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The distribution of the sensible
Melanie Gilligan asks an interesting question of Rancière. Anyone care to offer a response, thoughts?
By s0metim3s | November 15, 2006 in Art , Matters of Appearance, Politics | Permalink
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It seems like the question would be applicable to a critique of theories of modernism which Ranciere himself is trying to get away from. Capitalism's endless production of the new and modes of disruption are what Ranciere is calling the distribution of the sensible or the police. Of course, the question remains about how politics proper in Ranciere's schema can do something that is not recognized by capitalism, but this is not a problem Ranciere is unaware of. This is why politics is rare. BUt politics is not the production of the new or some avant-gardest happening. (And this is why Zizek is completely wrong when he uses the "flash mob" as his example of Rancierean politics.) It is a singular moment of dissensus in which the gap between what is counted and what is not is given visibility.
Posted by: Alexander Search | Nov 15, 2006 12:05:31 PM
This is a really interesting piece. But I guess I have a little bit of a hard time understanding the difference between the (say) US military's aesthetic agency and that of the excluded. Why are the former's aesthetic interventions qualitatively different from that of the excluded? Large soap box, better special effects, sure...
Gilligan seems to require the disruption of the excluded to be messianically total, to put an end to the norm altogether, or else it is nothing more than raw repetition. But, from this piece (and I haven't read tons of Ranciere yet so forgive me if I'm getting it wrong), messianic dissolution of the norm doesn't seem to be what Ranciere's talking about, but rather "reorganization."
In short, is the problem that Ranciere's talking about progressive liberalization while Gilligan demands that change be absolute, apocalyptic?
Posted by: CR | Nov 15, 2006 1:27:41 PM
Shock and Awe is not a disruption of the regime of the sensible. I think there is an emphasis being placed on "disruption" that is a misunderstanding. Of course, police violence both local and international disrupts the daily lives of its victims, but it is the actualization of a threat that they already live with. As such, it affirms and confirms (not denies) the organization of power and hierarchy as well as the distribution of places and roles that Ranciere defines as the police. For Ranciere, politics precedes from the axiom of equality. It's not clear to me how one could suggest that Shock and Awe could be politics in Ranciere's sense.
Part of the problem seems that Ranciere's current popularity has something to do with the fact that people read him and think "oh good, now I can talk about the interpenetration of aesthetics and politics again without fear of being reactionary." But Ranciere is very clear that there is nothing political about an aesthetic intervention. His point is only that aesthetic questions are central to everything in our society that tries to block political intervention through modes of distraction and the production of indifference and therefore aesthetic questions are also central to thinking about political modes of resistance.
It should be added, Ranicere is not in favor of apocalyptic change or progressive liberalization.
Posted by: Alexander Search | Nov 15, 2006 2:40:19 PM
I may have missed something - and I don't know much R. - but would someone please explain to me how his account of the political varies all that much from Badiou's?
Gilligan seems to hit on the fact that if R. limits 'the sensible' etc. to the political, - he runs some serious category risks - i.e. the politics as commerce etc.
Badiou's logic of appearance seems to me to be a similar account, but rendered over several fields - thus the cycle of appearance/disruption/reorganization (the gap between the state and the situation) is something proper to the appearance of truth in any realm - not just politics. So its rehearsal in the realm of commerce might not be as problematic for Badiou as Gilligan thinks it is for Ranciere.
But am I wrong about the fundamental parallels between these two here? Is ranciere just an impoverished Badiou? What does his thought offer that Badiou's cannot account for?
Posted by: squibb | Nov 15, 2006 6:03:21 PM
Very briefly, I'm quite sure that Gilligan's question about whether Ranciere's understanding of the disruption of the distribution of the sensible (now, there's a mouthful) might be a version of, say, "a generalized condition of performativity in contemporary labour" has anything to do with the messianic, apocalyptic or absolute. Nor is it a question, if we're to use much older categories, of 'revolution versus reform.'
I think the point Alexander raises about "the production of indifference" is more pertinent to the questions Gilligan raises. But can someone - Alexander maybe - unpack this a little, as it appears (or not) in Ranciere's understanding?
Posted by: s0metim3s | Nov 15, 2006 9:17:42 PM
Ranciere and Badiou share a vocabulary and in many respects their positions seem very close. Both see equality as the fundamental political question and view equality as an axiom and not as a goal. And what Badiou calls the state or empire is not unlike what Ranciere calls the police. The differences are complex and if you are interested Badiou has a fierce critique of Ranciere in his Metapolitics. Ranciere will seem like an impoverished Badiou if your main concern is "category risks." But one of the strengths of Ranciere is his emphasis on impropriety and heterogeneity and his radical egalitarianism. He is extremely sharp in revealing the ways intellectuals deny thought to "the people" even and often in the name of a radical commitment to them. Ranciere does not have recourse to a mathematical ontology but his thought is not sloppy. Again, I don't see any possibility of confusing politics with commerce in Ranciere. Nor are aesthetics and politics in any way equated.
