Abstract
Nine months before Rosa Parks’s protest on the buses of Alabama, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin had similarly refused to move from her bus seat. Her action however triggered little response for despite the fact that the NAACP were initially ready and willing to rally support, they decided that Claudette was not of good enough character to be able to stage a claim for equality with the white population. In particular, it is widely recounted that the NAACP saw Claudette as too different from the dominant order on two counts: she was black and was believed to have had an affair with a married man, as opposed to Rosa Parks who better met the criteria of respectability in all features—including her lighter skin tone. Given that Rancière cites Park’s protest as an instance of his, by now familiar, specialised usage of the term “politics” 1 —a moment where equality is staged by the part-that-has-no-part—this story reveals why many are led to question the value of such “politics;” prompting us to ask how much of a challenge it really poses to the reigning order (“police order” in Rancière’s terminology) or whether it actually presents a rather limited view of political change.
Indeed, this example does appear rather baffling when Rancière tells us that “politics” refers to rare moments that challenge or overturn the current configuration of police order. This is often taken to imply that “real” politics does not happen often, and the examples Rancière draws upon to illustrate it, including Rosa Parks’s success, thus appear to be as good as it gets. Clearly, Parks’s action prompted a dramatic and meaningful change to the presiding order of the time, but one that still fell short on many fronts. This leads to concern that Rancière overlooks the everyday struggles and political encounters that make up our social lives, instead indicating a higher sphere of “real” politics that is more meaningful than other political events which consequently appear demoted to a second, lower order. Such confusion has led many to question the import of Rancière’s “politics/police” framework, leaving readers to wonder if and why we should bother with Rancière. Consequently, Samuel Chambers’s The Lessons of Rancière is a welcome intervention. Despite the author’s insistence that this is not a book “on Rancière (p.1),” in the sense of seeking to explain Rancière’s work, it does, nevertheless clarify and develop Rancièrian scholarship in a way that seeks to elucidate how some of this confusion and inconsistency has come about. Furthermore, his interpretation of Rancière’s work in the light of this research serves to motivate his own inspiring political project of challenging and reinvigorating liberal democratic politics today.
Yet my concern with Chambers’s work is that it fails to address the question above, instead maintaining a rather timid interpretation of Rancière’s “politics.” It downplays the extent of change that “politics” can offer and overlooks the way that greater understanding of the relationship between “politics” and “police” is of urgent importance for contemporary struggles across the globe.
Chambers argues that failure to recognise many of the fundamental features of the Rancièrian “police/politics” relationship has come about due to inconsistency in translation from the original French into English. Showing that few of the resulting commentaries are consistent with Rancière’s writing on the subject he suggests that many commentators mistakenly read Rancière to be promoting a kind of Arendtian “pure” politics. They are therefore led to denigrate all other political behaviour as negative because it belongs to the order of the “police”—an order which they believe we must overcome. In contrast, Chambers draws our attention to Rancière’s claim that “there is no place outside of the police” (p. 62) emphasising that for Rancière, “politics” can never be pure because “all its objects are blended with the objects of the police” (p. 49). This forces us to accept that we can never be free of police ordering. However, Chambers suggests that this must not be seen as bad since “police order” simply refers to the continuing presence of the “social orders in which we all live” (p. 66). This is of crucial importance as it simultaneously reveals that “politics” is merely Rancière’s thematisation of change to social order, yet also forces us to recognise that there is no utopia of “pure politics” beyond social ordering in general although there can be better and worse configurations of order. Hence Chambers’s reading leads him to call for “commitment to and concern with the politics of the police in the . . . sense of changing, transforming and improving our police orders” (p. 85). He thereby counters the view that Rancière leads us to merely prioritise the “moment” or “significant event” at the expense of the everyday with a call for us to attend to ordinary exclusions, oppressions and injustices, since this is where “politics” resides.
