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? 

Arendt and Truth and Politics

Because of Martin Jay’s The Virtues of Mendacity, I sat down today to read Hannah Arendt’s “Truth and Politics.” I am very glad that I did, but I do wish that I'd started with the Arendt. Much of what Jay was doing, and why he was interested in certain questions and not others, would have then been clearer.

“Truth and Politics” is, as Jay points out, very much Arendt struggling with herself, raising issues that she is unable to contain in any definitive way. One point that Arendt touches, and that one might ask Jay to have dealt with in more detail, is, “the question of numbers” (pg 235 – I’m using the text as reprinted in Between Past and Future). This is salient in terms of the distinction between fact and opinion. Arendt contrasts the repressive capacities of the totalitarian states with the troubling tendencies of free countries,

to the extent to which unwelcome factual truths are tolerated in free countries they are often, consciously or unconsciously, transformed into opinions—as though the fact of Germany’s support of Hitler or of France’s collapse before the German armies in 1940 or of Vatican policies during the Second World War were not a matter of historical record by a matter of opinion. Since such factual truths concern issues of immediate political relevance, there is more at stake here than the perhaps inevitable tension between two ways of life within the framework of a common and commonly recognized reality. What is at stake here is this common and factual reality itself, and this is indeed a political problem of the first order. (236-7)

From this it follows that, “factual truth...is always related to other people: it concerns events and circumstance in which many are involved...it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about...It is political by nature” (238). These are the kind of sensible observations about which one doesn’t quite know what to do. Certainly not, it seems to me, follow Enrique Dussel’s advice and institute a ministry of truth(-telling in the media). Most interesting in this connection is the historical distance that separates Arendt and Dussel, which we might shorthand as the difference between the experience of totalitarianism and authoritarianism.

As I say, Arendt raises but never really grapples with the special problem that collectivity poses for truth. She of course points to the well attested fact that reasonable ethical principles for an individual cannot be followed by a polity—the relevant one here being Socrates’ ‘it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.’ If it seems clear than a politician, whose task is to act in the best interests of a polity, cannot abide by this principle, it is less clear to me that the polity itself is obliged to disregard it. Indeed, it seems to me that the eminently political problem of the establishment of collective norms and ideals is crucial to the question of truth—although perhaps it is a rational rather than a factual truth—and is not something Arendt approaches. It seems that for her, collective norms are simply aggregates of individual ones: “that all men are created equal is not self-evident nor can it be proved. We hold this opinion because freedom is possible only among equals, and we believe that the joys and gratifications of free company are to be preferred to the doubtful pleasures of holding domination” (247). Ethical ideals may become collective, for Arendt, only by undergoing a process of what we might call de-philosophication. This might be the gap between the philosophical and the literary. Ethical principles exist, but ethics is learned through example. Examples need not be physical, although they often are—they can be literary (Young Werther!)

For Arendt, truth-telling is not an action. It is purely reflective. In this it is like political thought, which is representative, and therefore not active. Lying, on the other hand, is an action. Ordinary language philosophy would no doubt have something to say here: truth is simply constative, while a lie is inherently performative—it assumes a whole range of things not assumed by the simple recitation of truth. That’s the story. I’m not sure that truth-telling as a specific kind of action is really any less freighted down with implied context than lying. (Doesn’t Doing Things with Words begin with the admission that, in fact, all language is performative? Or is this a willful miss-remembering on my part?) According to Arendt, though, truth-telling only takes on political meaning in specific circumstances: “Only where a community has embarked upon organized lying on principle, and not only with respect to particulars, can truthfulness as such...become a political factor of the first order” (251). This is the image of totalitarianism. It points to my major question about this essay, one that is very often asked and less often satisfactorily answered: do not contemporary forms of information distribution radical change the situation?

An important foil, in Jay’s book, to the Arendtian perspective, is the ‘aesthetic’ mode of political thought represented in this case by Pierre Rosanvallon and Jacques Rancière. I think it may be significant, in this comparison, that Arendt’s metaphorical construction of truth and the political are tactile, physical, whereas the ‘aesthetic’ (the quotation marks are there because the usage is a little out of the ordinary) is dominated by metaphors of visuality or of discourse.

