One of the key questions that emerges for anyone who reads Jacques Rancière’s book Disagreement is whether or not his work can be understood as normative. There is a substantive tradition in political philosophy that comes to understand the field as merely applied ethics. Ethics is about what one should do, and political philosophy is about how one can do what one can do under the externality we call society. Likewise, for the great tradition of radical and emancipatory politics, politics is about addressing some harm. Society is unjustly structure, the logic of capitalism causes harm and must be overcome. Emancipation is the demonstration and realization of capacity and equality wrongly denied by the existing system. In this sense, we might think normativity is at the heart of politics.
Rancière, however, does not appear to make many normative claims in Disagreement. Indeed there is one moment in his discussion of his concept of “the police”, where he seems to suggest strongly he is not concerned with questions of normativity at all. The problem emerges distinctly, and early on in Disagreement, with Rancière’s opposition of police logic to political logic. Both the terms police and politics have very distinct meanings in Rancière. To understand the concept of the police we need to first understand the concept of politics. And to understand his concept of politics we need to understand his concept of the distribution of the sensible.
In The Politics of Aesthetics Rancière defines the distribution of the sensible as follows: “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existences of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.” The distribution determines what is sayable and visible, and is required for there to be any functioning community whatsoever. It is a regime of inclusion and exclusion immanent to being with others. It’s disruption is what constitutes politics. This is all dense enough. Luckily Rancière – again in The Politics of Aesthetics - provides some examples:
A speaking being, according to Aristotle, is a political being. If a slave understands the language of its rulers, however, he does not ‘possess’ it. Plato states that artisans cannot be put in charge of the shared or common elements of the community because they do not have the time to devote themselves to anything other than their work. They cannot be somewhere else because work will not wait. The distribution 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.
Politics then becomes when the slave speaks, when the artisans devote themselves to something other than their work. It is when those excluded by law from citizenship or political participation acts as citizens. The suffragette movement seeks to give women the vote, for their political role in society to be recognized. They do so by acting politically. The arguments against them focus on their lack of capacity to be political beings. In order to gain recognition of their political capacity they must first exercise their political capacity. This is why equality is the very stuff of politics. The distribution of the sensible is an ontological requirement for the organization of any community. It enforces inequality, it must say “there are those who lack a capacity we have”. Yet because equality, in Rancière, is axiomatic and always possible then this inequality can always be shown to be unnecessary. This showing of the falsity of inequality is what constitutes political action.
This process is one of what Rancière calls ‘subjectification.’ He defines it in Disagreement as follows: “the production through a series of actions of a body and a capacity of enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience, whose identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience.” To claim that one is worker, or a citizen, or even a speaking being when that has been denied to one by the very structure of their community is to subjectify oneself as belonging to that category. Equality means anyone can be anything. The distribution of the sensible means we cannot be together and have anyone be anything.
Against the political logic that shifts the distribution of the sensible, there is the police logic that enforces it. The two are entwined, there can be no politics without the police. All those who say that there are those who do not count – those who shouldn’t vote, those who cannot learn, those who cannot understand and make art – enforce the police logic. The logic is upheld by me and you in meetings where we kick out the rowdy and demand order, the judges who uphold and enforce laws preventing criminals and children alike from voting, by those who insist the claims of those on the street demanding justice for police killings of African Americans are misguided and lack the correct understandings of the facts, by the academics who say that you will never understand art because your father never did. If it may begin to seem like there is a huge gap in these examples, that is because there is. In Disagreement Rancière will say that “the police can procure all sorts of good, and one kind of police may be infinitely preferable to another...whether the police is sweet and kind does not make it any less the opposite of politics.”
It thus appears that what matters from Rancière is merely a description, definition or ontology of politics. He is simply considered with the logic that governs politics, what politics is. And there is, in this, no room for normative claims about whether a political movement or even the police are good or bad.
On the podcast “What’s Left of Philosophy?”, during a discussion of Disagreement Dr.William Paris asks if Rancière has a concept of justice. Dr.Paris and his co-hosts identify a kind of formalist element of Rancière – something many early commentators did not – but it troubles them. As one is compelled to do with any formalistic account of politics or ethics, we go immediately to the extreme cases. Dr.Lillian Cicerchia asks how Rancière’s account deals with Nazism? Is not fascism part of what we call politics? The natural extension of this provocation is that theory should help us orient ourselves towards distinguishing good politics from bad politics and any theory that cannot adjudicate on one of the most extreme political movements in history has, to say the least, serious drawbacks.
