Abstract
This article contends that Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic understanding of corporeality is central to his interpretation of intellectual emancipation. Concretely, I will argue that Rancière’s aesthetic understanding can be viewed as a torsion of a body that affects its vital arrangements, which thereby open paths for political emancipation. I will support my claim with Rancière’s reading of the plebeian philosopher Gauny, as well as works that have not been sufficiently considered in secondary literature, such as The Nights of Labor and The Ignorant Schoolmaster. My reading will, I maintain, help to question common interpretations of emancipation in Rancière that tend to read this notion either in dichotomous terms or as a merely ephemeral, evental practice with no concrete conditions of possibility and without long-lasting or verifiable effects in the world.
Keywords
It is in the moments when the real world wavers and seems to reel into mere appearance, more than in the slow accumulation of day-to-day experiences, that it becomes possible to form a judgment about the world. (Rancière 1989, 19)
These brief references indicate that the question of the body and its connection to emancipation is polyvalent in Rancière’s work. The considerations at stake here are about a logic, which the author characterizes as a police logic that sees life in common in terms of a well-ordered political–social body, with no supplement. There are also reflections regarding how emancipatory political practices disassemble this well-assembled body in order to promote other configurations of the common, “precisely [because] a political collective is not an organism or a community body” (Rancière 2000, 64). This corporeal work of bodies on themselves allows them to re-experience their possibilities, exceeding the place that has been assigned to them. Finally, is possible to think that these individual and collective displacements bring forth another way of imagining the body (no longer as an organic body, representable with certain parts and functions, but as a fragmentary body, with no definite expression). 5
Although Rancière has often pointed out that there is no necessary step from the level of (dissensual but imperceptible) everyday transformations of bodies to the level of disagreement (mésentente)—that is, the level of visible intervention in institutional regulations that rule over them—he has also suggested that the latter level cannot occur without the former. In fact, once processes of political subjectivization or collective emancipation are produced, other quotidian transformations of the sensory fabric or, in Rancière’s terms, of “intellectual emancipation” can be prompted, the effects of which may be unforeseeable. It is, perhaps, for this reason that the level of everyday transformation of bodies tends to be given a certain preeminence in his reflections. This can be observed in his early works, The Nights of Labor and The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and in the importance he gives to these works in his interviews (Rancière 2009a, 2012), programmatic declarations (Rancière 2009a, 35–67, 173, 409–427, 575–576, 2009b, 114–115, 2011b, 7), 6 and later books such as The Emancipated Spectator. This article will, thus, focus on these early works where Rancière began to pursue “the imperceptible confrontations” that generated the quotidian transformations of some bodies, “the trace of those paths, the mark of their ruptures” (Rancière 2009a, 41), and their effects on a sensory fabric of experience. 7
Nevertheless, the importance Rancière attributes to these writings contrasts sharply with the scarce attention his commentators pay to them. This is particularly the case with The Nights of Labor. 8 Introductions and monographs about the author invariably mention this book, but they always do so only in order to trace a trajectory of Rancière’s thought that will enable them to show the preparatory stages of later theoretical works such as On the Shores of Politics or Disagreement. This strange inattention, which also reduces the singularity of Rancière’s writing and his indisciplinary and experimental form of doing philosophy, is a consequence of the lack of attention paid to the centrality of corporeality in Rancière’s work. Furthermore, as I see it, both omissions help to nourish problematic readings of the concept of emancipation in Rancière: (a) voluntarist readings that interpret intellectual emancipation as the liberation of a subjective will (Nordmann 2006, 127); (b) dichotomous readings of emancipation that interpret it as a completely excessive moment, entirely outside of police logic (Hallward 2009; May 2008, 2010a, 2010b; Myers 2016; Žižek 2006, 75); 9 (c) approaches that consider emancipation to be insubstantial, in the sense that it would bring few significant effects to the world (Hallward 2009). 10 To think of emancipation from the perspective of corporeality, or more precisely, as we shall see, to think of it as the torsion of a body, makes it possible to challenge the first of these readings and offers some elements to begin to problematize (b) and (c), 11 as I will explain in more detail at the end of this article. 12
In order to detail everything that is at stake in this movement of torsion, I would first like to pause to consider a scene described by the plebeian philosopher Louis Gabriel Gauny, which Rancière has pointed out as crucial for an understanding of the aesthetic dimension of emancipation, the corporal displacements it produces, and the affective impulse it mobilizes (see section entitled “A gaze disconnects from the activity of the arms”). I will then move on to consider the material but incorporeal figure of the écart 13 (interstice or interval) as central to an understanding of these dissensual displacements and the way in which they are closely related to the materiality of words ( see section entitled “The interstice (l’écart) and the materiality of words”). Next, I will reflect on the corporal potency that is felt in these emancipatory practices. I pay particular attention to the ways it can be deployed through different paths and languages (see section entitled “The languages of bodies”), and also as a common potency that allows for singular verifications of equality, always confronted with the factuality of the given circumstances.
