2007 The Author

Journal Compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Philosophy Compass 3/1 (2008): 8392, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00120.x
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Jacques Rancire: Literature and Equality
Todd May*
Clemson University
Abstract
Jacques Ranciere has become known for his writings both on politics and aesthetics.
What ties them together is that they both concern the concept of equality. However,
they address this concept in different ways. In this article, I address the concept of
equality as it appears both in his political and aesthetic writings, with a focus on the
latter.
If there is a Holy Grail for progressive political thinkers, it is the imagined
community of equality. We dont know what it looks like, much less how
we might get there. But it drives our thought and our action, perhaps more
tenaciously than any other motivation we have. Of course, there are specific
issues we discuss, organize about, and intervene upon. But when we step back
from these and ask ourselves where it all might come to rest, what might be
the end of our political involvements in both senses of the term end our
thoughts usually revolve around a community of equals, however vaguely
conceived.
It may be that we are only entitled to vague conceptions. After all, if
a community is truly to be one of equals, then it must be built by every one
of its members. A community of equals, even an imagined one, cannot simply
be my imagined community. In that community there is, in the end, only
one equal, which, as my kids would put it, kinda misses the point.
That such an imagined community remains vague, however, does not
require that it be completely opaque to our thought. We can approach this
community conceptually, as long as our concepts remain at a level that does
not prejudge its specific character. One might, for instance, read Marxs
gestures toward the communist society in precisely this way: as an attempt
to conceive communism without dictating to those who build it how it
should unfold. Anarchist thinkers, for their part, have tried to navigate the
difficulty of thinking a community of equals without drawing up a blueprint
that needs only to be followed. Peter Kropotkin is exemplary in this regard.
In this paper I would like to approach the imagined communities of equals
through a contemporary thinker, Jacques Rancire. Although his work has
only recently become available to the English-speaking world, it is beginning
to have an impact on the fields of both political and literary theory. Rancire
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has written extensively on both, focusing in the 1990s on politics and more
recently on literature as well as film. However, he carries a similar sensibility,
one oriented toward a thought of radical equality, to all the subjects he treats.
What I will do here is to take three elements of his work and try to draw
them together into a framework for thinking, from a literary point of view,
a community of equals. Those three elements are: Rancires conception
of equality, his discussion of le partage du sensible (variously translated as the
partition of the sensible and the distribution of the sensible), and his interpretation
of modern literature as a literature of equality.
Rancires conception of equality can be glimpsed through the contrast
he makes between what he calls the police and politics. He writes,
Politics is generally seen as the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and
consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution
of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution. I propose
to give this system of distribution and legitimization another name. I propose
to call it the police. (Disagreement 28)
The police offers, as Rancire points out, the terms in which we normally
think of politics. It concerns issues like who is entitled to what, how
power is distributed, what roles people are expected to play, and why these
entitlements, distributions, and role allotments are just. Those familiar with
traditional liberal political theory from Locke to Rawls will recognize in
this concept of the police the questions of distributive justice.
For Rancire, the police is not politics. What might be called politics as
usual is distinct from what he thinks of the real matter of politics, a
distinction he sometimes marks by calling the police work of politics as
usual le politique and the real matter of politics la politique.
I now propose to reserve the term politics for an extremely determined activity
antagonistic to policing: whatever breaks with the tangible configuration whereby
parties and parts or lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by definition,
has no place in that configuration . . . political activity is always a mode of expression
that undoes the perceptible divisions of the police order by implementing a
basically heterogeneous assumption . . . the equality of any speaking being with
any other speaking being. (2930)
Politics is the activity of undermining any given police order on the basis
of a presupposition of equality, a presupposition that everyone who can speak
is equal to everyone else who can speak. Put another way, politics is the
expression of equality by those who have often been considered less than
equal.
There are a couple of things to note about this view of politics. First, it
does not say who is held to be unequal. There are a multitude of inequalities,
from gender to racial to economic to social. Politics is the expression of
equality by any of the groups held to be less than equal, as well as those who
act in solidarity with them. In contrast to Marx, who holds one particular
type of inequality to be central the inequality embodied in exploitation
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Jacques Rancire 85
Rancires approach to politics is more plastic, less reductionist. Second,
this does not offer a particular picture of what political expression looks like.
