Presupposing equality

I Equality: Demonstrative event

The suggestion that we ought to regard equality as an axiom appears first in Rancière’s work in connection with pedagogy rather than politics per se. The Ignorant Schoolmaster, first published in 1987, contains all of the key elements that appear in his later, more obviously political treatments of axiomatic equality, especially Disagreement, On the Shores of Politics and subsequent essays. The book celebrates the figure of Joseph Jacotot, a teacher whose radical methods of instruction alarmed Europe in the early 19^th century. Rancière’s reflections on Jacotot center on this idea: ‘Equality is not a goal to be attained…Equality must be seen as a point of departure and not as a destination. We must assume that all intelligences are equal, and work under this assumption.’ ⁹ Jacotot, we are told, did just that: he began his teaching with the conviction that his students were of equal intelligence and proceeded accordingly. ¹⁰ Rather than ‘explaining’, Jacotot took his task to be enabling students to experiment, explore and, in short, ‘learn for themselves’, an undertaking premised on the belief that the ‘same intelligence is at work in all the productions of the human mind’. ¹¹ Rancière’s analysis of Jacotot’s unconventional approach places special emphasis on the status of the ‘equality of intelligence’ postulate, stressing that it is nothing more than an assumption, but one that has major consequences for action. He quotes Jacotot’s words: ‘“We direct students based on an opinion about the equality of intelligence’,”’ and elaborates further: ‘This is an opinion whose verification we pursue.’ Material practice, not philosophical justification, is primary: ‘Our problem isn’t proving that all intelligence is equal. It’s seeing what can be done under that supposition.’ ¹²

If equality can function axiomatically, as an assumption that guides action, this means it is no longer understood as a goal. Positing equality as a goal to be achieved can paradoxically reaffirm inequality in the present, Rancière insists, by situating equality in a distant future. ¹³ Presuming equality at the outset means that we conduct ourselves, as Jacotot and his students did, as equals here and now. To proceed on the basis of the presumed equality of anyone and everyone is not only to act in opposition to traditional pedagogy, Rancière argues, but to confront what is actually axiomatic for society as a whole: inequality. The hierarchical division of the world into capable/incapable, intelligent/stupid, knowing/ignorant is taken for granted, Rancière alleges, in Jacotot’s time and our own; it ‘is evident to everyone’ that we are naturally unequal. ¹⁴ Thus when Jacotot promotes a way of teaching that rejects explication, he is opposing not only dominant teaching methods, but the ‘explicative system’ itself, which reigns far beyond the classroom. This system, which ‘divides the world into two’, is all-encompassing: ‘[E]very institution is an explication in social act, a dramatization of inequality.’ ¹⁵ To assume equality, then, is at odds with the surrounding ‘hierarchical world’, where an inegalitarian axiom governs. ¹⁶

This same dynamic, in which the presupposition of equality functions as a counter-axiom to the axiom of society as such, appears in Rancière’s subsequent political analyses as well. ¹⁷ The assumption of the equal intelligence of all human beings is the ‘starting point’ of those disruptive demonstrations Rancière identifies with ‘politics’ proper. ¹⁸ As an ‘activity which turns on equality as its principle’, politics involves a public assertion by ‘whoever has no part – the poor of ancient times, the third estate, the modern proletariat’, who act so as to ‘attribute to itself the equality that belongs to all citizens’. ¹⁹ Equality is assumed and demonstrated fleetingly, in a confrontational scene staged by previously unseen or unheard beings, who behave as though they are the equals of those whom they address. And the performative verification of the ‘equality of anyone and everyone’ disputes the inequality that normally reigns in social life. ²⁰ Rancière’s historical examples of what he terms ‘politics’ all display this structure: ‘men of no position’ conduct themselves in such a way (that is, on the basis of a ‘mere assumption’ of equality) so as to interrupt the ‘order of domination’. ²¹

Rancière’s frequent retelling of the first Roman plebeian succession in 494 BCE bears these features. The plebs who gathered en masse outside the city, acting on the ‘mere assumption of equality’, demonstrated their equality with the patricians by ‘conducting themselves like beings with names’. That is, from within a social order that understood the plebs to be nameless and speechless, the plebs executed a series of speech acts that constituted themselves as ‘speaking beings sharing the same properties as those who deny them these’. ²² This transgression, by which the plebs ‘become “men”’ is nothing short of ‘incredible’: it violates the very order of the community by confronting its system of hierarchical classification with ‘an open set of practices driven by the assumption of equality between any and every speaking being’. ²³

When ‘the demos, the horde who have nothing’ enacts its equality, politics confronts the police. The public demonstration of equality interrupts the ‘explicative order’, those everyday relations of domination which Rancière labels ‘police’. There is much to be said about Rancière’s conception of ‘police’ (and I will return to it in section III), but what matters most for understanding axiomatic equality is that the ordering carried out by the ‘police’ is always done on the basis of an inegalitarian presupposition. Places and functions are ‘allotted according to the competences specific to groups and individuals’; an unequal distribution of ‘shares’ and ‘roles’ to parties and parts is (re)produced and enforced by the police. ²⁴ Politics, then, is an activity ‘antagonistic’ to policing and this conflict pivots on dueling, irreconcilable assumptions. Political acts ‘shift a body from the place assigned to it’ and challenge the boundary dividing those ‘who are born for politics from those who are born for the “bare” life of economic and social necessity’. Such an act takes equality as its starting point while the police order that it interrupts takes inequality as its starting point. ²⁵

