Abstract
In this essay we explore Rancière’s ‘politics of equals’ as an alternative conception of the political. Central to this conception is a division between instances of political contestation that address fundamental questions of equality (‘the politics of equals’) and those that are part of the management of the division of resources and positions in society (‘the police’). This distinction provides a new way of thinking about theoretical and empirical questions over logics of political action.
Introduction
If political sociology is defined as the study of the societal distribution of power and politics, what constitutes the boundaries of the ‘political’? That is, what is the proper way to define practices and discourses that reflect the fundamental conflicts that we consider to be part of ‘politics’? Is the political defined by the involvement of state institutions, or fundamental material interests? Is the personal political? The question of how to conceptualize the political has preoccupied political philosophers but has received relatively less attention in sociology, despite the obvious relevance to many areas of inquiry within sociology. For political philosophers, by and large, the political refers to characteristics of certain interactions rather than the social location of such actions or the kinds of actors involved, as political sociologists have generally assumed.
In this essay we explore the work of contemporary political philosopher Jacques Rancière, a scholar whose work has been influential in fields as diverse as cultural studies (Conley 2009; Ferris 2009; Davis 2010), literature (Rockhill 2004; Parker 2009), queer studies (Chambers 2009; May 2009), political theory (Hallward 2006; Dean 2009; Tambakaki 2009; Power 2009), and education (Den Heyer 2009), yet has, as of now, received insufficient consideration in English-language sociological circles (but see Lambert 2012; Pelletier 2009). A former student of Althusser’s, and a contemporary of the generation of post-1968 thinkers in France, Rancière’s work defies easy classification as it spans the range from cultural criticism, to social history, to reflections on education, aesthetics, and democracy. 1 The enduring theme in his work is a preoccupation with equality and emancipation, though perhaps uniquely among his peers he does so from the point of view of the capacity of the excluded to define the terms of their own emancipation.
In this essay we explore his conception of ‘political’ – which is at once restrictive and expansive. Restrictive in that most of the time most of what we think of as political activity does not qualify; expansive in that the politics of equals is not limited to a particular domain of activity or scale of action. It is not based on institutions or on material interests, as are most political sociologies and, it forms the basis for what we think is an interesting alternative to most current accounts. 2 As we discuss below, his conception of ‘the politics of equals’ provides a framework to understand and evaluate the logic and consequences of political claims and actions. We find his framework especially interesting as a heuristic in what many have come to describe as the routine operations of neoliberal democracy and find it to be a useful counterpoint, or complement, to analyses rooted in the framework of governmentality.
In essence, for Rancière most of what happens under the guise of ‘political activity’ – voting, lobbying, and even protesting – is not ‘politics’ but only procedures by which ‘the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved’ and legitimized for the distribution of resources, or as he calls it, ‘police’ (Rancière 1999: 28). These procedures can always become political, however, when fundamental questions of equality emerge. As he writes in a well-known passage:
A strike is not political when it calls for reforms rather than a better deal or when it attacks the relationships of authority rather than the inadequacy of wages. It is political when it reconfigures the relationships that determine the workplace in its relation to the community. (Rancière 1999: 32–3)
This definition of the political as those acts that challenge dominant relationships by presenting the possibility of their undoing is the centerpiece of Rancière’s equality. May (2008) calls this form of equality ‘active equality’ and is juxtaposed to ‘passive equality’ – an equality rooted in formalism whose horizons end at the guarantees of the state. The project Rancière advocates is always an incomplete project, and while it is one that is founded on a critique of the limits of the state and rooted in collective action outside of the state, it is a project of constant engagement, rather than disengagement with the state and formal institutions. This project is an alternative to many tired discussions between engagement and disengagement with the state, between reformist and transformatory strategies, between difference and equality, as well as providing another way to conceptualize ‘identity politics’ and their emancipatory potential, as commonly understood in Anglo-American contexts.