The expression of equality is enacted by those whose expression it is. One
cannot prescribe in advance the nature of a community of equals. It arises
out of the imagination and action of those who act on the presupposition
of their equality.
One might ask here whether everyone is held to be equal in Rancires
view. How about the Nazi or the racist: is he or she to be accorded equality
as well? In one sense, the answer to this question is, yes. But we must be
careful here. The Nazi and the racist do not engage in politics in Rancires
sense. Politics emerges from the presupposition of equality. Since they dont
share that presupposition, they are not, in his sense, political actors. Although
they may be treated as equal by political actors, they are not themselves
engaged in the practice of politics as he conceives it.
One of the results of politics in the Rancirean sense is the creation or
emergence of a political subject. Politics occurs through specific subjects
or mechanisms of subjectification, he writes, explaining that,
By subjectification I mean the production, through a series of actions of a body
and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field
of experience, whose identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the
field of experience. (35)
We should linger over this passage a moment, particularly since the concept
of the subject has come into question in recent philosophy. What Rancire
is proposing is not a return of the subject in any of the ways it has been
criticized or complicated in structuralist, post-structuralist, or deconstructive
thought. For Rancire, there is no pre-existing subject or no concept of
a pre-existing subject to be deconstructed. Subjects are not a foundation upon
which politics are built; rather, they are the products of the political process.
It is politics that create a subject rather than the other way around. Where
there were once workers, there is now a proletariat. Where there were once
women, there is a feminist movement. Where there were once agricultural
workers bound to small village communities, there are now Palestinians.
These subjects produce a capacity for enunciation that, Rancire says,
is not previously identifiable in a given field of experience. It is not that the
capacity did not exist. It is that it was not identifiable. By acting on the
presupposition of equality, a group of people now becomes identified with
a capacity it had been thought to lack. Rancire associates this capacity
with that of enunciation. Although there is much that can be said about this
association, and with the previous passages reference to the equality of all
speaking beings, let me just gloss it for the moment as referring to those who
can communicate together in the building of a common and meaningful life.
The third element in this passage is the reconfiguration of experience.
When a group previously taken to be less than equal expresses its own
equality, it reconfigures the experience of everyone involved. We can see
86 Jacques Rancire
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this through a historical example. The civil rights movement, by displaying
the equality of African Americans, changed not only their legal status but also
the experience of both whites and African Americans. They perceived
themselves, one another, and the world differently. A world where people
of various skin colors are equal is different from a world in which they are
not, not just as a cognitive matter but as a sensory one as well. As Rancire
points out, in critique of those who have ascribed to the Nazis or to the
society of the spectacle a peculiarly aesthetic orientation of politics, There
never has been any aestheticization of politics in the modern age because
politics is aesthetic in principle (58).
This leads us to the second element of Rancires thought: le partage du
sensible, which I will translate as the partition of the sensible, although we should
keep in mind that partage can also mean distribution as well as sharing, all of
which resonate in this concept. Rancire defines it this way.
I call the partition of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense
perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common
and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.
(Politics 12; translation modified)
If this definition sounds similar to that Rancires definition of the police,
it should. He tells us, a few lines further on, The partition of the sensible
reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on
what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed
(12; translation modified). However, we should also note that, in contrast
to his definition of the police, the partition of the sensible orients one to
how things are experienced rather than to the distribution itself.
In Rancires view, how things are perceived, how they are sensed, is a
political matter. Politics, he has told us, is aesthetic in principle. What is
given to us to sense how it is divided up, what is allotted where, they way
things seem to belong together or apart is not politically neutral. They
are part of a web of sense perception that gives a self-evidence to us, a
self-evidence that binds us into a community of unequals. Our inequality,
then, is not simply a matter of how we are treated. It reaches down into
our perceptual engagement with the world.
The idea that politics is aesthetic has two sides, both of which are relevant
for us. We might mark them by saying that every aesthetics is political and
that every politics is aesthetic. To say that every aesthetics is political is to
recognize that every partition of the sensible is politically charged. To say
that every politics is aesthetic is to recognize, conversely, that a political
intervention does not simply intervene on what laws there are or the way
people think. A political intervention affects how the sensible is partitioned.
