File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2004/postanarchism.0410, message 36


From: Jesse Cohn <jessecohn-AT-verizon.net>
Subject: Re: [postanarchism] Holmes: ""Hieroglyphs of the Future: Jacques Ranci?re and the Aesthetics of Equality"
Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 12:06:19 -0600


Thanks for posting this fascinating article.  I had heard of Jacques Rancière and _La Mésentente_ before from Alain Thevenet, the French psychologist who frequently writes for the journal _Réfractions_, but (partly due to the language barrier) I hadn't really grasped what was so interesting about this stuff from an anarchist perspective.  I'll really have to look more closely at it.


     --Jesse.


> From: Jason Michael Adams <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
> Date: 2004/10/30 Sat PM 04:02:19 CDT
> To: postanarchism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> Subject: [postanarchism] Holmes: ""Hieroglyphs of the Future: Jacques Ranci?re and the Aesthetics of Equality"
> 
> 
> "Hieroglyphs of the Future: Jacques Ranci?re and the
> Aesthetics of Equality"
> 
> by Brian Holmes
> 
> http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/02/22/1629221&mode=nested&tid=9
> 
> "We're not surplus, we're a plus." The slogan appeared
> at the demonstrations of the French jobless movement
> in the mid-nineties, in journals, on banners, on
> tracts printed by the political art group Ne pas
> plier. It knitted the critical force and the
> subjective claims of the movement into a single
> phrase. To be "surplus" (laid off, redundant) was to
> be reduced to silence in a society that effectively
> subtracted the jobless from the public accounts, that
> made them into a kind of residue -? invisible,
> inconceivable except as a statistic under a negative
> sign. Excluded, in short: cut out of a system based on
> the status of the salaried employee. Until they
> finally came together to turn the tables, reverse the
> signs, and claim a new name on a stage they had
> created, by occupying unemployment offices in a
> nation-wide protest during the winter of 1997-98. The
> people with nothing erupted onto the public scene.
> "We're a plus," they said, intruding through the TV
> cameras into the country's living rooms. Which also
> meant, "We'll drink champagne on Christmas eve."
> 
> One way to grasp the aesthetic language of the French
> social movements in the nineties -? and of the
> transnational movements now emerging -? is to read
> Jacques Ranci?re's work on equality. 
> In La M?sentente (The Disagreement, 1995), he
> confronted the philosophy of government with the
> scandal of the political.(1) Government fulfills an
> ideal of order when it administers, manages, and tries
> to totally account for a population; but its reality
> is the police. The police keeps everyone in their
> place, imposes the calculations of value, apportions
> out the shares in society. The political is an
> opposite process, and it's rare. It happens when
> outcasts stand up to say that the calculations are
> wrong, when they refuse the names and the places
> they've been given ("we're not surplus"), to claim
> both a share in society and another name, which will
> signify their particular addition to universal
> equality ("we're a plus"). Because the equality of one
> speaking being with any other ?- the fundamental
> presupposition of democracy ?- does not exist in the
> abstract. It only becomes universal each time it's
> proven, in a new language and on a newly visible
> stage. Equality is the groundless claim of a minority
> to have the rights of any other group, to be the
> demos, the people. But it's a claim whose naked truth
> does not suffice, it has to be put to the test,
> publicly verified. Which is why the political always
> takes the form of a demonstration: a logical proof,
> against all prevailing logic, and the mobile presence
> of a crowd, against the fixed frames of an
> institution. 
> 
> Ranci?re's description was in synch with its time. It
> anticipated the general strike of French state workers
> in December 1995, massively supported by the public,
> and it accompanied the later revolts of the homeless,
> the jobless, the paperless -? the "mouvement des sans"
> -? who rose up to demand a new division and sharing of
> the social whole, beyond the accounting systems of the
> industrial state. But it also offered a key that could
> reopen the airlocks between the aesthetic and the
> political. 
