Disorienting Democracy: Politics of Emancipation 9780415634298, 9781315473093

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Disorienting Democracy

Drawing on recent developments in continental political thought Disorienting Democracy rethinks democracy to counter the increasing poverty, inequality and insecurity that mark our contemporary era. In answer to concerns that the contemporary left is not strong enough for these so-called times of crisis this book argues that the left must urgently return to strongly redistributive policies. But this alone is not enough. To bring lasting change it must strive to untangle its long-standing emancipatory ideals from the dominatory tendencies that undermine it. This book proposes that the work of Jacques Rancière is crucial for this task. Countering domination with a resolute assertion of the capacity of all, he gives us a radical politics of emancipation that emerges through subjects who refuse to know their place. In appropriating alternative ways of living they disidentify with everyday consensus, rupturing and subverting our unequal order to force alternatives onto the agenda. Juxtaposing Rancière with other thinkers from Judith Butler to Jacques Derrida, Clare Woodford draws out the practical implications of Rancière’s work for our current time. She develops dissensual practices that provoke us not just to assert that another world is possible, but to bring about that other world today. Challenging what it means to do political philosophy, rethinking the role of critical theory, ethics, education, literature and aesthetics for democracy, and rejecting the longstanding divide between theory and activism, this book will be of particular interest to graduates, scholars and activists. Clare Woodford is Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the School of Humanities, University of Brighton, UK.

Interventions Edited by: Jenny Edkins, Aberystwyth University and Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of Warwick The Series provides a forum for innovative and interdisciplinary work that engages with alternative critical, post-structural, feminist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic and cultural approaches to international relations and global politics. In our first 5 years we have published 60 volumes. We aim to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working within broad critical post-structural traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics. Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical and textual studies in international politics. For a full list of available titles please visit https://www.routledge.com/series/INT The most recent titles in this series are: Refugees in Extended Exile Living on the edge Jennifer Hyndman and Wenona Giles Security Without Weapons Rethinking violence, nonviolent actions, and civilian protection M. S. Wallace Disorienting Democracy Politics of emancipation Clare Woodford Democracy Promotion as Foreign Policy Temporal othering in International Relations Cathy Elliott Asylum Seekers, Sovereignty, and the Senses of the International A politico-corporeal struggle Eeva Puumala Global Powers of Horror Security, politics, and the body in pieces François Debrix

Disorienting Democracy Politics of emancipation

YORK YORK

Clare Woodford

~~o~;J~n~~~up LONDON LONDON

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Clare Woodford The right of Clare Woodford to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-415-63429-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-31547-309-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

To those who walked and showed me the ways of the waterside

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Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Disorienting democracy

viii 1

1

Equality: The twisted path of emancipation

29

2

Reflexivity: Untangling the revolution

61

3

Aversivity: Provoking the self

90

4

Poeticity: From the glade of cicadas to the island of the people

117

5

Absurdity: Aesthetics of subversion

150

Reflections on revolutionising: A voyage without a compass

176

Bibliography Index

182 195

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to David Owen, Russell Bentley, Priya Khambhaita and Aletta Norval for inspiring me to begin work on the ideas that led to this project; and to Ray Kiely, Jeremy Jennings and Clive Gabay at Queen Mary, University of London for encouraging me to write a book in the first place. I also want to thank all my students on the POL375 Democracy in Action module at Queen Mary, University of London in the Spring of 2014, who, with their incredible energy and thirst for knowledge challenged my thinking and encouraged me to keep writing. In addition, I am grateful to the many people who read and commented on earlier drafts of sections of this book, including Lasse Thomassen, Robbie Shilliam, Jean-François Drolet and David Williams at Queen Mary, for their discussion of an earlier draft of Chapter 3; Christoph Menke at the Goethe University, Frankfurt for an animated discussion that contributed to Chapter 2; Alistair Jones for comments on Chapter 5; and all participants of the workshop on the draft manuscript in April 2015 hosted by the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, at the University of Brighton, in particular David Owen, Bob Brecher, Mark Devenney, Anthony Leaker, Victoria Margree, Robin Dunford, Tim Huzar and Lars Cornelissen for insightful comments on draft chapters; and to Andrew Schaap at Exeter, for a detailed review of the full manuscript. Further appreciation is owed to David Owen, Sam Chambers and Lisa Disch for taking time to discuss many of these ideas on separate occasions as well as to David for directing me towards ‘The Orange Alternative’; and I will ever be indebted to Mark Devenney for his close reading, enthusiasm for argument and passionate critique of many ideas herein, as well as his collegiality that provided me with time to write it all up. My sincere appreciation also to all of my colleagues in the Humanities department at the University of Brighton for welcoming me to this truly unique intellectual environment and unrivalled centre for interdisciplinary critical thought in the UK. Further thanks to my family, for the inspiration, the stories, the music and the endless questioning as well as putting up with losing me to the book over the past couple of years. Finally, special thanks as always to Neill for his wholehearted support, attention to detail, limitless patience, and for always understanding.

Introduction Disorienting democracy

Democracy is not a regime or a social way of life. It is the institution of politics itself, the system of forms of subjectification through which any order of distribution of bodies into functions is undermined, thrown back on its contingency. (Jacques Rancière1)

In a world marked by increasing poverty, insecurity and inequality, the work of Jacques Rancière is of critical importance. His thought is centred around a powerful conceptualisation of emancipation that is available to all. It does not rely on access to specialist knowledge or resources. It functions simply via two curious claims that polemically challenge what we thought we knew: first, politics is not the complex art of governing (which inevitably will exclude in some way or another) but rather is a moment that disrupts any ordered society in the name of the equality of anybody. Second, democracy is not an ordered, institutionalised system of government but is the emergence of ‘the poor’ onto the scene as a force to be reckoned with.2 For Rancière, emancipation happens through democracy, although as we can already see, a wholly unfamiliar definition of democracy. This emancipation is premised on the assumption that all are equal. The force of this assumption arises from its two rather banal-sounding effects: first, that there is no necessary, specific ‘aptitude’ that discerns what role or job one is fit for in society; and second, that work can wait. These two effects may seem uncontroversial but as will be argued below together they undermine the ‘knowing one’s place’ attitude that maintains any social order. They comprise the key that unlocks the impossible. They enable people to fight back against domination: to enact that which according to their social position, they cannot; to enact how things can be different; to reveal as contingent our current ways of being, saying and doing; and to demonstrate that other distributions of jobs, social roles, behaviours, ways of life and distributions of wealth and property are possible. Despite the force of his thinking Rancière’s approach is unassuming. He insists that he is not a theorist of anything; instead he intervenes polemically in already existing discussions about politics, struggle and emancipation. His works discuss and compare historical emancipatory struggles in order to

2

Introduction

make certain assertions about their common features. He does not claim to invent new ideas, or to construct a grand theory of the world,3 nor does he tell us what we should do or how we should act.4 Instead, he shifts our focus, redirects our gaze and changes our perception of what is possible. Thus, the impact of his thought is far-reaching. For those committed to equality and emancipation it underlines the need to resist the apparent necessity of all forms of suffering, poverty, division and inequality. He prompts us to attend to the strategies that those who have nothing can use, not merely to ask, but to force the world to take account of them. Rancière begins by rethinking the roots of democracy. This is no innocent step, for he acknowledges that to speak of democracy ‘means to speak of … struggle … to draw the map of a battlefield’.5 His thinking lives up to this description, disorienting familiar conceptions of what democracy is and how it works. Against the conception of democracy as a system of government he asserts that it is the momentary enactment of equality that takes place in the struggle between rich and poor. Democracy is the moment when ‘the poor’ are constituted as a grouping that can no longer be ignored or dismissed. Not only does he thereby disorient everything we thought we knew about democracy, but in turn his conception of democracy itself disorients and challenges any particular social order. Furthermore, Rancière’s thinking takes a trajectory that disorients the very history of Western thought despite operating from within it. For centuries established thought has justified and entrenched social order, hierarchy and inequality. Rancière’s writing reflects the poststructuralist assertion that mankind constructs knowledge in response to the uncertainty that marks the human condition. In giving authority to that knowledge we veil the traces of its construction in ‘certainty’, ‘fact’ and ‘truth’. Despite Nietzsche’s famous attack on philosophy’s presumed ability to represent truth, Rancière shows that philosophy, understood as both a discipline and a practice of thinking, continues to justify its place in the world today as the path to right knowledge. In considering how human knowledge excludes and obstructs the struggles of the poor to exist Rancière disorients us further by knocking philosophy – established human thought – off its pedestal. Yet we will always claim to know, if only because living involves thinking as we move through time. At the simplest level we accrue thoughts over time and refer to them as knowledge. Rancière’s project troubles this knowledge and undermines our certainty. ‘From the very beginning’, he tells us, ‘my concern has been with the study of thought and speech there where they produce effects, that is, in a social battle … over what we perceive and how we can name it’.6 This is a never-ending project. However much we may decry particular instantiations of knowledge, it is somehow in conjunction with thinking that we proceed through life. Our struggle against the dominatory effects of knowledge can therefore only be temporary. We build new idols as we destroy the old. Any disorientation that shocks us and stops us in our tracks is momentary. It may well effect meaningful changes to our world but the shock will fade and become normalised. Each particular change can never

Introduction

3

halt this general ‘will to know’ with its associated exclusionary effects. Time will continue to pass. We will continue to live and reorient ourselves. We make meaning of unmeaning. Due to the dominatory snares this entails any commitment to democratic equality requires repeated disorientation. Although Rancière’s work may appear as philosophy we can see that this is clearly not in any ordinary sense. Littered with metaphors of journeys, voyages and combat, his writing narrates for us a vision of ‘politics’ as an ongoing battle. Theorising ‘politics’ as a strategy of anti-philosophy his thought shreds the ‘Western tradition’ and insists that we rethink how knowledge, and the instituted discipline of philosophy, justifies inequality. Surrounded by the rubble of philosophy Rancière reads ‘politics’ as a moment of fighting back. Rather than a scientific method or an art of governing Rancière views ‘politics’ as the struggle against the ordering and justification of any inequality, better thought of as a strategy – a way of acting – against knowledge. This ‘politics’ breaks with domination and pits knowledge against knowledge. It changes worlds and smashes chains. It is available to those who have nothing and instantiates emancipation. For those opposed to poverty, insecurity and inequality Rancière’s account seems like a good place to start.

Disorienting the left and the limits of communism Yet surely all this talk of smashing chains and changing worlds is too melodramatic. We already have ways to counter poverty, insecurity and inequality. Over the last 250 years many on both the left and the right have come to agree that democratic systems of government, albeit in varying forms, are the best way to promote well-being and stability, wealth, fairer access to resources, and security. Consequently, it is necessary to ask about the extent to which Rancière’s work can be of use or even relevant to us today. First, it is interesting to note that despite this consensus it is strange that during the past four decades democracies have been plagued by a language of crisis. Since the late 1960s there has been significant concern about a crisis that is internal to the workings of democracy itself7 as well as the more recent threat to democracy emanating from the steady growth of the far right.8 In the midst of these worries about the survival of democracy the events of 9/11 sparked fears for Western security, which were also cast in the language of ‘crisis’. Regular security alerts and talk of a new ‘axis of evil’ are used to justify the perception of an increased risk to citizen lives from terrorist attacks and fundamentalist beliefs.9 These fears can be used to legitimate the intensification of securitisation and warfare across the globe driving surveillance of citizen populations and other states in the name of the very democracy these practices undermine. These two ‘crises’ were more recently compounded by a third: the financial crash of 2008 and the ensuing global recession. Democracy is thereby currently figured as plagued by this threetiered crisis of government, physical security and access to the wealth and resources needed for the reproduction of democratic life.

4

Introduction

Indeed, we see the evidence for these crises every day. First, many would recognise the democratic malaise neatly observed by Donatella della Porta in Can Democracy Be Saved? Democracy, she argues, is limited by diverse layers of factors, including the decline in representation and accountability, falling electoral turnout, and the dis-connect between citizens and politicians,10 compounded by a shift in power from political parties to executive decision makers, from nation state to international bodies such as the European Union (EU), the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and from state to market.11 Citizens seem cut off from state decision making or are unable to influence the governance of their own lives. Second, fears about terrorism are intensified as we attribute more suffering to terrorist attacks, from 9/11 and the 2004 Madrid bombings, to the multiple attacks in France and the massacre of foreign tourists on a Tunisian beach in 2015. The life-shattering effects for the survivors and those left behind to grieve, are all too evident. Finally, the financial crash and recession impoverished many people around the world. Health care and other essential services have been dramatically curtailed, and malnutrition, in particular among children and the elderly, is on the increase.12 Each of these ‘crises’ has had tangible negative effects on the lives of millions around the globe. In response, many democratic protest movements have emerged to repudiate the ‘no alternative’ narrative of parliamentary politics. These include Occupy! in the USA and the UK, as well as the Stop the Cuts Trade Union Movement in the UK; M-15 in Spain and the antaganesimoi in Greece; the student protests in Italy, Bulgaria, Sweden, Germany and Holland; the protests against the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil; the Iranian Green revolution of 2010; the ‘Arab spring’ of 2011–12; the 2012 Gezi Park demonstrations in Turkey; and the Hong Kong Occupy movement of 2013–14. In some countries these protests have given rise to new left-wing political parties, most notably Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. In many cases they have managed to halt contentious actions and oppressive practices or even overthrow regimes. It is not surprising that many identify this wave of protests and rebellion as the rise of a new left, a global populist movement that has emerged from the crisis to rethink democratic accountability, overcome the divisions that have led to terrorism, fear and surveillance, and to reject the austerity politics that continues to cause suffering and exacerbate inequality. Indeed, it is evident from the wave of publications that have appeared since 2008 that there is a growing sense of optimism and anticipation in contemporary academic literature. Some claim that ‘the time is now’,13 that ‘the age of revolutions is by no means over’,14 that ‘something new is happening’,15 and ‘something big is possible’;16 we are witnessing the ‘rebirth of history’17 or at least ‘a return to full blown history’:18 ‘the dream is being fulfilled’.19 Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek recently declared that ‘the long night of the left is drawing to a close’20 and many have turned to consider what this new left politics will comprise.

Introduction

5

In order to consider how we might further characterise the politics of this emerging movement a conference on communism was held at Birkbeck University in London, in March 2009.21 Although all the speakers seemed to agree that a return to the name communism could well be appropriate for this rising movement,22 they disagreed significantly on what exactly this name referred to. From their debates we get an overview of some of the main points of contention that have always antagonised, animated and divided the left more widely at protests, assemblies and occupations as well as in academic debates.23 Drawing out the key points of contention is also useful for our purposes here since Rancière was one of the speakers at this conference. Examining his response to these issues helps us to bring into sharper focus the unique approach that his thinking offers. The debate brings together those committed to the common and the struggle for liberation against oppression or domination from those who support individualism. It allows them to unite around, in Badiou’s terminology, a commitment to the ‘idea of communism’: a radical egalitarianism which is translated into egalitarian social practices of democratic order. Beyond this, however, it seems to split the left between two polarised positions: those who support the reformulation of an organised, theorised, vertical and institutionalised communist party versus those who support an organic or spontaneous emergence of activist-led, horizontalist, multitude of the people. Although this is a rough sketch of the diversity of opinions represented, its pertinence is supported by the ease with which we can use it to identify each of the thinkers at the conference taking up a position between these poles. With regard to spontaneity or organisation, people and parties, multitude or institutions, Badiou asserts his commitment to the ‘idea’ which he argues must be kept separate from any use of the adjective ‘communist’ in terms of movements or parties,24 while Hardt and Negri posit that communism is immanent within capitalism itself and relies upon the spontaneous emergence of the multitude which does not require the organisational form of intellectual critique or vanguardism.25 This is opposed by Žižek and Jodi Dean who champion the need to theorise and organise.26 In a separate vein but echoing the language of the debate, David Graeber emphasises his commitment to communism not through parties but in the ideal of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’,27 effected via local, organic, grass-roots, direct and activist-led democracy. We see here then a distinction between those who view this as a horizontalist organic process, directed by protestors themselves in response to local issues, and by those who demand a new global communist imaginary articulated by a party with some form of vertical leadership to anchor the struggle. Badiou insists that any notion of the ‘communist party’ is ‘misconceived’28 and Rancière adds that we should not be talking about ‘organisation or how to take over state power’.29 For Bosteels, by contrast, the party is a flexible way of organising our commitment to this ‘idea of communism’,30 while Hallward does not explicitly refer to the need for a party but does talk

6

Introduction

of the need for discipline and standing together.31 This echoes Dean and Žižek’s call for a communist party to provide discipline and preparation32 as a way of organising the collective to enable unified planning and preparation. Although they do contrast this with an authoritarian Leninist party they still insist on the need for hierarchy and leadership. I do not deny that these are important issues to discuss, but that by merely taking up positions within this debate we allow it to mask two more important issues. First, talk of the left’s revival too often ignores, merely accepts, or sometimes even celebrates the cost of protest thereby overlooking the relationship between order and change. The recent wave of protests has been met by a harsh and repressive response from the authorities. In many countries occupiers have been evicted, protestors prosecuted and restrictive new laws introduced. The austerity consensus continues, and the dissenting Greek (Syriza), and emerging Spanish (Podemos) positions, are condemned. Struggles beyond Europe and the USA, such as those in Turkey, Egypt, Bahrain, Iran and of course Syria, were met with even greater physical violence, insecurity and aggression.33 Consequently, despite the democratic calls by these movements we cannot ignore these instances of a troubling suppression of democracy with grave material consequence for many of those involved. This is not to claim that these protests have failed but that there are strategic questions about the effectiveness of protest tactics and who pays the highest price. Žižek and Dean both raise concerns that these movements are apolitical and risk descending into a short-lived carnival celebrating a temporary opening of space free of police control, which is then suppressed without lasting egalitarian consequences. In their view the way to avoid this is to introduce discipline and leadership into the movement in the form of the party.34 However, the impact of such protests cannot be easily quantified. The ensuing debate between the organic and the party approach, verticalism versus horizontalism, organisation versus spontaneity, and theorists versus activists misses the point and restricts our understanding. Both the valorising of the disorder of revolt at the expense of what may follow as well as the romanticising of the disciplined communist party and its political programme direct us to the same point: a new order. A disagreement about methods distracts us from the trickier question of how orders become more and less restrictive, and to consider features of order that may make it more possible for dissent to be articulated and responded to without the need for mass unrest, violence and loss of life. If protests are to lead to change it is worth attending to precise questions of strategy that foreground this question: to think about not only how to make change possible but simultaneously why and how change is resisted. Indeed, we need to consider what it means to talk of better order. Many of the aforementioned thinkers turn too soon to whichever method will help to break with our current order, intimating that beyond it lies greater equality and freedom. Yet they do not attend to how order in general functions – how it is entrenched, becomes dominatory and results in further rebellion and

Introduction

7

protest. Hence I suggest that there is value in considering Rancière’s particular theorisation of the dominatory effects of order in general, the relationship between emancipation (figured as a self-generated moment of equality) and domination, as well as the conditions under which domination can be reduced to make emancipation more readily available. A second concern about the recent literature on the turn to communism is that many of these thinkers replicate the language of crisis.35 As Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou note, the term ‘crisis’ provides a useful way to manage populations. It enables authorities to normalise exceptional acts and laws that were once deemed wholly unacceptable. Legislation violating human rights and privacy laws, or exacerbating poverty, are rendered legitimate during this time of permanent crisis. Resistance is characterised as disloyal, unpatriotic and selfish.36 Crisis is invoked to quell dissent, control citizens, and justify difficult conditions without resentment. This is not to deny that ‘crises’ have had significant negative effects. However, the wider order in which we live is that which generates the crises in the first place. Poverty, violence, insecurity, corruption and discrimination were present before the socalled crises which have only exacerbated them, making them visible in their extremes. Rancière sums up these concerns thus: To characterise the phenomena of our times we must, first of all, call into question the concept of crisis. One speaks of a crisis of society, a crisis of democracy, and so on. It is a way of blaming the current situation on the victims. Now, this situation is not the result of a sickness of civilisation but of the violence with which the masters of the world direct their offensive against the peoples … Those supposed calls for citizen responsibility only have, in fact, one effect: to blame the citizens in order to capture them more easily within the institutional game that only consists of selecting, between members of the ruling class, those they would prefer to allow to dispossess them of their power to act.37 Rather than responding to the short-term effects of the latest crisis, we must consider why our social order generates vulnerability, poverty and inequality; why some people are more vulnerable to crises; why it is that, despite the protestations of then UK Prime Minister David Cameron, we are not ‘in this together’ and why the poorest pay the highest price for systematically generated crises, while the wealthy continue to gain. This highlights the need to attend more carefully to (a) the precise ways in which emancipation becomes entangled with and thereby subverted by domination such that we understand better why the costs of certain protests and disputes impact more on some people than on others; and (b) how we might respond to the injustice and suffering caused by the weaknesses of the representative democratic system, war and terrorism, and financial instability, without veiling the vulnerabilities of our everyday order using the language of crisis to license domination.

8

Introduction

Rancière’s writing offers us an analysis which enables us to respond to these issues. His work gives us a thematisation of strategy that theorises how to effect politics in order to impact on the police order. It untangles emancipation from domination and avoids the language of crisis. His intervention in the debate on communism notes that reviving the term ‘communism’ is not the best answer since it names the current Chinese regime which is ‘one of the most prosperous capitalist powers today’.38 This is not to say that egalitarian and democratic values are not intrinsic to the history of communism. Rather it underlines the ambiguities of the communist tradition. He observes a tension between the logic of emancipation which asserts the equal capacity of ordinary people to do things for themselves, and the logic of domination which proclaims the incapacity and stupidity of ordinary people, deemed to need others such as intellectuals or the party, to lead them. Rancière disentangles the logic of emancipation from the logic of domination within the communist tradition so as not to re-valorise communism while merely introducing another form of domination. Following this method through Rancière’s essay leaves us with a communism that is very similar to his (idiosyncratic) understanding of democracy.39 This is particularly contentious given that Dean and Žižek posit democracy as a distraction from communism. Dean even suggests that democracy is merely what the left has ended up with in the wake of the defeat of communism.40 She deems democracy weak, unable to confront the inequalities and injustices that arise from contemporary capitalism. Yet Rancière is not defending the familiar liberal story that democratic and communist forms of government grew from the same root in the French revolution, and that the liberal/Marxist divide simply reflects a divide between those who prefer representation, institutions and elections against the passion, violence and extremes of communism. Rancière’s democracy is founded on neither of these positions. It is the moment when the dominated assert equality with those who rule over them, enacting it by taking what was previously denied, and triggering the formation of a new order. Dean’s concern about democracy is couched as a wider critique of the left today. Responding to the disappearance of left-wing alternatives, she paints the current situation as a crisis of the left, not just of democracy.41 For Dean, the left has ‘quit’ and is ‘short on ideas – or [at least] … the ones we have seem unpopular, outmoded’.42 Shaken by a severe lack of imagination and panicking that we might be pushed into oblivion we have jumped ship all by ourselves. This voluntary surrender sees the left adopt the position of ‘victim’ in the political arena, so that ‘to speak at all they have to demonstrate how they are weak, inadequate or suffering. They speak as those who are losers.’43 The current left wants visibility but avoids the responsibilities of not only coming up with alternatives but fighting to get them on the agenda and struggling to implement them. Recent left-wing protests in the USA ‘whether as marches, vigils, Facebook pages, or internet petitions aim at visibility, awareness, being seen. They don’t aim at taking power.’44

Introduction

9

Furthermore, this crisis of the left is now a popular narrative which identifies the lack of an inclusive, more plural, ethically responsive and open democracy as our main problem.45 For Dean, in embracing ‘democracy come what may’, the left has castrated itself and entrusted its future to what causes its own political stagnation.46 We should, she contends, loosen this attachment to democracy ‘in order to find other options for a leftist political future.47 According to Dean, the problem is not lack of ‘democratization’ but ‘the left’s failure to think beyond democracy’ and to explore and defend alternative visions of equality and solidarity.48 Although I disagree with Dean’s demand to go beyond democracy her analysis captures a continuing concern for the left: how to gain power in order to enact a more egalitarian but less dominatory order. The difficulties faced by the left are illustrated by the aforementioned struggles of Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and even Jeremy Corbyn’s battle over the leadership of the Labour party. I agree with Dean that alternatives are needed if the left first is to counter the risk that the extreme right gains popularity as the only existing alternative to the current political status quo, and second, and more constructively, is to consider ways in which it can continue to fight for emancipation and equality. Yet at the same time, any democratic political movement needs to avoid getting caught up in the ‘consensus system’ that Rancière criticises so vehemently.

Rejecting postdemocracy and rethinking the state of the left The term ‘consensus democracy’ emerges most clearly towards the end of Rancière’s most famous work, Dis-agreement, in which he asserts that we are currently living in an age of postdemocracy49 whereby ‘politics’ has all but disappeared50 and disputes that were previously deemed political, such as the distribution of wealth and resources, inequality, exclusion and injustice are suppressed before they can properly emerge. ‘Postdemocracy’ does not denote a ‘state of democracy’ that has once and for all surrendered to oligarchy but rather indicates the ‘paradox’ by which the name of democracy is currently being used to emphasise ‘the consensual practice of effacing the forms of democratic action’.51 Such effacement is neatly demonstrated by the EU’s indignant response to the 2015 election and subsequent negotiating position of Greece’s Syriza, ensuring that the voice of the people was beaten into submission in the name of Europe’s ‘democratic’ values. In this consensus democracy, Rancière observes, we act as if we have reached agreement on all political issues or accept that agreement cannot be reached, acknowledging that the structure of world finance is too complex for common people to question. The big ideological conflicts are said to be over. Without irreconcilable differences that demand our attention democracy is reduced to measuring public opinion. Democratic politics is no longer about fighting over whether and how to overcome poverty, oppression or domination. Democratic governments are now mere ‘business agents for international capital’.52

10

Introduction

This consensus system does not tolerate the existence of disagreement within its order. It labels those who do dissent as not only different but fundamentally wrong. This suggests that consensus and terror are two sides of the same coin. Since ‘politics’ has been stifled there is no method through which this wrong can come to be understood or responded to: it is beyond comprehension. This leads to what Rancière refers to as the ‘ethical absolutisation’ of the wrong. For Rancière, the identification of an absolute evil that cannot be mediated but must be annihilated is the logic that not only led to the Holocaust but also to the events of 9/11; to the US-led ‘war on terror’ and Guantánamo Bay; the torture documented in photographs from Abu Ghraib and the media-savvy shock tactics favoured by Islamic State. Such a logic clearly needs to be confronted if the ‘cycle of terror’ is to be tempered in any way: ‘The folly of the times is the wish to use consensus to cure the diseases of consensus.’53 Rancière’s analysis indicates a need to question the wider logic of the very consensus that is not to be questioned. It is only by criticising consensus that we can break out of the cycle. Rancière rejects postdemocracy. He envisages his work as threading a way through the straits of ambiguity, between the two ‘non-options’ of consensus and absolute wrong.54 For those of us who share this view the question is how to ‘reinvent politics.’55 Contra Dean,56 I contend that Rancière’s work defends an alternative version of equality and solidarity, and that this allows us to rethink a democratic ‘politics’ that promises a vibrant spectrum of alternative paths. Dean worries that democracy ‘depends on and requires exclusion’.57 Rancière’s understanding of democracy is substantively different from this. Democracy understood as a practice rather than a set of institutions challenges exclusion by forcing our attention onto how we may be able to lessen its entrenchment to make it less damaging and easier to overcome.58 But how does this relate to left-wing movements today? Few, if any, contemporary poststructuralist thinkers perceive the new left as having anything to do with the parliamentary state system. Instead, most take up either a melancholic position;59 criticise left-wing apathy and victim status;60 or call for a break with the left and extraction of emancipatory politics from ‘leftist intellectualism and hermeneutics’.61 In contrast, as usual, Rancière’s position here is more nuanced. In her aforementioned critique of Rancière’s ‘politics’ Dean accused him of advocating a ‘politics without politics’ which weakens the left, leaving it unable to fight back against neoliberalism. It has been shown above that in fact Rancière does not suggest that we need to respond to the problems of democracy with more democracy in the sense that concerned Dean. Instead, he claims that the problem of our so-called institutional democracies is that they are not true to the democratic value of universal equality, and it is this very fact that gives his ‘politics’ its ability to upset and overturn police configurations and open up the possibility for something different. To what extent though can this respond to Dean’s aforementioned concerns about the future of the left? If, as Dean wants, the left needs to be more focused on ‘how to

Introduction

11

take power’ it is clear that we need to consider how best to exploit these moments of rupture to build a new left-wing police. However, Rancière famously cautions against any such desire. In response to Dean’s question of how the left can take power, he says (talking about himself in the third person): Taking over power … is not such a big problem: knowing how to impose one’s will to other human beings is a science that any kid can learn in the playground of his/her school. He knows a lot of left-wing or leftist colleagues who took over power. He knows a lot of left-wing parties that had exerted or exert it … The question is not so much: what do they do with the power they hold, as it is: to what extent is their power a political one?62 We could be forgiven for thinking at this point that he seeks to sound the death knell of leftist party politics. His words indicate that any commitment to equality and emancipation actually requires us to focus on the relationship between power and ‘politics’ rather than a partisan struggle for power since it is evident that if the left succeeds in taking state power it will merely build its own police order that will go on to categorise, order, and thereby effect domination. Yet to read the passage in this way sees Rancière obscuring Dean’s concerns somewhat, and sets up yet another false dichotomy, this time between Dean’s preference for a leftist party-based movement and Rancière’s call to attend to the power of those who have no power. Dean’s motivation to rethink the left is in response to the question of why the left had to abandon many of the anti-neoliberal ideals that marked it out as leftist before it was able to take power in the governments of Mitterrand, Blair, Clinton and then Obama, and also exemplified in the concessions foisted on Greece’s Syriza. Her inquiry seeks to consider why the parliamentary left has merely accepted rather than challenged neoliberal economic and social policy. As will be argued in Chapter 2, this is the result of the left’s failure to untangle its commitment to emancipation from the logics of domination. We can thus conclude that the traditional party structure is too closely dependent on the logic of domination and as such contradicts and undermines its own ends. Yet if we stop here, we can only assume that a democratic left should abandon party politics to the liberals who embrace representative democracy and the conservative right which grows increasingly sceptical of any type of democracy at all. This is not the case. It will be argued below that Rancière’s ‘politics’ can be effective regardless of the configuration of police order. It enacts the impossible – the power of those who have no power. Since it primarily depends on the confidence of those who enact it, it cannot be prevented by structural conditions, for it is apparent that whatever the structural conditions the onus is on subjects to strategise in spite of these. Regardless of structural conditions ‘politics’ is just the result of subjectivation which arises from a certain confidence of the subject to assert their own equality.63 Indeed, all of Rancière’s examples show ‘politics’ enacted in the face of structural inequality. This indicates that we need to reverse the approach from

12

Introduction

a logic of incapacity (focusing on what is not possible) to a logic of capacity (asserting the possible). Rancière’s casual comment that ‘[t]aking over power … is not such a big problem’64 reminds us that more egalitarian social policy need not be difficult and has been effected before. Indeed, a wealth of literature and precedent is already available to inspire and guide new redistributive policy proposals. Policy change is not so difficult. What is required, however, is a change in the underlying mentality that asserts that egalitarian reforms are difficult or impossible in the current climate.65 Rancière inspires us to challenge left pessimism of incapacity with a nonchalant but firm confidence of capacity. Second, although it should not be confused with structural factors, however, such confidence will never be separate from structural factors, since these may nurture and encourage or restrict and constrain subjectivation. Given Rancière’s comments above about the politics of the state, we can identify a political project here, in the consideration of how we might be able to create and support such conditions. For example, factors such as lack of resources and high levels of social conformity may make it more difficult to stage ‘politics’ in a way that can elicit a response. Hence, to strategise ‘politics’ is also to strategise ‘police’: the consideration of conditions under which ‘politics’ may be more likely to emerge is also to consider those under which it is less likely to do so; to consider how we might weaken the hold of any distribution of ways of being, saying and doing that structure our lives, by both undermining their control but also their hold over us, to loosen our own attachments to them. Not only is there still a project here, but this is a project that can still be located on the left inasmuch as it is focused on emancipation, democracy and equality. Indeed, this is corroborated by Rancière in an interview in 2008 in which he notes that state structures do constitute an area for political struggle. Yet rather than position himself as for or against the state he once again takes a more nuanced view. Contrary to those Marxist and anarchist positions that judge anything to do with state structures to be bourgeois, illusory or unreal in some way, he suggests that it would be short-sighted to overlook the effects that state politics, infrastructure and organisational institutions have on people’s lives, and the ‘possibilities and capacities’ that these can themselves offer people ‘for new forms of action’.66 Rather than either support or condemn the state he notes that the contemporary ‘democratic’ state is a ‘hybrid’ that on the one hand comprises the democratic ‘capacity of the whole’ and ‘the result of successive democratic struggles’, while on the other hand ‘the oligarchical machine’ subordinates these democratic forces to its own oligarchic logic and privatises public space.67 This means that while it is ‘necessary to affirm a politics independent of State logic’ it is simultaneously important to recognise the terrain of the state as an area in which the cause of emancipation could be furthered.68 The forms of democracy are ‘in no way oblivious to the existence of elected assemblies, institutional guarantees of freedom of speech and expression, state control mechanisms. They see in these the conditions for being exercised and in turn modify them.’69

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13

However, to corroborate the position of ambiguity emphasised above, Rancière adds, ‘But they do not identify with them’.70 ‘Politics’ can be found in struggles over state power, and state-based concerns such as rights and institutions71 but this is merely one of many areas in which ‘politics’ operates. This helps us to understand that a democratic struggle in the terrain of the state would not aim to just ‘take power’ but to rethink and reformulate the repressive relations of sovereign power – to ‘affirm the power accrued to the people on all terrains’.72 We are thereby forced to realise that Rancière actually poses a much greater challenge for the left; one that is missed if we merely focus on ‘taking power’. This challenge is to rethink the leftist project as committed above all else to ‘politics’ understood as the enacting of as well as responding to equality and emancipation. This is absolutely not to say that leftist movements are wrong to focus on equalising access to resources, wealth redistribution and alleviation of poverty using the state to achieve these ends. However, this alone is not enough. Without this, policy change alone will be short term and superficial. Unless the logic of domination is challenged more deeply a redistributive order can simply reproduce the very logics of domination it sought to overthrow. Rancière’s analysis equips us to focus on the longer term, while his theorisation of ‘politics’ informs strategy for immediate action. Since ‘politics’ cannot be guaranteed this requires an investigation into how we might conceive of and construct police ordering that is more conducive to ‘politics’ and hence less prone to entangling ‘politics’ with police so tightly in the first place. This may seem like an oxymoron but it is conceivable that a less entrenched police order will be less likely to restrict or respond harshly to irruptions of ‘politics’. The left will only be protected from domination inasmuch as it simultaneously encourages practices though which ‘politics’ can be more easily effected, encouraging subjectivation by challenging social conformity with any particular order of ways of being, saying and doing. It is therefore imperative that a movement for equality would need to struggle both on the terrain of the state as well as beyond it and hence would need to consider both the institutional forms of a ‘better’ police but never separately from promoting practices more conducive to ‘politics’ to protect against its own entrenchment in ways of being, saying and doing. Furthermore, recalling the discussion of organisation versus spontaneity, this therefore implies that leftist organisation in the form of a party, albeit a horizontalist party, cannot be ruled out.

Plotting our route The book contributes to this project by clarifying the role of strategy in ‘politics’ and then elaborating four practices that are more conducive to ‘politics’. Chapter 1 argues that Rancière’s ‘politics’ is neither impossible to plan, nor rare or weak, and instead offers possible, available and effective strategies to effect social change. It identifies more precisely what Rancière’s ‘politics’ consists of and how it is related to the notion of ‘police’. By examining

14

Introduction

examples taken from several of his works over the last five decades I elucidate three common features of ‘politics’: dis-identification which leads to the subversion of order via appropriation and subjectivation. Chapter 1 argues that these practices could inform the strategies used in democratic struggle: to consider how dis-identification might be enhanced by employing appropriation and enabling subjectivation. However, it also illustrates the most pressing concern that we find with Rancière’s ‘politics’ through reference to Rosa Parks’ 1955 protest on the buses of Montgomery, Alabama. This concerns how much subversion ‘politics’ can really achieve. It suggests that the extent of subversion depends on strategy. The conceptualisation of struggle as ‘politics’ does not impose limits on what this struggle can achieve. Limits emerge in the symbiotic relationship between subjects and their order and the imaginaries that we construct. Hence, we can always negotiate and overcome limits via creative strategy to reconfigure police order. Given the absence of an elaboration of the relationship between ‘politics’ and the police order in Rancière’s own work, I suggest that it is helpful to read him alongside four other thinkers, Christoph Menke, Stanley Cavell, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, in order to identify practices which work on the police in order to make ‘politics’ more likely. These are ‘dissensual practices’ as mentioned by Rancière in the final essay of Dissensus. They are not an ethos (a correct way of being linked to a location). They are praxis: practices intended to bring about a particular end.73 In this case they are understood to be ongoing practices (for there is no future time when they will no longer be necessary) that we can effect if we wish to bring about more democracy, understood not as a site or an order but as a moment of disruption, or a break with order. They are not valued for their content but for their disruptive function. Beginning with the dissensual practice of philosophy already mentioned but not developed by Rancière, Chapter 2 seeks to consider in more detail what such a practice would entail, drawing on the work of Menke, a contemporary Frankfurt School critical theorist, to identify a central role for reflexivity. In response to Rancière’s recent charge that critical theory is counter-revolutionary and has been co-opted in service of domination rather than emancipation I unpack what type of critical theoretical project might be compatible with Rancière, drawing on Menke’s work which refigures critical theory as a reflexive democratic practice devoted to identifying and undermining the logic of domination. This refigures critical thinking not as an academic discipline but as a democratic dissensual practice. It also requires a reconceptualisation of revolution as an open-ended process rather than a singular one-off event. Given Rancière’s insistence that ‘politics’ is that which disrupts any given ways of being, saying and doing through a process of doubling, Chapters 3, 4 and 5 then turn to consider practices of disruption in these three domains, while acknowledging that they will never be mutually exclusive and will overlap everywhere. Chapter 3 reads Rancière alongside Cavell, the theorist of the double self. It argues that we can extract the practice of doubling the self,

Introduction

15

aversivity, from Cavell’s moral perfectionism, in order to disrupt ways of being. In order to do this we need to untangle aversivity as a practice from the ethos of aversive thinking, and also clarify the role of democratic exemplarity as one of provocation rather than imitation. This inheres a re-theorisation of democratic community as much more fluid, impermanent and ever changing rather than the more familiar assumption that it is bounded, identifiable and fixed. This community is always riven with a spirit of critique in that we demonstrate our care and commitment to it through our willingness to question and wish to better it. This leads us to conclude that we consent to our community only inasmuch as we dissent from it. Chapter 4 reads Rancière alongside the theorist of language par excellence Derrida, to bring into contrast Rancière’s emphasis on effecting ‘politics’ of linguistic disruption through poeticity, a form of playing with language to undermine its divisive and perjorative effects. Providing a genealogy of Rancière’s writing in this field this chapter clarifies the use of his term ‘literarity’ and identifies stages in the development of this term to identify the way that words break with and reconfigure meaning. The chapter concludes by drawing out a practice of making and remaking the world through poeticity, understood as play with linguistic meaning. I argue that it is of strategic importance to reflect on the distinction between political slogans that seek to educate and inform from those that use poeticity to effect dis-identification and scramble meaning. Finally, Chapter 5 juxtaposes Rancière’s work with that of Butler’s theory of performativity to consider how we might subvert our ways of doing through absurdity, to undermine norms of behaviour that restrain, restrict and dominate. Since subjectivation functions by disrupting the sensible in a way that cannot be located and given that a non-locatable disruption is found in the absurd understood as nonsensical and unintelligible, I argue that we can further maximise the ‘political’ impact of the absurd by extracting it from its institutionalised setting in the arts. I then move on to theorise how absurdity functions to undermine the sensible by drawing on Butler’s conceptualisation of performativity as a way of undermining normativity. This adds to Rancière’s work on subversion by theorising the role of iteration for subjectivation. This final practice of absurdity may appear frivolous yet the chapter contends that it is deeply political, because absurdity is that which turns the order of the sensible on its head, revealing the nonsense within the so-called sensible ordering of bodies, places and words. Tracing the recent history of the absurd I argue that it is not just an artistic genre but a political practice, greatly needed if political struggle is to stay open to its own limits and shortcomings. It provokes a constant questioning of our attachments that serves to undermine the workings of the police ordering. Although it may initially appear as if I am trying to make light of the most serious of issues (hunger, poverty, exclusion, oppression) I do not use absurdity as a comic motif but as a way of detaching from the ‘correct-ness’ of any order: from the ‘sense’ in the sensible

16

Introduction

order. Hence, I am not focusing on the power of absurdity to make us laugh, but its profundity. It enables us to see alternatives and to loosen our unthinking commitment to what is considered proper.74 This book does not deny that the practices named here as reflexivity, aversivity, poeticity and absurdity are better supported in some configurations of order rather than others and it acknowledges that these practices are already in operation all over the place. Yet they are not explicitly acknowledged as dissensual in these terms. Its small contribution is therefore to identify and theorise the relationship between these practices and democracy (not as an order but as a disruption of order in the name of equality) to assist in their strategic application.

Dis-reconnaissance in preparation for voyage Before embarking on this journey of disorientation it will help to elucidate my take on some key terms so that we can put them to use throughout the following chapters. First, as already noted, Rancière employs a rather unusual way of thinking about democracy and politics. He develops his usage of both terms via a close reading of the classical texts in which Western political thought first deals with the concept of democracy and how best to govern. This reading has warranted little discussion in the secondary literature and so is worth tracing it in detail. It is developed in the Preface and first two chapters of Dis-agreement75 which Rancière begins with a passage from Aristotle’s Politics. This tell us that the nature of the human animal is eminently political because it is endowed with speech or in Ancient Greek ‘logos’. Speech which differs from the mere ability to make sounds enables humans to express their reason, to determine that which is ‘useful and harmful, just and unjust, good and evil’.76 For Aristotle, humans are political because they possess this logos. They have access to reason which delivers the knowledge we need to make these definitive judgements about the correct way to live. It is this that distinguishes humans from other animals. However, Rancière is curious about how Aristotle moves so smoothly between the two pairings: ‘useful and harmful’ and ‘just and unjust’. He notes how strange it is that the first pairing ‘useful and harmful’ is presented as a simple opposite, which is not the way we understand these terms today. Rancière informs us that this was also the case in Ancient Greek when the two words used, sumpheron and blaberon, were not understood as opposites. Instead, blaberon denoted harm to the individual that could either derive from natural causes or from the action of others corresponding with our legal sense of ‘damage’. In contrast, sumpheron denoted a relationship to oneself: ‘the advantage that an individual or group hopes to gain from an action’.77 Rancière notes that blaberon was usually paired with ôphelimon which referred to ‘the help one receives’78 and therefore again concerned relationships with others rather than with the self. However, the unusual pairing of these terms occurred before Aristotle’s work, in Plato’s The Republic in which the

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interlocutors discuss how best to establish an ideal political community. Since they agree that any city is founded on justice, they begin by trying to define justice. Thrasymachus famously argues that justice is the advantage of the superior and uses the two terms sumpheron and blaberon to claim that justice is a matter of profit and loss. He argues that profit (sumpheron) for one will always result in loss (blaberon) for another such that ‘the profit of the shepherd is the loss of the sheep, the advantage for the governors the disadvantage of the governed, and so on’.79 In the discussion that follows Thrasymachus is proved wrong, and the argument is made that, on the contrary, the profit of one person is separated from the loss of another. In actual fact the beneficiary of superiority is the inferior party who may benefit from the rule, leadership or mastery of the superior party. Once justice has been introduced to the community, no one suffers a loss. Of particular interest is that the notion of wrong subtly vanishes in this discussion. No wrongs are suffered once justice is introduced. Plato constructs a picture of a harmonious city where the natural order of justice ensures an apparently non-contentious, exchange of services between the city’s rulers and the artisan workers who serve them. This enables the argument to be made that if advantages are distributed properly by founding the city on justice then a certain form of ‘wrong’ can disappear: that which occurs due to the actions of another. Once the city is well founded it is no longer necessary to be concerned about the parcelling out of uses, the weighting of profits and loss done by one to another. Blame and fault are no longer relevant and thus unable to cause disharmony. Once justice is instituted matters of guilt and fault-finding become a thing of the past. There is no longer anyone to blame if some are allocated a miserable or lowly position in life. That is their natural lot. Any questioning of the distribution of parts is deemed an unjustified complaint, and registered as pointless, disloyal whinging. The reason for this is because matters of use, profit, loss and wrongs done to one by another concern individuals as individuals, as separate units. When thinking about establishing a political community Plato asserts that we must focus on the whole. The individuals within the group comprise a larger single unit that is the community and the focus shifts from that which belongs to each individual to that which is held in common. The community is a single unit that occupies a certain geographical space; in this example the space of the city state with its particular resources at its disposal. As Socrates, Plato’s main character, argues that justice in a political community is about not taking more than your entitled share, the interlocutors’ discussion has to shift from who has what as an individual to who has what of the communal shares. Rancière refers to this as a shift from an arithmetical form of equality (whereby profits and losses are balanced in commercial exchange or advantage and harm measured in legal cases) to a geometrical equality whereby shares are distributed in whichever way is seen to be most proportionate, across the whole. This reflects a shift in the understanding of social order away from understanding different social positions as grounded in the

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Introduction

empirics of who has what, towards an understanding of order grounded in norms; on the meanings given to ‘facts,’ the myths of aristocratic virtues or superiority of blood lines that are built up around the possession of wealth, and the correlate myth that there is a lack of breeding, manners and virtue which are associated with a lack of wealth. Bearing Plato’s work in mind we can return to the passage from Aristotle. The aforementioned step from the useful and harmful to the just and unjust is Aristotle communicating to us that justice is exercised over the sphere of the useful and the harmful. Justice means that we move away from the simple counting of who has what on an individual basis and instead come to realise that it concerns each party taking their suitable share. However, Rancière suggests that at this point it is not yet a political order. Instead, the political questions emerge when we question what is meant by the notion of ‘suitable’: the principles by which we distribute shares in the community. Aristotle identifies three possible principles of distribution: wealth, virtue and freedom. If any virtue is allowed to take precedence we end up with one of three possible regimes: an oligarchy where the wealthy rule, an aristocracy where the virtuous rule, or a democracy, where the people rule. However, Aristotle fears that each of these regimes risks resentment from the other groups. He suggests that the most stable solution is to combine the three. This is not as straightforward as it might sound, for although it is easier to measure and identify wealth and virtue according to the criteria Aristotle sets out, it is not possible to measure what the third principle (i.e. the freedom of the people) consists of. This is a particularly important step for Rancière. He identifies the freedom of the people as a ‘fundamental miscount’ since ‘the freedom of the demos is not a determinable property but a pure invention’.80 This arose in Ancient Athens as a by-product of the abolition of enslavement for debt in the early sixth century. Although this was only one of the legislator Solon’s famous reforms which are all commonly understood to have contributed to the emergence of democracy in the ancient world Rancière suggests that it was in actual fact this particular reform that enabled the freedom of the people to emerge. It confirmed citizen equality in the sense that they could no longer become the property of one another. They were seen to bear an equality shared by all citizens with the disturbing outcome that ‘any old artisan or shopkeeper whatsoever is counted in this party to the city that calls itself the people, as taking part in community affairs as such’.81 The ‘unintended’ outcome of this reform was that it enabled the freedom of the people to exist. Rancière observes that in Aristotle’s discussion of the emergence of democracy we find a particular relationship between equality and liberty. Rancière acknowledges the dominant interpretation of the emergence of democracy within the liberal tradition whereby the equality of the people is deemed to be an ‘artificial equality’ invented rather than established according to natural fact. Its presence then blocks and obstructs the ‘natural freedom of enterprise and exchange’.82 However, in the classical texts Rancière identifies an alternative narrative whereby the freedom of the people operates

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19

as ‘an empty property’ that in emerging ‘set a limit on the calculations of commercial equality and the effects of the simple law of owing and having’.83 The effect is to undermine the myth that only the nobles can govern by virtue of their lineage, and instead reveals that all can govern. Lineage operates here as a useful myth which masks the fact that the basis of the nobles’ rule is just their ability to dominate through their monopolisation of the wealth and property of the community.84 Freedom of the people simply unveils the nobles as the rich, and demonstrates all notions of ‘nobility’ as a useful invention. This miscount is not a miscount in the sense that the people’s freedom is based on any concrete property. This freedom is not ‘proper’ to them at all for they are not claiming freedom as a party distinct from the other parties. The freedom they claim is not distinct or separate from the freedom that belongs to others (those who possess property such as wealth or virtue). Instead they simply claim to ‘be free like the rest’.85 This is central to Rancière’s subsequent work. He notes that ‘it is this simple identity with those who are otherwise superior to them in all things that gives them a specific qualification’.86 In this way the demos attributes to itself as its proper lot the equality that belongs to all citizens. In so doing the party that is not one identifies its improper property with the exclusive principle of community and identifies its name – the name of the indistinct mass of men of no position – with the name of the community itself.87 Returning to the aforementioned passage from Aristotle, freedom blocks any attempt to move from the regime of the useful, where profits and losses are neatly parcelled out, to that of the just, where each party only takes its appropriate share, for ‘the people appropriate the common quality as their own’.88 Hence the freedom of the people brings contention to the political community, for its members at one and the same time are denoted as having a place, that of the poor, of those with no wealth and no virtue, but also as being equal to all, and hence equal to those who do have wealth and virtue. Thus Rancière refers to them as ‘the part of those who have no part’.89 The emergence of this ‘part that is not a part’ thus reveals the miscount: the ‘fundamental dispute’ that concerns how to count the community’s parts. In the moment of the emergence of the people’s freedom all parts disappear. The very principles upon which they are based are suddenly revealed to be inconsequential. Nevertheless, in order to maintain domination, there will always be those who seek to suppress this miscount that disturbs order. They will do this by filling in a particular identification for the demos, referring to it by a specific name with additional identity criteria such as the majority, or the assembly, or the poor, seeking to denote the demos as a particular party, one group among others within the community. However, the ‘invention’ that is the freedom of the people will always reveal the lie behind any attempts to partition.

