Rancier and Equality, Ranciere
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January 3rd, 2008, 10:27 PM
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Transgendered Cyborg
[RELEASED] May - Jacques Rancière and the Ethics of Equality
Jacques Rancière and the Ethics of Equality
Clemson University
Name: TheScu
School: Binghamton University
Join Date: Jan 2000
How shall we characterize what is proper to contemporary anarchism?
What quality or qualities make it anarchist and not something else? What
distinguishes its critique of capitalism from Marxism, or its anti-
authoritarianism from nihilism? What draws the various threads of
different anarchisms together into a single weave?
At one time, people thought that the uniqueness of anarchism lay in its
critique of the state. While Marxists sought to take over the state, or to
establish a dictatorship of the proletariat until such time as the state would
wither away, anarchists sought instead to abolish the state outright. Is it
not Proudhon himself who writes, "To be GOVERNED is to be watched,
inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated,
enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated,
valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right
nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so" (293-4). And Bakunin, in his
criticism of Marx's program, points out that "the
doctrinaire
revolutionaries
, whose objective is to overthrow existing governments and
regimes so as to create their own dictatorship on their ruins, have never
been and will never be enemies of the state…They are enemies only of
existing governments because they want to take their place" (137).
For Marx, the central category of oppression is exploitation, the extraction
of surplus value from the worker. If exploitation is the problem, there is no
bar to commandeering the forces of the state in order to dismantle it.
True, the state will no longer be necessary once exploitation has ceased,
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and then it can disappear of its own accord. But in the meantime, the
state must be seized as a powerful source for the revolution of the means
of production. In contrast, it is said, anarchism finds the problem to lie not
primarily in exploitation but in power itself. Any institution that can exert
power is to be resisted, and the state, which possesses the most power, is
to be resisted above all.
This is a misreading of anarchism. We should not see the difference
between Marxism and anarchism as lying in the argument between those
who would lay the blame for oppression at the feet of the economy and
those who instead would lay it at the feet of the state. While this
[End
Page 20]
characterization captures Marxism rightly, it misreads
anarchism. What anarchism criticizes is not power, strictly speaking, but
domination.
What is the difference? We might say that domination is power that
operates deleteriously. The deleteriousness can happen in many ways. A
boss dominates a worker by the mere fact that he can withhold the
worker's means of subsistence. The mainstream media dominates the
public by veiling the interests of the elites that fund it. Domination can
happen in more subtle ways as well, ways that involve no conscious
intention. Michel Foucault's works, especially
Discipline and Punish
and the
first volume of his
History of Sexuality,
are analyses of domination without
intentional dominators. In the former he details the ways people come to
be dominated by the practices of discipline to which they become subject,
and by the practices of psychology and psychiatry that form the epistemic
basis of that discipline. There are those who benefit from this domination,
in particular the economic elites of capitalism. But the beneficiaries do not
engage in the domination; in fact, they are unaware of its occurrence. The
History of Sexuality
depicts how sexual domination has arisen over the
course of the last several centuries. But again, it is not a history of how
some people sexually dominate others, but of how the very category of
the sexual can become a form of domination.
Anarchism, then, should be seen as a critique of domination, rather than
as a critique of the state. Unlike Marxism, anarchism does not concern
itself with a particular type of oppression—exploitation—that arises in a
particular arena—the mode of capitalist production. Rather, it concerns
itself with the various dominations that occur throughout the social arena.
The state may stand out as a particularly egregious instigator of
domination, because of its concentration of bureaucratic and military
power. However, it is not the only source of domination, and under certain
conditions—for example the current situation of transnational capitalism—
it is perhaps not even the most oppressive one. What concerns thinkers
like Bakunin is not the state itself as the source of all domination, but the
state as a particular instigator of it. Further, in his view, Marx's inability to
see this would lead to a repetition of the very ills Marx sought to cure. In
this, of course, Bakunin is not mistaken.
Have we then isolated what is proper to anarchism? Is anarchism the
political view that seeks to critique and to eradicate, to the extent
possible, all forms of domination?
This is an important element of anarchism, but I want to argue that it is
not all there is, or at least not all there should be. Seen thus, anarchism is
defined in a purely negative manner; it is defined by what
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it is against. Recent attempts to replace the historically loaded label
"anarchism" with other terms, such as "anti-authoritarianism," reflect this
negative orientation. There is something right about the negative
orientation. By defining anarchism negatively, one does not impose a
particular solution to the domination it opposes. One does not draw up the
blueprint of a better set of social arrangements, and then seek to impose
them or to lead others toward them. This attempt, like Marx's, would only
[RELEASED] May - Jacques Rancière and the Ethics of Equality - Debate on the Web
result in a repetition of what is being fought. The blueprint becomes a new
form of domination, and the circle is complete.