The political ‘breakthrough’ that ‘introduces into the community of speaking beings some who were hitherto not of its number’, thereby verifying equality, is repeatedly characterized by Rancière as a collision between two opposed logics. ²⁶ Much as The Ignorant Schoolmaster revealed that teaching can operate according to one of ‘two axioms which have nothing in common’, politics, we are told, occurs when two competing and mutually exclusive ‘logics’ confront another. ²⁷ As Jean-Phillipe Deranty explains, for Rancière, ‘the basic logic of the social order is that of inequality…In essence, la police is oligarchic. On the other hand, the political works on the basis of the opposite principle, that of radical equality.’ ²⁸ The public demonstration of equality interrupts the smooth functioning of the police machine, refusing its system of hierarchical classification. Politics ‘undoes’ and ‘declassifies’, at least temporarily, what usually passes for the natural order of society. ²⁹

In the essay ‘Uses of Democracy’, Rancière recalls two ‘instances of democratic practice’ that further illustrate how he ties the axiom of equality to disruptive demonstrations which ‘break and enter’ the hierarchical police order. ³⁰ Here he adopts the language of ‘syllogism’ to capture the process by which equality is assumed, asserted and affirmed in public. In 1833 Parisian tailors went on strike and in so doing, Rancière says, they posed the basic question, ‘Are the French people equals or not?’ Their protest approximated a syllogism in the following way: the 1830 Charter declared that all French people are equal before the law (major premise). Yet ‘direct experience’ – such as when the master tailors refused even to respond to the demands regarding pay, hours and working conditions – showed that workers were not being treated as equals. This serves as the minor premise. So the syllogism consists in a major premise (the law’s declaration of equality) and a minor premise (‘what is said or done’ that contradicts that equality). On Rancière’s reading, the purpose of the strike is to insist that one or the other premise must be changed: if the bosses have a right to say and do as they are, then the preamble of the Charter should be deleted, but if that premise is upheld, then the bosses must speak or act differently. The striking workers aimed to do nothing other than ‘demonstrate equality’, thus verifying the major premise.

Rancière also cites the large-scale student strikes in France in 1986 in which students protested proposed legislation that would institute a ‘selection’ process for admission to French universities (in place of previous open admission policies for anyone who had completed a baccalaureate), intended to sort students according to their abilities and prospects for future employment. This was another instance of the ‘syllogism of equality’, according to Rancière: here the major premise was a ‘free and open university system [which] was considered a hard-won and inalienable right of French democracy’ and the minor premise was the government’s recent efforts to allow administrators to classify and rank students in the name of economic requirements. When the students unexpectedly objected to this proposal, they verified their equality not simply by reminding the French people of its commitment to a free and open university system, but by enacting their equal intelligence. Students read and discussed the text of the proposed legislation: ‘the students evaluated the law and they pronounced it bad law.’ In so doing, Rancière argues, they managed to create ‘a new polemical space’. They showed that the ‘issue came down to equality versus inequality, a simple matter of knowing which of the two in the final instance ruled’. Like the tailors a century earlier, the students set a ‘trap’ that took the form of the ‘syllogism of equality’. Taking equality as a ‘starting point’, the tailors and the students confronted those who wished to operate according to a very different presupposition: the supposedly natural hierarchy of human beings. ³¹

II Equality: Society’s secret

We have seen that axiomatic equality is closely tied to disruptive demonstration in Rancière’s work. Yet it also appears in a different guise as well. In addition to serving as the starting point for occasional, fleeting public performances (a pleb secession, a workers’ strike, a student demonstration) that interrupt inegalitarian orders, equality is figured by Rancière as an assumption that underlies all forms of collective life. Equality repeatedly appears as a momentary rupture in Rancière’s portrait of politics, yet it is also consistently figured as the ‘basis’ of even the most unequal social arrangements. On the one hand, equality is an assumption which finds instantiation only in specific events by which the ‘uncounted’ assert themselves as thinking and speaking beings. But on the other, equality is a concealed but necessary assumption of even the most extreme hierarchical relations: ‘In the final analysis, inequality is possible only through equality.’ ³²

To make this second point, Rancière relies heavily on the following claim: that every act of human communication, even between those who stand in a relation of profound inequality with one another, is evidence of a fundamental (though denied) equality. ³³ Building on this interpretation of communication, Rancière argues that large-scale organization – including the social order as such – has ‘equality of intelligence’ as its ‘necessary and sufficient condition’. ³⁴ More precisely: ‘There is order in society because some people command and others obey, but in order to obey an order at least two things are required: you must understand the order and you must understand that you must obey it. And to do that, you must be the equal of the person who is ordering you.’ ³⁵

Rancière’s position, which holds that equality is tacitly assumed even when a master commands a slave, is, among other things, a refutation of Aristotle. It has been noted that ‘Rancière’s politics begins in disagreement with Aristotle’, ³⁶ but the particular disagreement registered by Rancière’s claim that ‘only an equal understands an equal’ is not usually stressed by Rancière’s readers. ³⁷ In Disagreement and elsewhere, Rancière responds to Aristotle’s famous account in Politics of man as the creature who possesses logos, or reasoned speech, and is therefore a political animal. Aristotle distinguishes man, whose logos enables him to address what is useful and harmful, and just and unjust, from other animals who have only phōnē, or mere voice, which registers pain and pleasure. As many readers have highlighted, Rancière makes a crucial intervention here, de-naturalizing the logos/phōnē distinction and revealing it to be an exercise of power: ‘The simplest opposition between logical animals and phonic animals is in no way the given on which politics is then based.’ ³⁸ The division between creatures who speak and those who merely make noise, between political subjects and ‘lower animals’, is not discovered, but created. As Bonnie Honig explains, ‘Phōnē is the name for the sonorous emissions of the excluded, and logos is the name claimed by the included for their own sounds.’ ³⁹

