes of emancipatory political thought, it is difficult to shake off the nagging impression that, in a time still marked by accumulated defeats and resilient obstacles to the emergence of effective oppositional politics, the burdens of historical necessity are often turned into theoretical virtues. This is particularly evident in the pervasive preoccupation with identifying an elusive and sui generis form of action and subjectivity, politics, beneath the deceptive spectacle of social complexity.
In the context of a normalization of political life and a concomitant desublimation of the aspirations and energies that had coursed through the ‘red decade’ after 1968 – in other words, in the midst the neoliberal glaciation that some have referred to as the long 1980s or the Restoration – abstract and formalistic attempts to define anti-systemic practice could be understood as a way of retaining those very energies while withstanding the pressures of pragmatism and renegacy.1 Though it is perhaps facile to say that the activity of defining politics is inversely related to the strength of political movements, it is undeniable that the draw of contemporary invocations of politics in a radical vein is intimately linked to a widespread perception of political disorientation and social powerlessness.
In this respect, some features of a current preoccupation with the politics of emancipation, whose roots lie principally in a philosophical response to May ‘68 and its afterlives, are of interest. The first, and perhaps more debilitating one, is the implicit equation between the politics of emancipation (or communism, or equality, or radical democracy . . .) and politics tout court. There is a certain comfort in this move, which is of an exquisitely philosophical character, even if it is often accompanied by criticisms of philosophy’s pretension to oversee political practice. Rather than defeat at the hands of rival political projects, emancipation suffers because of the very disappearance or retreat of politics itself. This definitional move is philosophical to the extent that it judges the only real politics to be the one that is somehow identical, as a kind of singular universal, with the category of politics itself. The declaration that something is ‘just not politics’ then acquires the same dubious, self-satisfied ring that accompanies the judgment that something is ‘not philosophy’.
While providing a sense of purity and nobility in defeat, withdrawing the politics of emancipation (itself hardly a unified entity) from a strategic and agonistic field, in which it would be enmeshed with the politics of conservation, interest, inequality, conformity or management, makes a reckoning with the dynamics of historical failure and the possibilities of recomposition well-nigh impossible. Questions of tendency, opportunity, alliance, strategy, preparation, and so on – that is, questions having to do with the ‘dirty’ dialectic of building-up an alternative together with the means of implementing it – become unintelligible if what an emancipatory political perspective faces is not a multifarious, even if largely hostile, political field, but simply not-politics.
This radical alterity, of politics to its others (power, capital, knowledge, the police, the economy, etc.), translates into a second dimension common to a number of contemporary philosophical invocations of politics, the claim that politics (i.e. emancipation, equality, communism) is rare. What might be perceived as a massive, global setback for the cause(s) of equality is in this way given a kind of transcendental status. From such a vantage point, it is not that moments of genuine political transformation have become rare, but that they always were so. This may succeed in short-circuiting those liberal and conservative critics who gloated at the collapse of movements who thought they had history, and to a certain extent necessity, on their side; but it also stifles a sustained reflection on the organizational, ideological and strategic reasons behind the triumphs of reaction and normalization.
The rarity-of-politics thesis has the salutary effect of quelling the despondency of those who’ve come to realize that history, far from being one’s ally, is, in Fredric Jameson’s words, ‘what hurts’. We should not mourn living in seemingly apolitical times, since in a sense all times are apolitical. But the price of this move, together with that of a dualism between true politics (of radical equality and emancipation) and politics in its everyday usage, is to turn the recent history of painful setbacks for the radical Left, the very reason for the attractiveness and resonance of such a thesis, into an unintelligible phenomenon, due to some combination of insufficient will, sheer contingency, or indeed the quasi-transcendental fact that true politics – being entirely other than what generally goes by this name – is not a power that can (or should) consolidate itself into institutions and orders. Accordingly, the very idea of political transformation is sundered between its subjective or ‘aesthetic’ side (the affirmation and/or experience of equality) and its objective or ‘material’ side (social change, the establishing of a new order, a lasting mutation in everyday life) – which is regarded at best as an effect of true politics on not-politics (the economy, society, knowledge, etc.) or, at worst, a reification of emancipation into an order which, though it may be deemed better or worse than others, is different in kind, qua order, from politics itself.
Such a distillation and definition of politics can serve, as it arguably has, a tonic role in countering both the effective ideology of our systems of government and the theoretical common sense in the social sciences and humanities. Much like the slogan ‘another world is possible’, though not as openly drawing upon utopian discourse, the radical alterity claimed for a politics of emancipation forcefully asserts that, however hegemonic they may be, parliamentary capitalist democracies of a neoliberal stamp by no means exhaust the possibilities of human collective action. This alterity translates, at a high level of abstraction, the widespread, exasperated judgement that this is just not politics, that this can’t be all there is. It also breaks with the inevitable anti-politics that is but the other side of this apparent closure of possibilities: a hatred of politics based on the experience that politics can only be but the management of collective life for the sake of the privileged, at a far remove from human needs and aspirations. But it also bucks the tendency, present in much contemporary social theory, to entangle questions of emancipation in the endless ‘negotiation’ of differences and complexities – a move which, in its understandable wish to go beyond the sterile verities of classical sociology and political theory, ends up submerging moments of rupture and equality in a micropolitics where the micro ultimately prevails over the politics (see Toscano 2009).
