Interview with Jacques Rancière
Against
an ebbing tide: An interview with Jacques Rancière
Jacques Rancière
Interviewed by Paul Bowman &
Richard Stamp
First published as ‘Against an
Ebbing Tide: An Interview with Jacques Rancière’, Reading Rancière: Critical Dissensus, ed. Paul Bowman and Richard
Stamp, London: Continuum, 2011.
1.
Some recent scholarship has
argued that your political position is best described as ‘anarchist’. How do
you respond to this?
At a fundamental philosophical
level my position can be called anarchist stricto
sensu since I hold that politics exists insofar as the exercise of power
does not rest upon any arkhê. In
Greek, the arkhê is the identity of
commencement and commandment: the fact that the exercise of power is the
exercise of an already active superiority that precedes it, and which in return
it confirms. This is what happens when the exercise of power is identified with
the power of science, of birth, of wealth or any other entitlement to govern
founded upon an unequal distribution of positions. Conversely, a government is
political when it claims the people as its subject, that is to say the
collection of those who have no more reason to govern than to be governed. It
is in this sense that democracy – the power of those who have no particular
entitlement to wield it – is the very principle of politics and not a
particular form of government. Working on this principle involves putting two
ideas at the base of politics at the same time: the idea of a final
illegitimacy of every employment of power and that of a competency that belongs
to anyone. It’s clear that this approach is a long way from all those for which
politics is first of all the conquest of the State, the exercise of power or
avant-garde science. What is precisely proper to the State in general is to
seal the democratic breach that lies at the basis of every exercise of power,
to make this final illegitimacy that defines power as political, disappear. It
is in this way a permanent work of depoliticisation, which also means a
permanent work to transform the power of the people into the impotence of the
people. My ‘anarchism’ doesn’t signify a disinterest in what States do. Quite
the contrary, I have always sought to redirect attention upon the State
practices, whilst those who reproach me for my anarchism generally practice a
convenient short-circuit between the general tendencies of Capital and those
phenomena labelled as society. I’ve insisted upon the properly state forms of a
‘cold racism’ whereas many analyses, faced with the question of racism, content
themselves with hackneyed analyses that turn it into the distressed expression
of declining social categories.[1]
I’ve insisted on the contemporary forms of State reinforcement whilst, from all
sides, we’re told about its effacement in the age of the global market; and
I’ve indicated all the anti-democratic practices of our governments whilst
others mollify us with the fable of triumphant ‘liberalism’ and the great
democracy of consumers inundated by freedoms of all kinds. I’ve done it
precisely on the basis of tightening the knot between three terms that are
ordinarily disjointed: politics, democracy and anarchism. That said, this idea
of anarchism has not been strongly shared by historically active anarchisms.
All sorts of theories and practices have declared themselves anarchist in the
modern epoch: some have placed greatest importance on the idea of the
collective capacity of the anonymous. But others have shared with Marxism the
cult of science, or have repeated the ‘liberal’ opposition of the enlightened
individual to the stupid mass. Still today we find that both doctrines of
direct action based on a Nietzschean denouncement of democratic gregariousness,
and thoughts that aim at replacing politics with ecology (just as some
anarchisms, in the nineteenth-century, wished to substitute it with the economy)
are declared anarchist.
2.
Often, the same sorts of themes
and concerns recur within your works, even as the conceptual language and
approach shifts – for example, the conceptual chain of ‘theatrocracy’ –
‘police’ – ‘distribution of the sensible’. This variation and continuity gives
the impression that you have an underlying ‘project’. You have certainly made
it very clear from time to time that you want to intervene into various debates
– theoretical, political, national. So, do you have a project? Either way, how
then do you see the nature of your interventions?
