Jacques Rancière (1940-)
In terms of the position I and Jacques Rancière are in, it is not an easy task to say good things about him. Can't he think that getting my praise too often is the worst fate he can bear? Therefore, the decision to say good things is only the most cunning way to slander him. In particular, what would he do if I declared that we agreed on a number of important issues? Wouldn't he change his mind on all these issues at once and leave me alone?
The ethical principle that I must emphasize is to avoid any comparison with me. Don't talk about me. There is no agreement or inconsistency, nothing. Talk only about pure Rancière, outright praise. It was in order to distance myself from myself that I chose to enter his work through something that seemed to belong to another person: the relationship between knowledge and power. In fact, this dialectic of knowledge and power is now academicized through Foucault's frame of reference, perhaps also one-sided. In fact, in its universal form ("Any knowledge is power, hit to academic authority!") This dialectic is a cliché of the late 60s and early 70s. It can be asserted that if anyone can expand this concept more and better than Foucault, it is Rancière, as the title of his first book indicates: The Lessons of Althusser. He reflected on the connection between Althusser's "theorism" (a defense of science) and the reactionary political authority of the French Communist Party. It is the relationship between the knowledge of intellectuals and the power of their party, whether they are on the right path or deviate from it.
In order to understand his starting point, it is necessary to return to the context of the 60s, especially the crucial period of 1964-1968, which reached its peak in 1966. For in the case we are confronted this background is absolutely contradictory: it prepares and organizes a swing of positions that began in 1968, from a scientific position that promotes concepts to a practical position that advocates action and the direct point of view of actors. Don't forget that this is also the context in which Rancière grew up.
Look at what happened between 1966 and 1967. The reign of structuralism is undoubtedly the reign of science. The subject matter is profound because it is not an ordinary scientism. This neo-scientism focuses on formal themes and draws on the successes of structural linguistics, especially phonology. It is able to discern the hidden theories of form in the mainstream humanities of Marxism and psychoanalysis: the psychological configuration of the latter, that is, the form of the subject; The former's mode of production, i.e., the form of history.
Both Althusser and Lacan participated in the movement in their own way and assumed the paradigm of scientificity, that is, the paradigm of formalization, one to fundamentally distinguish between the history of science and ideology, and the other to make this formalization a paradigm in the classical texts of psychoanalysis itself. Thus, we are in a context where the problem of knowledge is a problem of paradigms in its deepest and most difficult forms (such as the forms of science, such as logic, mathematics, or linguistic phonemic cores).
However, in the mid and late 60s, a completely opposite trend emerged. This is an original paradox that we should consider in order to have a proper understanding of Rancière's path. In fact, this paradox may be an initial, subjective, and decisive illustration of what he later proposed (and for him these were important categories) non-correlated associations, or non-correlations that were considered associated.
A large-scale anti-authority uprising aimed at overthrowing a hierarchy based on possessive knowledge. The factory rebellion was also an anti-hierarchical revolt, which questioned the authority of engineers and leaders based on technical and scientific knowledge. The point is that the direct experience of the worker is at least as important. It is a sequence, a reference for many young philosophers, for me and for Rancière, even when we are committed to defending the scientific concept and its liberating authority. Whether our obsession with the Cultural Revolution is right or wrong is a secondary debate. In fact, a huge political phenomenon seems to be polarized, about the rejection or rebellion against all authority based on intellectual grasp. In this process, this is the most violent inherent paradox for the revolutionary scientists we aspire to be.
Let's get back to France. From 1967 onwards, there was a series of factory workers' uprisings, which lasted from before 1968 until early May. These uprisings were new in that they were organized by a group of young workers who were not affiliated with the trade unions, and they sought to subvert the internal hierarchy of the factories, which manifested firstly hesitation and even open opposition to the movement's trade unions, and secondly, a rather systematic willingness to insult the authorities. In the months that followed, that will led to the generalization of a rather violent act: the seizure of employers. What I would like to point out to you is the stylized summary of all this in Godard's film All Alright, which can be seen as an art documentary about how consciousness is shaped through the chaotic relationship between knowledge and power.
Jean-Luc Godard's film All Is Well tells the story of the love life of a pair of intellectuals working in the media industry and the strike that took place in May 1972 at a sausage factory
Finally, foreshadowed by various dissident movements, especially on gender and social inequality, the student uprisings of May '68 and the years that followed were explicitly aimed at the vertical organization of knowledge transfer. The uprising concerned issues such as academic authority, nurturing choices, curriculum stages, knowledge control, the possibility of self-learning by student groups, which were organized without the presence of any teachers.
These events constitute a paradox: a oscillation between a dominant philosophical ideology under the absolute paradigm of scientific knowledge and a series of political-ideological phenomena that develop the idea that the link between knowledge and authority is an oppressive political construct that must be defeated by force if necessary.
