File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2002/lyotard.0209, message 1


Date: Tue, 03 Sep 2002 21:11:08 +0100
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk>
Subject: Ranciere:


All

To continue with the Ranciere notes - (out into the late-summer silence 
little email, no doubt the recipients are still engaged in 'summer 
reading' of various forms of lit- porn... )

It is always alarming to by chance come across a writer who is 
addressing issues that you are especially interested in and I think 
Ranciere is of potential interest to people/participants on this 
list.... allow me to quote him, out of context in the way of 'chucking a 
brick through a glass window' which inbtellectually we are often guilty 
of not doing... "...I am thinking in the first place of the vision 
encapsulated by Jean-Francois Lyotard in the idea of postmodernity. 
After the age of grand narratives of the social centred on the theme of 
the absolute wrong and the universal victim, deomocratic indeterminacy 
has turned out, according to Lyotard, to be synonymos in principle with 
that 'insistent pressure of the infinite on the will' which 
charecterises the infinite tumault of capital. The logic of capital 
tends always to create discordence, heterogenity between linguistic 
discourses.  This heterogeneity prohibits the discourse of the universal 
victim but allows the same experience to be phrased in an infinity of 
different ways: this working class experience may be variously 
articulated in the language of contractual negotiations or in that 
discourse on the subject of labour.....   This approach has the merit of 
abolishing the distance that suspicion maintains, but it does so from 
the starting point of the categories of suspician themselves. Just as, 
for Marx, bourgious progressivism dissapated the illusion of chivalry, 
so for Lyotard, the democracy of capital dissapates the proletarian 
illusion. With the collapse of the political Phantasy of the ONE, what 
asserts itself, in its positivity, is solely the economic tumault of 
difference, which is called without distinction, either Capital or 
Democracy. .... " (P58/59 On the Shores of Politics Verso - 95 orig 
published 92) (Of course) Ranciere correctly notes Lyotard's positive 
response to the various 'forms of suspicion regarding deomcracy' but 
this only works of course within the collapse of Capital and Democracy 
mentioned previously.

Ranciere further suggests that Lyotard inverts the Platonic dislike of 
indeterminacy, of the demcratic uncertainty, and instead Ranciere states 
that Lyotard assigns a positive understanding to the contemporay notion 
of democracy as a marketplace, a bazaar.  Further the Lyotardian 
inversion of such neo-liberal/reactionary  themes such as the 'end of 
ideology', 'end of politics' and 'depoliticisation', normally related to 
the success of 'advanced liberal democratic' societies. (shades of 
Bataille's reading of Hegel here as usual). The two inversions mentioned 
here are both as Ranciere defines it - an inverted Platonism but which 
does not leave the ground on which Plato works. Namely the 
identification of demcracy with the 'turbulance of appetities' - the two 
understandings of this which are apparant in mid and late period Lyotard 
(and are precisely as Ranciere suggests the cause of the frequent 
readings of Lyotard as a proponent of liberalism) are the reading that 
proposes "the predominance of the "narcissistic self-gratification of 
the 'pluralist' society" or the other which draws out the 'philosophers 
gap' between the republic and democracy, suggesting that attempts at 
adminstrative rationality "are a 'soft' form of totalitarism".  This is, 
of course, an abbreviated reading of Lyotard's position but still it's 
necessary to recognise that both inversions/elements do not succeed in 
grasping the complexity of the arguments around the democratic instances 
that exist.... For example - to paraphrase  Ranciere - contemporary 
 anti-globalisation politics is especially interesting because of its 
recognition of a 'wrong' but the absence of a 'victim'. (A phrase that 
Ranciere uses to deliberately refuse the philosophical/political use of 
the term). (Ranciere is writing against the 'Tomb of the 
Intellectual...' i.e. especially against the sentiments that underpin 
such statements as "...one can be an 'intellectual' without dishonor 
only if the wrong lies entirely on one side..." and "...only allows 
defensive and local interventions...")
+++++++++++++++
Of course - as I walk around downtown Washington and north up 14th 
Street - falling over the SUVs and the edges of  a ghetto worthy of 
 Alan Moores 'TOP Ten' comic book - the local these days constitutes a 
sphere of space in excess of 50,000 miles in diameter. Whereas for 
Lyotard I suspect he means something slightly smaller. (Recent calls for 
the demilitarisation of space suggest the local....is growing)

Within the present day the demands of the freemarket, economic 
competition, the G20 geopolitical status quo - have placed us, 
supposedly but recognisably falsely, with only marginal possibilities 
for social-political-alternatives - and yet the slightest element is all 
that is necessery for a 'polemical space' to emerge where small 
differences are turned into major political conflicts - the Kyoto 
agreement might be a difficult example, but on a more local level 
 ongoing discussions as to whether a 'mass murderer' (and torturer of 
children in the case I am thinking of) - has social and political rights 
- the choice in both cases is whether the choice can be made between 
egalitarian phrases which confirm democracy and non-egalitarian words 
which are contrary to it... and of course the third conflict is the 
desire of the G1 state and presumably the US population to invade 
Iraq.... In all cases the ambivilance of the political is obvious

regards
steve



   

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