There are two questions here: one
bears upon the preoccupations that guide my research, the other upon the forms
of my intervention. Let’s begin from the point of departure represented by my
choice, in the 1970s, to turn away at once from the academic philosophical
scene, from intra-Marxist debates and from the mediatised intellectual scene in
order to shut myself away in archives and libraries researching the forms of
thought of yesterday’s workers. From the beginning there was a refusal and an
idea, both very simple: the refusal to follow an ebbing tide [la vague du reflux], a refusal to decree
that all these ideas of emancipation and revolution were an error or a crime,
and thus a resolute opposition to notions of the end – the end of illusions, of
utopias, of politics, of history. The idea was that these ways of rejecting an
entire revolutionary tradition in the name of denouncing Marxism’s crimes
extended the life of precisely those intellectual schemas that had been
transmitted by the Marxist tradition. A common thread throughout my work is
this attention to the ways in which arguments circulate between reasons of
order and the reasons of those who claim to attack it: this critical attention
was already at the heart of La Leçon
d’Althusser, and it’s still at the core of Hatred of Democracy or The
Emancipated Spectator. Resisting this refluent thought first of all meant
going back prior to Marxist and anti-Marxist certainties, trying to find out
what and whom was being spoken about in the use of words like ‘workers
movement’ or ‘proletariat’, ideology or ‘class consciousness’. Who were these
people, what did they do, think, want, say? It was a task of recovering the
texture of a perceptual experience [une
expérience sensible]: what singular experiences make a condition become
intolerable? For what kinds of gaze did this intolerability become visible? By
what use of words might it be expressible? This is where we can see the origin
of the idea of a ‘distribution of the sensible’: in the idea that to consent
and to refuse are first of all a matter of sensible perception because
domination itself operates across an organisation of the visible, the sayable,
the thinkable and the possible. Whence comes my way of posing problems from
scenes that are scenes of interpretation – and eventually of quarrels over
interpretation – of a perceptible datum: what permits a poet (Wordsworth) to
read the reality of a Revolution in the contrasts of a landscape; or permits a
novelist (Balzac) to symbolise the criminal subversion of a social order
through the dreamy narrative that a scrap-metal merchant’s daughter casts upon
an island? How to decide whether the noise made by plebeian mouths is really
argumentative speech? What is at stake in the glance that a carpenter casts
through a window, or at stake in the way that workers dissect the minutiae of
their masters’ and judges’ discourses? What interests me, as a researcher and
as a writer, is to follow these fluctuations of perception and speech and to
try to let their power and their stakes be felt. It’s clear that this attention
follows its own temporality which is not that of public events, and more
importantly that it obliges us to break up the borderlines between the genres
of discourse that define accepted ‘competencies’ in public speech.
This means that my public
interventions are not the natural continuation of my research. Instead, they
are born of occasions when the ‘simple ideas’ that underpin my research take on
a topicality in contexts that aren’t dependent upon me, but lie at the junction
between external instigations and my own personal intolerances. As, for
example, when some artists asked me to elaborate a reflection on the spectator
starting out from Jacotot and this request brought me to put the implications
of the thought of inequality into the form of a polemical relation with the
reigning post-Situationist mood. Or else such a context places me in the
situation of being the voice sounding a discordant note in the chorus of
opinion: for example, the surge of a new anti-democratic discourse in the
left-wing intelligentsia was an opportunity for me to put to the test of the
present everything that I’d been able to learn about the complicities between
the discourses of domination and those who claim to criticise them. But also it
is often circumstances out of my control that can transform a text into an
‘intervention’. The Politics of
Aesthetics [Le Partage du sensible]
was at the outset an interview given to a limited circulation journal.[2] As
chance would have it some people in the art world read it and told others about
it, who saw in it weapons to get out of the routine pseudo-critique that
prevailed in their world – and so this confidential text became a reference
text in the contemporary art world.
3.
There appears to be a tension
between your proposition that, on the one hand, in any given context there will
be a ‘distribution/partition of the perceptible’ demarcating, structuring and
reigning over thought and action, and on the other hand, your proposition that,
at any time at all, any individual at all might simply shake off the
stultifying effects of all of this and emancipate themselves. Is it the case
that these distributions and partitions are little more than discursive
inventions and institutional implementations (inscribed within and structuring
scholarship, institutions, legislations, policies, practices and so on); and
that these discursive inventions are produced in ignorance or blindness or
denial of the infinite complexity of individuals’ emancipatory agency?