As Rancire says, a politics reconfigures experience.
However, if politics and aesthetics are tied in this way, there is opened
the possibility for a form of political intervention that does not fall under
the traditional rubric of politics. If every aesthetics is a politics and every
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Jacques Rancire 87
politics an aesthetics, doesnt this allow one to intervene politically on the
aesthetic level? In other words, might one not start political intervention by
reconfiguring experience rather than winding up there? As Rancire points
out,
The important thing is that the question of the relationship between aesthetics
and politics be raised at this level, at the level of the sensible delimitation of what
is common to the community, the forms of its visibility and of its organization.
It is from this perspective that it is possible to reflect on artists political
interventions. (18)
This is where literature, and the arts more generally, become political, and
where they can participate in imagining a community of equals.
We should not think of the arts, for Rancire, as an avant-garde, in the
sense that they mark out a path for others to follow. Art ought not, any more
than political organizing, to consist in a group of leaders who show the
way for everyone else to follow. Rancire, at one time a student of Louis
Althusser, rejected his erstwhile teacher precisely because of the latters refusal
to recognize the equality of all speaking beings, his persistence in retaining
a divide between those who work and those who think and speak. Art
does not lead; rather, it intervenes on the partition of the sensible by
challenging it or offering other partitions to stand alongside it.
The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they
are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common
with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parceling
out of the visible and the invisible. Furthermore, the autonomy they can enjoy
or the subversion they can claim credit for rest on the same foundation. (19)
This leads to the third element of Rancires thought I want to discuss:
his treatment of modern literature as a literature of equality. Rancire rejects
the interpretation of modern art as art for arts sake. It is easy to see why.
The idea of art for arts sake assumes an autonomy for art that his view
of politics and aesthetics rejects. If our sensibility is a political matter, then
practices that intervene upon that sensibility are themselves political. There
is something right in the thought of art for arts sake, but not as it stands.
Rancire divides the history of art into three broad regimes of identi-
fication: the ethical, the representational, and the aesthetic or modern.
The ethical regime is associated with Plato. In it, there is no category of
art per se but rather that of images. The question for the ethical regime is
one of how images function within a society. [I]t is a matter of knowing
in what way images mode of being affects the ethos, the mode of being of
individuals and communities (21). One can see the hand of Plato at work
here, particularly in Socrates concern for placing the proper images and
music before students of the kallipolis in The Republic. It is not simply a
matter of banishing all artists, but of understanding the proper functioning
of images in leading students toward a self-discipline and an intellectual
orientation that will allow them to comprehend Ideas.
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The second regime, the representational, is associated with Aristotle. In
this regime,
It is the substance of the poem, the fabrication of a plot arranging actions that
represent the activities of men, which is the foremost issue, to the detriment
of the essence of the image, a copy examined with regard to its model. (21)
In the representational regime, there are four guiding poetic principles. First,
the poem is a story; it is not about language. Second, all fiction conforms
to a genre that is defined not by rules but by its represented subject. Third,
there must be a certain suitability to the characters represented, an appro-
priateness that relates them to one another and to the audience. Finally,
there is the primacy of speech as act; as with the first principle, speech is
not about language.
The rise of aesthetic regime is that of modern art.
The aesthetic regime of the arts is the regime that strictly identifies art in the
singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject
matter, and genres. Yet it does so by destroying the mimetic barrier that
distinguished ways of doing and making affiliated with art from other ways of
doing and making, a barrier that separated its rules from the order of social
representations. The aesthetic regime asserts the absolute singularity of art and,
at the same time, destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity. (23)
The aesthetic regime of art, then, operates by a double movement. On the
one hand, it posits art as a singularity by destroying the various rules that once
defined the arts. In particular, it no longer binds itself to representational
mimesis that was characteristic of the previous regime of identification. On
the other hand, this very destruction breaks down the barrier that separated
art from other cultural and social activities. Art is no longer defined by
representational mimesis. Therefore, it intersects more closely with other
aspects of the social order. We might put the point this way: the very
mechanism by which art in the aesthetic regime asserts its singularity is
that by which it cannot be conceived as art for arts sake.