So for Rancière, as for me and many others who have put this paradox into practice in different ways, an important question will arise: how do we unravel and move away from the existing image of the relationship between knowledge and authority, between knowledge and power? This question arises naturally in the context of what I have talked about, from the moment we became involved in the movement, when it was the inauguration of our young teachers. But I think the problem develops in a more complex form around the question of how experience will be imparted if the authority of knowledge is overthrown, when knowledge is established as a reactionary function in an oppressive image, through which knowledge becomes a monopoly? The issue of teaching has become particularly acute. If concepts do not come first, if practice and practical experience are the true source of liberation, how will this experience be taught? First of all, of course, the revolutionary experience itself. What is the new agreement to impart when the normative authority of power and knowledge that is institutionally a place of imparting is overturned, dissolved, and revoked? What is non-compulsory imparting?
We can also ask: what would be the new image of the teacher if all the validity of institutional authority was excluded? Are there teachers outside the system, or are there no teachers at all? You all know how important this question about teachers is in Rancière's work, but it is no less crucial in Lacan's work. It arose not only from abstract or genealogical questions of the relationship between knowledge and power, but, above all, from the direct legacy of participation in the global mass movement of youth and workers between 1965 and 1975.
This was a typical problem and a transitional solution of that era. Lacan himself slammed the issue of the teaching profession. He not only proposed the numerical element of a teacher's discourse, but also considered the relationship between the teaching profession, teaching and the system. For the new psychoanalytic school as a field of empirical impartation, he particularly makes a striking view of the establishment of a certain equivalence between disintegration and disintegration. If we follow the origins of Lacan's real system, we will first find that, in addition to the established form of teaching, this system is under the fundamental guarantee of the proper name of the teacher (likewise, "Lacan", like "Mao", expresses the conditions for teaching). Then we see that in order to avoid its "adhesive effect", and to ensure the transparency of imparting, it must be on the verge of disintegrating itself, day after day.
Alain Badiou (1937-)
All these situations, the paradoxes of history and subjectivity, constitute the origin of our own "generation", which, as someone has said, is the generation struck by the lightning of May '68. This origin illuminates the trajectory of Rancière's thought and illuminates its long path, for the simple reason that, unlike many others, Rancière has never denied it. For the same reason, it also illuminates my trajectory. Therefore, while I denied it at the beginning of my statement, I think it is necessary to make some use of the comparison between Rancière and me.
I apparently went back to the original dilemma: how do I compare Rancière to me without immediately proving that Rancière is wrong and I am right? In a limited but cosmopolitan environment, it can be cheekily and meaningfully said that the Rancière/Badiou comparison is gradually becoming a kind of model. None of us derive any special pride from it. Jacques said to me one day, "You know, we're moving towards seniority. "Exactly, but we can boast that this is a credible qualification, and not a social interest that some colleagues have found in their misleading denials.
I can do some methodological discussion about my comparison with Rancière. Generally speaking, this kind of comparison has three functions. First, comparison is often used to devise a mode of criticism that pits us against each other in relation to objects like Mallarmé, Plato, Straub, or Godard. Sometimes, comparison is used as a synthesis to frame an issue that is perceived to be unperceived, but flows "between us". Finally, it serves as a positive clarification for the work of one of us. This third function is what I'm going to take on, and I'm more or less clumsy every time, trying to play the wrong role. I will stick to the principle of "just say what is good about Rancière", even if it comes at the cost of saying only my bad.
As to the core question of the background I have mentioned, which is not only the question of the relationship between power and knowledge, but more importantly, the question of imparting when the link between knowledge and power is broken, Rancière argues that this is a democratic hypothesis, about the contingent image of a new type of impartation. I call it the assumption of "democracy", and it has to do with outbreaks, movements, people, lightning inscriptions. It is also associated with the "social" differences between the lower and upper classes of people. This circumstance, coupled with this distinction, creates a link between the new system of teaching and teaching and the betrayal of the old institutionalized practice that is always incomplete. In this context, the interconnectedness between inequality and equality motivation appears in their effective expressions, in the non-associations that are associated.
My first point is that this assumption compelled Rancière to engage in historic mediation. In fact, the assumption of democracy so conceived is based on the observation of the dysfunction of a certain shared system. Through this dysfunction, a shared possibility that is distinct from power, knowledge, the moving body, and the visible whole seems to fall into a gap. This different sharing puts on the agenda a new, fragile, transitional way of teaching that is no longer through established knowledge channels altogether, but exists where the distribution of the imprint of knowledge power changes. There, the sans-part of the old sharing becomes a part. This teaching is truly democratic because it directly relates to differences from the existing sharing system. It has reached the point where polis, the virtual city-state as equal collectives, are abruptly separated from the "police", the already established system of sharing, from the unequally distributed, including the partless as the necessary image of all redistribution.
