Rancière & La parole ouvrière

In 1976 Jacques Rancière published (together with Alain Faure) a collection of texts by workers from between 1830 and 1851 under the title La Parole ouvrière. His short introduction to this collection, appearing as it does well before La nuit des prolétaires, his own thèse on the same material, is a good (and concise!) starting place for understanding what Rancière is up to in this early post-Althusserian phase of his thinking. I would describe this introduction as working on two levels at once: the first and most fully-stated is a methodological and historiographical argument with a certain kind of social history; the second is an intervention into what we can, problematically, call ‘post-Marxist’ theory. Neither intervention is without ambiguity.

           

In returning to the archive of “la parole ouvrière” between the revolution of 1830 and the coup of 1851, Rancière is, he says, above all not looking for an origin story. He wants to avoid the teleological story of a working class that is at the beginnings of what we all know will eventually be its self-consciousness as “proletarian.” But of course we are in the presence of growing class-consciousness. The specificity of this experience of class-consciousness in this moment for Rancière is that “La prise de parole qu’ils [les ouvrières] effectuent constitue elle-même un élément décisif de cette expérience” (10). This new accession into la parole was a claim to full humanity on the part of the workers. To be more than arms or rifles, but not because they are strong, because they are just as able to speak truth and justice as anyone. This was never separate from other forms of struggle (18-19). But there was nonetheless something particular about the claim to speech: “Vivre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant. La parole fonde un droit que la violence ne saurait se donner à elle-même.” For this, education, and self-education, was required because it was clear that violence would be met with greater counter-violence and experience taught the likelyhood of political betrayal. “Entre la violence suspendue et la servilité refusée, ce dialogue nouveau avec la bourgeoisie exprime un idéal qui est moins de prendre la place des maîtres que de les réduire à leur rôle de marchands ou de prêteurs, d’avoir avec eux ce que Grignon appelle des ‘rapports d’indépendance et d’égalité’” (13). Or, differently put, “Le désir d’être reconnus communique avec le refus d’être méprisés. La volonté de convaincre de son droit engage la résolution de le défendre par les armes” (14). This was a dialogue with the bourgeoisie, and that is what gave it a class character.

This class character has, Rancière says, been challenged or missed by scholars who can see nothing but ideological domination in the adoption by the proletarians of the language of the bourgeoisie. What else but ideological domination could be indicated by claims to the same humanity as the bourgeoise? Claims to respectability and the like? This is to read badly, according to Rancière. The proletarian takes the language of the bourgeoisie literally, turns it against itself, denies to the bourgeois the exclusive right to determine the meaning of this language. “C’est aux ouvriers seuls qu’il revient de nommer leur situation et leur révolte” (16). Rancière pushes especially heavily on the use and reuse of the term “esclave.” The workers are not slaves. They refuse to be slaves. They are quick to feel that they have been called slaves. They refuse to be treated as slaves—and so we have a journal called “Spartacus” Because the workers are “Les Spartacus qui ne veulent pas qu’on les traite d’esclaves prennent les armes” (16). It is difficult, given the state of scholarship today, to read these lines without wanting some reference to the fact that contemporaneous with these exchanges during the Second Republic there is debate on and then the abolition of slavery in the Antilles. But Rancière doesn’t mention this. He is interested, rather in the “sourd travail de réappropriation des institutions, des pratiques et des mots” (18) undertaken by the proletarians. He is interested, that is, in the question “Que se passe-t-il quand la classe qui est dépossédée également des moyens de la production intellectuelle s’efforce de prendre la parole pour s’identifier?” (19).