I am not interested in this article in directly introducing Rancière into the complex epistemological and ontological discussion on corporeality and embodiment; 14 however, my reading of his work will allow for an aesthetic understanding 15 of corporeality that problematizes dichotomous distributions between the given and the acquired, the natural and the cultural, the material and the ideal, the mind and the body, and the spirit and matter. According to this aesthetic understanding, 16 I will argue later, the body is not entirely determinable by the practices that condition it (as in certain culturalist versions, see Bordieu 1988), but which can de-determine itself on the basis of them, opening up a “disagreement” between two regimes of sensoriality 17 : on the one hand, the forms of objectivization and disciplining that bodies are subject to and which, thereby, close their experiences; and, on the other, practices in which bodies turn back upon their own movements, going over what they do to affirm the potency of this mobility. 18 It is a dissent that, as I will show here, produces the opening of intervals in the midst of subjections, of intervals that have the materiality of the incorporeal and can drive qualitative transformations of bodies. And, it is this incorporeal potency that Rancière links in some places to the force of the as if, namely, of all those manifestations that, from certain coordinates, do not seem to have an existence, but act as if they did (Rancière 2009c, 9). 19
In this sense, the objective of this article is not only exegetic. By insisting on this aesthetic understanding of emancipation and the body, I want to emphasize how Rancière’s reflections allow us to explore a qualitative transformation of bodies. This allows us to address, with the help of Rancière, some of the political dead ends in which I believe certain constructivist and culturalist understandings of corporeality are trapped when they insist that bodies are completely disciplined, governed, or dominated by certain social practices. 20 It is a dead end, which as expressed by Eve Sedgwick (2003, 123–151), could even have a paranoid effect on critical theory, for it would place it in a constant state of alert, tracking the configuration of new power mechanisms that would somehow leave bodies trapped in the reiteration of their subjections, instead of inquiring into the affective territories that circulate among them, and the unexpected manners in which these could be transformed. 21 This is a concern that Rancière too, based on other considerations, has carried forth in his works. Ever since his first criticisms of Althusser and Bourdieu, nourished by singular archival research, and continuing with his more recent questionings of the critical and post-critical dispositif, Rancière has been interested in problematizing philosophical and social science perspectives that mobilize a demystifying logic of suspicion. 22 Such perspectives impede us from considering the unforeseeable and incalculable ways in which bodies can reinvent themselves from the positions, roles, and practices that they are subjected to.
Torsions of bodies
A gaze disconnects from the activity of the arms
There is a scene that appears time and again, almost obsessively, in Rancière’s texts (see Rancière 2004a, 199, 2008a, 68, 2012, 108): Believing himself at home, so long as he has not finished laying the floor, he loves the arrangement of a room. If the window opens out onto a garden or commands a view of a picturesque horizon, he stops his arms a moment and glides in imagination [plane enidée] toward the spacious view to enjoy it better than the possessors of the neighboring residences. (Gauny 1983, 46; Rancière 1989, 81) On the job one effort excites another [un effort en passione un autre], the movements follow one another in a straight and spirited way. Lured [attiré] toward the conclusion of the work, he is taken up by the charm as he kills boredom [l’ ennui]: that awful cancer that gnaws the soul of the day laborer. (Gauny 1983, 45) As he gives air to his thinking every day, the floor-layer mortifies his body more and more […] The craft bends this man under violent hardships that must be experienced to be appreciated. For it is crawling along on his knees that he lays the floor, tormented by the work, enchanted by the liberty! He mortifies his body to give flight to his soul. (Gauny 1983, 45; Rancière 1989, 80)
On the basis of this connection with the movement of his body in solitude, it is as if Gauny could also become absorbed in his thoughts, as if his body thus required, against the grain of a long metaphysical tradition, a reconnection with the body, its rhythms, its gestures, and its mobility, as if thought were this very mobility pleasantly re-experienced by a body in its different possibilities of movement, interruption, disjunction, exploration, and observation. It is as if thought, as I will insist later on, took place in this perceptive, affective, and aesthetic exploration of a body. This is what Gauny suggests when he goes on to say: “Almost always alone in the work entrusted to him, solitude protects his meditation, since nothing distracts him from his thoughts” (Gauny 1983, 