I would like to emphasize that the Rancière landmark summary organizes the various outcomes of a new type of democratic hypothesis, simply because my own assumptions differ from his. In fact, I started to play the wrong role, and I thought my assumptions were only aristocratic and political. For me, the emergence of a new imparting means a post-événementielle composition of the heteroplasm effect. However, this heterogeneity is in a dimension that is not directly democratic, because its heterogeneity inherently and dispersively affects the multiplicity, affecting the people (dèmos), and it is within the people that this heterogeneity is formed. What makes egalitarian assumptions exist, or at least teaches them, is not in a system of immediate equality. It's a bit like math: what's more average than a pure connection? In the face of this form of game, the ideas are exactly the same, the rules of the game are very clear, everything is recorded, nothing is hidden. That is why Plato gave compulsory precedence to these dialectics of thought, giving them the most convincing equality. This is his democracy: equality before ideas. However, everyone knows that the formation of theorems and their teaching as a whole is the work of a limited group of creative mathematicians. Thus, mathematicians in the strict sense constitute a very aristocratic field, although their selflessness and contribution to universality are unquestionable. It is from this assessment, or rather from this profound democratic paradigm, that Plato draws his conclusions about the scarcity of the guards, and those that affirm their complete equality (including women) and their indifference to communism (their disregard for private property). In this sense, I am referring to a teaching aristocracy, a "communist" aristocracy, whose problem today is that anything reminiscent of the form of a party must be avoided.
To avoid this problem, Rancière was kept as close to the collective sequence as possible, as it undermined the established form of transmission and was not concerned with the material organization of the results of further investigations.
This is our most common form of difference: we have two different analogies. Rancière's analogy is that of the ignorant teacher, mine is the proletarian aristocracy. Obviously, in some ways, these two metaphors, these two criteria, are very close. Roughly speaking, they are the same. Looking closely, there is a big difference. Why? This is arguably a precise and mature philosophical question. Why is it that the "ignorant teachers" still do not replace the "proletarian aristocracy", as was the result of the paradox of the 60s and 70s?
The analogy of the ignorant teacher activates its place in the contingent collective, the non-place position. It teaches without any assurance that what has happened, and in that capacity it is recognized. The ignorant teacher has a potential universality, an activation of what already exists, what has been generated. This historical phenomenon of imparting is both timely and chronological.
The proletarian aristocracy by which I speak is also an accidental aristocracy, but it is prescriptive, and not in a democratic way to justify the power to occupy a position (avoir-lieu) and the power of the absent (hors-place) to gain it. It prescribes what is important to it, and it also imparts without any guarantees. However, it is imparted by subsuming its own time frame, which is a completely different mode of imparting. I introduce it here only to shed light on the inverse metaphor of the ignorant teacher, and to point out that these are two pairs of new names to mentally name some kind of investigation of the paradoxical situation of which I have just spoken.
This duality leads to the use of the same but different things. For example, Plato.
Rancière and I certainly knew—and as Foucault knew, he might have laughed at all the attribution to him—that the dialectique disjonctive of knowledge and power was first and foremost a platonic question in philosophy. Plato devotes a great deal of space to arguing for the proposition that the agreement for the acquisition of knowledge and the distribution of positions of power, i.e., the hierarchical structure of the city (guards, warriors, craftsmen...... There is an inevitable connection. So for Rancière and I, Plato is an eternal and fundamental interlocutor. Plato is like a ridgeline, I believe we walk on the same ridge, but we don't see the same side.
If you look at the structure of the Ideal Republic as a model, you will notice that it can be read in terms of the overall distribution of positions in which the text operates (as we speak today, in terms of its social outlook), or in terms of the education of the Guardians. In the first case, we can conclude that the essence of Plato is a critique of democracy. Why? Because the principle of distribution of positions is that people who do only one thing, or who are forced to do only one thing, cannot really participate in the leadership of political affairs. Rancière stresses this point. In the final analysis, Plato's "social" anti-democracy is not based on the necessity of academic idleness, or the strict distinction between physical and mental work. The question of essence is still a question of one and many. Plato's hierarchical distribution of power was dominated by the belief that the person assigned to the task of production could only accomplish it well if he focused on that task. For handicrafts (i.e. "craft", including poetic craft and art), the principle of one is strict: one task, one person. Hence the existence of a practice monosemy. Instead, the defenders of the polis – in other words, political leaders – had to do several things at once, even if they were excluded from physical production. For example, they must study mathematics, gymnastics, martial arts, dialectical philosophy......
It can be said that in our general perception of Plato, Rancière emphasizes the reactive dimension of practical monosemy (each person has his place), while I emphasize the diversity of theories (the position of the leader is always on the move). Leaving aside the "social" model, we can see the guardian as a metaphor for the multi-functional human being, and in Plato we read a communist paradigm. In the dialogue, there is a coexistence of a rigid hierarchy that places the craftsmen at the bottom of the production and a communism of a kind that develops into a hypothesis – which Socrates considers terrible but inevitable – that of women's participation in the leadership. Plato's distribution is a projection of this division: on the one hand, the inverse metaphor of the ignorant teacher, which organizes ideas in terms of practical monosemy, "social" hierarchies, and their intolerable anti-democratic dimensions; On the other hand, there is the analogy of the proletariat or the communist aristocracy, which conversely extrapolates the Platonic view of the guardian as a paradigm of pluralism and at the same time a paradigm of quasi-human beings as a real vehicle of true equality.
Plato concluded from this relationship between knowledge and power that the key issue in politics is education. It is therefore interesting to consider how Rancière philosophically views education. Looking a little further, it can be noted that in Foucault, the anti-dialectic of knowledge and power does not produce a theory of education at all. Rather, it seeks the unpredictability of the so-called diagonal of practice, especially pathological, extreme, populist local practices that are close to those that cannot be named, and thus delineate various diagonals in the modes of expression of knowledge and power.
