Sunday (Part I) — Hatred of Democracy – A Teach-In
Comments Off on Sunday (Part I) — Hatred of Democracy – A Teach-InSunday (Part I) — Hatred of Democracy – A Teach-In
CONTENTS:
1. About this Sunday (Part I)
2. Download Reading
3. Interview with Ranciere on Democracy
4. Review of Hatred of Democracy
5. Democracy means equality
6. Related Badiou Texts
There is politics, the art and science of politics, because there is democracy. Politics is encountered as already present in the factuality of democracy, in the very strangeness of the combination of words which joins the unassignable quantity of the demos to the indefinable action of kratein.
-jr (On the Shores of Politics 94)
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1. About this Sunday (Part I)
When: Sunday, November 2, 1pm-6pm
What: Discussion / Teach-in
Where: 16 Beaver Street 4th Floor
Who: All are welcome
Democracy on our lips? Democracy on our minds? What is the status of democracy as a concept and (more importantly) as a practice today?
Early this year, many different individuals working within various cultural organizations in the city came together to talk about how we might combine our different activities in New York, to address the debacle (social, political, economic) which we are living through and connect them to the upcoming elections. What resulted was series of events retaining different variations on competing significations of the word, concept, or idea of democracy. This one day event is in some way in dialogue with those discussions early this year, the events which have been subsequently organized, the impending elections, and a consideration of this thing referred to as ‘democracy.’
While thinkers like Agamben, Badiou, and Zizek have attempted to undermine or question our inherited ideas of democracy, a long line of thinkers (many of them French) have attempted in various manners to retain fidelity to its calling. This long line has included thinkers of various persuasions, schools, and camps. Thinkers like Mouffe, Lefort, Balibar, Derrida, and most recently and vehemently Jacques Rancière have in their various critiques managed to still retain a space of agency within that thing calling or called democracy.
What stands out in the writings of Rancière are his consistent efforts to not only resuscitate an idea of democracy, but also to change its very coordinates. For Rancière, democracy is neither a form of government nor a form of society. Democracy is NOT about voting for x or y. It is obviously NOT something to be brought or exported elsewhere. It is NOT something that can BE: it is always taking place or the act of taking part (the taking-part of those who have no part). And this taking part is marked by ‘disagreements’ and ‘victories’, which also means an implicit acknowledgment of movements of inclusion and exclusion.
Democracy for Rancière exists through its own acts and through the fabric of common life that these acts weave – acts, which are directed towards making claims for a commons, toward rendering things, relegated to the private domain, public.
Rather than focus on his writings on aesthetics/politics, which have had a lot of traction within the art context in these last years, we will instead focus on the writings specifically oriented toward the political.
We will devote the first segment to a discussion of Rancière’s ‘Hatred of Democracy’ published by Verso in 2007. The book begins by assembling the various critiques being waged today against democracy and proceeds to trace them back to the time Plato and the Greeks. After that, Rancière begins to re-construct an idea of democracy that upends conventional uses of the word.
We will also be referring to ‘Disagreement’ and ‘On the Shores of Politics’ (two important reference points for Ranciere’s writings on politics) as well as Alain Badiou’s generous engagement with and critique of Rancière found in his book Metapolitics.
We would like to invite experts, amateurs, engaged and suspicious minds alike to join as equals in an experiment in collective auto-didacticism.
Deleuze and Guattari argued that sometimes you have to struggle to find new meanings for terms, sometimes it is necessary to invent new ones. One critical political question to be asked, particularly in light of the current financial failures, is what exactly we are struggling for, and what will it be called, what will be calling us.
We may be updating the links with additional resources, so please check back at: http://www.16beavergroup.org/Monday
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2. Download Reading
Hatred of Democracy
Chapter 3 and Chapter 4
http://www.16beavergroup.org/pdf/hatredofdemocracy.pdf
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3. Interview with Ranciere on Democracy
http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft.php?id=52&pos=0&textid=0&lang=en
The Abandonment of Democracy
Interview with Jacques Rancière
Christian Höller
Jacques Rancière is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of
Paris-VIII.
Christian Höller is coeditor of springerin: Hefte für Gegenwartskunst,
Vienna.
While the Western democratic system is still presenting itself as a model
for the rest of the world, it is facing all sorts of internal challenges.
Some of these stem from concerns with citizenship and the domain of
exclusive rights, or with the limits of the representative system quite
generally. However, a much more fundamental attack has been launched for
some time from the position of a power elite that is pitching itself as the
true defender of Western democratic values. Jacques Rancière, in taking aim
at this position, not only brings to the fore what a contemporary
understanding of »the political« might be all about, but he also sets out to
defend the democratic principle in its most comprehensive conception—a
defense whose repercussions are as relevant for critical art practices as
they are for new modes of political learning.
Christian Höller: A recent concern of yours has been tendencies of
antidemocratic thinking that increasingly surface in public discourse
today.[1] The focus of this concern, however, is not “anti-Western”
manifestations of this tendency (something the media have accustomed us to
over the past couple of years), but quite to the contrary: You locate
serious antidemocratic sentiments right in the heart of so-called Western
democracies, not least in the milieus of former leftist or
post-Enlightenment thinkers. Why is it exactly here that some of the most
persistent attacks stem from?
Jacques Rancière: It is clear that there are many forms of antidemocratic
thinking and that, from a global point of view, Islamic fundamentalism
weighs much more than the little group of Western intellectuals against whom
I take sides. But I chose to focus on the sort of antidemocratic thinking
that mattered to me: the one which was spelled out in the very core of our
»democracies« by thinkers who came from the Marxist or progressive
tradition. The loss of their revolutionary hopes has determined a double
feeling of nostalgia and resentment which took on the form of an
intellectual double game: on the one hand, they reject democracy because it
belongs to the progressive tradition of which Marxism was the supreme
expression; as they put it, the Gulag stemmed from the French Revolution.
But on the other hand, they express that rejection in keeping with the
Marxist view of »bourgeois democracy« as the mere expression of the reign of
the commodity.
Höller: Challenges to democratic thinking are currently coming from a
variety of positions. There are »people of God« of various flavors, ranging
from those who seek a »new shepherd«[2] and the believers in the Koran to
the global implementers of the Decalogue; but there are also the more
profane followers of oligarchic interests as well as the proponents of the
limitless circulation and expansion of capital. Can the antidemocratic
stance of all these different people be traced back to a common basis? Or
are they forming a kind of patchwork that might be all the more dangerous as
it is combining radically different forces into one common thrust?