> 
> In an essay written just after La M?sentente, Ranci?re
> explained that the political always involves a
> disidentification with some aspect of the existing
> community -? for example, with the police state that
> expels the jobless or the paperless. At the same time,
> it requires an impossible identification with "the
> cause of the other."(2) This impossible identification
> suggests a new, subjective figure of political
> commitment. Its paradigm in France is the
> identification of an entire generation on the left
> with the Algerian demonstrators thrown brutally into
> the Seine by the police in 1961. To identify with the
> murdered Algerians was not to speak for them -? an
> absurd idea, while their fellows were completing a
> revolution in Algeria -? but to live on in their
> place, in opposition to a national institution that
> excluded certain citizens (those of the former
> colonies) and included others (those of the
> metropole). That impossible identification would
> return in the transnational, transhistorical assertion
> of the students in May '68, "We are all German Jews."
> And then again in the specific legal and political
> context of the late nineties, with the public act,
> often performed in theaters, of parrainage or
> "god-parenting," which meant taking a quasi-familial,
> quasi- legal responsibility for an undocumented
> individual. 
> 
> This theatrical fiction, like the poetics of the '68
> slogan, points to the specifically artistic aspect of
> political engagement, sketched out in a few pages of
> La M?sentente. Ranci?re begins by opposing Habermas's
> view that the surprise of aesthetic experience, the
> opening to the world effected by metaphor, must be
> distinguished from the norms of communicative action.
> He claims instead that the uncertain reality of art,
> the shift or transport of meaning that defines
> metaphor, is an inherent part of every political
> dispute, where the argument itself bears first of all
> on the legitimacy or even the reality of one of the
> fundamental elements that configure the disagreement
> (its place, its object, its subjects). The
> place-changing action of metaphor ?- one thing or
> person for another ?- is what allows the creation or
> extension of a community of speaking subjects; and
> this potential extension of a community is needed for
> any argument about equality. This is why the modern
> forms of political group-formation, or
> subjectivization, are historically linked to the
> emergence of an autonomous aesthetic dimension split
> from any practical manipulation of usable objects: an
> unpredictable, infinitely extensible realm defining "a
> world of virtual community -? a demand for community
> ?- superimposed upon the world of orders and parts
> that lends everything its use."(3) 
> 
> Metaphors are the hieroglyphs of an unknown language,
> the demand for an unheard-of community. When the group
> Ne pas plier, in collaboration with the jobless
> association l'APEIS (l'Association pour l'emploi,
> l'information et la solidarit?), raised Marc Pataut's
> anonymous portraits above the crowd in 1994 ?-
> singular faces above a sea of demonstrating humanity
> -? the question was not whether these meter-high
> photographs, carried on a wooden picket, really
> represented identifiable jobless people. The question
> was whether a social issue could be extended beyond
> individual cases, to call for a general
> reconfiguration of society; whether each anonymous
> face was potentially the face of the unemployed peuple
> reclaiming its right to speak; and whether the
> gesticulating debates on Republic Square could compare
> to the ones in the National Assembly. A visual
> uncertainty, a metaphoric possibility of "one-for-
> another," intertwined with a political argument
> bearing on proper or improper names, on the proper or
> improper division and sharing of resources, of roles,
> of sensuous reality. In lieu of an answer, the
> question itself gestured toward a possible future that
> could only be opened up, among the existing divisions
> of the world, by an argumentative logic knit together
> with an artistic metaphor. 
> 
> A Change of Regime
> 
> Ranci?re's thinking of the political was formulated in
> the early 1990s, during the long French slide into
> recession and racism, when the status of salaried
> labor was falling into tatters along with
> welfare-state guarantees, when immigrants were being
> outlawed in the name of union jobs and the unemployed
> were being proclaimed the impossible political
> subject. Yet the threat of the flexible,
> transnational, networked regime -? the so-called
> "economic horror" ?- sparked original forms of protest
> and debate. A breach was reopened, marked in political
> economy by the work of Andr? Gorz, Mis?re du pr?sent,
> richesses du possible (Poverty of the Present, Wealth
> of the Possible), which turned the questions of
> flexible work and unemployment back on an entire
> system, to explore the reasons for maintaining a
> politics of scarcity in a society of automated
> production. 