It is time to think that Rancière's position is completely original, according to the formal system he gradually summed up from the contradictory experience on which I am based. There is a Rancière-esque cycle, the uniqueness of which is worth considering, which is the organization of his writing between the true philosophical origins of the problem, a material drawn mainly from the experience of workers' action in the 19th century, the arguments of contemporaries (especially Foucault), the examination of the status of sociologists and historians, and the major controversies related to the school of annals, literature or more broadly aesthetics and cinema. If you look at this cycle, you will see that it made possible to formalize our situation in the sixties and seventies. It seems to me that the heterogeneous material in Rancière's writings provides a convincing formalization of the initial paradoxical experience.
On the subject of education, it can be said that Rancière does not see education as central in the political sequence. In this sense, he does not endorse Plato's conclusions. However, he also does not admit the opposite proposition, that education is a superstructure without any privileges. This is a good example, and perhaps the source of what I call Rancière's "médian" style. By "median" I don't mean centrists, but rather styles that have never been immediately conclusive. This median style is due to the fact that Rancière is always looking for a point at which the answers obtained directly enter a game that obfuscates them, and this ambiguity proves that the answers are not as clear as they claim.
Rancière was always inspired by the events I spoke about at the beginning. He, like me, got from it the belief that the struggle is always a struggle on two fronts. This is the great teaching of Mao Zedong Thought. Politically, the struggle naturally pits us against the bourgeoisie, the capitalists and the imperialist rulers, but this important struggle is only possible against the Communist Party and institutionalized trade unionism. It is true that US imperialism should be overthrown, but this can only be achieved by condemning the USSR. In short: a genuine revolutionary left is both anti-right and anti-official "left". This was the exceptionally strong and broad background that lasted until the early 80s, the framework of which was outlined by the idea of a two-front struggle.
There is also a two-front struggle on theoretical issues that are still important today. The struggle rejects the idea that politics can depend on science and therefore on institutionalized teaching. The struggle also opposes the fact that politics must be taught by experts (i.e. the party of the working class) to ignorant workers and the people at large. But Rancière also rejects the idea that politics can be blind spontaneity, a life energy that has nothing to do with concepts, that can be completely absorbed into acts of resistance. There is neither a learned party that overrides the movement, nor is there the immanence of the movement of life, so that acts of resistance absorb or encompass the entire political entity.
On the first front, Rancière had to break with Althusser and write The Lessons of Althusser, as I did at the same time. This is because, for Althusser, science remained the fixed point that ensured ideological splits, which is why he remained loyal to the party long after the period I have referred. We should recognize that behind Althusser, the learned master, can be found what was called "rigid Leninism" by the followers of Mao Zedong Thought at that time. It is a belief that has nothing to do with any movement, that consciousness is instilled in the workers from the outside, and not from the knowledge of any worker, which is the empirical science of social history, that is, Marxism.
Rancière: The Lessons of Althusser
But it must not be forgotten that there is a second front. Rancière must distinguish politics from all vital identities, and firmly maintain the status of his statement, the solidity of his discourse, and the image of the exception. Rancière did not actively extend life forms. His argument is that even if politics is not transmitted to science on the first front, it does produce the necessary many forms of knowledge, and this is true for workers in conflict. On this front, he proposed a completely new dialectic of knowledge and ignorance.
Finally, the question of the political loosening of knowledge and power, and the need for some new form of impartation, proposes within the conceptual framework the dialectic of knowledge and ignorance, and more broadly, the dialectic of impartation and equality. I think these dialectics are at the heart of this important part of Rancière's work, which formalizes his primordial experience.
It seems to me that this dialectic can be summed up as two very subtle arguments, and even more subtle is the connection between them. To formalize the formalization of Rancière, I formulate these two arguments as follows:
(1) Ignorance is the place where new knowledge arises, under the conditions of proclamation of equality;
(2) Under the authority of an ignorant teacher, knowledge can become an equal space.
Of course, one thing is important, and one has become a universal experience in Rancière's work: equality is openly proclaimed, not never programmatic. For those of us who are steadfast Rancièrets, this may be a matter of course, but at the same time it is important to recognize that this is an important contribution of his. It is Rancière who proposes in the contemporary conceptual field the idea that equality is publicly proclaimed, not programmatic. This is a radical subversion, and I fully endorsed this argument a long time ago and attributed it to its author.
There is another nuanced comparison. We agree on the dimension of equal public declaration, but we interpret it differently. For me, equality is openly proclaimed rather than programmatic, which means that equality is in fact an immutable axiom that liberates all the practical sequences of politics. Whenever a new sequence of emancipatory politics begins, for the reasons of events, this axiom is publicly (again) proclaimed. This was what I called "communist invariant" in 1976, when the context of the times was still the same as the original one. The communist invariant is the axiom of equality as an axiom of sequence. Publicly proclaimed equality is the maxim of political aristocracy, which fights against specific or particular forms of inequality. The contingent political aristocracy is an active organization that carries the maxim in a unique sequence, whose sole task is to proclaim it as much as possible in the situation. This aristocracy is absolutely contingent and recognizable, simply because it is the validity of the aphoristic body in a given sequence.
