Garbiel Rockhill is an assistant professor of philosophy at Villanova University. He is edited and translated Jacques Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics. Philip Watts is an associate professor of French at Columbia University. He is the author of Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals in France.

Philip Watts is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University. He is the author of Allegories of the Purge.

JACQUES RANCIRE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Chapter One

In an essay written shortly after the American war in Iraq began, Jacques Rancire wrote about the seamless integration of capital, state, military, and media power achieved in the United States during the months preceding the invasion. He called the fusion "a perfecting of the plutocratic system." Certainly, those of us who lived through those months in the United States (or-again-the months preceding the 2004 presidential election) can testify to the background noise we heard. It wasn't bombs-these we saw and heard very little of-but rather the media's relentless litany of repeated phrases: "weapons of mass destruction," "Afghani women voting," "evil dictator," and one or two others. But I want to begin by evoking an earlier moment in the history of that seamless integration: the moment in 1983 when Ronald Reagan set up a covert CIA operation bearing a name I think Rancire might appreciate: "Perception Management." Perception Management, unlike other CIA operations, was directed domestically and was, for all intents and purposes, the now-forgotten origin of the media techniques later to be perfected by the George W. Bush administration. Reagan wanted to swing public opinion to support his Central American policies in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and to that end polling was conducted to determine which precise buzzwords and concepts would best turn U.S. citizens against the Sandanistas and get them to support the Contras and the Salvadoran government. In the face of the latest great "third-worldist" cause, the solidarity movements with the peoples of Nicaragua and El Salvador, the idea was to saturate the media with phrases repeated over and over like mantras: the Sandanistas are anti-Semitic, they're drug runners, they discriminate against indigenous peoples, they're terrorists, and so forth-to enormous effect. It is during these years, I think-the early 1980s-that consensus first comes to be taken for granted as the optimum political gesture or goal, with "Perception Management" its more than adequate figure. And it was around this time that I first began to read Rancire's work. Against this ideological backdrop, the untimeliness of his project was strongly perceptible. This is why I'll not focus on Dis-agreement and the recent intellectual developments which, as conferences held in the United Kingdom, Berlin, Cisy, and elsewhere suggest, are now placing Rancire's work at the center of contemporary discussions. I want to go back, rather, to the earlier stages of the project: to Jacotot and The Names of History. For it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s that a generalized offensive against equality, under the cover of a critique of egalitarianism, began to make of equality a synonym for uniformity, for the constraint or alienation of liberty, or for an assault on the free functioning of the market. It is in this context that Rancire's preoccupation with, or recurrent staging of, equality and its verification could be called untimely, or that my own experience reading a book like The Ignorant Schoolmaster could be one of delighted shock-only initially really graspable for me, teaching in central California, as a kind of echo of certain Latin American utopian pedagogical experiments of the 1960s. So although the introduction I wrote to my translation of The Ignorant Schoolmaster created a kind of context for the book out of the French educational policies and debates of the first period of Mitterrand, my own enthusiasm, what made me want to do the translation, was the way Rancire's book seemed to me to resonate, however slightly, with earlier interventions like Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society or Paolo Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Now France, of course, like Germany, had no Reagan or Thatcher, which is to say no full-scale ultraconservative restructuring of its economy in the 1980s. Then, as now, a difference can be detected between governments where systems of social protection and solidarity have not been completely dismantled and those, like the United States, where they have. But the 1980s in France were nevertheless what Serge Halimi might call an intensely philo-American time, as France began to accommodate itself to the ascendancy of an American liberal orthodoxy, an orthodoxy in which equality came to be seen as a body of principles which, at best, can be interpreted by a court rather than what Rancire's work insisted on showing it to be: a profoundly political problem, the problem, in fact, of politics per se.