I should defend my claims. Arendt describes facts and events early in the essay as “the very texture of the political realm” (231). Later, discussing the possibility of ‘the big lie,’ Arendt again uses the word ‘texture,’ this time comparing a lie to “a hole in the fabric of factuality” (253). The wonderful last lines of the essay are, “conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us” (264). Truth, that is, is that which can be touched and felt; we use it to cloth the nakedness of our existential condition, and when we engage in political struggle, it is the rocky ground on which we plant our feet.

Rancière’s perspective on the political is quite different. His ‘aesthetics’ is the partition of the visible, the making-visible of new subjects, the making-audible of new voices—in order to disagree, we must already consider one another speaking beings. This is a radically different way of conceiving politics. Rancière is not, I think, very interested in the issue of ‘truth.’ Rosanvallon, who is different from Rancière in many ways, is also not very interested in truth as such, but he does use little factual truths to build up a notion of politics as a discursively constructed field of possibilities that is not unlike the one that Rancière approaches from, shall we say, the direction of rational truth.

What both of these notions of politics share is a sort of placeless-ness, an abstract ‘public’ that is perhaps more substantial for Arendt than for, say, Rancière, but is none the less singular for both. I wonder if the real challenge that we face today in the apparent unification and massification of communication is not really the abolition of this abstract and singular place of the public. This is an argument I heard made long ago by Cass Sunstein, and although I know he has been much abused, his lecture made an impression on me, and seems to me still an important point. There is no public sphere, because there is no one place into which everyone must enter in order to hold an opinion. Mass democracy does not just mean, as Arendt and so many of her generation worried, that techniques of psychological control by a central government would become powerful means of political self-deception. Today, to the degree that the production and partition of ‘factual knowledge’ is autonomous and radically democratic, the process of generating and evaluating such knowledge becomes political to an absolute degree. In fact, today in a way never before possible, it seems to me that our political allegiances are broadly identical with the screens we use to evaluate incoming fact-claims. Certainly identity and political position are bound up in surprising (dare I say, early-modern) ways, it seems to me that this is closely related to the situation that one’s politics always precedes one’s ‘decision to believe.’

The simple fact that the above description of ‘our’ condition seems plausible to me at all is why I find that the final pages of Arendt’s essay sound as though she is attempting to convince herself of what she knows not to be true. Speaking of the independent judiciary and, above all, the academy, Arendt says, “it can hardly be denied that, at least in constitutionally rules countries, the political realm has recognized, even in the event of conflict, that it has a stake in the existence of men and institutions over which it has no power” (261). It is gratifying, although not perhaps practically convincing except in an ideal sense, to read Arendt say that, although the technical achievements of the academic technical sciences are enormous, “the historical sciences and the humanities, which are supposed to find out, stand guard over, and interpret factual truth and human documents, are politically of greater relevance” (261).

Rather than saying that Arendt is attempting to convince herself of what is clearly not the case, perhaps it is better to say that she has here driven her own line of thinking to its contradictory conclusion. The academic ward of truth has a crucial political function, but is not itself political. In what must be a pointed dig at Wittgenstein, Arendt says, “reality is different from, and more than, the totality of facts and events, which, anyhow, is unascertainable” (261). Facts and events (interesting distinction, given that the invasion of Belgium by German in 1914, surely an event, is one of her examples of fact) make up the texture of the political. The historian—and the novelist’s—task is “the transformation of the given raw material of sheer happenstance,” that is, to fuse these facts and events into narratives. Arendt glosses this herself as, perhaps, with Aristotle, the cathartic function of the poet—to cleanse men of emotions so that they may act, but also, “the political function of the storyteller...is to teach acceptance of things as they are” (262)—this acceptance is preparatory to judgment and then action; but does that make any sense? Can politics really require that one stops and judges objectively? Can that be what Arendt means? That the answer is at least a little complicated is suggested by who she identifies as the origin of objectivity: Homer. In the equal portrayal of Greek and Trojan—“Homeric impartiality” (263)—,she says, is the origin of the objective historical account. If, to push her a little, it is really Homer who made the earth and the sky, then perhaps there still exists in the power of fictionality some residual spark of the great poet’s capacity to manufacture the conditions of action?