45). And, what sort of thought could absorb him so? It is precisely the thought that evokes the scene, reiterated so often by Rancière, with which this section began—that movement of disjunction between arms and gaze, that directs the gaze to the space it occupies and to the spacious perspective that appears before it. But, it is worth insisting that this disconnection has nothing to do with a (contemplative) gaze that separates itself from the (manual) activity of the arms. Quite the opposite; it is a disconnection from a habitual, functional, corporal arrangement that denies contemplation to manual work, a disconnection from functionality that, thus, makes it possible to experience the movement of manual labor as a halting and moving of the body. This is a re-experiencing—in the movement of the body, in its effort—of the space in which the body moves, which also makes it suspend the effort and which, although allowing it to appropriate its mobility, takes it outside of itself in a sort of expropriating appropriation. It is as if the body, connected to its movement and observing and feeling what it is doing, and disconnected from its mere functionality, could also attend to the appearance of the world, suspending its habitual distraction (functional distraction when performing daily tasks) in the face of what appears. It is what Kant, as Rancière keeps insisting, 25 elaborated with the idea of the disinterest of the aesthetic gaze in Critique of Judgment, namely: disinterest as the openness that encourages the floor-layer and drives him to see; disinterest that is anything but indifference; and disinterest that perhaps makes the sensory fabric of experience interesting and significant. 26 And so boredom fades away.
That boredom, Gauny tells us in another text, is an affect 27 that consumes the body of those who are condemned to repellent (rebutant) work, given the long workdays that such jobs impose on them. This boredom “torments the limbs and the spirit” 28 of the worker, who is overwhelmed by this feeling, and who suffers “the corporal positions” required by his job as something unbearable. This is the reason why “everything in him wants to escape from himself” (Gauny 1983, 43, my emphases). Those who experience such constrictions in their job experience boredom in doing it. They feel the body is absent, so that everything in them wants to slip away from their situation, from their reality. We can, therefore, say that boredom seems to be related to that which prevents a body from re-experiencing itself, separating itself from its habitual positions, and fracturing the ensemble of its expected corporal gestures.
Thus, “the consumed soul of the day laborer,” the soul that is not allowed to be and that wears itself away, may be precisely the difference of the body with respect to itself. This unidentifiable difference without a concrete reference, without a fixed presence, emerges almost as if defeated in the compelled body, doomed to the incessant and prolonged repetition of its regulations, but without failing to emerge in any case. This difference could be interpreted as a certain very material incorporeality that is able to pass through bodies, fracturing them, diverting them, altering them.
Returning now to the scene outlined by Gauny, what it also tells us is that in a single stroke, the gaze is displaced from the spacious perspective it enjoys from the window to other spaces (cf. Gauny 1983, 46). The floor-layer then sees “two stains of shadow,” “two of those buildings that the spirit of enterprise and the spirit of reform have elevated in those years: manufacturing and the cell prison” (Rancière 1989, 87). These two shadows remain in his imagination as he resumes his work. He goes back to work, but his soul reflects the things going on outside better than a mirror, because it passes through the stones; he perceives the abominations they hide. The prisoners in their stifling cells and the hirelings consumed by factories sweep him into humanitarian fits of rage in which their indignation, accusing society, makes him forget the splendors of space and suffer from the evil he has seen. (Gauny 1983, 46; Rancière 1989, 87) No break in the walls, nothing filters through, everything gets lost. One senses there that tidiness and regularity are deadly. The air, circulating comfortably there, reeks of the base tyranny in the divisibility of its powers. One walks without calling up any echoes. Before the jailers, the objects make signs to keep silent and give the order to suffer. The outside oxygen […] is sanctimoniously replaced by an air-intake setup that, through the arrangement of its flow, loses the voice of the prisoner if he attempts to communicate into his opening. (Gauny 1983, 73; Rancière 1989, 89)
Let us gather together some of these threads. Thus far, a number of points are significant in terms of the interpretation I want to put forward here.
Emancipation begins with a subtle displacement of a body that relates to a “re-appropriation” of its mobility and its lived experience, but as an appropriation that alters and expropriates.
Dominations inhibit this mobility by stealing from the body a time and space of its own in which it may turn back upon itself.