Unfortunately the charismatic theory tamers of “What’s Left of Philosophy?” neglect to discuss the final two chapters of Rancière’s Disagreement: ‘Democracy or Consensus’ and ‘Politics in its Nihilistic Age’. There is a crucial moment in the first of these chapters, where Rancière discusses “the violent intrusion of new forms of racism and xenophobia into our consensus regimes”. By consensus regimes he means the post cold war democracies, the polities Fukuyama writes so ambivalently of in The End of History. By now we all know the story. The end of the cold war, the triumph of liberal democracy cascaded seamlessly into a series of ethnic conflicts and the return of vicious nationalisms. Rancière is keen to point out that these so called democratic regimes evacuate and deny the very principles of politics he has spent the last two-thirds of the book discussing. When one evacuates the world of politics one is left with identity. The emergence of consensus democracy post-Cold War lays the conditions for the eruption of ethnic and identitarian conflict. Of this brave new world – Disagreement first appeared in 1995 - Rancière writes:
We [France] had nearly the same number of immigrants twenty years ago. But they had another name then: they were called migrant workers or just plain workers. Today’s immigrant is first a worker who has lost his second name, who has lost the political form of his identity and his otherness, the form of a political subjectification of the count of the uncounted. All he now has left is a sociological identity, which then topples over into the anthropological nakedness of a different race and skin. What he has lost is his identification with a mode of subjectifciation of the people, worker or proletarian, as object of a declared wrong and as subject giving form to his dispute. It is the loss of the one-more of subjectification that determines the constitution of a one-too-many as phobia of the community.
What are the consequences of this “anthropological nakedness?” Rancière elaborates in the following chapter:
In that world of subjects strictly identified with their ethnicity, their race, or with that people guided by divine light, in these wars between tribes fighting to occupy the entire territory of those who share their identity, the consensus system also contemplates the extreme caricature of its reasonable dream: a world cleansed of surplus identities, people by real bodies endowed with properties expressed by their name. The consensus system announced a world beyond the demos, a world made up of individuals and groups simply showing common humanity.
Yet, we know from Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible, that there is no commonality without uncommonality, no inclusion without exclusion. To deny so, to make all the world be in common, is to deny politics. Yet to also insist on rigidity of identity, to deny the possibility of subjectification as part of one’s ‘political’ position is to make the same make mistake consensus democracy makes but from the other direction. Identititarianism is thus the denial of politics. Fascism, and in particular Nazism are the most extreme examples of this. And so, of the Holocaust, Rancière tells us this:
There is absolutely nothing outside what is thinkable in the monstrousness of the Holocaust; nothing that goes beyond the combined capabilities of cruelty and cowardice when these benefit from the means at the disposal of modern states; nothing these states are not capable of whenever there is a collapse in the forms of nonidentary subjectification of the count of the uncounted, wherever the democratic people is incorporated into the ethnic people.
The worst forms of what we commonly call politics are necessarily excluded by a proper understanding of what politics is. Does this undermine Rancière’s descriptive or formalist approach? Does this point to the instability of such claims when it comes to politics? Or has he been a normative theorist all along? Perhaps what is at stake is not starting with norms, but returning to them after we have established the nature of politics itself.
It is useful to conclude with a brief discussion by one of the few Rancière scholars who has considered this issue in depth. Dr.William Hebblewhite, in his paper “Jacques Rancière’s Account of Justice” he argues that justice occurs not in the moment of politics nor the logic of the police but in their intertwinement. As he writes:
Justice is not political in the Rancièreian sense because the resistance that takes place is not one of a dispute over what “justice” is. Nor is justice explicitly part of the police order because the very demand for justice that is encountered in social movements antagonistic to the police order is at odds with how the police order has perceived justice. Justice must be something else. It is clear that in Rancière's work justice does not exist on its own as a third conceptual apparatus but must somehow exist within the tense relation that is encountered in the development of politics against the social order.
For Dr.Hebblewhite there is a concept of justice in Rancière, one that has a somewhat liminal status:
It [Justice] is that which allows police to account for the unjustified complaint that occurs through the enactment of the axiom of intellectual equality between any and all human beings, but it is also that, which provides the impetus for that enactment to begin. Justice is the entwining of two heterogeneous ways of organizing society, which can be understood as police and politics.
The gambit is this: what links the police and politics in Rancière, and what requires their mutual entwinement is the polyvalence of the term justice. Whose justice? Which rationality? For justice is both the name with which politics – properly understood – so often speaks. Yet it is also something maintained, enacted and carried out by the institutions of society. It has a dual status then and because of this cannot be a concept that allows one to conceive of politics at a formalist or even ontological level. Rather it is an enmeshed and emergent phenomena. Unlike the Rawlsian approach and many approaches that see politics as applied ethics and thus begin with justice (and moral philosophy and its various quandaries more generally), Rancière starts with disagreement and speaking beings, which are for him, the stuff of politics. Justice will enter the scene later, as it were.