Posted by: Alexander Search | Nov 15, 2006 9:32:20 PM
In response to s0metim3s:
I don't think the term "production of indifference" comes from Ranciere but a term he does favor is distraction.
Here's an attempt to expand on it:
In Althusser, the police say "Hey you" and a subject is formed through interpellation. In Ranciere, the police say, "Go about your business. There's nothing to see here." The police for Ranciere is a term that encompasses both capital and the state and it works by dispersion not unification. This is why I see the question by Gilligan as missing the point. So then politics is a subjectification that refuses the partition of the sensible as it functions. For Ranciere it always involves both dissensus and equality--the verification of an equality that is both offered and denied at the same time.
Posted by: Alexander Search | Nov 15, 2006 9:54:16 PM
Thanks Alexander - that's interesting. And I agree that Ranciere is in no way an impoverished Badiou. Particularly on the question of the 'philosophical corporation,' as it were.
But, while I like the way you explain distraction, might there not be a sense in which dispersion and unification are but two 'poles' of the same process? Might not the distraction from the political bear some relation to the emergence of equality as axiomatic? (Not least, as an axiom of politics. Though Ranciere does introduce concepts such as dissensus and disagreement as a condition/definition of politics that isn't reducible, I think, to equality, I'm not sure why he retains the committment to equality, democracy, etc.)
But this is all some distance from Gilligan's question, if related.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Nov 15, 2006 10:38:48 PM
Like Andrew I think Gilligan at least partially misunderstands Ranciere. I think the 'sensible' and 'aesthetic' are more in an older (ahem) sense of the terms, from Baumgarten and Kant. R's point is not that art is politics.
As for capitalism revolutionizing life, for Ranciere that would presumably be a police redistribution, not a political redistribution (and thus at another register precisely not a disruption but a continuity - not unlike Marx's quip that one form of waged labor corrects the abuse of another, but doesn't correct the abuse that is waged labor). R's not for disruption as such but for specific modes of disruption, those which happens when those consigned the part of no part acts, breaking the rules of the given distribution and (thereby) force that distribution to break down or go into crisis, so to speak.
On Badiou and Ranciere, B says they share a lot but differ a lot, I don't really get his points. Jason Barker claims that Badiou is the hidden target of R's book Disagreement, for whatever that's worth.
Posted by: Nate | Nov 17, 2006 1:10:29 AM
R's point is not that art is politics.
Is that the issue? Gilligan assumes as a problem what - by suggesting that Ranciere is using 'older concepts' - you imply is not the case. Namely, and to put it crudely: that 'real subsumption' has not taken place in the interval between Ranciere and Kant.
So, what she is suggesting is that Ranciere's argument about politics as performativity (and I would add, of equality in particular) raises some significant questions about labouring subjects and their dispositions, more so as they relate to particular occupations deemed to be 'creative.' My own musing are this: Dissensus is significant for Ranciere, but I find his vacillating on the question of equality (as a political axiom) to be problematic. He's come some distance from One the Shores of Politics and Nights of Labour, closer to a sense of the incommensurate. But when he says that " it is once again possible to separate politics, in principle, from the gestation of the flux of populations and goods," how does he indeed make the separation by continuing to have recourse to politics understood as equality (and as democratic)? [ok, in hindsight I know the answer to this - it's in the "once again," the once upon a time of Athenian politics/democracy. Much as I like a lot of Ranciere, this is too silly for words.]
Anyway, are there specific passages or references where he steps back from the effusions about the politically axiomatic character of equality and its redistributions? I'm happy to be persuaded, but otherwise, I think Gilligan's remarks are onto something.
(And, I think you meant to say, Alexander, not Andrew.)
Posted by: s0metim3s | Nov 17, 2006 1:58:55 AM
Hi Angela,
I did mean Alexander not Andrew. Sorry Alexander!
On real subsumption, I think two things. First, I don't think the real subsumption narrative holds any water. So yeah, I don't think Gilligan's problematic is the case. I think Ranciere doesn't either. Even if it does, however, that would not be an objection to Ranciere. The transformation of something into part of policing that was once part of (a moment of) politics is built into Ranciere's story about politics and policing. It's more of a confirmation of one of his theses than an argument against him. Also, that performance is now often a part of waged labor (and thus of policing) does not mean that performance can no be a part of politics in Ranciere's sense. Ranciere insists on something like the ambivalence of categories - hence is early work on working class movement discourse coming to police workers, while still being in other cases used in politics.