Rancière: It is not likely that Western financial oligarchies, Islamic
fanatics, American evangelists, French »new philosophers«, and African
military dictators will join their forces in one common antidemocratic
thrust. But the point is that they conspire to dismiss the political
signification of democracy. Most of them present it as a mere state of
society characterized by individualism, consumerism, the »loss of the social
bond«, etc. Those who praise it, praise it only as a system of government
attuned to the power of the free market. But they reject it as the power of
anybody. Their democracy is an oligarchy that must be ruled by experts and
protected against democracy viewed as either the rule of the mob or the
empire of individualism.
Höller: You are referring to a double discourse on democracy that has gained
much currency in today’s (Western) world: Democracy as a—sometimes quite
rhetorical—shield against all forms of tyranny, barbarism, and
totalitarianism on the one hand; which also means the kind of democracy that
has to be »delivered«, be it with bombs, to the rest of the world. And, on
the other hand, the kind of democracy that is simply annoying to political
and oligarchic leaders, and by this you mean the excesses of democratic
life, the pursuit of particular interests by radically different subjects
and communities. What, would you say, brought about this split in democratic
discourse and what might have contributed to its widening over the past
decades?
Rancière: The double discourse on democracy is as old as democracy itself.
What we call »political institutions« or »political life« is the
articulation of two antagonistic principles: the »police« principle, which
has it that power belongs to those who are entitled to it because of their
quality or capacity, and the properly political principle, which has it that
power belongs to nobody, that »politics« means the specific power of those
who have no »qualification«. After the English, American, and French
revolutions, it had become a commonplace that politics meant »the power of
the people«, but that this power of the people had to be preserved from the
»whim« or the »ignorance« of the people. The collapse of the Soviet empire
has redistributed the roles. On the one hand, the triumph of the global
market imposes new constraints on the power of the people. The adaptation of
nation-states to the global law of the circulation of wealth turns out to be
the first concern of our governments, and it is thought of as too serious a
matter to be left to the power of the multitude. On the other hand,
religious fanaticisms and dictatorial states that had been supported as
anticommunist bastions appear to jeopardize their former protectors. So the
same governments complain about the risks engendered at home by democratic
life and try to export democracy to the places where they had previously
supported dictatorship and Islamism.
Höller: Today, democratic man (and woman) is sometimes portrayed, to quote
from your book, as »the young, idiotic consumer of popcorn, reality TV, safe
sex, social security, the right to difference, and anticapitalist or antiglobalist’ illusions«.[3] From this, the inference can be drawn that what democracy amounts to is a major civilizational catastrophe to be countered on all possible fronts. Is there something like the repercussions of—or reactions against—May 1968 and all sorts of liberation movements that articulate themselves in this kind of thinking? Or is this a genuinely contemporary diagnosis, appropriately developed for our very historical moment?
Rancière: The point is that the diagnosis identifying democracy with both
popular turbulence and individual consumerism dates back to Plato’s
Republic. In modern times it has been revived by the counterrevolutionary
interpretation of the French Revolution. It accused the democratic
revolution of having destroyed the reigns of the old social institutions and
authorities and unleashed individualism and the power of the market. The
triumph of individualism and consumption, the identification between
democracy and the excess of individualistic appetites is a commonplace that
has not much changed although the forms of consumption that it bemoans have.
May 1968 is conjured up just as a symbol allowing us to lump together in the
same basket social struggles, political claims for democracy, sexual
freedom, minorities’ rights, etc.
Höller: A particularly startling symptom of current antidemocratic thinking
seems to concern the historical role of the Holocaust. For some French
intellectuals as well as for the ideologues of American neoconservatism,
there is a link, sometimes very forcefully construed, between democratic
modernity and the extermination of Jews. In what ways is the Shoah,
considered as a central historical rupture, instrumentalized as the ultimate
reason for discrediting the excesses and the disastrous permissiveness of
democracy?
Rancière: Most intellectuals are apparently unable to think about politics
apart from a view of history in general and modernity in particular as
processes oriented toward a form of radical break or of decisive event. For
a long time, social revolution played the part of the event organizing the
historical development of modernity. With the collapse of the Soviet empire
the Holocaust was substituted for the Revolution in this role, which also
means that the messianic event achieving a history of progress was
overturned as the catastrophe achieving a history of decadence. Now the
interpretation of the decadence and the catastrophe was already preformed in
the counterrevolutionary tradition I was speaking of: the tradition that
portrayed the Enlightenment and the French Revolution as the triumph of
individualism. Individualism was said to have broken the collective
structures rooted in society and history and to have provoked the outburst
of terror. It is exactly the schema that was revived, on a renewed basis
provided by the Lacanian theory of the symbolic order, by Jean-Claude
Milner’s book Les penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique (The Criminal
Tendencies of Democratic Europe).[4] The Jews were exterminated because they
embodied against democracy the power of tradition and transmission. Of
course, this interpretation has to turn Nazism into the mere instrument of
modern democracy.
Höller: Part of your argument is that the current fear or hatred of
democratic life actually goes back to a much deeper concern which touches
upon the nature of politics and the political more generally. As you put it
in your book Disagreement,[5] politics is primarily the activity of claiming
a share, viz. by those who have not held any shares of the common good so
far (»the count of the uncounted«, as you also call it). Is it that
particular moment (which might be read as including those who have formerly
been excluded from political life) that lies at the heart of contemporary
resentment toward the democratic process? Or does this resentment go deeper,
viz. toward a fundamental denial of the democratic principle itself?
Rancière: When I say that politics is the part of those who have no part,
two things must be distinguished: there is the activity of groups, which
claim a share because they are excluded from the public sphere. But there is
also the fact that politics is not a simple redistribution of shares between
social groups. It is the implementation of the power of those who are not
members of any specific group, the collective capacity of those who have no
specific capacity, or what I called the power of anybody. The growing
entanglement of state oligarchies and market oligarchies demands that this
power be strictly subjected to the power of economical science and to the
negotiations based on its expertise. Now this »power of science« is limited
to a very small group, which generates resentment in the rest of the
intellectuals. This resentment is expressed in a way that in fact backs up
this power: those intellectuals who are excluded from any real influence
compensate for their humiliation by reviving the old discourse of the elites
on the danger of ignorant mobs and the egoism of democratic individuals.
