Abstract
Both these books, like all those in this Acumen series, have the aim of introducing ‘key concepts’ relating to (we might presume) ‘key thinkers’. Instead of a single author, however, there is an editor who, as well as being a contributor, organizes and edits material from other contributors, each of whom has an expertise on one or more aspects of a thinker’s oeuvre. Also, rather than outlining and interpreting a narrowly focused concept, the term ‘concept’ actually relates more accurately to a field of thought. For Rancière’s work, for example, the latter correspond to: philosophy, politics, poetics and aesthetics. Thus, even though ‘equality’ is Rancière’s key concept, it is not given separate treatment.
While, in Badiou’s case, things are a little more circumscribed with chapters on, amongst others, philosophy, the conditions, the subject, and science, the approach is not to give narrow definitions but to adopt a free-ranging approach that aims to locate the place of a field of inquiry within the overall oeuvre. Thus, if the expectant reader is hoping to find out precisely what ‘ontology’ means for Badiou, compared, say, to Heidegger, there is nothing on offer here. For what is at issue is how ontology (thinking being) relates to mathematics and about how Badiou conceives of the place of mathematics in the past and in the present in relation to philosophy.
The effect of this format, it has to be said, is to give authors considerable freedom with regard to how a theme is explicated and discussed. It is an approach which may well tend to work better for some thinkers than others. Thus, in explaining ontology with reference to Badiou’s complex book, Being and Event (2006), is it really possible to do this successfully without providing the reader with some background in ‘set theory’, as Alex Ling attempts to do? I think not – especially when the Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, rather than Cantor’s ‘transfinite number’, is the focus. The notation encountered in this regard is not going to help the neophyte (cf. Bartlett and Clemens 2010: 53). What is left out here, though, is the importance of the notions stemming from Badiou’s mathematics of set theory for politics based on ‘belonging’ and ‘inclusion’. As I have said elsewhere (Lechte 2008: 237), the exception belongs to politics but is not included in the normal political sphere. Or again, avant-garde works initially belong to but are not included in the field of art.
What is shown up here is the pedagogical dilemma for introductory reference texts which aim to render difficult thought accessible to a wider public, especially students; for the more one simplifies, the more one risks being unfaithful to the ‘master’ (text). However, the more one resorts to the actual language of the master text, the more the goal of greater accessibility is put at risk. It is, then, always a matter of judgement and maybe, in this instance, the balance is not quite right.
Reference to Being and Event raises the issue of the status of this work in relation to the whole of Badiou’s oeuvre. Chronologically, it was first published in French in the late 1980s, but its overall importance, it could be argued, is such that it should assume pride of place in any interpretation and explication of Badiou’s thought. Being and Event obviously belongs to Badiou’s oeuvre, but in what sense is it to be included? Is it the set in which all others (= works) are to be included, or is it only one amongst other texts? My view is that all of Badiou’s works have to be read through Being and Event. The editors of the ‘key concepts’ take a different view, seeing it as one amongst many of Badiou’s works. Readers, in light of this introduction to Badiou, will, it is to be hoped, work through the issue for themselves.
In the case of Rancière (b. 1940), we have a thinker who, like Badiou (b. 1937), rose to prominence, politically speaking, in the 1970s with the critique of his Master, Louis Althusser. As Jean-Philippe Deranty shows in his admirable introduction to the volume devoted to Rancière (Deranty 2010: 2–4), May ’68 opened up a gap, not only between Althusser and Rancière, but between Rancière and Marxist politics directed by the French Communist Party. Subsequently, in his project aiming for radical equality, in which equality is the underlying ‘axiom’ for all things social, political, aesthetic, educational, historical and much more, all hierarchies are challenged. Indeed, for Rancière, the whole political tradition in the West from Plato and Aristotle onward is inseparable from the institutionalization of inequality. In this context, the pursuit of meritocracy only confirms the still unproven assumption that there are essential, qualitative differences between people. Justice, on this basis, becomes a matter of finding a truly rigorous way of revealing the actual inequalities amongst people. Rancière challenges this notion of an essential inequality in light of his May ’68 experience. But does it make Rancière a thinker for our current times? Are we still in a post ’68 political climate? While commentators such as Martin McQuillan have their doubts, arguing that Rancière’s current popularity could be due to fashion (McQuillan 2011: 163–4), contributors to the book in question evince little uncertainty in establishing Rancière as the thinker for our time.