Rancière's case is different, he does not believe in principles, much less in the possible prescriptiveness of the relationship between principles and sequences. I think that for him, equality is both a condition and a production. This is the deeper meaning of the two arguments I outlined earlier. On the one hand, equality is a prerequisite for the new image of knowledge and impartation. On the other hand, under the sign of an ignorant teacher, this new image in turn reinforces equality, creating a new place or space in society for equality.
Equality is a premise, because its manifesto establishes a new intellectual relation, creating the possibility of knowledge where knowledge is not taken into account in the distribution of positions. Therefore, teachers of such knowledge can only declare themselves ignorant. In this movement as a condition, egalitarian regulations establish a new system of knowledge, and a system of imparting knowledge in an unforeseen disconnect from ignorance.
Equality arose as a new intellectual construct that created a place of equality that never existed before. We have given our wish for this wonderful criterion, according to which a part of the incomprehensible part will be realized. But this seems to me to be a bit too structured to properly encapsulate Rancière's thought. Because everything here is a process, an accident, a flash of meaning. In this process, the most important thing is to be equal in the dual occurrence of conditions and production. It is the combination of these two functions that makes equality the quintessential event.
This brings me back to the forbidden comparison. Yes, it can be assumed that for Rancière, the proclamation of equality is the event itself. The event itself will leave an indelible mark. In my view of politics, the egalitarian proclamation is facilitated by events, and it cannot be confused with events. It organizes a body, in a condition of events that are inconsistent with the proclamation.
This comparison led to a very complicated discussion that we did not leave the party in the same way as the initial common experience demanded.
Rancière's departure from the party had no incentive in itself to maintain the organization, and he put it on hold for the time being. If I decide to change the title of my speech now, I would use: "Rancière or the Organization on Hang". With Rancière, leaving the party was to get as close as possible to the inscription. This does not mean that he supports the movement, the opposition party, he just wants to get as close as possible to the original inscription. As an additional point, an indelible inscription, in the spacing, in the unrelated association, we are sure that it once existed, that it still exists, and that history sometimes proves it, and we can therefore admit it.
I left the party more in anxiety and hardship than Rancière, and it must be noted that political continuity is necessarily organized. What is a heterogeneous, aristocratic, egalitarian body of government that is not the heir or imitator of a post-Leninist party of scholars or experts? Philosophically, the difference between suspending organizing principles and keeping them at the center of political attention has profound implications for dealing with the relationship between events, inscriptions, bodies, and outcomes. We ended up with two philosophical definitions of politics that are similar, but different enough to always live in harmony.
In fact, the full wisdom of Rancière's two arguments (on the double occurrence of equality) means that we can draw conclusions with some definitions of politics. The difficulty of extracting some precise definitions from Rancière's text does not stem from the theoretical level. I don't think it's because his anti-Platonic tendencies are so pronounced that he rejects definitions of transcendence that are supposed to apply only to ideas. On the contrary, his writing is definitive, and there are so many impressive expressions that seem to be definitional, so much so that sometimes I feel that he is too defined and not axiomatic enough, so that he may be on Aristotle's side...... But for me, this is a very serious accusation, and I immediately withdraw it!
Perhaps we should think of the difficulty of precision as a formal one, related to Rancière's philosophical style. It's a unique style. It is eager and compact, and of course, it never ceases to captivate us. For a Platonist like me, however, the charm of philosophy has always been in ambiguity. Especially with Plato! When he draws us in, what he usually does is try to get through an ambiguous question.
Rancière's style has three characteristics. First of all, he has a clear point of view; He ties together many assertions in a unique flow, so that the argument is guided by style. It is very interesting to compare it in detail with the style of Deleuze, who also has a firm style, but in a different genre. Second, Rancière's style is one of non-stop polemics. You'll never see him give a single argument to support a recognizable argument. Finally, it is a style that seeks conceptual discourse around examples, with the aim of establishing some undecidable area between the actual and the conceptual. This is not empiricism. On the contrary – beg Jacques to forgive me – it is a subtle Hegelian shift: to prove that the concept is there, in the real intrusion of history, as in the validity of its rhythm. Obviously, my own style is more axiomatic and formal, with more dimensions of independent argumentation. In any case, Rancière's style – fluent assertions, argumentative continuity, elaboration of examples – makes it difficult to extract accurate definitions from his texts.
I want to show that style. Let's take a look at a well-known passage that deals with the definition of politics and rephrases almost all of the topics we discussed tonight. This is the beginning of the end of La Mésentente (Ambiguity):
“
Politics begins to exist when the part of the non-part is inscribed and the calculation of the shares or parts of society is disturbed. Politics begins when the equality of any person with another becomes part of the freedom of the people. This freedom of the people is an empty property, an attribute of non-self, by which those who are nothing equate their collective with the whole community. Politics existed as soon as the distinct form of subjectification renewed the initial form of identity between the community as a whole and the unowned owner that separated it from itself, that is, the only computation of its constituent parts. When this disparity no longer exists, politics disappears, and the whole community is restored to the sum of its parts without any remains. (p. 169)
”
That's what I call an eager and compact style. The comprehensibility of the text is entirely syntactically constructed. It can be said that Rancière's style is essentially a syntactic style, with a unique semantic distribution of the relationship between concepts and examples. Therefore, it is difficult to extract from this text a precise definition of concepts such as politics, equality, teachers, knowledge, etc...... But I still want to give it a try.