Höller: In unearthing a more substantial meaning of democracy and the
political, you claim that democracy is neither a form of government nor a
form a social life. Rather, it should be understood as the power of anyone
and everyone to play a role in political life, of »those who have no other
property that predisposes them more to governing than to being governed«.[6]
Once this radical absence of any entitlement to govern (be it by birth,
wealth or faith) was accepted and implemented in society—something we are
currently far away from—political life might look totally different from
what it looks like today. What would you think might be the most startling
consequences, besides a general condition of ungovernability?
Rancière: I am not envisioning a future in which this principle will be
fully accepted and implemented in society. I don’t propose programs for the
future but tools and gauges that enable us to judge the current state of
things and reframe the stage of the possible. We are in a world where
politics and police, equality and inequality are entangled everywhere in
many ways. The point is not to propose a world cleaned of any intricacy but
to provide tools that enable us to disentangle the principles and impose, in
the present, the power of »ungovernability«. We must think of the future as
the outcome of the possibilities created and the capacities enhanced in the
present rather than put it as the goal determining what has to be done in
the present.
Höller: Political action is, according to your conception of the democratic
process, primarily about bringing into play claims by those who have not
been considered to be legitimate political subjects so far (migrants, asylum
seekers, undocumented workers, etc.). While this is surely aimed at an
enlargement of the public sphere, I am wondering if this does not situate
politics in realms totally different from the traditionally understood
»political arena«—zones of civil life, spheres of culture, etc. At the same
time, all those dispersed »theaters of the political« seem to move politics
ever further away from decision-making processes. Can you comment?
Rancière: I don’t propose a view of politics that brings it back to claims
made by outsiders. The part of those who have no part is not simply the part
of the asylum seekers and the undocumented workers. Politics is not about
integrating the excluded in our societies. It is about restaging matters of
exclusion as matters of conflict, of opposition between worlds. The global
logic of our world has it that all obstacles to the circulation of wealth
have to be dismissed while the circulation of persons must be strictly
controlled. The same powers open the borders to wealth and close them to the
poor. This is what ties the struggles about immigration with the struggles
against the dismantlement of social security systems, the reforms of the
laws on employment, or of educational systems based on the sole logic of the
market, etc. On all these points, there is a topography of the possible that
is decided by national and international powers, and there are forms of
refiguration of the possible created by the initiative of workers, students,
etc., who embody the part of those who have no part. The problem is not so
much the decentering of the political sphere as it is the enlargement of
that sphere.
Höller: A quite influential strand of contemporary thinking identifies
sovereignty in today’s democracies with an omnipresent state of exception,
sees the nómos of modernity in the camp, and considers more or less all
political life (bíos) reduced to bare life (zoe).[7] What role does the
democratic principle, the way you conceive it, assign to the notion of bare
life? Is it really the inescapable condition that all possible participation
in the democratic process is heading toward?
Rancière: The notion of »bare life« has been borrowed from Hannah Arendt,
who had borrowed it from the aristocratic tradition that reserved the
political stage to those who were free from the necessity of dealing with
reproducing life and earning their livings. Politics begins with the refusal
of the distinction, with the affirmation that people who were »just« living
could participate in the configuration of the common world and that matters
of »bare life«—employment, sexual roles, health, etc.—were also matters of
collective deliberation and decision. The democratic principle is that there
is no frontier between bare life and political life, that this frontier is a
political issue at stake. The police law is not a »state of exception«.
Instead it is politics, which consists in creating a tissue of exceptions to
the police law.
Höller: A question related to the idea of »bare life« concerns the proper
democratic conception of »the people«. They are considered as idiotic,
self-indulgent, egotistical consumers by one extreme position, as the
»multitude« that carries all future revolutionary hope by others, or—as
Deleuze had it—a kind of empty signifier that points to something which »is
always missing«. How does democratic thinking the way you understand it (and
in distinction to the three positions mentioned) conceive of »the people«?
Rancière: The first two conceptions have something in common. Both have a
positivistic conception of the people. They identify it with a form of
society or with the deployment of »productive forces«. From my point of
view, the »people» of democracy is not a social group, not an accumulation
of productive forces. It is created by forms of subjectivization, by the
configuration of dissensual scenes. The political people exists only when it
disrupts the police distribution of the shares allowed to different parts of
society. It is missing as a social body, but it exists in the present
through the construction of its own space. It is not the people of a
democracy to come.
Höller: With respect to a proper assessment of today’s political realities
you state that »we do not live in democracies, neither … do we live in
camps«.[8] Leaving the camp and the state of exception aside for the moment,
my question is if democracy, according to your view, is something not
realized yet, or—quite to the contrary—something like an ever-receding
horizon, a state of affairs that is unrealizable in principle?
Rancière: Democracy is an unattainable future only if we think of it as a
perfect constitution or a state of perfect equality. That is not at all my
conception. For me the »not yet« cannot be separated from an »already now
and here«. Democracy exists only through its own acts and through the fabric
of common life that these acts weave. It is not »unrealizable in principle«.
It is a principle that we have always known as intertwined with its opposite
and as relentlessly striving against it. The horizon of equality is not what
determines a march toward an unattainable state of perfection. It is what
frames the stage on which we can think and act.
Höller: For quite some time, we have witnessed attempts to democratize the
arts and culture quite generally. Democratization has not only meant to make
art more accessible and collapse hierarchies of high and low, but also to
efficiently politicize it. Where, in your opinion, might a profound
politicization and application of the democratic principle in contemporary
art, start from—one that would go beyond a mere »thematization« of political
issues?