But it is the potential of his theory as heuristic that we focus on here. Specifically, we explore his vision of the workings of society and societal power and explicate how he arrives at the ‘politics of equals’ from his understanding of the workings of democracy. We find it a particularly intriguing counterpoint and complement to the analytics of governmentality. Though Rancière’s work has varying degrees of similarity to authors like Badiou, Arendt, Agamben, and even Schmidt, we believe the comparison to governmentality and the many rich empirical analyses it has spawned provides a fruitful avenue from which to see the value of Rancière’s work in the social sciences. As is well-known, analyses of governmentality, or ‘the conduct of conduct’ (Gordon 1991: 2), have opened inroads uncovering the micro-political processes of how states and individuals manage and govern themselves. This framework has been frequently used in citizenship studies (Ong 2003, 2006; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Cruikshank 1999; Mahmood 2005), social movement studies (Paley 2001; Brown 2006), and identity politics (Miller and Rose 2008; Cruikshank 1999). The politics of equals, we argue, is an interesting counterpoint to this framework because it raises the possibility of rupture, and a ‘deviation from this normal order of things’ which resides in the emancipatory potential of radical equality (Rancière 2001). With an understanding of the workings of power that is strikingly similar to Foucault, Rancière ends at a radically different point.
Rancière’s political
The miscount of parts and the police order
Central to Rancière’s thinking is the understanding that the social order is maintained by a vision of a proper social order that assigns individuals to roles and attributes advantages and entitlements to those positions based on their worth to the social order. This social order, which is arbitrary, presents itself as natural and as a cohesive whole. In Plato’s Republic there is a description of an ideal city in which people carry out roles best suited to their temperaments: some would be guardians, some would be merchants, and some would be rulers. Each takes part in actions of rule (metexein) – they take part in ruling and in being ruled, but in doing so enact a partition that implies a distribution of places in society (Tambakaki 2009). In Rancière’s language, these parts each receive benefits and power based on their supposed contribution to the whole. These orders create roles for every part.
In the making of these parts and the distribution of shares to these parts, a complex counting process occurs, but the count of community parts ‘is always a false count, a double count, or a miscount’ (Rancière 1999: 6). The miscount, for Rancière, is based in the ‘wrong’, or blaberon, that constitutes politics: ‘the order of political idealities must be linked to some construction of city “parts,” to a count whose complexities may mask a fundamental miscount’ (Rancière 1999: 6). Drawing on accounts of Athenian democracy, Rancière notes that when determining who can be a member of the political community, there are always those precluded from membership in this community: slaves, women, and the property-less have been common subjectivities that are miscounted. Because of this miscount, these precluded subjectivities become a ‘part without a part’, a ‘mass of men without qualities’ (1999: 9). However, the constructed social order denies that this partless part exists or that its members belong at all to the community:
The people are not one class among others. They are the class of the wrong that harms the community and establishes it as a ‘community’ of the just and the unjust. (Rancière 1999: 9)
As Rancière writes, it would be wrong to understand those without a part as simply an excluded group from the community. They are not only excluded, but they make up what might be described as a ‘constitutive other’ against which the ideal of the community is constructed, those whose qualities make them unfit for participation in the demos. Rancière describes the ‘poor of ancient times, the third estate, the modern proletariat’ (1999: 9) as belonging to this group. And it is precisely because their status is so radically denied, and this denial is so central to the self-understanding of the community, that claims by those without a part to equality have the potential to interrupt processes of domination because it exposes the arbitrariness of the social order and the way that it is founded on a miscount.