But Rancière challenges Aristotle’s central categories in another way when he insists that ‘only an equal understands an equal’. In Politics, Aristotle builds on the logos/phōnē distinction when defending natural slavery: ‘For he is by nature a slave who is capable of belonging to another (and that is why he does so belong), and who participates in reason so far as to apprehend it but not to possess it’ (1254b). In other words, a master is in full command of logos, while the slave shares in it only enough to receive orders. Rancière’s analysis above invites us to view this demarcation with suspicion, since the division between the full possession and mere apprehension of logos is itself parasitic on the logos/phōnē divide which Rancière exposes as a tool of exclusion. But Rancière makes a separate and additional claim when he declares that the relation between a master and a slave, in which one commands and another receives orders, actually depends upon a fundamental but disavowed equality. In response to Aristotle’s posited hierarchy between masters (who are in complete ‘possession’ of reasoned speech) and slaves (who can only ‘apprehend’), Rancière, partially echoing Hegel, locates equality in the heart of the command/obedience relation. Those whom Aristotle depicts as merely ‘apprehending’ are actually the equals of those who are thought to ‘possess’ logos. Moreover, Rancière suggests that even masters are operating, albeit not consciously, on the assumption of equal intelligence, on the belief that ‘every man is born to understand what any other man has to say to him’. ⁴⁰ The very act of speaking to another person, even if it is to issue an order, counts as evidence in favor of the equality of intelligence, according to Rancière. His retort to Aristotle’s account of slavery culminates in the declaration that ‘equality is ultimately the condition of possibility of inequality itself’. ⁴¹

Axiomatic equality in this second sense refers to an indispensable assumption which serves as the ‘absolute condition of all communication and any social order’, however hierarchical. ⁴² Rancière offers a number of striking formulations, all of which present equality as the secret linchpin of inequality in all its guises: equality is ‘necessary to the very functioning of the inegalitarian machine’. ⁴³ And: equality is the ‘necessary and sufficient condition for a society of men to exist’. Or: ‘There is an equality of speaking beings that comes before the relation of inequality, one that sets the stage for inequality’s very existence.’ ⁴⁴

This portrait of equality, as a central assumption of every society, complicates the earlier analysis of equality as an assumption driving specific acts of protest. Rancière, as we saw, depicts equality as ‘axiomatic’ for those individuals (Joseph Jacotot, Olympes de Gouges) and groups (the Roman plebs in 494 BCE, the striking students in 1986) who struggle to demonstrate the equality of all persons and thereby disrupt the smooth functioning of hierarchical society. But it now seems as though equality is axiomatic all the time. It is the assumption, Rancière suggests, that explains the actions of the conventional schoolmaster and the patricians no less than those of Jacotot or the rebellious plebs. For example, when Rancière writes about the plebian succession in ancient Rome, it is not only the plebs who act on the presupposition of equality and ‘demonstrate’ it through their transgressive speech acts. Menenius Agrippa also proceeds according to an axiomatic equality:

This assumption of equality is to be discerned even within a discourse proclaiming the fatal fact of inequality. Menenius Agrippa explains to the plebs that they are only the stupid members of a city whose soul is its patricians. But to teach the plebs this way he must assume they understand what he is saying. He must presume the equality of speaking beings, which contradicts the police distribution of bodies who are put in their place and assigned their role. ⁴⁵

Elsewhere Rancière describes the same event by noting, as he does in this passage, that although the content of the fable – its moral – was inequality, the ‘act of composing the fable’ conveyed a very different moral: the equality of intelligences. Indeed, Rancière writes that Menenius Agrippa ‘put the presupposition [of equality] into practice’ when he told the fable to the plebs. ⁴⁶

So is equality ‘axiomatic’ always and everywhere? Rancière’s understanding of equality as an assumption in this dual sense – as a feature of disruptive demonstration and as a universal condition – seems to imply, for example, that the conventional schoolmaster – the one whose pedagogy divides the world into inferior and superior intelligences – actually assumes equality, albeit not overtly, when he practises the method of explication that Jacotot rejected. Even the typical teacher or ‘explicator’ assumes that his students can understand what he is saying, and this, Rancière tells us, testifies to an assumed equality that lies below the surface of every seemingly unequal relation.

Where does this leave us? If everyone, everywhere is acting on the basis of an axiom of equality, then what, exactly, differentiates practices that verify equality from those that do not? What is the special importance of ‘starting from the point of view of equality, asserting equality, assuming equality as a given, working out from equality, trying to see how productive it can be’, as Rancière advocates, when it seems that equality is ubiquitous, ‘a reality that is constantly and everywhere attested to’? ⁴⁷

Most significantly, we might wonder whether understanding equality as hierarchy’s ever present ‘condition of possibility’ strains against Rancière’s other account, according to which equality is enacted only occasionally and rarely, when it is made manifest in specific public actions. ⁴⁸ Does regarding equality as a hidden assumption that enables every relationship and every set of socio-political arrangements, however stratified, make the issue of worldly demonstration obsolete? If equality is the implicit ground of everything we do, perhaps it does not have to be made explicit. ⁴⁹ Or, alternatively, we could think of equality as something that is constantly being demonstrated, everywhere and all the time, since even the most obviously unequal relations, Rancière tells us, count as evidence in favor of equality.