Broadly, then, there is no real critical evaluation of Badiou or Rancière. And this, to my mind, is a weakness of these books. For such an evaluation would not, by any means, mystify or necessarily denigrate the works concerned. It would rather render them more supple contributors – as much for weaknesses as for their strengths – to a deeper engagement with our times.
Like Badiou’s commentators, then, the contributors to the volume on Rancière are in no doubt that their hero’s increasing fame is justified. This includes a very positive view of Rancière’s approach to literature and art, even though there are problems here. Let me explain.
With reference to his axiom of equality, Rancière argues that the modernist tendency in art and literature entails a nobility of style, instead of the former focus on the nobility of subject matter or content (exemplified by the emphasis on religious and historical themes, on poetry over prose, and so on). Anything, within a modernist frame, can now become the raw material for great art or literature; for what makes it so is the capacity of the artist or writer to produce a beauty of form through a style – a beauty in relation to which the actual work of the creator should remain invisible. In the case of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which Rancière takes to be the paradigmatic case of modernity in literature, the banality – even ignominy – of the heroine’s life is bound to the nobility of the writer’s style (Rancière 2008). As we know, Flaubert made it quite clear that, for him as a writer, style was everything. Rancière sees no reason to doubt Flaubert on this point. This is because it enables him to talk about a new régime of the arts and a ‘redistribution of the sensible’ in modernity, in which inequality has simply been displaced from subject matter to the artist/writer. While, in an earlier historical period, not everything could be art, although it now can be in modernity – so that any content is equivalent to any other – only the select few in modernity can be great artists or writers.
In principle, then, Emma Bovary, the character, living in dull provincial France, could never be the writer of the Flaubertian novel based on her life because Emma cannot separate art from life (she wants life to be art); her lack of a nobility of style is in her very being. She cannot overcome this lack. No one who wants art to be incarnate in life can achieve the style exhibited by the great writer of French realism – the producer of ‘literature’.
There is a further corollary. It is that, according to Rancière, style as such, or form, can never, in the modern régime of the arts, be the subject matter of the novel or of art itself. Anything can be the subject matter of literature or art except what it is that turns this same matter into literature or art.
Even when discussing Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema, the ‘Flaubertian project’ is evoked to explain the role of this ‘sovereign style’ (Rancière 2001: 157). But what, Rancière continues to ask, ‘should this sovereign style produce?’ And he answers: ‘A work bereft of every trace of the writer’ (p. 157).
The question that leaps to mind, of course, is whether things are really as Rancière says they are. Questioning is needed here, questioning that is absent in the book on Rancière’s ‘key concepts’. For instance, is it not the polyphonic style of Dostoyevsky’s novels – as Kristeva after Bakhtin has shown – which is the content of the Russian writer’s art (Dostoyevsky and Flaubert were both born in 1821)? That is, maybe the truly modern artist emerges only when style becomes visible – when it becomes both subject and object of literature and art. Is this not what Abstract Expressionist painting also reveals? Might this not be what Finnegans Wake reveals?
To be sure, Rancière might well concede this but, equally, he might respond by saying that, even so, there is still an aristocracy of writers and artists; for it is still only the select few (according to the prevailing ideology) who can be writers à la Dostoyevsky or Joyce or painters in the manner of Abstract Expressionism. Moreover, the content of art never emerges in itself, or by itself. Either it must be fashioned by the artist/writer, or it has to be discovered by the philosopher/critic. Not everyone is deemed capable of such fashioning or of making such discoveries. Inequality thus still exists.
Perhaps. But it should also be noted that, currently, works simply need to be ‘collected’ – that is, be brought to a gallery space – for them to be consecrated as art, with the result that the border between those who are supposedly artists and those who are supposedly not is becoming increasingly porous. Moreover, interactive, digital art further complicates the mix. But, no doubt, for Rancière, that would be part of another story.
To conclude: the overall point that I want to make is a simple one. Even explicatory, introductory texts to thinkers can be strengthened through a critical engagement. We are not, after all, in Paris; we therefore do not just have to be undiscerning followers!