Ranciere - Politics and Aesthetics Interview, Ranciere
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A N G E L A K I
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 8
number 2
august 2003
introduction
peter hallward
Jacques Rancière retired from teaching philoso-
phy at the University of Paris VIII (Saint-Denis)
in 2002. In most of his otherwise varied projects
he seeks to overturn all imposed forms of classi-
fication or distinction, to subvert all norms of
representation that might allow for the stable
differentiation of one class of person or experi-
ence from another (workers from intellectuals,
masters from followers, the articulate from the
inarticulate, the artistic from the non-artistic,
etc.). As a general rule, Rancière believes that “it
is in the moments when the real world wavers
and seems to reel into mere appearance, more
than in the slow accumulation of day-to-day
experiences, that it becomes possible to form a
judgement about the world.”
1
As a student at the École Normale Supérieure
in the 1960s, Rancière was influenced by
Althusser and wrote an important section of
Reading Capital
in which, like Althusser, he
distinguished between the necessarily deluded
experience of social agents and the quasi-scien-
tific authority of theory (exclusively able to
grasp, for instance, the mechanics of production
or commodification). It is hardly an exaggera-
tion to say that everything else Rancière has
written rejects this distinction and all its impli-
cations. Outraged by Althusser’s distance from
the political mobilisations during and after
1968, and suspicious of the ever-widening gap
between theory and reality he found in the work
of his fellow
soixante-huitards
, Rancière
published a spectacular critique of his former
teacher in 1974. Turning instead to Foucault for
methodological inspiration, Rancière founded
the journal
Les Révoltes Logiques
in 1975,
jacques rancière
translated by forbes morlock
POLITICS AND
AESTHETICS
an interview
dedicated to recasting the relation between work
and philosophy, or proletarians and intellectu-
als, in such a way as to block any prescriptive
appropriation or representation of the former by
the latter.
Like Foucault, Rancière has applied the work
of de-normalisation or de-classification on a
number of successive though overlapping fronts,
which for the sake of analysis might be distin-
guished as philosophical, pedagogical, historio-
graphical, political, sociological, and aesthetic.
Rancière’s general argument with philosophy,
most substantially stated in
Le Philosophe et ses
pauvres
(1983), concerns its inaugural attempt to
distinguish people capable of genuine thought
from others who, entirely defined by their
economic occupation, are presumed to lack the
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/03/020191-21 © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of
Angelaki
DOI: 10.1080/0969725032000162657
1 9 1
politics and aesthetics
ability, time and leisure required for thought.
The paradigm here is Plato’s division of society
into functional orders (artisans, warriors, rulers),
such that slaves, or shoemakers, for instance, are
forever banished from the domain of philosophy.
To each type of person, one allotted task: labour,
war, or thought. Hence the importance of exclud-
ing those who, by seeking to imitate a type other
than their own, threaten to cross these functional
lines. Rancière finds echoes of both this division
and this exclusion in the work of Marx, Sartre
and Bourdieu.
In pedagogical terms, Rancière’s argument (in
The Ignorant Schoolmaster
, 1987) targets any
attempt to conceive of education in terms of the
generalised classification of children, i.e. in
terms of a process that leads them from initial
postures of submission and docility
towards
rela-
tive security precisely in so far as they come to
accept their suitably sanctioned place. Inspired
by the maverick example of Joseph Jacotot
(1770–1840), Rancière’s guiding pedagogical
principle is that “all people are virtually capable
of understanding what others have done and
understood […]. Equality is not a goal to be
attained but a point of departure, a supposition
to be maintained in all circumstances.”
2
Everyone has the same intelligence; what varies
is the will and opportunity to exercise it. On the
basis of this supposition, superior knowledge
ceases to be a necessary qualification of the
teacher, just as the process of “explication” (with
its attendant metaphors that distinguish children
as slow or quick, that conceive of educational
time in terms of progress, training and qualifica-
tion) is exposed as the dominant “myth of peda-
gogy.”