Neither of these readings, however, really captures the relationship Rancière draws between these two figurations of axiomatic equality. While the portrait of equality as a universal condition might seem at first glance to undermine the sense in which equality is something verified only by specific acts of transgression, a better way of understanding the relationship is in terms of a dynamic of concealment and disclosure. This is not a claim Rancière himself makes. In fact, he rarely acknowledges that there are two portraits of axiomatic equality in his work; still less does he articulate how they might be understood together. ⁵⁰ Nonetheless, the most convincing interpretation integrates the two formulations of the egalitarian presupposition in the following way: there is a fundamental, irreducible equality, understood by Rancière as an equality of intelligences and manifest in communication, which enables every social relation and every political order. Equality in this case is the hidden assumption behind everything we do. At the same time, we live within police orders that do their best to suppress, obscure and deny the fundamental equality of anyone and everyone. So we are only very occasionally made aware of it, when it is dramatized and made explicit, in disruptive acts such as those of Jacotot’s teaching and the protests of striking workers. Thus, while politics may happen only sporadically, it ‘makes real the ultimate equality on which any social order rests’. ⁵¹

The dynamic of concealing and revealing that seems to characterize the relationship between axiomatic equality in its two varieties can be further reconstructed on the basis of Rancière’s writings. He writes that ‘what makes society tick’ is the idea that understanding language has nothing to do with equality. That is, he claims that our social orders systematically fail to acknowledge that communication as such is evidence for equality. Indeed, ‘the idea that speaking beings are equal because of their common capacity for speech’ is regarded as ‘unreasonable’ by the ‘holy kingdoms of Antiquity’ and ‘our modern societies of experts’. ⁵² On his telling, although our social orders are ‘structured’ so as to deny the equality of speaking beings, those same societies also depend upon the very equality they disavow. Equality in this sense is the ‘ultimate secret’ on which the social order rests. ⁵³ It is normally concealed. Equality, Rancière writes, is ‘fundamental and absent’, the ‘omitted cause of society’s ordinary functioning’. ⁵⁴ This secret is, however, on rare occasions brought into the open and revealed. The event of politics is a ‘scene of revelation’, then, not only because its particular actors ‘demonstrate’ their own equality, which they assume when they conduct themselves as beings with names, but because they simultaneously reveal the equality that is the concealed engine of hierarchical society itself. ⁵⁵ Equality as an axiom animating disruptive demonstration and equality as an axiom operating as a universal condition are tethered together in this way: the political act of disruptive demonstration brings to the surface and dramatizes or ‘openly declares’ that equality which is a necessary, though denied and concealed, basis of every social order. ⁵⁶

Thus, while Rancière’s understanding of equality bears affinities to a Hegelian politics of recognition, as Deranty and others have argued, ⁵⁷ his specifically dualistic account of axiomatic equality, as both condition and event, secret and revelation, is perhaps best understood in Heideggerean terms: as a relationship that participates in what Nikolas Kompridis has termed ‘reflective disclosure’. Reflective disclosure is distinguished from ‘prereflective disclosure’, which refers to the fact that our everyday understandings of the world depend upon an horizon which ‘discloses’ entities to us but which is itself taken for granted, not the subject of reflection. As theorized by Kompridis in conversation with Heidegger, reflective disclosure entails practices whereby those ‘background structures of intelligibility’ are reopened. More specifically, reflective disclosure, as a kind of critical intervention, can take the form of ‘uncovering and rearticulating a shared preunderstanding of the world’. ⁵⁸ The ‘revelation’ that Rancièrean politics produces seems to be just this sort of disclosure; a public disruption reveals the ‘equality of anyone and everyone’, which is actually the always present but unrecognized basis of social existence. The concealing/revealing dynamic that marks Rancière’s account of axiomatic equality entails reflective disclosure insofar as political action uncovers a shared but normally hidden condition of possibility.

III Neither a moment nor a secret? Equality and the question of institutions

There is surely something appealing and important in this account of equality. First, Rancière is unwavering in his insistence on the absolute equality of all human beings. While much canonical political theory, including that of Hobbes (as Rancière notes), posits a form of basic human equality, Rancière does not primarily treat equality as a philosophical foundation on which to build a normative portrait of political community (as in the case of Hobbes, Locke and others). ⁵⁹ Rather, his declaration that we are equal functions as an exhortation, one that affirms the equality of anyone and everyone in order to claim that we systematically fail to organize our collective lives in ways that honor that radical equality. ‘There is no natural principle of domination by one person over another’, yet we continue to live within regimes of domination, both overt and subtle. ⁶⁰ Rancière’s approach to equality is powerful in part because it defends, again and again, the idea that we are equally intelligent while announcing that our social orders admit of no such thing (or admit it only tacitly). But it is probably Rancière’s emphasis on equality as an assumption informing political protest that is most compelling to his readers. The second provocative feature of axiomatic equality lies here. Axiomatic equality, understood in terms of disruptive demonstration, seems to encourage an energetic, vigilant and activist orientation. If equality is a presupposition that awaits ‘verification’ through action, then there is always more to do. Equality’s reality is never assured and can be made manifest only temporarily. Rancière’s axiomatic approach, then, seems to serve a practice-centered account of democracy, according to which equality, taken as a presupposition, gains worldly reality only through action. If axiomatic equality can be ‘productive’, as Rancière suggests, it is because equality is emphatically asserted without being cast as a ‘goal’, a casting that depicts equality as a ‘reward situated firmly in some distant future’ rather than a practice to be undertaken here and now. ⁶¹

Yet despite these significant offerings, axiomatic equality as conceptualized by Rancière also generates something of a theoretical and practical impasse. Equality is either a momentary event or it is a hidden condition. It is not, indeed, seemingly cannot, be a characteristic of ordinary life, something that is manifest, however partially and incompletely, in our ongoing relations with one another or in our social and political institutions. The concealing/revealing dynamic that characterizes axiomatic equality always occurs in relation to an inegalitarian social order. Indeed, a distinctive three-part structure is evident in Rancière’s political writings: equality in both its forms – demonstrative disruption and universal condition – is anterior to society, understood consistently as a hierarchical police order. That is, police regimes – where we actually live out our lives – are characterized by domination; they operate according to the presupposition of inequality. Equality, in both of its guises, is necessarily ‘outside’ of this order – its temporary interruption or prior condition.

