Jacques Rancière
Dis-agreement
(The French title is La Mésentente: Politique et philosophie which does not mean disagreement but misunderstanding. Disagreement implies that we are looking at a common object in a common way but come to different conclusions about it. Misunderstanding implies different or incommensurable regimes of discourse each of which posses different ‘objects’, or each of which conceives of a common object differently.)
Chapter 1: “The Beginning of Politics”
This book was published the same year as Agamben’s Homo Sacer and both books begin with the same passage from Aristotle’s Politics yet each derives a quite distinct new understanding of the political from the same beginning. Each finds in the same passage from Aristotle—a passage which is perhaps the most quoted of all Greek Philosophy—an obscurity. Rancière makes a nice phenomenological point right from the start around which the entire demonstration of the book revolves [1-2]: humans and animals both have a voice to indicate a particularity, a sensation (which is always empirical and singular) such as pain, hurt. This is the aisthêtic (from which we get the word aesthetics) which is singular. Kant was the philosopher who showed from this that there can be no science of the beautiful; aesthetics is always empirical and singular; it is always subjective but from which we derive judgments which claim universality (but cannot scientifically or methodically show universality). And what is this but the schema of politics, or the image of politics: the claim that this singularity of hurt is universally wrong, but there is no science of wrong. Ontologically dependent on aisthêsis are claims (logos or theoria) which are the general, the shared, perhaps the universal. The former are deictic (indicative: they point to something, call attention to something, while leaving the something relatively indeterminate), the latter are expressive of something shared. Ranciêre asks “where exactly do we draw the line between the unpleasant feeling of having received a blow and the feeling of having received an “injury” [in the sense of a “wrong”] through the same blow” unless there is a feeling of the difference itself? That other feeling—the feeling of the difference between the blow and the subject’s having been wronged—is a shared aisthêsis which defines the political: the sphere in which right and wrong are distinguishable from raw sensation. This is highly paradoxical since aisthêsis is classically understood as singular. The notion of a “shared aisthêsis” is, like his notion of the “sentence-image” confounding. It is a “mediation of opposites” [3] and this “mediation of opposites” is politics (and also Kantian aesthetics). Rancière is describing a threshold between the singular event and the generally expressible; the threshold where the phenomenological becomes political. The fate of this “shared aisthêsis” is the fate of the political as such.
The feelings pleasant/unpleasant are relative and subjective; the feeling just/unjust is felt as objective and common; likewise the difference between the two, the “line” that articulates the two is felt as common. Utilitarian political philosophy tends to obliterate or dis-articualte the difference by placing weight on the teleology of a common good that is immanent to the feeling of harm, wrong, or injustice and the goal of a state is simply to maximize or optimize the useful while reducing the harmful. Hence no line need be drawn; the specifically political never appears as such. In practical terms, the optimized utilitarianism of a state is as commonly as good as is realistically possible; it would be virtually on a par with an Ideal Good. The useful is on a par with the just. But there is still no clear logical connection between the two. Rancière examines the terms employed by both Plato and Aristotle in their obliteration of the political: sumpheron and blaberon.
Blaberon connotes the actual damage suffered by an individual at the hands of another individual. In this way the feeling of having been wronged and the feeling of the difference between pleasant/unpleasant—just/unjust would remain in play. Sumpheron, on the other hand connotes a relationship to oneself, as in the utilitarian state where the state relates only to itself in maximizing its own common utility. The two terms are heterogenous, not opposites. It is possible to conceive of the state as a reciprocal zero-sum game, as does Thrasymachus [4]. The loss of one party is compensated for by the gain of another party, thus the two zero each other out, a common harm never appears, and the state is as it were Good by default. The goal of such a state is the parceling out of rights and wrongs; the just is deduced from, or is a consequence of, the partitioning of rights and wrongs among individuals. At the individual level, it is an arithmetic; what remains then is the common and proportional parceling out of advantages and disadvantages across the state as a whole: a geometry of “parts” or axiaï, from which a distribution of advantages is based upon what each “part” contributes to a community.