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Introduction

From this follows three more points. First, despite Aristotle’s attempts to identify three basic principles for the foundations of a community – wealth, virtue and freedom – he later admits that the city has only two constituent parts, the rich and the poor, for in almost all cases we find that it is the virtuous who identify as the rich.90 Aristotle’s tripartite division veils a much more simple division between rich and poor. Of course, we could claim that this geometrical ordering of equality as a ‘fair’ distribution according to its parts could just be philosophy’s way of veiling the fundamental ‘real’ of class struggle. However, Rancière rejects this Marxist interpretation because although he acknowledges that the struggle of rich and poor is ‘the whole basis of politics’, this does not mean that it is a social reality or truth that can be overcome once and for all. Instead it will always reoccur in the division between those included in an order and those, whom for whatever reason, are excluded, overlooked, dismissed or derided. Importantly, Rancière asserts that any and all social orders (including communist ones) will be established in an attempt to veil this distinction, to hide it and pretend that it has either been dealt with once and for all, or that it never existed in the first place. Instead, it is only when this struggle succeeds in breaking onto the scene, rupturing the basis of any social order and revealing its fundamental miscount that the division between rich and poor has any salience. It is this moment that is ‘politics’ for Rancière: Politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part … It defines the common … as divided, as based on a wrong that escapes the arithmetic of exchange and reparation.91 This is rather different from how we might ordinarily think of politics. For Rancière, ‘politics’ emerges to challenge any justification given for dividing the common in any way (and any assertion that the ‘real’ of the social is anything in particular). He argues that any social partition or division is contingent. ‘Politics’ thereby challenges any notion of natural order such as those found not only in Plato and Aristotle but throughout the entire history of political thought. Moreover, Rancière claims that any distribution of the social is legitimated by a justification. In order to accept any particular distribution or to go about redistributing in the first place, one has to first accept the justification that would motivate it. This means that it is not enough to understand politics in the basic Marxist formula as struggle over material distribution (who has what), rather that it is the struggle over how to justify what parties count in that distribution. Hence Rancière’s thematisation of ‘politics’ indicates that the struggle over the symbolic field happens through a material redistribution but needs to be accepted within the symbolic in order to legitimate this distribution:

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Politics does not happen just because the poor oppose the rich. It is the other way around: politics (that is, the interruption of the simple effects of domination by the rich) causes the poor to exist as an entity.92 It is only because of ‘politics’ that we come to recognise ‘the poor’ as a salient category that demands a response. This is not to reintroduce a dualism between the symbolic and the material. Rancière treats these categories as interrelated. The material is always symbolically loaded and vice versa. However, there is a salient analytic distinction to be made here whereby the material refers to the field in which justifications for alterations to the symbolic are made. These alterations can only be recognised through the subsequent change they effect in the material. Hence the relationship between material and symbolic is symbiotic. It cannot be separated in practice, yet by distinguishing them conceptually, we can better identify the steps that together comprise ‘politics’. The third point is that ‘politics’ splits in two Aristotle’s initial claim that human beings are political because they possess speech or ‘logos’. It was possession of this that he thought distinguished humans from all other animals for while any animal can express pleasure and suffering through making noises, humans can express norms and reason – good and evil – through their possession of speech. Aristotle assumed that fundamental definitions of good and evil exist which humans learn through the exercise of reason. His underlying assumption is that reason is not only the ability to think and express meaning through language, but the ability to do this in the correct way, to express ‘right thought’ or ‘right reason’. Hence the claim that humans are political animals can be used not only to group together humans as distinct from animals, but also to group together some humans as distinct from others, as those people who are not deemed to express ‘right reason’ can justifiably be excluded from the political community and rendered as animal in some way. In identifying the logos as right reason, or right thinking, the ancients could dismiss the mass of men of no consequence and with no education. They could denote those who rule from those who are ruled, those who give orders from those who merely carry them out. The existence of ‘politics’ reveals a further miscount, for it shows that what is deemed to be good or evil, or indeed any value judgement, is contingent and based on argument. Any definitions of good and evil, just and unjust, upon which a city or political community is founded will always be lacking in one way or another. This is revealed in the moment of the emergence of the freedom of the people. ‘Politics’ reveals that behind the logos that Aristotle identifies is a further logos: ‘that which bestows the right to order’;93 that which denotes what the logos is. The demos can emerge here because this initial logos is undermined by a fundamental contradiction. For any order to exist there must be communication between those who count and those who do not, those who are political beings, who reason correctly and thus possess the logos, and those who do not. However, both parties need to comprehend

22

Introduction

each other’s speech such that rulers can issues orders and the rest can obey. Hence the very possibility of social inequality depends on a prior equality in the form of the capacity to understand. This equality, Rancière notes, ‘gnaws away at any [so-called] natural order’94 and thereby creates the ever present possibility for the freedom of the demos to emerge and challenge any social order. This detour through the classics enables Rancière to identify ‘politics’ as the moment when the freedom of the people emerges in contrast to any particular identity that belongs to the people as a particular party within society. It causes the part that has no part to identify with everybody else in society in the name of a universal equality: ‘politics’ is simply this assertion of equality whereby equality is understood not as ‘a value to which one appeals’ but as ‘a universal that must be supposed, verified and demonstrated in each case’.95 Nor does this mean that he is claiming that universality is the underlying essence of any particular community, just that it works here as a ‘logical operator’96 by which any attempt to partition community can be undermined. Rancière’s ‘politics’ does not belong exclusively to any particular identified grouping such as ‘the poor of ancient times, the third estate, the modern proletariat’ since in each enactment of ‘politics’ the part that has no part asserts equality with the rest whoever they may be.97 Rancière does not prioritise one narrative of struggle over another, or one identity of the oppressed over another, but instead provides a formal way of thinking about how struggle against domination emerges and is structured. Rancière challenges what we commonly understand politics to be: the business of running the state, electioneering and parties, governing or challenging the government; or even, in many cases, signing petitions, going on marches, joining organisations or going on strike. Everyday politics is renamed by Rancière as ‘the police’. This term is used to denote the everyday system of order, with its accompanying governance, policymaking and accepted forms of protest and challenge. His use of the term ‘police’ is peculiarly French and old-fashioned, referring to its use from the fourteenth century to denote public order, the realm of citizenship and administration of the public sphere.98 Although this change in usage was made famous by Michel Foucault’s work on policing as a mode of government, associated strongly with modes of disciplining and organising bodies,99 Rancière’s adoption of the term denotes more strongly the sense of policing as ‘a rule’ governing the appearance of bodies, ‘a configuration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed’.100 For Rancière, police ‘is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task’.101 In his particular terminology, policing is the ordering of who has what, how they act and how they speak, while politics is that which breaks with this order. Importantly, as will be emphasised in Chapter 1, Rancière does not conceive that it is ever possible to exist outside of police order since it merely refers to the way in which we create meaning within our lives and organise

Introduction

23

our everyday existence. Police order is another way of denoting the ordering of society. It is not necessarily negative, but neither is it positive. It is just the way we live. Within this framework it makes no sense to speak of overturning police order. ‘Politics’ is that which changes or challenges any particular configuration of police ordering, forcing it to be reconfigured. Rancière often uses the term ‘emancipation’ to refer to the process by which a subject breaks with police order to enact ‘politics’. The aforementioned claims about disentangling emancipation from domination return us to what he claims is the original meaning of emancipation as ‘escape from a minority’102 which is intimately linked to the moment of subjectivation: the moment in which a political subject is formed. Emancipation cannot be understood as a demand or pressure put upon the other but is ‘always a proof simultaneously given to oneself ’.103 This is why he claims that ‘nobody escapes from the social minority save by their own efforts’104 since it is only through seeing oneself as being equal to others and acknowledging that this equality is not apparent in the social order that one would be motivated to challenge this. But why is Rancière so keen to think about emancipation in this way? This definition accords with the claim that the moment of politics demonstrates universality, when the separate parts of society can no longer be justified and any minority disappears. It also introduces the notion of the hierarchy of relations between those who govern and those who are governed, those who have the major part in society and those who have the minor. If emancipation is something done for somebody, that still places the emancipated in a relation of debt to the emancipator, which means we cannot override the initial relations of domination. Rancière recalls that the term was not used in Roman law to refer to the freeing of a slave but the freeing of a son from the paternal authority such that he can make his own way in the world as an adult. In this sense it still referred to a prior relation of dependence but was also a moment that is initiated by the master who emancipates the other. Yet if we return to the meaning of the word ‘emancipation’ which comes from the Latin words ‘ex’ and ‘mancipium’ meaning ‘away’ or ‘from’ and ‘ownership’ or ‘taking in hand’ we see no relation of dependence. Instead, it is merely the emergence from authority – howsoever that may be achieved. As will be argued in Chapter 2, Rancière figures emancipation in contrast to domination, not as a binary pairing but as two logics that constitute the field in which the self is both constituted and constituting.105 Emancipation is not a state in which the self can exist beyond the confines of the police order, but given that we can never escape from the social it is merely the assertion of the equality of the subject in spite of the forces of domination. In asserting this equality the political subject is brought into being. By defining emancipation in this way Rancière argues that emancipation and emancipatory movements are often thwarted not by external opposition but by their internal, often well-meaning, intentions. The aim to emancipate others rather than to contribute to conditions under which they can emancipate themselves

24

Introduction

ensures that domination is maintained through the continuation of ties of indebtedness between the liberator and the liberated. By emphasising that emancipation is something that the dominated have to do for themselves Rancière provokes a rethink of how emancipatory movements conceive of themselves and their political aims. Consequently, democratic governance does not actually result in the practice of democracy (although we will see that Rancière does suggest that the modern emergence of democratic government has supported democratic practice). This is because democracy in its instantiation of radical universal equality is fleeting; it is the moment when the principle of universal equality is enacted. However, such equality cannot be instituted because as soon as we try to establish it we have to define it in a particular way as equality of something in particular or in one particular capacity or another. This means that in every instance of equality we will necessarily prioritise one form of equality over others, and however good we may think this to be, we will always overlook the claims of some in favour of others. Thus democracy as a state of total equality can never exist, and the impossible institutionalisation of universal equality takes place in brief moments which may inspire changes in our contemporary order but which do not last.

Setting out from equality This book does not imply that these practices are new since many of the practices and strategies outlined here are already used by political movements and activist groups. However, by theorising democratic practices more precisely it seeks to help us to think in greater detail about how democracy is not something that just appears spontaneously at a demonstration or on the barricades but is a mode of subjectivation supported by a collection of practices which work to challenge the conditions under which police order imposes consensus at such high costs. By theorising democracy in this way, I aim to focus not only on how to resist consensus but on how to subvert it: to move towards worlds in which measures of democracy are not reduced to turn out statistics used to evaluate a stupid, apathetic, ignorant and immoral populace in need of ever more repressive regimes of order and control. Worlds in which resentment, hatred and misery are not strong enough to sanction war or terror of the kind that produces drone strikes, suicide bombings and torture. Worlds in which poverty and inequality no longer drive deep divisions between residents of states, cities, boroughs and streets, propagating hostility, segregation and fear. This book suggests that in the face of our current configuration of order it might be worth experimenting with strategies of equality and practices of reflexivity, aversivity, poeticity and absurdity in the hope that they will help us to respond to Rancière’s call to overthrow the dominant ordering of ‘cheerful consensus’ and its respective ‘denial of humanity’;106 to restore the visibility of ‘politics’107 by reinvigorating the promise and possibility of emancipation.

Introduction

25

Notes 1 (1999: 101). 2 Rancière distinguishes politics from democracy . Democracy for him refers to the forms of subjectivation of politics. Such language sounds strange, perhaps even distasteful, to contemporary readers and jars uncomfortably with more familiar terminology of contemporary political thought. As we will see, part of Rancière’s project of ‘reinventing politics’ is to draw attention to vocabularies that have fallen out of usage, for example worker, poor, proletarian. It is important to note that these terms are not used here to denote a pre-existing sociological category. Instead their meaning is constituted simply through the emergence of a group as a political player. 3 Rancière (2009a: 114). 4 Rancière (2011a: 15). 5 Rancière (2009a: 116). 6 Rancière (2011b: xvi). 7 Or at least pertaining to certain aspects of democracy such as legitimation, accountability, representation, inclusivity and participation. See, for example, Pateman (1970); Habermas (1975); Barber (1984); Young (1990, 2002); Tully (1995); Held (1998); Dahl (1998); Dryzek (2000); Mouffe (2000); Fitzpatrick (2002); Crouch (2004); Tilly (2004). 8 For example, increasing support for France’s Front National, the British National Party (BNP) in the United Kingdom, Golden Dawn in Greece, the Dutch Freedom party in the Netherlands, Jobbik in Hungary, the Danish Peoples’ Party, the Freedom Party in Austria, the Swedish Democrats, and the Norwegian Progress party, all of which have seen substantially increased membership over last couple of decades. See Eatwell and Goodwin (2010) and Copsey (2011) for more on the BNP in the UK; Hainsworth (2008) and Bartlett et al. (2011) for further details on the extreme right in Western Europe; and Skocpol and Williamson (2013) for a nuanced reading of the rightist nature of the Tea Party movement in the USA. 9 Many would argue that there has been no significantly increased risk to Western lives since 9/11. 10 Fewer people are members of political parties than ever before in the modern democratic era (van Biezen et al. 2012). Although turnout is not so bad in the USA it is low enough to be of concern in the UK and the general trend is that it is falling throughout Europe and North America (Niemi et al. 2010). Discussion about the lack of choice and disillusionment facing voters in the UK gained attention through Jeremy Paxman’s high-profile interview with British comedian Russell Brand in 2015. Following the interview, in which he upbraided Brand for never having voted and for advocating the boycotting of elections, Paxman admitted that he himself had not voted in a recent local election. 11 Della Porta (2013, in particular Ch. 2). 12 Stuckler and Basu (2013); Sitrin and Azzellini (2014); World Food Programme (2016). 13 Harvey (2012: 164). 14 Graeber (2013: 302). 15 Sitrin and Azzellini (2014: 5). 16 Mason (2013: 261). 17 Badiou (2012). 18 Douzinas and Žižek (2010: viii). 19 Chomsky (2012: 24). 20 Douzinas and Žižek (2013: vii). 21 The proceedings were published in Douzinas and Žižek (2010).

26

Introduction

22 See in particular Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004, 2009); Badiou (2010a); Žižek (2009); Dean (2012); Graeber (2013). 23 For examples of how these debates have played out in recent protests see Graeber (2013); Mason (2013); Sitrin and Azzelini (2014). 24 Badiou (2010a). 25 Hardt (2010); Negri (2010); and see in particular Hardt and Negri (2009: 118). 26 Žižek (2009, 2010, 2012, 2013); plus Dean (2012, 2013). 27 Graeber (2013: 293). 28 Badiou (2010b: 5). 29 Rancière (2010d: 173). 30 Bosteels (2010: 61); see also Bosteels (2014: 237). 31 Hallward (2010: 128). 32 Dean (2012: 241); Žižek (2013: 189); see also Žižek (2002: 297). 33 See, for example, Amnesty International’s reports on abuse, intimidation and ongoing impact on protestors and those who supported them in Turkey, Egypt and Bahrain (2013a, 2013b, 2014). 34 Žižek (2012, 2013); Dean (2012). 35 See, for example, Douzinas and Žižek (2010: vii); Douzinas (2013); Hardt (2010); Hardt and Negri (2011); Žižek (2013); Graeber (2013); Mason (2013); Harvey (2014); even Sitrin and Azzelini (2014) use this language despite encouraging us to reject its outcomes. 36 See Butler and Athanasiou (2013: Ch. 14). 37 Rancière (2012b: n.p.). 38 Rancière (2010d: 167). 39 Ibid.: 176. 40 Dean (2012: 63, see also 2009a). 41 Dean (2009a, 2009b). 42 Dean (2009a: 5). 43 Ibid.: 105. 44 Ibid.: 35. 45 See Dean’s discussion of this (ibid.: 21). Here she seems, to have agonistic theory (Connolly 2005; Honig 1993; and Mouffe 2005) in mind. 46 Dean (2009a: 21). 47 Dean (2009b: 94). 48 Dean (2009a: 17). 49 Rancière (1999: Ch. 5). 50 Ibid.: 102. 51 Ibid.: 101–102. 52 Ibid.: 113. 53 Rancière (2007b: 106). 54 Rancière (2011a: 16). 55 Rancière (1995a: 70). 56 Dean (2009a: 23). 57 Ibid.: 21. 58 Rancière has made it clear in Dis-agreement (1999) that he does not think that ‘politics’ – which for him is always democratic – can be institutionalised, and consequently does not think that we live in democracies today. Instead he would categorise Western forms of government as oligarchic (see also Rancière 2006a: 73). 59 Brown (1999). 60 Dean (2009a and 2009b). 61 Badiou (2006: 273). 62 Rancière (2009a: 118). 63 See Frank (2015) on this. 64 Rancière (2009a: 118).

Introduction

27

65 Cf. Brown (2015) who asserts the need to keep searching for leftist alternatives, but is more cautious and pessimistic in her approach. In contrast to this, Rancière’s writing conveys an inspiringly casual confidence. He does not fret that leftist imaginaries are weaker now than they have ever been. He does not imply that we need to theorise an alternative approach, but that so many alternative approaches already exist – that we have nothing to search for. Instead he seems to want to see what happens if we just assume that we can do ‘politics’ differently and get on with demonstrating this. 66 Rancière et al. (2008: 183). 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Rancière (1999: 101). 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid.: 183. 72 Ibid. 73 At this point it is worth noting that Rancière rejects the theory-practice debate (see, for example, Rancière 2011b: xv). This will be returned to later in the chapter. 74 See Devenney (2011) for further elaboration of the politics of the proper versus the improper. 75 The Western tradition has long hailed the emergence of democracy in Ancient Athens in the fifth century BC as the time when democracy was invented. However, more recent scholarship suggest that democratic forms of government first emerged in Mesopotamia before 2000 BC. This does not challenge the fact that Western thought about democracy has long drawn on classical texts to inform us about what the ancients thought about democracy. 76 Rancière (1999: 1) citing Aristotle (1992, 1253 a 9–17: 60). 77 Rancière (1999: 3). 78 Ibid.: 4. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid.: 7. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid.: 8. 83 Ibid., italics in the original. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., italics in the original. 86 Ibid., italics added. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid.: 9. 89 Ibid.: 11. 90 Aristotle (1992, 1294 a 19–20: 260). 91 Rancière (1999: 11–12). 92 Ibid.: 11. 93 Ibid.: 16. 94 Ibid. 95 Rancière (1995a: 65). 96 Ibid. 97 Rancière (1999: 9). 98 Etymologically linked to the Ancient Greek ‘polis’ meaning city state and to ‘policy’ for matters of everyday administration and governance. 99 E.g. Foucault (1991). 100 Rancière (1999: 29, italics in the original). 101 Ibid. 102 Rancière (2007a: 48).

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Introduction

103 Ibid. 104 Ibid. 105 See Chapter 5 for more on the intersections between Rancière and Foucault’s work on the self. 106 Rancière (1999: 140). 107 Rancière (2007b: 106).

1

Equality The twisted path of emancipation

The democratic experience … means 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 maximizing all possible liberty and equality. (Jacques Rancière1)

Equality is central to Rancière’s ‘politics’. It is the axle that brings ‘politics’ into existence.2 Yet this equality is not a ‘value’ with already proscribed content. It is not ‘a goal; it is a starting point, an opinion or a presupposition which opens the field of possible verification’.3 It is formally empty but in every instance in which it is employed it is filled in with content that is context-specific but always invokes equality with the rest. In a struggle against racial segregation it may be filled in as the equality of black citizens; in a struggle for land rights it may become the equality of landless peasants; in a dispute over working conditions it may involve the equality of workers; in a struggle for women’s rights it may be the equality of women. All of these instances will effect transformation by demonstrating that the party in question is equal to everybody else. Hence Rancière tells us that ‘equality exists … to the extent that it is enacted’.4 It is an enactment – a staging – that proves the capacity of those previously thought to be incapable, in whichever way is relevant in the given context. As noted in the Introduction, the enactment of equality is only possible due to the capacity of humans to communicate with one another. For human beings to exist together they need to be able to communicate. Even when the terms of their existence are profoundly unequal the very existence of this inequality depends on a prior equality in terms of their capacity to communicate even if this is only in order for masters to give orders and slaves to carry them out. This ‘Achilles heel’ underlies all order and holds out possibility to those suffering any form of domination since it demonstrates that in some sense, human beings share intelligence – they are equal in their capacity to communicate about whatever order they exist in together. This leads Rancière to identify a second principle:

30

Equality intelligence is not divided, it is one. It is not the intelligence of the master or the intelligence of the student, the intelligence of the legislator or the intelligence of the artisan, etc. Instead it is the intelligence that does not fit any specific position in a social order but belongs to anybody as the intelligence of anybody.5

Thus the possibility always exists, however slight, for some form of communication about the very terms of the order and for even the most entrenched of orders to change. The use of the term ‘communication’ here is not meant to evoke already existing theories of communication. For Rancière, communication is radically open and need not necessarily take the form of speech, nor conform to already existing rules concerning things such as rationality, order or any other pre-specified criteria. As a result, emancipation of the dominated is always a possibility since its key component is ever present in every human society where communication of any sort is effected: ‘Emancipation then means the appropriation of this intelligence which is one, and the verification of the potential of the equality of intelligence’.6 Hence, for Rancière, emancipation simply requires the exploitation of this equal capacity for communication in order to demonstrate the underlying equality of intelligence. Despite the promise of these principles, Rancière’s work has had a mixed reception. His ‘politics’/police framework has been heavily criticised because many readers are worried that this apparent binary opposition actually obscures and hinders social change rather than helping us to understand it. These critiques can be grouped into three overarching concerns: that ‘politics’ is impossible to plan; it is rare, unavailable and narrow to the extent that it refuses to recognise the political import of our everyday lives; and it is weak and ineffective. I will argue that through a careful reading of the examples of ‘politics’ offered by Rancière we can identify three elements within the moment of ‘politics’: appropriation, dis-identification and subjectivation. A focus on these helps us to respond to these critiques to posit that while his ‘politics’ cannot be planned it can be made more likely and is available to all. Although reflection upon Rosa Parks’ protest on the Montgomery buses in the 1950s indicates that Rancière has not emphasised clearly enough the extent to which politics’ effects depends on the strategies it employs, I will suggest that this does not counter the claims he makes about ‘politics’ but simply indicates that the value of the ‘politics’/police framework depends on a clearer articulation of the strategies that ‘politics’ involves. Thus we can counter all three concerns and instead argue that ‘politics’ is about strategy and meaning. ‘Politics’ simply concerns how to effect change, and hence whether or not it appears to be unpredictable, weak and rare, or planned, effective and everyday, does not depend on any particular qualities inherent in Rancière’s formulation of ‘politics’ but on the strategies used to effect it. I will conclude by elaborating its potential through a brief discussion centred on recent strategies of occupation to think about how his work could be of value for democratic protest today.

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‘Politics’ as appropriation, subjectivation and dis-identification Let us first consider that ‘politics’ comprises three constituent moments. The first, appropriation, is clearly apparent in all of Rancière’s examples: when discussing the Roman plebeian revolt on the Aventine Hill, he refers to the plebs as appropriating the speech of their masters;7 the poet workers of nineteenth-century Paris appropriate bourgeois habits and pursuits;8 during his trial the socialist activist Auguste Blanqui appropriates ‘proletarian’ as an occupation in a way that had not previously been used to refer to the working class as a whole;9 while pausing in laying a floor, Gauny the carpenter appropriates a view from a bourgeois mansion;10 and the striking worker tailors appropriate bourgeois fashions and customs.11 In her recent book Democracy and the Foreigner, Bonnie Honig refers to such moments as ‘takings’: the taking of rights or ways of life that are yours according to the democratic value of equality, but have not been accorded to you in a particular system due to your identity as immigrant or ‘other’.12 This is a helpful way to figure ‘politics’ but only partly goes to identify how it operates as a break with the police. In comparing the above examples it becomes apparent that the appropriation is not simply a material taking but the taking of a ‘way’ – as described in Rancière’s oft-repeated phrase ‘ways of being, doing and saying’.13 This refers back to Rancière’s claim that ‘politics’ is the struggle over the justifications that are given for why different people have access to different material resources. In the case of Rosa Parks she appropriated the white man’s actions, or ways of doing. The Roman plebeians appropriated the patricians’ speech, or ways of saying, Blanqui appropriates the designated terms of identification, the ways of being, given by the dominant order which in this case is a recognised list of professions, and inserts the wrong term, an unplaceable term, into it: proletarian. Hence although an appropriation will always take place by operating on the material with the material (Rosa Parks keeps her seat on the bus, the worker tailors wear clothes similar to those of their masters) it does so to challenge the symbolic justification that allots material things and places according to ways. This may seem to be a moot point, given that in practice it is impossible for ideas to be separated from the material: ‘Ideas always are material realities, taking over bodies, giving them a map of the visible and orientations for moving’.14 However, an idea (albeit always entangled in materiality) does have to occur somewhere to begin with. It is conceivable that one could act on the material to stage equality and, although one’s own symbolic order has changed one may not succeed in having any impact on the wider symbolic order at all. Likewise, the distribution of the material could be effected differently but this distribution might be perceived as a mistake or an accident and then corrected rather than accepted as a new order. In order to redistribute ways of being, saying and doing in order to effect change to ways of having, the justification upon which that redistribution happens needs to be

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Equality

accepted more widely. Hence conceptually there is a valid distinction to be made here, even if in practice we can never separate ideas from the material. Turning back to the appropriations mentioned above we can see that each one is productive. Although ‘politics’ functions as ‘politics’ because it is a break with the current configuration of order and therefore is important not because of its content, but because of its failure to reproduce the dominant ways of being, saying or doing, this does not mean that it does not have content. It simply means that the content is not prioritised in its structural function. However, the content is important in the sense that it is necessary for the appropriation to stage a persuasive challenge to the dominant order such that it appears to offer a viable alternative to current ways of being, saying or doing. This means, first, that ‘politics’ needs to create rather than disrupt. Disruption is disorder, whereas ‘politics’ is that which stands between order and disorder.15 Second, this ‘viability’ is not limited to that which others will approve in advance as being viable, but on the ability of its staging to appear permanent and not temporary. By positing a potentially permanent alternative way of being, saying or doing ‘politics’ emphasises the contingency of the current ordering. Thus the staging of ‘politics’ is about the production of different ways of being, saying or doing that could replace those that currently exist, not necessarily with the longer-term aim of doing so but rather to demonstrate in the short term the contingency of the current configuration. Now that we have clarified the type of ‘taking’ that appropriation involves, we can see that it is this that is able to take us out of the existing police order because rather than relating to the dominant order in the expected subservient manner the subjects take the rights before they are given, proving their equal status in the face of the opinions that others might have of them.16 This adds a second constituent feature of ‘politics’: its function as a moment of subjectivation – the moment when a new subject emerges. No longer relating to the dominant order as a subordinate, the subject is one who asserts his/her right against his/her master, but as an equal who, in that moment, is in charge of his/her own actions.17 We will return to this in the discussion below where it will be shown that subjectivation is essential for ‘politics’. The third constituent feature of ‘politics’ is dis-identification from allotted roles. This comes about through the process of appropriation.18 It refers to the ‘removal from the naturalness of a place, the opening up of a subject space where anyone can be counted … where a connection is made between having a part and having no part’.19 In each of the above examples of ‘politics’ the appropriation effects dis-identification by breaking the link between the subject and their expected or given roles. Subjects thereby break with the ways of being they are meant to effect in the spaces they have been assigned. Such dis-identification is seen to happen in ‘politics’ in the realisation that one’s given identification or allotted role is incomplete in some way; that assigned positions no longer make sense thereby making acceptance of identification impossible. This is apparent in Rancière’s description of subaltern uprisings in Dis-agreement. First, we see that the Scythian slave revolt was

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effective as long as the slaves dis-identified with their given role and behaved as warriors (thereby mimicking their masters). However, as soon as they were treated as slaves again they accepted their allotted position, began to behave once more as slaves, and the revolt was done for.20 In contrast, Ballanche’s aforementioned retelling of the more successful Roman plebeian revolt on the Aventine Hill recounts how the plebeians imitated the ruling patricians by giving themselves representatives, consulting oracles, and expressing ‘intelligence’. They stopped identifying with their allotted role, and instead made ‘a place in the symbolic order of the community … a community that does not yet have any effective power’, thereby violating the order of the city.21 As the plebs kept up this behaviour the senators were consequently compelled to talk to them and to treat them with the kind of respect not previously accorded to them. By dis-identifying with their allotted role, acting ‘like men’ rather than mere mortals,22 the plebeians forced the hand of the patricians and won recognition that overturned their contemporary order. Dis-identification is a challenge to the existing community because it momentarily leaves those who dis-identify without a place – they are Rancière’s ‘part-that-has-no-part’ – those who appropriate that which in the eyes of the police order is not rightfully assigned to them. This is a subversion of the dominant order. The existence of this new grouping is a challenge to the existing community because it has no place in its logic. Through dis-identification with this logic it posits the-part-that-has-no-part as politically salient: a new grouping rather than an already existing people. This is reflected in Blanqui’s trial.23 When asked his profession by a magistrate Blanqui replied ‘proletarian’. We are informed by Rancière that this old Roman judicial category was previously used to refer to those whose role was merely to reproduce and who were excluded from the symbolic order of the political community.24 During Blanqui’s revolutionary era, however, the term had been taken up by nineteenth-century Parisian workers in affirmation of their collective exclusion, applicable across the board to all those, regardless of specific profession, who were forced to sell their labour and endure the misery of the workshop. At first the magistrate would not accept this response, denying that ‘proletarian’ was a profession, yet Blanqui’s reply25 used the term to dis-identify with those already recognised partial, particular professions and their associated identities (e.g. bricklayer, joiner, mason or tailor), which denoted one’s place in that order. He challenged the magistrate to recognize the shared hardship, regardless of their separate professions, of those whose poverty of existence had up until then been denied and who consequently had not been assigned an equal place of their own within its borders. Consequently, dis-identification breaks with given roles in a way that makes it impossible to place it within the already existing configuration of identities. By drawing out the roles of appropriation, subjectivation and dis-identification in any moment of ‘politics’ we can see that there is a place for strategy and hence for social movements to build and motivate ‘politics’. Armed with this understanding we can now turn to consider how it may help us to respond to

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the aforementioned concerns that Rancière is wrong to conceptualise ‘politics’ as rare, narrow and ineffective.

‘Politics’ can be willed Alongside Dean, some commentators assert that Rancière does not help us to think about the future of politics because although he comments on what is wrong with our current situation his conception of ‘politics’ as a moment of rupture or of ‘heroic change’26 artificially separates this moment from the social in a way that is unnecessary, and is thus unable to inform us about how to move forward and construct something better. In response to this, it is illuminating to examine some of the examples of ‘politics’ that Rancière provides us with to show how, first, we can draw upon his work to thematise key elements within the police ordering that are needed if we are to effect ‘politics’; and second, that there is danger in following the advice of the critics to focus on police order if this distracts us from the workings of politics. Not only does this indicate why Rancière initially establishes such a sharp distinction between ‘politics’ and police but also indicates to us that in order to remedy his apparent neglect of the police we need to consider the relationship between police and ‘politics’ in more detail, and not simply turn our attention to the police order. In order to understand why this concern has arisen let us examine the claim that Rancière’s ‘politics’ is inattentive or even closed to the more ordinary moments of everyday struggle and with this in mind consider the example of Rosa Parks’ protest on the Montgomery buses on 1 December 1955. Rancière’s account of the event is as follows: The young black woman of Montgomery, Alabama, who, one day … decided to remain in her seat on the bus, which was not hers, in this way decided that she had, as a citizen of the United States, the rights she did not have as an inhabitant of a State that banned the use of such seats to individuals with one-sixteenth or more parts of ‘non-Caucasian’ blood. And the Blacks of Montgomery who, a propos of this conflict between a private person and a transportation company, decided to boycott the company, really acted politically, staging the double relation of exclusion and inclusion inscribed in the duality of the human being and the citizen.27 Indeed, this is corroborated by Rosa Parks’ memoirs which record that she decided to remain in her seat not because she was physically tired, but because she was making a stand: ‘People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically … I was not old … the only tired I was, was tired of giving in’.28 Rancière’s keen focus on the moment of Parks’ protest itself and not on the background manoeuvrings that enabled this moment to happen (manoeuvrings

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that many of us would refer to as politics in the non-Rancièrian sense) does seem to corroborate the critics’ aforementioned concern: neglecting the very stuff that motivated Parks’ action. Indeed, we can see from her memoirs that she recalls being inspired by a conscious desire to challenge the social order, since the phrase ‘to not give in’ suggests awareness of something that she is not giving in to. It can be surmised that this attitude was at least influenced, if not formulated, by her attendance at the Highlander Folk School, an education centre for workers’ rights and racial equality only two months before the bus incident in Montgomery on 1 December 1955, and while she was closely involved in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (hereafter NAACP). Parks was well aware that the NAACP’s strategists were seeking a platform for a legal challenge to the racial segregation laws,29 making it fair to surmise that the political significance of Parks’ action came about because the racial equality movement existed, knew that an action was needed, and was actively looking for the chance to enact one. So, when Rancière says that we cannot plan or will politics to happen (it cannot be ‘set up in advance’30) it does appear that he is ignoring the work of such a movement, for surely the success of Parks’ action benefited from her own preparations and the ability of the NAACP to rally support for the following boycotts and demonstrations. Furthermore, by denoting all of this as simply ‘police’ it can be argued that he does overlook the variation in police orders – leaving his framework without the language to meaningfully distinguish between social configurations where racial segregation is and is not in operation.31 However, this claim is a little too strong, for when we compare Rancière’s examples of ‘politics’ we can see that this ‘politics’ does have a notable function that is distinguishable from the police order for we repeatedly find that it is comprised of a combination of certain distinct features, appropriation and dis-identification, which operate within a moment (not necessarily a moment of protest) to bring about ‘politics’. This implies that the background social planning and manoeuvring of social movements will often be critical but crucially will never be sufficient in supporting and motivating such ‘politics’. This observation will enable us to sketch a template for leftist strategy (see below). Furthermore, referring to all social order as police is neither to denigrate nor to reduce all orders as simply as bad as each other. Instead it is merely to emphasise the way in which any order – however good/better it may seem – will constrain and exclude (an issue that also concerned Dean – see above), such that even after segregation has been abolished, black citizens continue to face discrimination and injustice. Hence the function served by referring to all social order as ‘police’ is not so grand as to prioritise a digression from this as a ‘heroic moment’, but simply to emphasise the role of ‘politics’ as the point at which we can break with these patterns in order to open up spaces for change. With regard to Dean’s related concerns in the Introduction that the left merely seeks visibility and not power, we can see that visibility is important,

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but not for the left as much as for those whom the left is traditionally concerned about – the dominated and the excluded. Such strategies enable subjects not only to be visible as an already existing group within an order but to challenge the configuration of that order in their emergence. They therefore prompt us to think about the most effective manner of staging an injustice in such a way that can tear open the sensible order. The aforementioned ‘marches, vigils, Facebook pages, or internet petitions’ outlined by Dean are not necessarily destined to fail, but unless they are to enact some form of appropriation and dis-identification they will not suffice to bring about ‘politics’. I acknowledge that this claim alone does not address all of Dean’s concerns, but when united with other features of Rancière’s work outlined below it could indicate a rather different strategic priority than the reformation of the communist party.32 The work of the NAACP in the aforementioned Rosa Parks example, prompting appropriation and dis-identification, demonstrates the importance of a strong and strategic supporting movement to support and manage a staging of equality in order to increase its capacity for change. Accordingly, although Rancière’s critics are right to note that his analysis neglects the background work of social movements in building to a moment of ‘politics’, it is clear from this example that this need not mean that we ourselves cannot attend to the role of social movements in effecting ‘politics’.

The ordinary in the extraordinary: how to decide between ‘politics’ or police The second concern focuses on the claim that Rancière’s conceptualisation does not give enough credit to the everyday moments in our lives that may contribute to, or lay the groundwork for, the much grander-sounding moments of ‘politics’. Rancière denotes ‘politics’ as rare, and thus appears to refuse to acknowledge as ‘politics’ that which we commonly understand to be political (such as social movements, political organisations and institutional politics). Instead he relabels these as part of the police order. Hence Rancière appears to neglect the variation between police orders, and the scope of what we might consider everyday ‘ordinary’ politics of citizen struggles, constitutions and assemblies to effect some level of emancipation.33 As a result critics suggest that in order better to understand political resistance we need to pay greater attention to this police order34 because it is here that we can begin to effect immediate change. In the rest of this book I will refer to this group of concerns as the worry that Rancière’s politics is too narrow.35 In addressing this concern it is helpful to note that subsequent to Disagreement Rancière has clarified that his claim that ‘politics’ is ‘rare’ was not to distinguish simply between ‘politics’ as a moment of insurrection ‘after which everything comes back to mere apathy’ but first, we should not assume, following Foucault, that there is ‘politics’ simply because ‘there are always relations of power’,36 and second, ‘that what politics means can best be understood from the moments when the power of anybody emerges most

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significantly’. Hence when Rancière refers to the everyday ordering of the social as the police he does not seek to denigrate it but merely to indicate the distinction between action that ruptures our order and opens space for new possibilities, in contrast with that which does not. This distinction remains important in order to enable him to emphasise that despite the presence of strong and active social movements we cannot plan or will that ‘politics’ will take place, nor that it will have a particular effect, because a reaction to any staging of equality cannot be guaranteed.38 Such a break ‘can happen anywhere at any time’ but ‘can never be calculated’.39 Thus a break of the sensory order will happen within the everyday but will split it open, thereby making the ordinary extraordinary. Consequently, his use of the ‘politics’/police framework acts as a warning that we must not presume that all that is needed is for a movement to build any counter-imaginary; if it is to be democratic it must be a movement that posits universality built on an egalitarian counter-imaginary rather than any specific identity. In Rosa Parks’ case, where racial equality was the aim, Rancière is telling us that it was the imaginary of a world functioning without segregation that motivated and supported Parks’ action. Despite her staging only making clearly visible one feature of the inequality faced by black people in the USA (the segregation), it is clear from her biography and the actions of the NAACP that the counter-imaginary it painted did also seek to tackle other issues of inequality such as the division of labour and wider socialist politics as taught by the Highlander Folk School. The counter-imaginary built by the NAACP at this time provided an alternative narrative of a world where everyone would be included and where the distinction of skin colour would be of no relevance. Thus for such a moment to have an effect as ‘politics’, identification with an alternative grouping, for example on grounds of race, gender, or another ‘disadvantaged sector’,40 is not required; instead, it is simply necessary to see oneself as ‘include-able’ with everyone, as equals. According to Rancière, the success of the civil rights movement was not an assertion of a separate or superior black identity but the assertion of black equality with everyone else. Similarly, he describes the claims for equality made by the Parisian worker tailors who engaged in the strikes of 1833 and 1840 as needing to be achieved by way of qualitatively new solidarity: not just their rediscovered power as a group imposing its law on its masters, but also a newly achieved universality entailing its recognition and establishing proper social relations that will sanction the place of workers in the kingdom of reason and civilization.41 Thus it is only in such a way that a new configuration of equality can be introduced where workers are brought into a more qualitatively equal relation of co-existence with their masters. Rancière tells us that ‘politics’ is ‘where you create a stage where you include your enemy, even if your enemy does not

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want to be included’.42 Indeed, the tailors’ demands do not divide them from the community or draw lines of demarcation between groups. Instead, they proscribe how their shared lives are to be reorganised such that both masters and tailors come together once more, but this time in a new pattern of relations. This point is made even more forcefully in Rancière’s discussion of the Scythian slave revolt.43 He explains that the revolt failed not only because the slaves failed to continue to act like their masters, but also because their strategy was flawed: The Scythian slaves occupy the territory of their former servitude as a fortified camp and oppose arms with arms. This egalitarian demonstration at first throws those who thought they were their natural masters. But when the latter once more show the signs of their difference in nature, the rebels have no comeback. What they cannot do is transform equality in war into political freedom. This equality, literally mapped out over the territory and defended by force of arms, does not create a divided community. It cannot be transformed into the improper property of that freedom that establishes the demos simultaneously as both part of and as the whole of the community.44 Hence, the aim of a military battle is to force your opponents to submit to your physical strength rather than to pit your reason against theirs. After the battle the unequal relation of master and slave continues in the relation between the victor and the defeated. The Scythian slaves did not seek to pit their reason against the masters’ reason and hence did not claim their place as speaking beings by demonstrating that they too were political animals. Thus we see not only that ‘politics’ requires us to play the democratic game of reason and speech, which cannot be brought about through physical combat, but also that the subjectivation of ‘politics’ involves subjects portraying their reason45 as equal to those who dominate them. Two points emerge from this: the first concerns the strategy of how to do this, and the second the type of ideology that can inspire ‘politics’. We will return to the point about strategy in the following section, but the ideological question concerns a related issue raised by both Dean and Ernesto Laclau. For Dean, this emerges in the concern that: [i]f the dominant order presents itself as democratic, if the order of the police is the order of democracy, then only non-democratic stagings of disagreement can be politics since only they set up a contrast with the conditions of their utterance. Far from exclusively democratic, politics can be fascist, anarchist, imperial, communist.46 Similarly, in Laclau’s interpretation we find concern that ‘the uncounted might construct their uncountability in ways that are ideologically

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incompatible with what either Rancière or [Laclau] would advocate politically (in a Fascist direction for example)’.47 However, these concerns confuse institutionalised order with Rancière’s moment of ‘politics’ – which, for Rancière, is the only time when democratic values are truly at work. He claims that we should really only recognise democracy as the ‘institution of politics itself ’:48 the moment when ‘any order of distribution … is undermined’.49 Thus there are two understandings of democracy at work here: the ‘democracy’ that refers to the institutional framework of our dominant order, or Rancière’s ‘democracy’ of the universal claim to equality that underlies his ‘politics’. Rancière’s ‘politics’ cannot be fascist, anarchist or communist but neither can it be ‘democratic’ in the sense of being committed to any particular way of institutionalising political practice. It is simply not ideological in the traditional sense that Laclau is drawing on here, because it cannot commit to the grand narrative of any ideological corpus of the traditional left or right. If ‘politics’ can be said to have any ‘ideology’ at all it is to be found in the form of a commitment to a universal equality. It is democratic (in Rancière’s usage of the term) because, instead of being based on a prior body of knowledge, a view of the world, or human nature, it is based on an axiom that is devoid of prior content, and is simply ‘its own measure’ of equality. However, this ‘measure never applies directly. It does so only through the enactment of a wrong’ that demonstrates the ‘mere contingency of equality’.50 Although the dominant order does currently present itself as democratic Rancière suggests that in practice it can only ever be oligarchic, and will never be true equal rule because in practice such a thing cannot exist, but will always be dominated by elites in some sense.51 By dint of this fact, Rancière’s ‘democracy’ in the form of a claim to equality staged via ‘politics’ is always needed and always possible. It is able to subvert order by voicing the charge that an order claims to be based on equality, but in actual fact is not. This is the contradiction that ‘politics’ stages. If the dominant order did not claim to be democratic there would be no contradiction. ‘Politics’ is therefore a unique form of protest that aims to prove the inadequacies of any ‘wannabe democracy’. Furthermore, Rancière’s ‘politics’/police distinction is partly inspired by his caution not to overly valorise our everyday manoeuvrings within the police order, for he is aware of the danger of entrenching the alternative identities that are constructed alongside political movements. In his essay ‘Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization’ Rancière presents ‘politics’ merely as disidentification, because any identification will have to exclude. Dis-identification as ‘politics’ is merely a break with identification in the name of a universal postulation of equality and allows its subjects to indicate a gap in the reigning logic which ‘discloses a social bias’ and becomes the space of ‘a polemical construction’; a construction of a case of equality, which is neither ‘the act of an identity’ (for we are told in Dis-agreement that it ‘inscribes a subject name as being different from any identified part of the community’52), ‘nor … demonstration of the values specific to a group’ but ‘a process of subjectivization’.53 This insistent denial of a role for identification is important

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because it helps us to avoid the confusion of Rancière’s ‘politics’ with that which is more commonly understood as politics. This is because any identification that does emerge from a political movement will be attached to a specific political project that seeks emancipation for a particular and (by then) already existing category of persons resulting in the ‘othering’ that comes with any identity. For example, according to our own political projects, we may assume that the part-that-has-no-part refers to ‘poor wretched people, homeless and so on’; however, this means that we may immediately think of specific antipoverty or socialist movements as the relevant emancipatory project of ‘politics’.54 While we may rightly deem such identifications to be appropriate subjects of ‘politics’ we would be mistaken to confuse this with the claim that they are the only subject of ‘politics’ now and in the future. Consequently, in response to Norval’s concerns that every dis-identification is another identification,55 this is not to say that ‘politics’ will not emerge off the back of existing identities or cause new identities to exist, but that we must not prioritise them – get distracted by them and become too attached to them – as in so doing we are entrenching a particular ‘police’, a particular world view with its values and norms and accompanying limits and injustices. In contrast, Rancière’s ‘politics’ is empty of any particular content and identity other than the assertion of equality in the face of particular wrong. Here Rancière is indicating the difference between dis-identification (a newly asserted universality) and new identifications (a group emerging to become the new masters in a new configuration of police). Yet this is not to say that claims to universality can nor will be clearly demarcated from a social movement with its own imaginary orderings based on new identifications, just that it is the claim of universality that is doing the work, effecting the break that is ‘politics’. In acknowledging this we start to realise that the relationship between ‘politics’ and police is more nuanced than it first appeared. Indeed, although Rancière’s initial emphasis56 on ‘politics’ and the corresponding neglect of the police, particularly in Dis-agreement, did imply a distinction between ‘politics’ and police, in order to remedy this he has more recently sought to clarify the relationship between these two concepts to emphasise that his ‘politics’ ‘does not stem from a place outside of the police’ for ‘there is no place outside of the police’.57 As noted above, this does not have to be a bad thing, for it merely emphasises that our social lives will always depend on some order or other, but it does demonstrate to us the contingency of that order. Furthermore, by recognising that ‘politics’ therefore ‘“takes place” in the space of the police’58 we see that ‘politics’ and police are not mutually exclusive and in fact ‘politics’ depends on the police in a rather peculiar way, for it acts upon the objects of the police by establishing as political (in the Rancièrian sense) things which had, up until now, been ignored as non-political, and were either not seen to be significant at all or perhaps simply ‘viewed as “social”, “economic”, or “domestic”’.59 In line with the critics outlined above, in his book The Lessons of Rancière (2013) Samuel Chambers draws on Rancière’s more recent work to emphasise

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that ‘politics’ occurs in the space of the police, and thus it is not as easy as perhaps first thought to separate ‘politics’ from more ordinary social interactions.60 Although I value Chambers’ reading I prefer to use Rancière’s phrase ‘tangled’ as opposed to Chambers’ preferred term ‘blended’61 to figure the relationship between ‘politics’ and police, to ensure that we retain our focus on the way that the effects of ‘politics’ can vary depending on the configuration of forces in the police order. Some configurations of order will be much less disposed towards any sort of disruption and disorder such that ‘politics’ can be more or less violently repressed and restricted, whereas other configurations may actively value and encourage such practices. In seeing ‘politics’ and police as tangled we can identify a vital practice of taking a cautious and critical approach to all orders – however good we may think them. This means that contra the claims of the critics above, in order to develop Rancière’s work we must not just attend to police orders on their own but we must instead attend more carefully to the relationship between ‘politics’ and the police and in particular the question of ‘how any order’ comes to be entrenched in the first place.

‘Politics’ and effectivity The third concern centres on the claim that Rancière’s thematisation of ‘politics’ actually appears weak and ineffective. For example, Badiou argues that while on the one hand Rancière’s writing explodes the myth of emancipation commonly used to fuel left-wing struggle by showing that any realisation of equality will fall short of being truly universalising,62 he neglects the next step which is necessary if we are to motivate emancipatory struggle. This involves investigating how we could create conditions in which such a positing could be universalised.63 Badiou thus claims that through Rancière’s work ‘you will come to know what politics must not be, you will even know what it will have been and no longer is, but never what it is within the Real, and still less what one must do in order for it to exist’.64 Furthermore, critics are concerned that Rancière neglects the organisational nature of any political, or would-be political, process by remaining silent on the role of political action and militancy.65 These thinkers claim that to challenge the police order we need to organise and strategise but Rancière’s failure to focus explicitly on these topics leads to concern that without organised resistance the status quo will remain undisturbed. Thus some even go so far as to claim that Rancièrian politics is simple passivity, ‘an act of faith’66 lacking possibilities for meaningful change such that it is reduced to mere momentary outbursts of resistance.67 In sum, the critics argue that first, we cannot act to bring about Rancière’s ‘politics’, and that second, it is therefore ineffective: it is fleeting, momentary and does not last. It cannot therefore bring about any form of significant and lasting change. Turning to consider concerns that politics is not ‘effective’, we recall the quotation above in which Rancière explains that for him ‘politics’ is the

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moment ‘when the power of anybody emerges most significantly.’68 He does not primarily employ the terms ‘politics’ and police to enable us to distinguish them, rather he seeks to communicate how we might identify what ‘politics’ consists of in terms of social change, and to consider ‘politics’ as a matter of degrees that are more or less significant or effective. Hence his focus has always been ‘how can we determine to what extent a “political organisation” does politics?’69 Yet this means that we may need to reconsider an earlier passage in Dis-agreement. I quote at length: Nothing is political in itself. But anything may become political if it gives rise to the meeting of these two [egalitarian and police] logics. The same thing – an election, a strike, a demonstration – can give rise to politics or not give rise to politics. A strike is not political when it calls for reforms rather than a better deal or when it attacks the relationships of authority rather than the inadequacy of wages. It is political when it reconfigures the relationships that determine the workplaces in its relation to the community. The domestic household has been turned into a political space not through the simple fact that power relationships are at work in it but because it was the subject of argument in a dispute over the capacity of women in the community. The same concept – opinion or law, for example – may define a structure of political action or a structure of the police order.70 This passage can be qualified further now that we accept that we cannot always know in advance whether a thing is political or not, and acknowledge that ‘politics’ is entangled with the police often in ways we may not even realise. It tells us that although conceptually we may be able to distinguish ‘politics’ from police, in practice it is always going to be less certain. Hence the most we can say is that a thing will be more political the more the extent to which it reconfigures the relationships between the subject of the action and the community. However, this can lead us onto further problematic territory since it is easy to assume that the extent to which ‘politics’ can effect change depends on how receptive the police order is. In order to demonstrate this let us return once more to the strike demands of the Parisian worker tailors. We are told that their position close to the bourgeoisie is of importance in influencing the success of their claims: These haphazard, fugitive workers get their importance from their position on the frontier close to the bourgeois people, providing them with the armaments of social distinction and the material resentments of their thinking, sensitive to the revolutions from above effected through the ascendant power of fashion and the press. They are almost bourgeois, in a sense.71 This appears to illustrate that a staging most visible to the dominant class, and hence most effective, would be one that can best bridge the divide

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between the dominators and the dominated. Indeed, André Troncin, described by Rancière as having a ‘privileged relationship’ with the bourgeoisie,72 was chosen to lead the worker tailor strikes of 1833 and 1840. Despised yet admired by his masters, Troncin was often imprisoned for his political activities; however, on his release he would be employed on good terms and even entrusted with management of their workshops. This seems to lead us to the conclusion that a political movement seeking to bring about a moment of ‘politics’ that can rupture the police order while also being significant enough to warrant recognition, must look to stage a contradiction at its most clear, in order to create a rupture that can bridge the gap between the contemporary order and the counter-imaginary instead of a rupture that may be disregarded due to its being too incomprehensible. Yet when interpreted in this way, it can make Rancière’s ‘politics’ appear maddening, for it does not seem to offer much to the dominated, since those who suffer the greatest domination are faced with having to bridge the widest chasm, and are likely be those who are furthest from the ways and practices of the dominators.73 The stakes at play are even more worrying in the context of the Rosa Parks example, for although its success was influenced by the role of the NAACP which helped it to trigger the bus boycotts which were a key turning point in the emerging civil rights movement, it was not the first action of its kind. Indeed, just nine months earlier a fifteen-year-old student, Claudette Colvin, had also refused to move from her seat on the same buses (as no doubt had countless undocumented others at various times leading up to this moment) but neither action triggered such a response despite the fact that the NAACP were ready and willing to rally support since she was not deemed of good enough character to build a bridge with the white population while avoiding media denigration.74 So, even more discomforting than the Troncin example, it seems that Claudette Colvin was deemed too far outside of the reigning order on two counts: not only was she black but she was also an unmarried mother, as opposed to Rosa Parks, who by all accounts met the criteria of social respectability in all features other than the colour of her skin. Alarmingly, these examples indicate that if ‘politics’ is to be visible within the police it needs to stage ‘politics’ in a way that is comprehensible within the police order, and this makes us question the extent of change it can really offer. Let us recall the concerns of Badiou, Žižek, Dean and others. Does ‘politics’ really offer a way to smash open the police and reorganise the world in a meaningfully different way as reading Rancière may imply, or is it merely a way to stage dramatic moments which then get tidied back into an allencompassing order with only a few smaller changes to show for it? Rosa Parks’ protest may well have helped provoke the civil rights movement that then went on to overcome segregation, but black and ethnic minority populations continue to suffer disproportionately in Western countries despite the gains made by civil rights activists. Yet there is another important element that needs to be discussed here. As noted above in the discussion of the Scythian slave revolt, the prior step that

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enables ‘politics’ is the strategy of asserting one’s reason as equal to those who dominate despite the fact that one is in an unequal position. This will not usually be easy – but it would seem that everything rides on the ability to do this and do it convincingly. Rancière’s ‘politics’ is the moment when this different, previously unrecognisable ‘reason’ breaks through and is recognised, thus resulting in the subject of ‘politics’ carving out a new place for the part that up until then had no part, and this results in a new distribution of the sensible where all else shifts to accommodate this part. In The Nights of Labour Rancière tells us that this moment of subjectivation is the first stage on the path to emancipation. This is the moment in which one overcomes their hatred, which is necessary, Rancière tells us, because as long as you hate your master, you affirm his mastery. Therefore, in order to emancipate oneself one needs first to emancipate one’s outlook – not to love the master, but simply (indifferently) to relate to the master as an equal rather than as a subordinate to those who seek to dominate. Hatred marks out one’s position as subservient: there is no paradox in the fact that the path of emancipation is first the path whereon one is liberated from that hatred of the master experienced by the rebel slave. Servility and hatred are two characteristics of the very same world, two manifestations of the very same malady. The fact that the freedman no longer deals with the master but with the ‘old society’ defines not only a forward step in the awareness of exploitation but also an ascent in the hierarchy of beings and social forms.75 This is not meant as an empty platitude, something with which a worker or civil rights protestor could be placated and his anger eased. Instead, it is this that drives the unquenchable thirst for equality which when it catches hold will soon start to spread for ‘[t]he voluptuousness of emancipation is a fever from which one cannot be cured and which one cannot help but communicate’.76 For when one sees oneself as equal to others, but realises that this equality is not apparent in one’s social role despite the social order’s claims to democracy, this contradiction will provide the initial motivation to remedy this state of affairs. This enables us to respond to concerns about the need for the dominated to find a way to bridge the gap between worlds, for it suggests that we need to revise how we understand this bridging. Instead of ‘politics’ requiring us to find the most narrow distance between these world views and bridge this gap via a subject who can most easily be identified with the dominant grouping, Rancière’s implication is that if we are motivated by a strong enough sense of equality there is nothing to stop us seeking strategies to bridge the gap at its widest point – albeit that this is a far more difficult task.77 Thus it is the moment of subjectivation that is key to the effectivity of politics. He also emphasises that despite the need for the dominated themselves to be the ones who stage the equality, others can act in solidarity with those who are seeking

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to bring about this staging by finding ways to bring the worlds together for a moment.78 It is to be expected that the greater the extent to which this gap is bridged the deeper and more severe the rupture effected and, again in simple terms, the greater the potential for a ‘more different’ way of ordering the social.79 It becomes evident that even though ‘politics’ cannot exist in its own space, this does not mean that it cannot have far-reaching effects, as well as lesser, more modest outcomes. ‘Politics’ can be seen in popular uprisings that stage ‘the manifestation of a still unheard of subject’ but also could refer to ‘the modest meeting of nine persons creating in a London tavern a “Corresponding Society” open to an unlimited number of members or even a slight modification of the timetable of a worker’s evening’.80 ‘Politics’ is not defined in terms of scale. The ways in which it could reconfigure the police order are endless, and as such there are infinite possibilities for the change it could effect. This is made much clearer in Rancière’s description of his method as one of ‘untangling’. For example, in A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Rancière Rancière suggests that ‘politics’ is ‘almost everywhere and in every time interlocked, if not confused, with police. But it is precisely because things are continuously entangled … that you need criteria to handle the tangle itself ’.81 And previously in Dis-agreement he says that the terms ‘police’ and ‘politics’ may also, and mostly do, designate the very entanglement of both logics. Politics acts on the police. It acts in the places and with the words that are common to both, even if it means reshaping those places and changing the status of those words.82 This analogy of entangling seems to make the relationship clearer. ‘Politics’, Rancière tells us, is where two opposing logics collide – that of the police order (inequality) and that of equality.83 The criteria he gives us to look out for to help us to identify ‘politics’ at its most significant are appropriation of ways of being, doing and saying that produce alternatives via dis-identification and subjectivation. ‘Politics’ has no proper content of its own and therefore we must surmise contra Chambers84 that it can be neither pure nor impure. It is merely the moment of collision, lack and confusion – the scrambling of meaning and sense. By untangling the logic of equality a little we can make the collision greater and amplify the resulting confusion, maximising the space for alternative solutions. Although Chambers is right to note the paradoxical nature of the ‘politics’/police relationship,85 we need to clarify that although we can never unlock the two completely, the logic of equality not only can but also should, as much as possible, be untangled from police at any given opportunity. If we are democrats in the Rancièrian sense we should never accept the entanglement of the logic of equality in the police, despite knowing that there is no place where a ‘pure’ politics alternative could reside. Hence the task for all who wish to stand in solidarity with those who are excluded or marginalised (even while still unaware of their voices) is not just to attend to better

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police orders, but to counter this tangling wherever we encounter it and to question any given distribution of bodies and spaces. There are two ways to do this. First, by preventing the tangles from getting worse by thinking about how equality gets tangled up and entrenched as inequality in the first place; and second, by seeking ways of untangling, ways of not only tracing but also pulling on the separate threads of a knot as Rancière’s work has demonstrated.86 While we must accept that as we untangle in one area equality will be tangled back up elsewhere, it is a task we must attend to all the same in order to counter the entrenchment of any police order. This essential democratic activity goes unacknowledged in Chambers’ reading. Although he calls on us to change and improve our police orders87 via ‘cultivation, care and direction’ of democratic politics88 he does not broach the possibility that our own preferred police order may still restrict and exclude others who we have not yet recognised. When speaking of the objects of ‘politics’ and police as tangled we can think about a task of untangling. This is not to say that the objects of ‘politics’ exist prior to our untangling, but that we can untangle objects from the police in order to do ‘politics’. This is a task that is missed by Badiou and many other critics. It is not an easy task for we have already seen that any moment of ‘politics’ soon gets entangled back into police. However, in response to these concerns I would counter that a careful reading of Rancière’s work enables us to see that he has done much to indicate the first steps that we should take here. The remainder of this book will seek to tease out the directions that Rancière gives us and to then bring other thinkers into conversation with Rancière to enable us to progress a little further along this twisting path. The practice of untangling helps us to answer the objection that ‘politics’ is ineffective. It demonstrates to us that in both the worker tailor and Rosa Parks examples we see the strategising by a political movement incorporating both ‘politics’ and police. The relationship between these is further elucidated by a passage from Rancière’s early text, The Nights of Labour, which elaborates the twisted path of emancipation detailed in the diaries of workers where emancipation is understood in its original sense of emerging from a minority.89 This speaks directly to Dean’s aforementioned concern about institutionalised democracy that depends on exclusion. Emancipation is the emergence from the exclusion that is always masked by institutionalised democracy’s pretence to include all equally.90 Rancière’s path towards emancipation is neither a closed circle nor a steady ascent through history. In fact the image of a path must not be seen in terms of a forward-moving, teleological process at all.91 In this sense, then, emancipation is simply the snaking path leading between various configurations of our social order: The movement here is that of a spiral that, in the very resemblance of the circles in which the same energy is consumed for the benefit of the enemy, achieves a real ascent toward a different mode of social existence.92

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As we have already seen, differences between police orders incorporate both small and partial steps within a wider scale of social change as well as the grand revolutionary changes that bring about a different mode of production, or vastly reconfigured gender roles: Because a different society presupposes the production of a different humanity, not a destructive confrontation between master or the bourgeois class, because the healing of the ill entails the singular asceticism of rebellion and its apostolic propagation, the illusion of emancipation is not a nonrecognition reproducing domination but the twisted path whose circle comes as close to this reproduction, but with an already crucial swerve or digression. That the bell no longer makes itself heard or, above all, heeded, that the master is dispossessed of the sovereignty of his gaze and is no more than the accountant of social exploitation: these two little differences cannot be reduced to a trick permitting the productive investment of rebellious energy. The absence of the master from the time and space of productive work forms this exploited work into something more; not just a bargain promising the master a better relation to exchange for the freedom of the workers’ movements but the formation of a type of worker belonging to a different history than that of mastery.93 So for Rancière, political change is the moment of subjectivation. Yet despite recognising the freedoms brought by such changes, Rancière refuses to fall into utopian thinking. Referring to this emancipation as ‘illusory’ he denotes just how far ‘politics’ is interlocked with the police: ‘politics’ is enacted by taking and twisting the objects of police. It cannot introduce anything new and hence has to perform some form of trickery or illusion within the police in order to bring into focus that which has always been there but which up until now has gone unnoticed. However, the emancipation that change brings can never free us from the necessity of living within some form of social ordering. The aforementioned untangling can never be wholly complete, for emancipation can never be total since it is impossible to break free of the need for ordering in general. However, the important point is that this need not mean that ‘politics’ cannot be far-reaching in a significant sense but that its outcome is radically open and can be affected by the practice of appropriation and dis-identification with attention to the types of subjectivation that this provokes. Thus far this chapter has argued that the claims that Rancière’s ‘politics’ is impossible to plan, is rare and unavailable, weak and ineffective, were based on misconceptions that overlooked the way that ‘politics’ and police interrelate via appropriation, dis-identification and subjectivation. They thereby mistakenly figured ‘politics’ and police as separate and mutually exclusive rather than everywhere tangled together, and were inattentive to the way that ‘politics’ is the moment that manages to effect extraordinary outcomes from within the everyday. As a consequence, it is possible to defend Rancière’s

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conceptualisation of ‘politics’ for its redirection of our focus towards the strategy of appropriation, dis-identification and subjectivation which together undermine our conformity with given ways of being, saying and doing through positing alternative ways of living.