This motif, which dominates Rancière’s political writings, tends to limit equality to two possibilities: a fleeting revelation or a generalized secret. The very question of how to create more equal relations within society, including through its key institutions, seems to be barred in advance: equality is a hidden mechanism or an evanescent display, but not a characteristic of our ongoing relations with one another or of the institutions – socio-cultural or politico-legal – in which we participate. The prospect of creating lasting relations of equality, immanent to a regime, seems to be foreclosed. Instead Rancière presents us with a scenario in which a fundamental but disavowed equality lurks below the surface of domination and only occasionally makes its full and overt appearance as an eruptive break in the smooth functioning of the police. Accepting this view of equality seems to deny the possibility of a socio-political order even partially characterized by relations of equality. ⁶² This outlook, I argue, is not particularly hospitable to forms of radical democratic politics that aim to create, preserve and enlarge egalitarian relations throughout society, including its major institutions. Rancière presents a seductive political imaginary, but it invites us to hope for little more than an occasional break in the ‘inegalitarian machine’.

The impasse generated by Rancière’s account of axiomatic equality expresses his general aversion to ‘institutions’ as such. That is, the curious restriction of equality to a singular event or a hidden condition is consistent with Rancière’s tendency to align ‘order’, ‘organization’, ‘society’ and ‘institutions’ with hierarchy and domination. The problem appears most vividly in his analysis of police. This term, as we saw, names the ‘antagonist’ to politics; it is the hierarchical ‘system of distribution’, the order in which we live out our lives, which is only rarely ‘jolted’ by politics’ disruptive egalitarian logic. ⁶³ Rancière’s interpreters differ in their precise understandings of this antagonism – namely, whether politics and police are simply mutually exclusive, as Todd May believes, or whether politics is immanent to police, even as it signals a ‘break’ with that order, as Samuel Chambers argues. ⁶⁴ Chambers’ rendering seems closer to Rancière’s own formulations, but it is important not to overlook how thoroughly opposed they are nonetheless. That is, politics may signal a ‘disturbance’ within the police order, but the egalitarian presupposition that animates that disturbance ‘has no place’ in the police configuration. ⁶⁵ ‘Politics is specifically opposed to the police.’ ⁶⁶

Moreover, police, as the name for unequal, regulated society, verges on the universal and timeless. The police, as a particular ‘mode of human being-together’, defines life in ancient Rome no less than life in contemporary France. It is true that Rancière says ‘there are better and worse police’ – a statement his admirers are fond of repeating – but this is immediately followed by a reminder that the ‘nature’ of the police is constant and that ‘whether the police is sweet and kind does not make it any less the opposite of politics’. ⁶⁷ So although Rancière states that his definition of police should not be confused for a ‘dim leveler in which everything looks the same’, it is hard not to admit that something of the sort seems to occur in his writings. Indeed, there is almost no attention paid in his key political works to this distinction between ‘better and worse’ police; the main use of police is precisely the opposite: to name historical and geographical continuity rather than variation. Seemingly every form of social existence can be understood as a police order, a regime defined by the hierarchical distribution of roles and parts. ⁶⁸

The blunt opposition between police and politics maps directly onto a series of binaries, as we have seen: inequality and equality; order and disorder; form and event. This persistent, overarching frame supports a mostly monolithic account of ‘institutions’ and ‘organization’ which aligns them with the presupposition of inequality. Rancière makes no secret of his hostility to institutionalization, declaring that ‘the community of equals can never achieve substantial form as a social institution’ and that democracy ‘can never be identified with a juridico-political form’. ⁶⁹ If the ‘power of the people is always beneath and beyond these forms’, as Rancière says, it is because equality itself is ‘beneath’ the police order, serving as its secret condition of possibility, or it is ‘beyond’ it, appearing only sporadically as a ‘singular disruption’. ⁷⁰ Politics is an event, an act, a moment and not a particular organization of collective existence: the ‘power of the people…can never be institutionalized’. ⁷¹ The very question of institutionalization is either dismissed or ignored by Rancière, because politics is only ever a brief hiatus, a glimpse of equality, in the midst of unrelenting hierarchy. ⁷²

Still, despite all this, might it be possible to attenuate some of Rancière’s oppositions? He does, after all, say that the ‘set of state institutions’ is ‘not a homogenous place’ and even describes his own work as less hostile to institutions than other contemporary theorists. ⁷³ Are there openings in his thought which could be developed so as to allow for a consideration of equality as something other than a moment or a secret? Although most of Rancière’s readers have not pursued this precise question, several of his most interesting interpreters have focused on the task of mediating between the politics/police binary at the heart of Rancière’s thought, an approach that would seem to bear potential for probing how equality might be assumed and enacted more often, more regularly, as part of our ordinary socio-political worlds. Deranty, for example, has theorized ‘the political’ as a third term which he thinks is implicit in Rancière’s work and which he depicts as bridging the politics/police divide. ⁷⁴ Chambers pursues what he calls ‘the politics of the police’ and builds on Rancière’s reference to ‘better and worse’ police to argue for the importance of the ‘political project of transforming police orders’. ⁷⁵ Norval also takes up the task of mediation and looks to Rancière’s account of inscription to address ‘the transition’ from a democratic disruption to ‘ordinary politics’. ⁷⁶

There are two ideas in particular from Rancière’s writings that figure prominently in these efforts – the reconfiguration of the sensible and the practice of inscription. In what follows I want to consider these concepts in relation to the impasse I have identified. Are these resources capable of reworking the dualistic portrait of equality critiqued above? Might these ideas allow for equality to be understood as something we should strive to make axiomatic in our everyday relations with one another and in our society’s governing institutions?