Incipient (voyeuristic) liberalism

Zizek is generally at least stimulating. He manages to pose problems. Indeed, he has the courage at least to pose the obvious questions and face the obvious objections. As he says in a recent piece (May-June, 2009) in the New Left Review, "if liberal-democratic capitalism is, if not the best, then the least bad form of society, why should we not simply resign ourselves to it in a mature way, even accept it wholeheartedly? Why insist on the communist hypothesis, against all odds?" Indeed. In this short essay, “How to Begin from the Beginning”—which is at least half a retelling of Lenin’s ‘last struggle’ with Stalin and bureaucracy—Zizek does briefly suggest the basis on which he thinks that revolutionary politics should now be set. He says, “All truly emancipatory politics is generated by the short-circuit between the universality of the public use of reason and the universality of the ‘part of no part’. This was already the communist dream of the young Marx—to bring together the universality of philosophy with the universality of the proletariat.”

In the current configuration, there are four principle immanent antagonisms that seem like sources of potential catastrophe “the looming threat of ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of private property for so-called intellectual property; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments, especially in biogenetics; and last, but not least, new forms of social apartheid—new walls and slums.” Zizek doesn’t say this, but I imagine that these four broad categories can be arrived at by a simple content analysis of popular culture. Those things that scare us the most are understood to be somehow related to these immanent antagonisms. Fictions reveal them to us in utopias and distopias, apocalypses and period pieces.

Only the fourth of these four areas of potential catastrophe has the potential for universality, for Rancière’s ‘part of no part.’ In other words, the other forms of antagonism can all be managed in various ways by the many mechanisms developed by liberal democracy—rather than true democracy—and its culture for this very purpose. Zizek says,

“The predominant liberal notion of democracy also deals with those excluded, but in a radically different mode: it focuses on their inclusion, as minority voices. All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, and so on. The obsession of this democracy is the protection of all kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, etc. The formula of democracy here consists of patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost in this is the position of universality embodied in the excluded. The new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything. The threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract, empty Cartesian subject dispossessed of all our symbolic content, with our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unliveable environment. This triple threat makes us all proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The figure of the ‘part of no part’ confronts us with the truth of our own position; and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to avoid actually becoming so is to act preventively.”

Such are the last lines of the essay. I know that Zizek’s intention was radical, but it seems to me that, in essence, what he has just said is that it is only the ghettoized, only those most radically excluded by modernity, who are able to hold up to us a mirror of our own possible futures if we do not successfully moderate rampant capitalism through the judicious use of liberal, humanist reformism. The favelas, in this passage, are not a call to revolution, but a reminder that we do indeed have physical, psychological, and intellectual comforts worth defending. The ‘preventative action’ he invokes at the end does not sound like a revolution, it sounds more like a justification for another bailout. “In a way, we are all excluded...” surely this sounds just like the kind of “In a way, we are all different...” mindlessness against which Zizek supposedly stands? I see no relation whatsoever between Lenin’s dilemmas in the first part of the essay, and the (albeit very brief) analysis of the present situation in the last part. Perhaps Lacano-Leninism has in fact finally run out of ideas.

le plaisir du texte

As a sort of antidote to Lukács, I plucked Le plaisir du texte off my shelf and read some choice selections. It’s quite a wonderful little book. Possibly I wanted to go back to Barthes because of an essay I read yesterday or the day before about Barthes and Richard Rorty, which I found myself disagreeing with at nearly every turn. It’s from a very recent issue of New Literary History—and it seems to me to miss several things. The argument seems to be that at the very end of his life, Barthes gave up the playful self-fashioning he’d been engaged in, and turned to a traditional account of literature and écriture as speaking to deep and enduring human questions. This means that he isn’t at all the icon of ironist self-fashioning he apparently was always thought to be, or at least that he rejected the constant play of language in the late 1970s, just before he died.

