Moments politiques

148 Pages·2014·0.84 MB·English

by  Ranciere

MOMENTS POLITIQUES
MOMENTS POLITIQUES
Interventions 1977–2009
JACQUES RANCIÈRE
Translated by Mary Foster
Seven Stories Press
New York • Oakland
Contents
Preface
Portrait of the Old Intellectual as a Young Dissident
Are There Events in Intellectual Life?
Overlegitimation
The Immigrant and the Law of Consensus
Feigned Suffering
Sour Grapes
Division of the Arche
Society of the Spectacle or Society of the Billboard?
Seven Ways to Spread Racist Ideas in France
The Law and its Ghost
What Intellectual Might Mean
No Crisis in the Crisis
Politics and Identity
Intersecting Reasons
September 11 and After: A Rupture in the Symbolic Order?
On War as the Supreme Form of Advanced Plutocratic Consensus
An Immaterial Communism?
Advanced Science and its Backward Aims
Advanced Science and its Backward Aims
The State and the Heat Wave
Democracy, A Necessary Scandal
The Philosopher Without a Megaphone
Political Impurity
Election and Democratic Reason
The Politics of Disagreement
May ’68 Reviewed and Corrected
The Pleasure of Political Metamorphosis
“The Worst of Evils is Power Falling into the Hands of Those Who Desire It”
Communists Without Communism?
Preface
The articles in this collection were selected by the editor. They span more than
thirty years, but there is something that unites them: each responds to the
demands of its time. Sometimes these demands arise from a conflict that forces
us to take sides—for example, on French immigration laws or the American
invasion of Iraq. Sometimes events of lesser or greater impact—from a killer
heat wave to an innocuous sociological investigation—allow insight into the
mechanisms of power and the systems of interpretation that govern us. It may be
that an anniversary invites retrospection: forty years since May ’68, or twenty
years since the death of Michel Foucault.
Each of these situations provides the opportunity for a double exercise, first to
identify the particulars of a political moment, then to sketch out a map of the
present that moment defines. Talking about “a political moment” is not intended
to evoke the idea that the political exists only in rare moments of insurrection
violently detached from the normal course of things. In fact, the events that
motivated these articles often had more to do with demonstrations of oligarchic
power than with radical expressions of egalitarian power.
To speak of a political moment is, first of all, to assert that the political cannot
be identified with the uninterrupted course of government actions and struggles
for power. The political truly exists when the management of its goals leads to
the question of what exactly it is—in and of itself—and directly to questions
about the type of community it concerns, and who is included in this community
and on what basis. The political comes into play when it involves the
imagination of the community. For example, in France, in the fall of 1995,
interest in balanced retirement funds spread beyond accounting circles and set
the stage for new questions to emerge. What kind of community calculates
everyone’s future? Who is in a position to discuss this community and why? At
that moment, people who asserted a practice of solidarity in the streets were set
apart from those who allowed their representatives to choose the best
calculations. Reasoning from a shared intelligence was set against the
schoolmaster. The political also comes into play when a government decides the
threshold of acceptance for those who come to work and live in a foreign
country, or defines the qualities newcomers must offer to meet the values of the
national community.
Ways of dealing with common concerns are in fact ways of configuring and
reconfiguring a community, of defining its nature, and of sketching the outline of
those it includes and excludes. This work of the imagination never ceases to
efface itself by presenting its findings as simple surveys of data and identifiable
problems that the passage of time and the development of the world have
rendered obvious. This is “consensus.” A political moment occurs when the
temporality of consensus is disrupted. It occurs when a force is capable of
exposing the imagination of the relevant community and of contrasting it with a
different configuration of the relationship of each individual to everyone else.
The political doesn’t need barricades to exist. But it does require that there be
two distinct and perceptibly opposed ways to describe the common situation and
to count the players involved. This is also why it exists as moments, not as
fugitive bursts. A moment is not simply a unit of time. It is another weight
thrown on the scale that sizes up situations and the individuals capable of seizing
them. A moment unleashes or strangles a movement. It is never a simple
advantage taken by one force opposing another, but a tear in the common fabric,
a new possibility that makes itself visible and that challenges the obviousness of
a given world.
This means two apparently contradictory things. The first is that the political
exists only through the action of collective subjects who concretely change
situations by asserting their creativity and reconstructing the world—for
example, transportation workers who march to assert they are capable of
reshaping a city; or African hunger-strikers who show they are locals just as
authentically as those born with lighter skin, and that they contribute to the
community through their work, and to the political community through their
words and struggles. Some draw the conclusion that only activists with
organizational affiliations can talk about politics. But a confusion of two
elements underlies the figure of the activist: the forms of action through which
the terms of the possible are changed, and the interdependence of belonging to a
collective. If collective political action overthrows a monopoly on legitimate
discourse, the purpose certainly isn’t immediately to constitute a more beneficial
monopoly in its place. On the contrary, the goal is to open a space for inquiry
where anyone can speak, on the condition that one’s speech and one’s capacity
to make resonant the power of an action may be interrogated. The space where
this resonance takes place is usually called “opinion,” which since Plato has
been passed off as the opposite of thought. But opinion is actually the space in
which the possibilities of thought and the mode of community these possibilities
define are determined. Opinion is not a homogenous space for the lowest form of
thought, but rather a space in which to debate what can be thought under
particular circumstances and what the consequences of this thought might be.
The political also consists of efforts to enlarge the space of dissensus by
struggling against a machinery of interpretation that endlessly either erases the
singularity of circumstances or reabsorbs it into categories of domination,
transforming those who have protested into representatives of backward
populations, egotistical entities, or restricted minorities. The political only exists
through action by collective subjects. The consistency of the alternative worlds
they construct depends on the endless battle over how these worlds are
interpreted by the state, media, art, and science.