Rancière: We must take into account that art has its own politics, which
does not dovetail with attempts at »politicizing« it. The paradox of the
aesthetic regime of art is that art produces political effects out of the
very separation of the aesthetic sphere—which is not tantamount to the
»autonomy« of the artwork, since this separation of a sphere of experience
goes along with the loss of any determined criterion of difference between
what belongs to art and what belongs to nonartistic life. What characterizes
contemporary art is the way in which this disjointed junction between
aesthetic separation and artistic indistinction becomes the form and matter
of art. It means that its form of efficiency consists in the blurring of the
borders, in the redistribution of the relations between spaces and times,
between the real and the fictional, etc. In this respect it can play a role
against the logic of consensus: What characterizes mainstream fiction, the
fiction of the police order, is that it passes itself off as real, that it
pretends to draw a clear-cut line between what belongs to the obviousness of
the real and what belongs to the field of appearances, representations,
opinions, and utopias. And it also pins down groups to their identity, as
Godard pointed out by saying that the epic was for the Israelis and the
documentary for the Palestinians. It is not a question of reversing the
roles, it is a question of creating a room for play, where the very
distribution between epics and documentaries can be blurred. Contemporary
art can certainly play a part in this respect, even more so as political
groups don’t play it much today. Now this does not mean that artistic
practice has become political practice, as some theorists assert it. They
tend to identify artistic performance with new political activism on the
ground that we are in a new age of capitalism when material and immaterial
production, knowledge, communication, and artistic performance would fuse
together in one and the same process of implementation of collective
intelligence. In my view, this is a too easy way of erasing the
specificities of both artistic and political dissensuality and of reviving
the avant-gardist figure of the producer who is at the same time a worker,
an artist, and the builder of a new world. There are many forms of
collective intelligence just as there are many ways of performing and many
stages of performance.
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4. Review of Hated of Democracy
http://www.spaceandculture.org/2008/05/14/book-review-the-hatred-of-democrac
y/
Book Review: The Hatred of Democracy
The Hatred of Democracy, Jacques Rancière, trans. Steve Corcoran. London:
Verso, 2006, 106 pp.
In The Hatred of Democracy, Jacques Rancière polemically addresses what he
views to be a widespread trend of anti-individualism in the past and present
canons of social, political, and philosophical thought. Crucially for
Rancière, this trend of anti-individualism is part of “the hatred of
democracy,” a specific rationality that he claims is as old as democracy
itself. He contends that the hatred of democracy is a rationality of
ressentiment that identifies the “limitless desire of individuals” as the
symptom of democratic excess (p. 1).
Historically speaking, there have been two interrelated critiques of
democracy: the first, classical challenge – beginning with Plato – asserts
that democracy as a government of the people by the people must be limited
in order to reconcile itself with the will of aristocratic legislators, or
the government of experts. The second, modern critique – beginning under the
pressures of the drafting of the American constitution and carrying on to
Marx in the nineteenth century – picks up immediately where the ancients
leave off: that is, “the moderns” contend that since democracy cannot
survive without “the government of the best,” that is, without its elites,
democracy also cannot exist without the preservation of private property (p.
2). At least since Marx’s analysis of the hidden core of private property
contained in the republican constitution, these critiques have made possible
an argument in favour of significantly limiting the scope and reach of
democracy; that is, reducing it to something else, such as oligarchy (with
democratic aspirations perhaps). The problem from this perspective, then,
would not seem to be that there is not enough democracy but rather the
reverse: that democracy itself has become overburdening and excessive, and
something to be guarded against. Democracy has become the elephant in the
room of theories of government and politics, so to speak.
Following this discussion of the ancient and modern attempts to limit
democracy, Rancière frames the book around what he calls the “new hatred of
democracy” – a hatred that recombines both elements of democratic critique
outlined above but in novel ways. Rancière’s polemic challenges his readers
to reject the critique of democracy outright because such critiques
consistently define democracy so as “to confine it within limits” (p. 2)
seeking to control the so-called “evil quite simply called democratic life”
(p. 4). These are strategies of critique or containment that have the effect
of doing away with democracy as a politics. He warns:
This thesis of the new hatred of democracy can be succinctly put: there is
only one good democracy, the one that ‘represses’ the catastrophe of
democratic civilization (p. 4).
Guided by his denunciation of a limited or repressed sense of democracy,
Rancière turns to current debates regarding the U.S. led war in the name of
democracy in Iraq (p. 6) and ongoing European interventions in the Middle
East (p. 9). In doing so, he rejects the reigning theoretical definitions of
democracy that tend to conflate it with technocracy and oligarchy, authority
and obedience (p. 16). However, the main target of Rancière’s polemics is
not the Iraq war, or the ongoing struggles in the Middle East more broadly.
Rather, Rancière turns his attention towards French debates on pedagogy and
“the School”, to outline, in turn, his own theory of politics, a politics
that comes near to the question of “limitless” democracy (as we will see
below) in the last two chapters. Because of its ethos of equality, democracy
is a politics that founds a constituent power of “heterotopy, the primary
limitation of the power of forms of authority that govern the social body”
(p. 45). The limit of authority, in this sense precisely, is democracy.
In the first chapter, “From Victorious Democracy to Criminal Democracy,”
Rancière discusses “the scandal borne by the word democracy” (p. 4) to
reveal its paradoxical status (for many theorists, and as taken-up by
Rancière himself) as “the reign of excess” (p. 8). Rancière wishes to see
the reign of democracy defined as an “excess” resulting in a celebration of
its potential as a specific form of politics aimed to promote equality and
to level socio-political hierarchies. What he does notice, however, is a
constant elaboration by those with the power to do so (indeed those who hate
the excess of democracy) to reinvent ways to limit or “repress” democracy’s
extent and reach. This, in effect, is a strategy used by some to ignore
those “feverish” or democratic consumers “drunk on equality” (p. 28) who
demand equality in all realms of social life guided under the constitution
of the Rights of Man. Regarding “the School”, Rancière wishes to move beyond
those familiar images of so-called equality – such as that of the “student
treating school as a supermarket where the client is king” (p. 18), a
familiar criticism in many teaching and research institutions today.
For Rancière, democracy is “limitless”, in the sense that it is the
limitless potential of equality. However, he cautions that because of this
“limitlessness”, many wish to reduce democracy to something that it is not –
to a regime, or a “form of society” in which “the political, the
sociological, and the economic” are reductively collapsed into one
socio-philosophical plane of analysis (p. 20). For Rancière, this reduction
has the effect of combining sociology and philosophy and creating a dominant
“sociology of narcissistic consumerism” (p. 22) that rules out, in advance,
analysis of different forms of equality and inequality, focusing instead on
analysis of knowledge transmission and the “self-destructive tendency born
in a democratic society” (p. 29). Jean Baudrillard, for example, transforms
“the alienated consumer of the day before into a narcissus who uninhibitedly
plays with objects and the symbols of the market universe, favourably
identif[ying] democracy and consumerism” (p. 22). Rancière attacks the
collapse of the distinction between democracy and consumerism on all fronts,
especially in those forms he detects in the republican (as opposed to
democratic) works of Baudrillard, Hannah Arendt, J.K. Galbraith, Christopher
Lasch, Claude Lefort, David Riesman, Leo Strauss, and Jean-Claude Milner in
particular. As this list suggests, Rancière’s critique of the republican
rejection of democracy is as extensive as it is exhaustive.
