Jacques Ranciere: An Introduction

Joseph J. Tanke

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441135049
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Esthétique en philosophie

Jacques Rancière: An Introduction offers the first comprehensive introduction to the thought of one of today's most important and influential theorists. Joseph Tanke situates Rancière's distinctive approach against the backdrop of Continental philosophy and extends his insights into current discussions of art and politics. Tanke explains how Rancière's ideas allow us to understand art as having a deeper social role than is customarily assigned to it, as well as how political opposition can be revitalized. The book presents Rancière's body of work as a coherent whole, tracing key notions such as the distribution of the sensible, the aesthetics of politics, and the supposition of equality from his earliest writings through to his most recent interventions. Tanke concludes with a series of critical questions for Rancière's work, indicating how contemporary thought might proceed after its encounter with him. The book provides readers new to Rancière with a clear overview of his enormous intellectual output. Engaging with many un-translated and unpublished sources, the book will also be of interest to Rancière's long-time readers.

CHAPTER 1

FOR A CRITIQUE OF PHILOSOPHY

INTRODUCTION

Can philosophy enter into meaningful dialogue with the arts and political practice or is it irredeemably marred by the space and time of its production? Does its historical and institutional positioning put it at odds with the assumptions, actions, and discourses that might transform our world for the better? Does its refusal to think the site of its own production prevent it from entering into collaboration with other arts and practices, compelling it to monopolize the discourse on social-political reality? Are its procedures fundamentally inimical to equality, and are they themselves reliant upon its repudiation? Does philosophy’s long history endow it with an orientation that requires us to find a new idiom for theorizing art and politics?

Essential for our study will be determining how one should read the early works of Jacques Rancière with respect to this line of questioning. Do the analyses conducted in La leçon d’Althusser (hereafter, La leçon) and The Philosopher and His Poor (hereafter, The Philosopher) announce a departure from philosophy as such or just philosophy as it is traditionally conceived and practiced? Should one interpret the archival texts The Nights of Labor (hereafter, Nights) and The Ignorant Schoolmaster (hereafter, Schoolmaster) as the embodiment of a fundamental suspicion regarding this reactionary science? And, what do these early texts teach about the eventual nature of Rancière’s endeavor? Does his discourse ultimately dispense with philosophy entirely or are there some profitable connections to be found with it?

We would do well to consider the possibility broached at the end of The Philosopher, a trenchant critique of the elitist nature of philosophy. After over two hundred damning pages in which philosophy was exposed as constituting itself through the castigation of those who perform manual labor, Rancière writes:

It remains important today to be able to judge if what our institutions, our images, and our discourses imitate is democratic hope or its mourning.

Reflections in which philosophy can find itself implicated without pretending to give lessons about it.¹

In this slight opening, Rancière gives voice to the possibility that, despite its “traditional aristocratic requirement,” philosophy might play a part in the democratic adjudication of forms, statements, and arrangements.² Moreover, he indicates that there is a need for what I call a “topographical analysis” of our world, that is, the clarification and critique of the lines dividing those with the right to think from those deemed incapable of it. Can philosophy offer strong evaluations regarding what is better and worse, while maintaining a fundamental commitment to the equality of persons? Can it content itself with taking part in a conversation about our shared sensible world, without reviving the violence of its past?

This chapter elaborates this challenge and this possibility, reading the major works Rancière devoted to contesting philosophical privilege. It defends a thesis that might seem untenable given the thoroughgoing critique to which Rancière subjects philosophy. It argues that Rancière’s distinct form of analysis maintains a productive relationship with philosophy, even as it continually exposes the moments of exclusion that have defined the discipline. Moreover, I argue that a limited, self-critical version of philosophy remains central to Rancière’s attempts to disrupt the lines of division operative in our world. His practice is, in the first instance, dedicated to rooting out the moments of inequality that structure philosophy’s discourses, and, in the second, a refusal to occupy the place traditionally reserved for it. What emerges is a form of philosophy that continually displaces itself in order to make room for other practices working to create the distribution of the sensible. It is a form of thinking content to take part in a conversation with other efforts to clarify and critique our world.

