Ranciere - The Politics of Literature, Ranciere
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Jacques Rancière
The Politics of Literature
Jacques Rancière
I will start by explaining what my title means—and first of all what it does
not mean. The politics of literature is not the politics of its writers. It does not deal
with their personal commitment to the social and political issues and struggles
of their times. Nor does it deal with the modes of representation of political events
or the social structure and the social struggles in their books. The syntagma
“politics of literature” means that literature “does” politics as literature—that
there is a specific link between politics as a definite way of doing and literature
as a definite practice of writing.
To make sense of this statement, I will first briefly spell out the idea of politics
that is involved in it. Politics is commonly viewed as the practice of power or the
embodiment of collective wills and interests and the enactment of collective ideas.
Now, such enactments or embodiments imply that you are taken into account
as subjects sharing in a common world, making statements and not simply noise,
discussing things located in a common world and not in your own fantasy. What
really deserves the name of politics is the cluster of perceptions and practices
that shape this common world. Politics is first of all a way of framing, among
sensory data, a specific sphere of experience. It is a partition of the sensible, of
the visible and the sayable, which allows (or does not allow) some specific data
to appear; which allows or does not allow some specific subjects to designate
them and speak about them. It is a specific intertwining of ways of being, ways
of doing and ways of speaking.
The politics of literature thus means that literature as literature is involved
in this partition of the visible and the sayable, in this intertwining of being, doing
and saying that frames a polemical common world.
Now the point is: what is meant by “literature as literature”? Surprisingly,
few among the political or social commentators of literature have paid attention
to literature’s own historicity. We know, however, that classifying the art of writing
under the notion of “literature” is not old. We can trace it back to approximately
the beginning of the nineteenth century. But critics have not often deduced any
consequence from this. Some of them have tried desperately to connect literature
(taken as the a-historical name of the art of writing in general) with politics
conceived as a historical set of forces, events and issues. Others have tried to give
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© Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2004
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a specific content to the notion of literature. Unfortunately this was done on a
very weak basis, by referring literature’s modernity to the search for an intransitive
language. On this basis, the connection was initially flawed. Either there was no
way of binding together literary intransitivity and political action, with “art for
art’s sake” opposed to political commitment, or one had to assume a quite obscure
relationship between literary intransitivity (conceived of as the materialistic
primacy of the signifier) and the materialistic rationality of revolutionary politics.
Sartre proposed a kind of gentleman’s agreement, by opposing the intransitivity
of poetry to the transitivity of prose writing. Poets, he assumed, used words as
things, and had no commitment to the political use of communicative speech.
Prose writers, by contrast, used words as tools of communication and were
automatically committed to the framing of a common world. But the distinction
proved to be inconsistent. After having attributed the opposition to the very
distinction of two states of language, Sartre had to explain why prose writers
like Flaubert used words in the same “intransitive” way as did poets. And he
had to pursue endlessly the reason for this, both in the sad realities of class struggle
in the 1850s and in the neurosis of the young Gustave Flaubert. In other words,
he had to pursue outside of literature a political commitment of literature, which
he had first purported to ground on its own linguistic specificity. It is not a casual
or a personal failure. In fact, the identification of literature with a specific state or
use of language has no real linguistic relevance, and it cannot ground any
specificity of literature or its political involvement. Moreover, it proves very
ambiguous in its practical use, and we have to deal with this ambiguity if we
want to move forward in understanding literature as a new system of the art of
writing, as well as its relationship to the political partition of the sensible.
I would highlight this point by comparing two political readings of the
same novelist, taken to be the embodiment of “art for art’s sake” and the autonomy
of literature. I have just referred to Sartre’s analysis of Flaubert. From his point of
view, Flaubert was the champion of an aristocratic assault against the democratic
nature of prose language. He used prose’s transparency of words to create a new
form of opacity. As Sartre put it, “Flaubert surrounds the object, seizes it,
immobilizes it and breaks its back, changes into stone and petrifies the object as
well.” Sartre explained this petrification as the contribution of bourgeois writers
to the strategy of their class. Flaubert, Mallarmé and their colleagues purported
to challenge the bourgeois way of thinking, and they dreamt of a new aristocracy,
living in a world of pure words, conceived of as a secret garden of precious stones
and flowers. But their private paradise was nothing but the celestial projection of
the essence of private ownership. In order to shape it, they had to tear words
away from those who could have used them as tools of social debate and struggle.
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Jacques Rancière
So the literary petrification of words and objects went along with the bourgeois
anti-democratic strategy.
But the argument of “petrification of the language” had a long history.
Long before Sartre, the same argument had been made by contemporary
commentators of Flaubert. They pointed out in Flaubert’s prose a fascination for
detail and an indifference toward the human meaning of actions and characters
that led him to give the same importance to material things and to human beings.
Barbey d’Aurevilly summed up their criticism by saying that Flaubert was
carrying his sentences just as a worker carries his stones before him in a
wheelbarrow. All of them agreed that his prose was the petrification of human
action and human language. And all of them, like Sartre a century later, thought
that this petrification was not a mere literary device, that it carried a deep political
significance. Now the point is that the nineteenth-century critics understood this
differently. For them, petrification was the symptom of democracy. Flaubert’s
disregard for any difference between high and low subject matters, for any
hierarchy between foreground and background, and ultimately between men
and things, was the hallmark of democracy. Indeed, Flaubert had no political
commitment. He despised equally democrats and conservatives, and assumed
that the writer should be unwilling to prove anything on any matter. But even
that attitude of “non-commitment” was for those commentators the mark of
democracy. What is democracy, if not the equal ability to be democrat, anti-
democrat or indifferent to both democracy and anti-democracy ? Whatever
Flaubert might think about the common people and the republican form of
government, his prose was the embodiment of democracy.