There are two questions here as
well: one about the possibility of escaping from a given distribution of the
sensible; and one about the relations between the collective distribution of
positions and individual forms of emancipation. On the first point, I must
insist on the fact that the distribution of the sensible is not an ideological
machine or the disciplinary rule, fixing individuals in their places by a
mechanism of necessary illusion or a control of the body. It is the play of
relations between the visible, the sayable, the thinkable and the doable at the
heart of which gazes operate, things are named, discourses produced, actions
undertaken. From one perspective, the forms of distribution of the sensible are
like a datum, more or less accepted, more or less conscious – which forms and
limits the capacities of perceiving and thinking. But on the one hand this
datum defines a plurality of different articulations between its elements, a
multiplicity of possibilities that combine together in different ways; on the
other, it is constantly modified, for individuals and collectivities, either by
singular sub-systems, or by events that, breaking the ordinary temporal logic,
deploy other forms of possible experience, other possible ways of giving sense
to these experiences. Insurrectional experiences have taught us how
unimaginable things can very quickly enter into the field of possibilities. The
judgement and sentencing to death of the king of France by an assembly of
representatives of the people was something unimaginable in 1789. The
institution of worker power in French factories was something perfectly imaginable
at the end of May 1968, etc. In the experiences of workers’ emancipation that I
have studied, one sees how the very forms that structure the community and
assign individuals their places – work, family, national belonging, religious
belonging, forms of cultural (or other) identity – are in each case susceptible
to being deviated and of provoking a reorganisation of the whole: national
belonging becomes an affirmation of republican equality that entails a certain
idea of the worker’s independence, which is itself combined with the fraternity
of new religions and appropriates the indecisive identities of romantic
literature. Emancipation, for individuals and for the collectives in which they
gather, is the work that undoes the order of positions and identities that
define what is possible. This work of subjectivation operates by taking on
diverse forms of experience that define subject-forms, ways of being an
individual and those of being a small or large collectivity. Being subject is
something that draws on forms of juridical inscription or forms of labour
relation, on religious narratives, on models taken from school books, on ways
of being alone or of meeting others that are put into circulation by
literature, on definitions of bodily health and corruption circulated by life
sciences, on ways of seeing and hearing formed by metropolitan cultures with
their modes of strolling and display, etc. The religious phrase that should
subjugate, the spectacle that should fascinate, the juridical inscription that
should set things in order – they constantly lend themselves to the
construction of unforeseen trajectories of looking and speaking, to the
formation of deviant lines of subjectivation. The complexity of which we speak
doesn’t isolate individual forms of emancipation in relation to great
collective signifiers. It is much rather identified with the voyage between
these different registers of subjectivation. Deviant lines of subjectivation at
once produce individualities, inter-individual relations and new modes of
collective subjectivation. This is why that canonical opposition between
individual and collective is so pointless. It is much rather a question of
seeing how singularities get defined – whether as ways of being one or of being
together – at odds with constituted identities.
4.
From The Ignorant Schoolmaster to The Emancipated Spectator, your perspective on emancipation has been
focused on the individual. It seems to us that this is because you see a
problem in the ‘macro’ perspectives of socio-political work, perspectives which
‘flatten’ specificity by leading people to speak reductively of ‘the masses’,
‘the poor’, and so on. The scholarly, ethical and political virtues of pointing
out the skewing effects and reductiveness of these macro-political and
sociological perspectives seem eminently valid and important to us. But does
this make your position individualist?