Having said that, welcoming antidotes to the ideological monotonies of neoliberalism and complexity, and their foreclosure of the question of radical change and emancipation, should not blind us to some of the limitations of this turn to the affirmative definition of politics. One of its most striking aspects is a hostility towards ‘sociology’, often identified (not necessarily as a discipline, sometimes just as a generic intellectual attitude) as the key obstacle to grasping the specificity of politics. In Rancière’s work in particular, we could speak of the elaboration of a veritable anti-sociology. Exploring this dimension of Rancière’s political thought can help us to weigh up its important contribution to the revival of egalitarian thought, as well as to confront the way in which it instantiates some of the deeper limitations of the broader turn to radical redefinitions of politics. In the final analysis, the wish to rescue political action from the clutches of social conformity and economic determinism risks jettisoning some of the resources of emancipation, among them ones that can be developed under the rubric of sociology.
Rancière’s condemnation of sociology, like the repudiation of Althusserian ‘science’ with which it is basically continuous (Rancière 1974), stems from his steadfast opposition to any conception of political subjectivation that would posit a relation between a social structure of places and roles, on the one hand, and the experience of emancipation, on the other. In what is perhaps his most drastic repudiation of the very idea of a critical social science, Rancière argues that to approach political change beginning from social structure, that is, beginning from inequality, can only ever result in the reproduction of inequality. Thus theories of the obstacles to emancipation that base themselves on an investigation of differential access to culture, taste and speech, and especially of a differential access to political consciousness – in primis Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of dispossession – simply redouble oppression by giving it their academic and analytical imprimatur.2
Rancière’s opposition to sociology, broadly construed to include Marxian critiques of political economy,3 brings together questions of modality, knowledge and competence. Rather than siding with that Spinozist strand within Marxism, which sees the knowledge of necessity as the key to freedom, Rancière takes to its ultimate conclusions the view according to which ideology is that which passes off the contingency of domination as necessity. But this seemingly classical proposition is understood by him to mean that any order of domination is purely contingent, and that the very attempt to discern any kind of logic or regularity in the forms of dispossession is an act of unnecessary complicity with domination itself. Hence, on the basis of a key tenet of the theory of ideology – namely, that ideology eternalizes or naturalizes a contingent social structure – Rancière can end up suggesting that any theory of ideology is ultimately . . . ideological.
Such a position is in part rendered possible by a systematic evacuation of any nuance in thinking the question of modality in the social and political domains: for Rancière it seems that either a social order is necessary or it is purely contingent: intermediate notions such as tendency, probability, likelihood – arguably the only ones with which to think political change as neither miraculous nor mechanical – vanish. Marxism itself is rather cavalierly reduced to a science of social necessity, and, in a move Rancière is not alone in making, its explanations of supposedly ineluctable economic dynamics are presented as precursors to neoliberal market fundamentalism.4 In a society whose ‘governing intelligence today is nothing but the knowledge of the automatism of the great global stomach of wealth’ (Rancière 2005: 13), any concession to the idea of economic necessity is suspect.
Likewise, far from being an eminently equivocal term, a marker of cynical conformism as well as militant tenacity, for Rancière ‘realism’ becomes simply synonymous with the hypostasis and reduplication of reality as destiny:
Realism claims to be that sane attitude of mind that sticks to observable realities. It is in fact something quite different: it is the police logic of order, which asserts, in all circumstances, that it is doing the only thing possible to do. The consensus system has absorbed the historical and objective necessity of former times, reduced to the congruous portion of the ‘only thing possible’ that the circumstances authorize. The possible is thereby the conceptual exchanger of ‘reality’ and ‘necessity’. (1999: 132)5
Ideology, kicked out of the door, comes back through the window, as realism comes to be defined as the ‘system of belief peculiar to the consensus system’ (1999: 132).
Rancière does not set out to demonstrate the feebleness of arguments about necessity, to propose alternative modes of explanation that could undermine the belief in necessity – a task to which others in the Althusserian orbit, as well as Althusser himself, set themselves with considerable industriousness. Claims about social causality and necessity are in the end for Rancière ‘tautologies’, just like his own affirmation of axiomatic equality. In spite of all their epistemic trappings, tautologies of inequality – for instance those that seek sociologically to explain why those ‘left behind’ by modernization may have a proclivity for racism – simply declare that ‘the backwards are backwards’ (2005: 28). When it comes to society, it seems that knowledge can only ever take the form of the reproduction and reassertion of inequality; the social sciences are ultimately sciences of ignorance, of the gap between the intelligence of the master and that of the incompetent, who will never be able to make the famed transition to intelligence itself.6
In starting from inequality, the social sciences subordinate the possibility of emancipation and equality to the reality (which for Rancière is easily recoded as necessity) of hierarchy and disempowerment; in so doing, whether wittingly or otherwise, they pose themselves as the competent overseers and mediators of this passage from necessary ‘minority’ to possible maturity, ignorance to necessity – in a pedagogical scenario whose inegalitarian aporia Rancière has powerfully explored in numerous texts. The sociologist or critical theorist (or indeed the Marxist scientist- politician, who serves as their precursor and the ultimate object of Rancière’s animus) thus positions himself as the master of the gap between structure and agency, ignorance and knowledge, minority and maturity, thereby foreclosing the very possibility for real emancipation, which is always a contingent and immediate affirmation of the equality of intelligences, a taking of knowledge and rights, but above all a taking of speech (a prise de parole), which abhors any political oversight or scientific guarantee.