Strategy: from police to ‘politics’ Although we can defend Rancière’s ‘politics’ conceptually, if we take it on board what would it mean for the way in which we think about the emancipatory project and democracy today? In this section I seek to consider the implications of Rancière’s work on ‘politics’ for democratic strategy and the future of the left. Before we can consider the implications for strategy, we must first acknowledge that some perceive a tension in Rancière’s work – between on the one hand his avid disavowal of the guiding role of theory for action, and on the other the development of his theoretical ‘politics’/police framework that aims to speak in more detail about what ‘politics’ is. The reason why Rancière insisted on identifying the structure of ‘politics’ is that he wished to challenge the quasi-Foucauldian claim that politics arises simply because there are always relations of power. His concern is that this outlook obscures the identification of the structure of emancipation. Rancière’s analysis thus provides tools for ‘politics’. Although the above clarification about ‘politics’ being everywhere entangled with police does lower the stakes of this tension somewhat it still implies that we can theorise the underlying structures of the moments of disruption of the hierarchies of order and hence the fear remains that this overprivileges the role of theory. However, this fear is only valid if we still subscribe to the false binary between theory and practice which is simply the product of a division of labour itself.94 Rancière does not suggest that just because theory can be used to dominate political action95 we should as a precautionary measure abandon all theory, but simply cautions us to problematise this division, to be wary of and critique the revered status of ‘theory’, and to be less respectful of theory qua theory. Hence those previously labelled ‘activists’ and ‘thinkers’ (academics, teachers, intellectuals) should regard themselves as engaged in a common project to both think and act in tandem, thereby reconceiving the role of ideas in relation to political struggle and no longer prioritising the ideas of an ‘intellectual’ over those of anybody else.96 This does not mean that those who are still seen to be in the role of the ‘intellectual’ today cannot have ideas, merely that all those who are committed to the emancipatory project should judge them according to content rather than as the source of their conception. This relates to a second distinction between organisation and spontaneity. In 1974 Rancière commented on the Parti Communiste Français’s post-1968 commitment to the need to oppose ‘the “spontaneous” and “petty-bourgeois” ideology of the students with the scientific wisdom of the Central Committee’,97 wishing to manage and direct the workers’ ignorant ‘spontaneity’ with their organisational party structures. More than thirty years later in the

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aforementioned context of the revival of the idea of communism he is still cautioning us to reject this ‘spontaneity and organisation’ dichotomy in order to help us to focus more carefully on ‘the distribution of tasks, positions and powers’ that could accord with emancipation rather than domination.98 One example of such opposition still at work today can be seen in Dean’s distinction between her own support for the party form and the anarchist grass-roots spontaneity of Occupy Wall Street. Instead of Occupy Wall Street’s focus on autonomy (which she saw as leading to multiple and sometimes contradictory goals), horizontality (which according to Dean, led to a scepticism about any organising structures that eventually undermined them) and leaderlessness (which Dean claims caused paranoia among those who were in leader-like positions) she claims the need for a party that could bring solidarity, vertical and diagonal strength, and clear leadership.99 Although she is aware that the grass-roots activism that led to the evolution of Occupy Wall Street did involve some forms of immediate organisation and practice100 she still asserts that the party is needed to ‘organise individuals’ in the longer term into a collective form101 and to direct and discipline ‘mass spontaneity’.102 Likewise Žižek calls for a party to provide organisation to the ‘whole of social life’.103 While in an attempt to take up a middle ground Bosteels asserts that ‘the power of the plebs does not emerge spontaneously’104 and thus calls for a Badiou-inspired party,105 not for discipline and organisation, but to name what he refers to as ‘the flexible organization of a fidelity to events’.106 Yet he thereby continues to employ, even in this weaker form, the spontaneity/ organisation binary rather than problematising it in order to demonstrate the way that it is used to block ‘politics’ rather than to promote emancipation. Yet what does it mean to reject this binary? It does not simply mean that we must embrace both spontaneity and organisation, but that we need to stop seeing these as representing different methods of doing ‘politics’. Rancière tells us that although emancipation implies disorder ‘this disorder has nothing spontaneous about it’, while also noting that ‘organization may simply mean the spontaneous reproduction of existing forms of social discipline’.107 Hence when it comes down to the proposal for a party this is not about spontaneity versus organisation but two different methods of organising. Therefore it seems to mean that we can neither assume that a party will help us to organise nor that without a party we will not be organised. This enables us to recognise that the question of party form is not a question of organisation versus spontaneity but a question of which type of organisation is more congruent with emancipation: the communist party hierarchy and division of roles or the equality and horizontality that typically are favoured by the alterglobalisation movement and anarchists. In rejecting this debate Rancière is more interested in problematising the workings of particular instances and form of organisation. Since we have seen that it is impossible to separate emancipation from domination completely the important thing here for Rancière is not about how we organise. Organisation is inevitable. However, we need to find ways to accept organisation

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while simultaneously keeping a clear conceptual distinction between rupture and order, which will be present in any form of organising – at grass-roots level or party-based. This distinction is not communicated by spontaneity versus organisation figured as a binary but rather emancipation versus domination figured as overlapping interlinking logics that can more or less be untangled in places. Before moving on it is worth noting here that if, by party, we are simply referring to a grouping committed to horizontality and equality that was focused on organising and planning democratic strategy, it would seem that this could be congruent with Rancière’s democratic ‘politics’. Rancière’s commitment to untangling the emancipation that ‘politics’ offers thus does not simply reject or ignore these oppositions between theory and practice, organisation and spontaneity; instead he works through them identifying a need to problematise and overcome the division of labour and to see the argument about party form as using issues of organisation to mask a defence of hierarchy. Bearing this in mind, and in light of the recent wave of occupations around the globe, let us turn to consider the implications of Rancière’s work for the strategy of occupation. In the emerging literature on the Occupy movement, many commentators note the use of strategy, planning and organisation in preparing for and maintaining the recent wave of occupations.108 Rancière’s thematisation of ‘politics’ as appropriation, dis-identification and subjectivation does therefore seem to have something to offer those considering the most effective strategy for posing a democratic challenge to our current order. During this era of occupation it is particularly interesting to consider, albeit briefly, the extent to which occupation utilises appropriation, dis-identification and subjectivation. As it is only possible to engage in a brief discussion of this issue here I do not seek to provide a definitive analysis, merely to point in a direction that could be of interest not merely to ‘theorists’ or ‘activists’ but to anybody interested in questions of how to challenge police domination today. Despite the current proliferation of literature on occupation, as yet there have been few inquiries into how occupation functions to enact democracy.109 In fact Astra Taylor notes an urgent need for greater attention to be given to knowledge of ‘past movements and effective strategies and tactics’.110 Furthermore, given the history of occupation as a long-standing military tactic, especially with regard to the history of imperialism it seems especially important to question what it is that makes the strategy of occupation democratic.111 In an obvious sense, occupation clearly implies appropriation. However, we outlined above that appropriation is more likely to effect ‘politics’ when it involves a ‘taking’ that is also a remaking of ways of being, doing and saying in order to stage the equality of its subjects with everybody else. Hence it makes sense to highlight that occupation is not necessarily political in the democratic sense, especially if it is an occupation by an invading military force, but that instead it would need to demonstrate particular criteria. This discussion of the implications of ‘politics’ for the strategy of occupation will thus perform a cursory evaluation of some of the ways in which

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occupation does effect ‘politics’ in order to identify questions and areas of concern for future consideration. First, let us consider what occupation might be seen to consist of. Used for many years as a tactic of political struggle by those with few political resources beyond their own bodies, occupation became popular as a tactic of worker struggles in the late nineteenth century. It was borrowed for the purposes of democratic citizen protest by the 1960s civil rights movement which can be said to have more in common with the recent wave of occupations, since both portray their struggle as one of democracy and democratic rights rather than a more particular struggle between workers and bosses at a specific factory or plant location. These recent occupations appear to share some common features such as the taking of space (space deemed to have a symbolic meaning) to both disrupt and subvert its use. The occupation is undertaken by strategic participants and consists in them refusing to leave or vacate the space when expected or requested to do so by the authorities.112 So to what extent do these recent occupations enact ‘politics’ in terms of appropriation, dis-identification and subjectivation? It is clear that occupation will necessarily involve appropriation. More precisely it involves the appropriation of space that is, at least in some sense, not considered to be legitimate. However, since appropriation is primarily concerned with the taking and remaking of ways of being, doing and saying, the consideration of which space should be occupied113 is important only to the extent that it helps to stage the ways of being, doing and saying in a clearer way than other already accessible spaces. For example, Rosa Parks’ protest necessarily had to take a white priority space on the bus in order to demonstrate how she too was entitled to be in that space; likewise for the Lipp factory workers to take over factory production themselves they needed to occupy the space where the machinery and goods were located. The Occupy Homes movement that emerged from Occupy Wall Street involved appropriation of the particular space of the homes under threat of foreclosure and eviction.114 In each of these examples the occupation of a particular space is seen to be practically necessary in order to stage the equality at issue. However, it is interesting that in cases of ‘politics’ that challenge the economic system the symbolic use of space may be less important. When Argentine citizens revived barter clubs in 1995 in response to the unstable economy it was not necessary for them to take over a symbolic space, such as the stock market or a bank, in order to enact their alternative to the formal economy, but instead to simply find any space where they could set up market stalls.115 Nor does space seem to be such an issue with regard to the debt cancellation scheme ‘Rolling Jubilee’ and its spin-off ‘debt collective’ which developed out of the Occupy Wall Street open forums.116 By utilising online space and advertising via social media these institutions have already succeeded in cancelling millions of dollars of personal debt. They acknowledge this as a drop in the ocean and more of a symbolic gesture than a revolution, but seek to inspire debtors to unionise and demonstrate that debt can be

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overcome much more cheaply than creditors are prepared to admit.117 In performing this role they appropriate the behaviour of creditors and brokers but do not need to be in the same physical space as them to do it. They are utilising internet space but this is space that they have legitimate access to and does not involve them occupying the space of those whose actions they are appropriating.118 Hence it would appear that there is a question to consider here regarding the importance of the space occupied, since in these examples appropriation of space in the form of an occupation appears to be a secondary consideration that is dependent on the ways in which it can support a staging of the appropriation of ways of being, saying and doing.119 Furthermore, although occupation is often noted for its ability to disrupt,120 it is the nature of this disruption that is of particular interest when it comes to ‘politics’. Disruption that shuts down activity is less able to demonstrate alternative ways of being, doing and saying than disruption that produces or creates. Interestingly, with reference to Occupy Wall Street, Safri notes that because the term ‘occupation’ refers not only to the taking or seizing of property but also one’s category of employment, the practice of occupation thus etymologically implies both ‘the taking of space’ as well as ‘to do work’.121 Indeed, she goes on to document some of the work undertaken by Occupy Wall Street: the various working committees of OWS: the library which organized and ran a free book-lending service, the kitchen committee which produced and distributed up to 4000 meals a day on peak protest days, the education and empowerment committee which organized and distributed well-attended lectures and daily free classes … the facilitation committee which trained people in the art of running meetings, the press committee which handled the hundreds of reporters and media demands, the comfort committee that produced and distributed clean laundry and arranged beds and showers, the structure group that organized the eventual spokes council decision-making structure for the entire occupation, the technology committee that produced the infrastructure for communication, the janitorial committee charged with clean-up, and dozens of more committees.122 In this sense, then, the organisation and infrastructure of this type of occupation seeks to challenge the existing provision of goods and services with a model demonstrating another way in which ‘society can and does organize partial production and distribution of goods and services outside market mechanisms.’123 Yet this raises an issue for future consideration since the final point that Rancière offers us on appropriation is that the most effective moments of ‘politics’ are those that somehow manage to stage equality productively in a potentially permanent fashion. Of course, the practices listed here do demonstrate an ethos or manner of provision that its participants believe could and should be made permanent, and some of which have

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continued in different sites since the Zuccotti Park eviction; however, it strikes me that there are questions to be asked here about permanency, organisational structures and institutionalisation. Some writers regard this wave of occupations as a demonstration of alternatives that merely trigger debate and influence others. Conceived in this way, it is not able to effect ‘politics’ as powerfully as if it was seen to bring into being potentially permanent new ways that pose a significant challenge to existing ways. This brings into focus a significant difference between the use of these sites to host general assemblies versus the setting up of alterglobalisation-style encampments and service provision. Holding meetings and assemblies in public spaces makes efficient use of the infrastructure already in place to subvert the way in which democratic decision making is currently carried out. However, provision of sanitary facilities, health care and education in public parks and squares is more challenging and hence more difficult to stage as a potentially permanent state of affairs. Hence despite Kohn’s convincing defence of the way that the provision of basic amenities, food, health care, libraries and sanitation in public spaces posed a challenge to the dominant order questions clearly remain about the relationship between space, the focus of the occupation and the importance of permanency. The second feature of ‘politics’, dis-identification, is primarily effective through the reconfiguration of relations that it provokes and the inability of the police order to denote a place for those taking part. Occupation is thus political because of the ways it comes about via dis-identification understood as the refiguring of relations. For example, in factory occupations (particularly where production is continued), we see dis-identification result in a particularly strong refiguring of social relations posing ‘in a practical manner the question of who is the boss of the factory, the capitalist or the workers?’124 These workers challenge the very foundations that ordinarily distinguish the ways of being of masters and of workers. In such an occupation the workers dis-identify with their role as workers understood as those who sell their labour to others, and instead take ownership of the means of production and, in the cases of continued production, of their labour and that which it produces. To some extent dis-identification will necessarily feature in any occupation whereby the occupiers no longer accept the restrictions usually applied to a particular space according to their given identity. Put simply, the occupiers of Zuccotti Park stopped identifying as law-abiding citizens when they refused police orders to leave the park.125 This dis-identification was intensified when they started to engage in activities that were very different from everyday citizen practice in contemporary democracies, i.e. setting up assemblies and providing voluntary health care provision and living facilities. This saw them challenging expected citizen relations, as they stopped identifying with the contemporary neoliberal model of citizen as consumer126 and instead came together to deliberate and provide services for one another. However, if we recall the features of dis-identification noted above, this disidentification needs to break the link between a subject and their expected

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role, breaking with the ways of being they are meant to effect in the spaces they have been allotted such that assigned positions no longer make sense such that those who dis-identify are left without an easily locatable place. Disidentification breaks with given roles in a way that makes it impossible to place it within the already existing configuration of identities. Now, to what extent was this the case with these occupations? We can see that the setting up of deliberative forums and assemblies posed a challenge to the usual roles of the government to deliberate policy and citizens to vote on it. Furthermore, the establishment of alternative models of service provision demonstrated that people themselves can make decisions about how their society should be organised without the need for managers and expensive consultancy fees. The demonstrations of the civil rights movement successfully demonstrated that black citizens had equal capacity to white citizens. If the occupation is to assert the equal capacity of the 99 per cent to the 1 per cent in a way that would be difficult to ignore, the most productive issue to focus on strategically are the ways in which it can demonstrate the capacity of the 99 per cent to take on and transform the role that the 1 per cent are currently seen to perform. In some cases this has worked (for example the ‘Rolling Jubilee’ campaign has established a successful alternative method of debt transfer); however, there is clearly still a big challenge here with regard to how we can establish alternatives that are accepted more widely, which brings us back to the questions of infrastructure and permanency discussed above. Furthermore, it is important to recall the discussion about the need to resist attachment to new identities as they are less a part of the ‘politics’ that is being effected than the initial dis-identification. In this sense, Žižek missed the mark when he took it upon himself to remind protestors at Zuccotti Park that they must not fall in love with themselves.127 A democratic approach, contra Badiou, would surely require that those involved in democratic struggle avoid falling in love with anything at all. Perhaps Honig’s notion of passionate ambivalence is salient here as she encourages us to maintain a committed sense of detachment and ambiguity towards our social structures in order to always maintain a critical distance from any particular social configuration.128 Finally, considering occupation vis-à-vis subjectivation brings us back to the issue of organisation and the role of the party. Subjectivation for Rancière is the moment when a political subject emerges against the order that usually disciplines them. It is the moment of saying no, of doing the unexpected, of disobeying, but as noted above, through productive practice that challenges the dominant rationality with another. In this sense an occupation or protest may always involve subjectivation to some extent. However, it is important to remember that if appropriation is effected through the following of orders given by leaders then the scope for subjectivation may be dramatically curtailed. Although Dean is concerned that the absence of party leadership means that the collective will gets fragmented, thereby enabling a neoliberal individualisation to be the order of the day,129 this does not apply to

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democratic ‘politics’ since subjectivation is not about the fragmentation produced by individualism but instead concerns emerging parts that may well be collective, asserting their equality not to the rest, as separate distinguishable parts, but equality with the rest, asserting collectivity over the whole and thereby rupturing the justification for existing partitions. Consequently, the role of subjectivation prompts us to identify and seek to protect the extent to which the democratic emphasis of the recent occupations creates opportunities for subjectivation that different organisational structures could reduce. This cursory discussion of the extent to which occupation enacts ‘politics’ in a democratic sense has identified many ways in which the recent occupations of public parks and squares have effected ‘politics’ through bringing together appropriation, dis-identification and subjectivation. Yet it also indicates that in considering strategy for future occupations it may be productive to prioritise further consideration of the salience and symbolism of the spaces occupied, questions of infrastructure and permanency, and the way that occupation breaks with established identities and supports subjectivation.

Practising dissensus Despite critics’ concerns this chapter defends Rancière’s ‘politics’. It identifies within it a conceptual framework that can inform effective strategies to both inspire and enact alternative visions of equality and solidarity.130 It directs us further along Rancière’s twisted path, away from the current neoliberal consensus towards a reinvention of politics. This requires us to support the emancipation of ourselves and others through the development of dissensual practices that orient us towards equality, challenging our conformity with common-sense perceptions by loosening our attachment to given ways of being, saying and doing.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

(2007b: 51–52). Politics is ‘the activity that turns on equality as its principle’ Rancière (1999: ix). Rancière (2010d: 168). Rancière (1995a: 65). Rancière (2010d: 168). Ibid. Ibid.: 24–25. Rancière (2012d). Rancière (1999: 37). Rancière (2012a). Ibid. Honig (2001, in particular Ch. 4). See, for example, Rancière (1999: 29, 40, 55). Rancière (2009a: 114). Rancière (1999: 12).

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16 This assertion of equal status is why Rancière prefers the language of appropriation and taking rather than the alternative of making or creating (author’s conversation with Joe Hoover), for if the oppressed are to overcome their oppression it is through forcing their oppressors to recognise and accept them as equals, because there is nowhere beyond social order where they could escape to in order to create or make something separate. Hence it is only through subverting existing power relations that oppression can be overcome. However, this is not to say that something new or qualitatively different could not be created after the moment of ‘politics’, just that this is not the activity of ‘politics’, but is the activity of policing. This will be returned to later in the chapter. 17 This is elaborated by Aletta Norval in Writing a Name in the Sky (2012). 18 Here I am indebted to Norval (ibid.) for her discussion of dis-identification and subjectivation in Rancière’s ‘politics’. 19 Rancière (1999: 36). 20 Ibid.: 12. 21 Ibid.: 24–25. 22 Ibid.: 25. 23 This is detailed by Rancière in various texts, e.g. 1994: 93, 1999: 37–39 and 2007a: 563–564. 24 Rancière (2007a: 563). 25 ‘It is the profession of thirty million Frenchmen who live off their labour and who are denied of political rights’ (Rancière 1999: 37, citing Blanqui). 26 Thanks to Joe Hoover for coining this phrase in his comments about an earlier version of this chapter. 27 Rancière (2006: 61). 28 Parks and Haskins (1992: 116). 29 Barnes (2009); Koerner (2002). 30 Rancière (1999: 32). 31 See also Disch (1999) and Lloyd (2007) for parallel discussions about Rosa Park’s protest. 32 It is evident that Rancière would be sceptical about such a project but this does not mean that it is not a logical development from his project, merely that the left would need to remember that no social order is free of domination. So, if they decided to follow this path they would be responsible for any forms of domination that would ensue. I will return to this in the final section of this chapter. 33 Emancipation is taken by Rancière in its original sense as ‘the emergence from the state of minority’ (2009a: 42). 34 Norval (2007: 141); Davis (2010: 92–100); Bosteels (2009: 169–170); Citton (2009: 139); Dillon (2003: para. 20, n.p.). 35 To complicate matters further Todd May finds inspiration in Rancière’s work and even uses Rancière’s thematisation of the categories ‘politics’ and ‘police’ to inform contemporary anarchist thought and radical social movements in his two most recent books: The Politics of Jacques Rancière (2008) and Contemporary Political Movements and the Thought of Jacques Rancière (2010). Contra Badiou, Žižek and others, May sees no significant obstacles in using Rancière to inspire an emancipatory political project that might escape the grips of police and thus questions whether some form of institutionalisation of Rancièrian democracy could be conceived (2008: 176–184, 2010: 26–27, 137). Despite my respect for May’s project it will be argued below that Rancière’s ‘politics’ cannot be institutionalised in the way that May postulates since any attempt to theorise ‘politics’ could be used to found a new order and hence turn it into police. Indeed, Rancière says that any statement of equality will always be a ‘one-off performance’ because the very moment that equality ‘aspires to a place in the

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39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61

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social or state organization’ it will turn into the opposite: in being institutionalised it becomes particular to one dominant party (1999: 34). However, May questions whether it may be possible to create a space of politics beyond the dominatory effects of police order (2008: 176) but Rancière has subsequently emphasised that this is not the way he conceives of the relation between the two (2011a: 4). Rancière does acknowledge that long-term structures could exist that will allow and foster the presupposition of equality, but this is still rather different from the institutionalisation that May seeks to hold open as a possibility in both his works (see Rancière et al. 2008). Thanks to Todd May for bringing this to my attention; cf. May (2008: 176) and (2010: 26) in which he says ‘we do not want to eliminate that possibility theoretically’. Although I cannot help but wonder if May and I are seeking to get at the same point when I later make the claim that we need to retain the concept of ‘pure’ politics even if practically it could never exist. Thus however much I admire the way that May has sought to rethink Rancière’s assertion in order to sketch out his vision for anarchodemocratic politics I do not think that we need to adapt Rancière’s work to such an extent in order to identify its value for political movements today. Rancière (2009a: 118). Ibid. This point is illustrated by David Graeber’s surprise that Occupy Wall Street succeeded in occupying Zuccotti Park without being immediately evicted. He notes the background planning that went into organising the Wall Street protests, but also how so often in his experience protest attempts such as these are shut down by the police before they are able to occupy or disrupt anything at all (2013). Rancière (2008: 1–15). See Rancière (2001: para. 19, n.p.). Rancière (2012a: 45). Rancière and Lie (2006: n.p.). Rancière (1999: 12–13). Ibid.: 13. This should not be understood as ‘rationality’ in Enlightenment terms, but merely as one’s own way of thinking. Dean (2009a: 34). Laclau (2005: 246). Rancière (1999: 101). Ibid. Rancière (2011a: 4). Rancière (2006: 73). Rancière (1999: 37, italics added). Rancière (1995a: 66). Rancière (2003). Rancière (2012a: 15–16). ‘Initial’ at least in the English-language reception of his work of which Disagreement remains the most widely read. However, this obscures the anti-eventalist reading encouraged by his earlier papers (now available in 2011e and 2012c) as well as The Nights of Labour (later republished in English as Proletarian Nights 2012a). See Frank (2015) on this. Rancière (2011a: 6). Ibid.: 8. Ibid.: 4. Woodford (2014). Chambers (2013: 49).

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62 In On the Shores of Politics Rancière shows that a community of equals is impossible, and hence it is positing equality, rather than aiming to achieve it once and for all, that is of value (2007b: 84). 63 Badiou (2006a: 112–113). 64 Ibid.: 111, italics added. 65 Ibid.: 121; see also Citton (2009: 128) and Hallward (2009: 154 on this point). 66 Tambakaki (2009: 109). 67 See also Dillon (2003: n.p.); Bensaïd (1999: 45–46); Labelle (2001); Žižek (1999, see especially p. 277). 68 Rancière (2009a: 118). 69 Ibid. 70 Rancière (1999: 32–33). 71 Rancière (2012a: 46). 72 Ibid.: 43. 73 This does not mean that the oppressed must seek inclusion over the chance to break free from the order that oppresses them, merely that they cannot break free from the need for social order tout court. Thus they will need to allot themselves a new part in the new ordering that emerges after ‘politics’. 74 Barnes (2009); Koerner (2002). 75 Rancière (2012a: 82–83). 76 Ibid.: 83. 77 Thus it does not matter how ‘solid’ or embedded the police order is, because ‘politics’ can always be effected by appropriating and dis-identifying to challenge the given ordering of bodies, spaces and things. 78 Rancière (2007a). 79 It is troubling that this interpretation implies that it is the role of the oppressed to redeem the order of the oppressor. However, this is not a value judgement, merely the recognition that in order to become subjects the oppressed need to emancipate themselves (see below and also Bingham and Biesta 2010: Ch. 2 for a discussion of Rancière’s peculiar usage of this term), although others can stand in solidarity with them and create conditions under which it is easier to do this. It will be argued below that democrats must attend to the conditions under which emancipation becomes easier rather than seek to emancipate others. 80 Rancière (2009a: 117). 81 Ibid.: 114–123, 118. 82 Rancière (1999: 33). 83 Ibid.: 28, 31, 32. 84 Although he does provide a helpful discussion about various commentators’ approaches to this topic (2013). 85 Where he expresses this as meaning that although ‘politics’ cannot be ‘pure’ it will somehow remain ‘other’ to the police (2013: 49). 86 Rancière (2009a: 119). 87 Ibid.: 85. 88 Ibid.: 87. 89 Rancière (2009b: 42). 90 Rancière (1999: 6–7). 91 Emphasised by Rancière when he says that ‘the history of politics … is not a continuous process’ (2011a: 5). 92 Rancière (2012a: 82). 93 Ibid. 94 Rancière describes this debate as an ‘empty discussion’ (2011b: xvi). 95 We continue to see this domination at work in Žižek’s comments that the intellectuals can act as analysts to the people, not to tell them what they want, but to form the questions to which the people have the answers (2012: 204–205) and in

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110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122

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Dean’s claim that ‘The Leninist party doesn’t know what the people want. It’s a form of dealing with the split in the people. Their non-knowledge of what they, as a collectivity desire’ (2012: 242). Rancière is not saying that we should abandon theory but simply that theory should not become too divorced from practice (1974: 10). Ibid.: 6. Rancière (2010d: 169). Dean (2012: 210–211). Ibid.: 208. Ibid.: 247. Ibid.: 242. Žižek (2013:188). Bosteels (2014: 231). Drawing on a passage from Badiou’s Metapolitics in which he refers to the party as ‘an unfixable omnipresence’ (2006: 74). Bosteels (2014: 27). Rancière (2010d: 169). Sitrin and Azzellini (2014: see ch.1 in particular in which they outline conceptual categories of organisation; Graeber (2013); Maeckelbergh (2012: n.p.); Bray (2013); Castells (2012); and Gitlin (2012). See the sixty-six essays in Byrne (2012); Mitchell et al. (2013); Chomsky (2012); Mason (2013); Castells (2012); van Gelder and Yes! Magazine (2011); Gunning and Baron (2013); Malleson (2014); Sitrin and Azzellini (2014); Suliman (2013); Gamson and Sifrey (2013); Maeckelbergh (2012); Juris (2012); Caren and Gaby (2011); Berardi (2011); Brown (2011); Connolly (2011); Dean (2011); Grusin (2011); Harcourt (2012); Hardt and Negri (2011); McKenzie (2011). Notable exceptions are Kohn (2013) who evaluates the strategy of occupying public space; Hopkins et al. (2012) who evaluate the strategies adopted by student occupiers at the University of Newcastle; Sherry (2011) who traces the historical evolution of worker occupations; Tancons (2014) who focuses on the role of occupation as carnival; and Safri (2012) who traces the etymology of the term. However, none of these evaluate principally in terms of democracy; they all assume that democracy refers to a set of values or decision-making procedures. Taylor et al. (2011: 20). See Suliman (2013) for a discussion about the colonial and exclusionary impact of occupation as a tactic, given the history of colonial occupation of indigenous lands, in the Australian context. Graeber (2013); Taylor et al. (2011). See the discussion about whether and where to occupy prior to Occupy Wall Street recounted by Graeber (2013: 42–46). See http://occupyourhomes.org/. Krauss (2001: n.p.). These citizen forums followed the eviction of the Zuccotti Park occupation. See http://rollingjubilee.org and http://debtcollective.org for more information. http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/sep/17/occupy-activists-student-debt-cor inthian-colleges Perhaps the reason for this is that money itself occupies a rather unique space as both symbolic and material. See Bjerg (2014) for more on this. See Kohn (2013) for a discussion of why despite the irony of occupations often ‘appropriating’ already public spaces, this does still count as occupation because they were changing the ways in which these spaces were being used. Graeber (2013); Sitrin and Azzellini (2014). Safri (2012: n.p.). Ibid.

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Safri (2013: n.p.). Trotsky (1999: 30). Sitrin and Azzellini (2014: 154). Brown (2015). Speech made at Zuccotti Park later published in Taylor et al. (2011), but reiterated in Žižek (2012: 77). 128 Honig (2001). 129 Dean (2012: Ch. 6, see in particular p. 220). 130 Rancière (2009b: 17).

2

Reflexivity Untangling the revolution

The first step that Horkheimer took in order to bring theory … to a critical form was the step to a reflexive turn … In reflexive reconstruction the object of knowledge loses ‘the character of pure factuality’. (Christoph Menke1) But there is a third way of proceeding, which seizes the moment in which the philosophical pretension to found the order of discourse is reversed, becoming the declaration … of the arbitrary nature of this order. (Jacques Rancière2)

Traditionally, the task of thinking the leftist project has been given over to critical theory, yet unsurprisingly, Rancière appears highly sceptical of the ability of current critical theory to serve the needs of ‘politics’. Indeed, to the inattentive reader it could appear that recently he has denounced critical theory completely, referring to it as part of the intellectual counter-revolution and suggesting that it employs a suspect mechanism which subverts its proclaimed emancipatory aims. Yet in this chapter I wish to assert that while these claims must not be brushed aside lightly they do not result in the need to reject critical theory in its entirety. Instead, Rancière’s critical historical analysis of the development of the critical theory tradition identifies what it is that has ensnared the emancipatory logic of critical theory and prevented it from bringing about its desired ends of emancipation. Thus Rancière is not rejecting critical theory tout court but calling for a revised practice of critical thinking that enables us to disentangle its potential for emancipation.3 Hence, in this chapter I draw out the implications of Rancière’s critique for a critical theoretical practice that does not succumb to what he sees as this counterrevolutionary tendency. Instead, I wish to think through what it is that he means when he refers to a ‘genuine “critique of critique”’,4 an ‘aesthetic practice of philosophy [that] can also be called a method of equality’.5 I argue that this philosophy requires a practice of reflexivity which helps to ensure that it will function as ‘a space without boundaries … a space of equality’.6 Such a philosophy will be able to respond to the requirements of emancipation without becoming too deeply ensnared in dominatory logics. It can help

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us to plan and strategise better police orders while simultaneously serving the emancipatory logic, and offering democratic movements some level of protection against entrenching themselves too deeply in any police ordering. I will proceed by first tracing Rancière’s own critique of the academic discipline of critical theory, to identify more precisely why he thinks that the critical theory tradition has been hindered in its emancipatory project. This takes us back to the emergence of the promise of emancipation in the Enlightenment era before politics had been categorised into left and right. At this point the leftist project is understood less through its opposition to the right and more as an open commitment to emancipation and equality. Since this point, however, Rancière argues that the logic of emancipation has become entangled with the logic of domination. Hence the task for critical theory today is to attend to this untangling in all areas of thought. In the absence of any further work in this direction by Rancière I will turn to the thought of contemporary Frankfurt School theorist Christoph Menke. I suggest that this can be taken to complement and develop Rancière’s project since it adds a practice of reflexivity to protect this revised critical thinking from disciplinary ethics, while also theorising a way to overcome the teleology and mystification of earlier Frankfurt School critical theory. I will conclude by identifying reflexivity as a perpetual practice of actively reflecting on and reconstructing the grounds of the society in which we live, thus dis-orienting our ways of thinking. This does not counter the traditional left-wing end of revolution but instead transcends any particular instance of revolution, seeing revolution as an open-ended and continual project of perpetual revolutionising, rather than as a one-off momentous and closed event.

The counter-revolutionary charge Let us begin by trying to understand more precisely why Rancière sees contemporary critical theory7 as counter-revolutionary. This claim was made most stridently in his 2009 lecture Revising Nights of Labour given on the occasion of the launch of the Hindi translation of The Nights of Labour at the New Delhi Centre for the Study of Developing Societies8 as well as in the foreword to the English translation of Althusser’s Lesson.9 In the New Delhi lecture Rancière supports this claim as part of a wider argument concerning the dangerous tendency of political philosophy to efface ‘politics.’ Most famously he makes this argument in The Philosopher and His Poor and in Chapter 4 of Dis-agreement in which he argues that any attempt to think politics requires us to reduce it somehow to something regulatable, and hence something that we can control and contain. As a result he identifies three tendencies in political philosophy, each of which actually ends up oppressing ‘politics’ rather than supporting or enabling it. The first tendency, ‘archipolitics’, is best exemplified by Plato and seeks to transcend the messy dissensus of ‘politics’ by superimposing a just, well-ordered community on the unruly demos. For Plato, political philosophy is the task of conceiving of ideal societies in which

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disputes no longer exist. Hence Plato’s politics as an ideal transcends and ignores the struggle that is democratic ‘politics’. Rancière suggests that Aristotle has provided the archetype of the second tendency of political philosophy, ‘parapolitics’, which in turn seeks not to transcend the dissensus that is ‘politics’, but instead seeks to contain it by giving a space to ‘the people’ in governing institutions. This can be used to placate the demos and ensure that the elites are able to rule without troublesome opposition.10 Thus parapolitics figures political philosophy as the art of institutional design. In the modern era parapolitics gives rise to the third tendency, ‘metapolitics’. Contrary to archipolitics’ proposal that the struggle of politics must be suppressed via the art of constructing the ideal society, metapolitics indicates that there is a radical gap between any contemporary instantiation of society and the struggle that it masks. Hence, for metapolitics, hidden behind any social order is the true struggle of politics. As a result, the metapolitical task of political philosophy is to reveal the social as false and unveil the reality behind. This either leads to a nihilistic reading whereby philosophers will reveal to us that since society is simply struggle there is no point acting, or it leads back to archipolitics through which philosophy aims to construct an ideal society, free of dissensus, in which all are represented fairly through a liberal system of rights and freedoms.11 Rancière sees metapolitics at work across modernist and postmodernist philosophy, predominantly inspired by Marxist logics.12 As a result he argues that metapolitical logics prevent philosophy from serving emancipatory aims since they suppress and restrict the emergence of ‘politics’ as equality. Despite Marxism falling out of favour in the academy, the structure of Marxist critical and revolutionary thinking is still at play in contemporary (postmodern) critical thought. It has been recycled in such a way as to subvert its original emancipatory aims and instead operates against these to shore up the current neoliberal structures of order and domination.13 In his New Delhi lecture Rancière adds greater precision to this argument. Since it is not yet well known in English-language scholarship, it is helpful to summarise some key points of this argument on Marxism before we can go on to assess Rancière’s claims about their implications for critical theory today. Rancière demonstrates this ‘recycling’ of Marxist metapolitics in relation to four interrelated Marxist themes of economic and historical necessity, dematerialisation of structure, commodification of social relations and ideological inversion. Beginning with the theories of economic and historical necessity, he notes that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Marxism was a more dominant political ideology, its liberal opponents had no need for a logic of necessity. Instead, their position denied that conditions were predetermined and claimed that the freedom of the people was based on the ‘free’ exchange of goods in a ‘free’ market. However, following the late twentieth-century globalisation of world markets and in the face of the retreat of Marxism the dominant liberal view of freedom has shifted to appropriate

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the idea of necessity in its conceptualisation of freedom as the freedom of citizens to submit to the necessity of the global market.14 It rephrased the narrative of economic necessity from its Marxist version where it was understood as ‘the necessity of the evolution leading to socialism’ to a neoliberal rendering as ‘the necessity of the evolution leading to the triumph of this global market’.15 This is seen in everyday political discourse, where the rollback of the welfare state and the increasing attack on living standards and citizens’ rights are justified in the language of necessity to conform to market forces and demands. Furthermore, Rancière hears echoes of Marx in the contemporary condemnation of any attempts at resistance as ‘reactionary’, backward-looking and fearful of this necessary evolution, suggesting that this utilises the same logic as Marx’s denunciation of those who fought the development of capitalism and thereby prevented it from fulfilling its necessary historical role. It is crucial to his argument that this reaction is not reserved for those on the right but instead is often found in left-wing circles too. This is illustrated by leftist denunciations and failure to support recent strikes and demonstrations across Europe against financial reforms which claim that strikers are too short-sighted to realise that their protest is merely an ‘egoistical defence of their privileges’.16 Rancière thus concludes that all across the political spectrum we find consensus regarding the necessity of market forces and hence the eradication of any political programme of resistance. In this spirit of resignation Rancière also claims that leftist philosophers have adapted the Marxist slogan ‘all that is solid melts into air’17 in the postmodern commitment to the dematerialisation of structure which claims that everything is becoming more and more immaterial, liquid or ethereal. In particular, Rancière cites the work of well-known German cultural critic and popular philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and his theory that modernity is a process of anti-gravitation.18 Sloterdijk plays on the double meaning of gravity, arguing that our overcoming of gravity as a physical force that facilitates technical advances such as air and space travel is mirrored by our social progress. Hence we are now apparently also able to overcome the gravity of social problems suffered by previous generations such as poverty, hardship and pain.19 He argues that our contemporary affluent society has been released from these now outdated concerns, but in our ignorance we do not fully comprehend this and mistakenly still seek to respond to the world in the old ways.20 Rancière interprets Sloterdijk in relation to the Marxist claim that bourgeois society seeks to transcend and deny material inequality and suffering by projecting illusions that the material is not what really matters. Instead it seeks meaning in illusory ideas and values, thereby allowing suffering to continue. Marxism sought to reveal the way in which these ideas worked to distract society from suffering in order to replace these illusory ideas with consciousness of social reality in the hope that this would motivate the movement to revolution. In contrast to this Rancière posits that theories such as Sloterdijk’s aim to show that ‘our conduct … always projects into an illusory solid reality the inverted image of a process of escape’.21 Thus Rancière

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accuses Sloterdijk of denouncing the Enlightenment reason of the critical paradigm merely to reproduce its mechanism, whereby he transforms the Marxist idea that people are ignorant of reality and deny their own misery into a new claim that actually the reality that people are ignorant of is that reality and misery have disappeared. Hence Sloterdijk transforms the Marxist theme from a ‘desire to ignore what makes us guilty into the desire to ignore the fact that there is nothing we need feel guilty about’.22 Marxism and Sloterdijk both share the claim that the people are ignorant and need to be shown the ‘truth’, despite differing over what that truth may be. The point here is that, despite Sloterdijk’s unconventional and carefree style and his quest to critique the cynicism and seriousness of Enlightenment reason, he has not succeeded in overthrowing modernist critique and instead still retains the mechanism that seeks to educate people about the way they should be. In fact, Rancière seems to assert here that Sloterdijk actually embeds people more deeply in the mire of their oppression than Marxism ever did. Whereas it is more common to find the critical theory tradition seeking to trigger guilt or at least regret in its audience by revealing that people need to realise their compliance in orders of oppression and thereby appreciate their culpability, Sloterdijk inverts this one more time. He claims that what one needs to realise is that there is nothing to feel guilty about now, and instead admonishes people for still feeling this guilt. Thus he enmeshes people into a dual layer of guilt: the guilt at one’s culpability is replaced by guilt that one still feels culpable. Despite his ironic and carefree style he takes us down a melancholic path for, now that there is nothing to feel guilty about and we are all able just to enjoy our affluent society, ‘all that is solid melts into air and it remains only to laugh at the ideologues who still believe in the reality of reality, misery and wars’.23 He consequently closes off any possibility for change, leaving us incapable of addressing injustice. At this point, Rancière notes a third recycled Marxist theme – that of the commodification of social relations. In Marxism, this denotes the way that social relations are increasingly believed to be subordinate to market needs. However, Rancière suggests that in contemporary critical theory, this theme has also been transformed into its opposite, where ordinary people are denounced as idiots driven by a frantic ever expanding desire for consumption. Such idiots are beyond ‘redemption’ in the sense that they are no longer perceived to be capable of ever overcoming this desire. Rancière traces this line of argument in the work of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello who he interprets as suggesting that people cannot fight the reign of the spectacle, for even if they may think that they are challenging this they will actually simply create the conditions for the regeneration of capitalism.24 In particular they argue that this is what happened in the case of the ‘artistic critique’ that grew out of the 1960s student protest movement and focused on themes such as ‘authenticity, creativity and autonomy’ instead of more traditional Marxist social critique. They claim that during the 1973 oil crisis these new forms of critique began to be absorbed and subverted in the service of neoliberalism

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where we suddenly begin to find themes such as flexibility, authenticity, creativity, innovation and individual initiative.25 However, Rancière claims that their analysis rests on a false distinction that associates the struggle against social oppression with the worker identity, and this new emerging artistic struggle with the 1968 generation – the children of the petite bourgeoisie.26 As noted in Chapter 1, this distinction is challenged by Rancière’s research into the worker archives which suggests that social emancipation is at one and the same time aesthetic emancipation, and thus it makes no sense to seek to separate the two into separate struggles. In order to be emancipated socially one needs to break with the given ‘ways of feeling, seeing and saying’ that specify one’s identity in a capitalist society – i.e. what it means to belong to the category of worker versus that of the bourgeoisie.27 Such theory therefore no longer seeks to ‘provide anti-capitalist fighters with new wisdom’ but instead appears as a form of ‘nihilist knowledge of the reign of the commodity and the spectacle’.28 Yet this is not to say that the thesis of ‘artistic revolt’ cannot supply us with emancipatory radicalism29 but that it is based on a mistaken premise that emphasises ‘the impossibility of changing the world’ and thus leaves us trapped in melancholia.30 Faced with such a picture on the left we see the development of ‘a new right-wing frenzy … that reformulates denunciation of the market, the media and the spectacle as a critique of the ravages of the democratic individual’.31 Curiously, this echoes the Marxist claim that human rights are bourgeois but are here taken to threaten ‘all the traditional forms of authority that used to place a limit on the power of the market’ such as schools, religion and the family.32 Thus the concern emerges that our current democracy is based on a particular equality: the equality of consumers to obtain commodities. Consequently, the more people are seen to chase after equality the more they help to bring about the triumph of the market in every sphere. Subsequently, this can feed the claim that the thirst for egalitarian consumption has not only led to the dominance of the market in every sphere, but also to ‘the terrorist and totalitarian destruction of social and human bonds’.33 Consequently, the ‘enemy’ in this discourse appears to be the democratic individual and thus it is all too easy to accept that under these conditions any state or economic decision making must be done without consulting those irresponsible, frantically consuming individuals who got us into this mess in the first place. Enter the era of technocratic government and exit the democratic citizen, for it is to be concluded that it is the ordinary citizen figured as the individual consumer who is found to be responsible for our current world order, not the capitalists, the corporations or the aggressive governments. Furthermore, this inverted post-critical critique allows the argument to be made that the most dangerous democratic consumers are those with the least money as they are the least able to consume, and those who rebel in any other way against the empire of exploitation and consumption.34 The fourth and final theme that Rancière claims has been appropriated into the neoliberal order from Marxism can be identified within the other three. It

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is the theory of the mechanism of ideological inversion which claims that people are unaware that they are exploited because of the way they experience their life through the workings of ideology, which functions to mask reality with a constructed vision of the social. In the Althusserian version of this theory we find the assertion that people are unable to free themselves and instead rely upon the savants, the scientists trained in the Althusserian school, to reveal exploitation to them. Rancière’s frustration with the tautology of this theory, which entraps people in their ignorance for ever, can be seen in his claim that according to Althusser: people are exploited and dominated by the system the logic of which they cannot understand because the logic of the mechanism hides itself in an inverted image that people are subjected to. The only things that can reverse this is knowledge of the machine … but logic means they cannot see this.35 Rancière asserts that this entraps people in ‘a perfect circle’: People are where they are because they don’t know why they are where they are, and they don’t know why they are where they are because they are where they are. In short they can’t because they can’t!36 The worrying conclusion of this is that people can never free themselves and will always be dependent on the savants who can lead them to knowledge. Even a revolution that frees them from economic domination cannot free them from pedagogical domination. At this point Rancière suggests that we can identify within Marxism the residues of a perpetual mechanism of ideology that dates right back to the beginnings of Western philosophy in Plato’s claim that the division of labour between workers and the philosopher kings was necessary because the workers’ work needs to be done and cannot wait, and because the workers have ‘the aptitude, the intellectual achievement, that makes them fit for this occupation and for nothing else’.37 While the first is simply an empirical claim, the second is ideological and is based on the idea that workers are not fit for any other role and thus must always remain as workers. Thus we see behind the mechanism of the inversion of ideology a much older idea; in the Marxist mechanism of ideological inversion lurks the prior Platonic division of knowledge: there are those who can and those who cannot, and those who cannot must depend on those who can. Thus the postmodern perspective which denounces Marxism as a ‘grand narrative’ based on what is now commonly recognised to be an untenable ‘truth’ is itself comprised of a mixture of elements of which the Marxist grand narrative was composed, theories of necessity, dematerialisation of solid structure, and the commodification of social relations. This in turn has been shown to propagate two versions of post-critical critique. Either an ‘optimistic and progressive narrative’ that mixes historical necessity with Smith’s faith in

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the ability of economic providence to ensure the evil of human greed to serve human needs or the ‘pessimistic and reactionary narrative’ that sees our rampant thirst for equality destroying us in our desperate obsession with consumption. Of this pessimistic approach, Rancière suggests that the leftwing position is one of melancholy38 which claims that ‘there is no alternative to the power of the beast and to admit that we are satisfied by it’, while the right-wing position is one of frenzy which ‘warns us that the more we try to break the power of the beast, the more we contribute to its triumph’.39 We are thereby rendered impotent and passive, and unable to act. This makes it possible for Rancière to develop a unique analysis of the reasons behind the contemporary concerns that Western political parties are becoming increasingly similar and fail to offer alternatives to voters. He demonstrates why it does not matter which path this contemporary post-critical critical theory takes since both versions come to the same conclusion about our incapacity to effect change: [b]ecause [we either] cannot and must not oppose historical necessity that will choose good from evil … [or] … because [our] will to change will add up to the disastrous reign of the democratic individualism leading human kind towards its self-destruction.40 Consequently, we are left without alternatives other than that of submitting to the power of the market. This post-critical critique of both the right and left versions further perpetuates the Platonic division of knowledge, asserting that people cannot act to effect change themselves because they do not understand the workings of the machine. Thus Rancière has argued that although the more recent postmodern turn is commonly accepted to render much of the earlier critical theory tradition obsolete, this judgement fails to note how, despite rejecting much of the content of critical theory and despite the rejection of the emancipatory teleology, the most pernicious mechanisms which initially restricted critical theory’s emancipatory potential are still functioning in the very work of postmodern thinkers who wish to denounce it. The logic of this mechanism takes the social world as observed and then seeks to reveal that beneath this world of appearances lies a solid reality that has been veiled from view. Critical theory was the method through which we could remove the veil and peer through into the depths to reveal the truth of social reality that lies beneath. Hence the logic of this mechanism was one of inversion: it inverted our modes of description of reality and revealed the truth beneath the lies. For example, Althusserian critical theory sought to show how our developed life in the bourgeois state was based on illusion and how the reality of class struggle lay beneath this illusion, masked from view, and thereby prevented the workers from realising that they must rise up and lead the revolution. This reserved a place for the intellectual as a savant or scientist who unlocks the mysteries of the deep hidden below the surface and educates the ignorant masses.

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It appears that the postmodern turn has further ensnared critical theory by applying another inversion to its logic: while critical theory purported to seek the truth behind reality, postmodern theories of the spectacle claim that there is no truth behind social reality.41 Yet both devalue social appearances in that they think that this world of appearance is hiding something from us, whether this be truth or its absence. In both critical theory and the more recent denunciation of the spectacle there is always ‘the question of showing the spectator what she does not know how to see’;42 aiming to reveal the secret and prompt shame at not wanting to see the truth.43 Thus contemporary social theory remains ‘trapped in the logic of the critical tradition’,44 its emancipatory aims ensnared by the mechanism of inversion. As a result the ensuing disconnect that prevails on both the right and the left leaves critics impotently identifying the symptoms of today’s social problems without being able to effectively identify their cause.45 Although critical procedures still endure, they have been castrated through their inversion. They can no longer offer hope and instead wax lyrical on the myriad ill effects of our current social order. Not only is this critique unable to subvert the dominant order but it actually works to serve it since it masks the laws of domination and presents subjects with an inverted reality.46 By distinguishing between those who have knowledge of society’s workings and those who do not, it assigns to the knowledgeable ‘the exalted task of bringing their science to the blind masses’. However, it has been shown that it has a tendency eventually to dissolve into a form of resentment ‘which declares the inability of the masses to take charge of their own destiny’47 and thereby actually propagates a logic of domination while purporting to struggle against it.

