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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