This turning back upon itself may also throw it out of itself and into other spaces and temporalities, and may lead to an imaginative reflection (a reflection that produces other images of the world) on what it is that robs bodies of their mobility, their possibility of displacement, their freedom, and their desire for a different world.
In this sense, reflection, imagination, and judgment about the world relate to reconfigurations that may occur in a corporeality in its relation to times and spaces and the way it can, thus, be exposed to its difference.
For this same reason, emancipation is at the same time a movement of displacement in a corporeality and a movement of the imagination and its power to figure other images of the world. This turns out to be very significant for re-thinking critical agency and what it entails.
In fact, along these lines, one could also think that “the motive for militant passion” is not the new “awareness” of a previously unknown reality, or “the solidarity” of workers with one another, but the desire to imagine, “to see what happens on the other side, the desire to initiate another life,” that is to say, an impulse, a transformative corporeal force inhabiting reflection, and traversing imagination (Rancière 2009a, 38).
Gauny’s observations also suggest that the body is not simply considered material–natural data, nor a surface on which the social meanings that constitute it are inscribed, but that it reiterates time and again in a mechanical or altered way, as some “constructivist” visions insist on today (see Noland 2009, 8; Vasterling 2006; Wendel 2006). Rather, Gauny sees the body as an affective body of experience, able to introduce disjunctions and displacements between its movements and what is usually expected of them. 31
Last, it is highly significant that the freedom of bodies is related to such disjunctions and displacements, to the opening of interstices between what they do and what they see, between movement and stillness, and between the fissures and opacities that forms of subjection may leave as marks, and through which complicities, exchanges, desires, dreams, and feelings (passions, attractions, outrage) can flow with unexpected effects.
The fact that freedom, according to Rancière and Gauny, relates to the interstice (l’écart) is crucial and its implications deserve to be pursued. We could start by saying that the scene Gauny describes and all that it entails for the floor-layer’s body (and which also transcends that scene, for it leads to that other affective economy, which is the cenobitic economy), 32 may already reveal that the interval relates to border crossing: borders of sense and sensibility (perception and sensation) that delimit what a body can and cannot do. It is the border crossing between passivity/activity, when the most hardworking body (of which the merely obedient, docile, and passive fulfillment of a task is expected) comes to a halt and in doing so may become very active and indomitable, and just in seeing, may already act in the movement of thought and imagination. We could also say that it is the displacement of boundaries between the manual activity of the body and intellectual activity (i.e., thought), for the body that is most aware of its corporal forces is precisely the one that ends up most invested in the (and as the) activity of thinking. But, it is also the destabilization of frontiers between freedom and necessity, for those who experience how much they are conditioned by the activity and the physical effort of their body are also those who can move and mobilize themselves, affirming their power. Moreover, it is the border crossing between imagination and reality, for those who open themselves up to the exercise of their imagination can have a different type of contact with the reality that is given to them, and experience an uneasiness that drives them to approach the unseen in that reality. Finally, it is also the displacement of boundaries between the unique and the common, because the body that becomes sensitive to the singularity of its situation, and of what appears from its perspective, may also see its own pain from a broader view, from which it is perceived in connection to the pain of others in the “junctures” that reveal a common pain.
The interstice (l’écart) and the materiality of words
If there is anything The Nights of Labor invites us to think about, it is precisely this border crossing, and along with the crossing, the intervals. As is well known, the book is concerned with the subtle subversions that occur when several workers related to the Saint-Simonian utopian movement decided to put their nights to other uses. Rancière tells us that this is the start of a subversion of the world, as the successive alternation of work and rest that ensures productivity is disrupted because, as mentioned above, there is a resistance to having one’s time taken away and an urge to find some time in which something other than work might be achieved. Furthermore, these nights would be devoted to developing other abilities that do not seem “proper” to the proletarian condition: for example, the founding of and writing in periodicals, discussing and writing poetry, and reading philosophy and philosophizing. Such activities question the hierarchy between the manual worker and the thinker, which is also the hierarchy between a body condemned to “mere survival,” endowed with the inarticulate voice of suffering and pleasure, and the body that can be “more than a body,” capable of logos, of articulate discourse, that can give an account of the just and the real. They question the age-old Platonic, Aristotelian hierarchy that Bourdieu 33 and our society of experts continue to reiterate.