Must we, then, settle for a negative definition of anarchism? Or can we
articulate a more positive conception of anarchism that allows us to say
more about what anarchism
is
without recreating at another level the
domination anarchism seeks to oppose?
Here is where the political writings of the French historian and theorist
Jacques Rancière become relevant to us. Rancière has developed,
particularly in two works in the mid-1990s—
Disagreement
and
On the
Shores of Politics
—a thought of equality that allows us to think anarchism
in a positive fashion without permitting it to become programmatic in a
way that repeats the mistakes associated with Marxism. I would like to
investigate here a particular aspect of this thought, one that Rancière
himself has not pursued, in order to show that the politics he describes
also has within it an ethics to which the politics can appeal. The advantage
of this ethics is that it provides a structure of justification for the politics
he embraces.
Contemporary French thinkers are often criticized by people like Jürgen
Habermas or Nancy Fraser, for example, for failing to have coherent
political positions or for not grounding the positions they do have in a
reasonable ethical framework. One response to the latter charge is to
claim that such grounding is not necessary, and that in fact it may reflect
an already outmoded way of thinking about politics. I would argue that in
Rancière's case there can be such ethical grounding. This grounding
cannot be transcendental or founded in the way many earlier philosophers
sought with their ethics. The grounding is more pedestrian. Rancière's
politics appeal to a value that has an important place in our thinking, and
the burden ultimately falls upon those who would oppose that value to
show why we should abandon it. This does not offer any transcendental
guarantees, but in a philosophical world that has jettisoned the idea of
such guarantees, it is the best one can hope for.
Before turning to the ethics implicit in Rancière's thought (an ethics that is
distinct from the type of ethics he disparages in some of his recent
writings),1 it would perhaps be best to offer an overview of his political
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position. Although a number of his works are now being
translated into English, he is hardly a household name in intellectual
circles in the U.S. Rancière started his career as a student of the Marxist
Louis Althusser, but abandoned that position when he became convinced
that Althusser's thought is one of inequality rather than equality. As he
writes in his book
La Leçon d'Althusser
, "Althusser needs the opposition
between the 'simplicity' of nature and the 'complexity' of history: if
production is the affair of the workers, history is too complex a thing for
them and must be left to the specialists: the Party and Theory" (33). This
split between the workers and the intellectuals implies an inequality that
he finds intolerable. After years doing archival work on workers'
movements, particularly pre-Marxist ones, in the 1990s Rancière began
laying out a theoretical position that places equality at the center of his
thought.
In his view, most of what passes for politics is instead what he calls
policing
. "Politics is generally seen as the set of procedures whereby
aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of
powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for
legitimizing this distribution. I propose to give this system of distribution
and legitimization another name. I propose to call it
the police
" (
D
, 28).
What is this politics and why call it the police? What Rancière defines here
is mainstream politics as we have come to live it. It involves elections,
bureaucracies, the shifting of power relations in the state and the
economy, the procedures for such shifts, and the justifications that are
[RELEASED] May - Jacques Rancière and the Ethics of Equality - Debate on the Web
offered both for particular elements of this system and for the system as a
whole. The police is politics as it is usually conceived, and as it is practiced
by very few. We are subject to the police. We do not, however, participate
in either its creation or maintenance. The exception to this is voting, an
act that serves more to legitimize the police than to change it—which is
perhaps why so few people vote.
By naming this form of politics
policing
, Rancière surely intends the
resonances of coercion and repression often associated with the police.
However, there is another, more historical reference to the term, one that
has been analyzed by Michel Foucault. Policing refers to the set of
practices, emergent particularly in the eighteenth century, that seek both
to utilize and to maintain the population of a state. Police practices are
concerned with the demographics, health, and safety of a population, so
that it can contribute optimally to the welfare of the state.2 If we look at
the current state of mainstream politics, we see the relevance of this
association as well. Although it is not only the state but also corporate
elites who benefit from the population's stability, the general idea remains
much the same.