When philosophy gives up its efforts to monopolize the interpretation of the sensible, it enters into unprecedented relationships with other forms of thought. This is a key aspect of Rancière’s unique mode of philosophizing: it refuses to recognize the boundaries that have traditionally separated philosophy from other practices. This results in an output that bears greater resemblance to the knowledges of autodidacts than the specialized publications of university professors.³ Rancière has described this practice as “indisciplinary,” a method of analysis that works in explicit defiance of customary divisions. Whereas interdisciplinarity keeps existing disciplines in place and shuttles between them, indisciplinarity aims to show how the disciplines themselves are constituted. The stakes of this analysis are political, for the delimitation of a discourse simultaneously creates the criteria for who can speak it. “My problem,” Rancière explains, “has always been to escape the division between disciplines, because what interests me is the question of the distribution of territories, which is always a way of deciding who is qualified to speak about what.”⁴ Needless to say, it is this critique Rancière applies to philosophy, where he attends to the manner in which philosophical discourse attempts to naturalize a demarcation between those possessing knowledge and those condemned to remain its object. He analyzes how this discursive practice fashions for itself the spaces from which the few guide the many and the learned instruct the ignorant. In attempting to twist free from this distribution, he confronts the contemporary practice of philosophy with the history of its exclusions. The indisciplinary practice of philosophy is thus the attempt to break with these distinctions by thinking their history, measuring their effects, and indicating other possible configurations.

If philosophy remains central to Rancière’s enterprise, it is not simply because it is the field in which he obtained his academic formation. Philosophy, as many of its historical sources attest, remains too problematic to be endorsed wholesale, and Rancière is compelled to reject not only many of its positions, but the position it assumes for itself in articulating those positions. One element he takes from philosophy, however, is its respect for logic. Logic is operative in his investigations in two major ways. First, his writings retain powers of formalization, supplying appropriate levels of abstraction from historical events as well as literary and artistic forms in order to achieve the insights we have come to expect from philosophy. In the second instance, this form of presentation is related to Rancière’s attempt to discern the various logics at stake within a given historical space. His work frequently follows presuppositions, positions, and distributions through to their conclusions in order to evaluate their practical consequences. This involves comparing them in terms of the possibilities they create or foreclose. His writings reveal how ostensibly radical viewpoints often rely upon and reinforce anti- egalitarian presuppositions, how discourses that appear quite traditional, such as aesthetics, can work in a progressive manner, and how these two tendencies are never found in pure states. Rancière analyzes the logics and counter-logics by means of which the distribution of the sensible is constructed and contested. His goal is to avoid inegalitarian positions and bolster egalitarian suppositions.

Rancière’s form of philosophizing, which situates itself squarely on the side of human emancipation, is based on an unorthodox premise: people are not lacking in knowledge or the ability to think; what they require is confidence in their capacities for change. In this sense, it is tempting to view Rancière’s trajectory as already contained in the early works announcing a break with former teacher Louis Althusser. “I began by moving outside of the boundaries of the discipline of ‘philosophy,’ ” Rancière recalls, “because the questions I was concerned with revolved around Marxist conceptions of ideology—the issue of why people found themselves in a particular place and what they could or couldn’t think in that place.”⁵ Indeed, the differences between Althusser and Rancière are so pronounced that one might read many of Rancière’s core convictions, especially with respect to philosophy, as emerging through a reversal of his former teacher’s positions. While such a simplistic formulation fails to capture the complexity of the relationship between Althusser’s position and Rancière’s thought, it will be indispensable for us to chart these divergences at the outset. In these early writings, what takes root are many of the notions that we follow throughout our study: the sense in which theoretical propositions rely upon and perpetuate sensible-practical divisions, the need to curb philosophy’s scientific pretensions, and the manner in which the supposition of equality enables us to articulate new connections between the sensible, the thinkable, and the possible.

1.1 THE LESSON OF ALTHUSSER

It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Louis Althusser on the French philosophical scene of the 1960s. In 1948, upon passing his agrégation in philosophy, Althusser was awarded a position as agrégé répétiteur at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris. As caïman—a term of endearment among normaliens—he was responsible for preparing students for their agrégation in philosophy. In this role, he participated in the intellectual formation of many who would become France’s most distinguished intellectuals in the twentieth century.⁶ 1948 was also the year Althusser became a member of the Parti communiste français (PCF). The cold war placed students under pressure to choose sides in an ideological battle, and many would join the Party under Althusser’s influence. Depending upon the accounts one reads, Althusser was alternately an enormously charismatic teacher capable of winning over students or something of an intellectual bully who manipulated them with guilt over their class privilege. Regardless of one’s perspective, it is the case that Althusser was indispensable for opening the school to new theoretical perspectives, such as linguistics, Lévi-Strauss’ structural anthropology, and the readings of Freud pioneered by Jacques Lacan.⁷ Étienne Balibar explains that Althusser made ENS a “centre for a philosophy that was ‘living,’ not ‘academic,’ ” and compared the atmosphere to “a proper ‘philosophical life,’ ” in the sense which the ancients would have understood it.⁸ Rancière himself recalls fondly the “intellectual dynamism” centered around Althusser, and credits the differences he articulated with phenomenology as offering “a kind of liberation from university culture.”⁹

