Jacques Rancière

Oliver Davis, Oliver Davis

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745646558, 9780745646541
• eBook ISBN: 9780745659138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

This book is a critical introduction to contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière. It is the first introduction in any language to cover all of his major work and offers an accessible presentation and searching evaluation of his significant contributions to the fields of politics, pedagogy, history, literature, film theory and aesthetics.

This book traces the emergence of Rancière's thought over the last forty-five years and situates it in the diverse intellectual contexts in which it intervenes. Beginning with his egalitarian critique of his former teacher Louis Althusser, the book tracks the subsequent elaboration of Rancière's highly original conception of equality. This approach reveals that a grasp of his early archival and historiographical work is vital for a full understanding both of his later politics and his ongoing investigation of art and aesthetics.

Along the way, this book explains and analyses key terms in Rancière's very distinctive philosophical lexicon, including the 'police' order, 'disagreement', 'political subjectivation', 'literarity', the 'part which has no part', the 'regimes of art' and 'the distribution of the sensory'.

This book argues that Rancière's work sets a new standard in contestatory critique and concludes by reflecting on the philosophical and policy implications of his singular project.

1

The Early Politics

From Pedagogy to Equality

This chapter traces the emergence of the central unifying concept in Rancière’s work, equality, from his reflections on pedagogy. These were shaped by his own experience of institutional education, as a student of Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser in the early and mid-1960s. He subsequently became one of his former teacher’s most trenchant critics; the May ‘68 revolt crystallized his objections to Althusser’s thought and much of Rancière’s work thereafter can broadly be understood as the attempt to give discursive form to the idea of radical equality implicit in May but unrecognized, at the time, by Althusser.

Rancière’s most suggestive reformulation of the concept of equality takes place in The Ignorant Schoolmaster [1987], a book about pedagogy. This chapter aims to show how the far-reaching positive conception of radical equality contained in that book emerges out of sustained critical reflection on, and polemical reaction against, the philosophical pedagogies (and pedagogical philosophies) of Althusser, Marx, Sartre and Bourdieu. Despite their reputation as pillars of the Left, Rancière argues that these thinkers share a repressive conception of pedagogical power and a commitment to the social privilege of intellect first articulated by Plato in Republic. As this chapter unfolds, Rancière’s critique of the pedagogy of inequality will be related to radical thinking about education from Latin America, Britain and the United States.

Althusser’s lesson

‘It is impossible to choose one’s beginnings,’ Louis Althusser once insisted, in typically vigorous italics, with reference to, and in commiseration with, the young Marx, whose university education was steeped in the ambient philosophy of German Idealism.¹ With hindsight a similar remark could be made of the young Rancière’s encounter with Althusser in the 1960s, as his student. From the moment of his first presentation at Althusser’s seminar, in 1961, through his remarkably compliant contribution to Reading Capital [1965], the structuralist classic based on that seminar’s reading of Marx’s text, to the publication of his excoriating critique La Leçon d’Althusser (1974), Althusser’s Lesson, Althusser was the figure of reference.² I cannot offer an exhaustive account of Althusser’s work and its many vicissitudes here; however, because he is so decisive an influence, those features of his doctrine and philosophical style relevant to an understanding of Rancière’s work will be briefly outlined.³