As I mentioned above, one of the most interesting engagements in The Hatred
of Democracy is Rancière’s attempt to bring together the critiques of
democracy and key debates in education and pedagogy. Working especially in
the local context of his native France, the author argues that a majority of
debates regarding the rejection of democracy have emerged in relation to
questions of equality and inequality in education, and, more specifically,
in regards to the difficult ethical relationship between schoolmaster and
pupil.
It is precisely in relation to the question of education that the meaning of
some key words – republic, democracy, equality, society – has radically
changed (p. 29).
The main thesis of this book challenges its readers to rethink how easily
the critique of democracy rolls off of the tips of our tongues. Rancière
proposes that inequality (or authority) is not a necessary relation between
teacher and pupil. He writes that the republican debate on education:
“appeared to be about what public authorities could and should do with the
means at their disposal to remedy social inequality” (p. 26). However, he
adds,
in the stream of allegations about the inexorable rise of people lacking in
values owing to the torrent of supermarket values, the root of evil would
eventually be identified: it was, to be sure, democratic individualism. The
enemy that the republican School confronted, then, was no longer the unequal
society from which it sought to rescue pupils, it was the pupil him- or
herself, who had become the representative of par excellence of democratic
humanity – the immature being, the young consumer drunk with equality (p.
26).
On this basis, Rancière puts forward his egalitarian thesis. Since his now
famous pedagogical treatise, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in
Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford University Press, 1991), Rancière
insists that the Master should not necessarily act as figure of authority
over his or her students. Rather, education at base, like democracy and
politics, is egalitarian.
With that said, the most important aspect of democracy from this perspective
is the valuation of politics and uncertainty. He insists that democracy is
neither a type of constitution nor a form of society – and, he notes, even
the reservations regarding democracy in Plato’s dialogues demonstrates this
point. Democracy is, rather, something much more contingent, open, and ever
beyond the reach of those philosophers, teachers, sociologists, and
politicians who wish to do away with politics (or democracy) altogether in
search of certainty. If we are to accept this perspective, then, democracy
lacks foundation and is
simply the power peculiar to those who have no more entitlements to govern
than to submit (p. 47).
But the important point to note here is the distinction Rancière makes
between authority and politics, the former being bound-up with the logic of
“police” and the latter, as we have already seen, democracy. Drawing a sharp
line of distinction between police and politics, between the basic tenants
of authority and equality, Rancière leaves open the possibility of arriving
at a sense of politics that would no longer have recourse to the principle
of legitimacy. He writes:
From the moment obedience has to refer to a principle of legitimacy […]
commanding must presuppose the equality of the one who commands and the one
who is commanded (p. 48).
Pushing for a departure with the logic of police – and the concomitant
terminology of “authority,” “legitimacy,” and “obedience” in our current
intellectual context – Rancière’s project is as ambitious as it is radical.
Politics is democracy.
Reviewed by Barret Weber, University of Alberta, Canada
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5. Democracy means equality
Jacques Rancière
Democracy means equality
Jacques Ranciere first came to prominence as one of the co-authors, with Louis Althusser, of the original two-volume edition of Lire le Capital (1965), to which he contributed an essay on Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts (trans. `The Concept of “Critique” and the Critique of “Political Economy”‘, in Ali Rattansi, ed., Ideology, Method and Marx, Routledge, 1989). However, he soon broke with Althusser (see Ranciére, La Lecon d’Althusser, 1974), becoming an influential figure in French Maoism. This break, at once political and theoretical, was focused on what Ranciere has described as `the historical and philosophical relations between knowledge and the masses’. Developing out of a critique of Althusser’s theory of ideology (see Ranciere, `On the Theory of Ideology – Althusser’s Politics’, RP 7, Spring 1974; reprinted in R. Edgley and R. Osborne, eds, Radical Philosophy Reader, Verso, 1985), it led to a series of reflections on the social and historical constitution of knowledges: La Nuit des proleétaires, 1981 (trans. Nights of Labour, Temple University Press, 1989); Le Philosophe et ses pauvres, 1983; and Le Maître ignorant, 1987 (trans. The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Stanford University Press, 1991). More recently, since 1989 Rancieère has broadened his canvas to engage the constitution of `the political’ within the Western tradition (Aux bords du politique, 1990; trans. On the Shores of Politics, Verso, 1994) and the poetics of historical knowledge (Les Noms de l’histoire, 1992; trans. The Names of History, Minnesota University Press, 1994). His latest books are Le Mesentente, 1995 and Mallarme – la politique de la sirene, 1996.
Passages: Jacques Ranciere, for more than twenty years you have been following a somewhat unusual philosophical itinerary. It is obvious that what you are doing has nothing in common with traditional academic work. Most of your books reveal philosophical thought in unexpected contexts or in contexts that have been reformulated in atypical fashion.
Rancière: Given the historical and political conjuncture of the 1970s, which I certainly did not foresee, I wanted to look again at certain of the concepts and conceptual logics that Marxism used to describe the functions of the social and the political. For me, that wish took the form of a decision, which might be described as purely empirical, to look at the contradiction between the social and the political within the working-class tradition. Basically, I wanted to know how Marxism related to that tradition. I wanted both to establish what that working-class tradition was, and to study how Marxism interpreted and distorted it. For many years I took no more interest in philosophy. More specifically, I turned my back on what might be called political theories, and read nothing but archive material. I posited the existence of a specifically working-class discourse. I began to suspect that there was once a socialism born of a specifically working-class culture or ethos. Years of work on working-class archives taught me that, to be schematic about it, `working-class proletarian’ is primarily a name or a set of names rather than a form of experience, and that those names do not express an awareness of a condition. Their primary function is to construct something, namely a relationship of alterity.