Rancière also refuses the view according to which, in lieu of the guidance provided by scientists or intellectuals, impersonal social processes themselves could mediate between passivity and activity, submission and emancipation. His research into the intellectuality of nineteenth-century workers led him to the conclusion that it is not the passage to industrialization, and the harsh experience of hierarchy and exploitation, which functions as a kind of material pedagogue for the working class; instead, ‘the real movement of workers’ emancipation takes place against great industry’ – in idleness, the affirmation of craft, evasion, aesthetic activity, and so on (1978: 79). The momentum of capitalism does not provide a leçon des choses, a wrenching object-lesson that would retroactively identify radical dispossession as the precondition for full conscious reappropriation. There is no historical logic, no tendency, towards emancipation. What 1968 taught, in a lesson very different than the one which thoroughgoing industrialization was supposed to have imparted to the working class, is that submission and resistance have no cause but themselves (2007: 334).
Before we inquire further into the cogency of this refusal of any social explanation and causality for politics, it is worth delving further into Rancière’s own understanding of the social. In effect, Rancière’s polemic – which is sometimes rendered opaque outside of France by the combined specificity of his targets and obliqueness of his attacks7 – is as much against sociological accounts of domination of the Bourdieusian stamp, as it is against the so-called return of political philosophy, which, from the late 1970s onwards, sought to reaffirm the values of the rule of law against anti-capitalist hostility to liberal rights, and to assert the classical virtues of political life against the disaggregating and conflictual character of the social – following here, albeit in a distinctly French-republican vein, in the footsteps of Hannah Arendt or Leo Strauss. Against sociologists and Marxists, Rancière affirms the irreducibility and self-reliance of emancipatory political action, which is not prepared but rather hindered or perverted by the attempt on the part of critical theories to master it. But against the pretensions of the political philosophers to separate off a proper space of political appearance from the social, understood as a domain of necessity, interest and mere life (a position often founded on its own pseudo- sociological accounts of increasing massification and individualism),8 Rancière affirms that there are not two spheres, the social and the political, but rather incommensurable ‘logics’ that inhabit what our theoretical common sense perceives as more or less homogeneous domains. This is an operation that Rancière famously carries out in terms of the political arena, which is sundered into the inegalitarian operations of the police and the precarious irruptions of politics (here, again, synonymous with politics of emancipation). In what concerns the social, Rancière approaches this through the notion of homonymy.
The contentions and disagreements between politics and the police are in a sense above all about homonymy – about the terms that define our collective life, like people, democracy, class, or indeed politics itself. Rancière’s own disagreement with Marxism concerns especially the homonymy of the proletariat, which, like a number of his contemporaries, he is adamant to wrest away from the structural determinations and social necessities of the ‘working class’.9 ‘Class’, he writes,
is the perfect example of one of those homonyms over which the counts of the police order and those of the political demonstration are divided. In the police sense, a class is a grouping of people assigned a particular status and rank according to their origins or their activity. [. . .] In the political sense, a class is something else entirely: an operator of conflict, a name for counting the uncounted, a mode of subjectification superimposed on the reality of all social groups. (1999: 83)
These two classes are ‘rigorously opposed’, and if there is a fundamental casus belli to Rancière’s distancing from Marxism it is what he perceives as its equivocations over this difference, which at one and the same time posit a pedagogical transitivity between police classification and political declassification, and undermine the possibility of a politics of declassification by treating politics as a mendacious surface-appearance hiding the socio-economic truth of class. Lacking an ear for the homonymy, or wilfully manipulating it for the sake of mastery, ‘Marxist metapolitics introduces an ambiguity in which all the political disagreement about political disagreement is concentrated’ (Rancière 1999: 84).