So while ‘the excluded’ could be included, the claims of equality by those without a part are inherently radical, which is why Rancière claims they ‘cannot in fact have any part other than all or nothing’ (1999: 9). When those without a part make a claim for equality, they emerge as a subject, and challenge the natural order, creating the politics of equals:
Political activity is always a mode of expression that undoes the perceptible divisions of the police order by implementing a basically heterogeneous assumption, that of the part who have no part, an assumption that, at the end of the day, itself demonstrates the contingency of the order, the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being. (Rancière 1999: 30)
Central to his vision of the politics of equals is the ‘equality of any speaking being with any other’, an assumption at profound odds with the social order (May 2009: 5). The politics of equals is thus always a dissensus, or the declaration of a wrong. This process of declaration subjectifies, 3 creating political actors who did not exist prior to the declaration. ‘It is only politics that causes the poor to exist as an entity’ (Rancière 1999: 11). This dissenssus is more than a disagreement between parts – it is a more fundamental question that ties a particular conflict to a universal claim. The declaration of this wrong, ‘the mode of subjectification in which the assertion of equality takes its political shape’, institutes a ‘polemical universal, by tying the presentation of equality, as the part of those who have no part, to the conflict between parts of society’ (Rancière 1999: 39). In doing so, the politics of equals undoes the divisions and classifications that are the foundation of the social order that presents itself as natural (Rancière 1995: 33). The politics of equals is the voice of ‘floating subjects that deregulate all representations of places and portions’ (1995: 100). ‘Political struggle’, Rancière claims, ‘is not a conflict between well defined interest groups; it is an opposition of logics that count the parties and parts of the community in different ways’ (Rancière 2001).
The opposite of the politics of equals is the ‘police’, or the justification and maintenance of this social order, ‘the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and systems for legitimizing this distribution’ (Rancière 1999: 28). The police order presents the social order as given, and its division of parts as natural, while the politics of equals ‘disidentifies that which is presented as given’ (Tambakaki 2009: 104). And while the politics of equals represents an egalitarian impulse that shows the social order as contingent, the police order constantly justifies its own organizing inequalities:
Existing without reason, inequality has an even greater need to rationalize itself at every moment and in every place. […] In this way, simple non-reason, the contingency of things is turned into active unreason. And this ‘origin of inequality’ is reiterated at every explanation. […] The social bond is maintained by this endless manufacture of acquiescence, which in schools is called explanation and in public assemblies and courts goes by the name of persuasion. (1995: 83)
Rancière is clear that social institutions are part of the police order, as are most activities of routine politics. Police can be a positive element in society, he argues, yet improving the conditions of society is not necessarily the same as changing the roles and parts of society (Rancière 1999: 31). The activities of the state, political parties, and social movements – things sociologists normally consider the main parts of politics – are generally part of the police order. This comparison means that activities like voting, strikes, and movements can be about the politics of equality, but many times are not. In Rancière’s own writings, he cites the example of Joseph Jacotot’s pedagogy that challenged traditional didactical methods and the claim of expertise (Rancière 1991). Particularly pertinent to lower classes, this pedagogy was political in that the role of teacher was completely reformulated. The teacher was no longer supposed to impart knowledge, but instead to show that anyone is capable of knowing something. Hallward (2006) has persuasively argued that Rancière’s conception of the political is theatrical, in the sense that he imagines politics to be an interruption upon a stage. Other historical examples of politics might be the Civil Rights Movement in general, and the Seneca Falls Convention specifically, events that both demanded equality for African Americans and women, and sought to disrupt the partition of roles in which they found themselves situated. In Rancière’s terms, two conditions were met: a part without a part and the declaration of the wrong to interrupt the police processes that maintained their excluded position.
For the purposes of conceptualizing police in the social sciences, there are two key thoughts to keep in mind. First, police is the maintenance of an existing ‘natural’ order. ‘The police is, essentially, the law, generally implicit, that defines a party’s share or lack of it’ (Rancière 1999: 29). It maintains the boundaries of the included and excluded, as well as what counts as acceptable political demands. The second is that justification and maintenance is a continual one, and that politics emerges when this process is interrupted with a demand for equality from an excluded subjectivity. To use the quote mentioned earlier, a strike is political when it disrupts the maintenance of owner–worker relations with the demand that the workers are equal with the owners. This demand disrupts the ‘natural’ order of capitalism, one where the owners are the members of the community of equals and the workers are precluded from that part.
