Davide Panagia | Ceci n'est pas un argument: An Introduction to the Ten Theses | Theory & Event 5:3

10/26/2005 10:42 AM

Ceci n'est pas un argument : An Introduction to the Ten Theses

5:3 | 2001

Davide Panagia

1.

The Ten Theses on Politics[1] is not an argument about politics if, by argument, one intends a philosophical justification of the nature of the political. It is, rather, a series of considerations on political thinking that parallel Rancire's inquiry, in Disagreement, into "the set of reflective operations whereby 'political philosophy' tries to rid itself of politics, to suppress a scandal in thinking proper to the exercise of politics."[2] The Ten Theses is thus a critical intervention into the manner in which a philosophical orientation to political life attempts to purify politics by "effac(ing) the litigiousness constitutive of politics." (Thesis 9) Rancire's site of critical attack is recent attempts to restore and protect the political against the encroachments of the social. This includes the rise of "New French Thought," exemplified in the prose of Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry, along with neo-Kantian versions of consensus democracy. In these instances the political is identified with the state, "placing the tradition of political philosophy in the service of the platitudes of a politics of consensus."[3] Rancire's appreciation of politics differs substantially from such statist models. Politics, he posits, is a term of art synonymous with democracy; it refers to an evanescent moment when tensions arising from a human being-in-common produce instances of disruption, generating sources of political action.
1.

The reader of the Ten Theses will notice Rancire's repeated use of essentialist language. Expressions like 'proper to politics' and 'everything about' or 'essence of politics' pepper the Ten Theses, emphatically asserting Rancire's position. And this is precisely the point: Politics is the practice of asserting one's position that ruptures the logic of arche ; that is, politics is an event initiated by individuals or groups who insist that the ordered configuration of a political arrangement (what he calls 'the police') is wrong. Such proclamations, however, do not sound like anything because they are unrecognizable as speech; they are a version of the Aristotelian blaberon.[4] What The Names
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of History calls 'the excess of words' -- coincident with the democratic revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - is the voicing of a wrong ( tort )[5] that falls on the deaf ears of the police. These ears are deaf, however, not because they cannot hear but because there are no recognizable protocols by which the dissonant humming of the blaberon may be acknowledged. Contrasted to 'polite' deliberation, the political blaberon looks and sounds like a kind of billingsgate that is at once crude and disruptive. "For political philosophy to exist," Rancire explains, "the order of political idealities must be linked to some construction of city 'parts,' to a count whose complexities may mask a fundamental miscount, a miscount that may well be the blaberon, the very wrong that is the stuff of politics."[6]
1.

This is why appeals to procedures of deliberation are an insufficient account of democratic politics. The assertion of an utterance is crucial to political life but speech act theory is ill equipped to consider the blaberon. Political interlocution "has always mixed up language games and rules of expression, and it has always particularized the universal in demonstrative sequences comprised of the meeting of heterogeneous elements."[7] The difficulty of democratic politics, then, is not in determining the causes, effects, and correctives for communicative failure. Rather, "the problem is knowing whether the subjects who count in the interlocution 'are' or 'are not,' whether they are speaking or just making noise."[8] In other words, consensus theories fail because they presume that a communicative scenario is already in place when contesting groups come together; these theories assume further that communicative participants know what they are talking about. In contrast, Rancire characterizes political speech as excessive and noisy because there is no pre-established agreement regarding either the status of the speakers or the objectives they wish to pursue. This noisy populace is the 'no-part' of 'the part of those who have no part:' not only a miscounted element within the larger ordering of a polity, but also the ones who have no part in politics -- namely, the unrepresentable. Paradoxically, it is the police's miscount that allows for the politically relevant no-part to persist.
1.