Yet, I am still dissatisfied with Chambers’s reading for two reasons. First, he fails to defend Rancière against the claim raised above: Rancière’s “politics” is weak and ineffective because it is not capable of bringing about significantly deep political change. And second, his reading of the relationship between “politics” and “police” downplays the need for constant vigilance against the entrenchment of any police ordering which would have the unacknowledged effect of heightening the threat of violence that “politics” would face. This is a topic of pressing importance given current political instability and growing oppression both across the globe and in the increasingly aggressive stance towards struggles for democratic rights and freedoms in our supposedly liberal Western states.
First then, Chambers’s insistence that “politics” needs to be thought of as “impure” fails to address confusion about the effectiveness of Rancière’s “politics” in addressing political struggle today. This arises as an unintended implication of his emphasis on the impossibility of a “pure” Rancièrian “politics.” This is not to say that I disagree with his claim, for Rancière often states that his “politics” can never be pure. 2 However Chambers extrapolates this into the claim that “politics” itself is better thought of as impure because it is everywhere “blended” with police. This proves problematic in that it could be interpreted in two ways: not only indicating, as Chambers intends, that there is nowhere beyond the “police” and that “politics” operates in the space of “police” but has also been understood to imply that “politics” is weak because it is always contaminated by the ordering it wishes to challenge and can never therefore overturn that ordering in a meaningful way.
This second interpretation clearly involves a mistaken assumption, for just because “politics” cannot exist in its own space does not mean that it cannot have vast, often inconceivably far-reaching effects, as well as smaller, more modest outcomes. “Politics” is not defined in terms of scale, the ways in which it could reconfigure police order are endless, and as such there are infinite possibilities for the change it could effect. The worry is that Chambers does not engage with these concerns, and by referring to “politics” as “impure” masks the extent of its capacity for change. 3
Subsequently, Chambers is right to insist that we must reject misconceived notions of a “pure” politics, but perhaps we need to also be cautious of Chambers’s puzzling call that we commit to the “impurity” of “politics” (p. 64). Tempting though it is to use the term “impure” to indicate that “politics” and “police” operate in the same space, it follows that if “politics” cannot be conceived of as pure because it cannot operate in a separate space, it does not make sense to deem it impure because it operates in the “police” space. This feature simply makes “politics” what it is.
Instead, in “A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Rancière,” Rancière suggests that “politics” is almost everywhere and in every time interlocked, if not confused, with police. But it is precisely because things are continuously entangled . . . that you need criteria to handle the tangle itself.
4
Perhaps this analogy does make the relationship clearer. “Politics” Rancière tells us, is where two opposing logics collide—that of the police order and that of equality. It has no proper content of its own and therefore we must surmise that it can be neither pure nor impure, it is merely the moment of collision, lack and confusion; the scrambling of meaning and sense. It would seem that by untangling the logic of equality a little we can make the collision greater and amplify the resulting confusion, so although Chambers is right to note the paradoxical nature of the “politics”/“police” relationship, where he expresses this as meaning that although “politics” cannot be “pure” it will somehow remain “other” to the police (p. 49); we instead need to clarify that although we can never unlock the two completely, the logic of equality not only can but also should, as much as possible, be untangled from police at any given opportunity. 5
This leads to my second concern: that of the relationship between “politics” and “police,” which Chambers rightly wishes to draw our attention to. I welcome Chambers’s insistence that “politics” cannot exist without police, for in my reading of Rancière too, “politics” operates on police ordering. Hence “politics” would be meaningless without police as it is simply that which renders confusion/lack in the police. Yet in order to emphasize this point Chambers articulates this relationship in language not used by Rancière: He suggests that “police” and “politics” should be understood as blended (p. 49).