That, then, was the starting point. I then slowly went back to asking questions about a certain number of concepts from within the philosophical tradition. The essential matrix for what I have been doing since then was supplied by the writings of a carpenter called Gauny. They take the form of an experiment in what might be described as `wild philosophy’. The most significant of his writings deal with his relationship with time and speech. What did this mean? I had been working on these texts, and when I looked again at certain texts from within the philosophical tradition, and especially Plato’s Republic, I realized that this self-taught nineteenth-century carpenter had given philosophy the same conceptual heart as Plato, namely the fact that the worker is not primarily a social function, but a certain relationship with the logos, and that he is assigned to certain temporal categories.
At this point, I stumbled across the famous passage in Book II of The Republic where Plato speaks of the workers who have no time to do anything but work, and the passage in Book VI where he criticizes the `little bald tinker’ and those with `disfigured bodies’ and `battered and mutilated souls’ who `betake themselves to philosophy’. I recognized that the structure was the same. It was a largely empirical structure relating to the temporality of the worker’s activity. And there was a close correspondence between that structure and the fully elaborated symbolic structure that denied the worker access to the universal logos and, therefore, to the political. That is what I was trying to conceptualize in Le Philosophe et ses pauvres, but it also provided the main guidelines for my later research into how the ascription of any relationship with language is also the ascription of a type of being.
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6. Related Badiou Texts
For Badiou’s explicit engagement with Rancière’s work, please see his book, Metapolitics.
The following are two chapters from the book, but not the ones which explicitly address Rancière.
Chapter 10 (the final) of Metapolitics
The Political as a Truth Procedure
http://www.lacan.com/badtruth.htm
Chapter 5 of Metapolitics
Highly Speculative Reasoning on the Concept of Democracy •
http://www.lacan.com/jambadiou.htm
translated by Jorge Jauregui
The word “democracy” is today the main organizer of consensus. What the word is assumed to embrace is the downfall of Eastern Socialists States, the supposed well being of our countries as well as Western humanitarian crusades.
Actually the word “democracy” is inferred from what I term “authoritarian opinion.” It is somehow prohibited not to be a democrat. Accordingly, it furthers that the human kind longs for democracy, and all subjectivity suspected of not being democratic is deemed pathological. At its best it infers a forbearing reeducation, at its worst the right of meddling democratic marines and paratroopers.
Democracy thus inscribing itself in polls and consensus necessarily arouses the philosopher’s critical suspicions. For philosophy, since Plato, means breaking with opinion polls. Philosophy is supposed to scrutinize everything that is spontaneously considered as “normal.” If democracy designates a normal state of collective organization, or political will, then the philosopher will ask for the norm of this normality to be examined. He will not allow for the word to function within the frame of an authoritarian opinion. For the philosopher everything consensual becomes suspicious.
To confront the visibility of the democratic idea with the singularity of a particular politics, especially revolutionary politics, is an old practice. It was already employed against Bolsheviks well before the October Revolution. In fact, the critique addressed to Lenin – his political postulate viewed as nondemocratic – is original. However it’s still interesting today to peruse his riposte.
Lenin’s counter-argument is twofold. On the one hand he distinguishes, according to the logic of class analysis, between two types of democracy: proletarian democracy and bourgeois democracy. He then asserts the supremacy, in extension and intensity, of the former over the latter.
Yet his second structure of response seems to me more appropriate to the present state of affairs. Lenin insists in this that with “democracy,” verily, you should always read “a form of State.” Form means a particular configuration of the separate character of the State and the formal exercise of sovereignty. Positing democracy as a form of State, Lenin subscribes to the classical political thinking filiation, including Greek philosophy, which contends that “democracy” must ultimately be conceived as a sovereignty or power trope. Power of the “demos” or people, the capability of “demos” to exert coercion by itself.
If democracy is a form of State, what preordained philosophical use proper can this category have? With Lenin the aim – or idea – of politics is the withering of any form of State, democracy included. And this could be termed generic Communism as basically expressed by Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Generic Communism designates a free associative egalitarian society where the activity of polymorph workers is not governed by regulations and technical or social articulations but is managed by the collective power of needs. In such a society, the State is dissolved as a separate instance from public coercion. Politics – much as it voices the interests of social groups and covets at the conquest of power – is de facto dissolved.
Thus, the purpose of Communist politics aims at its own disappearance in the modality of the end of the form separated from the State in general, even if it concerns a State that declares itself democratic.
If philosophy is predicated as what identifies, legitimizes or categorizes politics’ ultimate goals, much as the regulating ideas acting as its representation, and if this aim is acknowledged as the withering of the State – which is Lenin’s proposition – and what can be termed pure presentation, free association; or again if politics’ final goal is posited as authority in-separated from infinity or the advent of the collective as such, then, with regard to this supposed end, which is the end assigned to generic Communism, democracy is not, cannot be a category as regards philosophy. Why? Because democracy is a form of the State; let philosophy assess politics’ final goals; and let this end be as well the end of the State, thus the end of all relevance to the word “democracy.”
The “philosophical” word suitable to evaluate politics could be, in this hypothetical frame, the word “equality,” or the word “Communism,” but not the word “democracy.” For this word is traditionally attached to the State, to the form of the State.
From this results the idea that “democracy” can only be considered a concept of philosophy if one of these three following hypotheses is to be rejected. All three are intertwined and somehow uphold the Leninist view on democracy. They are:
Hypothesis 1: The ultimate goal in politics is generic Communism, thus the pure presentation of the collective’s truth, or the withering of the State.
Hypothesis 2: The relation between philosophy and politics entails the evaluation of a certain politics’ final goal, its general or generic meaning.
Hypothesis 3: Democracy is a form of the State.
Under these three hypotheses “democracy” is not a necessary concept of philosophy. It can only become such provided one of these three hypotheses is dropped.
Three abstract possibilities follow:
1. Let generic Communism not be the ultimate goal in politics.
2. Let the relation between philosophy and politics not be one of scrutiny, enlightenment or legitimization of the final aims.
3. Let “democracy” imply something else than a form of the State.
Under any of these three possibilities the structure according to which “democracy” is not a concept of philosophy is put into question. I would like to analyze one by one these three provisions which allow for the consideration or reconsideration of “democracy” as a category of philosophy proper.
