Ranciere - On War as the Ultimate Form of Advanced Plutocratic Consensus, Ranciere
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Jacques Ranci`re
ON WAR AS THE ULTIMATE FORM
OF ADVANCED PLUTOCRATIC
CONSENSUS
JacquesRanci`reGENSTRING67
Everyone readily agrees that the Anglo-American war is evidence of some-
thing new in the government of our advanced societies. It is harder to identify
this newness for a simple reason. Our idea of the new, forged by the
progressive concept of historical movement, wants the new to be really new
and all new things to go hand in hand. Technological progress and Capital’s
global domination are thus thought to correspond to ever more modern forms
of the exercise of power: power ever more diluted and imperceptible, as
mobile and invisible as the flux of communication, negotiated like commodi-
ties, exercising its painless effects through a globally accepted way of life. We
call this, depending our temperament, the invisible world government of
capital, triumphant mass democracy, or soft totalitarianism. Under all these
names, we designate a form of government apparently far removed from
military campaigns for law and civilization, hymns to God and flag, and lies
of State propaganda. So how then do we think about this newness that so
strangely resembles the old? This gap between the technological sophistication
of weapons and the crudeness of the forms of manipulation of public opinion?
Let us start from the most obvious: the enormity of the lies it was
necessary to combine in order to construct the vision of an Iraq in possession
of weapons of mass destruction ready to reach western nations in less than an
hour. This lie was not only enormous. It was incredible to any mind with a
modicum of common sense. To force its acceptance, it was thus necessary to
rely on the old propagandistic principle: to impose the reality of a lie one
must exaggerate it beyond all plausibility: “the bigger it is, the better it goes
down,” precisely because it extends beyond the realm of belief. This kind of
principle was supposedly characteristic of totalitarian regimes. Today it
appears perfectly adapted to the government of a democracy inspired by the
Christian religion. It remains to be known why this government needs it, why
it was necessary to impose the implausible reality of this lie. To acquire the
necessary support to wage war, apparently. But why was this necessary when
the danger quite obviously did not exist? Out of anticipation? A possibly
Contemporary French and Francophone Studies Vol. 8, No. 3 Summer 2004, pp. 253–258
ISSN 1740-9292 print/ISSN 1477-2876
©
2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
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CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES
exaggerated feeling of insecurity? It seems we must turn the problem on its
head. It is not some felt insecurity which made the war necessary. Rather, the
war was necessary to impose insecurity. Indeed, the management of insecurity
is the most adequate way for our consensual State societies to function.
Whatever the philosophers of the end of history, the thinkers of soft
totalitarianism, and the theorists of the generalized simulacrum or of the
irresistible vitality of the multitude might think, the archaic lies very much at
the center of extreme modernity. The advanced capitalist State is not one of
automatic consensus, of adjustments between the daily negotiation of plea-
sures and the collective negotiation of power and its redistributions. It does
not proceed by defusing passionate conflicts and disinvesting values. It does
not self-destruct in the limitless freedom of digital communication and the
polymerization of individual identities so destructive to social ties. Where
commodities rule without limit, whether in post-Reagan America or post-
Thatcher England, the optimal form of consensus is one cemented by fear in
a society grouped around the warrior State.
The conflict between the United States and “Old Europe” is perhaps thus
the conflict between two states of consensual government. Where systems of
social protection and solidarity have not yet been completely dismantled, and
where governments still intervene in the redistribution of national wealth,
consensus adjusts to these traditional roles of arbitration. This consensus
signifies a global solidarity of conflicting interests against the backdrop of an
economic necessity presented as inescapable, and as such obliging us to
progressively abandon social “archaisms.” Where this last step has already been
taken, where the “humble” State has unburdened itself of its welfare function
and allowed free reign to the sole law of capital, consensus shows its true face.
The consensual State in its final form is not the managerial State; it is the State
reduced to the purity of its essence, the police State. The community of
feelings which supports this State, and which it manages to its profit, is the
community of fear. If some great thinkers have made fear the bedrock of
sovereignty, it is because this feeling maximizes not only the merging of
individual and collective interests, but also the merging of interests and values.