In historiographic terms, Rancière is calling for a history of “la pensée ouvrière qui occupe cette place demeurée pratiquement vide entre les histoires des doctrines sociales qui nous résument Marx, Fourier ou Proudhon, et les chroniques de la vie ouvrière qui nous deecrivent l’horreur des caves de Lille...” (21). This, let us remember, was written in 1976. We are here after EP Thompson, but in the midst of the ascendency of social history. We are ready for the turn to cultural history that, in this labor-history context, we can associate with Joan Scott, Bill Reddy, Bill Sewell, and others. (Indeed, although I’m not going to try to reconstruct it here, Rancière took part in face-to-face debates with anglophone historians, I’m thinking, if I remember correctly, of a 1983 conference reproduced as Work in France eds Kaplan and Koepp, 1986). It would be interesting to explore the difference between the account of political practice through experience that Rancière suggests here, or even more so his later interventions into arguments about political subjectivity and Joan Scott’s famous anti-“evidence of experience” argument. The two after all both come from French working-class history. Here Rancière is of course aiming at something much more historically specific: “il faudrait étudier comment l’expérience quotidienne de l’exploitation et de l’oppression trouve à se systématiser en empruntant des mots ou des raisonnements au discours d’un haut, comment des idées deviennent des forces matérielles, comment des plans de réorganisation sociale sont mis en oeuvre à l’échelle d’un atelier, d’une corporation, d’un quartier...” (21).

Here, though, we turn to the second, and less fully-articulated point that Rancière wants to make in this particular text. Taking a step back from the argument he has been making, he ventriloquizes a counter-argument: you will say that all of this history is really the past, “songeries d’artisans englouties en pratique par la grande industrie et anéanties en théories par le marxisme” (21-22). Now, there is a kind of social or cultural history that would pause here and say—but all utopias, all ruptures, all possibilities unrealized, are worth recovering. This is one of the great tasks of the historian: to rescue, to paraphrase Thompson, voices from the enormous condescension of posterity. But that is not what Rancière goes on to say. He turns, rather, to Marx. And he introduces two rather surprising (1976!) mechanisms into his narrative to do so: contemporaneity and choice. He writes, “L’idée de la révolution prolétarienne est inexorablement contemporaine des discours de cette avant-garde ouvrière qui pense et agit non pour préparer un futur où les prolétaires recueilleraient l’héritage d’une grande industrie capitaliste formée par la dépossession de leur travail et de leur intelligence, mais pour arrêter le mécanisme de cette dépossession” (22). These soon-to-be obsolete artisans saw themselves to be presented with a choice between two possible futures, “celui de l’organisation capitaliste qui, dans chaque métier, annonce, à travers la réorganisation du procès de travail, l’exacerbation de la concurrance entre les bras ouvriers ou le renforcement de la discipline de l’atelier, l’instauration d’un esclavage nouveau; ou celui de l’association ‘libre et volontaires’ des travailleurs. C’est dans le sentiment de ce choix que se forme l’idée de l’émancipation ouvrière sur laquelle viendra se greffer la théorie de la révolution prolétarienne : non à partir de la conscience des prolétaires formés à ‘l’école de la fabrique’ mais à partir du point de vue de ceux qui entendent refuser cette école” (23).

Marx could abuse Proudhon for his theoretical incompetence. He could struggle to assert that utopian socialism was past, that his own socialism was scientific. But between this science and the political dream of emancipation there was a gap and “ce décalage se trouve d’entrée de jeu au coeur de la problématique marxienne.” (Is this still an Althusserian reading of Marx? But historicized differently?) Marx “n’a pas pu penser le but à atteindre dans d’autres termes que ceux de ces ‘artisans’: communisme, émancipation des travailleurs, abolition du salariat, libre association des travailleurs. It s’est efforcé de penser avec plus de riguer la nécessité du renversement du pouvoir et les conditions de ce renversement,” along with his political economy, but “il ne pouvait se représenter l’avenir communiste autrement que ne le fait en 1850 le mécanicien Drevet: monde d’ateliers sociaux et de magasins coopératifs où, dans l’égalité de tous devant le travail et le loisir, des travailleurs librement associés régaleraient leur production sur les besoins désormais connus et reconnus de leur frères.” 23-24.