Domination and emancipation in critical theory So, how did this subversion of critical thinking come about? It would seem that the critical theoretical project has been doomed from the start and has always ended up serving the order it sought to critique because since its earliest beginnings the logic of emancipation has been entangled with the logic of domination. To demonstrate this Rancière works backwards to examine the situation from which critical theory initially emerged within Marxist theory where the root of the problem emerges in the way that emancipation is conceptualised in the first place. He notes how right from Marx’s earliest writings emancipation is figured as liberation from domination, which is presented as its binary opposite. Furthermore, in this conceptualisation domination is identified with a ‘process of separation’ and in contrast liberation appears as a response to this in the form of ‘regaining a lost unity’.48 In Marx’s theory of capitalist society alienation refers to the loss of a prior unity.49 In response to this, emancipation understood as liberation from domination aims to restore this unity and sets about this by seeking ‘knowledge of the total process of that separation’.50 Rancière’s problem with this is that any attempt by artisans (such as those documented in The Nights of Labour) who worked to reorder

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their contemporary world could not be conceived of as working for emancipation because, according to Marxist theory, we had not yet learnt the knowledge of this total process by which society had become fragmented, and hence their work was either ignored or denounced as some sort of illusion or trickery. This also reveals the influence of Hegelian logic within Marxist thought, whereby emancipation is put off or deferred as a final stage of the process of society’s reunification. This conceptualisation of emancipation as unifying has, for Rancière, created a blind spot that persisted throughout Marxism and prevented Marxist critical thought from ever achieving its emancipatory aims, since it led it to reproduce the aforementioned logic of domination, whereby knowledge is retained by the privileged few, thus placing everybody else in a relation of subordination. Yet as shown above, this leads to a cyclical process that is never able to escape the sphere of domination. It made it possible for emancipation to be identified with the promise of science which could reveal one’s true capacities beneath the illusion. Rancière notes that the logic of science was one of ‘endless deferment of the promise’, for all science can do is endlessly ‘generate its own ignorance’51 by creating its own spheres of reference and its own model of a real world hidden beneath the false to then work upon. The Marxist link between liberation and unity, based on the Hegelian logic of fragmentation synthesised in unity, diverted emancipation away from a focus on capacities and thus became endlessly deferred. Right from the start, emancipation has always been entangled with domination within Marxist thought. This was not a problem that began with Marxism but can actually be traced back further. Rancière notes how this tendency to tie emancipation into the logic of domination dates back to the very moment that a wave of emancipatory potential burst back onto the political scene via the revolutionary era. In the counter-revolutionary writings of Edmund Burke we find the unsurprising conservative concern that the revolution has destroyed all the traditional institutions of society that were thought to protect individuals such as religion, family and the monarchy, and after the revolution individuals without these traditional ties were a dangerous liability. Roaming about in newfound freedom, released from their traditional social bonds and without social hierarchy to protect them from themselves, these new individuals of the revolution were ripe for exploitation in the service of violence and terror as well as capitalism.52 However, Rancière notes, perhaps more surprisingly, that these conservative concerns were shared by many revolutionary thinkers and writers who were not quite willing to grant the people the power they had promised them, and baulking at the last moment, turned tail and began to shore up the new French Republic against the power of the unruly mob. Rancière claims that this last-minute fear, already prevalent in revolutionary thought even in the revolution’s earliest days, ensured the continuing presence of the logic of domination and hence can be traced from here straight into the emerging thought of Marx and subsequent Marxist critical thought.

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This does not mean that all emancipatory aims are doomed. Instead, Rancière suggests that where the movement for social emancipation has gone wrong is that it has misconceptualised emancipation from the start.53 As noted above, Rancière has argued that emancipation has been twisted away from its original meaning as the ‘emergence from a state of minority’54 into a contrasting idea that emancipation is something done to somebody by another party – the freeing of a slave for example.55 Rancière’s meaning therefore breaks away from the relation of dominance and asserts emancipation as something done for oneself. It signifies a break with the ancient link between one’s occupation and one’s capacities56 and instead posits the potential existence of beings ‘who are not adapted to any specific occupation; who employ capacities for feeling and speaking, thinking and acting, that do not belong to any particular class, but which belong to anyone and everyone’.57 Although this corresponds with many aims of Marxist and wider socialist thought his concern is that by conceiving of emancipation within a Hegelian structure or as the result of an accrual of knowledge it is held captive as a promise whose moment is endlessly deferred. If the logic of emancipation and domination is everywhere entangled then at this point we are left wondering where the impetus comes from to separate them and why Rancière begins his tale with the French Revolution? It would seem that he could have gone a step further in his tracing of this tale, but in the absence of this we can turn to Menke’s short essay Aesthetics of Equality (2006) to ponder the origins of this story and enable us to identify some more dramatic implications. In this essay Menke takes us back to the beginning of the modern age, to the dawning of Enlightenment thought as epitomised in the opening passage of Descartes’ Discourse on Method: the claim that ‘what one calls common sense or reason, is naturally equal in all men’.58 This moment, commonly understood as the birth of the Enlightenment, is thus characteristically twisted by Rancière to emphasise it as the re-emergence of the emancipatory logic into the sensible realm. A logic that has been and always will be ever present but was more prevalent in the democratic age of ancient Athens, it had subsequently been subdued by generations of Aristotelian thought according to which politics was commonly understood to be that which was concerned with the justification of distinctions between people based on the empirical unequal distribution of capacities.59 In Aristotle’s wake it was commonly accepted that those who possess reason could dominate those who lack it leading political philosophy to construct complex typologies of who possesses reason and in what form. Descartes, playing here the nuncio of the modern age, in one sentence brushes aside this ‘traditional political question’ of who possesses reason and redirects it towards a new question of the method as which one can best ‘exercise one’s reason’.60 To allow a shift of focus onto the method of exercising reason Descartes simply supposes that ‘Reason, is by nature equal in all men’.61 Yet in this small step he released the logic of emancipation, for equality as supposition unlocks possibility and opens the door to social change. Although this presupposition

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that all were equal drove the spirit of the revolution it did not prevail.62 Even in his famous essay on the Enlightenment Kant cannot quite bring himself to abandon the logic of incapacity fearing that if the majority of humans do manage to throw off the yoke of oppression they will not be able to exercise their reason without practice. He thereby wishes to promote the enacting of a ‘secure course’ of correct reason rather than the pitting of any old reason against another.63 Thus the battle between the logics of emancipation and domination had been fought and won before the French Estates General of 1789 established that those in favour of revolution would sit on the left and those in support of the ancien régime would sit on the right, thereby giving rise to our common conceptualisation of politics conceived as struggle that takes place on a continuum between left and right. The spirit of revolution, driven by the logic of emancipation that declared the equal capacity of anyone with everyone, had already been thoroughly tangled back up in the logic of domination. Instead of seeing politics as the struggle between order and disorder, the spirit of revolution as change and possibility versus the spirit of domination and stagnation and impossibility, it left us with two sides arguing over which sort of domination, stagnation and impossibility was best – which ordering of our society we preferred, rather than nourishing the forces of possibility that rupture any order. By the time Marxism emerged with its theorisation of emancipation and revolution the struggle between emancipation and domination had been so subverted as to result in a false dichotomy between liberation and domination.64 I need to emphasise here that I do not mean to present the logic of emancipation versus domination as a simple binary for if we are to understand the logic of emancipation as the logic of Rancièrian ‘politics’ and the logic of domination as the force of the police order, then we know from the previous chapter that the logic of emancipation can never be pure. It can never be completely separate from that of domination. As noted in Chapter 1 there is no social space in which we can be totally free of order and therefore totally free of domination, instead the untangling of the logic of domination and emancipation in this chapter can only ever be partial and will never be complete. This does not mean that it is pointless, for in untangling we create moments of greater emancipation from which reorderings can be constructed; merely that it is a task to which we must be continually committed and is never finished.

Distinguishing domination via the aesthetics of knowledge Although conceptualised differently, it could be argued that Rancière’s critique of the Enlightenment tradition simply echoes that already made by other poststructuralist thinkers. However, it is clear from his critique that the most common poststructuralist trajectories once again lead us back into metapolitics and its dominatory logics. This can be seen most clearly by juxtaposing his work with that of Foucault and Derrida. In tracing the

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distinctions between Rancière’s thought and their work we can see how Rancière’s analysis offers greater potential to guard against the dominatory tendency. First, let us distinguish Rancière’s conceptualisation of domination from that of Foucault’s. Foucault outlined his work on domination in two interviews shortly before his death, when he situated domination in relation to power, freedom and liberation. Beginning with liberation, while Rancière simply avoids this term Foucault has specified a particular objection to it. He is ‘suspicious of the notion of liberation’ since it implies that something has been lost that can be recovered,65 that we have a capacity to retrieve a ‘human nature or base, that as a consequence of certain historical, economic, and social processes, has been concealed, alienated, or imprisoned by mechanisms of repression’, and that somehow this can be overthrown in order to return to the natural or originary state.66 Here the problem for Foucault is that first, there is no such originary state that we can know of, and second, it implies that liberation can be reached in an absolute sense. Instead, he prefers to refer to ‘practices of freedom’ that will always be necessary because it is these practices that we use to operate within the power relations that structure our lives. Foucault understands power relations to be widespread and usually operating everywhere: ‘within families, in pedagogical relationships, political life and so on’.67 Usually these relations are mobile to some extent yet it is here that he introduces the concept of domination as an unusual occurrence, saying that one ‘sometimes encounters situations or states of domination’.68 However, in Foucault’s reading these are extreme examples when ‘power relations, instead of being mobile, allowing the various participants to adopt strategies modifying them, remain blocked, frozen’.69 Now usually practices of freedom are those practices through which we can negotiate power relations and hence exercise our subjectivity; however, in a state of domination ‘certain practices of freedom do not exist or exist only unilaterally or are extremely constrained or limited’.70 Foucault does seem happy here to retain the term ‘liberation’ in response to the successful overthrow of such a state. However, he is keen that we remember that liberation in this sense is still not a total event that gives rise to a happy, uninhibited and free human being, instead it can only ever pave the way for our return to a sphere of flowing power relationships which must in turn ‘be controlled by practices of freedom’.71 Hence domination is a rare limit form of our existence. Interestingly, Foucault goes on to say that power relations operate in three ways. The first can be found in these rare states of domination; the second takes place at the opposite end of the spectrum via free-flowing ‘strategic games between liberties’ which are a ubiquitous feature of human life. These two ways involve ‘structuring the possible field of action of others’ and can take various forms. Importantly, however, they do not necessarily mean that ‘power is exercised against the interests of the other’ party, and hence is not necessarily detrimental for they may not result in ‘the removal of liberty or options available to individuals’.72 In between these two ways are what he

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refers to as ‘techniques of government’ which relates to often implicit rules and conventions that do not only apply to the public sphere but also to family life, education and even to informal social interaction, all of which govern our day-to-day conduct. So for Foucault, when we are not in a state of domination our shared lives comprise everyday strategic games at local level and more institutionalised governing more generally. Although we can be liberated from the state of domination we cannot ever be liberated from the presence of power relations which structure our existence.73 In this sense, then, power relations are the domain that Rancière refers to as police order. However, Rancière tells us that beyond ‘politics’ ‘[t]here is only the order of domination or the disorder of revolt’.74 Domination is at work in all forms of social order. This is because the social is always in some sense organised according to an underlying logic or rationale that distributes bodies in places and justifies distributions of roles and things according to ways of being, saying and doing. Whereas for Foucault the social is the realm of power relations but not always of discipline,75 for Rancière, the social always involves some sort of ordering which take a form similar to Foucault’s understanding of discipline (the ordering of bodies and ways of being in space). Thus Rancière’s understanding of the social is far less complex: we either reject given instances of inequality and pit our reason against the dominant reason in order to effect ‘politics’ via the logic of equality; we accept the dominant reason and its ensuing inequality and do not challenge our order which will always necessarily include partition, hierarchy and thus domination; or we reject current instantiations of inequality according to a logic of inequality in which we fight against our current order in physical combat. At this point the order of domination has broken down, but rather than being challenged by an alternative is in a state of flux whereby we no longer relate to others as equals but as inferiors, enemies to be overcome and dominated. These distinctions are of importance since they result in different ways of conceptualising our response to domination and emancipation. First, for Foucault, domination in terms of blocked power relations can be resisted via liberation but this only takes us back to the field of power relations in which practices of freedom are our tool against the control of others. It would seem that for Foucault domination retains a negative sense. In contrast, for Rancière, domination can be more or less severe but is always present, apart from in the fleeting moments of ‘politics’ that rupture this order but only end in reordering. This means that for Rancière, domination is always a matter of degrees rather than simply being negative.76 Furthermore, their frameworks highlight different aspects of the social. Since for Rancière ‘politics’ is momentary and cannot be guaranteed it is clearly rather different from Foucault’s ‘practices of freedom’ which he developed into an ethics of care of the self.77 Such an ethic would fall within the sphere of policing for Rancière, albeit not necessarily in a negative sense and perhaps as a practice whereby a ‘better’ police order could be created.

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However, since the Foucauldian framework lacks the ability to distinguish these practices as police we fail to see that they too could have dominatory effects. In contrast, Rancière’s approach alerts us much more clearly to the fact that even if ‘practices of freedom’ can exist that may help to lessen the severity of domination in certain ways, they themselves can fall prey to the very logics they are designed to undermine.78 This concern for the domination imposed by any order puts Rancière’s anarchism into sharp focus. With regard to emancipation, if we understand this to be the equivalent of liberation, we have already seen that for Foucault this is momentary, returning us to a field in which we have greater subjectivity compared to the previous state of domination. This seems to accord with Rancière who also does not view emancipation as freeing us from social ordering in general but simply as a moment at which the distribution of the social is challenged and reordered. Despite the apparent similarities here, however, salient distinctions remain concerning the state in which emancipation occurs and what it entails. If, for Foucault, emancipation is the moment of liberation from domination understood as a rare and unusual state then emancipation will also be rare and unusual and only offer escape from extreme subordination rather than a chance to reorder the everyday power relations that structure our lives. Foucault conceptualises this via practices of freedom. Although in the form of an ethos these were suggested above to comprise dominatory elements, as mere practices this need not be such a concern. However, what Rancière’s analysis emphasises is that on their own these practices may not be successful. Practices can create conditions for but need not effect ‘politics’. In contrast, if for Rancière emancipation occurs during a moment of rupture with our everyday order it may be frequently called for, and offers the potential to challenge and reorder everyday distributions of the sensible in a way that can be supported by, but is separable from, dissensual practices such as Foucault’s practices of freedom. In contrast, Derridean poststructuralism leads back to domination via a different route. Rancière has noted similarities between Derrida’s thought and his own work with particular respect to their treatment of democracy, acknowledging overlaps between the way he describes the democratic paradox and Derrida’s assertion of democracy’s aporetic structure79 whereby democracy as a regime is always less than the equality of the name entails and hence the distance between the name and its practice can always undermine any particular instantiation of a democratic regime. However, to maintain the emancipatory function of Rancière’s thought on democracy it is necessary to distinguish his conceptualisation of emancipation from the structure of the Derridean ‘to come’ and critical theory as deconstruction. First, Derrida seeks to render the gap between the double functions of equality in terms of democracy-to-come. However, Rancière is anxious that in practice this move works to erase democracy, since it situates democracy between the democratic regime which is actually oligarchy and the continually deferred promise of democracy leaving us without a way of focusing on

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democracy in the here and now.80 Derrida’s democracy-to-come hence gives ‘both too much and too little to democracy’ in that first, it fails to note that democracy in practice ‘is more than a regime’ and second, because democracy in practice is thus ‘always less than the infinite openness to the Other’.81 In contrast, Rancière argues that ‘there is not one infinite openness to otherness, but instead many ways of inscribing the part of the other’.82 At first this may seem a little pernickety since Derrida clearly sees democracy-tocome opening up a function for democracy to work against itself as the critique of any instituted regime. However, Rancière’s distinction serves to highlight that Derrida’s focus on the ‘to come’ structure of democracy diverts our attention from the moment of subjectivation that is so essential for the practice of Rancièrian democracy.83 Furthermore, it enables us to pull back from the endless futurity of the Derridean impulse and focus on the here and now, on acting ‘in this broken time instead of invoking a messianism’.84 Moreover, the juxtaposition with Derrida brings into focus Rancière’s aversion to futurity and his rejection of the ethical turn. He elaborates this rejection via Derrida’s acceptance of sovereignty as ‘the essence of politics’85 in Force of Law onwards, which for Rancière has the effect of removing any force from the demos, since the demos thus has no specificity, and its political force is instead only inherited by the people following the overthrow of the institution of monarchy. This prompts Derrida to identify the notion of political subjectivity with that of brotherhood, guided by familial rules and conventions and consequently implies that political power is simply an extension of familial power.86 For Derrida, the political community involves an assumption of sameness in some sense: a form of ‘substitutability’ whereby citizens (male and female) are in equal brotherly relationships with one another. In contrast, Derrida’s concept of otherness denotes an other who is outside of citizenship and is never substitutable in the role of brother: the wholly other. Thus democracy-to-come involves a commitment to one who can never be ‘one of us’. It is rendered impotent and sterile; a democracy without a demos and without a relevant people. Instead, Rancière’s ‘aesthetic’ conception of ‘politics’ introduces an ‘as if ’ into the equation that has no place in the Derridean formula. For Rancière, as we have already seen, the political force of democracy comes from the ability of the subject to enact its part within the demos, to act ‘as if it were the demos’.87 Without the ‘as if ’ Derrida’s ethical ‘politics’ is empty of the force for change, and for emancipation. It is simply an unreachable horizon, a melancholic reminder that our current state is less than it could be. Yet this is not simply a nihilistic melancholia because it has far more serious implications. It places Derrida’s critical thinking in a position of irredeemable mastery over the other. In Rogues Derrida notes that democracy-to-come ‘does indeed translate or call for a militant and interminable political critique’,88 but swiftly follows this with the claim that the other who is the heart of this democracy-to-come is seen by the theorist as an ‘object of concern’89 rather than as a subject, who through their own actions ‘affirms the capacity

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of those who have no capacity’. Hence democracy-to-come permanently ‘others’ and subordinates, thereby applying the logic of domination, rather than seeking to loosen or break with it. This leads Rancière to express a general concern about the futurity that accompanies the ethical turn of deconstruction which distracts us from the urgent attention to the here and now: Stepping out of today’s ethical configuration, returning the inventions of politics and art to their differences entails rejecting the phantasm of their purity, giving back to these inventions their status as always being ambiguous, precarious, litigious cuts. This necessarily entails divorcing them from any theology of time, from any thought of a primordial trauma or a salvation to come.91 For Rancière, it is only through breaking with Derrida’s messianism and futurity that we can bring back the possibility of emancipation today. Yet this is not simply an argument with Derrida, it is part of Rancière’s wider argument with political philosophy whereby the formation of knowledge into a discipline involves the regulation of its object – in this case ‘politics’. As politics is a miscount, it is unregulatable, and thus all attempts to pin it down so that it can be studied end up misrecognising it in some way. This is not just a problem for political philosophy, it is an epistemological problem for the way in which we approach knowledge in general: we reduce it in order to make sense of it. However, this is particularly troublesome with respect to ‘politics’ because it suppresses change in our social structures. To avoid this reductive drive Rancière argues that we need to appreciate the aesthetic dimension of knowledge,92 the dimension in which all knowledge is appearance – with no proper truth underlying or behind it. This draws on the Kantian ‘aesthetic experience’ as that which breaks with what we know – an experience that we cannot make sense of in the existing frameworks of knowledge. Yet poststructuralist philosophy is fearful of such a notion, suggesting that belief in such a perspective outside of knowledge frameworks is either an illusion that masks the privilege of the subject (e.g. Bourdieu) or that it reveals a hidden truth, the radical dependency of the human on the Other (e.g. Lyotard and Derrida). Consequently, these varied critiques of Kantian aesthetics all share the metapolitical approach to knowledge that implies that such an aesthetic experience is not a break with knowledge but simple ignorance of the knowledge that can explain it away. Each in their different ways opposes the aesthetic dimension of knowledge with an ethical dimension that tells us of a way of being that corresponds to any particular identity or location in an order. Each discipline (e.g. sociology, philosophy, history, science) may seek to do this in different ways but nonetheless will all specify an order of knowledge that rejects the possibility of any confusion, break or rupture. In contrast, Rancière argues that aesthetics is concerned with the change in the status of the aforementioned ‘as if ’ whereby knowledge

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can be doubled: an artisan’s gaze can alight on a view ‘as if ’ he were the bourgeois master who owned it despite knowing full well that he does not. As we have seen this moment has the potential to provoke the subjectivation of a subject capable of escaping from the place to which it has been assigned and ‘intervening in the affairs of a community’.93 Thus any turn to ethics is a turn back to the division of knowledge that leads to domination. Hence the aforementioned point regarding Foucault’s turn to ethics is also the distinguishing factor between his and Rancière’s thought on the Enlightenment. For Foucault, despite the common conception that the Enlightenment concerned the emergence and promotion of ‘right reason’ which has subsequently been questioned and critiqued, its lasting legacy was in actual fact the emergence of an ethos of permanent questioning and critique.94 In contrast to this, we see in the above exposition that Rancière is far more cautious about any claim that the Enlightenment produced a new and admirable way of being, and instead remarks on its novelty in the emergence of the assumption that all were of equal intelligence. This does not necessarily lead to any attitude or ethos (which again is a claim of policing) about the way in which we should now behave post-Enlightenment. Instead, Rancière notes the emergence of the emancipatory logic and its immediate entrapment once again in forms of ordering, including any particular attitude or ethos. Here for Rancière we have the popular emergence of a potentially disruptive logic that consequently is immediately entangled back into our systems of ordering before it can do too much damage as opposed to Foucault’s rendering of the emergence of an attitude of critique and questioning that we should value in and of itself. For Rancière, the only reason we should value this is if we are committed to emancipation and equality. Hence it is not the attitude that is of value, rather the consequences that it can be used to effect. As a result, this brief juxtaposition of Rancière’s critique of the Enlightenment with that of other poststructuralist thinkers helps to distinguish his analysis and indicate how each of these thinkers lead us back into the logic of domination. Where, though, does this leave critical theory in even its broadest sense? Despite pretensions towards emancipation and revolution, Rancière has argued that any thinking, including critical theory, is deeply mired within the knowledge tradition and thus, despite any emancipatory aims, has always ended up serving and promulgating the very order it intended to critique. Curiously, however, and in spite of these accusations, Rancière does not appear ready to give up on the critical tradition for he concludes his New Delhi lecture by handing over to his audience the task of investigating anew the power ‘inherent in the equality of anyone with everyone’ and into ‘the multiplicity of its forms’.95 Furthermore, it is evident from his essay The Misadventures of Critical Thought that he conceptualises this as a task of critical thinking. Indeed, this title implies that critical theory has taken a wrong turn away from its original aims, and includes within it a call for a return to critique as a ‘genuine critique of critique’.96 Yet despite his detailed analysis of critical theory’s misadventure he has not yet thematised what this genuine

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critique of critique might be comprised of, nor has he detailed how any ‘genuine critique’ might avoid the dominatory logic that he has argued is inherent in any disciplinary organisation of knowledge. In response to his call, the remainder of this chapter will seek to sketch out how we might reconfigure an emancipatory critical theory that avoids the tendencies of archi- or metapolitics. In order to apply ourselves to this task let us pause a moment at this point to examine carefully the directions that Rancière gives us. He tells us that this revised critical theory ‘cannot be a further inversion of its logic’ but must instead take the form of ‘a re-examination of its concepts and procedures, their genealogy and the way in which they become intertwined with the logic of social emancipation’.97 In his call for a genealogy he indicates that we need to turn right back to the moment when the spirit of revolution emerged onto the scene at the beginning of the modern age, to patiently sift through the rubble surveyed by Benjamin’s angel of history, and to untangle the threads of emancipation from the threads of domination. However, it is clear that in this task we must also remain attentive to ensure that we do not inadvertently add ‘another twist to the reversals that forever maintain the same machinery’.98 Yet beyond these few sentences I am curious as to how this new aesthetic practice of philosophy as ‘genuine critique’ can itself be immune to the disciplinary logics of all forms of knowledge. A first step is apparent in Rancière’s suggestion that there are two ways to counter philosophy’s internal dominatory logic that emerges in its selfidentification as a kind of ‘super-discipline’ above all other disciplines. It could be challenged by an opposing dominatory logic that sets up another discipline (such as science) in opposition to it. However, he favours an alternative approach which would ‘seize the moment in which the philosophical pretention to found the order of discourse is reversed, becoming the declaration, in the egalitarian language of the narrative, of the arbitrary nature of this order’.99 It seems that this would force philosophy to become aware of itself as a poetic practice, and thereby enable the creation of a ‘space without boundaries which is also a space of equality’.100 As a result, it is clear that such a philosophy must reject the given disciplinary boundaries and hence would be an interdisciplinary practice that critiques the foundational claims and corresponding ethos of any discipline. In addition, rather than a secret veiled by the social Rancière simply posits the world as comprising scenes of dissensus. This is empowering because it reintroduces the possibility (of change) into the social landscape. It means we can never say never: every situation can be cracked open from the inside, reconfigured in a different regime of perception and signification. To reconfigure the landscape of what can be seen and what can be thought is to alter the field of the possible and the distribution of capacities and incapacities.101 This reveals the potential of dissensus to emerge at any time and in any place, such that it is always possible to conceive a way out of domination through

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reconfiguration of the order of the sensible; through ‘politics’ understood as the formation of subjectivities102 via appropriation and dis-identification. Political action must now focus on what is perceived rather than distracting itself through concern over what this perception may (or may not) be hiding, and this means a focus on the conditions for subjectivation in terms of ‘both the obviousness of what can be perceived, thought and done, and the distribution of those who are capable of perceiving, thinking and altering the coordinates of the shared world’.103 Thus we have identified critical theory’s task which is to attend to the question of which conditions are more or less conducive to such ‘obviousness’ as well as the relation between these and particular ‘distributions’ of the social. However, this still leaves us unsure about what the practice of critical thinking might consist of more precisely and how it can avoid being made sense of as a regular discipline. In the absence of any work by Rancière on this I wish to investigate whether Rancière’s call for a revised critical theory can be met by Menke’s rethinking of the Frankfurt School’s tradition of critical theory as an open-ended practice of reflexive reconstruction.104

Christoph Menke and critical thinking as a practice of reflexivity Why might Menke be of use to us here? Rancière suggests that critical theory is not all bad, but that it needs to untangle the logic of domination from that of emancipation. It needs to be careful of any tendency that leads to a theory of mystification and hidden truth. In his essay Critical Theory and Tragic Knowledge Menke critiqued the teleological tendencies of Horkheimer and Adorno’s critical theory so as to rethink it for today.105 It is suggested here that he helps us to proceed further in this task of untangling. Furthermore, he emphasises the central place of reflexivity and interdisciplinarity in the critical tradition but seeks to untangle this from the tendency towards idealist mystification.106 In Critical Theory and Tragic Knowledge Menke seeks to resolve internal tensions within the Frankfurt School’s critical theory project which undermine its emancipatory objectives. He proceeds by positing that critical theory needs to be based on a materialist rather than an idealist conception of social praxis while also abandoning the idea of a final resolution in either sublation or reconciliation, respectively. He begins with Horkheimer’s essay Critical Theory in which critical theory is presented as a practice through which we can dissolve the apparent necessity of our social world into freedom. For Horkheimer, critical theory belonged to a hopeful process consisting of ‘the effective striving for a future condition of things in which whatever man wills is also necessary and in which the necessity of the object becomes the necessity of a rationally mastered event’.107 Thus critical thinking at this point can be identified within the aforementioned logic of inversion: the method by which we are to overcome the supposed necessity of existing conditions, by unmasking the real of human will in order to create ‘a community of free

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persons’. However, a strong Hegelian idealism can be identified, whereby Horkheimer figures human society as alienated from itself through social praxis that takes us away from our true natures. He suggests that critical theory can lead us to an unalienated praxis in the concepts and metaphors of production as the result of free conscious spontaneity, thereby presenting reflection in the Hegelian mode as the unification of practice and thought.108 Yet Menke notes that in other places an alternative version is apparent, whereby reflection is presented as materialist since it can maintain ‘the irreducible tension between concept and object and thus has a critical weapon of defense against belief in the infinity of mind’.109 Hence this materialism results in the critical consciousness that praxis can never be totally and finally attained via reflection. Although Horkheimer forces this back to idealism maintaining that ‘the materialist truth beyond transcendental subjectivity should be the idea of a conscious and willed social self-reproduction110 Menke notes that his conceding to materialism this far entails the consciousness that ‘social praxis cannot be made as a whole because it cannot be known as a whole’.111 Hence Menke suggests that Horkheimer’s concession to materialism undermines the idealist version of critical theory. Menke traces critical theory’s further move towards materialism in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics in which Adorno asserts that ‘[t]he materialistically revealed moments of praxis, which withdraw reflexive acquisition just as much as planned production, are not, – or indeed not only – hindering, but rather enabling’.112 As such he refigures the reflexive reconstruction of critical theory as ‘interpretation, with no endpoint’.113 In this move, critical theory is understood as a task of reconstruction, a retracing of objects ‘as a hypercomplex web or … interweaving’.114 This enables a redrawing not in the sense of ‘(re)producing out of oneself ’ (as in the Hegelian model) but neither is it ‘a purely passive taking up or listening’ a simple reflecting back of a reality understood as prior to the subject (as traditional theory does). Instead, Menke notes that this is ‘a reading that must always be understood as a new and comprehensive writing’115 in the sense of a reading of the world that is always a remaking of the world. When thus conceived critical theory recognises its own implication in the world that it studies. As such reflexive reconstruction is not just a study of the world but a practice understood as an intervention in it. Despite this step, the aforementioned tendency towards idealism is maintained in both Horkheimer and Adorno’s work in their respective theories of sublation and reconciliation.116 These serve to lead both thinkers back to a final overcoming of the material, a final stage that leaves critical theory open to the logic of domination and control and it supposes a true knowledge of the system that can function via a mechanism of inversion. In contrast, Menke posits our need to acknowledge the tragic insight of contingency in place of necessity such that critical theory can be salvaged as a task of attending to human suffering and unhappiness, approaching each instance with the objective of emancipation, while at the same time acknowledging

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that this emancipation will be fragmentary and partial, and cannot emancipate humanity once and for all. Although this move may help to overcome this instance of the logic of domination Menke’s refigured critical theory is still conceived as an academic practice and thus can still fall prey to the idea that it is ‘the proper way of thinking’ that designates those who practice it to lead and others to follow. If we recall Rancière’s comments on capacity and emancipation, as well as his concern for the ethos that accompanies the disciplinarisation of knowledge it would seem that his call for genuine critique cannot be about trying to sketch out a new academic discipline or methodology, for he emphasises the equality of all and challenges any attempt to divide knowledge. Hence we can assume that the ‘investigation of this power’ that he calls for is something that would valuably be practiced by us all in our everyday lives and is not just intended as an academic exercise but needs to be considered as practicable outside of the academy. Thus it is not intended as a discipline of knowledge, used to divide and partition the knowledgeable from the ignorant, but as an everyday practice of reflecting on power structures around us in order to deepen our understanding of how they were formed and thereby recognise their contingency and the availability of alternatives.117 Hence if we return to Rancière’s claim that the ‘disconnection between critical procedures and their purpose strips them of any hope of effectiveness’118 one can extrapolate from this that in reconnecting critical procedures to the emancipatory purpose that he outlines by seeking to remove opportunities for tendency towards the logic of domination, we can bring the hope of effectiveness back in. Thus it appears that Rancière is holding out the hope that a practice of critical thinking extracted from the disciplinary tradition of critical theory can overcome this misunderstanding of emancipation and can both emancipate and lead to the emancipation of others. Yet despite extracting critical thought from the critical theory tradition in this way, we must recall that the tendency towards domination was not Rancière’s only concern, for we opened this chapter with his charge that critical theory is counter-revolutionary. This is puzzling in that it seems that Rancière is suggesting that critical theory must at one and the same time be devoid of a fixed end point while also in service of the revolution. Let us stay with Menke a little longer as he has taken steps to indicate how we might resolve this apparent contradiction. In The Permanance of Revolution Menke informs us that in the early days of revolution it was widely recognised that revolution was best conceived not as a one-off event but as an ongoing unfolding or momentum; never totally fulfilled, its fate is to ‘proceed ever further without end’.119 It was this ongoing momentum that alarmed its conservative opponents who saw this unstoppable progression as dangerous, while it excited its radical proponents, who instead saw it as an expression of the sublime. In an aim to rethink revolution as ongoing rather than as a singular event Menke argues that Burke’s well-known claim that the revolution is simultaneously monstrous and

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tragicomic deserves to be revisited for although this claim intends to communicate that any call for revolution should be rejected because it will bring us instability in either a violent or a farcical form Menke argues that this single two-part description actually awkwardly comprises two separate and opposing readings of the revolution. Each of these readings leads us to a different way of conceptualising revolution. First, in its monstrous form the revolution progresses in a linear fashion growing increasingly terrible and disproportionate to its original aims. The revolution seeks equality, yet since absolute equality can never be realised in any political configuration, the revolution must always overcome any political configuration that seeks to represent it and replace it with another, thus becoming increasingly pervasive and controlling. In doing so it will grow ‘into a terrible and deformed magnitude and power’ through which it seeks to establish its absolute and total formulation of equality.120 In contrast, it is tragicomic because despite seeking equality, it always fails. Every time it tries to effect a particular instantiation of equality in one sphere it will give rise to inequality in another. The revolution is hereby perceived to move in a farcical circular motion, always undermining its own success. Now, this conservative view of the revolution as both monstrous and tragicomic is countered by the radical view of the revolution as sublime yet within this we also find the dual monstrous and tragicomic readings since it is formulated in two opposing ways by French revolutionary Babeuf and Marx. In Babeuf ’s formulation of the French revolution as the forerunner of another revolution that is to come121 we see that the task of the first revolution is to bring about a second, and this will take mankind to a situation of greater justice than anything it has achieved so far.122 Thus the process of the revolution overcoming itself that was noted above by Burke is understood here to be driven by the force of necessity. Each previous revolution must eventually be overcome in quest of the infinite claim of a normatively correct principle of equality which will continue to elude us, yet drive us forward in pursuit of an ever greater perfection. This is theorised by Babeuf through reference to natural law, which means that he suggests that revolution is a political act which could restore an originary equality that humans lost when they left the state of nature.123 Although this conceptualisation is shared by many liberal thinkers, Babeuf differs in that he suggests that the liberal notion that such equality is limited to the legal public sphere is a fiction that must be overcome by applying it to our private lives as well, hence figuring equality as sublime since it is greater than the liberal conception, and is unlimited and borderless.124 However, Menke points out that the political consequences of such a utopian vision mean that the same can only be guaranteed to everyone by presupposing that ‘everybody already wants the same’ for it is rooted in the ancient idea of democracy in the sense of equality of citizen virtue or striving for virtue which is manifest in the public good which trumps each individual good. Here, Rancière’s mechanism of inversion returns in force for Babeuf is thus

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able to assume that all citizens must also want the public good and if not they can be labelled ‘ambitious’ or ‘selfish’ and in need of correction.125 Thus we see that the consequence of this utopian view is tyranny as exemplified by the revolutionary terror of 1790s France. Consequently, this sublime reading may manage to counter the reading of revolution as tragicomic, but it cannot counter Burke’s claim that revolution is monstrous. In contrast, despite Rancière’s identification of the mechanism of inversion in some of Marx’s writings, Menke identifies herein a second formulation of the sublime demand for equality, the aim of which is not to produce Babeuf ’s state of perfect equality but instead ‘to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected and contemptible being’.126 Thus we see that Marx’s interpretation of the imperative of revolution here is subversive rather than utopian,127 for although it wishes to overcome the existing order of legal-political equality it does not establish that the demand for equality that motivates the revolution is ‘grounded in the desirability of its aim of egalitarian relationships’ thereby projecting forward to where we have to go, but instead ‘traces the revolutionary demand of equality back to a preceding and, what is more, negatively oriented impulse: the impulse which is directed against all relationships of debasement and contempt’.128 Whereas the revolutionary demand for equality is fundamental for Babeuf who takes it as the basis for revolution and thus an end in itself, for Marx it is secondary, since it is in response to the relationships of debasement, enslavement, neglect and contempt. However, Menke has one remaining concern regarding Marx’s formulation in that Marx assumed that all of these conditions are ‘objectively ascertainable’ and can be discovered through the correct theory, while he also narrows and limits the many ways in which mankind can be subject to these conditions as reducible to class conditions.129 Here Menke argues that freeing Marx’s theory from these two suppositions helps us to see that the relations of debasement, enslavement, neglect and contempt that trigger revolution begin in the experience of individuals and thus are different for all who experience them. This allows us to liberate the sublime radical discourse from the utopian end we find in Babeuf and instead it reveals to us that revolution ‘is the place or, better, the time in which everybody’s experiences of debasement, neglect, enslavement, and contempt are expressed and brought to light’.130 Thus we see here that ‘revolution cannot be defined by its end point’ by a type of equality it is seeking to bring about, but instead can only be defined ‘by a present that seeks to break with the past’.131 Consequently, in this reading revolution needs to be defined not by a practice which asserts one particular realisation of equality (e.g. merely legal, material or civil), but one which goes beyond this as a practice seeking to realise the prior stage to this, i.e. ‘the state in which everybody gives voice – once again or for the first time – to their experiences of debasement, neglect, enslavement, and contempt’.132 This is the starting point from which competing interpretations of equality can perpetually be instantiated, challenged and reformulated.

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What then of the monstrous and tragicomic? Should we not be concerned that the tragicomic fate or the spectre of terror would still befall an openended revolution? First, with regard to the monstrous, Menke suggests that the utopian reading of the revolution as sublime cannot hold out against Burke’s reading of the revolution as monstrous because it incorporates a totalising impulse that drives revolution towards ‘an ever broader expansion of equality’.133 In contrast, the subversive reading of revolution is driven not by an abstract principle of equality but by equality as a response to a particular instantiation of domination. This provides an internal limit to the revolutionary aims, since even if one instantiation is overcome, a resulting experience of domination no doubt will still emerge to prompt a further reconfiguration of equality. With regard to the tragicomic figured as the self-undermining of the revolution, the utopian version sees any challenge to the onward march for equality as a weakness or betrayal that needs to be suppressed and overcome, and thus it can figure the tragicomic as avoidable and controllable. In contrast, the subversive version responds rather differently, in that it recognises the tragicomic as necessary and indeed constitutive of revolution, and thus embraces it rather than seeing it as a weakness. This is because the revolution can be seen to undermine itself in two distinct ways. First, self-undermining happens to the revolution since in achieving its ends (a certain form of equality) it realises the injustices perpetrated in its name and realises its imperfection. This is no bad thing as it limits the injustices it will engender. Second, it consciously enacts a form of undermining in that it then moves on to overcome newly emerging injustices. Thus Menke argues that the radical revolutionaries who follow the utopian reading of revolution run the risk of leading us to domination and underestimate the extent to which the revolution can be undermined. Meanwhile, the subversive reading is protected from revolutionary terror and can tolerate its own limits by accepting its tragicomic nature, thereby resolving Burke’s concerns. Menke’s identification of the subversive view of revolution not as a striving toward (as in Babeuf ’s utopian version) but as a struggle against helps us to overcome the logic of domination by refiguring revolution as open-ended. However, rather than filling in unnecessarily what it is a struggle against and hence limiting its scope as seen in the quote from Marx above, what I want to take from Menke here is that revolution is simply a struggle against domination however it appears. It is the transformation of social conditions via an act of emancipation. The subversive conceptualisation of revolution can avoid both terror and farce by relinquishing itself to neither. Instead, it avoids terror by not aiming for perfection and avoids farce by not surrendering to imperfection, but always strives to refigure social conditions to avoid domination and by reacting to instances of domination as they emerge. Critical thinking can thus avoid Rancière’s counter-revolutionary charge if it is figured simply as a

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reflexive process in service of revolution conceived as such, a practice dedicated to identifying conditions that contribute to domination. Indeed, in Politics on the Edges of Liberalism Benjamin Arditi draws attention to the fact that we think of revolution as a singular event. He makes a case for us to rethink ‘revolutionary singularity’ as ‘a multiplicity of discontinuous sites of enunciation of challenges to the status quo’.134 Any lasting confusion about the duration of such a multiplicity disappears with the realisation that ‘revolution is not simply a distant time-shattering event that will lay the foundations for a future state but primarily a performative designating the activity of revolutionising through which a revolution has already begun to happen as we work for it here and now’.135

Reflexivity as dissensual practice So what might this mean for us today? This chapter has identified that Rancière is calling for a practice of critical thinking that reformulates critical theory as a practice of reflexivity which in turn serves the logic of emancipation rather than domination. As a practice of untangling, this revised critical thinking seeks to identify and overcome the mechanism of inversion. I have suggested that the reflexive reconstruction of the Frankfurt School’s critical thought is of use here but is made available to us through Menke’s reconceptualisation that separates the practice of open-ended reflexive reconstruction from the telos of either sublation or reconciliation and replaces this with a commitment to perpetual revolutionising understood as a commitment to conditions that are more conducive to the emergence of ‘politics’.136 Approaching knowledge through its aesthetic dimension this practice promotes perpetual disorientation of our ways of thinking to disrupt disciplinary ethics and boundaries and thereby chart a different course for the thinking of the emancipatory project.

Notes 1 Menke (2006: 60–61). 2 Rancière (2006d: 10). 3 Thus, contra Toscano’s reading, it is clear that Rancière actually defends rather than rejects emancipatory movements (Toscano 2011: 230). 4 Rancière (2009b: 45). 5 Rancière (2009c: 19). 6 Ibid.: 17. 7 In particular Rancière singles out the work of Althusser, Barthes, Bourdieu, Baudrillard and Debord, as well as more recently Bauman and Sloterdijk. 8 16 February 2009. 9 Rancière (2011b: xv). 10 Rancière (1999: 74). 11 Rancière (1999: Ch. 4). 12 Ibid.

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13 Although he has made these claims in many texts (see especially Rancière 2004, 1997, 1999, 2006a, 2009b) as part of wider arguments the New Delhi lecture brings them together on the topic of their relation to critical theory. 14 Rancière (2009d). 15 Ibid.: n.p. 16 Ibid. 17 Marx and Engels (1985: 83). 18 See too Bauman’s Liquid Modernity (2000) for a different interpretation of where this might take us. 19 Sloterdijk (2004). 20 Rancière (2009d: n.p.). 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid.: 30. 23 Ibid.: 31. 24 Rancière (2007a). 25 Rancière (2009b: 34). 26 Ibid. and also Rancière (2011b: xiv). 27 See Rancière (2012a). 28 Rancière (2009d: n.p.). 29 Rancière cites the work of Virno (1996) and Holmes (2002). 30 Rancière (2009b: 36). 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid.: 38. 33 Ibid.: 38. Milner (2003) and Finkielkraut (2005) suggest that the terrorist attack on the twin towers, the rioting by youths of mainly north-African origin in Paris in 2005 and other expressions of resentment or terrorism towards the dominant liberal order were reactions to (or even punishment for) the reign of mass individualism and egotistical consumer freedoms. 34 This first point is made by commentators such as Finkielkraut (2005) on the aforementioned topic of youth riots in the immigrant settled poorest of Parisian suburbs, who in his analysis suddenly come to ‘embody the narcissism and atomism of consumer society’ (Rancière 2009d: n.p.). The second point can be seen by revealing that right and left concur in Boltanski and Chiapello’s aforementioned argument that the irresponsible rebellion of the 1960s generation facilitated the breakdown of society and thereby encouraged the reign of the market (Rancière 2009d: n.p., citing Boltanski and Chiapello 2007). 35 Rancière (2009d: n.p.). 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 See, for example, Brown (1999). 39 Rancière (2009b: 40). 40 Ibid.: n.p., italics in the original. 41 See Rancière’s critique of Meckseper in 2009b: 28–29. 42 Ibid.: 29. 43 Ibid.: 29, 30. 44 Ibid.: 31 45 Ibid.: 40. 46 Rancière (2011b: xvi). 47 Ibid. 48 Rancière (2009b: 43). 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid.: 44. 52 Ibid.: 41.

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Reflexivity Ibid.: 42. Ibid. See Bingham and Biesta (2010: Ch. 2). Rancière (2009b: 42). Ibid.: 43. Descartes (1968: 27). In Politics Aristotle explains that there are those who need to be dominated because they are by nature slavish for they do not comprehend reason, whereas those who do by nature comprehend reason are therefore required to lead, to decide, to order and thus to dominate. Aristotle puts forward an elaboration of the aforementioned argument of capacities found also in Plato’s Republic. See also Rancière’s quotation from Aristotle in the opening lines of Dis-agreement (1999: vii). Menke (2011: 8, italics in the original). Descartes (1968: 27). Thus, contra Foucault’s analysis that suggests that the Enlightenment attitude was jeopardised by the growth of disciplinary procedures, Rancière identifies this one point of contention concerning the assertion or denial of equality. Kant (1996: 59). Rancière (2009b: 43). Foucault (1997c: 282). Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., italics added. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.: 284. Lemke (2002: 53). Foucault (1997c: 292). Rancière (1999: 12). Foucault (1984a: 380. Hence police is a ‘neutral’ term (Rancière 1999: 29) since ‘there is a worse and a better police’ (Ibid.: 31). See Owen and Woodford (2012). Conversely, this could be said to beg the question of whether Rancière’s framework could gloss the distinction between extreme and less serious states of domination. However, there is no reason why this would have to be the case given his assertion that there can be better or worse police orders. Rancière (2010b: 45). See Derrida (2005a and 2005b) in which he figures the democratic aporia in terms of autoimmunity. Rancière (2010b: 59). Ibid.: 60, italics in the original. See Derrida (1994: 82) and (2005a). Rancière (2010b: 60), italics in the original. Rancière (2010d: 59). Rancière (2010b: 60). Rancière (2009c: 12). Derrida (2005a). Rancière (2009c: 13, italics added). Derrida (2005b: 84). Rancière (2009c: 12, referring to Derrida 2005b: 84). Rancière (2009c: 14). Rancière (2006b: 19). See in particular Rancière (2006d and 2009c). Rancière (2006d: 6).

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Foucault (1984a). Rancière (2009d: n.p.). Rancière (2009b.: 45). Rancière (2009c: 46). Ibid. Rancière (2006d: 10). Ibid. Rancière (2009b: 49). Ibid. Ibid. Despite the convergence of their thought here, it is important to note that in other areas their work differs significantly, in particular concerning their figuring of the relationship between politics and equality (see Menke 2006). Menke (1996). There are of course significant differences between Menke’s work and that of Rancière. For example, Menke (2006) theorises politics as beginning in equality, but takes a metapolitical approach rather than identifying equality as a miscount. However, this does not prevent his work on critical theory and revolution from being of use to us here. Menke (1996: 57), citing Horkheimer (1972: 230). Menke (1996: 64). Horkheimer (1972: 28). Menke (1996: 64), italics in the original. Ibid. Ibid.: 65. Adorno (1973: 55). Menke (1996: 66). Ibid. See, for example, Horkheimer (1968: 82) and Adorno (1973: 271). In The Use of Distinctions Rancière (2010c) refers to this practice simply as philosophy. However, since he has used the term critical theory elsewhere I have chosen consistently to use critical theory and then critical thinking for the sake of clarity. Rancière (2009b: 40). Menke (2006: 154). Menke (1996: 157). Menke (2006: 158). Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.: 160. Ibid.: 162. Ibid: 163, italics in the original. Ibid. Ibid.: 163–164, italics in the original. Ibid.: 164. Ibid.: 165. Ibid. Ibid., italics in the original. Ibid.: 171–172. Arditi (2008: 104). Ibid., italics in the original. Not to be confused with the Marxist theory of permanent revolution (Trotsky 2010, derived from Marx and Engels 2003).

3

Aversivity Provoking the self

Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. (Stanley Cavell1) To know that words are merely words and spectacles merely spectacles, can help us arrive at a better understanding of how words and images, stories and performances, can change something of the world we live in. (Jacques Rancière2)

In Chapter 1 it was claimed that if we wish to use Rancière to inspire a democratic strategy of appropriation, dis-identification and subjectification we need to think about how we can conceptualise and reduce the level of conformity that maintains police order, fixing any given conception of the social in place. In attending to this task, this chapter opens with a discussion of the brief mention of conformity by Rancière in his work. It will note that despite the centrality of emancipation in his writing and the insistence that we cannot be emancipated but must emancipate ourselves, he does little to tell us more precisely how we can do this. Consequently, the remainder of the book will proceed by engaging his work in conversation with other thinkers (Cavell, Derrida and Butler) in order first to effect a contrast through which we can bring his meaning into sharper focus, and second to develop his work via the formulation of three more dissensual practices. It will be guided in this task by Rancière’s aforementioned insistence that politics is about challenging existing ways of being, saying and doing through doubling, by which he means the imposition of difference on top of that which already exists. In this chapter it will be suggested that Stanley Cavell’s theory of the double self can help us to loosen our attachments to ways of being through aversivity. Chapter 4 will focus on how reading Rancière alongside Derrida on literarity and democracy helps us to identify poeticity as a practice of dis-orienting our ways of saying. In Chapter 5 it will be argued that by juxtaposing Rancière with Judith Butler’s theory of performativity we can identify absurdity as a practice of unsettling our ways of doing.

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Following the discussion of Rancière’s work on conformity, this chapter will take up its task by considering whether Cavell’s aversive thinking – the practice of doubling the self – can be of use to supplement Rancière’s work by informing a practice of weakening our attachments to ways of being. This chapter responds to my own previous work as well as that of Aletta Norval and David Owen on Cavell and Rancière regarding the topic of subjectivation and ‘soul dawning’.3 We argue that Cavell thematises more fully the moment of subjectivation that is so crucial for Rancière’s ‘politics’. Indeed, Norval suggests that the particular feature of Cavell’s work that is of use for this topic is the attitude of aversion which is theorised in his discussion of Emerson’s aversive thinking. However, I wish to suggest that the reason why aversion provides us with a potential bridge between Cavell and Rancière is that it is here that Cavell theorises the role of the double self in subverting and reshaping the political community. Cavell’s aversive thinking therefore theorises the moment of subjectivation as detailed in Rancière, but also the reidentification that follows. For that reason aversive thinking is of value to an emancipatory project since it contains a theorisation of how we undermine ways of being. However, on closer examination we will see that it cannot easily be extracted from Cavell’s wider theory of moral perfectionism understood as a way of life that is engaged in an ateleological project of democratic responsiveness towards others.4 Despite the loose and fluid conception of ethos underlying such a way of life it still entangles the practice of aversive thinking within an archipolitical project of ethical community, albeit one that is open and revisable. This chapter thus seeks to consider whether we can extract the practice of aversive thinking from moral perfectionism in order to use it to supplement democratic subjectivation. In doing so it will identify and respond to concerns that moral perfectionism is individualistic, introspective and elitist. It will conclude that aversive thinking posits a dissensual rather than an individualistic relationship with society, and that by reading Cavell’s work on exemplars alongside Rancière we can untangle and protect against the elitism that remains in moral perfectionism by replacing it with a relation of provocation both within and between selves. Thus for this project I reject aversive thinking as an ethos and instead extract a dissensual democratic practice of aversivity to both self and others in the name of equality that constantly disputes any order of the community from which it emerges and hence works to loosen our attachments to any given ways of being, consenting to the communities we construct only inasmuch as we dissent from them.