There are three parts in Aristotle: the oligarchy of the rich, the aristocracy of the good, and the freedom of the people (demos). These parts are said to contribute to a harmony. Keeping in mind that the “in common” is that all are speaking beings able to differentiate harm from wrong, how is it that the qualities wealth, goodness, and freedom—which are heterogeneous—can be harmonized? The basic problem is that freedom is not a positive quality, thus the free, the people, have noting to contribute, nothing to speak of—except in exceptional circumstances when genuine politics emerges. They have no name—they are the ‘they’, the ‘people’. The free are free only by default—they simply happened to have been born in Greece after slavery was abolished. The main point is that the poor are made to exist as that part of the whole that has no part, that has nothing to contribute to the whole except for its speech which is reduced to pleasure/displeasure. They (the demos, the ‘people’) are both nothing positive in themselves but at the same time they are the whole of the state. Thus the wrong disappears, or, the poor themselves are the wrong itself, political “stuff” itself. The virtuous aristocrats, Aristotle is compelled to admit [11] are in fact coextensive with the oligarchical rich. Hence there are really only two parts: the rich and those whose part amounts to nothing. There is then a struggle between rich and poor which constitutes politics, but the struggle is rigged since the poor are forced to exist as a party which is then compelled to represent the whole of the community even though they have nothing, have nothing to contribute to the community except for their bare existence itself and their empty freedom. So, there is no real opposition of rich versus poor. The State is the obliteration of the threshold of difference between harm and wrong and at the same time the institutionalization of wrong. It is a magnificent sleight of hand that covers over the sheer contingency of the entire set-up. Some are by happenstance born into wealth/virtue. These are those who possess wealth, intellect, logos. Others, the remainder, are by happenstance born into Athens after the abolition of slavery—they are not even slaves. They are the poor whom the law has brought into existence. They have nothing to say for themselves; each is nameless, that is, purely contingently equal to each other, interchangeable with each other. (This is what Hobbes will rechristen the equality which amounts to” the war of all against all”.) [15-17]
It does not matter that the poor may, for example, revolt and redistribute the wealth equally among all. The problem is deeper [14]. The poor are those who are without position; that is the fundamental wrong which they (the poor themselves) embody. They are politics itself which is, again, the threshold between indication and expression, animal and human, the relativity of pleasure/pain and the commonality of just/unjust. Now, in the prior order, the slave was at this threshold. The slave could understand logos but can not possess it [17]. This does not entitle the slave then to become equally included in the community. The slave remains part of the “natural pecking order”. In granting freedom to the slaves and converting them into the demos an interruption of the natural order is introduced. The demos unlike the slave-class is not a true part of the community, as we have seen. They are the same threshold as the slave but now “twisted”, introducing a “torsion” because they are given a property—freedom—which is actually nothing but impoverishment. Hence, instead of a competition of classes such as a slave revolt might engender, we have instead incommensuability and misunderstanding. The people are a class that is not even equal to itself, as was the slave class; the people are both the anonymous equality of anybody with everybody and also the communal whole. They are radically improper, caught between the arithmetical and the geometric orders and a confusion of both, as Plato dreaded, so that he devised his famous “one man, one art” principle, among others, in order to keep a veneer of naturalism to what threatened the State with coming apart at the seams.