Let's start with a very unique definition. What is the "end" of politics, or even the end of political activity in a given situation? This is the sequence in which the politics of liberation lies. Rancière tells us that politics ceases when the whole (collective) is restored to the sum of its parts without any remainder. At this point, I would point out a very revealing distinction between me and Rancière, a distinction that is more subtle than the others, because it is ontological in nature. This view of the sum of the parts assumes an ontology of many, which Rancière does not really give. Because in fact, if we were stricter, a set could not simply be reduced to the sum of its parts. There is always something that transcends the whole itself in the calculation of the parts. It is this overflow that I call the state (état), the state of many, the state of the situation. When a collective is merely the sum of its parts, Rancière calls it police, and I call it state. But then we went our separate ways. For Rancière, the agreement of political termination is the moment when the state of the collective, that is, partial security, is restored. For me, however, there will be no political termination in this sense, because the overflow of the state is irreducible. In the state, there is always something whose power transcends the pure manifestation of the collective. In the state, there is something that is not represented. Therefore, we cannot imagine politics stopping in a whole image that has been restored to the sum of its parts. I don't want to say too much, but it means that for me it is impossible to structurally describe the termination of politics. That's why Rancière and I often have different judgments about the reality of politics. Because we don't have the same judgment protocol to determine its termination. For him, the end of politics has a designable structural form, and that is the moment when the surnuméraire is abolished and thus the totality as the sum of its parts is fully restored. With an agreement on political termination, he can designate the absence and end of politics. Since I don't have such an agreement, political issues remain open, at least structurally. This may be a purely ontological space, about the differences in the judgment of the situation. This may be the root of the difference in experience: unlike me, Rancière has not been involved in organized political movements for a long time.
Now, can we give a definition of equality? Equality is a manifesto, of course within a particular system of inequality, but it is nevertheless certain that it will one day be abolished. This is not a procedure for repeal, but a statement that such an abolition will take place. I fully endorse this basic act. It follows that the exercise of equality is always a question of result, not of purpose. It is cause and effect or effect, not purpose. This is important. What we can have, and must organize, is the result of a declaration of equality, not an equal means as an end. I couldn't agree more on this point. In Rancière's conceptualization, equality has never been an idea. It cannot be an idea, because it is a collective real system at a particular time in history. The content of the declaration (changed in form) is "We are equal", and this solid declaration – albeit redundant in the historical sense – becomes a reality in its consequence. That's Rancière's point. For me, equality is fundamentally a very special idea. It is an idea because it is the invariant of a political manifesto, as it is formed in the sequence of emancipatory politics. As such, it is eternal in its own existence, although the local structure in a particular world is its only possible form of reality. When it comes to eternity, and the difference between "être" and "exister," I once again play the role of a dogmatic fool. Perhaps it is here that the separation between Platonism and non-Platonism (or anti-Platonism) is achieved, extending all the way to the center of political action: equal intellectual or non-conceptual status. At the same time, we all agree that the exercise of equality is always a question of results. Is this practical agreement sufficient to offset the ontological differences? Maybe not, maybe partial, in some cases, but never in continuity. This is simply because the eternity of the axiom of egalitarianism ensures a continuity that Rancière cannot bear.
On these bases of politics and equality, we can make a critique of the image of the teacher, which is the third definition. In addition, it is interesting to take stock of the image of the teacher in contemporary French philosophy. In the established sense, the critique of the teaching profession presents a new image, which Rancière describes with great skill. In the dual relationship of ignorant teacher/equal community, this figure has the power to break the connection established by Plato between the teacher of knowledge and the leader of the polis, and between knowledge and power. In Lacan's words, this means putting an end to the confusion between the discourse of teachers and the discourse of the university. I think it was here that Rancière demonstrated the abundance of resources he tapped from the 19th-century workers' and revolutionary creations. It is deserving to pay tribute to this extraordinary action, which is the activation of the archive, which, in my opinion, is much more effective and less sad than Foucault's. The worker's archive, which Rancière excavates and reactivates in an excellent text, shows its speculative richness, to be precise, a completely original image of impartation, which directly touches on the original question I discussed at the beginning. In my own words, Rancière has discovered a form that can conceptualize our innate paradoxes eternally. He proposed a new concept of teaching outside the system.