Whilst acknowledging firstly, the difficulty of finding any words that help describe the relationship between “politics” and “police,” secondly, the work that Chambers wishes “blending” to do, and thirdly, that Rancière himself tells us that the objects of “politics” are blended with those of the police; 6 I am concerned that in Chambers’s text we get an elision of the objects of “politics” and “police” with the actual concepts themselves. Thisglosses the way that the effects of “politics” can vary depending on the configuration of forces in the police order. Some configurations of order will be much less disposed towards any sort of disruption and disorder, including the practices of critical theory via a critical dispositif and literarity which Chambers seeks to encourage; whereas other configurations may actively value and encourage such practices. Thus “politics” may require more or less force depending on the configuration of order it is acting upon.
Despite distinguishing between blending and merging to ensure that some sort of distinction remains between “politics” and police (p. 49), Chambers’s elision of “politics” with its objects glosses the different ways in which “politics” and “police” may co-exist in the same space. He does not seem to address the extent to which “politics” is (or is not) able to emerge from the police (in order to act upon it). This can be conceived as a matter of degrees which will fluctuate over time depending on the configuration of forces in the police order: the police response will not always be favourable such that “politics” can be more or less violently repressed and restricted. I am therefore concerned that Chambers’s terminology distracts us from this crucial point, treating all police ordering as the same with regards to how it responds to “politics” and through this oversight allows for greater entrenchment and consolidation of any police configuration. Indeed, Rancière shows that however good we may consider a configuration of such order to be, it will always exclude and restrict—something that the logos of equality will always challenge.
Chambers rightly suggests that we need to work to better police ordering, but he does not flag up the vital practice of taking a cautious and critical approach to all orders—however good we may think them. If we are democrats in the Rancièrian sense, we should never accept the entanglement of the logic of equality in the police, despite knowing that there is no place where a “pure” politics alternative could reside. Hence the task for all who wish to stand in solidarity with those who are excluded or marginalised (even whilst unaware of their voices) is not just to attend to better police orders; it is to counter this tangling wherever we encounter it—to question any given distribution of bodies and spaces. Whilst we must accept that as we untangle in one area equality will be tangled back up elsewhere, it is a task we must attend to just the same. This is the only way that entrenchment of any order can be countered, yet this essential democratic activity goes unacknowledged in Chambers’s reading. Although he calls us to change and improve our police orders (p. 85) via “cultivation, care and direction” of democratic politics (p. 87), he does not broach the possibility that we may be hindered in this task by an increasingly entrenched and consolidated police configuration.
My two concerns may appear trivial, but their import resides in the way they bring into focus the degrees of change that “politics” could effect, as well as helping us to reflect upon what it is that enables and restricts politics as well as the costs involved. They highlight the question to which Rancièrian democrats must attend: what is it that makes police order more or less conducive to “politics”? This is a question that must be attended to before we can answer Chambers’s call to change, transform and improve our police orders (p. 85) since this desire may be thwarted by a police order that is so entrenched it will entangle equality and repress “politics” ever more tightly. It also highlights the need to attend to the practices available to those who seek to make meaning of an event, to challenge an order with an alternative, for it suggests that although Claudette Colvin’s protest may have met with greater resistance, it could have been used to trigger the same response as Rosa Parks—but such an outcome would have required vastly increased imagination and effort on the part of the NAACP and would have involved much higher stakes.
In his afterword, Chambers observes the resonance between Rancièrian “politics” and the Queen Nation chant: “We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!” where “get used to it” is read, not in a normalising sense but as an assertion that “deviation from the normal” will always be with us (p. 166). However, it seems strange that he still wishes to keep the phrase “get used to it” as it highlights the very crux of the relationship between “police” and “politics”—how far we get used to anything at all. Throughout the book Chambers is calling us to work upon our police order by using “politics” to reconfigure it, but this can only be an ateleological process if it is accompanied by a refusal to conform to our (police) instinct to grow comfortable, a refusal to ever get used to anything. In order to answer this call, it is imperative for us to attend to the types of conditions which promote and prevent social conformity: the conditions under which Rosa Parks’s action triggered the civil rights movement whilst Claudette Colvin was ignored.