This conflation of a community joined together by threats to its security and
a community united by the fundamental values of a divinely blessed human
congregation has obviously in this circumstance achieved its fullest manifesta-
tion. The United States threatened by Iraqi weapons is also this incredible
federation of white, black and Native American populations that decided a few
centuries ago to collectively build a great community founded on mutual
respect between races, religions, and classes.
There are two states of consensus, therefore, and it could very well be
that, contrary to the good old logic of progress, the most advanced State is
not the State as arbiter of social interests, rather the State as manager of
insecurity. Incidentally, the game our governments play with the theme of
WAR AS PLUTOCRATIC CONSENSUS
255
insecurity and with the parties exploiting it should give us ample warning.
One cannot eternally identify the new force of extreme right parties in Europe
with the reactive dismay of downwardly mobile classes and individuals who
have lost all affiliation. The events of the last presidential election in France
should at least help us to recognize the central role played by the theme of
insecurity, and the supposedly marginal parties that exploit it, in the global
logic of consensus. On the one hand, these parties maintain the feeling of
insecurity to these States’ profit. On the other hand, they themselves constitute,
for the consensual State, an added form of insecurity. At their own expense,
they thus favor sacred “democratic” unions, which today give the consensual
government the means to carry to term the politics of social consensus – in
other words, the “soft” liquidation of forms of protection and social solidarity –
and tomorrow offer it the means to manage the consensus of fear.
One will say, of course, that fear is not a matter of mere fantasy. The
Twin Towers
1
did indeed collapse. And forms of violence, racketeering and
others, which nourish our feeling of insecurity, do indeed exist. Yet what the
American example showed so stunningly is that the prevention of actual
dangers and acts of violence and the prevention of imagined insecurity are two
very different things, and that the advanced State is infinitely more at ease
dealing with the second than the first. Still, it is better here to abandon the
idea that the return of archaisms observed recently in advanced States and
societies are defensive reactions to the dangers represented today by the
reactive attitudes of the more or less disadvantaged populations of the planet.
Notions of “backwardness” and of the desperate reactions of modernity’s
“straggling” and “humiliated” cannot eternally mask reality, even by increasing
exponentially the number of sociologists and political scientists who live off
these notions. Firstly, nothing indicates that the limitless global development
of plutocratic government serves to reduce the gap between rich and poor,
which is seen to weigh as a permanent threat on advanced countries.
Secondly, the preparations for 9/11 have shown that international capital and
modern technology can very well align themselves with religious “archaism”
and destructive fanaticism. Thirdly, the media’s day-to-day handling of all
forms of danger, risk and catastrophe – from Islamism to heat waves – exactly
like the avalanche of catastrophist discourse and lesser-evil moralizing among
intellectuals proves sufficiently well that the resources of the insecurity trope
are unlimited. Insecurity is not a compilation of facts, but a mode of managing
collective life, and it has all chances of perpetuating itself even while our
towns and schools have rediscovered an acceptable mode of communal life. If
Iran is invaded after Iraq, there will still remain some sixty “rogue States”
threatening the security of plutocratic nations. And, as we know, arms are not
the only threat to our security. It is reasonable to predict military-police
operations, warmly supported by informed opinion and destined to topple
governments of countries capable of provoking, through their own lack of
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CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES
foresight, climatic, ecological, sanitary and other catastrophes. The famous
divide between advanced and underdeveloped nations that justifies interven-
tions by the security police, against all risks this divide invites, thus has all
chances of being dug indefinitely deeper by the same police.
No doubt, it is risky to predict the forms this management of insecurity
will take in the future. We are only at the dawn of the spectacles of the new
utopia, the utopia of a planet governed through the auto-regulation of capital.