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What is wrong with mainstream politics? Many things, of course. Rancière
focuses on a particular wrong: the inequality it presupposes. Mainstream
politics acts as though certain persons know both the public good and the
good of others, while those others are incapable of achieving this good
without the intervention of those properly situated to run the affairs of a
society. Mainstream politics, which Rancière calls
the police
, is predicated
on a refusal to recognize that people can run their own affairs, and so
must have them run for them. "From Athens in the fifth century B.C. up
until our own governments, the party of the rich has only ever said one
thing, which is most precisely the negation of politics: there is no part of
those who have no part" (
D
, 14).
What, then, is politics, politics not as policing but as something that
undermines the police order? Rancière says:
I propose now to reserve the term
politics
for an extremely
determined activity antagonistic to policing: whatever breaks
with the tangible configuration whereby parties and parts or
lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by
definition, has no place in that configuration—that of the part
that has no part…an assumption that, at the end of the day,
itself demonstrates the sheer contingency of the order, the
equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being.
(
D
, 29-30)
Politics is, in short, the undoing of the police order through the
presupposition of the equality of all speaking beings.
Why "speaking beings," and whose presupposition is this?
Speaking
beings
, because anyone capable of hearing and understanding an order is
capable of interacting with others in order to participate as an equal in the
creation of a meaningful life.
There is order in society because some people command and
others obey, but in order to obey an order at least two things
must are required: you must understand the order and you
must understand that you must obey it. And to do that, you
must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you.
(
D
16)
Anyone capable of understanding an order is no longer in need of one.
[RELEASED] May - Jacques Rancière and the Ethics of Equality - Debate on the Web
As to whose presupposition it is, it is the presupposition of those who act.
It is the presupposition of the part that has no part, when that part
decides to assert itself in the public realm in the name of its own equality.
In that sense, politics is not merely a proof to those in power, but a proof
to oneself through one's own actions. "This is the definition of a struggle
for equality which can never be merely a demand upon the other, nor a
pressure put upon him, but always simultaneously a proof given to
oneself" (
UD
, 48). Politics creates a political subject—it creates a people—
through the actions by which they come into being as a people who at
once see and impose themselves as equal.
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The effect of the presupposition of equality is to undo the classifications of
the police order—classifications by which some are given authority over
others, whether by virtue of wealth, race, gender, or status. "The essence
of equality is in fact not so much to unify as to declassify, to undo the
supposed naturalness of orders and to replace it with the controversial
figures of division" (
EP
, 32). This does not mean that there is no unity
within politics. What politics accomplishes is to divide the social order, to
introduce what Rancière sometimes calls a
dissensus
into it. The "part that
has no part," the people who are considered less than equal in a given
police order no longer assent to that order; they split themselves off from
it. They may have unity among themselves, but they introduce division
into the social order. This is inevitable, inasmuch as any social order
functions on a presupposition of inequality.
This undoing of the naturalness of police orders, this concerted action out
of the presupposition of equality, is, in Rancière's eyes, the only real
meaning that can be attached to the term
democracy
. "Every politics is
democratic in this precise sense: not in the sense of a set of institutions,
but in the sense of forms of expression that confront the logic of equality
with the logic of the police order" (
D
, 101). Democracy is the practice of
politics; it is the expression of the logic of equality through its assertion by
those who have been told, for one reason or another, that they have no
part in the determination of their collective lives.
The anarchism of Rancière's view is evident here. In contrast to those who
would seek a politics from above—be it a liberal politics of the state and its
limits or a Marxist politics of the avant-garde party—Rancière's politics
remains rigorously a politics from below. It is those who participate, and
who participate on the basis of their mutual pre-supposition of equality,
who create the political character of any politics. Moreover, it can be seen
how the presupposition of equality allows us to conceive of anarchism in a
positive way, without falling into the trap of speaking for others. If the
critique of domination is one side of the anarchist coin, the presupposition
of equality is the other. It is because equality is presupposed, that
domination becomes intolerable. The use of power over another is
deleterious in that it violates that person's equal ability to determine his or
her life. This, it seems to me, is the vital nerve of all anarchist thinking
and practice.
Finally, the presupposition of equality allows one to retain the anarchist
concept of domination as a plastic one, applicable to a variety of
situations. The presupposition of
in
equality is instantiated in different ways
in societies, whether through gender oppression or economic exploitation
or racism or homophobia or some other form of domination.
[End Page
25]
To act from the presupposition of equality, then, is to champion that
presupposition in a particular situation, in the face of a particular
domination. Acting from the presupposition of equality does not aim at the
same political target or require the same political behavior across all
situations. It is as flexible as the concept of domination, leaving the
character of political movement as well as the political analysis of
domination in the hands of those who have "no part" in a particular
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