ABSTRACT
In a world marked by increasing poverty, insecurity and inequality, the work of Jacques Rancière is of critical importance. His thought is centred around a powerful conceptualisation of emancipation that is available to all. It does not rely on access to specialist knowledge or resources. It functions simply via two curious claims that polemically challenge what we thought we knew: first, politics is not the complex art of governing (which inevitably will exclude in some way or another) but rather is a moment that disrupts any ordered society in the name of the equality of anybody. Second, democracy is not an ordered, institutionalised system of government but is the emergence of ‘the poor’ onto the scene as a force to be reckoned with.2 For Rancière, emancipation happens through democracy, although as we can already see, a wholly unfamiliar definition of democracy. This emancipation is premised on the assumption that all are equal. The
force of this assumption arises from its two rather banal-sounding effects: first, that there is no necessary, specific ‘aptitude’ that discerns what role or job one is fit for in society; and second, that work can wait. These two effects may seem uncontroversial but as will be argued below together they undermine the ‘knowing one’s place’ attitude that maintains any social order. They comprise the key that unlocks the impossible. They enable people to fight back against domination: to enact that which according to their social position, they cannot; to enact how things can be different; to reveal as contingent our current ways of being, saying and doing; and to demonstrate that other distributions of jobs, social roles, behaviours, ways of life and distributions of wealth and property are possible. Despite the force of his thinking Rancière’s approach is unassuming. He
insists that he is not a theorist of anything; instead he intervenes polemically in already existing discussions about politics, struggle and emancipation. His works discuss and compare historical emancipatory struggles in order to
make certain assertions about their common features. He does not claim to invent new ideas, or to construct a grand theory of the world,3 nor does he tell us what we should do or how we should act.4 Instead, he shifts our focus, redirects our gaze and changes our perception of what is possible. Thus, the impact of his thought is far-reaching. For those committed to equality and emancipation it underlines the need to resist the apparent necessity of all forms of suffering, poverty, division and inequality. He prompts us to attend to the strategies that those who have nothing can use, not merely to ask, but to force the world to take account of them. Rancière begins by rethinking the roots of democracy. This is no innocent step,
for he acknowledges that to speakof democracy ‘means to speakof… struggle … to draw the map of a battlefield’.5 His thinking lives up to this description, disorienting familiar conceptions of what democracy is and how it works. Against the conception of democracy as a system of government he asserts that it is the momentary enactment of equality that takes place in the struggle between rich and poor. Democracy is the moment when ‘the poor’ are constituted as a grouping that can no longer be ignored or dismissed. Not only does he thereby disorient everything we thought we knew about democracy, but in turn his conception of democracy itself disorients and challenges any particular social order. Furthermore, Rancière’s thinking takes a trajectory that disorients the very
history of Western thought despite operating from within it. For centuries established thought has justified and entrenched social order, hierarchy and inequality. Rancière’s writing reflects the poststructuralist assertion that mankind constructs knowledge in response to the uncertainty that marks the human condition. In giving authority to that knowledge we veil the traces of its construction in ‘certainty’, ‘fact’ and ‘truth’. Despite Nietzsche’s famous attack on philosophy’s presumed ability to represent truth, Rancière shows that philosophy, understood as both a discipline and a practice of thinking, continues to justify its place in the world today as the path to right knowledge. In considering how human knowledge excludes and obstructs the struggles of the poor to exist Rancière disorients us further by knocking philosophy – established human thought – off its pedestal. Yet we will always claim to know, if only because living involves thinking
as we move through time. At the simplest level we accrue thoughts over time and refer to them as knowledge. Rancière’s project troubles this knowledge and undermines our certainty. ‘From the very beginning’, he tells us, ‘my concern has been with the study of thought and speech there where they produce effects, that is, in a social battle … over what we perceive and how we can name it’.6 This is a never-ending project. However much we may decry particular instantiations of knowledge, it is somehow in conjunction with thinking that we proceed through life. Our struggle against the dominatory effects of knowledge can therefore only be temporary. We build new idols as we destroy the old. Any disorientation that shocks us and stops us in our tracks is momentary. It may well effect meaningful changes to our world but the shock will fade and become normalised. Each particular change can never
halt this general ‘will to know’ with its associated exclusionary effects. Time will continue to pass. We will continue to live and reorient ourselves. We make meaning of unmeaning. Due to the dominatory snares this entails any commitment to democratic equality requires repeated disorientation. Although Rancière’s work may appear as philosophy we can see that this is
clearly not in any ordinary sense. Littered with metaphors of journeys, voyages and combat, his writing narrates for us a vision of ‘politics’ as an ongoing battle. Theorising ‘politics’ as a strategy of anti-philosophy his thought shreds the ‘Western tradition’ and insists that we rethink how knowledge, and the instituted discipline of philosophy, justifies inequality. Surrounded by the rubble of philosophy Rancière reads ‘politics’ as a moment of fighting back. Rather than a scientific method or an art of governing Rancière views ‘politics’ as the struggle against the ordering and justification of any inequality, better thought of as a strategy – a way of acting – against knowledge. This ‘politics’ breaks with domination and pits knowledge against knowledge. It changes worlds and smashes chains. It is available to those who have nothing and instantiates emancipation. For those opposed to poverty, insecurity and inequality Rancière’s account seems like a good place to start.