There would be little point in proving that Sartre mistook a reactionary
argument for a revolutionary argument. It is more relevant to have a closer look
at the link between the “indifference” of a way of writing and the opposite
statements it allows for. It appears that three things are bound together: a way of
writing without “meaning” anything, a way of reading this writing as a symptom
that has to be interpreted, and two opposite ways of making this political reading.
I would like to show that this very link between a way of writing, a way of
reading and two ways of interpreting can lead us to the core of the question. The
“indifference” of writing, the practice of symptomatic reading and the political
ambiguity of that reading are woven in the same fabric. And this fabric might
be literature as such: literature conceived neither as the art of writing in general
nor as a specific state of the language, but as a historical mode of visibility of
writing, a specific link between a system of meaning of words and a system of
visibility of things.
This mode of visibility involves a specific system of the efficiency of words,
which dismisses another system. The contrasting of “literature” as such, literature
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as the modern regime of the art of writing, to the old world of representation and
“belles-lettres” is not the opposition between two states of the language. Nor is it
an opposition between the servitude of
mimesis
and the autonomy of self-
referential writing. It is the opposition of two ways of linking meaning and action,
of framing the relation between the sayable and the visible, of enabling words
with the power of framing a common world. It is an opposition between two
ways of doing things with words.
This is what was involved in the criticism made by the French champions of
the old literary regime, not only against Flaubert, but against all the new writers:
they had lost the sense of human action and human meaning. For us, this means
that they had lost the sense of a certain kind of “action” and of a certain way of
understanding the link between action and meaning. What was that sense? In
order to understand it, we have to remember the old Aristotelian principle that
sustained the edifice of representation. Poetry, Aristotle assumed, is not a specific
use of language. Poetry is fiction. And fiction is an imitation of acting men. We
know that this poetic principle also was a political principle. It set forth a hierarchy
opposing the causal rationality of actions to the empiricism of life as it unfolds.
Poetry, Aristotle said, is more “philosophical” than history, because poetry builds
causal plots binding events together in a whole, while history only tells the events,
as they evolve. The privilege of action over life distinguished noble poetry from
base history, to the extent that it distinguished those who act from those who do
nothing but “live,” who are enclosed in the sphere of reproductive and meaning-
less life. As a consequence, fiction was divided into different genres of imitations.
There were high genres, devoted to the imitation of noble actions and characters,
and low genres devoted to common people and base subject matters. The
hierarchy of genres also submitted style to a principle of hierarchical convenience:
kings had to act and speak as kings do, and common people as common people
do. The convention was not simply an academic constraint. There was a homology
between the rationality of poetic fiction and the intelligibility of human actions,
conceived of as an adequation between ways of being, ways of doing and ways
of speaking.
From that point of view we can figure out, at first sight, what upset the
defenders of the
belles-lettres
in the works of the new writers. It was the dismissal
of any principle of hierarchy among the characters and subject matters, of any
principle of appropriateness between a style and a subject matter. The new
principle was stated in all its crudity by Flaubert: there are no high or low subject
matters. Further, there is no subject matter at all, because style is an absolute
way of seeing things. This absolutization of style may have been identified
afterwards with an a-political or aristocratic position. But in Flaubert’s time, it
could only be interpreted as a radical egalitarian principle, upsetting the whole
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Jacques Rancière
system of representation, the old regime of the art of writing. It turned upside
down a certain normality, put as an adequation between ways of being, ways of
doing and ways of speaking. The new principle broke that adequation. The
“aristocratic” absolutization of style went along with the “democratic” principle
of indifference. It went along with the reversal of the old hierarchy between
noble action and base life.
On that ground we could easily construct a politics of literature, contrasting
the egalitarian principle of indifference to the hierarchical law of the old regime.
Such a “politics of literature” could square with de Tocqueville’s idea of
democracy, conceived as the “equality of conditions.” But we cannot end matters
that easily. Democracy is more than a social state. It is a specific partition of the
sensible, a specific regime of speaking whose effect is to upset any steady
relationship between manners of speaking, manners of doing and manners of
being. It is in this sense that literature opposed its “democracy” to the
representational hierarchy. When Voltaire accounted for the power of Corneille’s
tragedies, he made a significant argument. He said that his tragedies were
performed in front of an audience made of orators, magistrates, preachers and
generals. He meant an audience made of people for whom speaking was the
same as acting. Unfortunately, he assumed, the audience of his own time was no
longer composed of those specialists of the acting word. Is was only made, he
said, of “a number of young gentlemen and young ladies.” That meant anybody,
nobody, no addressee. The representational regime of writing was based on a
definite idea of the speech-act. Writing was speaking. And speaking was viewed
as the act of the orator who is persuading the popular assembly (even though
there was no popular assembly). It was viewed as the act of the preacher uplifting
souls or the general haranguing his troops. The representational power of doing
art with words was bound up with the power of a social hierarchy based on the
capacity of addressing appropriate kinds of speech-acts to appropriate kinds of
audiences.
Flaubert and his peers, on the contrary, addressed the audience stigmatized
by Voltaire: a number of young ladies and young gentlemen. Literature is this
new regime of writing in which the writer is anybody and the reader anybody.
This is why its sentences are “mute pebbles.” They are mute in the sense that
they had been uttered long ago by Plato when he contrasted the wandering of
the orphan letter to the living logos, planted by a master as a seed in the soul of
a disciple, where it could grow and live. The “mute letter” was the letter that
went its way, without a father to guide it. It was the letter that spoke to anybody,
without knowing to whom it had to speak, and to whom it had not. The “mute”
letter was a letter that spoke too much and endowed anyone at all with the
SubStance # 103, Vol. 33, no. 1, 2004
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