Chapter 6: “Politics in Its Nihilistic Age”
In this chapter Rancière moves from “a democratic stage to humanitarian stage”. He recapitulates that there is politics when a party that is/has noting nonetheless “purports to be the whole of the community.” The party of these people who have nothing are themselves the nothing that separates the community from itself. They are themselves the threshold between the herd of animals who only indicate pleasure/pain/danger and on the other hand the community of humans who articulate the just from the unjust. “Politics ceases whenever this gap no longer has any place” and when the community is the sum of all its parts and nothing (not even the nothing of “the people”) remains. The consensus state is the attempt to eradicate the threshold. It operates on the need for “real parties” that have their own specific properties which in turn are a part of the whole. This strict coextensivity of the whole and the sum of its parts was to be called “humanity”. It was hoped that the world would be entirely comprised of individuals and groups that show a belonging to a common humanity. But “this is where the trouble starts”. [123-24]
Having been victorious over totalitarianism, the consensus state called Europe saw itself confronted not with a “landscape of humanity” but with “a landscape of fundamentalisms of identity”. And even within its boarders it finds the population of immigrants. The consensus state witnesses ethnic warfare, religious warfare, and in fact the very parody of the consensus state itself: state, regions, tribes which wish to eradicate “surplus identity”. What the consensus apologists overlooked was that between the individual and humanity (the whole) there is a threshold. Either the consensus state counts a part of those who have no part but who purport to be the whole; or the consensus state eliminates that part and geometrically arranges and distributes real identities (identical to themselves) wishing to play and capable of playing a part in the whole. What Europe discovered was a “new political figure”, a “non-political figure of the all identical to nothing […] everywhere under attack […] [and also] from now on called humanity” who/which may be defined as man born human yet everywhere existing as the inhuman. [125]
The epithet “humanity” is no longer polemically applied to women, blacks, the “damned of the earth”—who can identify and speak of themselves from out of their own identities. Thus “humanity” is only applied to the wordless victim, the man deprived of logos. Humanity has no mode of enunciation. This had a parallel in May ’68 when one well known student slogan was “We are all German Jews”. This is now no longer possible. “German Jew” today signifies the universal victim, the violence against whom (massacre, extermination) is said to be unthinkable and unpoliticizeable. But this then leads to the possibility of denials such as Holocaust deniers, which Rancière then analyzes [128-34]. Part of the analysis turns on the problem that the unthinkable would be the impossible and so, if we do really characterize the destruction of the European Jews as an unthinkable crime against humanity then we will be confronted by the denier who will say that the “crime against humanity” never took place. Rancière dispenses with this argument. The Holocaust is entirely thinkable; its logic was the logic of the incorporation of the demos into an ethnos and there was certainly sufficient will, hatred, technology, cruelty and cowardice to carry out the job. [133]
Rancière then examines Arendt but especially Lyotard for whom the “reason for the crime” was the attempt to eliminate the “philosophical” victim, the witness/hostage—the “jews” (as Lyotard names them)—to/of the Greco-Roman West. The “philosophical” thinking of the extermination becomes an Ethics. Briefly put, ethics becomes the other to which philosophy (the philosophy of freedom, mastery, and self-possession and any political philosophy based on them) must submit itself in mourning. The question of the human, sub-human, and super-human is an ethical one, not a political or philosophical one. And indeed, philosophy and politics have, since WW II taken on a new “modesty” (perhaps with the exception of Badiou). The state is more or less a group of managers of wealth, led by experts who delineate the possible from the impossible—“realists”. It takes as much as possible a distance from politics. Nowadays, the last thing a state needs is a political event to occur, since this would ruin the myth that politics is dead and buried. (Likewise, philosophy is no longer the philosophy of over-arching systems of thought. Philosophy has become a ‘minor’ form of discourse, we could say after Deleuze.) Rancière, of course, is leery of the political modesty of consensus wealth management. In a way, politics can free itself of political-philosophy and take up an “immodest stand” against managerialism. Politics can and should recommence political impropriety—the count of the super-numeric, the part of those who have no part; and it should retreat from a definition of a sense of the world that is a “community of humanity based on the victim” which is achieved in a body count of groups, locations, bonds, and identities.
The “other” humanity that threads its way throughout the essay is that of an interesse or a between and among of any number of identities, such as in the case of Blanqui [137-38]. The political is a dividing of a condition from itself. Rancière makes the point that the massacres in Bosnia did not create a bond that congealed around an identification with the victims as the persecution of Algerians by the French congealed around a dis-identification with the France responsible for the crimes. The political is not a bonding over a common wrong but instead an art of mixing identities and warping deductions; “It is local and singular cases of universality.” Consensus is the denial of humanity and it is not yet foreseeable how this circle can be shattered. But Rancière sees hope in that the logic of consensus will always run aground on the on the necessity that there be a part that counts for nothing but that represents the whole.
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