But this does not mean—as for instance is suggested by the recent Sperber biography, as well as the grand narrative of bourgeois life outlined by Jerrold Seigel—that Marx is himself somehow surpassed by subsequent social-economic history. Rather, “la mise en place de ce réseau de mots et d’images où la pensée de Marx prend ses repères peut aussi être le point de départ d’une réflexion matérailiste sur l’histoire des transformations du marxisme” (24).  Rancière, much like Antonio Labriola in the 1890s, asks that we return to the moment at which Marx’s thought was constituted in order to understand it and further the project of emancipation. Although perhaps I am reading Rancière as more sympathetic to Marx than he really is?

To close this rapid overview of a single, now-ancient, text I want to present a methodological-political anxiety. I worry that the intellectual historical call to be open to the demands of the texts we encounter—dialogic, but also for instance the way Gordon frames it—makes it difficult for intellectual historians to make the kind of move that Rancière does. How can we not, if we begin by trying to allow Marx to speak directly to us, fail to read him against these worker-philosophers in just the way he wants us to? Rancière wants, we might say, to use the context of Marx to make Marx’s thinking alive in the present. But this is not the message I get from Gordon. Rancière uses the notion of historical choice—two choices, a moment of clear decision creating a rupture in imaginative futures—to insist that the workers of the 1840s, rather than the theorists, remain contemporary to the idea of revolution. This, it seems to me, requires a set of absolutely contemporary commitments (for Rancière we can say, to equality) that are simply not available to the historian. Or, if they are so available, it is at just the cost that Lilti, contra Gordon, says—we won’t be doing history any longer, but rather politics, because it seems to me that there is nothing else that a claim about contemporaneity can ultimately mean. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and this is to some degree what Gordon (et al, he’s getting unfairly abused here, see also Jay and LaCapra) wants. But with that come responsibilities and obligations that have nothing to do with professional historical training or practice. That would be militant history. That would be history that begins with a choice in the present imagined in the same way that Rancière claims works in the 1840s began with a choice. Evidently this is a problem of long standing. My worry, I suppose, is really the idea that intellectual historians (rather than, say, historians of social movements who are in many ways better equipped for this) should be particularly obliged to confront this problem of contemporaneity. Surely it is for us to ask, rather, why there could be a choice of that kind at all, in the particular moment that it seemed to present itself? There’s a problem of recursion here, of course, and the inevitability of making a choice at the beginning of subject-matter. But, then, if you begin by saying that you are an intellectual historian, probably you have already made a choice against, at the least, the equality with which Rancière begins—a choice for Marx and not the proletarians? 

My Brilliant Friend

“My return to Naples was like having a defective umbrella that suddenly closes over your head in a gust of wind.” (chapter 116)

This wonderful, arresting metaphor comes at the beginning of a short chapter near the end of Story of a New Name, the second volume of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. So far I have only read these first two. I’ll pick up the third soon, and perhaps even finish it in time to be impatient about the arrival of the translation of the fourth. Here I’ll make no attempt at plot summary (and won’t be shy about spoilers). I’ve read very little of the material which has appeared about these books so far. Rothman’s piece asking "Ferrante or Knausgaard?", which I read after I was already well into the first volume, left me with absolutely no desire to read the latter, but unsatisfied of course with the description of the former.

The umbrella metaphor is effective, and in several ways. The umbrella—a banal shelter—turns against the one holding it. This marks it at once as “defective,” but of course it is in the nature of umbrellas to open and close. Like this object, the narrator Lenù, if not the narrative, is defined by oscillation. She is now transcendentally happy, now plunged into depression. Open and closed. In part this is an effect of the childhood and adolescence that is the subject of the first two volumes of the novel, but the oscillation is nearly oppressive, and I cannot imagine that it will do more than stretch out a little as Lenù ages. I also stumble over the mix of temporal orders. Ferrante plays with this: “now that we were seventeen the substance of time no longer seemed fluid but had assumed a gluelike consistency and churned around us like a yellow cream in a confectioner’s machine.” The return to Naples is discrete, a punctual moment. But the comparison is not. The punctual return is not compared to another simple punctual event, but to the having of an umbrella like that. And this temporal structure is not without parallel in the book itself—the just-mentioned oscillation, of course, but also the various slowly-changing backdrops against which the events of the novel take place. This means, most immediately, “the neighborhood” in Naples, the menacing backdrop of poverty and the camorra.