In literature, this movement is reflected in a denial of the four literary
principles delineated above.
To the primacy of fiction is opposed the primacy of language. To its distribution
into genres is opposed the anti-generic principle of the equality of all represented
subjects. To the principle of suitability is opposed the indifference of style in
regard to the represented subject. To the ideal of speech in act is opposed the
model of writing. (La parole muette 28)
As an example of the aesthetic regime, we might choose Flaubert, who
is one of Rancires privileged writers. For Flaubert, there is no subject
matter that has any more inherent claim to artistic portrayal than any other.
Adultery among the bourgeois is equally worthy of artistic engagement as
the exploits of a warrior or a nobleman. Further, the building of a novel in
Flauberts case is done less through the story that is represented and more
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Jacques Rancire 89
by the elements he describes that come together into a whole, a whole that
is more musical than narrational. When Rancire analyzes the scene in
Madame Bovary where Charless love for Emma becomes apparent, he argues
that that love appears in nothing that is said, but in the description of gestures
and even inanimate objects. As Rancire puts it, The representative story
is constituted by atoms of anti-representation (115). Finally, Flaubert displays
a concern with language in his notion of style. Flaubert describes style as
an absolute manner of seeing things (qtd. in La parole muette 106). However,
this way of seeing things, this vision, is as much linguistic as ocular. It requires
a particular concern with language, one that does not efface the words before
the story that is told but rather concerns itself with the effects of the words
themselves. Thus, speech as language rather than as act comes to the fore.
These changes in literature introduce a type of equality that occurs on
at least two levels in the writing. First, the equality of subject matter
undercuts the hierarchy of subject matter. All lives can merit artistic treatment,
not just those of the elites. [T]he absolutization of style corresponds to a
principle of democratic equality. The adultery committed by a farmers
daughter is as interesting as the heroic actions of great men (Politics 55).
Second, the concern with language over representation coincides with a
time of rising literacy. The word is no longer the special province of a small
group of people aligned with elites. It has become available to a wider
public. Rancire sometimes refers to the word as orphaned, and claims that,
The democratic illness and the literary performance are the same principle: this
life of the letter muette-bavarde, of the democratic letter that perturbs every ordained
relationship between the order of discourse and the order of states. (La parole
muette 97)
Together, the equality of subject matters and the rise of the orphaned letter
help create a literature in which everyone can participate and in which
everyone can see himself or herself.
Rancire is quick to emphasize that the literary equality of modernity
is not the same thing as the presupposition of equality that characterizes
progressive political movements. He says of Flaubert, for instance, that he
constructs a literary indifference that maintains a distance from any political
subjectivization. He asserts a molecular equality of affects that stands in oppo-
sition to the molar equality of subjects constructing a democratic political scene.
(Politics 56)
We must be careful in reading this passage. Rancire is not arguing that
there is no communication that can be had between political subjectification
and literary practice. Rather, his claim on behalf of modern literature is
twofold. First, it embodies a particular type of equality. Second, this equality
is not reducible to the political equality characteristic of democratic move-
ments. In a recent text, Rancire writes,
The political disagreement [msentente] and the literary misunderstanding
[malentendu a technical term that Rancire sometimes puts in scare-quotes]
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then each take up of the consensual paradigm of proportion between words
and things. The disagreement invents names, enunciations, arguments, and
demonstrations that institute new collectivities where anyone can be made to
count . . . The misunderstanding works the count from the other side, in
suspending the forms of individuality by which the consensual logic bounds
bodies to significations. Politics works the whole, literature works the unities.
(Politique 52)
We need to keep both these moments in mind if we are to avoid reducing
art to politics and politics to art. However, recognizing as well that there is
an inescapable interaction between forms of sensibility and politics, we can
say that, although the molecular equality of affects stands in opposition to
the molar equality of subjects, the two are also intertwined, and are so in
a way that can begin to point to an imagined community of equality.
Here one might imagine a couple of objections being raised. First, much
of modern art, particularly literature, is difficult, even forbiddingly so, to read.
Think here of Joyce or Proust or Woolf. How is such literature to constitute
a specifically political contribution to equality? Second, does the unworking
of a particular political consensus necessarily contribute to political equality,
or may its contribution go in another direction? Could literary misun-
derstanding actually vitiate equality and contribute to inequality?