When Rancière turns to the writing of history,
it is in order to expose the way historians from
Michelet to Braudel have likewise presented a
picture of the world in which each individual is
set in their appropriate place, in which any
particular voice becomes audible in so far as it
articulates the logic associated with that place. In
Michelet’s histories, in keeping with a principle
that still dominates the discipline as a whole,
“everything has a meaning to the degree that
every speech production is assignable to the
legitimate expression of a place: the earth that
shapes men, the sea on which their exchanges
take place, the everyday objects in which their
relations can be read …”
3
What is banished from
this territorialising conception of history is the
very possibility of heresy (heresy understood as
the dis-placing of the speaker and dis-aggregation
of the community
4
), in particular that modern
“democratic heresy” incarnated by the arrival
upon the historical stage of a popular voice that
refuses any clear assignation of place, the voice
of the masses of people who both labour
and
think – a voice noticeably absent, Rancière
observes, from the
Annales
-inspired conception
of history.
It is precisely this heretical conception of
political speech that informs Rancière’s most
programmatic work to date:
Disagreement
(1995). The supervision of places and functions
is the business of what Rancière calls the
“police”; a
political
sequence begins, then, when
this supervision is interrupted so as to allow a
properly anarchic disruption of function and
place, a sweeping de-classification of speech. The
democratic voice is the voice of those who reject
the prevailing social distribution of roles, who
refuse the way a society shares out power and
authority, the voice of “floating subjects that
deregulate all representations of places and
portions.”
5
Applied in sociological terms, Rancière’s
subversion of classes and norms applies as much
to Marxist attempts to squeeze the complexity of
workers’ experience into the theory-certified
simplicity of the proletariat as it does to nostal-
gic attempts to preserve a “traditional” working
class identity.
The Nights of Labor
(1981),
Rancière’s first (and still most) substantial book,
a record and analysis of proletarian intellectual
life in the 1830s and 1840s, undercuts any effort
“to preserve popular, plebeian or proletarian
purity” and, in the absence left by the disap-
pearance of
the
authentic working class, clears a
space for the emergence of unauthorised combi-
nations and inventions – transposed utopias,
reappropriations of literary forms, worker-run
newspapers and nocturnal poetry societies, trans-
occupational associations, etc.
6
The workers
recorded by Rancière complain less about mate-
rial hardship and more about the predetermined
1 9 2
rancière
quality of lives framed by rigid social hierarchy.
“Perhaps the truly dangerous classes,” he
concludes, “were not so much the uncivilised
ones thought to undermine society from below
but rather the migrants who move at the borders
between classes – individuals and groups who
develop capabilities of no direct use for the
improvement of their material lives, and which
might in fact make them despise material
concerns.”
7
It is only a small if not imperceptible shift
from here to an interest in the attempt, which
Rancière names the “aesthetic revolution,” to
move from a rule-bound conception of art preoc-
cupied with matching any given object with its
appropriate form of representation (the basis for
a secure distinction of art from non-art) to a
regime of art which, in the absence of represen-
tational norms, embraces the endless confusion
of art and non-art.
8
In this aesthetic regime
(whose origins Rancière traces to Schiller, first
and foremost), genuine art is what indistin-
guishes, in newly creative ways and with the
resources peculiar to a specific artistic practice,
art and the other of art – examples include
Balzac’s application of epic modes of description
to the banalities of everyday life, or Flaubert’s
extension of an aristocratic conception of style to
a “democratic” equality of subjects, or
Mallarmé’s blending of the most subtle move-
ments of syntax with a general “reframing of the
human abode.” Rather than the author of a
purely intransitive or hermetic discourse,
Mallarmé figures here as the writer who
conceives of poetry as
both
the purest possible
expression of language and as caught up in the
rituals of private, collective and industrial life (in
the tiny movements of a dancer, the fluttering of
a fan, the fireworks of Bastille Day, and so on,
all part of that celebration of the ordinary which
comes to replace “the forlorn ceremonies of
throne and religion”).
9
Orthodox modernism, by
contrast, in its determination to restore a strict
barrier between (non-representational) art and
non-art, can only figure here as complicit in the
perpetual attempt to restore traditional hierar-
chies, to return things to their officially autho-
rised place, to squash the insurgent promise of
democracy.
notes
1 Jacques Rancière,
Nights of Labor
19.