Of course this background is not unchanging. Indeed the most obvious themes of the novel are woven into the larger story of the Italian postwar. Lenù and Lila grow up literally in the wreckage of fascist Italy, which is always present, if poorly understood and rarely discussed by the adults. There is ambient violence--unexploded wartime ordinance both real and metaphorical. As the characters grow up, Italy is going through the postwar boom, the years of modernization. Parents who grew up without running water will see their children demand televisions. Lenù, Lila, and practically all their acquaintances are poor, provincial—their parents aren’t illiterate, for the most part, but their parents were. Lenù will get out, go to university, other characters will educate themselves and be educated in various ways.

Writing and language therefore hold a special place here. Do you speak in dialect? Do you speak Italian? Lenù’s return to Naples, described in the quote above, is marked by the famous linguistic in-between-ness of one who has escaped, or is trying to escape, her origins through education. She never entirely lost her Neapolitan accent at school in Pisa, but she no longer sounds right to her friends and family either. From the very beginning the two friends read and were enchanted not just by words, not just by writing, but by the cultural object that is a printed book. It seemed important, magical, a marker of success and power. The novel begins, of course, with Lenu’s decision to write, to record as much as she can about the existence of Lila—a sort of counter to Lila’s willful disappearance. This is a sort of violence inflicted through words. And we see many examples throughout the narrative. In writing, Lila hurts Lenù, makes her feel small and a failure. Characters are constantly mixing their words together. Of course, most important are the acts of co-creation between Lenù and Lila. But there is also Lenù and Nino, Lila and Nino. Not that this is constrained to verbal reproduction. Lila’s creativity is manifest constantly, is an active force in the world of the novel, she designs shoes, and the conflict over Lila’s photograph is an important plot point, as is her her desecration/creation in reworking it, its eventual destruction. Lenù, it seems, is always struggling with the possibility, the feeling, that indeed she is nothing more than another creation of Lila’s, even if we as readers see clearly that this isn’t so.

The novel is of course actuated by a vanishing act, but it is also full of acts of wanton destruction, importantly of written words. The narrator writes, ostensibly, to prevent Lila from really disappearing, and begins the narrative proper with the primordial act of violence in which the two girls throw away one another’s most prized possessions, their dolls. The second volume is given its whole emotional tenor, is haunted, by Lenù’s shocking destruction of Lila’s private journals. Then of course that volume ends with the appearance of Lenù’s novel, the reappearance of its ur-text, the novel Lila wrote as a child, and Lila’s own destruction, in the hellish meat-packing plant, of that object. All of these texts are defined and given agency, in the novel, as much by their audience, the moral authority of culture, as by their authors. For instance Lenù’s first article so freighted with emotion and given, to no obvious response, to Nino. Lila’s childhood production had deeply moved Lenù, but for whatever reason vanished for years, unremarked upon, not encouraged, by their teacher. Lila’s text, the production of which is treated by the narrative in a cursory way, like the treatment for an illness, is apparently impulsively given to a man in response to his proposal of marriage. It, too, vanishes for a little while, only to be taken up, accepted, published, by cultural authority.

Some bonds cannot be dissolved. Some situations, some people, cannot be escaped. It seems wrong, insufficient, to say that the relationship between Lenù and Lila is at the heart of the novel. Who is the brilliant friend? This is not a relationship, the word is too vapid. On every page, we have the force-field of Lila shaping Lenù’s life—and, for the reader, for the narrator, if not for Lenù in the narrative, we can see how the lines of force run in both directions. This novel is not, I think, going to be about how, ultimately, we learn not to be cruel. It is not a liberal novel, not a Bildungsroman, not a novel about making one’s self on one’s own, not about learning to be free.