> 
> That breach seems to have closed today. La M?sentente
> had already shown how certain forms of political
> consensus act to freeze social identities, eliminating
> the disruptive claims of equality. There is the
> welfare-state conception of society as an interplay of
> "partners" (unions, businesses, public services); the
> neoliberal idea that society does not exist, only
> desiring, enterprising individuals; the multicultural
> vision of separate, Balkanized communities, each bound
> by their own beliefs. All exclude the political
> conflict formerly brought by the subject called
> "proletariat" ?- the most recent name of the antique
> demos or the revolutionary peuple. After integrating
> much of the National Front's racism, the French
> socialist party has now found an original mix of the
> first two forms of consensus: they intensify the
> neoliberal program of flexible transnational labor
> relations, in hopes of returning to the salaried
> employment on which the postwar social contract of the
> nation-state was based! As though the challenges
> raised by the "mouvement des sans" never even existed.
> 
> 
> But what is happening now, far beyond France, is that
> similar movements are expanding, proliferating, in an
> attempt to meet their adversaries on another stage:
> the stage set by the transnational corporations. This
> proliferation involves an identification with the
> cause of an impossibly distant other, Mayan peasant,
> Brazilian autoworker, Nigerian tribesman, Indian
> farmer? What are the metaphors that can speak on a
> world stage? To explore the role of art in these
> movements, I think we had better start with something
> much closer to home: the language machine that knits
> the transnational system together, and the kind of
> labor that is done with it. 
> 
> The Internet has widely (and rightly) been seen on the
> left as providing the infrastructure for what is
> called "digital capitalism."(4) But what the leftist
> commentators forget -? one wonders why? -? is that the
> simplest net application of them all, email, has
> offered an extraordinary chance to what Ranci?re calls
> "the literary animal." As large parts of the former
> working classes gained education, refused industrial
> discipline, and split away from their former position
> in the social hierarchy, they became "immaterial
> laborers" facing the new predicament of flexibilized
> conditions(5) ?- but they also found themselves in
> possession of a new writing tool. And as they taught
> themselves to use it and invented more applications
> every day, what did they claim, against all prevailing
> logic? That here, everyone is equal. The virtual
> realities of the 1990s saw the return of a utopia
> whose emergence Ranci?re has chronicled in his
> accounts of the self-education of the artisan classes
> in the early nineteenth century: "Thus one can dream
> of a society of emancipated individuals that would be
> a society of artists. Such a society would repudiate
> the divide between those who know and those who do not
> know, between those who possess or who do not possess
> the property of intelligence. It would recognize only
> active minds: humans who act, who speak of their
> actions and thereby transform all their works into
> ways of signaling the humanity within themselves and
> everyone."(6) 
> 
> That dream was bound to run up against what Ranci?re
> has called "the society of disdain." In the late
> twentieth century it took the usual form of the
> expropriation of a popular language, and its
> replacement by manipulated simulacra. Yet even as the
> dominance of the Internet by the commercial and
> financial spheres became clear, even as the figure of
> the shareholder emerged as the only one with a right
> to participate politically in the new economy,
> political activism took a new twist, and disruptions
> began appearing in the fabric of corporate and
> governmental speech. 
> 
> Since 1993, the anonymously run ?TMark group has been
> launching parodies into the ideological mix:
> consultancy and funding for consumer-product sabotage,
> following the actions of the infamous Barbie
> Liberation Organization; direct email campaigns
> promoting subversion, like the Call-in Sick Day to
> celebrate the non-holiday (in Anglo-Saxon lands) of
> May 1st; pseudo-official sites like gwbush.com,
> voteauction.com, or gatt.org.(7) Masquerading beneath
> a corporate- bureaucratic veneer ?- lackluster logos,
> deadpan graphics, pompous speech -? the ?TMark
> websites start off believable, waver in midflight,
> then tailspin into scandalous denunciation by an
> excess of liberal truth. Another movement, Kein Mensch
> ist Illegal, more recently took up the same kind of
> strategy with its Deportation-Class campaign:
> websites, a poster contest, information kits,
> super-activist mileage programs? all opportunities for
> Lufthansa's stockholders to find out just how much it
> could cost them to go on deporting illegal immigrants
> for the police. Then, in a parody of the "Oneworld"
> airline alliance, the Deportation-Alliance emerged,
> with collaboration from ?TMark and many others.