But Rancière does not simply wish, like Arendt or her epigones, to reclaim the rights of politics against the insidious intrusions of the social. Rather, he uses the method of the homonym to argue that both Marxist sociologism and philosophical politicism are led up blind allies by failing to distinguish between the logic of politics and that of the police. Rancière even suggests that a mishandling of homonymy can lead to a kind of radicalism or ‘fanaticism’ which, instead of employing homonymy to unsettle the police order, reifies the two logics into poles between which it then oscillates violently. In the case of proletariat, this means turning it into either a sheer social fact, a complete passivity which is in a way indistinguishable from the police order of capitalist classification, or into a purely active revolutionary leadership, a ‘nonclass’: ‘These two extreme poles strictly define two extremisms: an infrapolitical [i.e. sociological] extremism of class, that is, of the social embodiment of political classes, and an ultrapolitical extremism of nonclass – opposing extremisms whose homonyms, class and nonclass, allow them to come together in the single figure of the terrorist’ (Rancière 1999: 85).10
Against this misuse of homonymy, Rancière appears to suggest that we affirm the internal division between two logics that are different in kind, while nevertheless not reifying or ontologizing these into entities or spheres (as is done, for instance, by those political philosophers who wish to put ‘the social’ at a distance from ‘the political’). Importantly for Rancière’s sustained polemic against sociology, it is the social that according to him has been ‘the decisive homonym’, the foremost field of contention between, on the one hand, those attempts to connect the unconnected, ‘the forms of visibility of the egalitarian logos with the places where it is invisible’, and, on the other, ‘metapolitical’ attempts to freeze the relationship between the political and the social – making the social either into the obstacle to the virtues of citizenship (as in the return of political philosophy), or treating it as the real, material basis of politics’ illusory appearance (as in Marxism and sociology) (1999: 91, 90). For Rancière, the social
has caused several logics and intertwinings of logics to connect and to disconnect, to oppose one another and to blur [. . .] in the modern era, the social has been precisely the place where politics has been played out, the very name it has taken on, wherever it has not simply been identified with the science of government and with the means of taking it over. This name is, it is true, similar to the name of its negation. But every politics works on homonyms and the indiscernible. Every politics also works on the verge of its radical demise, which is embodiment as the police, the realization of the political subject as social body. (1999: 91)
There are thus two socials – one of inequality, one of equality (2004: 89).11 The social of inequality, the social of the ‘police’, is the one that Rancière more or less identifies with the object of sociology,12 whether this be understood as a social-scientific discipline or as an intrinsic component of philosophy’s own capture and suffocation of politics conceived as the exceptional affirmation of the equality of intelligences.13 The latter, for Rancière, is especially evident in the archi-political and meta-political dimensions of philosophy ever since its Greek inception. It seems that, in its foreclosure of a politics premised on the unalloyed equality of intelligences, philosophy must double itself with a sociology, that is an analysis and prescription of the social which creates an order of inequalities, of proper roles and of the spaces and times that define them.
Furthermore, there is a ‘socio-logy’ of politics, which seeks to ground the community in a univocal distribution of the sensible, without remainder (2004: 250). Democracy – another intensely homonymous term – shifts from being a political practice of equality to a policing of functions and differences precisely by erasing the ‘structural singularity’ of subjectivities whose refusal of dominant classifications puts them at odds with the social of inequality. The ultimate consequence of this approach is a ‘sociological end of politics’: the transformation of democracy into the name for a social order (2004: 48, on Tocqueville). The logic of democratic politics that Rancière discerns in the interstices of ancient Greek political philosophy, in the figure of the drawing of lots, is anti-sociological precisely in the sense that it is presented as an absence of transitivity between social placement and political action, an excess (‘the part with no part’) over the putatively exhaustive count that makes a community coincide with itself; a ‘state of exception in which no pair of opposites, no principle of the distribution of roles functions’ (2004: 230).
Philosophy instead becomes anti-democratic and anti-political – which is to say, sociological – in trying to exorcize this exception. Thus Rancière sees in Plato the inventor of sociology as the necessary support for a philosophical archi-politics:
Plato invents the regime of community interiority in which the law is the harmony of the ethos, the accord between the character of individuals and the moral values of the collective. He invents the sciences that go with this internalization of the bond of community, those sciences of the individual and collective soul that modernity will call psychology and sociology. (1999: 68)
Philosophy’s social, the social of an inequality that vouchsafes the superior competence of philosophy, is the utopia of a fully policed politics, which looks like an oligarchy to the oligarchs and a democracy to the demos; it is ‘the utopia of a sociologized politics’, the ‘fanaticism’ of a regime of consensus that abhors any excess, any real, unmanageable difference (1999: 74 and 111). Here, workers are nothing but workers (not poets or painters, and certainly not philosophers). Philosophy and sociology are therefore two different, but intimately related practices of depoliticization; that is, two ways of eliminating the difference between politics and the police, for the obvious benefit of the latter.14
But, as Rancière reminds us, philosophy’s sociology of inequality cloaks the fundamental equality that is inequality’s repressed presupposition. As he notes about the otherwise ‘idiotic’ tale of the war of all against all in Hobbes:
behind this feeble tale of death and salvation, something more serious makes itself felt, the declaration of the ultimate secret of any social order, the pure and simple equality of anyone and everyone: there is no natural principle of domination by one person over another. (1999: 79)
The question of modality – that is, of the contingency of inequality – defines Rancière’s perception of the social. We could ask whether the fact that social hierarchies are stripped of a putative natural necessity really does make them simply ‘contingent’, and whether, for those seeking to break with the effects of a distribution of the sensible that tries to be seamless and all-encompassing, this ideology of contingency is really such a boon. I’ll return to this matter in the conclusion. For now, it is worth reiterating that, unlike the French advocates of a return to political philosophy and their anglophone precursors, Rancière does not turn the social into the gelatinous repository of everything that is not politics. The thesis of homonymy, in one of Rancière’s typical operations, splits the social from within, stops it from coinciding with itself – precisely by opposing a logic of coincidence to one of non-coincidence.