Politics disrupts because it reconfigures ‘the order of the visible and sayable’ instituted by the police. ⁷⁷ It acts on the ‘sensory order’ or the ‘partition of the sensible’ that distributes bodies into two categories: ‘those that one sees and those that one does not see, those who have logos…and those who have no logos’. ⁷⁸ Both the police order and the political event which confronts it are aesthetic in this sense: a police regime is a ‘configuration of the perceptible’ that assigns bodies to particular places and tasks while politics ‘undoes the perceptible divisions of the police order’. This ‘undoing’ is famously described by Rancière as that which ‘makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where there was once only place for noise’. ⁷⁹

But if this is so, if politics is always an intervention into the ‘perceptible organization of the community’, then this suggests its effects must be somewhat enduring. ⁸⁰ In other words, if the political enactment of equality can be understood as a modification of the regime of the visible, as Rancière says, then does this not mean that equality is something more than a moment? ⁸¹ If politics entails the production of ‘a body and a capacity for enunciating not previously identifiable within a given field of experience’, then the emergence of this political subject entails the ‘reconfiguration of the field of experience’. ⁸² In other words, it would seem that the police order, understood as sensory regime, has itself been altered. Does this mean that equality has some foothold within our social context and is not only its temporary interruption or secret condition?

Chambers’ phrase ‘the politics of the police’ signals that politics is always ‘impure’ and can do nothing but ‘renegotiate and reconfigure the police order’. ⁸³ Rancière’s emphasis on the partitioning of the sensible is central to this claim. Because the police ‘arrange reality’, those rare instances of politics are effectively rearrangements of reality; the disruption that occurs, Chambers says, is ‘so radical…as to create a new distribution’. The notion of a new distribution is important, of course, because it gestures toward the possibility that the redistribution will be, if not exactly equal, more equal than the one that preceded it. In the wake of a disruption that ‘demonstrates’ and ‘verifies’ equality, the social order will likely be reconfigured in ways that resonate with that eruptive performance.

The trouble is, Rancière does not say anything like this. He does not claim that ongoing relations within a police order are rendered more equal as the result of a political dispute. Although he stresses that politics brings about a reconfiguration of the sensory order, that reconfiguration remains tightly bound to the event itself. In other words, the modification that the regime’s partitioning of the sensible undergoes seems not to last – or if it does last, Rancière tells us very little about its enduring effects. Rancière’s favored examples of politics, which are meant to illustrate the repartitioning of the perceptible, do not address whether or how the police order is altered in the wake of those disruptions. Instead, all the emphasis is placed on the confrontational scene itself. What Rancière calls the repartitioning of the sensible seems to be a feature of the particular event in which a new political subject is seen and heard rather than an ongoing consequence of it. Thus Norval’s observation that ‘Rancière tends to refrain from explicitly engaging with the issues that arise after moments of rupture’ is a vast understatement. ⁸⁴ He avoids all real consideration of what comes ‘after’ the public performance of equality. Instead, what comes after seems a lot like what came before: a police order which is, by definition, unequal.

But perhaps Rancière’s notion of inscription – albeit ‘underdeveloped’ – can complicate this narrative somewhat. ⁸⁵ This is the concept Norval affirms and pursues in her efforts to address ‘how extant systems are affected by the articulation of novel and often challenging demands’. ⁸⁶ Inscription is an important part of the stories Rancière tells about the 1833 tailors’ strike and the 1986 student strike – the ‘major premise’ each demonstration posits in its effort to expose a contradiction is an ‘inscription’ – an egalitarian proposition that has been previously established and which is available for new deployments. The workers, for example, invoked the preamble of the Charter of 1830, which announces that all French people are equal before the law, as their major premise. They were thus able to contrast the ‘fact of inscription with the fact of actual inequality’. ⁸⁷ Similarly, the students’ major premise drew on commitments enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Charter to insist that a free and open university system was an inalienable right. In both cases, political actors exploited the fact that equality was already ‘inscribed’ in the social order. This account of inscription seems to acknowledge that official institutions, namely core constitutional and legal texts, have a role to play in political struggles undertaken by the ‘uncounted’.

Rancière emphasizes this point by arguing that the inscriptions the protesters make use of are no less ‘real’ than the actions of the bosses or the workers. Rejecting the conventional Marxist distinction between real and formal, Rancière places the major premise of equality (inscribed in the Charter) and the minor premise of inequality (enacted by the bosses’ refusal to respond to the workers’ demands) on the same plane. ⁸⁸ While some might interpret the ‘legal/political words’, in the Charter, for example, as ‘illusory’ and the bosses’ exploitative treatment of the workers as ‘real’, Rancière maintains that the syllogism the strike presents does not oppose ‘word to deed or form to reality’ but instead ‘word to word’ and ‘deed to deed’. ⁸⁹ This implies that both premises are constituted by speech and action and are immanent to the regime; they are equally ‘real’ and inhabit the same space. This interpretation is important because it invites us to understand equality as something other than a pre-political condition or a singular performance. ⁹⁰ Here, equality is embedded in humanly produced institutions (constituted by ‘words’ and ‘deeds’) which can serve as contingent foundations, authorizing the strikers’ demands. As Oliver Marchart points out, we cannot explain the power of the egalitarian syllogism’s major premise without understanding how it is ‘anchored both in institutions and in a given “way of life”’. ⁹¹

This account of inscription points toward a more politically salient understanding of equality, one which affirms the importance of collective public acts that demonstrate equality, but which does not imagine those events as fleeting expressions of a hidden secret nor consign them to oblivion as ‘one-off’s. ⁹² Indeed, Rancière’s discussion of inscription implies that a commitment to equality can be a lasting feature of a police order, despite his otherwise dualistic portrait of equality and his portrayal of police orders as systematically unequal. Equality, it seems, can achieve some foothold within society. Momentary political disputes can produce something lasting, in the form of an inscription, which in turn can serve as a resource for subsequent struggles: ‘[M]oments when equals declare themselves as such…appeal to what has been inscribed earlier, which their action raises behind it as a banner.’ ⁹³