> Meanwhile, a group of slow-thinking Austrian lawyers
> stumbled on the gatt.org site and wanted Mike Moore of
> the WTO to come pep up their meeting in Salzburg.
> "Mike Moore" declined, but sent two substitutes -?
> later revealed to be the "Yes Men" -? who stood before
> the unwitting lawyers to explain a vast but rather
> shocking program for the extension of free trade? The
> whole incident was documented on video ("tactical
> embarrassment," as the activist Jordi Claramonte likes
> to say). 
> 
> Through mimicry and imagination, groups like ?TMark
> create a short-circuit between the anonymous, abstract
> equality of immaterial labor and the subjective
> exceptionalism of art. "The mimic gives the 'private'
> principle of work a public stage. He constitutes a
> common stage with what ought to determine the
> confinement of each to his place," writes Ranci?re in
> Le partage du sensible. But this "common stage" is a
> scene, not of stifling unity, but of dissensus: the
> mimic transmits "blocks of speech circulating without
> a legitimate father," literary and political
> statements that "grab hold of bodies and divert them
> from their destination," that "contribute to the
> formation of collective speakers who throw into
> question the distribution of roles, of territories, of
> languages ?- in short, political subjects who upset an
> established sharing and division of the sensible."(8) 
> 
> ?TMark or Deportation-Class are ways for immaterial
> laborers to claim a voice, a non-economic share,
> against the stock-market rules of a shareholder's
> society. They are also vectors of a new kind of
> transnational collaboration or reciprocity. They offer
> a way to rejoin the direct action movements, Art and
> Revolution, Attac, and hundreds of other organizations
> ?- the newest way into a much older configuration of
> the aesthetic and the political, which is also called
> democracy. 
> 
> Because the duplicity of art/work hardly began with
> Internet. It reaches back to what Ranci?re calls the
> aesthetic regime of the arts, which emerged, not
> coincidentally, at the end of the Ancien Regime.
> Aesthetics is the name of an indistinction, where fact
> is inseparable from fiction, where the lowest can
> become the highest and vice-versa. The aesthetic
> regime of the arts ruins the historically prior regime
> of representation, with its hierarchies, decorum, and
> strict separation of genres, but also its Aristotelian
> distinction between chaotic, accidental history, and
> well-constructed, plausible fiction. Working initially
> through mimetic or testimonial techniques ?- realist
> literature or painting, photography or cinema -? the
> new regime determines the paradoxical beauty of the
> anonymous subject, of whoever or whatever: "The
> ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true?
> when it is torn away from the obvious and made into a
> mythological or phantasmagorical hieroglyph." (9) 
> 
> Before and beyond any "modernist" or "postmodernist"
> program, the aesthetic regime "makes art into an
> autonomous form of life, thus simultaneously positing
> both the autonomy of art and its identification with a
> moment in a process of life's self-formation."(10) The
> understanding of activist art begins right here, with
> the notion of life's self-formation. 
> 
> Fictionable Futures
> 
> The originality of Ranci?re's work on the aesthetic
> regime is to clearly show how art can be historically
> effective, directly political. Art achieves this by
> means of fictions: arrangements of signs that inhere
> to reality, yet at the same time make it legible to
> the person moving through it -? as though history were
> an unfinished film, a documentary fiction, of which we
> are both cameramen and actors. 