2 Rancière,
Le Maître ignorant
9, 229.
3 Rancière,
Names of History
65. “Michelet invents
the art of making the poor speak by keeping them
silent, of making them speak as silent people,” in
so far as only the historian or analyst is able to
understand their words. Only the historian is able
to let the dead rest peacefully in the tomb to
which their garrulous silence confines them
(62–63).
4 In Le Roy Ladurie’s celebrated book
Montaillou
(1975), for example, the historian’s “object is not
heresy but the village that gives it a place.” The
result effectively repeats the inquisitorial gesture:
“the historian suppresses heresy by giving it
roots” (Rancière,
Names of History
73).
5 Rancière,
Disagreement
99–100.
6 Rancière,
Nights of Labor
x, 10.
7 Rancière, “Good Times or Pleasures at the
Barriers” (1978) 50.
8 “In the aesthetic regime of art, art is art to
the extent that it is something other than art”
(Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and its
Outcomes” 137 – this article offers a compressed
summary of aspects of the longer analyses that
Rancière has undertaken in his books
Mallarmé
(1996),
La Chair des mots
(1998),
La Parole muette
(1998) and
Le Partage du sensible
(2000)).
9 Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and its
Outcomes” 140.
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politics and aesthetics
politics and aesthetics: an
interview
1
at about the age of fifteen or sixteen: did you
grow up in a milieu where this option was
encouraged?
jacques rancière
J.R.: As a child, I wanted to go to the ENS
because I wanted to be an archaeologist. But by
the time I got into the ENS I’d lost that sense of
vocation. It has to be said, too, that this was a
time when, for people like me, there wasn’t really
much of a choice: you were good in either arts or
sciences. And if you were good in arts, you aimed
for what was considered the best in the field,
which is to say, the ENS. That, rather than any
vocation to teach, is how I ended up there.
Peter Hallward: One of your constant concerns
has been to analyse and condemn any posture of
mastery, particularly theoretical, pedagogical,
“academic” mastery. So may I ask why you
started teaching? How did you first get involved
with education?
Jacques Rancière: I became involved almost
unwittingly, when I went through the École
Normale Supérieure (ENS), which was set up to
train teachers. I am, in the first instance, a
student. I am one of those people who is a
perpetual student and whose professional fate, as
a consequence, is to teach others. “Teaching”
obviously implies a certain position of mastery,
“researcher” implies in some way a position of
knowledge, “teacher-researcher” implies the idea
of the teacher adapting a position of institutional
mastery to one of mastery based on knowledge.
At the outset, I was immersed in an
Althusserian milieu, and consequently marked
by its idea of forms of authority linked specifi-
cally to knowledge. But I was also caught up in
the whole period of 1968, which threw into ques-
tion the connection between positions of mastery
and knowledge. I went through it all with the
mentality of a researcher: I thought of myself,
above all, as someone who did research and let
others know about his research. Which meant,
for example, that as a teacher I always resisted
divisions into levels (advanced, intermediate,
etc.). At the University of Paris VIII, where I
have taught for most of my career, there were no
levels in the philosophy department and I have
always tried hard to maintain this lack of division
into levels. In my courses I often have people of
all different levels, in the belief that each student
does what he or she can do and wants to do with
what I say.
P.H.: And your initial collaboration with
Althusser, was it a true conversion or the result
of a theoretical interest? What happened at that
point?
J.R.: Several things happened. First, there was
my interest in Marxism, which was not at all part
of the world I’d been brought up in. For people
like me, our interest in Marxism before Althusser
had to follow some slightly unorthodox paths.
The people who had written books on Marx, the
authorities on Marx at the time, were priests like
Father Calvez, who had written a hefty book on
Marx’s thought, or people like Sartre. So, I
arrived at Marxism with a sort of Marxian corpus
which was hardly that of someone from the
communist tradition, but which did provide
access to Marx at a time when he didn’t have a
university presence and when theory was not
very developed within the French Communist
Party.