Inscription, as Norval suggests, seems to push against the ‘sharp division’ Rancière creates between politics and the police. ⁹⁴ This is certainly true. But even as the notion of inscription challenges the simplistic mapping of equality/inequality onto politics/police, it is conceptualized by Rancière in ways that betray his disinterest in, even hostility toward, serious questions of institutionalization. What do I mean? Rancière acknowledges that political struggles can produce institutions which express egalitarian commitments, and which can in turn be appropriated by later democratic demonstrations. Yet it is significant that these institutions of equality are treated by Rancière primarily as artifacts. ‘Inscriptions’ of equality appear in his work as objects or things: they are ‘made’ by protest activity and then are evidently set down, inert, in the context of a still thoroughly hierarchical police order until the next time they are picked up by the ‘uncounted’ who put them to novel use. In other words, there is very little, if any allowance, in Rancière’s work for the possibility that institutions could advance the presupposition of equality, shaping what citizen-subjects do, day in and day out. Institutions – at least those that might affirm equality rather than its opposite – do not register as the sites of lived practices that condition our ongoing relations with one another.

The tendency to treat egalitarian institutions as occasional use-objects rather than as constitutive of everyday experience is encouraged by Rancière’s frequent identification of these ‘institutions’ with founding documents. The institutions that Rancière credits with endorsing equality in the midst of police orders are always texts and this identification reinforces their artifact-like status. Equality is ‘inscribed’ in the police order quite literally: as ‘words of equality’; ‘a text’, something which is ‘written down’. ⁹⁵ These ‘legal/political words’ are consequently figured as things which can be taken up as tools now and again: equality appears in ‘ideal and fleeting inscriptions’. ⁹⁶

Quite strikingly and significantly, Rancière pays little attention to institutionalization that does not take the form of a written declaration – decision-making bodies, electoral practices, legal procedures, rights of citizenship, and so on are barely addressed. Nor does his work encourage us to differentiate among distinct kinds of institutions or institution-building. Instead, the social order writ large is identified with hierarchical institutions per se, and equality, when it is anything other than a moment or a secret, appears as an anomalous document to be taken up as a weapon. This excessively narrow treatment of institutions prevents the asking of important questions about what concrete changes would need to be made to existing institutions, or what kind of counter-institutions would need to be created, if we were to push for the equality of anyone and everyone as an organizing principle of society. ⁹⁷

Readers like Chambers and Norval emphasize certain concepts in Rancière’s thought, such as the reconfiguration of the sensible and inscription, in order to complicate the overarching binaries Rancière sets up and foreground the question of whether and how the police orders we inhabit might be transformed. Their overriding concern resonates with my own, but I believe Rancière’s thought poses more formidable barriers to the pursuit of egalitarian ‘ordinary politics’ than has been acknowledged. Indeed, as I have suggested, the problem runs deeper than Rancière’s obviously stark dichotomies of politics/police; equality/inequality; event/form. Even the ideas of reconfiguration and inscription are limited by Rancière’s abiding commitment to politics-as-event. As I noted above, the claim that the sensory order is reconfigured in the course of a political disruption is tantalizing, but that reconfiguration seems to be as fleeting as the demonstration itself; Rancière says very little about what happens in the wake of rupture. Indeed, he tends not to acknowledge that anything has been significantly transformed; the police, undifferentiated, reigns before just as it reigns after. And inscription, as conceptualized by Rancière, obscures the variety of institutional forms that actually matter for our social and political lives, in favor of a reductive portrait of texts as tools to be used sporadically. In other words, if one is interested in the daunting but vital task of remaking our socio-political environment, including its institutions, in ways that affirm the radical equality of anyone and everyone, Rancière may not be the best ally for that project. When Norval writes, for example, that ‘Rancière does not do enough by way of addressing questions regarding the processes through which democratic challenges find a foothold in existing orders’, this underestimates the problem his work poses. ⁹⁸ It is not merely that ‘he does not do enough’ in this regard; it is that his work actively avoids, even disparages, that very line of inquiry.

Given the increasing popularity of Rancière’s work, it seems important to ask, ‘What do we take on when we turn to Rancière to understand the present?’ As I have argued, the persistent figuration of equality as either a hidden secret or an eruptive moment, embedded in a political theory that is largely allergic to institutionalization, should give us pause. What do we affirm – and what might we also foreclose – when we draw on Rancière’s thought, especially as a lens through which to interpret contemporary forms of protest? In particular we may run the risk of abandoning the very aspiration of altering institutional arrangements in ways that affirm the radical equality of human beings.

IV Conclusion: Revisiting the plebs

To amplify what is at stake in the acceptance of Rancière’s account of axiomatic equality – and to point toward another understanding of egalitarian politics – it is helpful to return to his favorite example: the plebian secession in 494 BCE. We saw earlier that Rancière turns to this event to illustrate both aspects of equality-as-presupposition. The actions of the plebs appear as an open, public enactment of equality while Menenius Agrippa’s speech to the plebs is said to depend upon a disavowed equality between speaking beings. Thus, this single event evinces equality’s dual character: equality is an assumption made manifest in a rare disruptive demonstration and equality is an assumption hidden within every act of communication. The concealing/revealing dynamic is central to Rancière’s retelling of the pleb secession.

What is quite remarkable about Rancière’s reading – and which warrants our attention – is that he presents the secession strictly as a singular event, one that begins when the plebs exit the city and – importantly – ends when the patricians decide that the plebs are ‘creatures of speech’ and therefore ‘there is nothing left to do but to talk to them’. ⁹⁹ The many references to the secession in Rancière’s writings all conform to this basic structure.