Althusser’s commiserating attitude to the young Marx’s intellectual upbringing was more than idle sympathy; it reflected a central point of Althusserian teaching. Althusser, who claimed to be rereading Marx ‘as a philosopher’, contended that Marx’s early and mature work were separated by an ‘epistemological break’ (coupure épistémologique). According to Bachelard’s philosophy of science, from which Althusser had adapted this concept, all sciences begin with a phase in which the world is understood from a perspective centred on human nature and concrete particular facts; only after an ‘epistemological break’ with this early phase does abstract and properly scientific conceptual knowledge of the world become possible.⁴ Althusser argued, contrary to most other interpreters, that Marx’s work after 1845, and, above all, Capital, was not continuous with that of the early period but rather constituted a radical break with it. Capital, he suggested, was a theoretical revolution which made possible knowledge of the world as it really is, or ‘Marxist science’; Marx’s early work, by contrast, exemplified an inferior, pre-scientific, form of understanding, which he termed ‘ideology’, one which sought to explain the world in terms of human nature and could therefore also be characterized as ‘humanist’ and ‘anthropological’.⁵ Belief in ‘the break’ is a hallmark of Althusserianism; non-Althusserian Marxists tend not to think there is so pronounced a rupture, although many would acknowledge there is a discernible general movement away from explanation in human terms towards more abstract, theoretical, formulations. For example, Marx’s early account of the way in which factory workers are alienated by their work is centred on the human worker and the way in which his work gives rise to feelings of being divided from himself, from his fellow producers and from the object he is producing; ‘alienation’ in this early sense is a form of unhappiness, the mainly psychological quality of feeling divided from oneself.⁶ By the time of Capital, the logic of Marx’s approach, which sees him begin, in the first nine chapters, with a very abstract exposition of key economic concepts such as the commodity, value and labour, suggests he thinks that such concepts are required if the underlying mechanisms which account for the real basis of feelings of alienation are to be understood.⁷ So in Capital, the alienating effects of work can only be properly understood in terms of the structure of economic relations in the society in question. These relations are not immediately accessible, in the sense that they cannot be intuited by the factory worker as s/he works, or by an untrained observer, because they require a developed theoretical understanding of underlying economic processes and structures.

It may sound as though Althusser had been trying to read Marx as an economist; yet he always insisted that he and his students were reading Marx ‘as philosophers’.⁸ What did he mean by this? Marx, Althusser rightly noted, was both a voracious and a remarkably perceptive reader. According to Althusser, in Capital Marx can be seen undertaking two distinct types of reading. The second type is the one which interests Althusser, and his account of it can be summarized as follows: when Marx reads the work of economist Adam Smith, for example, Marx discerns that Smith’s theory had hit upon a correct answer to a question which Smith himself did not know how to formulate but which Marx is able to pose explicitly.⁹ Althusser called this type of reading ‘symptomatic’, and, in so doing, he aligned Marx with a certain (perhaps caricaturally simplistic) kind of psychoanalyst whose therapy consists in helping the analysand formulate explicitly the problem which lies beneath the surface manifestation that is his or her symptom.¹⁰ So to read Marx ‘as a philosopher’ also meant reading his text ‘as a psychoanalyst’, taking what it says on the surface to be a ‘symptom’ of its underlying meaning: Althusser’s intention was to formulate explicitly, theoretically, this underlying meaning, the philosophy of Marx, which he thought was performed but not stated explicitly in Capital. Marx’s philosophy, according to Althusser, his discovery, was a theory of history as ultimately determined by relationships of material production (a theory sometimes called dialectical materialism). Capital needed to be read ‘symptomatically’ because, while it demonstrated this discovery in practice when it analysed particular examples of material production, such as cotton-weaving in Lancashire, it contained no explicit theoretical statement of what dialectical materialism was. In Reading Capital, by applying Marx’s symptomatic mode of reading to his own major text, Althusser claimed to be formulating Marx’s philosophy in theoretical terms. The understanding of Marx’s philosophy thus obtained from Capital was to be supplemented by an analysis of revolutionary struggle: like Marx’s masterwork, revolutionary movements were thought to be practical enactments of Marxist philosophy in which it was Althusser’s self-appointed task to read the theory. For Althusser, books and revolutionary movements alike were deemed susceptible to his eclectic mix of self-assertingly philosophical and notionally psychoanalytic analysis.