Moreover, proletarians described in The Nights of Labor reveal how these displacements of bodies and their disruptions relate to the materiality of words, that is to say, to the way in which they may drive bodies, put them in contact, and divide them. In fact, they are mainly workers, initially attracted by the words of some utopia, particularly the Saint-Simonian movement that was implicated in labor struggles between 1831 and 1833 (Rancière 1981, 32). Such words can activate the force of desire that the boredom of daily work continually produces: a desire for another world, which may divert bodies from what they regularly and habitually do. Furthermore, these are words that produce contacts between one another, between different belongings and social environments, sometimes unidentifiable, written words with no owner or fixed meaning, texts that circulate, are borrowed and loaned, and translated, 34 words that can pass through bodies, affecting and altering them, as Gauny again suggests: “Plunge into terrible readings. That will awaken passions in your wretched existence, and the laborer needs them to stand tall in the face of that which is ready to devour him” (Rancière 1989, 21). Gauny, thus, recognizes what Rancière has elsewhere called literariness (littérarité): the capacity of enunciations to “appropriate bodies and to divert them from their destination” (Rancière 2000, 63).
But, how is it that words can have this power of affecting and diverting? This is in part related to what Rancière has called in many places “the names of history” in the book of the same name, for example, an excess of words. “Excess” in this case alludes to the way in which words can always be appropriated and translated in unforeseeable ways. In a certain sense, the excess is always linked to a duality, a difference; it is always a non-concordance. The excess is not an excessive, destructive, ontological power. We could say there is excess to the degree that there are multiplicities of arrangements that do not correspond to one another. (Rancière 2012, 111)
Thus, we could say that if poetry elevates the soul of the proletarians who read and write verses during the night, it is not so much because it separates them from the materiality of their bodies, but rather because it divides that materiality, disassembling it in positions, gestures, rhythms, and phrases that do not correspond to the usual expected ones, moving the desire for other rhythms, other positions, other phrases, other worlds, and other possible arrangements.
The interstice is opened at the crossing and mismatch of different logics, between the regulated routine “of terrestrial life” and the utopian dreams of another world that can perforate it. But, the interstice is not opened through the power of the word alone; it is, rather, always a word in relation to gesture, rhythm, image, or movement. It is always about the mismatches, the intervals, the in-between that is created in the dissonances between words, gestures, and forms of spatialization, and it is also about the crossing over of different body languages, which can also be affected because, in their incommensurability, they can be translated with frictions and remains.
The languages of bodies
The poor village women who live outside of Grenoble work at making gloves; they are paid thirty cents a dozen. Since they became emancipated, they work hard at looking at, studying, and understanding a well-made glove. They will understand the meaning of all the sentences, all the words of the glove. (Jacotot, quoted in Rancière 1991, 37, Rancière’s emphasis, slightly modified translation)
Intellectual emancipation, thus, implies recognizing, for itself, in what is done and how it is experienced, that there is a material display of a language that can be traced in its tracks even in the most manual type of work, that these are, in any event, ensembles of signs that can be learned and translated. There is nothing more either above or behind: “There are the signs that a hand traced on paper, signs whose type was assembled by a hand at the printer’s” (Rancière 1991, 23). But, thinking of activities in these terms also entails underscoring their expressiveness and communicability. Through them, human beings communicate their affects in one way or another; they communicate what they can, they communicate with one another (cf. Rancière 1991, 38). But, they do not communicate meanings that have to be found. Rather, they communicate, in the sense of “placing in common,” outlines, traces of signs, which may convoke and be read by others along unexpected paths, and which may display other unprecedented powers, without expecting there to be “something” definite to understand or to discover behind the signs, although they cannot be read just any which way. The outline also marks certain conditions of legibility, although as Jacotot seems to tell us in his anti-Platonism (see Rancière 1991, 36), this legibility has the openness of the written word, of what remains as an outline that can be re-appropriated in multiple ways by others, and thus as an outline of possible paths of freedom. That is to say, they are paths of reaffirmation of the common power of intelligence, of the localized and plastic movement of a body, and of its ability to knit relations: “The locksmith who calls the letter O ‘the round,’ and the L ‘the square’ is already thinking about relations. And inventing is not of another order than remembering” (Rancière 1991, 25).