Perhaps the best way to talk about Rancire's untimeliness in those years, though, is to remember how the interdisciplinary terrain had begun to be taken over and inundated, then, with a kind of cobbled-together "spatiality," as the human sciences came to embrace insights, perspectives, and methodologies imported from the "spatial sciences" of urbanism, architecture, ethnology, and geography. The spatial turn was reinforced by an appeal to culturalism, based on the category of culture as a static, spatial countenance-culture that cannot be seen as an agent of time. This spatial turn-the imbalance in humanistic and cultural studies that consisted in a privileging of space over considerations of temporality or change-is apparent in the still-manifest preoccupation in the critical literature (in its popular forms as much as in its more scientific uses) with the description of territories, movements, and relations in space. Students today-and not only students-shy away from large diachronic questions and from any attempt to conceptualize change, preferring instead to nest within a set of spatially determined cultural units of comparison. From the outset I think it's fair to say that Rancire's project worked against the grain of this spatial turn, both thematically and in its polemical attacks on the inherent functionalism that undergirded some of the principle thinkers associated with the turn. Functionalism, in all its guises, affirms the status quo by presenting a social system that is complete, achieved, from which nothing is lacking. Social systems or cultures appear as fixed and complete-fully formed. In the case of critics concerned with postmodernism and the spatial fix, such as David Harvey or Fredric Jameson, neither of whom figure in Rancire's polemics-(though Lyotard, another postmodernist, does)-the static fixity of the contemporary "postmodern" social system means some sort of arrival of what Marx called "real subsumption." Rancire's polemics have targeted a hyphenated structuralism-functionalism whose powerful hold on not only social anthropology and sociology, but also history and the social sciences generally, testifies to a kind of unbroken reign of evolutionist epistemology. Polemics, after all, is just a synonym for untimeliness. And to be untimely means to be about time, not outside of it, or beyond it. Rather than participating in the spatial fix, Rancire preferred to think the way time gives form to relations of power and inequality and how its denaturalization shatters those relations: his thinking concerns itself with both the temporal rhythms and schedules of work and ideology, as well as the temporality of emancipation. "Ideology," he wrote in The Philosopher and His Poor, "is just another name for work." Rancire is not alone, of course, in being a thinker of differential temporalities. But to characterize him this way is to place him in a constellation of thinkers that might at first seem incongruous and that I'm not entirely sure he'd appreciate: in the company of the Marx of Zeitwidrig or contretemps, of his old teacher Louis Althusser's articulation of multiple times and the irreducibility of various levels to a single common history, of Ernst Bloch's "contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous," of Maurice Halbwach's plurality of social times, or even of a conservative thinker like Reinhart Koselleck's recurrent insistence that the archaic persists, and even thrives, at the core of the most advanced modernity.