Now, there’s a reason Compagnon calls Barthes an antimoderne. We should not take his postwar Marxism as a profession of faith (or, if we do, we shouldn’t let it get to us). We should remember that the Mythologies were newspaper columns. They were fun—still are. He isn’t in any sense, I think it’s safe to say, committed to any particular politics. He is, in a certain sense, elitist. There’s plenty to say about that. I won’t go on about it all. Barthes is near to my heart, but I’d like to stay lucid about his successes and his failures.

Le plaisir du texte is from 1973—translated very quickly, in 1975. Wolfgang Iser’s The Act of Reading was translated into English in 1978. Not so long ago I read a piece, also in New Literary History, by Brook Thomas about Iser’s reception in the US, and why it hadn’t gone so well. I’ve read some of Thomas’s other stuff, and been quite impressed. I liked this article as well, but now that I think on it, I don’t remember him mentioning Barthes at all. And if I can imagine myself back in 1980, trying to find a theorist who would help me talk about the reader and the text and their relation...well, there’s no context. Barthes is much sexier. Also shorter. It seems to me that this is the sort of thing intellectual history should be able to take into account when they ask ‘why not?’ questions (which, anyway, are always dangerous to ask).

As a side note, continuing to post ideas had-too-late about the Rancière paper: Barthes loves the idea of inattentive reading, of skipping around. His model of textuality and readerly action is about as far as you can get from Jacotot. Could they talk to each other at all? Lastly, having nothing to do with Barthes: the Jacototian idea that everything is in everything, that any act of language contains all language---this is the totalizing impulse that Rancière otherwise more or less stays away from, or might be. Again, bears some more thinking.

Lukacs: The Theory of the Novel

Today I read Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel. It’s a fascinating book. I’d started it some time ago in an airport (because it’s slender and light), which was a terrible idea. I always wonder, when I like one part of a book like this better than other parts, if it’s an artifact of my attentiveness or energy while reading rather than the text itself. In this case, though, I’m fairly certain that it isn’t. I like the last chapter of the first part best. It was breathtaking—dense, energetic, captivating. The first chapters were a warm-up, and the whole last part is typological, which bores me pretty badly. Of course I’m not ready to give any kind of broad summary—I don’t think it’s that kind of book. But three things to point out.

First—in the preface, written in 1961, he talks about how his “conception of social reality was at that time [circa 1914] strongly influenced by Sorel” (18). The index (which is actually pretty good) gives this as Albert Sorel. This is obviously wrong—it’s my guy, his cousin Georges. I’ve seen this before: in Compagnon’s Brunetiere book, for instance, there was a similar mistake in the index. In that case, I think it really is minor. Compagnon certainly knows the difference, it’s just a confusion on the part of whoever did the copy-editing, the reference is anyway an aside, nothing to do with the main line of discussion. (I realize I’ve fallen to quibbling over index entries) Lukacs is different. Sorel’s influence in the period was great, and if it isn’t surprising that Marxists in the 1930s and later (Sartre, say, very influentially in 1961) want to disown him—well, it’s still a politically motivated rewriting of history. Indeed, later on in The Theory of the Novel, Lukacs says things that to me echo a Sorelian understanding of the structure of description as such: “the objectivity of the novel is the mature man’s knowledge that meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that, without meaning, reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality” (88). I would make the argument that this is Sorel’s understanding of the relation of social description (meaning) to social reality. Lukacs, then, is translating into the literary-philosophical sphere the epistemological moves Sorel made regarding social science. Of course, even wikipedia mentions that Lukacs knew Sorel. I should get a good secondary source on Lukacs. It’s fascinating. I’ve no choice now but to read History and Class Consciousness next.

Number two very fast: Brownstein’s argument about the novel enacting the becoming of the heroine—the convergence of realism and idealism (empirical woman and feminine ideal) in the body of the heroine—finds a real precursor here, “the inner form of the novel has been understood as the process of the problematic individual’s journeying towards himself” (80). Now, it’s quite possible that B actually cites L, or more likely, that there’s a much larger critical tradition making this observation. I’ve returned her book to the library, or I’d look. Anyway, naive me was surprised.