Rancière presents this homonymy as a distinction that cuts across social and political movements themselves. Whence the preference for the language of ‘logics’ rather than ‘spheres’ – though we might ask whether this legitimate wish not to reify distinctions does not fall, in spite of itself, into the moralistic trap of political dualism.15 Thus, writing about the widespread movement of strikes in France in 1995, Rancière proposes a concrete case in which the tension and overlapping between these two logics becomes a political matter in itself. For Rancière, the French strike wave, like every social movement, was marked by the homonymy of the social (and one might add of ‘movements’ themselves). On the one hand, these movements belong to the social as the management and balancing-out of different parts of the population, the administration (which sometimes manifests itself as antagonism) of conflicts of interests and balances of forces through operations of partition and redistribution. In this sense, social movements are an integral part of the ‘police’ of society – an observation that is the rather formalistic echo of the long tradition of critiques of reformism and trade-unionism as integral cogs in the reproduction of a capitalist order of hierarchy and exploitation. On the other hand, according to Rancière:
The social has also meant historically the fight to bring into question this police of social relationship, to unite to a given localised and determinate demand, coming from this or that group, the repudiation of the very logic of the distribution of parts, the inclusion of the uncounted of the social order in general. [. . .] Every social movement puts into play a more or less explicit gap between what is inscribed as a negotiable demand and what the struggle itself implies: the demonstration of this equality which ultimately sustains the distributions of competence in the social hierarchy, because without it [. . .] inequality itself cannot even be ‘explained’. There is no pure social movement and no essential distinction between defensive and corporativist struggle and universalist and ‘imaginative’ social movements. (Rancière 2009: 51)
This last formulation is particularly laudable, signalling as it does an awareness on Rancière’s part of the possible moralism that results from reifying logical distinctions into categorical differences. Yet Rancière’s work oscillates between positing an incommensurability between the two-names-in-one (of class, proletariat, democracy, people, and so on)16 and acknowledging, in spite of his allergy to any dialectical transition, that the ‘socials’ can be viewed as two logical moments in a single if discontinuous process. The more Rancière ratchets up his anti-sociology, the more his work risks producing a sterile and moralistic dualism, rather than a dialectic of homonymy in which questions of organization and social order cannot be disjoined from moments of exception. Indeed, to return to my opening remarks, it is this focus on the exceptional, shared by Rancière with many of his contemporaries, which can lead to an aestheticization of the rarity of politics, and to a rationalization and sublimation of political weakness that risks freezing into a latter-day beautiful soul posture, as well as offering a supplement d’âme to otherwise apolitical discourses (something present in some of the more spurious uses of Rancière in the artworld).17
In his intervention at the recent On the Idea of Communism conference in London, Rancière put his finger on this issue, when, in the context of a further iteration of his criticisms of the pedagogical model underlying Marxism, he raised the problem of the ‘discipline of emancipation’ in the following way:
The question is that of knowing how the collectivisation of the capacity of anyone at all [n’importe qui ] can coincide with the organisation of a society, how the an-archic principle of emancipation can become that of a social distribution of places, tasks and powers. (2009a: 134)
How is it possible to forge some kind of relation between two incommensurable logics, that of the political equality of intelligences and that of the policed inequality of competencies? The key thinker of emancipation for Rancière, Joseph Jacotot, or ‘the ignorant schoolmaster’, refused any such transition: emancipation could not be social (2009: 233).18 The thrust of Rancière’s own reasoning seems generally to push his own work in this direction: though there may be a worse or a better police there can be no such thing as the overcoming of the split between the two logics. In other words, the communist dream of an association of producers (or indeed the anarchist horizon of a federation of communes) remains inexorably attached, in however attenuated a way, to the logic of the police.
In this regard, and despite his generally hostile attitude to her stance and that of her epigones, Rancière often appears to replicate Hannah Arendt’s ambiguous paean to workers’ councils as spaces of appearance of political freedom and equal speech betrayed by their ‘sociological’ corruption, that is, by the use of councils to expropriate and run factories and manage social life more generally – leading to the re-emergence of unequal functions, asymmetries of power and the dumb activity that Arendt associates with labouring.19 Of course, Rancière, as noted above, rejects the idea of an instituted political space, which would perforce separate the competent from the incompetent, the knowledgeable from the ignorant – and yet his implicit suspicion that the goal of lasting, material emancipation will inevitably re-inscribe an inequality of intelligences makes him retread a similar path. Rancière’s distrust of ‘realized’ emancipation derives from his insistently negative estimation of the role of science and theory in Marxism, which Rancière sees as dispossessing the political action of communist militants in the name of the interests of workers, and the intelligence of workers in the name of the leadership of communist intellectuals and apparatchiks.20 Rancière’s critique of pedagogy allows him to refresh, though not necessarily innovate upon, the long (anarchist and left- communist) tradition of critiques of elitism and substitutionism in ‘authoritarian’ and Leninist socialisms. And yet his answers to the conundrum of the discipline of emancipation remain unsatisfying, too cosily reliant on a rather two-dimensional perception of the history of attempts at social and material emancipation (and of Marxism more broadly), which results in a worthy if excessively rhetorical invocation of communist ‘moments’.