In the end, all of this is a reaction to knowledge. Knowledge, premised on the egalitarian maxim, in a new type of relationship with ignorance, in turn opens up a new space for equality, which is clearly a kind of knowledge that is different from institutionalized knowledge. In my own words, this means that the knowledge we receive corresponds to at least one truth. For Rancière, I believe that knowledge, or true knowledge, is what the Declaration of Equality articulates or deploys in an unequal system. Supposed ignorance, known as ignorance in an unequal system, generates a new discourse as soon as it is constrained by the authority of the declaration of equality. We have said that this is a knowledge of revolution or emancipation, a real knowledge, the knowledge of happiness that Nietzsche spoke of. It can also be said that such knowledge is the influence of encountering an ignorant teacher on consciousness. Moreover, here we are very close to the "good" Plato that Rancière identifies. Because it is clear that, like all anti-Platonists, Rancière had his own "good" Plato. This is Plato's encounter or creation of the ignorant teacher. The first person to say "the only thing I know is that I don't know anything" and present himself as an ignorant teacher was none other than Socrates. In the consciousness of youth, what is produced by encountering an ignorant teacher should be called new knowledge, or real knowledge.
Once we get all of this into account – of course, I'm just giving the tip of the iceberg – we can get back to education. I think the main shift in Rancière's approach to education is to eliminate the question of "who educates whom". It is this question that is not quite the right one. For it can lead both to the assumption of the image of the teacher and to anarchy, where knowledge and non-knowledge are equal in the power of life, so much so that everyone educates everyone, or no one educates anyone. This is a typical example of a struggle on two fronts. We can accept neither the oneness of the erudite teacher, nor the unreliability of spontaneous knowledge. The struggle against universities and parties continues, but at the same time against vitalist spontaneists, supporters of pure movements or what Negri calls the multitude. The new concept of the link between knowledge and politics does not support either the authoritarian view of an enlightened party or an anarchist view subject to public opinion, which becomes more or less a manipulation of an unequal system. In both cases, according to Rancière, the city-state disappeared under law and order.
The correct way to put it is that the process of anonymous education is the result of the establishment of a series of declarations of equality. This is liberation education. "Who educates whom?" The problem is gone. We can only say: "We educate ourselves in this process", because the contours of "we" are unique each time, but each time it reaffirms in context that equality is the only universal criterion. Therefore, education is not a condition of politics, as it is with Plato, rigid Leninism or Althusser. But it is also not indifferent to politics, as in the spontaneism or vitalism of the movement's inner creation. I should say that I am aware of the need to come up with a difficult expression, both with Rancière and in his name: education is a fragment of politics. Fragments equal to the others.
There is no doubt that I unequivocally agree with all this. The difficulty, and the controversy, lies in defining or defining the anonymous "we" in the expression "we educate ourselves in the process". In defense of democracy, Rancière did not make provisions on this point, nor was there any real openness. In a sense, the basic preparatory measure of democracy is not to prescribe "we", even if it is conceptual. Of course, he has a lot to say about the central goal of utopian communism, the community of equals. But he clearly sees that this is a myth of regulation and a social outcome, not a tool of the political process. It can be argued that there is no definite image of an activist with Rancière. Conversely, in the genealogy of the Platonic school, which I call aristocracy, "we" are equal bodies, bodies of aphorisms, a given moment in its process. Of course, this is a kind of accidental aristocracy. The only function of the "we" is to deal with non-associative associations, i.e. associations with heterogeneity, and to adhere to the principle of equality as much as possible in the outcome. Therefore, it is defined by a group of activists who gather on the body as the result of truth.
Being an activist means embarking on a journey, changing boundaries, and defining impossible connections...... However, in the context in which we find ourselves, the main impossible connection is the link between the intellectuals and the workers. In the end, the whole history is also a history of this connection. Tonight, what we are discussing (and not too deeply) is the philosophical or speculative history of the connection between the intellectuals and the workers, as possible or impossible, as associative or non-correlated, as spacing, and so on. In the elements of Mao Zedong Thought of that era, this was what we call mass connection, but dialectically, mass connection was the power of liberation. It is during an initial process of liberation that the possibility of this connection arises, something incredibly new. But this possibility only establishes its own temporality in political organization.
Let's be a little more conceptual. Rancière's idea can be summed up in this way: Valuable is always the ephemeral inscription of a superfluous item. And I think that what is valuable is to stipulate some kind of overflowing discipline. For Rancière, in a particular system of inequality, the surplus can be described as a partless part. For me, the result of the discipline of truth is described as the multiplicité générique subtracted from all predicates (prédicat). For Rancière, there are only exceptions to the era or history. For me, there are only eternal exceptions.
This gave me a chance to end with a sharp criticism, which is in line with my glorification ethic. This involves Richard Wagner and touches on the theme of liberation or the power of kindness, just as art can produce its multiple incarnations. In one book, Rancière explains the third act of The Famous Singers of Nuremberg. The theme of "Famous Singers of Nuremberg" is the need to reconstruct the relationship between man and art. "Famous singers" are an art guild of craftsmen who inherit and teach a certain singing tradition. The central figure of the organization was the lowest-ranking craftsman, who was a shoemaker, which in India was almost synonymous with a pariah. However, this happens when people realize the need to establish the non-association between people and art as an association. Obviously this story is a good example for Rancière, and it is the same for me. Again, our original request is here. Because in the image of the young aristocrat Walther we see a new artist, a new art, a new singing. Walter – and Wagner – came to take part in a singing competition organized by famous teachers. The prize for this contest is to marry a young and beautiful woman, Eva. The inclusion of young women as a reward for Art Nouveau was fitting for Wagner and many other artists. Dominated by the formidable Beckmesser – the counterpart of Meyerbeer – the most traditional conservative representatives were unequivocally opposed to this new form of singing. At the heart of the story is the shoemaker Hans Sachs, who is the intermediary who reconstructs the associations, making the non-relational dimensions of the new style of singing inscribed in them. He played tricks, tricks, and the details were quite complex, all in order to enable the young lord to finally participate in the competition and win the prize, and in doing so, we openly construct a new connection between tradition, people, and innovation within the arts. The goal of Sachs's "radical" is to combine artistic innovation with tradition, so that the whole is constituted in the medium of art by the people in relation to their historical new essence.