> 
> That would be one way to describe an event like the
> "Carnival against Capital," staged by the ten thousand
> actors of Reclaim the Streets in the City of London on
> June 18th, 1999. Wearing masks of four different
> colors, the crowd wove converging paths through the
> City, displaying signs, creating images, knitting its
> mobile music and language into urban reality ?-
> weaving another world in order to tangle with the one
> managed by finance capital (and to tangle directly
> with the police). June 18th taught us to read a new
> story at the center of finance capitalism. But no
> privileged viewpoint could wrap up the film, gather
> the whole of this "artwork" into a totality and reduce
> its contradictions -? because the idea had already
> crisscrossed not just Britain but the earth, spreading
> and dividing like the wildfire of equality. By tracts,
> images, Internet, and word of mouth, by collaboration
> and spontaneous reinvention, the "disorganization" of
> Reclaim the Streets and the Peoples' Global Action
> network had mapped out a new kind of world, in which
> collectives in over 70 different countries could
> protest against the same abstract processes of
> neoliberal capitalism, under vastly different local
> conditions but on the same day. Did the "film" of
> Seattle, Prague and so on begin right here, with this
> "artistic" event? But where was "here"? And what did
> the "event" really consist of? 
> 
> If anarchic, artistic demonstrations like June 18th
> are political, it is because they involve a
> disagreement, a direct confrontation with the existing
> divisions or shares of sensuous reality. They make
> visible the "invisible government" of the
> international financial institutions (i.e. the new
> world police). But if they are aesthetic, it is
> because they bring a blur of indistinction to the
> proper subjects, objects, and places of the debate.
> They create another stage for politics: like the
> protesters in London opening a fire hydrant to
> symbolically return a long-buried river to the surface
> of the street, to reclaim that stream from the layered
> abstractions of capital. Or like the social forces in
> Porto Alegre displacing the wintry Davos economic
> forum to the summer weather of the South, turning the
> agenda and the very seasons of capitalist
> globalization upside down. 
> 
> It is certain that such confrontations must become
> more precise, more reasoned, more explicit, if the new
> claim to equality is to have any effect on the
> existing divisions of the world. The aesthetic "plus"
> of the demonstrations must find a way to return to
> each local environment, to the specific frameworks
> that govern the homeless, the paperless, the
> unemployed. This is the risky gambit that the far left
> is now making, on a world scale. But to be explicit is
> not to speak the opponent's language (neoclassical
> economics) ?- which would always be to play an unequal
> hand in a losing game. Instead, it is to engage in an
> unstable mimicry that seeks to prove its claim to
> equality on a public stage, while inventing new signs,
> new pathways through the world, new political
> subjectivities.
> 
> Notes
> 
> 1. La M?sentente, (Paris: Galil?e, 1995). (Throughout
> this text I will quote and summarize ideas by Jacques
> Ranci?re; but the contemporary examples of political
> and aesthetic practice, and the conclusions drawn from
> them, are my responsibility alone -? BH.) 
> 
> 2. "La cause de l'autre," in: Aux bords du politique
> (Paris: La Fabrique ?ditions, 1998). 
> 
> 3. La M?sentente, p. 88. 
> 
> 4. Cf. Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism, (Cambridge:
> MIT Press, 1999). 
> 
> 5. On the refusal of industrial discipline and the
> emergence of immaterial labor, see the arguments and
> references in Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, Empire,
> (Harvard University Press, 2000), chapters 3.3 and
> 3.4. 
> 
> 6. Le ma?tre ignorant (Paris: Fayard, 1987), pp.
> 120-121. 
> 
> 7. The first two sites were forced to change names and
> can now be found at rtmark.com, along with the other
> ?TMark projects. 
> 
> 8. Le partage du sensible: esth?tique et politique,
> (Paris: La Fabrique ?ditions, 2000), pp. 68, 63-64. 
> 
> 9. Ibid., p. 52. 
> 
> 10. Ibid., p. 37. 
> 
> ====> "The authority of laws rests only on the credit that is granted to them. One believes in it; that is their only foundation"
> 
> - Jacques Derrida http://www.humanities.uci.edu/remembering_jd
> 
> 
> 		
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