Appropriating emancipation against conformity Chapter 1 concluded that a priority for the left was to consider the ways in which ‘politics’ could be more easily effected through the development of democratic practices that might untangle ‘politics’ from police, encouraging subjectivation, by challenging social conformity with any particular order of ways of being, saying and doing. Although Rancière speaks at length about

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the current drive for consensus that seeks to close down possibilities for ‘politics’ he does not analyse how this conformity is maintained. He merely identifies that the main obstacle to the subjectivation of politics is doubt about one’s own capacity which is to blame for the acceptance of the division of labour that assigns bodies to allotted places.5 This claim is carefully outlined in The Ignorant Schoolmaster which tells the story of French school teacher Joseph Jacotot’s experiments with unorthodox pedagogical methods.6 While exiled in Flanders in the early nineteenth century, Jacotot took a job teaching literature at a Flemish university, but was unable to speak Flemish to his students who were in turn unable to speak French. With the help of a translator, he managed to teach a course of lectures on the text Telemaque and at the end of term set an assignment for the Flemish students to complete in French. The students’ only aid was a bilingual copy of the text. Jacotot was astonished when the students all managed to submit acceptable papers written in French. This prompted him to suspect that the common assumption that students need to be taught by a teacher who already has knowledge and who in the act of teaching passes his/her knowledge to the students, may be unfounded. In fact, Jacotot started to suspect that our understanding was in large part independent from the teacher. Reflecting further on this possibility he developed a new style of teaching that does not require a knowledgeable teacher and instead enables a teacher to teach what he or she does not know. Initially, he designed this as a method to be used by illiterate parents in order to teach their children to read by using the words of a familiar prayer or poem, for example, that could be found in an already available book or written down on request by a literate person. By pointing to each word and asking the child to observe what it must be, Jacotot suggested that a parent who cannot read nevertheless can teach their child to do so.7 Jacotot referred to this method as ‘universal teaching’ in opposition to the traditional understanding of education whereby the ignorant are taught by the knowledgeable. In the traditional ‘old master’ relation, knowledge is perceived as something that is transmitted to the student via explanation, and in the ‘explicative’ order hierarchies exist between those who know and those who do not. In contrast to the explicative order, universal teaching does not seek to provide knowledge to the student, rather to create the conditions for the student to learn on their own. This order has the power to challenge the hierarchies of the traditional relation by breaking down the unequal status of teacher and student. When Jacotot first developed his theory of universal teaching it attracted much interest. A journal was established by its followers, and Jacotot came to the attention of the Dutch royal family who appointed him to teach at a military academy.8 Yet it soon became evident to him that such an education could not be institutionalised because to do so would require the establishment of some form of order and regulation which would go against the principle of radical equality that universal teaching is founded upon. This is not to say that the proponents of universal teaching are completely opposed to

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any form of social order, merely that they tolerate order as instrumental (merely better than disorder), rather than as a good in itself. Rancière suggests that it is not enough for institutions to be founded upon such minimal respect, for they require much more from us in terms of loyalty and commitment.9 Thus, if any institutionalisation necessarily requires the explicative order because it cannot tolerate the destabilising notions of universal teaching, such teaching cannot be institutionalised and ‘can only be directed to individuals, never to societies’.10 Consequently, we see why Jacotot claimed that universal teaching ‘will not take’, i.e. it will never replace the traditional hierarchies of knowledge in that it cannot be established in society. However, he also asserted that ‘it will not perish’ either, ‘because it is the natural method of the human mind, that of all people who look for their path themselves’.11 Thus it retains an unsettling presence that can never be completely suppressed, and has the ability to overturn and challenge the ordered division between student and pupil, the giver and the receiver of knowledge. Yet what is of interest here is that barriers to this new method exist not in its failure to be instituted but simply in the lack of enactment of the capacity of all. Hence Rancière refers to the logic of emancipation as a hypothesis of ‘confidence’, and in The Nights of Labour identifies that the moment of ‘politics’ depends on subjectivation, a moment in which one rejects the identities, categorisation, and ways of being, saying and doing allotted by the given order, when one stops accepting the mastery of others and asserts one’s own equality. Indeed, the consensus system ensures that we do not challenge our allotted ways, and hence democracy cannot emerge. In direct opposition to this the remainder of this book seeks to investigate practices that can challenge our ways of being, saying and doing. This chapter begins this task by asking how we might undermine our dependence on preordained ways of being. As noted above, Rancière insists that emancipation cannot be something that is done for a person by another since this maintains a relationship of dependence between them. Instead, if emancipation is to happen people need to emancipate themselves. Initially, this can seem problematic but, as noted in Chapters 1 and 4, solidarity is possible. Thus, contra some of the critics discussed in Chapter 1, Rancière is not suggesting that the rest of us should sit back and wash our hands of social struggle. This is particularly evident from the story of Jacotot since Rancière notes that the logic of emancipation does not mean that teachers become unnecessary but that their role is reconfigured. The relationship between teacher and pupil changes from one of inequality to one of equality whereby rather than one party leading and emancipating the other, the teacher can help to create conditions under which pupils can emancipate themselves but cannot guarantee that emancipation will happen nor take credit for it when it does. It thereby switches from a situation of incapacity to one of capacity.12 It is puzzling, however, that in The Ignorant Schoolmaster Rancière implies that the barriers to this new method exist not in its failure to be instituted but in the individuals themselves who refuse to accept that their knowledge is

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equal to that of others. This path towards acknowledgement of one’s own intellectual faculties, which Rancière refers to as the path to emancipation does not appeal to everyone with some people being disinclined to acknowledge their own abilities. Rancière refers to such a disposition as ‘stultification’ and love of ‘routine’.13 In particular he states that Stultification is not an inveterate superstition; it is fear in the face of liberty. Routine is not ignorance; it is the cowardice and pride of people who renounce their own power for the unique pleasure of affirming their neighbour’s incapacity.14 Here he indicates that when people do not emancipate themselves it is because they prefer to conform to the current view that they are not capable because they are fearful of the alternative (the responsibility of having to think for themselves and to be held accountable for doing so). He seems to imply that to accept the thought of others is less daunting and brings the short-term benefit of being able to take one’s place in the hierarchy of knowledge, which enables people to look down on those they deem more ignorant. This language appears strangely judgemental and despite rejecting the binary of ignorance and knowledge seems simply to replace it with one of cowardice versus bravery. Although the above passage continues by clarifying that its object is the ‘followers of the Old Master and those powerful in the old mode’15 it appears inconsistent with the rest of Rancière’s work which focuses on capacity rather than condemnation. Although the style of the text does make it unclear when Rancière is speaking his own thoughts and when he is paraphrasing Jacotot16 it remains disconcerting. However, it is suggested below that since stultification is something that is done to people and hence is an effect of domination we need to read these comments as drawing our attention to the structure which depends on people remaining disinclined towards emancipation, as well as emphasising that thinking for one’s self cannot be done for you. In his book On the Shores of Politics the relationship between emancipation and Rancière’s police/‘politics’ schema begins to emerge more clearly, for it is here that Rancière defines emancipation as ‘escape from a state of minority’17 and furthermore explicitly links this to the struggle for equality that we later (in Dis-agreement) come to discover is what constitutes his understanding of ‘politics’. Here, he tells us that the moment of ‘politics’ depends on emancipation: the acknowledgement that one’s own thoughts are equal to another’s. Furthermore, this is not simply an individualistic exercise for ‘any individual can always, at any moment, be emancipated and emancipate someone else’ and the way in which they do this is not to explain but to announce, for they need to ‘announce to others the practice’ of universal teaching.18 He thereby acknowledges a role for those that Jacotot refers to as ‘the disciples’ of universal teaching who ‘announce to all individuals … the way to teach what one doesn’t know on the principle of the equality of

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intelligence’. In a later text on emancipation, The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière implies that such a disciple ‘does not teach a pupil his knowledge, but orders them to venture into the forest of things and signs, to say what they have seen and what they think of what they have seen’.20 Thus to create conditions for the emancipation of others it is necessary to encourage them to interpret for themselves and to no longer accept the thoughts of others, to engage in the practice of ‘knowing oneself ’.21 He also clarifies here that the aforementioned reference to a lack of emancipation as ‘stultification’ refers to the way that the traditional pedagogical methods entangle students into a discourse of their own inability rather than this being perpetuated through laziness or lack of routine.22 Rancière does not engage in further analysis of the conditions which either support or undermine this teaching, to loosen our conformity with ways of being, saying and doing that keep any given configuration of police order in its place. Picking up this thread, the following three chapters look at practices that may assist us to create conditions for emancipation. They approach this task along the three axes of being, saying and doing and consider practices that we could effect to become more attuned to the instances of doubling of our ordinary ways that may reconfigure social ordering.

Emancipation in Cavell’s aversive thinking Beginning with ways of being, Rancière has already indicated that the emancipation of ‘politics’ begins through change in the self: a struggle for equality can never be merely a demand upon the other, nor a pressure put upon him, but always simultaneously a proof given to oneself. This is what ‘emancipation’ means. It means escaping from a minority. But nobody escapes from the social minority save by their own efforts.23 Importantly, this is not a fixed and isolated notion of the self but a shifting fluid play ‘with the relation of self to self ’24 which indicates that the self is a fertile site for the doubling that is key to Rancière’s account of democratic ‘politics’. Given the lack of further work by Rancière on this, I am curious to consider the extent to which Cavell’s theory of the double self may enhance our understanding of emancipation. Such a task may strike the reader as incongruous since Rancière’s programme of radical pedagogy and emancipation has emerged from a separate tradition to that of the Wittgensteinian ethical focus of Cavell’s moral perfectionism. Nevertheless, it does not take much to find echoes of Rancière’s thematisation of subjectivation via knowing your own thoughts in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson that so inspire Cavell.25 Consequently, the next few pages will trace the emergence of the double self in Cavell’s reading of Emerson to consider the extent to which it can be seen to supplement Rancière’s work on emancipation.

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The double self emerges in the practice of aversive thinking in Cavell’s reading of Emerson. Aversive thinking challenges conformity in the sense that to conform is simply to follow the thoughts of others, whereas to rely on your own thoughts requires you to reflect upon others’ thoughts, to weigh them up for yourself.26 Emerson indicates that thinking in this way is achieved by appreciating that the thinking subject is itself in flux: it is continually (re)formed in response to its thoughts and thus is always working towards a new self currently ‘unattained yet attainable’.27 This process is never complete, not because we never reach the higher and next self, but because in reaching it, we will always see yet another next, still higher self, to reach for. Thus, for Emerson, aversive thinking is something that must be practiced continually. It requires constant commitment to what he refers to as the ‘conversion’ and thus ‘transfiguration’ of thought.28 These terms can be read with reference to Cavell’s earlier writing on Wittgenstein, in whose Investigations Cavell interprets a ‘call … for transfiguration, which one may think of in terms of revolution or conversion’29 invoking the necessity of ‘contesting (rather than blindly conserving) the culture’s understanding of its true needs’.30 Such thinking is depicted in Emerson’s work as oppositional or aversive, which refers to the fact that one’s thinking changes perspective in order to enable us to see things differently. Cavell identifies this change of perspective with Wittgenstein’s famous discussion of the duck-rabbit image through which an observer views one or the other image (duck or rabbit) in the same drawing without any new lines being added. A shift in perspective permits this movement from one to the other, yet crucially only one image can be viewed at any one moment, never both at the same time, despite the presence of both perspectives within the one drawing. Cavell emphasises that this means that recognition needs to arise in the viewer that both images exist within one another contemporaneously.31 So although the movement from one image to another is subject to will32 that which ‘we see from each standpoint is not … the opposition is total … one interpretation eclipses another, annihilates it – until it returns with its own annihilative power (or weakness)’;33 thus according to him, this change of perspective requires the aforementioned aversion to conformity in that this removes any control over where thinking may take someone (over what they want to see). Furthermore, Cavell’s figuring of aversive thinking as conversion and then transfiguration demonstrates that this process cannot be a one-off event whereby it takes an isolated thought from perspective A to perspective B. Instead, it must be an ongoing practice, in order to stand continually against conformity. To illustrate this further, it is helpful to reflect a little more upon the figure of the unattained but attainable self. It is noted above that Emerson often implies that aversive thinking will lead us towards what it means to be more human but he does not assert that aversive thinking will ever make one truly human (in the sense of once and for all), for its ateleological nature means that we can become more human without a teleological end-point. Emersonian perfectionism is therefore about one’s relationship to one’s self, or

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better understood as one’s relationship to one’s selves, for it recognises a doubleness of the self, between the self that we are, in a present moment, and the self that we can become. These two facets of the self are called the attained and the ‘unattained yet attainable’ selves by Emerson, whereby the relationship between the two is understood as a continual ateleological process. It is important for Emerson that the whole concept of ‘“having” “a” self is a process of moving to, and from, nexts’.34 This is important if we reflect on Rancière’s claim that emancipation is what makes you truly human, and that emancipation emerges in ‘politics’ which is the doubling of ways of being, saying and doing. Reflecting back on Rancière via Emerson helps us to posit that emancipation is an ongoing process of trusting your own thoughts, not a mere one-off instance. Interestingly, such a journey is evoked in Rancière’s aforementioned understanding of emancipation as a ‘twisted path’35 and draws out the notion that the next selves form stages on this journey. Indeed, this temporal dimension to emancipation as lived experience does accord with Rancière’s suggestion that emancipation concerns following one’s own path36 thereby also figuring emancipation as a process that unfolds over time. At first glance, then, this practice of aversive thinking appears to resonate closely with Rancière’s work on emancipation. Indeed, Norval has already noted the salience of this conceptualisation of aversion for supplementing subjectivation in Rancière’s work. However, in tracing Norval’s argument we can see that more work might be needed if we are to put aversive thinking in the service of emancipation. Rather than simply extract the practice of aversive thinking, Norval suggests that Cavell gives us an ‘ethos’ of aversion that helps to address a problem in Rancière’s work concerning how ‘democratic challenges find a foothold in existing orders’.37 Although we have already seen that Rancière is troubled by any turn to ethics in political philosophy, Norval argues that he has nothing to fear from the aversive ethos. His critique of ethics arises from the etymological root of ethos as referring to ‘abode’ and the elaboration of any particular ethos as consequently indicating ‘the way of being which corresponds to this abode, the way of feeling and thinking which belongs to whoever occupies any given place’.38 In contrast, the ethos of aversion that Norval finds in Cavell’s work is not specific to a particular place, it simply works to ‘unsettle’ any commitment to location and thus rather than affirming any way of being instead alerts us to the ever present need for change. It can therefore be distinguished from the ethos that concerns Rancière in three ways: first, it conceives ‘of subjectivity in a manner that avoids a given and pure conception of identity in favour of a critical subjectification’; second, it facilitates ‘the possibility of opening up new worlds … it [is] … futural in character’; and third, it conceives ‘of political community, not in substantive terms, but in terms that are attentive to the inevitable closures necessarily accompanying any police order’.39 Yet Norval’s formulation leaves us with two problems. First, she fleshes out the aversive ethos as one of responsiveness. The addition of responsiveness gives it a positive content which stops it from being simply a break from any

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locatable way of being.40 Second, her interpretation of the aversive ethos as futural lays it open once more to Rancière’s critique of Derrida (outlined in the previous chapter). In contrast, I suggest that we need to examine the relationship between aversive thinking and Cavell’s wider project of moral perfectionism in more detail. In doing so we can identify three areas of Cavell’s thought whereby aversive thinking is entangled in the logic of domination. By untangling it we can extract aversion not as an ethos of responsiveness but as a dissensual democratic practice of ‘aversivity’41 which retains but develops Norval’s theorisation of aversion as non-locatable. The three problematic areas are Cavell’s placing aversive thinking within a wider archipolitical project of moral perfectionism; the central role of perfection in the practice aversive thinking; and the charge that aversive thinking is undemocratic. It is only in working through each of these charges that we can identify which features of aversive thinking can work to support emancipation and which might hinder it. Let us begin this argument by considering how far the conceptualisation of aversive thinking depends upon the archipolitical features of moral perfectionism. We have already seen that for Cavell and Emerson the value of aversive thinking is its challenge to conformity. Although initially inspired by a similar concern to that found in Rancière regarding the domination of some through knowledge of others, Emerson diverges from this into an argument about a moral order. We can see this in the commencement address delivered by Emerson entitled ‘The American Scholar’. This is commonly understood as a call for ‘Man Thinking’ in the traditional sense that these young scholars need to commit themselves to their studies in order to learn and critique knowledge from the great masters, as each generation of scholars will surely do. Yet Cavell points out that as the essay develops it becomes apparent that Emerson is asking for something quite different: a deeper reflective and critical thought that emanates from within each individual. Similarly to Jacotot’s critique of the old Master model of teaching we see that Emerson asks these scholars to refuse to bow to knowledge and instead challenges them – the thinkers of the new world – to know their own minds and break free from the mental servitude of old order. For Emerson, it would seem that the figure of the American Scholar, understood as a truly thinking human being, who does not accept the authority of another’s thoughts over his own, does not exist anywhere42 and hence this speech reflects Emerson’s disappointment that the new world of America has not yet produced any new thinking, but is still in thrall to the philosophy, social mores and hypocrisy of the old world.43 Thus in accordance with Jacotot’s universal teaching, aversive thinking is figured here as a way of overcoming conformity with any order of knowledge. Furthermore, this does not represent a whim for Emerson but is an urgent call for change motivated by concern about material injustice. This is particularly clearly exemplified in the essay ‘Fate’ in which he compares the failure to think for oneself to a form of slavery.44 The context through which he makes this argument underlines for us just how seriously he takes the danger

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of conformity, because this essay, written in 1850, only a few months after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, makes no reference to the actual struggle against slavery that so strongly defined that era in American politics.45 Knowing the historical context of this silence, this analogy appears crude, and to many people, reprehensible. Indeed, it is known from other writings that Emerson, who was no supporter of slavery, was horrified by the fact that Daniel Webster, a prominent senator, had supported the Act.46 Hence although the question of his silence on the matter at first seems to hang heavily throughout the essay Cavell’s interpretation suggests that ‘Fate’ is actually about forcing the pressing matter of slavery into the wider context of the very real and serious physical dangers and injustices that can emerge from our social conformity. The likening of non-reflective thought to slavery in this context is therefore not a trite and parasitical claim, but rather when made by a man who abhors the slave trade, emphasises just how seriously he takes the threat of conformity. Cavell reads Emerson as noting a type of hypocrisy in the citizens who condemned Southern slave owners while they themselves continued to be enslaved to conformity. Emerson suggests that many of the proponents of anti-slavery only supported the movement because it is a popular sentiment, not because they have thought it through and believe it is the right thing to do according to their own considerations, that it is right for them. Illustrating his concern by reference to his contemporary reform movements which he suggested were being used in place of ‘critical self reflection’47 he was thereby pointing to the way that these movements represented a banner under which to locate oneself as a ‘moral’ person, as a person who belonged to the current ordering of society and thus could use his or her status of belonging for their own personal advantage, for example, to run for election for public office. Hence the lack of aversive thinking is about locating one’s self in one’s order such that one can benefit from it, whereas the activity of aversive thinking distances oneself from one’s order. This is not to say that Emerson’s analogy does not seem insensitive and distasteful with regard to the existence of slavery, merely that it is important to realise that it was accepted and widely known that Emerson abhorred slavery (and spoke explicitly about it on many other occasions).48 Consequently, this context adds to the rhetorical impact of his argument. The audience, hearing ‘Fate’ for the first time, would have been expecting it to focus on the anti-slavery cause, yet instead they were met with accusations of their own complicity in the society that they now suddenly sought to distance themselves from. Yet unlike Rancière’s focus on emancipation for democracy, the contradiction between the values of the social order and the instance of slavery is not figured by Emerson in terms of equality, but in terms of morality. Emerson argues that if we are to ever overcome material injustices, including but not limited to the example of slavery, we need to realise that we face a more deep-seated challenge: to overcome the mental slavery of conformity too. Emerson indicates that it is only when people are happy to go along unthinkingly with popular ideals that widespread injustices such as the slavery

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of the plantations and farms of the Southern States would be tolerated.49 He uses this essay to demonstrate how a lack of aversive thinking, obvious in social conformity, ‘makes only a formal, superficial, inauthentic form of community’.50 Furthermore, he implies in ‘Self-Reliance’ that instead of living a moral life, truly motivated by one’s own conscience, the radical reformers of his contemporary era ‘had adapted reform as a kind of accounting procedure, a moral penance for a life that was fundamentally alienated’.51 He therefore posits the reform movements as an empty sham; a charade of morality writ large to hide the immoral, conformist persons hidden behind it. Such reform can change society, but will maintain the relationship of dependence rather than prompt subjectivation in the way that Emerson seems to call for. Interestingly, Cavell suggests here that we should take Emerson’s essay as a ‘parable of the struggle against slavery not as a general metaphor for claiming human freedom, but as the absolute image of the necessary siding against fate toward freedom’.52. This is necessary because democracy claims to be a regime of freedom. It is a logical necessity of demonstrating the contradiction between democracy’s promise and the lived reality. This is the contradiction that Rancière has argued is central to ‘politics’. However, Emerson’s method of demonstrating this contradiction involves him pointing towards a more moral future order. He uses morality rather than equality as the measure of this society’s distance from itself. As a consequence he figures the practice of aversive thinking in the service of an archipolitical conception of democracy with its associated approved ways of being. Likewise for Cavell aversive thinking is the central practice of a particular way of life: ‘moral perfectionism’. This, for Cavell, is the best life, the way we should live, whereby we seek always to perfect ourselves, without giving up despite never attaining the ‘final’ end that we aspire to. Thus, for Cavell, aversive thinking serves an ethos or preferred way of being that is locatable, albeit loosely, in a particular concept of democracy as order. The extent to which this makes moral perfectionism an ethos of the type that concerned Rancière can be seen in a closer reading of two places where this emerges most clearly: Cavell’s decision to retain the term ‘perfection’ and the discussion of the role of exemplars for moral perfectionism. First, Cavell’s work is a defence of the perfectionist strand of thinking that runs through the work of many thinkers in the Western canon, from Plato to Kant, and on to (among others) Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Kleist.53 Cavell uses perfectionism as a response to the scepticism of modern philosophy, and its bitter ‘sense of disappointment with the world’.54 He finds in perfectionism the means for not rejecting the disappointment but for accepting it without despairing at the world as ‘cursed’.55 One may allow that it is not perfect but that does not mean we cannot work to make it better. Perfectionism thereby counters the desire to withdraw that the disillusionment of scepticism may invoke. Instead, it emphasises our responsibility and commitment to remain within society to work at imperfection rather than to use scepticism as an excuse to render us passive and silent.

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Cavell retains the term ‘perfection’ and its inherent implication that the world may be perfect-able, not to affirm, as other perfectionists before him, that the telos of perfection is attainable, neither merely to indicate that better is possible, but that we should always aim for better, thus invoking the need for constant striving, rather than ever accepting what we have. So, where Cavell differs from the perfectionist tradition is that he notes that what we perceive to be best, or perfect, at one point on our perfectionist journey, will inevitably seem lacking or shabby in some way once we reach it. Hence there will be many apparent perfections that we pursue but each will fade into imperfection upon its attainment. Thus moral perfectionism holds perfection out to us as our life’s aim, accompanied simultaneously by the acknowledgement that ultimate perfection is impossible.56 Such perfectionism is therefore processual rather than teleological whereby ‘there is no question of reaching a final state of the soul but of endlessly taking the next step to “an unattained but attainable self”’.57 This is problematic for two reasons. First, if the linearity between selves is perceived in any way as a developmental process leading into the future rather than simply as the passing of time, it seems to come up against the same critique that Rancière raised about the futurity of the Derridean ‘to come’ distracting our focus away from the here and now. Hence, if one is reading Cavell alongside Rancière even this looser notion of ‘perfection’ must be seen as unnecessary given that it relies upon a conception of a final order even if this can never be reached. Second, we see that the desire to retain the term perfection is in response to the philosophical problem of scepticism. This makes Cavell’s project a response to an individual philosophical concern whereby democracy is an effect, rather than a project centred on democracy. This is important since the notion that we could construct a less sceptical society is arrived at in Cavell through a particular understanding of aversive thinking not simply as a practice of negation motivated by a commitment to equality, but motivated by a concrete commitment to an ongoing ideal of perfection. This figures aversive thinking as a way of being that belongs in a specific location of a particular conception of a democratic order. However, in turning now to the third charge that aversive thinking is undemocratic I will argue that we can extract the practice of aversivity from any notion of a moral order and a conception of perfection in order to use it as a practice of loosening our attachments to any given location.

Dissensual community We can now consider the charge that aversive thinking may be undemocratic in that it is elitist, individualistic and introverted. This emerges in Rawls’s critique of Nietzschean perfectionism due to what he sees as Nietzsche’s elitist call for us to live for the ‘good of the rarest and most valuable specimens’.58 However, Cavell has provided a detailed defence of this passage, arguing that Nietzsche is simply calling for us to live in a relation of exemplarity to one

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another whereby we support and demonstrate to each other better ways of living in accordance with moral perfectionism. He thereby posits that Nietzsche’s argument can inspire a pluralist and fluid democratic community in which we live for the good of each different and various position which could be taken within society.59 Cavell takes Nietzsche’s words to support the pluralism of democratic culture, thereby challenging Rawls’ interpretation of this passage as aristocratic and elitist with a claim for Nietzsche as the defender of democratic diversity. Furthermore, Cavell interprets a concrete political project in this passage from Nietzsche whereby he interprets Nietzsche as saying that the first step on the journey to thinking aversively is for an individual to come to realise that they are not perfect, hence the notion of being a ‘failed work of nature’. However, they possess the potential to lessen that failure, first simply by coming to this realisation, and second, by trying to improve themselves while simultaneously helping others to do the same. This acknowledgement of the perfectionist life as a shared endeavour of aversion suggests that Nietzsche cannot be arguing for an elitism which would separate great individuals from the rest, and instead indicates that a perfectionist community is one in which all individuals are involved in shaping their future together. Yet this again links aversive thinking to an ethical perfectionist community60 that although always in the process of renewing itself replicates the logic of the archipolitical ethical community that gave Rancière so much concern. As to whether aversive thinking is individualistic and introspective, Emerson notes the need for others and for community in the practice of aversive thinking to the extent that aversive thinking cannot be practiced in isolation. This at first becomes apparent when we realise that in speaking of the self Emerson often refers to his ‘constitution’, whereas Cavell argues that he is referring ‘simultaneously [to] the condition of his body, his personal health (a figure for the body or system of his prose), and more particularly his writing (or amending) of the nation’s constitution’.61 Consequently, Cavell suggests that when ‘Emerson identifies his writing … as the drafting of the nation’s constitution’62 and when he says that ‘No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature’, he is arguing that ‘it is we who are the “law-givers” namely to the world of conditions and of objects, and to ourselves in the world of the unconditioned and of freedom’.63 Furthermore, Cavell believes that when Emerson states that ‘the only right is what is after my constitution’64 he is not speaking of his own health and well-being, for this conclusion refuses to acknowledge the complexity of Emerson’s thought exemplified in his statement that ‘we are now “bugs, spawn,” which means simultaneously that we exist neither as individual human beings nor in human nations’.65 To try and be one or the other alone is to fail to do justice to one’s whole self; thus we will never succeed in aversivity if we are too introverted, nor can we attend merely to our public lives without attending to our own aversive journeys. Cavell asserts that Emerson is actually using the duality of meaning found in the term ‘constitution’ to indicate that for the health of our society we must

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each take charge of our own self-development. An individual is always also a member of a political community in a way that can never be mutually exclusive due to the fact that when we acknowledge the veracity of our own thought by thinking aversively each of us is capable of speaking, indeed required to speak, that which is ‘true for all men’.66 So we speak for ourselves not as an individual but as one who is representative of others due to already being one within a community of those who hear and interpret this speech. Cavell purports that Emerson’s term ‘constitution’ is intended to refer to both his own ‘make-up and the make-up of the nation he prophecies’.67 Thus it is due to our work on this ‘constitution’ that Emersonian perfectionism engages us with the community through aversive thinking. Consequently, aversive thinking requires not just a relation to the self but also a particular type of relation to one’s present community. This is not an insular ethical project because the strategic practice of aversive thinking prevents it from becoming introverted. Each stage in the ongoing process of aversion is a ‘step that turns us not from bad to good or wrong to right but from confusion and constriction toward self-knowledge and sociability’.68 To further understand this engagement with the social that aversivity promotes it is helpful to linger a little longer over the theme of community in Cavell’s work. In particular, we need to turn to his apparently discomforting claim that we cannot opt out of our society, even and perhaps especially when we have a grievance or do not agree with something that has been done in our name.69 Thus Cavell asserts that we must practice aversive thinking within rather than outside of our communities. We have at one and the same time the need to be active members of our society – active in our dissent – due to our concern for society’s future, which we critique and seek to change. Hence we show our consent to our community through our dissent from it which demonstrates our unavoidable interrelation with it. Such a practice seems to evoke the idea of an agonistic relation commonly found in the work of thinkers such as William Connolly, Bonnie Honig and Chantal Mouffe.70 Yet where Cavell differs from Mouffe is that he does not identify baseline values that are needed within the community (liberty and equality), for the contestation of what constitutes community goes all the way down. Furthermore, Cavell goes beyond the agonism of Connolly or Honig in his attention to subjectivation in the practice of aversive thinking,71 the theorisation of how an individual is tied to his/her community; his appreciation of the role of the arts within this; and the need for an exemplar relation. Instead, the emphasis Cavell places on aversion to community strikes me as being particularly evocative of Rancière’s work on ‘politics’ in that it goes against consensus.72 This leads me to figure Cavell’s work as dissensual rather than agonistic.73 Furthermore, despite what we may expect after the above passage on consent to community, Cavell draws on Milton’s tract on marriage to argue that the state has no interest in forcing an individual to remain in an unhappy relation as it will bring unhappiness to this individual who will then make ‘the

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commonwealth suffer in terms very like those in which he himself suffers’.74 For Milton, unhappiness in marriage is ‘a bondage to “a mute and spiritless mate”’; the effect of this on society is ‘a “heaviness” and … without redress from it the life of its members cannot be “spiritful and orderly”’ and is therefore taken to be ‘dispirited and disorderly, or anarchic’.75 Thus for Milton, society needs to seek an end to this unhappiness and so it is as if the commonwealth were [itself] entitled to a divorce from such a member since from a commonwealth divorce would mean exile, and since mere unhappiness is hardly grounds for exiling someone, the commonwealth is entitled to grant the individual divorce, hoping thereby at any rate to divorce itself from this individual’s unhappiness.76 This is of political significance, for here Milton is suggesting that in order to avoid overreacting to the unhappiness of a citizen it may be better for the future of a society to allow dissenters to remain within our community rather than seeking to exile them. Cavell’s use of this argument draws a curious analogy between marriage and political relations today, namely that in the same way divorce cannot mean total separation, and nor can political dissatisfaction – instead we need an acknowledgement that we can be together in our separateness – our futures (our fates) are always interlinked, whether we are in agreement or disagreement. Just because spouses or citizens disagree this does not mean that they are no longer in a relationship, just that the nature of that relationship has changed. For a divorced couple there can never be a complete break from the other person whom they will still have feelings for some way or another (good, bad or neutral – in the marriage relationship between them or the negation of that relationship, there is still a link between them that cannot be erased – i.e. they have a history). In any society in which citizens do not agree it would make no sense immediately to assert that there is no longer any society, just that the relationship is not harmonious and can even be antagonistic. Furthermore, particularly pertinent to our investigation of Cavell in relation to Rancière is the above claim that to allow for this middle ground in a relationship, that is neither a being together nor being totally apart from one another (still in conversation as Cavell might say), we avoid concerns that this may descend into chaos via the assertion of ‘spiritful’ order. This use of the word spiritful implies not just accepting social order over disorder in the sense of siding against Rancière’s ‘politics’ in favour of police, but asserting a certain relation with order; a police order in which we consent to dissent, whereby we commit to thinking against the society in which we find ourselves. Interestingly, this invokes a looser and less embedded relation towards social order than that of an embedded, conformist and oppressive police. However, an element of ethos remains in the claim that ‘a certain happiness’ or perhaps acceptance of our common fates ‘a certain spirited and orderly participation’ is seen here to be owed to the community even though this is

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understood in a loose sense as simply the others among whom we live (the commonwealth). From this Cavell figures ‘that if the covenant of marriage is a miniature of the covenant of the commonwealth, then one may be said to owe the commonwealth participation’77 in the sense of the deep and continual engagement and critique of society that Cavell takes a conversation to require. In response to this concern, we can note that the requirement for ‘happiness’ is unnecessary. Indeed, despite the use of Milton to argue that we can (and perhaps should) remain together in disagreement, Rancière would insist that we do remain together in disagreement, whether or not we want to or think that we should. Without this requirement of happiness we can see this as a claim that we need to accept disagreement, since in trying to iron it out we dominate more strongly (through the drive to consensus). This enables us to focus more clearly on the peculiar way in which Cavell figures community, whereby our relations are never fixed and thus each person’s whole life can be figured as a claim to community, one that is constructed from moment to moment and hence invokes a conceptualisation of community as ever shifting in meaning and content.78 Furthermore, his understanding of the marriage relation as analogous for political community implies a certain unlimitedness of community. In the same way that Rancière’s parts-that-have-no-part emerge suddenly from within the social order, even though before that moment they were not seen,79 Cavell’s appreciation of the unfoundedness of community envisages the excluded Other as already within the community to enable exclusion to be rendered meaningful. His emphasis on conversation understood as shared lives together, as the marker of community, invokes Rancière’s aforementioned argument that the weakness of any police order is that all positions within it need to be able to communicate, even if this is simply in order for one party to give orders and the other to receive them. Hence if Cavell’s conceptualisation of community is simply those who communicate together – at the level of allotting and being allotted positions that they may disagree about – then community is the term for the ever shifting terrain of politics, the space in which human animals constitute and reconstitute the logos. This means that the subjects who practice aversive thinking are in what we may deem to be a rather peculiar situation vis-à-vis ‘community’. They see themselves as within a community at the same time as they dissent from it. Such a relation dramatically refigures our understanding of democratic community as fluid and in a constant process of construction that takes us far beyond both liberal, and even poststructuralist agonistic, conceptions.

Exemplars of dissent Although we have overcome the concern of introspection within the relation of exemplarity, our ability to do so seems to depend upon a certain arrogance at the level of the subject that enables the election of oneself to speak for others. We have already seen that in Cavell’s response to Rawls’ charge of elitism he initially turns to Nietzsche to argue that perfectionism is actually

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about working towards a more egalitarian pluralist and fluid democratic moral community. However, if we work back one further step to the passage from Emerson’s American Scholar which is said to have inspired Nietzsche’s work on exemplarity we find that there is no requirement for an underlying ethos to work towards. Emerson writes: in a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say, one or two approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in the hero or the poet their own green and crude being – ripened; yes, and are content to be less, so that may attain to its full stature.80 Cavell points out that in this passage Emerson does not say that contentment with being less than a hero ‘is the best or necessary state of things’ but merely that many seem content with that state of affairs.81 He proposes that the concerns about elitism can be resolved here since in what follows we see that Emerson suggests that the cause of this problem lies in the fact that humankind is not alive, but merely ‘sleepwalking’ in our conformity with society, and that we need to ‘wake’ in order to ‘leap’ to the true good whereby we would come to see that ‘[e]ach philosopher, each bard, each actor has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself ’.82 According to Cavell, this emphasises that ‘the intuition of a higher or further self ’ is not a contemporaneous relation of two persons of different value, but is ‘to be arrived at’ by one and the same person who in saying ‘that the great have been his delegates’ also ‘declares that “I” can one day … be that delegate’.83 Thus Cavell concludes that each individual foreruns themselves, or their future possible self, as ‘a sign’ or ‘an exemplar’,84 and so it is evident that one cannot only be an exemplar to others, but that each self can act as an exemplar to itself. Furthermore, this need not be a normative injunction, but can be interpreted as a practice of aversivity to others and oneself, a relation of questioning and distancing that enables us to loosen our attachments to any given identity. Consequently, representation can here be understood to refer not to one subject representing the interests of another but to Rancière’s staging of universal equality, whereby a human demonstrates that they are as human as the next – that they too possess the logos. Indeed, Cavell suggests that this passage demonstrates Emerson’s aspiration to the human whereby in understanding thinking as returning to previously rejected thoughts we are aspiring to becoming what Emerson implies is more human, in that increasingly we will think for ourselves, rather than accept what others think. This invokes Rancière’s aforementioned reading of Aristotle but in so doing indicates that this is not a processual project of becoming increasingly human but simply an ongoing process of having to demonstrate one’s humanity (possession of logos). Indeed, when we remove the directionality and temporality from Cavell’s double self we can instead rethink this as an undirected back and forth relation of play between selves, between the selves of the subject and between subjects.

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However, Cavell’s argument against elitism in the exemplar relation is perhaps undermined by his recurrent claim that Emersonian perfectionism ‘underlies the moral outlook of the genres of film’ he has studied. In particular, he focuses his analysis on the Hollywood remarriage comedies of the 1930s and 1940s85 which refers to films such as The Lady Eve, It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, Adam’s Rib and The Awful Truth. Although Cavell’s writing on film is illuminating and endlessly inspiring, his claim that these films are useful for our understanding of exemplarity is rather troubling, since in his various discussions of the films he is inconsistent in his portrayal of the precise role they play in the practice of aversive thinking. Given the space Cavell dedicates to film in his work, it is helpful to reflect further on this question to enable us to assess the extent to which this discredits the value of the exemplar relation for democratic emancipation. Cavell wishes to use the Hollywood remarriage comedies to ‘manifest’ moral issues to us,86 and suggests that they may have something to say to us about the society in which they were created.87 As such it seems fair to say that for Cavell, at least at times, these films exemplify a particular instance of the practice of perfectionism. Indeed, Cavell’s frequent discussion of the films consists of him using them to demonstrate or illustrate elements of the perfectionist life to his reader.88 However, many objections have been raised with regard to Cavell’s use of these films to manifest the perfectionist relation to us. The films each end with the withdrawal from society by the central pair who, in nearly all cases, are wealthy and well-protected from the effects of economic hardship – particularly prevalent during the Depression era whence they emanated. Added to this is the concern that the friend/exemplar relationship is just too bourgeois and as such is not equally available to all. This stems from the way it seems to envisage, at its more familiar level, those with plenty of time, relaxing over lunch or dinner, discussing with friends how one might better one’s life. It seems fair to assume that aversive thinking would be much less burdensome for the better off with their increased leisure time and lack of financial concerns. In addition, the portrayal of women is often sexist89 and shallow, with the lead female roles in many ways depicted as dependent on and inferior to the male partner. This is compounded by claims that in many ways these films are racist in their portrayal of non-white Americans.90 Furthermore, there is concern that the characters in the films do not give us clear exemplars, or whether this potential is often overlooked, instead feeding into a shallow cult of celebrity.91 In addition, the marriage relation, especially as portrayed in these films, can appear far too intimate a relationship to use as analogous to democratic relations. Finally, we could ask whether cultural limits are imposed on these films in the sense that they may only be able to prompt conversation in their own culture, and when exported to another setting could perhaps lose the ability to promote deep exemplarity and instead become mere representations to be imitated.92

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Consequently, it is surprising that Cavell claims that these films can ‘instruct’ us,93 since upon reflection of these issues one cannot help asking if there may be another genre of films that could better manifest the features of perfectionism to us? Yet in answer to our question Cavell explicitly claims that it is this genre of film that is particularly good at manifesting perfectionism to us, arguing that in his work he seeks to draw on these films, referring to them as examples of ‘good film’. This undoubtedly leaves us a little wary of the availability of the value of exemplarity for aversive thinking as it appears that Cavell’s dogged commitment to these Hollywood films, that glamorise the lives of an elitist and exclusive class, could undermine his argument that such exemplarity is fit for a democratic, rather than an elitist, project. Cavell is aware of his critics and has in various texts sought to defend his choice in the light of these concerns. In some of his essays he offers an interpretation of why it is that the central couple finish each film by stepping outside of their society;94 why it is not problematic that they are rich and privileged;95 why we can defend these films against the claims that they represent sexist or racist discourses;96 and how, despite all of these issues, these films can still be exemplary in offering provocation for our democratic lives. However, in all of his interpretations, Cavell fails to distinguish that the way in which we relate to and understand these films depends on how we view our own role vis-à-vis the exemplar relation. Although in his aforementioned discussion of the exemplar in Emerson and Nietzsche Cavell argues that the exemplar role is one of provoking the self to develop, not to merely be imitated, in his defence of these films he fails to note this essential point and instead slides into a defence of the use of these films as role models to be imitated.97 Indeed, all of the aforementioned concerns arise due to the assumption, by Cavell as well as his readers, that these films exemplify perfectionism in the sense that they are to be copied or imitated in some way; that they portray an exemplary way of life. Yet when we examine more carefully Cavell’s claim in Pursuits of Happiness that the films ‘instruct’ us he elucidates a few pages later that one way in which he understands this instruction is that these films are as worthy a topic of study as are philosophical texts in that they can ‘teach us how to consider’ them in the same way that we may look to texts such as Kant’s Critique of Judgement to do this.98 Therefore it seems here that Cavell is not seeking to use the films as examples of how we should live but instead to provoke our thought. Indeed, such a relation is made explicit by Emerson’s Divinity School Address: ‘Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul’.99 However, Cavell does not consistently make this distinction clear leaving us unsure how to relate to the films that form such an important part of his work. Thus we see that Cavell’s use of these films is not necessarily to suggest that we should imitate them, or even that there is anything about them worthy of imitation. Instead, he values them for their ability to provoke. Yet even if we

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accept this interpretation we are still left with unease regarding why these films. Cavell’s insistence that this genre of films (alongside one or two other chosen genres he has drawn on in other texts) are especially exemplary in some way leads us to wonder if access to them could be limited by our tastes and preferences, and also whether there is some implicit ordering of the value of certain genres over others in a perfectionist society, leading to concerns about censorship of the arts for perfectionism. This could be resolved if Cavell were more consistent in his use of these films as exemplars for provocation rather than imitation. On this matter it is necessary to turn back to Rancière whose critique of the spectator relation helps us to identify more clearly these two models of exemplarity that seem to be rather blurred in Cavell’s work. In doing this, Rancière can also help us to resolve the aforementioned concerns about culture and censorship as well as the question of how to draw on Cavell’s work on aversive thinking while avoiding the commitment to a particular ethical order. To do this we need first to acknowledge that all these issues are grounded on the relationship between the audience and these films that Cavell is proposing. His argument invokes the ancient debate concerning the relationship between the arts and political community. Plato’s writings on this topic are well known from The Republic in which his character of Socrates declares that, first of all, censorship of the arts is necessary to ensure that to avoid corruption in only good (morally upstanding) examples of poetry, song and myth can be used in the education of the young. He later revises this to suggest that the arts should be banned entirely from the ideal political community to protect the young from any bad influence they may bring. The reason for this argument is that the relationship between the arts and their audience is one of imitation, and thus whatever is portrayed artistically will be imitated directly by those exposed to it. A restatement of this position was famously resurrected in Rousseau’s Letter to D’Alambert on the Theatre in which, arguing against d’Alambert and his patron, Voltaire, and many other liberal Enlightenment thinkers, Rousseau suggests that seventeenth-century Geneva should not revoke its ban on theatre for fear of the bad influence that theatrical works could have on the townspeople. The article that prompted this letter was d’Alambert’s article on Geneva in an encyclopedia which suggested that Genevans would be improved if the ban were lifted. Yet, although it may at first seem that Cavell’s desire to see the role of film as educational echoes d’Alambert’s celebration of the arts to teach the citizenry desirable ‘morals’100 this does not sit well with the above claim that exemplars should not be imitated but should instead provoke us to think for ourselves. Clarification of this point is especially pressing in the case of this investigation, since in his essay The Emancipated Spectator Rancière indicates that both sides in this debate are based on an inaccurate picture of the relationship between art and the spectator. Both believe that because the artist can control, at least to some extent, the effect of their art upon its audience they ‘always assume that what will be perceived, felt, understood is what they have

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put into their dramatic art of performance’.101 In contrast, despite the aspiration of artists, playwrights and writers, Rancière suggests in the quotation above that they can never control the influence of their art because the contingency of meaning cannot be controlled once it is let loose into the social world.102 Thus the aforementioned imitative model of the relation between art and its spectator is arguably illusory: the relation of imitation that so concerned Rousseau and Voltaire from their different perspectives is thereby seen here to be a useful myth to propagate the status of intellectuals (for example philosophers, playwrights and authors) as society’s interpreters.103 Instead, spectators already do and will continue to interpret for themselves in ways that are beyond the control of any director, playwright, actor or artist.104 Consequently, Rancière elucidates a different relationship between audience and art. To begin with he asserts that to assume that spectators are passive until awakened by the knowledge imparted to them by others is a political stance founded on an assertion of a natural division of knowledge. Instead, he claims that the condition of the so-called passive spectator is our normal condition105 in the sense that although we may often assume spectators to be passive, the very act of viewing is to be doing something,106 for in the act of viewing we automatically link what we see and understand to what we have already seen and said, done and dreamed, in order to understand it. We thereby weave what we view into the web that is our own individual life course.107 Thus, to denote spectators as ‘passive’ is to disregard them and is therefore undemocratic as it is based on an inequality that establishes two camps: the knowledgeable from the ignorant (those most in need of this knowledge); and the active thinker who must educate the passive spectator. Seen in the light of Rancière’s aforementioned work on emancipation in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, we see that the division between artist and audience is one of knowledge giver and ignoramus. If we apply this model of emancipation to the audience as spectator then here too we need to trust our own judgement and not defer to another’s interpretation.108 To view films democratically requires a willingness to accept one’s own translations of what is experienced, not by preventing film, or other art forms from telling stories, but by relating to whatever we encounter in an emancipated way, for ‘an emancipated community is a community of narrators and translators’, where all acknowledge their own ability to be ‘active interpreters who develop their own translation in order to appropriate the “story” and make it their own story’.109 This therefore encourages us to go beyond Cavell’s focus on remarriage comedies for democracy. Although he may find them inspiring for his own work (in the sense of being thought-provoking for him and helping him to see democratic relationships differently) this is merely, as he recognises, his own interpretation.110 Hence Rancière’s analysis prompts us to be less restrictive indicating that any film or indeed, any art form can act as exemplar in that it can prompt us to consider our own experiences from another perspective.

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Rancière further translates what this practice of emancipation entails, suggesting that as emancipated spectators we link what we see to that which we know in order to learn something new ‘if we refuse, firstly, radical distance, secondly the distribution of roles, and thirdly the boundaries between territories’.111 Ultimately, then, we are emancipated if we reject the representations of the world that we inherit, are given or told about by others, and instead listen to our own thoughts.112 Yet in emphasising this passage it could appear that there is a danger in supplanting the damaging division between knowledge giver and knowledge receiver with another unequal relationship – that of emancipated versus un-emancipated, thereby ignoring Rancière’s concern for equality. Upon consideration, however, it becomes clear that this is not the case, for the emancipated are not in a relation of power over the unemancipated because what they assert – that all are of equal intelligence – unites rather than divides. However, this implies that there are two ways of being a spectator. In neither case is the spectator passive in the sense of not thinking. Instead, the crucial difference is whether or not he/she trusts the authority of his/her own interpretation or whether in the unemancipated model he/she submits his/her own interpretation to the authority of others. Yet again, this need not mean that there is a value judgement between the two practices of spectating. Instead, what Rancière indicates is that the former practice is one of emancipation and thus one that can lead to ‘politics’ as it will challenge the entrenching of any police order, whereas the latter will contribute to conformity within a society. Instead of using the division between passive and active spectators we have seen that Rancière refers to the condition whereby we refuse to trust our own thoughts as one of ‘stultification’ and ‘routine’,113 and identifies a task for ‘disciples of universal teaching’ who announce its practice to others.114 In identifying that universal teaching is the exhortation to trust one’s own thought Jacotot’s ‘disciple’ bears a somewhat uncanny resemblance to Emerson inasmuch as the passages in which he exhorts us to think for ourselves, are telling us to trust our own thoughts. In particular, this is clear in Emerson’s claim in ‘Self-Reliance’: ‘Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say “I think”, “I am”, but quotes some saint or sage’.115 Indeed, when we read this alongside the above discussion on the role of exemplars for Cavellian perfectionism we see that there is a clear strand within Cavell’s thought that upholds a view of exemplarity as provocation, yet that this at times becomes blurred with the implication that exemplarity can also at times be imitative, teaching or instructing us how to behave. Rancière’s discussion of the emancipated spectator helps us to identify the need to separate these two models of exemplarity retaining only the provocation model in order to enable aversive thinking to function as a practice of challenging the conformity that entrenches police order. It is suggested that the importance of the exemplar relation as provocation (as Cavell finds in Emerson) contributes to a practice of aversivity against conformity, for it is not a relation between people but a practice one can

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perform to challenge established relations, to assert one’s equality and challenge others rather than to accept the allocation you have been given. In contrast, the model of exemplar as imitative implies a hierarchy of social relations. It is not based on equality but on inequality, with teachers and students, ‘ignorant’ and ‘knowledgeable’. Thus the exemplar relation as provocation could be retained as essential to the practice of aversivity understood as a practice used to challenge police order.

Provoking the self through aversivity This dialogue between Cavell and Rancière has enabled us to draw out the way that aversive thinking challenges conformity by configuring the self as divided and partial, and engaged in unavoidable conversation with its social order. In order to separate aversive thinking from Cavell’s wider theory of moral perfectionism it required us to rethink the temporality of the double self, to reject the need for perfection, and to distinguish between the imitation and provocation models of exemplarity in order to move away from the former with its assumption of hierarchy in the order of knowledge, towards the latter’s focus on equality of intelligences. Hence the practice of aversivity can be figured as a strategy of resistance to self and society, operating through an exemplar model of provocation rather than of imitation. Aversivity thus sees us consenting to our societies inasmuch as we consent to take an interest in their future, to challenge the direction we are taking, and thereby consent to dissent. With regard to the above discussion about police order most conducive to ‘politics’ we discover that the most democratic citizens (in the Rancièrian sense) are not those who subordinate themselves to institutional rule but the most ‘spirited’ or disordered, for these are the citizens who uphold our ability to do ‘politics’ – resisting the attempted closure of the social order by breaking open spaces within the conformity of social values. Hence we can assert that prior to and beyond the edges of Zuccotti Park, Gezi Park, Tahrir Square and any other site of democratic struggle, past and present, there is a practice which gives birth to protest, a dissensual engagement with one’s social order: the practice of aversivity.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Cited by Cavell (1990: 37–38). Rancière (2009b: 23). Norval (2007, 2012); Owen (2015); Woodford (2016). See Norval (2007, 2012); and Owen (2006) for elaboration of this moral perfectionism as a political project. 5 Rancière (2010d). Before examining this further a note on terminology is needed, as any exploration into the problem of social conformity immediately invokes the Gramscian problematic of the hegemonic formation of common sense. Although at times the terminology of hegemony is useful throughout this work, it will be borrowed from Gramsci without its accompanying Marxist content. As we have

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seen, Rancière’s formulation of the way in which conformity is to be overcome and to what ends (if we can even use the term ‘ends’), while acknowledging its debts to this tradition, does take us beyond the Gramscian position. Rancière (1991). Ibid.: 30. Ibid.: 102. Ibid.: 105. Ibid. Ibid. This differs markedly from the neoliberal slogan of ‘doing it for yourself ’ in terms of what Rancière means by equal capacity. In neoliberal versions of capacity, one’s capacity is to work hard, in order to achieve, and to be someone – in relation to others, to the ‘nobodies’, to the poor and the lazy who apparently refuse to pull themselves out of poverty by their bootstraps. This is not a vision of equal capacity but of the stronger person’s ability to embrace competition and thrive in hierarchy, better than the weaker person’s. In contrast, Rancière emphasises that his focus is not on empirical ability but on assumed capacity if the conditions are conducive, thereby circumventing concerns about physical and mental disabilities (1991: Ch. 3 and in particular p. 46). Rancière (1991: 108). Ibid., italics in the original. Ibid. Ross (1991: xxii). Rancière (2007b: 48). Rancière (1991: 98, italics in the original). Ibid.: 105. Rancière (2009b: 11). Rancière (1991: 98). Rancière (2009b: 9). Rancière (2007b: 48). Rancière (1991: 108). Other productive readings of the parallels of these thinkers are Norval (2007, 2012); and Owen and Havercroft (2015). In some ways my reading draws on Norval’s argument that Rancière and Cavell have parallel theories of aspect dawning (2007) and subjectivation (2012) but it diverges from her call for an ethos of responsiveness. Emerson (2003: 269). Cavell (1990: 12). Ibid.: 36. Cavell (1988b: 43–44, citing Wittgenstein 1953). Norris (2006b: 92). Although the figure only allows for two perspectives, I am assuming that the situation for which Wittgenstein uses it to point to can still be one where many (or possibly infinite) perspectives can exist. Perhaps ‘subject to volition’ makes is more accurate here, see Frankfurt (1971). Cavell (1991: 131), italics in the original. This means that ‘our position is always (already) that of an attained self; we are from the beginning, that is from the time we can be described as having a self, a next’ (Cavell 1990: 12). Emerson indicates this when he says that our existence and our thinking are always partial (ibid.), for we are always only ever able to attain one step at a time. Rancière (2012a: 82). Rancière (1991: 57). Norval (2012: 812).

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46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Aversivity Rancière (2006d: 5). Norval (2012: 819, italics in the original). Ibid.: 824. So named to distinguish it from the ethos of aversion as well as to imitate the structure of the names of the other practices identified. Cavell (1990: 37). In particular, Cavell interprets this as a precursor to the Heideggerian concern that despite the apparent development of our societies, we are still not thinking: ‘it would mean capturing the idea of the thing most critically provoking in our riskily provocative time to be that we are still not really provoked, that nothing serious matters to us, or nothing seriously, that our thoughts are unscrupulous, private’ (ibid.). Cavell (1995: 29). Cavell details this argument primarily in two essays: ‘Emerson’s Constitutional Amending: Reading ‘“Fate”’ (1995) and ‘Being Odd, Getting Even’ (2003). This Act sought to force the authorities of free states to return slaves to their masters, making any official who did not act in accordance with this law liable to a US $1,000 fine, and any individual found assisting a slave liable to six months’ imprisonment as well as a $1,000 fine (the full text of the Fugitive Slave Act is available at http://www.usconstitution.net/fslave.html). See Garvey (2006) as well as Cavell (1995). Garvey (2006: 161). Cavell (1995, 2003). At least in a purportedly democratic context – for it is only in a democracy that this takes the form of hypocrisy. Worley (2001: 12). Ibid. Cavell (1995: 18). See Cavell (1990: 5) for his list. Cavell (2005: 3). Ibid. Cavell (1990: 12–13). Cavell (2005: 355). Rawls (1971: 325, note 51, citing Hollingdale 1965: 127, citing Nietzsche 1983: 6). Cavell (1990: 49–50). As outlined in more detail by Norval (2007, 2012) and Owen (2006). Cavell (1990: 10). Cavell (1995: 34). Or as Cavell has come to say ‘as amending our constitution’. Ibid. The complete sentence reads: ‘Good and bad are but names readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong, what is against it’ (‘Self-Reliance’ in Emerson 2003: 271). Cavell (1995: 34). ‘Self-Reliance’ in Emerson (2003: 266). Cavell (1995: 38). Cavell (2005: 355). The work on consent to our communities arises in Cavell’s critique of John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1971). Cavell is concerned that in the Rawlsian (contractual) approach to society we find an idea that we consent to ‘the principles upon which society is based rather than to society as such’ which leads to ‘an effort to imagine confining or proportioning the consent I give my society’. The view of consent as finite and limited and based on pre-established principles concerns Cavell because it appears to limit the extent to which one may feel implicated in the actions of one’s society and the extent to which one may feel

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beholden to work at changing it. Hence Cavell claims that it makes no sense to specify consent to society in particular terms; instead he asserts that we must recognise that the very content of our consent (and disagreements about it) constitutes part of our shared daily lives. This claim becomes even more interesting when we recall that the Cavellian citizen is beholden to practice aversive thinking, the practice of thinking in aversionto one’s society. E.g. Connolly (2005); Honig (1993); Mouffe (2005). See also Norval (2007: 144) on this. Rancière (1999: Ch. 5). Here I build on the differences between Cavell and agonists as outlined by Norval (2007: 144). Cavell’s approach is further elucidated during his aforementioned critique of Rawls, drawing on Rawls’ claim that justice concerns ‘what we can say to one another’. Cavell refers to our shared lives together as lives lived in ‘conversation’ to denote not just that we talk to one another, but a deeper sense of a ‘way of life together’ (2004: 172–173) and a ‘readiness for exchange’(1990: 104). Cavell borrows this meaning from a well-known passage in John Milton’s seventeenth-century tract on divorce ‘in which he justifies divorce in terms of a conception of marriage as “a meet and happy conversation”’ (ibid., citing Milton). This analogy makes us realise the import we should accord to the depth of political relationships between citizens, for Cavell emphasises the point made by Milton’s use of the term conversation, that this idea of conversation ‘is indispensably one of words, but not confined to words’ (ibid.) in that it incorporates the idea of living lives in common (beyond the mere words exchanged by a couple) that is embodied in a marriage. This analogy prompts us to realise accordingly that there is far more to our relationships with those whom we share our political lives – our fellow citizens – than the words we exchange. Cavell (1981: 151). Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.: 151, italics added. See in particular the discussion in Cavell (1979a, esp. p. 27). Cavell (1999: 22). ‘American Scholar’ in Emerson (2003: 240, italics in the original). Cavell (1990: 54, italics added). ‘American Scholar’ in Emerson 2003: 240–241). Cavell (1990: 54). Ibid. Cavell (1981, 1990, 2004). Cavell (2005: 9). Cavell (1981: 6). Cavell (1981 and 2004 in particular). But not always – and in the case of The Lady Eve explicitly challenges such sexism. Particularly explored by Gooding-Williams (2006). Dienstag (2016). Consider the example of how American films added to the allure of the GI marriage for post-war British women who were facing rationing and the scarcity of goods. Cavell (1981: 7). Cavell (1990: 117). Cavell (1981: 5–7 and 1990: xx); also see defence in Mulhall (1994: 281–282). With regard to sexism see Cavell (1981: 16–18); and with regard to racism see Cavell’s response to Gooding-Williams (2006). Cavell (1981, 1990, 2004).