Rancière’s contribution to Reading Capital followed immediately after Althusser’s prefatory essay ‘From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy’.¹¹ Entitled ‘The Concept of Critique and the Critique of Political Economy from the 1844 Manuscripts to Capital’, the essay is a remarkably compliant rehearsal of Althusserian doctrine.¹² Taking fidelity to Althusser’s concept of the epistemological break to an extreme, Rancière even enacts the break in the very structure of his contribution, which is in two parts, corresponding to early and late Marx. He argues that in early Marx the activity of critique involves identifying contradictions and then working upwards to find the general and human meaning of the contradiction; the early Marx’s approach is therefore humanist and anthropological.¹³ In late Marx, by contrast, the process of critique is, to all intents and purposes, synonymous with the Althusserian practice of ‘symptomatic’ reading. At the heart of Rancière’s contribution lies an Althusserian reading of Marx’s celebrated concept of commodity fetishism. Classical political economy had succeeded, to some extent, in deriving the concept of value as the content hidden beneath the various forms of riches and in grasping that this value is realized in the exchange of goods. However, classical political economy had failed to understand that this exchange of commodities (the formula of which is given by Marx and cited by Rancière as ‘x commodities A = y commodities B’) is impossible unless it is understood that the value of the commodity is the socially necessary labour exerted in producing it rather than a property of the object as such. A commodity only has a certain value because, according to Marx, a certain minimum amount of labour is necessary to produce it; this minimum amount of labour is itself fixed by the ways in which material production operates in the society in question. Everyday perception sees value as a simple property of objects, whereas Marxist science understands it to be a function of the overall economic and social structure, ‘a metonymic manifestation of the structure’.¹⁴ Ordinary perception is ‘fetishistic’ in that it takes the complex structural property, value, to be a simple property of the object; Capital is scientific because the relationships between commodities it describes – relationships of value – are grasped in the context of the overall economic system, as functions of the social relations of production in capitalist society. Value is a structural and scientific concept and, as such, is not accessible to ordinary perception and cannot simply be read off objects: ‘We are no longer dealing with a text to be read in such a way as to reveal its underlying meaning but with a hieroglyph to be deciphered. This work of deciphering is science.’¹⁵ Rancière’s contribution is extreme in its Althusserian orthodoxy because it emphasizes the opacity of the world to ordinary perception and because it holds that only symptomatic reading can give rise to a reliable understanding of the world.

The attraction of Althusser’s enterprise to Rancière and a whole generation of aspiring activists on the Left is partly to be explained by the political climate of the time: it was clear in the 1960s to all but the most ideologically self-deluding that, under Stalin, the Soviet Union had become a brutally repressive police state and ‘Althusser’s objective was at this stage to find in Marx’s own thinking the principle of a theoretical understanding of Marxism’s aberrations’.¹⁶ Only a correct understanding of the true meaning of Marx’s philosophy could serve as a reliable guide to political action and as a safeguard against those aberrations. Revolutionary political practice without correct theory was felt to be doomed to the short-sighted pursuit of ill-understood goals:

Left to itself, a spontaneous (technical) practice produces only the ‘theory’ it needs as a means to produce the ends assigned to it: this ‘theory’ is never more than the reflection of this end, uncriticized, unknown, in its means of realization, that is, it is a by-product of the reflection of the technical practice’s end on its means. A ‘theory’ which does not question the end whose by-product it is remains a prisoner of this end and of the ‘realities’ which have imposed it as an end.¹⁷

Althusser’s enterprise held particular appeal to activists on the Left who were also intellectuals because it seemed to transcend the distinction between theory and practice by deftly redefining the kind of intellectual work undertaken in certain lecture theatres and seminars as a form of political action: ‘theoretical practice’. As Rancière put it: ‘We found in Althusser’s work the idea that intellectuals could have a different role, one other than cultural consumption or ideological reflection: real involvement as intellectuals in transforming the world.’¹⁸ That this was a false hope, and the notion of ‘theoretical practice’ something of a sleight of hand, did not become fully clear to Rancière until the events of May ‘68, as we shall see in a moment. Yet in the early and mid-sixties, Althusser’s approach not only promised Marxist intellectuals a role in the revolution as intellectuals, it set the interpretation of Marx free from the authority of the Party, a Party which, in France, had performed a series of about-turns flagrant enough to test the loyalty of even the truest of true believers. The unqualified support by the French Communist Party (PCF) of Stalin in the fifties had given way to vigorous de-Stalinization in the sixties; simultaneously, its commitment to violent revolutionary struggle had morphed into support for the pursuit of social change by democratic means. Perhaps most damagingly of all, during the Algerian War of Independence the PCF had supported Socialist prime minister Guy Mollet’s 1956 bill granting ‘special powers’ to the governor of Algeria, thereby effectively establishing a p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Published
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Early Politics
• 2 History and Historiography
• 3 The Mature Politics
• 4 Literature
• 5 Art and Aesthetics
• Afterword
• References
• Index