Interrupting the conduct of conduct
Rancière’s politics of equals give us an interesting vantage point from which to address Foucault’s writings, especially his influential later texts on governmentality. As is well-known, his earlier writings on disciplinary projects, the ‘multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control’ (Foucault 1977: 198) that characterize modern society, gave way to investigations of governmentality, or the management of populations, in later works. In particular, biopolitics becomes especially salient, as governmental projects focus not on conduct in general but on life – births, deaths, conditions of the environment and economy, and lifestyle (Dean 1999: 99). In contemporary liberal societies, heavy-handed state interventions into areas like family planning or health are generally unfeasible due to concerns for individual liberty. Foucault argues the place for biopolitics is civil society (Foucault 2008: 295). Here individuals govern themselves without state biopolitical projects being directly applied (2008: 312). In a liberal democracy, Foucault argues that individuals desire freedom from the state. Yet as they manage themselves in civil society, they in fact create and strengthen the state. Liberal societies create a form of governance where individuals constitute the state and politics becomes concerned with managing populations through governmental processes.
Foucault and Rancière share similar understandings of the contemporary workings of power. While not exactly synonymous concepts, Rancière’s police order (‘the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution’; 1999: 28) and Foucault’s governmentality (‘the conduct of conduct’) both refer to the ‘broader set of practices to do with the health of the state.’ (May 2008: 41). 4 For both, the maintenance of social ordering is not only carried out by an overt punitive state but also through legitimation. Both authors point to the importance of the image of the social order – thus Foucault’s studies of biopolitical discourses and Rancière’s on the supposed foundations of democracy – and both theorize the workings of power as non-coercive and working through the placement of individuals in positions.
Both authors provide a compelling starting point to analyze the passivity of contemporary democracies. In both cases, the goal of the police/governmental project is to create a ‘good’ democratic government, one which limits and controls the ‘evils’ of democratic life. As the focus of subjects turns inward – towards self-realization or other projects and away from collective activity – the ‘symbolic constitution of the social’ (Rancière 2001) remains constant. Like Foucault, Rancière conceives of the contemporary moment as one in which technocratic management has overtaken overt political dispute. It is the attempt to create a unified whole where only minor governance is needed to guide the community towards growth and prosperity. ‘Politics is the art of suppressing the political. It is a procedure of self-subtraction’ (Rancière 1995: 11–12). In this view, fundamental questions of inclusion in or exclusion from the community of equals are displaced. Instead, contemporary politics is based more on managing the society and its people with greater efficiency than on realizing ideals of inclusion or equality. The management of populations, central to governmentality, has a part in Rancière’s thinking. Most of what modern states do now is ‘police’ work, or technologies of governance. The population becomes the target of governance in this logic, and concerns over political equality are removed (Rancière 1999; Singer and Weir 2008). Using the police in a literal sense, Rancière says:
The police is not that law interpellating individuals (as in Althusser’s ‘Hey, you there!’) unless one confuses it with religious subjectification. It is, first of all, a reminder of the obviousness of what there is, or rather, of what there isn’t: ‘Move along! There is nothing to see here!’ The police says that there is nothing to see on a road, that there is nothing to do but move along. It asserts that the space of circulating is nothing other than the space of circulation. (Rancière 2001)
In a case such as this, the police order ensures the regular, productive functioning of society. When subjects move along and do not see anything, they are doing two things. First, they are not intervening upon the ‘visible and sayable’ (Rancière 2001); the political moment will not occur at this time. Second, the subject is complicit in the maintenance and governance of the state as it is currently constituted with its various divisions and partitions of subjects and resources. Policing therefore is not concerned with equality but instead stability. A population which is well-governed is therefore healthy, making the state wealthy, sturdy, and permanent (Foucault 2008: 4)
We can think of the differences between the two authors as coming down to disagreements on two related fronts: on the potential of the interruption, and the role of the role of subjects in that process. First, the interruption, which is so central to Rancière, finds no analogous concept in Foucault. For Foucault, there are different epistemes, discourses, and governemental regimes, but change is not intertwined with notions of emancipation, just different modalities of power relations and subjectivities. Foucault does not conceptualize the possibility of the interruption of a governmental logic by those who show it to be arbitrary. Rather, he is more concerned with the way that power and resistance are intertwined: ‘[w]here there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (Foucault 1978: 95). As Rancière noted in a 2000 interview, he believed Foucault was not interested in the theoretical question of subjectivation, instead focusing on studies of biopower and biopolitics in regards to the state, not ontological meanings of the political (Rancière 2000).