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Aversivity Cavell (1981: 11). Cited by Cavell (1990: 37–38). D’Alambert, cited by Rousseau (1968: 4). Rancière (2009b: 14). Ibid.: 14–15. Ibid.: 8. Ibid.: 14–15. Ibid.: 17. Ibid.: 13. Ibid. Rancière (1991: 13). Rancière (1995: 22). Cavell (1981: 36). Rancière (2009b: 17). Ibid.: 22. Rancière (1991: 108). Ibid.: 98. Emerson (2003: 279).

4

Poeticity From the glade of cicadas to the island of the people

No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy. (Jacques Derrida1) The encounter of literary power with democratic literarity is itself bounded by the proposition of a new writing of the new community … The fixed gaze suspended over the island. (Jacques Rancière2)

Turning now to consider practices that could disrupt ways of saying we can begin with the discussion of political slogans in which Rancière demonstrates the doubling of language involved in ‘politics’. These include the appropriation of the term ‘hooligan’ by Eastern Bloc dissidents;3 the 1968 Paris student slogan ‘we are all German Jews’;4 Blanqui’s appropriation of the term ‘proletarian’;5 and the Australian left’s reworking of the term ‘un-Australian’ to challenge the use of the term to exclude immigrants and others who are not considered to fit into the image of Australia built by the centre right.6 Rancière tells us that these are instances of what he refers to as ‘literarity’ in which certain stigmatised names are appropriated and given a positive affirmation to scramble their use and problematise the distribution of order in which they are being applied. In his little-cited essay on the term ‘un-Australian’ Rancière further develops his work on the poetics of ‘politics’. Here he suggests that poetic speech creates dissensus, which is not a disagreement between two already defined parties, but a ‘poetic invention’.7 This is dissensus as opposed to redistribution; it is not a reordering but a break with order (see Chapter 1) for poetic invention does not mean the invention of an imaginary place. A place that is elsewhere or nowhere. It means a displacement or a break in a given set of places and identities. In other words, it is a political matter. There is a poetics of politics which consists in inventing cases of dissensus.8 Poetic invention involves the appropriation of terms in response to stigmatisation.9 It aims to confront the logic of order, the logic that the subject has to

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be either one identity or another. In this sense, the slogan ‘we are all German Jews’, used by protestors who were neither German nor Jewish, challenged the logic that demanded they be either ‘French or foreigner … inside or outside … students or agitators, etc.’.10 Hence in chanting this slogan the demonstrators ‘caused an error in this adequation between bodies, names and identities’ such that it not only disturbed ‘the normal distribution between French and foreigners, students and agitators’ but also proclaimed that ‘there is no intruder, no foreign agitator; we are all intruders’.11 We see that in this poetic invention the ‘wrong name’ was not designed to identify something, but instead could only work because it ‘identified nothing’ and in this sense the ‘we’ in the slogan refers to what Rancière refers to as an ‘un-being’: an un-being that replaces the categories and divisions of the police order with a universal claim to equality. This construction of un-being through a universal claim is displayed by Rancière as a strategy of resistance and challenge to the status quo. Poeticity is a way of constructing un-being using words and meaning. It emerges here as a practice whereby un-being can be constructed through language to rupture police ordering. An example of such a rupture may be seen in the Occupy Wall Street slogan ‘We are the 99%’. Indeed, inspired by Rancière Dean asserts that this slogan ‘claims a division … names a wrong’.12 Here she is referring to a passage in Dis-agreement in which Rancière tells us that there are two ways in which ‘politics’ exposes a wrong. First, as noted in Chapter 1, the notion of the demos doubled for both a part of the population of the city as the whole population of the city. In contrast the wrong exposed by Blanqui’s use of the term proletariat ‘makes the gap between two peoples explicit: between the declared political community and the community that defines itself as being excluded from this community’.13 Thus ‘“Demos” is the subject of the identity of the part and the whole. “Proletarian” on the contrary subjectifies the part of those who have no part that makes the whole different from itself ’.14 How is this effected? Rancière tells us that although the judge wanted to identify workers within the already existing categories of their professions Blanqui refused this wish, and forced the issue that his ‘superiors’ did not want to admit. He laid claim to the name proletariat – a name that at the time merely referred to those who were ‘no more than children makers, men who were trapped in the domestic world of production and reproduction, and thereby excluded from the symbolic order of the political community’.15 He thereby inscribed ‘the uncounted in a space where they are countable as uncounted’.16 He forced them to recognise that their society was not a harmonious count of all parts, but that the proletariat (usually regarded as being so lowly and diminished as to not represent a valuable part of society to the extent that they were not counted as among its legitimate parts) were suddenly to be included. Dean claims that this slogan ‘asserts a “we” of a divided people’.17 It asserts division, the division between two classes: ‘those who have and control the wealth, and those who do not’.18 It names a gap ‘that asserts the people as

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a divisive force in the interest of overturning present society and making a new one anchored in collectivity and the common’.19 In The Communist Horizon she argues that this division flies in the face of the reigning order’s desire to enforce unity upon the people. She cites Obama’s 2008 presidential election campaign slogans as examples that ‘aimed to obscure division, attempting to repress and depoliticize it’.20 However, upon examining Rancière’s work on poetic doubling in more detail this chapter will suggest that its effectiveness does not come from division nor simply from obscuring division. Poeticity at one and the same time asserts a division that effaces all division. It does not assert a division that requests a response. In its very emergence it demonstrates the illogicality of that division, thereby forcing an impact on any order in which it emerges. This chapter will depart by tracing the developments of Rancière’s work on literature. His claim that ‘humans are political animals because they are literary animals’21 is increasingly capturing scholars’ attention, leading to multiple discussions of what this means for the way we understand and use language and literature and precisely how they relate to politics and the social. In light of this I do not simply wish to add another interpretation to the many that have recently emerged in English language scholarship. Instead, I will consider how it may be of value for democratic practice today. In doing so it is necessary to respond to existing confusion about the translation and use of the term ‘literarity’, so I will return to Rancière’s French texts to identify how the concept of literarity developed in his thought over time. I will demonstrate that it is short-sighted to focus on literarity at the exclusion of the practice of its application, poeticity, which refers to an open-ended play with meaning. It is through the practice of poeticity that the disruptive force of literarity is employed for emancipatory purposes. Literarity’s disruptive power is emphasised by recognising poeticity as a democratic dissensual practice, a way of playing with linguistic meaning to provoke rupture. Throughout this discussion I will elaborate Rancière’s work by contrasting it with Derrida’s on literarity, politics and democracy. This is necessary since despite acknowledging Derrida’s influence, Rancière’s thought on literarity is at once a development and subtle critique of the relationships that Derrida identifies between politics, democracy and writing. I will argue that Rancière transects deconstruction to reveal concern about its restrictive political implications. Consequently, the practice of poeticity enables us to exploit the disruptive force of literarity in a way that deconstruction cannot. I will conclude this chapter by returning to the question above about how we can use poeticity in political slogans to name division and effect ‘politics’.

Rancière, writing and literarity It is helpful to begin by identifying Rancière’s key claims about literature and the literary for those readers who are less familiar with this area of his work. In sum, Rancière can be understood to have made two central claims in his

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discussion of literature; first, that the emergence of literature as an art form was part of a wider shift in aesthetic sensibilities that he labels the ‘aesthetic regime’; and second, that writing is innately disruptive and the shift from belles-lettres to literature loosed control over this disruption in such a way as to allow institutionalised writing to become politically salient. Beginning with the first claim, Rancière narrates the familiar tale of the emergence of literature: at the start of the nineteenth century the previous convention-bound ways of writing were challenged by the emergence of more creative and less regulated writing. This saw the gradual abandonment of the prior belles-lettres tradition and the emergence of literature in what we might now consider to be freer ‘poetic’ forms of writing as well as the development of the narrative form in the shape of the modern novel.22 Rancière thematises this change as a move from a representative to an aesthetic regime of writing. The representative regime which dominated since ancient times regarded the role of writing as one of re-presenting factual events that have actually happened. Both writing and painting were taken to be comparable media because they gave us two ways of re-presenting information about a prior event. Both were understood to play a secondary role to the event which they merely portrayed. This phonocentrism has already been theorised by Derrida who noted that because writing was considered a retelling of a live event it was perceived to be less important than the original speech (phonos) event. Thus the presence and speech of the actor in the event is valorised over the writing or painting which is merely a retelling of acts in the actor’s absence.23 According to this regime, the act of writing or painting is not valued for its own sake. The emergence of literature markes a departure from this, for it is where language itself ‘becomes the subject, or matter, of the work rather than merely the transparent medium of reference to a represented subject’.24 It is no longer necessary for writing to be understood as secondary to a pre-existing event; instead, the actual words on the page gain greater significance as the object of the art. The particular contribution of Rancière’s work in this area is his claim that this is a shift in ‘regimes’ – from the representative regime to the aesthetic regime.25 He thematises this along four axes: fiction, genre, appropriateness and language.26 Under the representative regime, writing presents to us a fiction in the sense that it tells a story and is thus a representation of actions that, whether or not they actually happened, are depicted as if they did happen. Therefore writing is understood to retell a previous event.27 Furthermore, the genre of representative writing is dictated by its subject matter: if it is derived from ‘low culture’ it is comedy or satire; if from ‘high culture’ it is tragedy or epic.28 Relatedly, the actions of the characters in the representative regime must be deemed ‘appropriate’ to their social station.29 Finally, since writing is understood here as an act of representation it is understood to be based on the ideal of speech as action. Despite telling fictional stories it does so in a way that submits to the superiority of live speech in the form of rhetoric and oratory.30 In contrast, Rancière identifies a move away from this framework in the development of literature under the

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‘aesthetic regime’. Here writing is valued for its use of language rather than whether or not it is telling a story; genre is no longer respected and is replaced by equality between subjects; style is ‘indifferent with respect to the subject represented’ and writing no longer dwells in the shadow of the ideal that is speech in action and instead carves out a distinctive space for writing qua writing.31 Rancière thus suggests that literature constitutes a new poetics: a new way of constituting the function of the written word. At this point it is important to note that Rancière is not claiming that there has been a mutually exclusive shift from one regime to the other, but that in the main the development of literature reflects these changes. Although some contemporary writing will no doubt reflect features of the older representative regime, these features are no longer widely considered to be what constitutes ‘good’ writing. Rancière is hereby making two further claims. First, he identifies a structural contradiction in literature for if it is the overturning of all convention regarding both subject and style so that ‘anything goes’ we are left wondering how it is that we can still distinguish literature as ‘good’ writing from all other forms of writing. This enables Rancière to elucidate his own position since he then identifies that this struggle is constitutive of literature. Second, since literature has no essence he posits that what is deemed to be literature and what is excluded as simply ‘ordinary’ language is a political matter. Although Davis has read this as an ‘attempt to revalorise, politicise and reposition the traditionally scorned and externalised … ordinariness of ordinary written language against which the work of literature struggles to define itself as art’,32 this is too strong. Rancière merely shows that the distinction between ordinary language and literature is not set is stone. He does not make a claim that any particular language should be valorised at the expense of another, rather he identifies that any attempt to privilege and fix the identity of literature over ordinary language is unfounded and functions to include and legitimise some voices at the expense of others. Rancière’s claim that writing is disruptive is inspired by the myth of the invention of writing as recounted by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus. According to the legend, writing was invented by Theuth, an Ancient Egyptian deity, who went at once to the royal court of King Thamus to offer his invention for the use of the kingdom describing it as an aid to memory. Thamus was not impressed. Rancière tells us that this is for three reasons. First, writing leaves many things unexplained so that written instructions for an art will never be able to communicate enough to teach a novice, and instead is only of value to remind those who already know.33 As such Rancière notes that writing cannot speak beyond the information that is on the page; it remains mute in the face of a perplexed reader seeking to know more.34 Second, this muteness can curiously make the written letter too talkative since it is not guided by anyone; it can go anywhere, speak to anyone and be interpreted in various ways without being able to speak up and correct the reader. Third, the written word is thus like an orphan, without a master to explain how it is to be read and direct it to the right reader and as such ‘it can neither defend itself not

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come to its own support’.35 These features endow writing with a disruptive potential. It has the capacity of saying more than the author intended, and to address people other than those whom the author sought to address. It fails to respect the rules and order of society. Writing can be said to be political owing to its availability in the sense of the constant availability of language for reappropriation and reinterpretation over time. Rancière refers to this availability of meaning that effects disruption as ‘literarity’. As noted above, the three claims about the lack of ‘essence’ for both writing and literature in large part echo prior arguments made by Derrida. However, it will be shown below that Rancière’s theory of literarity not only draws out much more explicitly the politics implied by this reading of literature and writing, but in doing so turns Derrida’s argument back on itself.

‘Literarity’ or ‘literariness’? To overcome concerns about Rancière’s theory of literarity in a way that will help us to grasp the full force of this argument it is necessary first to take a detour that will help us to navigate our way around confusion in the English language scholarship. The confusion is perhaps caused and certainly compounded by a lack of consistency in the translation of the single term literarité from French to English because it has sometimes been translated ‘literariness’ and other times ‘literarity’. This has led to the mistaken assumption that there are two distinct concepts at work here when there is actually only one. This inconsistency is furthered by Rancière’s own shift in the way he conceptualises literarity. Initially, he uses it merely to denote the excess of meaning for words, but later it also comes to encompass the disruption that this excess can cause. Let us begin by unpicking these issues one at a time to see how they play out in the dominant texts on Rancière and literarity today. First, it is necessary to note that this concept has a small but increasingly important role in Rancière’s work,36 yet his usage of it has shifted subtly over time37 until clarified in The Politics of Aesthetics where he tells us that literarité is both the condition of the availability of meaning and the effect of this availability in terms of the disruption it causes. 38 Difficulty in appreciating the genealogical development of this term has been compounded by the order in which these texts have been translated into English.39 The French term literarité was translated as literariness in the first three of these texts, The Names of History, Dis-agreement, and Mute Speech; and rendered as literarity in the latter two interviews as well as in The Flesh of Words and The Politics of Aesthetics. This is doubly unfortunate since it not only gives a false impression of a chronological development from one term to the other; but the sheer existence of two modes of communicating the literary nature of something – as literarity or literariness – in the English language also thereby dilutes the jarring effect of Rancière’s work which plays explicitly on his appropriation of the term literarité from literary theory where

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it denotes an essence internal to a language that could be identified in literature but not in everyday writing and therefore enables us to distinguish between writing as art and writing as everyday.40 Since English readers are thus presented with ‘literariness’ in Rancière’s earlier texts and ‘literarity’ in the later ones41 some commentators appear understandably to have assumed that he moved from an earlier term to a later one, denoting this shift in his work on literarity from the availability of meaning to its more explicitly political use.42 Yet as noted above, this is more than a simple mistake based on inconsistent translation as the possibility that this claim could be made depends on the underlying fact that Rancière’s usage of the term does shift over time leading to a variety of interpretations. To sum up these differences, we have those who do not distinguish between literariness and literarity;43 others who indicate that both terms refer to the disruption caused by writing;44 still others who suggest that literariness is simply the excess of words while literarity is the political import of this excess,45 and finally Robson’s take on this, whereby he presents literariness as excess and literarity as the way in which this excess can be employed.46 It is unsatisfyingly uncritical to conclude that such variation simply arises from inconsistent translation. In each case commentators have provided an enlightening discussion of Rancière’s work that offers us applications and critique of literarity regardless of these differences. They also do not differ with regard to their interpretation of Rancière’s overall argument that writing has a disruptive power, nor with his claim that writing is democratic, and that the disruption of writing is constitutive of literature which as a consequence needs to remain open and recognise itself as a site of agonistic struggle. However, if we accept these inconsistencies too many questions remain regarding first, the exact relationships between writing, literature, ‘politics’ and democracy; and second, how writing specifically effects disruption and how this can be employed. In addition, there are also questions about the historical emergence of literature as art and its relationship with writing in general concerning why it emerged at a certain point in time and whether this means that writing’s force to disrupt is always inherent in writing and therefore how and why it was merely released by the aesthetic turn; or whether writing’s disruptive power was created by socio-historical conditions at the turn of the nineteenth century. Consequently, despite unpicking the confusion about literarity in Rancièrian scholarship more work is needed to gain a more precise understanding of the relationship between his claims about literature and this apparent political potential of writing to disrupt. This is an incongruous task in that I wish to seek further precision over the meaning of a term that Rancière uses to denote the radical lack of precision in meaning. The irony is that despite acknowledging the inability of meaning ever to be fixed once and for all, if we are to exist we cannot do without assigning meanings to words and seeking to use these words to communicate. Hence better identifying the spirit of the meaning Rancière gives to literarity in his own writing will help us to think about linguistic and extra-linguistic strategy for Rancièrian ‘politics’.

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The need to continue with this task is particularly clear when reading the divergent interpretations of literarity offered by two of the most recent booklength commentaries on Rancière’s work: Oliver Davis’s Jacques Rancière47 and Sam Chambers’ The Lessons of Rancière.48 Rather than attempting to throw a third interpretation into the ring in opposition to these I suggest that reading Davis and Chambers together on literarity helps us to clarify Rancière’s thought on the relationship between language and his notion of ‘politics’. It also helps to identify areas where more attention may be needed to explicate this relationship in order to evaluate how Rancière’s work contributes to our understanding of how language may be utilised to create conditions that are more conducive for Rancièrian ‘politics’ today. To begin with, Davis raises three concerns about Rancière’s failure to discuss the limitations that structural conditions impose on literarity’s disruptive power. He wonders why Rancière limits his discussion of the disruption that words can cause to writing rather than incorporating recorded speech.49 He identifies that Rancière has not done enough to consider the social conditions under which writing can be disruptive (availability of writing and literacy rates and censorship).50 Moreover, he is concerned that Rancière’s depiction of writing as orphan makes it overly optimistic, and drawing on Lacan asserts that its users will not necessarily be able to break out of the pre-scripted power relations they unwittingly propagate.51 In contrast to Davis, Chambers takes literarity to be far less problematic. In his reading, literarity ‘can be read back into and through [Rancière’s] wider body of writings’ in a way that reveals it to be central to his whole philosophical project, beyond just the essays on literature.52 He thereby suggests that Rancière identifies literarity as a kind of force of disorder which therefore always haunts all attempts at ordering, including those attempts by philosophy itself. Reading literarity in this way means that Chambers sees it as a development of Rancière’s whole philosophy and thus seeks to situate it more broadly in relation to his ‘politics’/police framework. In applying literarity Chambers at first seems to accept that literarity names the way that writing disrupts order. Yet he swiftly takes literarity beyond writing to claim that it ‘names the countervailing force to “police”’.53 Drawing on Rancière’s claim in The Ignorant Schoolmaster that ‘all words, written or spoken, are a translation that only takes on meaning in the countertranslation’54 he suggests that Rancière is arguing here, contra Plato, that the strong distinction between speech and writing as two different types of discourse is misleading inasmuch as it fails to acknowledge that ‘all language is translation’ and thus speech should ‘never be elevated above’ writing.55 In particular, Chambers notes Rancière’s use of the word ‘counter-translation’56 positing that this indicates ‘the interminability of the process of translation itself. Every translation must be translated again, such that meaning can never be fixed once and for all. There is an excess of words.’57 Chambers takes this ‘excess’ to be that which Rancière refers to by the name ‘literariness’ which Chambers asserts is related to but still distinct from

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‘literarity’. In contrast to literariness understood as the mere availability of meaning, literarity is for Chambers ‘a political term’ for it is that which ‘makes disagreement possible; it serves as the condition of possibility for disidentification’.59 As such, literarity appears to us as ‘a category separate from both writing and literature’60 and instead names disorder. Chambers suggests that Rancière uses this term in a similar manner to his notion of ‘disagreement’, citing the interview with Panagia in which Rancière claims that ‘literarity disrupts the relation between an order of discourse and its social functions’.61 Thus literarity, concerning ‘the availability and accessibility of “writing” to everyone’,62 is the condition of Rancière’s ‘disagreement’ and so Chambers claims that there is ‘no disagreement without literarity’.63 Consequently, in Chambers’ reading literarity is central to Rancière’s democratic ‘politics’ for it is in the ‘polemical’ scenes of who counts and does not count as a speaking being that literarity is at work. In sum, what makes Chambers’ reading so compelling is the way in which he places literarity in the context of Rancière’s wider project and in so doing indicates that literarity’s potential to disrupt is not limited to writing but is present in the play of all words and meaning. This enables the political import of literarity to be drawn out more than in Davis’s interpretation. Furthermore, it provides a way of responding to some of Davis’s concerns. First, the way Chambers reads literarity as operating beyond the written word reveals that, as Davis suggested, it can operate in other encounters with words and meanings such as recorded speech. It also means that literarity could be at work in challenging the ‘pre-scripted social-psychic texts’64 that lead individuals to conform to social norms rather than to question them. Moreover, the concerns about literacy rates and censorship seem to dwindle in light of Chambers’ work, since access to literarity could occur via alternative forms of word encounter. Furthermore, this diversity poses a wider challenge to attempts to censor, thus making it far harder and requiring much greater oppression and control (in terms of speech and thought as well) than if the control of literarity were just limited to the censorship of writing.65 However, Chambers’ reading does not help us to respond to Davis’s wider concern regarding the socio-historic conditions under which literarity is available since the degree of rupture literarity can effect could still be seen to depend on the social agency of subjects. Furthermore, there is another surprising element to Chambers’ argument that requires a little more attention since in suggesting that literarity is ‘the countervailing force to “police”’66 he seems to be claiming that literarity is Rancière’s new word for ‘politics’ as it was understood in Chapter 1. This is significant because it could indicate revision of Rancière’s earlier work on ‘politics’, and also, without further attention, could be taken to signal a shift in Rancière’s work from the material to the symbolic (discursive), thereby misdirecting readers away from the implications of Rancière’s work for material redistribution. In the remainder of this chapter I will unfold the argument that literarity is not a replacement for Rancière’s ‘politics’ and that Rancière’s underlying principal concern is 58

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neither the material nor the symbolic but the negotiation of the relationship between the two that for him constitutes the ever shifting boundaries of our being. In doing so I will also respond to Davis’s remaining concern.

Retracing literarity against Derrida Since Rancière is fond of telling us that we need to begin at the beginning67 it is fitting to return with him once more to his initial use of the term literarity and trace its development through his wider work in order to see how it evolved vis-à-vis his thought on ‘politics’ and democracy. Indeed, in his own words Rancière has informed us that [f]rom the very beginning, my concern has been with the study of thought and speech there where they produce effects, that is, in a social battle that is also a conflict, renewed with each passing instant, over what we perceive and how we can name it.68 Yet a particular concern with the manner in which thought and speech is expressed in writing remains implicit in his earliest works and only explicitly emerges from the 1980s onwards, beginning with the notion of ‘theotocracy’ to refer to the disruptive power that stems from the availability of the arts.69 The salience of this availability is then discussed more via the new term literarity that first emerges in The Names of History and Mute Speech and lies behind his comments on ‘politics’ and literary animals in Dis-agreement. This is finally clarified to refer also to the disruptive power of writing. His next book, The Flesh of Words, sketches out the relationship between literarity, ‘politics’ and democracy in more detail. He then theorises this latter relationship in more detail in the essays ‘The Politics of Literature’ and ‘Literary Misunderstanding’. Although reading Rancière’s work accompanied by the knowledge of where he ends up does help us to uncover the roots of the concept of literarity, the approach of looking for something that was actually coming into being as a process over time gives an artificial impression that it existed prior to Rancière’s own practice of writing. Instead, although this rereading helps us to recognise key stages in the development of literarity, rather than cherrypicking these sections from his work it is essential to read them in tandem with his wider project in this period, which was the development of a critical commentary on the ‘poetics of knowledge’ understood as ‘the literary procedures by which a particular form of knowledge establishes itself as a scientific discourse’.70 This was inspired by his years of research in nineteenth-century workers’ archives, which drew his attention to the multiplicity of voices that exist at any one time, and the impressive ability of the emerging sciences to block these out. In his subsequent works he seeks to elaborate the way in which each scientific discourse is actually constructed as an agonistic site of struggle between the voices included and excluded, all conditioned through

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the medium of writing, which initially comes to take centre stage in his thought during this period. From the 1980s onwards Rancière explores this theme from various angles, beginning with philosophy, then history, and finally moving on to literature. Before examining this ourselves it is worth noting that he chooses to use the term ‘poetics’ here in order to emphasise the creative element of writing. In its earliest usage, poetry simply refers to the arts in general, and poetics refers to the way that the arts are understood as manifestations of human creativity. Hence the term ‘poetics of knowledge’ alerts us to the fact that all knowledge is constructed and thus is a work of creativity. Rancière’s attention is on how this construction takes place and in particular how the medium of writing shapes the knowledge that can be presented in it, while in turn being shaped itself.71 One text that helps us to situate Rancière’s work on the various poetics of knowledge is The Ignorant Schoolmaster.72 As discussed in Chapters 1 and 3, this text argues that the division of knowledge is at play behind all instances of inequality. A study of the poetics of knowledge must take into account the division between the traditional way of partitioning knowledge in society which functions to distinguish between savant and ignoramus, and its opposite which is found in the axiomatic equality of all. As Rancière uses this text to elucidate his position on knowledge more clearly, it can be seen as the lens through which all of Rancière’s other essays should be read.73 This approach enables us to identify that even in the opening pages of his earlier text, The Philosopher and His Poor, Rancière’s polemic is aimed at the academy as much as at the world beyond its gates: from the very beginning of philosophy there has been a desire to contain the creative force of change by limiting its availability to the elites of any ordering. Order may be reconfigured but the very definition of order is that a new elite will form who will keep the dominant knowledge of that ordering to themselves. Thus all political struggle is first and foremost a struggle over knowledge, and a struggle over truth.74 After generalising this argument in The Ignorant Schoolmaster Rancière seeks to test this hypothesis in disciplines beyond philosophy, beginning with history75 and then turning to literature itself.76 In doing so he frequently refers to three tropes from Plato: theotocracy; the invention of writing; and the myth of the cicadas. Theotocracy is used by Plato to refer to the increasing availability of the arts, first music then poetry, to anybody and everyone via the democratisation of the Ancient Greek theatre – access to which was widened to remove income restrictions and to ensure free access during the democratic years. Rancière is particularly interested by the discussion of theotocracy in Plato’s Laws which denotes the growing dominance of ‘an opinion that all are competent in everything’.77 Rancière notes Plato’s treatment of this to emphasise two points: first, theotocracy, understood as the order of the people, is an enemy to the well-ordered city and therefore an enemy to philosophy, for the well-ordered city is the city of philosophy, the city ruled by philosopher kings – where each man attends only to his one role and thus all

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the parts harmoniously come together to form a unity that is greater than the sum of all its parts. Rancière wishes to highlight this starting point to make his argument that not only the foundation of philosophy but its continuation up to the present day, including the political philosophy of Marx, is founded on a division of labour that underlies class with another division that renders the workers unable to think for themselves and therefore in need of being led. Second, Rancière is able to note here the partitioning of philosophy and the work of thinking as separate from the arts, which Plato deems dangerous and corrupting for philosophy. He maintains that both these divisions between philosophers and ordinary labour and between philosophy and the arts persists in philosophy today and that it is only by questioning and critiquing the ways in which philosophy opposes equality and the arts that we can begin to overcome the material inequalities of the world founded on these ideas. Another way of figuring the danger writing holds for philosophy is found in the second trope. Drawing this time on the aforementioned myth of Theuth and Thamus Rancière notes the danger of writing in that it makes words available to any who can read them, rather than limiting exposure to a speech act, a moment in time when a speaker speaks specifically to address a particular audience.78 We see a third division emerge here, this time a division between those who can access philosophical knowledge. Thus these tropes highlight the divisions of labour, discipline and access to knowledge; characterised here in the distinctions between philosophers and labourers; philosophy and the arts; and speech versus writing. It is writing’s errant nature that makes it particularly dangerous for philosophy since a written account has the potential to entrap ideas, sneak them out of a specified location (their ‘proper’ place, time, speaker and audience) and deliver them to anybody. It could not be guaranteed to respect the aforementioned divisions between the work of philosophers and ordinary labourers, and between philosophy and the arts. Furthermore, according to Rancière, since the time of Plato philosophy has been the systematisation of thought which seeks to assign order and place. To ensure that knowledge is a tool of ordering rather than a challenge to it philosophy needs to control errancy to ensure that the division between philosopher and labourer and the activities of philosophy and the arts remain separate. Finally, then, Rancière seeks to emphasise that the division of disciplines and access to knowledge rest on the previous division of labour by noting that in the same text, and prior to the recounting of the myth of Theuth, Plato records philosophy’s fear of the thoughts of the ordinary people. The dialogue begins as Socrates and Phaedrus escape the midsummer heat of the city by taking a walk in the countryside. They eventually pause at midday in a shady spot by the river where the cicadas are singing. At this point in the dialogue Socrates recounts an old myth in which the cicadas are said to be an ancient race of people. Enchanted by the singing of the Muses they wasted away, distracted from worldly needs. Flattered by this attention the Muses sent them back into the world in the form of cicadas, able to sing for their whole lives.

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After they died they were required to repay this kindness by reporting to each Muse the names of the mortals who had honoured them. To the most important Muses, Calliope and Urania, the cicadas had to report who had led a philosophical life.79 Accordingly, Socrates tells Phaedrus that while under the watchful gaze of the cicadas, they must be careful to keep talking despite the heat and not to fall asleep as common labourers would do.80 In this distinction Rancière notes a simple but important point: here labourers are taken to be those whose lives are dominated by the simple material needs of life, to eat and sleep enough to be able to work all day at their trade. In contrast, the philosopher, as a higher being, is one who has leisure time and as a matter of duty must devote it to philosophical conversation. Philosophy is thus denoted the preserve of the intellectual and not something that ordinary people need to bother themselves with. What interests Rancière in this myth is the distinction drawn between the ordinary people, who are dependent upon the material, and the philosopher, or divine man, who has access to the world of the arts, to music, poetry and literature. From this distinction is born two types of human being: not just the proletariat and bourgeoisie of socialist thought, divided via their relation to the means of production, but a further distinction about who has legitimate access to language, and who must remain silent, asleep under the watchful gaze of the cicadas.81 The import of Rancière’s reading of this myth can be emphasised in comparison with Derrida. Derrida’s reading of the same text focuses almost exclusively on the story of Theuth and Thamus which he reads to reveal the phonocentrism82 and thus logocentrism83 of Western philosophy, indicating the power imbalance therein, and the violent exclusions that Western thought effects.84 Yet the added point about the distinction between the labourers and the philosophers in Rancière’s reading is more political.85 It draws attention to the outcome of this imbalance in terms of who benefits and who is excluded. Not only will all writing and indeed all thought be used to effect exclusion, but so will the relationship between the division of knowledge that underlies this exclusion and its material consequences. The addition to the discussion of the myth of writing with the commentary on the myth of the cicadas emphasises the destabilising political force that is available in the errancy of writing and its uncontainable creative force. Rancière employs these tropes in various locations. In The Philosopher and his Poor86 they are used to show how from the very beginning philosophy has sought to carve out a privileged position for itself and thus for its practitioners, away from the necessary labours of the ordinary people. This indicates why a political philosophy that seeks to emancipate, such as Marxism, is doomed from the start because it presumes rather than challenges this division. Rancière subsequently tests this hypothesis with regard to both history and literature. In The Names of History he demonstrates that the study of history will always exclude voices since it is only ever really able to tell stories, despite seeking to raise this storytelling to the status of a ‘science’. Within the formal study of history, Rancière argues that the voices of the poor, the

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marginalised, and the excluded, will never be heard by dint of these people either being ignored or spoken for by others.87 This is not just a recognition of the contingency of history but an analysis of the way that this contingency is structured by the very practice of writing history which means that the excluded voices are present in their absence in the sense that the lack of closure that writing gives and the ever present alternatives within any one text mean that alternative voices haunt every account. Yet it is only by drawing attention to this that we can start to appreciate the lack of history. It is in this text that he first introduces the term literarity which is here identified as a property of human beings – that which renders each of us a ‘literary animal’.88 Furthermore, he notes that our literarity is in turn actually neutralised by literature – the art of writing – as it seeks to restrain the power through which the word’s availability to the human mind enables humans to endlessly interpret, retell and revise histories, submitting it to set rules or structures. At this point Rancière claims that the study of history also needs to control the errant letter by restraining the literarity of the people in the sense of people’s endless ability to exploit the availability of meaning, to interpret and reinterpret differently. We are prompted here to see that Rancière’s overall concern is that in the study of anything the academy distinguishes the privileged voices over the others and therefore close off all our disciplines to the marginalised and oppressed whose histories are never heard and whose thinking is thereby foreclosed. Given Derrida’s famous reading of the myth of Theuth in Plato’s Pharmacy,89 it seems too much of a coincidence that Rancière’s chooses the same text to supplement the same point made by Derrida with a further comment about the elitism and hierarchies perpetrated by philosophy. I cannot help but read Rancière’s reading of the myth of the cicadas as an implicit critique of Derridean deconstruction. Rancière paints an implicit analogy between the way that Derrida not only missed or chose to overlook the political import of this loaded statement in the Phaedrus but also, according to Rancière’s reading (elaborated in Chapter 2), more generally shied away from the political import of deconstruction, using instead the structure of the messianic ‘to come’ to endlessly defer political questions.90 This is particularly apparent given that Rancière’s reading of the Phaedrus first appears in a text critiquing the elitism of philosophy and the way it is used to maintain divisions rather than break them down even when it declares specific emancipatory aims.91 Rancière’s point can also be seen to relate to the fact that Derrida’s focus remained squarely within the academy. Although Derrida undermined the privileging of philosophy over literature conceptually92 and in a way that prefigures Rancière’s work in this area, in practice it never moved out of the domain of accepted academic disciplines to engage with the ordinary in the way that Rancière has sought to do. Since we will return to Derrida later, and having outlined these prior stages of Rancière’s thought, we are ready to turn once again to Rancière’s work on literature for we can now see that it forms just one step in a wider project.

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However, this is a particularly fruitful step. In his next book-length work, The Flesh of Words, Rancière finally turns his problematic in on itself. Up until this point he had focused on the relationship between writing and other disciplines, first philosophy then history, but his third step is to examine the relationship between writing and itself, in the sense of considering the art of writing that has come to be known as literature and how it is constituted and challenged by the media through which it is communicated: the practice of writing. As noted above, in Mute Speech Rancière traces the emergence of literature to argue that literature is a democratic art form born out of and indeed enabled by the revolutionary values of the democratic age. This in itself does not constitute a claim for Rancière since it is widely accepted that literature emerged in the post-revolutionary era at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth century whereby the growing popularity of ideals of equality and freedom led to the overturning of the ancien régime.93 The old hierarchies and rules surrounding the art of writing were rejected as part of this signalling of an end to the formal tradition of belles-lettres and the appearance of a new, popular narrative form in the development of romantic poetry and writing and the emergence of the modern novel. This anti-hierarchical writing was able to flourish in the new democratic age. What is unique about Rancière’s retelling of this story is the relationship he draws between the emergence of literature in relation to democracy. It is important to note here that Rancière never suggested that either philosophy or history were themselves democratic, merely that when they became written disciplines they contained within them the potential for equality which it seems remained in the large part locked away until released (albeit only ever partially) by the spirit of democracy following the revolutionary era. This gave them a democratic force which challenged any attempt to establish and define them in a fixed manner. However, in turning to investigate literature Rancière is setting himself a double challenge for he is interested in outlining the way that literature emerged in the democratic age. Although it too had to suppress the equality that was potentially within writing in order to establish itself as an art this inhered a greater paradox than the claim about philosophy and history. Whilst philosophy and history pre-date the democratic era, Rancière’s claim is that literature as a discipline was born out of the democratic urge and is itself the art of writing democratically, writing by anybody for anybody, yet it is also an ‘art’: a ‘correct’ way of writing, a correct way of undermining and challenging the correct, an art of directing the undirectable, the art of organising the un-organisable. Hence Rancière’s argument about literature is twofold: literature suppresses the democratic drive within it as all disciplines must in order to be constituted as a discipline; however, literature itself is democratic and hence is constituted by a contradiction that we do not find at the constitutional level of philosophy and history. Thus Rancière’s engagement with literature and literary theory is deeper and more complex than his studies on philosophy and history, for in

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these essays we see him carefully unpicking the contradictory strands that constitute literature as a discipline and a practice. In doing this it becomes necessary for him to identify the spirit of writing (literarity) from the art (literature). Let us examine this process in more detail. As we have already seen, Rancière claims that writing is in spirit a democratic practice. Drawing once more on the tropes of the invention of writing and the myth of the cicadas he notes how Plato’s concern with the anti-hierarchical power of writing to disrupt and challenge order was what prompted him to suggest that it had no place in the ideal community governed by the philosopher kings. This ability to disrupt is possible because of literarity in the sense of the ‘availability’ of the errant letter which, as a prompt for disruption, is therefore presented here as a principle of redistribution,94 a principle whereby given distributions are challenged and refigured. Because writing is therefore a mechanism by which the order of being, doing and saying can be refigured it appears that writing is related in some way to Rancière’s moment of ‘politics’, the moment of the universal claim to equality. Indeed, Rancière suggests that: Democracy is the regime of writing, the regime in which the perversion of the letter is the law of the community. It is instituted by the spaces of writing whose overpopulated voids and overly loquacious muteness rends the living tissue of the communal ethos.95 The errancy of the letter, here typified by writing has the power to rupture order and create an opening for the new. Democracy as rupture depends on this. Yet let us recall Davis’s aforementioned concern that writing is not as democratic as Rancière claims, since although if one is literate it is possible to read any writing and interpret at will, literacy is far from guaranteed in many societies. Hence if Rancière’s claim is that writing itself is in some way democratic, he needs to attend to the social conditions which structure who has access to reading and writing and who does not. On top of this concern about access, an apparent inconsistency emerges, for on the one hand Rancière tells us that literature emerges because of democracy – because of the dawning of the democratic age – but on the other hand, writing carries within it a potential for equality which brings about democracy. This seems simultaneously to claim that writing causes democracy while democracy causes writing. Although Rancière has claimed that the democratic power of writing is unleashed via the democratic turn and this then has the potential to maintain democracy within our current paradigm, he has told us nothing about his understanding of the socio-historical conditions that led to the emergence of the democratic era, nor how to guard against its subversion and redirection into a non-democratic age in the future.96 Without addressing this further Rancière’s theory of writing risks being reduced to mere observation, lacking in critical dimension.

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Doubling democracy, doubling literature If we recall Rancière’s retelling of the tale of the Plebeian revolt on the Aventine Hill, we can see that these concerns are too hasty, for he uses this story to demonstrate an instance of ‘politics’ that took place before the modern revolutionary age. To break open this apparent tautological circle we need to remember Rancière’s penchant for using words and concepts against themselves. We note that Rancière has two ways of thinking about democracy:97 first, as a system of government; and second, as a moment of equality. In the Rancièrian schema it seems that although humans may try to institute democracy as a system of government based on equality, they will only ever be able to institute oligarchy because as soon as one instantiation of equality is instated at the expense of others, it will be ruled by those who benefit from it and who will become the new oligarchs. Democracy, understood as a positing of equality, cannot be instituted. Noting this will make us more attentive to Rancière’s use of the terms democracy and democratic, in particular his assertion that we are living in an age many would refer to as democratic but only in an institutionalised sense, for it is merely the age in which democracy has been instituted as a representative system of government. Furthermore, Rancière tells us that there are two competing forces in literature which means that it is founded on the aforementioned paradox whereby literature embodies the power of writing to subvert all rules of what is and is not literature at the same time as being a discipline that therefore needs to control this disruptive force.98 He theorises this paradox in his essay ‘The Politics of Literature’99 in which he explains that literature does two things: it does democracy understood as the moment of equality in that it marks the collapse of the system of differences that allowed social hierarchies to be represented. It achieves the democratic logic of writing without a master and without a purpose, the great law of the equality of all subjects and of the availability of all expressions, that marks the complicity of absolutized style with the capacity of anyone at all to grab any words, phrases or stories.100 In this sense it effects a break with what has gone before. Yet it also establishes a new order, for Rancière tells us that literature simultaneously opposes the democracy of writing with a new poetics that invents other rules of appropriateness between the significance of words and the visibility of things. It identifies this poetics with a politics or, rather, a metapolitics, if metapolitics is the right word to describe the attempt to substitute, for the stages and utterances of politics, the laws of a ‘true stage’ that would serve them as a foundation.101

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Literature is born out of disruption but subsequently ever seeks to suppress its literarity, instituting a new stylised form of apparently unregulated writing – a ‘poetics’ – which can be understood to function more as a form of police ordering that forecloses ‘politics’. In The Flesh of Words he says that writing in literature is at one and the same time ‘an imbalance of the legitimate order of discourse, of the way in which it is distributed’. It is also an act of distribution, whereby it is distributing ‘bodies in an ordered community.102 Literature is born out of the unleashing of meaning, yet is destined to a perpetual struggle to avoid being put back on its leash as a particular instantiation of this freedom from rules of meaning. In light of this paradox, we see that the quotation above suggests that it is writing rather than literature that can institute democracy in terms of a moment of rupture or break with that which has gone before. If we take the doubling of democracy alongside the paradox of literature whereby it contains both the practice of writing that has the potential to rupture fixed meanings and the art of writing in literature, then we can see that each usage of writing corresponds with each type of democracy. Writing as rupture is writing that can prompt a moment of democracy by breaking with prior meaning, whereas writing as art in the form of literature, a particular recognised form of ‘writing without rules’, is the writing of the age in which democracy has been instituted as a representative system of government. Hence literature is the art of writing in the age of democracy and in this sense the move to the democratic age facilitated the emergence of literature as a discipline. However, writing’s potential to rupture has always existed and thus has always been able to prompt moments of equality. It is not limited to the prior existence of democratic institutions. We can now understand how literature is born out of democracy while simultaneously causing democracy. At the time of the French Revolution the new ideas of equality came to operate in society to challenge all the old ways of being, saying and doing. At this moment many new forms were instituted, including a new art of writing: literature. Literature was brought into being alongside the institution of the democratic system of government because both were brought about by the emergence of the revolutionary discourse of equality. As such, the discipline of literature contributes to and accompanies the resulting particular democratic system of government, since it embodies or stages a particular type of equality. This is the same instantiation of equality upon which the current democratic system is based – the refusal to acknowledge hierarchy in terms of the topics and subject matter of writing and the inclusion and focus on minor details at the expense of grander themes.103 Literature counters hierarchical order by undermining and opposing it through fragmentation. This gives literature a strange status between order and disorder, for although we have seen that it was bought into being by the revolutionary era, it upholds the bourgeois values of equality upon which this was founded and as such challenges any move to establish any further alternative order. It therefore supports and maintains the order in

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which liberal democracy is considered a legitimate system of government. The revolutionary moment which led to both the new system of government and the birth of literature was ‘politics’ in the Rancièrian sense. It involved the universal positing of equality. Yet it was quickly ordered back into police ordering, such that politically the first bourgeois state was born, and in terms of writing, new rules, styles and notions of the ‘correct’, of better and worse writing, crept into literature to form it as a new discipline. Hence we see that Rancière’s claim that literature is democratic does not mean that literature is necessarily democratic in the sense of democracy as a moment of radical equality. Instead, it is the art of writing that accompanies the democratic age. As such, although a more complex discussion of the socio-historic conditions through which literature emerged may have helped to avoid these confusions, it seem that Rancière has already provided us with the information we need here, for he tells us that it was the romantic ideas that flourished in the wake of the revolution that allowed the new art form of literature to emerge, but that the potential for equality that it contained has always been present in writing and thus does not wholly depend on any particular social conditions, although some will be more favourable than others.104 The modern emergence of democracy has helped to create conditions that are more conducive for ‘politics’ since representative democracy does institutionalise some elements of the aforementioned spirit of revolution, but on their own these conditions are far from sufficient and cannot be relied upon. In order to distinguish literarity more clearly from Derridean différance, it is necessary for Rancière to make explicit the function whereby this availability acts to disrupt. Hence in The Flesh of Words he suggests that literarity is the ‘disordering peculiar to writing’.105 Literarity is both the disorder that emerges from the availability of the word as well as the condition of availability. This disorder ‘confuses … hierarchy’ because it ‘introduces dissonance’.106 This reveals a more explicit focus on the political as it identifies what it is about this availability that can be wielded in such a way as to act against order. ‘By confusing the destination of living speech’ such that it can be read and interpreted by just about anybody ‘writing confuses this relationship between ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of speaking whose harmony constitutes … the community’.107 This disordering of writing is made possible by writing’s availability – the fact that there is an excess of words and meanings. The emphasis on disorder indicates that availability of meaning is necessary but not sufficient for literary disorder. Hence by the time of writing The Politics of Aesthetics Rancière has concluded that literarity comprises both the condition of the availability of meaning plus the disruptive effect caused by this availability.108 The unique point that Rancière adds here is that in removing rules from writing in literature, writing’s political impact – its potential to rupture – which has always existed, has been released in particularly potent ways in the modern age. Although writers seek to discipline this potential in various ways throughout the democratic age109 they can never contain it completely. As

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long as literature remains the dominant art of writing it will always have the potential to contribute to democracy understood as moments of equality. However, before we get swept away by the romantic notion that we can do ‘politics’ by writing novels and poetry Rancière urges caution. As noted above, in ‘Literary Misunderstanding’ Rancière finally turns to theorise explicitly the distinction between political disagreement (‘politics’) and literary misunderstanding.110 Having now understood that literarity is the disruption that comes from the availability of meaning, we can see that these represent two divergent directions that this disruption can take. Literary misunderstanding and political disagreement both work against police order.111 Indeed, earlier Rancière asserts that literary misunderstanding is a ‘miscount’112– a dispute about which things are important and should be included and which should not. This is the exact word he uses in Dis-agreement and elsewhere to describe the moment of ‘politics’.113. Yet ‘political disagreement and literary misunderstanding each attack one aspect of the consensual paradigm of proportions between words and things’114 and thus work together from ‘different angles’.115 Whereas disagreement is about the invention of the new – ‘names, utterances, arguments and demonstrations that set up new collectives where anyone can get themselves counted in the count of the uncounted’ – misunderstanding is that which suspends ‘the forms of individuality through which consensual logic binds bodies to meanings’116 such that words can be used outside of their ‘correct’ meaning to create a particular effect. Thus he summarises that ‘politics works on the whole, literature works on the units’.117 Consequently, we see that the way in which literarity disrupts in formal writing is different from how it disrupts outside of the discipline of formal writing. Literarity can effect dissensus (rupture with given meanings) in literature due to literature’s indifference.118 It is this dissensus that Rancière refers to as literary misunderstanding. This misunderstanding creates ‘new forms of individuality that dismantle the correspondences established between states of bodies and meanings’.119 Yet this dissensus that is peculiar to literature is limited with regard to its field of operation: the discipline of literature. It can disrupt literature momentarily but is then absorbed into the discipline. Indeed, in terms of the impact of literary misunderstanding for literature Rancière notes that in order for such misunderstanding to operate it still needs to maintain an idea of literature as a coherent whole. This means that although it challenges the place of bodies and meanings within the whole it cannot overthrow the need for there to be a coherent entity. As such, it is enclosed in a field between two poles: on the one hand a drive to pure literature (as we find in Flaubert’s obsession with style); on the other the drive that dissolves literature completely. This latter is effected via either gradual elimination of words in the quest for real experiences below the words120 or via the need to communicate reality through the words, which subsequently undermines the words which are reduced to pale imitations of real things and such no longer count as literature.121 Hence paradoxically this very

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misunderstanding becomes a ground: its lawlessness is the law of literature. It functions as a new principle of order rather than as a rupturing force. Political dissensus works on the constitution of the field itself, rupturing its constitution. It ‘operates in the form of subjectification procedures that identify the declaration by the anonymous that they are a collective, an us, with reconfiguration of the field of political objects and actors.’122 In contrast, literary misunderstanding takes us in the ‘opposite direction’.123 Instead of organising ‘the perceptual field around the subject of utterance … it dissolves the subject of utterance in the fabric of the percepts and affects of anonymous life’.124 Thus Rancière claims that literary misunderstanding actually opposes the staging of ‘politics’ with a different staging that invalidates ‘the markers of political subjectification’.125 Hence he tells us that literature as a whole can never effect ‘politics’. As long as writing is deemed to belong within a discipline its literarity will operate as metapolitics. At this point we can clarify the distinction made previously between Derrida and Rancière concerning the relationship between literature and democracy. Rancière accuses Derrida of sidestepping ‘politics’ but this is partially due to Derrida’s misconceptualisation of politics as rooted in sovereignty rather than, in Rancière’s reading, emerging via democracy. Furthermore, in his later works the term literarity helps Rancière to articulate the relationship between the availability of the word and democracy, and to reveal more precisely the role of literature in this respect. Rancière figures this relationship via the use of another trope, that of an island which he suggests represents a response to the fable of Theuth and the invention of writing. Rancière claims that in narrative, the figure of the island is used to represent a place where order is redistributed and its meaning inverted. Hence islands are portrayed as mythical places of other lives, alternate orders, enchantment, seduction and spells; the temptations that lure us away from the real world of order and sense. In this respect he suggests that books themselves operate within our oligarchic order as these islands, word-islands, whose ideas challenge and counter the reigning order: The island is not just the fiction within a book. It is the metaphor for the book in general, for the book as a type of being. The space of the island and the volume of the book express each other and thus define a certain world, a certain way in which writing makes a world by unmaking another one.126 In the democratic age, the new availability of the novel enabled ideas to circulate and reach those who had no business reading and dreaming of other ways of living: ‘these word-islands that silt across the channelled river of logos are not content with troubling fragile souls. They re-carve the space that is between bodies and that regulates their community.127 Yet they do this by positing as an eternal challenge the availability of another community, that based on a claim to universal equality: the community that is

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democracy.128 This is a community that can never be instituted and so we see that it always exists, like the mirage of an island on the horizon, to motivate the journey away from existing order, and to counter the order that we have. Rancière acknowledges that the more common interpretation of an island within literary theory is as a representation of utopia, yet he argues in contrast that it is first of all democracy whose representation the island symbolises. Democracy is this ‘empty’, ‘abstract’ space that divides up the power of the few words available: people, equality, liberty, etc. It is also the movement by which these available words take hold of and divert from their intended path people who had not been concerned with dealing with logos or the community.129 Thus the island as a literary trope represents the rupture of political disagreement rather than literary misunderstanding. Literarity can lead to political disagreement which is democratic, or it can lead to literary misunderstanding which need not be. This positions Rancière at odds with Derrida’s claim: ‘No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy.130 While institutionalised democracy and the institution of literature as a certain type of writing without rules are interdependent, and while democracy understood as the rupture of order does indeed need to exploit the literarity of writing in order to break and refigure the bonds between particular bodies and meanings, writing can disorder without effecting this particular understanding of democracy. Hence when democracy is conceived as rupture we must amend Derrida’s formula: no democracy without literature, but quite feasibly, literature without democracy. As with social movements in Chapter 1, the availability of meaning in books, writing and its various interpretations can motivate a rupture but do not constitute the rupture. They may be necessary but will not be sufficient for ‘politics’. Indeed, Rancière tells us that the ‘fixed gaze suspended over the island’ reveals to us the suspense of literature between its two fates: that of its disciplinarity; and that of literarity which ruptures and reveals its drive to fix and order.131 For this literarity to effect political disagreement it needs imaginaries (figured by the island) to motivate it. Yet the gaze, looking beyond any particular imaginary takes the unfolding of ‘politics’ beyond the story or idea that provided its original motivation. This emphasises that the existence and availability of literature in the form of readily available novels and poetry as well as their various interpretations may help to figure counter-imaginaries but are not sufficient resource for ‘politics’ since any fragmentation they effect can too easily be tucked back into the order of literature and neutered of their rupturing force. Hence if literarity remains within the discipline of literature it can effect fragmentation in the form of literary misunderstanding. However, outside of the discipline it can effect politics. This is elaborated in Rancière’s essay on Balzac where in trying to navigate the contradictory tendencies of literature’s

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drive for mastery of the word and the disruption of literarity Balzac is rendered unable to write. Instead, he becomes a hostage of democracy, the island of the people, forcing him to turn to the material world in order to resolve his story.132 Yet in his contribution to the building of a new poetics, Balzac also alerts us to the overflow of meaning and ideas beyond words back into the material existence from whence they have come. Here Rancière traces the path of meaning, breaking away from where it has been captured by literature and into the material existence of human lives. He notes the play of poetics in the power of the mind which is already at work in this humanity whose language is already a living poem but one that speaks – in the stones it shapes, the objects it makes and the lines it cuts in the land – a truer language than that of words. Truer because closer to the power by which life is written.133 Indeed, writing is not limited here to mere marks on a page. It goes beyond the paper and includes writing that is ‘inscribed on the very texture of things’.134 It is the writing of materiality. It includes the ways in which we interact with the material around us: the material distribution of things, places, belonging, the way we accept or reject ways of being, saying and doing. Writing is any act of inscription, of seeking to fix meaning in order to communicate it between people. As Chambers notes above, Rancière is seeking to disrupt much more radically the distinction between speech and writing, not merely noting that one should not be prioritised over the other, but that they are not substantially different.135 Yet Chambers does not fully develop the import of this step, for Rancière is not simply seeking to blur the division between writing and speech but, like Derrida, to blur too the division between writing, speech and thought. Thus Rancière sees the presence of writing in all interactions between the human as well as between the human with the non-human. In this sense, writing is the realm of meaning that seeks always to fix our relations between each other and between humans and the material, yet it can never succeed once and for all, due to the excess of meaning. Literarity, as the force of disorder inherent in writing, is available for us to exploit for political ends; it is the disorder inherent in any attempt to fix, through the medium of meaning, the order of human relations with the world around them. At this point we are ready to reflect anew upon Rancière’s claim that modern man is a literary animal before he is a political animal.136 This, he tells us, is because man is ‘caught in the circuit of a literarity that undoes the relationship between the order of words and the order of bodies that determine the place of each’.137 We can now understand that this is because man’s literarity means that no one human or group of humans will ever have complete mastery over inscription, or indeed over the meaning and use of language. Literarity is not simply found in writing but in all forms of communication. It is the excess of meaning and the disorder it effects which

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can then be used to subvert order. In some ways this idea of writing that is more than what is written functions as a form of utopia, but not a utopia in the sense of a distant imaginary place but as a ‘heterotopia’;138 the potential of democracy, the moment of equality, as a non-place of ‘a polemical reconfiguration of the sensible, which breaks down the categories that define what is considered to be obvious’.139 ‘Politics’ exists because man is an animal that can express meaning and argue over whether others do or do not express meaning. The existence of ‘politics’ is dependent on the ability of mankind to communicate meaning at the same time as playing with meaning. Consequently, writing and any form of communication can never simply be tools for domination and will always offer the possibility of emancipation. Ever since humans have been able to constitute speech and meaning ‘politics’ has been available via the subversion of inscription. As all are equally implicated within this140 the potential for democracy has always been with us. It is this that Plato saw and sought to contain in the very first steps of Western philosophy, codified by Aristotle in the formula that man is a political animal because he possesses the logos. This fixed the logos as singular and achievable. Thus, in dominant circles, until the dawning of the age of democracy the foundation of the singular logos of natural order went unquestioned. Emancipation in this sense refers to exploiting our literarity by playing with the availability of meaning to strategically effect disorder in the form of a rupture of meaning and sense in favour of equality, from which ‘politics’, the challenge to the police, can occur. Yet here another question arises. If Rancière wishes to claim that literarity is the disorder inherent in the inscription of all meaning, not just the written word, why did he have to take us all round the history of writing to get there? Rancière has argued that writing includes a dangerous feature – literarity – that was contained more securely, while writing was subordinated to speech. When the aesthetic regime emerged this enabled writing to break free of this position and also of its constraining rules and conventions so as to unleash literarity and its fertile imaginaries to inspire stagings of equality. However, this identifies the ways that literarity operates through writing and does not mean that it operates only through writing. Plato was particularly concerned about the dangers of writing due to his particular context in which the ability to read and write was spreading and hence writing as an institution needed to be regulated and contained by social convention in the same way that speech and philosophy already were via the division of labour (enter Aristotle). In analysing this Rancière is able to identify the underlying concern about the way that the availability of language in all its forms can undermine the order of the polis. Plato’s particular concern with writing demonstrates how the materiality of communicative strategies is always going to interact with literarity to impact on conditions of possibility as noted by Davis who observes that the errancy of speech, and hence its literary potential, has been enhanced by the development of recording and video technology.141

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Hence Rancière focuses on using writing to demonstrate literarity (the errancy of the letter through all inscription and re-inscription of meaning) for political disagreement. By focusing on the example of writing, Rancière is able to weave into his narrative analysis of how the discipline of writing – literature – became less disciplined in the democratic age and outline the way that writing came to be more available as a tool of ‘politics’ in the sense of freeing it from the constraints by which it had been bound.