Rancière writes commendably about collective efforts at a politics of equality, which have always shown more organizational capability than the one manifested in bureaucratic machinations, invoking an ‘organization of disorder’ (an unwitting echo perhaps of the transitional ‘non-state state’ evoked by certain Marxists). For him, in a passage that seems to run counter to the temptation to separate off emancipation from the mess of social production and reproduction, communism is only worth reviving as a tradition
created by those moments, whether celebrated or obscure, in which simple workers, ordinary men and women, have shown their capacity to struggle for their rights and for the rights of all, to run factories, companies, administrations, schools or armies by collectivising the power of equality of anyone with anyone. (2009: 240)
But aren’t these moments defined precisely by the attempt to generate new orders? Orders which, while recognizing the dangers of hierarchy and dispossession, actually confront the need to collectively control the institutions of power, hierarchy and authority that accrue to the running of political systems and to the division of labour, without allowing them to overwhelm the principles of egalitarianism? The fact that the problem of the discipline of emancipation has received some incomplete, feeble, or at times repugnant responses, doesn’t mean it does not remain the chief problem for egalitarian politics, nor that we can simply dispatch it with the argument about the homonymy of the social. A ‘non-police police’, so to speak, remains a real organizational and strategic question.
Though Rancière’s explorations of emancipation can help us to pose these questions and to remain vigilant against elitist temptations, I think his anti-sociologism is in the final analysis an obstacle to tackling the question of how the equality of intelligences can be combined with radical social transformation. Rancière’s now rather outdated fixation on a dogmatic Marxism that would read off political action from social analysis (hardly a hegemonic position today!), leads him to an anti-explanatory ideology of contingency that would be seriously debilitating if it were actually imported into the practice of social and political movements. Unsurprisingly, collective drives to emancipation have generally been accompanied by attempts to analyse the mechanisms of domination. Politics may indeed always be ‘a leap that no knowledge can justify and no knowledge can exempt us from’ (2005: 186), but that does not mean that knowledge (of bureaucratic structure, class fractions, forms of exploitation, military forces, financial systems, commodity chains, and so on) is something that politics can do without.
The ‘situational representation’ or ‘cognitive mapping’ of one’s position vis-à-vis the often invisible forces and agencies that impinge on the affirmation and flourishing of one’s capacities is a vital dimension of political action (see Jameson 1988; 1991). Indeed, the formation of counter- knowledges and counter-cartographies can be regarded both as a creative opposition to the policing of what can be seen and said, but also as a strategic tool in organizing against the ‘social of inequality’. The kind of knowledge produced by the Detroit Geographical Expedition, for example, which brought together radical geographer William Bunge, community activists and ordinary residents of Detroit’s dispossessed black neighbourhoods, was not merely an affirmation of the contingency of domination, but an inquiry into how and where and for whom that domination operated. The production of knowledge and of explanations became an emancipatory activity, as it cut through representations of urban space, to remap Detroit’s street-plan in terms not of the normal tropisms of traffic and commerce but of ‘Where Commuters Run Over Black Children’ or the regional map in terms of the net flows of wealth from the inner city ‘slums’ out to the rich suburbs (Wood 2010: 114–15, 166–71).21 Within the workers’ movement itself, it could be argued that the ‘workers’ inquiry’, from Marx’s 1880 questionnaire for the Revue Socialiste to the Italian workerist debate on the socialist uses of sociology22 and more recent attempts at inquiring into call-centres, migrant labour or sex work, has precisely been the emblem of a form of knowledge that does not involve the ideological superiority of communist intellectuals over ignorant workers, but which is also capable, for the sake of equality, to draw on different capacities, in fraught but potentially emancipatory processes of collective learning and explanation – in which knowledge becomes itself a force for displacement, disappropriation and declassification.23
In such practices, we can glimpse that sociology too can be turned into a ‘homonym’; though it may ‘begin’ from inequality (and how could it not . . .) it can also function as a sociology of equality, for instance in combining a meticulous, ‘scientific’ knowledge of cycles of production with the strategic capacity to interfere with them, and with the political will to make radically egalitarian wage demands.24 By continuing to struggle doggedly against the chimerical figure of a knowledge substituting itself for politics and dispossessing the incompetent, rather than investigating the forms of emancipatory knowledge that may be produced from below – and across different competencies – for the sake of equality, Rancière risks sacrificing the (counter-)epistemological dimension of politics to its aesthetic one, missing the potentially fruitful links between the two.
Recognizing the non-naturalness of domination is all the more reason to inquire into the specificities of its functioning. To think that explanation, strategy and knowledge, and indeed sociology itself, are not intrinsic components of politics is not only debilitating, it dispossesses – potentially in a more severe way than Bourdieu’s sociology – those forced into positions of ‘minority’ of the very tools of emancipation. If it is not simply to turn into a spectacle for the melancholy enjoyment of the theorist or the historian, emancipation is a process that cannot simply be reduced to the affirmation of equality but of necessity drives one towards investigating the conditions for the institution and durability of equality.