And as for the role of subjects, where Foucault argues that in modern society there is no privileged site of power (and therefore politics), Rancière, using Aristotle, argues that those without a part are the privileged subjectivity of politics. Yet this privileged subjectivity is not an objectively determined nor constant one. The contingency of the political process means that it is contingent on the aforementioned meeting of police processes with the politics of emancipation.
It is worth explaining how Rancière imagines this interruption to emerge. The interruption of police by politics occurs when the part without a part becomes aware of its position and makes a claim for equality that cannot be addressed within the normal functioning of courts and juridical processes (1995: 97). This is when the part without a part emerges as a challenge to the community of equals.
There are moments when the community of equals appears as the ultimate underpinning of the distribution of the institutions and obligations that constitute a society; moments when equals declare themselves as such, though aware they have no fundamental right to do so […]. (1995: 91)
The concept of ‘part without a part’ has no exact equivalent in Foucault. For governmentality studies, the state tracks and manages the entire population within its borders. The idea that various members have varying symbolic positions as (un)equal is absent. Without a conceptualization of those symbolically erased, governmentality studies miss the contingent nature of the political moment. Groups and individuals can be completely excluded from full membership in society but not challenge the dominant order so as to remove this miscount. The ‘natural’ order remains unchanged, and even further cemented, and the fundamental assumptions on the boundaries of the community of equals are unchallenged.
The community of equals is ‘an insubstantial community of individuals engaged in the common creation of equality’ (Rancière 1995: 84). Equality, though, is not a goal to be reached but a ‘supposition to be posited and constantly reiterated’, and the community of equals cannot ever become a ‘substantial form as a social institution’ but ‘is tied to the act of its own verification’ (Rancière 1995: 84). In other words, equality is a utopian goal for a community. As mentioned earlier, the counting of parts is always a miscount, leaving certain subjects without a part. This lack of a part is not noticeable to those parts of the community of equals – those without a part are invisible, and their voice is unheard. Resolving one miscount in no way implies resolving other miscounts, ones that remain as noise rather than discourse to the community of equals. Rancière give us this paradox: ‘A choice must be made between being equal in an unequal society and being unequal in an “equal” society, a society which transforms equality into its opposite’ (Rancière 1995: 84). This statement reflects his beliefs that there will always be inequality and a part without a part, no matter how the community organizes itself.
This discussion highlights the distinction of political logics, one based on becoming equals and the other on justifying and reifying the current ‘natural’ order and its set of inequalities. When political issues enter the public sphere and lack any discussion of the community of equals, or any opposition or challenge to the counting of ‘parts’, it is only part of the police order. Citizens and the state in this instance are debating over issues regarding the condition of subjects in cemented social roles; fundamental roles of subjects in the community are not on the table in these instances. ‘The essence of the police is neither repression nor even control over the living. Its essence is a certain manner of partitioning the sensible’ (Rancière 2001). Partitioning the ‘sensible’ is the demarcation of parts, roles, and subjectivities in a police order. As May (2008) argues, the process is similar to how Foucault envisions individuals experiencing disciplinary and governmental processes (May 2008: 48). Subjectivities, in other words, partition themselves in ways so that the part without is invisible, cannot be heard, yet still exists and has the potential to create a political moment from within the police order. It ‘presupposes a partition between what is visible and what is not, of what can be heard from the inaudible’ (Rancière 2001). This distinction displays the differences Rancière sees in politics and police (and, by proxy, governmentality). The intrusion of equality, or the intersection of politics and police as a possibility inherent in police, means that ‘political’ activities like voting, strikes, and movements can be political, but many times are not (Rancière 1999: 32). ‘Nothing is political in itself for the political only happens by means of a principle that does not belong to it: equality’ (Rancière 1999: 33). It is the form of the action that makes it political, not the object or place (Rancière 1999: 32). In other words, ‘politics is first and foremost an intervention upon the visible and sayable’ (Rancière 2001), while police concerns itself with partitioning and managing parts and resources of the community.