In relation to all that, Althusser represented a
break. People told me about him when I first
entered the ENS: they said he was brilliant. He
really did offer a way of breaking with the
Marxist humanist milieu in which we had been
learning about Marx at the time. So, of course, I
was enthusiastic, because Althusser was seduc-
tive, and I was working against myself in a way,
because following Althusser’s thinking meant
breaking with the sort of Marxism that I had
known, that I was getting to know, and with
those forms of thought that did not share its sort
of theoretical engagement.
P.H.: I suppose you must have made your initial
decision to take up teaching and research path
1 9 4
rancière
P.H.: Would it be too simple to say that
Althusser was a teacher, whereas Sartre was
something else – not a researcher or a teacher,
but a writer or an intellectual, I guess?
what we had seen taking place in the student and
other social movements it was almost laughable.
At the time, what really made me react was a
programme for the department put together by
Etienne Balibar, a programme to teach people
theoretical practice as it should be taught. I came
out rather violently against this programme, and
from that point began a whole retrospective
reflection on the dogmatism of theory and on the
position of scholarly knowledge we had adopted.
That’s more or less how things started for me,
not with the shock of 1968 but with the after-
shock. Which is to say, with the creation of an
institution, an institution where we were, in one
sense, the masters. It was a matter of knowing
what we were going to do with it, how we were
going to manage this institutional mastery, if we
were going to identify it with the transmission of
science or not.
J.R.: I don’t know if you can say “teacher.” In the
end, Althusser taught relatively little. His words
seduced us, but they were those of certain written
texts as much as anything oral. He was like the
priest of a religion of Marxist rigour, or of the
return to the text. It wasn’t really the rigour of
his teaching that appealed so much as an enthu-
siasm for his declaration that there was virgin
ground to be opened up. His project to read
Capital
was a little like that: the completely naive
idea that we were pioneers, that no one had really
read Marx before and that we were going to start
to read him.
So there were two sides to our relation with
Althusser. There was, first of all, a sense of going
off on an adventure: for the seminar on
Capital
,
I was supposed to talk, to explain to people the
rationality of
Capital
, when I still hadn’t read the
book. So I rushed about, rushed to start reading
the various volumes of
Capital
, in order to be
able to talk to others about them. There was this
adventurous side, but there was something else as
well: our roles as pioneers put us in a position of
authority, it gave us the authority of those who
know, and it instituted a sort of authority of
theory, of those who have knowledge, in the
midst of a political eclecticism. Thus, there was
an adventurous side and a dogmatic side to it all,
and they came together: the adventure in theory
was at the same time dogmatism in theory.
P.H.: How did that work at Paris VIII? How did
you bring the rather anarchic side of egalitarian
teaching together with the institutional necessity
of granting degrees, verifying qualifications,
etc.?
J.R.: At the time, I had thought very little about
an alternative pedagogical practice. I had more or
less given up on philosophy, the teaching of
philosophy, and academic practice. What seemed
important was direct political practice, so for a
time I stopped reflecting on and thinking of
myself as creating a new pedagogical practice or
a new type of knowledge. This was linked to the
fact that the diploma in philosophy at Paris VIII
was quickly invalidated. We no longer gave
national diplomas, so we were no longer bound by
the criteria needed to award them. For a good
while, then, I was absolutely uninterested in
rethinking pedagogy: I was thinking, first, of
militant practice and then, when that was thrown
into question, of my practice as a researcher. For
years my main activity was consulting archives
and going to the Bibliothèque Nationale. My
investment in the practice of teaching was fairly
limited.
P.H.: It’s the role of the pioneer you’ve held on
to. Did your break with Althusser take place
during the events of May 1968? What happened
exactly?
J.R.: For me, the key moment wasn’t the events
of May 1968, which I watched from a certain
distance, but rather the creation of Paris VIII.
With the creation of a philosophy department full
of Althusserians, we had to decide what we were
going to do. It was then I realised that Althusser
stood for a certain power of the professor, the
professor of Marxism who was so distant from
P.H.: Did your courses continue more or less as
usual, that is, as lectures?
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