For Rancire, 'democracy' is irreducible to the institutions in which it is set: Democracy does not simply refer to the organization of an edifice that a citizenry must legitimate; it is a practice, a divisive operation, where the unrepresented element
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voices a wrong. In this vein, Rancire's unit of political analysis is the mistake, the miscounted ones whose speech utterances are misunderstood [ms-entendu]. Since misunderstanding is constitutive of political interlocution, dissensus comprises the nature of political argument. Political argument, therefore, cannot escape the trappings of what he will periodically refer to as literarity (or the excess of words). We are political animals, Rancire believes, because we put words into circulation; we invent useless and unnecessary words that exceed the function of rigid designation and confound those who claim to "speak correctly."[9] Such cacophony produces effects and his principal interest, as historian, literary critic, and political theorist, is to investigate into the effectivity of speech acts. Hence the value of his historical examples: Clisthene's reorganization of the ancient tribes of Athens into demes, seventeenth century preachers referring to monarchs as tyrants , and nineteenth century workers referring to themselves as proletariat .[10] The transference of these terms from one political situation to another by a class of people whose authoritative status is, at best, illegitimate because it is not recognized is, for Rancire, the political moment par excellence.
1.

In this respect, troping is the political activity par excellence. The ability to make and shape words, to create a novel turn of phrase and have it circulate, implies that politics permits a substantive aesthetic and, more specifically, 'poetic' dimension. "To affirm the 'poetic' nature in politics," Rancire has recently stated, "means first and foremost that politics is an activity of reconfiguration of that which is given to the sensible."[11] This practice of reconfiguration, of speaking out of turn in a cacophonous manner, is a part-taking in politics that is always at risk. It is because individuals are not permitted to participate that politics occurs: individuals part-take because they do not have a part and it is in the multiple attempts at part-taking that the democratic moment emerges.
1.

In highlighting 'disordering' and 'reordering' as two key features of democratic political action, Rancire endorses a poetics of politics whose image is of the order of the sublime. Democracy is not an institution; it is a force that dislocates. It does not permit stasis, nor does it allow for the kind of contemplative harmony characteristic of a consensus imaginary. Instead, democratic life tends towards the partisan: accountability is divisive because it exposes a constitutive inequality at the heart
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of institutional arrangements. Equality and tort , then, are principles of political illegitimacy that allow for democracy to occur rather than merely persist. The 'return of the political' thesis, present in much contemporary political thought, cannot account for this scandal of thinking; Rancire's Ten Theses addresses this fundamental miscount.

Further Reading
Rancire, Jacques & Panagia, Davide. "Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancire." Diacritics. 50:3 (2001): 113-126. Rancire, Jacques. Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Rancire, Jacques. On the Shores of Politics. Trans. Liz Heron. Phronesis. Ed. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. New York: Verso, 1995. Rancire, Jacques. The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge. Trans. Hassan Melehy. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Rancire, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Rancire, Jacques. "On the Theory of Ideology - Althusser's Politics." Ideology. Ed. Terry Eagleton. London: Longman Group UK Ltd., 1994. 141-161.

Notes
[1] The Ten Theses on Politics, originally delivered in Bologna, Italy, was written between 1994 and 1996 and subsequently published in the second French edition of Rancire's Aux bords du politique(1998). It appears in English here, for the first time. [2] Rancire, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, p. xii. [3] Rancire/Panagia, "Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancire," in Diacritics (Fall, 2001), p. 6. [4] Rancire, Dis-agreement, p. 4. Although Rancire does not
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cite it, the reference is to Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics. [5] I refer to the English translation of wrong (in Disagreement) from the French tort ( La Msentente: Politique et Philosophie , Galile, 1995). Though 'wrong' is not incorrect, it overlooks the juridical tradition of tort law that coincides with the emergence of social contract theories of government. Thus 'wrong' not only refers to the logical correctness of a proposition but also to the historical emergence of 'tort ' (i.e., to be wronged) as a relevant political category coincident with the rise of democratic revolutions in the eighteenth century. I would like to thank Frances Ferguson for helping me formulate this point. [6] Rancire, Dis-agreement, p. 6. [7] Rancire, Dis-agreement, p. 50. [8] Rancire, Dis-agreement, p. 50. [9] Rancire/Panagia, "Dissenting Words," p. 3. [10] Demeswere townships or divisions of ancient Attica while proletariat , according to the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd Ed. CD-ROM), refers to "the lowest class of the community in ancient Rome, regarded as contributing nothing to the state but offspring." [11] Rancire/Panagia, p. 3.
Davide Panagia recently completed his Ph.D., Images of Political Thought: Judgment, Opinion, and the Science of Politics, at The Johns Hopkins University. His most recent publication is entitled The Predicative Function in Ideology (in Journal of Political Ideologies , 2001). He can be reached at davidepanagia@earthlink.net

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