The Famous Singers of Nuremberg is a three-act play composed by the German composer Richard Wagner between 1845 and 1867. The protagonist of the opera, "Hans Sachs", is the most famous "famous singer" in German history, who wrote a large number of poems that express real human nature and real life, and made an important contribution to the development of German art in the 16th century. Through this figure, Wagner fully expressed his ideals of artistic reform and his pride and admiration for German culture and art
Rancière and I gave a slightly different interpretation of one of the sections, which tells the story of the knight overcoming obstacles, participating in the competition, singing his new tune, and conquering the people. People said to him: Now you are going to join the ranks of "famous singers". Walter, however, refused, and out of abhorrence of the insult he had to endure, he was a proud and lonely romantic. The shoemaker spoke at this point. The shoemaker explains to the young man, believing that he must accept this fact, because it is only when the non-association is established that he has the potential to become a new instrument of the collective. It is only when the non-connection between tradition and innovation can be practiced as a kind of association to some extent that the people can be framed by art. This tirade further explains the fate of Germany. Hans Sachs does support a very peculiar argument, which seems to me quite accurate: the "real" and universal destiny of Germany can only be German art. In the end, the knight accepted. However, it was not the people who shouted "Long live Walter!" ", but "Long live Hans Sachs!" The laurel was presented to the shoemaker amid cheers. In short, it was recognized that the real teacher in the whole process was the poor shoemaker.
Rancière thinks it's all rather poignant, because the time has passed when the real connection between Art Nouveau and the shoemaker was possible. When Wagner finished his opera, he conceived of the public coronation of the shoemaker as the spiritual domination of the artistic figure, a pure nostalgic fiction in which the young Wagner had climbed the trenches of Dresden in 1848. Wagner understood that we were already in the process of a complete disconnect between avant-garde art and popular groups.
It is at this point that I give a different opinion. This scene shows that if art does not enjoy strong popular acceptance as it traverses dissociation, it will become penniless and will be replaced everywhere by a consumable "culture", a Beckmesser stereotype. Hans Sachs gave the image of theatre and music a forward-looking view that has not yet been realized, because the "socialist realism" that reformulated it could not be realized: the idea of a great art that was neither confined to the educated bourgeoisie nor reduced to a noisy minority. It's a great popular art, like today's films from Chaplin to Takeshi Kitano. Since the 19th century, this idea has been zigzag to generate its true eternity. The crowning of the shoemaker Saxophone for his realization on stage of an idea that is generating eternity is well deserved, even though it has been historically difficult since a century and a half. It would have been more convincing if, instead of singing a new song, Walter had said, "I have a camera, I invented cinema". It is true that he did not propose an art that was both inherited from the folk tradition and strongly innovative. He's just singing a song that's something fresh. In fact, this is one of Wagner's most beautiful songs...... But in the end, the truth of this scene lies in what it affirms, not what it regrets. Neither Walter's songs nor Saxophone's manifesto are musically dominated by melancholy. From the beginning of the energetic set, the opera is artistically positive and joyful. It is interesting to note that if Sachs really chooses to give up (he knows that the new song belongs to Walter, that he is only an intermediary, and therefore, although he is the lover of his father and Ava in the symbolic sense, it can only be this young man who should marry her), this renunciation—as a warm theme of a Midsummer Night, as a vocal presentation of the fragrance of the lime tree—is absorbed by the general energy of mass history, in the form of a comic uproar in the second act, and patriotism and the workers' march in the third.
Since then, music itself seems to have created a quasi-image of an artistic discipline, as an analogy to a political discipline, which remained on hold after 1848 and remained so after the repression of the Paris Commune until Lenin and the revolution of 1917.
This subtle difference is interesting because it relates to history. Rancière incorporates practical contemporaneity into his judgment of Wagner's fables. It is true that the hopes of the 1848 revolution have been disillusioned since 1850, but my inference is quite the opposite. I believe that the allegory of art is forward-looking, forward-looking, and a beacon of time for the eternal generation of ideas. The timely denial of history does not bring sadness, but rather puts the idea into practice in a tense future, even if it is a very distant future. This is what Wagner understood in his art music at the coronation of the shoemaker Hans Sachs. In fact, Wagner's question is: "Who are the masters of art?" "This is a question that comes up a lot in our discussions about Rancière's work, especially when it comes to film.
Ideas that arise in inconsistent worlds are to be judged not in terms of what caused their apparent failure in a particular historical sequence, but rather in terms of their general compulsive gradual generation as they travel through unpredictable new worlds.