Poeticity as play with meaning Yet this clarification has afforded us only a moment’s pause for there is one more area which we must visit before we can reconsider what Rancière’s literary theory offers our investigation into his ‘politics’. Early in his study of the poetics of literature, Rancière introduces the principle of poeticity to explain that the revolution in writing that marked the birth of literature was a revolution concerning the way poetry was understood to express meaning. Following Vico, he notes that in the representative regime, poetry was merely ‘an activity that produces poems’ yet in the aesthetic regime poetry ‘is the quality of poetic objects.’142 The removal of rules for writing that we see in the new literature meant that the poeticity of the world could be expressed in formal writing whereby poeticity refers to the property by which any object can be doubled, taken not only as a set of properties but as the manifestation of an essence, not only as the effect of certain causes but as the metaphor or metonymy of the power that produces it.143 For Victor Hugo, the stone of the cathedral is no longer simply limited to the properties of the stone for this stone can now ‘also be language’ – the language that is written in every object of the world.144 Again Rancière is not claiming that metaphor or metonymy never existed before this moment, but that they were afforded a new ‘legitimate’ status that provided the new ground of formal writing – the ground of literature.145 This legitimation of metaphor is a symptom of the wider democratic shift in the modern era. This shift is the reason why Rancière qualifies that it is modern man who is a literary animal.146 The legitimacy given to the lack of rules in literature makes it available as a paradoxical discipline which can provoke ‘politics’. Man has always been a discursive animal, one that creates and recreates the logos at the same time as living in accordance with it. Yet the values of the democratic era loosen the hold of convention over language and its uses thereby rendering the power of words to make and remake the world in which we live more available. Accordingly, in such a world it becomes even more fitting to describe man as a literary animal. We need not stop there, however. Although poeticity is that which is now enshrined as the basis of literature, its reach goes further. Rancière cites Vico

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to suggest that poetry is the meeting of language and thought, the first expressions of emerging consciousness. In the roots of poetry we find the meanings of speech, words and ideas, myths and the logos (the right, the true) all tangled up together.147 Poetry is the arena in which the new emerges in thought and speech is a language that speaks of things ‘as they are’ for someone awakening to language and thought. It speaks of things as he sees them and speaks of them. And he cannot help but see them and speak of them. It is the necessary union between speech and thought, between knowledge and ignorance.148 In poetry we find that fiction is not so separate from fact, for the first fact was only fiction of sorts: a supposition. Yet this was defended as true, a myth defended as history. Thus the idea becomes the logos, the fixed word, the true. Logos emerges from poetry and will be challenged again by poetry. Poetry emerges from the ‘first impotence of a thought incapable of abstraction and an inarticulate language’149 and is thus duplicitous150 for it is not only the establishment of truth, the telling of the world, but is also the subsequent challenging of this truth with others. Poetry is therefore ‘one particular manifestation of the poeticity of the world, that is, of the way in which a truth is given to a collective consciousness in the form of works and institutions’.151 As the language of the new, poetry ‘is defined by poeticity’, by the way that words and meaning can be doubled and such it is ‘a state of language, a specific way that thought and language belong to one another, a relation between what the one knows and does not know and the other says and does not say’.152 The challenging of truth brought about by the telling and retelling of the world through poetry, rooted in the Ancient Greek word poiesis (to make or create), is only possible because of the principle of poeticity, the doubling of meaning which is this setting of a word against itself via metaphor and metonymy. Thus Rancière dissolves the ancient debate between poetry and philosophy. Philosophy’s claim to truth is shown to be a sham: it is a form of poetry dressed in the garb of ‘reason’. Because of poetry, the power of endlessly reworking the way we seek (and can never fully succeed so endlessly continue to try) to communicate being wanders outside the realm of text and is seen to ‘cover with its very power of errancy the experience of the whole world’.153 The power of disruption – literarity – in the disorder of meaning available to anybody to read, write and interpret as they will, can be seen beyond writing in the realm of how we comprehend, inscribe and use words and meanings in the whole of our social existence. There is a veiled practice of poeticity at work in everyday communication because all communication necessarily comprises an element of creativity, yet this is veiled by our everyday adherence to ordinary conventions of language. Literarity is present in all forms of communication. However, it will always be stifled by the linguistic

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conventions that enable efficient communication. Poeticity is the practice through which our literarity is exploited. It is that which facilitates the doubling of meaning whereby the logos is split-able. Poeticity takes us back to Aristotle once again, and underlines Rancière’s argument in Dis-agreement that our political nature, our political existence as beings that have the logos, depends on our prior ability to constitute and reconstitute the logos in a political struggle. This constituting and reconstituting requires us to be less respectful of linguistic convention and hence a practice of poeticity can be identified here to denote a practice of playing with language without a necessary intention, to undermine and draw attention to our usual unquestioning adherence to linguistic convention. In Dis-agreement Rancière further articulates the link between poetry and ‘politics’ in his short critique of the wrong turn taken by contemporary liberal political theory. He insists that we need to revisit the dominant thematisation of political dialogue or political ‘rationality’ which maps out the terrain of political speech in contemporary political thought. This comprises two exclusionary poles: first, that of rational speech, of the kind we find in liberal analytic and Habermasian thought;154 and second, that of irrational violence that takes us beyond the political sphere. In addition to these, Rancière suggests that in order to understand political struggle it is necessary to recognise an alternative option whereby voices struggle to make themselves heard and understood through the political manoeuvrings that take us to the moment of ‘politics’. This is a moment when the rational, logical, accepted order of speech is overturned in order to redistribute ‘the way speaking bodies are distributed in an articulation between the order of saying, the order of doing, and the order of being’.155 Yet Rancière is not suggesting that political speech can be located somewhere between the two poles of rational speech and irrational violence but that ‘politics’ is beyond this binary and concerns that which identifies which forms of speech and action belong to either. Accordingly, we must reject Habermas’s distinction between two kinds of linguistic act: poetic versus argumentative; thus deigning argumentative speech the legitimate form of rational speech and poetic as non-political. This is because for Habermas the poetic leads us too far away from the everyday needs of ‘politics’, opening up the world. In contrast argumentative speech closes the world in and leads to a decision.156 Yet political speech is ‘always both argument and opening up the world where argument can be received and have an impact’ for this is argument that is about ‘the very existence of such a world’ about the existence of a common stage before we can get onto the stage and order it again (policification).157 In such a moment there can be no distinction between the language of rational argument and poetic language since such speech is at one and the same time both rational argument and ‘poetic’ metaphor158 (and hence there can be no final distinction between rational speech and irrational speech since at any one time what is considered rational to one grouping may be considered irrational to others). This is because in a moment of ‘politics’ ‘it is necessary to simultaneously produce

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both the argument and the situation in which it is to be understood, the object of the discussion and the world in which it features as an object’.159 The moment of ‘politics’ constructs its stage at the same time as arguing on it. It is comprised of language that is at one and the same time poetic (building new worlds, revealing new ideas in speech) and argumentative (seeking to persuade within the logos to break open the logos). Political communication is for Rancière that which practices poeticity in order to break open the logos of rational order and make space for the emergence of an alternative poetics. We must therefore reject Habermasian typologies of what is and is not appropriate speech for ‘politics’ and instead focus on the very ways in which we construct that which is recognised as rational and irrational, poetic and argumentative, thereby challenging a given ordering. This can be effected by practicing poeticity: playing with the doubling of meaning to loosen our commitment to language rules and bring into focus possible opportunities for literarity. In the discussion above we saw this poetic doubling at work in various political slogans. There it was claimed that a slogan ‘asserts a “we” of a divided people’.160 Yet crucial to understanding this point is Rancière’s claim that ‘[t]he proletarian class in which Blanqui professes to line himself up is in no way identifiable with the social group’.161 It did not denote an identifiable homogenous culture or ethos, but instead was fractured by a multiplicity of voices, identities and experiences. Hence Blanqui’s use of the term ‘proletarian’ did not draw up the line of battle between two already existing identities. It introduced a pejorative and denied name, not clearly identifiable with any existing party, smack down onto a society that denied it existed. Hence ‘in the particular name of a specific part or of the whole of the community’ this ‘class’ ‘inscribe[d] the wrong that separates and reunites two heterogenous logics of the community’,162 by refusing to acknowledge the given legitimate partitioning of that order and thereby rupturing its legitimacy. In considering the effect of this slogan we can note that ‘We are the 99%’ does proffer a new grouping, comprised of multiple voices, not identifiable with already existing classes (e.g. working class or middle class), or a distinct ethos or culture; it is also clearly identifiable within the existing order as a label that names the vast swathe of the population. Nevertheless, it is neither a pejorative term in the way that un-Australian, hooligan or German Jew was, nor a term that denotes those who have no legitimate democratic claim in our current order. Furthermore, it is perhaps rather too easily identifiable as a part of society, a statistical grouping of the majority. When used by occupiers who clearly were not numerically ‘the 99%’ it does assert a wrong term, a challenge to the order, but one that seemed to be written off fairly quickly as they were perceived by many to replicate the logic of representative democracy and simply to claim to represent ‘the 99%’. Interestingly, when David Graeber recounts the story of choosing this slogan there is no talk of choosing a pejorative term that identifies those who had no legitimate claim to it. Instead, the aim was to name the facts of the dispute, to identify that 1 per cent of the world’s population control the wealth and fortunes of the

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remaining 99 per cent. Hence although the slogan can in some senses double the people, identify a new grouping that is not representable in our current configuration, and bring together a multiplicity of voices it has perhaps also too easily reproduced consensus logic which seeks to name that which is, with nothing left over. Ninety-nine per cent can too easily be added to 1 per cent to create the whole, and in this sense the slogan does not cause confusion, or stage a miscount. In addition, the slogan did not easily seem to create a single state in which ‘you include your enemy’ in order to blur and render nonsensical the existing division between the included and the excluded.164 This too is where Dean’s reading runs aground for she emphasises the need to name division between parties (already existing classes) rather than a division between two worlds:165 a world in which the 1 per cent rule the 99 per cent, and a world that may seem nonsensical by today’s standards for it would be a world in which that distinction would no longer exist. Before we get carried away with this analysis, however, Rancière has noted that once a ‘collective intelligence affirms itself in the movement it is the moment of doing away with any philosophical providers of explanations or slogans’.166 In spite of this assertion he evidently does see a role for analysing slogans as this is the task he undertakes in What Does it Mean to Be Un? in which he asserts that ‘there is a poetics of politics which consists in inventing cases of dissensus’.167 It is not my intention here to make suggestions, merely to note the features of literarity in the examples Rancière provides and to discuss the slogan ‘We are the 99%’ in order to bring into focus considerations of the practice of the poetics of politics. This chapter has sought to clarify Rancière’s work on the politics of language to enable us to draw out a practice of poeticity that could be used to support democratic activism today by undermining our conformity with our everyday ways of saying. Building on the focus on language herein, Chapter 5 will consider poeticity in action, beyond the linguistic. In doing so it will consider the role of the subversive subject in Rancière’s work and reflect further on the relationship between subversive behaviour and everyday life to consider how everyday action can be used to create conditions for ‘politics’ by subverting and rupturing our everyday ways of doing.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Derrida (1995: 28). Rancière (2004b: 110). Rancière (1999: 59). Ibid.: 59, 200, 560–561. Ibid.: 37, Rancière (2007a: 565–566). Rancière (2007a). Ibid.: 560. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

146 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45

Poeticity Ibid.: 561. Dean (2011: 88). Rancière (1999: 38). Ibid. Rancière (2007a: 564). Rancière (1999: 39). Dean (2011: 88, italics added). Ibid. Ibid. Dean (2012a: 218). Rancière and Panagia (2000: 115). See, for example, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe (1988). Derrida uses this argument to suggest that this reveals a logocentrism in Western metaphysics that prioritises presences over absence – the speaker is there in the speech act, but is absent – as is the writer – in the written account (See ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ in Derrida 1981). Davis (2010: 103). Rancière’s notion of ‘regime’ clearly shares much with Foucault’s notion of episteme. Rancière (2011d: 49). Ibid.: 44. Ibid.: 73. Ibid.: 45–48. Ibid.: 48. Ibid.: 50. Davis (2010: 107). Rancière (2011d: 94). See Derrida (1995) on the same point. ‘Phaedrus’ in Plato (1977: 275e). From The Names of History in 1992, Dis-agreement (1995), and Mute Speech (1998). It was developed a little more in The Flesh of Words (also 1998), elaborated in two interviews carried out in 2000 (one conducted with Davide Panagia and the other with Solange Guenon et al.) and then summed up in The Politics of Aesthetics (2004). The dates shown here are for the original French publication of these works. Cf. initial usage in Rancière (1992: 108, 1995: 61, 2010e: 83, 1998b: 126, then 2000a: 115 and finally 2000b: 8). Rancière (2004c: 39). Although The Names of History was translated in 1994 only two years after its publication in French, it was followed, albeit rather late, by Dis-agreement which appeared in English in 1999. Following the popularity of Dis-agreement the two aforementioned interviews were immediately available via English-language journals in 2000, whereas we had to wait until 2004 for the English editions of The Politics of Aesthetics and The Flesh of Words despite the latter text having been published in French in 1998. Finally, Mute Speech, which also appeared in French in 1998, only became available in 2011. See Davis (2010: 109–110) on this, and comments in Guenon et al. (2000). I have chosen to use the term literarity in this chapter on the basis that its English form differs less from the French original. At least until 2011 when the English edition of Mute Speech appeared. Ross (2010: 136); and Chambers (2013: 114). Kollias (2007), Davis (2010). Rockhill (2004). Chambers (2013) and Ross (2010).

Poeticity 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

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Robson (2009). Davis (2010). Chambers (2013). Davis (2010: 108). Ibid.: 109. Ibid.: 114. Chambers (2013: 89). Ibid.: 113. Rancière (1991: 64). Chambers (2013: 114). See Rancière (1981: 64). Chambers (2013: 114). Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.: 115. Rancière and Panagia (2000: 115, italics in the original); cited by Chambers (2013: 116). Chambers (2013: 116). Ibid.: 117. Davis (2010: 114). This is not to overlook individuals who are physically unable to speak or hear but that it is not dependent on social factors such as access to education. See also Rancière’s comments on ability in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991). Chambers (2013: 113). See, for example, Rancière (1999: 1 and 1998b: 42). Rancière (2011b: xvi). Rancière (1983: 45). Unlike Andrew Parker I do not take theotocracy to be a precursor to the concept of literarity but instead as a more general term referring to all arts, not just writing. Rancière (2004c: 88). At this point it is important to clarify that for Rancière there is no pre-existing human subject that could use poetics to construct knowledge but, as shown in Chapter 1, the subject itself is formed via the practice of poetics – the phrase ‘poetics of knowledge’ then emphasises how human creativity shapes knowledge including the knowledge of ‘who’ the human subject might be (See discussion of Vico’s work on the origins of poetry in Rancière 2011d: Ch. 2). I will focus in more detail on Rancière’s theory of subjectivity in Chapter 5. 1991. Such a reading is supported by Rancière’s comments in Guenon et al. (2000: 3). Obvious parallels with Foucault will be laid aside here but are discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. Rancière (1992). Rancière (1998a, 1998b). Plato (1997: 700e/701a). Rancière (1983: 40). Which Socrates describes as ‘a special kind of music’ (Phaedrus, 259c) implying a type of harmoniousness that is directly challenged by the absurdist tradition as discussed in Chapter 5. Phaedrus, 259a-b. Rancière (1983: 47–51). Prioritising of speech over language. Prioritising of physical presence (of speaker) for reason over absence. Derrida (1995). Bell (2004: 132).

148 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104

105 106 107 108

109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

Poeticity Rancière (2004a). Rancière (1994). Rancière (1992: 52). Rancière (1995). See Rancière (2009c, 2010b). Rancière (2004a). Derrida (1995, 2004). See Chapter 2. Rancière (2011d: 95). Ibid. Davis (2010: 115) and Rockhill (2004: 71–72). Although Rockhill suggests that it emerges due to Rancière’s dependence on two contradictory tendencies, at times situating his take on the different regimes of art within the neo-Kantian historical transcendentalism often associated with Foucault (see Rancière 2004c: 9–10), while at other times seeming to take ‘his regimes of art as immanent conditions that only exist in actual historical configurations’ (Rockhill 2004: 71–72). He suggests that it would make sense for Rancière simply to abandon the neo-Kantian tendency found in his account of the historical symptoms that contribute to the emergence of each historical regime (ibid.: 74). In Dis-agreement (1999), discussed in Chapter 1. Rancière (2011d, 2004b). Rancière (2004d). Rancière (2011c: 21). Ibid. Rancière (2004b: 103). Rancière (2011c: Ch. 2). In Dis-agreement Rancière does suggest that it is modern man that is a literary animal before he is a political animal; however, I take this to refer to his explaining how the force of literarity has been unleashed via the democratic age and is therefore more available through the democratic revolution, not that it did not exist beforehand (1999: 37). Rancière (2004b: 103, italics added). Ibid. Ibid. To clarify a little more, in Dissenting Words Rancière says that ‘literarity refers at once to ‘the excess of words’ that ‘disrupts the relation between an order of discourse and its social function’ and is thus excess of words in three senses: first, that which he elsewhere denotes literariness – ‘words available in relation to the thing to be named’, but second and simultaneously to this, the excess ‘relating to the requirements for the production of life’; and third, ‘vis-à-vis the modes of communication that function to legitimate the “proper” itself ’ (Rancière and Panagia 2000: 115). See his essays on Flaubert, Balzac, Proust and Mallarmé. Rancière (2011c: 41). ‘Actually makes itself felt to the detriment of the same paradigm of order as political disagreement’ (ibid). Ibid.: 36. Rancière (1999: 10). Rancière (2011c: 41). Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Rancière (2004c: 15). Rancière (2011c: 41–42).

Poeticity 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167

149

As in Balzac (Rancière 2004b: 111). As in Proust (Rancière 2011c: 43). Ibid, Ibid. Ibid., italics added. Ibid.: 44. Rancière (2004b: 100). Ibid.: 103–104. Ibid.: 104. Ibid.: 104–105, italics in the original. Derrida (1995: 28). Rancière (2004b: 110). Ibid. Ibid.: 110. Ibid.: 106–107. Chambers (2013: 116). Rancière (1999: 37). Translation amended by the author; Rancière (1999: 39). Rancière (2004c: 41). Ibid.: 40. Not equally able by any particular measure, but all are implicated to greater and lesser extents in different ways and thus the argument about which measure is the best to use becomes possible. Davis (2010: 108). Rancière (2011d: 59). Ibid.: 60. Ibid. Literature occupies the space between the two poles of poeticity and naked writing, ibid.: 171–172. Rancière (1999: 37). Rancière (2011d: 58). Ibid.: 57. Ibid.: 58. Ibid.: 59. Ibid. Ibid. Kollias (2007: 85). Public reasonableness in Rawls (1997) and rational speech in Habermas (1985). Rancière (1999: 55). Ibid.: 56. Ibid., italics added. Ibid. Ibid.: 57. Dean (2011: 88), italics added. Rancière (1999: 38). Ibid.: 39. Graeber (2013: 37–41). Rancière and Lie (2006: n.p.). Rancière (1999: 42). Rancière (2012b: n.p.). Rancière (2007a: 561).

5

Absurdity Aesthetics of subversion

No freedom without dwarves. (The Orange Alternative1) [T]he question of subversion, of working the weakness in the norm, becomes a matter of inhabiting the practices of its rearticulation. (Judith Butler2) Dissensus is not a confrontation between interests or opinions. It is the demonstration of a gap in the sensible itself. (Jacques Rancière3)

As the communist regime struggled to maintain power in 1980s Poland, political graffiti was commonplace but short term. Any scrawled expression of dissent or protest would vanish soon after it appeared, covered over with almost supernatural speed by hurried splashes of paint that neutralised its message. However, in August 1982 in an even more mysterious fashion, gnomes began to appear, dancing and strolling their way across these hastily painted coverings. The casual, ‘apolitical’ pointy-hatted stick men seemed oblivious to their precarious location in the midst of a political dispute. Nor did they have anything to say about it. They just appeared. Then of course, the government functionaries had to be despatched once more to attend to the urgent business of painting over gnomes. Since the late 1990s Rancière’s work has taken a more explicitly aesthetic turn, observable in his introduction of a new phrase for the police order as a ‘distribution of the sensible’.4 Although the introduction of this phrase has gone unremarked in earlier chapters it is salient to flag it up at this point in our discussion because it was introduced to articulate more precisely the particular way that police logic defines and legitimates the appropriate distribution of the social. Through this shift to the terminology of the ‘sensible’ Rancière signals the centrality of aesthetics for his conceptualisation of the ‘politics’/police framework. He tells us that the distribution of the sensible refers to a ‘generally implicit law that defines the forms of partaking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed’.5 Accordingly,

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the essence of the police is a distribution ‘characterised by the absence of void or supplement’ such that all identities are tied to particular ways of doing, saying and being in particular specified locations.6 In contrast, the ‘essence of politics is dissensus’ which he now describes as a ‘demonstration of a gap in the sensible itself ’.7 As we have seen in the previous chapters, ‘politics’ ‘before all else, is an intervention in the visible and the sayable’.8 ‘Politics’ operates according to dissensus, which is the break in the order of the sensible, allowing us to recognise that the rupture of ‘politics’ is that which ushers in a reconfiguration of our sensory perceptions. While Chapters 3 and 4 elaborated practices that could help to weaken our attachment to ways of doing and saying, this final chapter will turn to consider how we might conceive of practices that challenge our very ways of being. Following on from the previous chapter’s discussion of poeticity, it will expand the argument beyond the linguistic field to consider poeticity in the more general sense of the poeticity of being. It will begin by questioning the availability of Rancière’s conceptualisation of ‘politics’ as dissensus, raising the concern that this does not acknowledge the ways in which our perceptions are regulated and disciplined to shut down and oppose dissensus. It will suggest that the tradition of the absurd may be able to inspire ways of undermining this regulation, but in order to do so effectively, it needs to be liberated from its location within performance to recognise our everyday lives as performative. It will thus be argued that Butler’s theorisation of performativity through iteration can be used to supplement the theorisation of ‘politics’ as dissensus. In order to make this argument, however, it is necessary to trace the differences between these two thinkers on the topic of subjectivation, which will enable us to think more carefully about the subject of subversion. Thus we will conclude that absurdity can provide us with the final democratic practice of this book, a practice that exploits the poeticity of being to undermine and challenge our everyday adherence to any sensible distribution.

Senses of absurdity We return, then, to Rancière’s mapping of the aesthetic as an order of the sensible ruptured by dissensus. Rancière’s depiction would benefit from a further acknowledgement of the way that the order of the sensible is that which regulates the distinction between sense and nonsense. This provides an important insight given that the term nonsense denotes that which is commonly understood to lack not only sense, but to therefore lack value, and consequently does not require suppression for it can simply be disregarded as laughable or silly. The existence of nonsense reminds us that even that which is seen to lack sense or contradict the logos occupies a place within order, but it is a subordinate place, as that which does not adhere to the logos. It is thus foolish or inconsequential. Hence the failure to conform to order can be interpreted as either a threat (an alternative form of sense) to be suppressed or

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as nonsense to be disregarded. However, in both situations this failure to conform should not be assumed to result in exclusion beyond borders of order, or to provide the possibility of a free space within, for instead it could simply render one subordinate. As Rancière indicates, the only way to avoid this is to block the workings of the underlying logic so as to rupture this system entirely via dissensus. This has significant consequence for ‘politics’ since if Rosa Parks’ protest had been rendered nonsensical its political import could have been neutralised. This example helps us to consider the concerns outlined in Chapter 1 concerning the efficacy of ‘politics’ from the perspective of aesthetics. Appropriation, dis-identification and subjectivation bring together elements that are neither wholly sensible nor nonsensical, but are instead a strategic mixture of both which ensures that, at least momentarily, they cannot be categorised. Dissensus is that which momentarily breaks with the sensible order, not as nonsense, but as a break with these normative categorisations. This prompts us to recall that ‘politics’ functions not by challenging one logic with another but by utilising a counter-logic to scramble the sensible order. Hence any counter-logic causes ‘politics’ not by its content but by momentarily presenting us with a paradox9 of how to proceed. In the moment of ‘politics’ the logic of the sensible order is rendered incapable, unable to categorise and situate effectively and thus is incapable of making sense of the dissensus. This forces change in the order. It was argued in Chapter 1 that the more we adhere to legitimate and expected ways of being, doing and saying, the more we contribute to the everyday operating of the police order. Practices that loosen our commitment to these ways of being, doing and saying therefore undermine the entrenching of the police, weakening its hold and making it more likely that unforeseen ruptures may appear. The possibility of dissensus emerges from a conceptual space that is neither sensible nor non-sensible, but cannot be placed or made sense of. With respect to Rancière’s discussion of the account made of speech in Dis-agreement, no account can easily be made of it. This indicates that we require another term to denote this conceptually, to denote that which functions to rupture more than construct, the a-logical rather than the illogical: that which lacks its own meaning and hence cannot simply be belittled and denigrated and could possible even retain a lingering sense of mystery or strangeness. Although any way of rendering this in language will necessarily be imperfect one potential option that is worth exploring is absurdity in ways of doing. Although also seen to have nonsensical and comical associations absurdity cannot be reduced to refer only to the comical, the foolish and hence at least to some extent can be seen to avoid normative sensory categorisations. Calling for a practice of absurdity and playfulness could open this book to many humorous critiques and disparaging comments yet the use of the term is appropriate both etymologically and conceptually. With regards to etymology, it is formed of two parts, the prefix ‘ab’ which denotes divergence from

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that which follows it (originally denoting ‘away from’), and ‘surdus’ the Latin for deaf. It was initially used to refer to a lack of harmony, a dissonant racket that could not be made sense of. This is congruent with my purposes here in two ways. First, it invokes Rancière’s claim that speech beyond the logos is merely noise. It cannot be recognised as speech and therefore its speakers are not recognised as equals or even as human. A noisy din is one thing, but a window can always be closed on a protest below and quiet restored to a room. To use the term absurd to refer to such a disruption denotes a possible political meaning that circumvents this example for this din is one in which deafness is not a possible response. The opposite of deafness is hearing, even when it hurts to hear. Hence absurd refers to a din that is heard but not made sense of within the existing frames of reference.10 A practice of absurdity means repeating actions that do not make sense and are not acceptable within the normative order but regardless of this cannot be ignored. Second, practice of this lack of harmony in support of democracy is particularly salient given the consideration below of the intersections between Rancière and Butler since Butler has recently referred to democracy as the creation of dissonance.11 Accordingly, my usage of the notion of absurdity is not to render its practice as ridiculous in a normative sense, such that it can be reduced and belittled. Instead, it simply denotes that which is without meaning,12 and ‘devoid of purpose’.13 The analogy with dissonance points towards us conceiving of absurdity as a democratic practice, a practice of seeking out that which is neither sensible nor non-sensible, thereby creating conditions under which ‘politics’ may be more likely. In conceptual terms the claim that absurdity is politically significant is not new. Indeed, there is already a rich tradition in which the absurd is acknowledged to have been philosophically, politically and socially valuable since the comedies of Aristophanes or even before.14 In particular, the term absurd was introduced into modern philosophical thought in the work of Søren Kierkegaard who asserted that far from being nonsense, the absurd is actually the form taken by an extreme paradox: that which can neither be understood, nor solved by reason. However, in such instances reason ‘has no power over the paradox’, it is ‘in no position to judge it to be nonsense, simply to dismiss it as necessarily false’.15 This is because inasmuch as reason reflects on its own limits it has to conceive of paradox as that which it cannot master, as that which proves its own finitude. This enabled Kierkegaard to argue that since reason is opposed to religious faith, to have such faith was absurd. Yet it is this feature of it that means that it should be celebrated since it proves the superior status of faith as that which takes us beyond human understanding.16 We do not need to follow Kierkegaard’s use of the absurd in defence of religious faith in order to appreciate the claim that absurdity is absolute paradox over which reason holds no power. This accords with our purposes here since Rancière has already told us that ‘politics’ effects just such a paradox. It poses a question that cannot be resolved within the current configuration of order. Hence police logic does not know how to respond: it can neither comprehend

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nor dismiss it. Thus, we see that the effectivity of ‘politics’ arises due to it occuring within the parameters of the absurd. After his death Kierkegaard’s work was revived in early twentieth-century France, inspiring the development of French existentialism. Most famously, the writings of Albert Camus popularised the philosophy of the absurd in the 1940s and 1950s. In contrast to what he saw as Kierkegaard’s retreat into nihilism Camus utilised the absurd as a philosophical position and metaphysical claim.17 Metaphysically it described man’s desire for meaning despite the lack of possibility of any ultimate meaning, and philosophically it thus staged a confrontation that posed a challenge to human beings to construct their own meaning and purpose for life, coming to find meaning and happiness in the search itself. Despite the requirement that ‘politics’ eschew both metaphysical and philosophical content, we can extract from Camus the commitment to absurdity, not as a metaphysical necessity, but simply as a democratic practice. This then poses a further question for us regarding what such a practice would comprise. Camus’s absurd was a major influence on the flourishing of the tradition of the absurd in the theatre movement of the same name in the 1960s, and the ensuing traditions of performance art and political protest. Although not a self-proclaimed movement, the Theatre of the Absurd comprised theatrical works from the late 1950s and 1960s that were strongly influenced by existentialism as well as elements of absurdity in the tradition of the arts more generally, including, but in no way limited to, the comedic tradition in Aristophanes through Shakespeare, folk theatre, puppetry, Commedia dell’arte, pataphysics, Dadaism and Brecht’s epic theatre. Given that this movement is widely recognised to have synthesised all of these influences it can prove a helpful resource, providing us with a useful location from which we can identify the key features of absurdity. It is notable that over time the Theatre of the Absurd developed an increasingly distinct position on absurdity that rejected Camus’s philosophical stance. Like existentialism it saw humanity as cast adrift in a world of contingency and uncertainty, yet it responded to this uncertainty in a markedly different manner concerning both what it sought to communicate and its method of communication: first, the Theatre of the Absurd accepted the postmodern political premise that there are no longer any given truths, such that plays cannot communicate an ultimate reality and instead can merely ‘present, in anxiety or with derision, an individual human being’s intuition of the ultimate realities as he experiences them; the fruits of one man’s descent into the depths of his personality, his dreams, fantasies and nightmares’.18 Thus these plays seek not to communicate certain information about how the audience should act or respond, but merely to present the subject’s basic situation.19 Second, although Camus and the wider existentialist movement also sought to treat this subject, their approach was to use theatre to propose a path for others to follow, presenting their ideas in a rational manner whether in philosophical or theatrical form, via ‘lucid reasoning and discursive

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20

thought.’ In contrast, the Theatre of the Absurd can be distinguished by its attempt to go ‘a step further in trying to achieve a unity between its basic assumptions and the form in which these are expressed’21 such that the manner in which the ideas are presented is at one with the underlying premise – that there is no underlying truth to be communicated. Hence the aim was more to embody absurdity as a way of communicating the absurd, rather than to seek to communicate it via rational forms.

From theatre to the streets Turning now to the ways in which the Theatre of the Absurd demonstrates the practice of absurdity Martin Esslin’s still unrivalled work in this area identifies four features: pure theatre, which refers to the utilisation of abstract effects without providing an explanation; clowning; verbal nonsense; and appreciation of dream and fantasy.22 These features all foreground the contingency of our current world. In pure theatre, we see the contingency of communication, the possibility of communicating without language or precision; clowning, as a form of playfulness demonstrates awareness and scrutiny of the everyday, looking afresh at the ordinary. Chapter 4 has already analysed the significance of linguistic play in relaxing the hold of meaning. Thus verbal nonsense operates at the edges of our understanding, bursting ‘the bounds of logic’.23 Finally, the language of dreams allows the imagination to run beyond the possible in order to posit the strange, the wonderful and the non-real. In this way, dreams and fantasy sequences provide space to ponder the space between what is and is not possible, posit alternatives and paint the futures we might rather live. Consequently, the tradition of absurdist theatre helps us to identify four ways in which absurdity can be practised to create conditions under which dissensus may be more likely to emerge. Furthermore, these practices enable absurdity to undermine aforementioned forms of domination effected through language and the division of knowledge. First, the Theatre of the Absurd tries to circumvent language, communicating instead through actions which, if not performed in silence, often contradict the words being spoken.24 Hence it can be seen to seek to challenge Western phonocentrism, our ‘reverence for the written or spoken word’ in the way that it recognises ‘the limitations of logic and discursive language acknowledging the uses of poetic language’ in its place.25 Moreover, because playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd are thus seeking to avoid presenting a simple message of how to behave or respond it does not seek to be interpreted: ‘[i]nstead of being provided with a solution, the spectator is challenged to formulate the questions that he will have to ask if he wants to approach the meaning of the play’.26 As such we could suggest that it is designed to prompt aversion, to prompt the asking of questions, the revisiting of the ordinary from a new perspective. Consequently, the playwright’s role is consciously transformed from a position of leadership and knowledge to one of a reporter of experiences: ‘a playwright simply writes plays, in which he

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can offer only a testimony, not a didactic message’.27 The playwright’s aim is thus to break down language highlighting that, due to the impossibility of semantic closure, it is always impossible to make oneself fully understood. However, as long as it remains in a theatre setting the emancipatory potential of absurdity remains limited due to the interrelation of three factors: communication, subjectivation and institutionalisation. With regard to communication there are questions to be asked about the division of knowledge and pure theatre. First, there is a risk that the move towards ‘pure’ theatre can perpetuate the binary of linguistic and the extralinguistic, failing to acknowledge the continuum between them that was discussed at the end of the previous chapter. By removing language completely the Theatre of the Absurd risks the implication that pure action can communicate what language cannot. This overlooks the aforementioned inability to draw a distinction between action and language28 as well as the fact that actions can also be interpreted in myriad ways and likewise inscribe meaning. Second, despite reducing the playwright’s traditional role from one of message giver to witness, it seems that at some level the idea of knowledge to be communicated from playwright to audience still remains, in both intention and the effects of theatre. For example, Ionesco suggests that ‘a work of art is the expression of an incommunicable reality that one tries to communicate – and which sometimes can be communicated. That is its paradox and its truth’.29 Although minimised in these works, and particularly in the plays of Beckett, this formulation retains the wish to communicate something from playwright to audience, seen in the fact that Ionesco in particular never abandons the desire to provoke change in his audience since ‘[t]o renew language is to renew the conception, the vision of the world. Revolution consists in bringing about a change in mental attitudes’.30 Although he refrains from suggesting where this change might lead it still implies once more a residue of the Old Master model of the passing of knowledge. Even when Beckett sought to involve non-actors in the writing and staging of his plays, as long as the role of the playwright is distinguishable it is difficult to see how, even if only in a minimal way, it cannot help but retain the division of knowledge that assumes an audience need for direction and leadership. Hence despite Ionesco’s aims, as long as the absurd remains within the theatre setting, institutional power structures will invest in this distinction to some extent, for the playwright is still the one whose work, or simply raw idea, takes the floor. The playwright is still in some sense the poet behind the work, the designer of the project, and as such is the visionary whose creation takes precedence over that of the audience. There is a further issue here regarding who authors absurdity. This is brought into focus in the relationship between the actor and playwright which can also be seen to reproduce the logic of domination in the sense that however loosely the notion of playwright and play is retained there will always remain some sense of an author behind the actions of an other. This does not mean that such theatre could not still weaken and undermine sensible

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configurations, but simply that it will do so at one remove from ‘politics’. The potential of absurdity to provoke ‘politics’ depends on its being authored by the subject itself. These concerns are compounded by the fact that as long as absurdity is institutionalised in the theatre or at least in a theatrical setting it is less able to provoke change as its absurdity is to be expected and can be made sense of as ‘art’. By identifying the absurd as belonging within a theatre movement or even within the arts more generally, we denote the arts as the proper place for absurdity. This defuses the political potential of absurdity by taking away its element of surprise, confusion and challenge to the sensible order. Although a promising complementary art form for a more open democracy, the Theatre of the Absurd is an institutionalisation of one particular vision of the playfulness, questioning and possibility inherent in absurdity. As such, institutionalised absurdity is at the behest of this particular vision rather than operating without direction within the realm of everyday life. Consequently, in the remainder of this chapter I want to consider if and how we might think of the political power of the absurd in a way that is valuable for ‘politics’. If we might thus consider breaking with sense as a practice of democracy, we need to ask how we may harness the power of the absurd in the work of countering both actual and symbolic violence effected via the sensible normative order. In taking the absurd out of the theatre to liberate its emancipatory potential we are following in well-trodden footsteps. Many protest movements in the 1960s, inspired by just such an aim, sought to bring together practices of absurdity with politics in order to effect surprising new tactics of performance protest in city streets. In particular, these groups sought to exploit the ‘liminality’ of performance art whereby the removal of performance from the theatre blurred the boundaries between performance and ordinary life, increasing the effectiveness of the performances staged, and enabling the performance to reach a wider audience beyond self-selecting theatre audiences.31 Some examples of these movements help to demonstrate how they combined absurdity and ‘politics’. In 1960s Latin America, Augusto Boal, inspired by Freirean pedagogical practices and Brecht’s Marxist radical theatre developed the Theatre of the Oppressed incorporating methods through which theatre could be used as a weapon of revolution, to educate and change.32 The Theatre of the Oppressed sought to overcome the spectator/actor divide by devising ways of audience playwriting, and the exchange of roles. It also sought to dramatise ordinary elements of life, including family relationships and the daily routine, often in workshop form, in order to facilitate analysis and scrutiny by participants. Even in its ‘finished’ form it encouraged performances outside of traditional theatre settings. ‘Invisible theatre’ referred to planned but unannounced performances in public spaces to facilitate audience participation and discussion concerning a revolutionary topic. One performance involved a large number of actors dining in a restaurant unbeknownst to the ordinary customers and

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the restaurant staff. Upon finishing their meal one of the actors refused to pay his bill and began to argue with the waiters about the cost of food. Other actors, dining at other tables, joined in, arguing about income inequality and the cost of living and encouraging and provoking non-actor customers to get involved in the discussion. Importantly, the actors of invisible theatre never revealed their identity. At the end of a performance, they sought simply to disappear back into the streets from whence they came. The distinction between performance and life was even more blurred by the actions of the San Francisco Diggers, a break-away group from the more overtly Marxist San Francisco Mime Collective. The director of the Mime Collective declared the group’s intention not only to teach and direct with a view to bringing about change but also to ‘be an example of change’.33 This third aim became the prime motivation for the Diggers. They took their name from the seventeenth-century English movement set up to oppose the enclosure of the commons. Practising what they preached, this short-lived revolutionary group set up a collective commonwealth, sharing their food and possessions.34 Inspired by this ‘vision of the total transformation of social and economic relations’ peace and reliance on information pamphlets and direct action the Diggers attempted to do the same in 1960s San Francisco.35 They were primarily a political collective that sought to use avant-garde and absurdist performance as one method of communicating their message, supplementing this with a commitment to alternative living. Motivated by the idea that ‘if one objected to capitalism, then one simply abolished the system of private property’ the Diggers’ main project, the enactment of ‘free’, aimed to set up a comprehensive model of an alternative free society.36 Taking ‘free’ as an imperative as well as an adjective, it inspired their actions, which included the distribution of free food and a free shop, and over the next few years expanded their activities to include free housing, a medical clinic, legal services and entertainment. The Diggers’ use of performance itself sought to break down further the divisions between performer and audience, but often within a broadly educational model. For example, they often utilised the symbol of the ‘frame’ through which they encouraged bystanders to pass (sometimes with the help of a constructed wooden frame big enough to step through) to symbolise the need to change one’s entire ‘frame of reference’ in order to abandon capitalist ways. They integrated this with the Mime Collective’s use of carnival, utilising masks, puppets and simple props to interact and work with bystanders. In one example of the absurd at work, police trying to disperse the crowd that had gathered at the 1966 ‘Full Moon Public Celebration’ even ended up in a terse conversation with one of the Diggers’ puppets.37 A final and more recent example, as referenced in the opening epigraph, is found in the Orange Alternative, inspired directly by the Dutch provos and the New York-based Yippies, who were themselves inspired by the Diggers. The Orange Alternative was a political and performance movement that used absurdity to challenge the authorities in communist Poland. Their activities

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centred on using absurdity to embarrass and confuse the authorities, and, beyond ridiculous graffiti, included the organisation of gnome conventions, Father Christmas rallies and the distribution of toilet rolls. Their events sought loosely to orchestrate and integrate the innocent activities of passersby in order to provoke maximum perplexity for the state militia. The aim was to avoid aggressive confrontation via events that were so silly any military response would seem ludicrous. By simply calling for people to convene in public spaces wearing red, or dressed as Santa Claus a week before Christmas, they made it difficult to distinguish planned participants from passers-by and usually resulted in the militia making arrests at random leading, for example, to the mistaken arrest of several store workers who were simply dressed in Santa Claus costumes for work. Such events made a mockery of the authorities and their ability to keep order, despite the imposition of martial law. Hence the Orange Alternative used absurdity to stage events that subtly mixed protest and performance in such a way as to make a mockery of the police authorities, making citizens less scared of the state and helping to undermine the political order. Practices of absurdity and in particular carnivalesque clowning and fantasy have also been integrated into direct protest strategies. The philosophical and theatrical absurdism of the 1960s soon began to influence student protests, leading to scenes such as those when students handed teddy bears to riot police in the confrontations of 1968.38 Such a break with ‘expected’ behaviour of protest and demonstration is often used as a tactic to befuddle and confuse police, who are not prepared to respond to passive, unpredictable and apparently friendly behaviour. Indeed, David Graeber recounts how more recent anti-globalisation protestors have taken to incorporating elements of street theatre and absurdist action into their demonstrations in order to break with logics and to avoid and diffuse aggressive confrontations with police. He notes a ‘self-conscious’ desire among activists to ‘destroy existing paradigms’ through confusion and disorientation, citing groups of protestors simply sitting down in front of a line of riot police, the protest group Ya Basta! who attend protests dressed in absurd padded white overalls; the Pink Bloc, dressed in tutus armed with feather dusters; Billionaires for Bush at the American Party Conventions who handed out wads of fake money to police, thanking them for suppressing their dissent; and the general mayhem created by Revolutionary Anarchist Clowns, riding unicycles in rainbow wigs carrying squeaky mallets. He suggests that such tactics are ‘perfectly in accord with the general anarchist inspiration of the movement which is less about seizing state power than about exposing, delegitimising and dismantling mechanisms of rule while winning ever larger spaces of autonomy from it’.39 Hence we see absurdity being practised as a method of protest against the state or supra-state organisations. These examples demonstrate some ways in which the practice of absurdity can be extracted from its institutionalised setting. However, they navigate different routes through the concerns outlined above. Boal’s invisible theatre

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maintains the notion of theatre as a tool to change people but seeks to overcome the spectator/actor divide, as well as performing in the spaces of everyday life; the Diggers blurred the distinction between performance and everyday life even more through their mode of living ‘free’ but also sought to create new meanings and order rather than simply break with meaning and order. The Orange Alternative used absurdity not to direct political change but merely to break with the current order, and also challenged the distinctions between organisers, actors and audience, utilising everyday public spaces. However, it still to some extent planned and orchestrated ‘events’. Finally, protest movements use absurdity to confound and reveal contingency, but also often seek to express a particular message or perspective and are seen to be limited to particular events and public spaces. In many of these examples absurdity is used by protest movements or groups to break with police logic in face-to-face confrontations between the people and the state. Yet Boal and the Diggers also point beyond this confrontation into a more general infiltration of absurdity in everyday life, confronting not just the state but our wider everyday police order of the sensible. In its use by performing arts and protest movements, absurdity is still in some ways circumscribed, identified with a movement or group, mobilised for a particular end, and often in public spaces at particular specified ‘events’ which are to some extent orchestrated. However, Rancière tells us that the police order functions through organising our everyday sensory world, our ways of being, saying and doing. It categorises these ways into identities and then partitions the social according to these identifications. Hence the more entrenched these identities – the more that our ways of being, doing and saying accord with pre-ordained places and expectations – the stronger the logic of domination and the greater the resistance to ‘politics’ and its ensuing emancipation. Thus it would seem that absurdity has something to offer us when practiced in the everyday rather than simply in the streets, or in public. Absurdity of the everyday offers a way of breaking with our everyday expected and given identities in order to weaken identification, loosen attachments and thereby undermine the hold of any police ordering.

Subversion as iteration in the work of Judith Butler In order to theorise in more detail how absurdity could operate in this way to resist and undermine identifications we need to understand more precisely how our police order is constructed and maintained. Butler’s work can be of help here because she theorises the way that social norms and identities are maintained through performativity and repetition. Most famously she developed these arguments in relation to the performativity of gender.40 She argued that there is no ‘true’ underlying gender that one’s behaviour as either male or female expresses. Instead, we perform our gender, we learn to dress, talk, walk and desire in accordance with the dominant idea of what it is to be male or female, and this regulates our expectations and normative judgements of what

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appearances and behaviours are masculine and feminine. We come to expect men and women to look and act a certain way because the ongoing repetition of this performance retroactively creates the illusion that there is an inner core of gender ‘essence’. Hence for Butler gender is constructed.41 In examining Butler’s thematisation of performativity in more detail we can identify a theory of subversion, whereby she not only theorises the way in which any norms operate to govern social convention and behaviours but also, at least initially, identifies ways in which these norms could be subverted in order to create the possibility of alternate ways of living. This work can supplement Rancière’s theory of ‘politics’ as subversion of the police, in particular by emphasising that in order for norms to be maintained they need to be repeated. This repetition is identified by Butler as an Achilles heel to be targeted via appropriation. However, in reading Butler and Rancière together we also see that Rancière’s stronger emphasis on dis-identification and subjectivation as a momentary break helps to draw out the way in which both of these features are present, but downplayed, in Butler’s work. It thus seems beneficial to combine Butler and Rancière’s work on subversion to theorise how absurdity could work to loosen our sensory attachments and thereby weaken entrenchment of the sensible order. Butler’s theory of performativity forms a central part of her work on subversion. Although she does not describe herself as a theorist of subversion and few of her commentators identify subversion as a key feature of her work42 it is a recurring theme right from the subtitle of her most famous work: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.43 This is not to say that there is no literature on Butler and subversion. In the main, however, commentators have focused on either whether such subversion is desirable, or possible,44 the interrelation between agency, parody and resignification45 or to critique or redevelop Butler’s approach on agency and subversion.46 In a critical vein Martha Nussbaum does engage with Butler on subversion in order to explain that it is Butler’s focus on subversive practices that make her work ineffective,47 whereas Penelope Deutscher emphasises subversion as key to Butler’s work but merely in order to claim that Butler fails to elucidate what it is.48 Although I too am not seeking to comment on the role subversion plays in her overall project I am keen to reveal that where Butler does discuss subversion she does so in a way that proves fruitful for those of us interested in elaborating conditions which may be more conducive to Rancièrian ‘politics’.49 In doing this I dispute Deutscher’s claim that Butler does not tell us what subversion is, and instead suggest that we can identify a theory of subversion in Butler’s work. We can begin with Butler’s assertion that identities, in particular gender identities, are performed rather than essential, and are maintained via repetition. This repetition is essential for the continuation of any identity, and hence it provides us with a weak spot since it reveals that identities could be subverted through inaccurate repetition. Butler theorises this by drawing on Derridean theory of the interpretation of actions. Responding to Austin’s

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work on the ways in which speech can perform certain acts (such as pronouncing a couple as married or the making of a promise) Derrida suggests that this performativity is only possible because of the accrued history of the performative element which means that it repeats what has gone before and thus builds up a precedent of historical force. Thus a performative can only be recognised as such, and hence its significance understood, if it ‘echoes prior actions, and accumulates the force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior authoritative set of practices’.50 Thus a felicitous performative (as Austin denotes a successful performative that achieves the desired end) ‘draws on and covers over the constitutive conventions by which it is mobilized’.51 Given that there is no identifiable start point or primary source for social behaviour and speech, Derrida uses the verb iterate rather than repeat to denote each re-enactment of the performative. For example, Butler notes the need for hegemonic heterosexuality to constantly reiterate itself in order to seek to imitate its own idealisations which themselves change over time. Thus hegemonic heterosexuality must repeat this imitation, that it sets up pathologizing practices and normalizing sciences in order to produce and consecrate its own claim on originality and propriety, suggests that heterosexual performativity is beset by anxiety that it can never fully overcome, that its effort to become its own idealizations can never be finally or fully achieved, and that it is consistently haunted by that domain of sexual possibility that must be excluded for heterosexualized gender to produce itself.52 However, this need for repetition imbues the maintenance of norms with vulnerability, since to subvert conventions all a performative needs to do is perform this iteration imperfectly. By inserting difference into each repetition it draws on but at the same time reveals rather than covering over, the conventions underlying it. Thus for Butler, subversion is a type of imitation with a twist, an iteration in which something is not quite right, where the copy is not exact. In its obvious and purposeful failure to imitate completely, parody and mimicry can subvert by revealing the contingency of the original. We therefore work the weakness of the heterosexual norm by revealing its failure to apply in all cases and hence reveal that it is clearly not necessary or natural as may have been thought. Furthermore, by revealing the way that these norms are embodied via performativity Butler argues that there is no underlying ‘proper’ or ‘natural’ way to behave. Instead, our behaviours are performed and thus constructed and hence could be otherwise. This then shows the contingency of the assumed relationship between gender and sex. By asserting the contingency of norms she seeks to argue that it is possible to construct new ways of living and thereby overturn the normative order that oppresses, excludes and subordinates those whose gender and sexual identity do not fit. Famously, Butler demonstrates this subversion through the example of drag. Consider the example she gives in Undoing Gender that in watching male

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drag artists perform femininity ‘better than she thought she ever could’ she realised how gender is something we perform rather than ‘are’. She thus argues that drag can reveal to us the contingency of our heteronormative practices and thereby opens up a possibility that such practices could, in future, be less violent as, after realising their contingency (as opposed to their naturalness) they may no longer be enforced upon people in either symbolic or actually violent ways. Although drag will not always have this effect, at this point she notes that it may at times be one way of effecting this realisation, and thereby subverting norms. Butler thus emphasises far more explicitly than Rancière the importance of repetition for the subversion of norms. In tandem with Rancière, Butler emphasises that subversion functions via appropriation, not in the sense of appropriating the dominant culture in order to sustain it and thereby remain subordinated by it, but instead in a way that ‘seeks to make over the terms of domination, a making over which is itself a kind of agency, a power in and as discourse, in and as performance, which repeats in order to remake – and sometimes succeeds’.54 She subsequently recognises the key role of appropriation for subversion even more explicitly asserting that ‘the appropriation of such norms [those via which the body is discursively produced] to oppose their historically sedimented effect constitutes the insurrectionary moment of that history, the moment that founds a future through a break with that past’.55 Hence both Rancière and Butler suggest that we can challenge the normative order via practices of subversion that function via appropriation. Like Rancière, Butler recognises that the success of such an attempt to context the normative order can never be guaranteed, but argues that this should not prevent us from recognising the immanent possibility that such activities present to us. This leads Butler to conclude Gender Trouble by noting that greater attention needs to be paid to the conditions under which parody and drag as parody will subvert, asking 53

What performance where will invert the inner/outer distinction and compel a radical rethinking of the psychological presuppositions of gender identity and sexuality? What performance where will compel a reconsideration of the place and stability of the masculine and the feminine? And what kind of gender performance will enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire?’56 Indeed, we see her calling for further work exploring what it is ‘that makes certain types of parodic repetitions effectively repetitious, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony’.57 However, concerned that her work in Gender Trouble implied a volitional subject58 who could see these norms operating and choose when and where to subvert them, Butler has diverted from this exploration of parody and instead turned to clarify the way that subjects are not merely self-constituting but are

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constituted by norms themselves and thus operate within a field of power relations that limits their ability to see the constraints of norms and to act to subvert them.59 This should help us to understand more clearly how subjects can break with the norms that form them. She employs the ‘figure of turning’ to explain ‘how a subject is produced’60 and thus to subsequently identify how a subject can turn against their constituting conditions. Although the moment of the inauguration of the subject is theorised successively in the work of Nietzsche, Althusser and Foucault, she finds that none of these thinkers explain how this turn is possible – the turn back on the self. However, she suggests that this is due to a blind spot in these theories concerning the psychic workings of power that overlooks the passionate attachments by which a subject comes into being.61 Hence she proposes that any investigation into the emergence of the subject needs to appreciate both the social and the psychic workings of power. This does not simply mean that we can supplement Foucault with Freud, however, for psychoanalysis assumes that there is some sort of unconscious essence that is resistant to normalisation62 leaving us with an impasse between determinism of productive theories of power and the agency of psychoanalysis.63 Consequently, she sets about seeking to read theories of power alongside psychoanalysis in order to trace an account of how power forms subjection in ‘the turns of psychic life’ as well as an account of psychic subjection in terms of the ‘regulatory and productive effects of power’: If forms of regulatory power are sustained in part through the formation of a subject, and if that formation takes place according to the requirements of power, specifically as the incorporation of norms, then a theory of subject formation must give an account of this process of incorporation, and the notion of incorporation must be interrogated to ascertain the psychic topography it assumes.64 Hence at this point, Butler’s investigation into subversion leads her to consider more precisely the subject who may or may not subvert. However, in tracing the psychic formation of the subject in relation to the social, Butler is led further away from her focus on subversion and instead begins to outline her subsequent ethical project. By the end of The Psychic Life of Power she seems to have forgotten her opening concern with how the subject can effect transformation and reduces agency to a focus on survival instead.65 Indeed, in Giving an Account of Oneself she ends with a call to a sort of ethical openness to being undone by the other,66 while her latest two books are devoted to expounding the notions of liveability and responding to precarity.67 Thus her turn to psychoanalysis does leave readers concerned that the way in which the subject could effect political transformation was left underdeveloped.68 Although she indicates that ‘the trauma of subjection contains within it resources for reworking or resignifying the painful interpellations constituting the subject, these resources are not identified or explored in any detail’.69 Accordingly, both Disch and Lloyd suggest that

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these resources can be found in Butler’s other text of the same year Excitable Speech, in which she elaborates a practice of ‘talking back’.70 As in the examples of poeticity in the above chapter, here Butler explores the potential for insurrectionary counter-speech, which, like Foucault’s ‘reverse discourse’ appropriates the language and inscriptions of the dominant order to challenge and rupture existing power structures and posit alternatives. However, I am concerned that Butler has still not explained how exactly we come to break with our social and psychic prohibitions to manipulate performativity and resist or challenge our normative order. Furthermore, how can we loosen our attachments to all identities in order to avoid these problematic structures in the first place? In addition, she does not explain why she is willing to accept the assumptions of Freudian psychoanalysis and the priority psychoanalysis gives to sexual attachments, or, translated into her Hegelian terminology, a wider underlying desire for existence, which rather surprisingly, seems to appear in her work as pre-discursive.71 Consequently, we are left to ask what happens to subversion in Butler’s work and can we salvage her theory of iteration for democratic ‘politics’ without having to commit to an untenable notion of a volitional subject?