Let’s assume that the ultimate goal of politics is not the pure assertion of collective presentation, is not the free association of men, disengaged from the State’s principle of sovereignty. Let’s assume that generic Communism, even as an idea, is not the ultimate goal of politics. What can then be the goal of politics, its practice’s finality, much as this practice involves, or questions, or challenges, philosophy?
I think two main hypotheses can be construed in light of what is viewed as the history of this question. According to the first hypothesis, politics’ aim would be the configuration, or the advent, of what can be termed “the good State.” Philosophy would be brought forward as an examination of the legitimacy of the State’s various possible forms. It would seek to name the preferable character of state configuration. Such would be the final stake of the debate on politics’ goals. This is indeed related to the great classical tradition in political philosophy, from the Greeks onwards, devoted to the question of sovereignty’s legitimacy. Now, of course, a norm appears on the scene. Whatever the regime or the status of the norm, an axiological preference for a distinct type of state configuration relates the State to a normative principle as, for instance, the superiority of a democratic regime over a monarchic or an aristocratic one, for any particular reason. That is, the convening of a general system of norms sanctions this preference.
As a passing remark let’s say this situation does not apply to the hypothesis in which the ultimate goal in politics is the withering of the State, since you are not dealing with “the good State.” For the case you are dealing with the political process as self-cancellation, that is as engaged in the cessation of the principle of sovereignty. It does not concern a norm associated with the state configuration. It rather concerns the idea of a process that would bring about the withering of the entire state configuration. The singularity of withering does not belong to the normative question as it can be exerted upon the persistence of the State. On the other hand, if politics’ ultimate goal is “the good State” or the preferable State, then the emergence of a norm seems ineluctable.
Now, this poses a difficult question in that the norm is inevitably external or transcendent. The State, in itself, is objectivity without norm. It is the principle of sovereignty, or of coercion, endowed with a separate functioning necessary to the collective as such. It will obtain its determination in a set of regulations stemming from subjective topics. These are precisely the norms that will introduce the subject of “the good State” or the preferable State. In our present situation, that is, the circumstance in our parliamentary States, the subjective relation to the issue of the State is regulated according to three norms: the economy, the national question and, precisely, democracy.
Let’s consider the economy first. The State is accountable for assuring a minimal functioning of the circulation and distribution of goods; it falls into disrepute as such if it proves exaggeratedly incapable of complying with this norm. In the sphere of the economy broadly, whatever its organic relation to the State, the latter is subjectively accountable for the functioning of the economy.
The second norm is the national question. The State is under a set of regulations such as the nation, the representation on the world scene, national independence, etc. It is accountable for the very existence of the national principle at home and abroad.
Thirdly, today democracy is itself a norm as it’s considered within the subjective relation to the State. The State is accountable for knowing wether it is democratic or despotic, for its relation towards instances such as freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of action.
The opposition between dictatorship and democracy is something that functions as a subjective norm in the evaluation of the State.
Thus the actual situation of the question subordinates the State to the threesome normative of economic functioning, national evaluation and democracy. Here “democracy” acts as a normative characterization of the State, precisely as what can be termed the category of “a politics,” not of politics in general. “A politics” is what regulates a subjective relation to the State. Let’s say that the state configuration regulating its subjective relation to the State under the three aforementioned norms – economy, national question, democracy – may be dubbed parliamentarism, though I prefer to call it parliamentary-capitalism. However, since “democracy” is here summoned as the category of a particular politics – a particular politics whose universality is quite problematic – we should refrain from defining it as being in itself a philosophical category. At this level of analysis then “democracy” unfolds as a category characterizing – by means of the formulation of a subjective norm in relation to the State – a particular politics, which I deem to call “parliamentarism.”
So much for the case with regard to the hypothesis that politics’ ultimate goal is in determining “the good State.” What you get at most is that “democracy” turns out to be the category of a particular politics, parliamentarism. This is not a definite reason to posit “democracy” as a philosophical concept.
What we are examining here is the ultimate goal of politics when this goal is not generic Communism. Our first consideration was that politics aimed at establishing the best possible State. It follows from there that “democracy” is not necessarily a concept within philosophy.
The second possible reasoning leads you to the notion that the ultimate goal of politics is none other than itself. In this case politics would not address the issue of “the good State” but would be its own goal for itself. Conversely to what has been reflected previously, politics would then become a movement of thought and action that freely eludes the dominant state subjectivity and propounds, convenes, organizes projects ill-suited for consideration and representation within the norms under which the State functions. In this case politics is presented as a singular collective practice estranged from the State. Again that kind of politics, in its essence, is not the carrier of a State agenda or a state norm but instead the development of what can be termed as the dimension of collective freedom, precisely in that it avoids the normative consensus represented by the State – provided the State is assessed by this organized freedom.
“Democracy,” is it thus relevant? Yes, “democracy” is relevant “if democracy is to be understood in a sense other than a form of the State.” If politics is thus to itself its own goal insofar as it is able to withdraw from state consensus, it could eventually be termed democratic. Yet in this case the category will not function in a Leninist sense, as a State form. And this brings you back to the third negative condition with regard to the three Leninist hypotheses.
Here concludes the first part of our discussion, that is: what if the goal of politics is not generic Communism?
The second part of the discussion concerns philosophy itself. Let’s assume that philosophy is not related to politics as much as it is the representation or the seizure of politics’ ultimate ends, that philosophy has another rapport to politics and that it is not intended to evaluate – the appearance before a court – or legitimate politics’ ultimate ends. How does then philosophy relate to politics? What is the name of that relation? How are we to prescribe it?
There is a first hypothesis, namely that the task of philosophy would be what I call the formal description of politics, its typology. Philosophy would set up a space where politics are discussed in accordance with their sort. All in all, philosophy would be a formal apprehension of States and politics as it pre-elaborates or exposes the said typology to possible norms. Yet, when this is the case – indubitably this is part of the work of thinkers such as Aristotle or Montesquieu – it becomes apparent that “democracy” acts upon philosophy as the description of a form of the State. There is no doubt about it. Accordingly, the categorization starts from state configurations, and “democracy” becomes, from the viewpoint of philosophy, the description of a form of the State, as opposed to other forms such as tyranny, aristocracy and so on.
But if “democracy” designates a form of the State, the premise would then be asserted, regarding this form, about “the goals of politics.” Is it a matter of “willing” this form? If so, we are inside the logic of “the good State,” which is what was previously analyzed. Or is it a matter of going beyond this form, dissolving sovereignty, even democratic sovereignty? In this case we relapse inside the Leninist frame, the withering hypothesis. In any event, this option brings you back to the first part of the discussion.