So, we think in terms of relations, because we move from the very beginning in relationships that we can appropriate and re-appropriate, and the memory of bodies is also composed of relations of elements that can be re-articulated with others that are barely known or hardly identifiable. There is, thus, no static, homogeneous, corporeal memory, but only heterogeneous, relational arrangements inscribed in bodies that can be dis-arranged and re-arranged. Thus, in creating continuity between the differentiating levels that establish the logics of inequality, the circle of impotence is broken; in establishing these continuities, which are relations, spirals are created and, in turn, these spirals open–displace–distance themselves from the circle (s’écartant is the French word that contains the notion of écart, distance–gap–interstice). 37 Thus, with certain intervals, the circle in which bodies are limited by boundaries between ability/inability and knowledge/ignorance (fixed by distributions of sense and perception reiterated by master explicators, progressive sociologists, empowering militants, humanitarian bureaucracy, victimizing treatments, and the society of experts, etc.) is perforated.
Power of bodies
Once more universal teaching proclaims: an individual can do anything he wants [Un individu peut tout ce qu’il veut]. But we must not mistake what wanting means. Universal teaching is not the key to success granted to the enterprising who explore the prodigious power of the will. Nothing could be more opposed to the thought of emancipation than that advertising slogan. […] By the will we mean that turning back upon oneself by the reasonable being who knows himself in the act [ce retour sur soi de l’être raisonnable qui se connaît comme agissant]. (Rancière 1991, 56, slightly modified translation)
But, this knowledge of oneself is not a recognition of what would be a recognizable and transparent self. Rather, as shown in the section entitled “A gaze disconnects from the activity of the arms,” it is a movement of experiencing and re-experiencing what one does, what one can do, and the community of this power, of the way it can unfold in translations that drive bodies to what they do not know, and to explore other languages and forms of speech and perception. Furthermore, this power of opening and of mobility recognizes itself as subject to conditionings, to localized needs; thus, it can also “know itself” (Rancière 1991, 50–51). It is need (an imperious voice that makes unconditioned requests or the difficulty of a situation that demands, that challenges) that moves intelligence, that displaces a body from what it has assumed as known and given, leading it to probe, to explore, to find other pathways, making use of what it already can do. Therefore, compared to the bodiless Cartesian subject, “who only knows himself by withdrawing from all the senses and from all the bodies, we have a new thinking subject who is aware of himself through the action he exerts on himself as on other bodies” (Rancière 1991, 54). Thus, it is an ability for speculation, exploration, and experimentation 39 that can only know itself in its own agency, in its actions, as the mobility of a body to attend to what it can do from and within the location into which it is thrown (cf. Rancière 1991, 54–55). But, the confirmation of this power for itself also seems to suggest that it can only develop as a mobility that affirms said power both in itself and in others (cf. Rancière 1991, 56–57). In these forms of mutual affectation, bodies divide themselves and act against “the destiny of matter,” (Rancière 1987, 134) that is to say, against an understanding of self and of the world as a given, resistant, regulated, natural, uniform matter that imposes certain things. 40 But, this anti-materialism of Jacotot, or rather his non-reductionist position, does not lead him to an idealism of transcendence or an idealism of the unconditional nature of the sovereign autonomous subject. That certain anti-materialism is also very material for, as I have argued, it focuses on the power of bodies, on what they can do, on the forces that move them, on the materiality, therefore, of the incorporeal. 41 (I shall come back to this point in the final section of this article.)
All of this already indicates very clearly that, for Rancière following Jacotot, the freedom affirmed in a movement of emancipation cannot be thought of as the unconditional or absolute freedom of an individual who takes possession of himself beyond any conditioning, as Nordmann (2006, 124) assumes, on the contrary, this freedom indicates a power of mobility, displacement, and alteration with respect to a given position, from conditions that precede, mark, and affect that power, but which are also endowed with a certain plasticity.
Effects: By way of conclusion
In this article I was interested in pursuing emancipation as a movement of torsion by a body, which begins with subtle subversions in everyday activities (forming a different relation to the movement of labor and the gaze, a different use of nights, a different relation to what one already knows), highlighting the conditions from which this twisting movement may emerge: the heterogeneity of practices; the dis-incorporating power of writing; and the common power of bodies. But, I have also tried to suggest some of the effects of this torsion and the transformations that it may entail: a certain militant attitude; a desire to transform the self and the world; the affirmation of a common power; and the opening up of the field of the possible that Rancière links to the desire for emancipation. We could, therefore, say that this exercise of emancipation, which Rancière defines as intellectual emancipation, is an affective–reflective movement (reflective only inasmuch as it is moved, affected by forces of transformation): a movement by means of which a corporeality re-appropriates mobility, and with it its power of “dissensus” that allows it to re-experience the positions, functions, and social meanings that are given to it, asserting their heterogeneity, and the way in which they can be disassembled and reconfigured in other arrangements. Hence, we see the importance of thinking about what this impulse can bring about, this force of transformation that is also, as we have seen, a power of thought, understood as a common corporeal capacity of re-experiencing.