Last, having to do with something I wish I’d put in my paper on Ranciere. David Bell, in a recent essay on Rancière, uses the word ‘tact’ to describe his ability to balance philosophical generalization and historical specificity (or something to that effect). Lukacs uses the same word—or the translator does—to describe the novel’s balancing act between various impossible completenesses. Zizek also is obsessed with politesse, which is almost the same thing as tact. I guess it’s interesting because it is a widespread, totally common phenomenon of a code of behavior with sometimes strict enforcement methods, which absolutely cannot be expressed or codified. It’s a sub-legal legal order. I suppose Norbert Elias would have a thing or two to say about manners—but tact is a bit different. Hmm. To consider, at any rate.

Dis-agreement class discussion

Today was the class on Rancière’s Dis-agreement. We didn’t talk very much about the last two chapters of the book, which were for me some of the most interesting. For instance, I found Rancière’s discussion of the outlawing of Holocaust denial as a symptom of the contemporary situation telling about his own position. But we didn’t get to talk about it

[A note on this word, symptom: Rancière doesn’t use it, I think, but I can’t stop doing so. Even in inappropriate contexts. Perhaps I find the inexactitude of it attractive? I need to discipline myself to use it in a more precise medical or psychoanalytic sense.]

Indeed, the most interesting comments were all, for me, at the end of class. They also largely came through attempts to compare Rancière and Laclau—a necessary comparison, I think, and one that suggests what the real limits to this theoretical imagination might be. For one thing, the question of pluralism came up. This raises three cascading points/questions.

First, In light of Rancière’s articulation of politics as rising everywhere to meet police, Laclau seems to posit a convergent logic. I mean by this (I think it’s what other people meant as well), that for Laclau, politics is about building a unity, whereas unity does not seem to be necessary for Rancière. At least, it isn’t if politics is an interruption, or refiguring, of the police order of the perceptible. Even if we speak in terms of the creation of subjects, Rancière allows for a kind of multiplicity and disconnectedness between specific struggles that it is the whole point of Laclau’s project to transcend. Now—I wonder if things have changed for Rancière since 1995? The main thing here is Laclau's need to invoke one form of ego-ideal or another. Rancière doesn't feel this need.

[I’ll just say again, terminologically: I use ‘articulation’ and ‘problematic’ too often. I believe they are Althusserian technical terms which have entered common academic parlance—I should be more responsible. It makes my skin crawl when people say ‘deconstruct’ when all they mean is ‘argue against,’ or worse, ‘argue for the constructed nature of...’]

Second, on the other hand, Rancière does talk a great deal about the demos, and those of the part of no part, who must have everything or nothing. This is democratic politics. I don’t ever remember him adjudicating the relationship between politics and democracy—the two are by no means the same, though. I assume that we are to understand radical democratic politics as making totalizing claims, which would make it look very similar to Laclau’s radical democracy, or populism.

Third and finally, I wonder about the connection of this, the necessity, of the logic of equality. It is certainly the operative motor of politics for Rancière, so I suppose it cannot be excised from the system. But, if we re-orient Rancière’s chain of reasoning, what is it about subjectivization that requires equality? It seems that nothing requires this. It is just that the limit case of political subjectivization is that of the demos, which reaches this limit by radicalizing the logic of equality.

I suppose the question really is: can the Police order only be challenged qua order through the logic of equality? Rancière’s answer must be yes—to me this doesn’t make intuitive sense. I would toss in here also the problem of historicity. Again, I think the comparison between Rancière and Laclau is instructive. In some ways, Rancière is obviously the more transcendental and a-historicist of the two. The equality of speaking beings is not open, philosophically, to question. It is in the nature of speaking beings to be equal. The treatment Rancière gives to forms of government, especially republicanism, also seems very transhistorical. Republicanism goes straight from Plato and Aristotle to the French Third Republic. Yet, by the same token, history is present in the texture of Rancière’s writing—the slow evolution (this term is absolutely not teleological, and strictly speaking, means the same thing as mutation) of concepts and structures across history is very much on his mind. Laclau, for all his historical sketching of the progress of an idea, gives really the impression of creating a model which might safely be applied transcontextually.