Remember equality? Toward a sociology of the political
Distinguishing politics from police provides more than just an ontological definition of the political. It provides a tool for understanding and uncovering trajectories of what is considered political action. To paraphrase an earlier quote, Rancière claims a strike is political only when the strike changes the relations between the workers and community. The strike is merely part of the police order, until that moment when it intersects with processes of freedom, or in this case, reconfiguring community relations. Finding this moment, or lack of it, can be a fruitful endeavor in the study of politics. Uncovering political trajectories can show how political movements and actions relate to issues of equality. In this sense, equality means becoming full members of the community, or having an equal part with others. When a political action lacks the declaration of the wrong, or the statement of the fundamental inequalities that implies the possibility of the re-ordering of society, actors without a part may receive concessions, but their essential position as unequals and being without a part remains.
Utilizing Rancière’s theory in essence means doing sociology that goes beyond the logic of the social. It is a way of understanding the relationship between actors and institutions (which includes but goes beyond just the state or capitalism) to find the precarious and ephemeral moments when the politics of equality does occur. Studying politics through state-society interaction, social movements, capitalist practices, and friend-enemy distinctions can find political moments, but they all tend to miss out on what Rancière believes is truly the political – interruptions that call the social order into question. To study politics in this way means one should give up presuppositions of where politics occurs and instead look for moments when this disturbance of the community provides opportunities for the ‘part without a part’ to gain entrance into the community of equals.
While we believe sociological accounts of politics that use Rancière would be beneficial, Rancière remains dubious of sociological studies of politics in general. A break from a relatively straight translation from philosophy to social science is needed to create a beneficial Rancièrian framework that does not ignore his concerns over sociology. In his ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, Rancière speaks of the de-politicizing tendencies in sociological and political-philosophical studies on politics. The ‘end-of-politics’ thesis is used as a sociological concept that de-politicizes, merging the logic of the political into the logic of the social (Rancière 2001: 10: 33). He argues that this mode of studying politics is merely a study of the social, and that there is a separation of political and social logics where ‘politics has no reason for being in any state of the social and that the contradiction of the two logics is an unchanging given that defines the contingency and precariousness proper to politics’ (Rancière 2001: 10: 33). In his limited reading of sociology, Rancière rejects it as something that reduces politics to a point where the political moments he is interested in cannot be recognized. Rancière also critiques the ‘return of politics’ camps of political philosophy, which he argues also conflate politics with the state and ‘identify it with the practices of state control which have, as their principal principle, the suppression of politics’ (Rancière 2001: 10: 32). In both cases, he argues that these logics de-politicize:
the debate between the philosophers of the ‘return of politics’ and the sociologists of the ‘end of politics’ is thus a straightforward debate regarding the order in which it is appropriate to take the presuppositions of ‘political philosophy’ so as to interpret the consensualist practice of annihilating politics. (Rancière 2001: 10: 33)
A fair sociological rendering of what Rancière would deem actual studies of politics entails removing both determinist and reductionist approaches to politics that place the political beneath larger structuring social forces. Engaging in a re-politicized study of politics means engaging the logic of the police order and the logic of the interruption. It is important to remember that these are logics, and that in contemporary societies particular issues or topics are not inherently one or another. Through cultural frames and codes, historical conditions, and particularized strategies and responses, an issue may become one about the ‘community of equals’. These issues are about who is an equal member of that society, and entitled to all the rights and benefits that society provides for its citizens. On the other hand, police issues are managed ones, or ones where particular groups are given (or taken away) various resources in the society. Rather, it is what public actors are able to bring up or close off as relevant to their debate that leads to an issue gaining or losing status as political or not. Rancière’s definition of politics is in this way restrictive because indeed, most of the time, claims by those without a part are not part of discourse in democratic societies. This framework is at odds with much social science, and Rancière has at times expressed contempt for sociology’s apparent project of ‘annihilating politics’ (Rancière 2001: 10: 33). He argues that because sociology is often concerned with understanding social reproduction, it becomes part of the project of naturalizing the very inequalities it seeks to explain. 5 The alternative, he suggests, is to open up to the possibility that the social sciences seem to have all-but-abandoned: the horizon of equality.