ability, time and leisure required for thought.The paradigm here is Plato’s division of societyinto functional orders (artisans, warriors, rulers),such that slaves, or shoemakers, for instance, areforever banished from the domain of philosophy.To each type of person, one allotted task: labour,war, or thought. Hence the importance of exclud-ing those who, by seeking to imitate a type otherthan their own, threaten to cross these functionallines. Rancière finds echoes of both this divisionand this exclusion in the work of Marx, Sartreand Bourdieu.In pedagogical terms, Rancière’s argument (in
The Ignorant Schoolmaster
, 1987) targets anyattempt to conceive of education in terms of thegeneralised classification of children, i.e. interms of a process that leads them from initialpostures of submission and docility
towards
rela-tive security precisely in so far as they come toaccept their suitably sanctioned place. Inspiredby the maverick example of Joseph Jacotot(1770–1840), Rancière’s guiding pedagogicalprinciple is that “all people are virtually capableof understanding what others have done andunderstood […]. Equality is not a goal to beattained but a point of departure, a suppositionto be maintained in all circumstances.”
2
Everyone has the same intelligence; what variesis the will and opportunity to exercise it. On thebasis of this supposition, superior knowledgeceases to be a necessary qualification of theteacher, just as the process of “explication” (withits attendant metaphors that distinguish childrenas slow or quick, that conceive of educationaltime in terms of progress, training and qualifica-tion) is exposed as the dominant “myth of peda-gogy.”When Rancière turns to the writing of history,it is in order to expose the way historians fromMichelet to Braudel have likewise presented apicture of the world in which each individual isset in their appropriate place, in which anyparticular voice becomes audible in so far as itarticulates the logic associated with that place. InMichelet’s histories, in keeping with a principlethat still dominates the discipline as a whole,“everything has a meaning to the degree thatevery speech production is assignable to thelegitimate expression of a place: the earth thatshapes men, the sea on which their exchangestake place, the everyday objects in which theirrelations can be read …”
3
What is banished fromthis territorialising conception of history is thevery possibility of heresy (heresy understood asthe dis-placing of the speaker and dis-aggregationof the community
4
), in particular that modern“democratic heresy” incarnated by the arrivalupon the historical stage of a popular voice thatrefuses any clear assignation of place, the voiceof the masses of people who both labour
and
think – a voice noticeably absent, Rancièreobserves, from the
Annales
-inspired conceptionof history.It is precisely this heretical conception of political speech that informs Rancière’s mostprogrammatic work to date:
Disagreement
(1995). The supervision of places and functionsis the business of what Rancière calls the“police”; a
political
sequence begins, then, whenthis supervision is interrupted so as to allow aproperly anarchic disruption of function andplace, a sweeping de-classification of speech. Thedemocratic voice is the voice of those who rejectthe prevailing social distribution of roles, whorefuse the way a society shares out power andauthority, the voice of “floating subjects thatderegulate all representations of places andportions.”
5
Applied in sociological terms, Rancière’ssubversion of classes and norms applies as muchto Marxist attempts to squeeze the complexity of workers’ experience into the theory-certifiedsimplicity of the proletariat as it does to nostal-gic attempts to preserve a “traditional” workingclass identity.
The Nights of Labor
(1981),Rancière’s first (and still most) substantial book,a record and analysis of proletarian intellectuallife in the 1830s and 1840s, undercuts any effort“to preserve popular, plebeian or proletarianpurity” and, in the absence left by the disap-pearance of
the
authentic working class, clears aspace for the emergence of unauthorised combi-nations and inventions – transposed utopias,reappropriations of literary forms, worker-runnewspapers and nocturnal poetry societies, trans-occupational associations, etc.
6
The workersrecorded by Rancière complain less about mate-rial hardship and more about the predetermined
politics and aesthetics192
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