I wish I had a better language to describe why the two writers seem so distinct to me, possibly it’s a matter of pure style. Laclau’s prose is expository: making provisional definitions, defining terms, returning to the definition; raising possible objections, dealing with them; even creating typologies of examples. Rancière demands that you follow the twisting line of his thought. There are certainly returns, spiraling redefinitions, but there is no regularity.

Ranciere, The Hatred of Democracy

If I had more intellectual energy, I would somehow synthesize the Jacques Rancière book I’ve just put down. Here’s a half-hearted effort.

For him, democracy is the absolute principle of egalitarianism, which founds even inegalitarian systems. Democracy is the foundational meaninglessness of things, it seems. It is the essence of relativism and the blank space at the foundation of every power-structure. Equality, radical and contentless, is the transcendentally deduced starting-point for Rancière’s thought. He draws a number of consequences and makes a number of observations that I won’t discuss here. I will point to the interesting comparison with Badiou, who, we might say, puts the ontological relation of belonging in the same place as Rancière does equality.

He also, incidentally, has some interesting things to say about the Third Republic in this light. Jules Ferry is a hero, for instance, of genuine equality, whose vision was corrupted by the pressure for social reproduction.

I’m sympathetic with Rancière’s whole project, though there are points of interpretation on which I’d like to challenge him. In this particular book, there were two issues, both historico-theoretical.

The first one has to do with his discussion of J.-C. Milner’s book, Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique. Rancière seems to accept uncritically the idea that Europe’s ‘peace’ in the post 1945 world was somehow founded on the elimination of the cosmopolitain humanism that somehow inheres to the essence of Jewishness. I’m not at all familiar with Milner’s work, though I remember a bit of Zizek’s discussion. So I’m not sure quite what he’s up to. The argument, interspersed with Rancière’s additions, seems to be a) that the postwar ‘unification’ of Europe under abstract law is possible because the imaginary presence of ‘the Jew’ has, in fact, been successfully erased by Hitler; and so b) it is in this light that we must see European demands for ‘peace now’ in the middle east. Such demands obviously mean the end of Israel, and therefore the extension of the democratic/totalitarian project that is liberal/capitalist Europe onto a global scale. That is: European support for the Palestinians really is a new form of Nazi anti-Semitism. I won’t even begin to argue against this here—but I will point out that there is surely some theoretical interest to the empirical truth that Europe’s peace was, as Tony Judt points out, built not so much on the destruction of the Jews as on the massive scale of wartime and immediate postwar population transfers and border re-drawings, everything tamped down by Soviet control in the east.

More importantly, and in a completely different directly, it seems to me that Rancière grants capital the same transcendental status as equality (in his sense of the word, democracy). He says,

“In order for it [liberalism, which is really to say: capitalism] to function, it has no need that any constitutional order be declared for ‘deregulated competition’, that is, the free and limitless circulation of capital. It requires only that the latter be permitted to function. The mystical honeymoon between capital and the common good are needless for capital. It serves only the ends pursued by oligarchs of State: the constitution of interstate spaces liberated from the need for popular and national legitimacy.” 82

It is important that capitalism, just like everything else, is at least in part a social practice. There is an ample body of literature on the development, and lack of development, of capitalism. Capital is not a subject, though it may be useful to think of it that way. Capital is not a transcendental category. The development of something that we now call capitalism, either in the 16^th or 18^th centuries, did not in itself constitute a radical or epistemic break in world history. Capitalism may not need, as Rancière says, “any constitutional order” to support it, but it needs some kind of order. The proper institutions and infrastructure is necessary even for it to malfunction. Globalization is witness to this. Some economists say that the problem of globalization is that there isn’t enough of it—the poor states are the ones for one reason or another unconnected to the global economy. This doesn’t take the whole state of things into account, but it is none the less simply true that the system has gaps, and is sustained as a system by a huge amount of labor (and not just the sweating kind) and energy.

I’ll have to read more Rancière and see what he really thinks. This book has the feel of an occasional piece, dashed off in a hurry (again, that might be the translation). Certainly, he is in real conversation with Laclau, even Badiou, Zizek, and has some nasty (i think correct) things to say about Agamben. There will certainly be more about Rancière here later.