Put differently, the parallel which Gilligan, following Virno et al, sees between performativity in labor and performativity in politics is precisely a parallel: parallel lines don't touch each other. The performativity of labor doesn't in any way undermine performativity or its potential in conflict against labor. That seems to me no more meaningful a parallel than the fact both bosses and workers breathe oxygen. (Virno's version of this is particularly silly as he relies on Aristotelian and Arendtian categories which he asserts without argument as having been the case for all history until about the 1970s with the development of postfordism.)
On equality and democracy for Ranciere, I'll have to glance over my notes and come back to this. I don't think Ranciere's moved much away from equality as a political axiom, but I think it functions less as a substantive positive claim (that would be equality as police function) and more as a negative assertion against posited inequalities. He's maintained since the Ignorant Schoolmaster that equality is not subject to proof, which implies that it can't function as a logic for the distribution of places. R seems to use it and to like it exclusively in the context of a disruption of the distribution of places. In a sense it may be similar to the old marxist permanent revolution.
I do think there's problems in R's account, which I'd love to try and hash out together, namely that he may still end up slipping back into a police logic if he's not careful, slipping from axiomatic equality into equivalence. (I have an inkling that Badiou may be better on this than Ranciere, though I'm hesistant on principle to conclude that.) I don't know that R's democracy is quite the same as the democracy that you and Brett have polemicized against. I'm not keen on R's use of that term either, but I think it's more like a homonym than a synonym for the democracy that you write about. Ranciere calls that 'consensus'.
take care,
Posted by: Nate | Nov 17, 2006 10:42:38 AM
It is my understanding that in Ranciere's politics, equality must be thought only in terms of disagreement and vice versa. One of his claims is that "equality" and "democracy" are terms used to mean their opposites. "Equality" is mobilized by the police to maintain inequality. Equality as an axiom can be difficult to picture because it can only be enacted. Hence the "theatricality" of his politics. Politics presumes something that doesn't exist in advance (equality) and follows through on its consequences. To me it's one of the more powerful parts of his work.
I do believe that you're right to be suspicious of "once again..." And it's not that I think Gilligan's questions are bad ones but just that I think that responses can be found in Ranciere's work. I tend to think that Ranciere's thought offers one of the better antidotes to contemporary capitalist dispositions out there. As for texts, I'm probably mostly getting most of this from Disagreement and shorter essays and interviews. Peter Hallward had an essay in a recent New Left Review about Ranciere taking him to task for the "theatricality" of politics in his work. It's worth looking at but it could have been more dialectical.
Posted by: Alexander Search | Nov 17, 2006 10:47:56 AM
A belated response ...
I don't think the real subsumption narrative holds any water
Really, Nate? I think scepticism about the narrative is a good thing - for many reasons, but also for some of the ones it's possible to borrow from Ranciere (as I did in this essay). But none of that adds up to insisting on the autonomy of the aesthetic, surely.
equality is not subject to proof
It may not be subject to proof, but it does presuppose a common measure, even if only in the form of the assumption that unlike things are alike. Which is, in another sense, why the question of whether 'permanent revolution' means perpetual capitalist innovation present itself.
On the democracy polemic - the short answer is no, that's not it. Here, explicitly.
Thanks for the tip on Hallward's essay, Alexander.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Nov 20, 2006 8:51:45 PM
hi Angela,
The measure stuff is exactly my doubts about Ranciere, and I think it could happen w/out equality - "every case of politics is unique" can easily turn into essentially a flattening concept. The same problem applies to invocation of singularity/singularities. I'll have to get back to this soon when I get a break. I've read that piece you've linked to, I think we have a disagreement on our understanding of R's take on democracy. I think R's response on equality and permanent revolution being measure and capitalist innovation would probably be something like "definitely sometimes but not necessarily always"...
On real sub, yeah that's totally fallen apart for me, spurred not least by exchanges w/ you on the need to move away from epochal frameworks. It's a category I'd really like to revisit eventually.
take care,
n8
Posted by: Nate | Nov 20, 2006 9:07:12 PM
to add to Alexander's remarks,
as a latecommer:
Concerning the “two versions” of appearance as disruption, I am reminded of Nancy’s response in Being Singular Plural to the Society of Spectacle. Nancy regards the Situationist will to distinguish the true art-event from the spectacle of the market as a desire for the appropriation of the proper. To exclude the risk of the spectacle, which for Nancy is one of the ways of co-appearing, means to claim the proper way of appearing. Which is also to say, to lay claim, through the true art-event, to the proper being of the demos or ‘the part that has no part’. I think the radicality of what Ranciere means by appearance or staging is that it does not do away with the risk of the spectacle. In his discussion of metapolitics, for instance, he points to the conflation of demos with ethnos in postcolonial politics. A real pitfall, a fall back into the spectacle, and the closure of the possibility of other postcolonial enunciations.
Posted by: pomagrenade | Dec 4, 2006 4:05:30 PM
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