Reading Butler and Rancière together In what remains of this chapter I contend that although subversion is by this point perhaps rather subdued by Butler’s ethical turn it can be retrieved by reading her work alongside Rancière’s ‘politics’. This prompts us to scrutinise her critique of Foucault, in order to suggest that her turn to psychoanalysis was unnecessary for we can instead use Rancière’s theory of subjectivation to chart a route out of the aforementioned impasse between agency and determinism. In contrast to Butler, Rancière suggests that subjectivation is the moment that the subject, constituted in the sensible order, breaks with this order, via a moment of politics that renders that order incomprehensible and dysfunctional. This subjectivation is not a lasting condition but is instead momentary, since the social will reorder and tuck this subjectivated subject back in, giving it a place, and particular ways of being, doing and saying that constitute its identity. Thus subjectivation is always a moment that leads back into subjection. Rancière tells us that the police order is the order of domination. Hence Rancière’s ‘subjectivation’ gives us the break that Butler is looking for, but where does this come from? Since Rancière does not theorise subjectivation any further it is necessary to turn back to the roots of the term in Foucault. As Milchman and Rosenberg note, although always interested in the emergence of the subject Foucault introduced the term subjectivation to denote a shift in focus from the way a subject is formed in relation to order and others, to the way that the subject is formed in relation to the self.72 In contrast, in his earlier work he preferred to use the term assujettissement to refer to the formation of the subject. In light of this we can clarify the relationship between Rancière’s and Foucault’s

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work, for Rancière’s police order regulates and organises our ways of being, doing and saying and so appears to correspond to the Foucauldian domain of assujettissement where the subject is conceived in relation to order and others. In contrast, Rancière’s ‘politics’ involves the coming together of the two, since as emphasised in Chapter 1, it relies upon the key trigger of subjectivation, which Foucault tells us operates within the domain of the subject’s relation to itself. This then enables appropriation and dis-identification from the disciplinary forces of the social order and social relations. Despite choosing to denote subjectivation in English in 1991 as subjectification and in 2007 as subjectivization,73 when writing in French Rancière always uses the term subjectivation indicating that this is his preferred term. This allows us to locate his work within the Foucauldian framework and as such indicates that in the same way that Foucault introduced the term subjectivation to complement rather than replace assujettissement, Rancière’s writing on subject formation as subjectivation via ‘politics’ is not to deny that structures of power/knowledge restrict or subordinate us via the ‘police’74 structuring the very possibilities of resistance, but that subjectivation as the trigger of ‘politics’ involves a relation of the self to being albeit within this wider matrix. Hence we see that Rancière theorises the constructed self ’s relation with itself in a way that is absent from Butler’s formulation. In his introduction of 1984 to The Foucault Reader Paul Rabinow famously suggests that we can identify a further distinction here in that the first two modes of subject formation identified by Foucault (in relation to order and others) condition the subject as passive in contrast to the third in which the subject appears as active.75 Although this summary could be helpful analytically to show how Foucault’s focus changed over time, it can be misleading to seek to categorise these modes as simply either passive or active since it implies that the development of scientific disciplines and dividing practices renders a fully passive subject while the process of subjectivation involves a fully active subject. Milchman and Rosenberg suggest that the tendency towards this interpretation has been encouraged due to the word that Foucault originally used to refer to subject formation: assujettissement.76 They note that although this ‘clearly entails subjugation and subjection’ it is also meant by Foucault to include ‘autonomy, and the possibility of resistance, of the one who is assujetti as well’.77 This active element within the formation of disciplines and dividing practices is missed by the popular rendering of assujettissement in English as ‘subjection or subjugation’ which confusingly seems to render the subject as entirely passive or incapable. Pertinently for our discussion, Milchman and Rosenberg note that Butler’s reading of Foucault in The Psychic Life of Power does acknowledge both the active and passive element of subject formation. However, they note that it is a pity that Butler too decides to translate assujettissement as ‘subjection’ throughout The Psychic Life of Power78 since ‘subjection’ privileges an interpretation of incapacity in the subject which runs counter to the more nuanced subject she outlines. This allows readers to continue to misread passivity back

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into her subject. Although her careful explanations work hard to preclude such a reading it turns out that this is compounded by the way that, although acknowledging Foucault’s shift to ethics and the introduction of his term subjectivation Butler continues to read assujettissement as equivalent to subjectivation.79 She thus interprets subjectivation as contiguous with her earlier reading of assujettissement and thereby continues to overemphasise the way that subjects are constituted overlooking the resources provided by Foucault’s later work that denote the subject’s ability to constitute. After The Psychic Life of Power Butler does go on to critique Foucault’s later work and in doing so draws out further features of subversion. However, these are increasingly overshadowed by her focus on ethics. In What Is Critique she identifies Foucauldian critique as a form of ‘desubjugation’, a mechanism by which the subject ‘risks its deformation as a subject’.80 Hence although the subject has to form itself ‘within forms that are more or less already underway’ there is the possibility to disobey the principles according to which one is formed, the aforementioned iterations of selfhood. Interestingly, she notes that this becomes clear to her in Foucault’s introduction of the term ‘subjectivation’ where we can isolate a possibility by which the self ‘delimits itself and decides on the material for its self-making’ even through this delimitation takes place ‘through norms which are indisputably already in place’.81 Hence Foucauldian critique offers one way in which the subject, constrained by both the social and the psychic, can resist these constraints via a practice of questioning. This necessarily involves self-transformation since it helps to expose the limits of the normative order and it is at these limits that such disobedience can be practised. In addition, both here and in Giving an Account of Oneself Butler discusses Foucault’s later revisions of his work on confession to emphasise how confessional practices need not always be disciplinary, but are in themselves an act that can work in the service of subjectivation if it prompts a relinquishing of the attachment to the self, and the opportunity for reflection and remaking.82 In particular, she suggests that the practice of psychoanalysis can, in this role, be rescued for Foucault. However, in the main, Butler does not emphasise these elements of her work, subsequently turning away from politics and towards more ethical considerations. This is first seen in the way she revises her initial claims about drag, moving away from its use as an example of subversive behaviour to the claim that it is simply identifiable as a critical site of ambiguity in Bodies that Matter. She also suggests here and in The Psychic Life of Power that drag is allegorical for performativity’s melancholic structure of loss that means all identities are in part constituted by opposing identities they have rejected (e.g. heterosexual by homosexual, male by female). By Undoing Gender she surmises that her use of drag was not to claim that drag was subversive of gender norms but that we live, more or less implicitly, with received notions of reality, implicit accounts of ontology,

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Absurdity which determine what kinds of bodies and sexualities will be considered real and true, and which kind will not.83

Thus by this point she merely seeks to use drag to point out that ‘this set of ontological presuppositions is at work’ and ‘that it is open to rearticulation’.84 In addition, drag makes ‘us question the means by which reality is made’85 thereby drawing our attention to the way that reality is constructed rather than given. Yet the questions of who does the constructing and how are here left undeclared. Butler presents political transformation not so much as subversive but more as explicit, foregrounded in her repeated use of the term ‘dispossession’ to refer to the aforementioned moment of desubjugation, whereby it is only in losing oneself that the subject can find itself. Here the loss of self emphasises the interaction with others: the loss of self, in others, through dependency on others. Yet here she suggests that it is only in the acknowledgement of such, its realisation, that we come to be dispossessed. Such dispossession requires new social institutions, social critique and transformation.86 Our ability to act for ourselves, rather than simply in accordance with social and psychic norms, confusingly depends on the formation of new social and psychic norms. In addition, despite her earlier emphasis on appropriation Butler suggests that ‘resignification’ of meaning alone cannot constitute a radical democratic politics since it is simply the way that meaning is refigured over time and hence can be used by both the left and the right. Instead, she suggests that it is politics in a radical democratic sense when coopted in service of ‘liveability’: attention to the conditions that render some lives liveable and others unliveable. Hence Butler’s focus here is less on the break with norms than on her own particular project of resignification via an ethical project of attending to conditions of liveability and intelligibility. Thus her investigation into the subjects of subversion has led her to elaborate her own particular preferred way of being. Furthermore, within this ethical turn she figures a new role for psychoanalysis as a practice of self-constituting through a non-disciplinary practice of confession. Butler does not acknowledge the extent to which this is not only a critique of Foucault, but also entails a critique of psychoanalysis since this transforms psychoanalysis from a discipline to a more Cavellian practice of living in conversation with one another in order to constitute a mutual working on ourselves. Although as noted in Chapter 3 such aversive practices elaborated as an ethics may contribute to a better police order, in contrast Rancière’s focus on the subject of subversion leads him to elaborate subjectivation as the moment of break with all ways of being, doing and saying, clearly situating Butler’s ethics within the domain of the police. Here we can recall Rancière’s concern repeatedly outlined above that any turn to ethics entrenches ways of being, often sharpening and deepening dividing lines between the subject and the Other. Although this critique was directed towards Derrida, the concern about ways of being applies to Foucault’s

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‘modes of conduct’ too. However, it is interesting to note Foucault’s clarification in one of his very last interviews in which he distinguished ethics as a ‘practice’ as opposed to an ethos which is ‘a manner of being’.87 By shifting to identify ethics as a practice, Foucault indicates that it is volitional and is less internalised by the self and more a tool for resistance. However, Butler’s ethics is imbued in a set of values and norms that locate it as a way of being rather than simply a set of practices. Thus Butler’s ethical turn poses problems for democrats, for she still has not elucidated how the subject can break with dominant ways of being, nor how to ensure that her own preferred ways of being do not come to dominate and exclude. I contend that Butler is prevented from this reading of Foucauldian subjectivation as break, not just due to her conflation of assujettissement with subjectivation but also due to her alternate mapping of the sensory field alongside a confusion of the subject of subversion with the subject of aversivity. As a consequence I will suggest that we need to distinguish Butler’s ‘politics’ in the identification of subversion as exploitation of the iteration of norms, from her turn to policing in the form of a loosely psychoanalytic ethics. With regard to the mapping of the sensory field then, the aforementioned citation that drag makes us ‘question the means by which reality is made’ continues by asserting that it also makes us ‘consider the way in which being called real or being called unreal can be no only a means of social control but a form of dehumanizing violence’.88 Butler suggests that the hegemonic order functions via a hierarchy of violence that denotes some as humans while refusing to recognise others. She argues that the label ‘unreal’ ‘is the border that secures the human in its ostensible reality’ and that one can be oppressed by being called a copy, by being interpellated as not authentic, and based on something else that is more real, more legitimate and thus of higher value.89 Yet she goes on to say that it is even more serious than this, since to be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as the visible and oppressed other for the master subject as possible or potential subject. But to be unreal is to be something else again. For to be oppressed one must first become intelligible. To find that one is unintelligible … is to find that one is has not yet achieved access to the human.90 Here then we see her sketch the sensory domain as one of intelligibility versus unintelligibility, real versus unreal, and later we see that it is this distinction that structures whether or not one is compelled to live a liveable or an unliveable life.91 However, if we return to Rancière’s sensory mapping as outlined at the beginning of this chapter we can identify a clash. The unintelligible seems within the Rancièrian schema to denote that which cannot be identified on a scale of either sense or nonsense. However, the illegitimacy that unintelligibility renders in Butler’s terminology is intelligible. It is intelligible as lesser, lacking, non-human, derisory or subordinated.92 Rancière

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reminds us of this in his claim that there is no space beyond the police93 drawing our attention to the pervasiveness of policing to structure and regulate every inch of social space. This does not mean that such regulation cannot be more or less severe, simply that it is always present. Consequently, Butler’s choice of language at times seems to cover over the possibility of subversion and resistance through unintelligibility here. Unintelligibility is that which for a fleeting moment can force open the sensory order and create the possibility for reconfiguration. The power of the unreal must not be muddled with the very real domination that functions to regulate and maintain the distinction between the human and the nonhuman. By painting real experiences of domination and oppression as unreal we risk – against Butler’s very clear intentions94 – veiling and mystifying lives that have to be lived in very real abject and dismal conditions. Furthermore, it displaces the potential for the unreal and the unintelligible to function in the boundary between the legitimate and the illegitimate, rather than on one side of this boundary. By shifting them into the space between we free them up for use as tools of subversion, the means for democratic subjectivation. In addition, Butler does not distinguish the subject of subversion. In the example of drag as subversive it seems that for Butler a subversive act is one that reveals to its audience or spectators the contingency of the normative order – it unveils for them the hidden workings of the norm. This recalls Rancière’s aforementioned concerns about traditional critical theory as that which seeks to reveal the hidden or masked depths of our system to those not in the know. In contrast, Rancière is committed to the idea that the contingency of the system is not some big secret but is actually already known. What is needed is a moment of radical equality in which a subject, asserting their equality appropriates that which is not theirs, dis-identifies with the role they have been given and thereby demonstrate not a secret or a hidden mechanism but that alternative orders are not only possible but have already arrived. Butler’s description of subversion and appropriation in Bodies that Matter accords in part with Rancière’s theory here, but does not emphasise that the subject of subversion is the one who appropriates, rather than the audience, who are not passive, but who are watching and thinking about the appropriation that they have witnessed. In contrast, in her comments about Jennie Livingston’s film Paris Is Burning the emphasis is shown to be on the audience rather than on the actor:95 the subversive effects seem to be on the audience of the act – for example, those watching a drag performance. Indeed, in her assessment of why drag pageantry in the film may fail to subvert gender norms she suggests that its subversive potential depends on the audience response, refusing to allow the film to become ‘an exotic fetish’ and instead seeking the ambivalence that the film presents between ‘embodying – and failing to embody – that which one sees’.96 Hence the potential for drag to operate in such a way as to challenge the normative order is dependent on other factors – the degree of fixity within which the audience, as subjects, are

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held. However, in Butler’s discussion of appropriation the bodies that effect the appropriation are the bodies of the performers: those who perform the act. What is interesting about this blurring of the audience and subject of subversion is that she thus conflates Cavellian aversive thinking with the subversion of ‘politics’. Her realisation of the performativity of gender while watching a drag act was akin to the Cavellian aversive moment described in Chapter 2. By separating aversivity from subversion in Butler’s work we can distinguish her theory of subversion as appropriation via iteration from her considerations of how to loosen our attachments to the normative order through the ways we watch and interact with the arts and the social. This also helps us to see more clearly the need to attend to the moment of subjectivation to help to cast light on who the subversive subject is and the self-oriented practices that are required for Rancièrian ‘politics’. I would suggest that this conflation of audience and performer is what led Butler to make her earlier claim about drag as an identifiable critical site which she abandoned in her later work. Instead, following Rancière’s logic, anything could be potentially subversive; it simply depends on how it is played. Thus there is no need to identify any such sites of ambivalence since appropriation means that any site could be critical. It is always merely a matter of strategy. In this chapter we have contrasted Butler’s theory of subversion figured as an appropriation that ‘makes trouble’ with Rancière’s appropriation as disidentification and subjectivation to help us gain a better understanding of the different stages of ‘politics’ and draw out the role of the subversive subject. We have sketched how we can read Rancière’s ‘politics’ with Butler’s performativity to help to identify practices whereby subversion can be triggered though repetition. This has also enabled us to unpick the elision between aversion and subversion in Butler’s work to help us focus more clearly on how subversion functions without needing to follow her turn into the domain of ethics. We are thus able to drawn on her theorisation of subversive acts as repetitions that imitate ‘wrong’ which helps to elucidate what Rancière’s appropriation consists of. This can supplement Rancière’s thematisation of subversion as appropriation and dis-identification to help us theorise subversive acts as repetitious appropriation that provoke dis-identification and hence subjectivation. However, in appreciating Butler’s greater emphasis on the subject as constituted as well as constituting, we must emphasise that subjectivation is not volitional. Given that we can never guarantee that subjectivation will occur, if we are to create conditions under which it may be more likely there is a need to identify a democratic practice in the practice of absurdity. Absurdity is clearly important for the moment of ‘politics’ itself, given that this is a moment when the logic that orders sense is ruptured by an enactment that cannot be situated or made sense of. Thus all ‘politics’ has to operate within the domain of the absurd. However, since this cannot be planned or guaranteed owing to our inability to see logics at work, we need a practice that loosens our attachments to our order to start with, thereby working away

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constantly to undermine the entrenchment of any order of the sensible. This is where absurdity can operate as a democratic dissensual practice. Through repeating the everyday but repeating with a twist, absurdity is that which operates at the edges of sensible order; it is constituted by the very vulnerability of our sensory perceptions. As such, an open-ended practice of absurdity can operate to weaken attachments, as well as at times contributing to the irruption of ‘politics’. Police logic is the logic of domination. Hence any practice that loosens our attachments to police logic works to create conditions that are more conducive to ‘politics’ – the moment of emancipation and equality. Such a practice cannot prescribe exact behaviours or strategies, instead it works at a more abstract level, simply encouraging inexplicable behaviour, clowning and play that questions and turns on its head our everyday practices to examine them anew, to play with language and inscription in order to question why things are currently inscribed the way they are, and an appreciation of the impossible as figured in dreams to inspire and push at the boundaries of our current world. By refusing to take the police order seriously, by throwing in the occasional banana97 and engaging with humour and play we find yet more resources that help to prevent the order of domination from gaining too strong a hold over our lives. Such a practice figures anyone who enacts it as an actor in the sense of one who directs their own actions, but not necessarily in the direction of any particular outcome, simply to work on ourselves, to weaken our own attachments to our current sensory order, and to help us to identify sites and strategies for ‘politics’.

Practicing absurdity, living the carnival When Judith Butler visited the Wall Street occupation she noted the power of bodies in the street ‘in alliance’. Taken in isolation this statement could seem frustrating and apolitical, since bodies in alliance in the street could mean all sorts of things, and not necessarily democracy or the power of the people. However, in this chapter we have seen Butler’s commitment to the potential of bodies to come together in a certain way, to build something new, to subvert existing norms and to challenge current ways of living. Butler’s ‘bodies in alliance’ have the potential to be subjects of subversion, through repetitious appropriation, dis-identification and subjectivation. This argument brings us full circle. Although we noted in Chapter 1 that Žižek’s response to Occupy Wall Street asserted that the carnival will soon be over and we will then have to return to our ordinary lives,98 the tradition of the absurd prompts us to question this assessment. First, the carnival is much more than mere ‘fun’. The Orange Alternative’s absurdity had a deadly serious side as reflected in arrests and interrogations. Since the carnival has the potential to weaken the logic of domination, then contra Žižek, we need to find a way of taking the serious business of carnival into our ordinary lives.99 Absurdity calls us to keep the carnival alive, to carry it beyond any instantiation of protest, into the everyday.

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By reading Rancière and Butler together on the topics of subversion, subjectivation and meaning, this chapter has sought to emphasise the role of subjectivation in subversion, and to theorise subversion as subjectivation that arises from repetitious appropriation which triggers dis-identification with the dominant order. In contrasting the aesthetics of subversion for both Rancière and Butler we come to appreciate the potential of the tradition of the absurd, abstracted from its usual location in the arts and refigured as a democratic practice, to undermine the strength of the sensible order. Given the aim of this book to defend Rancière’s ‘politics’ against claims that it is impossible to plan, is unavailable and ineffective, and instead to argue that it is of supreme value for those of us who seek to challenge the increasing poverty, insecurity and terror prevalent in our contemporary era it may seem incongruous to conclude with a discussion of the value of the absurd. Yet this chapter has claimed that far from being frivolous the absurd offers the opportunity to undermine the very forces of conformity that entrench such poverty, insecurity and terror and enable us to circumvent the logic of domination by refusing to meet it on its own ground. If we too render the absurd as frivolous we merely replicate police logic and close down the serious potential of absurdity to help us to bring about alternative, more egalitarian, worlds.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Fleming (2013: n.p.). Rancière (2011b: 181, italics in the original). Rancière (2010a: 38). Discussed in The 10 Theses (Rancière 2001, repr. as 2010a). Rancière (2001: n.p., italics added). Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Rancière repeatedly uses the term ‘paradox’ to describe politics and the way that politics initiates democracy. See, for example, 1999: ix, 15, 17, 55, 61, 62, 65, 72, 83, 98, 101. Although Schaap (2009) has identified an element of the absurd within Rancièrian ‘politics’, he uses this in a conversational sense rather than drawing on the philosophical tradition. Butler (2004: 39, 226). Camus (1942: 18). Ionesco (1957). Esslin (1960, 1968); Fotiade (2001); Cornwell (2006); Cartledge (2013). Schufrieder (1983: 68). Kierkegaard (1941). See in particular The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Esslin (1968: 392). Ibid.: 393. Ibid.: 24. Ibid. See ibid.: 318, as well as Esslin (1960).

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23 Esslin (1968: 331). Esslin notes that the tradition in verbal nonsense has a history as long as that of verbal expression itself for so long as there are rules of communication there are opportunities to break the rules. He traces the tradition of verbal nonsense from thirteenth-century poetry, through Shakespeare’s poems to the Victorian poetry of Lear and Carrol, and the nonsense prose of Flaubert and Joyce. 24 Ibid.: 26. See, for example, Ionesco’s farce The Chairs. 25 Ibid.: 400. 26 Ibid.: 406, italics in the original. 27 Ionesco (1958), cited in Esslin (1968: 406). 28 See Chapter 4. 29 Ionesco (1958: n.p.). 30 Ionesco (1959). Translation taken from Esslin (1968: 406). 31 Cohen-Cruz (1998). 32 Boal (1979: 122 in particular). 33 Doyle (2002: n.p.). 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Allen (2007a: 81). 39 Graeber (2002: 68). 40 1990. 41 To use the term ‘constructed’ is not to imply that this construction is volitional. It does not happen at will but occurs through the dynamic interaction of the subject in the social. 42 Except for Chambers and Carver (2008). 43 In this work as well as in later texts she seems to employ the term ‘making trouble’ as a sort of shorthand for ‘subversion’. 44 Stone (2005: 5). 45 Lloyd (1999, 2005a, 2005b). 46 Disch (1999); Webster (2000); McNay (2000). 47 Nussbaum (1999). 48 Deutscher (1997). 49 Similarities in their work can immediately be seen by comparing their discussion of Rosa Parks’ protest, in which both identify a subversion through appropriation (Rancière 2006a: 61; Butler 1997b: 147). 50 Butler ( 2011b: 172, italics in original; inspired by Derrida (1988). 51 Butler ( 2011b: 172, italics in original). 52 Ibid.: 85. 53 Butler (2004: 213). 54 Butler (1993: 95). 55 Butler (1997b: 159). 56 Butler (2006b: 189, italics in the original). 57 Ibid. 58 Butler, Preface to 2006b edn. 59 See principally Butler (1993 and 2007a). 60 Butler (1997a: 3). 61 Ibid.: 7. 62 Ibid.: 88. 63 See Disch (1999) on this. 64 Butler (1997a: 18–19). 65 Disch (1999: 554). 66 Butler (2005: 136). 67 Butler (2006a, 2009).

Absurdity 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

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Disch (1999: 554, citing Butler 1997a: 18). Lloyd (2007: 101). Disch (1999) and Lloyd (2007). Chambers (2003: 147). See also Rancière’s (2009e) critique of Freud. Milchman and Rosenberg (2007). Two of the few essays Rancière wrote in English rather than in French. Despite many claims – see Chapter 1 – that Rancière has not paid enough attention to this topic. Rabinow (1984: 11). Milchman and Rosenberg (2007: 55). Ibid., italics in the original). Ibid.: 76. Butler (1997a: 11, see also 2005: 17). Butler (2002). Ibid. Butler (2004: Ch. 8, and 2005: Ch. 3). Butler (2004: 214). Ibid. Ibid.: 217. Ibid.: 7. Foucault (1984b: 377). Butler (2004: 217). Ibid.: 218. Ibid. Further elaborated in Butler (2005) and (2006a). See her discussion of this in Butler (2004: 30 and Ch. 10, particularly pp. 217–218). Butler (2011a: 4). See her critique of Agamben on this point (Butler 2006a: 68). In making this observation I am not simply trying to find an alternative way to distinguish between the drag performer as an active subject and the audience as passive, for as Rancière emphasises, the audience is always ‘active’. However, what is interesting is consideration of the modes by which members of the audience may or may not experience subjectivation differently from the ‘actor’ in the way that they act as they spectate. Butler (2011b: 95). Allen (2007b) and example in (1998). Butler (2011b: 68). On the seriousness and political nature of carnival see Tancons (2014).

Reflections on revolutionising A voyage without a compass

The sea smells of sailors, it smells of democracy. The task of philosophy is to found a different politics, a politics of conversion which turns its back on the sea … In response to these assaults we know, however, that the sea will take its revenge. (Jacques Rancière1)

This book has proposed that Rancière’s work is of use for those of us seeking to combat poverty, insecurity and inequality. By recasting politics as a moment of equality and democracy as a practice rather than a system of government, we are forced to consider the leftist project as dual layered, committed to strategies that can bring about redistribution of wealth and resources while simultaneously fighting against domination. This requires struggle on the terrain of the state as well as beyond it, not in terms of ‘taking power’ but in redefining and transforming rights and institutions wherever this will support emancipation. This need not provoke a ‘fear of being incorporated into state structures’ so as much as to remind us that state structures too are ‘an effective field of battle’.2 Redistribution is necessarily part of any egalitarian movement but redistribution is not as impossible as many on the left as well as on the right make out, and alone it is not enough. For emancipation to accompany redistribution the logics of domination must be undermined as well. In Rancière’s terminology this calls for in-depth theorisation of the relationship between politics and police: how might the police order be challenged and undermined so as to support opportunities for emancipation? In response to this question Chapter 1 emphasised the role of strategy in making politics happen. It identified the three constituent elements of ‘politics’ as appropriation, dis-identification and subjectivation and argued that while ‘politics’ cannot be planned the focus on the strategic use of these three elements can make it more effective and more available. However, in the absence of an elaboration of this relationship between ‘politics’ and the police order in Rancière’s work I then suggested that it is helpful to read him alongside four other thinkers, Christoph Menke, Stanley Cavell, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, in order to identify dissensual practices which could contribute to

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making ‘politics’ more likely. These practices undermine and weaken any police ordering. They operate on the edges of the sensible to untangle, question and loosen our given ways. Reflexivity untangles and weaves afresh the threads tying us to the past and everything we thought we knew. Aversivity loosens our attachments to our identities, our ways of being. Poeticity undermines our ways of saying, our ways of relating and organising through linguistic meaning. Finally, absurdity playfully queries our ways of doing whatever it was that we were supposed to be doing. These are all practices that work on the police. They are volitional practices that we can take up at will, not to guarantee any particular planned future but to make alternative more egalitarian futures more likely as well as to undermine existing domination today. Emancipation does not rely on such practices. It is always possible. However, its costs vary. These practices help to reduce the costs by operating in both the short and the long term. They are tools of resistance against any ordering, any instance of domination. They fight consensus and set democracy against our so-called democracy to produce more democracy. This is a democracy that opposes all instances of poverty, insecurity and inequality and never ceases to work in service of the promise of emancipation. Rancière suggests that the ‘politics’ of this democracy is optimistic: it makes possible the impossible. I have added that in our current world such ‘politics’ is urgent. As this book of dis-orientation comes to a close, let us pause to consider the silty ground of the word-island where we have washed up. We hereby bring into focus the metaphor of the voyage that has accompanied us throughout this narrative and which is woven into many of Rancière’s texts where it serves as a perpetual reminder of Plato’s initial act of enclosure that claimed philosophy as a tool of the powerful.3 With the final backward glance of this book we find ourselves pausing to reflect on Rancière’s critique of modernity via the famous tale that sent Plato’s philosophy back to sea in the modern age: the death of God that Nietzsche recounts in The Gay Science. This is not simply a fable about the waning influence of religion. It is the story of the death of metaphysics, the death of certainty and truth with regard to the ways in which we understand the world. It is a story of land and sea, of knowledge and ignorance. Nietzsche’s madman announces a new age that seems at first to be free of the need for certainty: at hearing the news that ‘the old god is dead’, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel illuminated by a new dawn; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, forebodings, expectation – finally the horizon seems clear again, even if not bright; finally our ships may set out again, set out to face any danger; every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an ‘open sea’.4 In this new age philosophy can once again go to sea without the constraints of all that once held us in its sway. Philosophers sail courageously,

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directionless and free. There is no sign of land on the horizon, yet this does not frighten them. They sail in heady bliss at no longer needing to feel the solid ground beneath their feet. In the wake of God’s death Nietzsche can introduce us to that which has for too long been masked by the image of God: mankind is driven by a will to power. Philosophy can now seek new meanings and pit them against each other in an unending quest for domination through control of knowledge. We use knowledge to dominate others and without one universally accepted truth we can acknowledge that all we have is struggle. Rousseau told us that mankind is everywhere in chains. Reading Rousseau after Nietzsche Foucault adds that if we are to understand or maybe even overcome these chains it is power that we must study rather than metaphysics. So what can we add now in the wake of our journey? Nietzsche tells us that despite God’s death there are caves in which his shadow is still shown. The enduring presence of this shade becomes a statement on how we conceive the material world. It represents all our tricksy ways of mediating the material through meaning. Without them we would not know the world at all. So it is puzzling that Nietzsche then tells us that we must ‘defeat’ God’s shadow as well.5 He notes that our happy philosophers are too wrapped up in the ‘immediate consequences’ of the death of God and do not look far enough ahead to see the dark clouds that it will bring – the clouds of the eternal struggle of the unbridled will to power. He asserts that we must overcome our will to interpret, to understand, to order and categorise, to know. Socrates’ oracle announced ‘Know thyself ’. Nietzsche says not only that we never can but that we should stop trying and embrace not knowing. But will we ever be free of this shadow, the entanglement of our existence with knowledge? Can we ever vanquish our desire for certainty, to entrench one interpretation as the one truth over all others? Nietzsche says we cannot although we can appreciate that this is merely an attempt to ground knowledge in a quest for domination and therefore not truth itself. So what might this mean for thinking and acting today? Nietzsche despondently warns us that we may remain in thrall to God’s shadow on the walls of caves for a long while yet, invoking Plato’s tale of cave dwellers captivated by the shadows of puppets on the wall. We recall that it was only the clever few, the philosopher kings, who saw the trickery at work and, turning their backs on the realm of shadows, stumbled up the pathway out of the cave to contemplate true knowledge in the bright light of the sun. In Nietzsche’s version, those ‘in the know’ realise that there is no true knowledge. They embark on a lifetime’s voyage without a map, without directions, on an adventure of open-ended exploration to seek new meaning which they can teach the ignorant townsfolk. Nietzsche’s tale helps us to distinguish between those who know and those who do not; between those who live a worthy life, bravely searching for knowledge; and the foolish who stay on land, in caves, seeking meaning in candle smoke and shadows. Yet in this passage Nietzsche prophesies in the terms of the world he derides and places too much faith in the philosopher sailors. It is not

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philosophy that must go back to the sea, but knowledge, slipping loose of the boundaries that philosophy always seeks to impose. Now that Nietzsche has unmasked the will to power those in charge of knowledge are seen to have the supremely powerful role. They control the tools for domination. Domination is an all or nothing game. Domination has no place for ambiguity. Defeating God’s shadow consequently has three possible interpretations. First, it could indicate that we dispel the shadow or the spectre of God. We no longer crave understanding and meaning and can come to know the walls of the cave as they really are, unmediated by shadows or spectres. Second, Nietzsche derides the idea that we can know truth or certainty so we must consider if perhaps there is no knowledge to be had of those walls of stone. We must grow indifferent and thus it would not matter if God’s shadow persisted or not. However, without his shadow how would we access the walls and if we are to be indifferent why must we defeat these shadows at all? Third, then, if these shadows are to be defeated it must be so that we can put something else in their place, some other shadow to capture our imaginations. And with the priests defeated, the philosophers become the master puppeteers. Alternatively, to escape or at least undermine the puppet masters’ show we could ask why we must defeat the shadows at all? If we are to embrace not knowing we do not need to use the language of domination and annihilation. The shadows do not need to be defeated. Our indifference simply leads us to finding them less enchanting. Ambiguity and uncertainty means we cannot proclaim the death of certainty with certainty. If certainty is dead we live instead in a perpetual state of ambiguity whereby we cannot know and yet we cannot help but seek to know. It would seem that there is no pathway out of the cave and no way of overcoming our search for the path. What if we have always been at sea while all along pretending to be on land? Nietzche announces uncertainty and yet we still seek knowledge. If all we know is that we cannot know and yet we still want to know, what we need is to work out how to proceed through the uncharted waters of the shadow lands between our desire to know and our realisation that we never can. The waters through which we navigate our lives, where the chains that bind us are smashed open yet in the same moment reforged differently, where some claim to be philosophers and others propose that they are only in thrall to new shadows. What then of Nietzsche’s philosopher sailors? With certainty still in the picture, though now strangely marked by ambiguity, we lose our ability to distinguish between those in the know and those who still await the message of the madman. We are all at sea and all at sea and the spirit of adventure that marks Nietzsche’s philosophers becomes the continuous struggle for equality that marks the democratic movement. The madman rushes back to the square not realising that his time has not yet come but that he was too late (although he cannot dispel a nagging doubt that he is not needed at all, for the townsfolk knew his secret all along, hence their embarrassed silence). He has had another dream: a dream marked not by clarity but by ambiguity; a dream of mankind, philosopher indistinguishable from non-philosopher,

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free spirit from unfree spirit (and the sea thus owned by no one and fair game for all) sailing forever the narrow straits between the land of stones and flesh and the God-shaped shadows on the misty horizon. Between certainty and uncertainty mankind will always construct shadows to pit against each other. Nietzsche knew that the will to power means struggle. Plato knew that the shadow lands are the realm of ‘politics’. Yet both seek to escape struggle and politics via knowledge, knowing full well that any attempt to escape is merely an attempt to mask power. It can never be transcended. Philosophy cannot kill certainty for we are crafty and will use shadows for our own means. In a mischievous twist of fate, leaving the philosophers fighting with ghosts and shadows in the cave below and despite not knowing or perhaps not caring if the mind plays tricks the people of the cave sneak up on deck and raise the anchor, and straining to make out the shadows in the mist, head for them, hearing the call of sea birds and human voices in the sound of the wind. In the moment that Nietzsche tells us to defeat God’s shadow he seems to forget that despite the promise of freedom, the illusion of sailing into the ‘open’, long before Plato unknowingly founded the Western canon, and without the help of ‘philosophy’, people learnt to navigate by the stars. The practices elaborated in the preceding chapters are proposed as techniques we can use to traverse the ambiguity of our existence in the shadow lands. Rancière’s writings reflect on what it means to question meaning while relying on meaning; to continue to struggle for freedom despite the perpetual negotiation of oppression. This can prove fruitful in providing us with tools to navigate the world of order; to loosen the hold of sense and thereby weaken domination. The focus on politics indicates that the will to power can be challenged through subjectivation but that this is an ongoing struggle, a journey that does not know where it will end up, that does not aim to end up anywhere. It is a journey that as democrats committed to universal equality we have already embarked upon, but necessarily without an overriding sense of direction, for we have disoriented the knowledge we thought we had. Yet to fight for better worlds today requires embracing our immersion in the current order of meaning, to exploit its weakness and change it for the better. In doing this we will over and again continue to fall in love with shadows and become ensnared anew in preferred directions and end points. Rancière’s work gives us tools to smash each compass that we forge and turns our minds to wondering what lies beyond the charts we draw. It helps us both to act in the here and now and simultaneously to navigate the ambiguity between our love of shadows and the nagging doubts that the shadows can never fulfil. Democrats ‘do’ democracy not so much as a regime but as a practice. Democrats revolutionise with a cause but a cause that can never be established once and for all – an axiomatic cause of equality. And because they have a cause, but no place in which they can come to shore and set up camp, they must continue the unending struggle against domination. Perpetual revolutionising names this movement without an end point, a journey without ultimate direction. Although we may not be able to overcome the

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habit of searching out the stars in the sky, we can also sail under the clouds that Nietzsche foresaw, for emancipation has no need of compasses; it dwells in the here and now. Rancière tells us that he seeks to map the possible, yet in so doing we have seen that he also charts the ever present markings of the impossible drawn on the same map. What is possible is constructed via our understandings of the world and by being, saying and doing what has heretofore been considered impossible we can change these understandings. By enacting the production of different social relations we demonstrate that other ways of being, saying and doing are thinkable, sayable and doable. But in the same way that we cannot read back into history the definitive reasons why we are where we are now, we also cannot know where we will get to in the future. We can only do politics a day at a time, with no grand plan to direct us to where we want to end up. That does not mean that we will not make plans, just that we need to be wary of them controlling us, and always remain open to revising them. All democrats can ever do is continue the battle. Although we will always try to navigate our struggle we would do well to avoid the allure of compasses and charts, but instead set sail in the misty morning half-light to see where the wind and the waves may take us; to see, to just see, what other worlds might be possible if we set out from the assumption that all might be equal. Whether or not we have amazement or foreboding in our hearts we may find a smashed compass in our pockets. It would remind us that we are not there because we are philosophers but because each of us may be no more a philosopher than anybody else.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

(2007b: 2–3, 2nd edn). Rancière et al. (2008: 183). Rancière (2007b: 1). Nietzsche (2001: 343, italics in the original). Ibid.: 108.

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Index

2008 financial crisis 3–4 9/11 3, 4, 10 absurd/absurdity: tradition of the absurd 152–61; absurdity as practice 152–61, 172–3 Adorno, Theodore 80–1 aesthetic practice: emancipation and 62; experience and 77; knowledge as 77; of philosophy 61, 79; politics as 76 aesthetics of knowledge 72, 77 aesthetic regime 120, 140, 141 ‘A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Ranciere’ (Rancière) 45 Althusser, Louis 67, 68, 165 America see philosophy appropriation 31–2, 51–3; performativity and 162, 164, 167, 169, 171–4; writing and 122, 123 archipolitics 62–3; moral perfectionism and 91, 98, 100 aristocracy 24 Aristotle 16–21, 63, 140 assujettissementsee Foucault, Michel Athenian democracy 18, 71 Austin, John 163 aversive thinking see Cavell, Stanley aversivity 98, 103, 114n41 Ballanche, Pierre Simon, 33 Balzac, Honoré de 139 Bauman, Z. 86n7, 87n18, Blair, Tony 11 Blanqui, Louis Auguste 31, 35, 118, 144 British National Party (BNP) 25n8 Boal, Augusto 158–9, 161 Bourdieu, Pierre 83, 86n7 Brown, Wendy 27n65

Butler, Judith 7; Bodies that Matter 168, 17; drag 164, 168–72; ethics 165–70; Excitable Speech 166; gender 161–5, 168–9, 171–2; Gender Trouble, 162, 164, 165; Giving an Account of Oneself 165, 168; insurrectionary speech 166; normativity 153–4, 158, 161–72; parody 162–5; performativity 161–6, 168, 172; Psychic Life of Power, The 165–169; repetition 161–3; speech acts 163, 166; subversion 161–6, 168–74; Undoing Gender 164, 174; ‘What is Critique?’ 168 Cameron, David 7 carnival 6, 159–60, 173–4 Cavell, Stanley: aversive thinking 96–112, 114n69; double self 90–1, 95–6, 106; ethics 91, 95, 102–3, 109; exemplars 91, 100, 101, 103, 105–12; film (remarriage comedies) 107–10; marriage 103–5; moral perfectionism 91, 98, 100–2, 107, 109; Pursuits of Happiness 108 Chambers, Samuel: on Rancière and politics 40–1, 45–6; literarity 124–5, 139 civil rights 37,43, 51, 54 Clinton, Bill 11 communism 3–9, 36, 38–9, 49; see also democracy conformity 12, 48, 125, 152–3; Rancière on 92–95; aversive thinking and 96–100, emancipation and 111 Connolly, William 103 consensus democracy 9–10 crisis 3–9, 65 see also democracy

196

Index

critical theory Rancière’s critique of 61–69 see also domination, and Menke, Christoph critique 61, 67, 68–69, 77, 78, 79, 168 Davis, Oliver: literarity 121, 124–56; 132, 141 Dean, Jodi on communism 5–6; communist party 54, 58n95; critique of Ranciere 8–11, 34–6 38, 43, 46; Occupy Movement 49, 118, 145 deconstruction, see Derrida, Jacques democracy-to-come, see Derrida, Jacques democracy: communism and 8–9; crisis and 3–4; emergence of 1, 27n75; equality and 2, 39; freedom of the people 18, 100; institutional/ised 1, 2, 39, 46, 56n35, 133; literarity 131, 132, 133–140; subjectivation and 25n2; writing and 134–41; seealso Derrida, Jacques; postdemocracy; consensus democracy; representative democracy Derrida, Jacques: deconstruction 130; democracy-to-come 75–7; democracy 137; democratic paradox 75; ethics 75–7; Force of Law 76; literature 137; logocentrism 129; messianism 77; other 76–7; phonocentrism 120; Plato’s Pharmacy 130; politics 76, 137, 129; promise 75; Rogues 76; writing 129 Descartes, René 71 Dis-agreement (Rancière) 32, 39, 40, 42, 45, 62, 94, 118, 126, 143, 153, dis-identification 14–15, 32, 33, 39–40, 53–54, disciplinarity: access to knowledge 130, 167; bodies 22; critical thinking 14, 80, 82; differences between Foucault and Ranciere 74; Derrida and 131; ethics 62, 86; party 6, 49, 54; perceptions 152; psychoanalysis 169 Dissensus: on politics and aesthetics (Rancière) 20, dissensus: literary 136–7; political 62–3, 79, 117, 137, 145, 156; of sense 152–3 domination: politics and 1, 3, 22–4, 43, 49, 88n78; conditions of 7; logic of 8, 157, 161; the left and 11, 13, 56n32, 58n95, 67, 69–79, 80–85 see also Foucault, Michel double self, the see Cavell, Stanley Douzinas, Costas 4 drag see Butler, Judith

Emancipated Spectator, The (Rancière) 95, 109 emancipation 1–3, 23–4, 56n33; via aversive thinking 97–9; against conformity 93–5; critical theory and 61–2 69–72; domination and 7–9; and exemplarity 107, 110–111; for Foucault 75; and the left 11–13, 58n79; and politics 95, 97, 111; via revolution 80–2, 85; social/ aesthetic 66; strategy for 48–50; and subjectivation 44, 46–7, 92–5, 97, 100; and writing 140; see also aesthetic practice Emerson, Ralph Waldo 95–111 Enlightenment 57n45, 62, 65, 71–2, 78, 88n62 see also Menke, Christoph episteme see Foucault, M. equality: and politics 1–3, 17–22, 29–30, 37, 39, 44, 88n62, 89n104, n106; revolution and 83–5; literature and 133–6 see also democracy ethics/ethos: 14, 97, 102–3, 109, 144 see also Butler, Judith; Cavell, Stanley; Derrida, Jacques; and Foucault, Michel exemplars see Cavell, Stanley Flaubert, Gustave 136, Flesh of Words, The (Rancière) 122, 126, 131, 134, 135 Foucault, Michel: assujettissement 167, domination 73–75; ethics, ethos and critique 74–5, 78, 170; episteme 146n25; policing 22; power 36; subjectivation 167; Frankfurt School, The 62, 80 freedom of the people see democracy Freire, Paolo 158 French Revolution 8, 70–3, 83, 134 Freud, Sigmund 165–6 Gauny, Louis-Gabriel 31 gender see Butler, Judith government: democracy as system of 1–3, 133–5 Gramsci, Antonio 112n5 Habermas, Juergen 143–4 Hardt, Michael 5 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich 70, 71, 81, 166 history as discipline 77, 79, 127, 130–2, 142 Honig, Bonnie 103

Index Horkheimer, Max 80–1 Hugo, Victor 141 identification 19, 31–2, 37, 39–40, 48, 161, 170, identity 37, 40, 53, 66, 77, 97, 106, 118, 163–4, 166 Ignorant Schoolmaster, The (Rancière) 110, 124, 127 insurrectionary speech see Butler, Judith iteration 15, 152, 161–6, 168, 170, 172 Jacotot, Joseph 92–4, 98, 111 Kant, Immanuel 72, 77, 100, 108 Kierkegaard, Søren 154–5 knowledge see aesthetic practice; and discipline Lacan, Jacques 124 Laclau, Ernesto 38–9 language 21, 118, 120–4, 140–5 left, the 3–13, 27n65, 35–6, 39, 41, 48, 56n32, 61–2, 64, 66–69, 72, 87n34 literariness 123–5 literarity 119, 122–6, 130, 132, 134–45 see also democracy ‘Literary Misunderstanding’ (Rancière) 126, 136, literature ch.4 passim, seealso Derrida, Jacques; and discipline logocentrism see Derrida, Jacques logos 16, 21, 105–6, 138, 140, 142–4, 152, 154 Lyotard, Jean-François 77 marriage see Cavell, Stanley Marx, Karl 64, 69, 83–5, 128 Marxism 8, 12, 63, 64–7, 69–72, 130, 158 May ’68 generation 48, 66, 117, 160 May, Todd 56n35, Menke, Christoph: Aesthetics of Equality 71; critical theory 80–2; Critical Theory and Tragic Knowledge 80; Enlightenment 71; Permanence of Revolution, The 82–4; reflexivity 80; revolution 82–6 messianism see Derrida, Jacques metapolitics 63, 72; of literature 137 Mime Collection, The 159 Mitterrand, François 11 moral perfectionism see Cavell, Stanley Mouffe, Chantal 103

197

Mute Speech (Rancière) 122, 126, 131 myth 142; of nobility 18–19; of Theuth 121–2, 128, 129, 130, 132; of cicadas 127, 129, 130, 132; of the island 137 Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, The (Rancière) 126, 130 Negri, Antonio 5 Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 100–2, 105–6, 108, 165, 178–82, Nights of Labour, The (Rancière) 44, 46, 62, 69, 93 normativity see Butler, Judith Obama, Barack 11 occupation 5–6, 17, 22, 30–1, 38, 50–5, 67, 71, 144, 152 Occupy movement/Occupy Wall Street 4, 49–54, 57n38, 59n109, 118, 173 oligarchy 9,18, 75, 133 On the Shores of Politics (Rancière) 64 Orange Alternative, The 151, 159–61, 173 other see Derrida, Jacques parapolitics 63 Parks, Rosa 14, 30–1, 34–7, 43, 46, 51, 153 parody see Butler, Judith part-that-has-no-part 33, 40 Parti Communiste Francais (PCF) 48 performativity see Butler, Judith Philosopher and his Poor, The (Rancière) 62, 127, 129 philosophy 2–3, 20, 79, 100, 127–32, 178–81; America and 98; critical theory and 61, 79; poetry and 142; political philosophy 62–3, 71, 77, 97, 128, 130; Western philosophy 67, 71, 77, 79, 97, 129 phonocentrism see Derrida, Jacques Plato 62–3; and the arts 109; divisions of labour and knowledge 67–8; myth of the invention of writing 121–2; philosophy 140–1, 178; theotocracy 127–8; writing 132; Phaedrus, The 121–2; Republic, The 16–18 plebeian revolt on the Aventine hill 31, 33, 133 Podemos 4, 6, 9 poeticity 15, 118–9, 141–5 poetics: of philosophy 79; doubling 119; writing 120, 121, 133, 134, 139, 141; of knowledge 126, 127, 147n71; of

198

Index

linguistic acts 143, 144; of politics 144 poetry 109, 127, 129, 131, 136, 138, 141–3, 147n71 police order 10–13, 22–3, ch.1 passim, 54–5, 88n76n78, 104–5, 111; absurdity and 151–3, 155; literature and literarity 134–6, 140; 161–2; subjectivation and 166–7, 169, 171–3 policing 22, 56n16, 74, 78, 170–1 see also Foucault, Michel political parties 5–9, 11–13, 36, 48–50, 54 political philosophy see philosophy politics 1, 3, 8, 9, 11–13, 20–3, 26n58, ch.1. passim, 74, 80; as left and right 72, Derrida’s 76–7; and slogans 118– 19; and literature 126, 133–41, 143–5; performance of politics through the absurd 151–5, 158, 166–7, 170–3 see also Derrida, Jacques; and emancipation ‘Politics, Identification, Subjetivization’ (Ranciere) 39 Politics of Aesthetics, The (Rancière) 122, 135 ‘Politics of Literature, The’ (Rancière) 126, 133 Porta, Donatella della 4 postdemocracy 9–10 power see Foucault, Michel promise see Derrida, Jacques reflexivity 62 regime see aesthetic; and representative, remarriage comedies see Cavell, Stanley repetition see Butler, Judith representative democracy 11, 133–5, 145 representative regime 120, 121, 141, Revising Nights of Labour (Rancière) 62 revolution: for critical theory 82–6; see also French Revolution. rights 7, 13, 29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 63, 64, 66, right-wing parties, 3, 25n8

Rousseau Jean-Jacques 109–10 San Francisco Diggers, The 159–61 science 70, 77, 127, 136, sensible/sensory order 151–4, 158–9, 161–2, 166, 170–1, 173, slogans 117–19, 144–5, Sloterdijk, Peter 64–5, 86n7 social/protest movements 33–7, 40, 161 sociology 83 Socrates 17, 109, 121, 128–9, 179 Solon 18 speech acts see Butler, Judith state: Rancière on the state 5, 11–13 strikes 22, 37, 42, 43, 64 subjectivation 11–13, 23, 25n2, 32–3, 38, and occupation 54–5; aesthetics of 77–80; aversive thinking and 103; and performance 157; in work of Judith Butler 162, 166–74 see also democracy; Foucault, Michel; and emancipation subversion see Butler, Judith Syriza 4, 6, 9, 11 Taylor, Astra 50 terror 3, 4, 7, 10, 66, 70, 84–5, 87n33 Theatre of the Absurd 156–8 theotocracy 126–8, 147n69 Voltaire,109–10 ‘What does it mean to be Un?’ (Rancière) 145 worker tailors 31, 37, 42 writing see Derrida, Jacques; democracy; and literature Yippies, The 160 Žižek, Slavoj 5–6, 8, 43, 49, 54, 58n95, 173