I would like to suggest that the notions of torsion, re-experiencing, and excess, that have been shown to be crucial in this interpretation of the emancipation of bodies, relate to an aesthetic–cartographical understanding of them (Rancière 2009c, 2–3). According to this reading, a body is a heterogeneous arrangement of discourses, gestures, images, routines, affects, forms of rationality, and spatializations, a heterogeneous arrangement that is experienced in its movements, in its forms of perception, but which can be re-experienced, producing disjunctions in the existing arrangements and, thereby, produce other arrangements. In this sense, it is an approach that accentuates the fact that, however subjected a corporeality may be to certain habits and routines that it has incorporated, it can both resist and dis-incorporate them, but also perforate them with holes and gaps that make de-subjecting reconfigurations possible, validating what has not taken place. Hence, we see the importance of the incorporeal: of those non-places that perforate the established places; of those enunciations that exceed the given as real, but which have a great power of affectation over bodies; of those existences that are not intelligible from a certain rationality, but which act as if they were; 42 of those forces that move bodies and drive them to produce transformations that are not necessarily definable and conceptualizable; of that excess that appears in the possible dis-adjustment of what is assembled; and of the interval. And, thus, the emphasis is also on the materiality of the incorporeal, and on the effects that these intervals may have on the given (on bodies, their practices, and modes of relation).
For this reason, that incorporeal interval with no definite place or existence is also very material and it has effects: Gauny’s corporal explorations give rise to a very different form of life, as revealed by his cenobitic economy, so that we are dealing with deviations that alter a whole existential landscape. Moreover, the workers’ deviations studied in The Nights of Labor have the effectiveness of the clinamen, of those Brownian movements (Rancière 1989, 31) that may threaten a whole order of meaning in an unforeseeable way, for “an atom only needs to deviate slightly from its parallel trajectory for it to collide with others and a new world will be born from it.” 43 In that collision, “the horizon is crossed over and a new form is produced” (Huberman 2009, 106). This was progressively discovered and obliquely traced in The Nights of Labor (see Rancière 1989, 22). The displacements that are produced in the divided figures in this book, through their contact with other experiences (of writing, reading, relating to others), allow them to ask questions about their identity, their abilities, the use of their time and space, and the visibility of their voice as a significant word. Moreover, this interrogation may also lead them to question their right to speak, their right to not always have to be represented by others. 44 That is why Rancière insists that workers’ emancipation depends more on the possibility of workers having other knowledge and other experiences of themselves—through the corporal explorations we have pursued here, which allow them to call into question the hierarchies at the base of their exploitation—than on their discovery of exploitation and its conditions (Rancière 1989, 22). It is also in the experiences of dis-identification with respect to a fixed, assigned worker identity that “the voice of the great collectivity of workers” (Rancière 1989, 22–23) can be configured, a collective voice that, from not having a place, manifests itself and makes claims, for the proletariat begins to emerge here, according to Rancière, not as a defined class but as the class of all those who remain in the margins and refuse to be integrated in a particular fashion. The proletariat begins to assert itself as a de-classifying class, as “the part of those who have no part” to put it in the words of the later Rancière (1999, 29–30). 45
However, emphasizing the border crossing that gives life to the interval and to its effectivity allows us to take up another point of special interest for this article, one which relates to the kind of ruptures and de-subjections that may take place in bodies when they become emancipated. To express it more exactly, it can be said that in his reflections on intellectual emancipation, Rancière invites us to think of a particular movement of de-subjection that cannot be defined only as resistance, transgression, or parodic reiteration. 46 Let us return to the figure of Gauny. The way in which his body becomes de-subjected from a series of dominations (identifications, constrictions, and regulations imposed by certain boundaries of meaning and perception) is a movement that can be characterized as a subtle subversion and, therefore, as a certain surpassing of given limits. However, in this movement of the subversion of certain codes, an interval emerges between them, in which a body reconfigures itself rather than undoing or losing itself as a certain type of subject. The limit, therefore, is neither denied (as in a merely negative resistance), nor radicalized (as in the more interesting movement of transgression). The movement is that in which the limit is radicalized to the point of reaching its own limits, the limit where both the limit and the subject produced by the delimitation can disappear. 47 In fact, in the scene we considered, Gauny does not appropriate the criteria of a dominant code of conduct (e.g., capitalist functionality with its urge to obtain results, efficiency, and productivity) in order to radicalize them by turning them around, transgressing them, and transvaluating them. Instead, Gauny pauses and suspends, rather than radicalizing the urge for functionality driven by the pursued object. That is to say, he separates the activity from the object, in order to retain the experience of the movement of the productive activity alone and what follows from this pause in the cadence of the effort and the gestures of the body, and subsequent reconfigurations in another type of affective economy and existence. Likewise, the de-subjection and re-configuration that is produced in Gauny’s movements cannot be considered as the altered (mimetic, parodic, decontextualized) reiteration of codes and acquired routines; routines here are not reiterated in order to be altered in the reiteration, but disassembled from the start. They are twisted and altered, suspending themselves rather than reiterating themselves, thus, giving rise to a discordance between the elements of routine activity: a non-concordance between gaze and arms, between activity and expected object, and between maximum effort and functional productivity.