This is only a manner of speaking, of course. Indeed, no historical necessity
forces us to see the fulfillment of this apotheosis. It makes it all the more
necessary to shed the apparent inevitability of historical progress in order to
recognize the link between the “archaism” of insecurity and the advances of
plutocratic government. It is equally important to identify some specific traits
of this government. The recent lies of State should help us here. We have
witnessed the quintessence of the principles of so-called totalitarian propa-
ganda at work there. Some will no doubt exclaim that the United States of
George W. Bush has nothing to do with the Germany of G¨bbels: those
opposed to the war have expressed their opinion freely and demonstrated in
public. This is perfectly true. But this shows us precisely the singularity of the
present situation in view of commonly accepted oppositions between totalitar-
ianism and democracy. We have witnessed, in fact, a situation of unpre-
cedented juxtaposition between forms of free expression of modern
constitutional States and forms of propaganda of so-called totalitarian States.
For months, the mainstream television networks in the United States have
hammered the truths of the official discourse day and night: the horrible
menace aimed at the American nation by Iraqi arms of mass destruction. They
have hammered them through the mouths of the president and his secretaries
of State, the representatives of the majority and the “opposition,” and
journalists and experts of all ilk. They have hammered them “freely” since, as
is well known, the television networks are independent of the government, at
the very most dependent on the same financial powers to which it is
indentured. It has clearly become apparent that a State-run television network
is not necessary in order to have television function in the service of State
deception. As it has become more apparent than ever that the solidarity of the
parties in managing insecurity and State deception constituted the substantial
reality of their supposed conflict. (The few timid attempts made by the
Democrats to criticize the Republican administration concerned its failings in
the matter of the fight against insecurity.) Capital has manifested its perfect
skill in erecting news machines to maintain the propaganda of State deception.
We have thus seen what form of liberty one may expect from a news system
freed from the servitude of public service, entirely homogeneous with the
conjunction of State power and the power of wealth. Forms of State control,
the military machinery, economic power, and media power have attained in
the American war the high degree of integration that marks the perfection of
WAR AS PLUTOCRATIC CONSENSUS
257
the plutocratic system. The direct power enjoyed by the moguls of media
empires, experimented with in Italy, figures among the pioneering forms of
the same system.
The originality of the present situation is the coexistence of this capitalist
machinery of State propaganda and democratic public opinion. Berlusconi’s
Italy, Aznar’s Spain and Blair’s England have known gigantic mass antiwar
demonstrations. Even in the United States, despite the consensual pressure
and the alignment of the so-called liberal press, opponents to the war have
been able to express themselves freely in the streets, and even the most rabid
newscaster on Fox News ended up admitting that the First Amendment to the
Constitution forbids firing a Columbia University professor for having said that
the true opponents of the war should hope for the victory of Iraq. It was
enough, he concluded, to spit in his face. The official system of integrated
news/opinion can tolerate in its vicinity a demonstration of free expression it
considers meaningless. And it does this, apparently, even when the demon-
stration no longer concerns the personal and debatable opinion of an individ-
ual, but rather mass movements. President Bush warmly thanked allied
European governments for not being swayed from the right path by the
opposition of public opinion in their countries.
It undoubtedly makes sense, on the other hand, to ponder this coexistence
of systems of opinion. Some people will interpret it in a pessimistic fashion
as a sign of the uselessness of democratic opinion. One could, on the contrary,
find an occasion here to recall that it is the duality, not of governmental
parties but of systems of public opinion that distinguishes political democracy
from the ordinary forms of a government of wealth. The normal tendency of
these oligarchic governments, which are given the name “democracies” by
confusing forms of State control for forms of political action, is not the
egalitarian reign of mass communication and mass consumption. It is the
integration of capitalist, State, military, and media powers. Against the
progressive faith in the homogeneity of developments, a serious democratic
movement should take full measure of what separates its forms from forms of
State control and its freedom from the freedom of commodities.
Translated by Lucy R. McNair
Note
1
In English in the original.
Jacques Ranci`re
’s recent books include
Le destin des images
(La fabrique,
2003) and
La fable cin´matographique
(Seuil, 2001). Among his books to appear
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