But if we return to the dominant spatial discourse of the period, we can see how a kind of all-pervasive functionalism informed the work of even those progressive thinkers who were called upon to form the bridge, so to speak, between an earlier linguistic/structural moment and the new explicit focus on exploring the mechanisms of living societies. I'm thinking of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau, two thinkers whose principle works, Distinction and The Practice of Everyday Life, were translated into English during the 1980s and frequently assigned in classes, in the States at least. In the United States and Australia, critics attuned to developments in British cultural studies and weary of post-structuralism were looking for works they hoped would help them break out of the corral of epistemology to reach the social, and these books seemed to respond to that demand. These critics were particularly drawn to the spatialized dynamics of power and resistance that de Certeau derived from Foucault, and to the figure of his wily pedestrian, twisting and turning along backstreets and by-ways, "turns" that were tropological as well as geographic-de Certeau conflating the two in a whole celebratory rhetoric of nonconformist walking. Here all the liberatory values and frissons of mobility associated, in the earlier moment of the linguistic paradigm, with the slippage of meaning in a literary text are attributed to the pedestrian's cunning tactics: the maneuvers and resistance of the relatively powerless. Leaving considerations of power to the center-where, like all good functionalists, de Certeau believes it belongs in the interest of social stability-what remains is life in the margins, which is allowed to exist precisely because it poses no threat to the center's hold. In a striking formulation that reading Rancire makes us alert to, de Certeau writes, "Their bodies follow the thick and thins of an urban text they write without being able to read." A popular text is being written, in other words, but only on the condition that its authors cannot read or understand it. These, then, are the maneuvers of a more-or-less authentic urban folk, the authenticity of whose daily practices derives from their sheer, unknowing ordinariness, as well as their sheer unknowingness. "The actual order of things," de Certeau writes, "is precisely what popular tactics turn to their own ends, without any illusion that it is about to change." Unlike, say, a more nuanced thinker of the everyday like Henri Lefebvre, de Certeau cannot imagine how the everyday can be about history-any tension between experience and anticipation for him has been erased. Change having been precluded and temporality effectively frozen, the way is now cleared for a socially cohesive, consensus portrait of what de Certeau called "ordinary culture"-unchanging, repetitive customs, hobbies, and dispositions that form what might at best be called a culture of consolation. And the historian's role is completely assimilated to that of the ethnologist. "For the historian," he writes, "as for the ethnologist, the goal is to make function a cultural whole, to make its laws appear, to structure a landscape." It is easy, now, to see how such a mechanistic see-saw of power and resistance could go on to form the backbone of Anglo-American cultural studies' celebration of ludic resistance through consumption. Here, too, there is the presumption of a fully formed commodity relation, or "real subsumption." But already in 1977 the Rvoltes Logiques collective, in an interview with Foucault, asked questions they and Nicos Poulantzas were alone in formulating at that time, questions that showed how power, in Foucault's schema, operates like full subsumption. For in such a schema, wasn't power, presupposed to be always already there, locked in the grip of a battle with equally unchanging mass-resistance tactics-wasn't power thus rendered absolute? Wasn't it better to begin a discussion of power with the question of whom it serves, in whose interests?

De Certeau arrives at the same ratio of unknowingness and repetitive motion as Pierre Bourdieu, whose guiding concept of habitus houses both humans and their habitual dispositions. Habitus is that which allows us to practice an accumulation of collective experiences without knowing we are doing so. For Bourdieu, it goes without saying because it comes without saying. Once again, the Rvoltes Logiques collective was alone at the time, in the early 1980s, in showing the way in which Bourdieu represented a powerful afterlife to Durkheimian sociology and its logic of social cohesion. What is eternalized and internalized-the aptly named "second nature"-becomes what is forgotten in history.

And a once-lively history filled with agents and eventfulness subsides into the stable representations of the habitus-where no horizon other than being in perfect conformity to one's condition is visible. I wanted to revisit these widely read thinkers whose concerns with popular culture bore at least a passing resemblance to those of Rancire in order to highlight how different, in fact, his own questions were. Beginnings, points of departure, are more important for Rancire than for most thinkers, and the gesture of throwing the engine into reverse is one way he likes to begin. What happens if you begin not with culture conceived of as one's proper allotment of symbolic capital, nor with culture conceived of as a set of consoling rituals? What happens if you don't begin with culture at all, but instead with emancipation? "The concept of culture," Rancire noted in his book on history, "whether one applies it to knowledge of the classics or to the manufacture of shoes, has the sole effect of effacing this movement of subjectivization that operates in the interval between several nominations and its constitutive fragility." The concept of culture presupposes an identity tied to a way of speaking, being, and doing that is itself tied to a situation, a name, a body, assigned to a place, a life station. Culture is inherently functionalist, noncontingent.

Arlette Farge has written very eloquently about the antiethnological dimension of Rancire's work on history writing, and the disquiet with which social historians initially greeted it, only to have their hostility subside into a willed forgetting. What I take from her remarks is this: as long as space-territory or terroir-is the departure point for an analysis, if you begin with space, whether it be the space of the region, ghetto, island, factory, or banlieue, then peoples' voices, their subjectivities, can be nothing more than the naturalized, homogenized expression of those spaces. Rancire's project, in this sense, could be said to be at the forefront of one kind of cultural studies-but only an anti-identitarian one: a cultural studies where the concept of culture has been banished from the outset and identitarian matters twisted into a fluid and unscheduled nonsystem of significant misrecognitions.

(Continues...)

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