At the beginning of the 1960s, Althusser became known to readers beyond the rue d’Ulm through a series of journal articles (later collected in For Marx) in which he advanced an original, if idiosyncratic interpretation of Marx. His reading hinged on what he construed as the radical break between Marx’s early, ideological writings, and the mature, scientific project of Capital. The early writings, in Althusser’s assessment, are marred by their reliance on the vocabulary of German idealism, thus preventing the development of a scientific understanding of social, political, and economic reality. Later, however, Marx developed a scientific perspective by quitting the terrain of philosophy. The “epistemological rupture,” a notion borrowed from Gaston Bachelard’s histories of science, was announced in The German Ideology of 1845, where Marx and Engels resolved to “settle accounts” with their “erstwhile philosophical consciousness.”¹⁰ According to Althusser, the later works belong to a fundamentally different “problematic,” his word for the general conceptual framework in which concepts gain their meaning and applicability.¹¹ Although it would undergo subsequent revision, Althusser’s position in For Marx was that Marx’s thought could be parsed according to the following schema:

1840–44: early works

1845: the works of the break

1845–57: transitional works

1857–83: mature works¹²

This science/ideology distinction is central to nearly all of Althusser’s thought, and much of his work consists of separating properly scientific notions from the vestiges of idealism hampering Marxist thought. The rupture, Althusser cautioned, must be continually produced if Marxism is not to lapse into the speculative thought that preceded it. Activating this break thus involved scrubbing Marx’s corpus of concepts such as labor, alienation, consciousness, species-being, and the vague anthropology they define. Althusser can be read as attempting to distance Marxism from the humanist platform espoused by the PCF, as well as working to undermine its attempt to find common cause with socialists, social democrats, and the Catholic left. One part of this strategy involved distancing Marx from his predecessors. For example, he opposed the interpretation, spawned by Marx and Engels themselves, according to which historical materialism would be Hegelianism in inverted form.¹³ Readers should take seriously, Althusser counseled, the famous XIth thesis on Feuerbach in which philosophy was condemned for only having interpreted the world. This proclamation signals not the transformation of philosophy, “but a long philosophical silence during which only the new science speaks.”¹⁴ The science inaugurated by the break is of course the science of history, likened by Althusser to the discoveries of mathematics and physics.¹⁵

According to Reading Capital, the scientific status of Marx’s analysis follows not simply from a different interpretation of economic facts, but the delimitation of a new object. Marx starts by treating as questions what bourgeois political economists regarded as solutions. His method, as Althusser describes it, consists of working through the blind spots in their writings in order to supply concepts for the economic phenomena they left unexplained. Marx, for example, applies the name “surplus-value” to what Smith and Ricardo could think only as profit, rent, and interest. While Marx was not the first to isolate this concept, Althusser contends he was the first to handle it properly, using it to reconstruct the causal nexus to which it belongs. After identifying surplus-value as the key to the explanation of capital, Marx used it to elaborate the entirety of the capitalist mode of production, itself viewed as a historically variable system of effects. Crucially for Althusser, this understanding of the mode of production is what allowed Marx to describe capitalism’s distinct form of structural causality, that is, the manner in which the capitalist system is determined by the reciprocal functioning of economic, political, ideological, and scientific components.¹⁶ This, in Althusser’s estimation, is the object of Marx’s science: the structural relations of partial effects governing a given society at a particular moment in history. The scientificity of Marx’s analysis thus results from the identification of a concept-problem, and the rigorous analysis of the causal system to which it belongs. The first volume of Capital (1867) was, for Althusser, the creation of both a new object and theoretical problematic. When both are pursued systematically such that the object’s nuances become known in greater detail, one is operating on the plane of science.¹⁷ It would be a mistake to think that all aspects of the object must be elabor...