To be sure, the pleb secession was a dramatic, powerful form of protest. And Rancière is at pains to show that it was not a disorderly revolt but a properly political dispute in which ‘those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account’. ¹⁰⁰ But tellingly, Rancière’s account omits any discussion of the institutional changes that were achieved as a result of this landmark protest. He persistently ‘cuts away’ from the scene at the point at which the plebs and patricians enter negotiations. In fact, if reading Rancière in isolation, one would not know that the important political offices of the tribunes of the plebs [tribuni plebis] along with the Plebeian Assembly [Concilium Plebis] were created as part of this dispute’s settlement. These institutional innovations were highly significant in a political environment dominated by patrician consuls and senators, and marked a turning point in Roman republicanism. ¹⁰¹ The office of the tribunes, in particular, was especially important (and unique) because it functioned as a quasi-executive office. Over time, both of these plebeian-specific institutions were expanded, shifting from a primarily defensive role, acting as a check on elite power, to more active participation in governance. The tribunes effectively became full magistrates and the Plebeian Assembly acquired equal standing with the Centuriate Assembly by 287 BCE, at which point the republic arguably functioned as ‘two polities in one’. ¹⁰² But even the initial establishment of the tribunes and assembly, as part of the resolution to the 494 BCE secession, was an important achievement (and one which created the conditions of possibility for these plebian-specific institutions’ continued elaboration). From the beginning, the tribunes were declared sacrosanct and endowed with the capacity to obstruct political acts undertaken by elites [intercessio] and to come to the aid of an individual threatened with injustice by elites [auxilium] and the exclusively plebeian assembly was established so that tribunes could be selected by and from among their own ranks. ¹⁰³

Rancière’s version of the story tells us none of this. He neither documents the institutional transformation that took place as a result of this particular demonstration, nor does he situate this episode within what was in fact a 200-year struggle between the patricians and the plebs over the organization of the city. The plebs’ enduring efforts to minimize the domination over them and achieve a measure of political equality during this period took place largely through agitation for the creation, preservation and revision of specific institutions. (The next probable secession, for example, in 449 BCE, was reportedly undertaken to oppose the protracted rule by the decemvirs and to demand the restoration of the consuls and the tribunes.) Yet Rancière strips the secession of its historico-institutional context and presents it as an isolated act, a ‘one-off’. ¹⁰⁴

This is hardly accidental. The failure to address the consequences, both short- and long-term, of this event, is indicative of Rancière’s commitment to a dichotomous opposition between the rare, eruptive political act of equality and the constant, ubiquitous police regime of inequality. More pointedly still, this rendering of the pleb secession expresses Rancière’s reluctance to see institutions, even those born of popular protest and designed to lessen subordination, as potential sites of equality. By truncating the narrative of the secession so that only the demonstration itself (and not any of its longer-lasting repercussions) is reported, Rancière reinforces the idea that equality is only ever fleeting and cannot itself be pursued, protected, or deepened by (re)building institutions.

It is for these reasons that we may want to loosen the hold Rancière’s work has on contemporary theory, on behalf of a different and more institutionally minded egalitarian politics, one which refuses to accept that equality is only a moment or a secret. Such a politics requires relinquishing the easy conflations of ‘order’ with ‘domination’ and ‘organization’ with ‘hierarchy’. Most vitally, it depends upon a recognition of the extent to which ‘institutions’ and ‘institutionalization’ are pluralistic categories which describe entities and processes that can push in egalitarian or inegalitarian (and many other) directions.

What would it mean if radical egalitarian politics today were understood to entail a concerted struggle over the specific institutions we want to govern our lives? From this vantage point, the disruption produced by a secession or a strike, when those who are normally unseen and unheard assert themselves as equals in public, is a powerful political act in its own right. But those rare and occasional disruptions may also be parts of a lasting struggle to inscribe equality into society, not only – and not even primarily – in the form of textual declarations (as Rancière sometimes suggests), but through political institutions that distribute decision-making powers, secure political space, determine the selection of leaders, authorize law-making, define political offices, and so on. ¹⁰⁵

Still, the creation of institutions, even those designed to equalize relations among citizens, cannot substitute for specific performative actions that verify equality. Unless citizens continue to make themselves seen and heard as equals, institutions may be nothing more than dead letters. Rancière hints at this idea with regard to rights when he explains, ‘They were won through democratic action and they are only ever guaranteed through such action. The “rights of man and of the citizen” are the rights of those who make them a reality.’ ¹⁰⁶ Hannah Arendt, who is much more inclined than Rancière to regard institutional mechanisms as essential for promoting and sustaining equality, also imbues institutions with an activist sensibility: ‘Political institutions, no matter how well or how badly designed, depend for continued existence upon acting men; their conservation is achieved by the same means that brought them into being.’ ¹⁰⁷ The first plebeian secession and the ‘conflict of the orders’ of which it was a part illustrate this insight well: the plebs’ struggle for standing in the Roman republic is a history of institution-building animated by a persistent sense of vigilance, sometimes expressed in disruptive acts like secessions.

The recognition that institutions can play a vital role in fostering equality, then, does not require relinquishing a practice-centered understanding of politics. Indeed, it may be especially important for egalitarian politics today to recenter the question of institutions without endorsing the fantasy that any institution – no matter what its form – can replace or render unnecessary the specific activities by which equality is publicly demonstrated, again and again. But if the popularity of Rancière’s work is any indication, it may be the other side of this mutually constitutive relationship that deserves emphasis now: actions which openly verify equality can be crucially enabled or disabled, made less or more likely, by reigning institutions. And the plebeian-specific tribunes and assembly of the Roman republic can serve as potent reminders today that ‘institutions’ can take many shapes beyond those that are most familiar to us now. Some of those forms – whether recuperated from the past or created anew – may be indispensable to the project of rendering equality more axiomatic.