Finally, breaking with the ideology of pure contingency that underlies Rancière’s anti-sociology can allow us to be true to his inspiring studies of emancipation while not succumbing to what we could call a meta- sociology. By the latter, I want to refer to the paradoxical result of Rancière’s position which, eschewing explanation, nevertheless seems to eternalize an invariant and transcendental structure of domination and incapacitation (the ‘police’) which, for all of its unnaturalness and contingency, seems to congeal into a figure of destiny. Among other things, sociology, along with other social and historical sciences, can also provide us with a knowledge of contingency capable of fuelling the imagination of other forms of social order, including ones in which a redistribution of economic, political and aesthetic resources would not be incompatible with the maximization of equality; where systematic and durable social transformation would not need to be viewed as incommensurable with the affirmation of an equal capacity for politics.
If moments of communism are to be rather more lasting and expansive than they have been, and to attain a greater momentum, some advance between the threadbare dichotomies of social knowledge and political truth, necessity and contingency, will have to be made. This will also mean, learning from Rancière, spying out the homonymy within academic disciplines themselves and fostering forms of knowledge that cannot be so easily dismissed as elitist and disempowering. It will also entail not dispossessing, as anti-sociology risks doing, those struggling against domination of their rightful claims not just to the experience of equality but to forms of power and of knowledge that can permit the affirmation of equality to have lasting consequences.
1.For Rancière’s own defence of the politics of form, see Disagreement (Rancière 1999: 87).
2.In a judicious and intelligent account of the Rancière/Bourdieu differend, Charlotte Nordmann has criticized Rancière for treating intellectual dispossession as a cause rather than, as she argues it remains in Bourdieu, an effect of domination, and for discounting the fact that the capacities of individuals are really determined and delimited by the process of dispossession (Nordmann 2006: 143). For a critical if sympathetic investigation of Rancière’s critique of pedagogy and its contemporary political relevance, see Power (2009). Rancière’s principal attacks on Bourdieu can be found in the chapter devoted to the latter in The Philosopher and His Poor (2004a), as well as in ‘L’éthique de la sociologie’, in Les scènes du peuple (2003), which collects articles from Les Révoltes logiques, the journal Rancière co-edited between 1975 and 1985, and which also published the collective volume L’empire du sociologue (1984). For a more recent and ironic take on sociology, see Rancière’s Chroniques des temps consensuels (Rancière 2005: 51–2), on Lévi-Strauss’s encounter with the Bororo people of the Amazon, who are even more ‘sociological’ than Comte or Durkheim, and on classical sociology’s ‘idea of a society which transforms its science into common rituals and beliefs’.
3.In effect, ‘Marxist metapolitics’ is identified by Rancière as the source for the ‘rules of the game’ which define sociology’s own elision of politics, understood in terms of ‘the shift between the real social body hidden beneath political appearances and endless assertion of the scientific truth of political falseness’ (Rancière 1999: 92).
4.Chroniques des temps consensuels, p. 46; more specifically on the question of the supposed affinities between Marxist determinism and neoliberal necessitarianism in their shared dismissal of democratic politics, see Disagreement, pp. 96–7. Bruno Latour is another author who views neoliberalism as a kind of ‘second Marxism’. See ‘Never Too Late To Read Tarde’, Domus, October 2004, available at: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/presse/presse_art/GB-DOMUS %2010–04.html. Here Latour speaks of ‘Marxists from the Left’ and ‘Marxists from the Right’.
5.Note once again the thesis of a continuity between Marxist determinism and the neoliberal creed that ‘there is no alternative’.
6.See the very perspicuous comments on Rancière’s anti-scientism and its political limitations in Hallward (2006). According to Hallward, the ‘political price to be paid for this downplaying of knowledge is prohibitively high’ (2006: 127).
7.This is especially the case in what concerns The Hatred of Democracy, a book whose polemical objects don’t have such obvious analogues in a British or American context.
8.See Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958), much of whose argument hinges on a particularly bleak and US-centric vision of the depoliticizing effect of ‘consumer society’, itself reliant on 1950s American sociology.
9.‘This multiple without a name which in Latin is called proles and proletarius and which the modern age has picked up on in the homonymy of the “proletariat”, which makes of it less the name of a social category than that of a singular multiple, an analyzer of being-together, an operator of distance for productive and reproductive bodies from themselves’ (2004: 187). See also Blechman et al. (2005: 285–301), where ‘class struggle’ is redefined as that power of declassification that moves the proletariat from a social identity to an egalitarian experience of disidentification, as in Rancière’s repeated reference to Blanqui’s courtroom claim to be a proletarian – a claim evidently devoid of sociological truth. For a particularly stark statement of the foreignness of the proletariat to the working class, see Agamben (2005: 31).