From this perspective, the period spanned by these articles—from summer
1977 to spring 2009—is particularly significant. The significance of these years
is a political matter. Dominant opinion has characterized this period, in the
simplest way, as an after: postmodernity and the end of utopias—the end, in
short, of all that is susceptible to ending. These articles were written with the
simple belief that proclamations of millennial or apocalyptic change need not be
read as a mere sign of laziness. These accounts are stakeholders in an intellectual
logic of domination that should be recognized for what it is.
The thirty years between the first and the last of these articles were the stage—
in France where they were written, and in the West more broadly—not simply of
the end of great narratives and grand hopes, but also of an intense intellectual
counterrevolution. Some of the benchmarks of this counterrevolution are
recognizable. In France at the end of the 1970s, a new philosophy emerged. It
was neither new nor philosophical, but it did restore the old reactionary wisdom
—translated into fashionable language—that all attempts at social justice lead
inevitably to totalitarian terror. In 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet
Union, the first Gulf War legitimized, in Western intellectual opinion, America’s
universal right to intervention. When people were on strike in France in the fall
of 1995, much of the leftist intelligentsia supported the government’s attack on
the pensions of transportation workers. Using old Marxist arguments, they
articulated a reactionary doctrine that would be used to launch an offensive
against all the previous gains of labor struggles. After September 11, America
declared its sacred right to intervene against evil in the name of “infinite
justice”—a right that extended to the peddling of propagandistic lies about
weapons of mass destruction. In Europe, xenophobic movements gained ground.
In France, the Left accepted the necessity of dealing with the so-called
immigrant problem.
We could cite many other forms and stages of this intellectual
counterrevolution, which has slowly converted all forms of revolutionary action
—all social struggles and emancipatory movements of the past—into early
warning signs of totalitarianism. The counterrevolution has in effect presented
the collective assertion opposing the subjugation of all social relations to the
logic of the market as a symptom of backwardness. It has redefined democracy
as rule of the stupid consumer. The impact of this interminable intellectual work
should not be underestimated. Generally carried out by former Marxists, it has
put arguments at the service of the dominant system, the purpose of which, not
long before, had been understood as critiquing this same system. It is not true
that the attacks made by capitalist and state oligarchies over the past thirty years
have met with no resistance. Mass protests—like those in England, Italy, and
Spain against the invasion of Iraq—bear witness to this. And a multitude of
actions often invisible in the media also bear witness. On the other hand, it is
true that the demonstrations of this resistance are often captured—with an ever-
growing intellectual violence—by grids of interpretation that cancel or recode
them in the categories of dominant thought. This intellectual counterrevolution is
very weak philosophically. But the very paucity of thought that characterizes it
was proved effective when a state that sent its police to arrest the children of
illegals at their schools could support its actions with the rhetoric of a
universalist and secular republicanism, or when financial groups that had
destroyed jobs and offloaded workers to guarantee profits—not to mention
governments that had systematically destroyed systems of solidarity and social
protection—were able to justify their conduct by invoking the same discourse of
economic rationality and historical necessity that yesterday promised a socialist
future.
The articles gathered here are situated in the polemical space where
demonstrations of power are subject to a war of interpretations. They hope to
increase the visibility of the ruptures that egalitarian interventions work into the
fabric of domination. They are, so to speak, texts of circumstance. And these
texts of circumstance are carried by the idea that the political does not exist
outside particular circumstances that must be discerned discretely. To put it
another way, there is no political theory per se. Or, rather, any political theory is
a discourse on the circumstances of the political—a manner of describing the
places and moments of its intervention, the objects brought forth by its action,
and the subjects that participate in it. From this perspective, an analysis of the
conception of the universal used to justify a law prohibiting the Islamic
headscarf, or an examination of the ideas about democracy and freedom that are
used to legitimize a military invasion, are no less theoretical than an analysis of a
few lines of Plato or Aristotle on the conditions of good government. The
opposite is equally true, as the rhetoric of American neoconservatives and their
French imitators has taught us. The appropriation of texts from Greek antiquity
can be more political in its impact than an analysis of the last elections. There is
no clear divide between theory and its practical application, any more than
between transforming the world and interpreting it. All transformation interprets,
and all interpretation transforms. Texts, practices, interpretations, and bodies of
knowledge intertwine and together define the polemical field within which the
political constructs its possible worlds.
On this plane, these articles operate. That is, they do not claim any mission of
theorizing about politics in the universal sense, a mission that often characterizes
the identity of the intellectual. Many of the articles in this collection, starting
with the first, mark the refusal to construct such an identity. This is not only
because such an identity serves as a banner for various charlatans who start out
as orators on behalf of the suffering populace and end up prostituting themselves
to the most banal ambitions. The very idea of a class in society whose specific
role is to think is preposterous and can be conceived only because we live under
a preposterous social order. The rare occasions on which the term has been
claimed with some dignity is when it has been claimed and used to assert the
right to speak of those whose opinions are not sought. The term intellectual,
when used to characterize a particular person, is meaningless. As a characteristic
of a collective political subject, it can only set up a revealing contradiction: that
those who use it thereby renounce all authority tied to the exercise of a
profession or to the privilege of specific knowledge. They declare an intelligence
that belongs to anyone and everyone.
The articles to be read here are not the manifestos of an intellectual collective,
a philosopher’s explanation of the state of the world, or the prescriptions of a
moralist drawn from the norms of coexistence. They are an individual
contribution to the work of people and collectives who are, without permission,
redesigning the map of the possible.
—J.R.
Paris, June 2009