The difficulty of modern literature does not constitute a bar to making
a political contribution, if we understand literatures contribution to equality
the right way. The issue is not one of bringing literature to the people.
Equality in literature is not a matter of writing something that everyone
can read, or read without effort. Rather, it consists in unmaking a certain
partition of the sensible in ways that open up other remakings, of under-
cutting the consensual logic that itself underpins so many hierarchies.
Literature does not do this in order to serve political ends: the distinction
between literature and politics must remain alive. However, in doing what
it does, particularly in the aesthetic regime, literature opens a space for other
ways of seeing that are not bound to current hierarchies.
This answer, however, only makes the second objection more urgent.
If literatures work does not consist directly in supporting political equality,
is it possible that it can support the opposite, political inequality, or that
it supports nothing at all politically? I dont think that there is an in-principle
argument against this possibility. However, there is a good reason to believe
that, if Rancires interpretation of literature is right, it is unlikely. Our world
is one of hierarchies and oppressions. The current partitions of the sensible
work to sustain those hierarchies. That is how our consensual logic works.
It elicits agreement on presupposed necessities whose consequences are
the inequalities that define our world. Undercutting that consensual logic,
particularly in the way modern literature does by undercutting the
hierarchies of traditional literature itself creates openings through which
politics can be created. It does not create politics, but it softens the barriers
against which politics must often throw itself.
1
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Jacques Rancire 91
The imagined community of equality for literature, then, does not lie
at the level of a political subject but rather at the level of the partition of
the sensible. To experience oneself as worthy of literary treatment is to
live in a different world of sensibility from experiencing oneself as beneath
such treatment. In the latter case, ones world is that of work and procreation,
perhaps periodically interspersed with the release of entertainment. In the
representational regime of art, for instance, it is to be exposed to the banality
of comedy rather than the rigors of tragedy. By contrast, when ones own
life or the lives of ones socioeconomic, gender, or racial peers is the
subject matter of art, then one is encouraged to approach ones life differently,
to take it as a more vital matter, perhaps as worthy of reflective concern. And
one does so alongside others, alongside all those with whom one shares a
society.
Moreover, to be immersed in a world of language, in a world where the
letter is orphaned rather than a child of the elites, is to participate in the literary
rather than seeing it as someone elses domain. It is to be part of a world
from which one had previously been excluded. One of Rancires early
works, entitled Nights of Labor, is a recounting of how many workers,
especially among labor organizers, spent their evenings in literary pursuits.
These pursuits threatened the elites perhaps as much as workers strikes,
because they gave the lie to the inequality on which so many labor
arrangements are made. The equality of intellectual pursuits, which drove
Rancire from the camp of Althusserian politics, appears in modern literature
in the form of the orphaned letter.
As mentioned earlier, and as Rancire has emphasized, the literary
equality that affects the partition of the sensible is not simply another form
of political organizing. It does not create democratic subjects of equality. Its
imagined community of equality is aesthetic rather than political. However,
since the political and the aesthetic are inseparable, and since both modern
literature and democratic politics concern constructions of equality, we
can say that literature is capable of introducing a particular egalitarian political
sensibility into art without itself ever becoming simply another form of
the art of politics.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Bill Schroeder for helpful comments on an earlier
draft of this paper.
Short Biography
Todd May is Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University. He is the author
of eight books of philosophy, including a forthcoming work on the political
thought of Jacques Rancire from Edinburgh University Press. He specializes
in contemporary Continental philosophy.
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Notes
* Correspondence address: Department of Philosophy and Religion, Clemson University, 126
Hardin Hall, Clemson, South Carolina 29634-0528, USA. Email: mayt@clemson.edu.
1
This softening of barriers is also something against which literature struggles, which is one of
the constitutive contradictions of literature itself. But from the other side, it [ literature] opposes
to the democracy of writing a new poetic that invents other rules of adequation between the
significance of words and the visibility of things (Politique 30).
Works Cited
Rancire, Jacques. Disagreement. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1999.
. La parole muette. Paris: Hachette, 1998.
. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum Press, 2004.
. Politique de la littrature. Paris: Galile, 2007.