10.Similarly, the Marxist abuse of the homonym is responsible, in Rancière’s eyes, for brutally reincorporating the politics of declassification into the social, triggering ‘the most radical figure of the archipolice order’ (90) – clearly an allusion to the kind of ‘politics’ which begins with the interpellation: ‘What is your class background?’
11.It is worth noting that, for Rancière, the social of equality is primarily connected to a legal-political inscription – exemplarily, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.
12.Whereas politics is a matter of subjectification, sociology is for Rancière caught up in the problem of identity (1999: 118).
13.The ‘police’ itself has a quasi-transcendental relationship to the constitution of a social of inequality: ‘Police is not a social function but a symbolic constitution of the social’ (2004: 240). In the ‘aesthetic’ sense, it is above all a way of shaping what can be seen and what can be said.
14.Nonetheless, philosophy retains an emancipatory potential not accorded to sociology. It seems that Rancière is much more sanguine about the possibilities of a plebeian philosophy than he would be about a plebeian sociology.
15.‘Dualism is, I believe, the strong form of ideology as such, which may of course disguise its dual structure under any number of complicated substitutions. This is so, I want to assert, because it is the ultimate form of the ethical binary, which is thus always secretly at work within ideology’ (Jameson 2009: 198).
16.These would moments of what, in the wake of Badiou’s work, Bruno Bosteels has elaborated as ‘speculative leftism’. On the presence of such a speculative leftism in Rancière’s Disagreement, see Bosteels (2009).
17.Détourning Kierkegaard, as taken up by Schmitt and then Agamben, we could say that endless talk about the exceptional becomes boring, there are universals; if the general cannot be explained, then the exception can’t either.
18.The two emblematic thinkers of emancipation for Rancière, Jacotot and Schiller, both develop their intuitions in the wake of the excesses, defeats and misfortunes of revolutionary politics aimed at taking power and creating a new order. Though Rancière is conscious of the problems inhering in purely aesthetic or (anti-)pedagogical models of emancipation, in the final analysis he seems to be closer to the likes of Jacotot and Schiller than to proponents of a social revolution that could build the institutions of freedom and bring about a non-policed order.
19.‘The fatal mistake of the councils has always been that they themselves did not distinguish clearly between participation in public affairs and administration or management of things in the public interest. In the form of workers’ councils, they have again and again tried to take over the management of the factories, and all these attempts have ended in dismal failure’ (Arendt 1990: 273–4). It could of course be noted, in the light of numerous historical examples, from the Russian Revolution to the occupation and self-management of the Lip factory in Besançon in the 1970s, to the recent case of factory occupations in Argentina, that there is no necessity inhering in such ‘failures’, and that their causes are often extrinsic and political. The incompatibility of political freedom with collective control over social and economic life is a liberal dogma impervious to counter-examples.
20.‘The competence of the proletarian cannot be his competence. It is the knowledge of the global process – and of the reasons for his ignorance – a knowledge accessible only to those who are not caught up in the machine, to communists inasmuch as they are nothing but communists’ (Rancière 2009: 237).
21.The practice of counter-mapping, as Wood shows, has long been an important political tool in the production of strategic, anti-systemic knowledge, and has attained remarkable prominence in recent art and activism.
22.See the whole 1965 issue of the operaista journal Quaderni Rossi, featuring the key article by Raniero Panzieri, ‘Uso socialista dell’inchiesta operaia’ [Socialist Use of the Workers’ Inquiry]. The problem of the consciousness of equality – posed in terms which would doubtless be castigated by Rancière – is at the core of the inquiry itself: ‘It is a matter of verifying to what extent workers are conscious of demanding, in the face of an unequal society, an equal one, and how conscious they are that this can take on a general value for society, as a value of equality in the face of capitalist inequality’ (74–5). For an important study of workerism through a radical sociological prism, which also explores the contemporary challenges of co-research (conricerca), see Borio et al. (2004).
23.To offset the monolithic view of Marxist and communist politics as a politics of pedagogical mastery so dear to Rancière, it would be worth contrasting his thinking to that of Gramsci, who combined, in both theory and practice, a commitment to the equality of intelligences with a staunch interest in questions of linguistic and political pedagogy that could not do without some degree of transmission and explanation. For a fascinating account of Gramsci’s ‘art of listening’, his practical egalitarianism and his work to promote workers’ writing in the journal Ordine Nuovo, see Bermani (1980/81: 11–20). (Bermani’s text is followed by a few specimens of this proletarian literature, making it an interesting counterpoint to Rancière’s own Nights of Labour). In order to promote a literature by rather than about workers, Gramsci, exemplifying some of the ambiguities of pedagogy that the model of the ignorant schoolmaster seems to evade rather than resolve, spent hours and hours polishing and proofreading their texts, so that their equal intelligences, which he wished to affirm, did not end up being overshadowed by their unsurprisingly unequal linguistic resources.
24.On this dynamic, see the excellent chronicles of workers’ militancy in the petrochemical complex of Porto Marghera in Sacchetto and Sbrogiò (2009), which provides a detailed record of the articulation between egalitarianism, knowledge of the production cycle and the capacity for these struggles to break through the confines of factory demands.
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