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Politics and Aesthetics an Interview Jacques Rancie`Re Available Online: 03 Jun 2010 This article was downloaded by: [UNISA University South Africa] On: 21 May 2012, At: 05:18 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20 Politics and aesthetics an interview Jacques Rancie`re Available online: 03 Jun 2010 To cite this article: Jacques Rancie`re (2003): Politics and aesthetics an interview, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 8:2, 191-211 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725032000162657 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities volume 8 number 2 august 2003 introduction peter hallward Jacques Rancière retired from teaching philoso- phy at the University of Paris VIII (Saint-Denis) in 2002. In most of his otherwise varied projects he seeks to overturn all imposed forms of classi- fication or distinction, to subvert all norms of representation that might allow for the stable differentiation of one class of person or experi- ence from another (workers from intellectuals, jacques rancière masters from followers, the articulate from the inarticulate, the artistic from the non-artistic, etc.). As a general rule, Rancière believes that “it translated by forbes morlock is in the moments when the real world wavers and seems to reel into mere appearance, more than in the slow accumulation of day-to-day POLITICS AND experiences, that it becomes possible to form a judgement about the world.”1 AESTHETICS As a student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1960s, Rancière was influenced by an interview Althusser and wrote an important section of Reading Capital in which, like Althusser, he dedicated to recasting the relation between work distinguished between the necessarily deluded and philosophy, or proletarians and intellectu- experience of social agents and the quasi-scien- als, in such a way as to block any prescriptive tific authority of theory (exclusively able to appropriation or representation of the former by grasp, for instance, the mechanics of production the latter. or commodification). It is hardly an exaggera- Like Foucault, Rancière has applied the work tion to say that everything else Rancière has of de-normalisation or de-classification on a Downloaded by [UNISA University South Africa] at 05:18 21 May 2012 written rejects this distinction and all its impli- number of successive though overlapping fronts, cations. Outraged by Althusser’s distance from which for the sake of analysis might be distin- the political mobilisations during and after guished as philosophical, pedagogical, historio- 1968, and suspicious of the ever-widening gap graphical, political, sociological, and aesthetic. between theory and reality he found in the work Rancière’s general argument with philosophy, of his fellow soixante-huitards, Rancière most substantially stated in Le Philosophe et ses published a spectacular critique of his former pauvres (1983), concerns its inaugural attempt to teacher in 1974. Turning instead to Foucault for distinguish people capable of genuine thought methodological inspiration, Rancière founded from others who, entirely defined by their the journal Les Révoltes Logiques in 1975, economic occupation, are presumed to lack the ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/03/020191-21 © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/0969725032000162657 191 politics and aesthetics ability, time and leisure required for thought. shapes men, the sea on which their exchanges The paradigm here is Plato’s division of society take place, the everyday objects in which their into functional orders (artisans, warriors, rulers), relations can be read …”3 What is banished from such that slaves, or shoemakers, for instance, are this territorialising conception of history is the forever banished from the domain of philosophy. very possibility of heresy (heresy understood as To each type of person, one allotted task: labour, the dis-placing of the speaker and dis-aggregation war, or thought. Hence the importance of exclud- of the community4), in particular that modern ing those who, by seeking to imitate a type other “democratic heresy” incarnated by the arrival than their own, threaten to cross these functional upon the historical stage of a popular voice that lines. Rancière finds echoes of both this division refuses any clear assignation of place, the voice and this exclusion in the work of Marx, Sartre of the masses of people who both labour and and Bourdieu. think – a voice noticeably absent, Rancière In pedagogical terms, Rancière’s argument (in observes, from the Annales-inspired conception The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 1987) targets any of history. attempt to conceive of education in terms of the It is precisely this heretical conception of generalised classification of children, i.e. in political speech that informs Rancière’s most terms of a process that leads them from initial programmatic work to date: Disagreement postures of submission and docility towards rela- (1995). The supervision of places and functions tive security precisely in so far as they come to is the business of what Rancière calls the accept their suitably sanctioned place. Inspired “police”; a political sequence begins, then, when by the maverick example of Joseph Jacotot this supervision is interrupted so as to allow a (1770–1840), Rancière’s guiding pedagogical properly anarchic disruption of function and principle is that “all people are virtually capable place, a sweeping de-classification of speech. The of understanding what others have done and democratic voice is the voice of those who reject understood […]. Equality is not a goal to be the prevailing social distribution of roles, who attained but a point of departure, a supposition refuse the way a society shares out power and to be maintained in all circumstances.”2 authority, the voice of “floating subjects that Everyone has the same intelligence; what varies deregulate all representations of places and is the will and opportunity to exercise it. On the portions.”5 basis of this supposition, superior knowledge Applied in sociological terms, Rancière’s ceases to be a necessary qualification of the subversion of classes and norms applies as much teacher, just as the process of “explication” (with to Marxist attempts to squeeze the complexity of its attendant metaphors that distinguish children workers’ experience into the theory-certified as slow or quick, that conceive of educational simplicity of the proletariat as it does to nostal- time in terms of progress, training and qualifica- gic attempts to preserve a “traditional” working tion) is exposed as the dominant “myth of peda- class identity. The Nights of Labor (1981), gogy.” Rancière’s first (and still most) substantial book, Downloaded by [UNISA University South Africa] at 05:18 21 May 2012 When Rancière turns to the writing of history, a record and analysis of proletarian intellectual it is in order to expose the way historians from life in the 1830s and 1840s, undercuts any effort Michelet to Braudel have likewise presented a “to preserve popular, plebeian or proletarian picture of the world in which each individual is purity” and, in the absence left by the disap- set in their appropriate place, in which any pearance of the authentic working class, clears a particular voice becomes audible in so far as it space for the emergence of unauthorised combi- articulates the logic associated with that place. In nations and inventions – transposed utopias, Michelet’s histories, in keeping with a principle reappropriations of literary forms, worker-run that still dominates the discipline as a whole, newspapers and nocturnal poetry societies, trans- “everything has a meaning to the degree that occupational associations, etc.6 The workers every speech production is assignable to the recorded by Rancière complain less about mate- legitimate expression of a place: the earth that rial hardship and more about the predetermined 192 rancière quality of lives framed by rigid social hierarchy. notes “Perhaps the truly dangerous classes,” he 1 Jacques Rancière, Nights of Labor 19. concludes, “were not so much the uncivilised ones thought to undermine society from below 2 Rancière, Le Maître ignorant 9, 229. but rather the migrants who move at the borders 3 Rancière, Names of History 65. “Michelet invents between classes – individuals and groups who the art of making the poor speak by keeping them develop capabilities of no direct use for the silent,
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