First of all, we have to leave
behind the false obviousness – as much Marxist as liberal – that opposes the
individual and the collective. Indeed, one way of taking part in a community
goes hand in hand with a way of being an individual. Moreover, this has been
the historical problem of emancipation. Communities composed of communists have
generally collapsed: they were composed of men of the people who hardly
attained the possibility of being individuals or of living family lives freed
from very old communitarian rules. They weren’t ‘individualists’ for all that,
they were sincerely communist, but this new communism did not recognise itself
in the rules of communitarian discipline to which, in contrast, groups founded
on a religious rule or a charismatic authority adapted very well. The
sociological or macro-political models that you mention have generally focused
upon an imaginary vision of the collective according to which the latter
collectively puts to work common interests and values rooted in a communal
experience. At the beginning of my research, I too believed things worked like
that. I looked for the workers’
authentic thought that expressed the life experience and the struggle of a
class forged in the workplace. Research forced me to find out that this was not
the case, and that there were always, on the basis of an experience, several
antagonistic ways of constructing common interests or common values. There is
always a plurality of ways of constituting the common of a community, just as
there is in defining the singularity of an individual. This is what
‘subjectivation’ means, either for an individual or for a collective: you construct
a way of being ‘one’ in opposition to the identity you’ve been assigned; you
also construct it by combining ways of life that were supposed to belong to
separate identities. This construction is the work of individuals and random
groupings of individuals who have formed as such through singular paths between
the ways of being subject that collective structures and signifiers allow to be
built. But these ways of being-subject are always at the same time ways of
world-making, ways of being counted as members of a certain collectivity. And
the collectivity built in this way is not the sum of individuals who belong to
such and such a group of the population, or share such and such a situation. To
mark the gap between subjectivation and identification doesn’t characterise an
individualism.
5.
In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, you argue for the suspension of mastery in
the name of emancipation, and claim that the mastery of the teacher has nothing
to do with the content of his
knowledge, and everything to do with the pedagogical power he holds over the gap between ignorance and
knowledge. How do you answer the complaint that your insistence on this formal
power of the ‘master’ blunts from the outset any possibility of communicating
better the knowledge and expertise
involved in intervention? In other words: is there not a pedagogical value in
mastery and expertise worth preserving?
Several questions appear to be
mixed together here. First of all, I have not opposed mastery and emancipation
in general and I have always hated forms of guilting that prove to the master
that he is guilty in advance due to his institutional position. The ‘ignorant
master’ is an emancipating master. From a Jacotist perspective, a master is an
emancipator if he dissociates his mastery – that is, the effect his will can
have upon the actions of his pupil – from his own knowledge. It’s a principled
dissociation [une dissociation de
principe]. Here the principle is not the opposite of reality, it is a way
of distinguishing between two sides of the same ‘reality’. It’s a fact that the
effects one produces through mastery are distinct from those produced by one’s
expert capacity. It’s another fact that these effects are often produced by the
same acts and within the same institutional apparatuses [dispositifs], and thus constantly mixed together. On that basis,
the logic of domination is to make indistinguishable in order to identify in
general the exercise of a power with that of a form of knowledge. The function
of the distinctions I make is to enable judging and acting in confusing
situations. The distinction is like a Kantian formula that helps to distinguish
what is, in such and such a situation, the maxim to adopt, the reasons one has
to adopt it, the type of effect one want to favour. What we generally call
‘transmitting’ is allowing the other to produce performances equivalent to
those produced specifically for him.
That can be very effective for enabling people to pass an exam that will
enable them to get a better job – and I’ve got absolutely nothing against the
fact that we enable people to pass exams. I find that preferable to
pseudo-radical attitudes that refuse students the benefits of the master’s
knowledge. It is necessary to know simply that the beneficial effect of
‘transmission’ is limited, that this benefit doesn’t produce any emancipation
and very likely comes at the price of losing one’s own intellectual capacity.