The purpose here is also to insist on an idea that has appeared transversally in this article and which highlights the singularity of Rancière’s aesthetic–cartographic methodology—its importance in thinking about emancipatory practices and considering social formations and practices as heterogeneous arrangements that can be dis-arranged in different ways, giving rise to other arrangements. 48 Underlining this heterogeneity and its nature as “arrangement” is crucial to reflecting on the way social regulations both fail to saturate the field of action (see Foucault 1982, 790) and, as Rancière repeatedly affirms, even “quite poorly” (see Rancière 2012, 108). And, that is why the borders those subjections impose can be crossed over, and punctured here and there in unforeseeable ways by the interstices mentioned above, giving place to qualitative transformations that make it possible to experience the world in a different manner.
Last, keeping this methodological proposal in sight would prevent problematic readings of Rancière’s thought that attribute a dichotomic understanding of the social field to him, as if it were divided by the antithetical territories of politics and police (like Hallward 2009; May 2008, 2010a, 2010b; Žizžk 2006, albeit with very different proposals, and also Deranty 2003, with his dialectical vision), separate territories that have often been read in terms of opposition between the institutional and the non-institutional (Myers 2016). In fact, an aesthetic–cartographic understanding of emancipation implies that it is understood as an experimental activity that unfolds from the heterogeneity of the social world, twisting, and not merely exceeding police mechanisms. In this sense, there is no pure terrain of politics or of emancipation that can be thought of as excessive exteriority or as an encounter, on a third terrain, of two different logics (see Deranty 2003). Nevertheless, this does not imply thinking that the only terrain in which emancipatory practices emerge is the police sphere (see Chambers 2013, 62). The police is not precisely a terrain for Rancière, for example, the terrain of the institutional, but a logic, concretely a conjunctive relation between sense and sense (Rancière 2009c, 2–3), and between regimes of meaning and forms of perception that may always be dis-arranged and give place to other arrangements and intervals. That is why affirming there is no “outside” of the police (Rancière 2011b, 6) implies that there is no pure terrain of emancipation, nor any unitary and uniform terrain of the police, precisely because social formations and, concretely, institutional arrangements—state or non-state—are multiple ensembles that can be divided, altered, and reconfigured. That is also why emancipation does not occur in exteriority with respect to the police, but in its destabilizations, torsions, redoublings, and alterations. Nevertheless, if the different forms of emancipation can redouble elements and dispositions of police logic, it is because they can make use of police resources, dividing them, multiplying them, and exploiting their heterogeneity. This shows that these elements are not merely police ones, but that they can also be divided and crossed with other types of logic, for example, with egalitarian logics, to give rise to emancipatory intervals. 49
Thus, re-thinking political emancipation from the perspective of the subtle torsion of bodies also makes it possible to restore the singularity of Rancière’s thought—its resistance in the face of abstract formulations that force him to generate a theory. Here and there, at different points in his work, we have tried to pursue what bodies can do, in their divergent paths and in their collective encounters, in order to highlight the material effects of this common power, which are also dissensual and therefore have no definite place, in the face of readings that discredit it and distrust anything that lacks a fixed place. Thus, in one way or another, we have tried to “keep the space of thought open, the space of affective power, of desirability [puissance affective, de désirabilité], of everything that is covered by the term ‘emancipation’” (Rancière 2012, 267), the very material and effective space of the as if, that is, of everything that here and now asserts itself as if it existed, although we often, as in certain critical theory approaches, do not wish to embrace it.