The second possibility implies philosophy’s attempt to apprehend politics as a singular activity of thinking, of politics itself as providing for the historical collective a modality of thinking which philosophy must take in as such. Here philosophy should be understood – consensual definition – as the cogitative apprehension of thinking operational conditions in their different registers. If politics is deemed as an operative thinking, in a register of its own (Lazarus’ central thesis), then philosophy’s task is the grasping of thinking operational conditions in this particular register named politics. It follows that if politics is an operative thinking, it cannot be subservient to the State, it cannot be reduced to or reflected on its state dimension. Let’s venture a rather spurious proposition: “the State does not think.”
As a passing remark, the fact that the State does not think is the source of all sorts of difficulties for philosophical thinking as far as politics is concerned. All “political philosophies” adduce evidence that the State does not think. And when these political philosophies posit the State as leading the research on politics as thought, difficulties increase. The fact that the State does not think leads Plato, at the end of book IX in Republic, to declare that as a last resort you can pursue politics everywhere except in your own fatherland. And the same eventuality brings Aristotle to the distressing conclusion that once the ideal types of politics have been isolated, only pathological types are left in the real. For instance, for Aristotle monarchy implies a kind of State that does think and is reputed to be thinkable. Yet, in the real there are only tyrannies, which do not think, which are unthinkable. The normative type is never achieved. This also leads Rousseau to ascertain that in history all that exists are dissolved States, and no legitimate State. Finally, these postulates, which are extracted from within utterly heterogeneous political conceptions, agree on one point: namely, it is not possible to envision the State as the doorway to politics’ research. Perforce one comes up against the State as a non-thinking entity. The problem should be pursued from another angle.
Therefore, if “democracy” is a category of politics-as-thought, that is if philosophy needs to use “democracy” as a category to get hold of the political process as such, then this political process eludes the pervasive injunction of the State, since the State does not think. It follows that “democracy” is not here understood as a form of the State but differently, otherwise, or in another sense. And this is how you are brought back to the proposition positing “democracy” as something other than a form of the State.
Let’s then advance a provisional conclusion: “democracy” is a category of philosophy only when it indicates something other than a form of the State. Yet what is “something other”?
There lies the core of the question. It is a problem with conjunction. To what, other than the State, is “democracy” to be conjoined in order to become a real approach to politics-as-thought? There is a large political tradition pertinent to this, and I won’t go further into it. Let’s suffice to mention just two examples concerning the attempt to conjoin “democracy” to something other than the State thus allowing the meta-political (philosophical) re-examination of politics-as-thought.
The first instance concerns the direct conjoining of “democracy” to the masses political activity – not to the state configuration but to its immediate antagonism. For usually the masses’ political activity, its spontaneous mobilization, comes about under an anti-state drive. This produces the syntagm of mass democracy, which I’ll style romantic, and the opposition between mass democracy and democracy as state configuration, or formal democracy.
Whoever happens to have experienced mass democracy – historical events such as collective general assembling, crowded gatherings, riots, and so on – manifestly notices an immediate point of reversibility between mass democracy and mass dictatorship. Inevitably the essence of mass democracy is translated into a mass sovereignty, and this mass sovereignty becomes in turn a sovereignty of immediacy, of assembling itself. The sovereignty of assembling exerts – pattern formations Sartre termed “group-in-fusion” – a fellowship of terror. Here Sartrian phenomenology persists indisputably. There is an organic correlation between the practice of mass democracy as internal principle of the group-in-fusion and a point of reversibility with the immediate authoritarian or dictatorial element at work in the fellowship of terror. Looking into the issue of mass democracy itself notice that it is not possible to legitimate the principle after the sole appellative of democracy, since this romantic democracy immediately includes, in theory as well as in practice, its reversibility into dictatorship. You are dealing thus with a pair democracy/dictatorship that avoids an elementary designation, or eludes a philosophical apprehension, under the concept of democracy. And what does this entail? It entails that whoever assigns legitimacy to mass democracy, at least today, does so on the basis, or rather from the viewpoint of the non-state perspective of pure presentation. The appraisal, even under the appellation of democracy, of mass democracy as such, is inseparable from the subjectivity of generic Communism. The legitimization of this couple of immediacy – democracy/dictatorship – is only conceivable if the pair is thought, and valorized, from the generic point of the withering of the State, or from the perspective of a radical anti-state attitude. Actually, the opposite pole to State consistency, which precisely shows up in the immediacy of mass democracy, is a provisional representative to generic Communism. We are now brought back to our first major hypothesis: if “democracy” is conjoined to “mass,” the goal of politics is actually generic Communism, whence “democracy” is not a category of philosophy. This conclusion is empirically and conceptually established by the fact that from the perspective of mass democracy it is impossible to differentiate democracy from dictatorship. It is what has obviously enabled Marxists to employ the expression “dictatorship of the proletariat.” It should be our understanding that the subjective valorization of the word “dictatorship” thus rested on the presence of such reversibility between democracy and dictatorship as it historically appears in the figure of mass democracy, or revolutionary democracy, or romantic democracy.
We are left with another hypothesis, a quite different one: “democracy” should be conjoined with the political regulation itself. “Democracy” would not be related to the figure of State or to the figure in political mass activity, but would rather relate organically to political regulation, provided that political regulation is not subservient to the State, to “the good State,” when it is not systematized. “Democracy” would be organically tied to the universality of political regulation, to its capability of universality, and thus the word “democracy” and politics as such would be bound. Again, politics in the sense that it is something other than a State program. There would be an intrinsically democratic characterization of politics, insofar as its self-determination is posited as a space of emancipation removed from State consensual figures.
There is some evidence of this in Rousseau’s Social Contract. In chapter 16, book III, Rousseau discusses the issue of the establishment of the State – apparently the opposite topic we are discussing here – the issue of the institution of the State. He comes up against a well-known difficulty, namely that the causative instrument of government cannot be a contract, cannot proceed from the dimension of a social contract in the sense that this contract acts as founder of the nation as such. The institution of the State concerns specific individuals, and this cannot be carried out by means of a law. For Rousseau a law necessarily implies a global association relating the people to the peop