The experience of each day and of a lifetime teaches us to distinguish between
the results of knowledge and those of mastery, the effects sought by one kind
of intelligence and those produced by another, as it teaches us to distinguish
the different indeed contradictory effects of an apprenticeship. We can
certainly use our status as legitimate ‘transmitters’ to put our knowledge at
others’ disposal. I’m constantly doing it. But what is ‘stultifying’ from a
Jacotist perspective is the will to anticipate the way in which they will grasp
what we put at their disposal. From this point of view, Jacotist radicalism
strikes me as much closer to experience and good sense than those discourses
that first liken the exercise of mastery to the transmission of a body of
knowledge and then class this transmission of knowledge as the awakening of a
soul, as the acquisition of critical thought or sense of citizenship [sens citoyen], or some other warmed-over
fairytale served up for us on a daily basis by good progressive souls.
6.
Many readers are struck by the
affinities in your work with the works of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
It might be argued that your argumentative moves are very often deconstructive,
whilst your focus on the messy realms of individuals operating in particular
situations seems concerned with distinctly Foucauldian ‘visibilities’. However,
whilst you often criticize deconstruction, Foucault rarely surfaces explicitly
in your work. Is this because you feel a greater sense of proximity to
Foucault’s project(s) and approach?
I’ve been influenced very little
by Derrida’s thought and I’ve never thought of myself as practicing
deconstruction. Doubtless there is in me, as there is in both Derrida and
Foucault, a calling into question of dominant categories that are used to
describe forms of experience. But beyond this work of putting categories into
aporia, it seems to me that deconstruction is caught between the Heideggerian
form of awaiting the complete reversal of a civilisation’s development and the
Kierkegaardian privilege of the decision in a situation of radical uncertainty.
Basically, it’s a matter of making a logical aporia lead on to an ethical
confrontation with the impossible. That is to say, it’s a matter of getting
philosophy to recognise an outside – an unknowable and an unmasterable – that
is of a religious nature. As far as I’m concerned, my approach has never been
to deconstruct in order to come back to the undecidable via the mediation of
the aporia, but to bring to light, through the checking of contradictions, a
heterogeneity of logics that is, in the final instance, a conflict of worlds. It wasn’t the double aspect of the pharmakon
that interested me in the Platonic critique of writing but the articulation
between a theory of speech and a social stratification. In other words, the
outside that interests me is not the ethico-religious outside, but the one of
forms of domination that come to be internalised in the thoughts and practices
of speech and of discourse. It is the latter that draws me closer to Foucault’s
thought, the only contemporary thought, in fact, to have strongly influenced
me. What that also means is that it’s the only one I’ve been able to
incorporate in my own way, without therefore needing to comment on it, or take
it as an external reference point. That said, the aspect of Foucault’s thinking
that I’ve been able to turn into my own is that which first asks itself how such a thought is thinkable and who can think it. It is a thought that
takes philosophy out of its privileged domain, forcing it to encounter all
those discourses and practices in society that mark out the discursive lines
and material barriers separating the possible from the impossible, the
permitted from the forbidden, the thinkable from the unimaginable. The force of
Foucault’s thought is located at the point where it allows one to wonder: what
thought is at work in a regulation or in a building? But also: what happens,
what worlds confront each other in the insignificant words of some individual
or other? That for me was an organon, allowing one to think the way in which
words manifest the tension of lives caught between two possible universes (Nights of Labour) or the way in which
literature deploys this tension as the tension of fictional logics (Politique de la littérature), or the way
cinema deploys it as a conflict of temporalities (Film Fables), etc. It seems to me that this tension of lives
gripped by relations of possibility and impossibility has been nullified by the
dominant discourse about Foucault today, the biopolitical discourse. Whatever
radical political references it may be given, the discourse of biopolitics
repatriates Foucault’s thought onto traditional philosophical terrain, that of
a metaphysics of life, and rids it of the subversive potential it got precisely
from its capacity to problematise the conflict of lives.
7. Several of your works make use of what might be read
as a rhetoric of utopian failure – one thinks, for example, of the final pages
in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, where it is stated that universal teaching wouldn’t ‘take’ but
doesn’t die, and the essays in Film Fables that treat of the ‘thwarted’ fables animating cinema. Some of your
critics read this recurrent oscillation between failure and hope in your work
as a refusal of political engagement; but what, for you, is the political
import of the experience of ‘failure’ and of being ‘thwarted’?
The ‘thwarting’ [‘contrariété’] that Film Fables speaks about is the tension between two logics: a logic
of linkage and a logic of suspension. I show that for cinema as for literature
this tension is a productive force and not an obstacle. The most beautiful
films like the most beautiful novels are the result of this tension. It’s not a
matter of failure, except for those specialists in literary theory or film
semiotics who will endeavour, until the end of the world, to maintain the
illusion that literature or cinema are arts solely the concern of their own
concept, employing their own language, etc. And the fact that universal
teaching doesn’t ‘take’ marks not the failure of intellectual emancipation, but
of those who want to transform into a social institution a thought and a
practice that cuts across the logic of social institutions. In fact, there are
a vast number of things that ‘don’t take’, but which are no less those that
have changed our lives and those worth living for. Men live and die for words
that never entirely keep their promise. This excess of words is itself the
object of pleasure [jouissance] and
is the energy source for the creation of individual works like collective
uprisings or forms of community. This is what I meant by saying that man is a
political animal because he is a literary animal. It is this capacity to be disappointed, to
bear the disappointment and if needs be enjoy it that I tried to show in the
thought and the practice of these men and women of the people that the learned
always wanted to confine within a positive story of gains and losses, and it is
precisely this that allows them to create works and forms of community. I have
constantly tried to challenge the simplistic way in which success and failure,
faith and disillusion are conceived. I’ve attempted to show that a movement of
emancipation is never simply an instrument for ends that might be objectively
judged according to whether or not they’ve been reached, but already a way of
transforming the forms of what is thinkable and possible in the present. Many
have enjoyed the communist fraternity far more than they were saddened not to
have founded a dictatorship of the proletariat. The great hopes of workers’
emancipation have often met with failures, sometimes ending in social reforms
by which the learned claim that capitalism has only been adjusted. But for many
militants the failures, on the one hand, and the limits of success, on the
other, have contributed towards maintaining the very meaning of the struggle
between two worlds that their movement brought to life. Dominant thought,
including its ‘progressive’ and ‘radical’ variants, always operates according
to a caricatural logic of ends to come and means to attain, of expectations and
balance sheets. This logic spends its time blocking any experimentation with
life, in art or knowledge, in the name of an entirely imaginary knowledge that
it grants itself over what is possible and what is impossible, as well as over
the means to realise the possible. In the past it functioned as a means of
submitting every emancipatory aspiration to pseudo-scientific strategies. Today
it functions as a way of crushing them beneath the endless and acrimonious
stocktaking of dead illusions. I’ve always insisted on the contrary upon the
ambiguity of these expectations that one opposes to results, and upon the
precise difficulty of knowing what is success and what is failure.
8.
You use the word ‘police’ to
illuminate your argument about the rarity of politics. However, because of the
rhetorical and semiotic baggage of the word ‘police’, it is very easy to read
in your usage as signifying the negative in a binary of ‘police’ versus
‘politics’. But is your use of the word ‘police’ always negatively charged? Is
there a good and bad police? Is there a good and bad politics?
We must pay attention to the fact
that a concept rarely designates a unique and univocal thing. A concept often
says several things at once because it tries to bring together several lines of
reflection. So the concept of ‘police’ in my work tries to respond to two
problems. I first proposed the term in response to a question that was put to
me: ‘what is the political?’ It seemed necessary to me at that time to unravel
the confusion that identifies political activity with the various practices of
government. I therefore proposed the term ‘police’ in order to designate the
set of practices associated with the operation of institutions, with the
management of populations and the administration of things. It’s in this sense
that one can say that there is a good and a bad police. I have said that there
is politics when this set of practices happens to come up against another set
of practices that put into operation the verification of equality. I have
subsequently been led to clarify – that is, to displace – the politics/police
relation, by rethinking it in terms of the distribution of the sensible. At the
time I insisted on another signification of the ‘police’, namely the type of
community that it constructed: a saturated community, defined as the entirety
of places, functions and identities, ruling out any supplement. And I defined
politics as the activity that breaks this closure through the intervention of
subjects in excess of any social identity. From this point of view the two
terms are necessarily opposed, and this opposition can’t be reduced to the
opposition between spontaneity and institution. It doesn’t mean that politics
is good, as opposed to police being bad. They are two forms of the distribution
of the sensible that are at once opposed in their principles and yet constantly
intermixed in their functioning. The State is an institution whose operation
tends to transform the political scene into purely a matter of police
management. But that’s exactly why it needs political legitimisation. And its
managerial operations, therefore, constantly lead to the opening of scenes of
political debate and action. The State presents such reforms of social
insurance or retirement schemes as a purely technical matter of redistributing
resources and expenditures, and of future projections. But technical
optimisation has to be considered a matter of common good, thus such projection
asks the question: who is capable of thinking the future? Whence opens the
quarrel about the stakes of equality and inequality set out by these
‘technical’ reforms. That also means that the common space opened by the
political difference lends itself to all sorts of perversion. I’ve often
insisted on the fact that one of the reasons for the success of certain
far-right groupings, like the National Front in France, came from their
capability of restaging an idea of popular power abandoned by the purely
managerial discourse and practice of the right- and left-wing parties. The
empty concept of ‘populism’ is a handy way of concealing this reality of the
extreme-right’s seizure of political signifiers abandoned by the ‘left’.
Instead of talking about a bad politics, it’s better to say that political
division also produces bad things.
9.
Does your emphasis on the
disarticulation of equality place too much emphasis on the individual (qua ‘subjectivisation’) at
the expense of addressing the problem of contemporary political organisation? In other words, isn’t the organisational
logic of police rejected too quickly for the interruptive moment of politics?
And might it not call for a closer examination of what might be called the
‘politics of police’ in the formation of collectivities? Or, reciprocally: Is
it possible for an individual to make politics happen?
Once again, the question of
subjectivation isn’t that of the relation between individual and collectivity.
A political subjectivation is the constitution of a collective capable of
speaking in the first person and of identifying its affirmation with a reconfiguration
of the universe of possibilities. To contrast the moment of interruption with
organisational continuity is a handy way of masking the basis of the problem:
to what extent is a collective capable of giving this reconfiguration of the
universe of possibilities an autonomous temporality? All those who deafen us
with their old refrain about the critique of spontaneity and the necessity of
organisation forget precisely that an organisation is only political if it is
‘spontaneous’ in the strict sense of the word, that is to say if it functions
as a continuous origin of an autonomous perception, thought or action. The
question is not how long an organisation lasts, but what it does with this
time, that is to say how it transforms this time into something political. To
put it another way, it’s a question of which forms of the present are in
themselves future-bearing. That’s precisely the question at the heart of the
thinking of emancipation: how the break with the time of domination is at work
in the present. Both organisations and individuals live in several times
simultaneously. The same goes for both the organisational and the pedagogical
successes we spoke about earlier. The question is what they consist of, what
organisations do. There is no denying that those who tell us what to do first
of all set about reinforcing their collective identity and that, as regards an
autonomous temporality, they extend their continuity in the relation between
two temporalities: that of expiry dates imposed by the dominant power – whether
that be elections or capitalist outsourcing – and that of a revolutionary
process now forever comfortably installed.
Translated by Richard Stamp
Notes
[1]
Translator’s note: see Rancière,
‘Cold Racism, July 1996’, in Chronicles of Consensual Times, trans.
Steven Corcoran, London & New York: Continuum (2010), pp.12-15.
[2]
Translator’s note: ‘Le partage du
sensible’ originally appeared in Alice
(issue 2, Summer 1999) and is archived online at multitudes-web -
http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Le-partage-du-sensible
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